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Islam, Irigaray, and the retrieval of gender Search

Abdal Hakim Murad Islam
America
Abdal Hakim Murad
(April 1999) Search For:

The Prophet said that women totally dominate men of

intellect and possessors of hearts.
Submit your
But ignorant men dominate women, for they are
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is a creator
- you could say that she is not created. -
- Jalal al-Din Rumi
Dar Al Islam
The 1969 female eunuch was nothing but womb. The
1997
female eunuch has no womb.
- Germaine Greer

Can men any longer write about women? Will our

discourse always fallaciously subjectivise the male, as
the Lacanian digit to the feminine zero? Andrea
Dworkin and many others are insistent here. And yet
the theologian must oppose such a closure no less
stridently. No-one should claim a monological right to
instruct the other sex concerning moral thought and
conduct. Moreover, and no less seriously, we must
object to that anti-dialogical aspect of the prevailing
academic feminism which, supported by biometric
footnotes, proposes that men have nothing to say
here because truly 'female thought' is on every level
categorically different from the thought of males. On
this view, sexual difference not only creates a
predisposition to be interested in certain kinds of
issues, but fundamentally affects every way in which
we handle concepts. Knowledges are sexualised, we
are told; 'the very way in which we decide what is
true and false is a function of sexual difference.'
One reaction against this view is voiced in detail by
Jean Curthoys in her new book Feminist Amnesia. She
applies a kind of Friedanite fundamentalism,
lamenting the recent decline of 60s and 70s radical
feminist theory which was grounded in assurances of
identity between the sexes rather than mere equality.
Conventional academic feminism today, she avers,
draws on recent biology to posit a total epistemic
discontinuity between male and female, so that all
scholarship, and all conclusions about reality, are
bifurcated accordingly, excluding all possibility of
dialogue across the gender abyss. This aporetic
cessation, she insists, is intolerable.
Clearly there is force to her complaint. But equally
clearly, both she and her antagonists go too far.
Biologists and philosophers now converge on a
median position which suggests that men and women
do indeed think differently, but not so differently that
they can form no judgement on each other's
conclusions. It is not just the practical implications
which make this inference inescapable (could we
tolerate, for instance, separate encyclopedias for each
sex?). More seriously, the claim to aporia is to be
rejected as forming part of a recent feminist turn
away from rationality itself as an oppressive product
and tool of 'male linearity'. On this view, women's
discourse, sceptical about attempts to deduce any
intrinsically true facts about reality, is hence pre-
eminently responsive to the project of
postmodernism, while men languish amid the
rationalising games of late modernity. This thesis of
male backwardness is intriguing and has appealed to
many; yet remains without persuasive proof. As the
Maturidis insist, rationality and morality are observed
by the mind, not merely constructed by it. Is this
scruple a 'linear male objectification'? Surely it is just
objectification: to claim that women have a
categorically more indirect, empathetic, spontaneous
approach to reality may be tantamount to affirming
that they are less capable of sustained argument
based on fact. Such a conclusion is far from universal
among feminists, converging as it does with a certain
masculine stereotype. Of course, it is almost certainly
true, as Professor Carol Gilligan has argued that
ethical responses differ markedly between the sexes.
For her, women 'make moral decisions in a framework
of relationships more than in a framework of rights'.
Women's 'moral processing is contextually oriented'.
This is uncontroversial. But value judgements amid
the hurly-burly of lived reality are one thing; large
generalisations about the nature of the world are
quite another. And in the latter field, neither
revelation nor reason persuade us that the two styles
of argument, the male and female, cannot overlap.

What follows, therefore, is not an androcentric

apologia, although a deliberate or even unwilled male
discourse is inescapable and is not inherently
improper. It claims to be factual, not a self-
authenticating view from within a particular
'gendered' language-game. A second preliminary
point raises the entire problem of gendered
approaches to spirituality. The British religious
philosopher John Hick, in a recent moment of
feministic reflection, proposed that 'because of the
effects upon them of patriarchal cultures, many
women have 'weak' egos, suffer from an ingrained
inferiority complex, and are tempted to diffusion and
triviality.' He thus suggests that women experience
greater difficulties in becoming saints because the
spiritual struggle can only be undertaken by a
coherent, confident personality. On this view, women
must pass through two stages in achieving sainthood,
while men require only one.

A little reflection will reveal that this position suffers

from two sharp problems. For a start, it deploys an
unexamined stereotype of traditional women as
shallow and easily distracted; whereas any
observation of women's attendence at, say, salat, or a
Turkish mevlud, suggests that women's devotional
behavior tends to be not palpably less sober, or
focussed or directed than that of men. Often it is
women rather then men who retain a more serious
faith under secularizing conditions; although this may
flower in the privacy of the home, rather than under
public scrutiny in the mosque. Secondly, it implies
that spiritual growth is a primarily mechanical,
discursive procedure whereby the will overcomes
passion, leading to the detachment from the world
which is the precondition for sainthood. This begs
some fundamental questions about the spiritual life;
Hick's image may hold good for some forms of
Christianity and Hinduism, but cannot be applied to
many other varieties of religious development, where
the conscious, calculating will is deliberately pushed
into the background. Specifically, what is
characteristically male about love-based mysticism?
The insistence that the mind is a prison, and that
emotion and spontaneous love of God, triggered by
relatively informal practices of the dhikr type, is a
commonplace even of 'male' spirituality. Here, for
instance, is a poem by Rumi:
'In the screaming gale of Love, the intellect is a
gnat.
How can intellects find space to wander there?'

And again:

'Do not remain a man of intellect among the

lovers, especially if you love that
sweet-faced Beloved.
May the men of intellect stay far from the
lovers, may the smell of dung stay
far from the east wind!
If a man of intellect should enter, tell him the
way is blocked, but if a lover
should come, extend him a hundred welcomes!
By the time intellect has deliberated and
reflected, love has flown to the
 seventh heaven.
By the time intellect has found a camel for the
hajj, love has circled the
Ka'ba.
Love has come and covered my mouth. It says:
'Throw away your poetry, and
come to the stars!''

