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- Subject: Excerpts from Leila Ahmed's "Women and Gender in Islam" (post 2)
- From: "S. Charusheela" <charu@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 17:36:38 -0400 (EDT)
In order to have a serious conversation about whether Arab-Muslim
feminists like Ahmed are dangerous relativists, it may help if those
partaking in the discussion actually knew a little about the
perspectives of these 'third worldists'. Since we third worldists are a
rather eclectic lot, and the debate here stems out of the supposed
relativism inherent in the perspective of feminists like Ahmed, I am
providing some excerpts below from Ahmed's work -- I hope that Katha
Pollitt, Barbara Bergmann, and various others incensed by Ahmed's
appointment let me know what it is about her analysis or perspective
they dislike or find dangerous, and what specifically they find
revolting and unethical and relativist and anti-feminist in this
stuff.
One last word before I provide the excerpts (thought that waiting would
get it out of my system and calm me down -- guess I am still pretty mad,
sorry but I need to get this out of my system).: If anybody wonders if
orientalism matters, think about this exchange and what it implies for
politics of solidarity among feminists. For those who know feminists in
the Middle East who are secularist and who offered these
'counter-voices' as a critique of Ahmed, perhaps before touting that as
a counter-example, you may be a little more open with them and share the
whole exchange -- including all the stuff that was said about Ahmed's
politics and also the excerpts which allow you to see what Ahmed's
perspective actually is on the question of Islam and feminism -- and
then see what they say. You may find that brown women can distinguish
between critiques of fundamentalism that come out of commitments to
secularism and respectful exchange and critiques of fundamentalism that
are rooted in racist neocolonial stereotypes about brown people.
Unfortunately, among feminists in the West there are many folks who are
unable to comprehend this distinction, and hence they keep offering us
the latter, when what we'd like is to receive the former. AND they seem
unable to grasp this much -- critiquing racist orientalism doesn't mean
supporting patriarchy or minimizing the evils of non-Western culture, as
you'd know if you cared to read what we write or hear what we say.
Offering orientalism barely wrapped up in the packaging of 'support'
rather than honest solidarity and ethical commitment worsens the
dilemmas and binds that mark third world feminism, and if you are really
committed to solidarity, why insist on making things worse rather than
better? THAT is what the critiques of orientalism are about (changing
the terms on which and the reasoning by which you offer support), and it
amazes me that something so simple can be so utterly impossible for some
Western feminists to grasp.
yrs, Charu. ____________________________________________________________
Excerpts from Leila Ahmed's Writings (post 2) -- apologies in advance
for typos etc., I did not have time to check the typing since I had to
spend time I can't afford (semester starts tomorrow at a new job!) to do
the work of getting this together.
Excerpts from *Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern
Debate* by Leila Ahmed, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
Ahmed is widely published, but is most famous for her historical study
of women's position, gender ideology, Islamic thought, and Middle
Eastern feminism laid out in this book. I apologize in advance for this
long post, since no doubt in theory folks on this list are literate and
educated and can get hold of the book from a library or via purchase and
read it for themselves. Unfortunately, the tenor of the posts on
Ahmed's work and the discussions of Middle Eastern feminism or of Third
World feminism so far make it quite clear to me that theory and practice
are distinct things, and folks on the list engaged in this debate are
not taking the effort to read the work before they proclaim on Islam and
feminism or on Ahmed's work. So, I am providing a series of excerpts
for those interested in following up with serious discussion who find it
is too much of a pain to actually go out and read the work of a
non-Westerner before they proclaim on it. Hopefully, this may spark
enough interest among feminist scholars who are serious in their
interest and political commitment to the women in the Middle East to
cause them to follow up with more reading of their own:
a) Discussing the social and cultural organization of Mesapotamia
(modern Persia): "In spite of the unequivocal conceptual subordination
of women codified in the laws governing the patriarchal family,
upper-class women did enjoy high status and legal rights and
privileges. Indeed, women of all classes within the legal systems just
discussed often enjoyed such rights as owning and managing property in
their own name, entering into contracts, and bearing witness. As Lerner
and others have argued, the high status and economic rights of kin and
dependent women were not in conflict with the patriarchal system but
rather served the interests of ruling patriarchs by establishing power
through a 'patrimonial bureaucracy.' "(p. 15)
b) Discussing the period from 539 BCE to the early Islamic era, a period
of intense cultural exchange among differing groups, she notes: "The
spread of reductive and controlling practices and misogynist ideas at
this time and this region is striking. And it is also striking that the
attitudes that apparently recognized women's humanity as well as their
biological capacity -- attitudes that had also existed in this region
(as will be discussed in chapter two) did not [emphasis original] spread
and were not [emphasis original] copied and exchanged from one culture
to another. Indeed, even within each particular culture --
Mesopotamian, Hellenic, Christian and Islamic -- it was the more humane
ideas regarding women that apparently were consistently lost and those
increasing male control and diminishing women that consistently gained
ground. For both the West and the Middle East the societies of this
period and this region and the ideas to which they gave rise have
exercized and continue to exercize a controlling power over history."
