Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam (29 page)

In conjunction with a woman’s primary care-taker role in the nuclear

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family, increasingly, wherever there is mass urbanization, the father’s role

as sole provider of
nafaqah
(material support) is

challenged.

Material

support, since the industrial revolution, means wages.
38
Wages are mostly the results of work that no longer takes place in the home. The male was

culturally acknowledged as

the

wage-earner in the

isolated

nuclear

couple, leading to

the assumption that the non-wage-earning female

fulfills all other needs. This assumption idealizes the woman as one who only reproduces and cares for offspring. Many assume that this is natural, and hence a voluntary contribution with no bearing upon female agency. In reality, women’s lives – including women in Muslim majority contexts – are adversely affected by global economics that presume the fulfillment of multiple extended tasks without the domain of an equally extended family or public policies that explicitly carve out resources designated to help with this care-work.

While this transition to the nuclear family has become normalized globally, the new global economy has increased the need for two wage earners to provide decently for the family. Few mothers are able to choose to attend only to the house and children. Of course, poor families, the majority of the Muslim families worldwide, have never had such a choice. One of my concerns about male-dominant concepts of family is that women’s work inside the home goes unnoticed. This is most evident when weighed upon the wage-earning scale. There are many tasks that women are expected to fulfill as primary care-takers and keepers of the domestic sphere. For simpli- city’s sake, if each of these tasks were compensated by at least the minimum wage in the West, at-home mothers have an extensive balance overdue. After all, when a woman leaves the house to earn wages in the public sector, she must pay someone else to fulfill these tasks, or simply work double shifts: one paid, one unpaid. For that matter, with technology-assisted reproduct-

ion

(T.A.R.), where surrogate mothers carry

children for other couples,

they are paid tens of thousands of dollars. Reproducing a child could also

be weighed

on the wage-earning scale. All these tasks are applied to

mothers and wives as only “natural.” Coincidentally, childcare and house- keeping are not defined as extensions of motherhood in the time of the Prophet or in the formation of
shari‘ah
.

In the context of modern industrial societies, these responsibilities must be reflected upon and integrated into all aspects of reformist discourse. Simply overlooking the realities of these complex but inherently essential tasks associated with mothers for the sake of healthy moral upbringing of future generations, simply because these women have the biological

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capability for child-bearing, is a serious overestimation on the part of too many cultures today. It stands in stark contrast to the Qur’anic statement, “
lil-rijaali nasiban min-maa-ktasabu wa lil-nisaa’ nasibum min-maa- ktasabna
, for men shall have a share of what they earn and women shall have a share of what they earn . . . truly Allah has knowledge of all things” (4:32).

In light of the added reality of global economics, more and more women are also burdened with the responsibility of contributing to the family income. All this severely strains the notion of the self-sufficient nuclear family unit. When a woman faces the multiple roles of parenting in the nuclear family with the presumption of sufficient wage-earning from the male, but without the extended network of support, she is already overly burdened. Next to these, working wives and mothers are doubly burdened. Yet an even more illogical reality faces the many women today who are single heads of household with no financial support, except what they are able to provide, and no structural system to alleviate the plight of their families. This leads to my notion of the new Hajar paradigm.

HAJAR

Once a year, millions of Muslims converge on Makkah to perform the pilgrimage rites or
hajj
. Included among these rites is running between two foothills, Safa and Marwah, seven times, symbolically re-enacting the plight of Hajar who was abandoned in the desert with her child as a homeless single parent. All needs of the child now fell upon her shoulders exclusively. Never mind the magical rhetoric of “with Allah’s help.” Faith is a spiritual and psychological posture that describes a partnership between one’s practical efforts and one’s understanding of a spiritual relationship with the divine. Allah provides as we provide. Faith alone does not. Yet the need for nurturing the child has not displaced the idealization of the mother as exclusive or primary care-taker.
39
Hajar was forced to make a way where there was none, for herself and her son.

I wonder how many Muslims who run seven times between Safa and Marwah actually reflect on the realities of a woman who entered into a customary practice of her cultural heritage and bore a child for a man soon to be recognized as the father of monotheist, scriptural religious traditions. Hajar was raised in a context with certain customary codes that promised she would never have to worry about her or her child’s livelihood or protection. What did she feel when such an unprecedented responsibility

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fell upon her shoulders – to say nothing of life in the desert! Once isolated from a network that had carried the promise of provision, protection, and care, nowhere in the exegetical literature of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam is the reality that this woman faced juxtaposed to the understanding of normative family at that time or in the present. Her status as single head of household is never commented upon, no one was held accountable for its resolution, and later legal codifications in Islam would still overlook it. Such patriarchal practices and texts do not elaborate on her plight. At some point in Muslim historical records it is implied that some Bedouin Arab tribe took in her and her child. She saves the Arab lineage with no serious analysis of her parenting experience in their commentaries. The silence over this discrepancy is my consideration here.

Islamic personal law is built upon a notion of family that

does not

include a woman thrown into the desert, forced to construct a healthy, happy life for her child and to fend for herself. Islamic law for family, as constructed and still maintained, is not only premised upon an ideal

of an extended

family

network,

it presumes that a woman will never,

for any reason, become responsible for providing for and protecting her- self and her offspring. Yet this reality happens more and more frequently the world over. At the time of the Prophet, in the extended family net- work of the tribe, a woman had no other responsibility beyond the safe delivery at the birth of a child who would potentially contribute to the future. The newborn child Muhammad was considered an orphan because his father, ‘Abd-Allah, had died during Aminah’s pregnancy. Motherhood was solely based on her child-bearing capacity. The establishment of guard- ianship through the patriarchal line was the only means available for him to become a legitimate heir and a recognized member of the patriarchal society.