Perhaps a modern Protestant theologian will have

problems with this; but most traditional religions
assume that the way to God is through the heart, not
the mind. So Hick's idea that 'patriarchy' slams the
door to God in the face of traditional women simply
because they are (supposedly) less cerebral than
men, seems distinctly unpersuasive. He is simply a
victim of his own cultural and denominational
limitations. With these preliminary points in mind, let
us now move on to the core issue. Modern women
writers on religion, such as Rosemary Ruether, insist
that all talk of gender in religions has to start in the
beginning, with the archetypes. What do images of
God tell us about the place of men and women in the
world? In her book Sexism and God-Talk, Ruether
objects to ways in which Christian metaphors about
God's maleness are taken literally. For her, the
Decalogue's prohibition of idolatry 'must be extended
to verbal pictures. When the word Father is taken
literally to mean that God is male and not female,
represented by males and not females, then this word
becomes idolatrous.' She acknowledges that Christian
doctrine affirms that all language about God is
analogous. Nonetheless the use of male terms for the
Ultimate Reality, and the characteristically Christian
emphasis on the personhood of God, has regularly
resulted in this kind of idolatry. Her solution is to urge
the use of inclusive language, so that God is referred
to from time to time as the 'Goddess', or as 'She'.
Ruether even objects to the idea of God as parent,
suggesting, no doubt absurdly, that this encourages
what she calls a virtue of spiritual infantilism which
makes 'autonomy and assertion of free will a sin.'
Despite her promethean confidence in her ability to
revise tradition, Ruether has been famously
outstripped by Mary Daly, a former Catholic
theologian who now, like several influential feminists,
describes herself as a 'witch'. Her book Beyond God
the Father rejects even the metaphorical possibilities
of traditional language. To call God Father, she insists,
is to call fathers God. The Trinity is thus revealed as
'an eternal male homosexual orgy'. As the
engendering matrix of the world, God is, in fact,
paradigmatically female. And the world itself, as
mirror of heaven, 'bears fruit', and is hence female
also. The male principle is the alien force, the nexus
of disruption, aggression, and sin. Daly seems to
approach the almost dualistic notion that God is
female, while the 'horned' devil is male. This
gendered Manicheanism may seem a bizarre inversion
of Augustine's androcentrism, but her books are
hugely influential, selling in hundreds of thousands of
copies.
Not every figuring of the divine is androcentric, of
course. Luce Irigaray observes that it is in the West
that 'the gender of God, the guardian of every subject
and discourse, is always paternal and masculine'.
Even Orthodoxy is more aporetic in its metaphorical
gendering of the sacred. The paintings of El Greco, as
they reflect his trajectory from the timeless icon-
painting of his native Crete, through his studies in
Venice under Tintoretto, to the Toledo of the muscular
Counter-Reformation, reveal a process of increasing
concretization, with growing attention to perspective,
expression, and sharpness of form. His Christ, in his
late, 'Catholic' paintings, is more human than divine;
and hence more humanly and authentically male.
In this respect, perhaps more than in any other way,
ours is not a Western tradition.

Islamic theology confronts us with the spectacular

absence of a gendered Godhead. A theology which
reveals the divine through incarnation in a body also
locates it in a gender, and inescapably passes
judgement on the other sex. A theology which locates
it in a book makes no judgement about gender; since
books are unsexed. The divine remains divine, that is,
genderless, even when expressed in a fully saving
way on earth.
The source of this teaching is unproblematic for
believers. Secular historians might see it differently,
as confirmation that early Islam was not
covenantally-defined. Andromorphic views of the
divine were necessary to Judaism, which was
communally constituted in opposition to neighbouring
goddess-worship, whence the imagery of Israel as
'God's bride'. This continued in the Christian church,
the 'New Israel', the 'bride of Christ', as the Church
Fathers waged war on the goddess cults of late
antiquity, and also, increasingly, on 'woman' herself
as the paradigm of responsibility for the Fall. But
Islam's community of believers never saw itself as a
feminine entity, despite the interesting matronal
resonances of the term umma. The Islamic
understanding of salvation history did not require that
Allah should be constructed as male.

From a theologian's standpoint it might be said that

Islam averts the difficulty identified by Ruether
through its emphasis on the divine transcendence
(tanzih). The same 'desertlike' abstract difference of
the Muslim God which draws reproach from Christian
commentators also allows a gender-neutral image of
the divine. Allah is not neuter or androgynous, but is
simply above gender. Even Judaism, which generally
has fewer problems in this area than has Christianity,
does not go this far. In the Eighteen Benedictions said
by pious Jews every morning and evening, we find
the words: 'Cause us to return, O our Father, to thy
Law,' while in Deuteronomy 8.6, we read: 'As a man
disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you.'

Such references to God as Father are less common in

the Old Testament than the New, but they are still
abundant, and are thorns in the path of gender-
sensitive liberal theologians. When we turn to the
Qur'an, we find an image of Godhead apophatically
stripped of metaphor. God is simply Allah, the God;
never Father. The divine is referred to by the
masculine pronoun: Allah is He (huwa); but the
grammarians and exegetes concur that this is not
even allegoric: Arabic has no neuter, and the use of
the masculine is normal in Arabic for genderless
nouns. No male preponderance is implied, any more
than feminity is implied by the grammatically female
gender of neuter plurals.

The modern Jordanian theologian Hasan al-Saqqaf

emphasises the point that Muslim theology has
consistently made down the ages: God is not
gendered, really or metaphorically. The Quran
continues Biblical assumptions on many levels, but
here there is a striking discontinuity. The imaging of
God has been shifted into a new and bipolar register,
that of the Ninety-Nine Names. Muslim women who
have reflected on the gender issue have seized, I
think with good reason, on this striking point. For
instance, one Muslim woman writer, Sartaz Aziz,
writes:
I am deeply grateful that my first ideas of God
were formed by Islam because I was
able to think of the Highest Power as one
completely without sex or race, and thus
completely unpatriarchal . . . We begin with the
idea of a deity who is completely
above sexual identity, and thus completely
outside the value system created by patriarchy.

