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| Nadia Yassine, 2007-09-29 |
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| The gravity of our political deviations can be measured by several indices. The status of women bears eloquent testimony to the deviation of the nature of power and its repercussions on the social aspect of our life as Muslims. The status of women is traditionally recognized as a powerful barometer of the decadence or civility of civilizations. |
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| As an identifiable point of the reference, the period of the Abbasids stands more prominently in our diverted and manipulated memory than that of the Prophet (grace and peace be upon him). The reign of Hārūn ar-Rashīd flatters our feeling of membership and fires up our collective imagination. Evocation of this epoch is always associated with the Thousand and One Nights. It is synonymous with splendor, jewels, and especially with beautiful slaves and palace intrigue. In the curricula of Muslim countries the reign of this sovereign is unanimously presented as the zenith of Islam.This approach to our Muslim past is doubly misleading: (1) we gauge the history of islam by purely material values while relegating spiritual values to a dark corner and regarding the spiritual quest as a matter of vocation or eccentricity; and (2) we normalize our intellectual and emotional relationships with a system whose nature and legitimacy ought to be called into question. |
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| This myth further undermines our moth-eaten memory. To cite but one example of the numerous repercussions of this official view ingrained in our Muslim subconscious, we will touch on the status of women, thus opting for an indirect approach so as to broach a subject that concerns an entire umma in which the first victim of its decline is woman. |
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| In the history of declining civilizations, women are always the scapegoat. Our Muslim societies are no exception to this rule. It will be to our advantage to develop our history heuristically; to do so we must consider the upheavals experienced by women in the land of Islam as being intimately dependent on the conception of power and its involution from shūrā to autocracy.The Prophet (grace and peace be upon him) came to rescue the Arab woman from the limbo of history so as to make her a full and responsible human being, ready to assume the heavy responsibility incumbent upon those who make sense of life.12 The system that came to replace shūrā made it its duty to erase the outlines of a nascent society wherein the woman is man’s equal in “the ordering of Good and the pursuit of Evil.”13 It encouraged an enslaving mentality that considers woman a common if beautiful commodity of speculation. |
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| The goodwill of the princes who usurped power as from Mu‘āwiya went against the Qur’ānic teachings that recommend the progressive abolition of slavery.The mark of Pharaoh in this domain is most profound, as the first victim of this degeneration from the top is surely woman. |
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| The jāhiliya 14 that the Prophet (grace and peace be upon him) came to remedy was characterized by a state of deep ignorance and perdition of the godless. Ignorance as such—both of sense and of essence—has always had as a corollary social violence and the law of the strongest. Islam came to create a new balance and to promote new values by censuring despotism, whether political or chauvinistic in practice. The link between these two expressions of ignorance is so strong that it engenders a perfectly clear dynamic of cause and effect; the liberation of woman from the yoke of tradition can be considered only in the sense of a global struggle that aims to eradicate archaic and authoritarian political systems. |
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| It is easy to subscribe to this argument once we examine the historical relationship between the deterioration of the status of the Muslim woman and that of power. But let us first examine the pre-Islamic period. We note at first that, with few exceptions, all the peoples of the earth had adopted the same attitude with regard to woman, an attitude of distrust and suspicion, attraction and repulsion similar to the attitude toward the dark forces of nature.These sentiments were expressed in different ways, but the watchword was always the reification of the woman. For the Arabs of the jāhiliya, this reification was a bit less abject than that of the Romans or the Greeks. Yet it was no less cruel. |
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| They were so jealous of their women, whom they regarded as properties, that they would not hesitate to bury them alive. The newborn girl child was at the mercy of the paterfamilias, who held the power of life and death over her. Among certain tribes, he sometimes even buried her for fear of dishonor, should he deem that necessary, without the least reproach or worry—quite the opposite. Many settled and rich tribes who could do without the woman’s social work used to bury her symbolically when they did not inter her physically. The practice of khidr was widespread in Arabia.khidr is the word that describes the bearing and the house of the woman who never goes out of her household. |
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| The example of Khadija (God bless her), a free and independent woman, the first spouse of the Prophet and the first support to his cause, was not commonplace in the Qurayshi nobility to which she belonged. It is certainly not by pure coincidence, however, that she was elected by God to be on the path of the future Messenger (grace and peace be upon him). Non-believers might call this a coincidence, an accident not representative of the image of the woman advocated by islam. A predestination, we would reply, that serves as proof that the woman that islam wishes is far from being the thing of “caliphs” and men, but an active actor in the progress of history. |
