The Routledge Handbook of Islam and Gender [1 ed.] 2020019099, 9780815367772, 9781351256568

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF ISLAM AND GENDER

Given the intense political scrutiny of Islam and Muslims, which often centres on gendered concerns, The Routledge Handbook of Islam and Gender is an outstanding reference source to key topics, problems, and debates in this exciting subject. Comprising over 30 chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into seven parts: • • • • • • •

Foundational texts in historical and contemporary contexts Sex, sexuality, and gender difference Gendered piety and authority Political and religious displacements Negotiating law, ethics, and normativity Vulnerability, care, and violence in Muslim families Representation, commodification, and popular culture

These sections examine key debates and problems, including: feminist and queer approaches to the Qurʾan, hadith, Islamic law, and ethics, Sufism, devotional practice, pilgrimage, charity, female religious authority, global politics of feminism, material and consumer culture, masculinity, fertility and the family, sexuality, sexual rights, domestic violence, marriage practices, and gendered representations of Muslims in film and media. The Routledge Handbook of Islam and Gender is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies, Islamic studies, and gender studies. The Handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as cultural studies, area studies, sociology, anthropology, and history. Justine Howe is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Case Western Reserve University, USA.

Routledge Handbooks in Religion

The Routledge Handbook of Muslim–Jewish Relations Edited by Josef Meri The Routledge Handbook of Religious Naturalism Edited by Donald A. Crosby and Jerome A. Stone The Routledge Handbook of Death and the Afterlife Edited by Candi K. Cann The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Animal Ethics Edited by Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey The Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender Edited by Amy Hoyt and Taylor G. Petry The Routledge Handbook of Islam and Gender Edited by Justine Howe The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Journalism Edited by Kerstin Radde-Antweiler and Xenia Zeiler For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/RoutledgeHandbooks-in-Religion/book-series/RHR

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF ISLAM AND GENDER

Edited by Justine Howe

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Justine Howe; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Justine Howe to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Howe, Justine, 1981- editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of Islam and gender / edited by Justine Howe. Description: 1. | New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge handbooks in religion | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020019099 | ISBN 9780815367772 (hardback) | ISBN 9781351256568 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Sex–Religious aspects–Islam | Gender identity–Religious aspects–Islam. Classification: LCC BP190.5.S4 R68 2020 | DDC 297.081–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019099 ISBN: 978-0-815-36777-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-25656-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by River Editorial Ltd, Devon, UK

CONTENTS

List of contributors Acknowledgements

ix xiv

Introduction Justine Howe

1

PART I

Foundational texts in historical and contemporary contexts

21

1 Classical Qurʾanic exegesis and women Hadia Mubarak

23

2 Sex and marriage in early Islamic law Carolyn G. Baugh

43

3 Islamic gender ethics: traditional discourses, critiques, and new frameworks of inclusivity Zahra Ayubi

57

4 Muslima theology Jerusha Tanner Rhodes

68

5 Gender and the study of Islamic law: from polemics to feminist ethics Fatima Seedat

83

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Contents

PART II

Sex, sexuality, and gender difference

99

6 Applying gender and queer theory to pre-modern sources Ash Geissinger

101

7 Intersex in Islamic medicine, law, and activism Indira Falk Gesink

116

8 Sexuality and human rights: actors and arguments Anissa Hélie

130

9 Mixité, gender difference, and the politics of Islam in France after the headscarf ban Kirsten Wesselhoeft

146

PART III

Gendered authority and piety

161

10 Gendering the divine: women, femininity, and queer identities on the Sufi path Merin Shobhana Xavier

163

11 Gender and the Karbala Paradigm: on studying contemporary Shiʿi women Edith Szanto

180

12 The stabilization of gender in zakat: the margin of freedom and the politics of care Danielle Widmann Abraham

193

13 Muslim chaplaincy and female religious authority in North America Sajida Jalalzai 14 Malama Ta Ce!: women preachers, audiovisual media and the construction of religious authority in Niamey, Niger Abdoulaye Sounaye

209

222

PART IV

Political and religious displacements

239

15 Gender, Muslims, Islam, and colonial India Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst

241

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Contents

16 Islam and gender on the Swahili coast of East Africa Nathaniel Mathews

256

17 Mujahidin, mujahidat: balancing gender in the struggle of Jihadi-Salafis Nathan S. French

269

18 Modelling exile: Syrian women gather to discuss prophetic examples in Jordan Sarah A. Tobin

282

PART V

Negotiating law, ethics, and normativity

297

19 Transgressing the boundaries: zinā and legal accommodation in the premodern Maghrib Rosemary Admiral

299

20 Women and Islamic law: decolonizing colonialist feminism Lena Salaymeh 21 The emergence of women’s scholarship in Damascus during the late 20th century Feryal Salem 22 Human rights, gender, and the state: Islamic perspectives Shannon Dunn

310

318

328

PART VI

Vulnerability, care, and violence in Muslim families

341

23 Two ‘quiet’ reproductive revolutions: Islam, gender, and (in)fertility Marcia C. Inhorn

343

24 Aging and the elderly: diminishing family care systems and need for alternatives Mary Elaine Hegland

358

25 Domestic violence and US Muslim communities: negotiating advocacy, vulnerability, and gender norms Juliane Hammer

375

26 #VoiceOut: Sufi hardcore activism in the Lion City Sophia Rose Arjana vii

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Contents

PART VII

Representation, commodification, and popular culture

405

27 Hijab, Islamic fashion, and modest clothing: hybrids of modernity and religious commodity Faegheh Shirazi

407

28 Constructing the ‘Muslim woman’ in advertising Kayla Renée Wheeler

423

29 French Muslim women’s clothes: the secular state’s religious war against racialised women Shabana Mir

435

30 Female filmmakers and Muslim women in cinema Kristian Petersen

447

31 Gender, race, and American Islamophobia Megan Goodwin

463

Index

475

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CONTRIBUTORS

Rosemary Admiral is Assistant Professor of History in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her research focuses on Middle East and North African history, Islamic legal history, and histories of women and gender. Her current book project explores how women engaged with Islamic law and legal institutions in premodern Morocco. Sophia Rose Arjana is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Western Kentucky University. She is the author of four books: Muslims in the Western Imagination (Oxford, 2015), Pilgrimage in Islam: Traditional and Modern Practices (Oneworld, 2017), Veiled Superheroes: Islam, Feminism and Popular Culture (Lexington, 2017), and Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi: Orientalism and the Mystical Marketplace (Oneworld, 2020). Zahra Ayubi is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College and specialises in women and gender in premodern and modern Islamic ethics. She is the author of Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society (Columbia University Press, 2019). She also teaches and publishes on gendered concepts of ethics, justice, and religious authority, and on Muslim feminist thought and American Muslim women’s experiences. Carolyn G. Baugh (PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 2011) is Associate Professor of History and Arabic at Gannon University. She is the author of Minor Marriage in Early Islamic Law (Brill, 2017). Shannon Dunn is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Gonzaga University. She earned her PhD from Florida State University. Professor Dunn’s research focuses on gender, violence, and religious and secular systems of law. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters in comparative religious ethics. Nathan S. French is an Associate Professor of Comparative Religion and an affiliate of Middle East and Islamic Studies at Miami University. He is the author of And God Knows the Martyrs: Martyrdom and Violence in Jihadi-Salafism (Oxford University Press, 2020).

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Contributors

Ash Geissinger is an Associate Professor in the Religion Program at Carleton University (Canada) who researches the intersections of the Qurʾan and its exegesis, the hadith, gender, and sexuality. Recent publications include the book chapter: ‘Are Men the Majority in Paradise, or Women?’ Constructing Gender and Communal Boundaries in Muslim b. al-Ḥajjā j’s (d. 261/875) Kitāb al-Janna (in Roads to Paradise: Eschatology and Concepts of the Hereafter in Islam, edited by S. Günther and T. Lawson, Brill, 2017). Indira Falk Gesink is Professor of History at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, Ohio. Her work has also appeared in the American Historical Review and the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, and she is author of Islamic Reform and Conservatism: Al-Azhar and the Evolution of Modern Sunni Islam (I.B. Tauris, 2009), Barefoot Millionaire (Baldwin Wallace University, 2013), and Philosophies of History (Cicero Press, 2018). Megan Goodwin is Program Director of Sacred Writes: Public Scholarship on Religion, a Luce-funded project hosted by Northeastern University, as well as a visiting lecturer in Northeastern’s Department of Philosophy and Religion. Her work on American Islamophobia has appeared in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and the Muslim World. Her first book, Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions, is available through Rutgers University Press. Juliane Hammer is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts against Domestic Violence (Princeton University Press, 2019) and American Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism: More Than a Prayer (University of Texas Press, 2012), as well as the co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to American Islam (with Omid Safi, Cambridge University Press, 2013). Mary Elaine Hegland is Professor of Anthropology at Santa Clara University. Dr Hegland authored Days of Revolution: Political Unrest in an Iranian Revolution and many articles based on her fieldwork during the Iranian Revolution and other periods of research in Iran from 1978 to 2018. In addition to religion and politics, her publications deal with aging and the elderly in Iran and among Iranian Americans in California’s Bay Area; women and gender, change and continuity in an Iranian village; Shiʿa Muharram rituals among Pakistani women; and marriage and sexuality among Iranians. Anissa Hélie is Associate Professor of History at John Jay College, New York City. Growing up in Algeria, she has been involved with feminist organisations and transnational networks, and works on issues of sexuality, wars and conflicts, religious fundamentalisms and violence against women. Justine Howe is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Case Western Reserve University. Her research focuses on contemporary Islam with an ethnographic focus on Muslim communities in the United States. She is the author of Suburban Islam (Oxford, 2018). Marcia C. Inhorn is the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at Yale University, where she serves as Chair of the Council on Middle East Studies. A medical anthropologist focusing on gender, religion, and reproductive health in the Middle East and Arab America, Inhorn is the author of six books on the subject. x

Contributors

Sajida Jalalzai is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She specialises in the study of Islam and Muslims in North America, with a specific interest in the professional education of Muslim leadership. Her research focuses on the impact of educating Muslim chaplains in North American Protestant seminaries. Nathaniel Mathews is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at SUNY-Binghamton. He is currently writing a book about the post-1964 revolution diasporas from Zanzibar to the Gulf region. Shabana Mir is Associate Professor (Anthropology) and Director, Undergraduate Studies at American Islamic College. She wrote the nationally award-winning book Muslim American Women on Campus: Undergraduate Social Life and Identity (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), based on ethnographic research on Muslim college students after 9/11. Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst is Associate Professor of Religion and Associate Director of the Humanities Center at the University of Vermont. Her first book, Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion, attends to imperialism, colonialism, racialisation, and minoritisation and Islam in South Asia. Additionally, she works on the histories of religious and Islamic studies. Hadia Mubarak is Assistant Professor of Religion at Queens University of Charlotte. Mubarak completed her PhD in Islamic Studies from Georgetown University, where she specialised in modern and classical Qurʾanic exegesis, Islamic feminism, and gender reform in the modern Muslim world. Her upcoming publication, Rebellious Wives, Neglectful Husbands (OUP), explores significant shifts in modern Qurʾanic commentaries on the subject of women against the backdrop of historical, intellectual, and political developments in 20th-century North Africa. Kristian Petersen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. His current research interests include Muslims and popular culture, media studies, and religion and film. He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims. He is the editor two forthcoming volumes: Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (Ilex Foundation and Harvard University Press) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). Jerusha Tanner Rhodes is Associate Professor of Islam and Interreligious Engagement and Director of the Islam, Social Justice, and Interreligious Engagement Program (ISJIE) at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. Her work and writing focus on Islamic feminism, interreligious engagement, and social justice. She is author of Never Wholly Other: A Muslima Theology of Religious Pluralism (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Divine Words, Female Voices: Muslima Explorations in Comparative Feminist Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Lena Salaymeh is Associate Professor of Law at Tel Aviv University and Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and Private International Law. She is the author of The Beginnings of Islamic Law: Late Antique Islamicate Legal Traditions (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Feryal Salem (PhD, University of Chicago) is Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at American Islamic College. Her research interests include Islamic philosophy and xi

Contributors

theology in the post-classical period, interreligious studies, and the development of Muslim thought in the contemporary era as it came into conversation with aspects of modernity. Dr Salem is the author of The Emergence of Early Sufi Piety and Sunnī Scholasticism: ʿAbdallā h b. al-Mubā rak and the Formation of Sunni Identity in the Second Islamic Century (Brill, 2016) published in the Islamic History and Civilization series. Fatima Seedat (PhD Islamic Law, McGill) is Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Cape Town. Her work focuses on gender studies at the intersections of Islam, sexuality, and law. She writes on the convergences of Islam and feminism, queering the study of Islam, militant Muslim masculinity, and egalitarian readings of Islamic law. Her current research projects include feminist readings strategies and reform methods for Islamic law, and she is in the early stages of a project on gender non-conforming Muslim sexualities. Dr Seedat’s teaching focus lies in African and other feminist theorising, and feminist research and writing methods. Faegheh Shirazi is Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of numerous academic articles in diverse journals and contributor of book chapters and encyclopaedia articles. Shirazi is author of The Veil Unveiled: Hijab in Modern Culture (University Press of Florida, 2001); Velvet Jihad: Muslim Women’s Quiet Resistance to Islamic Fundamentalism (University Press of Florida, 2009/2011); Brand Islam: The Commodification of Piety (University of Texas Press, 2016); and the editor of Muslim Women in War and Crisis: From Reality to Representation (University of Texas Press, 2010). Professor Shirazi’s research interests focus on the Islamic popular religious practices and rituals and their influence on gender identity and discourse in Muslim societies, with a primary focus on Iran, Islamic veiling, material culture, textiles, and clothing. She also serves on a number of academic editorial boards nationally and internationally for various journals and book publications. Shirazi’s new book project is Textiles, Clothing Symbology and Rites of Passages in Islamicate Societies (in progress). Abdoulaye Sounaye is Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Contested Religion Unit at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient. He received his doctorate from Northwestern University. He is the author of Islam et Modernité Contribution a l’Analyse de La ré-islamisation Au Niger (L’Harmattan, 2016) and Muslim Critics of Secularism: Ulama and Democratization in Niger (Lambert Academic, 2010). Edith Szanto is an Assistant Professor in Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. She received her doctorate from the University of Toronto and previously taught there and at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani. She is finishing a book manuscript, tentatively entitled ‘Transgressive Traditions: Twelver Shi’ism in Modern Syria’. Sarah A. Tobin, Research Professor at the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway, is a cultural anthropologist of Islam and economy, politics, and Syrian refugees in Jordan. Dr Tobin’s books are Everyday Piety: Islam and Economy in Jordan (Cornell University Press, 2016) and The Politics of the Headscarf in the U.S. (with B.C. Welborne, A.L. Westfall, O. Celik-Russell, Cornell University Press, 2018). Kirsten Wesselhoeft is Assistant Professor of Religion at Vassar College. She studies Muslim social activist and intellectual culture, combining ethnography, cultural history, and xii

Contributors

constructive Muslim ethics. Her forthcoming book, Fraternal Critique: Muslim Social Ethics in Contemporary France, focuses on class, racialisation, feminist politics, and trans-Atlantic circulation in Muslim Paris. Her articles have appeared in Sociology of Islam, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and the Oxford Review of Education. Kayla Renée Wheeler is Assistant Professor of Gender and Diversity Studies at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. She received her PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Iowa. Her forthcoming book, Fashioning Black Islam, explores how Black Muslim fashion designers, stylists, and social media taste-makers use fashion to challenge hegemonic Islamic femininity, to create alternative modes of Islamic knowledge production and transmission by centreing materiality and embodied practices, and to construct networks of belonging based on a shared BlackMuslimWoman identity that is facilitated by social media. She is the curator of the #BlackIslamSyllabus. Danielle Widmann Abraham is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies and Comparative Religion at Ursinus College where she also holds the Wright Lectureship in Middle East Studies. Dr Widmann Abraham is a scholar of contemporary Islam who researches responses to violence, poverty, gender, and suffering. Her scholarship explores the ways in which Islamic tradition intersects with movements for social change in South and Southeast Asia, as well as the contemporary United States. Merin Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Queen’s University in Canada. She works on contemporary transnational Sufism, with regional interests in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism: Bawa Muhaiyaddeen and Contemporary Shrine Cultures (2018) and the coauthor of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics and Popular Culture (2017).

xiii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to all of the authors for their contributions to this collective effort. As I review the final submissions, I am overcome with gratitude for their hard work, critical acumen, and brilliant insights. I thank Aysha Hidayatullah and Saadia Yacoob for our generative conversations about the field of Islam and gender. From the beginning, Rebecca Shillabeer at Routledge has been a stellar editor, providing unwavering support and excellent guidance at every stage. Likewise, Amy Doffegnies expertly shepherded the manuscript through the submission process. I am indebted to Timothy Beal, my department chair, for encouraging me to take on this project. The introduction was much improved by the feedback of several colleagues: Amanda Baugh, Brian Clites, Kate Dugan, Maggie Popkin, and Michal Raucher. As always, my family has been there to provide support and a lot of love and joy every step of the way. I am finishing the editing process in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic. To the health care and other essential workers who are keeping us safe and cared for: Thank You. Justine Howe Cleveland, OH USA April 2020

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INTRODUCTION Justine Howe

The 19th century saw the rise of a great poet, teacher, and spiritual guide in West Africa named Nana Asma’u (1793–1864). She was the daughter of Shehu Usman dan Fodiyo, the scholar, preacher, and Sufi (mystical) leader who led the early 19th century rebellion and reform movement, known as the Sokoto Jihad, against the Hausa Kings of Gobir in present-day Nigeria. Dan Fodiyo successfully unified existing territories into a single political entity based in the new city of Sokoto. In 1837, Nana Asma’u started her poem, ‘Sufi Women/Tawassuli Ga Mata Masu Albarka’, with the following lines in Hausa/Fulfulde:

Alhamdulillahi, we Thank God We invoke blessings on God’s Messenger We invoke blessings on his family and Companions And those who followed them, thus we gain self-respect We invoke blessing on the Companions of the Prophet Who are now sanctified My aim in this poem is to tell you about Sufis To the great ones I bow in reverence I am mindful of them while I am still alive So that they will remember me on the Day of Resurrection (Mack and Boyd 2000, p. 127) In the religious authority unit in my introductory Islam and gender course, I always begin with the story of Nana Asma’u. Her life and literary works serve several purposes. First and foremost, they help my students to see that Muslim women have played important social roles that defy our contemporary representations of them as passive victims of religious patriarchy. Her story also illuminates key dimensions of Muslim religious authority. As the daughter and sister of major religious and political figures, her religious status, like that of her father and brother, was constituted through genealogies of scholars who transmitted knowledge through networks of family, scholarship, and piety over great geographic distances. Her family were prominent members of the Qadiriyya, a transnational Sufi order that had thousands of followers stretching across multiple continents. The beauty of her

1

Justine Howe

poetry, as a mode of religious expression, further attunes my students to the expansive religious, linguistic, and aesthetic horizons of Muslim communities. And finally, it centres West Africa as a key site for transnational Muslim intellectual and cultural contributions. For example, we read about contemporary communities in the United States who draw on Nana Asma’u’s example as the basis for their collective religious life. Like my students, I suspect many readers have never heard of Nana Asma’u, even though she was an important intellectual figure of the 19th century, who was fluent in multiple languages, including her native Fulfulde, Hausa, Tamachek, and Arabic. She was an effective teacher and author, who worked to unify diverse communities under the banner of Islam. Close to the centre of political power, Nana Asma’u was instrumental in bringing Shehu Usman dan Fodiyo’s vision to fruition. Her extraordinary life is of particular concern for a volume devoted to the study of Islam and gender. Her absence from many 19th century Muslim intellectual and cultural histories is but one example of the ongoing neglect of women’s voices and experiences in Islamic studies scholarship, even when such contributions, like those of Nana Asma’u, have an established written archive. The marginalization of Black and African Muslims has also contributed to this lack of attention to her many achievements in literary, educational, and religious areas. Who are these exemplary mystics to whom Nana Asma’u devotes the next 80 verses? The poem attests to the expansive network of female scholars and mystics through which Asma’u embedded her religious and political project, bringing to life the contributions of more than two dozen Muslim women in the past, the present, and in the hereafter. Some of these exemplary figures are well known, such as ʿAʾisha, the wife of the Prophet Muhammad and daughter of Abu Bakr, the first caliph or successor of Muhammad. Nana Asma’u also honours other exemplary female figures, namely Rabiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya (d. 801), the famed mystic and poet from Basra, Iraq who was renowned for her exceptional piety and ascetic discipline. Her poems and ‘mastery over learning’ make her a key figure in Nana Asma’u’s genealogy of female mystical models (Mack and Boyd 2000, p. 128). Many other women in the poem are significant in the Sufi lineages of Nana Asma’u’s West African context. In short, the women honoured by Asma’u are a diverse group of religious exemplars throughout Muslim history and spanning multiple continents. These exemplary women were teachers, scholars, mothers, wives, ascetics, preachers, and saints. Nana Asma’u also praises them for a range of attributes and characteristics: kindness, generosity, zealousness, nobility, grace, and determination. They embodied many of the conventional attributes associated with women such as grace and kindness. Yet they also exceeded these expectations by accomplishing extraordinary spiritual feats. And by presenting these women as models for other women, Nana Asma’u suggests the possibility of emulating their example in daily life. Nana Asma’u and the Sufi women in her poem challenge dominant contemporary representations of Muslim women, namely that they are passive, lack agency, and are subordinate to their husbands and fathers. In Asma’u’s poem, these female mystics embodied none of those characteristics. They had particularly special roles to play in mediating between the living, the dead, and the divine due to their exceptional piety and their worldly achievements as women. Nana Asma’u praises women such as Rabiʿatu for her commitment to prayer as well as her ability to see ‘male and female jinns’, or beings made from fire who have free will. She mentions that devotees who visit the tomb of Nafisatu, a figure who recited the Qurʾan 6,000 times in the grave, would receive blessings (baraka) from God. Many of the women praised in the poem were intercessors who had the power to remember the deeds of others on the Day of Judgement. 2

Introduction

The multivalent dimensions of Nana Asma’u’s authority illuminate important insights for this volume as a whole, especially how gendered norms and practices in religious contexts are tied to other domains of social power as well as broader theological and philosophical frameworks. Her authority was constructed in part through the authority of her male relatives, who were themselves subject to paradigms of masculinity and male power that in turn buttressed their religious and political authority. This particular poem was commissioned by Asma’u’s brother, Muhammad Bello (d. 1837), who succeeded his father as the political and religious leader of the emergent Sokoto caliphate. Bello wanted his sister to transform his prose work about Sufi women, A Book of Good Advice, into verse. This was no straightforward task, and Asma’u approached the work as her own creative and religious project, which she intended to reach a much broader audience. She made notable changes to the content Bello’s work, omitting his many admonitions to women, and calling attention to both the worldly and extraordinary accomplishments of the Sufi women in the poem (Mack and Boyd 2000, pp. 60–61). Similarly, the women she celebrates in her poem are identified through their fathers. And yet, they, like Nana Asma’u, pursued their own agendas within the gendered and other social hierarchies of their times. Her example demonstrates how gendered norms and practices are imbricated in multiple social domains, working to structure political and religious authority, conceptions of the divine, and individual and collective identities. All of the chapters in this volume take a similarly inclusive and expansive approach to gender, demonstrating how gendered norms and practices are essential to exploring the complexities of Muslim social worlds, not just the particular experiences of women. While many chapters focus on women, others focus on the structuring effects of gender on men and non-binary people. These chapters show that bringing gender and queer theory to bear on Muslim materials and contexts yields broader insights into theology, law, economics, politics, and culture. Moreover, a focus on gender parochializes male-centred and androcentric perspectives that are frequently taken to be objective or universal. At the same time, foregrounding gender highlights the importance of social actors and practices that are often deemed to be insignificant agents of history and culture. This volume brings to the surface new voices and new archives for scholarly inquiry, encouraging scholars and students to focus on communities and practices that are often marginalized by dominant, hegemonic frameworks that privilege certain kinds of bodies over others. Together, these chapters show that gendered categories and ideologies in Muslim contexts are complex and multifaceted. This volume aims to capture the global processes through which the dynamic interplay between Islam and gender has unfolded and continues to unfold.

Introducing Islam Islam is a vibrant faith of more than 1.8 billion followers. Muslims trace their religion’s origins to the 7th century, when Muhammad ibn Abd-Allah began preaching a new message of monotheism and devotional piety in what is now the nation-state of Saudi Arabia. This volume focuses on three primary dimensions of Islam: texts and their interpretations, community, and embodied practice. These aspects demonstrate the historical contingency of Muslim beliefs and practices and the internal diversity of Islam as a global religion. Muslims recognize a diverse set of sacred texts. The most important is the Qurʾan, which Muslims believe was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad from the angel Gabriel in Mecca and Medina from around 610 CE to his death in 632 CE. The Qurʾan contains just 3

Justine Howe

over 6,000 verses. Muhammad’s message focused on restoring monotheism to the Arabian Peninsula, through belief in the one God (in Arabic, Allah), establishing key pious practices in devotion to God, such as daily ritual prayer (salat), and creating a religious community that superseded tribal and kin loyalties. From the beginning, the Qurʾan had an important ritual function for Muslims, primarily through the practice of recitation. For example, Muslims recite the Qurʾan during salat and during major life events such as weddings and funerals. Contrary to contemporary public representations of the Qurʾan, it is not primarily a legal text. Only a few hundred verses provide explicit guidance on mandatory or prohibited behaviours. Muslims also recognize hadiths as a body of authoritative texts. The hadith corpus preserves the sayings and the deeds of the Prophet Muhammad as recorded by his closest companions and family members. These diverse sources and the relative paucity of direct guidance in the Qurʾan has meant that Muslims themselves have done a lot of interpretative work in order to establish gendered norms and practices, as well as other normative questions around law and ethics. There is no single Islamic position on the status of women or normative gender norms and practices. Like members of other faiths, Muslims have put forward many interpretations of their sacred texts and what they require Muslims to do based on those understandings. From the 8th to the 12th centuries, (male) Muslim elites established the scholarly disciplines and methods for interpreting canonical sources. The areas that have been most prevalent in the study of gender and Islam are: Qurʾanic interpretation (tafsīr), theology (kalam), jurisprudence (fiqh), and philosophical ethics (akhlaq). The methods that scholars developed in the formative and classical periods still play an important role in how modern Muslims understand these foundational texts. Yet each community brings a new set of questions and concerns to them. Scholars use the term Islamic tradition to describe the dynamic relationship between sacred texts and their interpretations through which Muslims produce authoritative meanings and practices (Asad 2009). The Islamic tradition is neither static nor fixed in a single set of interpretations. Muslims return again and again to their tradition in response to changing historical and social circumstances. The Qurʾanic verses concerning polygyny are a good illustration of how interpretations are historically contingent and dynamic. The fourth chapter (sura) of the Qurʾan, known as al-Nisāʾ (The Women), outlines the conditions for men taking more than one wife. The Qurʾan stipulates that men may marry up to four women, but ‘if you fear that you will not deal justly, then only one, or those whom your right hand possesses’ (4:3). Kecia Ali argues that in classical legal texts, male Muslim scholars took polygyny for granted as part of a broader hierarchical system, in which free male Muslims assumed positions of social power over dependents, including women, children, and slaves (Ali 2010). Ali’s point is that jurists’ recommendations for how polygyny ought to work reflected their particular historical conditions in which slavery was also taken for granted. It is not enough to observe that such interpretations are patriarchal. Nor can we assume that such positions simply reflect what the Qurʾan says. Rather, this link that premodern scholars drew between marriage and slavery demonstrates the contingency of patriarchy as it is articulated and implemented in a particular social setting. Muslim positions regarding polygyny became more varied with the advent of colonialism. Faced with European critiques of polygyny as backward and immoral, and as a result of broader economic and political changes that favoured companionate, nuclear families, Muslim legal positions on polygyny shifted as well. Muslim thinkers such as the 19th century Egyptian jurist Muhammad ʿAbduh argued that in the modern period, polygyny often 4

Introduction

produced injustices and conflicts within families. Due to these problems, he argued that it should be prohibited (Ali 2006, p. 504). While many Muslims today do not practice polygyny, the practice does continue in many social locations. Debra Majeed has documented the experiences of some contemporary Black Muslim women who engage in polygynous relationships (Majeed 2016). Like Muslims in other times and places, the women’s justification of polygyny reflects broader social and religious imperatives and constraints. By telling their stories, Majeed shows that the women who embrace polygyny are not helpless victims of an oppressive patriarchy. Instead, they exercise agency under a set of intersecting gendered and racial hierarchies and contemporary political conditions (Majeed 2016, p. 30). Women in polygynous relationships put forward sophisticated and nuanced readings of the Qurʾan and other Muslim sources to understand their complex family lives. They are also aware that these marital arrangements sometimes leave them without formal legal resources and restrict their financial options upon divorce. However, they enter into polygynous relationships for a variety of religious, economic, and interpersonal reasons. Whatever their outcomes for particular Muslim women, Majeed’s point is both intuitive and cutting-edge: Muslim marriages are complex and defy recourse to singular factors, such as culturalist explanations of Islamic patriarchy. The next aspect of Islam that is pertinent to our discussion of gender is community. Muslims are part of multiple, sometimes overlapping communities. By focusing on the multiple communities to which Muslims belong, the inadequacy of the often-posed question, ‘What is the status of women in Islam?’, becomes apparent. The better question is, ‘How do Muslims negotiate and construct gendered practices and norms in their particular communities?’ Today, Muslims are part of many communities and social spaces that work to structure gendered beliefs and practices, including religious communities. A US Muslim may consider themselves to be part of the umma or global Muslim community. Some may also be members of a religious congregation, as are the 50 per cent of US Muslims who belong to mosques (Sciupac 2017). Others may consider families to be their primary place for religious worship and belonging. For still others, ethnic or national organizations form a core part of their communal identity as Muslims. And some US Muslims participate in political causes or social justice movements that come to constitute their primary religious community. These communities represent rich and contested places where Muslims construct and negotiate overlapping commitments that are sometimes in tension with one another. Through communities, Muslims form relationships with one another and with ‘special beings’ (Orsi 2018). These include God and the Prophet Muhammad, but also saints and the companions and family members of the Prophet. These braided relationships always have gendered dimensions that have unpredictable material effects on practitioners. In Shiʿi piety, Fatima al-Zahraʾ is a major figure. The daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, the wife of the fourth caliph (successor to the Prophet Muhammad), and the mother of Husayn, who was martyred at Karbala, her status is both contingent on her relationships to male figures and transcends them. She is represented as existing before Creation, which gives her intercessory powers independent of her male relatives’ deeds (Ruffle 2010, p. 8). Like Nana Asma’u, Fatima is an exemplary figure, honoured by both men and women for her exceptional capacity to relate to the divine. In some Sunni mystical traditions, conceptions of God as articulated by Sufi scholars and shaykhs celebrated feminine aspects of the divine as superior to masculine attributes. Yet these gendered metaphysical frameworks do not necessarily translate into positions of power for women within Sufi organizations (Xavier, this volume).

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Finally, this volume focuses on embodied Muslim practices. Religion is as much what people do as what they believe. To be sure, Muslims have a robust belief system. For example, the shahāda, or declaration of faith, affirms Muslims’ belief in one God and in the Prophet Muhammad as the messenger of God. But equally, if not more important, are the multiple acts that Muslims perform to worship God and perform service for their communities. Embodied practices include religious rituals such as prayer, fasting, and charity. Other practices such as everyday ethical action and consumer practices are also central to tracking gendered norms and practices and their significance within Muslim communities, such as sartorial practices, everyday material cultures and narratives, and media such as music, television, and film. The most visible and contested Muslim practice today is not prayer or pilgrimage, but instead Muslim women’s dress. In Euro-American contexts, and in many Muslim-majority ones, like Turkey, the ‘veil’ or ‘headscarf’ has generated tremendous controversy. In the eyes of many Europeans and Americans, the hijab has become the symbol of Muslim women’s purported lack of freedom under Islamic patriarchy and the mark of Islam’s supposed incompatibility with liberal democracy. These representations show how gendered symbols become implicated in broader social debates concerning modern governance. Hijab controversies tell us much more about Euro-American anxieties over citizenship, sexuality, and race than they do about the actual religious lives of Muslim women (Wesselhoeft, this volume; Mir, this volume; Goodwin, this volume). Exploring Muslim women’s sartorial practices and their justifications for wearing (or not wearing) headscarves or other articles of clothing shows how religious practices are necessarily tied to wider social factors. Muslim women not only choose whether or not to cover parts of their bodies, they also make choices about how to cover, including which garments to wear and their design, fit, and fabric materials. All of these choices have complex motivations that stem from individual preferences as well as broader political and economic realities, but especially the modern consumer economy. Sartorial practice is also contingent on women’s particular geographic location, educational or employment status, racial and ethnic identities, and family situation. Elizabeth Bucar uses the term ‘pious fashion’ to refer to this matrix of fashion choices and practices through which Muslim women signal their religious commitments, aesthetic tastes, ethnic heritage, and class status (Bucar 2017, pp. 3–4). Even in Iran and other places where the state requires women to cover in public, Iranian women display a variety of identities and preferences through what they wear (Shirazi, this volume). These embodied practices thus demonstrate how Muslim women make meaning and create belonging through a variety of sources, with religion being just one. Their participation in the global consumer economy also reveals persistent representations of Muslim women that privilege certain racialized bodies over and against others (Goodwin, this volume; Wheeler, this volume). In all of these examples, normative Muslim texts and practices are crucial for understanding sartorial trends, but never in isolation from other structuring forces.

Defining gender This volume focuses on gendered Muslim beliefs, practices, and identities. Scholars use the term gender to refer to how societies differentiate among human bodies according to sex characteristics as well as certain behavioural, psychological, and cultural features. Gender is a relational category that classifies individuals into groups such as ‘man’ and ‘woman’ or

6

Introduction

‘male’ and ‘female’. Today, such categories are often presented as mutually exclusive but as multiple chapters in this volume explore, gendered categories are dynamic and relational. In the contemporary American context, binary conceptions of gender are inextricably connected to social understandings of biological sex. Gendered norms and practices work on human bodies from birth. For example, parents now routinely have ultrasounds at 20 weeks into a pregnancy to check for potential health problems. These tests may also ‘reveal’ the baby’s sex. Based on that result, parents may choose clothing or decorate the baby’s nursery in particular colours and with particular objects, such as trucks for boys, dolls for girls. After babies are born, hospitals often assign and then record an infant’s sex based on observable biological characteristics such as the presence of a vagina or penis. These practices help to build the idea that sex is the biological, natural core of a binary gendered identity. That is, babies can be either male or female, but not some other category. Health care providers may then perform a number of gendered practices based on that assignment. A baby with a penis may be swaddled in a blue blanket and an infant with a vagina is swaddled in pink. Assigning binary sex to babies does not just reflect societal norms; such a practice is prescriptive, by helping to reinforce and maintain the sex/gender binary as natural (Butler 1989). However, these practices, peculiar to a particular time and place, further demonstrate how gender is something people do, not just what they intrinsically have. Despite the stable identity that sex assignment presumes, we know that designating an infant as ‘male’ or ‘female’ does not mean that the infant will necessarily grow up to identify with their assigned gendered or sexual identity. Some infants swaddled in pink blankets may grow up to identify as male or transgender or non-binary. Nor do these assignments reflect actual sex characteristics on a chromosomal level. Up to 10 per cent of those babies will have chromosomal variants that make them ‘intersex’, meaning they do not fit neatly into categories such as ‘male’ or ‘female’ that are based on observable characteristics such as the appearance of sex organs. Whatever their biological sex characteristics, any of those babies may grow up to identify as either male or female or as non-binary. As Indira Gesink explains in her contribution, knowledge of persons who do not fall into binary sex categories is far from new even when premodern cultures did not share notions of modern identity. Premodern scholars were aware of these sex variations and wrote about their implications for a host of religious and social practices (Gesink, this volume). Gender is thus better thought of in terms of process rather than as a fixed category. While sex and gender are often presented as natural, with gender identity following from biological sex, these identifiers are actually unstable markers and are culturally constructed. Gendered norms and practices do important cultural work on bodies from birth, but these practices are not solely determinant of a person’s gendered identity or expression. Gendered norms and practices are highly performative, dependent on how individuals and communities enact them, and how such enactments are perceived and acted upon by others in their historical and cultural context. And while the field of gender studies has historically been associated with the study of women, people with a variety of gendered identities, including men and non-binary people, participate in these processes of negotiating, maintaining, and challenging gendered categories and norms. Everyone does gender. Simone de Beauvoir’s classic observation that one is not born but rather is made a woman, captures the social processes through which individuals come to inhabit, perform, and sometimes contest gender ideals (de Beauvoir 1949). Moreover, gendered norms are engaged and performed in a variety of ways that are not always conscious for the performer.

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Emphasizing process underscores how gender norms and practices are culturally specific and historically contingent. Not all cultures associate blue with boys and pink with girls. Some societies recognize a third gender or non-binary persons; others do not. More importantly, the processes through which societies understand sex, gender, and the relationship between them depend on the political, social, religious, and economic conditions, rather than stemming from natural facts. These tensions are often best observed through social symbols. For example, high heels are now a symbol of femininity. When worn by a woman, high heels project female power while also signalling her sexual allure for men. Borrowed from Persian horse back riding culture, high heels gained popularity among the European elite men in the 17th century. The high heel still projected graceful power, but its gendered meaning connoted elite masculinity rather than femininity. That is, the high heel conveyed some of the same attributes of the wearer, but associated with a different gender. This one article of clothing shows how gendered practices and their perceived meanings are highly malleable, and change according to social conditions (Wade and Ferree 2015). Even within particular cultures, gendered classifications and their associated meanings and practices shift over time. Although often taken to be a natural (i.e. scientific) or divine distinction between human bodies, decades of cross-cultural gender studies scholarship have shown that there is no ‘man’ or ‘woman’ in a universal sense. Moreover, historians have warned against reading the modern gender binary back onto premodern societies, where different gender categories and frameworks operated. Studies of premodern Muslim sources have shown how in some contexts, scholars sometimes allowed for more ambiguity than a binary approach may presume, even if these authors did not share our modern concept of gender identity (Geissinger 2015, pp. 30–65; Gesink 2018). This observation has important implications for understanding the emergence of heterosexuality as a normative ideal, i.e. the expectation that male persons are expected to be attracted to female persons, and women to men. These expectations reinforce the idea that heteronormative couples are the ideal pairing, crucial for social reproduction, and therefore essential for national preservation. Through her examination of material culture and art in Iran, Afsaneh Najmabadi shows how a range of homoerotic practices and representations came to be displaced by heterosexuality as the singular sexual norm of Iranian modernity. She argues, ‘if the 19th century began with male and female beauties as desirable objects of male eroticism and ended with the female as the only acceptable object of desire of male eroticism, then all objects of male erotic desire had to become femininized. It is this momentum that created feminized passivity as the only position for the male homosexual objects in modernist imagination’ (Najmabadi 2005, p. 59). That is, a new conception of gender difference as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ narrowed Iranian conceptions about who was beautiful and desirous. The object of desire (whether heterosexual female or a homosexual male) became feminized and passive. Najmabadi’s work suggests that the gender binary and its related heteronormative ideal are now more important in contemporary Iran than in the past (Najmabadi 2005, p. 1). Yet it is important to keep in mind that religious practitioners (both male and female) and authority figures often present gendered identities and heterosexual desires as natural and divine or both. Many contemporary Muslims maintain that God created two categories of gendered bodies: men and women. In many cases, the binary supports an ideal model of gendered relationships, in which men and women assume complementary masculine/feminine roles and responsibilities in social institutions such as the family. In this arrangement, men often assume the role of primary breadwinners and public religious, political, and economic responsibilities. Women take charge of the caregiving responsibilities such as 8

Introduction

childrearing and household tasks. That these social roles are taken to be traditional and/or normative attests to the important role that gender norms and practices play in community belonging, religious authority, and conceptions of the divine. Even when ‘traditional’ norms are upheld and named as such, no simple recourse to ‘Islam’ explains why these ideals maintain their staying power. Individuals and communities shape the meaning and significance of these norms in particular historical contexts, in which Islamic norms and gendered norms are shaped by one another (Geissinger, this volume). The assumed naturalness of gendered identity and norms appears often in texts and institutions that seek to produce and maintain particular social relations. For instance, mosques are highly gendered spaces. Men and women often sit separately. Some ritual roles, such as that of the imam, or prayer leader, have historically been assigned only to men. Yet these arrangements have never been without debate and the need for justifications on the part of Muslim scholars. Marion Katz has explored why and how Muslim legal authorities have sought to limit female access to mosques, while attending to why such attempts were never entirely successful (Katz 2013). Katz shows how premodern scholars made claims that women did not belong in mosques and other public spaces during times in which women became more visible in religious and political settings. Such arguments thus reflected a dynamic relationship between political developments, local religious practice, and understandings of divine intent. In the modern world, as increasing numbers of Muslim women have become visible presences in mosques around the world, the mosque as a gendered space is changing too (Bano and Kalmbach 2012). Debates surrounding the presence of female bodies in certain spaces of worship has become reactivated, but this debate takes different shapes in particular cultural settings. The fact that these debates become reactivated demonstrates that gendered norms and practices within religious communities are contingent, rather than monolithic or static.

Situating the field of Islam and gender This volume builds on three key strains of scholarship in the field of Islam and gender: feminist engagements with Muslim sources; historical and anthropological literature that has explored the contours of Muslim women’s lives in global contexts; and the more recent turn toward queer theory, critical race theory, and masculinity studies. Many of the chapters in this volume continue the field’s historical focus on women’s lives and experiences. Other chapters explore the experiences of non-binary people and men. But all of them use gender as their analytical framework through which to explore the broader religious and political implications of their objects of study. In recent decades the field of Islam and gender has addressed several political concerns in both academic conversations and in broader public debates. The narrow frames through which gender and Islam continue to be represented demonstrate the enduring legacies of 18th and 19th century European colonial ventures into Muslim-majority societies. Muslim female bodies have long been sources of desire and disgust, as they signified alluring yet dangerous sites of imperial domination and rescue (Abu-Lughod 2013). The female Muslim body became a ground through which colonial actors constructed their versions of Islam as backward and uncivilized. At the same time, these gendered constructions undergirded racial hierarchies in which European, Christian societies were celebrated as the high point of civilization, while Muslim societies (as well as other non-Christian communities) were necessarily inferior and thus the targets for imperial domination.