This passage is cited by the modern Catholic writer

Maura O'Neill, who writes on women's issues in
dialogue, and who rightly concludes: 'Muslims do not
use a masculine God as either a conscious or
unconscious tool in the construction of gender roles.'
This does not mean that gender is absent from
Muslim metaphysics. The kalam scholars, as good
transcendentalists, banished it from the non-physical
world. But the mystics, as immanentists, read it into
almost everything. We might say that while in
Christianity, relationality is in the triune Godhead, and
is explicitly male, in Islam, relationality is absent from
the Godhead but exuberantly exists in the Names. To
use Kant's terms, the noumenal God is neutral,
whereas the phenomenal God is manifested in not
one but two genders. The two leading modern
scholars of this tradition in Islamic thought are Izutsu
and Murata, who have both noted the parallels
between Sufism's dynamic cosmology and the Taoist
world view: each sees existence as a dynamic
interplay of opposites, which ultimately resolve to the
One.
The Sufi metaphysicians were drawing on a
longstanding distinction between the Divine Names
that were called Names of Majesty (jalal), and the
Names of Beauty (jamal). The Names of Majesty
included Allah as Powerful (al-Qawi), Overwhelming
(al-Jabbar), Judge (al-Hakam); and these were seen
as pre-eminently masculine. Names of Beauty
included the All-Compassionate (al-Rahman), the Mild
(al-Halim), the Loving-kind (al-Wadud), and so on:
seen as archetypally feminine. The crux is that
neither set could be seen as pre-eminent, for all were
equally Names of God. In fact, by far the most
conspicuous of the Divine Names in the Koran is al-
Rahman, the All-Compassionate. And the explictly
feminine resonances of this name were remarked
upon by the Prophet (s.w.s.) himself, who taught that
rahma, loving compassion, is an attribute derived
from the word rahim, meaning a womb. (Bukhari,
Adab, 13) The cosmic matrix from which
differentiated being is fashioned is thus, as in all
primordial systems, explicitly feminine; although Allah
'an sich' remains outside qualification by gender or by
any other property.
Further confirmation for this is supplied in a famous
hadith, preserved for us by al-Bukhari, which
describes how during the Muslim conquest of Mecca a
woman was running about in the hot sun, searching
for her child. She found him, and clutched him to her
breast, saying, 'My son, my son!' The Prophet's
Companions saw this, and wept. The Prophet was
delighted to see their rahma, and said, 'Do you
wonder at this woman's rahma for her child? By Him
in Whose hand is my soul, on the Day of Judgement,
God shall show more rahma towards His believing
servant than this woman has shown to her son.'
(Bukhari, Adab, 18)
And again: 'On the day that He created the heavens
and the earth, God created a hundred rahmas, each
of which is as great as the space which lies between
heaven and earth. And He sent one rahma down to
earth, by which a mother has rahma for her child.'
(Muslim, Tawba, 21)
Drawing on this explicit identification of rahma with
the 'maternal' aspect of the phenomenal divine, the
developed tradition of Sufism habitually identifies
God's entire creative aspect as 'feminine', and as
merciful. Creation itself is the nafas al-Rahman, the
Breath of the All-Compassionate. Here the Ash'arite
occasionalism which insists on preserving the divine
omnipotence by denying secondary causation is
shifted into a mystical, matronal register, where the
world of emanation is gendered by the sheer fact of
its engendering. 'We have created everything in
pairs,' says the Qur'an.
This 'female' aspect of God allowed most of the great
mystical poets to refer to God as Layla - the celestial
beloved - the Arabic name Layla actually means
'night'. Layla is the veiled, darkly-unknown God who
brings forth life, and whose beauty once revealed
dazzles the lover. In one branch of this tradition, the
poets use frankly erotic language to convey the
rapture of the spiritual wayfarer as he lifts the veil - a
metaphor for distraction and sin - to be annihilated in
his Beloved.
One thinks here of Christian bridal mysticism, but in
reverse. St Teresa of Avila appears to use sensual
images to convey her union with Christ. But again,
Christ, as God the Son, is male. In Islamic mysticism,
the divine beloved is 'female'.
The kalam hence abolishes gender; spirituality
deploys it exuberantly as metaphor, thereby
displaying an aspect of the distinction between 'iman'
and 'ihsan'. The third component of the ternary laid
down by the Hadith of Gabriel, 'islam', comprising the
outward forms of religion, also recognises and affirms
gender as a fundamental quality of existence, and
this finds expression in many provisions of Islamic
law and the norms of Muslim life.
The pattern of life decreed by Islam, which is the
retrieval of the Great Covenant (mithaq), is
primordial, and hence biophiliac and affirmative of the
hormonal and genetic dimensions of humanity. Body,
mind and spirit are aspects of the same created
phenomenon, and are all gendered through their
interrelation. To the extent that the human creature
lives in wholeness, that creature's spiritual essence is
possessed of gender, whence the magnificent
celebration of the genius of each sex which is so
characteristic of Islam. The Prophet (s.w.s.) himself
can only be fully understood in this light: his virility
indicates his wholeness and hence his holiness. His
archetypal celebration of womanhood, his multiple
wives, recalls the virility of Solomon or other Hebrew
patriarchs, or even of Krishna. Living life to the full,
he embraced and utterly sacralised the divinely-
appointed rite of procreation. His khasa'is, the rules
which the Lawgiver fashioned for him alone, and
which are listed by Suyuti in his al-Khasa'is al-Kubra,
generally imposed upon him rigours from which his
followers were exempt. The tahajjud prayer was
obligatory for him, but only optional for other
Muslims. He was entitled to fast for twenty-four
hours, or for much longer periods (the so-called
Continuous Fast - sawm al-wisal); although ordinary
believers were required to fast from dawn to dusk
only. His khasa'is are for the most part austerities;
and yet among them we find the inclusion of an
expansive polygamy. Several of his wives were
elderly, it is true (Sawda, Umm Habiba, Maymuna),
and their marriages may have been straightforward
matters of compassion and political wisdom; but
other wives were young. By his triumphant polygamy,
the Blessed Prophet was indicating the end of the
Christian war against the body, and rhetorically re-
affirmed the sacramental value of sexuality that the
Hebrew prophets had proclaimed.
Inseparable from this was his valour on the field of
battle. His style of spiritual self-naughting linked to
heroism has no European equivalent: it was not that
of the celibate Templars, or the Knights of Calatrava,
but resonates instead with the warrior holiness of
Krishna, or the bushido of medieval Japan. The
samurai ethic combines meditative stillness, military
excellence, and love for women in equal measure; it
is a spectacular expression of maleness which is
illuminative of this, to many Europeans, most remote
and ungraspable dimension of the Sunna.
And this leads us towards a further question.
Feminists point out that early Christian celibacy was
driven by a horror of the flesh, so that women were,
in Tertullian's words, 'the devil's gateway'. This could
have no deep purchase in Islamic culture, with the
hadith insisting that 'Marriage is my sunna, and
whoever departs from my sunna is not of me;' a
valorization of marriage which implicitly valorized
functional womanhood in a way that the Church
Fathers, with their preference for virginal perfection,
had found problematic. It is true that a celibate
advocacy developed among some second and third
generation Muslim ascetics also, with Abu Sulayman
al-Darani declaring, 'Whoever marries has inclined
towards the world'. However, this kind of sentiment
tended to be expressed in the very early ascetical
milieu, where the drive for celibacy, as Tor Andrae has
shown, was the result of Christian monastic influence,
and was later swept away by the tide of normative
Sufism. In high medieval Islam the conjunction of
holiness and celibacy was unimaginable, and few who
aspired to God were unmarried: Ibn Taymiya was the
rarest of exceptions.
This evolution of values again parallels the situation in
early Christianity. A bitterly-fought scholarly
argument debates whether the appearance of the first
Christians improved or degraded the status of
women, with Peter Brown and many feminists arguing
the latter view. Ben Witherington observes that it is
the later New Testament material (Luke, Acts) that
advocates an improved role for women and a
departure from the rabbinical (and hence post-
prophetic) norms which shaped the attitudes of the
first Christians. However, as Jesus was a Jewish
prophet, loyal to revelation, and in particular to its
interpretation within a compassionate template, it is
reasonable to assume that there existed genuinely
pro-female possibilities in the early Jesus community
that capsized under the weight of pre-existent
Hellenic misogyny which some authors of the Pauline
epistles imported from the mystery religions, in the
way that Foucault has shown in the second volume of
his History of Sexuality.
It may be said that an analogous corrosion befell
Islamic social history. Critically, however, this
happened to a much lesser extent, for a set of
reasons which demand careful attention.

