Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam (18 page)

Although his critique did not adequately address

the

specific issue of

studying Oriental women, it was an important catalyst to achieve such advancement under this Muslim Women’s Studies umbrella. Instead it has been disappointing to draw attention to the way that it has become even more deeply embedded in the hegemony of discourse he addressed.

Returning to the importance I have given to work in Muslim Women’s Studies to include a detailed discussion of the meanings for the term “Islam,” at an abstract level I first agreed with Fazlur Rahman,
23
that the

criteria referent for the study of Islam cannot be the plethora or varieties of the “little tradition” that have evolved among Muslims throughout the history of living Islam.
24
The assortment of understandings both reflect

the Islamic worldview as based upon the referents and the diverse cultural and historical conditions which each collective of Muslims bring as influ- enced by the circumstances of their cultures, and the consequences of their historical circumstances, whether peaceful or under conflict. Negotiating between the influences of these interactions helps to better understand that Islam is one factor among many that we must study about individual cultures and the spread of the religion. The expectations established, limit- ations, and strengths of a specific cultural and historical milieu contribute to the variant implementations that take root or are totally ignored. For example, it would seem contradictory that some places which enforce greater general limitations on women, like Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan under the Taliban, do not practice any form of genital mutilation, whether the lesser “symbolic” removal of the clitoris or the full-fledged infibulations. Knowing what factors cause which restrictions on women in concert with their interpretation and implementation of textual sources indicates that patriarchal practices among Muslims reflect some things other than the religious sources themselves. Yet, the consistent justifications given to these restrictions in too much of the literature generated to justify them to women and non-Muslim international groups have been that these prac- tices are essential to “Islam.” So they conclude: Islam oppresses women. Ultimately, those of us working not just as academics, but also as activists

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creating reform, must strategically negotiate these multiple factors at the level of policy and legal re-articulations with due research attention given to evidence of their existence and the consequences of their violation. Consis- tently across the Muslim world, the academic inclusion of alternative, female-inclusive interpretations have helped to advocate more liberative and egalitarian implementations in actual policy.

All these variants need to be incorporated into critical analysis of the specific case studies done on Muslim women in these societies. The absence of clarity about these variants has led too many readers to conclude that
each example reflects the goals, principles, ideologies, or worldview of Islam
. The patriarchal authority and control over what becomes accepted as “Islam”, which developed from specific cultural and historical contexts, bears heavily upon the experiences of Muslim women and men in each of those contexts as analyzed in the case by case methods of study. How authority and control are determined and implemented, coercively or through acquiescence, is essential to the appropriate location of case studies

work in contribution to this field of academic study.
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In addition, it is clear that the academic expertise of the one doing the analysis contributes in other specific ways to understanding the particulars of the study itself. The expertise primary to the author cannot be used as the sole basis for explaining the nature of Muslim women’s experiences. Since “Islam is a faith tradition with an intellectual legacy that has developed sometimes coherently and systematically over the past 14 hundred years, and sometimes in contradictory directions from previous generations,” it is important that intelligent consideration of Muslim women makes clear cor- relations between this legacy and the areas of gender studies as developed in the West, especially as it has spread to become a global phenomenon in modernity.
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Finally, I hope that Muslim and non-Muslim women and men aca- demics who are working on these crossroads continue to orchestrate forums, conferences, and networks with a variety of motivating causes. I am especially interested in finding an opportunity for Muslim women teaching any subjects related to “Islam” to form a national collective that meets to discuss experiences in the academy, strategies of survival, and methods employed to excel.

All of my discussions about Muslim Women’s Studies started at a meeting held at M.I.T. on African-American Women in the Academy. I cannot imagine what was needed to bring such a forum together, and despite the claims of many in 1993 that it was their desire to recreate such a forum

78 inside the gender jihad

annually, if not on a regular basis, it has yet to occur again. Muslim women academics are even more fragmented. Certainly, discussing the creation of Muslim Women’s Studies should not take longer than it took to create Women’s Studies in U.S. academia or should not be plagued by many more obstacles. This vision of the matter, however, does indicate how formidable a task it will be to create the sub-discipline or the collective.

GENDER ISSUES

Whether with regard to identity, self-awareness, spirituality, sensitivity, inclusivity, mainstreaming, or political reform, gender is one of the major issues to be addressed by the world community in the past century. It is also one of the most crucial issues facing Islam and Muslims in modernity. Where the key Islamic issues might be seen as democracy, sustainable devel- opment, human rights, and globalization of the economy, all of these issues intersect in some strategic way with gender issues. In fact it was at the mismanagement of the element of gender and the vital significance of women’s varied yet often unacknowledged skills and contributions that the earlier efforts at constructing sustained development met some of their greatest failings. “The failure to include women in the macro-economic policies as major and potential actors leads to the exclusion of
half the human resources and their potential
from the national development process. Therefore, mainstreaming women in the whole policy process is not only a matter of social justice but, it is an economic imperative”
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(emphasis in the original). The leading models for gender analysis are still primarily from the place given or taking assertive advantages of individ- ualism and consumerism to reconfigure the family – not as an extended unit of multiple networks of mutual self-support – especially for women, but in adapting the nuclear family, the structure most easily exploited for individ- ualism and consumerism.

