While not as much in the news lately as it has been in the past, Female Genital Mutilation is still a scourge of women worldwide. Muslim apologists have repeatedly claimed that this practice is strictly cultural and has nothing to do with Islam as a religion. For example, the Muslim Women's League informs us that "According to Sayyid Sabiq, renowned scholar and author of Fiqh-us-Sunnah, all hadiths concerning female circumcision are non-authentic." Shaykh Tantawi and Shaykh Ali Gomaa of Al-Azhar were both against the practice.
But what is the reality? When we examine classical, relied upon texts on Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), another picture emerges. In Umdat as-Salik, translated as the "Reliance of the Traveler" we find that "Circumcision is obligatory... for both men and women." In the Risalah of Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani, a core text of the Maliki school of fiqh, it is recorded that circumcision for women is "honourable." Notably, the translation for the commentary on male circumcision was provided while the commentary on female circumcision was omitted. It gives some detail as to what is required and so I have decided to translate it myself. The commentator, Shaykh Saalih Abdus Samee al-Azhari, tells us that "[Circumcision [literally: reduction] in women] And it is cutting the protuberance at the top of the vulva that is like the comb of the rooster. [is honourable] ... with the meaning that it is desirable." Quite colourful.
What of the modern inheritors of the classical tradition? Shaykha Shazia at Sunnipath tells us that "Female circumcision is it itself obligatory in the Shafi`i school, and Shaykh Nuh Keller’s translation in the Reliance of the Traveler is accurate and defines the meaning well. She emphasizes that the clitoris should not be completely cut off and laments " that the correct practice has become an almost-lost art." Abu Haleema at the Hanafi Fiqh Blog informs us that the practice is "sunnah" according to "the view of the Hanafis and Maalikis, and [this] was narrated in one report from Ahmad." This is after giving an over view of the textual evidence in favor of the practice. The Guiding Helper, a modern Maliki fiqh text, defines circumcision as "the removal of the foreskin at the head of the penis or the small cap that covers the clitoris)" (Footnote 2186) and notes that "it is a fadilah (weaker mandub) to remove the small cap over the clitoris in females (of all ages). [Nothing more than this small cap should be cut.] Please note that cutting this small cap usually does not affect the ability of the female to reach orgasm (and by cutting this cap, the female will be able to get mandub credit in the next world for having performing circumcision)" (Footnote 2188).
What is one to make of all this? First, the practice of cutting the sexual organs of women is definitely an Islamic practice. It is not merely cultural and is either obligatory or encouraged in all of the four schools of law. Second, the cutting countenance by the shariah is limited (it is not removal of the whole clitoris) and does not include common practices such as sewing up the vagina. Some critics have maintained that Shaykh Nuh was being dishonest in his translation and that the text literally means to "cut off the clitoris." The Arabic verb qaTa3a means both to cut and to cut off, among other things, but the Shaykh is drawing on the entire tradition of Shafi'i scholarship to which he is heir. The intended audience of the Reliance is the body of English speaking Muslims, not non-Muslims, so I don't think there is a reason to be deceptive because this would constitute misleading fellow Muslims. If his intent was to sugar-coat the issue, he would have simply removed the material entirely or left it untranslated, such as he did with the section of the Umdat that deals with slavery.
But, it must be said, the insistence of modern Shuyookh such as Faraz Rabani, that the practice is no longer recommended (besides being questionable from a fiqhi standpoint) implies that they recognize the abuses that can come out of even this limited permission to cut. The question is, given that the proper procedure has become a "lost art" and horrendous abuse is rampant, why would any scholars recommend it all? Is adherence to medieval formulations of religious law worth all the (female) suffering that results?
Showing posts with label Gender. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gender. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Culture War is not Liberation
I recently intended an informal gathering that featured a long lecture on Islamic politics. One of the points made during this talk really struck me as typical of the problems of Muslim political thought in the current era. The speaker said that Islam was currently the only force capable of resisting the onslaught of Western imperialism and that this was because, to paraphrase, Muslims don't drink liquor and their women don't follow western modes of dress. This, of course, was in a room with many women, at least half of whom were dressed in western clothes.