(p. 19)
c) Skipping over the chapter on the Hellenic period (ch. 2, where she
discusses the role of the Hellenic-Egyptian encounter in forming the
'pre-history' of the rise of Islam), and moving to Ch. 3, titled Women
and the Rise of Islam: "?the evidence does at least unambiguously
indicate that there was no single, fixed institution of marriage and
that a variety of marriage customs were practiced about the time of the
rise of Islam, customs suggesting that both matrilineal and patrilineal
systems were extant. Uxorilocal practices, for example, can be found in
Muhammad's background?.From early on, evidently, the institution of a
type of marriage based on the recognition of paternity was part of the
Islamic message?What zina [often translated as 'adultery] meant before
the advent of Islam -- in a society in which several types of unions
were legitimate -- is not clear, nor, apparently, was it always clear to
converts to Islam?[examples provided]?" pp. 42-44?
d) She also discusses this issue further: "Islamic reforms apparently
consolidated a trend toward patriliny in sixth-century Arabia?The type
of marriage that Islam legitimized was, like its monotheism, deeply
consonant with the sociocultural systems alreadyin place throughout the
Middle East. Within Arabia, patriarchal, patrilinial, polygynous
systems were by no means starkly innovative. [Note: Ahmed is an
extremely careful scholar, and note the care with which she accurately
uses three distinct terms -- without presuming that one implies the
other -- to define the martial system here]. Rather, Islam selectively
sanctioned customs already found among some Arabian tribal societies
while prohibiting others?" (p. 45).
e) She goes on to discuss veiling, sexual practices, property laws,
etc. And ends her discussion of the first Islamic community -- the
community forming around Muhammad and formulating a social ideology
which -- not surprisingly -- drew on and reformulated the multicultural
social landscape within which it emerged as follows: "So far I have
focused on the practices of the first community with respect to women
and marriage, omitting from consideration the broad ethical field of
meaning in which those practices were embedded?When those teachings are
taken into account, the religion's understanding of women and gender
emerges as far more ambiguous than this account might suggest?The
tensions between the pragmatic and ethical perspectives, both forming
part of Islam, can be detected even in the Quran, and both have left
their mark on some of the formal rulings on women and marriage made in
the ensuing period. Thus some Quranic verses regarding marriage and
family appear to qualify and undercut others that seemingly establish
marriage as a hierarchical institution unequivocally privileging
men?Thus, while there can be little doubt that in terms of pragmatic
rulings Islam institutionalized a hierarchical type of marriage that
granted men control over women and rights to permissive sexuality, there
can be no doubt, either, that Islamic views on women, as on all matters,
are embedded in and framed by the new ethical and spiritual field of
meaning that the religion had come into existence to articulate." p.
62-63.
f) Laying out the ethical egalitarianism of the edicts of Islam with
the same carefulness with which she laid out the misogynist, patriarchal
and anti-feminist thrust of Middle Eastern society (carefully noted by
her as dating well back in time and forming part of the founding
discourses of the religion -- there is little that is dreamy eyed or
romantic in her discussions of gender in the Middle East, contra the
assertion made by Barbara Bergmann and Katha Pollitt), Ahmed then notes
in Ch. 4: "There appear, therefore, to be two distinct voices within
Islam, and two competing understandings of gender, one expressed in the
pragmatic regulations for society (discussed in the previous chapter),
the other an articulation of an ethical vision. Even as Islam
instituted marriage as a sexual hierarchy in its ethical voice -- a
voice virtually unheard by rulers and lawmakers -- it insistently
stressed the importance of the spiritual and ethical dimensions of being
and the equality of all individuals."