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Scholars of Islam and gender have productively demonstrated how the legal, economic, and political changes wrought by colonialism created new gendered categories, identities, and practices for Muslims under imperial rule (Morgenstein Fuerst, this volume). Under the logic of colonialism, if Muslim women were passive victims, then Muslim men were either their brutal oppressors, patriarchal and domineering, or effeminate, decadent figures (Arjana 2015). These gendered constructions were highly racialised as well, turning on the notions of non-white people as inherently inferior to white Europeans. Although such representations have varied over time and space, Orientalist images of Muslim women as both objects of desire and as symbols of Islam’s incompatibility with the ‘West’ have proved to be remarkably durable. These representations reflect an ideology that declares to be in the service of improving the lives of Muslim women, but ultimately it serves political ends – usually the exercise of (neo)colonial power – that often have the opposite effect. These colonial logics are still at work today. Muslims have increasingly been the target of violence (often state-sponsored), surveillance, and discrimination around the globe, but especially in North America, Europe, South Asia, and China. Despite the fact that Muslims are overwhelmingly the victims of terrorist acts and white nationalists perpetuate many more acts of extremist violence, Islam is persistently cast as the existential threat to a liberal, democratic way of life and to state security more generally. The colonial narrative of ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’, to invoke Gayatri Spivak’s evergreen assessment of this political strategy, has retained its ideological appeal in the hands of political leaders looking to expand economic and political domination in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, under the guise of the War on Terror following 9/11 (Spivak 1994). This justification of military intervention has obvious echoes in imperial strategies that sought to save Muslim women by subjugating them to foreign rule. The legacies of colonialism and orientalism continue to shape the kinds of materials that scholars focus on, with particular consequences for how gendered norms and practices are presented. The tendency to focus on texts produced in the early centuries of Islam has been an enduring feature of Islamic studies since its beginnings. Within the field of Islamic studies in general and in the area of Islam and gender in particular, there has been far more attention to the Qurʾan and legal materials, with less attention to other religious sources (theology, philosophy, ethics), not to mention the broad literary and cultural production (such as poetry and art), which have all played important roles in shaping the political, social, and religious fabric of Muslim societies (Ahmed 2016). In the last few decades, scholars have challenged male-dominated perspectives in Muslim sources and the Islamic interpretative tradition (Barlas 2002; wadud 1999). amina wadud developed a rich feminist hermeneutic for assessing and challenging male-centred interpretations and for probing the gendered hierarchies undergirding Islamic sources. Her work has been highly generative for the field on the whole. In the process, wadud and others have proposed new understandings of Qurʾanic notions of justice, equality, and divinity as well as conceptions of Muslim authority (Chaudhry 2013; Geissinger 2015). These modes of inquiry have produced vibrant debates concerning, for example, the extent to which the Qurʾan professes egalitarian principles, as well as the impact of this gendered language, narratives, and content on living Muslim communities. Such scholarship has also investigated how interpretative traditions have been shaped by patriarchal and androcentric frameworks. Recent work by scholars such as Aysha Hidayatullah has pushed this conversation further, toward a critique of how some feminist scholars map their own normative assumptions about ideals such as equality onto the Qurʾan and other sacred texts (Hidayatullah 2014). In addition to probing the gendered assumptions and frameworks of texts, the field of Islam and gender has long focused on restoring Muslim women to the historical record and 10

Introduction

to investigating how and why gendered norms and practices took shape. Leila Ahmed’s ground-breaking Women and Gender in Islam (1992) argued that while the early Muslim community enacted more egalitarian gender norms, patriarchal practices came to be hegemonic in the decades following the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Along with the work of Fatima Mernissi (1983), Ahmed’s book provided a foundational account of the contributions of Muslim women in Islamic history. Ahmed and Mernissi both noted how the construction of the classical Islamic tradition normalized patriarchy and decreased female religious and political power, as well as women’s social and legal status. Most importantly, these histories demonstrated how patriarchy came to be naturalized as God’s intended law. Social history has also highlighted the importance of everyday negotiations of gender norms and practices in Muslim contexts. Historians such as Leslie Pierce and Judith Tucker have shown how Muslim women participated in legal proceedings, and while untrained in the realm of fiqh, have helped to shape the mechanisms and outcomes of Muslim legal proceedings. These works reveal Islamic law as a process, not a fixed set of rules enshrined in a set of texts. Although courts often crystallized patriarchal arrangements that placed women in subordinate roles to men, their work explains how women also used the law and the courts to improve their material circumstances. Rosemary Admiral (this volume) explores Islamic law as a site of local contestation among a variety of social actors only some of whom were specialists in fiqh. These actors bring divergent motivations, skills, and aspirations to their understanding of the relationship between sexual ethics and social order, which they marshal to greater or lesser effect depending on their contingent positions within multiple domains of social power. Similarly within anthropology, the themes of agency and authority have been key areas of inquiry in the study of gender and Islam, particularly in regards to the experiences of women. Saba Mahmood’s landmark study (2005) of Egyptian women affiliated with the revivalist mosque movement paved the way for more nuanced examination of female engagement with the Islamic tradition and how textual study and ritual practice facilitate their embodiment of religious norms. In Mahmood’s analysis, women do more than simply conform to, or challenge, prescriptive discourses. Rather, Muslim women possess complex goals and motivations for inhabiting conservative religious norms. Their religious practices and frameworks often complicate liberal feminist concepts such as autonomy and freedom (Mahmood 2005). Ethnographers have built a rich body of scholarship that has documented emerging gendered religious authority in the modern world. As Muslim women entered public spaces (schools, places of employment, civil society) in greater numbers in the 20th century, their religious roles shifted as well. Joseph Hill documents how some Sufi women in West Africa have built large followings of urban young people. Rather than eschewing gendered practices usually associated with women, such as cooking, these female Sufi leaders embrace them. Hill demonstrates that these emergent forms of religious authority enable extraordinary women to both achieve great spiritual heights and reinforce gender difference. More recent scholarship has refocused the centre of inquiry on gender, expanding the locus of inquiry to include men and masculinity (Abdul Khabeer 2016). This focus on gendered norms and practices illuminates how men and women navigate patriarchal gendered norms and expectations that can be damaging for both of them. Marcia Inhorn (2012) shows how new companionate ideals have taken hold in Arab marriages among both men and women. She shows how the agency of individual couples has been paramount in the shift toward smaller families centred on the nuclear family unit, which enable women to work outside the home, and for men to assume child care responsibilities, including family planning and struggles with infertility. 11

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Scholars have also interrogated masculinity and homosociality in Muslim texts to show how Muslim men also negotiate gendered norms and perform gendered practices. This line of inquiry has demonstrated how foundational sources that profess to be universal are actually highly particular in their outlook, usually aimed at an elite male audience. Zahra Ayubi’s recent work on akhlaq (philosophical ethics) has shown how elite men were the presumed audience for texts aimed at cultivating ethical refinement. Non-elite men and women were merely instrumental to this project of ethical perfection (Ayubi 2019). Ayubi demonstrates how gendered assumptions in these texts produce tensions between their stated commitment of metaphysical equality of all humans and their conviction that women and non-elite men were simply not capable of ethical perfection. Other foundational work in masculinity studies (De Sondy 2013) explores how patriarchal interpretations of Muslim sacred texts have foreclosed possibilities for masculinity. De Sondy’s Islamic Masculinities called for new models of Muslim manhood that more fully account for the many roles that exemplary Muslim men have held, both past and present. The study of Islam and gender has only recently begun to use the insights of queer theory to explore Muslim texts and practices. Fatima Seedat has called for ‘queering the study of Islam’, a project that entails both the intentional study of alternative sexualities and the study of non-normative areas of study, for example, the introduction of Islamic perspectives in hegemonically Christian contexts (Seedat 2018). Adopting a posture of ‘sitting’ with difference and irresolution, Seedat encourages scholars to resist seeing the Islamic tradition as essentially ‘straightened’ or absolutely heteronormative (Seedat 2018). For Seedat, the challenge of queering the study of Islam lies in the capacity of scholars to analyse the ambiguities around sexual and gender difference without flattening or essentializing them. The above discussion demonstrates just a sampling of the broader insights that are generated through a focus on gender in Muslim contexts. And yet the marginalization of this kind of inquiry continues to happen on two fronts: one, the ongoing lack of attention to women and non-binary people as agents shaping their own histories and as important to the history of Islam more broadly; and two, the ongoing lack of attention to gender theory as a rich analytical lens for scholarship in Islamic studies (Kueny 2013). The contributors to this volume thus share a commitment to interrogate these power dynamics through a variety of theoretical and methodological tools, including but not limited to feminist inquiry. Although this self-reflexivity is practiced in different ways, each contributor sees this interrogation of how academic knowledge is produced, and who benefits from it, as essential to their academic practice. The contributors share this ethical stance of self-reflexivity, whether they identify as Muslim or not, whether they see their scholarship as normative or descriptive or both, or whether their work concerns premodern or modern contexts. These chapters also share a commitment to opening up new archives and new voices in the study of Islam, and to exploring expanded theoretical and methodological terrain for exploring them. These exciting possibilities for the future of Islam and gender are evident in each of the chapters, which are briefly outlined below.

Chapter outline Part I Foundational texts in historical and contemporary contexts The chapters in Part I build on the robust scholarship that analyses gender norms and practices within authoritative Muslim texts and the genres that emerged to interpret them. In Chapter 1, ‘Classic Qurʾanic exegesis and gender’, Hadia Mubarak captures the internal 12

Introduction

pluralism of tafsīr (Qurʾanic interpretation). She takes up Karen Bauer’s (2015) argument regarding the polysemy of Qurʾanic interpretation to examine controversial verses dealing with polygyny and wives’ obligations in marriage. Mubarak argues that rather than cast the Qurʾan as either patriarchal or egalitarian, scholars should instead attend to the complex web of social hierarchies through which interpreters attempted to promote just gendered norms and practices. Carolyn G. Baugh expands on this inquiry into the internal plurality of Muslim discourses concerning sex and marriage through her analysis of 9th century legal compendia, or the musannaf genre. Chapter 2, ‘Sex and marriage in early Islamic law’, explores the forgotten responses to daily situations that were preserved in this legal tradition alongside records of the practices and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, his Companions, and the early generations of followers. The compendia reveal the legal tensions arising from situations stemming from daily life, and crucially, the problems posed by ruling an expanding multireligious and multiethnic empire. Zahra Ayubi’s contribution, ‘Islamic gender ethics: traditional discourses, critiques, and new frameworks of inclusivity’, similarly expands the textual horizon for inquiry into Islam and gender. For Ayubi, ‘Islamic ethics’ encompasses a broad array of sources including scriptures (Qurʾan and hadith), fiqh (jurisprudence), akhlaq (philosophical ethics), and Sufism. After surveying previous feminist engagements with Islamic ethics, Ayubi excavates new approaches, such as the ethics of care and love ethics, which suggest alternative frameworks for Islamic normativity. Taking up this constructive thread, Jerusha Rhodes lays out the contours of a Muslima theology in Chapter 4. A constructive, theological, and comparative project, Muslima theology aims to interrogate assumptions concerning gender and women within theological explorations of God and the divine and its relation to humanity and other forms of creation. Through comparative engagement with Christian and Jewish feminist thought, Rhodes shows that interreligious feminist debate is essential to the work of Muslima theology. In the final chapter in Part I, Fatima Seedat further investigates gendered approaches to Islamic law through her survey of feminist approaches to Muslim legal texts and practices. She outlines three trajectories that have emerged over the course of 40 years of inquiry: frameworks that propose new interpretations, approaches that move from deconstruction to reconstruction, and ethics-based reform projects. Seedat shows how all of these methodologies focus on the accountability that scholars and other religious authorities have toward women and gender minorities in their local communities..

Part II Sex, sexuality, and gender difference Part II shows how gendered hierarchies and practices are implicated in configurations of sexuality and sexual difference. These chapters interrogate connections between gender and sexuality, showing how they help to constitute broader relations of power in the premodern and modern periods. In Chapter 6, Ash Geissinger challenges the conventional view that premodern textual traditions were uniformly heteronormative and that they prescribed a gender binary based on physical (namely genital) differences. Using gender and queer theory, Geissinger probes several hadiths to demonstrate how non-normative persons and gender minorities, who fell into a variety of social categories, were in fact central to constructions of power, space, and authority in an emerging Islamic empire. Indira Gesink’s piece further explores one such group of gendered minorities known as the khuntha, or ‘intersex’ in premodern legal and medical discourse. Chapter 7, ‘Intersex in Islamic medicine, law, and activism’, shows how Muslim medical and legal authorities addressed intersex individuals’ position of sexual ambiguity. Rather than seeking to erase or correct this 13

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ambiguity, premodern Muslim authorities debated the position of intersex individuals in relation to practices such as inheritance and dress as well as institutions such as slavery and marriage. Gesink suggests that these premodern texts, with their recognition of nonbinary persons, could be a potential resource for trans* and other gender minorities’ activism. Turning our attention to the modern period, Anissa Hélie surveys sexual rights advocacy, paying particular attention to the ways that advocates and their opponents have engaged human rights frameworks. Chapter 8, ‘Sexuality and human rights: actors and arguments, considers how diverse actors marshal categories such as ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ to expand or deny sexual rights to women and gendered minorities. While the human rights framework has many flaws, Hélie demonstrates how local actors have eliminated damaging practices and challenged laws that deny the right to sexual expression and bodily autonomy through engagement with human rights concepts and strategies Kirsten Wesselhoeft shows how gender and sexual difference and the eroticization of interactions among men and women have come to play a crucial role in French imaginaries of national identity. Chapter 9, ‘Mixité, gender difference, and the politics of Islam in France after the headscarf ban’, highlights the concept of mixité, or prescribed heterosocial interactions. The headscarf, which symbolizes gender segregation and female modesty, is thus seen as undermining these supposed foundations of French identity. Wesselhoeft demonstrates how public critiques of Islam increasingly centre on solidifying gender difference and erotic gender mixing as essential to the construction of Frenchness. This renewed emphasis on mixité and the erotics of public life has implications not just for Muslim women but for all women in the French republic.

Part III Gendered authority and piety Part III explores the variegated positions of authority that Muslim women inhabit in the modern world. Muslim women are healers, teachers, transnational Sufi leaders, chaplains, and preachers. They often have significance caregiving responsibilities, especially the task of raising pious Muslim children. Some are recognized by their communities; others are less visible. In some places women in authority roles are working to challenge dominant social hierarchies, while in others they seek to maintain what are seen as timeless gendered divisions of labour that restrict certain forms of religious authority to male and female bodies. In Chapter 10, ‘Gendering the divine: women, femininity, and queer identities on the Sufi path’, Merin Shobhana Xavier traces the ambivalent dimensions of images, concepts, and frameworks related to the feminine in Sufi contexts. She argues that gendered norms are often subverted in everyday practice and sometimes open up possibilities for queer expressions. Chapter 11, ‘Gender and the Karbala Paradigm: on studying contemporary Shiʿi women’ shows how representations and practices of Zaynab in Twelver Shiʿism have changed over the past four decades. Szanto offers a more expansive view of Shiʿi piety by reconsidering the narratives and practices of Zaynab, who has come to represent a wide range of possible political and religious roles. These practices and narratives are not the products of a broader Muslim turn toward self-cultivation, but rather the result of persistent conditions of war and violence experienced by Shiʿi communities in various contexts. Danielle Widmann Abraham examines the gendered dimensions of zakat practices in Chapter 12. By comparing three philanthropic organizations in India and the United States, she shows how, through their efforts to challenge structural poverty and state violence, zakat projects also stabilize gendered norms and representations. In Chapter 13, Sajida Jalalzai turns our attention to emerging forms of female religious authority in the United States through the 14

Introduction

example of chaplaincy. She examines how the institution of chaplaincy enables women to take up new public leadership roles, and demonstrates how this position of leadership serves the specific needs of Muslim Americans. Drawing on fieldwork with female chaplains, she shows how the role of chaplain, with its emphasis on pastoral care and emotional labour, reinforces, rather than disrupts, traditional notions of femininity while possibly challenging dominant modes of masculinity. Finally, in Chapter 14, Abdoulaye Sounaye looks at the rise of Muslim women preachers in Niger, who have effectively used radio and television to carve out new positions of religious authority. Their message of reviving Muslim practice at the local level has proven to be highly appealing among urban youth. And in the process, these preachers have effectively challenged a male-dominated religious sphere.

Part IV Political and religious displacements The chapters in Part IV examine the gendered dimensions of colonial and postcolonial legal and political processes. Together, these chapters demonstrate how experiences of displacement, whether through colonialism or war, are themselves gendered. In Chapter 15, Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst demonstrates the long reach of colonial gender laws in India. Through an examination of two 19th century laws, the Contagious Diseases Act and the triple talaq law, she shows how legal categories (and the assumptions undergirding them) helped to inscribe intersecting gendered and racialized hierarchies that continue to have resonance in Indian politics and society. These laws had consequences for both Muslim men and women, who found themselves subject to a legal regime bent on solidifying their religious, racial, and gendered identities. The ways that gender interfaces with other forms of political and religious identities is also a principal theme in Nathaniel Mathews’ contribution, Chapter 16, ‘Islam and gender on the Swahili coast of East Africa’. This chapter explores the gendered effects of major social changes in East Africa, namely the abolition of slavery and the end of colonial rule. He shows that the rise of ‘anxious patriarchy’ in Swahili communities in the 20th century cannot be attributed solely to the legal or textual traditions of Islam, but rather the result of economic and political changes whose effects are discernible in the local negotiations of everyday life. The next two chapters deal with the ongoing effects of the vast humanitarian crisis unfolding in Syria and surrounding regions. In Chapter 17, ‘Mujahidun, mujahidat: balancing gender in the struggle of Jihadi-Salafis’, Nathan French traces the evolution of the term mujahidat within Jihadi-Salafi writings. Contrary to media accounts that define women who fight for ISIS in relation to their husbands and children, French paints a more complex picture of subjectivity and agency. He shows that the term ‘mujahidat’ encompasses three potential roles for women to occupy: as purified embodiments of passive femininity, as female martyrs who take on military responsibilities, and as self-renouncing actors who embody exemplary models of patience and other virtues. Within this same geographic context, Sarah Tobin explores the effects of mass displacement on the pious practices of female Syrian refugees. Chapter 18, ‘Modelling exile: Syrian women gather to discuss prophetic examples in Jordan’ shows how experiences of exile have changed the religious practices and perspectives of the women she interviewed. In contrast to the ‘architectural piety’ of Syrian religious practice before the war, which tended to be more individualized and focused on visiting prominent mosques, Muslim piety in exile has become more community based and more centred on the Qurʾan and prophetic narratives. This chapter shows how practices of place-making produce new forms of religious agency and learning, even under significant political and economic distress. 15

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Part V Negotiating law, ethics, and normativity Legal contexts have long been key sites for the study of Islam and gender, encompassing both the administration of law in specific institutional contexts, such as the courts, and ethical and other normative settings (which often overlap). Part V explores new directions in this sub-field, examining feminist and human rights approaches to the dynamic, shifting ways in which law, gender, and Muslim practice interact. Chapter 19, ‘Transgressing the boundaries: zinā and legal accommodation in the premodern Maghrib’, uses fatwas dealing with sexual transgressions from premodern North Africa to demonstrate how various legal actors, specialists, and non-specialists alike used Islamic legal norms and concepts toward a variety of ethical and pragmatic goals. Even in cases that seemed to warrant harsh punishment, Rosemary Admiral finds that jurists and everyday Muslims were guided by the imperative to bring sexual relationships back into licit arrangements, usually by restoring the marriage, and in these cases, they were far less likely to punish transgressions. In Chapter 20, Lena Salaymeh critiques the colonialist feminism paradigm and its distorting representations of Muslim women. By comparing practices of female circumcision and cosmetic surgery, Salaymeh seeks to expose the inconsistent standards applied to Muslim and non-Muslim women. In the process, she offers possibilities for a decolonial feminism. Chapter 21 highlights the contributions of female Syrian scholars to contemporary fiqh and hadith scholarship. Salem demonstrates how these scholars cultivated broad followings of women by synthesizing and collecting a vast array of premodern material into new, accessible formats. In the final chapter of Part V, ‘Human rights, gender, and the state: Islamic perspectives’, Shannon Dunn explores the tension between intellectual efforts to expand and enhance women’s rights in Muslim contexts and the political imperative of selfdetermination in postcolonial contexts. Through a close examination of key Muslim thinkers who engage a human rights framework, Dunn shows the internal diversity of contemporary Muslim thought on questions concerning women’s rights, what those entail, and how best to achieve them in the legal institutions of modern nation-states, which are often guided by other priorities.

Part VI Vulnerability, care, and violence in Muslim families Part IV focuses on the institution that has been a key focal point for the study of Islam and gender: the family. These chapters go beyond culturalist and modernization approaches to examine the diverse familial arrangements of modern Muslim families. While families can be sites of care and companionship, they can also be places of violence and instability. In Chapter 23, ‘Two quiet revolutions: Islam, gender, and (in)fertility’, Marcia Inhorn analyses two major recent developments among Arab families: dramatic rising infertility rates and the increasing use of reproductive technologies by both men and women. Inhorn argues that these shifts are due not just to increased access to and religious support for assisted reproductive technologies. They also reflect broader changes in attitudes concerning the family and gendered roles within them. In particular, she highlights the role of individual and familial agency through the pervasive ideal of companionate marriages formed around emotional bonds and the desire on the part of Muslim couples to have smaller families. Yet these same forces that have supported the autonomy of nuclear families and companionate marriages have also diminished broader kin networks. As Mary Elaine Hegland explores in Chapter 24, ‘Aging and the elderly: diminishing family care systems and need for 16

Introduction

alternatives’, older women in Iran expected to depend on extended family networks in the end of life. They now find themselves subject to neglect and sometimes abuse as their sons and daughters prioritize careers and their own families, and as they outlive their husbands. Through their stories, Hegland documents growing isolation and neglect among this demographic, arguing that alternative social institutions and ethics of care ought to be developed to fill the current void in material and emotional support. The last two chapters highlight advocacy efforts to address the troubling problem of domestic violence in Muslim families. In Chapter 25, ‘Domestic violence and US Muslim communities: negotiating advocacy, vulnerability, and gender norms’, Juliane Hammer draws our attention to the complex interplay of factors that anti-domestic violence advocates must negotiate in their work to support survivors. Not only do these advocates engage broader American gender norms and the persistent neglect of domestic violence as an urgent and widespread social problem, they also have to navigate anti-Muslim racism, especially pernicious representations of Muslims as inherently violent and oppressive toward women. They also seek the elimination of domestic abuse within a specifically Muslim context that produces another set of constraints and possibilities around gender norms, textual interpretation, and religious authority. In Chapter 26, Sophia Arjana looks at anti-domestic violence efforts in Singapore led by a Sufi organization known as Sout Ilaahi. The community uses practices of spiritual discipline and therapeutic models to help survivors deal with the physical and emotional toll of their abuses, while encouraging survivors to use law enforcement and governmental resources.

Part VII Representation, commodification, and popular culture Finally, Part VII illustrates the multifaceted dimensions of Islam and gender in modern consumer culture. These chapters work to expand the archive of Islam and gender to include social practices not typically deemed ‘religious’. In the contemporary world, this means taking stock of the importance of pop culture and consumer practice in sustaining religious identity and practice (Deeb and Harb 2016; Lofton 2017; McLarney 2012; Gökariskel and McLarney 2010). Muslim religious identities are constructed and negotiated through a whole host of material and consumer practices from fashion and makeup to film and social media. Pop culture producers and consumers play an indispensable role in mediating transnational perceptions of gender and Muslims. And these representations are indelibly marked by contemporary racial, national, and class-based assumptions. In Chapter 27, Faegheh Shirazi explores the politics and economics of Muslim fashion in Iran. She analyses new trends in women’s fashion choices, and the commitments they perform by wearing them, in terms of broader economic developments that have made Muslims into a growing market for the global fashion industry. In her contribution, Chapter 28, Kayla Renée Wheeler examines how Muslim fashion companies construct and distribute representations of the ideal Muslim woman alongside the Islamic clothing they sell. Through her analysis of Instagram ads, she argues that these companies portray thin, covered, brown female bodies as normatively Muslim and in the process maintain extant racial hierarchies within the umma that marginalize Black Muslim women. Building on the politics of Muslim fashion, Shabana Mir critiques the racial and gendered dimensions of the burqa bans in France. Her chapter, ‘French Muslim women’s clothes: the secular state’s religious war against racialised women’, argues that these bans reveal how secular state policy and public discourse in France has marginalized and stigmatized Muslim women in a number of chilling ways, rendering them hypervisible threats to French identity, all in the name of affirming the autonomy and agency of women writ large. 17

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Kristian Petersen examines questions concerning representation and visibility in Chapter 30, ‘Female filmmakers and Muslim women in cinema’. Focusing on Southeast Asian films, he shows how Muslim women, both as creators and subjects of ‘transnational cinema’, defy conventional understandings of terms such as ‘Muslim’. He argues that film represents a rich, intercultural archive for exploring how gender constructs other categories such as ethnicity and race, as well as how religious representations are produced and received in global contexts. The final chapter, Megan Goodwin’s ‘Gender, race, and American Islamophobia’ pursues an intersectional analysis of anti-Muslim racism, tracing its historical roots and examining its contemporary manifestations. Through recent legal and cultural developments, such as the Muslim ban, Goodwin demonstrates how Islamophobia depends not just on racist and racialized representations of Muslims, but also how they perpetuate images of white women as passive victims of male Muslim violence.

A note on classroom use This volume was designed with an undergraduate audience in mind. It aims to provide students with a window into the rich scholarly conversations in the field of Islam and gender, as well as to give them a sense of the theoretical and methodological diversity of these conversations. To do this, the volume contains multiple chapters that focus on key areas of inquiry, such as family, marriage, and sexuality, as well as religious practices that have becomes sites of political controversy, such as the headscarf/veil, in different geographic locations. It is my hope that this handbook will provide a compelling entry point into both the broad range of inquiry and the depth of the insights that have emerged from this exciting field.

References Abdul Khabeer, S. (2016). Muslim Cool: Race, Islam, and Hip Hop in the United States. New York: New York University Press. Abu-Lughod, L. (2013). Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ahmed, L. (1992). Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ahmed, S. (2016). What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univesrity Press. Ali, K. (2006) ‘Polgyny,’ The Qurʾan: An Encyclopedia. Edited by Oliver Leaman. London: Routledge, pp. 504–506. Ali, K. (2010). Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Arjana, S.R. (2015). Muslims in the Western Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Ayubi, Z. (2019). Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society. New York: Columbia University Press. Asad, T. (2009). ‘The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam’, Qui Parle 17 (2), 1–30. Bano, M. and Kalmbach, H. (eds.) (2012). Women, Leadership, and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority. Leiden: Brill. Barlas, A. (2002). Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qurʾan. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bauer, K. (2015). Gender Hierarchy in the Qurʾan: Medieval Interpretations, Modern Responses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bucar, E. (2017). Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Butler, J. (1989). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Chaudhry, A. (2013). Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press. De Beauvoir, S. (1949) The Second Sex. Paris: Gallimard.

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Deeb, L. and Harb M. (2013). Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shiʿite South Beirut. Princeton: Princeton University Press. De Sondy, A. (2013). The Crisis of Islamic Masculinities. London: Bloomsbury. Geissinger, A. (2015). Gender and Muslim Constructions of Exegetical Authority: A Rereading of the Classical Genre of Qurʾan Commentary. Leiden: Brill. Gökariskel, B. and McLarney, E. (2010). ‘Muslim Women, Consumer Capitalism, and the Islamic Culture Industry’ Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 6(3), 1–18. Hidayatullah, A. (2014). Feminist Edges of the Qurʾan. New York: Oxford University Press. Inhorn, M.C. (2012). The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Katz, M.H. (2013). Prayer in Islamic Thought and Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kueny, K. (2013). Conceiving Identities: Maternity in Medieval Muslim Discourse and Practice. Albany: State University of New York. Lofton, K. (2017). Consuming Religion. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mack, B. and Boyd, J. (2000). One Woman’s Jihad: Nana Asma’u, Scholar and Scribe. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Mahmood, S. (2005). The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Majeed, D. (2016). Polygyny: What It Means When African American Women Share Their Husbands. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Mernissi, F. (1983). Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society. Revised Edition. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Najmabadi, A. (2005). Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Orsi, R. (2018). History and Presence. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Ruffle, K. (2010). ‘May Fatimah Gather Our Tears: The Mystical and Intercessory Powers of Fatimah alZahra in Indo-Persian, Shiʿi Devotional Literature and Performance’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 30 (3), 386–397. Sciupac, E.P. (2017). ‘U.S. Muslims Are Religiously Observant but Open to Multiple Interpretations of Islam’, [Online] www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/28/u-s-muslims-are-religiously-obser vant-but-open-to-multiple-interpretations-of-islam/ Accessed March 12, 2020. Seedat, F. (2018). ‘Sitting in Difference: Queering the Study of Islam’, Journal of Feminist Studies of Religion 34 (1), 138–142. Wade, L. and Ferree, M.M. (2015). Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. New York: W.W. Norton. wadud, a. (1999). Qurʾan and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press.

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PART I

Foundational texts in historical and contemporary contexts

1 CLASSICAL QURʾANIC EXEGESIS AND WOMEN Hadia Mubarak

Among its many functions, the genre of tafsı̄ r has long created an interpretive space for understanding the Qurʾanic text. The Islamic exegetical tradition underscored textual polysemy as an inherent feature of the Qurʾan, rendering it amenable to a multiplicity of readings (Calder, 1993, p. 103). As early as the mid-8th century, when the genre of tafsı̄ r first emerged, exegetes debated the meaning of the Qur’an – a scripture of 114 chapters and 6,236 verses1 believed to be the word of God verbatim. While exegetes of all stripes and colours agreed on the Qurʾan’s divine origin, this did not preclude their disagreement on the nature of Authorial intent. What does God mean by His words? What are the legal or theological implications of a given verse? To what extent should the Qurʾan’s words be measured against an external source, such as law, prophetic tradition, theology, philology, and the like? The answers to these questions were by no means monolithic. Early on in its development, the exegetical tradition, therefore, bequeathed to Islam’s central text a multiplicity of meaning. Interpretive pluralism has been a key feature of tafsı̄ r. As Karen Bauer notes, the genre of tafsı̄ r was ‘inclusivist’, ‘polyvalent’, including conflicting interpretations, and ‘diachronic’, developing through time (Bauer, 2015, pp. 11–12). Interpretive differences that arose between exegetes were the product of two sources of influence: hermeneutics and context. First, an exegete’s methodological, legal, and theological inclinations came to bear in his/her participation in the interpretive process (Calder, 1993, pp. 105–106). Second, an exegete’s intellectual, historical, and social milieu often influenced his/her intellectual preoccupations and concerns (Netton, 1996, p. 132). Nowhere does this become more obvious than in a comparative study of pre-modern and modern Qurʾanic exegesis. The milieu in which a scholar writes his exegesis of the Qurʾan often frames his intellectual concerns and priorities, which bears influence on his interpretive choices. As Bauer accurately notes, ‘For the ʿulamaʾ, social context extended into their methods of writing texts. Their intellectual milieu had much to do with how they wrote, which in turn affects what they wrote about women’ (2015, p. 272). As such, this chapter brings attention to the role of context in premodern exegetical interpretations of the Qurʾan. Does the exegetical tradition evince the same level of pluralism in its interpretations regarding women and gender? The answer to this question remains disputed in contemporary

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scholarship on gender in the Qurʾan. Maysam al-Faruqi, for example, describes the classical genre of Qurʾanic exegesis as ‘decidedly misogynistic’ (2000, p. 82). Similarly, Asma Barlas argues that the exegetical tradition ‘enabled the “textualization of misogyny” in Islam’ (2002, p. 9 n35, citing Rashaand Sass). amina wadud depicts traditional exegesis as ‘voiceless’ of women’s perspective (1999, p. 2, 2000, p. 13). Yet much of these works evade a substantive engagement with tafsı̄ r as a scholarly genre with methodological boundaries. In the last decade, a few works have attempted to bridge the separate fields of tafsı̄ r and gender studies. Most notably, Bauer and Ayesha Chaudhry have extensively examined the pre-modern exegetical tradition on significant gender issues in the Qurʾan. In her work, Bauer underscores the diversity and heterogeneity of the pre-modern exegetical tradition on gender, in terms of both methodology and interpretation. She examines interpretations of verses 2:228, 4:1, and 4:34. Based on her findings, she writes in ‘Room for Interpretation’, Despite broad agreement on some essential points, the interpretations of these verses present a striking range and variety through time. The nature of the variation found in these exegeses means that they defy simple categorization of ‘dogmatic’ … A more precise way of describing the exegeses of these verses is that certain interpretations remain constant through time, while others vary between times, places, and individual authors. This gives the impression of constancy while incorporating change and variety. (2008, p. 2)2 In contrast to this representation of diversity, Ayesha Chaudhry depicts the pre-modern exegetical tradition on gender as ‘consistently and monolithically patriarchal’ (2013, p. 40). While she notes a variety in interpretation, she argues that a constant feature of all premodern exegetes in their exegesis on Q. 4:34 is that they predicate their interpretations on ‘a patriarchal idealized cosmology’ (2013, pp. 54–55). Departing from binary conceptions of Qurʾanic tafsı̄ r as either patriarchal or egalitarian (Naguib, 2010, p. 33), this chapter seeks to complicate current narratives on scriptural interpretations of women and gender in the Qurʾan. It argues that a closer engagement with tafsı̄ r reveals a more complex image of classical and modern exegetes’ attitude towards gender, a byproduct of the genre’s interpretive pluralism. The medieval exegetical tradition, despite its patriarchal bent, simultaneously reflects a consistent concern for women’s welfare and wellbeing. For example, although medieval male exegetes do not appear to place a premium on notions of gender justice or gender equality, as we understand these concepts in our contemporary context, they were quite attuned to notions of justice, legal rights, and men’s responsibility to provide good companionship (h ̣usn al-muʿā shara) to their wives as evident by their discourse on marriage and divorce in the Qurʾan. Further, as I illustrate below, although premodern commentators showed no discomfort with the institution of polygyny as expressed by verse 4:3, they all emphatically concluded that the verse’s central objective was to protect women and orphans from injustice. In fact, as early as the 10th century, Qurʾanic exegetes posited that monogamy was the preferred course of action for those who want to stay clear from potential injustice, as implied by the wording of Qurʾanic verse 4:3. Rather than force this tradition into a false dichotomy of being either ‘misogynistic’ or ‘egalitarian’, scholars who work on gender in the Qurʾan should consider more nuanced ways of engaging and capturing the complexity of the tafsı̄ r tradition. On women’s issues in particular, medieval exegetes were clearly influenced by their historically bound, socialcultural realities. As Karen Bauer writes, 24

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There is no doubt that the patriarchal context of pre-modern Muslim societies shaped their interpretations, but that does not mean that interpreters had no notion of fairness or justice. At times, they too struggled to explain a system that might lead to abuses of power. (2015, p. 275) A historical survey of the genre of exegesis suggests that patriarchal interpretations become entrenched by the 6th/12th century.3 Many, although not all, classical commentaries reflect a persistent adherence to patriarchal norms about women’s place in society. To attempt to prove otherwise would be disingenuous. Yet this patriarchy should not be mistaken as misogyny. Rather, it is a reflection of historically particular notions of justice. As Aysha Hidayatullah writes, ‘we often forget that our notions of equality are guided by historical values of our own that we bring to the text’ (2014, pp. 150–151). The same is also true regarding gender justice. It was natural, to some extent, for the Qurʾan’s medieval readers to read the Qurʾan in light of their present realities. Their conceptions of women’s roles in societies, capabilities, and weaknesses were in many ways informed by existing social hierarchies, which they projected upon the text. The social hierarchies of the medieval period were a given. As scholars such as Kecia Ali (2010) and Patricia Clark (2001) have illustrated, medieval societies in both the Middle East and Greco-Rome were structured on a complex web of social hierarchies. Men and women could occupy diverse positions on the strata of social privilege based on a multitude of factors, including one’s status as free or slave, married or unmarried, and even ‘honour’. In Qurʾanic exegesis, like in other modes of interpretation, there is a life-relation between the exegete and the subject matter of the text (Rahman, 1997, p. 3), which becomes most evident upon comparing a number a diverse number of exegeses on a specific text. Is it possible that gender hierarchies, however, were not by-products of the medieval period but embedded within the Qurʾanic text itself? This question has been at the centre of intense scholarly debate in the last two decades. The answers generated by scholarship on gender and the Qurʾan are far from conclusive. On one end of the spectrum are scholars, such as Asma Barlas, Azizah al-Hibri, Maysam al-Faruqi, Riffat Hassan, and amina wadud, who absolve the Qurʾanic text itself of patriarchy and instead blame the exegetical tradition for entrenching patriarchal readings in classical Muslim thought.4 On the other end of the spectrum are scholars, such as Kecia Ali, Aysha Hidayatullah, and Raja Rhouni,5 who critique feminist scholars for imposing their own contemporary sensibilities upon the Qurʾan, even when the literal meanings of the text appear to contradict their egalitarian aspirations for it. For example, in Feminist Edges of the Qurʾan, Hidayatullah argues that there may be no inherent contradiction between Qurʾanic verses that express egalitarianism with those that express gender hierarchies. She writes, ‘It could be that in the context of the Qurʾan “patriarchy is not bigotry, hatred or oppression, but rather the natural social order”’ (Hidayatullah, 2014, p. 166, quoting Linda Luitje, 2001, p. 152). Hidayatullah is correct to note that social hierarchies did not necessarily preclude mutual love and affection; in fact, the gendered nurture women were expected to receive, based on exegetical articulations, may have been a function of their social status as ‘individuals in need of protection’. As Patricia Clark (2001, pp. 54–75) also notes in regard to GrecoRoman societies, ‘More than a simple hierarchy of authority and obedience was involved, however, for at the core of the ideal family was the conjugal pair, bound by mutual ties of marital affection’. However, it is important not to reduce the Qurʾan’s intended meanings to its historical context or the context of its exegetes. While the Qurʾan’s historical context 25

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is critical to an accurate understanding of its development over 23 lunar years, it would be a mistake to collapse this historical context with the Qurʾan’s transcendent meanings, which are being continuously negotiated and renegotiated by its communities of readers. The textual polysemy of Islam’s longstanding interpretive tradition of tafsı̄ r underscores the fact that meanings are often derived by their authors. There is no hegemony of meaning, as Jonathan Brown (2014, p. 84) argues, but a ‘hegemonic power’ of communal understanding. The community reading the text establishes the boundaries of interpretive possibility.

Medieval exegesis on women As the Qurʾan has become the focal point of the modern debate on whether Islam is irreparably patriarchal or even misogynist, this chapter takes these three verses as the centre of its focus: 4:3, 4:34, and 4:128. These verses have been at the centre of a contentious debate within the last two decades on the Qurʾan’s potential to be a site for gender justice. Verse 4:3 has elicited attention in the debate on gender for granting men the right to marry up to four women, under certain conditions. Verse 4:34, the target of even greater controversy, grants husbands the function of qiwā ma over women due to ‘what God has preferred over others’ and men’s financial maintenance of women. Among other themes, it also prescribes three measures for dealing with a wife who is guilty of nushū z. Based on a literal reading of the verse, these three measures are first, giving advice, second, hajr in beds (primarily interpreted as sexual abandonment or separation of beds), and third, hitting. It impossible to untangle the translation of qiwā ma or nushū z from their interpretation; for the sake of clarity, however, men’s qiwā ma over women has been traditionally interpreted as guardianship, protection, ‘being in charge of’, and financial responsibility. The meanings attributed to nushū z range from recalcitrance, defiance, and disobedience to hatred and sexual deviance. However, I leave the terms qiwā ma and nushū z in their Arabic form throughout the chapter because any translation requires an interpretative choice. Whereas Q. 4:34 has been the subject of countless articles and books, another verse in the same chapter, Q. 4:128, which describes the process of resolution when the husband is guilty of nushū z, has been almost entirely overlooked.6 The lack of scholarly attention to a Qurʾanic verse that speaks of men’s nushū z is a perfect illustration of the disproportionate emphasis given to verses on male privilege or female passivity as opposed to verses that focus on the duties that men owe to women. In contrast to Q. 4:34, which identifies women as the source of marital turbulence, based on a literal reading, Q. 4:128 identifies men as the source of marital conflict. As I have argued elsewhere (Mubarak, 2014, p. 298), my findings strongly suggest that scholars should consider new ways of approaching premodern exegesis on gender. To arrive at a more holistic understanding of exegetes’ approaches to the foundational text of the Qurʾan, I consider exegetical discussions on the nushū z of both genders in tandem.

