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Excerpts
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| In the land of our backwash (3/3)* | |
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| Nadia Yassine, 26 -10-2006 |
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| A Cruel Relapse |
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| The destiny of woman that had been promoted by the Prophet (grace and peace be upon him) ended, alas, with the advent of despotism embodied in Mu‘āwiya. The respect we owe the Companions surely allows us to judge him sharply. But criticism is not necessarily synonymous with hatred; our Muslim perception of the world makes us see each past and ended action with a certain fatalism. Free will affects the here and now; as for the future we may only speak of destiny. |
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| The last specimens of the adult and responsible woman were moreover decidedly eloquent in their criticism of Mu‘āwiya. But the decline and retreat of the Muslim woman had begun. Before long, the brutal loss of her vital momentum would bear out the warning of the Prophet (grace and peace be upon him), who on his deathbed said by way of recommendation and premonition, “Be mindful of the ordeal of women.” |
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| Not totally cured of its old natural penchants, the community would soon make a chauvinistic interpretation of this recommendation, oblivious of the fact that Muhammad (grace and peace be upon him) could not possibly have exhorted anything so contrary to what he had defended all his life. This hadīth may simply be listed among those through which the Messenger informed the Muslims of the ordeals that awaited them, going to the far end of his mission as bashīr and nadhīr.(22) |
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| If Muslims have so misinterpreted the Messenger’s recommendations and warnings, it is because they have forgotten the very essence of the Qur’ānic Message, and they suffer from a fragmented view of their faith. It is precisely the profound dimension of islam our misogynous exegetes so desperately lack. When this dimension is taken into account, we have in our heritage such scholars as al Ghazālī (Algazel), who reconsidered the status of woman with relatively (23) benevolent eyes. Today, we have Qaradawi in Egypt, Kubayssi in Iraq. |
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| The status of woman was not only fashioned very far from this deeper meaning.It underwent the passions of the princes who perpetuated disastrous traditions and instituted practices at extreme odds with the Qur’ānic Message. How sound are these words of Zakia Daoud, supporting the idea that the history of the status of the Muslim woman is essentially political: In the three cases of authoritarian regimes that used the situation of women to further strengthen and perpetuate their own existence, it was the women who paid for their mistakes. It is in the soft underbelly of the inner seraglios that the tyrants’ extravagant behaviors are proved true, andwhere the slow composition and recomposition of the social processes is best measured. The problems thus faced today are part of the dispute between civil societies and the regimes in power.(24) Wallowing in the luxury of a corrupted and corrupting power, the princes superbly ignored the teachings of the Qur’ān that had been revealed precisely to release man from his shackles in the literal and figurative sense. Their futūhāt(25)went to their heads. The great fl ood of beautiful female prisoners of war reawakened the universal instincts to possess women. Islam recommended keeping the prisoners of war for a certain time within the Muslims families with a view to making them appreciate de visu what the life of a Muslim is about, and what it offers in terms of psychological balance and answers to anxieties. The objective was to initiate them into a lifestyle based on striking a balance between the spiritual and the temporal, between transcendence and daily life, and then to set them free to return home as informed missionaries of islam.Detention became the rule, as it enabled these princes to take advantage of a kind of feminity that was refused to the free Arab women: the symbol of scared and misdirected dignity. The morals of the court rubbed off onto Muslim society, especially in cities that had long struggled within a hyperchauvinist Arab aristocracy. |
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| It is true that the status of woman varied from country to country, from rural to urban conditions, and from region to region. But the prevailing culture, reaching back to the khudūr of history,26 was one of woman-as-object. Ibn Khaldūn’s adage, “societies embrace the faith of their kings,” aptly applies to the status of woman. As a kind of what he calls dīn al-inqiyād (imitated faith), the whole society, somehow or other under the infl uence of this unconscious imitation, was imbued with a misogynistic culture that reproduced jahilian traditions while imagining itself on the path of islam. |
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| Lapses |