Firstly, the above-noted refusal of the scriptures to

attribute male gender to the Godhead deprived the
tradition of an unarguable gynophobic foundation.
The doctrine of the Names as archetypes for all
bipolarities in creation ruled out any possibly
consequent idea that humanity's retrieval of
theomorphism must entail a shedding of gender in
favour of androgyny. On the contrary, the retrieval of
theomorphism is the retrieval of gender, fully
understood.
Secondly, the very word 'woman' had been for many
Church Fathers a metonym for concupiscence; and
patristic Christianity's consistent preference for
celibacy as a calling higher than marriage had
entailed a particular attitude towards women. The
model was, of course, Christ himself, as later figured
and interpreted by the Church's imagination. Islam,
by stark contrast, maintained a version of the
primordial, and also Solomonic, polygamous, heroic
model of Semitic prophethood. As Geoffrey Parrinder
has shown, sex-positive religions tend also to accord
a higher status to the female principle; and Islam
from its inception stressed that the presence of
women's bodies and spirits was in no way injurious to
the spiritual life. The Prophet (s.w.s.) worshipped in
his tiny room for much of the night, and when he was
descending into prostration he would nudge aside the
legs of his young wife Aisha, to make room. A far cry
from the devotions of the Syrian monk, alone in his
desert cell.

Also built into the archetypal patterns of Islam is a

characteristic amendation to existing purity laws.
Feminists have often identified these as a major sign
and strengthener of misogyny. They exist in branches
of Christianity, as is shown by Russian Orthodox
hesitations about the reception of the Eucharist by
menstruating women. In Judaism they are very
elaborate, so that the menstruating woman is only
sexually available for half of every month. Special
bathhouses are required for her purification.
This reflects and responds to a very ancient, and very
widely-observed taboo. In some primitive societies,
women are banished from their husband's house
during this time; the Galla tribes of Ethiopia allocate
special huts for menstruating women. Even today, the
significant disruption to women's behavioural patterns
is acknowledged in some legislation: modern French
law, for instance, even classifies extreme
premenstrual tension as a form of temporary insanity.
Islam has preserved the memory of this ancient, and
also Semitic hesitation, but in an interestingly
attenuated and non-judgemental form. So in sura 2
verse 220 we read:

'They will question you concerning the monthly

course: Say, it is a hurt. So go apart from
women
during the monthly course and do not approach
them until they are clean.'

What this means is clarified in the sunna. A

hadith reports that:

'A'isha was sleeping under one coverlet with

God's Messenger, when suddenly she jumped
up and left
his side. The Messenger said to her, 'What is the
matter? Are you losing blood?' She said, 'Yes.'
He said:
'Wrap your waist-wrapper tightly about you,
and come back to your sleeping-place.''

