|
| By Nadia yassine December 12, 2005 |
|
|
|
|
| Acknowledgment |
|
| Islam has honored women, Islam has granted rights to women, Islam has protected women; that is the same old song that each man and woman hear when they happen to ask questions on the status of women in the Muslim world. |
|
| We do not have enough time to delve into details and enumerate the real differences that may exist between one woman and another in the reality of a world that is so large, so stratified and so diverse as the Muslim world. The daily life of a Tuareg woman undoubtedly has almost nothing in common with that of a woman from the Lebanese upper class except that they share the same faith.There are certainly huge differences if we broach every single case apart; however, the fact is that there is well and truly a certain specificity of the status of women in the Islamic world. Such specificity is reflected in traditions, mentalities, curricula; worse still, it finds expression in laws and statistics which, it is time we admitted it, side with a variety of discourses that Muslims have hitherto refuted and denied.Yes, the Muslim woman is oppressed in the name of Islam. Sure, she is treated like a child in the name of Islam. Yes, she is repudiated and cast away in the street in the name of Islam; she is marginalized in the name of Islam. Yes, she is excised in the name of Islam. |
|
|
| Questioning |
|
| More and more, an essential question is being asked: do the original text, that is the Qur’an and the Sunna (The Prophet’s Tradition), support the disparagement of women ? Or is it actually our estrangement from these sources that has made people ascribe such obvious underestimation of women to Islam ?Soon as we rid ourselves of the ideological straitjackets made by centuries of accumulated and heterogeneous jurisprudence and we go straightforward to the sources and the teachings the Prophet of Islam, it becomes clear to us that the dynamic inherent to his teachings has been slowly but surely eclipsed.We easily find out that we have estranged ourselves from the spirit of the Islamic laws. That is due to several causes that are inevitably and intrinsically linked but that we may bring out and caricature out of illustrative concern as follows : |
|
| 1°) The political break represented by the Umayyad coup d’état inhibited the dynamic of liberation established by the teachings of the Messenger. |
|
| 2°) The splits occasioned by the political break weakened even more such dynamic, wasted the lifeblood of the umma (The Islamic community) and relegated to the background any exhaustive reflection on a privileged status that was newly gained by women in the time of the Prophet Muhammad. |
|
| 3°) Ijtihad, this living and anti-stagnation force in constant search of the best and most adequate of solutions to safeguard the spirit of the law, transformed progressively into a struggle against stopgaps, and then declined altogether and faded away to leave room for taqleed “conformist literalism”. From the light of necessary ijtihad we passed to an endless and inevitable night of intellectual and spiritual ossification for which the women pay dearly the price. Instead of enjoying the rights granted by the original texts, they found themselves prisoners of a certain jurisprudence based on “sad ad-darâi’” (which we may translate literally as “stopgap” jurisprudence). |
|
| 4°) The resurgence of certain tribal practices disguised, knowingly or unknowingly, by certain jurisprudence in order to grant them legitimacy. |
|
| 5°) The spread of Islam brought about two major phenomena that are intrinsically linked: - It delayed the dynamic initiated by the Qur’an regarding the abolition of slavery. - That exacerbated the propensity to confine Muslim women in order to underline their distinction from female slaves and servants: locking up women to better protect them. Such was the motto. |
|
|
| Plan of action |
|
| The reality is surely very complicated; so are the solutions that we may suggest in order to draw on the sources in an appropriate manner. The fact is that such effort needs to be concentrated on three dimensions: - Recharging our spiritual batteries by means of the heart: the spiritual field and the intuitive knowledge are essential elements that will enable us to draw on texts that were revealed mainly to remind us of the spiritual dimension of Islam and the practice of such spirituality. - Renewing our rational capabilities through acquiring theological instruments. In other words, infusing life into ijtihad, “which I may define as an effort of exhaustive reflection”, and exerting every possible effort so that more women take part in its process. Making of the effort of reflection an undertaking inspired by collective effort and group work. To a complicated world the solutions to be found cannot be the fruit of the work of one individual. - Transcending our political legacy. The effort of reflection can only be done in societies that are really democratized, that is, societies that have ridded themselves of these coercive regimes that are behind the very alienation of the women and men of those societies. |
|
| The work to be done is then a work of education coupled with a work at the political level. However, we must count on the long term and especially ensure that our action does not come within the tradition of classical Western feminism that has an inevitably materialist vocation. It is not a matter of taking reprisals against a male chauvinist society. It is a matter of achieving a certain complementarity wherein women and men are equal partners in a society that is more equitable and, therefore, more human and spiritual: a society of good sense and confidence. |
|
| Promoting a western-style feminism amounts to taking the wrong historical path and choosing the wrong points of references. That will amount particularly to disrupting violently the course of an age-old history, to generating more acts of resistance and to exacerbating still more paradoxes.Knowing the provisions that our sacred texts have really prescribed concerning the rights of women is something that is required; yet attempting to put them in force right now, overnight and in one stroke, amounts to committing a social suicide or making a systemic condemnation of society. |
|
| * This paper was sent to the 1st international congress on Islamic Feminism Barcelona 27th, 28th, 29th October 2005. |
|
|
