Amina Wadud's "Inside the Gender Jihad"

Wadud, Amina. Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam. Oxford: Oneworld, 2008.

Amina Wadud, a convert to Islam, received her B.S. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975, her MA. in Near Eastern Studies, and her PhD. in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Michigan in 1988. During graduate school, she studied advanced Arabic in Egypt at the American University in Cairo, along with Quranic studies and tafsir (exegesis) at Cairo University; she also took a Philosophy course at Al-Azhar University in Cairo. She received full professorship of Islamic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and is currently (2010) a visiting professor at the Center for Religious and Cross Cultural Studies at Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia. 

An earnest condemnation of patriarchy within Islam, the book wages jihad (war) against gender prejudices that are rooted in patriarchal interpretations of the Quran. Wadud includes in her book her personal struggle with the consequences of the mixed-gender prayer she led in 2005, concluding that the insults and imprecations she continues receiving are a result of the male hegemony and privilege that have dominated intellectual discourses in Islam; the fact that women have been the objects, not discussants, in discourses on shariah, Islamic law,says a lot, she asserts. It is precisely for this reason that she impugns the literalist, narrow, and static interpretations of Islam. She reminds her Muslim readers that Islam came in order to establish justice, which she believes is defined differently by each individual, contending that it is men who bestow full justice to men who limit it on women. The author notes that the term “Islam” is attached to arguments by Muslims so that the interlocutors may gain legitimacy and authority and to prohibit others from dissenting. Wadud’s book is an attempt to contribute to the future development of Islam as a system of social justice that acts in accordance with the Islam that is just and not bound by any unjust interpretations that deny women their Islamic rights, which include direct involvement in dialogues held about the readings of Islamic scriptures in order to establish the shariah.

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Maulvi Begum Sahib: The eunuch who found her calling as a Qur'an teacher

SUKKUR: Seventy-year-old Jameela has come a long way from playing as a child with eunuchs to teaching 450 children the Holy Quran every day.

Born a transgender in March 1941, Jameela never fit in at home or at school, so when an elderly eunuch, Pasham Fakir, offered to take her away she ultimately yielded and followed him.
She continued to live in what she later called ‘sin’ until May 1972, when her brother died in a robbery. “This proved to be a turning point in my life because I started learning the Holy Quran,” Jameela told The Express Tribune.

She was born in Syed Mohammad Yakoob Shah’s household in Pishin, Balochistan. “My father had two wives: my mother was from a Syed family, while my stepmother was from a non-Syed family,” she said. “My mother died when I was four and my aunt looked after me for two years after which my father sent me to live with my stepmother in Ranchore Lines, Karachi.”

Jameela’s stepmother sent her to an all-girl middle school near their house, but the young eunuch left school when she was in class three because she used to get teased for her “attitude and strange style of walking.”
After dropping out of school, she helped her stepmother with domestic chores. “When I was 10 years old, a eunuch named Pasham Fakir came to our house and asked my mother to hand me over to him but my mother refused.”

She said that Pasham kept coming back for her and they used to talk outside the house. “Then one day I just went him without telling my mother,” she said dolefully.


Pasham took Jameela to his house in Garhi Yaseen near Shikarpur and she began her ‘training’ as a eunuch.
“I lived with him for three years but I wanted to get away because I didn’t like his company,” said Jameela. “Luckily, the fakir took me to Hazrat Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai’s shrine for the annual Urs celebrations, where eunuchs come together from every part of the country.”

This is where Jameela met her new guru, Fakir Ameer Zadi, also known as Saboo. “He looked quite decent so I told him I wanted to go with him,” she said. Saboo talked to Pasham and after paying Rs5,000, Saboo adopted Jameela.

Saboo took Jameela to Sukkur, where he lived in a double-storey house in Makrani Muhalla. With his permission, Jameela purchased a house at Takkar Muhalla for Rs4,000 in 1970. “I knew how to read Urdu, even though I had dropped out of school. One day I was reading the newspaper when I came across news of my elder brother Syed Muhammad Rasool’s death,” she recalled, her eyes filling up with tears. Rasool used to run a car showroom on Tariq Road, Karachi, and was murdered during a robbery.
Jameela said she rushed to Karachi to reunite with her family but they had left with her brother’s body for Pishin. “His death was a turning point in my life. A female neighbour taught me how to read the Holy Quran. With Allah’s grace, things just fell into place for me after this.”

In 1975, Jameela began teaching her neighbour’s child, four-year-old Aasia, the Quran. “Since she proved to be a brilliant student, other neighbours started sending their children to my house to learn,” she said. The number of students grew day by day and now Jameela has a total of 450 students, who she teaches in seven different shifts without any charge.

