Chapter One
Introduction
Based on my humblest of origins in the Muslim culture of a small village in Uttar Pradesh in Northern India and my experience of Muslim life— my own and observation of the lives of members of my parental family and those of Muslims in general—over the last sixty-six years in India, Pakistan, and the United States (since 1965 to date during which time-period I have resided in Southern California) and what understanding of social evolution and human progress I have developed as a student of economic development, I have reached the conclusion that our lived Islam has been and remains an important factor in the underdevelopment of the Muslim society. Certainly, one crucial aspect of our lived Islam is the unemancipated; unequal, actually inferior; subordinated; dominated; and highly restricted, constrained, and controlled condition of Muslim women, who are denied virtually any real opportunity to develop, grow, train, and prepare themselves to play a fully human, productive, creative, contributive, and fulfilling role in the Muslim society. No career in the public domain is fully open to them. Probably, the only career, which is fully open to them without restriction or limitation, is that of the work of the vagina and the womb and what goes with it inevitably, viz., servicing men sexually, becoming pregnant, bearing and rearing children, domesticity, and all the rest that pertains to home and hearth. Islamic tradition demands that women obey and submit to men—father before marriage, husband during marriage, and brother(s), sons, and/or a male guardian after divorce or widowhood. Never is a Muslim woman encouraged, expected, or required to train or prepare herself to become self-supporting, self-sufficient, and independent with a will of her own and living her life alone or with other women as a person in her own right.
But perhaps our lived Islam is not wholly responsible for this. Our doctrinal Islam, too, has to share a part of the responsibility, probably the fundamental responsibility, for this condition of Muslim women, and, therefore, for our falling behind the times. After all, the Qur'an does command men to take charge of women and commands women to stay at home quietly, obey and submit to their men, and dedicate them to bearing children and domestic occupation. Orthodox, traditionalist, and fundamentalist Islam turned those commands, even while ignoring a great many other commands of Allah in the Qur'an, into the end all and be all of Muslim life and living. Thus we have the sad state of affairs that exists in Muslim societies and cultures around the world, of which the status of Muslim women is most critical, even after the fourteen centuries of Islam. This state of affairs is reprehensible not only because it produces inequality and injustice in the home and arrests the development of Muslim women, but also because it produces inequality and injustice in the Muslim society as a whole and arrests the development of that society. What shall the status of women in Islam and contemporary Muslim society be is, therefore, an urgent question for Muslims today.
An important book, certainly a book written by a man who, by all reckoning is qualified to write a book on the subject, is the Status of Women in Islam by Mr. Justice Aftab Hussain, who was for many years the Chief Justice of the Federal Shariat [Shariah, or Islamic Law] Court of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. In his official capacity, Justice Aftab Hussain presided over many a case, pertaining to "questions concerning the status of women before the Federal Shariat Court during my [his] tenure in that court, some were decided while others remained pending. Heated controversy was generated…."3 Indeed, the controversy over the "Woman Question" in Islam remains heated today, too. This is understandable in that no other problem is more crucial and urgent for Muslims than the problem of the status of women in Islam and in the contemporary Muslim societies and cultures. But while controversy goes on, the hold of orthodox, traditionalist, and fundamentalist Islam and its official representatives and/or guardians, viz. the Ulama (religious scholars), Fuqaha (Shariah, or Islamic law, jurists) and Imams (clergy), on the Muslim mind and psyche, and
the majority of Muslim governments and masses, remains powerful. Then, too, there is their power to incite terror, civil strife, often bloodshed through the agency of militant religious-political parties and even more militant Islamic fundamentalist organizations, which, more often than not, denounce, protest, and reject the proposed and/or potential emancipation, liberation, and the equalization of the statuses of men and women in Muslim life and living in practically all Muslim countries. We seem to have an insurmountable problem. Muslim women seem to be condemned to unfreedom, inequality, subordination, domination, and oppression—as the language of religion would have it—universally and eternally. However, Muslim fears of equalizing the statuses, opportunities, rights, and roles of Muslim men and women are deep-rooted, long-standing, and widespread. In all probability, before Muslim men and Muslim women can overcome these fears, a wholesale mental and cultural revolution would be necessary in the Muslim psyche and society.
