Other Than Men

One of these women is Umm ‘Umara.  You are in good company, if you ask: ‘who was she?’  There might even be an obvious reason why her name has receded to the sidelines of history, even though early biographers paid quite a bit of attention to the details of this early Muslim woman’s life.   Umm ‘Umara, after all, was the kind of woman who makes many men (and some women) feel uncomfortable.  She asked questions, she sometimes loudly protested the lack of fairness she saw around her, particularly in regard to women, and she was active in various public events.  The truth of the matter is that she was typical of the early Muslim women from the generation of the Prophet Muhammad in the first century of Islam and through most of the early medieval period.  Umm ‘Umara was one of the well-known women Companions of the seventh century and is particularly valorized in the early literature for her courage on the battlefield.  According to the ninth century biographer, Ibn Sa‘d (d. 845), she fought fearlessly in a number of the early battles in Islamic history.  During the battle of Uhud, she defended the Prophet himself against a particularly ruthless enemy and as a consequence was fulsomely praised by him for her matchless bravery. 

Another very important reason to remember her name is that she is cited as the reason for the revelation of a significant verse in the Qur’an.  Most verses in the Qur’an have what is known as an occasion of revelation behind them; in other words, we have recorded for us in commentaries the specific historical event in the Prophet Muhammad’s life which prompted the revelation of a particular verse.  It is reported that Umm ‘Umara remarked to the Prophet, regarding the Qur'anic revelations up to that point: ‘I see that everything pertains to men; I do not see the mention of women’. As a result, this particular verse was revealed:

In Islam, and I would assume in most faith traditions, God clearly listens to women and is responsive to their needs. Women who can read and understand the Qur’an for themselves draw their power and strength from the Qur’an itself.  The Qur’an, as we see in this passage for example, specifically addresses women and uses language deliberately inclusive of them. This verse, above all, maintains the absolute religious and spiritual equality of women and men - no ifs or buts.

The Qur’an also confers specific legal rights on women, some of which had not previously been granted to women and were quite revolutionary in their consequences. Thus the Qur’an gives women the right to contract their own marriages, to hold property in their own names even after marriage, to seek divorce under specific conditions, although this is a practice not encouraged either for men or women, and to expect fair and equal treatment from their husbands and fathers in particular.  Islam also recognizes the special gifts that women are endowed with as compassionate caregivers and nurturers within the family.  A famous saying of the Prophet places the position of the mother far higher than the father in terms of the respect and love she is entitled to from her family.  Another saying of the Prophet glowingly asserts that Paradise lies beneath the feet of mothers.

The early Islamic community was also inclusive of women regarding political rights and citizenship. Political rights for women are usually assumed to have been born in the modern period and as a consequence of the rise of the modern nation-state.  Prominent among such rights is the right to vote, the most graphic indicator of modern participatory citizenship.  Early historical and biographical sources contain valuable information that allows us to state that there was a recognized public, political space for women from the very inception of Islam in the seventh century.  When the Muslim community was established in Medina by the Prophet Muhammad in 622, the early converts to Islam personally had to make a pledge of allegiance to the Prophet, which signaled their formal entry into the Muslim polity. This pledge, known as bay‘a, was required equally of men and women. The terms of the oath were similar for both, except that the women were not obliged to militarily defend the community. Early biographers like Ibn Sa‘d (784-845) provide us with extensive details about some of these remarkable women who made the arduous trip between Mecca and Medina often under very dangerous conditions and sometimes with irate male relatives in pursuit. A number of these women came on their own, leaving behind families and oppressive social circumstances to seek spiritual fulfillment in the new Muslim community.  They found the Qur’anic message of the complete equality of men and women before God and the recognition of their independent moral and social status highly empowering. Modernist Muslims today see in the bay‘a as an early precursor of the electoral vote, by means of which their predecessors had registered their approval of the leader of their community. The fact that the Prophet took the bay‘a from all the faithful, regardless of gender, as a prelude to membership in the Islamic polity is pregnant with all kinds of ramifications for the contemporary period. It particularly allows us to draw the conclusion that women were equal participants in the early Muslim polity during the time of the Prophet and that the bay‘a was a concrete affirmation of the political enfranchisement of Muslim women from the very beginning of Islamic history. All of this stands as a stark contrast to the late ‘Abbasid period when women’s public roles were considerably circumscribed.  