g) She meticulously goes on to note the history of women's position and
gender ideology in Islam in terms of the dialectic this tension
generated. Her analysis here is not unlike analyses which carefully
track the challenges and changes and shifts in the development of
Liberalism in the concrete history of challenges and struggles by which
the tension between the pragmatic edicts around racial and gender
hierarchy and the ethical edicts about equality unfolded. What is
remarkable is the extraordinary care she takes to examine the social
organization of society and the concrete historical points of contention
-- i.e., this is no dreamy eyed asserter of some arbitrary 'possibility'
in a utopic sense, this is a historian taking care to ground her
analysis in the empirical evidence. She argues -- in a manner which
would probably please those feminists concerned about the relationship
between culture, power, and oppression who care to read her -- that
ethics sans power implies that concretely, challenges to hierarchy were
easily subdued and the net result was that the ethics did not end up
creating a sustainable challenge which created change. Thus, on page 67
she notes "However, throughout history it has not been those who have
emphasized the ethical and spiritual dimensions of the religion who have
held power. The political, religious, and legal authorities in the
Abbasid period in particular [the period during which Islam gets
consolidated in the Middle East and rises to power] whose interpretive
and legal legacy has defined Islam ever since, heard only the
androcentric voice of Islam, and they interpreted the religion as
intending to intitute androcentric laws and an androcentric vision in
all Muslim societies throughout time."
h) I skip over her discussion of the historical process through which
Islamic society turned ever more misogynist and patriarchal hegemony was
consolidated ,except to say that she is meticulous in noting that one
must take care to examine the distinction between critical discussions
of Islamic society in the late-Abassid period which are backed by
careful discussion -- where many of the depictions and descriptions of
the Middle East are quite accurate and backed by concrete scholarship,
she says, we should not stupidly presume that this is orientalism. This
needs to be distinguished from discussions or depictions which attribute
late-Abassid practices to non-Abassid groups or locations, and which
present an analysis or description of Middle Eastern societies which are
not so backed by evidence or scholarly analysis. What I like about this
is that she reminds us that the critiques of orientalism are rooted not
in an 'anything goes, we can make truth to be whatever we wish' type of
silliness (which is usually the actual position taken by those who
pretend to be anti-relativist and what-not but don't actually want to be
held up to the standards of empirical and historical accuracy they so
ostentatiously pretend to uphold), but rather, in a very careful
empirical historical analysis of the actual evidence, and comparing the
concrete evidence with the mythical pronouncements to show not only that
they are misguided and wrong, but also to show that there is a
consistent pattern to these misattributions (for the statistically
minded, the analogy would be to empirically show that there is a
consistent non-random bias in the deviation between empirical evidence
and interpretation of that evidence).
i) Before I go on to the modern period, let me add that she is also
extremely clear that Islamic society was and is extremely misogynist,
and also extremely careful not to fall into the trap of dismissing the
important role that non-Islamic sources had in critiquing the misogyny
of the hegemonic discourse. Since one charge laid at the door of
scholars and 'third worldists' like Ahmed is that they are excusing or
minimizing the patriarchal nature of these societies, or that their
critiques of orientalism and racism imply that they are somehow
'anti-Western' and bent on rejecting positive contributions merely
because they emerge 'elsewhere,' it may help those unfamiliar with her
work to know that she does no such thing. Thus, she notes on pp.
86-87: [discussing the triad of concubinage, polygame and seclusion of
women which marked the late-Abassid period] "Altogether, the prevalence
and ordinariness of the sale of women for sexual use must have eroded
the humanity from the idea of women for everyone in this society, at all
class levels, women as well as men. The mores of the elite and the
realities of social life, and their implication for the very idea and
definition of the concept "woman," could not have failed to inform the
ideology of the day, thus determining how early Islamic texts were heard
and interpreted and how their broad principles were rendered into law.
