Chapter Nine
Conclusion
Perhaps nothing gives greater disrepute to Islam and Muslims—and well it should—than the perception in the West that women in Muslim families, communities, and societies are relegated to an inferior, in some respects subhuman, status, treatment, and role in private and public life. Whether this perception by Westerners and even by Westernized Muslims is entirely true is seriously questionable. However, after my sixty-five years of experience and observation of Muslim life and living and the condition of Muslim women, I am convinced that there is enough truth in this perception of the Muslim scene and the reality of the lives of Muslim women that this should awaken the individual and collective consciences of Muslims to re-take stock of the situation and address the issues of the freedom, equality, dignity, and the cultural constructions of gender and sexuality, marriage and spousal relations in the family, the masculine and/or phallic view of this and the next world, the place and role of Muslim women in the social, political, economic, and cultural systems and institutions, and the patriarchal social psychology and social order of the Muslim society in the world of today. This is no small order. The question is not merely a sociological one, but also a doctrinal one. That reform on the empirical plane is necessary is obvious, but what may not be obvious, at least to the not very thinking and/or reflective Muslim, is that there is an urgent need for rethinking Islam at the doctrinal plane, as well as its fundamental paradigms of gender and genderization, sex and sexuality, marriage and the conduct of family life, and the status, rights, and roles of women in all the sectors and departments of public life of the larger Muslim society. I am convinced that, in the social, political, economic, and cultural spheres, the Islamic view of women and their opportunities for development, growth, advancement, contribution, and achievement, in a word, self-actualization and/or fulfillment, both in their own and society’s best interest, need urgently to be redefined and/or readjusted to the conditions of life under which we live today. Our aim ought to be that Muslims must carry out the processes of the redefinition and/readjustment of women’s opportunities, position, and role in Muslim society to a degree where our women feel subjectively and say so with self-assurance, certainty, and confidence that they have real-life opportunities to develop, grow, advance, contribute, self-actualize, and fulfil themselves to the fullest degree by applying their God-given abilities, talents, and capacities, as human beings, as members of the Muslim ummah (community and society), as citizens, and as women. Does it not stand to reason that, if being a son, a brother, a husband, a father, a male member of the ummah, and a male citizen ought not to restrain, constrain, and/or disqualify a Muslim man from this, that or something else, why should being a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, a female member of the ummah, and a female citizen restrain, constrain, and/or disqualify a Muslim woman from this, that or something else? Is it not strange that, for example, in America, whereas the American society grants the American Muslim woman full and complete and equal freedom, dignity, and opportunity for personal development, growth, advancement, contribution, and achievement, in a word, self-actualization, and/or fulfillment, it is the Muslim community in the United States that denies her those very amenities in life? I think it is not only strange, but also an outrage. I am certain that if the larger American society were to treat American Muslim women unequally in those very respects—for instance deny Muslim young women admission to a business school or not give a job to a Muslim woman in the accounting, finance, or insurance fields, because, according to the Sayings of Prophet Muhammad, women cannot master and remember details of complex business and financial transactions, which is why the Shariah, i.e., Islamic law, does not value and accept their testimony, witness, or evidence in these matters and, consequently, accords only half the weight to their testimony, witness, or evidence that it accords to that of a man—we should legitimately consider it discrimination. The same would be true if the larger American society and its institutions were to segregate Muslim women, which is something Muslim communities and institutions do only too routinely in the United States, not to speak of Muslim countries. Consider for a moment if the sort of restrictions that are imposed upon Muslim women in countries like Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, etc. were to be imposed upon them in the United States in recognition and respect of the strictures of the Shariah. Immigrant Muslims in America resent and complain that the American law forbids polygamy and thereby keeps them from practicing polygamy in the United States, an institution which is sanctioned by their religion, but even so they would not stand for the
Islamic-traditional restrictions upon their behavior in other respects, because that will take away all the fun and fortune that living in America makes possible for both our men and women. What Muslim woman in America wants to be robbed, even in the name of Islam, of the opportunities of acquiring an education and working outside the home, or of the freedom to move about and not to veil her face. The orthodox, traditionalist, and fundamentalist Muslims in America make a virtue of the Saudi brand of Islam—though none would trade New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles for Jeddah, Madinah, or Makkah—but none would stand for making it unlawful in the United States for Muslim women to drive an automobile, as is the case in Saudi Arabia. The fact is that the Islamic culture, of which so much is made by them, is in disfavor with immigrant Muslims themselves in America. That is why Islam is a new religion in the United States. The Islamic way of life and living as it was practiced in the time of the Prophet or as it is even practiced today in much of the Muslim world is no more. As American Christianity is different from Ethiopian Christianity, so American Islam, too, is different from Pakistani, Afghan, Iranian, and/or Saudi Arab Islam. I think Islam, as an American religion, is a wholly new reality.