Pre-modern Qurʾanic commentaries on polygyny And if you have reason to fear that you might not act equitably towards orphans, then marry from among women whom are lawful to you – [even] two, or three, or four: but if you have reason to fear that you might not be able to treat them with justice, then marry one – or those whom you rightfully possess. Thus, it will be more likely that you will not do injustice.7 (Verse 4:3) 26

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Pre-modern commentators showed no discomfort with the institution of polygyny as expressed by verse 4:3. Unlike exegetes who were writing in the 20th century,8 premodern exegetes made no attempt to justify the institution of polygyny or to identify its advantages over monogamous marriages as the ideal standard of marriage. Rather, premodern Qurʾanic exegetes sought to explain why God restricted the number of wives a man could have to four, not why He permitted it. This stands in sharp contrast to modern Qurʾanic commentators.9 In assessing pre-modern commentaries on gender issues, one should not lose sight of the historical particularity of medieval authors’ contexts and cultural milieus. Whereas their historical frame of reference leads them to read Q. 4:3 as a restriction of polygyny, our own contemporary standards of monogamy as the marital norm leads us to read Q. 4:3 as a license instead. This underscores the need to recognize the ‘historical specificity’ of notions of gender justice and egalitarianism that exegetes bring to the Qurʾan, an argument Hidayatullah makes in regard to feminist exegetes (2014, p. 150). In their interpretations, the primary focus of pre-modern exegetes was to identify the exact correlation between the issue of orphans, on one hand, and the issue of marriage to more than one woman, on the other hand. The verse begins with a dependent clause expressing a condition, the protasis (sharṭ): ‘And if you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly with orphans’. It then follows with a second clause expressing the consequence, the apodosis (jawā b al-sharṭ): ‘then marry those women made lawful to you, in twos, threes, or fours’. For the pre-modern exegetes, any interpretation of this verse needed to take into account its syntactical structure. What is the correlation between fearing unjust treatment of orphans and multiple marriages? If textual polysemy was an inherent feature of medieval Qurʾanic exegesis, then it was most evident in the 10th-century exegesis of Ibn Jarı̄ r al-Ṭabarı̄ (d. 923). Al-Ṭabarı̄ ’s methodology was to include the entire range of opinions that existed on a particular issue, even when he was aware of explicit contradictions between the reports, their weaknesses or complete fabrication (Hodgson, 1974, vol. 1, p. 353). Al-Ṭabarı̄ cites three possibilities for the correlation between orphans and multiple marriages, as expressed in the conditional phrase of verse 4:3. The first opinion al-Ṭabarı̄ cites (2010, vol. 7, p. 531) is that this verse restricts male legal guardians from marrying orphans under their care due to the potential injustice it may cause. He attributes this opinion to the wife of Prophet Muhammad, ʿAʾisha, who narrates a hadith10 that connects the two pieces of the puzzle: orphans and multiple marriages. According to ʿAʾisha’s report, this verse addresses legal guardians who desire to marry female orphans under their care because they are attracted to the orphan’s beauty and wealth. Yet their status as legal guardians creates a conflict of interest. More specifically, by marrying a female orphan under his care, the legal guardian would likely not give her the same amount of marital dower – mahr – that another man would have gifted her, ʿAʾisha notes. Accordingly, God forbids these men from marrying those orphans under their care, unless they could be just and give them the full amount of mahr due to them. The option to marry other women whom are lawful to them, therefore, functions as a deterrent to male legal guardians from marrying orphans under their care, who are vulnerable to exploitation by their social status as minor, orphan, and female (al-Ṭabarı̄ , 2010, vol. 7, p. 531). This report by ʿAʾisha is cited by all the pre-modern and modern exegetes I examine (Mubarak, 2014, pp. 136–168). Based on al-Ṭabarı̄ ’s characteristic of citing interpretive reports (Donner, 1998, p. 258), he cites all the chains of transmission for the authorities who have adopted this interpretation, which demonstrates the prominence of ʿAʾisha as a reliable source of exegetical material. As Ash Geissinger notes (2015, pp. 176–182), ‘ʿAʾisha is the preeminent female source of exegetical hadiths’ in both the hadith cannon and early exegetical works. 27

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The second interpretation that al-Ṭabarı̄ cites is that Q. 4:3 deters men from using orphans’ wealth to financially support their multiple marriages. According to this interpretation, this verse directly addresses a social practice of Arab men from the Quraysh tribe in 7th-century Arabia. These men would marry ten women, or more or less, and then use the wealth of the orphans under their care to financially support these multiple marriages (alṬabarı̄ , 2010, vol. 7, p. 534). Worse yet, they would use the orphan’s wealth to get married in the first place, by paying for the dower and other marital celebrations out of the orphan’s wealth. Accordingly, this verse restricts the number of marriages that a man could have in order to eliminate his need or desire to use the wealth of orphans under his care (al-Ṭabarı̄ , 2010). The third interpretation al-Ṭabarı̄ cites, which is the opinion he champions, is that the Arab men of Quraysh did in fact refrain from being unjust with orphans’ wealth, but they did not exhibit that same level of restraint towards the women they married. For al-Ṭabarı̄ , the correlation between orphans and multiple marriages at the beginning of the verse is not in the legality of marrying orphans versus non-orphans. Rather, the correlation between these two topics is in the level of concern one should have towards both subjects: women and orphans. Al-Ṭabarı̄ argues that since Q. 4:2, the preceding verse, warns against unjustly appropriating orphans’ wealth, then verse 4:3 commands men to fear being unjust towards women they marry just as they fear being unjust towards orphan. He writes (al-Ṭabarı̄ , 2010, vol. 7, pp. 535–6), Just as you fear being unjust with orphans, likewise fear being unjust to women, so do not marry of them except one to four, and do not exceed this; and if you still fear that you will not be just with more than one woman, then do not marry except that [number] in which you do not fear being unjust, from one to what your right hand possesses. In contrast to what one might assume, the 11th-century Shiʿi scholar and exegete Abū Jaʿfar Muhammad Ibn Ḥasan al-Ṭū sı̄ (d. 406/1068) does not present much that is hermeneutically or interpretively different from al-Ṭabarı̄ . Structurally, al-Ṭū sı̄ maintains the characteristics of polyvalence and the citation of named authorities, two features that Calder (1993, p. 103) had described as ‘constitutive of the genre’ of tafsı̄ r. Al-Ṭū sı̄ cites six possible scenarios for the correlation between orphans and marriage to more than one woman, as described in the verse. The first opinion he cites (1985, vol. 3, p. 103) is that of ʿAʾisha, which al-Ṭabarı̄ had also referenced. Accordingly, men should refrain from marrying orphans under their care due to the potential injustice that could ensue from doing so. Rather, they should marry other women instead, up to four, if they could ensure justice. The significance of this citation lies in the fact that ʿAʾisha’s role as a source of exegetical authority appears to transcend sectarian boundaries during this period. Al-Ṭū sı̄ appears to prefer this first interpretation, which he attributes to ʿAʾisha and al-Ṭabarı̄ . Unlike the latter, however, al-Ṭū sı̄ does not make his preferences explicit, reflecting the belief that the Qurʾan carries a breadth of meaning. The second and third opinions he cites parallel al-Ṭabarı̄ ’s second and third interpretations. The fourth opinion he deduces introduces a third factor: illicit sex. Accordingly, the verse means, if you fear being unjust towards orphans’ wealth, then likewise fear approaching illicit sex and therefore, get married instead (al-Ṭū sı̄ , 1985, vol. 3, pp. 103–104).11 To arrive at this interpretation, however, requires one to stretch the semantic boundaries of the verse. In this case, the connection between the two subjects, orphans and multiple marriages, 28

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is not a straightforward one, but must be extrapolated by several hermeneutic layers: men should fear committing the sin of illicit sex just as they fear committing a sin towards orphans, so rather than engage in illicit sex, they should ‘marry those women made lawful to them’. This opinion is also cited by Mah ̣mū d ibn ʿUmar al-Zamakhsharı̄ (d. 538/1144) and later exegetes. The fifth opinion al-Ṭū sı̄ cites is that this verse recommends marrying eligible orphans who are relatives rather than orphans under one’s care. The final opinion he posits (al-Ṭū sı̄ , 1985, vol. 3, p. 105) is that this verse reminds men that just as they fear usurping orphans’ wealth, as referenced in Q. 4:2, they should also fear the practice of polygyny with orphans unless they could ascertain justice. The 12th-century Persian commentator, al-Zamakhsharı̄ , represents an important structural shift from both al-Ṭabarı̄ and al-Ṭū sı̄ in that he rarely cites his authorities. Unlike alṬabarı̄ , he does not cite reports from earlier authorities, although it is clear that he is still relying on the interpretations of predecessors. His theological orientation as a Muʿtazilı̄ theologian strengthens the tendency to eschew certain possibilities. Yet in his interpretations on gender issues, al-Zamakhsharı̄ ’s Muʿtazilı̄ orientation does not appear to bear any influence. He cites three possible interpretations regarding the meaning of verse 4:3. Like al-Ṭabarı̄ , al-Zamakhsharı̄ suggests that the connection between orphans and marriage to more than one woman is in the level of reverence one should assume towards both (2016, vol. 1, p. 373). To this interpretation, he adds the following analysis: if you fear being unjust with the rights of orphans and therefore, refrain from it [being unjust], likewise, fear being unjust to women, so reduce the number of women you marry, because whoever refrains from one sin or repents for it, while committing another sin, is neither abstinent [from sin] nor repentant … because repugnance exists in every sin. (2016, vol. 1, p. 373) In other words, it is pointless to refrain from one sin while engaging in another. If it is a sin to be unjust with orphans, likewise, it is a sin to be unjust towards women. Al-Zamakhsharı̄ identifies two other possible interpretations. The 13th-century Ashʿarı̄ theologian and exegete, Fakhr al-Dı̄ n al-Rā zı̄ , continues the classical method of citing a range of possible meanings and then choosing a particular one. Although he cites four interpretations, he singles out one as being the most probable. According to al-Rā zı̄ , the objective of this verse is to restrict the number of marriages that a man could have in order to eliminate his need or desire to use the wealth of orphans under his care (2013, vol. 5, p. 140). Therefore, the correlation between fearing injustice towards orphans and marrying up to four women is an inverse one. Marrying more than four women could lead to a financial burden and greater temptation to use the wealth of orphans under one’s care. According to a report by ʿIkrima (d.105 AH/723/4 CE), a man would marry many wives while simultaneously having orphans under his legal care. After spending all of his money on his wives, he would have nothing left and be in financial need. He would then use the orphans’ wealth to financially support his wives. According to al-Rā zı̄ ’s reading (2013), if one fears being unjust to orphans’ wealth, then one should decrease the number of women one marries accordingly. From the medieval vantage point of pre-modern exegetes, polygyny was the default position and the objective of this Qurʾanic verse was to restrict it. Therefore, their interpretations centred on explaining why God had restricted the practice of polygyny, not on why 29

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He allowed it to exist. Subtle differences in the various interpretations aside, for all four of these pre-modern exegetes, the objective of this verse was either to prevent injustice to orphans or prevent injustice to women themselves. None of the pre-modern exegetes entertained the idea that the institution of polygyny itself, under any circumstance, could be unjust. A man’s simultaneous marriage to more than one woman was not inherently just or unjust; it all boiled down to individuals’ capacities and circumstances. Unlike commentators in the modern period, pre-modern exegetes felt no need to defend or justify the existence of the institution of polygyny. This was, simply, a non-issue.

Gendered notions of nushū z The Qurʾanic text prescribes two different scenarios for resolving cases of nushū z, depending on the whether the wife or husband is the source of turbulence. The parallel wording of Q. 4:34 and Q. 4:128 suggests ‘some parity between spouses’, as Chaudhry observes (2013, p. 62). The verses describe a state of turbulence that may arise in marital relationships. While the former verse locates the blame for nushū z with the wife, expressed in the phrase ‘those [women] whose nushū z you fear’, the latter verse locates the blame for nushū z with the husband, using strikingly similar language: ‘If a woman fears nushū z from her husband’. However, most pre-modern exegetes ignored the parallel wording12 of these two verses and instead interpreted these two terms ‘in completely different ways’, as Chaudhry notes (2013 p. 63). Whereas most pre-modern exegetes defined a woman’s nushū z as her ‘disobedience to her husband’, (Chaudhry, 2013, p. 64), they instead interpreted men’s nushū z as hatred, cruelty, superiority, or the sexual or financial abandonment of women.13 The notion of men’s defiance or disobedience made no appearance in their exegesis on Q. 4:128, an interpretation they applied exclusively to women’s nushū z. Yet exegetes acknowledged that the term nushū z in Q. 4:34 and Q. 4:128 derives from one semantic wellspring. For example, the 10th-century exegete, al-Ṭabarı̄ , uses the terms elevation (istiʿlā ʾ) and rising (irtifā ʿ) to interpret nushū z in both verses. In the context of marital discord, this nushū z is a type of haughtiness or arrogance that one spouse espouses towards the other. Yet for al-Ṭabarı̄ , the way that men and women display haughtiness is clearly gendered. A woman’s nushū z, according to al-Ṭabarı̄ , is her refusal to have sex with her husband, due to ‘her disobedience’, and her defiance in other matters in which she should obey him, either out of hatred or disregard for the husband (al- Ṭabarı̄ , 2010, v. 3, p. 801). A husband’s nushū z is his sexual abandonment of his wife, due to his preference for another woman, which amounts to neglect or cruelty rather than disobedience. The gendered ways in which al-Ṭabarı̄ describes the sexual disinterest of both spouses is grounded in Islamic legal conceptions of marriage as an exchange of rights. In both cases, the nushū z that he describes constitutes a spouse reneging of one of the rights he/she owes the other. Al-Ṭabarı̄ uses the term disobedience ‘ʿiṣyanan minhunna’ to characterize the wife’s abandonment of her husband’s bed due to legal conceptions of sex as a right that a wife owes to her husband. On the other hand, al-Ṭabarı̄ uses the phrase ‘giving preference to another’ (atharatan ʿalayhā ) to characterize the husband’s sexual neglect or abandonment of his wife. The equal treatment of co-wives was regarded as a legitimate right that a woman could demand from her husband.14 A man’s sexual neglect of his wife, therefore, was not regarded as ‘disobedience’, but as a violation of a wife’s right to be treated on par with other wives, based on Q. 4:3 ‘and if you fear that you will not be just, then marry only one or your female slaves’. Therefore, al-Ṭabarı̄ ’s understanding of nushū z is grounded in his legal conception of marriage as an exchange of rights. 30

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Nushū z, according to legal-minded exegetes like al-Ṭabarı̄ and al-Qurṭubı̄ (d. 671/1273), amounts to a spouse reneging on the rights of the other. The nature of these rights, as law specialists Kecia Ali (2016, pp. 9–13) and Judith Tucker (1998, pp. 42–46) have illustrated, however, was largely gendered. This gendered definition of nushū z, informed by the different legal rights that each spouse owes the other, continues with 12th- and 13th-century exegetes. The 12th-century Muʿtazilı̄ exegete, al-Zamakhsharı̄ , interprets (2016, vol. 1, p. 538) a woman’s nushū z as her disobedience and agitation towards her husband. On the other hand, he interprets (2016, vol. 1, p. 604) a man’s nushū z as being harsh towards his wife ‘by depriving her of sexual intercourse, finances, love, and mercy, which should be between a man and woman’ and verbal or physical abuse. Chaudhry notes (2015, p. 336) that exegetes ‘argue[d] that when love and mercy were lacking in a marriage, that was a failing on the part of the husband’, based on Q. 30:21, which describes ‘love and mercy’ as essential qualities of a marriage. The 13th-century exegete, al-Rā zı̄ , acknowledges that the term nushū z shares one linguistic origin in both verses. He writes (2013, vol. 6, p. 52), ‘nushū z could stem from either of the spouses and it is the hatred of one for the other’. Despite this initial concession, alRā zı̄ proceeds to define the markers of nushū z for men and women in distinct ways. For alRā zı̄ , a woman’s nushū z is grounded in her disobedience towards her husband (2013, vol. 5, p. 73). The husband’s nushū z, on the other hand, is marked by his disinterest in his wife or ill-treatment of her. Al-Rā zı̄ writes (2013, vol. 6, p. 52), ‘A man’s nushū z against his wife’s right is that he neglects her, frowns in her face, ceases to have sex with her, and treats her badly (yusı̄ ʿ ʿushratahā )’. In both cases, the spouse evinces disinterest in the other. Yet in the case of women, al-Rā zı̄ characterizes this as disobedience; in the case of men, he characterizes it as bad companionship. As Karen Bauer writes (2015, pp. 173–177), a woman’s right to ‘good companionship’ was central to exegetical discussions on marriage. This understanding was informed by verses in the Qurʾan such as Q. 4:19, ‘And live with them in kindness’ and 2:229 ‘A divorce may be revoked twice, then (a woman) must be retained in honour or released in kindness’.

Can men hit rebellious wives? Classical interpretations of Q. 4:34 Men are qawwā mū n [supporters to] women with what God has favored some over others and with what they (men) spend out of their wealth. Therefore, righteous women are devoted and guard the unseen as God has guarded (it). As for those (women) whose nushū z [uprising] you fear, admonish them, (then) avoid them in their beds and (then) hit them. But if they obey you, then seek nothing against them. Behold, God is most High and Great.15 (Verse 4:34) No other verse in the Qurʾan has garnered as much controversy to the scholarly debate on gender in the Qurʾan as Q. 4:34. The list of works that focus or engage with this verse is exhaustive. In the English language alone, over 40 publications have been published in the last two decades on Q. 4:34.16 The ‘difficulty’17 of dealing with Q. 4:34 has become more pronounced in the last few decades, as religious texts are measured against modern notions of gender equality and gender justice. As G. Vermes, a scholar of Biblical texts, once stated (1970, quoted in Calder, 1993, p. 104), one should distinguish ‘between a problem that arises because of something in the text’ itself, and one that arises ‘because something external to the text is imposed upon it’. The level of attention given to Q. 4:34, one of over 6,000 31

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Qurʾanic verses, speaks to the tensions involved in reconciling scripture – divine truth for 1.8 billion Muslims – with contemporary sensibilities of ideal marital norms between a husband and wife. The quest to make meaning of Q. 4:34 – which has assumed scholarly, spiritual, and advocacy forms – is most certainly a reflection of our own times and intellectual priorities, rather than a reflection of the text itself. As Norman Calder writes (1993, p. 104, emphasis added), exegetical problems arise when ‘something within the text is recognized as being at odds with something outside the text’. While Calder (1993, p. 105) is primarily concerned with external structures such as ‘the scholastic disciplines of law, theology and prophetic narrative’, Arabic morphology, rhetoric, and grammar, I argue that human societies’ evolving cultural norms and notions of morality also shape the process of scholarly interpretation. Verse 4:34 becomes central to the contemporary debate on women and gender because of three concepts that it introduces. First, the notion that husbands are qawwā mū n over their wives, a term that has been interpreted and translated in significantly different ways: as protectors of women, financial providers for women, and being ‘in charge of’ women. Second, the verse prescribes three disciplinary measures for wives who are guilty of nushū z. Since the three disciplinary steps are to be applied to a wife only in a state of nushū z, how an exegete defined nushū z was critical for the either the restriction or expansion of the verse’s application. As I demonstrate below, exegetes derived a broad range of meanings for the term nushū z. For the most part, women’s nushū z was grounded in the concept of spousal defiance or disobedience for pre-modern exegetes (Chaudhry, 2013, p. 172; Mubarak, 2014, p. 202). Third, the last disciplinary measure of this verse has unquestionably provoked the greatest level of controversy. Based on a face-value interpretation, it allows husbands to ‘hit’ women who are guilty of nushū z. The range of semantic possibilities of the phrase ‘wad ̣ribū hunna’ (‘and hit hem’), its theoretical implications for the project of gender feminism, and its impact on Islamic family law have entered the mainstage of contemporary debates on women and Islam. As Kecia Ali writes (2016, p. 157), Q. 4:34 is one of the most ‘notoriously difficult verses for exegetes concerned with gender justice and equality’. The most provocative question to the Qurʾan’s contemporary readers is the following: does this verse permit husbands or even suggest for them to hit their wives when the latter are guilty of nushū z? The modern period yields a cacophony of voices in response to this question; the range of responses is complex and evades binary categorization. The traditional approach, which is the most common one, has been to restrict the application of this verse by obliging a chronology of steps, a ‘light’ or symbolic hitting with a handkerchief or toothbrush, and the certainty of nushū z.18 The modernist approach to Q. 4:34 has been to reinterpret the semantics of d ̣araba, arguing that the term has been misunderstood by the majority of Muslim scholars.19 For these scholars, the verb d ̣araba does not mean to hit women, but to separate from them – or according to one translator, to have intercourse with them – the former meaning being also supported by prophetic practice. A third position, one taken by a few Muslim scholars in the West, is to move beyond debates about the verse’s meaning. Rather, they argue that regardless of the verse’s intended meaning, one must prioritize one’s conscience and ethics over the text’s literal meaning. Scholars who have taken this approach include amina wadud, Khaled Abou El-Fadl, Farid Esack, Ebrahim Moosa, and Laury Silvers, among others.20 While the interpretive strategies of these scholars are by no means homogenous, they share one important commonality: privileging an ethical, egalitarian paradigm over the Qurʾan’s literal meaning. What does it mean to privilege an ethical paradigm? For a scholar like amina wadud (2006, pp. 199–200), it means ‘to finally come to say “no” outright to the literal implementation of 32

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this passage [4:34]’. Although definitive and bold, wadud’s stance raises uncertainties, as ‘it is not clear what saying “no” to texts such as Q 4:34 means precisely’, an observation made by scholars like Chaudhry (2006, p. 163). For Khalid Abou El-Fadl (2005, p. 94), a ‘conscientious pause’ denotes measuring divine speech against divine ontology. ‘How can The Beautiful demand of us anything but the beautiful’, he asks (Abou El-Fadl, 2019). ‘Before I ascribe to God something that torments the heart, I must weigh the possibilities in my head’ (2019). In contrast to wadud’s definitive ‘no’, Abou El-Fadl casts doubt on the notion that God could require of His creation anything less than sublime and beautiful. In a similar vein, Silvers argues (2006, p. 177) that ‘we must struggle with our conscience even in response to God’, relying on Prophet Muhammad’s alleged response to the revelation of Q. 4:34. For Silvers, however, this is not a post-modernist position, but one that conforms to an ethical interpretation of the Qurʾan, as reflected by both the Prophet’s example and the hermeneutics of the 12th-century Andalusian scholar Muh ̣yı̄ al-Dı̄ n ibn al-Arabı̄ (d. 638/1245). While contemporary, post-modernist, and progressive scholars have certainly made important contributions to ethical discussions of Q. 4:34, I argue that they are not radically new. A close analysis of both modern and pre-modern Qurʾanic exegesis reflects similar hermeneutic tensions and ‘conscientious’ wrestling described by contemporary scholars. The assumption that classical scholars were unperturbed by the notion of a husband abusing his wife does not withstand a close, historical inquiry. As early as the second Islamic century, the well-known jurist and mufti of Mecca, ʿAtā ̣ ʾ b. Abı̄ Rabā h ̣ (d. 115/733), argued that his contemporaries had misunderstood Q. 4:34 (Maydā nı̄ , 2002, pp. 6–16). He established, ‘The husband does not hit his wife, but gets angry with her’ (Ibn al-ʿArabı̄ , 2012, vol. 1 p. 536). Based on the Prophetic hadith ‘the best of you shall not hit [his wife]’, Ibn Abı̄ Rabā h ̣ deduced that the imperative form ‘wa-d ̣ribū hunna’ (commonly translated as ‘hit them’) did not function as an obligation (wujū b) nor a recommendation (mandū b) nor even an license (ibā h ̣a); rather it functioned as a karā hiyya (an odious or disliked thing) (Ibn al-ʿArabı̄ , 2012). While the majority of traditional Muslim scholars did not adopt this position, Ibn Abı̄ Rabā h ̣ was certainly not alone in taking this view. Most notably, Muhammad ibn Idrı̄ s al-Shā fiʿı̄ restricted the application of Q. 4:34 on the basis of prophetic precedent. In his legal treatise al-Umm, al-Shā fiʿı̄ demonstrates a clear discomfort with the notion that a husband should hit his wife, even when guilty of nushū z. Moving away from a literal understanding of the imperative verb wa-d ̣ribū hunna, he argues that this cannot denote an obligation, but a permissibility. Yet al-Shā fiʿı̄ does not stop there and argues (2008, vol. 6, p. 424), ‘we prefer for him [the husband] what the Prophet peace be upon him preferred; therefore, we opine that a man not hit his wife due to her loose tongue towards him or what resembles this’. As the Islamic legal specialist Kecia Ali notes (2006, p. 149), ‘It is fair to assume that al-Shā fiʿı̄ shares the prophetic distaste for striking wives; the refrain “The best of you will not strike” is repeated three times in one section alone, while Shā fiʿı̄ ’s contemporaries very rarely mention striking’. These two legal opinions become critical points of intervention in the exegetical commentaries of three significant works of tafsı̄ r: first, the legalistic commentary of the Mā likı̄ Andalusian jurist, Abū Bakr ibn al-ʿArabı̄ (d. 1148); second, the philosophical commentary of ‘one of the most celebrated theologians and exegetists of Islam’, Fakhr al-Dı̄ n al-Rā zı̄ (d. 1209) (Anawati, 2018); and third, the 20th-century philological exegesis of the Tunisian scholar, Muhammad al-Ṭā hir ibn ʿĀ shū r (d. 1973), described ‘as one of the most influential and encyclopedic authors of his generation’ (Haddad, 2019, p. 50).21 Although representing 33

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two different genres, in both the exegetical and legal literature, the jurists and exegetes rely on a prophetic tradition to impede a straightforward interpretation of Q. 4:34. The earliest of these three exegetes, Ibn al-ʿArabı̄ , argues that it is impossible for a man to resort to disciplining his wife, child or servant without compromising his own faith. For Ibn al-ʿArabı̄ , the prophetic concession, ‘[you may] hit, but the best of you will not hit’ (2012, vol. 1, p. 536), highlights that the moral high ground is to never hit a woman, irrespective of her own state. In support of this position, he references the 8th-century legal opinion of Ibn Abı̄ Rabā h ̣, arguing that Ibn Abı̄ Rabā h ̣ arrived at this position due to his ‘[accurate] comprehension (fiqh)’, and ‘understanding of divine law (sharı̄ ʿa)’ (Ibn al-ʿArabı̄ , 2012). Therefore, as early as the 12th century, exegetes like al-Ibn al-ʿArabı̄ made the argument that saying ‘no’ to a literal application of Q. 4:34 was a reflection of an accurate understanding of divine law. For legal-minded exegetes like Ibn al-ʿArabı̄ , an accurate interpretation of divine law necessitated measuring divine speech against the Qurʾan’s broader ethical paradigm and prophetic precedent. A century later, Fakhr al-Dı̄ n al-Rā zı̄ emerges as another proponent for the legal position that it is recommended to refrain from physically chastising a wife. He relies (2013, vol. 5, p. 73) on al-Shā fiʿı̄ ’s legal opinion that although a symbolic hitting is permitted as a third measure, it is legally preferable not to hit (‘wa tarkuhu afd ̣al’). Like al-Shā fiʿı̄ and Ibn alʿArabı̄ , al-Rā zı̄ opines that a correct application of this verse means to refrain from enacting the last disciplinary measure identified in Q. 4:34 (al-Rā zı̄ , 2013). He bases this on an authentic Prophetic tradition,22 which concludes with the statement, ‘certainly those [who hit women] are not the best among you’.23 As Chaudhry observes (2013, p. 91), ‘How could Muhammad criticize husbands for an action that was divinely prescribed in the Qurʾan?’ The only way to reconcile this apparent contradiction with the belief that Prophet Muhammad is the Qurʾan’s first recipient and ‘perfect embodiment’ (Silvers, 2006, p. 171) is to refute its existence. There is only a mirage of a contradiction, much like the sun setting and rising from our optical vantage point when, in reality, the earth itself moves around the sun. This understanding seems to be in line with the way the scholarly Muslim community interpreted the Qurʾan’s words, reflecting a myriad of inner, allegorical, and figurative meanings. As Ingrid Mattson describes (2008, p. 189), scholars argued that imperative commands in the Qurʾan did not share one normative value. In some instances, an imperative could be interpreted as a religious obligation; in other instances, an imperative command might denote a recommendation or a mere permission to do something. The idea that the Qurʾan should be reduced to its most literal meanings never gained any credibility within the exegetical tradition. While pre-modern exegetes did not negate the husband’s authority to potentially discipline his wife, they clearly attempted to restrict his authority. As Judith Tucker writes (1998, p. 180) in regards to Islamic law, ‘In elaborating and enforcing the law concerning these [marital] rights, the muftis and courts upheld a model of marriage in which the dichotomy of power was tempered by concepts of fairness and protection from abuse’. Similarly, in their interpretations of Q. 4:34, ‘all exegetes qualified this imperative [“hit”] in one way or another’ (Chaudhry 2013, p. 81). They restricted the implementation of the verse in three ways. First, they imposed a sequential order to the three disciplinary measures, even when a literal reading of the verse did not support this interpretation. The verse separates the three disciplinary measures with the conjunction ‘and’. Accordingly, it states, ‘for those [fem.] whose nushū z you fear, admonish them and avoid them in beds and hit them’. While the conjunction ‘and’ could signify simultaneity, the overwhelming majority of exegetes 34

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instead argued that husbands could not move to the second step until they had exhausted the first step. Similarly, they could not move on to the third step until they had fully exhausted the first two steps (Chaudhry, 2013, pp. 87–88). A second most common condition that exegetes imposed on this verse was the qualification that the hitting be ‘nonextreme’ (ghayr mubarrih ̣) (Chaudhry, 2013, p. 81). Chaudhry (2013, appendix 24, p. 232) lists 29 exegetes who qualify that any hitting must be ghayr mubarrih ̣. In reports cited by alṬabarı̄ , ʿAṭā ʾ ibn Abı̄ Rabā h ̣ seeks more information on the meaning of ghayr mubarrih ̣ from ʿAbdullā h Ibn ʿAbbā s (d. 68/687), the Prophet’s cousin, who clarifies that it means to hit with a siwā k24or a similar object (al-Ṭabarı̄ , 2010, vol. 8, pp. 314–315).25 Al-Ṭabarı̄ ’s insertion of these citations seeks to restrict or diminish the effect of the hitting, although not eliminate it. Hence, exegetes advised men who resorted to this final option to use symbolic gestures like a toothbrush (siwā k) or handkerchief (mandı̄ l). This interpretation has been the most common ‘traditional’ interpretation in both the classical and modern periods. Allowing a husband to symbolically hit his wife with a siwā k or handkerchief is problematic for several reasons, including the intrinsic authority it denotes to the husband over a wife’s body and the loophole it leaves for justifying violence against a spouse, a practice that Prophet Muhammad had personally shunned and discouraged. Yet by consistently interpreting the phrase, wa-d ̣ribuhunna (hit them), in a restrictive sense, exegetes clearly obviated a literal interpretation of this verse, which could have provided a license for serious violence and abuse. This leaves us to pose the following question, in Shuruq Naguib’s words (2010, p. 40) regarding Q. 2:222, ‘What do we make of this history of exegetical determination to defuse, as much as possible, the negative implications of a literal reading of this piece of revelation on women?’ Scholars’ answers will likely vary. While pre-modern exegetes may have not been concerned with championing women’s rights, many of them also evinced a hermeneutic tension with a literal or straightforward interpretation of this verse. A survey of pre-modern exegesis on Q. 4:34 and other verses illustrates that exegetes often upheld male privilege as a marital norm while also attempting to mitigate injustice or abuse by obliging men to be affectionate, fair, and kind to their wives (based on interpretations of other Qurʾanic verses).

What happens to husbands who are guilty of nushū z? If a wife fears cruelty or desertion on her husband’s part, there is no blame on them if they arrange an amicable settlement between themselves; and such settlement is best; even though men’s souls are swayed by greed. But if ye do good and practise self-restraint, Allah is well-acquainted with all that ye do. (Verse 4:128) When husbands are guilty of nushū z, the Qurʾan recommends that the two parties reach a settlement, without specifying the nature of that settlement or which of the two parties should compromise or bear the consequences of the settlement. Rather, the verse utilizes the dual form of the Arabic verb ‘to settle’ (yuṣlih ̣ā ), which denotes a level of mutuality. Despite the explicit wording of the Qurʾanic text, pre-modern exegetes disproportionately lay the onus to settle on the wife. For the most part, they recommended she relinquish some of her financial rights, such as a portion of her deferred dower, or nights allotted to her in order to remain married to her husband (al-Bayd ̣ā wı̄ , 1997, vol. 2, p. 101; al-Ṭabarı̄ , 2010, vol. 4, pp. 191–197; al-Rā zı̄ , 2013, vol. 6, p. 53; Al-Zamakhsharı̄ , 2016, vol. 1 p. 605). Nonetheless, pre-modern exegetes highlighted a wife’s consent to any settlement as a condition for its validity (al-Ṭabarı̄ , 2010, vol. 4, p. 195; al-Qurṭubı̄ , 2006, vol. 7, p. 164; 35

Hadia Mubarak

Al-Zamakhsharı̄ , 2016, vol. 1, p. 605). They assumed that a woman’s willingness to relinquish certain rights in exchange for marital stability meant that she desired to remain married and deemed marriage to be a superior alternative to divorce. Yet rendering the meaning of Q. 4:128 in this way meant that women paid the price in the case of their husbands’ nushū z, as well as their own nushū z, as reflected by pre-modern interpretations of Q. 4:34. This fact didn’t seem to cause pre-modern exegetes much angst. One must question, however, why would classical exegetes suggest that a wife give up some of her rights in order to remain married to a man who no longer desires her? The answer to this question is embedded in the way exegetes interpreted the phrase ‘wal-ṣulh ̣u khayr’ (‘and reconciliation is better’). The superlative in the sentence, ‘better’, indicated that reconciliation was a superior alternative to something else. It appeared obvious to pre-modern exegetes that it was ‘better’ for an aged woman to remain within a marriage, which provided either social, physical or financial security – even if she had to forgo some rights – than to be divorced. This understanding is certainly informed by Islamic legal conceptions of marriage. As historian Yossef Rapoport (2005, p. 52) writes, the ‘prevailing assumption’ of classical Islamic law is that marriage brings financial security to women. Another historian of the Middle East, Judith Tucker, also writes (1998, p. 42), ‘marriage was … defined as a relationship of material support, and the provision of that support was strongly gendered … A man was solely responsible for his wife’s nafaqa (support), regardless of the wife’s own resources’. Pre-modern exegetes who were interpreting the Qurʾan were informed by the legal conception of marriage as a source of financial stability for women and their children of that union. Therefore, in their interpretations of Q. 4:128, exegetes privileged marriage as a better alternative to divorce for aged women who had lost their husbands’ sexual interest – even if they had to forfeit some of their rights. Such interpretations were not necessarily malicious or misogynist in nature, but reflections of a ‘gendered system of nurture’ (Tucker, 1998, p. 43) in which legal conceptions of marriage are embedded.

Conclusion By surveying classical Qurʾanic exegesis on key gender verses, this chapter demonstrates the difficulty of categorizing this discursive tradition into neatly sized boxes labelled as ‘misogynistic’ or ‘egalitarian’. Perhaps, as other scholars have noted, projecting these categories on a medieval scholarly genre such as tafsı̄ r is anachronistic to begin with. As Hidayatullah critiques (2014, pp. 150–151), in placing feminist demands on the Qurʾan, we have projected a historically specific (and at the same time theoretically unclear) sense of ‘gender justice’ onto the text without fully considering how our demands might, in fact, be anachronistic and incommensurate with Qur’anic statements (and the exegetical tradition …). An in-depth analysis of classical tafsı̄ r reveals that although the characteristic of interpretive pluralism diminished when it came to women’s issues, it was not entirely eliminated. For example, as I illustrated above, significant jurists and exegetes such as ʿAṭā ʾ b. Abı̄ Rabā h ̣, alShā fiʿı̄ , Abū Bakr Ibn al-ʿArabı̄ , and al-Rā zı̄ employed prophetic traditions to argue against the interpretive consensus regarding implementing the last disciplinary measure in Q. 4:34. The legal positions of Ibn Abı̄ Rabā h ̣ and al-Shā fiʿı̄ became the basis for the positions of two notable exegetes, Ibn al-ʿArabı̄ and al-Rā zı̄ , highlighting the intersections of law and exegesis. Such scholars had leveraged Prophetic tradition in their interpretation of Q. 4:34 to argue for a different legal norm than most exegetes: hitting one’s wife, even if she is 36

Classical Qurʾanic exegesis and women

guilty of nushū z, should be avoided. While one must not single out exceptional positions as the norm, one must also recognize the diversity of interpretation that has characterized the scholastic disciplines of law and exegesis. If we are to recognize the nature of exegesis as ‘a genealogical tradition’, as Walid Saleh argues (2004, p. 14), it becomes evident that exegetical opinions entered the mainstay of tradition not simply by repetition, but by the weight of the scholar adopting this position. This becomes evident in the exegetical works described in this chapter. Classical exegetes’ attitude towards women is more complex than binary categorization permits. While many subscribed to notions of male privilege, they also believed that men’s greater privileges should translate into greater responsibility.26 A more holistic examination of classical exegesis on verses related to marriage, marital dower, and divorce demonstrates a concern with women’s rights to justice, a dower, financial provision, and good companionship (h ̣usn al-muʿā shara), which they described with detail. If a man was unable to provide a woman with her due rights, they emphasized the need to release her with kindness rather than hold her prisoner in a suboptimal marriage, based on Qurʾanic verses Q. 2:229, Q. 2:231, and Q. 65:2, among others. For future research, this chapter recommends that scholars of the Qurʾan also examine critical verses dealing with the ethical boundaries of marriage and divorce, which may yield surprising results. Much of the conversation on gender hierarchy or egalitarianism in the Qurʾan continues to take place outside the genre of Qurʾanic exegesis. Rather than cast aside the exegetical tradition as patriarchal or misogynist, I argue that a close study of this discipline enriches contemporary efforts to recover Islam’s capacity to support diversity and pluralism.

Notes 1 This numbering of verses is based on the Kufi count, which is one of the seven canonical Qurʾanic recitations. Furthermore, legal schools differ on the exact number of verses in the Qurʾan due to a number of factors, including whether or not one includes the basmala – ‘Bismilla ar- Rah ̣mā n arRah ̣ı̄ m’ – and disjointed letters at the beginning of 29 chapters. 2 Some of these findings became the basis for Bauer’s later work (2015), Gender Hierarchy in the Qurʾan. 3 My own research corroborates Karen Bauer’s finding that patriarchal interpretations and references increase during this period (Bauer, Gender Hierarchy, 271–272). See also Hadia Mubarak, Rebellious Wives, Neglectful Husbands (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 4 amina wadud writes about the ‘voicelessness of women in tafsı̄ r’ in both her article, ‘Alternative Qurʾanic Interpretation’ in Windows of Faith, 13, as well as in Qurʾan and Woman, 2; Maysam J. alFaruqi, ‘Self-Identity in the Qurʾan and Islamic Law’, Windows of Faith, 82; Barlas, ‘Believing Women’, Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qurʾan, 9, 36. 5 These works include Kecia Ali’s Sexual Ethics in Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’ā n, Hadith and Jurisprudence (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006), Aysha Hidayatullah’s Feminist Edges of the Qurʾan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), Raja Rhouni’s Secular and Islamic Feminist Critiques in the Work of Fatima Mernissi (Leiden: Brill, 2019). 6 Ayesha Chaudhry’s Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition (2013) is one of the few works that give some attention to the way pre-modern exegetes interpreted men’s nushū z in comparison to women’s nushū z (62–67). She also examines these two verses in parallel in her book chapter, ‘Marital Discord in Qurʾanic Exegesis: A Lexical Analysis of Husbandly and Wifely Nushū z in Q. 4:34 and Q. 4:128’, in The Meaning of the Word: Lexicology and Qurʾanic Exegesis. Men’s nushū z is mentioned in passing in Seyed Asadinejad’s ‘Legal Strategies to Resolve Problems of Martial Relationships in the Qurʾan’, Journal of Politics and Law 5.3 (2012): 81–87 and Kecia Ali’s ‘The Best of You Will Not Strike’, Comparative Islamic Studies 2.2 (2006): 143–155. 7 Qur’an, 4:3. This translation is an edited version of Muh ̣ammad Asad’s translation for the most part and Pickthall’s transition for the last clause. I omitted most of Asad’s parenthetical insertions, which were more interpretive than literal.

