Religion and Theology

No subject is more fraught with controversy than the relation of women and Islam. On one side of the debate there exists the widespread perception that the faith oppresses and even persecutes women on the other there are arguments about cultural authenticity, about the rights of women to assert themselves in ways that differ from the modes of female self-assertion current in non-Muslim societies. The issue is complicated by the interaction of history, religion, culture, and politics. Historically the patriarchal family and the extended networks of kinship connected with it have proved to be among the most durable social structures in Muslim societies, far more durable than structures built around professional association or class interest. The role of religion in sustaining these structures is not entirely clear. Islamic law privileges the family over other institutions the laws of inheritance, favoring males over females, are written in the Quran along with other discriminatory provisions, such as the testamentary inferiority of females in certain court proceedings. The law, however, is not always a reliable guide to actual social practice slavery and concubinage, widely practiced in pre-colonial times, is also the subject of detailed legal provisions and though permitted under the Shariah, both have disappeared from Muslim societies. Unlike the hijab or veil they are not among the shibboleths insisted upon by todays Islamists. Protection of the patriarchal family and the symbolic capital it holds in the shape of female chastity is deeply embedded in the semantics of Islam the word haram shares the same root with harim -- the part of the household reserved for women -- and mahram -the kinship group to which a woman is forbidden sexually by law, and within which she is free to associate. (Appley, Halliwell, 7). The duality of the manifest and the hidden fundamental to the Quranic approach to the divine is suggestively linked in at least one passage to sexuality, with the female pudenda associated with the hidden aspect of deity. Restrictions on women are intimately bound up with notions of the sacred. As Michael Gilsenan has observed the honour of person and family which is particularly identified with control of womens sexuality, is crucial to the public, social identity of men (qtd. in Ruthven, 400). The same observation applies, a fortiori, in many other parts of the Muslim world. But an obsession with gender and status and its corollary, the assertion of masculine power through violence, is by no means exclusively Islamic. The same patriarchal assumptions are found in non-Muslim Mediterranean societies as well as others further afield. Conversely there are Muslim communities in West Africa and Southeast Asia where matrilineal systems of ownership and inheritance predominate. All of this calls into question the view that Islamic texts and the values they enshrine are of themselves responsible for types of behavior underpinning male supremacism. At the same time there can be no doubt that the public and symbolic role of women lies at the heart of the Islamist discourse. In one polemic after another Islamist writers contrast the virtuous Muslim women with their Western or Westernized counterpart  naked, unchaste, and corrupt, a potent source of fitna or strife.

Women in Social and Religious Life
In the classical traditions the positive value of sexuality is affirmed, but it is also perceived as dangerous and potentially destructive of the social order determined by God. The bias against celibacy prevents the emergence of a distinctive caste of female religious comparable to the nuns and abbesses of the Christian West. The sense that good social order is contingent on regulating sexuality  particularly female sexuality becomes institutionalized. The seclusion of women is justified by fear of female sexual power an atavistic cultural memory, perhaps, of the female deities destroyed by the prophet of triumphant singular God. (Tate, 3)

Gender differences are strongly emphasized, God have created humans (male and female), and any aspect of behavior in dress or comportment that clouds the distinction is discouraged or forbidden. Homosexuality, in this view, is a major sin, a reversal of the natural order, a corruption of mans sexuality and a crime against the rights of females. Men should grow beards in order to distinguish themselves from infidels. Be different from the polytheists, says a hadith in al-Bukharis collection let the beard grow and trim the mustache. It is makruh (disapproved of) to shave the beard or drastically to cut or shorten it, but it is mustahab (commendable) to remove something from its length and breadth if it grows big.

Apart from her husband, if she is married, a womans social circle must be confined, according to traditional interpretations of the law, to female friends and her mahrams  which includes those male members of her extended family whom she cannot marry by law. These are fathers, sons, brothers, foster-brothers, nephews, and male in-laws. Although local customs vary the taboo on female association with men outside the mahram relationship is widespread in Muslim societies from Morocco to south Asia. These patterns, however, are not universal. In parts of South Africa of the Sahara Islamic law has become mixed with local traditions giving women substantially greater rights in marriage and divorce. (Tate, 3) Among Muslims in Southeast Asia there are no traditions of seclusion and elements of matrilineal customs survive even in pious communities. Here the Shariah is seen in terms of religious and ethical duties rather than social practices, where local customary law has priority.

In the Middle East, South Asia and other parts of the Muslim world the extended kinship group sustained by the mahram taboo was basic to the social structure. The contrast with the development of Western societies is striking. In the medieval West the Church sustained deliberate policies against kin-based groups, encouraging distance-marriages, insisting that the Church as the corporate body of Christ transcend and supersede the biological ties of kinship. As the Church was gradually replaced by civil bodies, from cities to trading corporations, class interests and divisions emerged which in due course became the occasion of social conflicts and hence the subject of historical change. Womens emancipation was predicated on the emancipation of men from the bonds of kinship, with profession, trade, or class eventually acting as co-determinants of an individuals identity along with family background. There is no church in Islam to compete with the family as focus of allegiance the individual remained much more closely tied to the bonds of kinship. Women may sometimes have enjoyed an honored and protected position in this system, but their freedom was limited in proportion to their reproductive capacity as genetic carriers and bearers of kinship identity. Today the legacy of the privileged status the family had under the Shariah continues to militate against the assertion of alternative institutions or solidarities based on free association or common purpose. In many Muslim countries, public institutions have been subverted or undermined by the persistence of kinship solidarities examples are the ruling parties in Syria and Iraq, both of which are dominated by kinship groups from sectarian minorities.