Women’s presence in the public sphere in the first century of Islam is rather dramatically underscored by the fact that A’isha, the Prophet’s widow, assumed a prominent political role after her husband’s death.  She is notably remembered for having led a revolt against the fourth caliph ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib in 656 for not having brought the assassins of his predecessor ‘Uthman b. ‘Affan to justice.  She made a public speech in the mosque at Medina, rousing supporters to her side, and went off to the battlefield with her army, mounted on her camel, thereby conferring the name ‘Battle of the Camel’ on the battle itself. 

A’isha was clearly exercising her right to ‘command good and forbid wrong,’ a moral imperative that is equally binding on men and women, according to verse 9:71, which states: ‘(Male) believers and (female) believers are the natural partners of one another; they command the good and forbid wrong and they perform prayer, give the obligatory alms, and obey God and His messenger.  They are those upon whom God has mercy; indeed God is Almighty, Wise’. Read from a contemporary Islamic feminist perspective, this verse is understood to be very empowering of women within a religious and moral context. Women and men are described as enjoying an unqualified equal partnership with one another - because of what they do and the qualities they share in common. The criteria of faith and righteousness are invoked equally for men and women and are not gender-specific. However, male commentators in the classical, medieval, and modern did not however stress the equality of this partnership (al-wilaya) in their interpretations of this verse but went on instead to construct hierarchical gendered identities consonant with their own milieu.  Muslim feminists are interpreting this verse in a manner that they believe unlocks the full potential of gender egalitarianism in the Qur’an. They are revisiting the highly-gendered social roles crafted by pre-modern male Muslim scholars and have cogently argued that their perspectives subverted the original intent of this and a number of other verses in the Qur’an which mandate the full social and ethical partnership of faithful men and women.  

Ibn Sa‘d, once again, can be invoked as an authoritative source for documenting the numerous instances of women’s public activities of a religious, intellectual, and humanitarian nature during and after the time of the Prophet. These activities included transmission of Qur’anic verses and the sayings of the Prophet, the two basic sources of Islamic law. A’isha and Umm Salama, widows of Muhammad, transmitted many prophetic traditions which were recorded in the most reliable collections of these reports. The Sahabiyyat , or women companions, ran makeshift hospitals in the mosque at Medina, tended to the wounded on the battlefield, and led, usually other women, in prayer, among other activities. There is also one recorded instance in which Umm Waraqa was appointed the prayer leader over her entire, mixed household by the Prophet because she was the most learned in her family.

History also informs us that the second caliph, ‘Umar b. al-Khattab (d. 644) appointed a woman, Shifa binti Abd Allah, as the public inspector of Medina, a position roughly equivalent to that of a city mayor today.  It is also worth noting that Umar entrusted his daughter Hafsa with the safekeeping of the original manuscript of the Qur’an, which became the basis of the final codex of the Qur’an in less than ten years after Umar’s death. Of course, Umar could have given it to one of his sons, but he preferred his daughter over them for this enormously important task. The reasons were quite clear: Hafsa was better known for her intelligence, piety and charity than his sons, and gender was irrelevant in ‘Umar’s selection. 