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Hadia Mubarak 8 See for example Rashı̄ d Rid ̣ā ’s and Sayyid Quṭb’s commentaries on Q. 4:3, which primarily functions as a justification and rationalization of the Qurʾan’s qualified endorsement of polygyny. 9 My upcoming publication, ‘Rebellious Wives, Sexually Neglectful Husbands’, deals extensively with modern approaches to verse 4:3. 10 The entire text of the tradition in Ṣah ̄ ̣ıh ̣ al-Bukhā rı̄ is as follows: Narrated by ʿUrwa ibn Al-Zubayr that he asked ʿĀ ʾisha regarding God’s Statement: ‘If you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly with the orphan girls.’. (4.3) So she said, ‘O son of my sister! This is an orphan girl who is under the care of a guardian with whom she shares property. Her guardian, being attracted by her wealth and beauty, would intend to marry her without giving her a just mahr; he does not give her the same amount of mahr that another man would give her. So such guardians were forbidden to do that unless they did justice to their female wards and gave them the highest mahr their peers might get. They were ordered to marry women of their choice other than those orphan girls’. ʿĀ isha added, ‘The people asked God’s Messenger his instructions after the revelation of this Divine Verse whereupon Allah revealed: “They ask your instruction regarding women” (Q. 4:127) ʿĀ ʾisha further said, ‘And God’s statement: “And yet whom you desire to marry”, (Q. 4:127) as anyone of you refrains from marrying an orphan girl (under his guardianship) when she is lacking in property and beauty’. ʿĀ ʾisha added, ‘So they were forbidden to marry those orphan girls for whose wealth and beauty they had a desire unless with justice, and that was because they would refrain from marrying them if they were lacking in property and beauty’, Ṣah ̄ ̣ıh ̣ al-Bukhā rı̄ , Volume 6, Book 60, Number 98. http://sahih-bukhari.com/Pages/Bukhari_6_60.php 11 He cites Mujā hid b. Jabr al-Aswad al-Qā riʾ (d. 104/722 or 103/721) as the source of this opinion. 12 Q. 4:34, ‘and those [women] whose nushū z you fear’, and Q. 4:128, ‘and if a woman fears from her husband nushū z’. 13 The most commonly cited definitions for men’s nushū z by premodern exegetes were: (1) acting superior to the wife, (2) treating the wife with cruelty or hatred, and (3) abandoning her physically or financially. Al-Ṭabarı̄ mentions all three reasons in his interpretation of Q. 4:128 (al-Ṭabarı̄ , Jā miʿ alBayā n, v. 4, pp. 191–197). In a similar vein, al-Ṭabarı̄ also presents a range of meaning for women’s nushū z in Q. 4:34, including haughtiness, sexual abandonment, and defiance (v. 3, p. 801). AlZamakhsharı̄ defines men’s nushū z as being harsh towards his wife by depriving her of sexual intercourse, financial provision, love, and mercy, which should be between a man and woman, and that he harms her physically or verbally (Al-Kashshā f, v. 1, p. 604). On the other hand, a woman’s nushū z, according to al-Zamakhsharı̄ , is her disobedience and agitation towards her husband (v. 1, p. 538). For al-Rā zı̄ , ‘a man’s nushū z (in Q. 4:128) against his wife’s rights is that he abandons her (yuʿrid ̣ ʿanhā ), frowns in her face, does not have intercourse with her, and behaves ill towards her (yusı̄ ʿ ʿushratahā )’ (al-Tafsı̄ r al-Kabı̄ r, v. 4, p. 235), whereas in Q. 4:34, he states that a woman’s nushū z is her disobedience to her husband and acting superior to him through defiance (4:72). Ibn Kathı̄ r defines men’s nushū z as his repulsion from his wife (Tafsı̄ r al-Qurʾā n al-ʿAẓı̄ m, v. 2, pp. 474–475), whereas he interprets a woman’s nushū z as her haughtiness towards her husband, who ‘leaves his command, abandons him (sexually) and is hateful towards him’ (v. 2, p. 326). 14 Women’s legal right to equal treatment with co-wives is discussed in all four legal schools based on the Qurʾanic verse 4:3 and the Prophetic tradition: ‘If a person has two wives and he is inclined towards one of them, he will appear on the Day of Judgement with one of his sides paralyzed’ (Sunan Abı̄ Dawū d, 2133; Al-Zaylaʿı̄ , v. 3, p. 214 (as cited in Al-Hidā yah v. 1, p. 545)). ‫بي‬ ِ ‫ن َأ‬ ْ ‫ع‬ َ ‫ياَمِة‬ َ ‫ق‬ ِ ‫ل‬ ْ ‫يْوَم ا‬ َ َ‫ج ا ء‬ َ ‫حَداُهَما‬ ْ ‫لى ِإ‬ َ ‫ل ِإ‬ َ ‫فَما‬ َ ‫ن‬ ِ ‫تا‬ َ ‫لُه اْمَرَأ‬ َ ‫ت‬ ْ ‫ن‬ َ ‫كا‬ َ ‫ن‬ ْ ‫ل ‘َم‬ َ ‫قا‬ َ ‫لَم‬ َّ ‫س‬ َ ‫يِه َو‬ ْ ‫ل‬ َ ‫ع‬ َ ‫لُه‬ َّ ‫لى ال‬ َّ ‫ص‬ َ ِّ ‫ب‬ ‫ي‬ ِ ‫ن‬ َّ ‫ن ال‬ ْ ‫ع‬ َ ‫يَرَة‬ ْ ‫ُهَر‬ ٌ ‫ئ‬ ‫ل‬ ِ ‫قُه َما‬ ُّ ‫ش‬ ِ ‫’َو‬. 15 Qurʾan, 4:34. Author’s translation. 16 To capture a few of the most significant pieces: Abdulhamid Abusulayman, Marital Discord (London: IIIT, 2003); Asma Barlas, ‘Believing Women’ in Islam; amina wadud, Qurʾan and Women; Ayesha Chaudhry, Domestic Violence; Ayesha Chaudhry, ‘The Problems of Conscience and Hermeneutics’, Comparative Islamic Studies 2.2 (2006): 157–170; Azizah al-Hibri, ‘An Islamic Perspective on Domestic Violence’, Fordham International Law Journal 271 (2003): 195–224; Hadia Mubarak, ‘Breaking the Interpretive Monopoly’, Hawwa: Journal of Women of the Middle East and Islamic World, 2.3 (2004): 261–289; Julianne Hammer, ‘Men are the Protectors of Women’, Feminism, Law and Religion (2013); Karen Bauer, Gender Hierarchy in the Qurʾā n; Kathryn Klausing, ‘Two Twentieth-century Exegetes between Traditional Scholarship and Modern Thought’, Tafsı̄ r and Islamic Intellectual History; Kecia Ali, Sexual Ethics and Islam; Kecia Ali, ‘The Best of you Shall Not Hit’, Comparative Islamic Studies 2.2 (2006): 143–155; Khaled Abou El Fadl, Speaking in God’s Name

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17 18

19

20

21

22

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(Oneworld, 2005); Laury Silvers, ‘In the Book We have Left Out Nothing’, Comparative Islamic Studies 2.2 (2006): 171–180; Mohamed R. Beshir, Family Leadership (Maryland: Amana publications, 2009); Saadiya Shaikh, ‘Exegetical Violence: Nushuz in Qurʾanic Gender Ideology’, Journal for Islamic Studies 17 (1997): 49–73; Seyed Mohammad Asadinejad, ‘Legal Strategies to Resolve Problems of Martial Relationships in the Qurʾan’, Journal of Politics & Law (2012); Zainab Alwani, ‘The Qurʾanic Model’, Change from Within; Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Mulki Al-Sharmani and Jana Rumminger, Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition (Oneworld, 2015); Johanna Pink, Muslim Qurʾanic Interpretation Today (Sheffield: Equinox, 2019). Kecia Ali writes that Q. 4:34 and Q. 2:228 are ‘notoriously difficult verses for exegetes concerned with gender justice and equality’ (Sexual Ethics and Islam, 2nd ed., p. 157). As Ayesha Chaudhry illustrates in one of the most comprehensive studies on this subject, this has been the position of the majority of pre-modern exegetes as well as contemporary scholars whom she labels as ‘neo-traditionalist’ due to their attempt to synthesize the tradition with notions of an egalitarian marriage (Domestic Violence, pp. 81–84; pp. 165–168). Some scholars who have taken this approach include Abdul-Hamid Abu Sulayman in his book Marital Discord, Laleh Bakhtiar in her Sublime Translation of the Qurʾan and Ziauddin Sardar in Reading the Qurʾan; Ahmed Ali also challenges the common translation of this term in his Contemporary Translation of the Qurʾan. Rather than identify its meaning as ‘separate from’, however, he interprets it as ‘to have intercourse with’, based on a lexical analysis of the verb. According to Johanna Pink, some contemporary professors in Turkey have also defined the term as ‘separate from’ (Epilogue, Muslim Qurʾanic Interpretation Today, 284–285). Abou El-Fadl, Speaking in God’s Name, 94; Esack, ‘Islam and Gender Justice: Beyond Simplistic Apologia’, What Men Owe Women, 192; Silvers, ‘In the Book We have Left out Nothing’, 177; wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 199–200. For a detailed exposition of Ibn ʿĀ shū r’s exegesis on Q. 4:34, see Hadia Mubarak, ‘Change Through Continuity: A Case Study of Q. 4:34 in Ibn ʿĀ shū r’s Al-Tah ̣rı̄ r wa-l-Tanwı̄ r’. Journal of Qurʾanic Studies 20.1 (2018): 1–27. The tradition narrated by Shā fi’ı̄ is: ‘It has been related that ʻUmar b. al-Khaṭṭā b said: [When] we were in the society of the Quraysh, our men controlled our women, but when we came to Medina we found their women controlled their men. Then our women mingled with their women and they became frightening/threatening (dhaʼara) to their husbands, meaning they committed nushū z and became audacious. So I went to the Prophet and said: the women are quarreling with their husbands, so permit us to strike them. Thereafter the apartments of the wives of the Prophet were surrounded by a gathering of women complaining about their husbands. So [the Prophet] said: ‘The family of Muhammad was surrounded tonight by seventy women, all of them complaining about their husbands, and you will not find [those husbands] to be the best of you’ (al-Razi, 10:73). I use Ayesha Chaudhry’s translation of this tradition (‘Wife Beating’, p, 282). Classified as ṣah ̄ ̣ıh ̣ (authentic) and narrated by Ah ̣mad ibn Ḥanbal, Abū Dawū d, Al-Nasā ʾı̄ , Ibn Hibban, and al-Ḥā kim. See Abū Dawū d al-Sijistā nı̄ . Sunan Abı̄ Dawū d. Beirut: Dā r al-Risā la alʿAlā miyya (2009). A small twig of the arak tree, traditionally used as a toothbrush and recommended for hygienic use by the Prophet. It is also referred to as miswā k. See reports #9368, #9387 and #9388. In the last one, ʿAṭā ʾ does not identify Ibn ʿAbbā s as the source of this information. For example, al-Ṭabarı̄ interprets men’s degree in Q. 2:228 as men’s responsibility to pardon their wives for any shortcomings towards their husbands, while not using this as an excuse to renege on their own responsibilities. Similarly, al-Zamakhsharı̄ and Abū Qā sim al-Qushayrı̄ (d. 465/1072) interprets the passage ‘men are qawwā mū n over women’ in Q. 4:34 to argue that greater strength entails great responsibility.

Further reading Bauer, Karen. Gender Hierarchy in the Qurʾan. Cambridge University Press, 2015. Bauer’s Gender Hierarchy in the Qurʾan is the first to bring forth significant nuances in contemporary religious scholars’ interpretations of Qurʾanic verses on human creation, female witnesses, and marital hierarchy by

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incorporating interviews from conservative, neo-traditionalist, and reformist scholars in Iran and Syria. Her inclusion of female scholarly voices is a refreshing shift from the academic literature’s nearly exclusive emphasis on male scholarly views. Chaudhry, Ayesha. Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition. Oxford University Press, 2013.Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition remains the most exhaustive work on Q. 4:34, providing an impressive breadth of exegetical and legal interpretations on men’s qiwā ma over women and ways to deal with wives guilty of nushū z. Moving outside the genre of tafsı̄ r, she incorporates a range of contemporary scholarly and activist voices in Arabic, Urdu, and English from three media – video, text, and audio – to assess modern interpretations of Q. 4:34. Geissinger, Aisha. Gender and Muslim Constructions of Exegetical Authority: A Rereading of the Classical Genre of Qurʾan Commentary. Leiden: Brill, 2015.Geissinger’s Gender and Muslim Constructions of Exegetical Authority is distinct in examining the role that female exegetical authorities played in the earliest sources of Islam, including hadith, exegesis, reports and variant readings, and the ways in which these sources shaped the pre-modern genre of tafsı̄ r. Through the lens of gender, Geissinger introduces readers to hitherto neglected historical material attributed to female figures or related to female bodies. Pink, Johanna. Muslim Qurʾanic Interpretation Today. Sheffield: Equinox, 2019.This most recent work explores the diverse ways in which contemporary Muslims interpret the Qurʾan, by drawing upon the authority of the tradition in unique ways, historicizing it or arguing for new approaches. It draws upon a rich array of untapped sources including social media blogs, YouTube videos, and television shows. Stowasser, Barbara. Women in the Qurʾan, Traditions and Interpretations. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.In 1994, Stowasser was the first Western scholar to comprehensively examine how women appear in the Qurʾan and its exegesis, specifically through the depiction of historic female characters and the Prophet’s wives. It brings to readers’ attention the discrepancies that sometimes exist between the Qurʾanic portrayal of women and Qurʾanic exegesis.

References Abou El-Fadl, Khaled. Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women. Oxford: Oneworld, 2005. ———. ‘Excerpt by Khaled Abou El-Fadl: On the Beating of Wives’. Scholar of the House. Accessed 29 May 2019. . Abū Dawū d al-Sijistā nı̄ . Sunan Abı̄ Dawū d. Beirut: Dā r al-Risā la al-ʿAlā miyya, 2009. Abusulayman, Abdulhamid. Marital Discord. London: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2003. al-Bayd ̣ā wı̄ , ʿAbdallā h ibn ʿUmar al-. Anwā r Al-Taʾwı̄ l Wa-Asrā r Al-Tanzı̄ l. Edited by Muhammad ʿAbd al-Rah ̣mā n al-Marʿashlı̄ . Beirut: Dā r Ih ̣yā ʾ al-Turā th al-ʿArabı̄ , 1997. Al-Faruqi, Maysam J. “Self-Identity in the Qurʾan and Islamic Law.” Windows of Faith: Muslim Women Scholar-Activists of North America. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000. al-Hibri, Azizah. ‘An Islamic Perspective on Domestic Violence’. Fordham International Law Journal 27.1 (2003): 195–224. Ali, Kecia. Sexual Ethics and Islamic: Feminist Reflections on Qur’ā n, Hadith and Jurisprudence. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2016. ———. ‘The Best of You Shall Not Hit’, Comparative Islamic Studies 2.2 (2006): 143–155. ———. Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. al-Qurṭubı̄ , Abū ʿAbdullā h Muhammad ibn Ah ̣mad al-Anṣā rı̄ al-. Al-Jā miʿ li-Ah ̣kā m al-Qurʾan, 1st edition. Edited by ʿAbdullā h ibn ʿAbd al-Muh ̣sin al-Turkı̄ . Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Risā la, 2006. al-Rā zı̄ , Fakhr al-Dı̄ n al-. Al-Tafsı̄ r al-Kabı̄ r (Mafā tı̄ h ̣ al-Ghayb). Beirut: Dā r al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2013, 292. al-Shā fiʿı̄ , Muhammad ibn Idrı̄ s. Al-Umm. Cairo: Dar al-Ḥadith, 2008. al-Ṭabarı̄ , Abū Jaʿfar Muhammad Ibn Jarı̄ r al-. Jā miʿ al-Bayā n ʿan Taʾwı̄ l al-Qurʾan. Edited by Ṣalā h ̣ ʿAbd al-Fattā h ̣ al-Khā lidi. Cairo: Dā r al-Hadith, 2010. al-Ṭū sı̄ , Muhammad Abū Jaʿfar Ibn al-Ḥasan ʿAlı̄ . Al-Tibyā n Fı̄ Tafsı̄ r al-Qurʾan. Beirut, Lebanon: Dā r Ih ̣yā ʾ al-Turā th al-ʿArabı̄ , 1985. Alwani, Zainab. ‘The Qurʾanic Model for Harmony in Family Relations’. In Change From Within, edited by Maha al-Khateeb and Salma Abugideiri, 33-66. Herndon, VA: Peaceful Families Project, 2007.

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Classical Qurʾanic exegesis and women Al-Zamakhsharı̄ , Mah ̣mū d ibn ʿUmar al-. Al-Kashshā f ʿan Ḥaqā ʾiq al-Tanzı̄ l Wa ʿuyū n al-Aqawı̄ l fı̄ Wujū h al-Taʾwı̄ l, 2nd edition. Edited by ʿAbd al-Razzā q al-Mahdı̄ . Beirut: Dā r Ih ̣yā ʾ al-Turā th al-ʿArabı̄ , 2016. Anawati, G.C., ‘Fakhr al-Dı̄ n al-Rā zı̄ ’. Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., edited by P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs. Consulted online on 17 April 2018. . Badran, Margot. ‘Feminism and the Qurʾan’ In Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾan, edited by Jane Dammen McAuliffe. Georgetown University, Washington D.C.: Brill, 2011. Accessed on December 7, 2011. 0-www.brillonline.nl.library.lausys.georgetown.edu/subscriber/entry?entry=q3_ COM-00065. Barlas, Asma. ‘Believing Women’ in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qurʾan. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Bauer, Karen. ‘Room for Interpretation: Qurʾanic Exegesis and Gender’. PhD diss., Princeton University, 2008. ———. Gender Hierarchy in the Qurʾan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Brown, Jonathan. Misquoting Muhammad. London: Oneworld, 2014. Calder, Norman. ‘Tafsir from Tabarı̄ to Ibn Kathı̄ r: Problems in the Description of a Genre, Illustrated with Reference to the Story of Abraham’. In Approaches to the Qurʾan, edited by G.R. Hawting and Abdul-Kader A. Shareef, 101–140. London: Routledge, 1993. Chaudhry, Ayesha S. ‘The Problems of Conscience and Hermeneutics’. Comparative Islamic Studies 2.2 (2006): 163. ———. Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. ———. ‘Marital Discord in Qurʾanic Exegesis’. In The Meaning of the Word: Lexicology and Qurʾanic Exegesis, edited by S.R. Burge, 325–349. London: Oxford University Press, 2015. Clark, Patricia. “Women, Slaves and the Hierarchies of Domestic Violence: The Family of St. Augustine.” In Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture: Differential Equations, edited by Sandra Joshel and Sheila Murnaghan, 109–129. London: Routledge, 2001. Donner, Fred M. Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing. Princeton: Darwin Press, 1998. Esack, Farid. ‘Islam and Gender Justice: Beyond Simplistic Apologia’. In What Men Owe to Women: Men's Voices from World Religions, edited by John Raines and Daniel Maguire, 187–210. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Geissinger, Aisha. Gender and Muslim Constructions of Exegetical Authority. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Gilliot, Claude. ‘Exegesis of the Qurʾan: Classical and Medieval’. In Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾan, edited by Jane Dammen McAuliffe. Washington, DC: Brill Online, 2014. Accessed March 19, 2014. http:// referenceworks.brillonline.com.proxy.library.georgetown.edu/entries/encyclopaedia-of-the-Qurʾan/ exegesis-of-the-Qurʾan-classical-and-medieval-COM_00058. Haddad, Gibril Fouad. ‘Tropology and Inimitability: Ibn ʿĀ shū r’s Theory of tafsı̄ r in the Ten Prolegomena to al-Tahrı̄ ṛ wa’l-tanwı̄ r’. Journal of Qurʾanic Studies 21.1 (2019): 50–111. Hammer, Julianne. ‘Men are the Protectors of Women’. In Feminism, Law and Religion, edited by Marie Failinger, Lisa Schiltz, and Susan Stabile. 237–256. London: Ashgate, 2013. Hidayatullah, Aysha. Feminist Edges of the Qurʾan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Hodgson, Marshall G. The Venture of Islam. Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Ibn al-ʿArabı̄ , Muhammad b. ʿAbdallā h Abū Bakr. Ah ̣kā m al-Qurʾan. Beirut: Dā r al-Kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2012. Ibn Kathı̄ r, Ismā ʿı̄ l ibn ʿUmar. Tafsı̄ r al-Qurʾan al-ʿAẓı̄ m. Damascus: Maktabat Dā r al-Fayh ̣ā ʾ; Riyadh: Maktabat Dā r al-Salā m, 1994. Luitje, Linda. ‘Response to Asma Barlas ‘Muslim Women and Sexual Oppression, Reading Liberation from the Qurʾan’. Macalester International 10 (2001): 152. Mattson, Ingrid. The Story of the Qurʾan. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing: 2008. Maydā nı̄ , Muhammad Shakū r. ‘Al-Marʾa bayna al-musā wā t wal qiwā ma’. Hadyi l-Islam 46.7–8 (2002): 6–16. Mir-Hosseini, Ziba, Mulki Al-Sharmani, and Jana Rumminger, eds. Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition. Oxford: Oneworld, 2015. Mubarak, Hadia ‘Breaking the Interpretive Monopoly’. Hawwa: Journal of Women of the Middle East and Islamic World 2.3 (2004): 261–289.

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Hadia Mubarak ———. ‘Intersections: Modernity, Gender and Qurʾanic Exegesis’. PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2014. ———. ‘Change through Continuity: A Case Study of Q. 4:34 in Ibn ʿĀ shū r’s Al-Tah ̣rı̄ r wa-l-Tanwı̄ r’. Journal of Qurʾanic Studies 20.1 (2018): 1–27. Naguib, Shuruq. ‘Horizons and Limitations of Feminist Hermeneutics’. In New Topics in Feminist Philosophy of Religion, edited by Pamela Anderson, 33–49. Dordrecht: Springer, 2010. Netton, Ian Richard. Texts and Trauma: An East-West Primer. London: Curzon Press, 1996. Pink, Johanna. Muslim Qurʾanic Interpretation Today: Media, Genealogies, and Interpretive Communities. Sheffield: Equinox, 2019. Rahman, Yusuf. ‘Hermeneutics of Al-Baydā wı̄ in his Anwā r Al-Taʾwı̄ l Wa-Asrā r Al-Tanzı̄ l’. Islamic Culture 71 (1997): 1–14. Rapoport, Yossef. Marriage, Money and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Saleh, Walid. The Formation of the Classical Tafsı̄ r Tradition. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Shaikh, Saadiya. ‘Exegetical Violence: Nushū z in Qurʾanic Gender Ideology’. Journal for Islamic Studies 17 (1997): 49–73. Silvers, Laury. ‘In the Book We have Left Out Nothing’. Comparative Islamic Studies 2.2 (2006): 171–180. Stowasser, Barbara. Women in the Qurʾan, Traditions and Interpretations. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Tucker, Judith. In the House of the Law. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Vermes, G. ‘Bible and Midrash: Early Old Testament Exegesis’. In Cambridge History of the Bible, edited by P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans, 199–231. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. wadud, amina. Qurʾan and Women: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. ‘Alternative Qurʾanic Interpretation’. In Windows of Faith: Muslim Women Scholar-Activists in North America, edited by Gisela Webb, 51–71. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. ———. Inside the Gender Jihad. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006.

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2 SEX AND MARRIAGE IN EARLY ISLAMIC LAW Carolyn G. Baugh

What sorts of questions about sex and marriage arose for early Muslims, and how did some of Islam’s earliest authorities attempt to answer them? Rediscovering these questions, as well as the answers attempted, can shed light on what early Muslims understood ‘Islamic law’ to be. When a course of action was in doubt, members of the Muslim community sought out the insights of the most respected local authorities. Far from a monolith, early law was a tapestry of queries with widely varying opinions in response. Although early Muslims considered the opinion of the Prophet to be preeminent, for some topics it was simply unavailable. Thus, many early Muslim questioners were forced to rely on the opinions of esteemed local community members. These opinions, like those of the Prophet, were passed on for generations orally, preserved in the minds of citizens and legal authorities alike. Ultimately these opinions came to be written and gathered into folios. The genre that emerged was called the musannaf (compendium/written compiḷ ation). The compendia of the 9th century contained legal opinions relevant for Muslims attempting to sort out how to apply divine law to their lives. These compendia are compilations of the practice, habits, and legal decisions/opinions attributed to the Prophet, his Companions, and the successor generations. The emerging musannaf literature represents ̣ an early legal hybrid, straddling the genres of prophetic tradition/saying (h ̣adı̄ th) and legal opinion of authorities from the community (raʾy). These two competing sources of law fought for supremacy as an ever-increasing Muslim community wrestled with how best to behave as Muslims, pursuing information that could facilitate informed decisions. Two early scholars, ʿAbd al-Razzā q al-S ̣anʿā nı̄ (211/826) and Ibn Abı̄ Shayba (234/849), were among those who began preserving both prophetic and non-prophetic opinions in writing in the early 9th century. The Musannaf of Ibn Abı̄ Shayba is a much larger work than the better-known ̣ Musannaf of ʿAbd al-Razzā q. On the topics of marriage and sex, however, the less ̣ famous work proves a much richer resource. Both of these non-canonical collections provide access to what Crone refers to as ‘pre-classical law’ (Crone 1987). The legal tradition had been entirely oral in its earliest periods (from the 7th through mid-8th centuries). This oral legal tradition was characterized by a culture of question (istiftā ʾ) and response (iftā ʾ), on points of law and social behavior as well as regarding proper interpretation of Qurʾanic verses. Some 50 years later the classical prophetic hadith collections 43

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would take precedence over these earliest compendia. This was due to a trend in legal theory that called for elaboration of the law to be based solely on the opinion of the Prophet. In an expanding empire rife with regional differences, legal scholars hoped this shift would aid in unification and simplification. Thus, scholars pursued the gathering and preservation of authentic hadith that could be verified as to content and chains of transmitters; the resultant ‘sound’ prophetic sayings were deemed the second most authoritative source of law after the Qurʾan itself. Meanwhile, the emerging legal schools (Ḥanafı̄ , Mā likı̄ , Shā fiʿı̄ , and Ḥanbalı̄ , all linked to late 8th and early 9th century scholars) began generating discussions and decisions that were collected in manuals of positive law. How, then, do the compilations differ from other legal sources or from authentic hadith collections? The issues of authenticity, as well as the challenges posed by such sweeping and – crucially – regionally heterodox collections, have been discussed at length by Motzki in his illuminating study. An important takeaway from Motzki’s work on the Musannaf collections is the conclusion that they are closely linked to the early legal works ̣ of the likes of the Medinan authority Mā lik (179/795) (Motzki 2002, pp. 51–2). Many of the topics are presented as debates, becoming prototypes for legal works that would address multiple perspectives. Some recorded perspectives would prove highly controversial, and later jurists would angrily refute some of the content found to be at odds with what came to be accepted practice. As to the hadith works, Muslim scholars demanded reports traced to the Prophet be verifiable, with every member of the chain of transmission identifiable and of irreproachable character and memory. Indeed an entire field of study, with extensive biographical dictionaries, emerged to meet the demands of this method of analysis. In contrast, many of the reports in the compendia lack named transmitters, instead referring only to ‘a man’ or ‘a man of the Arabian peninsula.’ Yet the compilations were not easily discarded, because the opinions in the compendia were often attributed to famous and well-respected early Muslims. Many of the opinions therein surfaced in exegesis and even in later positive law manuals, occasionally as definitive sources, occasionally only to be rebutted. The anecdotes and debates provide fascinating clues to Muslim social history. It is also crucial to note that early Muslim scholars took the Musannaf works very seriously. ̣ For example, Ibn al-Mundhir al-Naysabū rı̄ (318/930), famed last of the ‘truly independent jurists’ (mujtahid muṭlaq) and compiler of points of consensus, learned Ibn Abı̄ Shayba’s Musaṇ naf from Ismā ʾı̄ l ibn Qutayba (284/897) in Nishapur, before traveling in search of further knowledge and acquiring al-Shā fiʿı̄ ’s Umm and only later the Musannaf of ʿAbd al-Razzā q. ̣ The chains of transmission that Ibn al-Mundhir cites for Companion and Successor opinions in his works mirror those provided by the Musannaf works. Ibn al-Mundhir in turn was ̣ a major source for later legal scholars like the 13th-century Hanbali jurist Ibn Qudā ma alMaqdisı̄ (620/1223) who quoted him extensively. Further, Ibn Abı̄ Shayba’s Musannaf was ̣ among the textbooks used by scholars in Cordoba, while in the Maghrib his book was regarded as one of the canonical collections of hadith (Pellat 2008). Then as now, those with knowledge of Islamic law took seriously the task of shaping Muslim social behavior, and this is evident in the ideals around which they focused their discussions. While it is possible to guess at the nature of some portion of lived reality from these discussions, it is wise to resist the temptation to simply equate lived reality with what authorities considered proper behavior. Their purpose was ultimately prescriptive, not descriptive.

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Sex and marriage in early Islamic law

General overview of marriage law Before delving in depth into the chapters on sex and marriage in the compendia, it is useful to have a brief overview of classical Islamic marriage law. Many of the following issues, such as polygyny, compulsion, guardianship, and divorce law generally, are contested by reformers and indeed banned or modified by civil law; others, such as concubinage, have been rendered obsolete with the abolition of slavery. Even so, classical law still holds sway in certain elements of global Muslim family law. The compendia allow us to see now-forgotten differences of opinion on issues that would eventually be presented as settled. The compendia under discussion have in common with hadith collections and later legal manuals their chapter titles: Kitā b al-Nikā h ̣. The word nikā h ̣ means both sexual intercourse and marriage; the Qurʾan uses the word to mean both. Although other words from the Arabic lexicon convey these concepts, when scholars used the title Kitā b al-Nikā h ̣ it meant ‘The Chapter on Marriage,’ although a more precise rendering would be ‘The Chapter on Sex and Marriage.’ Because the primary goal of marriage is to render sex licit, the semantic link is clear. Early jurists held that licit sex can occur through either the purchase of a female concubine or through entering into a valid marriage contract. Legal manuals explain that men are unrestricted in the amount of concubines they can own and thus to whom they have sexual access; women are not allowed to have sex with their male slaves. Men are restricted in several ways with regard to whom they can marry. Almost all interpretations of Q4:3 have determined that men may marry up to four women provided that they give each an equal share of their attention. The Qurʾan prohibits marriage with sisters, mothers, grandmothers, stepmothers, stepdaughters, aunts, great-aunts, nieces, and milk-sisters. Simultaneous marriage to related women (sisters, mother–daughter or aunt–niece combinations) is also prohibited. Although marriage to polytheists is prohibited, marriage to free Christian and Jewish women is allowed. For Muslim women, only Muslim men are legal spouses. Key to the legality of the union is the marriage contract. The valid marriage contract has certain essential components. It must be witnessed by two men or one man and two women. In all but the Ḥanafı̄ school a marriage guardian, most usually of the agnatic kin, is required to represent the bride at the time the contract is signed. The Ḥanafı̄ al-Shaybā nı̄ (189/805), perhaps recognizing the fraught nature of his school’s position, feistily begins his chapter on marriage with the assertion that a woman can marry off her slave or slave girl and conclude a marriage contract, even her own (al-Shaybā nı̄ 2006, pp. 64–79). Part of the duty of the guardian is to assure that the bride is married to a ‘suitable’ spouse; definitions of suitability differ widely, with no consensus as to whether it refers to piety, lineage, social or economic status, or some combination of all these. Fathers are allowed to compel virgin daughters to marry in the Shā fiʿı̄ , Mā likı̄ , and Ḥanbalı̄ schools, while in the Ḥanafı̄ school fathers can only compel their prepubescent virgin daughters (because pubescence, not loss of virginity, confers legal capacity according to that school). The contract contains details of the spouses’ names, their lineage, and the amount of the marriage dower owed the bride in exchange for her complete sexual availability and obedience. She is also due maintenance (nafaqa) throughout her marriage, which includes food as well as clothing and any monies necessary for the support of offspring resulting from the union. The contract will often further include the details of any maintenance agreement, although jurists have opined that the amounts due can change based on the economic circumstances of the husband. Non-essential components to the contract can include conditions or stipulations. Although there is general agreement that stipulations have been allowed in the marriage contract since its inception, it is a fact that many marrying Muslims have not been cognizant 45

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of their right to include them. Stipulations can range from guarantees that a woman be housed in proximity to her family, to being allowed to work or continue education, to an effective prohibition of the husband’s marrying additional wives or taking concubines. Jurists insisted that stipulations could not prohibit what is allowed by law. For example, a stipulation that no offspring result from the union would be void. Because polygyny is licit, a wife cannot stipulate that her husband refrain from it, only that if he does so the legal effect would be to trigger her divorce by judicial process. Marriage is entered into via contract. Thus, the dissolution of that contract ends the marriage. Three modes of divorce exist. The first mode is unilateral repudiation of a wife by her husband (ṭalā q). This can occur at whim and be revoked at whim only twice. A third repudiation is irrevocable, although the couple can remarry after the wife has entered into a consummated contract of marriage which then ends through divorce or the new husband’s death. The second mode of divorce is by judicial process (faskh), referenced above, which occurs when a judge determines the couple should be divorced (i.e. if a husband is proven to be impotent or has not paid maintenance, or in cases where the husband is deemed unsuitable). Both repudiation and divorce by judicial process allow the wife some financial rights upon divorce, most commonly the payment of the remainder of her dower and any arrears of maintenance. The third mode of divorce is the woman-initiated divorce (khulʿ), which results in a wife surrendering all financial rights in exchange for her freedom.

Early opinions from the chapters on Nikā h ̣ Early legal compendia recorded questions posed by men concerned with the mechanics of living with and having sex with women (including queries about licit sexual positions and how to divide one’s time equably between multiple wives). Which women were marriageable was a topic of great concern: although the outer limit of four was clear enough, there were restrictions on marrying women who were related to each other (or to the potential groom). What of marrying women of other religions? In a suddenly sprawling empire, issues of community definition arose as Muslims – who remained for many generations a minority – now found themselves in constant contact with Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians. Underlying all these issues was concern with paternity and sexual ethics in a world where a man could have multiple concubines in addition to his multiple wives.

Issues of consent and valid contracts In a culture that still valued orality over writing, people also worried about the nature of contracts and consent. Many early legal issues centered on the mechanics of constructing a valid contract, with questions posed about consent, guardianship, and legal agency. For the most part, the chapters on marriage of the early compendia establish an overwhelming body of evidence in support of a requirement for female consent. This need for female consent applied to virgins as well, despite the fact that the Mā likı̄ and Shā fiʿı̄ and Ḥanbalı̄ schools would later deny virgins this right when they anchored attainment of legal capacity in loss of virginity. In ʿAbd al-Razzā q’s three chapters on female consent, only five of 43 reports deny a virgin the right to refuse a marriage. Similarly, in Ibn Abı̄ Shayba’s compendium, five of 24 reports obviate female consent: one allows the father to force any of his dependents to marry; two say he can compel his daughter whether she is a virgin or a non-virgin, and two deny virgins any right to choose their spouses (Baugh 2017, pp. 64–5). If we add to this the even earlier work of al-Awzā ʿı̄ (157/773), we find 46

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five reports confirming that a virgin who was married by her father against her will complained to the Prophet who separated her from her husband (Al-Awzā ʿı̄ 1993, pp. 325–6). The necessity of a guardian to contract the marriage, be it the father, a member of the agnatic kin, or the ruler, is generally established. In Ibn Abı̄ Shayba, sub-chapters five and six insist on the inability of women to play that role, although one report allows her to contract marriage for her slave. Those reports responding to the queries of women who had contracted for themselves use the language of prostitution: a woman who marries in this way is the equivalent of a whore. Even so, any Qurʾanic basis for the role of the guardian is challenged in the compendium. Sub-chapters 139 and 140 discuss the meaning of the verse 2:237. Several opinions included say it refers to the husband himself instead of the guardian, throwing into question the presumed explicit Qurʾanic textual support for the institution of guardianship. Contractual conditions or stipulations were also debated among the early scholars. The right of a woman to stipulate that she not be moved away from her family, for example, was supported by some (sub-chapter 73) and rejected by others (sub-chapter 74). One opinion notes clearly that women have no right to stipulate anything whatsoever. Meanwhile, there is evidence that fathers were using stipulations for financial gain: ‘ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzı̄ z intervened in a case where a man had stipulated that he should get one thousand and his daughter one thousand; ʿUmar awarded 2000 to his daughter and none for him’ (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, p. 500). Although such contracts of marriage, even when entered into with full consent, afforded marital status to free women, the institution of marriage retained much that smacked of un-freedom.

Marriage and slavery Discussions regarding marriage law took shape in a society profoundly shaped by slavery. The extent to which slavery was a global cultural norm in the 9th century cannot be overstated. The vast Muslim empire had endured a six-year civil war between the sons of Hā rū n al-Rashı̄ d (193/809). The victor in this war, al-Maʾmū n (r. 197–218/813–833), became determined to rely even more heavily on slave regiments than any previous Caliph (Lapidus 2002, p. 104). Slavery thus took on new layers of complexity in contexts where slave soldiers could be empowered and promoted, mixing, often unchecked, with the citizenry. Meanwhile, highly cultured and very expensive concubines represented coveted status symbols. Questions about how slaves should marry and be married off, and how to balance marriage to slaves with marriage to free persons weighed heavily on the minds of many in the community. Marriage and slavery in early Islamic law share vocabulary, conceptual categories, and power structures (Ali 2010). For example, the dower (mahr) paid to a woman in exchange for granting a man exclusive sexual access to her can be analogized to the price paid for the purchase of a slave. Ownership (milk) grants the license to have sex; milk al-nikā h ̣ refers to the ownership of marriage, or a man’s dominion over his wife through the marriage contract. Its corollary with regard to slavery is milk al-yamı̄ n, or ownership of the right hand, a term found throughout the Qurʾan to refer to slaves. The position of the slave girl was often analogized to that of the prepubescent child or the virgin woman; just as a master could contract marriage for his slaves without their consent, a father could marry off both his sons and his daughters prior to pubescence, or his daughters in their virginity. The jargon of early legal discussions supports the hierarchical nature of marriage: ‘al-rajul yakū n tah ̣tahu al-marʾa’ – meaning literally ‘a man has beneath him a woman’ – is another 47

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way of referring to his marriage. It is also not too difficult to locate something of the actual semantics of marriage and sex interwoven in such an elliptical mode of reference. Ibn Abı̄ Shayba’s 84th sub-chapter contains the following: Those who say [a newly freed slave girl] can rescind whether married to a free man or a slave … [Ṭā wū s] said, ‘She can rescind even if married to a man of Quraysh (tukhayyar wa in kā nat tah ̣t rajul min Quraysh).’ (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, p. 506) This anecdote, useful for illustrating one of the idiomatic expressions for marriage, further illustrates the commitment some early jurists had to the need for female consent. The agency attained by a now-freed woman was affirmed in the strongest terms possible (men of Quraysh were considered the community’s most elite stratum). Even if such a match were imposed upon her during her enslavement, some insisted her consent was necessary, once freed, in order for the marriage to retain its validity. Vocabulary regarding sex is also extremely hierarchical, positing male actors and female receivers of action. The verb waṭaʾa is used constantly in the early sources, which I have translated elsewhere as ‘to perform the sexual act upon,’ but other terms include – most frequently – dakhala bi-hā , literally ‘to enter her,’ and always referring to the act of consummation which triggers payment of the dower, asā ̣ ba (to penetrate), and ghashā (literally to cover), as well as waqaʿa ʿalā (to fall upon). Infrequently, the term yujā miʿ or jā maʿa is used, the one term for sex – denoting coming together – that suggests anything more than a unilateral act. The hierarchical nature of marriage is affirmed and reaffirmed in the early sources. The obedience of wives is stressed as a virtue: The Prophet said, ‘The greatest benefit the Muslim benefited, after Islam, is a beautiful woman who pleases him when he looks at her, obeys him when he orders her, and, if he must be absent, guards his money and herself for him.’ (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, p. 559) The most graphic example emerges from the following narrative, at least part of which is enshrined as a hadith in some of the minor collections: Abū Saʿı̄ d al-Khudarı̄ said, ‘A man brought his daughter to the Prophet and said, “My daughter refuses to marry.” The Prophet said to her, “Obey your father.” She responded, “No, not until you tell me what right a husband has over his wife.” She repeated herself, then [the Prophet] responded, “The right of a husband over his wife is that if he had a wound (qarh ̣a), and she licked it (lah ̣asathā ), or if his nose flowed with pus or blood, and she licked it, even then she still would not have fulfilled his right.” She replied, “By the One who sent you with the Truth, I will never marry.” The Prophet replied, “Do not marry them off without their permission (lā tunkih ̣ū hunna illā bi-idhnihinna).”’ (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, pp. 556–7) Despite the vile imagery, the anecdote contains much that is useful. Neither the girl’s age nor sexual status (virgin or non-virgin) was mentioned, yet the Prophet included her under the umbrella of those who cannot be married without giving permission. The girl had refused a direct order from the Prophet (‘Obey your father’), demanding more information. 48

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The information he gave her allowed for an informed decision on her part, in that she saw that she would prefer independence over a life of servitude and obedience. In response, the Prophet did not challenge her, but rather affirmed her choice not to marry. Other legal difficulties arose in the area of marriage to and sex with slave girls. In the early formative era, no over-arching legal doctrine had emerged to reconcile Islam’s hostility toward adultery with its receptiveness to owning and having sex with multiple women. Thus, the way that early legal authorities responded to questions about sex, marriage, and slaves often varied. Kecia Ali (2010, p. 25) has remarked that, The critical conceptual links between marriage and slavery emerge from a core idea about sexuality and sexual licitness: licit sex was possible only when a man wielded exclusive control over a particular woman’s sexual capacity. This view, implicitly shared at the outset of the formative period, was fuzzy with regard to female slaves and stronger with regard to free women. By the end of the formative period … it was accepted that the same strictures would apply to slave sexuality. The jurists’ comfort with the semantic overlap between marriage and slavery facilitated this process. As prime examples of the process of negotiating this ‘fuzziness,’ the compendia shed light on the issues that evolved as the allowance for owning slaves and sleeping with slave girls collided with strict requirements against committing adultery and wariness of allowing for any ambiguity in lines of succession. One key question, for example, was whether or not a slave could have concubines. Ibn Abı̄ Shayba records nine opinions allowing the slave to have concubines, some stipulating that it should be with his master’s permission (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, p. 485). The most intriguing of the anecdotes reads that Ibn ʿAbbā s himself had a merchant lad (ghulā m tā jir) and allowed him to take six or seven concubines. Four other opinions, however, decried this. The famed dream interpreter Ibn Sı̄ rı̄ n (110/728) was not alone in insisting that the male slave should marry rather than take concubines. The compendium’s succinct style includes only opinions; in-depth legal analysis of this issue can be found in a legal manual like that of al-Shā fiʿı̄ . Al-Shā fiʿı̄ pointed out that slaves, by virtue of being owned, cannot own assets such as concubines. The slave, therefore, should be allowed to have sex only through marriage. To do otherwise would cause confusion regarding the status of the concubine: is she solely the property of the slave or also the property of his master (al-Shā fiʿı̄ 2008, pp. 118–19)? In a milieu wherein slaves could attain wealth, power, and education, questions of misrepresentation arose. What if a husband claimed to be free but he was in fact enslaved? Some scholars insisted that an enslaved man was not suitable for a free woman. The four opinions listed in Ibn Abı̄ Shayba’s Musannaf give the woman a choice as to whether she ̣ wants to rescind the union or not (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, p. 478). Further confusion centered on sons having sex with their fathers’ slave girls. Some of the most interesting opinions in Ibn Abı̄ Shayba’s work have to do with the idea that a father can render his slave girl off-limits to his son simply by seeing her naked. The power of the patriarch’s gaze was in fact to make a woman illicit for his son, with the intended legal outcome being, in this case, perhaps, an overcorrection with regard to ensuring lines of descent. Thus the very title of the section reads: ‘Regarding the woman who is [no longer] licit for a son if a father strips and touches her’ (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, pp. 479–80). The quicktempered second Caliph ʿUmar ibn al-Khā ṭṭā b (23/644) figures prominently (two nearly identical reports) in this section: he had stripped a slave girl and then averred that this 49

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rendered her illicit for one of his sons who requested her. One early authority drew strong lines between actually having sex with his slave girl and merely doing what makes her illicit for his sons: ‘touching and looking.’ A man who inserts his finger into the vagina of a slave girl (qabalahā bi-yadihi) has made her illicit for his son. The Musannaf further records how a wife could use this knowledge of the law to her ̣ benefit, should she seek to prevent her husband from sleeping with his slave: A man bought a slave girl and his wife feared he would take her (khashiyat imraʾtuhu an yatakhidhahā ), so she ordered one of her sons, a lad (ghulā man), to sleep with [the slave girl] (an yaḍṭajiʿa ʿalayhā ) in order to render her illicit for the husband. (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, p. 480) The issue of simultaneous relationships with sisters sparked ambiguity when it came to slaves. Sub-chapter 50 of Ibn Abı̄ Shayba’s Musannaf is entitled, ‘A man owns two sister ̣ slaves and performs sex upon them together (fa-yaṭaʾhumā jamı̄ ʿan)’ (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, p. 480). Although evocative, as titles go, it is not impossible that jamı̄ ʿan (together) in this context merely meant being in a sexual relationship with both simultaneously. In exploring this section we find one anecdote that reads: ʿAbd Allā h ibn al-Mubarak related from Mū sā ibn Ayū b from his uncle from ʿAlı̄ , saying, ‘I was asked about a man who had two slave girl sisters. He had sex with one and then wanted to have sex with the other. ʿAlı̄ said, “No, not until he no longer owns the first one.” I asked, “What if he married her to his slave?” ʿAlı̄ said, “Not until he no longer owns her.”’ (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, p. 482) Such clarity does not find its way into all of the opinions listed. Another anecdote says that the man in question can do whatever he desires with whomever of his slaves simultaneously. Four reports said one verse (Q4:24) makes it legal and another (Q4:23) does not. Of these reports, two were ascribed to third Caliph ʿUthmā n ibn ʿAffā n (36/656), one to fourth Caliph ʿAlı̄ (41/661), and one to the legal scholar Abū Ḥanı̄ fa (150/767). The issue of one verse disallowing certain combinations among slaves and another rendering them legal also presents itself in questions about combining mothers and daughters. Of the seven opinions listed, only two are unequivocal that such a combination was forbidden. One anecdote has a master describing how he became attracted to the daughter of one of his concubines and mentioned he wanted to ‘ask about her’ and ‘look’ at her. The mother responded that she would not do that until she heard it was licit from the Caliph ʿUthmā n ibn ʿAffā n. The latter’s response was not to condemn the idea outright, but to say that as for him, he would not practice such a combination (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, pp. 481–2). Much of marriage law is, as mentioned, designed to clarify lines of descent. A divorced woman must sit for a waiting period (ʿidda) of three menstrual cycles or three months to prove herself not pregnant before remarrying. What, then, of a slave girl newly purchased? After all, she would have been at the disposal of her previous master. A waiting period had to be innovated. Opinions in the Musannaf convey that a man need only wait two cycles for ̣ his slave girl to become allowable. In the meantime, he can still kiss and fondle her. If he purchased her from a woman, or if she is too young for sex (saghı ̣ ̄ ra lā yujā miʿ mithluhā , i.e., those of her body type are not typically sexual partners; thus she would not have a period 50

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that could demonstrate a lack of pregnancy), he can even have sex with her without observing the waiting period (lā baʾs an yaṭaʾhā wa lā yastabriʾuhā ) (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, pp. 515–16).