“I started teaching when I was 31 years old and at that time people used to call me Khala (aunt) Jameela. Then it became Amma (mother) Jameela and now that I am 70 years old, they call me Nani (grandmother) Jameela.”
Jameela added that her neighbours have always respected her, irrespective of their age or gender.
A student’s mother sends Jameela two meals a day and offers to wash and iron her clothes. Since she teaches her students free of charge, their parents give her money and clothes as gifts. Jameela said she was lucky enough to perform Hajj four times and Umrah once.
“I teach in groups for an hour each and the children start coming at 10 am until 5:30pm,” she said. There is no age limit for female students but Jameela said that she does not take boys older than 10 because she does not believe in intermingling between “big boys and girls.”

“Allah created me the way I am, but nowadays being a eunuch has become a profession,” she regretted, adding, “teenage boys turn into fake eunuchs by taking hormonal injections and this is a big sin.” If you meet 1,000 eunuchs, Jameela added, you will seldom find a real fakir.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 27^th, 2012.

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Islamic Law and Women - Part I: Introduction

I'm currently writing a paper on Islamic feminism and Islamic law, and so I'm reading what I find very troubling things in Islamic law, such as early Muslim scholars'/jurists' view of women, particularly in marriage. Understandably, the concept and role of marriage back then were much different than what they are today for at least the western world, and so when we come across views that deem marriage a sort of a kingdom that's headed by the husband (king) and the wife is not the queen but the caretaker of that kingdom (household), we get upset. But this isn't actually what I'm troubled by: it's how the jurists saw me (a woman) as almost completely incapable of making a decision on my own because I lack the intellect to do so. I'll give many examples of this in the upcoming posts, which will be a series of posts on Islamic law and women, but for now, lemme give you a brief intro to what I'm doing and where I'm hoping to get with this.

Some years ago, my sister and a (Muslim) classmate of hers were having a discussion on some aspect of Islamic law. When she expressed a difference of opinion, the classmate asked her, “Have you ever read Islamic law?” – as though Islamic law is a sourcebook that you can turn to, a book at all, or a guide, something that answers all of your questions.

(Un)fortunately, this is not the case: Islamic law is not a sourcebook; it is not published or codified in one text, and it does not have answers to all of our questions. Yes, it may have answers – but if anything, they go like this: “Well, according to Scholar X, this is the case, but according to Scholar Y, this is the case.” In other words, one really can’t argue that there’s one fixed solution or answer to question problem or question. And despite the claim that the doors of ijtihad have been closed since the 10^th century (ijtihad = independent reasoning, or re-interpretations of a certain or all Islamic rules/guidelines, even the Qur’an), Muslim scholars have discussed the same issues – and offered different viewpoints, often contradicting each others’ – from the 7^th century until today. Yes, the doors to ijtihad are believed to have been closed, but that doesn’t mean the debates have been closed, and many scholars see the illogicality in this claim and thus refuse to submit to it, refuse to let it silence their thoughts. 

Islam’s Sources - what "Islam" actually is
We are always told that Islam = the Qur’an and hadiths, that the Qur’an is the first, ultimate source of Islam and then come the hadiths.  In reality, however, this isn't completely true. The Qur’an plays a very minor role in our lives and in Islamic law, and I think this is because the Qur’an is very ambiguous and extremely difficult to understand. This isn’t to say that the scholars/jurists never did understand it – no, they did. But most of their opinions (which later became Islamic law) are not grounded in the Qur’an, most of the discussions they held among each other and that they wrote down were practical issues that came up and needed to be addressed. Unfortunately for most of those issues, they became the norms of Islamic law and now, one is not allowed to disagree with those opinions of the scholars that became majority at that time.

So, what exactly is "Islam" or Islam's sources? Mostly the early (and partially the medieval) Muslim jurists' opinions, to a lesser extent the hadiths, and to an even much lesser extent, the Qur'an. To believe that Islam = Qur'an is completely untrue, and it's not even mostly hadiths. I cannot and I am not dismissing the merit of these scholars, however: I acknowledge their intelligence, often their humility (but not always), and the extreme care they took while forming opinions. So their opinions aren't "just" opinions -- they are the basis of Islamic law. They are, in fact, facts.

I’ll give many examples in upcoming posts, but for now, consider this.

