PREFACE
An unbridgeable division exists within Islam over the constructions of gender, sexuality, and marriage. Following the logic of Aristotle’s middle, on the one side, are those—orthodox, traditionalist, and fundamentalist Muslims—who assert that the proper role of Muslim women is the dedication of their time and energies in the carrying out of the tasks of catering to their husband’s sexual needs, procreation, raising and caring for children, and dedication to domesticity in the all-inclusive sense, with the full and complete social, economic, and financial responsibility to support one’s wife or wives, concubines and slave girls, too, and other womenfolk of the family and children and keeping the household financially solvent, placed legally upon the man (or menfolk) of the house. On the other side, are those—unorthodox, liberal, and modernist Muslims—who advocate the education of Muslim women, women’s freedom of movement, sexual and gender equality, family planning, raising and caring for children and sharing household chores by both male and female members of the household, women working and pursuing careers of their choice outside the home, and the joint social, economic, and the joint financial responsibility, too, of both spouses for the household economy. In other words, according to the modernist Muslims and even more so the emerging Muslim feminist—both female and male, women have to be trained and prepared to become economically self-supporting, like men, when grown to full adulthood. A very great deal of the misery of these women and their male guardians and their immediate families derives from the demand of orthodox, traditionalist, and fundamentalist Islam that men are the maintainers and protectors of women, and it is, therefore, their religious, social, moral, and legal obligation to support and maintain these women as dependent members of the extended family.
Islam is a promising religion, though it has failed to deliver on its promise in modern times. As is well known, the Shariah, or Islamic law, has been becoming increasingly outdated since the seventeenth century. No one has quite known for two or three centuries or knows today how it can be reinterpreted and reformulated so as to make it suitable for Muslim life and living in the modern world. Paradoxically, one responsible factor in the failure of Islam to make good on its promise is the Muslim rhetoric, probably even romanticism, about Islam. Muslims often make declarations, rather stridently, such as that "Islamic guidance is for all humanity [and that] this guidance is universal, comprehensive, most compatible and adaptable for all times and places, and the most balanced guidance: [with] balance between things spiritual and material, between this world and the hereafter, between the individual and the society, [and] between freedom and responsibility."1 This learned writer goes on to say: "Reason and revelation are not mutually contradictory in Islam. Science and religion are also not incompatible in Islam. The principles of Islam are all universal. They are not limited to one race or color or one nationality. Its Shariah [Islamic law] is the most comprehensive and capable to solve the problems of human beings in any place and time."2 These claims may well be true. But they remain to be demonstrated. A wholly mistaken conviction exists in the popular imagination or fantasy of Muslims that Islam not only has the ideal and practical solutions to all of humanity’s problems in every department of life, but that these solutions are ready-made to be implemented spontaneously. This conviction, superstition indeed, has done a very great deal of harm to Muslims and Muslim society in modern times. If Islam has solutions, these have to be worked out and keptupdated continually. Islam has no more ready-made answers for anything than does any other religion or philosophy of existence. Perhaps it is my accounting training which leads me to believe that Islamic solutions to the real problems of Muslim life and living need to be worked out, in theory and practice, with at least as much care given to the tedious details as an accountant must give to the accounting components of business transactions, before he or she can balance the general ledger system and have the whole system add up so as to make it possible to prepare and present an income statement and a balance sheet of the accounting entity at the end of the fiscal year. In this respect, Islam and Muslims leave much to be desired. Muslims have simply not done their homework for centuries. The vast majority of Muslims have rested easy 0n the notion that the prescriptions of the Qur'an and the Sunnah, or practice of the Prophet, have ready-made solutions to all Muslims’ and humankind’s problems. Not surprisingly, there are so far no feasible and practical Islamic solutions to the social, economic, and political problems of contemporary Muslim societies. Even Muslim social scientists, under the institutional joint leadership, moral and material support of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists and the International Institute of Islamic Thought and their efforts over a generation to build Islamic social sciences, have achieved little. Be that as it may, on the problems and issues concerning the position of Muslim women’s status and role in Muslim society, much less in the modern world, there is little consensus among Muslims, including among immigrant Muslims in the United States.
Certainly, when understood, interpreted, and applied orthodoxly, traditionalistically, and fundamentalistically, Islam not only ceases to be a dynamic paradigm of thought and way of life, but even becomes an obstacle in the path of the progress of Muslim societies, as indeed it has been in the modern age and will become more so in the postmodern age. This book presents a view of Islam that is a departure from orthodox, traditional, and fundamentalist Islam, none of which seem to me to have the conceptual resources to solve the problems that Islam, Muslims, and Muslim communities and societies are faced with in the modern and postmodern world, much less those of humanity at large.
Perhaps a comparative perspective is in order. It is well known that there has been prevalent in India since time immemorial the custom of suttee, or burning alive the widow on the funeral pyre of her deceased husband. To be sure this practice had the religious rationale of ensuring the union of the two in the next world, but the practice of suttee was made possible and tolerated only by the insignificance and inferiority of women in Hinduism. Thanks to the British government of India, this practice was recognized for what it is, viz., plain and simple murder, and legally abolished in 1829. Like suttee, what is called, for example in Pakistan and Middle Eastern countries, "honor killing" by their father, brother (s), or both of Muslim women who might or did marry a man of their own free will is plain and simple murder, too, notwithstanding the religious and legal rationale in Islam that a Muslim woman is forbidden to give herself in marriage to any man, and that for her marriage to be considered halal, or lawful according to the Shariah, or Islamic law, she must be given in marriage by her father, brother, or some other male guardian.
Jihad (armed struggle in the defense
of Islam) and Ijtihad (legal reasoning, based on self-exertion,
to derive laws from Islamic sources) are basic concepts in Islam.
But Jihad need not necessarily be armed and Ijtihad necessarily
legal. This book is both my jihad, a peaceful intellectual
defense of Islam, as I reconstruct or even reinvent it—because I do think
that Islam has something of value to contribute to Muslim thought and life,
probably even to human civilization in general—and it also represents my
Ijtihad, because, I think, the religious resources of Islam do provide
ample support for social conceptualizations and cultural constructions
of gender, sexuality, and marriage to accommodate gender equality in Muslim
life and living. But where I thought that the Qur'an and the Sunnah
do not seem to provide for gender equality and the equality of the dignity
of man and woman, I have not hesitated to say so either. In this
sense, this book is also a critique of some of the principal doctrines
bearing upon gender, sexuality, and marriage in Islam. In the end,
perhaps more important than whether Islam allows or disallows equality
of man and woman, is the question whether today’s Muslims—both men and
women, especially the latter—want gender equality in Muslim society.
If they do not, it hardly matters what the Qur'an (the revealed Scripture
of Islam) and the Hadith (the reported Traditions: record of the
practice, decisions, and sayings of Prophet Muhammad) have to say.
Ausaf
Ali
San Pedro, California
November 2000