Who to marry Ibn Abı̄ Shayba’s chapter on sex and marriage begins by addressing those who are ‘ordered’ to marry. Reports in this section highlight the Prophet’s disapproval for men who could marry but chose not to, while also noting that many would have voluntarily become eunuchs had he not forbidden it. Both males and females dealt with pressure to marry. However, they could also successfully refuse, as observed in the anecdote above regarding the girl who refused the Prophet’s command that she obey her father. The Musannaf includes stories of resistance to direct orders from even the much-feared ʿUmar ̣ ibn al-Khaṭṭab: Abū Yazı̄ d related that Subā ʿ ibn Thā bit married the daughter of Rabā h ̣ ibn Wahb. He had a daughter from another and she had a son from another. The boy [Subā ʿ’s son] fornicated with the girl [his step-sister] and she became pregnant. They were sent to ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭā b so they confessed. He whipped them and insisted they marry, but the boy refused. (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, p. 527) The boy effectively exercised agency in the face of this order to marry, challenging the Caliph’s decision. Opinions were not confined to encouraging marriage, but also described what qualities should be sought in a wife. Beyond the lauding of good-mannered women over badmannered women, the compendium includes four entries, three of which are ascribed to the Prophet, listing the most attractive qualities in a woman as being: ‘religion, money, and beauty’ (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, p. 560). One sub-chapter includes opinions on the proper vocabulary for courting during the potentially awkward waiting period of a widowed or divorced woman. The Qurʾan itself refers to this situation (2:235), encouraging men to marry such women and to make their intentions known even as they defer to the rules regarding the waiting period. One opinion instructed that the woman could only be approached through her guardian. Others, however, provide substantive advice (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, pp. 532–3): Mujā hid said, ‘He can say, “You are beautiful (jamı̄ la) and useful (nā fiʿa) and good for me (innaki la-ilayya khayr).”’ Ibn ʿAbbā s said he should say, ‘I desire you and want to marry you’ until such a time as she knows this without yet having made any promises or contracts.

People of the Book The marriage chapters in the compilations are concerned with community building. Marriage to women of the People of the Book, therefore, presents particular quandaries. How many can one marry at one time, and should they have the same allotment of conjugal nights per week as Muslim women and the same marriage rights? Their rights are the same, 51

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the opinions convey, but even so, there are numerous opinions averring that marriage to Muslim women is preferable: Ḥudhayfa [ibn al-Yamā n, 36/656] married a Jewish woman, and ʿUmar wrote to him that he should leave her. So he wrote back, ‘If it is forbidden, I will leave her.’ To which [ʿUmar] responded, ‘I do not claim that it’s forbidden, only that I worry you all will pursue their whores (akhā f an taʿā ṭū al-mū misā t minhunna).’ (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, pp. 474–5) Other opinions suggest that such marriages only took place in the past when Muslim women were few. Another, this time emanating from ʿUmar’s son Abdullā h (73/693), shows the lingering fear that People of the Book had some taint of polytheism. Ibn ʿUmar detested marriage to women of the People of the Book and would recite: ‘Do not marry polytheists until they believe (Q2:221)’ (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, p. 475). The status of the People of the Book remained problematic. Even a sub-chapter on what purpose the deferred dower serves and when it should be paid suddenly devolves into a discussion of whether or not the Christian Arabs are actually People of the Book. There were opinions holding that this was not in fact the case (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, pp. 476–8). Al-Shā fʿı̄ also holds forth on this topic, discarding them outright as converts and differentiating between genealogy and religion, as he asserts that the People of the Book are in fact members of Banı̄ Isrā ʾı̄ l to whom were given the Torah and the Gospels, and this is not something to which one can convert, so to speak (Al-Shā fʿı̄ 2008, pp. 16–18). The fact that many early Muslims considered large swaths of the Christian population polytheists, and therefore unmarriageable, is just one of the social tensions and ambiguities that the compendia have brought to light.

Combining women Among other challenges for early Muslims was coming to terms with the allowance of four women. Which four women? The Qurʾan is explicit about what women are not marriageable: a man cannot marry his sisters, mother, grandmothers, nieces, aunts, and great-aunts, nor can he marry any step-mothers and step-daughters (Q4:23). However, there are gray areas. As per usual, the compendia address these by presenting the questions and multiple opinions. For example, the aunt–niece combination is forbidden, as well as mother–daughter combinations and marriages to sisters simultaneously. Even so, illicit combinations occurred, often on technicalities: ʿAlı̄ was asked about a man who divorced his wife, and she had not yet completed her waiting period when he married her sister. ʿAlı̄ separated them and decreed she should have her dower due to the fact that her genitals had been made licit for him. He said, ‘If he consummated the marriage [with the new sister/wife], then she is due her entire dower, and must sit for the entirety of her waiting period. The two of them must both sit through their waiting periods. Each must sit for three cycles, and if they do not menstruate, they must sit for three months.’ (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, p. 525) Still, the compendium then muddies the waters somewhat by proceeding to include other opinions that if a man has divorced his wife triply, it is not illegal to marry her sister while 52

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the divorcee is in her waiting period. Other complexities arose for converts to Islam who happened to have been simultaneously married to two sisters prior to becoming Muslim: ‘ʿUmar said, “By God, you may pick one of them, for if you go near the other I’ll cut off your head”’ (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, p. 563). Sub-chapter 61 is entitled, ‘Regarding a man who commits adultery with his wife’s sister; what is the status of his wife for him?’ This suggests that the illicit nature of engaging in sexual intercourse with both sisters was not enough to prevent men from doing it. The opinions there vary: one reads, ‘An illicit thing does not render a licit thing illicit (lā yuh ̣arram h ̣arā m h ̣alā lan).’ Another opinion said that the wife was now off-limits for him. Yet another said that he would have to wait for the sister to sit for her waiting period to prove that she was not pregnant (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, p. 491). Sub-chapter 68 responds to questions that came up given the social realities of divorce, death, and remarriage. Step-daughters, it was well-known, were off-limits. But what about marrying a woman and her step-daughter, or, conversely, a woman and her step-mother? Predictably, there were those who supported such combinations and those who found them reprehensible (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, pp. 496–7). Another gray area arose with regard to milk-sisters. Sharing a wet nurse rendered two people, for all intents and purposes, siblings. Thus, a man nursed by a wet nurse was forbidden from marrying any female also nursed by her. Ibn Abı̄ Shayba’s sub-chapters 142 and 143 highlight questions about how much or how little milk, or how many sessions of nursing, might cause the status of ‘forbidden’ to kick in, while sub-chapter 80 explains that – in all opinions but one – a single wet nurse’s testimony that she had nursed them both was enough to separate two spouses. Nursing from the same woman would also render two females effectively sisters, and combining sisters in marriage is forbidden. This is the explanation behind another fascinating anecdote presented in the Musannaf of ʿAbd al-Razzā q (ʿAbd al-Razzā q 2000, p. 206). [Sufyā n] aḷ Thawrı̄ (161/777) described how he was asked about a man who had married a woman and not yet consummated the marriage. Not long thereafter this man contracted an additional marriage with an infant who was still nursing. Outraged, the first bride’s mother took herself to the infant’s home and somehow managed to gain access to the child and to nurse her. Al-Thawrı̄ ruled that both marriages were then immediately rendered invalid, and the rogue breastfeeder would have to pay both brides half their dowers since she was the cause of the problem. After the contracts were invalidated, the husband could remarry whichever one he chose, although if he had in fact consummated the first marriage then the first wife would get the full dower and have to sit for a waiting period; he could, however, marry her during her waiting period. While it is not a leap to imagine that this was an anecdote manufactured for the sake of legal debate, the fact remains that it found its way into the compendium.

Sex The compendia also make room for graphic discussions regarding birth control and sex. Questions about sex and sexual positions, in addition to how to cope when a wife is menstruating, are all discussed openly. The Musannaf of ʿAbd al-Razzā q, like that of Ibn Abı̄ Shayba, includes ̣ a lengthy chapter on how to go about having sex – what to say and what to do (ʿAbd al-Razzā q 2000, pp. 193–5). One choice bit of advice from the early authority Ibn Jurayj (150/767) says that he heard from Anas ibn Mā lik (93/711) that the Prophet said, ‘If a man has sex with his wife (idhā ghashā al-rajul ahlahu), he should be attentive to her (fa-liyaqsidha ̣ ̄ ). If he fulfills his need, and she has yet to fulfill her need, he should not rush her (lā yuʿajjiluhā ).’ 53

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Beyond this acknowledgment of women’s sexual needs, the compendia include sections that explore the limits of what a man can perform sexually. Ibn Abı̄ Shayba’s sub-chapter heading #124, entitled ‘What came regarding entering women through their anuses’ rules out sodomizing both males and females: ‘Ibn ʿAbbā s said that God does not look at a man who has entered a man or a woman via the anus’ (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, p. 569). The Qurʾanic verse 2:223, ‘Your women are your tilth,’ generated much discussion regarding not only sexual positions but birth control and menstruation. Generally, any position that allows for vaginal sex is allowed. Ibn Abı̄ Shayba’s Musannaf contains the oft-recurring exegetical ̣ anecdote regarding how the Muslims rejected the Medinan Jewish community’s contention that vaginal sex from behind generated cross-eyed children. Other interpretations of the verse in the compendium find in it allowance for a man to practice the withdrawal method of birth control or not, as he wishes (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, pp. 517–18). This would be in contradistinction to sub-chapter 96 containing opinions forbidding the withdrawal method, including one of Ibn ʿUmar who was angry that the slave girl he had given to his son had yet to become pregnant. Sub-chapter 97 further contains opinions that the withdrawal method is allowable with slave girls but free women must give their permission. All opinions support the idea that sex is not allowed during menstruation, but Ibn Abı̄ Shayba’s very next sub-chapter expounds widely on what a man can do when his wife or slave is menstruating. While many opinions convey the ‘all that is above the underwear (mā fawq al-izā r)’ hadith, this section in the Musannaf also includes ̣ graphic descriptions of an ‘everything-but’ approach to sex with a menstruating woman, including touching but not penetrating the vagina with the penis and ejaculating on her belly or between the thighs (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, pp. 530–2).

Conclusion Mining Ibn Abı̄ Shayba’s Musannaf for information on law regarding sex and marriage is ̣ both risky and fascinating. As a source, it is both rich and problematic. Some of Islam’s most respected scholars (such as Ibn al-Mundhir) began their legal studies by memorizing it; it was used as a textbook in Muslim Spain from the 9th century on. Its reports, in various forms, surface in other legal sources both contemporaneous (such as al-Shā fiʿı̄ ) and much later (such as Ibn Qudā ma). The variety of early opinions recorded suggest much more debate and equivocation than the discussions of the legal schools convey. The scope of the questions and the often-explicit nature of the responses suggest that believers sought legal advice on every aspect of marriage and sex. Those seeking answers did not limit themselves to the dicta of the Prophet, but gave credence to early Companions and Successors as well. Still, the impetus behind the consolidation of the legal schools in the 9th and 10th centuries stemmed from intentions to limit the amount of conflicting legal opinions, just as the move to rely solely on prophetic reports sought to keep the Muslim community on a clear and unequivocal path for any given topic. While the issues found in the early compendia are not all still pertinent, as with so much of the Islamic tradition, the content tends to be used selectively. A 2005 internet fatwa uses the Prophet’s response to a girl’s query about marriage (discussed above) to bolster an argument for marital subservience for women (https://fatwa.islamweb.net/ar/fatwa/67037/). Yet the version used in the fatwa makes no mention of the incident with which Ibn Abı̄ Shayba begins and ends: the girl was protesting her father’s pressure to marry. Ultimately she had rejected the sort of power dynamic the Prophet described, and the Prophet affirmed that she could not be forced to marry (Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 1989, pp. 556–7).

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The reports depict a world where slave women, even children, had no voice with regard to their sexual partners and the vocabulary of sex was determinedly unilateral. Nonetheless, a slave woman could demand to question a Caliph about what the law allowed. Some reports supported slave women who were freed immediately exercising their legal agency and rejecting the matches made for them – even if the match had been with a man from the exalted tribe of Quraysh. Women with an understanding of the law could use it to subvert the plans of men to gain multiple partners – even if it meant pushing their sons into early sex or breastfeeding a stranger’s child. Thus while the Musannafs generally – and that of Ibn Abı̄ Shayba in particular – do not ̣ enjoy the status of the accepted hadith compendia or legal manuals, there is much insight to be gained on early legal culture and the sorts of questions that confronted the first generations of Muslims in a diverse and rapidly expanding empire.

Further reading Ali, K. 2008, Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence, OneWorld, Oxford. Kecia Ali explores sexual issues ranging from a wife’s obligation to provide sex to how the law views homosexuality, bringing to bear her vast knowledge of both the sources and processes particular to Islamic Law. Ali, K. 2010, Marriage and Slavery in Islam, Harvard University Press, Harvard. This work delves into how early jurists conceptualized marriage. It identifies and highlights links between marriage and slavery and divorce and manumission, as well as nuances in legal methodology that allow for challenges to such concepts. Hallaq, W. 2005, Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. A comprehensive approach to unpacking the complex structures of Islamic Law. Hallaq deftly explains legal sources as being both Qurʾanic and socio-cultural, exploring Islam’s early centuries and luminaries. Motzki, H. 2002, The Origins of Islamic Jurisprudence, Brill, Leiden. Motzki asserts that Joseph Schacht’s (Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, Oxford, 1950) dismissal of the earliest legal tradition by assuming early chains of transmission are all forgeries does a massive disservice to the understanding of early Islamic law. Motzki has provided a lucid approach to the early scholars by cross-referencing their legal decisions with biographical material related to them. His focus is on the Musannaf of ʿAbd al-Razzā q, much more so than on that of Ibn Abı̄ Shayba; ̣ however both works shed light on legal opinions that were not confined geographically to Medina and Kufa (as ultimately was the case with the preserved works of the legal schools), and thus add much texture to Islam’s early legal history. Abou el Fadl, K. 2005, Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority, and Women, OneWorld, Oxford. This book is concerned with explaining, in very accessible ways, the methods by which early jurists determined what Islamic law was; Abou el Fadl gives close attention to women’s issues, arguing that many Qur’an-centered legal approaches would affirm women’s rights rather than result in their oppression. Lowry, J. 2007, Early Islamic Legal Theory: the Risā la of Muh ̣ammad ibn Idrı̄ s al-Shā fiʿı̄ , Brill, Leiden. A work of crucial importance in understanding how Islamic Law evolved from drawing on multiple, disparate sources to reliance upon a hadith-centered legal methodology.

References Al-Awzā ʿı̄ , Abū ʿAmr ʿAbd al-Rah ̣mā n. 1993, Sunan al-Awzā ʿı̄ , ah ̣ā dı̄ th wa athā r wa fatā wā , Dā r al-nafā ʾis, Beirut. Ali, K. 2010, Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam, Harvard University Press, Harvard. al-S ̣anʿā nı̄ , ʿAbd al-Razzā q. 2000, Musannaf, Vol. 9: Kitā b al-Nikā h ̣, Dā r al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, Beirut. ̣ al-Shā fiʿı̄ , Muh ̣ammad. 2008, Kitā b al-umm, Vol. 6, ed. Rifʿat Fawzı̄ ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib, Dā r al-Wafā , alMansụ ̄ ra. al-Shaybā nı̄ , Muh ̣ammad. 2006, Kitā b al-Ḥujja ʿalā Ahl al-Madı̄ na, ed. Mahdı̄ Ḥasan al-Kı̄ lā nı̄ , ʿAlam alKutub, Beirut.

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Baugh, C. 2017, Minor Marriage in Early Islamic Law, Brill, Leiden. Crone, P. 1987, Roman, Provincial, and Islamic Law, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Ibn Abı̄ Shayba, ʿAbd Allā h ibn Muh ̣ammad. 1989, Kitā b al-Musannaf, Vol. 3: Kitā b al-Nikā h ̣, Dā r ̣ Qurṭuba, Beirut. Lapidus, I. 2002, A History of Islamic Societies, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Lucas, S. 2008, ‘Ibn al-Mundhir, Muh ̣ammad b. Ibrā hı̄ m’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3, Brill, Leiden, consulted online on 20 January 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_24330. Motzki, H. 2002, The Origins of Islamic Jurisprudence, Brill, Leiden. Pellat, C. 2008, ‘Ibn Abı̄ S̲ h̲ayba’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, Brill, Leiden, consulted online on 21 January 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_3055.

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3 ISLAMIC GENDER ETHICS Traditional discourses, critiques, and new frameworks of inclusivity Zahra Ayubi

What is the difference between what is Islamic and Islamic ethics and how does one study gender ethics? Islamic ethics is an academic construct, which scholars have used to describe the values imparted in various genres of the Islamic tradition, including Qurʾan and hadith, which I treat together as the scriptural ethics tradition; the intellectual ethics tradition including jurisprudence (fiqh), Sufism, theology (kalam), philosophical ethics (akhlaq), and literature (adab). In addition to that which is prescriptive and originates from one of these scriptural or intellectual traditions, scholars also define Islamic ethics by Muslim praxis. What various scholarly descriptions of Islamic ethics have in common is that they describe moral values and/or practices that Muslims have distilled as the way to live a life according to an Islamic ethos, whether or not it adheres to any tangible theoretical or prescriptive discourse. In other words, people may still insist on something being Islamic even if it goes against something found in the Qurʾan, hadith, law, etc. An idea deemed as Islamic based on one genre may not exist in other genres. So Islamic ethics is then best defined as an articulation of principles or values of what is Islamic for Muslims either in theory or praxis. Rather than complicating this picture, paying attention to the category of gender in Islamic ethics actually helps clarify how a belief or practice which does not necessarily originate in scripture or law becomes Islamic. The origin of something believed to be ethical could be historical, an influence of something adjacent religiously or culturally – regardless, it is a deeply held belief that thinking philosophically can uncover. Paying attention to the underlying philosophy of gender or gender ethics is asking the question, whether historically or now, how is life that is lived in accordance with an Islamic ethos gendered or variable given a person’s gender? It is to pay attention to the deeply held philosophical ideas about how someone’s gender affects how they are to live as a Muslim in the world, even if they themselves might be focused on preparation for the hereafter or aspire to a gender-blind relationship with the Divine. To be sure, attention to the category of gender emerged in Islamic studies through feminist work. Likewise, to study gender in Islamic ethics is to take a feminist standpoint – that is to focus on how the discussions about how to be Muslim while inhabiting a gendered body has been a normative male one. Most scholars follow the lead of medieval Muslim thinkers for whom the whole universe is male dominion to order according to Divine wishes.

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Muslim feminist ethics is a category that we can use to classify Islamic ethics positions from decidedly feminist standpoints, even if the various moments in which Muslim feminists have used the term ethics have been disjointed. Kecia Ali’s Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qurʾan, Hadith, and Jurisprudence (2016) was among the first monographs to employ the category of ethics meaningfully. While Ali limits the scope of ethics to classical and contemporary jurisprudential discourses, the work is largely about the deeply ethical issue of Muslim women’s consent in marriage, divorce, sexual relations, and other issues of bodily autonomy, while questioning the notion of what is and who are authoritative. Ali’s work demonstrates that approaching the Islamic intellectual tradition on gender and sex from an ethical standpoint allows Muslim feminist discourses on sex to account for the “increasing gap between classical doctrines, present-day ‘values,’ and actual sexual practices;” discourses on authenticity and authority; and shifting values on sex and consent (Ali, 2016: xxxii). In Inside the Gender Jihad, amina wadud employs the category of ethics in her approach to interpreting the Qurʾan in order to advocate for gender equality on the basis of ontological equality (wadud, 2006: 29). Ali’s analysis echoes amina wadud’s assessment that “what is ethical is relative to context,” and because the Qurʾan does not outline an ethical system, “it must be formulated through human beings, the agents responsible for implementing and maintaining those systems in the first place” (wadud, 2006: 38). While Ali contends that the “Qurʾan itself poses challenges for those committed to egalitarian social and intimate relationships” (2016: 195), wadud holds that the “responsibility of acting on the earth to fulfill moral agency involves acting in accordance with the guidance about right and wrong given in these two primary sources,” the Qurʾan and Sunnah (wadud, 2006: 37–38). Ali and wadud’s works, both first published in 2006, emphasize that Muslim feminist ethics is an endeavor rooted in individual and collective interrogation of what is considered just and unjust in an Islamic framework. More recently, in Gendered Morality, I offer reflections on philosophical problems that emerge from feminist close reading of the philosophical ethics (akhlaq) tradition with respect to the exclusion of women and non-elites in ethical refinement. I argue that there is a need for reimagining the philosophical definitions of what it means to be human that is inclusive of gendered, racial, and various marginalized experiences. The methods, or what sources scholars turn to define gender ethics in Islam have varied. In this chapter, I describe the major ethical constructs associated with masculinity, femininity, and gender relations that scholars have distilled across the various genres of Islamic ethics. Many of these descriptions of gender ethics across the genres of Qurʾan, hadith, jurisprudence, Sufism, and akhlaq are feminist-critical. I then discuss new ethics discourses within Muslim thought that seek to uncover or recover the ethical bedrock of Islam, which supports gender justice. In particular ethics of care and love ethics focus on contemporary Muslim women’s activism. I argue that although these new ethics movements remain critical of gender ethics in the intellectual tradition, they are creating a new Islamic ethical tradition based on their experiences and what they believe a moral life today requires.

Gender ethics in the Qurʾan and Hadith Male superiority, gender complementarity, and gender equality are the main three, distinct positions that faithful Muslims have taken in reading Qurʾanic verses and hadiths about gender roles. While some argue that the Qurʾan and hadith support absolute male superiority, others soften the patriarchal blow by arguing that the scriptural tradition supports equal status in the eyes of God, but that God has created men and women with different natures that are best suited to different roles. The complementarity thesis holds that within these differing roles, 58

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men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because of their essential nature, and thus have been burdened with power, strength, and responsibility over women, whose roles are fulfilled in part by their nature to reproduce and nurture. Proponents of equality in the scriptural and interpretive tradition have argued that male superiority is a historical, philosophical paradigm of gender ethics in which the Qurʾan and hadith emerged and have been interpreted. Examining the relationship between historical context and the Qurʾan has produced two distinct conclusions in feminist scholarship. On the one hand, Muslim feminist theologians have contextualized Qurʾanic verses that propose hierarchical gender relations as a product of the social norms of 7th-century Arabia and propose that the universal, egalitarian ethos of the Qurʾan should be prioritized over historically specific, gender-hierarchal verses. On the other hand, and as argued by Aysha Hidayatullah’s analysis of Muslim feminist theologians’ interpretive strategies, the prioritization of egalitarian verses over hierarchical verses is not instructed in the Qurʾan. Thus, if interpreters acknowledge the historical context of verses in the Qurʾan, then “from a contemporary perspective in the here and now, the Qurʾan perhaps endorses a notion of sexual hierarchy as we define it today that is incompatible with sexual equality as we define it today” (Hidayatullah, 2014: 153). Hidayatullah’s “radical uncertainty” in the Qurʾan’s ability to support contemporary notions of male–female equality suggests that “instead of putting so much pressure on the text to say things that we wish it to say, we must relocate the intensity of our demands elsewhere: to an honest interrogation of our interpretive aims and objectives” (Hidayatullah, 2014: 150). Muslim interpreters of the scriptural tradition have utilized a few methods to arrive at gender equality. Feminist theologians such as amina wadud and Asma Barlas emphasize the overwhelming egalitarian worldview of the Qurʾan and have critiqued the atomistic hermeneutical method of traditional male-centered tafsı̄ r that focused on linguistics of the Qurʾan over its ethical core. Rather than values that are “external” to Islam, this ethical core of absolute egalitarianism emerges for them from the Qurʾan itself and asking questions about what kind of society that is yielded by belief in a just God and in the oneness of God. This egalitarianism also extends to those with non-binary gender identities and diverse sexualities – the idea that according to Qurʾanic ethics, all human beings are equal. Another method for arriving at gender equality within Muslim feminist theology is through a comparative religion approach. Jerusha Lamptey compares scholarship on the “Word” of the Qurʾan and the “Word” of Jesus to offer theological, constructive, and comparative reflections on shared feminist concerns, such as the role of the “Word” in a contemporary context. In recognizing that Muslim feminist theology has both highlighted the egalitarian ethos of the Qurʾan and noted its gender egalitarian limitations, Lamptey draws on Christian scholar Kwok Pui-lan’s work on feminist imaginings of Jesus to propose that Muslim feminist theologians adopt a hybrid approach towards the Qurʾan. That is, viewing the Qurʾan as a “site of relationship” and embracing its complexities and ambiguities (Lamptey, 2018: 69). In doing so, readers are able to recognize that “the Qurʾan is divine and of this world. It is universal and revealed in response to a particular context. It is egalitarian and marked with androcentrism and patriarchy” (2018: 68). Lamptey proposes that such an approach allows for additional egalitarian interpretations “by refusing to privilege historical meaning or accumulated tradition,” and approaching historical meaning and tradition as a “responses to aspects of Qurʾanic hybridity, but they are not the only possible or legitimate responses” (2018: 70). In addition to cultivating strategies for defining, defending, and critiquing gender egalitarianism in the Qurʾan, feminist scholars have examined scriptural exegesis as a normatively male tradition. Ash Geissinger argues that pre-modern exegetes brought 59

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their pre-existing gender biases to tafsı̄ r, or interpretive analysis of the Qurʾan, and further marginalized women through their engagements with hadith. Geissinger’s survey of “cultural work” performed by gender in pre-modern tafsı̄ r illustrates that constructions of gender are fluid and contextually specific, but exegetes defined any kind of social authority, including interpretive authority, as masculine. Consequently, pre-modern exegetes framed the authority to interpret the Quran “over/against femaleness, which they associate[d] with intellectual, physical, moral and spiritual deficiency” (Geissinger, 2015: 25). By both marginalizing women’s roles in exegetical materials and their roles as hadith transmitters, pre-modern interpreters constructed “the Qurʾanic text so that it appears to virtually refuse the possibility that a woman could possess the authority to legitimately interpret it” (Geissinger, 2015: 25). In tandem with Gessinger’s analysis of pre-modern interpretive and religious authority as normatively male, Fatima Mernissi argues that hadith and the chain of transmission (isnad) that attributes hadiths back to the Prophet or his companions served as formidable political weapon used to maintain the power of male elite after the death of the Prophet. Mernissi argues that the manipulation of hadith to uphold male authority was a “structural characteristic of the practice of power in Muslim societies. Since all power, from the seventh century on, was only legitimated by religion, political forces and economic interests pushed for the fabrication of false traditions” (1991: 9). In examining the historical context and methodological issues that arise in examination of frequently cited hadith used to justify hierarchical gender relations and misogynistic attitudes of highly accredited transmitters, Mernissi argues that women’s rights have never been incompatible with the Prophet’s message or Qurʾan, “but simply because those rights conflict with the interests of a male elite” (1991: ix). Ethics, in the valence of praxis, which stems from engagements with the Qurʾan and Islamic religious knowledge, refers to people’s real-life experiences and actions they believe are in accordance with Qurʾanic principles. Sa’diyya Shaikh’s research on Muslim women domestic violence survivors argues that Islamic gender ethics are not only derived from tafsı̄ r by traditional and feminist scholars, but informed by Muslim women’s lived experiences, or a “tafsı̄ r of praxis.” Shaikh examines how participants’ experiences with domestic violence led them to contemplate their humanity, Islam, and Islamic ethics, which resulted in a “Islamic ethical and theological framework that challenged misogynist and utilitarian religious views on women and explicitly interrogated the abusive relationships on a religious basis” (Shaikh, 2007: 80). Through their experiences with oppression and contemplation of their religion and humanity, participants were able to derive Islamic ethical frameworks that condemned patriarchal interpretations of 4:34 by their husbands and local religious leaders. Shaikh’s work demonstrates that the contemporary gender ethics derived from the Qurʾan are in “an arena of engaged, dynamic, and polysemic encounters” (2007: 89). Thus, women’s lived experiences are a “source of understanding and knowledge production within religious traditions” (2007: 89). The notion of tafsı̄ r of praxis points to a possibility of an Islamic feminist ethics that is not confined by the gendered intimate and social relationships described in Islamic texts.

Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) as ethics and its limits Islamic jurisprudence is probably the most tangible and obvious genre of Islamic thought that dictates gender ethics but also responds to Muslim praxis, in the second sense of ethics as people’s practices, through the apparatus of fatwas or legal responsa. Discourses on gender in Islamic jurisprudence are frequently discussed in relation to family and marriage law, for 60

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example women’s right to divorce, inheritance, maintenance, education, and employment. Fiqh has responded to contemporary debates on gender and women’s rights through fatwas that either uphold, amend, or recontextualize classical Islamic jurisprudence on marriage and family law. However, based on analysis of classical fiqh on marriage, Kecia Ali argues that early jurists viewed fiqh on marriage as a contract (2003). The parameters of this contract were based on jurists’ environment and premised on the notion that women’s maintenance was a condition of their sexual availability, as demonstrated on early rulings that compared marriage to slavery or a contractual sale. Feminist scholars, like Ali, have identified two contemporary approaches for responding to gender hierarchical fiqh, neo-traditionalist or gender complementarism (Mir-Hosseini, 2003) and “feminist apologist” (Ali, 2003: 175). Neo-conservative or neo-traditionalist scholars who have taken the complementarity position concede that from the perspective of Allah, all human beings are equal – that is they have been created by Allah in the same way and will be judged by Allah using the same standards of their weighing their deeds and misdeeds in the hereafter. However, such scholars primarily understand that equality is limited to the Divine perspective in the hereafter and not God’s intent for earthly gender relations. On Earth, they contend that according to the Qurʾanic verse 4:34 God intended complementary roles for men and women. In the complementarity thesis men are the protectors and especially financial maintainers of women (qawwamun ‘ala an-nisa), who in turn are suited to feminine domestic roles. Ziba Mir-Hosseini identifies a complementarity approach towards Islamic gender relations that emerges out of Muslims authority figures’ contradictory need to both defend and uphold traditionalist fiqh models of family and gender relations, while also being aware of, and sensitive to, criticism of the patriarchal basis of Islamic law and the desire to ground gender egalitarianism as inherently Islamic, not Western or imported (2003). The contradictions that arise from the gender complementarity thesis are illustrated when a single text argues “for gender equality on one issue (for example, women’s education and employment), but rejecting it on another (for example, divorce)” (Mir-Hosseini, 2003: 16). In addition, women’s biological disposition or nature towards domestic work are often cited to support gender complementarism and defend classical fiqh. However, Ali points that such arguments are inconsistent with classical fiqh as early jurists concluded that domestic work was not a wife’s responsibility, just sexual availability (2003: 175). Ultimately, these tensions expose the “internal contradictions and anachronisms in fiqh rules” on gender, which Mir-Hosseini attributes to classical jurists misconstructions of the concept of qiwamah (traditionality translated as male guardianship). Based on an analysis of classical jurists use of qiwamah in family and marriage law, qiwamah developed in accordance to pre-Islamic marriage contracts and have “mistakenly been understood as placing women under men’s authority, with the result that they have become the building blocks of patriarchy within Muslim legal tradition” (Mir-Hosseini, Al-Sharmani and Rumminger, 2015: 18). Second, scholars who adopt a feminist apologist approach emphasize the importance of stipulations and practical applications of marriage contracts. For example, the inclusion of stipulations that guarantee a woman’s right to education and outside employment within marriage contracts. However, Ali argues that such an approach “misses the forest for the trees” (2003: 164) and “though potentially quite effective in securing for women’s rights that are not respected today, it runs the risk of further cementing the authority of the traditional opinions” (2003: 181). Thus, Ali proposes that a critical appraisal and analysis of the methods and rules of traditional jurisprudence will demonstrate “that its doctrines are entirely inadequate to serve as the basis for laws governing Muslim families, communities, and societies today” (2003: 182). 61

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Like the scriptural ethical tradition, feminist scholars have identified the limits of jurisprudence in defining and defending egalitarian gender ethics. These limitations are a consequence of the historical context in which schools of jurisprudence emerged. However, pre-modern jurisprudence has contemporary consequences, and forces feminist scholars to ask whether a tradition formed to support patriarchal social structures is capable of producing egalitarian gender ethics.

Sufi ethics meets feminism Often scholarship about women and gender in Sufism notes that Sufism is not a social movement but that the focus is on the spiritual and not the embodied – even if discipline of the body is the way to the divine. Feminist literature on Sufism and gender ethics aims to bridge this gap, demonstrating that engagement with the Divine and the refinement of the soul are not only spiritually accessible to women, but dependent on just and egalitarian social relationships. For example, Sa’diyya Shaikh proposes that Sufi discourses on ontology and metaphysics offer Muslim feminists an alternative, faith-based approach for critiquing Islamic law and gender inequality (2009). Shaikh draws on Sufi narratives and Ibn Arabi’s work, one of the foremost Sufi scholars, that challenge gender inequality to argue that Sufi ontology, which can be understood as pertaining to the spiritual elements of being Muslim and cultivation of the soul or nafs, is inherently egalitarian. Reading Ibn Arabi’s work and Sufi narratives from a feminist lens, Shaikh makes two important ontologically based defenses of gender egalitarianism within Sufi discourses. First, with the Sufi mission to cultivate “soul at peace” (an-nafs al-mutma’innah) through complete submission of God and the purification of the heart posited, Sufi narratives demonstrate that “the commitment to a constant awareness of God’s absolute sovereignty counters the human instinct to claim power, including male claims to authority over women” (Shaikh, 2009: 792). Thus, any claim of social or physical authority over another being signifies an uncultivated and impure soul (an-nafs al-ammara). Second, Ibn Arabi’s references to women’s spiritual equality in response to hierarchical Islamic law and hadith serve to recognize women’s social inequality, question the applicability of gender-hierarchical hadiths, and connect “women’s ontological capacity for perfection to agency in the social realm and specifically, in the law” (2009: 811). Laury Silvers’s historical mystery novel, The Lover, offers a fictional, but historically sensitive account of gendered engagement with mysticism in tenth century Baghdad (Deighton, 2019). Following the life of the lead character Zaytuna, a Nubian wash woman whose mother was a famous mystic, and other servant-class characters in their pursuit to uncover information about a murdered a local boy, The Lover is an example of Sufi gender ethics that insists upon deep mystical engagement with the Divine, while being conscious of gendered experiences and embodiment while trying to live a fulfilling life. Through Zaytuna and other characters, Silvers depicts how gender and socio-economic status impact both characters’ lived experience and engagements with the Divine and displays “the full range of cognitive and embodied dissonance that can emerge when the doctrines designed to keep us ‘right with God’ give rise to our trauma” (Deighton, 2019). Although it is fiction, the novel’s themes are a commentary on how women encounter the ethical/Muslim life in gendered ways. Feminist engagements with Sufism posit an understanding of gender ethics that is equally concerned with addressing gender hierarchies in both the physical and metaphysical world. In doing so, gender hierarchies can be approached as a characteristic of women’s social 62

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relationships, as well as their relationship with the divine. In light of such understandings, one is forced to ask whether the soul is gendered and examine how social oppression both inhibits women’s access to religious authority and the ways in which women have imagined new means of fostering spiritual refinement in response to such conditions.

Hierarchies in Kalam and Akhlaq and their gender ethics implications Although kalam (theology) is not directly about people, much less gender, many of the debates within this genre are relevant to gender ethics in Islam. The central questions in the genre of kalam is what is the nature of God and what does that nature tell us about Divine intent for the universe and humanity? The way Muslims have imagined God, as documented in the kalam genre, becomes about human relationships to God as well as access to God, authority to speak or act on behalf of that God, and so on. There are a few vital issues regarding the concept of God that manifest in Muslim understanding of gender and gender roles; namely, the gendered male language and understanding of God in masculine terms; the concept of oneness of God (tawhid); and relatedly, the notion of God’s absolute authority/will and how that will is embodied and enacted by humans (khilafah). Language and pronouns for the Divine were among the first issues that feminist theologians (across religious traditions) grappled with in coming to terms with the patriarchal nature of scriptural interpretation. In questioning male pronouns used in tafsı̄ r (Qurʾanic exegesis) and in everyday language and thought, Muslim feminist theologians were not just questioning a patriarchal intellectual tradition, but exposing a deep theological and philosophical assumption that many Muslims make – that God is male. Although the Muslim tradition rejects anthropomorphization of God, using female pronouns seems absurd to many, revealing the idea that the use of the male pronoun is not arbitrary, but rather normative. The ramifications of male normativity in the conception of God has had consequences as far as Muslim men’s self-perception as representatives of God’s plan for humanity, society, and their families and in the form of the male-oriented concept of khilafah (vicegerency of God). Consequently, Muslim men have viewed themselves in their descriptions of God and God’s intent for humanity. Although the Qurʾanic concept of khilafah can be construed as a gender neutral responsibility of every human being to be a “trustee” or “moral agent” of God’s justice, as wadud has argued (2006: 35), in practice, the role of khalifah, or the public title that involves being God’s stewards of Muslims/society, has only been played by men. This fact also relates political leadership, which is often construed as a peripheral concern for Muslim women, to the fundamental idea about their status and relationship to the Divine. Relatedly, the idea that Divine authority has been invested only in men manifests as justification for male superiority – of their intellect, strength, and rulership over women. A salient critique of gender hierarchy as mandated by the Divine is wadud’s perspective on Muslim belief in tawhid (Divine unity), which she calls the tawhidic paradigm. She argues that the most fundamental aspect of Islam, that is belief in one God, requires gender equality. She reasons that all humans must be equal if there is a singular Lord – that is no humans “lord over” others, including men over women or free persons over the enslaved. Consequently, “when a person seeks to place him- or herself ‘above’ another, it either means the divine presence is removed or ignored, or that the person who imagines his or her self above others suffers from the egoism of shirk [idolatry]” (wadud, 2006: 32). Thus, gender hierarchy violates tawhid because it invests moral and spiritual superiority in men, despite the impossibility for Muslim women to believe in any superior power other than God. 63

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In the adjacent genre of philosophical ethics (akhlaq), women are likewise excluded from the path of ethical refinement. As I have shown in Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society, pre-modern Muslim ethicists cut women off from the creator’s plan for humanity as they invested khilafah in elite men on the basis of their higher rational capacity, while prescribing an instrumental role for women to serve their husbands on the basis of their deficient capacity for rationality. I argue that this seemingly time-bound marital arrangement has far-reaching consequences on Muslim understandings of how existence and roles in life are gendered and hierarchical (Ayubi, 2019: 172–173) Elite men are also meant to rule over the lower classes of men in the homosocial male public arena, as well as all enslaved persons because of their supposedly higher intellects (Ayubi, 2019: 217–220). While hierarchy may seem like a logical or natural order for society, often the criteria used to determine who counts as elite or worthy of occupying higher status perpetuates the exclusion of women and non-elites (Ayubi, 2019: 270–272). It is also based on a definition of rationality that is as cyclical as it is exclusionary: elite men are most rational, and rationality is defined as perfected manhood.