I talked to the him later and asked him to clarify his remarks. He then gave me a more nuanced, if flawed, explanation of his words: Western Capitalism is constantly seeking out new markets for its products and the social restrictions peculiar to Islam hamper this expansion significantly. The glaring flaw of this statement is that the one country that, more than any other, imposes all of these social restrictions "with extreme prejudice" is also the most integrated into the global capitalist system. I am writing, of course, of Saudi Arabia. While subjecting women to the most restrictive controls of any country on the planet and imposing strict forms of censorship various cultural practices, they not only function as a leading petroleum exporter but as a major investor as well. They've been more than willing to invest massive amounts of money in the American economy to keep it going, fueling the very culture it is intent on resisting.
I take his point that alcohol and other drugs have been used by those in a position of power to keep their charges in state of thralldom. The use of alcohol to subjugate American Indians is well known. The FLN targeted bars and brothels during the Algerian independence struggle because these institutions were used by the French to demoralize and degrade the Algerian people, weakening their capacity to resist. The penetration of American urban ghettos by liquor stores is widely noted as contributing to the downward spiral of the disenfranchised. These attacks on what can be called the political economy of liquor are not sufficient to justify a total cultural prohibition of the practice. Alcohol consumption, for example, has often been used by progressive and leftist groups to build up comradery and group solidarity. The numerous drinking songs of the Wobblies and other left groups are an example of this (the International makes an excellent drinking song!). The absolute prohibition on consumption therefore can not be justified on political grounds alone. In the hands of an absolute monarchy like Saudi Arabia, the prohibition becomes another means to cultivate subservience to royal fiat. Abstaining from drink does not make you a chic revolutionary and indulging in it does not make you a dupe of imperialism.
The political economy of women's dress is a long and complex topic. It is easy to find justification for a number of views simply by observing the endless conga line of fashion trends that surge into prominence and then fade into oblivion. Coach bags? Those are totallyVeblenian objects of conspicuous consumption, meant to inspire an invidious comparison between those who possess them and those who do not. In previous times, a well-accessorized woman was a reflection of worth of the man who kept her, a form of vicarious consumption. Now these items have become direct status-symbols for the woman, reflecting the increasing integration of women into the mainstream of economic life.
The endless round of seasonal variations that characterizes fashion in Pakistan serves many purposes: conspicuous consumption, assertion of identity in the midst of enforced religious anonymity, a creative outlet to compensate for narrowing prospects of professional empowerment. While on the subject of fashion, the speaker stated that it was odd that gay men worked as fashion designers for women. Acting on the theory that gay men are rejectors of women, he cited this as an example of the producers of mass culture having contempt for its consumers. This struck me as odd. It would seem to me that if one wanted a form of dress that did not attempt to objectify women as mere sexual objects, gay men (and heterosexual women, of course) would be just the ones to turn to. But I guess its hard to resist taking pot-shots against the gays.
The reasons which prompt individual women to take up the abaya and niqab are too numerous to mention. When this mode of dress becomes a uniform enforced by the power of the state, such as in Saudi, the effect is to reduce women to the status of what Agamben named Homo Sacer: sacred humans. Their rights are guaranteed in the abstract so that they may be violated in the concrete particulars. They are protected by way of abuse. In the words of the No Doubt song Just a Girl,
"'Cause I'm just a girl, little 'ol me
Don't let me out of your sight
I'm just a girl, all pretty and petite
So don't let me have any rights
'Cause I'm just a girl I'd rather not be
'Cause they won't let me drive
Late at night I'm just a girl,
Guess I'm some kind of freak
'Cause they all sit and stare
With their eyes"
This perfectly encapsulates the paternal voyeurism that plagues gender relations in most Muslim societies. The restrictions are really protections and any woman who in the least way foregos them is fair game for the male gaze and the male hand. I am reminded of Marx's passage in the Communist Manifesto:
"Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class... the bourgeois is a bourgeois — for the benefit of the working class."
One could easily rephrase this as:
"Burqas: for the protection of women. Driving restrictions: for the protection of women. Chaperones: for the protection of women. A patriarch is a patriarch, for the protection of women."