That the interaction between the sexes in the dominant classes was
predicated on and chiefly defined by the easy acquisition of women as
slaves and objects constitutes therefore the distinguishing feature of
this society--the feature that rendered it profoundly, and perhaps at a
fundamental level, immeasurably different from either the societies of
early Islamic Arabia or those of the contemporary, predominantly
Christian Middle East?Although this fusion, on the experiential level,
between the notions of 'object,' slave,' and 'woman' contributed its own
specific and unique blend of objectification and degradation to the idea
of woman in the ethos of the day, other types and manifestations of
misogyny also, of course, formed art of the other traditions of the
Middle East (described in chapter 2) that Islam inherited and that
eventually came to be woven together seamlessly and indistinguishably to
form the heritage of Islamic civilization. After the conquests all
Muslims who did not come from Arabia were converts from other religions,
including in particular Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism. They
naturally heard and understood Islam in terms of the assumptions they
brought with them from those heritages?By definition, contributions from
other religious traditions brought in by converts and descendents of
converts were discrete in that they were either unconscious or
traceless, by deliberate intention, to any tradition other than
Islam?Other kinds of facts--such as the fact that Hasan al-Basri (d.
728), the eminent early Muslim mystic, was the sone of Persian Christian
parents captured by Muslims and the fact that Harun Ibn Musa, a convert
from Judaism, was the first to write down the variations in oral
renderings of the Quran--are suggestive of the routes by which the
heritages of other traditions entered Islamic civilization, and point to
the discrete contribution from converts and the descendents of converts
to the ideas and practices to become part of Islam." Thus, we can note
that Ahmed is careful both to note the socio-cultural origins and nature
of misogyny here, and to acknowledge -- and even celebrate -- the vital
contributions of converts from other religions to the emerging discourse
which then marks the period following the late-Abassid.
j) Skipping over her equally careful history of the medieval and late
medieval periods, I now turn to her discussion of the modern period and
the rise of early feminist movements in the Middle East at around the
turn of the century. As with her earlier discussions, we find that her
aim is to provide a careful historical discussion of modern Middle
Eastern society, one which is quite serious in documenting both the good
and the bad, without apology -- but equally without orientalism. I will
leave out the careful presentations of the work and debates among turn
of the century feminists like Sha'rawi , Nassef, Mai Ziyada, and
al-Ghazali. For those interested in this history, Jennifer Olmsted
would be a much better resource than I. As an aside, since Katha
Pollitt raised literacy as a key aspect of her critique of Islamic
feminism, she and others interested in the literacy question may find
the chapter titled 'divergent voices' (chapter 10) instructive and
useful (other questions about class, poverty, resource access, and
gender, are raised here as well). Chapters 9-11 effectively lay out
both the problems and limits facing Muslim feminists (Ahmed is I think
best understood as a Muslim Middle Eastern feminist who is a careful
scholar of culture and social history of Islam, rather than as an
Islamic feminist. Her assessment of what scope there is for different
types of feminist intervention, and her political analysis of the modern
Middle East, is extremely careful), and it is here that one may discover
what exactly Ahmed has in mind when she talks of Muslim feminism.
Instead of laying this out in detail, I hope critics will take the
trouble, given the preceding excerpts, to read it and engage with its
concrete arguments, rather than set up an imagined 'straw caricature
with little relationship to the actual perspective which can be rather
easily felled. Felling the caricature is easy, but it does little to
further debate or to resolve pressing political issues. Let me however,
end with two quotes which may help folks understand what Ahmed's
perspective is (note that the quotes below are put forward by her based
on her concrete historical analysis of modern Islamic societies, in
terms of social structure, ideology, and social and cultural movements
in this century, thus when she discusses 'ethical Islam,' she is doing
more than invoke some mushy romantic possible strain etc., she is
referring to the very specific type of Islamic practice and cultural
discourse that emerged in the wake of the nationalist movements and the
feminist movements of the early part of this century through to the
1950s and 60s, which remains the key mode of comprehending Islamic
ethics for most Arab feminists. It may also help us remember that Ahmed
is best understood not as an Islamic feminist, but as an Arab or Muslim
or Middle Eastern feminist to understand her perspective):
"There is no ambiguity within establishment Islam and its laws on the
proper treatment of men and women?Nor is there any doubt or ambiguity
about the willingness of establishment Islam, yesterday or today--once
ensconsed in political power--to eliminate those who challenge its
authority or its particular understandings of Islam, including other
Muslims intent on heeding the ethical over the doctrinal voice. For
this reason the alarm with which many Arab women, including feminist
women, view the Islamist trend and the return of the veil is justified.
