Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam (14 page)

The Challenges of Teaching and Learning
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exclusivism is internally reflected, with some Muslims aiming to remove other Muslims who believe in diversity. It seeks to deter them from even engaging in Islamic practices, whether ritual or cultural, and to convince them and others less informed that there is some simple measure to determine whether one is within the faith of Islam or outside it. Even as I was preparing the chapters for this book, one Muslim woman was involved in the procedures her mosque had instituted to excommunicate a member from its congregation. They have adopted these procedures of excommuni- cation with no reference to
shari‘ah
or its primary sources, the Qur’an and
sunnah
. Thus, the consequences of articulating alternatives to the status quo emphasize the problems of displacement experienced by Muslims, both those intent on practicing Islam within various community settings and those who feel personal devotion to the Islamic faith while experiencing or accepting relative isolation from the collectives. Those identified as Islamic authorities randomly exclude others from the faith even by using Islamically selective or illegitimate methods themselves. Discourses about the multifaceted aspects of gender in Islam are not merely a form of intellec- tualism. They are fraught with personal consequences for Muslim scholars, activists, and the real lives of all Muslim women.

I will nevertheless consider the juxtaposition of the Islamic intellectual legacy, historically and currently, to the recent concerns over gender reforms in Islamic thought and practice. My focus in this chapter will shift between my experiences as teacher and researcher – primarily in the context of U.S. academia – as a Muslim woman, and address Muslim Women’s Studies within that context, and the larger areas of existing Women’s and Gender Studies programs in North America,including the studies of women and religion. I will revisit challenges made within the academy to make a space for both protecting academic freedom and promoting intellectual exchange. In order to create a legitimate and dynamic discipline of Muslim Women’s Studies, especially in the U.S.A., distinctive aspects of this area of

study must not only be recognized but ultimately given

assistance to

develop. Throughout this book I address gender, as one of the most important issues in Islam today, both as an area in need of research and analysis and as a dynamic aspect of Muslim identity, practice, and conten- tions.What exists within the proliferation of Muslim Women’s Studies in the last two decades has remained haphazard. In my brief and admittedly random review of this proliferation, I do eventually conclude with a consoli- dation of its multiple contributions at the crossroads of several different disciplines, while emphasizing that Islamic Studies are essential prerequisites

56 inside the gender jihad

of the sub-discipline. My perspective grew both out of experiences as a Muslim woman scholar and out of full awareness of the potential contri- bution that theoretical work on gender has in actual practices and reform in the lives of Muslim women worldwide.
2

ISLAMIC STUDIES IN WESTERN ACADEMIA

The study of Islam entered Western academia as part of a larger agenda of Orientalism. According to Edward Said,
“
Orientalism is more par- ticularly a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is a veridic discourse about the Orient (which is what in its academic or scholarly form it claims to be).
”
The two-pronged geopolitical domination and hegemonic discourse continues to shape every discipline related to the East (Far, Middle, and Near, as such descriptive terms indicate). There- fore, a power relationship is always at the core of the study. It seems that few other academic disciplines are plagued by such a persistent hegemony

–
not even Women’s Studies, which actually has had some modicum of success in entering mainstream Western academia after several decades of struggle, and, as will be shown here, also participates in the hegemony over many aspects of the potential development of Muslim Women’s Studies.

Within the field of Religious Studies, some aspects of intersecting power politics can be distinguished to sustain the sacredness of the faith systems, but not so for Islam. In the political quagmire encompassing modern Judaism, for example, the convenient term “Zionism” distinguishes itself and disentangles the political realm from the sacred. No equivalent epistemological operation occurs for the separation of political Islam from the sacred, so one is never certain what is meant by the word “Islam” when

it is used.
3

Transition from Learner to Instructor

I have studied abroad, including at the American University in Cairo, Cairo University, and al-Azhar University, and taught at Qar Younis University in Libya, at the International Islamic University in Malaysia, and at other smaller institutes. However, most of my Islamic studies – learning, teaching, and research – were in the U.S.A., where popular media tend to cluster around a set of simple factors commonly used to characterize “Islam.” While these characteristics might be meant to help non-Muslims

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understand the role of Islam in modern international politics, their reductionism leads to negative stereotypes that impede the learning process of Islamic Studies in the academy, especially at the level of undergraduate education.
4
This forms an important condition to my experiences in the academic study of Islam and to the analysis I make about developing Islamic Studies programs – especially the developing of a critical area of Muslim Women’s Studies.

Before I began teaching Islam, the academy was the more significant of two primary locations for formulating ideas on Islamic Studies in the U.S.A. My initial encounter was inspired between Islam as an ideological frame- work and its worldview as a living faith system. I made my transition into Islam in 1972, while an undergraduate in the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution. At that time a tiny Muslim Students’ Association operated rather loosely on campus. I lived off campus and the greater Phila- delphia area was steaming with local Muslim growth, especially among African-Americans. As a transitioning Muslim woman, I had no organized study programs to introduce me to Islam as a theoretical arena of academic research. I simply withdrew as many books as I could out of the university library and read them, with no ability to argue for their benefits or deficits relative to the macro-context of Orientalist agendas with its incoherent sub-categories still used now to ascribe self-determining merits vis-à-vis the diversities of opinion. This independent reading was simultaneously available to me with the confessional literature from local mosques. My naivety resulted in heightened optimism. I knew little about Muslim women’s experiences globally. A student life is often insulated from the world at large and constricted by a tunnel vision. Where my insulation led to optimism, this is neither less nor greater than my current students’ pessimism, a tunnel vision due mostly to increasingly negative media associ- ations with “Islam.”

