Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam (25 page)

by their social-cultural and intellectual-spiritual circumstances; and (2) by the noticeable absence of women’s ideas and reflections in considering what Islam means or what it means to be human in Islam. S.I.S. advocated a compulsory expansion in the vision of Islamic thought by explicit inclusion of the voice of women’s experiences and epistemological perspectives. A comprehensive paradigm shift from within can effect a radical change for the future of Muslim women and men and can increase Islamic efficacy by shifting from coercive participation to voluntary dedication.

Evolution of Strategies

As Sisters in Islam worked toward this goal a variety of strategies evolved. What began as an ad hoc group of professional Muslim women, meeting to discuss highly publicized events that adversely affected the lives and percep- tions of Muslim women, would also evolve. At this initial stage, S.I.S. was very similar to other Muslim women’s collectives, distinguished by the level of expertise, class privilege, and professional status of its members. The concern over the lives of women adversely affected by conditions for Muslim women at large
united
us to give critical consideration to these conditions, to raise our own level of consciousness or understanding, and to determine immediate and long-term actions to give care in resolving these adverse conditions.

After launching the booklets in a public forum on gender issues as discovered by the research and consciousness-raising strategy, future activ- ities were given consideration. This raised S.I.S. from an informal social group to a semi-formal and goal-oriented organization. The group pro- posed an explicit strategy toward that goal. It centered on answering fundamental questions in the context of women and Islam. Is our current situation a true and accurate reflection of the full potential for women implied and intended by our religion? Are things the way they are supposed to be, or is this a consequence of particular circumstances in Muslim

Muslim Women’s Collectives
115

societies where men have rendered the interpretations that sustain their privileged position?

Since Muslim women’s personal lives and social roles came under the jurisdiction of the
shari‘ah
courts in Malaysia, S.I.S. had reasoned, then any case could be questioned when it led to unfair treatment of women by breaking the spirit of the law. Court officials could be held liable. This had led to a previous forum before I encountered S.I.S. when they had met with Islamic court officials to point out inconsistencies between implementation of the letter without the spirit of the law due to patriarchal prejudices of individual court officials. The results of this meeting had not been very satisfactory, perhaps because each liberal argument they would raise against the court conclusion of results was countered by the haphazard exclusivism of court officials speaking in the name of “Islam,” randomly quoting sources against which S.I.S. had no will or viable articulation. Obviously, this did not lead to any specific means for guaranteeing systemic progress toward positive and comprehensive change, or uniform results.

When S.I.S., a grassroots
women’s
organization, came forth offering holistic Qur’anic hermeneutics to challenge current responses to the issue of women’s rights, it was a novel strategy. It supported the idea of a broad- based reconsideration of what it means to be Muslim and of how “Islam” can be interpreted under various circumstances, including our current situation. With less dependence on a select class as the sole authorities of official interpretation, ordinary Muslims might focus their energies and intellect on a more meaningful direct connection with that aspect of their identity. This is attractive to intellectuals in general. More important than that, women began to see that the distance between their lives and the meanings of the Islam passed down to them was not the same as the distance between themselves as believers and the Creator – some patriarchal interpretations had interceded. S.I.S. initiatives were met with enthusiasm for providing a means for creative regeneration of thought and establishing dynamic and relevant Islamic paradigms. It meant no longer reacting to “Islam” as projected by media, traditional institutions, governments, or cultural relativity.

This perspective and goal distinguished S.I.S. then from the two most well-known types of Muslim women’s organizations in Muslim majority contexts at that time. One type relied on viewpoints, arguments, and ration- ales from outside the Islamic heritage. Their effectiveness was reduced because their arguments failed to identify with broad-based concerns over identity and this diminished their support. The other type was status quo

116 inside the gender jihad

oriented, relegating Muslim women’s organizations to the status of auxil- iaries to larger Muslim male-led initiatives, like the youth movement known as A.B.I.M. The attractiveness of these groups for Muslim intellectuals and youth, male and female, has been in the fervent stand against Western he- gemony, the anti-colonialist position, and the dialectic of offering a funda- mental core of self-assertion for Third World Muslim peoples. This raised ethnic and Islamic identity in the post-colonial period and heightened the sentiments of autonomy and self-identification.