What the fight over women's dress in the context of Islam most thoroughly unveils (don't kill me!) is the extent to which women are excluded from this struggle. A political football can't be allowed to dictate its own trajectory. Militant secularists in Tunisia rip the veils from women and then rape them with soda bottles, Islamists (or old-fashioned misogynists) splash acid in the faces of unveiled women, representatives of Saudi state force girls back into their burning school because they don't have their scarfs, veiled women are denied a place in civil society in Turkey, Tunisia, and, increasingly, Western Europe. What is lacking, or, to be precise, actively silenced or ignored, is the voice of Muslim women themselves. The debate over appropriate dress needs to be one internal to the community of Muslim women, without the bearded men or the humanitarian warmongers intervening. Of the Muslim women who have been most active in shaping the debate over hijab, the four most influential have been Fatima Mernissi, Amina Wadud, Maryam Jameelah, Yvonne Ridley, and Asra Nomani. The first three wrote influential books touching on the issue and the last two have been prominent in activism and journalism. Of these four, only the latter has been prominent during the latest phase of the debate: the recent increase in islamophobia in the US and the attempts to criminalize the veil in Western Europe. Whatever side they take on this issue, Muslim women need to play a more prominent role in how it is decided. They should not remain mere objects of debate, but the principal participants.
Both the issue of alcohol and women's dress demonstrate the limits of a culture war as a response to empire. A culture war can easily provide the pretext for a community's incorporation into the global capitalist economy via the ideology of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is a ploy to support capitalism: it buys off the Muslim leadership, sells out the women, and paves the way for the more thorough capitalization of the Muslim world. We must think dialectically here. It is not a matter of islamophobes getting the government to start concentration camps. The professional islamophobes serve certain very specific goals: invoking the feared Other during a heated election, supporting US foreign policy vis-a-vis Israel. They will come and go as required. It is the ideology of multiculturalism that is the key to the long-term sustainability of capitalism. The dialectic of the closed, mono-cultural, (usually) mono-racial society proposed by the Islamophobes and their secular anti-immigrant allies pitted against the institutional advocates of liberal multi-culturalism will soon give way to a new synthesis: an ‘enlightened’ yet ‘principled’ tolerance that tames the Other, defangs it, and displays it for purposes of ideological reinforcement and entertainment.
This dialectical process will repeated on a larger, global scale vis-a-vis the West and the Islamic world. The ultimate result will be ‘quaint’ survivals useful for justifying the existence of Western civilization as a way of life and, on the more liberal end, to meet the ideological requirement of tolerance of diversity. These survivals will be economically integrated, their resources, both physical and cultural, will be tapped, but they will be self-policing. Identity politics will give way to identity police. Saudi Arabia and Occupied Palestine are both illustrative examples.
In the latter case, the West Bank plays the part of the respectable, secular Arab state. It clamps down on the Islamists, negotiates with Israel, and accepts money from the US in order to more effectively control its own people (an example of the latter being the funding of the Dahlan gangs’ attempted take over of Gaza). The Gaza Strip, under the rule of the Islamist Hamas party, acts as a crucible of Islamist political identity. When the pressure increases, the women feel it. Women, for example, can no longer smoke sheesha (hookah) in public. Lingerie ads are now banned, although perhaps this affects the men more than the women. Women are no longer free to have fabulous male hair-dressers. There is a dialectic at work here: the harder that one side asserts its secular/islamic identity, the greater the identity policing performed by the other side. In Gaza, women are slowly being squeezed back into the home while in the West Bank the space of political participation is being restricted to Fatah apparatchiks. The only solution for the vicious dialectic of multiculturalism is a new global project committed to universal emancipation. Partial solutions and parochial battles are no longer sufficient.
I talked to the him later and asked him to clarify his remarks. He then gave me a more nuanced, if flawed, explanation of his words: Western Capitalism is constantly seeking out new markets for its products and the social restrictions peculiar to Islam hamper this expansion significantly. The glaring flaw of this statement is that the one country that, more than any other, imposes all of these social restrictions "with extreme prejudice" is also the most integrated into the global capitalist system. I am writing, of course, of Saudi Arabia. While subjecting women to the most restrictive controls of any country on the planet and imposing strict forms of censorship various cultural practices, they not only function as a leading petroleum exporter but as a major investor as well. They've been more than willing to invest massive amounts of money in the American economy to keep it going, fueling the very culture it is intent on resisting.