Ethics of care Ethics of care has its roots in feminist philosophy, but has made an appearance in Islamic thought. Coined by Carol Gilligan and further detailed by Nel Noddings, “the focus of the ethics of care is on the compelling moral salience of attending to and meeting the needs of the particular others for whom we take responsibility” (Held, 2007: 10). An ethics of care offers a framework to derive moral values from Muslim women’s work to resist oppression and address the needs of their communities. For example, wadud frames African American Muslim women’s grass-roots initiatives that respond to community needs, like T.R.U.T.H. and Muslim Women United, as an ethics of care that pre-dates slavery and is reflected in the African idiom, “It takes a village to raise a child” (2006: 103). wadud identifies two dynamics present in an ethics of care: “the need of one member, one family, or the communities; and the development of collective help and support” (2006: 103). In detailing the work of black Muslim women leading grass-roots initiatives to address food insecurity, raise funds for medical care, and create support networks for fellow Muslim women, wadud proposes that these leaders’ work reflects an ethics of care defined by an approach to leadership that is “in concert with other Muslims,” does not impose authority, and emphasizes a unity that is “never used for uniformity, as demonstrated in the inclusive nature” of organization events. wadud’s assessment of black Muslim women’s community work suggests that a Muslim ethics of care is concerned with addressing community needs in a manner that does not recreate social hierarchies or oppressive power dynamics. Like wadud’s framing of black women’s community leadership as representative of an ethics of care, Amaraah Decuir uses a Muslim ethics of care to frame women’s leadership in Islamic schools. Drawing on interviews with Muslim school leaders, Decuir proposes that participants’ leadership represents a critical ethics of care that uses the act of caring to “transform a community” and resist everyday oppression (2019: 8). Decuir proposes that school leaders’ commitment to establishing equitable school practices, resisting oppression within and outside of their school communities, nurturing or “other mothering” students, and approaching their work as an Islamic obligation to address community needs represents a “Muslim-centered conceptualization of a critical feminist ethics of care” (2019: 20) This Muslim ethics of care is also consistent with black feminist critical ethics because school leaders’ social justice advocacy is displayed in their choice “to lead in ways designed to establish equity in the presence of injustice” (DeCuir, 2019: 19). 64

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wadud and Decuir’s assessment of Muslim women’s community leadership offers an example of the morals and values that have the potential to define equitable social relationships. Their work demonstrates social relationships derived from an ethics of care prioritize community needs over maintaining authority, and center social justice advocacy over establishing uniformity. Ethics of care offers a distinct methodology for deriving Muslim feminist ethics, one that supplements the moral values derived from Islamic intellectual tradition with the moral values reflected in Muslim women’s social justice work to define egalitarian social relationships relevant to Muslims’ contemporary lives.

Love ethics Muslim love ethics is a new current of gender ethics that seeks to subvert oppressive practices out of love for the tradition and fellow Muslims with an eye toward the future. Muslim love ethics is not just concerned with assigning moral language to everyday women’s resistance, as is the focus of an ethics of care, but in its contemporary use is concerned with imagining the moral language that characterizes an egalitarian future. This definition of Muslim love ethics draws on contemporary and black feminist scholarship that approaches love and love politics as a guide for identifying the values and practices that ought to define a utopian future (Nash, 2011) and assign “normative moral language for what should and should not be the case” (Fitz-Gibbon, 2011: 41). For Muslim feminist ethics, love ethics turns its focus to the moral language and values represented in Muslims’ work to create and imagine alternative communities absent of oppression, rather than focusing on the moral language derived from their experiences of oppression. For example, Iman AbdoulKarim’s work on Muslim women’s participation in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement finds that Muslim women are creating “their own practice of a love ethic, one that aims to create alternative communities and spaces that … adopt a radiating approach towards inclusion that works to center the margins of the marginalized” (2017: 67). AbdoulKarim argues that BLM activists’ commitment to centring the margins of the marginalized is a moral value that defines their vision of an egalitarian community. Her work demonstrates that love ethics can be used to consider the moral values Muslim women develop in an attempt to create egalitarian communities, in addition to those derived from their work to resist oppression. Love ethics’s emphasis on assigning moral language to oppression-free communities is also reflected in the emergence of Muslim futurism in contemporary art movements that propose a gender and race inclusive ethical framework. Drawing on Afro futurism, Muslim futurism is concerned with the practices, events, and trends that characterize a future in which Muslims emerge from and evolve past contemporary social conditions of oppression. Under the banner of queer Muslim futurism, artist Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s multi-media and performance series, “Tomorrow We Inherit the Earth,” centres the narrative of a Muslim drag character leading a queer rebellion who discusses “contemporary politics in a future that signals a different dimension” to present a reimagined, future expressions of Muslim masculinity where “gender and sexuality are undefined and identities are left unclear” (Yerebakan, 2018). Like Bhutto’s aim of redefining the parameters of a Muslim identity, Mipsterz’s, an artist and culture collective, short film, Alhamdu, aims to reimagine a Muslim future through “a vibrant and joyous future where Muslims exist unapologetically” (Mipsterz, 2019). In the film, various expressions of Muslim identities are embodied by a racially diverse cast dressed in gender and ethnically fluid clothing. The film is set in urban New York City and a California dessert and accompanied by a song that combines hip-hop 65

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and Egyptian musical styles in a manner that further emphasizes the film’s aim to imagine a future absent of a uniformed expression of a Muslim religious identity. Mipsterz and Ali Bhutto’s works not only resist mono-dimensional constructions of Muslims, but echo love ethics’s focus on identifying the moral language that characterizes oppression-free communities. By using art as a medium, Mipsterz and Ali Bhutto’s work suggest that an egalitarian Muslim future is characterized by fluid religious and gendered identities and a constant interrogation of what expressions of Islam are privileged over others. Muslim futurism and love ethics propose that Muslim feminist ethics can derive egalitarian moral values by not only defining what is and is not representative of an Islamic ethos, but through embracing that a single definition of Islam and what it means to be Muslim may not be possible. Ethics of care and love ethics make two important contributions to Muslim feminist ethics. First, both frameworks allow feminist scholars to explore what moral language and virtue practices can be defined through social relationships and Muslim women’s social justice work, not just textual analysis. Thus as I discuss above, if the Islamic intellectual tradition emerged within patriarchal social conditions and produced gender ethics that privilege and maintain male authority, assigning moral language to Muslim women’s acts of resistance and imaginings of an oppression-free futures offers a new, woman-centered method for deriving moral values that support egalitarian social relations within an Islamic framework. As I propose in Gendered Morality, moving forward, attention to the category of gender requires a reimagination of Islamic ethics that is inclusive of women, non-elites, and individuals who may be marginalized on the basis of their gender, race, sexuality, physical or cognitive abilities, etc. (Ayubi, 2019: 273–274). New currents in Muslim ethical thought and praxis such as love ethics and ethics of care are frameworks that are already doing this work: with origins in black feminist theory, they require Muslim feminist ethics to account for race, sexuality, and other marginalized aspects of human existence in considering the moral language that support radically egalitarian social relationships. In accommodating the varieties of human experience that are gendered, at stake is accessibility to the good life according to a Muslim ethos.

Further reading Ali, K. (2016). Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qurʾan, Hadith, and Jurisprudence, Oxford: Oneworld Publications. A ground-breaking exploration of multiple topics related to sexuality and the ethics and lawfulness of sex in the Islamic tradition such as sexual relations in marriage, outside of marriage, homosexuality, and more. Ayubi, Z. (2019). Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society, New York: Columbia University Press. This book is an extended feminist critique of pre-modern Islamic philosophical ethics treatises that argues for feminist philosophical engagement with the perennial philosophical questions that the texts raise. wadud, a. (2006). Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam, Oxford: Oneworld Publications. This book raises several feminist ethics questions of Muslim approaches to the Qurʾan, relationship with the Divine, and gender justice work in Muslim communities.

References AbdoulKarim, I. (2017). “Islam is Black Lives Matter:” Muslim Women on the Frontier of Islamophobia and Anti-Blackness. BA Thesis, Dartmouth College, Hanover. Ali, K. (2003). Progressive Muslims and Islamic Jurisprudence: The Necessity for Critical Engagement with Marriage and Divorce Law. In O. Safi, ed., Progressive Muslims on Justice, Gender and Pluralism, Oxford: Oneworld Publications, pp.163–189. Ali, K. (2016). Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qurʾan, Hadith and Jurisprudence, rev. edn. Oxford: Oneworld Publications.

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Ayubi, Z. (2019). Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society, New York: Columbia University Press. DeCuir, A. (2019). Toward a Muslim Ethics of Care: Leadership in American Islamic Schools. Journal of Islamic Faith and Practice, 2(1), pp.8–23. Deighton, R. (2019). Four Muslim Women on Laury Silvers’ the Lover: A Sufi Mystery. Review of the Lover: A Sufi Mystery, by Laury Silvers. AltMuslimah, viewed 03 October 2018, Available at: www. altmuslimah.com/2019/09/four-muslim-women-on-laury-silvers-the-lover-a-sufi-mystery/. Fitz-Gibbon, A. (2011). Intersectionality and Love. In D. Poe, ed., Communities of Peace: Confronting Injustice and Creating Justice. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp.35–42. Geissinger, A. (2015). Gender and Muslim Constructions of Exegetical Authority: A Rereading of the Classical Genre of Quraeˉ n Commentary, Boston: Brill. Held, V. (2007). The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global, New York: Oxford University Press. Hidayatullah, A. A. (2014). Feminist Edges of the Quran, New York: Oxford University Press. Lamptey, J. T. (2018). Divine Words, Female Coices: Muslima Explorations in Comparative Feminist Theology, New York: Oxford University Press. Mernissi, F. (1991). The Veil And The Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam, New York: BASIC Books. Mipsterz. (2019). ALHAMDU. [online] Kickstarter. Available at: www.kickstarter.com/projects/mip sterz/alhamdu [Accessed 1 Oct. 2019]. Mir-Hosseini, Z. (2003). The Construction of Gender in Islamic Legal Thought and Strategies for Reform. Hawwa, 1(1), pp.1–28. Mir-Hosseini, Z., M. Al-Sharmani and J. Rumminger (2015). Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition. Oxford: Oneworld Publications. Nash, J. (2011). Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality. Meridians, 11 (2), pp.1–24. Shaikh, S. (2007). Tafsir of Praxis: Gender, Marital Violence, and Resistance in a South African Muslim Community. In D. Maguire and S. Shaikh, eds., Violence against Women in Contemporary World Religions: Roots and Cures, 1st ed. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, pp.69–89. Shaikh, S. (2009). In Search of al-Insan: Sufism, Islamic Law, and Gender. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 77(4), pp.781–822. wadud, a. (2006). Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam, Oxford: Oneworld Publications. Yerebakan, O. (2018). Imagining a Queer Muslim Futurism. [online] Garage. Available at: https://garage. vice.com/en_us/article/59jmed/imagining-a-queer-muslim-futurism [Accessed 1 Oct. 2019].

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4 MUSLIMA THEOLOGY Jerusha Tanner Rhodes

Introduction Muslima theology arises in response to ongoing discourses within and outside of Muslim communities. It seeks to build upon existing Islamic feminist contributions by outlining and deploying a new methodology that is simultaneously constructive, theological, and comparative. This chapter introduces the approach of Muslima theology, with a particular emphasis on the ‘why’, ‘how’, and ‘what’. It traces the reasons for, the methodology of, and an example of the constructive content of Muslima theology related to theological anthropology. Throughout this chapter, the primary emphasis is on the comparative component of Muslima theology, underscoring the necessity and strategic value of interreligious feminist engagement.

What is Muslima theology? Muslima theology is a label I use to describe my work as a Muslim scholar, theologian, and activist. This label arises in conversation with – not rejection of – diverse formulations of feminism.1 While I consider my work to be feminist, I am also interested in asserting particular characteristics of my location, approach, and concerns. Therefore, I use the term Muslima (meaning, in Arabic, a female who submits to God, a female Muslim) to highlight my personal positioning as a female, as a Muslim, and as an individual committed to critical reappraisal and interpretation of the Islamic tradition in pursuit of egalitarianism and justice. I also use the label to highlight my theoretical positioning as a scholar who draws upon gender theory and feminist discourses to interrogate the value assigned to various forms of human difference, including – but not limited to – gender and biological sex. I do not apply this label to other scholarship but recognize similar strands of work and the possibility that others may employ this label to describe their own contributions.2 The approach of Muslima theology is simultaneously constructive, theological, and comparative. The first two characteristics – constructive and theological – are already evident in some existing work of Muslim women scholars and Islamic feminists. Their value is recognized, as is the need for further expansion and integration of these areas. The third 68

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characteristic – comparative – is novel. However, as I will argue, it is not wholly new and likely invaluable.3 To begin, Muslima theology is constructive. It is not solely focused on retrieval or purification of what already exists in the tradition and sources; it aims to go beyond exegetical work and historical ressourcement. As a result, it is rooted in – but not limited to – reinterpretation of the central sources and historical figures. This characteristic responds directly to a number of contemporary critiques of existing Islamic feminist discourse, including those of Kecia Ali, Aysha Hidayatullah, and Hibba Abugideiri, that call for structural revision of the entire legal system, consideration of the egalitarian limits of the Qurʾan, and movement beyond deconstructive analysis alone.4 This characteristic aims to foster constructive rethinking of the tradition, methods, and approaches. Muslima theology is also theology. My usage here of ‘theology’ does not align holistically with the field of kalam (speculative Islamic theology), which focuses on questions related to divine attributes, free will and predeterminism, sin, and authority. I use the term theology to indicate the project of articulating integrated interpretations about God and God’s relation to creation, including humanity. The goal is to contextualize discussions of women and gender within a broader theological exploration of the nature of the Divine, the types of interactions between the Divine and humanity (including topics such as creation, revelation, prophethood, morality, and ethics), and the nature and purpose of humanity itself (theological anthropology). Theological exploration serves to problematize and destabilize assumptions that have gained traction in the tradition. The Muslima approach uses theological concepts and the integration of these concepts to assess existing practices, laws, and interpretations, and to suggest new practices, laws, and interpretations. Elements of the theological enterprise already exist in the writings of amina wadud, Asma Barlas, Riffat Hassan, and Sa’diyya Shaikh.5 Even more such intentional, extensive, and – to borrow Shaikh’s term – ‘creative’ theological reflection is needed to uncover and evaluate the implicit theological assumptions of existing interpretations and methods. In keeping with the constructive characteristic of Muslima theology, these reflections serve as a basis for reformulating practice, law, and ethics. Finally, Muslima theology is comparative. It is carried out in critical conversation with other discourses on religion, women, and gender, particularly those articulated by women in other faith traditions. Explicit engagement with other traditions is a unique feature of my formulation of Muslima theology; it is not something that is used by all Muslim women scholars, activists, or theologians. In my view, however, comparative engagement is necessary and advantageous. Before turning to a detailed examination of the comparative approach of Muslima theology, I will endeavour to outline some of the reasons for its value and necessity.

Why? Muslima theology as intervention and response Muslima theology is both an intervention and a response. It is an intervention into ongoing and ambivalent debates over the relationship between Islam and feminism. This relationship is complex. There are many Muslim scholars who promote women’s equality. Ambivalence, though, arises from the concern that dominant forms of feminism and feminist theology are not expressive of – and potentially oppressive to – the experiences, challenges, and liberative strategies of Muslim women. In this way, ambivalence is an assertion of identity, autonomy, and voice that highlights diversity among women and among religious traditions. Ambivalence, though, is not simply an assertion of identity, autonomy, and voice. It is also 69

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a position adopted in reaction to various discourses that emerge from outside of and within the Islamic tradition. These include external critiques of Islam that are grounded in notions of cultural superiority and that propagate negative stereotypes of Islam and Muslim women. These critiques can give rise to efforts that ostensibly aim to improve the situation (typically singular and homogeneous) of Muslim women, but rarely attend to the voices and concerns of diverse Muslim women. Islam is often portrayed as ‘other,’ ‘backward’ or devoid of egalitarian possibilities. Muslim women are often portrayed as being in need of rescue from Islam and Muslim men. And, as a result, rigorous and extensive efforts by Muslim women to search for and reclaim egalitarian resources within Islamic traditions are ignored and dismissed. From within the Islamic tradition, ambivalence is fueled by the existence of patriarchy and androcentrism – that is, male rule or dominance and male normativity. As part – although certainly not all – of Islamic tradition, these realities result in texts and practices that enshrine, normalize, and operationalize hierarchical views of humanity. They also result in attacks on and rejections of interpretations of the Islamic tradition that promote egalitarianism, equality, and women’s rights. Such interpretations are often labelled ‘feminist,’ ‘Western,’ ‘deviations,’ and ‘un-Islamic.’ The authority of egalitarian interpretations is effectively undercut by presenting such interpretations as external impositions upon a ‘pure’ Islam. Muslim scholars are well aware that their work can be dismissed and, more significantly, rendered impotent (incapable of changing anything) when it is caricatured as a product of external forces, external forces that have concrete, historical, and contemporary records of negatively approaching Islam and Muslims. These external and internal discourses append specific – and frequently oppositional – definitions to Islam and feminism, and thereby seek to dictate what counts as an authentic expression of Islam. In doing so, they fuel the ambivalence of Muslim scholars toward feminism in general, and also obscure valuable possibilities, specifically those related to interreligious feminist engagement. These discourses stifle deep conversations and informed solidarity among women across religious traditions. They pit women and various formulations of feminism against each other, they capitalize off of superficial knowledge of traditions and feminisms, and they convince many that such conversations are of abundant risk and little benefit. Why does all of this matter? Because Muslima theology is also a response. A response to growing calls within Islamic feminist and egalitarian scholarship for new, constructive methods and approaches. As Abugideiri observes, the deconstructionist approach remains the dominant method of Islamic feminists. Part of the reason for this relates to limitations of the academic disciplines in which many Muslim women scholars in the United States are situated. This positioning is not always amenable to scholar-activists or scholar-theologians who advocate constructive possibilities related to Islam, women, and gender. Deconstructive challenges to patriarchy, androcentrism, and hegemony are invaluable, yet constructive rethinking is also required for egalitarian interpretations to become more robust and transformational. In line with more recent contributions from wadud, Ayesha Chaudhry, and Shaikh, new approaches that go beyond textual interpretation, historical reclamation, and identification of past egalitarian precedent must be articulated and implemented, not only to contend with negative stereotyping and male dominance, but also to articulate new ways of asserting authority both within and outside of the Muslim community.6 It is my contention that interreligious feminist engagement is a central resource for developing one such new approach. In stating this, I am not overlooking existing tensions surrounding interreligious feminist engagement. Interreligious feminist engagement is not actually new; it is already ongoing. While sometimes implicit, sometimes unnamed,7 and 70

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sometimes premised upon unproductive caricatures, the discourse on Muslim women is embedded in an inherently comparative setting. This is evident in the tensions of negative othering, patriarchy, and androcentrism, as well as in debates over Islamic feminism.8 It is also apparent in the comparative ‘distinctions’ employed by some Muslim women scholars, including Azizah al-Hibri and Riffat Hassan, in an effort to purify the Islamic tradition of nonegalitarian texts, interpretations, and laws.9 More pertinently, it has not always been a productive endeavour. We must acknowledge the challenges and realties of much interreligious feminist engagement, especially Muslim– Christian engagement. As Aysha Hidayatullah and Zayn Kassam aptly note, while assumed to be beneficial, Muslim–Christian engagement can be a site of harm and jeopardy due to power and structural issues.10 It is often characterized by language and concerns being drawn from or determined by Christian traditions, a framing of rivalry, myths about liberating Muslim women, and a persistent lack of knowledge across traditions. All of these create expectations and assumptions of parity across traditions, for example, that Muslim and Christian women would have similar questions about and approaches to their respective scriptures (the Qurʾan and the Bible). Therefore, I am arguing that if historical, comparative, and epistemological challenges are identified, confronted, and skilfully navigated, then interreligious feminist engagement can be a rich source of insights in the ongoing development of Islamic feminist and Muslima theology.

How? Muslima theology as comparative feminist theology How do we do this? Is there a method or form of engagement that would mitigate against common challenges and open doors to meaningful interreligious feminist engagement? The specific ‘how’ (the method) that I propose and use is the approach of comparative feminist theology. Comparative feminist theology builds critically upon the more general method of comparative theology. As defined by Francis X. Clooney, S.J., comparative theology is simultaneously comparative and theological. It describes acts of faith seeking understanding which are rooted in a particular faith tradition but which venture into learning from one or more other faith traditions … for the sake of fresh theological insights that are indebted to the newly encountered tradition/s as well as the home tradition.11 Comparative theology is the process of learning deeply about and from other traditions, and then returning to one’s own tradition(s) with new insights, questions, and perspectives. This process grows out of commitment to a particular tradition(s) – not lack of commitment – and is impelled by the idea that there is something profound to be learned about, from, and with other traditions. More specifically, it is a process that begins with deep learning about other traditions. Such learning requires openness, humility, and development of competency in another tradition. Learning about and from the other is described as learning about them on their ‘own terms,’ that is, as listening to and taking seriously what people in the other tradition say about themselves and their tradition.12 This type of leaning is not superficial, and therefore requires time and thorough study. The process is one of depth, not of width. Competency is vitally important because it is a way to maintain respect and responsibility. By learning deeply about another tradition, the comparative theologian develops and expresses respect 71

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for its integrity, its theological infrastructure, and its internal concerns. Comparative theologians strive for a dual accountability in this regard; they strive to present their own and the other tradition in a way that is recognizable and meaningful to members of the respective communities.13 This implies that competency in one’s own tradition is also a requirement of the process. Collapsing of particularities or presenting all traditions as ‘pretty much the same’ or as holistically different does not add to the process. In fact, both render the process ineffectual and even harmful.14 On the basis of competency, the next step in the process is to place the knowledge of the other tradition in conversation with one’s own tradition(s) through limited acts of comparison. This frequently involves side-by-side reading of authoritative texts from the two traditions. However, the focus of comparative explorations is beginning to broaden to include oral theologies, aesthetic and emotive representations, and embodied ritual.15 The process cultivates a refined sensitivity to both similarities and differences between the traditions; it identifies substantial but provocatively incomplete instances of resonance.16 Crucially, identification of similarities and difference is not a polemical exercise; the other tradition is not a negative foil for or simple proof of the beauty and abundance of one’s own tradition(s). In comparative theology, the overlaps and the ruptures – as well as every nuance in between – are significant because they produce a creative tension capable of prompting new theological considerations.17 As James Fredericks explains, the other comes to us with stories that we have never heard before, with questions we have not asked, ways of responding to life that we have not imagined. New stories, new questions, and new customs, by expanding our horizons, allow us to see ourselves and our own religious tradition in new ways.18 This is the central objective of comparative theology: to produce new theological insights, questions, and approaches. This process is risky and destabilizing. Particular perspectives are not always confirmed, and there is always the possibility of seeing something in the other that is beautiful and religiously meaningful. This same destabilization, however, is the precise payoff of comparative theology; we understand ourselves in new ways in the ‘light’ of the other.19 It is important to emphasize that this does not mean that the objective is appropriation, direct cooptation, or abandonment of one’s own tradition(s).20 It is an assertion that we see new facets of ourselves, our traditions, our sources, and our practices when they are illuminated by comparative engagement. We ask new questions of our traditions and ‘discover patterns hidden beneath the grooves of well-worn narratives.’21 We see new possibilities. Of vital importance to comparative feminist theology, we are prompted to imagine new legitimate and rooted options beyond the dominant forms of theology and interpretation within our traditions.22 The comparative lens assists in penetrating the ‘unthought’ and the ‘unthinkable,’ that is, those aspects of and possibilities within our own traditions that are obscured or rendered invisible by prevailing formulations of orthodoxy and interpretations of texts and practices.23 The goals of comparative theology therefore are transformation, imaginative theological reconstruction, and even transgression within and in conversation with the tradition(s) of the comparative theologian.24 Comparative feminist theology follows this basic process with a few key modifications. First, it centres, what Michelle Voss Roberts calls, the ‘outsider within’ traditions. While some works in comparative theology – including Clooney’s own Divine Mother, Blessed Mother – deal with female figures and the feminine, the field overall does not focus on 72

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feminist discourse, texts, and practices.25 Voss Roberts argues for such a focus in order to destabilize generalizations, move beyond texts, and offer new sites of comparison by centring the ‘outsider within’ various traditions.26 Comparative theology, with its emphases on deep learning about and accurate representation of traditions, has the unfortunate side effect of excluding voices and perspectives that are not part of the authoritative canon of traditions. Women feature prominently in this category. They are often excluded in texts, scriptures, interpretations, and as competent scholars of their own traditions. Comparative theology is typically focused on authoritative ‘insider’ to ‘insider’ engagements, but comparative feminist theology seeks to contest the ‘traditional enough’ standard and bring outsiders within into the conversation.27 Voss Roberts also contends that the method of comparative theology can have a positive impact on feminist theologies. Specifically, comparative theology can enhance feminist theologies by drawing attention to ongoing colonial legacies and power dynamics among religious traditions, and by emphasizing competency in other traditions and thus avoiding superficial generalizations and assumptions of parity.28 It is worth noting that these are primary concerns voiced by many Muslim women scholars in relation to interreligious feminist engagement. Comparative feminist theology also revisits the way in which the ‘fruits’ – the fresh insights – comparative theological engagement are received by and resonate with the original tradition.29 Feminist outsiders challenge the structures of authority within their respective communities; they do not desire to uphold the structures as they are. While feminist theologians aim to resonate with their traditions and religious communities in pursuit of change, history demonstrates that reception of their ideas will be a combination of resonance and disregard (if not outright resistance). Therefore, the idea of communal reception must be reconfigured. Communal resonance remains important, but feminist theologians are more interested in provocative communal resonance, that is, in stirring people to embark upon difficult, yet imperative conversations. Finally, comparative feminist theology is especially attentive to expectations of parity in concerns, methods, and theologies. It does not rest on the foundations of sameness or familiarity, and it endeavours to be deliberately conscious of explicit and implicit norms. For Muslima theologians, in particular, comparative feminist theology is a means to conscientiously and critically engage other feminist theologies without glossing important differences or universalizing a particular feminist theological perspective. It also provides a counterpoint to discourses that foster ideas of interreligious corruption, contamination, and opposition. Comparative feminist theology – while unpredictable and dynamic – ironically provides a more stable and safe structure for interreligious feminist engagement, which is too often characterized by power, stereotypical or superficial depictions, and limited knowledge. The goals of comparative feminist theology therefore are transformation, transgression, and imaginative theological reconstruction within and in conversation with the tradition(s) of the comparative theologian. At the same time, comparative feminist theology provides a way to learn with other traditions, and to gain new and indispensable insights related to egalitarianism. Interrogations of power, attentiveness to on-the-ground realities, and a thrust toward liberation become empowering aspects of comparative feminist theology. Engagement among traditions becomes a theologically sound, theologically rich, and practically effective means of change. It reveals new resources crucial to our own struggles. Rather than a risky distraction or side project, comparative feminist theology recasts interreligious feminist engagement as an invaluable resource for reflection and action.

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What? Muslima theology, divine words, and theological anthropology Two of the most powerful aspects of the method of comparative feminist theology are, first, that it is premised upon deep knowledge, and, second, that it is not premised upon expectations of absolute parity or sameness. Why does this matter? Simply, it allows comparative feminist theologians to identify better points of analogy, better places to start productive and strategic comparative conversations. In my recent work on Muslim and Christian comparative feminist engagement, the unique starting point that I adopt is reorientation around the analogy of two ‘Divine Words,’ that is, centring comparative theological reflection on the analogy between the Qurʾan and Jesus, instead of the more common alternatives of Muhammad and Jesus (the central figures) or the Qurʾan and the Bible (the scriptures).30 This is not a new comparative analogy; in the US context, Seyyed Hossein Nasr identified it in the 1960s in his book Ideals and Realities in Islam.31 While not originally voiced by feminist theologians and scholars, it is notable that those who employ this theological analogy do so on the basis of their deep knowledge of both traditions and their frustrations with the ‘confusion of categories’ that occurs with other analogies.32 This analogical starting point is deeply relevant to and fruitful for comparative feminist conversations among Muslim and Christian theologians. Why? Because when one looks at this analogy from the perspective of the diverse concerns voiced by theologians and scholars in both traditions, overlap is readily discernible. What are their concerns? What are their primary sites of struggle? What questions disturb them? The diverse responses to these questions reveal something striking. They point back to the analogy of the Words. Even when the terminology and concept of ‘Word’ is challenged, concerns in both traditions swirl around the Divine being in the world in all of its contextual messiness and the way value has been assigned to various markers of that worldly ‘messiness.’ More concretely, similar concerns are raised in relation to the Qurʾan and Jesus Christ, questions about Divine inbreaking in a limited, worldly/human form and context; questions about historical contextualization and universal relevance; questions about patriarchy and maleness. Based on this organic – albeit productively imperfect – overlap in concerns, the analogy of the two Divine Words becomes an invaluable place to start a new conversation. I use this new starting point to reorient the entire comparative conversation and explore central theological concerns. I begin by placing approaches to the Qurʾan in conversation with Christology, and then extend the analogy to explore the hadith corpus in conversation with Biblical exegesis, and Prophet Muhammad in relation to the Virgin Mary as feminist exemplars. I also use the analogy to examine the topics of theological anthropology and ritual change (specifically women-led prayer), topics that are often sites of comparative jabs, hegemonic assertions, and horizontal violence in interreligious feminist engagements. With each of these topics, I provide a critical analysis of existing Islamic feminist and Muslima scholarship on the topic; then I engage – listen and learn from – diverse Christian theologians; and then I articulate constructive Muslima theological takeaways. To concretely illustrate this, I will explore some details related to the topic of theological anthropology.33 Theological anthropology is a prime site of much feminist grappling in both traditions and also is a prime site of less than productive comparative jabs across traditions. The contours of Islamic feminist theological anthropology are extremely positive and optimistic.34 Humans are created equal in the sight of God and in relation to each other. They are only distinguished from one another on the basis of taqwā (God consciousness) not on the basis of sex or gender. They can fulfil their purpose and choose to manifest taqwā . 74

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Their basic human nature (fiṭra) begins in perfect relationship with God, and while this relationship can certainly be disturbed through forgetfulness and arrogance, the core fiṭra (or human nature) that inclines toward God can never be eradicated. This is a very positive theological anthropology. It is also a theological anthropology that is phenomenally well rooted in the primary texts and sources, and phenomenally well suited to egalitarian argumentation. It is a theological anthropology on which I have based the majority of my constructive Muslima writing.35 It is beautiful, empowering, and human-positive. However, there is a nascent discussion of whether this theological anthropology is attentive enough to the realities of human constraint and limitation. Based on their research among Muslim women in South Africa, Nina Hoel and Shaikh explore the intersections between theological anthropology and religious subjectivity. They specifically engage the theological concepts of ʿ abd Allah (servant of God) and khalifah (moral agent, vicegerent).36 Acknowledging the importance and empowering role of these concepts, they argue that the concepts ‘need to be analysed in relation to complex and embodied social contexts characterized by hierarchical gender power relations.’37 Hoel and Shaikh, for example, outline the ways in which servitude as a positive theological concept can be detrimental in situations of power and gender asymmetry. They also argue that even khalifah should be placed in conversation with the fact that some women do not have any control over their physical body. Their research points to ‘implications for women’s individual cultivation of religious piety and moral action when … capacities to act and make decisions … are bound up with symbolic and real patriarchal power.’38 Hoel and Shaikh’s research raises questions about human freedom and constraint. As such, it also raises questions about dominant Islamic feminist and Muslima formulations of theological anthropology. Are these beautiful, positive, optimistic theological anthropologies founded on the intersections of tawḥīd, fiṭra, khilafah, and taqwā attentive enough to the realities of human constraint and limitation? If not, how might Muslima theological anthropology be expanded to be more attentive, while retaining the powerful and deep roots already articulated? To consider these questions – in line with the method of comparative feminist theology – I engage with perspectives on theological anthropology articulated by M. Shawn Copeland, Delores S. Williams, and Jeannine Hill Fletcher.39 These three Christian theologians focus specifically on issues of freedom, suffering, embodiment, and systemic and relational constraint. Copeland and Williams do so by foregrounding the atrocities and survival strategies of black women in slavery and post-slavery contexts. Copeland seeks to make the damage ‘visible’ and proposes a more ‘realistic’ anthropological subject: exploited, despised, poor women of colour.40 This move is not simply an effort to include overlooked experiences, nor to restate earlier models – sometimes proposed even by feminist theologians – of theological anthropology based on androgyny, unisex ideals, or complementarity. The new anthropological subject, rather, provides a more robust, realistic, and responsible model of a human being; it is a model of a human who is made by God, situated in social relationships with other humans, ‘capable of working out essential freedom in time and space,’ unafraid of difference and interdependence, and willing to engage in the necessary daily struggle.41 Williams describes her focus on the faith, experiences, thought, and life struggles of African American women as not simply cathartic but as a theological corrective to even liberation theologies. Womanist theology critiques black liberation theology’s participation in making some experience ‘invisible,’ challenges doctrines of redemption and salvation based on ‘bloody surrogacy,’ and introduces a of new ethical model.42 She also emphasizes how the survival, quality of life tradition – in distinction from liberation traditions – centres 75

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female agency in the person of Hagar and describes God’s response not as liberation but as presence and participation in survival and amidst oppression.43 Hill Fletcher uses the metaphor of motherhood and argues that the human condition is one in which relationality precedes the individual, constraint challenges freedom, and interreligious knowledge is a form of sacred knowledge.44 While modern theological anthropology imagines the human person to be free, autonomous, and independent, even capable of reaching outside of their own selves or conditioning, the reality is that each individual is born into and found in a ‘web of relationships and responsibilities.’45 Freedom without any constraints is an illusion. Rather, humans exist in ‘constrained creativity.’ They are always characterized by some constraint, but no particular system of constraint is fixed, static, true, or universal.46 These three, diverse Christian perspectives present a significant challenge to other dominant Christian theological anthropologies and provide an invaluable dialogical lens for Muslima reflections on the extent of freedom and capacity. How does engagement with these perspectives impact Muslima theology? What are some of the constructive theological takeaways or insights? I will highlight only three. One is the theme of visiblization and invisiblization. These Christian theologians ask what is rendered visible and invisible in dominant – even feminist and liberation – models of theological anthropology. Applying this question to Islamic feminist perspectives and Muslima theology, it is clear that existing formulations emphasize individual value, freedom, and capacity. In doing so, they stress ideal relationships between humans and between humans and God. However, claims to an aspirational ideal are not the same as attending to the descriptive reality on the ground, the real. A realistic model is not simply an embrace of whatever the on-the-ground reality may be; it is not just description. A realistic model, though, needs to be in conversation with the descriptive, embodied reality, particularly the reality of the most marginalized in any society. If a model of theological anthropology is too distanced from or out of touch with the reality on the ground, then no matter how many beautiful claims it makes to equality, freedom, and responsible relationality, it can serve to further marginalize. A theological anthropology of freedom, choice, and capacity can be irrelevant and oppressive to those who are not free, cannot choose, and are not capable. The complexities of constraint and relationality are somewhat obscured in existing Islamic feminist and Muslima anthropologies. A second takeaway relates to the subject or exemplar of theological anthropology. The central concept of fiṭra (human nature) puts forth a fairly robust idea of unrestrained autonomy and individuality. One way it does so is through connection to the model of Abraham. In many ways, Abraham becomes the exemplar of a fiṭra-based theological anthropology.47 He is entangled in social, familial, and ideological constraints, but he extricates himself from those constraints. Drawing upon Hill Fletcher, Abraham’s fiṭra and natural capacity enable him to escape – cut constraints from – both his context of relationality and his sociocultural economy of knowledge. And this ability is extensively praised. Abraham is the model of faith, the model even for Muhammad (Qurʾan 6:123). The exemplarily model of Abraham thus promotes the idea that people can actually escape embodied realities of relationality and constraint. While I find this Abraham-centric theological anthropology empowering in the way that it validates basic individual human integrity irrespective of context, it is also true that it fails to grapple sufficiently with constraint and can thus function as a sort of theological rugged individualism. This brings me to a third takeaway, a question: could there be another model of theological anthropology? Another exemplar? A model that would simultaneously attend to the 76

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real, aim for the ideal, and impel the gritty and continuous work of transforming structural and systemic constraints? One answer is found in an overlap in the writings of Williams and wadud: they turn to the example of Hagar or Hajar.48 Hagar/Hajar provides a more realistic, relational, constrained, embodied model of theological anthropology. But, this is the fascinating part. The overlap is valuable because it is partial and incomplete. Williams and wadud do not invoke the same exact Hagar or Hajar. She is situated differently within each tradition, and therefore her potential as an anthropological model is unique in each. Hajar is in relation to God. Hajar acts socially. Hajar is situated in and not extricated from a tangle of social and relational constraints. In addition, though, Hajar in Islamic tradition is the ignored, but hypercentred exemplar. She the mother of Islam, is known and ritually centred, is romantically praised and honoured, yet her example is not deeply considered. Every Muslim longs to run in her footsteps in the rites of hajj, but not every Muslim considers the realities and implications of that running. wadud, herself, bemoans the fact that few actually reflect on Hajar’s experience and manifestation of engaged surrender.49 Hajar thus complicates the theme of visiblization. She is very ‘visible,’ but she is not always ‘seen,’ ‘understood,’ ‘accounted for’. This is part of the reason why even raising questions about how she felt or struggled can be seen as problematic; these questions seek understanding and accountability. In this position, Hajar can expand existing models of Islamic feminist and Muslim theological anthropology. She is an active agent who engages in constrained creativity and responsible relationality. However, she is also an exemplar that challenges norms and makes an ethical demand. Hajar cannot manifest taqwā within dominant or romanticized social norms; she cannot even survive within these norms. Hajar’s creative deviance, therefore, is a challenge to the value and authority of singular and static norms of action and relationship. The ethical demand that she makes is a call to become aware of constraints that we may not notice or know, a call to social conscientization. In short, the payoff of centring Hajar is that she foregrounds action, deep sustaining relationship with God, constrained and relational creativity, and social accountability. She thus enhances – but does not abandon – the existing foundations of Islamic feminist and Muslima theological anthropology. This brief example provides a glimpse into the process and payoffs of Muslima theology as comparative feminist theology. It is a messy yet rich process of listening, learning, and thinking with diverse scholars, of hearing stories one has not heard, of considering questions unasked, and of imagining new possibilities. It is an approach that acknowledges interreligious tensions, responds to calls for new methods, and seeks to articulate constructive theological and practical takeaways aimed at change and equality.

Notes 1 See Jerusha Tanner Lamptey (Rhodes), Never Wholly Other: A Muslima Theology of Religious Pluralism (New York: Oxford, 2014). 2 For example, Ednan Aslan, Marcia Hermansen, and Elif Medeni, eds., Muslima Theology: The Voices of Muslim Women Theologians (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013). The editors use ‘Muslima theology,’ yet acknowledge that it is not used or used in this sense by all Muslim women scholars, activists, or theologians. 3 For a more detailed description of these characteristics, see Jerusha Tanner Lamptey (Rhodes), ‘Toward a Muslima Theology: Constructive, Theological, and Comparative Possibilities,’ Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 33, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 27–44; Jerusha Tanner Lamptey (Rhodes), Divine Words, Female Voices: Muslima Explorations in Comparative Feminist Theology (New York: Oxford University, 2018).

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Jerusha Tanner Rhodes 4 Kecia Ali, ‘Progressive Muslims and Islamic Jurisprudence: The Necessity for Critical Engagement with Marriage and Divorce Law,’ in Progressive Muslims: on Justice, Gender and Pluralism, ed. Omid Safi (Oxford: Oneworld, 2003), 164–167; Kecia Ali, Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence (London: Oneworld, 2006); Aysha Hidayatullah, Feminist Edges of the Qur’an (New York: Oxford University, 2014), 147–151; Hibba Abugideiri, ‘Revisiting the Islamic Past, Deconstructing Male Authority: The Project of Islamic Feminism,’ Religion & Literature 42, no. 1/2 (Spring-Summer 2010): 137–138. 5 amina wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006), 24–37, 39–42, 158–162; Asma Barlas, ‘Believing Women’ in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 13–15; Riffat Hassan, ‘Feminism in Islam,’ in Feminism and World Religions, ed. Arvind Sharma and Katherine K. Young (Albany: State University of New York, 1999), 253, 257–261; Sa’diyya Shaikh, ‘Islamic Law, Sufism and Gender: Rethinking the Terms of the Debate,’ in Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition, ed. Ziba Mir Hosseini, Mulki Al-Sharmani, and Jana Rumminger (London: Oneworld, 2015), 106–131, here 106–107, 128–129. 6 amina wadud, ‘The Ethics of Tawḥīd over the Ethics of Qiwamah,’ in Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition, ed. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Mulki Al-Sharmani, and Jana Rumminger (London: Oneworld, 2015), 256–274; Ayesha S. Chaudhry, ‘Producing Gender-Egalitarian Islamic Law: A Case Study of Guardianship (Wilayah) in Prophetic Practice,’ in Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition, ed. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Mulki Al-Sharmani, and Jana Rumminger (London: Oneworld, 2015), 89; Sa’diyya Shaikh, ‘Islamic Law, Sufism and Gender: Rethinking the Terms of the Debate,’ in Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition, ed. Ziba Mir Hosseini, Mulki Al-Sharmani, and Jana Rumminger (London: Oneworld, 2015), 106–131, here 107. 7 Marcia Hermansen, ‘Introduction: New Voices of Muslim Women Theologians,’ in Aslan, Hermansen, and Medeni, Muslima Theology, 18. 8 See Valentine M. Moghadam, ‘Islamic Feminism and Its Discontents: Toward a Resolution of the Debate,’ Signs 27, no. 4 (Summer 2002): 1134–1171, esp. 1142; Margot Badran, ‘Between Secular and Islamic Feminism/s: Reflections on the Middle East and Beyond,’ Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 1, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 6–28, esp. 6; Haideh Moghissi, Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis (London: Zed Books, 1999), 6; miriam cooke, Women Claim Islam: Creating Islamic Feminism through Literature (New York: Routledge, 2001), ix; Fatima Seedat, ‘When Islam and Feminism Converge,’ Muslim World 103, no. 3 (July 2013): 404–420, Fatima Seedat, ‘Islam, Feminism, and Islamic Feminism: Between Inadequacy and Inevitability,’ Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 25–45; and Aysha Hidayatullah, Feminist Edges of the Qur’an (New York: Oxford, 2014), 36–45. 9 See Azizah Y. al-Hibri, ‘An Introduction to Muslim Women’s Rights,’ in Windows of Faith: Muslim Women Scholar-Activists in North America, ed. Gisela Webb (Syracuse: Syracuse University, 2000), 51–71; Hassan, ‘Feminism in Islam,’ 254–261; Aysha Hidayatullah, ‘The Qur’anic Ribectomy: Scriptural Purity, Imperial Dangers, and Other Obstacles to the Interfaith Engagement of Feminist Qur’anic Interpretation,’ in Women in Interreligious Dialogue, ed. Catherine Cornille and Jillian Maxey (Eugene: Cascade, 2013), 152–154, here 150–151. 10 Hidayatullah, ‘The Qur’anic Rib-ectomy,’ 150–167, 150–151; Aysha Hidayatullah, ‘Inspiration and Struggle: Muslim Feminist Theology and the Work of Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza,’ Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 25, no.1 (2009): 162–170, here 170; and Zayn Kassam, ‘Constructive Interreligious Dialogue Concerning Muslim Women,’ in Women in Interreligious Dialogue, ed. Catherine Cornille and Jillian Maxey (Eugene: Cascade, 2013), 127–149. 11 Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Comparative Theology: Deep Learning Across Religious Borders (Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), 10. 12 James Fredericks, Faith Among Faiths: Christian Theology and Non-Christian Religions (Mahwah: Paulist, 1999), 164; James Fredericks, Buddhists and Christians: Through Comparative Theology to Solidarity (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2004), xii. 13 Clooney, Comparative Theology, 13. 14 Fredericks, Faith Among Faiths, 163. 15 Michelle Voss Roberts, Tastes of the Divine: Hindu and Christian Theologies of Emotion (New York: Fordham, 2014); Jeannine Hill Fletcher, ‘What Counts as “Catholic?” What Constitutes “Comparative”?’ and ‘Response to Daria Schnipkoweit,’ Studies in Interreligious Dialogue 24, 1 (2014): 78–85, 91–93.