Umar also provides with an example that illuminates for us the status and role of women in the public sphere during the first century of Islam. Umar once publicly announced in the mosque at Medina that he wanted to cap the amount that women can claim as their mahr, or bride-gift. As part of the Muslim wedding contract, the groom agrees to pay this monetary gift which is contingent on his financial circumstances and the consent of the other party. This gift is the bride’s alone; and no one else can lay claim to it. During the Prophet’s time, no cap was placed on the amount but Umar wished to impose a ceiling. Upon hearing this, an older women present in the audience cried out to Umar that he was overstepping his bounds and unjustly imposing a restriction on women’s rights where none existed. At that ‘Umar is said to have felt ashamed and retracted his decision. Moreover, he acknowledged the woman’s courage and correctness of opinion by publicly declaring, ‘Umar is wrong and a woman is right’. This anecdote is remarkable because of a number of inferences we can draw from it: it informs us that women freely attended the mosque in Medina; that they publicly took part in legal interpretation along with the caliph; and that their views were accepted when deemed correct and appropriate. This is all the more remarkable when we observe today that ultra-conservative countries like Saudi Arabia and a number of the Gulf states, which claim to adhere strictly to Islamic principles, prohibit women from going to mosques.   

And yet the fact that Muslim women were highly visible and active in the early period should not come as a surprise to us. Religious communities which emphasis the value of faith and piety over wealth, lineage, descent and kinship, like the early Muslim and Christian communities, have in fact little regard for gender.  However, regretfully, the memory of women’s robust roles in the early Muslim community has all but evaporated. 

But recent scholarship reveals the productive educational, social and economic roles that women continued to perform throughout the medieval period. During this period, that is before the rise of modernity, wealthy Muslim women who had exclusive control of their property continued to endow charitable foundations and establish institutions of higher learning that sometimes bore their name. In religious scholarship in particular, women played outstanding roles as teachers and scholars. The Qur’an insists on the obligation to acquire knowledge for the believer, whether male or female, as does the sunnah, or example, of the Prophet Muhammad. Therefore, the right to study the Qur’an and learn about the religious law remained a fundamental right for women, even as some of their social and economic rights became restricted during the Middle Ages.  Our historical records show that girls and women, especially from the upper classes, studied alongside males in private homes as well as in more institutionalized settings and became conscientious and beloved teachers. We know this important fact because male scholars gratefully included the names of their female teachers in their lists of prominent scholars of their day and testified to their extensive learning.  

There is nothing therefore in Islamic injunctions themselves that disallow women’s participation in the public sphere, including the political realm.  If anything, the early record shows that Islamic principles of egalitarianism and high regard for learning empowered women in both the private and public spheres. The later gradual diminution in the public rights of women is a consequence of culturally conditioned, masculine interpretations of the religious law, whose effects are still with us today.

An example of some of these drastic changes is provided by the twelfth century conservative legal scholar ibn al-Jawzi (d. 1201), who remarked, in a manual he wrote for the edification of men, that they should not consult with women in any matter. Compare this statement with the reports we find in early biographies of the Companions of the Prophet that the male Companions eagerly sought the advice of A’isha and other knowledgeable women after his death. The memory of the first generation of Muslim women must have grown so dim for Ibn al-Jawzi that he, unintentionally one is inclined to think, insults the widow of the Prophet as not worthy of being heard and consulted by the male Companions of the Prophet. Such transformations remind us that attitudes can changed drastically when one loses touch with the foundational history of one’s faith and community.    

The historical facts concerning early Muslim women are totally out of sync with the situation of Muslim women today. The oppression of women in Afghanistan, or by the Taliban, for example, is truly shocking. Highly educated women, some with Phds, have to wear veils wear veils which fully camouflage their bodies and even their faces, are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, and find their job opportunities severely limited.  Granted these are extreme examples, which have been severely criticized on other Muslims themselves. There are many Muslim countries, such as Malaysia and Turkey, where women obtain advanced degrees, hold jobs, and definitely drive, even if some of them are veiled. However, majority of women in Muslim countries lag behind men in education and earning potential and cannot aspire to the topmost managerial or leadership positions. True, the Muslim world has produced many female presidents and prime ministers but in terms of widespread, concrete economic and civic rights, women seriously lag behind men, if we compare them within the same educational, social and economic categories.  One may then logically ask the following question: when the foundational texts of Islam, the Qur’an and the samples and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, uphold a woman’s inalienable right to full equality with men, why has that not produces societies where gender equality and egalitarian is the norm? Why is there such a disjunction between normative prescriptions and the reality on the ground? 