Coincidentally, both these types were visible and outspoken at the 1995 International Conference for Women in Beijing. Sisters in Islam presented at Beijing in the N.G.O. forum and mediated between these two poles. They gave a “yes” to Islam, but “no” to the history of Islamic patriarchal articu- lations and implementations that had robbed women of their full humanity, dignity, and Islamic agency. The other two types of groups were irrecon- cilably at opposing strategic ends of the quest to affirm Muslim women’s identity in the global complexities essential to attaining those ends. Some of the polarization between these two groups has abated and a part of that abatement was the tendency of more concerned Muslim women entering

into the debates and seeing the contradictions but believing in

their

potential reconciliation. Sisters in Islam had set up a track record of recon- ciling the contradictions, and that was important to its initial public image and its expression of potential developments for women’s well-being. In my days actively involved with Sisters in Islam, we were also primarily a volunteer women’s group – albeit at a class level above what might be considered “grassroots” for Muslim Women United and T.R.U.T.H. discussed above. At that voluntary level we operated without resorting to larger international funding organizations and with no particular government affiliations. It was also non-hierarchical, with no president, chairperson, or executive body. This operative collectivity was another one of the aspects that I loved in the time I spent with S.I.S. Meanwhile, my tendency toward theory was put to the test of actual practices and my participation in activism has its origins within this early group.

S.I.S. Forum Inc.

In 1992 I completed my contract at the university and lost my residency status in Malaysia. This was the same time that Sisters in Islam completed its formal registration as a Malaysian N.G.O. As a non-Malaysian and a long-distance core member my status would become more one of a consultant. As a registered group, essential changes to the intra-group dynamics were instituted and have continued to develop along the standard male corporate lines. From a group

Muslim Women’s Collectives
117

of equals to a structure with an executive director, with salary and salaried workers, the organization has substantially increased its membership. The The motivation to work on defining and sustaining Muslim women’s human dignity still stands, but the subtle difference between a voluntary reciprocal membership structure and the more hierarchical structure of other professional
groups is what distinguishes Sisters in Islam from the two other women
’
s
groups described in this chapter. The attraction of public attention has gone beyond mere local levels to explicit networks regionally and internationally, especially in coordination with extensive international funding organizations. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to do justice to the long list of accomplishments of this organization: once this professional status was

formalized,

international

funders

were multiplied, networking became

extensive, and progress within Malaysian civil society and government agendas were more closely coordinated. Sisters in Islam has organized local, regional, and international activities like workshops, lectures, conferences, and publications, and through its central office provides resources for multiple levels of research and learning, and is actively engaged in looking at systemic reformations and policy changes. At the same time, issues and perspectives particular to the Malaysian context hold sway over other issues and determine the ways they are addressed. There have been consid- erable advancements in acknowledging the accomplishments of Sisters in Islam. There have also been suggestions for its future development, including comments from a special session in 2005 held with Khaled Abou El Fadl concerning greater autonomy for women-centered self-reliance within the larger arena of reformist discussions and developments. Interest- ingly enough the basis of his suggestion was the initial basis of the group’s formation: to build a women-centered trajectory
through
the history of the Islamic intellectual heritage by engaging the tradition in a female-inclusive method within the context of modern circumstances and challenges.

Indeed, the discourses now appear even more open to various individual and collective contributions and challenges. Sisters in Islam played an important role in identifying the necessity and competency of women engaged in these discourses for reform. Their agenda was independent of funders’ requirements or government approval.