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Muslima theology 16 Zayn Kassam, ‘Response to Daniel Madigan,’ in Catholicism and Interreligious Dialogue, ed. James L. Heft, S.M. (New York: Oxford University, 2012), 75–77, here 75; Francis X. Clooney, The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation (London: T & T Clark, 2010), 199; Clooney, Comparative Theology, 16–19. 17 Clooney, Comparative Theology, 7; Fredericks, Faith Among Faiths, 169. 18 Fredericks, Faith Among Faiths, 175–176. 19 Clooney, Comparative Theology, 16; Voss Roberts, Tastes of the Divine, xxii; Reid B. Locklin and Hugh Nicholson, ‘The Return of Comparative Theology,’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78, no. 2 (June 2010): 477–514, here 499. 20 Fredericks, Faith Among Faiths, 178; Peter Phan, ‘From Soteriology to Comparative Theology and Back: A Response to S. Mark Heim,’ in Understanding Religious Pluralism: Perspectives from Religious Studies and Theology, ed. by Peter Phan and Jonathan Ray (Eugene: Pickwick, 2014), 260–264, here 262; John J. Thatamanil, The Immanent Divine (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 23–24; Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier, ‘Comparative Theology as a Theology of Liberation,’ in The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation, ed. Francis X. Clooney, S.J. (London: T & T Clark, 2010), 129–150, here 139. 21 Michelle Voss Roberts, Dualities: A Theology of Difference (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010), 18. 22 Voss Roberts, Tastes of the Divine, xxii; and Francis X. Clooney, S.J., ‘Afterword: Some Reflections in Response to Teaching Comparative Theology in the Millennial Classroom,’ in Comparative Theology in the Millennial Classroom, ed. Mara Brecht and Reid B. Locklin (New York: Routledge, 2016), 219–234, here 227. 23 Mohammed Arkoun, The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought (London: Saqi Books, 2002). 24 Locklin and Nicholson, ‘The Return of Comparative Theology,’ 493. 25 Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 26 Michelle Voss Roberts, ‘Gendering Comparative Theology,’ in The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation, ed. Francis X. Clooney, S.J. (London: T & T Clark, 2010), 109–128, here 114–115; Voss Roberts, Dualities, 4–5. 27 Voss Roberts, Dualities, 12; Voss Roberts, ‘Gendering Comparative Theology,’ 116. 28 Voss Roberts, ‘Gendering Comparative Theology,’ 127. 29 Voss Roberts, ‘Gendering Comparative Theology,’ 118–124. 30 See, Lamptey (Rhodes), Divine Words, Female Voices. 31 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Ideals and Realities of Islam (Chicago: ABC International Group, 2000). See also Joseph Lumbard, ‘Discernment, Dialogue, and the Word of God,’ in Criteria of Discernment in Interreligious Dialogue, Interreligious Dialogue Series 1, ed. Catherine Cornille (Eugene: Cascade, 2009), 143–152; Daniel Madigan, ‘Muslim Christian Dialogue in Difficult Times,’ in Catholicism and Interreligious Dialogue, ed. James L. Heft, S.M. (New York: Oxford University, 2012), 57–74, here 58; Daniel Madigan, ‘Jesus and Muhammad: The Sufficiency of Prophecy,’ in Bearing the Word: Prophecy in Biblical and Qur’anic Perspective, ed. Michael Ipgrave (London: Church House Publishing, 2005), 90–99, here 95; Annemarie Schimmel, And Muhammad Is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1985), 24. 32 For example, see Nasr, Ideals and Realities, 30; Lumbard, ‘Discernment, Dialogue,’ 144; Daniel A. Madigan, ‘Mutual Theological Hospitality: Doing Theology in the Presence of the ’Other’,’ in Muslim and Christian Understanding: Theory and Application of ‘A Common Word’, ed. Waleed ElAnsary and David K. Linnan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 57–68, here 5, 7; Madigan, ‘Jesus and Muhammad,’ 93, 95. 33 For a more detailed exploration of this topic, see Lamptey (Rhodes), Divine Words, Female Voices, 156–189. 34 Central texts include, amina wadud, Qurʾan and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Position. New York: Oxford University, 1999, 19–26; Barlas, ‘Believing Women’ in Islam, 133, 136; Hassan, ‘Feminism in Islam,’ 253–260; Lamptey (Rhodes), Never Wholly Other, 142–154, 237–238. 35 See, Lamptey (Rhodes), Never Wholly Other. 36 Nina Hoel and Sa’diyya Shaikh, ‘Sexing Islamic Theology: Theorising Women’s Experience and Gender through ‘abd-Allah and khalifah,’ Journal for Islamic Studies 33 (2013): 127–150, here 128–135. 37 Hoel and Shaikh, ‘Sexing Islamic Theology,’ 135.

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Jerusha Tanner Rhodes 38 Hoel and Shaikh, ‘Sexing Islamic Theology,’ 128. 39 See M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, Being (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010); Jeannine Hill Fletcher, Motherhood as Metaphor: Engendering Interreligious Dialogue (New York: Fordham University, 2013); Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-talk (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993). 40 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 9, 38, 92. 41 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 92. 42 Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, 144–177. 43 Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, 2–5. 44 Hill Fletcher, Motherhood as Metaphor, 5. 45 Hill Fletcher, Motherhood as Metaphor, 40. 46 Hill Fletcher, Motherhood as Metaphor, 131. 47 See Lamptey, Never Wholly Other, 194–197, 212–217, 228–232. 48 wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 143. 49 wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 143.

Further reading Barlas, Asma. ‘Believing Women’ in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qurʾan. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002.This groundbreaking work opened up new modes of reading the Qurʾan and other Islamic texts that challenged patriarchal and androcentric interpretations. Clooney, S.J. Francis, X. Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders. Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2010.This book sets out the key methodologies in comparative theology and provides important examples of how comparative theology works in practice. Lamptey (Rhodes), Jerusha Tanner. Divine Words, Female Voices: Muslima Explorations in Comparative Feminist Theology. New York: Oxford University, 2018.In this book, Jerusha Rhodes shows how interreligious feminist engagement is essential for Muslim feminist theology. Voss Roberts, Michelle. ‘Gendering Comparative Theology.’ In The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation, ed. X. Francis Clooney, S.J., 109–128. London: T & T Clark, 2010.This important piece argues that comparative theology needs to account for unequal social power relations around gender and other marginalized identities, by delving more fully into the lived experiences of these communities. wadud, amina. Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006.Through an intersectional perspective, amina wadud explores the challenges and possibilities for working toward gender justice in Muslim communities and in our world today. ———. Qurʾan and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Position. New York: Oxford University, 1999.Another foundational text, this book sets out a new exegetical framework for interpreting the Qurʾan, demonstrating the gender egalitarian vision of the text and its potential for guiding gender reform in contemporary Muslim communities.

References Abugideiri, Hibba. ‘Revisiting the Islamic Past, Deconstructing Male Authority: The Project of Islamic Feminism.’ Religion & Literature, vol. 42, no. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 133–139. al-Hibri, Azizah Y. ‘An Introduction to Muslim Women’s Rights.’ In Windows of Faith: Muslim Women Scholar-Activists in North America, ed. Gisela Webb, 51–71. Syracuse: Syracuse University, 2000. Ali, Kecia. ‘Progressive Muslims and Islamic Jurisprudence: The Necessity for Critical Engagement with Marriage and Divorce Law.’ In Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism, ed. Omid Safi, 163–189. Oxford: Oneworld, 2003. ———. Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qurʾan, Hadith and Jurisprudence. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006. Arkoun, Mohammed. The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought. London: Saqi Books, 2002. Aslan, Ednan, Marcia Hermansen, and Elif Medeni, ed., Muslima Theology: The Voices of Muslim Women Theologians. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013. Badran, Margot. ‘Between Secular and Islamic Feminism/s: Reflections on the Middle East and Beyond.’ Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 6–28.

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Muslima theology Barlas, Asma. ‘Believing Women’ in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qurʾan. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Chaudhry, Ayesha S. ‘Producing Gender-Egalitarian Islamic Law: A Case Study of Guardianship (Wilayah) in Prophetic Practice.’ In Men in Charge?; Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition, ed. Ziba Mir Hosseini, Mulki Al-Sharmani, and Jana Rumminger, 88–105. London: Oneworld, 2015. Clooney, S.J., Francis, X. Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. ———. Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders. Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2010. ———, ed., The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation. London: T & T Clark, 2010. ———. ‘Afterword: Some Reflections in Response to Teaching Comparative Theology in the Millennial Classroom.’ In Comparative Theology in the Millennial Classroom, ed. Mara Brecht and Reid B. Locklin, 219–234. New York: Routledge, 2016. cooke, miriam. Women Claim Islam: Creating Islamic Feminism through Literature. New York: Routledge, 2001. Copeland, M. Shawn. Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, Being. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010. Fredericks, James. Faith among Faiths: Christian Theology and Non-Christian Religions. Mahwah: Paulist, 1999. ———. Buddhists and Christians: Through Comparative Theology to Solidarity. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2004. Hassan, Riffat. ‘Feminism in Islam.’ In Feminism and World Religions, ed. Arvind Sharma and Katherine K. Young, 248–278. Albany: State University of New York, 1999. Hidayatullah, Aysha. ‘Inspiration and Struggle: Muslim Feminist Theology and the Work of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza.’ Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, vol. 25, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 162–170. ———. ‘The Qurʾanic Rib-ectomy: Scriptural Purity, Imperial Dangers, and Other Obstacles to the Interfaith Engagement of Feminist Qurʾanic Interpretation.’ In Women in Interreligious Dialogue, ed. Catherine Cornille and Jillian Maxey, 150–167. Eugene: Cascade, 2013. ———. Feminist Edges of the Qurʾan. New York: Oxford University, 2014. Hill Fletcher, Jeannine. Motherhood as Metaphor: Engendering Interreligious Dialogue. New York: Fordham University, 2013. ———. ‘What Counts as ‘Catholic?’ What Constitutes ‘Comparative’?’ and ‘Response to Daria Schnipkoweit.’ Studies in Interreligious Dialogue, vol. 24, no. 1 (2014): 78–85, 91–93. Hoel, Nina and Sa’diyya Shaikh. ‘Sexing Islamic Theology: Theorising Women’s Experience and Gender through ‘abd-Allah and khalifah.’ Journal for Islamic Studies, vol. 33 (2013): 127–150. Kassam, Zayn. ‘Response to Daniel Madigan.’ In Catholicism and Interreligious Dialogue, ed. L. James S. M. Heft, 75–77. New York: Oxford University, 2012. ———. ‘Constructive Interreligious Dialogue Concerning Muslim Women.’ In Women in Interreligious Dialogue, ed. Catherine Cornille and Jillian Maxey, 127–149. Eugene: Cascade, 2013. Lamptey (Rhodes), Jerusha Tanner. Never Wholly Other: A Muslima Theology of Religious Pluralism. New York: Oxford, 2014. ———. ‘Toward a Muslima Theology: Constructive, Theological, and Comparative Possibilities.’ Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, vol. 33, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 27–44. ———. Divine Words, Female Voices: Muslima Explorations in Comparative Feminist Theology. New York: Oxford University, 2018. Locklin, Reid B. and Hugh Nicholson. ‘The Return of Comparative Theology.’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 78, no. 2 (June 2010): 477–514. Lumbard, Joseph. ‘Discernment, Dialogue, and the Word of God.’ In Criteria of Discernment in Interreligious Dialogue, Interreligious Dialogue Series 1, ed. Catherine Cornille, 143–152. Eugene: Cascade, 2009. Madigan, Daniel S.J. ‘Jesus and Muhammad: The Sufficiency of Prophecy.’ In Bearing the Word: Prophecy in Biblical and Qurʾanic Perspective, ed. Michael Ipgrave, 90–99. London: Church House Publishing, 2005. ———. ‘Mutual Theological Hospitality: Doing Theology in the Presence of the ’Other’.’ In Muslim and Christian Understanding: Theory and Application of ‘A Common Word’, ed. Waleed El-Ansary and David K. Linnan, 57–68. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ———. ‘Muslim-Christian Dialogue in Difficult Times’ and ‘Responses’.’ In Catholicism and Interreligious Dialogue, ed. James Heft, 57–87. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

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Jerusha Tanner Rhodes Moghadam, Valentine M. ‘Islamic Feminism and Its Discontents: Toward a Resolution of the Debate.’ Signs, vol. 27, no. 4 (Summer 2002): 1135–1171. Moghissi, Haideh. Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis. London: Zed Books, 1999. Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. Ideals and Realities of Islam. Chicago: ABC International Group, 2000. Phan, Peter. ‘From Soteriology to Comparative Theology and Back: A Response to S. Mark Heim.’ In Understanding Religious Pluralism: Perspectives from Religious Studies and Theology, ed. Peter Phan and Jonathan Ray, 260–264. Eugene: Pickwick, 2014. Schimmel, Annemarie. And Muhammad Is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1985. Seedat, Fatima. ‘Islam, Feminism, and Islamic Feminism: Between Inadequacy and Inevitability.’ Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, vol. 29, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 25–45. Shaikh, Sa’diyya. ‘Islamic Law, Sufism and Gender: Rethinking the Terms of the Debate.’ In Men in Charge?: Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition, ed. Ziba Mir Hosseini, Mulki Al-Sharmani, and Jana Rumminger, 106–131. London: Oneworld, 2015. Thatamanil, John J. The Immanent Divine. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006. Tiemeier, Tracy Sayuki. ‘Comparative Theology as a Theology of Liberation.’ In The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation, ed. X. Francis S.J. Clooney, 129–150. London: T & T Clark, 2010. Voss Roberts, Michelle. Dualities: A Theology of Difference. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010. ———. ‘Gendering Comparative Theology.’ In The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation, ed. X. Francis S.J. Clooney, 109–128. London: T & T Clark, 2010. ———. Tastes of the Divine: Hindu and Christian Theologies of Emotion. New York: Fordham, 2014. wadud, amina. Qurʾan and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Position. New York: Oxford University, 1999. ———. Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006. ———. ‘The Ethics of Tawḥīd over the Ethics of Qiwamah.’ In Men in Charge?; Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition, ed. Ziba Mir Hosseini, Mulki Al-Sharmani, and Jana Rumminger, 256–274. London: Oneworld, 2015. Williams, Delores S. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993.

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5 GENDER AND THE STUDY OF ISLAMIC LAW From polemics to feminist ethics Fatima Seedat

Introduction Over the past 40 or more years, scholarship on women, gender and sexuality in Islamic law has developed to produce varied approaches to law reform and different narratives of gendered legal subjectivity. Scholarship has expanded and evolved, and perspectives have changed reflecting increasing awareness of the complexities that animate the legal consequences of gendered and sexual aspects of social difference. This chapter presents an overview of three approaches to law reform and four discernible narratives of sex difference that have emerged in the study of gender in Islamic law. Collectively they indicate toward the richness and the nuances of this field of work. Theoretically, I argue, they indicate a move toward the deconstruction of a received notion of shariʿa as a metanorm that regulates individuals in both their outward behaviours and their internal self-discipline (Salvatore 2000). While the regulation of behaviours is possible through legal systems, the latter, which is internal discipline relies on systems of social accountability which remain illusive in the context of legislation and law making in the nation state. Following a brief survey of early studies on women in Islamic law, this chapter outlines a series of gender-based reform efforts to suggest here that reform approaches of the late 20th and early 21st centuries which take the gender concerns of society seriously have taken a different route from earlier efforts. Whereas 19th and 20th century reforms utilised a concept of shariʿa as a hardened ‘civilising kernel’ (Salvatore 2000), the approaches discerned in this chapter offer instead an opening-up of the concept of shariʿa and the gendered underpinnings supporting Muslim understandings of legality in the context of women and sexuality, offering a variety of new approaches to gendered legal subjectivity. The three approaches to genderbased reform which I discern here do this by either offering different interpretations of the law, by deconstructing legal concepts (including shariʿa) or by offering an alternate ethics-based approach to the law. They emerge alongside some discernible narratives of gendered legal subjectivity. I offer only a brief tracing of these four narratives of women’s legal subjectivity here with the intention of expanding this analysis in later work; these are namely a narrative of complementarity, an equality narrative cast in human-rights discourses i.e. a rights-based narrative, a disability or deficiency narrative that is primarily textual and a narrative of women as wives

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in marriage. The most recent aspect of this scholarship also offers deep interrogations of the historical texts casting a feminist lens on historical Muslim law and practice. Collectively, trajectories of development in the study of gender in Islamic law reflect a maturing and a deepening deconstruction or opening of the categories supporting gendered understandings of Islamic law; while they still speak to a common interest in the idea of a historical shariʿa, they also open it up to contemporary scrutiny reflecting the gendered politics of knowledge production. “Who studies what” and “what is studied” are elements of this development, and the nature and form of the scholarship presented below demonstrates how the study of gender in Islamic law has shifted to reflect emerging gendered legal subjectivities, as well as the need for further developments in this vein.

Theorising reform Theorizing the developments in 19th-century state formations and attendant legal reforms, Armando Salvatore has argued that what emerged was a reformed “kernel-like” understanding of the law of shariʿa as a “normative and at least, potential legal system” (2000, p. 105). What emerged was a notion of shariʿa as a metanorm imploded into a hardened and “authentic normative and civilising kernel”, dislodged from its institutional structures, focused on state forms of accountability, yet also intended to regulate the inner-self through the processes of self-discipline, however unreachable by legislative decree (2000, p. 105). Further, Amira Sonbol’s (1998, 2006, 2016) work argues that legal reforms of the 19th and 20th centuries functioned through the patriarchal norms of nation states, which also combined Victorian, Napoleonic and other colonial and modern perspectives with contemporaneous paradigms of sex difference, thus significantly transforming Muslim legal marriage practices, namely polygyny and marriage contracts. Sonbol’s work on legal transformations of the colonial period studies the development of laws determining the relationship between husbands and wives, illustrating how “nation state reforms” deteriorated the status of women (Sonbol 1998, 2006). Amongst the accretions of this age were the emergence of the concept of bayt al-ta’a’ and the consequent requirement for wifely obedience. Through colonial period transformations husbands received rights to physical, sexual and mental aspects of a wife’s person, which they did not previously have. Thus emerged the concept bayt al-ṭā’a (house of obedience), an institution “unheard of before the last decades of the nineteenth century”, which limited a wife’s capacity to exit her husband’s marital authority and thus the marriage (Sonbol 1998, pp. 293–294). Similarly, modern legal change transformed the legal flexibility of marriage contracts and placed women under the “custody” of their husbands, severely curtailing their historical capacity to negotiate or to exit marriage (Sonbol 2016, p. 90). The process of transformation therefore extended beyond the structural mechanisms for the application of law, but also functioned in its conceptual apparatus, affecting paradigms of sex difference and producing a redefinition of gender that drew from modern forms of state authority and subjectivity. Not only were existing gendered power dynamics formalised, but also new understandings of sex difference were simultaneously innovated and adopted into the transformed legal systems. The regulation of these applied to the material legal situation in terms of the discipline of wives, now newly enforceable through the state, but also relied on the discipline of the husband’s inner self, however unenforceable.

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Cast in the mould of a civilising discourse of shariʿa (Salvatore), the gendered nature of these reforms meant that new gender norms were also associated with ideas of “holiness” and there after rendered “untouchable” (Sonbol 1998, p. 285). In a similar fashion, presentday Muslim states, including those signed to international human rights treaties, appeal to a notion of shariʿa which they claim does not permit change in gender relations. Conceptualised as law imbued with the religious normativity and immutability (Sonbol 1998, p. 285), shariʿa comes to function as a terministic screen that can broach no change. Gender norms receive equally terministic treatment in the argument that Islamic law postulates a definitive understanding of gender difference. Together, terministic concepts of shariʿa and gender function as two vital axes through which religious authority is produced in Muslim communities. In contrast to colonial-era and nation-building reform efforts which funnelled a wide range of diverse legal interpretations into a single kernel-like notion of shariʿa, easily identified in legal codes, but unenforceable in moral codes, more recent gender-based legal reform, I argue here, moves in the opposite direction to interrogate the limited scope and selectivity of codified law and in the interest of a wider range of historical legal interpretations with the effect of figuratively “exploding” the received concept of shariʿa and reclaiming the inner dimensions of the law including an appeal to its ethics. These reform voices represent the increasingly voluble voice of scholarship guided by women-centred legal concerns, namely the tension between law’s promises of justice and women’s lived experiences of injustice. Characteristically they surface the tensions in and between the historical archive and contemporary experiences or theories of the law, and between the letter and the spirit or ethics of the law. The two elements central to gender-based law reform are a re-engagement with the historical legal tradition and a call for accountability or recognition of the ethical aspects of legal obligations. I trace three discernible approaches to gender based legal reform here, namely an approach that allows reinterpretation of the historical laws in contemporary contexts, an approach that reconstructs historical legal concepts and paradigms and finally an approach that centres on ethics to realign historical understandings of difference and sexuality for contemporary sexual ethics. Further, within these reform efforts there are also discernibly different legal subjectivities. Below I explore these three reform approaches and offer a brief presentation of four narratives of gendered legal subjectivity, namely: a subjectivity based on complementarity, a human rights-based equal subjectivity, the notion of women as disabled subjects, as well as the emergence of a fourth, which is the subjectivity of a wife based on women’s sexuality.

Early Studies of Islamic law with a focus on Women Prior to the series of gender-based reform approaches highlighted discussions that follow, during the 1980s and the 1990s, the analysis of women’s position in Islamic law was largely represented by the works of Murtaza Mutahhari (1981), Abdur Rahman Doi (1989), Jamal Badawi (1999), Kaukab Siddique (1994), Asghar Ali Engineer (2001, 2008) and to some extent the work of Hassan Turabi (1973). Some of these scholars represented a polemic response to Western critics and some offered a critical response to gender difference in the practical and textual representations of Muslim women. Amongst the themes that connect these scholars are ideas of Muslim exceptionalism and an argument that Islam is compatible with ideas of modernity together with the impetus to explore ways in which Islamic law illustrated this compatibility.

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Doi’s Women in Shariʾah (1989) was the earliest of these and quickly became popular in English-speaking South Asia and its diaspora. The book is detailed and legalistic, intended to show Islam’s progressive stance on women’s spiritual status and property and contractual rights vis-à-vis Christianity. For a time Badawi’s Women and Islam (1999) was the standard reference text for newly immigrant North American Muslims trying to adapt to their new environment and English-speaking Muslims. Mutahhari’s Status of Women in Islam (1981) was inspired by the fervour of the Iranian Revolution to affirm the contributions Iranian women made to the Revolution. Badawi and Mutahhari repeated Doi’s assessment of Islam’s progressive stand in comparison to Christianity and Western society. The three were also united in their understanding of gender complementarity – advocating that men and women hold complementary roles in social life, that these are divinely ordained roles and ideally suited to realising the fullness of a properly Muslim life. Their solutions to the problems that Muslim women experienced in their encounters with the law lead toward a romantic Islamic exceptionalism. In their view, Islam, having granted Muslim women freedoms now associated with modernity over 1,400 years prior to modern times, continues to be exceptional in its treatment of women. Until modern times, neither Christian society nor Western nation states granted women rights to own property or to exercise political independence in the manner that Islam had. The responsibility of Muslims, therefore, was to adhere to the parameters of femininity and masculinity defined by these freedoms and to avoid aspiring to the Western modes of freedom. Kaukab Siddique (1994) represents a slight shift in this narrative by highlighting the political impetus that motivated a narrative of women’s rights aligned to social transformation and the idea that Islam’s message is revolutionary. Similarly, Mutahhari’s revolutionary Iranian context shares some of this political motivation. The works of Badawi and Doi, as well as later scholars, include the idea that Islam brought social change into Meccan and Madinan societies. Siddique’s writing however does not take a conciliatory tone but displays a revolutionary motive evident in his book title, The Struggle of Muslim women, and an argument that makes direct links between the transformations brought by prohibitions on alcohol and usury and directives regarding the relationship between husbands and wives. Siddique illustrates methodological inconsistencies in the interpretations of these three directives, namely that scholars fail to apply the same reasoning of gradual elimination and final prohibition of the normative pre-Islamic practice of drinking alcohol to the discrimination against women. Asghar Ali Engineer (2001) has had the most sustained and evolving analysis of women and Islamic law and is more critical than these previous works; his early writings are cast in much the same framework as these above, but later, Engineer offers a bolder critique that also recognises the need to challenge normative gender dynamics, offering robust support for a rights-based narrative. Hassan Turabi’s (1973) work held influence in terms of his leadership of the Sudanese reform movement. It was also promoted largely by women in his own family and, as perhaps the most declaratory statement on Muslim women at the time, Turabi’s arguments came to be integrated into the Muslim reform movements of the time, motivated by arguments that connected the historical downfall of the Muslim society and its necessary resurgence and revival along the lines of a historically reclaimed model of the Sunnah. Turabi’s value in the study of women in Islamic law is his argument for women as equal subjects of Islamic law. He differs in this from previous scholars who maintained an argument that difference was to be understood as complementarity (Turabi 1973).

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Badawi, Mutahhari and Doi appear to be aligned in the gendered subjectivities of complementarity which they produce, Siddique offers some variation on this, while Engineer and Turabi, more so the latter, offer more radical awareness of the uncritical associations of gender, sexuality and legality.

Gender-based approaches to Islamic law reform Characteristically, the gender-based reform approaches outlined below all return to the archive of Islamic law either to offer a reinterpretation of historical legal frameworks or to deconstruct and reconstruct the archive of concepts and assumptions that inform the law. The reinterpretation framework adapts historical legal paradigms to contemporary legal and social circumstances. Deconstructing and reconstructing the archive also works with the historical legal record, but this time to mine it for historical alternatives to normative readings of past theoretical and legal paradigms. Representing the first is the work of Azizah al-Hibri (2000). The second approach is represented by Ziba Mir Hosseini (2004, 2009, 2003) who suggests conceptual deconstruction, as well as Kecia Ali (2006) who offers a rereading of the historical record. The more recent approach has been to take a broad view of the ethics of the law and rests on an early impetus in Muslim women’s analysis of Islamic law that discerned an analysis of the ethics over the legality of the law, which was initiated by the work of Leila Ahmed (1992) and taken on in various forms by a number of scholars, Kecia Ali (2006) and Sa’diyya Shaikh (2012) amongst them. An important aspect of this reform scholarship is their alignment with rights-based activism.

Reinterpretive approach Representing a reinterpretive approach, Azizah al-Hibri is an American lawyer whose scholarship for reform advocacy is also channelled through “Karamah”, an American charitable organisation which she established in 1991, which advocates for the “gender-equitable principles of Islam”.1 In her early work, al-Hibri argued for legal reform by explaining that while Muslim women cannot “reject even a single word of the Qurʾan” if they are to continue calling themselves Muslim (al-Hibri 2001, pp. 39–40), they are also “bewildered” by laws and judicial systems which are supposed to be Islamic but offer little legal protection (2001, p. 37). This tension is evident in that while they have rights to inheritance, property, divorce and lifelong financial support from the males in the family, the law also fails women at significant points in their life as for example when the law allows women to be easily divorced and left penniless even after years of marriage (2001, p. 47). Al-Hibri’s analysis of Muslim women’s experiences with Islamic law leads her to argue that even though Muslim societies dispense injustices to Muslim women under the guise of Islam, “the hallmark of Islam is justice” (al-Hibri 2000, p. 37). In Al-Hibri’s view, the problem with the law is not a fundamental one but a matter of legal interpretation. A large portion of her argument is to challenge what she considers “obsolete cultural interpretations”, patriarchal aspects of earlier juristic interpretation, misinterpretation and questionable interpretation (Al-Hibri 2001, pp. 107, 109, 121 and 125). These include misunderstanding and misapplication of the Qurʾan, and “cultural distortions or patriarchal bias” that have produced “problematic jurisprudence” (Al-Hibri 2001, p. 40). To illustrate, she explains that a woman is not required by law to do housework, yet in many Islamic cultures today housework is considered a wife’s duty. Further, while the 87

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Islamic law does not obligate women to breastfeed, social consensus demands that a mother breastfeed her baby, even at the expense of her education and career (Al-Hibri 2001, pp. 52–53). For Al-Hibri, misinterpretation and cultural bias are at the root of the Muslim woman’s legal dilemma, and these stem from the patriarchal bias of the law that is a relic of an earlier pre-Islamic patriarchy “that survived the clear injunctions of the Qurʾan to the contrary. It prevented interpreters from seeing the simple truths of the Qurʾan and seriously delayed the advent of the ideal Muslim family and society” (2001, p. 55). The premise of this analysis is that the Qurʾanic text, and some of the hadīth literature too, incorporate a latent sense of justice for women that the juristic tradition failed to capture. The result is a comprehensive historical failure to realise the Qurʾanic vision of gender, family and social authority. Consequently, in this approach solutions are directed at legal interpretations and the scholars who formulate them. Outmoded interpretations indicate the persistent adherence to outmoded ideas in the face of modern conditions and may be remedied by textual reinterpretation (Al-Hibri 2001, p. 41). A reinterpretive approach relies on an adherence to the “internal rules” of Islamic jurisprudence, namely the use of historical jurisprudential methods and tools such as theories of public interest (maslaha) and avoidance of harm (la darar wa la dirar) which may be used to perform the sorts of legal reasoning (ijtihad) necessary to arrive at better laws for contemporary times (al-Hibri 2001, pp. 93–94). This requires some structural reform in terms of opening the doors of juristic learning to women. This would facilitate women’s knowledge of the law, of juristic rules for change and ultimately allow women to be vocal and socially influential in promoting legal change, as they were in the times of the Prophet and soon thereafter (al-Hibri 2001, p. 94). Included in this commitment to the traditional mechanisms of Islamic law is also the revival of the Islamic marriage contract. Amira Sonbol’s (1998, 2006, 2016) work has contributed significantly in this area. Raising the profile of historical marriage contracts and illustrating these as mechanisms of legal control over the power dynamics of marriage, Sonbols work provides a valuable resource for the use of marriage contracts as a point of legal reform. Finally, a reinterpretive approach also argues for a distinction between religious and cultural norms, the latter considered un-Islamic. Reflecting reformist geo-political loyalties, a reinterpretive approach accords non-Arab or non-traditional Muslim women a special role in these processes of change. Hibri, for example, considers American Muslim women as “free from local quasi-religious politics”, unbound “by tribal custom of faraway places nor by values of past colonial powers” (al-Hibri 2001, p. 98) and so their application of internal juristic rules in the interests of reform could demonstrate the flexibility of Islam to the Muslim world. They could, she argues, “provide a prototype of jurisprudence that is liberating, modern, yet authentic” to invigorate other Muslims and usher in an age of reform in the Muslim world (al-Hibri 2001, p. 99). Summarily, while a reinterpretation approach traces problematic contemporary legal practices to inferior or outmoded legal interpretation, it offers reforms which maintain the existing foundations of the law, “modernising” it by exposing and eliminating outmoded ideas though not through an outright separation of the law from its traditional paradigm (al-Hibri 2000, p. 41). The argument is that the ideal, Qurʾanically intended, gender egalitarian Muslim community was never realised, and certainly never implemented to the point where egalitarian legal norms were formalised. Generally, reinterpretive reform approaches are characterised by a commitment to the traditional systems and structures of law and reinterpretation in the light of contemporary progressive values. This is largely committed to the extant Islamic law framework with some changes, mostly including women amongst classically trained legal 88

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scholars and redeploying classical legal tools to illicit new interpretations in line with contemporary needs. This is by far the most popular approach to the study of women and Islamic law; it offers new readings of the classical legal tradition, adapting to contemporary concerns. It applies historical legal techniques, principles and practices to contemporary Muslim legal concerns. The work of Asifa Quraishi (1997, 2013) and Hina Azam (2013, 2015) also represents a reinterpretive approach. And, as we will see below, much like Al-Hibri, they also offer conceptual reframings of Islamic law. Azam for example examines “doctrines in the Islamic law of rape” to point to modern “misunderstandings” of historical juristic conceptions of rape. Both also work between reinterpretation and conceptual deconstruction.

Conceptual deconstruction approach Representing a conceptual deconstruction approach is the work of Ziba Mir-Hosseini, an anthropologist and independent scholar. Her work has been increasingly well received in international Muslim women’s rights advocacy work, at first by the network Women living Under Muslim Laws, then the Malaysian group Sisters in Islam and the more recently established and highly successful international advocacy group Musawah. Mir-Hosseini’s work represents the disjuncture between women and the law as historical, namely as a result of “the inner contradictions between the ideals of Islam and the social norms of the early Muslim cultures” (2004, p. 4). Much like Al-Hibri, Mir-Hosseini explains that Muslim women experience the law as an imperfect representation of the Qurʾan; therefore what is required is a distinction between the concepts shariʿa and fiqh. The inequality in fiqh, she argues, is not “a manifestation of divine justice”, but a construction of male jurists “contrary to the very essence of divine will as revealed in the sacred texts” (Mir-Hosseini 2003, p. 20). Like al-Hibri, she contends that the Qurʾanic ideal is not the reality of contemporary Muslims but that the Qurʾanic ideal does hold the capacity for justice for women. She draws attention to the distinction between shariʿa and fiqh in a manner that separates revelation or religious normativity from legal science and allows for a critique of the latter while maintaining the integrity if not sanctity of the former. In terms of their similarities, both Al-Hibri and Mir-Hosseini make a distinction between more and less authentic historical representation of justice or women’s rights. For al-Hibri, the Qurʾanic norm was never realised in Muslim society and for Mir-Hosseini, legal interpretation has distorted the Qurʾanic norm. Both narratives of justice for women remain within a normative notion of shariʿa or a normative religiosity that was either overlooked by the patriarchy of early Muslim society or thwarted by the patriarchy of later juristic society. In her approach Mir-Hosseini argues that to adapt the law to new and changing social circumstances historical concepts must be re-examined, which requires that the male monopoly on knowledge-making be broken and that women participate in the production of knowledge. The aim of this approach is to bring women’s knowledge and experiences into the conceptual production of Islamic law. Central to this approach is a challenge to historical understandings of women’s sexuality in order to sever the implicit link between rights and sex difference, which Mir-Hosseini does (2003, p. 20). Rather than defining women’s sexuality and associated gender specific rights in terms of “woman’s nature” and “divine will”, she suggests a social constructionist view that meets with contemporary familial and social circumstances (Mir-Hosseini 2003, p. 20). This shift is designed to release reformers from “old fiqh wisdoms” and allow for

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“new questions and new answers” reflecting contemporary realities (Mir-Hosseini 2003, p. 21). Conceptual deconstruction in Mir-Hosseini’s work applies to ideas of justice and female sexuality. In reconstructing concepts of justice she distinguishes between shariʿa (considered to be imbued with justice) and fiqh (considered as a human endeavour). Similarly, she distinguishes between the demand for legal justice in the present and the moral justice in the afterlife. Some aspects of classical Muslim family law that were reproduced in modern legal codes, she explains, have become empty; they are now only legal shells and no longer in line with ideas of justice associated with the notion of shariʿa (2009, p. 47). Her idea of justice in the historical law is further qualified by attention to the historicity of gender equality. Contemporary notions of gender equality and human rights, she argues, had “no place and little relevance to the classical jurists’ conceptions of justice” (2009, p. 37). More than the letter or the systems of the law, this approach is concerned with the concepts underpinning the application of the law. For example, a change in the foundational understandings of sex difference and equality, Mir-Hosseini argues, would expand a wife’s rights and limit a husband’s arbitrary powers over his wife (2003, p. 25). The separation of enforceable legal rights and unenforceable moral obligations reflects essentialist notions of sex difference and the links drawn between rights and sexuality. In another example, in highlighting the intersecting boundaries between moral and legal rights she draws attention to the connection between a man’s legal right to wide-ranging marital powers which are legally enforceable, and the discourses of morality intended to restrain these powers which are legally unenforceable. The potential for this argument is evident in her more recent work with Musawah – an international non-governmental organisation that advocates for equality and justice for women as Muslims and citizens; here Mir-Hosseini explains that the concept of justice in Islamic law was not historically contingent upon gender equality (Mir-Hosseini et al. 2015). Because historically Islamic law did not include gender equality in its understanding of justice, she argues that contemporary assessments of the law must be premised upon new ideas of justice, including gender equality. Al-Hibri and Mir-Hosseini, much like Sonbol earlier, argue that Islamic law is redeemable through an authentic message of justice found in the Qurʾan. While they argue for reform responsive to contemporary gender concerns, we cannot tell the degree to which their suggestions might allow reform efforts to entirely abandon Qurʾanic norms of sex difference. My analysis is that a reinterpretive approach would be less flexible in the degree of change allowed. Unless there is room to formulate a new jurisprudence, if juristic reinterpretation is the preferred route for reform, then the degree of reform is limited to the parameters of historical jurisprudence. Comparing the two, al-Hibri works with a legal framework drawn exclusively from traditional understandings of sex difference, namely complementarity and equity rather equality. Mir-Hosseini’s work appears to align more with an international human rights law paradigm that she brings to bear upon the practice of Islamic law. In her recent work with Musawah, Mir-Hosseini’s analysis of Islamic law functions in the space where an international human rights-based framework is combined with Islamic legal reasoning. Moving away from arguments for reinterpretation, this approach offers a conceptual and deconstructionist turn in that it separates shariʿa and fiqh, reframes the divisions between law and morality and separates contemporary and historical notions of gender and sexuality. In

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advocating for notions of justice that include gender equality and distinguishing a specifically human rights legal paradigm that includes the concerns for “equality in the Muslim family”, which is also the by-line of Musawah, Mir-Hosseini’s approach represents the beginnings of a turn toward a conceptual deconstruction in women-centred legal reform. Other more recent work in the vein of conceptual deconstruction includes the work of Saadia Yacoob whose doctoral thesis (2016) deconstructs categories of male and female through a study of sexual desire. The discursive construction of gendered legal subjectivity illustrates how legal norms pivot around the centrality of the “gaze and experience of the male body” (Yacoob 2016, p. 14). Seeking to rationalise legal precedent, the result is a set of gendered legal norms that display conceptual inconsistencies and tensions designed to maintain the “legal fiction” of the desiring male and desirable female, which holds together the internal world of the legal text (Yacoob 2016, p. 12). Marion Katz too has interrogated the category woman to conclude that it is not a universal category exclusive of age or other aspects of social status (2015). And in other work I (Seedat 2015) have examined the female legal subject of historical legal theory concluding that the woman of Islamic law is neither singularly nor uniformly constituted, and nor does the female legal subject of Islamic law move in time with the identity “woman”.