I take his point that alcohol and other drugs have been used by those in a position of power to keep their charges in state of thralldom. The use of alcohol to subjugate American Indians is well known. The FLN targeted bars and brothels during the Algerian independence struggle because these institutions were used by the French to demoralize and degrade the Algerian people, weakening their capacity to resist. The penetration of American urban ghettos by liquor stores is widely noted as contributing to the downward spiral of the disenfranchised. These attacks on what can be called the political economy of liquor are not sufficient to justify a total cultural prohibition of the practice. Alcohol consumption, for example, has often been used by progressive and leftist groups to build up comradery and group solidarity. The numerous drinking songs of the Wobblies and other left groups are an example of this (the International makes an excellent drinking song!). The absolute prohibition on consumption therefore can not be justified on political grounds alone. In the hands of an absolute monarchy like Saudi Arabia, the prohibition becomes another means to cultivate subservience to royal fiat. Abstaining from drink does not make you a chic revolutionary and indulging in it does not make you a dupe of imperialism.
The political economy of women's dress is a long and complex topic. It is easy to find justification for a number of views simply by observing the endless conga line of fashion trends that surge into prominence and then fade into oblivion. Coach bags? Those are totallyVeblenian objects of conspicuous consumption, meant to inspire an invidious comparison between those who possess them and those who do not. In previous times, a well-accessorized woman was a reflection of worth of the man who kept her, a form of vicarious consumption. Now these items have become direct status-symbols for the woman, reflecting the increasing integration of women into the mainstream of economic life.
The endless round of seasonal variations that characterizes fashion in Pakistan serves many purposes: conspicuous consumption, assertion of identity in the midst of enforced religious anonymity, a creative outlet to compensate for narrowing prospects of professional empowerment. While on the subject of fashion, the speaker stated that it was odd that gay men worked as fashion designers for women. Acting on the theory that gay men are rejectors of women, he cited this as an example of the producers of mass culture having contempt for its consumers. This struck me as odd. It would seem to me that if one wanted a form of dress that did not attempt to objectify women as mere sexual objects, gay men (and heterosexual women, of course) would be just the ones to turn to. But I guess its hard to resist taking pot-shots against the gays.
The reasons which prompt individual women to take up the abaya and niqab are too numerous to mention. When this mode of dress becomes a uniform enforced by the power of the state, such as in Saudi, the effect is to reduce women to the status of what Agamben named Homo Sacer: sacred humans. Their rights are guaranteed in the abstract so that they may be violated in the concrete particulars. They are protected by way of abuse. In the words of the No Doubt song Just a Girl,
"'Cause I'm just a girl, little 'ol me
Don't let me out of your sight
I'm just a girl, all pretty and petite
So don't let me have any rights
'Cause I'm just a girl I'd rather not be
'Cause they won't let me drive
Late at night I'm just a girl,
Guess I'm some kind of freak
'Cause they all sit and stare
With their eyes"
This perfectly encapsulates the paternal voyeurism that plagues gender relations in most Muslim societies. The restrictions are really protections and any woman who in the least way foregos them is fair game for the male gaze and the male hand. I am reminded of Marx's passage in the Communist Manifesto:
"Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class... the bourgeois is a bourgeois — for the benefit of the working class."
One could easily rephrase this as:
"Burqas: for the protection of women. Driving restrictions: for the protection of women. Chaperones: for the protection of women. A patriarch is a patriarch, for the protection of women."
What the fight over women's dress in the context of Islam most thoroughly unveils (don't kill me!) is the extent to which women are excluded from this struggle. A political football can't be allowed to dictate its own trajectory. Militant secularists in Tunisia rip the veils from women and then rape them with soda bottles, Islamists (or old-fashioned misogynists) splash acid in the faces of unveiled women, representatives of Saudi state force girls back into their burning school because they don't have their scarfs, veiled women are denied a place in civil society in Turkey, Tunisia, and, increasingly, Western Europe. What is lacking, or, to be precise, actively silenced or ignored, is the voice of Muslim women themselves. The debate over appropriate dress needs to be one internal to the community of Muslim women, without the bearded men or the humanitarian warmongers intervening. Of the Muslim women who have been most active in shaping the debate over hijab, the four most influential have been Fatima Mernissi, Amina Wadud, Maryam Jameelah, Yvonne Ridley, and Asra Nomani. The first three wrote influential books touching on the issue and the last two have been prominent in activism and journalism. Of these four, only the latter has been prominent during the latest phase of the debate: the recent increase in islamophobia in the US and the attempts to criminalize the veil in Western Europe. Whatever side they take on this issue, Muslim women need to play a more prominent role in how it is decided. They should not remain mere objects of debate, but the principal participants.