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| It is equally revealing that the Muslim community of that time declared the year of the death of Khadija (God bless her) a “Year of Sadness.” This was uncommon in a society that Omar (God bless him) recognized as deeply misogynist: “Before islam,” he said, “we used to attach little importance to women.” The same Omar who before his conversion to islam buried his daughter, the same Omar who admitted the chauvinistic nature of his society and from whom women used to hide behind the back of the Prophet (grace and peace be upon him), is the Omar who during his mandate appointed a woman to head the financial administration of a large city. |
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| This change is the result of the education the community received from the Prophet. Successfully and progressively, the Messenger of islam rescued men from the prison of their vices, their habits, their ill-fated customs. Left to their own devices, their natural instincts would have engendered and unleashed destructive forces in governing a society where the weakest had no place, and where the law of the strongest was the sole valid rule. The weakest could only submit or escape an unenviable lot by means of tortuous paths of hatred, treachery, ill-will, and guile. |
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| Jahiliya also describes a society where distrust and violence are exacerbated by want and need, a society where men live by submitting women to their physical might, where tribe crushes tribe, where man fights man, where barbarity prevails.Muhammad (grace and peace be upon him) came to guide the Companions and the Muslims with the might of love, to free them from the vicious circle of violence and self-centeredness. Yet he behaved towards them with the care of the teacher who is concerned about making progress without brutal ruptures or traumatic shock-treatment. |
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| As our Prophet (grace and peace be upon him) was fully aware that the Arabs were captious regarding the status of women, his gentleness was even more in evidence in that highly sensitive area than elsewhere. By ordering the Companions to allow women to go to the mosque, he posed a veritable moral dilemma for the Muslims. The concern to obey the Prophet (grace and peace be upon him) and his teaching prompted a dynamic of woman’s liberation and promotion from the state of a thing to that of an active citizen. |
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| When we consider that the mosque was the very heart of the nascent community -the locus of meeting and social life as well as its place of worship- we realize the scope of this apparently trivial commendation. The Prophet (grace and peace be upon him) was inviting women to enter, by the main gate, into a social field hitherto exclusively reserved for men. |
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| Before this, women did not exist in this field, since social life frequently consisted of waging war and engaging in trade—which amounted to the same thing, considering the state of insecurity endured by the desert caravans, where raids were common. The Message of Peace with God and with the Other made woman a partner of man in this society of growing confidence. Instigating the presence of women in the mosque was first of all proof of their equality before God, Who received them in His House the same way as men. |
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| Women were not only securing public space and times that had been exclusively male prerogatives; they were also entering the sacred space as God’s guests. What further annoyed certain Companions about these three acquisitions was no doubt the fact that the dawn and night prayers (Fajr and ‘Ishā’ ) were performed at times where it was unthinkable to allow women out in a society particularly touchy in matters of honor.15 |
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| The community then lived in constant transformation; it was becoming accustomed to obeying the counsels of the Prophet as matters of Islamic Law, since He says nothing that does not come from God.16 |
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| * From the Book "Full Sails Ahead" (available online at www.jspublishing.net).12. I write this knowing of the circulation in the Islamic countries of ready-made ideas concerning putting the woman under guardianship and her eternal status as minor. The polemic surrounding the topic is volatile; the problem cannot be discussed in depth in a single work. Women live among the interstices of a particular history that is made of breaks and lapses. During an unstable course of events against which the jurisprudential schools struggled they have lost their rights—but this is not the subject of this book. I shall defer a study of the complicated issue of the woman in islam until, God willing, I can devote a prospective book exclusively to it.13. L’ordonnance du Bien et le pourchas du Mal, in Jacques Berque’s phrase, renders the divine order addressed to the Muslims to “order Good and combat Evil.”14. Jahiliya is the state of ignorance and, inevitably, of violence that characterizes impious societies. It is commonly translated as “the pre-Islamic period.”15. Qays, a bashful lover of the pre-Islamic era, was for life refused by his tribe permission to marry his lady friend for having dared to mention her in his poems.16. Qur’ān: S. LIII. 3. |
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