But in all fairness, not all the blame for the condition of women in Muslim society can be laid upon the shoulders of men. Women are responsible, too. In any gathering of Muslims, in which women are present, even in the United States, where questions are being raised about gender justice in Islam, it becomes readily apparent that Muslim women are rather happy and content with the pattern of gender relations in Islam, as laid down, for instance in verse 4:34 of the Quran which gives unquestioned authority to the husband over the wife, prescribes obedience by the wife, and gives the husband the right to beat her in case of her disobedience to him in order to make her to submit to his authority and control.
In the year of my birth, 1934, the author of the above-mentioned book, Status of Women in Islam, Justice Aftab Hussain was an undergraduate at Bareilly College in India. He writes in his Introduction that "my Professor of English once asked me: ‘Aftab! what is your opinion about girls’’ education?’ Promptly I replied: ‘If you wish to make harlots of them, educate them in schools.’ The answer did not stun or surprise him. By that time he had become accustomed to receiving such darts from members of the middle and higher classes among the Muslim Junta [public]. He was Professor Abdul Shakoor the Founder of the first Islamia Girls’ School in Braeilly and a local Sir Syed"4 (By the way the latter, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, was the man who founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, India, in 1875, during British rule in India with the patronage of the British and with the avowed goal of introducing Western, i.e., British, education, in content and method, which became in 1920 the famous Muslim University, Aligarh (MUA), which it was my good fortune to attend in 1951, starting as a Freshman in the Faculty of Commerce.) If the Indian Muslim believed anything, he or she believed that Allah was One, Muhammad was His Messenger, and that it was patent folly to send girls to school. It was universally accepted that—please bear with how I construct the proposition—since the life and work of vagina and womb and home and hearth was all that the future held in store for them, when grown up, for which nature had already equipped them fully for their life’s mission, why educate them? It did not even strike Muslims for centuries, until after the mid twentieth century (by which time modernization, a more acceptable word to Muslims than Westernization, became the official policy of independent Muslim countries in the era of the decolonization of the world after World War II), that, if servicing their husbands sexually, cooking and cleaning, getting pregnant, and giving birth to babies did not require any schooling, certainly intelligent mothering, rearing, and training of children did.
The opinion about school-going girls in the Muslim community in India being trained for a life of harlotry, which the young, college-going Aftab Hussein held in 1934, and which opinion, apparently, he did not change even after such education and enlightenment from and exposure to Professor Shakoor as he did receive, was indeed the most widely held opinion in the Indian Muslim community even in the 1950s, as I recall both from my village and from what I heard and witnessed at the premier citadel of Western higher learning and Westernism that Aligarh Muslim University was. None of my professors at Aligarh asked me a question of the sort, but, if anyone had, I, as a freshman at MUA, probably would have given much the same answer as had Aftab Hussain, though probably I would not have had the courage to use the word "harlot" in a conversation with a professor of mine, a Muslim one at that. However that might have been, even today American Muslim parents are mortally frightened that, for instance, what with Muslim girls going to American public schools and on to college and university and especially if they live away from home alone, working outside the home and with an independent income of their own, and under the influence of the pervasive American
Actually, there is a built in institution in Islam for precisely such thinking about and understanding, interpreting, and constructing the message, teaching, and intent of Islam, not only in every age, but on a continuing basis. It is called Ijtihad, which is translated into English variously as intellectual exertion, independent reasoning, creative thinking, etc. When the primary sources, viz., the Qur'an (Sacred Scripture of Islam) and the Sunnah (practice of Prophet Muhammd), and such secondary sources as custom and consensus do not provide a ready solution of a problem of Muslim life, the Muslim is urged to exercise his individual reason and judgment to devise a rational solution in the best interest of the Ummah, or the Muslim community. But, a thousand years ago, the door of Ijtihad was declared closed—because the religious authorities decided that all questions of Muslim life and living, personal or social, had been fully and finally resolved which left no need or room for new thinking in the Muslim society and culture—and it has remained closed since. Certainly, that has been the historic tragedy of Islam and the greatest misfortune of Muslim society and culture. It simply froze them in time.
