Women and Islam

Lahoucine Ouzgane

Dept. of English
University of Alberta
LOUZGANE@vm.ucs.ualberta.ca

 

Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1992. Pp. viii + 296. Cloth, $30.00

 

Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam centers on the conditions and lives of women in Middle Eastern Arab history. It is a response both to the growing strength of Islamist movements, which urge a return to the laws and practices set forth in the core Islamic discourse, and to the way in which Arab women are discussed in the West.

 

The book is divided into three parts. “Part One: The Pre-Islamic Middle East” includes a chapter on Mesopotamia and another on The Mediterranean Middle East. Citing archeological evidence, Ahmed points out that the subordination of Middle Eastern women became more or less institutionalized with the rise of urban centers in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers between 3500 and 3000 B.C.E. These centers gave rise to military competitiveness, the patriarchal family, the exclusion of women from most of the professional classes, the designation of women’s sexuality as the property of men, and the use of the veil to differentiate between “respectable” and “disreputable” women. Challenging the assumption that Islamic societies are inherently oppressive to women–a task that she undertakes throughout her book–Ahmed stresses the fact that the “Mesopotamian, Persian, Hellenic, Christian, and eventually Islamic cultures each contributed practices that both controlled and diminished women, and each also apparently borrowed the controlling and reductive practices of its neighbors” (18).

 

Reviewing, for example, some of the salient features of Byzantine society, Ahmed notes that the birth of a boy (but not that of a girl) was greeted with cries of joy, that, “barring some general disaster, women were always supposed to be veiled” (26), and that the system of relying on eunuchs to enforce the separation of the sexes was already in place. To show continuity with the rigid Byzantine customs, Ahmed turns to Classical Greek, and specifically Aristotelian, theories which conceived of women “as innately and biologically inferior in both mental and physical capacities–and thus as intended for their subservient position by ‘nature'” (29). Citing several scholars–Sarah Pomeroy, Dorothy Thompson, Naphtali Lewis, Jean Vercoutter, and Christiane Desroches Noblecourt–Ahmed finds that only the “remarkably nonmisogynist” culture of the New Kingdom in Egypt “accorded women high esteem” (31). But neither Ahmed nor her sources explain this anomalous situation. The rest of the chapter outlines how, in the centuries immediately preceding the rise of Islam, the politically dominant Christianity brought with it “the religious sanction of women’s social subordination and the endorsement of their essential secondariness” (34).

 

The four chapters of Part Two are grouped under the heading of “Founding Discourses.” Here, the text deals with Arabia at the time of the rise of Islam, carefully delineating the changes brought about by the new religion when it spread to the rest of the Middle East. When Muhammed became the established prophet, women lost their economic independence, their autonomy, and the right to a monogamous marriage. The period also witnessed the institution of the patrilineal and patriarchal marriage (Aisha was ten years old when she was married to Muhammed). After the prophet’s death in 632, the mechanisms for controlling women’s lives were more clearly articulated by the succeeding caliphs. Under Umar’s reign (634-44), for instance, segregated prayers were established (with a male imam for the women); and polygamy and marriage of nine- or ten-year-old girls were sanctioned. Umar himself was very harsh toward women both in private and in public.

 

At the end of this chapter, Ahmed makes one of the most important points of her argument: what has been consistently overlooked, she declares, is “the broad ethical field of meaning” in which these restrictive practices against women were embedded–“the ethical teachings Islam was above all established to articulate” (62). Her point has far-reaching implications for how we understand Islam’s attitude toward women. “When those teachings are taken into account,” she says,

 

the religion's understanding of women and gender emerges as far more ambiguous than this account might suggest. Islam's ethical vision, which is stubbornly egalitarian, including with respect to the sexes, is thus in tension with, and might even be said to subvert, the hierarchical structure of marriage pragmatically instituted in the first Islamic society.(62-63)

 

To prove that Islam recognizes the “identicalness of men and women and the equal worth of their labor” (65), Ahmed quotes the following Quranic verse: “I suffer not the good deeds of any to go to waste, be he a man or a woman: The one of you is of the other.” But even if one were to overlook the problem of translation (another translator, N.J. Dawood, renders the passage in question this way: “I will deny no man or woman among you the reward of their labours. You are the offspring of one another”), it is hard to argue for a “stubbornly egalitarian” vision when the only Quranic Sura entitled “Women” is addressed to men, and where one can read that “Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. . . . As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them. Then if they obey you, take no further action against them” (Sura 4: 34).