Both the issue of alcohol and women's dress demonstrate the limits of a culture war as a response to empire. A culture war can easily provide the pretext for a community's incorporation into the global capitalist economy via the ideology of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is a ploy to support capitalism: it buys off the Muslim leadership, sells out the women, and paves the way for the more thorough capitalization of the Muslim world. We must think dialectically here. It is not a matter of islamophobes getting the government to start concentration camps. The professional islamophobes serve certain very specific goals: invoking the feared Other during a heated election, supporting US foreign policy vis-a-vis Israel. They will come and go as required. It is the ideology of multiculturalism that is the key to the long-term sustainability of capitalism. The dialectic of the closed, mono-cultural, (usually) mono-racial society proposed by the Islamophobes and their secular anti-immigrant allies pitted against the institutional advocates of liberal multi-culturalism will soon give way to a new synthesis: an ‘enlightened’ yet ‘principled’ tolerance that tames the Other, defangs it, and displays it for purposes of ideological reinforcement and entertainment.
This dialectical process will repeated on a larger, global scale vis-a-vis the West and the Islamic world. The ultimate result will be ‘quaint’ survivals useful for justifying the existence of Western civilization as a way of life and, on the more liberal end, to meet the ideological requirement of tolerance of diversity. These survivals will be economically integrated, their resources, both physical and cultural, will be tapped, but they will be self-policing. Identity politics will give way to identity police. Saudi Arabia and Occupied Palestine are both illustrative examples.
In the latter case, the West Bank plays the part of the respectable, secular Arab state. It clamps down on the Islamists, negotiates with Israel, and accepts money from the US in order to more effectively control its own people (an example of the latter being the funding of the Dahlan gangs’ attempted take over of Gaza). The Gaza Strip, under the rule of the Islamist Hamas party, acts as a crucible of Islamist political identity. When the pressure increases, the women feel it. Women, for example, can no longer smoke sheesha (hookah) in public. Lingerie ads are now banned, although perhaps this affects the men more than the women. Women are no longer free to have fabulous male hair-dressers. There is a dialectic at work here: the harder that one side asserts its secular/islamic identity, the greater the identity policing performed by the other side. In Gaza, women are slowly being squeezed back into the home while in the West Bank the space of political participation is being restricted to Fatah apparatchiks. The only solution for the vicious dialectic of multiculturalism is a new global project committed to universal emancipation. Partial solutions and parochial battles are no longer sufficient.
More Thoughts on Domestic Violence
One of the acts of a wife which may trigger the chastisement discussed in the earlier post on domestic violence is "nushuz" or disobedience. Nushuz covers many acts, including leaving the home without permission or refusing to have sex with the husband. Because of this, acting in a way that many if not most women living in the west (including Muslim women) take for granted, whether it be freedom of movement, freedom to work outside the home, the right to refuse her husband when she is angry or because she is simply not in the mood, is criminalized in the Shariah. While it is true that a wife may place many stipulations in the marriage contract, most women do not and, to quote Kecia Ali, "this approach misses the forest for the trees" because it "fail[s] to address the basic parameters of the marriage contract itself and the assumptions it is based on." More than this, it fails to take into consideration the universal ethical principles that make life in a diverse, multicultural society possible.
It is this lack of principle that I find to be the most objectionable trait of the Muslim community. All the other evils that I have written about or will write about in this blog, gender injustice, racism, irrational prejudice against Jews and homosexuals, etc., are symptoms of this cardinal failing. Muslims are quite quick to condemn the injustices done to them by invoking universal moral norms or by taking shield behind legal structures that embody these norms, such as the Bill of Rights. On the other hand, when criticism is made of certain Islamic practices, they are just as quick to retreat into the particularities of their own religion, eschewing any universal framework for moral thought.