The exclusion of women from the public domain in the main Islamic centers inevitably led to their exclusion from the religious domain as well. In Cairo, for example  as described by Edward Lane in the 1820s  women were forbidden to pray alongside men in the mosques because the Muslims are of the opinion that the presence of females inspires a very different kind of devotion from that which is requisite in a place dedicated to the worship of God (qtd. in Ruthven, 73). Female exclusion was reinforced by pollution taboos over menstruation, childbirth, and contact with young children. The hadith collections contain detailed sections on ritual impurities, and it is generally women who are disadvantaged by the rules. Women participate in some Sufi practices and are often associated with visits to the tombs of saints or friends of God  activities often disapproved by the ulama. In the more tradition-bound sections of society female religiosity is more likely to find expression in activities disapproved of by the pious, such as the zar or spirit possession cults still widespread in Egypt and North Africa. Significantly, these spirits are now said to be forcing their hosts to resist the veil baladi (country) women ordered to cover themselves in accordance with Islamist demands are possessed by spirits which cause them to fall sick if they do so.

Islam and Feminism
Muslim feminists argue that it is not Islam as such, but rather reactionary male interpretations of the faith that are invoked to justify patriarchal attitudes. As suggested earlier the logic of this position inevitably comes up against certain discriminatory provisions in the divine text of the Quran. A modernist hermeneutic stating that the Quranic provisions are time contingent rather than absolute becomes necessary before the contradiction between the spiritual and moral equality of women and their legal inequality can be resolved. The argument that a woman giving evidence on a business matter might need assistance from her friend might make sense under pre-modern conditions when most women were illiterate, but as the Quranic rules stand, the testimony of a woman with a higher degree in business administration is only worth half that of an illiterate male. (Dale, 6). Beyond such textual sticking points, however, there are areas where masculine or androcentric interpretations are being contested, particularly in the field of hadith, where the questioning of sources belongs to a time-honoured methodology and are less controversial than taking issue with the text of the Quran. The biggest obstacles facing Muslim feminists are cultural and historical feminism is perceived as coming from a hostile source.

One strategy for defusing the accusation that the Muslim feminist critic of Islamic attitudes is simply a Western-inspired lackey is the indigenous feminist approach adopted by several women writers, notably the Moroccan Fatima Mernissi and the Egyptian-born Leila Ahmed. Both writers see a contradiction between the ethical principles of Islam with its commitment to social justice regardless of gender and the restrictions to which Muslim women became increasingly subjugated. (Dale, 6). For Ahmed the practices sanctioned by Muhammad in the first Muslim society reflect far more positive attitudes than became current during the later Abbasid era, when the practice of concubinage, sanctioned if not encouraged by Islam, became widespread. She believes that if the ethical voice of Islam had been attended to, it would have significantly tempered the extremeandrocentric bias of the law. Access to slaves and concubines led to women being treated as commodities, as upper-class women became increasingly marginalized. Mernissi, adopting a similar line of argument, claims that the women of the Prophets day were relatively free. They participated with men in the public domain, if not in battle, and were active in the early Islamic movement. According to the majority of traditions, Khadija, Muhammads trusted wife, was the first Muslim, the first in Muhammads household to accept that Muhammads messages came from God. After her death Muhammad married many women, some of them for political reasons, others apparently for love. His favorite wife Aisha, daughter of his close companion Abu Bakr became the source of numerous hadiths. She was a major political actor in the civil war or strife (fitna) following the assassination of the third caliph Uthman in 656. Her role as a source of hadiths is so important that in one tradition the Prophet is supposed to have told the Muslims that they received half their religion from a woman. Mernissi documents personal tensions between Aisha and Abu Huraira, a Companion of the Prophet who heads a great many chains of hadith transmitters, seeing in him the source of numerous antifeminist hadiths that eventually gained currency. Mernissis method, as Andrew Rippin points out, shares with that of the Islamists a tendency towards the remythologization of society, with both sides selectively citing the evidence to suit their arguments. (Widhalm, 11)

Conclusion
The symbolism conveyed by veiling may be ambiguous, but there can be no doubt that Muslim women are becoming a force to be reckoned with in the public domain. Even Saudi Arabia, bastion of Islamic sexual apartheid, has witnessed a public demonstration by women protesting against Shariah rulings forbidding them to drive motor vehicles. Among the less affluent labor migration forces changes in the sexual division of labor, with a significant proportion of households now headed by women. The universities are producing more and more female graduates. Challenges to religiously grounded restrictions are inevitable. The signs of change are already apparent. The female vote is reported to have contributed substantially to the unexpected election of Muhammad Khatami to the Iranian presidency in May 1997, on a platform that included an easing of restrictions on women and greater female participation in management of the economy and state. (Widhalm, 11)