Only in the twentieth century has there been a call for the revival and reinstitutionalization of the practice of Ijtihad in Islam. In his 1928 lectures on Islamic thought, delivered at the University of Madras in India and subsequently published under the title of The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam by Oxford University Press, Muhammad Iqbal (1876-1938) lamented the closure of the door of Ijtihad, because for him it was precisely "the principle of movement in the structure of Islam," which is also the title of what I think is the most important chapter in his book. Iqbal wrote (I am quoting from the reprint issued by his son, Dr. Javid Iqbal:
What then is the principle of movement in the structure of Islam? This is known as ‘Ijtihad’. The word literally means to exert with a view to form an individual judgement on a legal question. The idea, I believe, has its origin in a well-known verse of the Qur'an—‘And to those who exert we show our path’. We find it more definitely adumbrated in a tradition of the Holy Prophet. When Ma’ad was appointed ruler of Yemen, the Prophet is reported to have asked him as to how he would decide matters coming up before him. ‘I will judge matters according to the Book of God,’ said Ma’ad. ‘But if the Book of God contains nothing to guide you?’ ‘Then I will act on the precedents of the Prophet of God.’ ‘But if the precedents fail?’ ‘Then I will exert to form my own judgement.’6
If this anecdote is true—it certainly makes perfect sense—the religious authorities that decided to close the door of Ijtihad had been absolutely wrong in doing so. Changing times, circumstances, and conditions would always require new understandings, interpretations, constructions, and applications of the message of Islam, if that message has to remain relevant to Muslim life and living. I was, therefore, quite amazed to read in the Preface of the book, Status of Women in Islam, its author, Justice Aftab Hussain, writes: "This book is not an attempt at Ijtihad nor was Ijtihad at all necessary."7
Today on the subject of the status of women in Islam, all the Ijtihad that Muslims are capable of is not only necessary but is urgently needed. Without it Muslim life and living must remain caught up in Medieval times. What Ijtihad I am
capable of, given my modest abilities and limited experience of life, I have certainly brought to bear upon the writing of this essay. I am a Muslim and I have always identified and identify today with Muslims as my people, though I have nothing against any other people—as Abraham Lincoln would say, "with malice toward none and charity toward all" have I approached my subject, because I am convinced that unless and until Muslim society gives its women an equal status, dignity, and role with men, that society will not achieve the quality of life that all human beings deserve and are entitled to in our world. Poverty, ignorance, disease, stagnation, underdevelopment, tyranny, despotism, injustice, and all-round impoverishment plague Muslim society, and they will not be removed till such time Muslims awaken, wise up, take stock of the situation, enrich the conceptual resources of the Muslim community though Ijtihad, and create and learn to sustain favorable, encouraging, and conducive conditions of life in the family, school, mosque, community, society, polity, government, law, economy, and all the other social and cultural institutions of Muslim life and living that will inspire, motivate, and enable men, women, young and old, and one and all to look at life positively, constructively, and optimistically, and do the best and the utmost that everyone is capable of, both to enhance the quality of one’s own life as well as to contribute the maximum one is capable of contributing to the general well-being of the whole society. Only by making this possible, I want to emphasize: only by making this really possible, will Islam, Muslims, and the Muslim society and culture serve and achieve their own ends and the goals of humanity.