 

From Ahmed’s point of view, Muslim women suffered the worst excesses of the pragmatic teachings of Islam under the Abbasid dynasty ruling at Baghdad (749-1258). The Abbasid elite men kept enormous harems of wives and concubines and sanctioned polygamy and the seclusion of women; an enormous number of Arab soldiers who arrived in Irak took wives and concubines from the local non-Muslim populations; and “one young man,” we are told, “on receiving his inheritance, went out to purchase ‘a house, furniture, concubines and other objects'” (83). To survive in this kind of atmosphere, women had to resort to manipulation, poison, intense rivalries, and falsehoods. (“Zubaida, royal-born wife of Harun al-Rashid, jealous of his attachment to a particular concubine, was advised to stop nagging–and felt the need to make up for her jealous lapse by presenting al-Rashid with ten concubines.”) Once again, Ahmed observes, the ethical injunctions of Islam were rarely translated into enforceable laws. Only texts that orthodox theologians, legists, and philosophers (the likes of Al-Ghazali) created were–and continue to be–regarded as the core prescriptive texts of Islam. But Ahmed also makes it clear that this intense misogyny was neither originally nor exclusively Muslim in character, but rather the consequence of a cultural negotiation between Islam and “an urban Middle East with already well-articulated misogynist attitudes and practices”:

 

[B]y licensing polygamy, concubinage, and easy divorce for men, originally allowed under different circumstances in a different society, Islam lent itself to being interpreted as endorsing and giving religious sanction to a deeply negative and debased conception of women.(87)

 

“Part Three: New Discourses” is narrow in focus– dealing mainly with Egypt from early 19th Century to the present–but crucial to a good understanding of Islam and women today. The period witnessed the Western economic encroachment on the Middle East and the emergence of the “modern” states. While the inroads made by European goods in Egypt were decidedly negative for women–who worked mainly in textiles–the process of change set in motion would prove broadly positive for them. Most importantly, Ahmed notes, the period saw “the emergence of women themselves as a central subject for national debate. For the first time since the establishment of Islam, the treatment of women in Islamic custom and law–the license of polygamy, easy male access to divorce, and segregation–were openly discussed . . .” (128). But the debates about “women” and social reform always took place in a European context, so to speak: the Muslim society felt the need to catch up to a relatively “advanced” European culture. This, indeed is one of Ahmed’s central arguments. The problem with proponents of “improvement in the status of women,” she observes, is that they had

 

from early on couched their advocacy in terms of the need to abandon the (implicitly) 'innately' and 'irreparably' misogynist practices of the native culture in favor of the customs and beliefs of another culture--the European.(129)

 

Ahmed extends this discussion in Chapter 8: “The Discourse of the Veil”–one of the best treatments of the subject I have seen and, for me, the strongest part of Ahmed’s study. The chapter begins with Ahmed’s examination of Qassim Amin’s The Liberation of Woman, a book that provoked intense and furious debate upon its publication in 1899 (with more than thirty books and articles appearing in response) and that is traditionally regarded as marking the beginning of feminism in the Arab world. Amin argues passionately for the abolition of the veil and for fundamental changes in culture, society, and even in Arab character. Of Egyptian women he writes that they are

 

not in the habit of combing their hair every day . . . nor do they bathe more than once a week. They do not know how to use a toothbrush and do not attend to what is attractive in clothing, though their attractiveness and cleanliness strongly influence men's inclinations. They do not know how to rouse desire in their husband, nor how to retain his desire or increase it. . . .(Quoted in Ahmed, 157)

 

At this point, Ahmed remarks that the fusion of the issue of women and culture and the expanded signification of the veil originated in the discourses of European societies:

 

Those ideas were interjected into the native discourse as Muslim men exposed to European ideas began to reproduce and react to them and, subsequently and more persuasively and insistently, as Europeans--servants of Empire and individuals resident in Egypt--introduced and actively disseminated them.(149)

 

Throughout this segment of her argument, Ahmed insists that “the peculiar practices of Islam with respect to women had always formed part of the Western narrative of the quintessential otherness and inferiority of Islam” (149). Prior to the seventeenth century, Western ideas about Islam derived mainly from travelers and crusaders. The other source of Western ideas of Islam came from the narrative of colonial domination regarding the inferiority of all other cultures and societies, a narrative that successfully co-opted the language of feminism and whose thesis was that “Islam was innately and immutably oppressive to women, that the veil and segregation epitomized this oppression, and that these customs were fundamental reasons for the general and comprehensive backwardness of Islamic societies” (151-52). If the situation of Egyptian women was to improve, Lord Cromer deemed it essential that Egyptians “be persuaded or forced into imbibing the true spirit of western civilization” because the practices of veiling and seclusion constituted “the fatal obstacle” to the Egyptians’ “attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of Western civilization” (quoted in Ahmed, 153).