There are echoes here of this primordial human

unease, but they are very reduced. The naturalism of
Islam constantly insists that holiness does not
emerge from the suppression of human instincts, but
from their affirmation through regulation, so that the
natural rhythms of the body and the awe with which
we regard them are not to be ignored, but need
commemoration in religious ritual. Hence a woman is
granted a suspension of formal prayer and fasting for
several days in every month. Some feminists see this
as a diminution of female spirituality; Muslim female
theologians regard it as a reverent acknowledgement;
others, such as Ruqaiyyah Maqsood interpret it as a
relief from religious duties at a difficult time. The
dispensation is easily deconstructed by either
suspicious or benign hermeneutics, and resists total
interpretation.
What Muslims do stress is that Islam valorises women
by making the basic duties of the faith equally
incumbent upon both sexes: the suspension for a few
days each month is seen as a pragmatic and
generous dispensation which does not vitiate this
basic principle. The Five Pillars are hence gender-
neutral. Similarly, Islam does not establish sacred
spaces inaccessible to women. Women can and do
enter the Holy Ka'ba. The Inner Court of the Temple
in Jerusalem before its demolition by the Romans was
out of bounds to women, who faced the death penalty
if they penetrated it. Under Muslim auspices, it was
thrown open to both sexes. Hence the Dome of the
Rock, the golden structure which still symbolises the
Celestial City, and which marks the terrestrial point of
the Mi'raj, is allocated on Fridays exclusively to
women, so that men pray in the nearby al-
Aqsa mosque hall. Here, as elsewhere, the sexes are
segregated during congregational prayers, and the
reason given for this is again the pragmatic and
unanswerable one that a conmingling of men and
women during a form of worship which entails a good
deal of physical contact would readily lead to
distraction. Women may penetrate the sacratum; but
what of the ambivalent privilege of leadership? Who is
the broker of God's saving word? If in Judaism,
women could not approach the Torah, while in
Christianity they found themselves excluded from
administering the Eucharist, does the new
dispensation of Islam restrain them analogously?
Here Islam extends its feminizing of sacred spaces to
its own epiphany of the Word which resonates within
them. For the Shari'a, the word made Book is open to
female touch and cantillation. Symbolically, the
custodianship of the first Qur'anic text was entrusted
to the Prophet's wife Hafsa, not to a man.
Regarding collective celebration of the divine word, it
is clear that there can be no Islamic equivalent to the
debate over women's ordination, for the
straightforward reason that Islam does not ordain
anyone, whether male or female. Our recollection of
the primordial Alast and our affirmation of the Great
Covenant have already conferred holy orders upon us
all. They are valid to the extent of our recollection.
The imam does not mediate; but the spiritual director
may do so, by praying for the disciple and offering
techniques of dhikr. It is a manifestation of the
inescapably anti-feminine harshness of modern
pseudosalafite activism that the Sufi shaykh is for
such activists a figure not to be revered, but to be
abolished. Sufism, and several other forms of Islamic
initiatic spirituality, have frequently accommodated
women in ways which purely exoteric forms of the
religion have not: the Sufi shaykh, who exercises
such influence on the formation and guidance of the
disciple, and is often a more significant presence for
the individual and for society than the person of the
mosque imam, may be of either gender. The modern
Lebanese saint Fatima al-Yashrutiyya is a conspicuous
and deeply moving example; but there are many
others. Frequently in those Muslim societies where
the mosque has become a primarily male space, the
tomb of a prophet or a saint supplies a sacred place
for women, responding to their affective spirituality
which flourishes, as Irigaray would have it, in the
embrace of closed circles rather than in straight lines.
The importance of some of the tombs of the Prophets
for Palestinian women has often been noted in this
regard. Pseudosalafism, with its nervousness about
any public visibility for women, seeks to suppress
such contexts, with the exception only of the tomb at
Madina, which it construes not as paradigm but as
exception.
Nonetheless, the issue of a possible female imamate
has been raised in several communities in recent
years, although the evidence suggests that very few
women aspire to this ambivalent position. The imam
of a mosque can claim none of the mediating
authority of a priest: he does not stand in loco
divinis; but is mainly present to mark time, to ensure
that the worshippers' movements are co-ordinated,
and to represent the unity of the community. While in
some cultures he may have the added function of a
pastoral counsellor, this is not a canonical
requirement. All four madhhabs of Sunni Islam affirm
that the imam must be male if there are males in the
congregation. If there are only females, then many
classical scholars permit the imamship of females,
and this is generally accepted nowadays. But women
cannot lead men in prayer. There are in fact no
Qur'anic or Hadith texts that explicitly lay this down:
it is a product of the medieval consensus. Although
those who reject the Four Schools, and attempt to
derive the shari'a directly from the revelation,
sometimes repudiate this consensus, only a few, such
as Farid Esack, have proposed it seriously. In practice,
women activists in the Muslim world appear to have
little concern for this, again, because of the absence
of inherent prestige and authority in the imamate.
One can be a religious leader without being imam of a
mosque, the example of prominent theologians such
as Bint al-Shati' in modern Egypt, and a host of
medieval predecessors such as Umm Hani, A'isha al-
Ba'uniyya, and Karima al-Marwaziyya, affording
sufficient proof of this.
The discussion so far has moved downwards through
districts of metaphysics to touch on issues of shari'a.
Theologically, as we have seen, Islam tends to assert
the equality of the male and female principles, while
in its practical social structures it establishes a
distinction. To understand this paradox is to
understand the essence of the Islamic philosophy of
gender, which constructs roles from below, not from
above.
Women's functions vary widely in the Muslim world
and in Muslim history. In peasant communities,
women work out of doors; in the desert, and among
urban elites, womanhood is more frequently
celebrated in the home. Recurrently, however, the
public space is rigorously desexualised, and this is
represented by the quasi-monastic garb of men and
women, where frequently the colour white is the
colour of the male, while black, significantly the sign
of interiority, of the Ka'ba and hence the celestial
Layla, denotes femininity. In the private space of the
home these signs are cast aside, and the home
becomes as colourful as the public space is austere
and polarised. Modernity, refusing to recognise
gender as sacred sign, and delighting in random
erotic signaling, renders the public space 'domestic'
by colouring it, and makes war on all remnants of
gender separation, crudely construed as judgmental.
For Muslims, a significant development in the new
feminism is the renewed desire for apartness.
Contemplating the crisis of egalitarian social
contracts, where the burden of divorce invariably
bears most heavily upon women, Daly and many
others advocate an almost insurrectionist refusal of
contact with the male, and the creation of 'women's
spaces' as citadels for the cultivation of a true
sisterhood. This cannot be immediately useful to
Muslims. Hermeneutics of suspicion directed against
either sex are irreligious from the Qur'anic
perspective. God, as a sign, 'has created spouses for
you, from your own kind, that you may find peace in
them; and He has set between you love and mercy.'
(30:21) Nonetheless, the feminist demand for
apartness should not be cast aside; it may even
converge significantly with Islam's provision of it.
In her Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray denounces
the technological workplace created by men, which
'brings about a sexuate leveling at a certain level,
[and] neutralizes sexual differences'. To compete,
women must assume the 'tunnel vision' of the
achievement-oriented male, and hence relinquish
aspects of their hormonally-coded essence for the
sake of a public mercantile space which is biocidal,
profiteering, anti-feminine, and now anti-gender. She
also observes that 'the sexual liberations of recent
times have not established a new ethics of sexuality',
and that women have been the prime sufferers. But
an insurrectionist feminist response 'often destroys
the possibility of constituting a shelter or a territory of
one's own. How are we to construct this female
shelter, this territory in difference?' The question is
shared with Islam; but her response is disappointing,
and surely futile. Like Levinas, she demands a
revolution in love, a 'fertility in social and cultural
difference' rooted in reconciliation, a new language of
gesture, and valorization of the separate nature of
femaleness by males.
Given her pessimism about the mutability of the male
temper, apparently reinforced by new molecular
genetic studies on gender difference, this looks like
wishful thinking, and cannot provide more than part
of the agenda for an authentic and affirming
mutuality. However in her diagnosis we may locate
the clue to the more moral and more spiritual solution
for which she clearly yearns. 'Our societies,' she
notes, 'are built upon men-among-themselves
(l'entre-hommes). According to this order, women
remain dispersed and exiled atoms.' But there is a
rival cultural economy which cries out to be
considered.
Traditionally, the Islamic public space is constructed
and subjectivised primarily by 'l'entre-hommes', the
men in white. The women in black signal a kind of
absence even when they are present, by assuming a
respected guest status. But Islamic society, rooted in
primordial and specifically Shari'atic kinship patterns,
emphatically refuses to reduce them to the status of
'dispersed and exiled atoms'. There is a parallel space
of the entre-femmes, a realm of alternative meaning
and fulfilment, where men are the guests, which
intersects in formal ways with the entre-hommes but
which creates a sociality between women, a space for
the appreciation of nos semblables which is largely
lacking amid the conditions of modernity or
postmodernity, and which is more profoundly human
and feminine than the academicised utopia of which
Irigaray dreams.
Irigaray commends the new institution of
affidamento, current among some Italian feminists,
which seeks a withdrawal from the irreducibly male
and abrasive public space into nuclei of relaxed
female sorority. For her, this is 'the token of another
culture which preserves for us a possible and
inhabitable future, a culture whose historical face is
as yet unknown to us'. She acknowledges that the
power-struggles and generally negative experience of
women's groups suggests that affidamento cells may
not be able to merge to create a larger and stable
women's solidarity apart from men. But the random
intrusion of women into the public space, and the
consequent patterns of conflict, marginalisation, the
neglect of children, and spiralling divorce, suggest
that some form of localised, informal sorority may
provide women with the matrix of identity which a
fragmenting modernity denies them.