Hitherto, Islam has been an obstacle in the path of human progress and flourishing, for the most part because orthodox, traditionalist, and fundamentalist Islam has held back, repressed, and oppressed Muslim women. The institutionalization of sexual and gender inequality in the family has systematically produced universal institutionalization of human inequality in all the social, political, and cultural institutions of the Muslim society as a whole, which is why no Muslim country can establish and sustain democracy in our time. To continue this will be the greatest folly of Muslims of all time. The time has come when we must accept that human beings, people, even Muslims, come in two sexes and/or genders and that the two are still equally deserving of having their humanness recognized equally—religiously, spiritually, morally, socially, politically, economically, psychologically, and culturally. And if the old, familiar Islam cannot handle it, we shall have to reinvent a new Islam that can.
I think I have said all I can to provide a general statement of the mindset or mentality with which I have written what is presented in the following pages. My specific purpose is to explore the normative boundaries of Muslim behavior in the modern world in which we live. The world today is certainly very, very different from the world in which Islam made its appearance in seventh century Arabia. Islam is timeless, and its message is, as the orthodox, traditionalists, and fundamentalists so stridently proclaim, equally, perfectly, and absolutely applicable to all times and climes and will be so till the Last Day of Judgment. But no sooner is one finished saying it than we begin to confront problems. Let me mention only one problem here, more will become apparent in the following pages. According to Islamic teaching, doctrinally and ideally, no, unfailingly, the father should and must marry his children on or before reaching the age of puberty, and, indeed I remember from my growing up days in my village in Uttar Pradesh, India, that they were, but how many parents today want or do marry their sons and daughters at or before the age of puberty? Pick up any Muslim newspaper or periodical in America, read the "Matrimonial" column, and you will see advertisements by Muslim men in their late twenties, thirties, even forties (never married) "Seeking Wife" and even a greater number of advertisements on behalf of Muslim women (never married) in their twenties, thirties, even forties "Seeking Husband." We need not go into the reasons for delayed marriages in our time, not here. But, don’t you think, that presents a problem both for these Muslim pre-or-unmarried in question as well as for their parents, meaning the Muslim community? I think it does. Have you ever given thought to what the sexuality of these young men and young women is, I mean those whose marriage is delayed until their 30th or 40th birthday or later? That is what I mean when I say that Islam and Muslims are confronted with entirely new kinds of problems in our time, whose solutions will demand all the Ijtihad that Muslims can bring upon understanding, interpreting, constructing, and applying Islam anew in the modern, no, postmodern, world today.
What is called in Islam the family proper results from nikah, or a permanent marriage (in comparison to mutah, or a temporary marriage), which a man and a woman contract and embark upon with the good-faith intention of setting up
house-keeping to live together as permanent husband and wife, procreate, build a family, and raise their children together. The crucial difference between mutah and nikah is that the former has, as its goal, temporary sexual relations only, whereas the latter has as its goal both sexual relations and procreation. In the broader and/or extended sense of the term, in the Islamic conception of family are included a man’s wife or wives (Islam permits a man to have up to four wives at a time), concubines, children, and more, meaning parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, servants, and other wards and dependents. The question is: Is this patriarchal sex-gender and family system of Islam viable in our time? I do not think it is.
How Islam’s teaching on the sex-gender system, marriage, and family is to be understood, interpreted, constructed, and applied in the life and living of Muslims in the modern world will, in my view, determine the form and extent of Islam’s relevance in our time, especially in the Muslim communities in the West but also, at least, in the liberal and modernizing upper and middle classes of the Muslim world, too, which are increasingly adopting or adapting to the ways of the West The influence of the West, viz., Europeanization in the nineteenth century and Americanization since World War II, has been pervasive in Muslim societies and cultures. All present-day sociological and cultural trends seem to indicate that this influence of the West—which Muslims call (mistakenly in my view) the "cultural imperialism of the West"—is going to become only more pervasive in the twenty-first century. In all probability, its new agent will be the changing character of Muslim life and living of the immigrant Muslims themselves, who have settled permanently in the West. One can already see that, with the first and second generations of immigrant Muslims born and raised in the United States, an increasing degree of Americanization is already becoming visibly pronounced in the younger Muslim generations in America, while the first immigrant generation is still alive and going strong. Indeed, it cannot be otherwise. A place where one lives has a claim of its own, too.