What does the Qur’an say about the whole “eye for an eye” issue? One would think it’s very clear and easy to comprehend – I mean, all there is to it is that you do onto others what they do onto you (unless you choose to forgive them, which is the better option and God will reward you for your patience and forgiveness), right? Wrong. If that’s so, then why is it an entirely different story in Islamic law? Islamic law looks at the gender, social ranking (class, status), religion, freedom or its lack thereof, age of the person killed. This becomes especially important when the blood money is concerned – i.e., when the victim decides to forgive the perpetrator but still demand some sort of recompense for the damage caused.

You know how the scholars (and ordinary Muslims) tell us that the whole “eye for an eye” doesn’t imply in cases where the effects might be worse for the initiator? For example, if Person A pokes Person B in the eye and his eyeball comes out of the socket, Person B is not allowed to do the exact same thing to Person A because of other results that might ensue from the revenge (such as possible damage that may be caused to the brain or the head). So, how do we know this? Because the scholars figured it. (However, the Qur’an makes it very clear that it’s best to forgive – it’s just that it’s realistic enough to understand that it can’t demand everyone to turn the other check, requiring everyone to forgive their criminals.)

[Importantly, let me point out that the "eye for an eye" verse can be read as a law that was specific to the Jews, since the introduction of that verse should not be ignored. And it's also been argued that that verse is talking specifically about murder cases. More on this later.]

Hence, a slave is not worth the same as a free person; a woman is not worth the same as a man; a homosexual is not worth the same as a heterosexual; a “normal” (heterosexual male/man or female/woman) is not worth the same as an intersex individual or any other sexual minority; a rich person is not worth the same as a poor person; a child is not worth the same as an adult. And so on. (I’m not deciding whether this should be the case or not; I’m only stating what it is according to Islamic law.) Interestingly, the Qur’an does not seem to make any reference to non-female and non-male members of the world, such as inter-sex individuals, and so for one to claim that the Qur’an covers every single topic in the world is an erroneous statement. One wonders, for example, what portion of the inheritance they are to gain, since the Qur’an recognizes only daughters and sons, no sexes/genders that fall in between. (And, contrary to popular opinion, inter-sex individuals do exist, and I’m referring here to those people who have neither or both the male and female reproductive organs.)

So, next time someone tells you that “in Islam, …” ask them what “Islam” refers to in that context. It can mean the Qur’an only, hadiths only, the scholars’ opinions, the consensus, a norm in a Muslim society or Muslim societies, the opinion of only one madhhab or all four, or even some reforms in a Muslim state (e.g., whether a married man can have another wife without his wife’s consent or knowledge).

Coming up in this series:

Part II: Origins of Islamic Law
a) Background/context
Part III: Sources of Islamic Law
Part IV: Women in Islamic Law
a) A woman’s Consent in a Marriage
b) the dower and how Islamic law sees it (caution: the Jurist/scholar al-Shafi, founder of the Shafi School of thought, termed the dower “price of the vulva.” The dower is the gift (usually money or jewelry) that the groom gives to his bride at the time of the marriage, and although it’s supposed to be given before the consummation of the marriage, some scholars say it’s okay if the husband gives it after the marriage. And whereas most Muslims today insist that the purpose of the dower is so that the wife will have enough to live on in case she gets divorced and doesn’t have a job or in case her husband dies and she has no other reliable financial support system, the truth is that, according to the early Muslim scholars, the dower is what gives the husband full control over his wife’s sexuality: he cannot have sex with her until he gives her the dower. Yet, what does the Qur’an say? This: And give unto the women (whom ye marry) free gift of their marriage portions; but if they of their own accord remit unto you a part thereof, then ye are welcome to absorb it (in your wealth). (Qur’an, 4:4) In other words, if the woman does not want to get the mahr/dower from her husband, it’s perfectly all right. But because Islamic law believes that the sole purpose of the dower is for the husband to access his wife at his delight, whenever he wants regardless of whether the wife is in the mood for it or not, it makes it obligatory for the husband to give the wife her dower. But I’ll discuss this in detail when I reach this section of Islamic law.)
c) Divorce
d) Child Custody
e) Punishment for Women Apostates (versus that of men apostates)
f) the jurists on the woman's dress code

Part V: The Role of Islamic Feminism in Interpreting Islamic Law

Feel free to offer your opinions as well as to correct me wherever I am wrong. I will appreciate it!
But bear with me - I have a lot to say, and I need to get it out of my system. I'll try to provide references for every claim I make whenever I believe it's necessary, but if I don't do so in cases where the readers deem necessary, please don't hesitate to point it out to me.

Thank you!