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| Semantics is useful here in witnessing a deviation that fl owed outwards from the inner circles of society to its broad periphery. The concept of the wali, mistakenly translated as “guardian (of a minor),” may serve to demonstrate an etymological lapse that reflects comparable lapses of faith, system, and society. This later, perverted notion of wali rightly makes the hair of more than one feminist in the land of Islam stand on end, but they might be reconciled by its original sense, derived from a root meaning of supportive proximity. In the Qur’ānic verse that identifies God as the “wali of the believers,” the sense of the term is surely not one of “guardian” but one of “support.” |
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| Another verse further reveals this meaning: The believers, men and women, are protectors,(27) one of another.(28) It is ridiculous to translate the phrase as “mutual guardians.” |
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| The principle of the wali was adopted by the majority of the imams in the fi rst sense of “support” or “supportive friend.” They regarded it as a means to protect the woman, not to bully her, diminish her, nor make her an eternal minor under supervision. Marriage used to lie within a logic of social links involving the two families. It was not merely a binary union. We may, however, upbraid Muslim jurisprudence for having failed to keep a hadīth as important as that of the wali.The Messenger (grace and peace be upon him) ordered: “Do take into account the opinion of mothers in the marriage of their daughters.”(29) The main interested person remains certainly the daughter who gets married. Islam just wants to reinforce its social relations and institute a dynamic to which partake all the members of the two families. We equally begin to wonder why in practice we have wandered so far from this framework that makes the family a protecting nest, not a cruel jail for the woman, mother and daughter alike. |
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| Why then has the concept developed this way? The semantic lapse from wali as support to wali as guardian is not an innocent one. It accompanied the political and social lapse that saw the revival of a most merciless patriarchal tradition. History is certainly not linear but really made of twists and turns. Back to spiritual square one, the Arab-Muslim world abandoned the integration of woman into its social life and returned to its pathological jealousy of females. The privileged class, making decisions for everybody, decided to cloister the woman once again.Originally meant to protect the woman by providing a male counterbalance in a set of relations where the psychological dimension must not be overlooked and to be a moral support in case of dispute between the two parties of the marriage treaty, the wali became, by this return to jāhiliya, her torturer, her guardian. His guardianship, combining with that of an equally chauvinistic husband, brought about an objective alliance between the males across history and across their different status. Between males, whether wali or husband, the complicity that developed was reinforced by an increasingly diffi cult economic situation. Considered by the males of her own family as one more mouth to feed, the woman is virtually sold to her husband. The wali, meant to be a refuge, is rarely concerned with the suffering of his ward. He prefers not to see anything as long as the “mouth to feed” is where she belongs. In this legal, historical, and economic imbroglio, the entire fair sex is liable to falling prey to male violence, an expression of violence that descends from the very top of the social ladder and lurks in the depths of hearts where faith has wilted.(30) |
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| The circle of violence, physical and moral, slowly closes around women, the traditional victims of decadent societies. The pressure issuing from a corrupt and violent regime fi nds domestic expression in a deep deviation from the spousal relationship which, according to the Qur’ān, is to be one of tenderness and mercy.A Moroccan proverb, doubtless with equivalents in the other Muslim countries because of their common history, says: “People humiliate me and I humiliate ‘wisha,(31) my little woman.” |
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| Such is the f tna of the woman alluded to by the Prophet (grace and peace be upon him). It is the ordeal of the woman we failed to protect, or whom we eventuallystifle while trying to protect her. |
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| Confronted with the stir of the Great Ordeal, our imams of the first periods of islam promulgated the principle of saddu ath-tharī‘a (32) just as a country in a state of war declares the state of emergency. Undoubtedly, they were really concerned about the fate of the umma. Thoughtful and certainly brave, they were seeking a solution to a real crisis. But the state of emergency has become a permanent state. The rights granted to the woman by the Prophet (grace and peace be upon him) were consigned to the scrap heap of history, a history that continues to slide now worse than ever. |