On August 30, 1999, I watched a documentary on PBS (KCET in Los Angeles), entitled "A Life Apart: Hasidism in America" in which it came out loud and clear how separate, insulated, and apart from mainstream American life and thought the life and thought of Hasidic Jews in America is. I was, however, impressed by one comment that a Jewish commentator, though not one belonging to the Hasidic community, made. He commented that he had witnessed a Hasidic small businessman talking in the course of a sale of an item of his merchandise to an apparently Christian woman, a customer who was dressed, or "undressed," in very revealing clothing, in the friendliest way that any salesman in America uses as an art, and, as she started to leave, he told her with a most pleasing smile, "Have a nice day." His point was that, no matter how summarily, contemptuously, and arrogantly the Hasidic Jews in America may reject all things American, including public education, university education, professions of law, medicine, and engineering, social interaction with Gentiles and even non-Hasidic Jews, assimilation into the American society, television, movies, and the mainstream of life and living in the United states, if they have learned to say and feel perfectly comfortable with saying to a scantily dressed or "undressed" female customer "Have a nice day," which is, as he termed, the "quintessential American phrase," they are already accepting in their business or public life what they reject with contempt in their private life. In this sense perhaps no group of Muslims in America is even as " faithful and sincere" in his religious profession, as the Hasidic Jew or the Amish Christian is to his version of Judaism or Christianity. Already, the assimilation of Muslims in America has gone much further. For all practical purposes, even the orthodox, traditionalist, and fundamentalist Muslims in America are as integrated and assimilated in the American society as the unorthodox, liberal, and modern Muslims are. Only the former are far more hypocritical than the latter. Not only do Muslim men and women in America want their sons and daughters to become medical doctors, they both feel perfectly comfortable with practicing all branches of medicine and make their professional services available to persons of both sexes. For a Muslim male physician who provides gynecological care to women and/or a Muslim female physician who examines the prostates of her male patients goes much further than a Hasidic Jew who only talks to a female customer to make a sale and says with a smile to her at the conclusion of the transaction, "Have a nice day." And, of course, Muslims in the United States have opted enthusiastically for secular education at all levels and in all professions and feel proud and are honored with "Achievement Awards" by the Islamic centers and the Muslim communities in the United States for success and making huge fortunes in the equal opportunity American economy.