CONCLUSION

Muslim women have always collected to address the care and concerns of their communities. The mechanisms for their valuable contributions to

118 inside the gender jihad

become transformed into government-level mechanisms for the concerns of all members of society warrants substantial analysis of the arbitrary divide between public and private spheres of operation as well as analysis of the relationship between theory and practice. With no need for dominion – whether useful or intrusive – women’s civic contributions may have been overlooked as simply a reflection of the feminine nature, but have surely indicated the intense level of agency required to perform these various functions and are not restricted to women as natural extensions of their instincts, but rather as demonstrations of what is potentially accessible to all humankind for transforming communities and governments.

Muslim Women’s Collectives
119

4

“The Fire of Hajar”

For one short span, she was our Hajar, my bright young bride, the helpmeet of a lonely aging couple.

How she grew from round-cheeked girl, capable, aproned, baby strapped to high hip, into a woman beyond our ken, strange giant straddling rockscape, midwifing a new earth! Twice Sarah put Hajar’s hand in mine,

as God willed, first to marry, then to desert her. But it was I who let her hand drop.

Our last night we spent alone in God’s wilderness, one last time to circle, in the crook of my body, hers, the baby nestled between her breast and belly,

my arm around them both.

Then I dropped her supple girlish hand and freely I admit the tears that wet my dusty beard,

fell brackish into that dry ground

as I walked, willing, to the slaughter of my own bared neck, my Hajar-love. I walked away.

She called, “Ibrahim!” She knew what I had to do, but still she called,

let me hear my name shaped by her lips

120
inside the gender jihad

one last single time, “Ibrahim!”

At the pierce of that cry, I wanted

to bundle her up and carry her home again, protect her from this howling barren land. I turned around. But one look at her face – she was already fiercer, older, a woman

I do not know. She chose too.

“To whom do you leave us?” she said quietly.

For a minute I could not answer. Fire

like the fire of the trials of my youth, this fire! God who made the fire cool and safe for me will make this scorched desert for Hagar

a garden surely.

When I said “God is here,”

she took my words and threw them back

at me, “Then I’ll take God. I’ll take the God of this wilderness over your home and city.” She turned away. I know that turn.

I as a young man chose to accept from God a hard vocation. But an old man knows what it means to drop the supple hand.

I walked away bent nearly double,

picking my ragged path back home to Sarah. I took one last look.

Hajar was walking into her own soul-scorching days, head-on,

far from me now, her shadow thrown

by the lowered sun across a wild country, turning into something stark and strange. Be cool and safe for Hajar, fire!

– Mohja Kahf
1

A New Hajar Paradigm
121

FROM HAGAR TO HAJAR: THEN AND NOW

In the 1990s a pragmatic academic trend began in women and religion studies to draw attention to shared aspects of history and ideology between women of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
2
This trend focused on women as daughters of Sarah and Hagar. It was a successful strategy helping to forge epistemological relationships between women, in place of patriarchal conceptualizations of the Abrahamic tradition. In a much-beleaguered area of Religious Studies, this gender-based dialogue was intended to concentrate on shared concerns, and create ecumenical publications, conferences, workshops, research projects, and reforms. However much benefit this new awareness brought to my own concerns about gender, religion, and justice, a few presumptions were already built into the particular Sarah–Hagar paradigm as configured. These presumptions privileged Judaism and Chris- tianity by presuming that the stories of Hagar were taken from the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. This privileged historical reading left unresolved issues of difference between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Although the focus is on gender, it reinforced certain other hegemonies, at the expense

of more comprehensive intellectual and political alliances against oppres- sions. One simple distinction is in the Anglicized spelling of the name. Arabic contains neither a letter “g” nor any words pronounced with the hard
“g”
sound. The soft “g” sound relates to an Arabic letter, which is rendered
as “j”
in the Library of Congress transliteration system. Therefore Hajar is the preferred spelling used in this chapter.

Additionally, the presumptions failed to acknowledge certain aspects of ethnicity crucial to the Abrahamic experience. Although the Abrahamic paternal bloodline is the same, the two maternal bloodlines bear on current historical and political circumstances. Gender discourse does not render ethnic, racial, class, and other situational contentions mute. To reduce the story only to a presumed relationship between Sarah and Hajar overlooks the fact that they are foremothers of Jews and Christians or Muslims and Arabs. The tension that looms over the subsequent and continuous annihi- lation of Palestinians means that significant players – real people and real families – will not be resolved by such an oversimplified reading. This reading carefully reads in certain concerns, and silences others.