The Islamic entre-femmes has been explored by

several anthropologists. Chantal Lobato, in her
studies of Afghan refugee women, angrily rejects
Western stereotypes, praising the warmth and sisterly
richness of these women's lives. As she records, such
women's spaces, with systems of meaning, tradition,
and narrative constructed largely by women
themselves, intersect with the male narrative through
institutions such as marriage. We would add that
intersection, critically, is not determined by either
sex. Irigaray holds that all discourses are gendered;
but Islam would say that this is not true: there are in
fact three discourses: male, female, and divine.
Tawhid, as we have seen, refuses to gender God or
God's word; and the Qur'anic text is hence a neutral
document. It is read by men and by women, and
hence imported and internalised in gender-specific
ways. As such it supplies a barzakh between the two
worlds of meaning, equally possessed by each. It is
the missing link in Irigaray's theoretical model which
enables an authentic and stable inter-sexual sociality.
What this theology, and the anthropology which is
emerging to support it, propose, is that normative
Islamic society is concurrently patriarchal and
matriarchal. The public space is primarily that of men,
who may valorise it over the private; but the latter
space is valorised by women, who may regard the
public space as morally and spiritually questionable.
Hence a feature of Muslim folkways is a kind of
reflexive amusement. Men frequently construct a
trivialising discourse on women; but women, as any
eavesdropper on a Muslim female conversation will
know, dismiss men and their concerns with an even
more amused disregard. They are right to say, 'Men,
what do they know?' And the male patriarchal
dismissal is, from the male viewpoint, no less correct.
Aspects of the hadith discourse which appear to
diminish women can be affirmed, and also relativised,
by adopting this perspective. A final aspect of the
concurrent patriarchy and matriarchy of Muslim
cultures concerns the status of the mother. A
weakness of Irigaray's work is her worrying
indifference to the aged; like many feminists, she
appears to be concerned only with her semblables.
While she accepts the reproductive and nurturing
telos of the female body, she signally fails to consider
its other natural trajectory, which is towards
senescence.
The veneration of aged mothers is a recurrent feature
of the Prophetic vision, in which kindness and loyalty
to the mother, a rahma to reciprocate the rahma they
themselves dispensed, is seen as an almost
sacramental act. Ibn Umar narrates that 'a man came
to God's Messenger (s.w.s.) and said: "I have
committed a great sin. Is there anything I can do to
repent?" He asked, "Do you have a mother?" The
man said that he did not, and he asked again, "Then
do you have a maternal aunt?" The man replied that
he did, and the Prophet (s.w.s.) told him: "Then be
kind and devoted to her".' (Tirmidhi) Other hadiths
are legion: 'Whoever kisses his mother between the
eyes receives a protection from the fire' (Bayhaqi);
'Verily God has forbidden disobedience to your
mother' (Bukhari and Muslim).