Certainly, in America, Muslim women, including immigrant Muslim women, are and have to be a new species of Muslim women. What perhaps distinguishes them most from their sisters in Muslim countries is that in America they are all literate and those born and raised in the United States have received and/or are receiving formal schooling. Of course in the U.S., schooling up to the age of sixteen is legally mandatory and, beyond it, up to and including graduation from high school is highly recommended and is universally free. In America are available to every one, motivated and willing enough to get further education, plenty of opportunities for the same. This is a wholly different situation from the one in the Muslim world where, educational opportunities are virtually absent for the vast majority of girls. Given a sufficient level of motivation, a Muslim woman, like other women, can acquire any amount of education in the education in America. However education by itself, not
even higher education in the humanities, basic sciences (physical, social, psychological, etc.), administrative sciences, medicine, engineering, law, and what not, is no guarantee that Muslims will become an open-minded, thinking, and reflective people, simply by virtue of acquiring university degrees, because none of that may, motivate, inspire, cause, or move Muslims to rethink, reinterpret, reevaluate, and reinvent Islam to make it suitable for Muslim life and living today. It remains to be seen as to what will enable them to overcome Islam’s and their own inherent tendencies toward orthodoxy, traditionalism, fundamentalism, schism, sectarianism, obscurantism, and, above all, their animosity toward and even rejection of human equality, gender justice, democracy, individual freedom, and freedom of thought and expression. Muslims, even in America and elsewhere in the West, may simply continue to pursue and acquire modern education ritualistically, i.e., by going through the motions of it, by choosing the promising fields of study, taking the right college and/or university courses, and obtaining prestigious and marketable degrees and diplomas, as they have done so far at European and North American universities, only in order to qualify for lucrative jobs and careers in the labor market of the modern and postmodern economy, as a necessary means of earning a livelihood and/or acquiring wealth, without acquiring in the least any new habits of thought or learning new ways and means of solving and resolving the intellectual, moral, and social problems of Muslim life and living, personal or collective, in the world in which they live and will live in the century to come. They may arrive in the twenty-first century no better prepared then they arrived in the past in every new century of the Common Era since the thirteenth century, i.e., lagging behind the West by a century or two or more every time.
For this historical and contemporary predicament of Muslims—with all its aftermath of internal strife, backwardness, underdevelopment, stagnation, poverty, impoverishment, despotism, tyranny, and victimization under Western—European, Russian, American, and more—colonization and imperialism, which remain the reality under disguise even today—only Muslims are responsible. They themselves are largely, if not wholly, to blame. Their weaknesses and vulnerabilities were/are of their own creation. Muslims today are scientifically, industrially, technologically, politically, socially, culturally, and economically dependent upon the West, because they have chosen in the past and choose today to be dependent. The greatest single factor responsible for the historic failure of Islam and Muslims has been and remains the doctrinal construction of the Shariah, or Islamic law, along the orthodox, traditionalist, and fundamentalist understanding and interpretation of the message of the Qur'an and the Sunnah, as reported in the Hadith, and the insistence upon its implementation which have held back the cultural progress and social evolution of the historic Muslim society, especially since the dawn of the modern Scientific and Technical Age in Europe in the seventeenth century. The falling behind of Muslims is due to failures, faults, and defaults of their own. What is popularly called today, for want of a more telling expression, Islamic Fundamentalism, like its predecessor Taqlidi Islam (unthinking imitation of the doctrinal interpretation and construction of Islam and the rigid fixation of the Shariah, or Islamic law, in early Islamic history) is today, too, an obstacle in the path of what is proposed to be the modernization of the Muslim society.