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Reza Aslan's "The Keeper of the Keys"

Aslan, Reza. "The Keeper of the Keys: Muhammad in Mecca" (Chapter 2) No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam. New York: Random House, 2005.

Reza Aslan holds degrees in Religion from Santa Clara University, Harvard University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa. He also writes for the Daily Beast (an American news reporting and opinion website) and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (an American nonprofit organization committed to improving the understanding of U.S. foreign policy and international affairs) and the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. His first book, No God but God: the Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen different languages.  He is also the author of Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in a Globalized Age.

In Chapter 2 of his book No God but God, Aslan provides two different translations of verse 4:34 of the Quran, the verse that seems to command men to beat their wives if the latter are disobedient. Offering various meanings of the Arabic terms qawwam and adribuhunna, both which have multiple meanings, Aslan argues that these terms should not be seen as conclusive, because how one interprets the terms depends on one’s overall understanding of the Quran.  He then declares that Umar, the third caliph of the Muslim community after Prophet Muhamamd’s death, was a misogynist who sought to confine women to their homes—and his violent attitude towards women was, Aslan says, acknowledged by Aisha, the Prophet’s youngest wife, who refused to allow him to marry her sister. To support his argument, Aslan narrates a series of misogynistic acts by Umar. He explains that the reason that many Muslim women, some of whom are self-identified feminists, are fighting to have their exegesis of the Quran heard is that their voice has been missing from Islamic scholarship. It is not that they accuse Islam of being a woman-hating religion, he clarifies; it is that the Quran has been in the control of men who have interpreted the Quran from an overly patriarchal point of view that has subjugated women.

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Riffat Hassan's "Equal before Allah?"

Hassan, Riffat. "Equal before Allah? Woman-Man Equality in the Islamic Tradition," in Harvard Divinity Bulletin 17/2 (1987). 

Riffat Hassan is a Pakistani-American theologian and scholar on the Quran. She received her PhD from Durham University in Islamic Philosophy in 1968 and has taught in many institutions, including Oklahoma State University and Harvard University. She is currently a professor at the University of Louisville.

In her feminist theological study of women’s position in Islam, Riffat Hassan states that in spite of the fact that early Islam witnessed the involvement of significant women like Aisha and Khadija (the Prophet’s wives) and Rabia al-Basri (an outstanding Sufi woman), Islam has remained a patriarchal domain even until today. Patriarchal figures have traditionally defined for women their roles and status. While Muslim women have historically accepted this until recently, Hassan observes, many of them are now standing up because they realize that Islam is being used to oppress them rather than to liberate them. Comparing Christian and Jewish scriptures to hadith narrations that pertain to women, Hassan finds strong resemblances among the three, the most important of which concerns the subjugation of women. Hassan makes a strong appeal to Muslims to more humane and feminist interpretations of Islam for the sake of a healthier global Muslim community.

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Important Texts for a Gender/Islam Course

I'm taking a class called Gender, Sexuality, and Islam. I want to post my ENTIRE syllabus here for that class! But I first need to ask my teacher's permission, I'd think.

Required Texts:

Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (Yale University Press, 1992).

Ali, Kecia. Sexual Ethics in Islam (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007).

Kugle, Scott. Homosexuality in Islam: Islamic Reflection on Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims (Oxford: Oneworld Publication, 2010).

Mernissi, Fatima. Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Muslim Societies by Fatima Mernissi  (also titled The Veil And The Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation Of Women's Rights In Islam) (Perseus Books, 1991; originally in French, 1987).

Stowasser, Barbara. Women in the Qur'an, Traditions, and Interpretation (New York: Oxford U Press, 1994).

Wadud, Amina. Qur'an and Woman:Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective (Oxford University Press, 1999). 

Recommended Texts:

Barlas, Asma. Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an (University of Texas Press, 2002). 

Spellberg, D. A. Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of 'Aisha Bint Abi Bakr (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

Supplementary Texts:

Abou el-Fadl, Khaled. Speaking in God's Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001).

Haeri, Shaela. The Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Iran (Syracuse University Press, 1989).

Hambly, Gavin (ed.), Women in the Medieval Islamic World (St. Martin's Press, 1999).

Musallam, Basim, Sex and Society in Islam: Birth Control before the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1983). 

Safi, Omid (ed.), Progressive Muslims: On Gender, Justice, and Pluralism (Oxford: Oneworld, 2003).
 
Ruth Vanita (ed.), Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society (Routledge, 2002).

In the next blog post, I will share what our last three assignments have been about. They're really interesting and stimulating topics, and I hope that those who hear about them will try doing them on their own.

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