Anthropologists working in Islamic cultures hence

consistently report a dual hierarchy which requires
wives to be dutiful to husbands, while husbands must
be dutiful to mothers. Modernity loosens both these
ties, the former vehemently, and the latter
absentmindedly; and the consequence has been a
lopsided, frankly ageist new hierarchy which
prioritises youth over age, and imposes ruthless
forms of discrimination against those who were once
considered the community's pride and the repository
of its memory. As medical advances prolong average
longevity without substantially eroding the differential
which separates male and female mortality, modern
societies relegate increasing numbers of women to
involuntary eremeticism in regimented but prayerless
convents. In 1998 the Chicago Tribune recorded that
sixty percent of inhabitants of American old people's
homes never receive a visitor. Given the gender ratio
normal in such establishments, the percentage
among women must be higher still. Hence the irony
that young and middle-aged women in the West have
broader horizons than hitherto (excluding, for the
moment, the religious horizon), but must all fear a
decade of solitary confinement at the end, staring
into television screens, recycling memories, and
fingering months-old greetings cards from relatives
who rarely if ever appear. Even in the most
Westernised of Muslim societies, the confinement of
the old to what are in effect comfortable
concentration camps, is regarded with the disgust
that it merits. Other aspects of Shari'a discourse also
call for elucidation. It cannot be our task here to
review the detailed provisions of Islamic law, and to
explain, in each individual instance, the Islamic case
that gender equality, even where the concept is
meaningful, can be undermined rather than
established by enforced parity of role and rights. Such
a project would require a separate volume of the type
attempted recently by Haifa Jawad; and we must
content ourselves with surveying a few representative
issues.
Perhaps the most immediately conspicuous feature of
Muslim communities is the dress code traditional for
women. It is often forgotten that the Shari'a and the
Muslim sense of human dignity require a dress code
for men as well: in fully traditional Muslim societies,
men always cover their hair in public, and wear long
flowing garments exposing only the hands and feet.
In Muslim law, however, their awra is more loosely
defined: men have to cover themselves from the
navel to the knees as a minimum. But women, on the
basis of a hadith, must cover everything except the
face, hands and feet.
Again, the feminine dress code, known as hijab,
forms a largely passive text available for a range of
readings. For some Western feminist missionaries to
Muslim lands, it is a symbol of patriarchy and of
woman's demure submission. For Muslim women, it
proclaims their identity: many very secular women
who demonstrated against the Shah in the 1970s
wore it for this reason, as an almost aggressive flag
of defiance. Franz Fanon reflected on a similar
phenomenon among Algerian women protesting
against French rule in the 1950s. For still other
women, however, such as the Egyptian thinker
Safinaz Kazim, the hijab is to be reconstrued as a
quasi-feminist statement. A woman who exposes her
charms in public is vulnerable to what might be
described as 'visual theft', so that men unknown to
her can enjoy her visually without her consent. By
covering herself, she regains her ability to present
herself as a physical being only to her family and
sorority. This view of hijab, as a kind of moral
raincoat particularly useful under the inclement
climate of modernity, allows a vision of Islamic
woman as liberated, not from tradition and meaning,
but from ostentation and from subjection to random
visual rape by men. The feminist objection to the
patriarchal adornment or denuding of women, namely
that it reduces them to the status of vulnerable,
passive objects of the male regard, makes no
headway against the hijab, responsibly understood.
A further controversy in the Shari'a's nurturing of
gender roles centres around the institution of plural
marriage. This clearly is a primordial institution whose
biological rationale is unanswerable: as Dawkins and
others have observed, it is in the genetic interest of
males to have a maximal number of females; while
the reverse is never the case. Stephen Pinker notes
somewhat obviously in his book How the Mind Works:
'The reproductive success of males depends on how
many females they mate with, but the reproductive
success of females does not depend on how many
males they mate with.'
Islam's naturalism, its insistence on the fitra and our
authentic belongingness to the natural order, has
ensured the conservation of this creational norm
within the moral context of the Shari'a. Polygamy, in
the Islamic case, appears as a recognisably Semitic
institution, traceable back to an Old Testament tribal
society frequently at war and unequipped with a
social security system that might protect and
assimilate widows into society. However it is more
universal: classical Hinduism permits a man four
wives, and there are many Christian voices, not only
Mormons, who are today calling for the restoration of
polygamy as part of an authentically Biblical lifestyle.
(See, for example, http://www.familyman.u-
net.com/polygamy.html)
Faced with the failure of normative Western marriage
and relationship codes, a growing number of
contemporary thinkers are turning to this primordial
institution for possible guidance. Phillip Kilbride,
professor of anthropology at Bryn Mawr, aroused
much interest with his recent book Plural Marriage for
Our Times: A Reinvented Option. Audrey Chapman
has written a more popular study entitled Man-
Sharing: Dilemma or Choice, while in 1996, the
women's rights activist Adriana Blake published her
Women Can Win the Marriage Lottery: Share Your
Man with Another Wife.
These studies, from their different perspectives,
present three major ethical arguments for polygamy.
Firstly, the institution can, as its origins suggest,
allow the reintegration into a post-war society of
bereaved women, of whom a tragically large number
now exist around the globe. Secondly, it can work to
the advantage of women: an extended family is
created which allows one woman to go to work, while
the other cares for the children. The juggling of work
and children which is a besetting hazard of modern
relationships is thus neatly averted: showing
polygamy as a frankly liberative option for women. Its
advantages for children, also, have been amply
documented by the recent research of Carmon Hardy,
who shows the strong degree of family bonding and
much lower incidence of crime among offspring of
Mormon polygamists at the turn of the present
century. Thirdly, polygamy is realistic; and from the
Muslim perspective, we would identify this as a
principal argument given the Shari'a's general
realism. Muslims point out that modern Western
societies are in practice far more polygamous than
Muslim ones, the difference being that in the West the
second relationship exists outside any legal
framework. The present heir to the British throne, for
instance, has been polygamous, and to traditional
Muslims nothing seemed more absurd than that Diana
needed to be divorced, and a constitutional crisis
provoked.
True monotheism, as always, entails realism. Men are
biologically designed to desire a plurality of women,
and, unless we can carry out some radical genetic
engineering work, they will always do so. And when a
man has two simultaneously, the law may either
deprive one of the two women of legal rights and
social status, as in the modern West. Or it can
recognise both as legitimate spouses, as in the
Shari'a. Muslims regard as an absurdity the present
arrangement in the West where consensual
relationships of all kinds are allowed and even
militantly defended: homosexual, lesbian, and so on;
whereas a consensual ménage a trois is still regarded
as immoral. The last hangover of Victorian morality?
In fact, a menage a trois is perfectly acceptable in
modern Western law, as long as the parties to it live
'in sin' and do not attempt to marry. The absurdity of
this position requires no comment.