So the question is: what is immigrant Muslims in the West to do? How are or ought they to respond to the moral, social, and/or cultural challenge in their new homelands, to which their move, and which permanent settlement in the West presents before them? To be sure, Muslims immigrated to America, or other Western countries for that matter, by their conscious decision, with their eyes and ears wide open. Even those, who went/came to America for a couple or a few years for education, decided to remain in America. I do not know a single Muslim who did not choose, if he or she had a choice, to make America his or her home freely and voluntarily. Then too, I do not know a single Muslim who settled in America for a reason other than that life in the United States is better and more promising of riches than in his or her former Muslim country. That is also precisely the reason why a Muslim family, settled comfortably in America, does not, cannot, leave the United States to return and settle back in its country of origin. There is no denying the fact that life in the Muslim countries is simply too unpromising, uncertain, uncomfortable, impoverished, oppressive, and dangerous, certainly for the vast majority of middle class Muslims, with a certain amount of modern education and professional training and expertise, who immigrated to America. Also, available to them in the United States and elsewhere in the West are such amenities of civilized and modern life as civil liberties, freedom of thought and expression, autonomy, freedom of choice, personhood, and more, which even some Muslims, men as well as women, may and do value and may want to avail themselves of and be protected by the legal systems of the West in their exercise of such rights of the individual under the auspices of Western civilization.
There are thoughtful Muslims, both in the West and the Muslim countries, who seem to think sincerely that it is only in the West that a Muslim can think freely and honestly about Islam and the fortunes of Muslims in the world today—that is if he or she wants to do so serious-mindedly and without the traditional hypocrisies of Muslims. I agree. At any rate, I probably would not have thought the thoughts, even risked a new thought or two, that I have in this book, and would certainly not have expressed them publicly, if I had never come to America, gotten an American education, and become audacious enough—obviously under the American intellectual, social, and cultural influence—to think for myself. Rarely a man really learns anything from another culture, but, if I have learned anything from American culture, it is that I have gained a new respect for women. The lesson I have learned is quite simply and summarily that women are people, too, and, if of no greater worth than men, then, certainly of no lesser. I think that is the lesson, which all immigrants Muslims in America ought to learn from their adopted country.
I am convinced that, in order for Muslims to be able both to abide by the basic teaching and spirit of Islam and to live successfully, flourish if possible, in the world of today, they have to be open to the idea of rethinking, reinterpreting, and reconstructing wholesale the message of Islam in general and in the area of the sex-gender system and the status and role of women in particular. We need to redefine the normative boundaries of Muslim behavior, functioning, social action, and the role of Muslim men, and even more so that of Muslim women, anew, as men and women in their own respective rights, as self-responsible moral agents; as members of the Muslim family, community and society; and as citizens of a Muslim country or community and/or of the modern world. We truly live in a Global Village today.
If this modest book has a purpose, it is precisely that, i.e., an attempt at exploring and defining the new normative boundaries of Muslim behavior, functioning, social action, and the role of Muslim men and Muslim women in our time. Certainly, the area of genderization, gender relations, and sexuality is the foremost area in which such boundaries need to be explored and redefined. That is what I have tried to do in this essay. That is what has to be done. Wiser men and women—of greater learning, better understanding, wider and richer experience and observation of life, and nobler qualities of heart and mind than I possess—would have to rethink, reinterpret, reconstruct, even reinvent Islam and reveal the promise and possibilities that this venerable religion and the Islamic way of life can contribute to improving the status of Muslim women and their role in the Muslim society especially and the human society generally, and their dignity, social worth, and fulfillment, so as to eliminate the conditions of gender, sexual, and marital inequalities, injustices, and oppression under which they have lived in the past and under which they live today. The failure on the part of thought Muslims—male or female—to do so would be tantamount to saying that Islam lacks the conceptual resources and resourcefulness to deal with and master the problems of the Muslim community in the twenty-first century and that Muslims had better look for an alternative philosophy of human existence.