In the 1970s, media focus was still on the Cold War and U.S. military intrusion in Vietnam. Coincidentally, my undergraduate years also over- lapped both the Black Power movement and the full second-wave feminist

movement
5
in the U.S.A. The resulting scramble in academic institutions to

reflect these two movements, however randomly, lent itself to the devel- opment of new courses and programs. Critical studies of modern Islam and gender were nowhere in sight. In a Sociology of Women course I tooted the horn of neo-traditionalist form of Islam’s moral advantages for the woman. A required twelve-page paper turned into a twenty-five-page exposition on the virtues of Islam and women. I got an A for the course. I knew nothing

58 inside the gender jihad

about the existence of women’s struggles under Islamic law and customary practices and the instructor knew nothing about Islam. So how could she grade me except on the extent of my research and the coherence of my artic- ulation?

I admit I focused on some romantic notions of the place of women in “Islam.” That same focus would later became one of critical scrutiny and analysis after local and global inquiry into the developments of the Muslim world. In 1972, Islam offered me an escape from the overwhelming phenomenon of double oppression as an African-American woman. Part of Islam’s mystique for females in larger groups of oppressed people, strug- gling for collective survival, is the appeal that they have been unable to experience: masculine honor and the protection of the raised pedestal. No doubt some women amongst the empowered and privileged have reason- ably articulated the struggle to be free from that very pedestal and the ways it acts to cage and limit autonomy, creativity, and empowerment, especially in terms of politics and economics. The experiences of this privileged minority bear little reality for the majority of women in the world, who struggle with poverty, national, cultural, or ethnic displacement, and whose collective identity with these forms of oppression give them no opportunity to experience relief from daily drudgery that such a pedestal offers, or the extent of its particularized male hegemony. As a young, poor, black female entering Islam, such a suggestion and other romantic images and notions of Muslim women’s honor were accepted without critical examination. Local discourse assured females in transition that instead of being op- pressed by the necessity to struggle in the white male, sexist, racist, and capitalistic world of paid employment and the cutting double standards politically, Islam offered care, protection, financial support, and adoration

for women,
6
which would provide escape from that struggle and a rise onto

that pedestal.

After more than three decades as an African-American Muslim woman, I have never experienced that honor, but I have faced the (external and sometimes internalized) humiliation of its absence. Now I am adamantly opposed not only to that superficial discourse, but to how it is advocated as a reality along with other dialectical games played to convince women to submit to the limitations of this façade of honor in the domestic realm and to accept second-class status vis-à-vis other women worldwide, as well as Muslim men in their own families and communities. When my experiences with Islam and Muslims eventually took me to live in Muslim communities across the world, diverse by class, ethnicity, and nationality, I began to

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encounter certain parties whose vested interests were in defending to the death such an ideal as a complete and actual reality lived by the “true” Muslim woman, or as the goal of Islam for the “good” women. I also observed the way they ignored certain limitations on women’s full and free agency. One of the most effective ways to defend this is to keep women silent about their actual experiences. The main method of silence is to authorize neo-traditional concepts about women’s roles – no matter how abusive – as integral to “Islam.” That is why national and international public exposure of the atrocities experienced by Muslim women is such an affront to the image of perfect “Islam” that they wish to express. They pretend such practices do not exist, because “Islam gave women their rights fourteen hundred years before the West.”

Paradoxically, many Muslim women still acquiesce to these images of honor in Islam, irrespective of actual experiences, which they shrug off as merely the consequences of men not practicing real Islam. They are unwilling and sometimes ill equipped to challenge whatever articulations of “Islam” allow double and triple standards. Many are burdened by the need to, at the very least, see to it that they and their children have a chance at male presence by remaining in a nuclear or quasi-extended family – what- ever the degree of its reality or illusion – because it offers the advantage of

looking like a working marriage.
7

Despite my lengthy struggle in the

white, male,

sexist,

racist, and capitalistic world of paid employment

against increasingly more oppressive opposition as an African-American, a Muslim, and a woman, I have become aware that the victimology of my experiences is not proof that I was not a good Muslim woman. I may experience many exceptions to some idealized norm in “Islam,” but that only proves that the “norm” has a great deal more variance than romantically fantasized by both Muslim patriarchal thinking and Western Orientalist and neo-Orientalist studies with their media support.
8

By the time I began serious work in the academy as a graduate student on issues of Islam and gender, I had already lived abroad and worked on these issues with other Muslim women. I had also already requested my first divorce and was managing the care of my eldest two children, first with welfare as our sole income, then from a job as a substitute teacher in the Philadelphia public schools and later in an Islamic private school. While the Muslim community in Philadelphia made specific judgments about the virtue of my womanhood in the context of many mainstream Muslim communities, I continued my contributions and eventually rejoined

60 inside the gender jihad

academia for graduate studies. Between academic grants or scholarships, Medicaid, and some personal charities, I began my specific research on Islam and gender.

There were many obstacles to overcome in efforts to help provide more critical representations of the diversities of thought and reality within an Islamic framework. Oppositions are both intra- and extra-Islamic. One obstacle is being directly attacked by aggressive patriarchal interpretive restrictions in Islamic thought. Critical representations of such obstacles

and encounters are one of the core inspirations for writing this book.
9
Here

I start by recalling experiences and addressing limitations of the teaching of Islam studies in U.S. academia, let alone gender and race dynamics that obscure and exacerbate progress. I will then offer some ideas about devel- oping a critical arena of Muslim Women’s Studies within academia.