While the theoretical foundation can be quite different and specific application may vary, the universal ethical principles which have guided moral decision making have at least one trait in common: they admonish us to place care for the other and care for ourselves on equal footing. This is true whether we are talking about the Golden Rule (in it's Jewish, Christian, or Confucian forms), the principle of utility, the Categorical Imperative, veil of ignorance underlying Rawls' Theory of Justice, or Schopenhauer's injunction to "harm no one; on the contrary help everyone as much as you can." These rules force use to take a universal perspective in our decision making, to consider other people as beings with the same inherent worth as we ourselves possess. This universality is independent of their usefulness to us, our emotional attachment to them, or their familial, cultural, or religious bonds to us. Unfortunately, Islam's version of the universal rule, "Love for your brother what you love for yourself" is ambiguous. While many Muslims interpret the term "brother" (akh in arabic) in a universal sense, embracing all of humanity, there are a large number of Islamist ideologues who interpret this term in an exclusive way, referring only to the brotherhood of Muslims. Another ambiguity, to return to the topic of this post, is the manner in which this principle is applied in practice.
Islam is the religion of Submission. Muslims seek the pleasure of Allah and a share in his paradise by way of a life-transaction or, in Arabic, deen. This life-transaction requires sincere submission to a number of religious rites, restrictions, and duties. When notions of gender equality are mentioned to Islamic scholars and other ideologues, the most common apologetic tactic is to invoke the notion of this ultimate goal. Yes, we should love for our sisters in Islam what we love for ourselves. In this case, we should want them to go to paradise just as we desire to go to paradise. The way to paradise according to Islam is clear: in the sphere of gender relations it requires obedience to certain norms regarding dress, speech, association with members of the opposite gender, and compliance with certain laws regarding marriage and family life. Islam is not concerned with equality but equity. A good husband is not the one who indulges his wife's desire but one who ensures that she gets to paradise via adherence to the formal code. Indeed, as any member of the Tableeghi Jamaat will tell you, men will be held accountable for the action of "their women." This creates a further incentive, beyond the strictly ethical, to maintain prescribed norms within the Muslim household. The problem with this approach is that it permits virtually any behavior in the name of the benevolent tutelage of the wife and the sanctity of the home.
To what extremes can this attitude lead? Kecia Ali argues that, based on a study of several Sunni legal texts, "The husband's right to derive pleasure from his wife... led the jurists to grant him total control over her mobility." She quotes a striking example from the Hanafi Law Book, Kitab an-Nafaqat, by Al-Khassaf. What measure can the husband take in response to a refusal of sexual relations? "Is it lawful for the husband to have sex with her against her will...? It is lawful because she is a wrongdoer." This is not an isolated opinion, at least not within the Hanafi school which is dominant in South and Central Asia and parts of the Middle East. Marital rape is a serious issue in every community. It does not need a religious sanction or motivation to occur; it is an expression of the desire for absolute power over another. When this illicit desire is fed the fuel of piety and righteousness, when it is combined with the urge to punish a wrongdoer, it is easy for the marital chamber to become a torture chamber.
It is this lack of principle that I find to be the most objectionable trait of the Muslim community. All the other evils that I have written about or will write about in this blog, gender injustice, racism, irrational prejudice against Jews and homosexuals, etc., are symptoms of this cardinal failing. Muslims are quite quick to condemn the injustices done to them by invoking universal moral norms or by taking shield behind legal structures that embody these norms, such as the Bill of Rights. On the other hand, when criticism is made of certain Islamic practices, they are just as quick to retreat into the particularities of their own religion, eschewing any universal framework for moral thought.
While the theoretical foundation can be quite different and specific application may vary, the universal ethical principles which have guided moral decision making have at least one trait in common: they admonish us to place care for the other and care for ourselves on equal footing. This is true whether we are talking about the Golden Rule (in it's Jewish, Christian, or Confucian forms), the principle of utility, the Categorical Imperative, veil of ignorance underlying Rawls' Theory of Justice, or Schopenhauer's injunction to "harm no one; on the contrary help everyone as much as you can." These rules force use to take a universal perspective in our decision making, to consider other people as beings with the same inherent worth as we ourselves possess. This universality is independent of their usefulness to us, our emotional attachment to them, or their familial, cultural, or religious bonds to us. Unfortunately, Islam's version of the universal rule, "Love for your brother what you love for yourself" is ambiguous. While many Muslims interpret the term "brother" (akh in arabic) in a universal sense, embracing all of humanity, there are a large number of Islamist ideologues who interpret this term in an exclusive way, referring only to the brotherhood of Muslims. Another ambiguity, to return to the topic of this post, is the manner in which this principle is applied in practice.