So the question is, what is to be done? Certainly, what is to be done cannot be to insist doctrinally upon and try to forcibly implement the demands of the fundamentalists to turn back the clock and do what was done over the past many centuries that has landed Muslims and Muslim societies in the predicament in which today they find themselves in the modern and postmodern world. Hence, the only promising and viable option left for Muslims and Muslim societies is, it seems to me, a new—rethought, reinterpreted, reconstructed, and even reinvented, if you will—message of Islam, which is conducive to and in tune with contemporary Muslim life and living, and which also, at the same time, would provide an urgently needed shift, as it were, to a doctrinal paradigm of Islam within which to work out viable, effective, and contemporary solutions to the problems, predicaments, and dilemmas confronting Muslims, as men and woman and as communities and countries, in the twenty-first century ahead of us. In this rethought, reinterpreted, reconstructed, and reinvented Islam, there is certainly no room or place or need for the inequality of man and woman, or of male and female, whether they interface, interact, or interrelate with one another as siblings, spouses, class or school mates, friends, neighbors, coworkers, members of society, citizens of the country, or as candidates, competitors, and rivals for the same opportunities to develop personally, educationally, socially, economically, professionally, politically, religiously, culturally, and so on and so forth. I think that all such Islamic doctrines as those that
seek to justify, limit, and/or set boundaries in the path of Muslim women, in respect of certain opportunities, pursuits, activities, interests, callings, jobs, leadership positions, and/or whatever else are dated, outdated, and obsolete. To think, argue, and contend that a woman is Islamically disqualified from becoming, for instance, even an imam (one who leads a mixed congregation of Muslims in the conduct of the five daily, Friday, and Eid prayers and delivers the khutaba, or sermon) or that a woman is Islamically disqualified to hold the office of the head of a Muslim or Islamic state is, for me, the equivalent of thinking, arguing, and contending that, Islamically, only a man of the Quraysh (Prophet Muhammad’s own tribe in Makkah) can and ought to be the head of the present day Saudi Arab state. To be sure, Prophet Muhammad disqualified women from the imamat, or religious leadership of Muslims; khilafah, or caliphate, i.e., political leadership of the Muslim ummah, or polity, in other words, the headship of the Islamic state; and, finally, he laid down, too, the descent from the Quraysh tribe as a foremost, second to maleness only, condition for the head of the state. Even if the reported Ahadith [plural of Hadith], or Sayings of the Prophet, which the traditionalists cite as the source of the disqualification of women from holding the position of imam or the highest political office in the land and all other types of positions of authority and leadership over men are true—which I seriously doubt they are—can we still not say that however true and relevant these prescriptions may have been in the time of the Prophet and/or in the early centuries of Islam, they certainly are not applicable to ours? I think we can, and we should, and we must.
In the long run, actually in Islamic history to date and Islamic Tradition as it evolved historically, Muslim women were simply relegated under the Muslim social order to a permanent status and place of subordination, inferior status, and domesticity, so much so that they were not even regarded as citizens of the Islamic state, but simply as members of the Muslim household, providing sexual gratification to their husband or owner, and conceiving his children, giving birth to and rearing them, with domesticity as their only natural and social concern in life. They were considered fit for nothing else or nothing else was considered fit for them. Their natural and emotional talents fitted them for the work of vulva (vagina) and womb only. Indeed the sexual objectification and domestication of Muslim women was so pervasive and decisive in the Islamic society that, ultimately, women were valued only for their vulva and womb, and domesticity. The world outside the home became nonexistent for them and they, if they ever were allowed to and/or had to venture to go in the world outside the home, became invisible in it. Thus were created and maintained the separate worlds—physical and social—of women and men in Islam, which have existed down to our own day. Only under the influence of the West and the adoption or adaptation of its ways are Muslim women coming out and stepping into the world, as it were. In this sense, not Islam, but the West is becoming the emancipator of Muslim women. Whether the West will succeed in bringing about the meaningful emancipation of Muslim women remains to be seen. I do hope and pray it will, at least to a degree.
There is always the question of a role model for Muslim women. For Muslims, the choice is usually between Fatima, the favorite daughter of Muhammad and the self-effacing, obedient and submissive wife of Ali, who gave birth to two sons and raised them and Aisha, Muhammad’s favorite wife (who was 43 years younger than he, remained infertile, was widowed at 19 and forbidden to remarry, and died as an honored but single woman at 67). She was brilliant, energetic, feisty, aggressive, outgoing, full of initiative, probably even meddlesome, and led the opposition against the fourth Caliph Ali and rode her camel at the head of a small army of rebels as the commander and fought a losing battle against the government of the day. Had Prophet Muhammad not disqualified women from leadership positions, especially the head of the state, Aisha in retrospect could even have been considered as the most suitable first successor of her late husband, as is so often the case today, when a wife or daughter of a dead leader succeeds him.