In the Bible and Qur’an, Sarah is the wife of Abraham by one form of customary marriage existent at that time. However, Sarah is beyond child- bearing age and no longer hopes to produce an heir for Abraham. She avails herself of another existing customary practice to resolve this problem. Hajar, an Egyptian slave woman, is given to Abraham as a concubine-

122 inside the gender jihad

spouse. One significant discrepancy over the privileged status of Abraham’s
only
son occurs between the Judeo-Christian story of Sarah and Hajar and the Islamic one, leading to different conclusions regarding the heirs of these two women. There is no competition implied in these customary practices with respect to household status:
Any offspring resulting from the liaison of the master with the slave woman Hajar becomes heir of a household ruled by Abraham and Sarah.
Several competing assumptions with regard to this cultural practice are no longer discussed in today’s use of this paradigm. However, I will refer here to several such assumptions in order to recon- struct issues of gender and family in Islam and will do so specifically to focus on the experiences of female heads of households in the African- American Muslim community and beyond.

THE INSTITUTION AND PRACTICES OF SLAVERY

Some attention must also be given to the institution of slavery in its multiple historical formulas. All forms of slavery severely limit the freedom, dignity, and human potential of those enslaved. Noting first that the Qur’an acknowledged the existing practices of slavery in the seventh century, and that it was not a major source contributing to the eradication of the insti- tution of slavery, interferes with the guidance I seek from the Qur’an with regard to my priority over underlying principles of human dignity irrespective of class, race, or gender. Slavery was not only alive and well throughout the entire course of Qur’anic revelation, the Prophet Mu-

hammad’s exemplary

actions in

freeing

slaves, adopting a slave, and

cohabiting with slave women are remnants of his fixed location in history, not reflections of ultimate moral integrity, which must adapt to changing circumstances in order to sustain the efficacy of their essential values rather than mimic previous particular historical or cultural forms. Today, there is clearly universal consensus over the idea that slavery violates human dignity, so it is not only unacceptable as a form of labor exploitation, it is morally unjust.

Moreover, the particular race-based slavery practiced in the Americas proved even more heinous than other practices of slavery throughout human history, with centuries of residual racial discrimination following it even up to today. Again the dominant Western practice of race-based slavery obscures some nuances of other historical practices of slavery during the time of the Prophet and by earlier civilizations, including European, Muslim, and African. Although race became significant to slavery only with

A New Hajar Paradigm
123

the transatlantic slave trade some four hundred years ago, Black Africans were enslaved before that. So also were other racial and ethnic groups. Black Africans even enslaved others from their own race. Fair-skinned people of Europe, Persia, Turkey, and other parts of Asia enslaved fair- skinned people as well as darker-skinned people. Likewise, darker-skinned people enslaved people with fairer skin.
3

One major distinction in these historical practices of slavery of concern here is with reference to the offspring resulting from a sexual liaison between a male master and his female slave (whether by force, mutual

consent, or customary

acquiescence to the circumstances of a woman’s

enslavement). In Islam, for example, descendents of a slave were full and legitimate heirs to the inheritance and legacy of their father–master. Some who became enslaved might have formerly been masters of other slaves. Under Islam’s historical practice of slavery it was possible for the sons of concubines to become masters, prominent political leaders, and rulers of the empire.
4
A Muslim leader was sometimes permitted to marry up to four

wives; these marriages were usually arranged with other prominent families and tribes, and often helped solidify political alliances. After the ceremonial marriage consummation, his preferred sexual partners were the concubines selected for his
harim
. It was not uncommon for him to produce through these slave women the future heirs to power in the empire. Slave sons became rulers. This could never occur in the form of slavery practiced in the Americas.