Islam is the religion of Submission. Muslims seek the pleasure of Allah and a share in his paradise by way of a life-transaction or, in Arabic, deen. This life-transaction requires sincere submission to a number of religious rites, restrictions, and duties. When notions of gender equality are mentioned to Islamic scholars and other ideologues, the most common apologetic tactic is to invoke the notion of this ultimate goal. Yes, we should love for our sisters in Islam what we love for ourselves. In this case, we should want them to go to paradise just as we desire to go to paradise. The way to paradise according to Islam is clear: in the sphere of gender relations it requires obedience to certain norms regarding dress, speech, association with members of the opposite gender, and compliance with certain laws regarding marriage and family life. Islam is not concerned with equality but equity. A good husband is not the one who indulges his wife's desire but one who ensures that she gets to paradise via adherence to the formal code. Indeed, as any member of the Tableeghi Jamaat will tell you, men will be held accountable for the action of "their women." This creates a further incentive, beyond the strictly ethical, to maintain prescribed norms within the Muslim household. The problem with this approach is that it permits virtually any behavior in the name of the benevolent tutelage of the wife and the sanctity of the home.
To what extremes can this attitude lead? Kecia Ali argues that, based on a study of several Sunni legal texts, "The husband's right to derive pleasure from his wife... led the jurists to grant him total control over her mobility." She quotes a striking example from the Hanafi Law Book, Kitab an-Nafaqat, by Al-Khassaf. What measure can the husband take in response to a refusal of sexual relations? "Is it lawful for the husband to have sex with her against her will...? It is lawful because she is a wrongdoer." This is not an isolated opinion, at least not within the Hanafi school which is dominant in South and Central Asia and parts of the Middle East. Marital rape is a serious issue in every community. It does not need a religious sanction or motivation to occur; it is an expression of the desire for absolute power over another. When this illicit desire is fed the fuel of piety and righteousness, when it is combined with the urge to punish a wrongdoer, it is easy for the marital chamber to become a torture chamber.
Islam and Domestic Violence
The reaction of the Muslim community to domestic violence is extremely ambiguous. On the one hand, there are organizations that do good work, especially in providing women’s shelters. On the other hand, we have a community that is in deep denial about the existence of spousal and child abuse within our homes. This results in a continuance of problems that, in any other community, would have been long ago resolved and in a chronic lack of funding for the organizations mentioned above.
This ambiguity has its root in two realities of the Muslim community: troubling textual sources that appear to give permission for domestic violence and the desire to maintain a “good” image for the community. The latter has its origins in the struggle for acceptance and for relevance that the Muslim community has engaged in since the fall of the Islamic world as a major world power. This impulse can be found in virtually any community, religious or non-religious, that has a stake in the battle for public opinion. While disturbing, it is not unique to Muslims.
The textual source is a uniquely Muslim problem. In the 4th verse of Surat an-Nisaa’ (Womankind) Muslim men are given the command “iḍribūhunna” in the context of dealing with a disobedient wife. This literally means “hit them” or “strike them.” The verb Daraba (he hit) is a favorite among Arabic Grammarians and is used often in giving examples of new grammatical forms. Zaidun Daraba Huseinan (Zaid hit Husein), unfortunately, can quickly become Zaidun Daraba Hindan.
Recently, I had a conversation with a friend who is a native Arabic speaker on this subject. Her objection was not just to the command itself, but to the ambiguity of the command. As Muslims apologists are quick to point out, the verb Daraba has more than one meaning, even in the Qur’an. In the name of apologetics or even reform one could use these alternate meanings to defang the command. But, as my friend pointed out, the very ambiguity is what does the most damage: it allows some to live with themselves and continue to maintain a religious system which gives permission to others to engage in domestic violence. She argued that this ambiguity makes it hard to believe that the Qur’an (or parts of it, at least) is a true scripture sent down by an Omniscient being. Such a being would know precisely how these ambiguities would be used for evil and would therefore avoid them.
There is a further problem with this command, however. Let’s assume the apologists are correct and this is not a reference to physical violence. Let’s go beyond them and assume it really is unambiguous and any interpretation which gives permission for physical violence is in bad faith and unauthentic. We are then forced to confront the problem of existential choice. This command and obedience to it affirms a system of values in which men have authority over women and have the right to admonish, instruct, and discipline them. It is a system of values in which women are reduced to permanent childhood and tutelage vis-a-vis men. This system of values finds its concrete expression in the legal systems of various Muslim countries. Even more “liberal” nations are deeply steeped in a patronising patriarchy, an phenomena illustrated in this report out of the United Arab Emirates.