 

But when Ahmed examines Cromer’s policies in Egypt, they turn out to be extremely detrimental to Egyptian women: he placed restrictions on government schools, raised school fees, and discouraged the training of women doctors because, as he declared, “throughout the civilized world, attendance by medical men is still the rule.” Ahmed also underscores the fact that “This champion of the unveiling of Egyptian women was, in England, founding member and sometime president of the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage” (1953). Others besides the official servants of empire shared and promoted Cromer’s ideas. For the missionaries, the degradation of women in Islam was legitimate ground for their attacks on native culture, so missionary-school teachers actively attacked the practice of veiling by trying to persuade girls to defy their families and not wear one. Ahmed quotes a missionary woman’s conviction that marriage in Islam was “not founded on love but on sensuality” and that a Muslim wife, “buried alive behind the veil,” was regarded as “prisoner and slave rather than . . . companion and help-mate” (154). To show how insiduous and widespread this campaign against the veil was, Ahmed cites the case of the well-meaning European feminist Eugnie Le Brun, who earnestly encouraged young Egyptian women to cast off the veil as their first step toward female liberation (154).

 

Qassim Amin, “son of Cromer and colonialism,” had apparently internalized the colonialist perception of Egyptian culture, and his Liberation of Woman merely replicated this perception. Cromer’s well-known pronouncements (on the differences between, on the one hand, the European man’s close reasoning, his clarity, his natural logic, and his love of symmetry, and, on the other hand, the Oriental’s slipshod reasoning) are echoed in Amin’s assertion that

 

For the most part the European man uses his intellect, but when circumstances require it, he deploys force. He does not seek glory from his possessions and colonies, for he has enough of this through his intellectual achievements and scientific inventions.(Quoted in Ahmed, 155)

 

As colonialists and missionaries have always maintained, to change a culture, il faut chercher la femme. To make Muslim society abandon its backward ways, Amin argued, required changing the women–for whom, as noted earlier, he reserved his most virulent contempt: “The grown man is none other

 

than his mother shaped him in childhood," and this is the essence of this book. . . . It is impossible to breed successful men if they do not have mothers capable of raising them to be successful. This is the noble duty that advanced civilization has given to women in our age and which she fulfills in advanced societies.(Quoted in Ahmed, 156; emphasis in original)

 

The irony here, Ahmed argues, is that it is Western discourse that in the first place determined the new meanings of the veil: Muslim men exposed to European ways felt the humiliation of being described as uncivilized because “their” women were veiled. Amin’s ideas can thus be explained only in the context of the authority and global dominance of the Western world, for, as Ahmed says, “the connection between the issues of culture and women, and more precisely between the cultures of Other men and the oppression of women, was created by Western discourse” (165). Ahmed does not deny that Islamic societies oppressed women: “They did and do; that is not in dispute.” Rather, she wants to emphasize “the political uses” of the idea that Islam oppressed women, so as to challenge the “vague and inaccurate understanding of Muslim societies,” an understanding derived from what patriarchal colonialists identified as the sources and main form of women’s oppression in Islamic culture. In short, the attention given to the issue of the veil far outweighs its significance and obscures the real and substantive matters of women’s rights, including their right to identify what they (and not Cromer or Amin) define as significant sites of struggle.

 

Chapter 9, “The First Feminists,” looks at the two founding feminist discourses that appeared in Egypt in the first three decades of this century. While the dominant voice, closely allied with the westernizing and secularizing tendencies of society, promoted the desirability of progress toward Western-type societies, the alternative voice, wary of and opposed to Western ways, searched for ways of articulating female subjectivity within a native Islamic discourse (174). Here, Ahmed deals briefly with the work of such figures as Huda Sharawi, Malak Nassef, Mai Ziyada, Alila Rifaat, and Nawal El-Saadawi. For the first time, Egyptian women themselves were exploring the implications of a male-gendered debate and its fixation on the veil.

 

In the last chapter, “The Struggle for the Future,” Ahmed examines the significance of a “new” phenomenon in Egypt known as al-ziyy al-islami or the Islamic dress:

 

Men complying with the requirement of modesty may wear Arabian-style robes (rather than Egyptian robes), sandals, and sometimes a long scarf on the head, or they may wear baggy trousers and loose shirts. Women wear robes in a variety of styles. . . . but the skirts are ankle-deep and the sleeves long . . . and some of them, depending on how they personally interpret the requirement for modesty, wear face veils."(220- 21)

 

Ahmed’s point is that the Islamic dress might be seen as a democratic one, erasing class origins; it is also economical, and most importantly for women, it gives them a great deal of social mobility while preserving their native culture. Ultimately, the Islamic dress “is the uniform of arrival, signaling entrance into, and determination to move forward in, modernity” (225).

 

As no other general survey of women and gender in Islam exists, Women and Gender in Islam is a welcome contribution to the subject and particularly to the current debates about the “inherently misogynist” nature of Islam. The book is a fascinating survey of Islamic debates and ideologies about women and gender in the Middle East, a part of the world that has exercised–and continues to exercise– a compelling influence on the Western imagination.