However that might have been, by common consensus among Muslims, the honor of being the ideal wife and mother and, therefore, a proper role model for Muslim women for all times and climes and places goes to Fatima. Given the orthodox view that the exclusive devotion of Muslim woman giving birth to children and rearing them, and to home and hearth and domesticity is the ideal of Muslim womanhood, Lady Fatima was certainly a paragon of Muslim womanhood. But with all the due respect to Fatima, today perhaps Aisha might be considered a more appropriate role model for Muslim women in that an ever growing proportion of Muslim women has the aspiration to take an active part in public and work life and build careers outside the home. Anyway, I would cast my vote for Aisha’s choice as the premier role model for Muslim women in the twenty-first century.
Be that as it may, it is a question, deserving of the most serious consideration by Muslims today, whether Muslim women ought to continue to be disqualified from public life under Islam or the public life of the Muslim community, notwithstanding the doctrinal system of Islam as to the role of women as the orthodox, traditionalist, and fundamentalist interpreters of the Qur'an and Sunnah see it. Must Muslim women devote and dedicate themselves exclusively to and remain restricted to and content with being the source of sexual gratification to their husbands or masters, giving births to babies, rearing children, and domesticity? I do not think so. Because I think women are as much human; endowed with God-given abilities and talents; capable of pursuing, mastering, contributing, and advancing knowledge; and becoming productive and creative in life as are men. I think there is, has to be, more, a very, very great deal more, to the lives of Muslim women than sexuality, reproduction, child-rearing, and domesticity. I think the relegation of Muslim women to those activities and functions in orthodox, traditionalist, and fundamentalist Islam is mistaken, outrageous, inhuman, and an obstruction in the path of the progress of human justice, dignity, equality, freedom, and all things beneficial for Muslim women, men, and the society as a whole. For me, for one, all such doctrines as justify the disqualification of women from the public life of the Muslim society, polity, and economy have no relevance today. These doctrines are simply and purely a residue from Arab atavism, tribalism, and male sexism, and have no justification today, even if the Prophet sanctioned them, which I doubt he did in the manner and with the intent and to the effect with which the same have been understood, interpreted, and applied by the later generations of Muslims under the instigations and superstitions of our ulama (religious scholars), fuqaha (religious law jurists), and imams (clergy) over the centuries, so much so that they are taken for the essence of the message of Islam. Just why cannot a man of a different tribe, for example the Saudi tribe, be the ruler, or the king, of Saudi Arabia? And if a nonQuraysh is acceptable as the head of the Saudi Arab State, why should not a woman be acceptable as the national leader of Saudi Arabia or any other Muslim country? But, then, why cannot a woman become and function as an imam—leading prayers of mixed congregations; judging cases according to the Shariah, or Islamic law; performing nikah, or marriage; and such other duties as the Muslim clergy perform—and give a khutabah, too, at Friday and Eid prayers of a mixed congregation and pronounce fatawas, or juridical opinions, as well? What does the shape of genitalia have to do with the ability, training, and performance of any of these functions? Why should biology be the destiny of Muslims? Why should a life and/or career of the work of the vulva or vagina and the womb, rearing children, and domesticity be the only career open to a Muslim woman, as a wife, a concubine, and/or a mother? Why should not Muslim women be as free as Muslim men to aspire to and train for any kind of work, job, vocation, and profession that they choose of their own volition and free will? Just why not? If the society does not owe them any more than it owes to men, why should it say to them that you cannot and shall not aspire to become this, that, or something else? Only give them an equal opportunity and a level playing field and let life and luck take their course. Let women’s success and failure be their own, as is men’s. Let neither the cultural advantaging of men nor the cultural disadvantaging of women be the first organizational principle of the modern and/or postmodern Islam and contemporary Muslim society.