The answer is complex. First, we have to consider the historical reasons for the retrograde transformations. Our sources indicate that starting sometime after the ninth century, women’s position began to change slowly. The religious, social, and legal rights that have been given to women by the Qur’an began to be slowly whittled away as the nature of Islamic society itself began to change. Outside cultural influences from the Hellenist and Persian worlds began to impact upon Islamic societies.  Both Hellenist and Persian societies were very hierarchical in nature and enforced social divisions among people on the basis of lineage and occupation.  Hierarchical societies tend to be rigid and authoritarian since everyone is expected to know their place, and women’s place is usually towards the bottom in such social arrangements.  A hierarchical system also encourages patriarchy - that is to say, a social system based literally on  the ‘rule of the father.’  Under patriarchy women are subordinated simply on the basis of their gender, masculine values are considered intrinsically superior, and social structures are designed to maintain male privilege. These positions are or should be problematic for Muslims because they undermine basic, core principles in the Qur'an. Four verses from the Qur'an may be presented here which clearly challenge these patriarchal notions: 

With the rise of patriarchal societies, many of the progressive and liberating teachings of early Islam, particularly concerning women, began to be compromised - never completely eradicated , but definitely compromised.        

Second, we need to consider the how the sacred texts are interpreted. Typically, practically without exception, sacred texts like the Qur’an, the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, have primarily been interpreted by men throughout centuries. It is their interpretation that has become authoritative.  In the early period of Islam, we had women interpreters, foremost being, not unexpectedly, A’isha. She had disciples of her own and her interpretation as transmitted by her disciples has been preserved for us in various commentaries. If there were other female commentators from early period, their names have not become part of the official record. As a result, masculine perspectives became privileged in Qur’anic hermeneutics since only their commentaries survive.  Viewing the Qur’an through a masculine lens meant that the well-being of society was understood to be equivalent primarily to the well-being of men. Although the text of any scripture is stable and the words themselves do not change, any text, particularly, a religious text, can be read and understood by different people in different ways in different times.  Androcentric interpretations leave their imprint on a number of Qur’anic verses that have been used to assert the husband’s special prerogatives within marriage.  For example, polygamous unions with up to four women is said to permitted in the Qur’an for men on the basis of a particular verse which states: ‘If you fear that you cannot act equitably towards orphans, then marry such women as are seemly to you, two and three and four; but if you fear that you will not do justice, then only one or what your right hands possess; this is proper, so that you may not stray from the right path’ (4:3). Those who look favorably on polygamy read this verse as a general permission provided that a man can treat all his wives absolutely equally on all fronts - economically, socially, and emotionally. Those who are not inclined to accept polygamy read this verse as allowing polygamy only as a concession during special circumstances, such as war, when the death of a large number of men can leave many women and children in dire circumstances.  The verse does specifically refer to women with children with no male provider - and it is helpful to remember that we are talking about a time when a woman, if not independently wealthy, was inevitably financially dependent on a man. Muslim modernists arguing against polygamy as a regular, rather than a highly exceptional practice, point to another verse which states, ‘you are never able to deal fairly among women, even if it is your ardent desire’ (4:129). Reading these two verses together, these interpreters insist that the Qur’an actually states very clearly that no man is humanly capable of treating more than one woman justly, and thus effectively considers polygamous unions, under normal circumstance, beyond the realm of possibility.

Scholars, particularly women scholars, have now started to reclaim women’s voices throughout history in an attempt to separate what is genuinely Islamic from culturally conditioned interpretations of Islamic principles. Muslim feminists tend to argue that the main tools for countering social injustice towards women lie in the Qur'an and authentic example of the Prophet Muhammad and that being a feminist within these parameters means being true to the highest religious and social ideals of Islam - ideals which lead to the promotion of the human rights of women. Other religious feminists make similar statements based on their own faith traditions, as in Judaism and Christianity. Questions have been raised, however, about the credibility of such claims, particularly by those who believe that human rights derive from secular notions of the dignity of human being and that religious claims often undermine them.   