Slave women’s subhuman status was not viewed as a threat to the advantage for the ruler since there could be no regional contentions after his death from the people of any of his prominent wives who still held position, ties, and allegiance to their heritage. The dominion of the empire was less subject to conflict after his death. Islam, by Qur’anic edicts, elev- ated the position of all a man’s offspring through inheritance, heritage, and legitimacy. As with the existing customs at the time of Abraham, primacy was given to the paternal line. The value of the father’s seed has been variously constructed and reconstructed historically, culturally, and biologically.

The Sarah and Hajar story partially indicates how women were perceived as vessels to carry male and female offspring, with male progeny to continue the paternal heritage. Little or no functional significance was given to the wife’s roles beyond this utility. Nothing seemed to matter in the household as much as continuation of the paternal family line. It was para-

mount to

other

concerns that women may

have

had.

Interestingly,

124 inside the gender jihad

Judaism eventually transferred the descendent line from that of the father to a matrilineal one, perhaps as a result of conflicts between Sarah and Hajar’s offspring regarding their priority over legitimacy. Ishmael, Abraham’s first son, was born of an Egyptian slave woman. So when the scriptures command Abraham to take
his only
son, the politics of transmutation that interprets that to mean Isaac,
Sarah’s
only son, are difficult to explain. This new construction of lineage only coincidentally appears less patriarchal. Around the time of this transmutation, Hajar and her son are banished to the desert. Matrilineal lines continue in Judaism, but not in Christianity or Islam, even as other male privileges continue or are resumed for all three faiths.

MOTHERHOOD CONSTRUCTS: PRISMS OF PARADIGMS, NOT BIOLOGY OR DIVINITY

I have a painful response and long experience with the oft-cited prophetic statement, “Paradise lies at the feet of the mother,” a saying pretending that unconditional honor belongs to the one whose biology was created with the capacity to hold life under her breast and then in due time release it. It has been my nemesis, I suppose, for I have struggled in the public space to argue for the dignity and honor of every Muslim woman while I have suffered at home to maintain the care and nurturance of those to whom I am mother without knowing the ways to bridge the great schism this has created in my own identity as Muslim woman and mother.

But it is just an expression. It is not an actual goal to be achieved bypolicy, economic structures, and legal codes, especially in neo-conservative circles and other places of male privilege. It is not a statement of fact. It does encourage some women with this biological capacity to yield the whole of themselves into conformity with misogynist fantasies and ideals. Such a woman must conform to a “role” which is more easily manifest if the bearer of the child is not also the one who must make a way for that child to survive in a harsh world – like our beloved Hajar in the desert.

In my life, as a five-times-over mother, I have opened my body to receive the sperm of men as celebration of a love I thought we shared – and perhaps we did, for a moment or two, perhaps even at the moments of conception. After carrying the seed of that act for nine months until its fullest fruition – for not all such seed reach completion – I opened my body again in surrender to Allah’s call. It yielded up the fruit that was planted between my legs, not in pain but in labor. I have been transformed in the act of delivery.

A New Hajar Paradigm
125

The moment of crowning is better than orgasm itself, well worth what might have preceded – be it real or illusion – the love I covet.

The fathers meanwhile were present at both moments of opening. They also cry out in both, but for each a different manner of abandonment: the one, abandonment of their ego self into my body; the other, an acknow- ledgment of my body-self as it opens to bring forth the fruit of the seed, a new life, in the act of delivery. But, no matter what, on both occasions, and in no time at all, they wipe away the sweat from their brow and walk away.

Sometimes they never come back. And I am alone, the mother.

No one celebrates the altar at my feet, for like Sojourner, I must plow the dusty fields and draw the carts upon my back. Even as my breasts harden and weep with the fullness of milk, the whip draws blood. Both flow freely in my awakening: there is nothing romantic about the one who works like a man to save her young from the mighty grips of death and despair. She grows hard in the task. Little thought is given to her: in opening to receive the seed, she also opened to be the one who was loved and cared for. But no one is there for her.