It would be unreasonable to fault the young women of today for adopting
Islamic dress, as if the dress were intrinsically oppressive--which is
how the veil, at least, was viewed by former colonial powers and by
members of the indigenous upper and middle classes who assimilated
colonial views. It would be even more unreasonable to fault them for
adopting Islamic dress as a means of affirming the ethical and social
habits they are accustomed to while they pursue their education and
professional careers in an alien, anomic, sexually integrated world. In
fact, the emergence of women capable of forging a path of political,
educational, professional, and economic autonomy for themselves, as
veiled women are doing, pragmatically invoking an idiom intelligible and
meaningful to the majority within their societies, in itself represents
a moment of perhaps unprecedented potential for Muslim women. Yet
without their particularly intending to, their affiliation with a
cultural and ethical Islam lends support and strenght to Islamist
political forces which, if successful in realizing their objectives,
would institute authoritarian theocratic states that would undoubtedly
have a devatatingly negative impact on women." (p. 230-31).
AND:
"In the discourses of geopolitics the reemergent veil in an emblem of
many things, prominent among which is its meaning of rejection of the
West. But when one considers why the veil has this meaning in the late
twentieth century, it becomes obvious that, ironically, it was the
discourses of the West, and specifically the discourses of colonial
domination, that in the first place determined the meaning of the veil
in geopolitical discourses and thereby set the terms for its reemergence
as a symbol of resistance?And it attests to the fact that, at least as
regards the Islamic world, the discourses of resistance and rejection
are inextricably informed by the languages and ideas developed and
disseminated by the West to no less a degree than are the languages of
those openly advocating emulation of the West or those who, like Frantz
Fanon or Nawal El-Saadawi, are critical of the West but nonetheless
ground themselves in intellectual assumptions and political ideas,
including a belief in the rights of the individual, formulated by
Western bourgeois capitalism and spread over the globe as a result of
Western hegemony?Islamic reformers?intellectuals radically critical of
the West, including Marxists?and liberal intellectuals wholeheartedly
embracing the colonial thesis of Western superiority?all differ
fundamentally in their political stance, but they do not differ in the
extent to which, whether they acknowledge it or not, they draw on
Western thought and Western political and intellectual languages?In the
discourses of the Arab world comprehensively, then, whether they are
discourses of collaboration or resistance, the goals and ideals they
articulate and even the rejection of, and often-legitimate anger at the
West that they give voice to areformulated in terms of the dominant
discourse--Western in origin--of our global society. This is of
particular relevance to Islamist positions. Marxists, secularists, and
feminists generally concede, tacitly, if not overtly, their grounding in
Western thought, but Islamists, arguing for what they claim to be a
restoration of an 'original' Islam and an 'authentic' indigenous
culture, make their case, and conduct the assault on secularism,
Marxism, or feminism on the gorunds that these represent alien Western
importations whereas Islamism intends the resoration of an indigenous
tradition. But today, willy-nilly, as the Indian psychologist and
critic Ashish Nandy has remarked, the West is everywhere, "in structures
and in minds," and Western political ideas, technologies, and
intellectual systems comprehensively permeate all societies. There is
no extricating them, no return to a past of unadulterated cultural
purity--even if in this ancient and anciently multucultural part of the
world such a project had ever been other than chimerical. The Islamist
position regarding women is also problematic in that, essentially
reactive in nature, it traps the issue of women with the struggle over
culture--just as the initiating colonial discourse had done?The notion
of returning to or holding on to an "original" Islam and an "authentic"
indigenous culture is itself, then, a response to discourses of
colonialism and the colonial attempt to undermine Islam and Arab culture
and replace them with Western practices and beliefs. But what is needed
now is not a response to the colonial and postcolonial assault on
non-Western cultures, which merely inverts the terms of the colonial
thesis to affirm the opposite, but a move beyond confinement within
those terms altogether and a rejection or incorporation of Western,
non-Western, and indigenous inventions, ideas, and institutions on the
basis of their merit, not their tribe of origin. After all and in sober
truth, what thriving civilization or cultural heritage today, Western or
non-Western, is not critically indebted to the inventions or traditions
of thought of other peoples in other lands??" (p. 236-37).
_______________________end excerpts__________
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