It is no longer possible to construct Third World and all other specified articulations and philosophical developments of feminism without due ref- erence to the Western origins of feminism. That is why I still describe my pos- ition as pro-faith, pro-feminist. Despite how others may categorize me, my work is certainly feminist, but I still refuse to self-designate as feminist, even with “Muslim” put in front of it, because my emphasis on faith and the sacred prioritize my motivations in feminist methodologies. Besides, as an African-American, the original feminist paradigms were not intended to include me, as all the works on Womanism have soundly elucidated. In

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addition, socialist feminism has focused clearly on the significance of class as it further problematizes the origins of feminism in the West. Finally, Third World feminisms have worked tediously to sensitize women and men to the complexities of relative global realities to resolving universally existing but specifically manifested problems in areas like gender.

Starting with Simone de Beauvoir’s basic idea that feminism is the “radical notion that women are human beings,”
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we move to examin- ations of what is meant by human being. Women are human beings in ways

particularly distinct from men as well as in ways very similar to men. They are also similar to and distinct from each other as women, so likewise between Muslim women. The unifying principle of Islam, according to the Qur’an, is the notion of the human being based on a relationship with the

divine; more specifically, the concept of
khilafah
(moral agency),
2
9
the

ontological purpose for all human creation. This purpose, of direct respon- sibility to the divine, must be fulfilled here on earth and will only be fulfilled in a multiplicity of ways determined by and integrally intertwined with human circumstances and reasoning.

Islamic Thought, Feminism(s), and Postmodernity

In Western academic circles, the main focus of feminist thought seems incongruent with the establishment and sustainability of sacred systems, rendering them incorrigibly patriarchal and hence beyond redemption.

Post-Christian and post-Jewish feminist theologians contend that the biblical traditions are simply too broken to be fixed, that patriarchal values and symbolism are too essential and too central to their world views ever to be overcome. They do not see patriarchy, in its many levels of manifestation and meaning, as accidental or secondary to the biblical outlook, or as merely an unfortunate outgrowth or outmoded cultural habits.
Therefore, they contend, no woman will ever experience whole- ness, healing, integrity, and autonomy while committed to a biblical religion.
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(emphasis mine)

Shulamit Reinharz emphasizes the pluralist approach to her book
Feminist Methods in Social Research
to demonstrate “the fact feminists have used all existing methods and have invented some new ones as well.”
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Instead of orthodoxy, feminist research practices must be recognized as a plurality. Rather than being a “woman’s way of knowing” or a “feminist way of doing research,” there are women’s ways of knowing, she reminds us, and

80 inside the gender jihad

we must remember “collective voices.” Yet much can be said of the often- quoted remark of the black lesbian feminist literary and political genius Audre Lorde: “The master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house.” I do not propose to create or to engage in the creation of a new female- centered goddess tradition post-Islam.

While I acknowledge the potential contributions of both secularist and pro-faith perspectives in feminist work, I can only participate in gender reforms in (and outside of) Islam from a pro-faith perspective. I chose the literary tradition of Qur’anic exegesis as the specific discipline that would sustain my faith by equipping me with the tools to determine exactly how the masters’ houses have been constructed, without limiting the sacred potential to human tools. I wrestle the hegemony of male privilege in Islamic interpretation (“master’s tools”) as patriarchal interpretation, which continually leaves a mark on Islamic praxis and thought. Too many of the world’s Muslims cannot perceive a distinction between this interpre- tation and the divine will, leading to the truncated notion of divine intent as well as of the divine nature and essence limited to the maelstrom perspective, hence violating the actual transcendent nature of Allah. Western scholars are stuck between the variegated articulations and appli- cations of these mutually existing and yet sometimes utterly contradictory paradigms, motivated by the need to find the simplest means to eradicate the significance of this trickster that takes the name “Islam” to suit its whims and to legitimate its reactive desire to build its own power agendas in place of its post-colonialist disintegration.

I see a link between these two – interpretation of praxis and ideas about Allah – because we cannot know how to “surrender to the divine will” – what might be considered as the fundamental “definition of being Muslim or Muslimah” – if we have a truncated notion of the divine. The notion of the divine is overwhelmingly as a male being, parallel to the cosmological notion rejected in Islamic orthodox theology of a male person literally made in the image of God. The idea of Allah as the sacred essence transcending all thing-systems (
laysa ka mithlihi shay’
) is too illusive for constructing and sustaining systems that exert power over others.

This brings to mind an important theoretical question: can there be such a thing as a post-Muslim? If a fully mature and responsible member of society selected of their own volition to embrace Islam as their worldview and complete way of life, and then with the same volition and full maturity rejected Islam, such a one – according to
shari‘ah
– is punishable by death, for apostasy. Although I prefer the simple Qur’anic imperative articulated

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as “
la ikraha bi-l-din
”
(there is no compulsion in religion) (3:256), the persistence of the “death-threat” tactic does interfere with non-compulsory religious freedom of choice for Muslims. Given the complication of this, to actually openly declare oneself “post-Muslim” might be tantamount to suicide.

On the other hand, most of the world’s Muslim population consists of persons raised in religious or non-religious households of parents known as Muslim. Upon reaching maturity almost none were given the opportunity to decide whether Islam was the right choice for them. If someone raised in such a household was not only allowed but expected to choose for them- selves, then those who wanted to leave could do so freely, openly, and with acceptance and respect for their choice. Instead, the legal ruling is generally understood to apply without distinction to those who never had the right to choose, so any expressions of dissatisfaction with being Muslim legitimates the punishment for apostasy and many would fear for their lives and safety, so might find it better to remain closeted about their real feelings on the matter.