Furthermore, as Islamic law has developed, if a wife or a mother has material assets by inheritance or other means, now extended to her wage earnings, these assets are exclusively for her. She has no responsibility toward
nafaqah
, the material maintenance of the family, the household, or even herself. If her husband dies, she is supposed to be taken in, provided for, and protected by the extended family. Likewise, the law presumes that if she divorces her husband or is divorced by him, she returns to an extended family network. All material needs of her children are the responsibility of the father and the father’s extended family. Other aspects of protection are presumed to be available through an entire network. For a mother, the implications of this nurturing and supportive environment must make it

144 inside the gender jihad

easier to imagine that a woman has nothing to focus her attention upon except the moral and emotional welfare of her children. Ironically, even in that system, no actual tasks of nurturance or guardianship were presumed to fall upon the mother.

The reality that many women face today is nowhere near the ideals presumed within the concept of family sustained by Islamic law and under- scoring Muslim cultures. Suad Joseph proposes an examination of the relations between the family and the gendering of citizenship in the Middle East by analyzing what she calls the “kin contract.” Furthermore, “the binary between public and private . . . situate citizenship in the realm of the

“public.”
40
Women’s citizenship is intricately linked to their roles in the

family where family and state can be said to be mutually constitutive.
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“For women, this means that their citizen rights are often mediated through the very patriarchal structures (kin, communities, religious sects) that control (and care for) them.”
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“[M]ost Middle Eastern states constitute men as citizens through their roles as heads of patriarchal families and treat women as dependent mothers, wives, children, and siblings.”
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The idea of a woman’s agency apart from various notions of family, as they bear upon changes in family or diverse realities of women as mothers, must be restruc- tured in policy terms of state and
fiqh
. The ways and means for achieving the fulfillment of family needs without patriarchy or without the ideal of extended family is not sufficiently studied under the area of Islamic Studies. For this reason, women like Hajar can only be considered deviant, with no practical steps proposed, either for the individual or the community, to construct other models of family and motherhood to assist these women at addressing both their internal struggle of identity as Muslim agents and their external struggle to retain the honor of human dignity stolen in patri- archal presumptions of marriage as the subjugation of women. This “ideal family” is the bind of the unexplored Hajar paradigm.

THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN FAMILY, ISLAM, AND WOMEN

African-Americans began turning to Islam in the late 1920s. In addition to the establishment of the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam, which both borrowed many underlying ideas from the fourteen-centuries- old tradition, many African-Americans in major urban areas along the

U.S. east coast also joined global Islam with reliance upon its orthodox dogma, creeds, and practices. These numbers slowly increased over the next few decades. At the beginning of the twentieth century, transnational

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movements, even amongst Muslims, were motivated by secular and financial interests in coming to assimilate with mainstream white America. They gathered in ghettos or moved far from urban centers, especially from African-Americans, whom they avoided at all cost and on all levels. They married white Americans, especially non-Muslim women, named their children according to the names prevalent in their new secular culture and did little to represent Islam or to promote its expansion in America.

By the mid-1960s, changes in U.S. immigration laws brought more immigrants or transnationals from Muslim countries, mostly students, but also their wealthy families. They were more dedicated to preserving and promoting their cultural identity as Muslims. They constructed cultural enclaves in the form of mosques and other organizations. This new trans- national population was soon coordinated with public life in America and by extension with those members of the African-American community who had already gained an interest in Islam. By the 1970s Islam was becoming a part of the American landscape both in transnational and indigenous–transitional elements.

African-Americans who were the first part of this growth of Islam in America were representatives of the totality of the social, cultural, moral, political, economic, and spiritual history of African-America. This is particularly important regarding my focus on African-American Muslim women. They are a part of the repository of many events that make up a complex history, affecting notions of identity, including motherhood, family, and community.

Extensive research on the African-American family has been contrib- uted over more than three decades, particularly after the 1970s
Moynihan Report
. Without referring to the biases of the report itself, I have benefited from the subsequent research in order to make a coherent link between the development of the African-American family and the African-American Muslim female head of household.

Research on Black women’s unpaid labor within extended families remains less fully developed in Black feminist thought than does that on Black women’s paid work. By emphasizing Black women’s contributions to Black family well-being, such as keeping families together and teaching survival, such scholarship suggests that Black women see their unpaid work as a form of resistance to oppression[rather]than as a form of exploitation by men.Less attention is given to ways that Black women’s domestic labor is exploited within African-American families, an omis- sion that obscures investigations of families as contradictory locations

146 inside the gender jihad

that simultaneously confine yet allow Black women to develop cultures of resistance.
44

The African-American family is a reflection of the African family and of the tenacity and flexibility of African-Americans in surviving the brutal history of slavery in this country. Slavery was followed by de juro and de facto oppressions that would further exacerbate the presumption that family has clear and narrow boundaries, necessarily established in patriarchal terms or like those delineated for the nuclear family construct. Unlike the nuclear family, premised upon the conjugal relation between two heterosexual adults, the African family was, and in many ways continues to be, based upon the consanguineal core of blood relations. The structural privacy of the nuclear family that focuses primarily on the married couple is not universal. Families survive with a complexity of adult relations based upon the significance of having and bringing up children. Within the context of comparative family studies, the African-American family shows itself to be an enduring institution with its own set of values and mechanisms for flexi- bility and adaptability, which manages to meet family needs.