I find this much more disturbing and destructive to faith than any empirical test of religion (i.e. Did Ancient Egyptians crucify people, was there a flood that killed Nuh’s people, etc.). When I was in college, I had a professor who was astonished and disappointed by my conversion. He brought up this verse and I was ready with my copy of Muhamad Asad commentary explaining all of the problems away. A tooth brush (miswak) was all that was meant and it was purely ceremonial! My professor told me (paraphrasing), “What right does a man have to subject a woman to such an undignified ceremony?” I had no answer for that and I still do not. No one has the right to strip away the dignity of another person, in the name of religion, the family, or pure egotism. As a thinking being endowed with a body, I affirm a set of values when I think and I act. That is the higher level of my responsibility, beyond the thoughts and actions themselves. Is it possible to affirm a set of values that avoids the injustices that are rampant in the Muslim community and yet still authentically Islamic? I now have serious doubts.
This ambiguity has its root in two realities of the Muslim community: troubling textual sources that appear to give permission for domestic violence and the desire to maintain a “good” image for the community. The latter has its origins in the struggle for acceptance and for relevance that the Muslim community has engaged in since the fall of the Islamic world as a major world power. This impulse can be found in virtually any community, religious or non-religious, that has a stake in the battle for public opinion. While disturbing, it is not unique to Muslims.
The textual source is a uniquely Muslim problem. In the 4th verse of Surat an-Nisaa’ (Womankind) Muslim men are given the command “iḍribūhunna” in the context of dealing with a disobedient wife. This literally means “hit them” or “strike them.” The verb Daraba (he hit) is a favorite among Arabic Grammarians and is used often in giving examples of new grammatical forms. Zaidun Daraba Huseinan (Zaid hit Husein), unfortunately, can quickly become Zaidun Daraba Hindan.
Recently, I had a conversation with a friend who is a native Arabic speaker on this subject. Her objection was not just to the command itself, but to the ambiguity of the command. As Muslims apologists are quick to point out, the verb Daraba has more than one meaning, even in the Qur’an. In the name of apologetics or even reform one could use these alternate meanings to defang the command. But, as my friend pointed out, the very ambiguity is what does the most damage: it allows some to live with themselves and continue to maintain a religious system which gives permission to others to engage in domestic violence. She argued that this ambiguity makes it hard to believe that the Qur’an (or parts of it, at least) is a true scripture sent down by an Omniscient being. Such a being would know precisely how these ambiguities would be used for evil and would therefore avoid them.
There is a further problem with this command, however. Let’s assume the apologists are correct and this is not a reference to physical violence. Let’s go beyond them and assume it really is unambiguous and any interpretation which gives permission for physical violence is in bad faith and unauthentic. We are then forced to confront the problem of existential choice. This command and obedience to it affirms a system of values in which men have authority over women and have the right to admonish, instruct, and discipline them. It is a system of values in which women are reduced to permanent childhood and tutelage vis-a-vis men. This system of values finds its concrete expression in the legal systems of various Muslim countries. Even more “liberal” nations are deeply steeped in a patronising patriarchy, an phenomena illustrated in this report out of the United Arab Emirates.
I find this much more disturbing and destructive to faith than any empirical test of religion (i.e. Did Ancient Egyptians crucify people, was there a flood that killed Nuh’s people, etc.). When I was in college, I had a professor who was astonished and disappointed by my conversion. He brought up this verse and I was ready with my copy of Muhamad Asad commentary explaining all of the problems away. A tooth brush (miswak) was all that was meant and it was purely ceremonial! My professor told me (paraphrasing), “What right does a man have to subject a woman to such an undignified ceremony?” I had no answer for that and I still do not. No one has the right to strip away the dignity of another person, in the name of religion, the family, or pure egotism. As a thinking being endowed with a body, I affirm a set of values when I think and I act. That is the higher level of my responsibility, beyond the thoughts and actions themselves. Is it possible to affirm a set of values that avoids the injustices that are rampant in the Muslim community and yet still authentically Islamic? I now have serious doubts.
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