The question before American Muslims is: Shall Muslim women and Muslim men stand on a footing of equality, if not in the worldwide Muslim community at least in its advanced sections, as in the case of the emerging Muslim community in the United States, for example? And will advanced Muslims around the world join the human race in the interest, pursuit, and promotion of human freedom, equality, and dignity for one and all in the twenty-first century? My opinion, decision and recommendation are that we Muslims have no graceful alternative but to do so and move in that direction with a sense of urgency. And if this demands that we rethink, reinterpret, reconstruct, and/or reinvent Islam, and recodify the Shariah or abandon parts of the Shariah, we had better do so with haste, that is, if we want Islam, the Islamic Shariah, and the Islamic way of life to remain a viable alternative to an all-out secular way of life and thought. The task before us is to rethink, redefine, and reset the normative boundaries of Muslim life and living, behavior and conduct, morality and ethics, and individual and social action as we move into the twenty-first century. And the best place to start is to make an honest attempt to reconceptualize doctrinally and reconstruct socially the cultural systems of sex and sexuality, gender and genderization, and adopt new patterns of socialization, interactions, and interrelations between male and female in Islam with the aim of creating and sustaining a new social as well as psychological contract between Muslim men and Muslim women on the basis of a social ethics of gender justice and human equality.
Equality of man and woman is, in and by itself, a moral and social value that ought not to be compromised or denied in a decent society. In today’s world and the world of the foreseeable future, equality is at the core of a rational and efficient economic ordering of society, democratic institutions, the legal system, the judicial system, the educational system, and the whole spectrum of social and cultural institutions, including the family, school, mosque, workplace, marketplace, indeed, any and every human institution in contemporary society. Gender inequality in Muslim society today is the foremost obstacle in the development of that society. Insomuch as Islam, or the orthodox, traditionalist, conservative, and fundamentalist Islam provides intellectual and ideological rationalization and legitimacy to sexual and gender inequality, Islam itself has become the foremost obstacle to not only the development, but also the introduction and sustenance of democracy in Muslim countries. As long as Islam and Muslims in the twenty-first century cannot handle the equality of male and female, so long democracy would remain unachievable in the Muslim world. Moral, social, political, economic, and cultural equality of men and women in the Muslim society today—both conceptually and legally—is essential, imperative, and indispensable. If Islam cannot be the source of inspiration for the full and complete equality of women and men in social, political, economic, and cultural walks of Muslim life, then, I am afraid, it will have demonstrated its unfitness as a way of life and as a public philosophy, and, therefore, as an acceptable alternative to rational humanism. In that case, it, Islam that is, might even come to be regarded as an inadequate religion in the private life of the individual. Thoughtful Muslims must understand this clearly. There has to be a sense of urgency about it, for, in a decade or two, the fateful consequences of Muslim failure of understanding shall present themselves before us, but it would already be too late.
I began with the eulogy
to Islam by Ahmad b. ‘Asim al-Antaqi. Whether it was a fitting eulogy
at the beginning of the ninth century I cannot say but, if Muslims fail
to adjust the message of Islam to the twenty-first century, we would, then,
be right in eulogizing Islam in the words of Al-Antaqi:
that wife and adult sons and daughters (unmarried or married), living in the parental home, too, should be equally responsible and must contribute their fair share to the economic and social well-being of the household. What has to be eradicated from the Muslim family is the widespread phenomenon of parasitism, i.e., perfectly able-bodied adult sons and daughters, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, nephews and nieces, aunts and uncles, widowed and divorced women, and more living in utter idleness off the earnings of a single productive male in the family. Not only are they all a huge economic and financial burden upon the family, but they, more often than not, are also responsible for the great unhappiness and discord that exist in most Muslim families and, thereby, obstruct, frustrate, and hold back everyone in the family. Therein is to be found, too, the chief cause of underdevelopment, impoverishment, and the subsistence, or below subsistence, -level life conditions in the majority of Muslim societies today. All this has to change.
If any of this makes sense—to me it makes all the sense in the world—then there can be no more rational and effective first step than putting boys and girls, men and women, and husband and wife at a footing of equality—with equal freedom and opportunities for individuation, personhood, growth, development, and maturation into responsible adults at the disposal of male and female alike from earliest childhood. The time to do this is now.