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| Depriving women of their rights in the name of a state of emergency that became normal was to shake the structures of the Muslim community.Women are the wombs of the society in the literal and in the fi gurative sense (even truer in the fi gurative sense than in the literal). Their mirror, so to speak, is society. When they are beaten, marginalized, humiliated, deprived of their rights, despised, and illiterate, their lot inevitably rubs off on their environment. They cannot pass on the torch of faith, courage, the fi ghting spirit, and intelligence. They can no longer be the guarantors of a balanced family that produces a healthy society full of promise. A society that treated its women that way deserved to be colonized, which came about like a slap of destiny. So long as there was no differing civilization that might function as a mirror and suggest a way of life in stark contrast to the established reality, the fatalist mentality could reproduce itself infinitely across the centuries. |
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| Woman underwent such marginalization as naturally as she breathed the air. She did not even suffer from it. She accepted being cloistered by a community that had reverted to its original misogyny, which she herself joins at the age of menopause so as to become even more ferocious toward her own sex. |
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| There is no worse torturer of the woman than the woman as mother-in-law and ignorant of God. Having reached the sole honorable status (that of mother) which a society of fitna grants to her fellow women, she ignobly abuses the status.This mother infantilized her male child and eventually stifl ed him through showering on him the excessive tenderness she should normally have shared with her husband. |
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| Ignorance, frustration, and the idealization of the future husband, on whom the mother transfers all her suffering and pins all her hopes of being respectable, create an intolerable situation for the poor spouse. The latter will then have to suffer from the conceits of the spoilt son and the cantankerous character of the mother-in-law who will express the aversion she feels for her own image of the woman by the systematic humiliation of her daughter-in-law. |
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| Even intrigue has a social color. From the bottom up, save the exception that proves the rule, the atmosphere in the home is one of mistrust; nothing is spared so as to give vent to suppressed angers and frustrations.(33) If, thanks to affluence, palace intrigues among women are relatively fluid and muted, in the cottages they are quick to tear each other’s hair out. The ill-fated services of the fqihs,(34) well equipped with disgusting potions to which the unfortunate spouses have recourse, often go as far as poisoning. Were we to disinter the mothers-in-law and the husbands of long ago (and today as well, by the way) and to conduct serious examination on the causes of their death, we would certainly be greatly surprised.Such is what they have managed to do to our societies and our families once they severed from us the lively sources of our faith. It is not because woman is illtempered that she is cantankerous, or that she resorts to unscrupulous procedures.The superfi cial woman, the superstitious woman, the crafty woman, the lyingn woman, the woman who indulges in sorcery, all are purely the product of a chauvinistic society that failed to realize the fitna of its women. Responsibility ought not to be cast on the woman but rather on our wandering, all of us, from the vital teachings of our Prophet (grace and peace be upon him), from the spirit of the Message. |
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| * From the Book "Full Sails Ahead" (available online at www.jspublishing.net). |
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| 22. Bashîr and nadhīr, lit. “one who gives glad tidings” and “one who informs of punishment in the Life to come and warns of deviations in the present life.”23. I say “relatively” since nobody easily escapes the prevailing social environment: tradition weighs equally heavy for even the most open-minded mujtahidîn.24. Zakia Daoud, Féminisme et politique au Maghreb; sept décennies de lutte [feminism and politics in North Africa: seven decades of struggle], EDDIF, Casablanca, 1996, p. 8.25. Translated as conquests by incomprehension, or by eclipse of the Islamic phenomenon.Cf. II.3., “Rerouting History.”26. Khudūr or “curtains” refers to life retirement, the antecedent of the harem.27. Awliya is the plural of wali.28. Qur’ān: S. IX. 71.29. TN: Reported by Abu Dāwad in his Suman.30. In addition to the destabilizing of cultural relationships occasioned by globalization, thecontext of underdevelopment and unemployment aggravates the status of the woman today more than ever.31. The term ‘wisha, diminutive of Aisha, may be affectionate, but it often expresses lack of consideration and respect.32. Arabic phrase for a state of emergency, when certain recognized rights or practices are put on the back burner for such compelling reasons as, for instance, safeguarding the unity of the community.33. I know very well that there are many exceptions. Certain Muslim peoples whose traditions are not chauvinistic and certain families who have remained close to the sources donot correspond to this black image; but the exceptions prove the rule. To proclaim that the woman in the land of Islam has always been well treated amounts to burying one’s head in the sand or adopting cant.34. This is another, very revealing semantic lapse. Fqih means an erudite person, a scholar of islam. |
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