Such questions are influenced by the fact that human rights in the European context had to be developed sometimes in opposition to the clergy and organized religion. To ensure certain basic rights, the state had to step in and create new laws. Thus it was not until the nineteenth century that the Married Women’s Property Act was passed in Britain finally giving married women the right to own property in their own name rather than having the husband automatically gain control over her assets, as was the case until then. In Muslim societies, women have always had the right to own property in their names. In the pre-modern period, Muslim jurists also developed a human rights scheme according to which every individual (male and female) had the right to protect one’s life, property, religion, progeny and intellect.  This is why most Muslims continue to argue for human rights based on Islamic values that are understood to be consistent with universal notions of human rights. However, it is important to realize that there remain certain issues and limitations that have not been adequately addressed in the modern period. Thus, according to pre-modern interpretations of the religious law, a woman’s legal and social status was inferior to that of a man’s and remains so, at least on the books, in a number of Muslim societies today.         

Muslim reformists have therefore been calling for a reinterpretation of the Sharia, or Islamic Law, since the nineteenth century. But the Shari’a is not law as we understand it in the modern period. It is a broad set of moral and ethical guidelines, some of which, but not all, have legal implications. Through their ability to reason, what in Islamic terminology is called ijtihad, human beings) study the Sharia to derive specific legal rulings from it.  Through ijtihad Muslims have the ability to interpret and reinterpret the religious law in order to make it consistent with certain basic moral principles and objectives that are regarded as unchanging. Thus Muslim reformers argue that if the objective of the law is to promote equality, justice, and tolerance, and these basic moral principles cannot be compromised, then the understanding of the Shari’a and the specific rules that are developed from it must always be consistent with these objectives.   This means that over time, as our conceptions of what constitutes justice, equality, and tolerance change, our application of the law has to change accordingly. With regard to gender justice, our notions have changed quite drastically in the last few decades. Now we take it for granted that women have equal rights to education, employment and compensation; anything less would be considered unjust.  Such arguments are beginning to be increasingly heard in Muslim societies; in Egypt, for example, the Egyptian Supreme Court recently allowed women the right to initiate divorce, that is to petition for divorce on their own in cases of abuse or desertion by the husband.  Although it sounds revolutionary, this is a right that has always existed for women under Islamic law, although not extensively practiced or even well-known among Muslims. 

Women’s rights advocates in the Muslim world base their arguments on specific interpretations of the religious law that promote gender equality and are woman-friendly. They also draw upon the early history of Islam to establish that gender-egalitarianism is a strong and integral component of Islamic belief and tenets.  The recuperation of scripturally mandated rights and concepts is the driving force behind the scholarship and activism of a considerable number of Muslim women and men. This is a courageous enterprise that often faces strenuous opposition from ultra-conservative religious ideologues.   

But the effort continues.

Citations

For a detailed account of the contribution of women in early Islam see Asma Afsaruddin, ‘Education, Piety, and Religious Leadership in the Late Middle Ages: Reinstating Women in the Master Narrative’ in Knowledge and Education in Classical Islam edited by Sebastian Guenther (Brill, Leiden, forthcoming); ‘Early Women Exemplars and the Construction of Gendered Space: (Re-)Defining Feminine Moral Excellence’ in Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces edited by Marilyn Booth (Duke University Press, Durham, 2010) pp 23-48; and The First Muslims: History and Memory (OneWorld, Oxford, 2008).

See also: Asma Sayeed, Women and the Transmission of Knowledge in Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2013) Mohammad Akram Nadwi, Al-Muhaddithat: The Women Scholars of Islam (Interface Publications, Oxford, 2013, second revised edition); Leila Ahmad, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1993); and Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite (Perseus Books, Jackson, TN, 1993).