There are other aspects of the Shari'a which deserve

mention as illustrations of our theme, not least those
which have been largely forgotten by Muslim
societies. The intersections between the two gender
universes are sometimes designed by the Lawgiver as
rights of women, and sometimes as rights of men;
and the former category is more frequently omitted
from actualised Muslim communities. Frequently the
jurists' exegesis of the texts is plurivocal. Domestic
chores, for instance, appear as an aspect of interior
sociality, but this is not identified with purely female
space, since they are regarded by some madhhabs,
including the Shafi'i, as the responsibility of the man
rather than the wife. A'isha was asked, after the
Blessed Prophet's death, what he used to do at home
when he was not at prayer; and she replied: 'He
served his family: he used to sweep the floor, and
sew clothes.' (Bukhari, Adhan, 44.) On this basis,
Shafi'i jurists defend the woman's right not to
perform housework. For instance, the fourteenth
century Syrian jurist Ibn al-Naqib insists: 'A woman is
not obliged to serve her husband by baking, grinding
flour, cooking, washing, or any other kind of service,
because the marriage contract entails, for her part,
only that she let him enjoy her sexually, and she is
not obliged to do other than that.'
In the Hanafi madhhab, by contrast, these acts are
regarded as the wife's obligations. Another sufficient
reminder of the difficulty of generalising about Islamic
law, which remains a diverse body of rules and
approaches. (Another important area, which cannot
be detailed here, is the law for custody of children:
the Hanafis prefer boys to leave the divorced mother
at the age of 7, to live with the father; girls remain
with her until the menarch. For the Malikis, the boy
stays with the mother until sexual maturity (ihtilam),
and the girl until her marriage is consummated.)
Islam's theology of gender thus contends with a
maze, a web of connections which demand familiarity
with a diverse legal code, regional heterogeneity, and
with the metaphysical no less than with the physical.
This complexity should warn us against offering facile
generalisations about Islam's attitude to women.
Journalists, feminists and cultivated people generally
in the West have harboured deeply negative verdicts
here. Often these verdicts are arrived at through the
observation of actual Muslim societies; and it would
be both futile and immoral to suggest that the
modern Islamic world is always to be admired for its
treatment of women. Women in countries such as
Saudi Arabia, where they are not even permitted to
drive cars, are objectively the victims of an
oppression which is not the product of a divinely-
willed sheltering of a sex, but of ego, of the nafs of
the male. In this way, types of 'Islamization' being
launched in several countries today by individuals
driven by resentment and committed to an
anthropomorphised and hence andromorphic God,
appear to bear no relation either to traditional fiqh
discourse or to the revelatory insistence on justice.
This imbalance will continue unless actualised religion
learns to reincorporate the dimension of ihsan, which
valorises the feminine principle, and also obstructs
and ultimately annihilates the ego which underpins
gender chauvinism. We need to distinguish, as many
Muslim women thinkers are doing, between the
expectations of the religion's ethos (as legible in
scripture, classical exegesis, and spirituality), and the
actual asymmetric structures of post-classical Muslim
societies, which, like Christian, Jewish, Hindu and
Chinese cultures, contain much that is in real need of
reform.
By now it should have become clear that we are not
vaunting the revelation as either a 'macho'
chauvinism or as a miraculous prefigurement of late
twentieth-century feminism. Feminism, in any case,
has no orthodoxy, as Fiorenza reminds us; and
certain of its forms are repellent to us, and are clearly
damaging to women and society, while others may
demonstrate striking convergences with the Shari'a
and our gendered cosmologies. We advocate a
nuanced understanding which tries to bypass the
sexism-versus-feminism dialectic by proposing a
theology in which the Divine is truly gender-neutral,
but gifts humanity with a legal code and family norms
which are rooted in the understanding that, as
Irigaray insists, the sexes 'are not equal but
different', and will naturally gravitate towards
divergent roles which affirm rather than suppress
their respective genius.
Biology should be destiny, but a destiny that allows
for multiple possibilities. Women's discourse valorizes
the home; but Muslim women have for long periods of
Islam's history left their homes to become scholars. A
hundred years ago the orientalist Ignaz Goldziher
showed that perhaps fifteen percent of medieval
hadith scholars were women, teaching in the
mosques and universally admired for their integrity.
Colleges such as the Saqlatuniya Madrasa in Cairo
were funded and staffed entirely by women. The most
recent study of Muslim female academicians, by Ruth
Roded, charts an extraordinary dilemma for the
researcher:
'If U.S. and European historians feel a need to
reconstruct women's history because women
are
invisible in the traditional sources, Islamic
scholars are faced with a plethora of source
material that has
only begun to be studied. [ . . . ] In reading the
biographies of thousands of Muslim women
scholars,
one is amazed at the evidence that contradicts
the view of Muslim women as marginal,
 secluded, and
restricted.'

Stereotypes come under almost intolerable strain

when Roded documents the fact that the proportion
of female lecturers in many classical Islamic colleges
was higher than in modern Western universities.
A'isha, Mother of Believers, who taught hadith in the
ur-mosque of Islam, is as always the indispensable
paradigm: lively, intelligent, devout, and humbling to
all subsequent memory.
But until past ideals are reclaimed, a polarisation in
Muslim societies is likely. The Westernised classes will
reject traditional idioms simply because those styles
are not Western and fail to satisfy the élite's self-
image. The pseudosalafi literalists will continue to
reject Sufism's high regard for women, and its
demand for the destruction of the ego. The same
constituency will defy legitimate calls for a due
ijtihad-based transformation of aspects of Islamic law,
not because of any profound moral understanding of
that law, but because of a hamfisted exegesis of usul
and because those calls are associated with Western
influence and demands. Whether the conscientious
middle ground, inspired by the genius of tradition,
can seize the initiative, and allow an ego-free and
generous Muslim definition of the Sunna to shape the
agenda in our rapidly polarising societies, remains to
be seen. No doubt, the Sufi insight that there is no
justice or compassion on earth without an emptying
of the self will be the final yardstick among the wise.
But it is clear that the Islamic tradition offers the
possibility of a truly radical solution, offering not only
to itself but to the West the transcendence of a
debate which continues to perplex many responsible
minds, contemplating an emergent society where the
absence of roles presides over an increasingly
damaging absence of rules.

For more articles like this one, visit Mas'ud Ahmed

Khan's site.
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