Ethics-based reform approach Offering a third approach, Kecia Ali is a professor of Islamic law whose primary work lies in the area of marriage and divorce law, first published in an anthology Progressive Muslims (Ali 2003). Part of her doctoral study, this innovative analysis of marriage and divorce law in early legal literature drew conceptual links between legal treatment of marriage and slavery. Her earlier writing online, featured through the Brandeis University’s Feminist Sexual Ethics Project, offered a new path of thinking on the intersections of sex difference, sexuality and law, including an ethical analysis of sexuality focused legal norms. She concretised these ethical concerns in her book Sexual Ethics and Islam (Ali 2006). Ali’s work on sexual ethics extends beyond marriage and divorce to sexual, racial and religious difference and discrimination. She analyses not only the limits to which Islamic law can accommodate change in the field of marriage and divorce, but also, more generally matters of sexual difference, power, authority and the hierarchical relationship between the believer and the Divine. To illustrate the ethical dilemma in its most significant form, she questions the role of slavery in the Qurʾanic paradigm of justice, a permission which requires a much more critical assessment of the notion that the Qurʾan represents a universally applicable notion of justice. These arguments are drawn out further in her study of marriage in early Islam. Extending the questions that Mir-Hosseini raised regarding sexuality and equality as well as the link between legal and moral obligations, Ali approaches the law as an ethical system, attending to the relationship between enforceable duties and ethical obligations in the context of contemporary social and economical determinates of marriage, family and sex (2006, pp. xxi and xxii). Accordingly, I characterise this as an ethics-based reform approach. She focuses on normative legal doctrine and prioritises classical textual sources because, as she observes, the arena of sexual ethics is precisely the arena where “normative Islamic texts and thought have been, and continue to be most influential” (Ali 2006, p. xix). An ethical analysis requires an engagement with the Islamic intellectual heritage aimed at renewing and invigorating Muslim ethical thought (Ali 2006, p. xx). However, Ali is cognisant of the limitations of the Islamic heritage and cautions against blind optimism and 91

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romanticism (2006, p. 153). Pragmatic in her approach, Ali puts the utility of the Qurʾan as a source for egalitarian reform in perspective, arguing that the “Qurʾan itself poses challenges for those committed to egalitarian social and intimate relationships” (2006, p. 153). MirHosseini’s incursions into accountability and sexuality receive detailed attention when Ali reflects on the limits of “revelatory support” for women as “fully sexual in a way that recognises their status as moral agents” (2006, p. 154). Ali is equally wary of uncritical Muslim feminist exegesis and cautions against the uncritical adoption of an equality paradigm as the foundation of justice. She is concerned that contemporary reformers do not become as dogmatic about the assumption “that equality is necessary for justice”, as classical exegetes were in their assumptions of male superiority (Ali 2006, p. 133). Arguing for a comprehensive rethinking of Islamic sexual ethics she suggests an “ethics of sexual intimacy” based on “meaningful consent and mutuality”; neither, she argues further, are possible within the classical jurists’ understandings of lawful sexuality (2006, p. 151). This ethics-based approach is critical of other approaches, which Ali calls neo-conservatist and apologist, based on their commitment in the first instance to women’s primary construction as wives whose main responsibility is household management, and in the second to “women’s protections under Islamic law”; namely, the dower as a deterrent to divorce and an economic safety net, and the exemption from housework as a right or a sign that women are “companions” and not maids to their husbands (Ali 2003, pp. 107, 174, 177–179). For an ethics-based approach, the analytic frames of patriarchal legal thought are unsuitable to gender justice, if not “entirely inadequate” to the legal aspirations of Muslim society today (Ali 2003, p. 182), demonstrated through an appraisal of traditional jurisprudence and the fundamental assumptions that form the basis of family structure in Islamic law. Ali’s bold treatment of same sex relationships makes obvious the sorts of interrogations necessary to make historical legal paradigms relevant for contemporary Muslim ethics. Summarily, Ali argues for nothing less than “a new jurisprudence” (2003, p. 183). Rather that “piecemeal modification” of doctrines “until we come up with something we can live with”, reform processes must be comprehensive, necessarily begin anew, using new assumptions and shape new laws to recognise “that men and women are ontologically equal, and that ultimately our equality as human beings in the sight of God matters more than any other distinctions based on social hierarchy” (Ali 2003, p. 182). In my analysis, Ali’s approach comes from a direct confrontation with the discomfort entailed in asking difficult questions. This is much like the discomfort that Al-Hibri talks about in describing Muslim women and the impossibility of rejecting even a single word of the Qurʾan. Ali questions the Qurʾan, not in a manner that dismisses its sacrality or centrality to Muslim thought, nor its utility thereto; rather her questioning is the demand for an engagement on the limits of historical norms for contemporary ethics. An ethics-based approach does not question the Qurʾan as a source of legal guidance but reflects on its positionality in the reform process. Primarily it questions the existing structural assumptions that the law is built upon, namely gender and religious difference and the concomitant loci of authority that they produce, which are primarily androcentric. At the centre of this approach is firstly the ethical challenge of contesting the immutability of laws and then challenging the limits that these laws establish on women’s moral agency over their sexual subjectivity. Ali’s suggestions are transformative, expansive and hold the potential for far-reaching ethical reform, which Sa’diyya Shaikh’s (2012) work has also pre-empted in her presentation of a philosophy of sex difference sourced from the writings of Ibn Arabi. Shaikh examines the 92

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meanings of humanity for males and females, the impact of gendering the divine-human relationship and consequently “intimate relationships between the sexes” with a view to unpacking an “ethical core of Islamic values” that speak to concerns for gender justice amongst contemporary Muslim communities (2012). Similarly Zahra Ayubi (2019) examines historical and contemporary understandings of masculinity and femininity through a study of equality. Islamic cosmologies are examined for the gendered ontologies underpinning the consequent hierarchies of difference. Her conclusions on “an instrumental femininity in relation to a rational masculinity” (Ayubi 2019, p. 7) offer critical readings from an Islamic feminist philosophy of gender.

Narratives of sex difference Further to these reformist approaches, amongst the collectivity of the study of women and Islamic law there are important distinctions emerging in the ways that scholars analyse sex difference in Islamic law. While the modernist narrative of gendered legal subjectivity in Islam has presented sex difference in a paradigm of sexual complementarity, more recent narratives emerging from feminist interpretations of the law have also produced new and contested alternative understandings of Muslim women as subjects of Islamic law. I identify a normative narrative of complementarity prevalent in modernist scholarship of which Abdurrahman Doi’s (1989) work is illustrative. Next, are Shaheen Sardar Ali’s equality based human rights narrative and two further narratives represented by Judith Tucker and Kecia Ali. Respectively Tucker and Ali illustrate to us what I call a narrative of disability, and a narrative of sexuality or alternately a narrative of marriage.2 The normative modern narrative in studies on women and Islamic law has been that men and women are complementary to each other; the female subject of the law complements a normative male subject.3 By contrast, critical studies have taken issue with the normalisation and subsequent privileging of the male legal subject that the complementary narrative is founded upon to argue against sex difference as the primary distinction between men and women as subjects of law.4 Commonly, however, both normative and critical studies constitute the female legal subject through a narrative of tension between women and men or matters of equality and inequality. Though each suggests a different approach to women as legal persons, they come together in positing a female legal subject in tension with a male subject, who operates in a dual and at times contradictory manner.5 Without devaluing the potential for a rights-based analysis, I find the narrative that distinguishes the subjectivities of a wife from other gender-based subjectivities to be the more productive of the four narratives in the struggle for equality through the paradigms of Islamic law. While the disability narrative uses the concept of a female legal subject with an “impeccable” textual pedigree yet circumscribed by patriarchal social norms, the narrative does not hold well for reform efforts once we recognise that even the textual pedigree of the female legal subject is formulated in a patriarchal paradigm.6 Working with Kecia Ali’s analysis, it is evident that the unique legal incapacities imposed upon women’s sexuality cause “marriage” or “being a wife” to function as potential impediments to women’s full legal capacity such that marital and sexual status qualifies or delimits female legal subjectivity (Seedat 2015). At this point in legal developments on women and Islamic law, recognising this last narrative may be most productive for Muslim women’s equality-based reforms.

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The politics of knowledge production and further studies A large part of the legal reform work above rests on the lived experiences of Muslim women who inhabit various measures of conformity or resistance to the strictures of Islamic law. The two elements central to gender-based law reform are a re-engagement with the historical legal tradition and a call for accountability or a recognition of the ethical aspects of legal obligations. The profiles of some scholars demonstrate that they are also engaged in national and international activist communities; amongst these are the international networks Women Living Under Muslims Laws (based in the UK) and Musawah (based in Malaysia), as well as Karamah in the USA and Sisters in Islam in Malaysia. Activists have been deeply embedded in academic circles and vice versa, both similarly responsible for the maturing and deepening of knowledge and understanding of gender and Islamic law. Reflecting on the politics of knowledge production to recognise how intellectual and pedagogic motives align to the processes of empire and colonisation, the question of who studies Islam and who is studied in Islam may similarly be applied to speak to the politics of the study of gender and Islamic law (Chaudhry 2015). The male gaze is central to the production of Islamic law in the colonial and post-colonial presentations of Islamic law; early approaches to Islamic law were premised upon the “kernel-like” understandings of shariʿa, and in contrast, recent Muslim women’s engagements have worked in the opposite direction, namely to open up the study of the law, its categories and in so doing also its assumptions. The various approaches to gender-based reform and the different ways in which gendered subjectivities are shaped in the discussions above indicate the rich contours of the field of gender and Islamic law. The collective effect of this work has been to trouble easy acceptance of a static notion of shariʿa, in effect to “pop” the received kernel of normativity and piety that it represents, and in its place to show the inner workings of the law, namely the gendered systems that produce the law and the gendered assumptions that the law rests upon. Gender-based law reform efforts question the laws’ processes and also the laws’ understanding of women, gender and sexuality. In imperial, colonial and neocolonial practice, law and gender are two vital axes through which religious authority is produced in Muslim communities. Collectively, the response to the historical law and its colonial and nation state transformations has worked with a notion of shariʿa premised on the gendered aspects of its civilising pretensions, namely the assumption that historic gender norms, further managed by the norms of patriarchal colonial or nation states, are appropriate for contemporary Muslims in general and for contemporary Muslim women more specifically. The reform approaches and narratives highlighted here include a separation of fiqh and shariʿa, the reformulation of gender norms, the separation of moral and legal accountability and the demand that both be justiciable, potentially reformulating the concept of marriage and ideas of sexual, religious and other aspects of social difference. And so, the law has become open to critical assessment, in this case from a feminist critique of the gendered biases that historical and modern developments in Islamic law impose upon contemporary Muslim women. This nuanced and complex engagement with the law is a potentially productive step toward reopening of the shariʿa as a critical lens through which to examine the place of the state and other formal and informal legal authorities in determining gender norms. It recognises the historicity of shariʿa and its employment as a means of social control beyond the parameters of legislation and into realm of the self, highlighting the limitations of contemporary legal systems in managing the inner dimensions of the self. It also recognises how the notion of shariʿa fails to address the historically pejorative representations of sex difference. It 94

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argues for reform to make the law relevant to the concerns of contemporary Muslim society, specifically in its entanglements with ideas of sex difference, women’s rights and Muslim women’s aspirations for justice. Ali expresses it as a call for increased, expanded and expansive conceptual paradigms, and a restoration of “philosophical and ethical complexity” (2006, p. 154). While the approaches and narratives highlighted here have appeared over a period of almost 20 years, they are now also present concurrently. Together they offer a variety of alternative feminist approaches to the law and, with some creativity, may be even used collectively. Among the collective effects of this new scholarship is its success in dispelling the simplistic understandings of the relationship between women and the law. Further, by challenging the authority of those who claim the right to determine the law, they have also changed the nature of the discussions on reform, producing a more complex interrogation of the treatment of the notion of shariʿa itself as law and of the law’s treatment of sex difference. Some trajectories for future work will no doubt include more engagement with issues of sexuality and trans-embodiment. The scholarship is still thin in this area but in the area of male homosexuality what exists already is also rich. Less work has been done on female homosexuality and on transsexuality. While the historical archive offers some options there remains much room for critical work on intersexuality in the context of Muslim understandings of legality. More broadly, questions pertaining to the nature and forms of gendered legal subjectivity are likely to be most relevant to the immediate concerns for gender-based reforms in Islamic law broadly.

Notes 1 The organisations website: http://karamah.org/ 2 For this see Shaheen Sardar Ali, Gender and Human Rights in Islam and International Law: Equal before Allah, Unequal before Man? (The Hague and Boston: Kluwer Law International, 2000); Judith E. Tucker, Women, Family, and Gender in Islamic Law (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Kecia Ali, Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 3 For studies that take this approach see, Doi, Women in Shariah; M. Mutahhari, The Rights of Women in Islam, 1st ed. (Tehran, Iran: World Organization for Islamic Services, 1981); Lamya Loisa alFaruqi, Women, Muslim Society, and Islam (Indianapolis, IN: American Trust Publication, 1991). 4 For studies that take this approach see, Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Family Law: Iran and Morocco Compared (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1993); Azizah Yahia al-Hibri, “Muslim Women’s Rights in the Global Village: Challenges and Opportunities,” Journal of Law and Religion XV, no. 1&2 (2000) pp. 37–66; Nayereh Tohidi, “Women’s Rights in the Muslim World: The Universal-Particular,” Hawwa 1, no. 2 (2003) pp. 152–188; Riffat Hassan, “Members, One of Another: Gender Equality and Justice in Islam,” www.religiousconsultation.org/hassan. htm#contents. 5 For this tension see the works of Doi, Women in Shariah; Tucker, Women, Family, and Gender; Ali, Marriage and Slavery. 6 Specifically Tucker, Women, Family, and Gender; Ali, Marriage and Slavery.

Further reading Ali, Kecia (2010) Marriage and slavery in early Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kecia Ali investigates how 8th–10th century Muslim jurists conceptualized marriage as analogous to slavery, showing how this parallel emerged out of scriptural interpretation, local practice, and precedent. Azam, H. (2015). Sexual violation in Islamic Law: substance, evidence, and procedure (Cambridge studies in Islamic civilization). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In this book, Hina Azam traces six

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centuries of Muslim jurists’ writings on sexuality and sexual violation, explaining how two divergent positions emerged over whether to provide compensation to victims and the tensions that such positions produced. Mir-Hosseini, Ziba (1993) Marriage on trial: a study of Islamic family law: Iran and Morocco compared. London and New York: I.B. Tauris.This important book shows how Muslim women navigated family law systems and found ways to advocate for themselves and their children in cases concerning divorce, child custody, and other family issues.

References Ahmed, Leila (1992) Women and gender in Islam: historical roots of a modern debate. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. al-Faruqi, Lamya Loisa (1991) Women, Muslim society, and Islam. Indianapolis, IN: American Trust Publications. al-Hibri, Azizah Yahia (2000) Muslim women’s rights in the global village: challenges and opportunities. Journal of Law and Religion XV(1&2), pp. 37–66. ——— (2001) Redefining Muslim women’s roles in the next century. In Democracy and the rule of law. Edited by Norman Dorsen and Prosser Gifford. Washington, DC: CQ Press, pp. 90–100. Ali, Kecia (2003) Progressive Muslims and Islamic Jurisprudence: the necessity for critical engagement with marriage and divorce law. In Progressive Muslims on justice, gender and pluralism. Edited by Omid Safi. Oxford: Oneworld, pp. 163–189. ——— (2006) Sexual ethics and Islam: feminist reflections on Qurʾan, Hadith, and Jurisprudence. Oxford: Oneworld. ——— (2010) Marriage and slavery in early Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ayubi, Zahra (2019). Gendered morality: classical Islamic ethics of the self, family, and society. New York: Columbia University Press. Azam, Hina (2013). Rape as a variant of fornication (Zinā) in Islamic Law: an Examination of the Early Legal Reports. Journal of Law and Religion 28(2), pp. 441–466. ——— (2015). Sexual violation in Islamic Law: substance, evidence, and procedure (Cambridge studies in Islamic civilization). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Badawi, Jamal (1999). Gender equity in Islam: basic principles. Plainfield, IN: American Trust Publications. Chaudhry, Ayesha (2015). Domestic violence and the Islamic tradition: ethics, law, and the Muslim discourse on gender. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doi, Abdur Rahman (1989) Women in shariah (Islamic Law). London: Taha Publishers Ltd. Engineer, Asghar Ali (2001) Islam, women and gender justice. New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House. ——— (2008) Rights of women in Islam. New Delhi: Sterling. Katz, Marion (2015) Women in the mosque: a history of legal thought and local practice. Cairo, Egypt: American University in Cairo Press. Mir-Hosseini, Ziba (1993) Marriage on trial: a study of Islamic family law: Iran and Morocco compared. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. ——— (2003) The construction of gender in Islamic legal thought and strategies for reform. Hawwa 1 (1), pp. 1–28. ——— (2004) The quest for gender justice. Emerging feminist voices in Islam. Islam 21(36). Available online at: www.fu-berlin.de/sites/gpo/tagungen/tagungfeministperspectives/Mir_Hosseini.pdf [Accessed 10 December 2019]. ——— (2009) Towards gender equality, Muslim family laws and the shari’ah. In Wanted: equality in the Muslim family. Edited by Zainah Anwar. Petaling Jaya: Musawah, pp. 23–64. Mir-Hosseini, Ziba, Al-Sharmani, Mulki, and Rumminger, Jana (2015). Men in charge? Rethinking authority in Muslim legal tradition. London: Oneworld. Mutahhari, Murtaza (1981) The rights of women in Islam. 1st ed. Tehran, Iran: World Organization for Islamic Services. Quraishi, Asifa (1997) Her honor: an Islamic critique of the rape laws of Pakistan from a woman-sensitive perspective. Michigan Journal of International Law 18, pp. 287–320. ——— (2013) A meditation on Mahr, modernity, and Muslim marriage contract law. In Feminism, law and religion. Edited by Marie Failinger and Elizabeth Schlitz. Ashgate Publishing Co, pp. 173–196.

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Salvatore, Armando (2000) The Islamic reform project in the emerging public sphere: the meta normative redefinition of shariah. In Between Europe and Islam: shaping modernity in a transcultural space. Edited by Almut Hefert and Armando Salvatore. Brussels: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, pp. 89–108. Sardar Ali, Shaheen (2000) Gender and human rights in Islam and international law: equal before Allah, unequal before man? The Hague and Boston: Kluwer Law International. Seedat, Fatima (2015) Sex and the legal subject: woman and legal capacity in Hanafi law. PhD Dissertation McGill University. Available online at: http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA/R/?func=dbin-jumpfull&object_id=130731 [Accessed 9 December 2019]. Shaikh, Sa’diyya (2012) Sufi narratives of intimacy: Ibn Arabi, gender, and sexuality. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. E-book. Siddique, Kaukab (1994). The struggle of Muslim women. Dhaka, Bangladesh: Jamaat al Muslimeen. Sonbol, Amira El-Azhary (1998). Ṭ aeˉ ʻa and modern legal reform: a rereading. Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 9, pp. 285–294. ——— (2006) Mixed and other courts: women and the modern patriarchy. In Beyond the exotic: women’s histories in Islamic societies. Edited by Amira Elazhary Sonbol. Cairo, Egypt: American University in Cairo Press, pp. 198–226. ——— (2016). Marriage contracts in Islamic history. In Changing God’s law: the dynamics of Middle Eastern family law. Edited by Nadjma Yassari, Lena-Maria Möller, and Imen Gallala-Arndt. London: Routledge, pp. 225–244. Tohidi, Nayereh (2003) Women’s rights in the Muslim world: the universal-particular.”Hawwa 1(2), pp. 152–188. Tucker, Judith E. (2008) Women, family, and gender in Islamic law. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Turabi, Hassan (1973) Women in Islam and Muslim society. translation of Turabi’s 1973 publication available online at: soundvision.com/book/export/html/2765 [Accessed 9 December 2019].

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PART II

Sex, sexuality, and gender difference

6 APPLYING GENDER AND QUEER THEORY TO PRE-MODERN SOURCES1 Ash Geissinger

What can gender and queer theory contribute to the historical study of pre-modern Muslim sources? What do we lose if we fail to consider the questions that gender theory and queer theory raise for our approaches to these sources, and our understandings of them? Gender theory challenges the presumption that gender categories such as ‘man’ or ‘woman’ exist outside of specific historical circumstances, cultural contexts, and power relations (e.g. Butler, 1999). Queer theory critically examines gender and sexual identities, as well as categorizations of sexual desires or practices as ‘normative’ or ‘deviant,’ asking what such classifications foreground, marginalize, or erase, where and how they do so, and why (Jagose, 1996). Gender and queer theory have been utilized in the academic study of religion in North America for several decades (for an overview see Schippert, 2011). More recently, a growing number of scholars are fruitfully applying gender theory and queer theory to the study of late 19th and early 20th century Muslim writings (e.g. Najmabadi, 2005; Mian, 2019), as well as to contemporary Muslim societies, communities, and discourses (e.g. Amar and El Shakry, 2013; Kiriakos-Fugate, 2019). A small number of studies have analysed some pre-modern Muslim sources in light of questions suggested by gender theory or queer theory (e.g. Ze’evi, 2006; Babayan and Najmabadi, 2008; for some methodological issues involved see Traub, 2008). Yet, this is still uncommon, particularly in the case of texts typically regarded by Muslims as most religiously authoritative. These typically continue to be read, analysed, and taught by academics in ways which are both heteronormative and based on the presumption that the gender binary familiar to contemporary North Americans, Western Europeans, and people in many other parts of the world, including many Muslim-majority communities, is universal across time and space. This state of affairs is beginning to change (e.g. Geissinger, 2015, 2017; Seedat, 2018; Ali, 2019a), yet the potential for analysis informed by gender and queer theory to contribute to more historically grounded understandings of such texts is still not widely recognized. This chapter first discusses some of the factors that interact in order to produce the appearance of a body of texts that are heteronormative and solidly based on a binary view of gender – which Fatima Seedat aptly characterizes as a ‘straightened’ classical tradition that ‘exclude[s] fluidity and ambiguity’ (2018, p.153). Then, it demonstrates some of the ways that utilizing questions suggested by gender and queer theory can result in more careful

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analysis of representations of space, power and authority, social status, and intracommunal boundary negotiations in hadiths and tradition-based classical Muslim sources. In order to do this, several texts from hadith compilations as well as one from a biographical work which refer to several different gender categories will be read analytically in order to determine what types of ‘cultural labor’ these references perform (for this type of reading see Najmabadi, 2005, 2006). As will be shown, minority gender categories or gender presentations as well as what today we would term nonheterosexual desires are not marginal to these particular texts. Rather, their constructions of space, power and authority, proto-Sunni and Sunni ‘orthodoxy,’ and social status actually depend on these things – a point that has rarely been recognized (for literary representations of heterosexuality which rely on male–male sexual desire see Sedgwick, 2008). This chapter will not attempt to date any of these hadiths and traditions attributed to early Muslim figures, and nor will it be presumed that they can be traced back to the Prophet Muhammad or to the persons who are credited with transmitting them. Academic approaches to hadiths have often overemphasized the question of their origins, while paying little attention to their lengthy and complex histories of reception. Even in a case where it is possible to determine that a given saying circulated in mid-7th century CE Arabia, it does not necessarily follow that the person to whom it is attributed actually uttered it. Even more crucially, regardless of what its ‘originally’ intended meaning might have been, we now have access to it as part of an archive of texts which has a complex relationship to historical debates. The formation, organization, and interpretation of this archive was decisively shaped by empire. Therefore, these hadiths and traditions will be examined here with these factors in mind. During the first few centuries of Muslim history, the weight that hadiths ought to have was extensively debated. The claim of the Partisans of Hadith that hadiths provide authoritative guidance for every facet of existence was made in contradistinction to those early Muslims who doubted the reliability of hadiths or had limited use for them (El-Omari, 2012, pp.234–235). As the hadith compilers gathered and organized their hadith collections, they positioned themselves as the true heirs of the Prophet Muhammad’s legacy and the practice of the early generations (the salaf) – over against other Muslims with whom they disagreed. These compilations portray the perspectives of some free Muslim male scholars on one side of these debates as normative for the community. One result is that when other gendered figures are made textually visible, it is typically in relation to this imagined norm. Constructions of gender categories as well as of normative sexual desires and practices are central to empire (McClintock, 1995; Gopinath, 2005). For our purposes here, two imperial moments are particularly salient: the 7th century CE Arab conquests and their aftermath, and the present. The first of these moments decisively shaped how words and deeds credited to the Prophet Muhammad as well as the lives and opinions of the early generations of Muslims came to be remembered. Later generations recalled, circulated, and recorded these in order to address questions that arose in their own Muslim imperial contexts. In addition, the present Western neocolonial moment shapes the ways that classical Muslim texts are read.

A ‘straightened’ tradition According to Mā lik, Hishā m b. ʿUrwa reported from his father that a transgender man (mukhannath) was with Umm Salama, the wife of the Prophet (pbuh). He said to ʿAbd Allā h b. Abı̄ Umayya while the Messenger of God (pbuh) was listening, ‘ʿAbd Allā h, if God grants you victory at Ṭā ʾif tomorrow, I will show you the daughter of Ghaylā n: when she walks toward you, she is a real beauty, but when 102

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she turns her back to you, she is even more of a sight to behold!’ The Messenger of God (pbuh) then said, ‘Men such as these are not of the sort who should be present with you in private.’ (as quoted in Katz, 2019) A milestone in Muslim legal studies was reached at the close of 2019 with the completion of a new translation into English of the Muwattaʾ, a legally focused compilation of traditions credited to the eponymous founder of the Maliki legal school, Malik b. Anas (d. 795). This translation was sponsored by the government of Morocco and carried out by an international team of translators. In order to mark this august occasion, ten specialists in the study of Islamic law were invited to present their reflections at a roundtable held at Harvard University. In her contribution, Marion Katz quotes the above hadith (henceforth, ‘the Ghaylan’s daughter tradition’). Calling attention to the editors’ decision to translate two words, ‘mukhannath’ and ‘muʾannath’ (the latter appears in the sub-chapter heading) as ‘transgender,’ Katz comments that [t]he word’s obvious advantages are its familiarity and its inoffensiveness. The flip side of these benefits is its erasure of difference, both between the gender categories of the modern English-speaking world and those of seventh-century Arabia, and between the two Arabic terms muʾannath and mukhannath. (Katz, 2019) While I would agree that the editors likely aimed to provide a nondenigrating English equivalent for ‘mukhannath,’ translating this word as ‘transgender man’ is not only anachronistic, but incorrect. In contemporary North American English, a transgender man is a person who was assigned female at birth (typically, due to the appearance of their genitalia), but identifies as male – which usually involves some degree of social transition (e.g. adopting a male name and masculine pronouns, wearing male attire), and possibly also medical transition (e.g. taking testosterone, undergoing gender confirmation surgeries). However, as Everett Rowson’s pioneering research demonstrates, mukhannaths were a class of persons in early Muslim history (and likely also in pre-Islamic Arabia) who had been born with a penis, yet they habitually spoke, moved, behaved, and adorned themselves in ways that were deemed to more closely approximate what was regarded as appropriate for females (1991, pp.672–675). Nor would the term ‘transgender woman’ – meaning a person who was designated male at birth (due to the appearance of their genitals) but identifies as female (which typically entails some level of social and possibly also medical transition) – have been accurate. Mukhannaths evidently did not regard themselves as female, and nor did others categorize them as such. While the Ghaylan’s daughter tradition as well as some anecdotes in Arabic literary texts depict them socializing with free elite secluded women who usually did not mingle with free adult males not closely related to them, this was allowed due to the presumption that mukhannaths did not have sexual interest in females (Rowson, 1991, p.675). ‘Mukhannath’ evidently constituted a gender category on its own (Rowson, 2003, p.56; Geissinger, 2015, p.34). A simple solution would have been to leave this word untranslated and provide an explanatory footnote. However, its (mis)translation as ‘transgender man’ can be said to do several types of cultural work. It both acknowledges that some sort of nonnormative gendered behavior is involved, while at the same time presenting gender as inevitably binary and always determined by genitalia. It also implies that the lustful description of 103

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Ghaylan’s daughter’s body was voiced by a man, which banishes the specter of any sexual desire which does not fit into a heteronormative and cisnormative framework from the hallowed space of the Prophet’s household (for same-sex sexual desires in some mostly later classical texts, see e.g. El-Rouayheb, 2005; Habib, 2009). These moves help sustain the construction of early Muslim Medina as a usable past which today’s English-speaking conservatively pious Muslim readers can experience as reassuringly familiar and as a source of inspiration, rather than as unsettlingly strange. They are also designed to minimize obstacles to the ready comprehension and appreciation of the Muwattaʾ by academics who are not specialists in Muslim legal history but seek to gain insight into early Muslim legal thinking. Ultimately, they reflect the apprehension that both types of readers are ill-equipped to encounter ‘too much’ alterity in the text (Ali, 2019b; Katz, 2019). As this example illustrates, several factors interact in order to produce the appearance of a ‘straightened tradition’: neocolonial power dynamics, still-common presumptions that gender and sexuality are ‘natural’ and have no history to be investigated, and the difficulty experienced by many when attempting to think beyond binary views of gender. Available evidence points to the existence of a degree of variety in human genital configurations, in their correspondence with internal reproductive organs, hormone levels, and chromosomes (Blackless et al., 2000), as well as with gendered self-understanding and comportment. The social meanings given to such diversity have differed and continue to differ, depending on historical and cultural context (e.g. Westphal-Hellbusch, 1997; Nanda, 1999; Gesink, 2018). Yet, the following beliefs are still widely treated as commonsensical in North America and Western Europe: ‘that there are only two genders, that one’s gender is invariant and permanent, that genitals are essential signs of gender, that there are no exceptions, that gender dichotomy and gender membership are “natural”’ (Shapiro, 1991, p.257). While the increased visibility of intersex, trans, and nonbinary persons in Western Europe and North America are beginning to unsettle such reflexive assumptions in those regions, Western neocolonial political, military, and economic power as well as cultural influence worldwide often still construct and reaffirm such claims as normative in multiple ways. Presumptions of these types have resulted in misreadings of the ways that classical Muslim texts present gender as well as sexual desires and acts. Such misreadings appear in academic publications, as well as in Muslims writing from confessional perspectives from the 19th century onward (Najmabadi, 2005; Ze’evi, 2006; Gesink, 2018). While the hadith corpus as well as other hadith-based sources do not present what we would regard as a unitary gender system, they do construct a hierarchical view of gender, in which the freeborn Muslim adult, sane and able-bodied man, embodies hegemonic masculinity – the normative, ‘most honoured way of being a man’ in a given society, over and against various subordinated masculinities (for hegemonic and subordinated masculinities, see Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005; for constructions of Muhammad’s masculinity see Roded, 2006; Knight, 2016). This status is associated with certain abilities, traits, legal entitlements, and responsibilities, which follow from the belief that of all human beings, such a man is the most religiously, intellectually, and physically complete. It is correlated with reason and eloquence, as well as courage, virility, and strength. Legally speaking, it is linked to the maximal ability to act independently, to exercise control over one’s own body, movements, and domicile, to sexual entitlement to the bodies of his wives and female slaves,2 and to the obligation to protect, supervise, and discipline dependents of lesser status – particularly wives, children, and those who are enslaved. All other categories of persons are positioned at various removes below (Geissinger, 2015, 2017). Gender categories

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are not presented in monolithic terms in such sources; they are ‘internally fractured’ (Najmabadi, 2006, p.12) due to important distinctions such as free/enslaved status, age, and lineage (Katz, 2016).

Queering constructions of ritual space Subchapter: Prayer Leadership by One Who is Beguiled (al-maftū n) and One Who Innovates Al-Hasan said, ‘Pray (behind him), and his innovation will be counted against him alone.’ … ʿUbaydallah b. ʿAdi b. Khiyyar, that he visited ʿUthman b. ʿAffan while he was under siege, and said to him, ‘You are the imam of the community, and you see what has happened to you. An imam of fitna leads us in prayer, and we shun (it).’ (ʿUthman) responded, ‘Prayer is the best deed that people perform, so when people do good, then do good along with them. If they do evil, then keep away from their evil.’ … al-Zuhri said, ‘In our opinion, one does not pray behind a mukhannath unless out of necessity, (meaning that) there is no avoiding it.’ … Anas b. Malik said (that) the Prophet said to Abu Dharr, ‘Hear and obey, even if (your leader) is an Abyssinian whose head is like a raisin!’ (Al-Bukhā rı̄ , 1979, vol.1, p.376)3 The first mention of mukhannaths in al-Bukhari’s (d. 870) Sahih appears in this subchapter (henceforth, ‘the prayer leadership subchapter’). While other subchapters in this work which discuss aspects of congregational prayers in mosques or elsewhere present free male adult protoSunni Muslims as the normative prayer leaders and congregants, the prayer leadership subchapter momentarily includes mukhannaths in such spaces. But this temporary unsettling of the textual norm serves to construct proto-Sunni rituals and beliefs as correct and authoritative by linking them with hegemonic masculinity, as well as with cosmic and imperial order. In this subchapter, political, sectarian, and ritual concerns are fused, as the ritual-legal question of whether a proto-Sunni worshipper’s prayer in a congregation led by an innovator or a mukhannath is valid is addressed by hadiths about civil war and the duty of obedience to the ruler. It begins with a legal ruling attributed to a well-known Successor al-Hasan (d. 728), who opines that if a person prays behind an innovator – in other words, a heretic – then the latter’s sin of heresy accrues only to him. The first tradition quoted presents the third caliph, ʿUthman (r. 644–656), under siege in his house by the rebels who would soon assassinate him. It is under these dire circumstances that ʿUthman is questioned about the acceptability of praying behind an unnamed man who is described here as an ‘imam of fitna’ (chaos, civil war) who had not been designated by him to lead the congregational prayers. That the situation has come to this makes undeniable the crisis that now faces Muhammad’s followers. Nevertheless, ʿUthman directs the questioner to pray behind the unauthorized imam, while keeping his distance from any wrong actions that the latter or his supporters are involved in. Next, a legal ruling attributed to the well-known Successor al-Zuhri (d. 742) declares that a mukhannath is not to be taken as a congregational prayer leader unless this is unavoidable for some reason. Finally, this subchapter concludes with a hadith in which Muhammad instructs one of his Companions to obey the leader even if he is not from the Quraysh tribe. In early Islamic history, Qurayshi descent was among the prerequisites for a legitimate caliph (Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalā nı̄ , 2001, vol.2, pp.268–269; for this hadith see Crone, 1994; Juynboll, 2007, p.488). 105

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Here, al-Bukhari associates those whose beliefs he deems heretical (including Kharijis, Shiʿis, and Muʿtazilis; for classical commentators’ elaborations of this point see e.g. Ibn Baṭṭā l, 2003, vol.1, pp.386–387) with the rebels who infamously instigated the First Fitna (civil war). Sunni retellings present this event as a calamity. Therefore, al-Bukhari’s affirmation that in the absence of an alternative, one can perform prayers in a congregation led by a heretic is not an expression of tolerance; his aim is to prevent further weakening of the community due to internal strife. By quoting al-Zuhri’s reported ruling, he scornfully emphasizes the distance between ‘correct’ belief and groups he deems heretical by implicitly comparing the latter to mukhannaths. Two subchapters earlier, al-Bukhari asserts that enslaved men, freedmen, prostitutes’ sons, or boys can be followed in prayer if they know more Qurʾan. Significantly, he does not include mukhannaths in that list of subordinated masculinities. While it seems that in his view, as mukhannaths have penises they are similar enough to men to be considered as possible prayer leaders (al-Bukhari does not discuss female prayer leaders even for other women), they are too proximate to femaleness to be allowed to do so except in unusual circumstances. He presents the the mukhannath as a figure who is maftū n, beguiled, led astray – a grammatically passive word. However, ‘maftū n’ has the same root as ‘fitna,’ which implicitly links the mukhannath to the ‘imam of fitna’ mentioned in the first hadith. As has often been pointed out, ‘fitna’ is associated with femaleness in more than one sense; this grammatically feminine word can mean ‘beautiful woman’ as well as ‘temptation’ (for sources see Geissinger, 2015, p.147, n.154). Mukhannaths at the ʿAbbasid court in Baghdad were often associated with joking (which at times involved offense to some people’s religious sensibilities) as well as playing receptive roles in anal intercourse (Rowson, 2003, pp.56–65). Such characteristics – frivolousness, deficiency in religion, sexual receptivity – were associated with femaleness (Geissinger, 2015, pp.38–53). In his discussion of the prayer leadership subchapter in his commentary on al-Bukhari’s Sahih, Ibn Battal (d.ca. 1052–3) polemically asserts that this means that a mukhannath has been misled into imitating women, while prayer leadership according to all the scholars is a position for the sound (kamā l, lit. ‘complete’, ‘perfect’), and one chosen by the virtuous. The mukhannath resembles women (and) so has a lower (nā qiṣ, lit. ‘deficient’) standing among whoever is eligible for prayer leadership. (Ibn Baṭṭā l, 2003, vol.2, p.387) The mukhannath and the heretic alike are constructed here as feminized figures who prefer their misguided ways, seductively threaten to tempt the community away from the right path, and therefore should not be followed in prayer by proto-Sunnis except in extenuating circumstances.

Queering household order and religious authority Subchapter: The Woman Who Resembles a Man … Ismaʿil, that ʿAʾisha would forbid women who had husbands to leave their shins unadorned, and she would say, ‘The woman should not neglect to use dye (khiḍā b), for the Messenger of God used to detest the rajula.’

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… Fatima bt. al-Mundhir said, ‘I saw Asmaʾ wearing safflower-coloured [clothing] until she met God, and if she wore a shift it would be dyed with safflower.’ … Haram b. ʿUtla, that his aunt informed him that she had seen ʿAʾisha, Mother of the Believers, (adorned) with dye (and) wearing red garments. He said, ‘And I saw Safiyya bt. Shayba (adorned) with dye (and) wearing safflower-coloured garments.’ (ʿAbd al-Razzā q, 1970–2, vol.7, pp.487–488) This subchapter (henceforth, ‘the rajula subchapter’) in the Musannaf of ʿAbd al-Razzaq (d. 826) utilizes the specter of the rajula – literally, ‘man(like) female’ – in order to delineate the bounds of acceptable comportment for married free women. Here, ʿAʾisha bt. Abi Bakr (d. 678), the wife of the Prophet Muhammad, believed by Sunnis to have been his favourite, instructs women to adorn themselves for their husbands, and also enacts this imperative upon her own body, wearing brightly colored clothing and decorating her hands or feet with henna. In addition, several other early Muslim women either wear appropriate adornments themselves, or recount that others did so – in contradistinction to an abjured figure, the rajula. In the hadith corpus in general, the use of henna as well as other dyes for hair, utilizing henna in order to adorn certain parts of the body or for medicinal purposes, as well as colors which can be used when dyeing clothing, are much-debated issues. Hadiths about such matters function in various ways, drawing boundaries between Muslims and religious Others, subsuming new, post-conquest practices within Muhammad’s sunna, and negotiating ‘correct’ gender performance (Juynboll, 1986). Cloth dyed with safflower (ʿuṣfur) seems to have been associated at times with rebels (Fierro, 1993). Part of what is at issue here is distinguishing between normative and nonnormative gender presentations, sexual desires, and acts. Putting on colorful clothing and henna are presented in this subchapter as a duty for married women, who should beautify themselves for their husbands. This reflects the legal notion that wives owe their husbands sexual submission (Ali, 2010). Such adornments signal that within the social and familial hierarchy, a free married woman’s position is privileged in some important ways (in contradistinction to enslaved men as well as enslaved women), yet also subordinate to their husbands. The implication that rajulas do not adorn themselves with henna or the like hints that their sexual desires or behavior violate the norms upheld by this subchapter in some way. While the likely implication is that they fail to comply with their husbands’ sexual demands, another possibility is that they are suspected of same-sex desires or acts. While some classical commentators mention the latter as one reason that Muhammad reportedly cursed ‘women who resemble men’ (e.g. Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalā nı̄ , 2001, vol.10, pp.470–471), it is unclear whether such claims extend as far back as ʿAbd al-Razzaq’s time, much less what connection to reality they might have had. The rajula subchapter also constructs religious authority. The early Muslim women named in this subchapter are granted varying degrees of religious authority as exemplars, as well as hadith transmitters. Asmaʾ bt. Abi Bakr (d. 692) was divorced by her husband and then reportedly lived to a ripe old age, so for a significant portion of her life, the colorful garments and henna that she is said to have worn would not have been intended for his delectation. Rather, they appear to be understood here as having been meant to set a ‘proper’ example of a praiseworthy moderation that avoided both luxury and ‘extreme’ ascetic practices. The attire attributed to her half-sister ʿAʾisha, worn decades after the prophet’s demise, plays a more complex role. The word used for ‘red’ here, ‘muḍarraj,’ can also mean daubed or stained with blood (Ibn al-Athı̄ r, 1963, vol.3, p.81)—which would remind the audience/ 107

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reader of her leading role in the Battle of the Camel (656) during the First Civil War.4 It would also evoke the long history of Sunni-Shiʿi polemics associated with the charge that in so doing, she had sinfully transgressed the limits placed on the prophet’s wives (Spellberg, 1994). But in this textual context, ʿAʾisha’s red clothing is reframed so that it primarily signals her eternal status as Muhammad’s wife who will be reunited with him in Paradise, reminding the audience/reader of her unparalleled religious merits in proto-Sunni eyes. It also paradoxically highlights her religious authority as a reliable source and exemplar of the sunna, in contradistinction to the rajula, whose lack of proper adornment here polemically signifies the reversal of the divinely intended social order. The hadith corpus contains a few other (negative) mentions of rajulas (e.g. Abū Dā wū d, 1994, vol.4, p.28; ʿAbd al-Razzā q, 1970-2, vol.11, p.243), and some brief condemnatory references to mutarajjilā t (‘masculine women’), and ‘those among women who resemble men’ (al-mutashabbihā t min al-nisā ʾ bi-l-rijā l, e.g. Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalā nı̄ , 2001, vol.10, p.470; Abū Dā wū d, 1994, vol.4, p.27). It is uncertain if these terms or expressions were ‘originally’ equivalent (though these sources often treat them as such). Whether such figures constituted an identifiable group in Muhammad’s Medina, or if anyone in early Muslim history actually used words such as rajula, mutarajjila, al-mutashabbiha bi-rijā l (or for that matter, mudhakkara— more on the latter word below) in order to describe themselves is unknown. Nor is it clear whether the use of male garb by some girls (most of whom were enslaved and aiming to attract male lovers) in ninth century Baghdad (Rowson, 2003) had any direct connection to such hadiths or terminology. The rajula subchapter presents the rajula as a figure whose disavowal is necessary in order to construct ‘proper’ familial and cosmic order, and as the pious female religious authority’s polar opposite. It reflects profound anxiety over the possibility that free and particularly elite women might not stay in their assigned place within the gender hierarchy. Nonetheless, several works on obscure vocabulary found in hadiths penned from the tenth century onward state, ‘kā nat ʿĀʾisha rajulat al-raʾy’ (lit. ‘ʿAʾisha was a man(like) woman of opinion’)—meaning that the judgments that she made on legal matters were as good as men’s (e.g. AlHarawı̄ , 1999, vol.3, p.721). Majd al-Din Ibn al-Athir (d. 1210) explains that the hadiths stating that the prophet cursed the rajula and the mutarajjila refer to women whose attire or comportment resembles men’s. However, if a woman is like a man in her level of knowledge, good sense, and understanding, then this is praiseworthy; the word ‘rajula’ can be applied to her in a laudatory sense, as it is to ʿAʾisha (Ibn al-Athı̄ r 1963, vol.2, p.203). This latter use of the word ‘rajula’ is an example of an ancient topos which is appears in some late antique Christian writings and classical Muslim texts that speak of a few extraordinarily praiseworthy women as ‘male’ in some sense. While as Cameron Partridge notes, the androcentric aspects of this topos have been well studied, it also requires a critical reading which is not based on cisnormative presumptions (2018, p.72, n.14). Calling ʿAʾisha a rajula in order to praise her as superlatively knowledgeable reflects a hierarchical view of gender, in which intellectual acumen and religious authority over all members of the community are constructed as masculine. This also explains why the word ‘rajula’ (unlike ‘mukhannath’) could be used by classical Muslim authors in order to enhance the prestige of a revered figure. It also illustrates the relational and malleable nature of these gender categories, and their relationship to power. In calling ʿAʾisha a rajula, Ibn al-Athir affirms Sunni beliefs about the authority and reliability of the knowledge that she is said to have transmitted from the prophet—in contradistinction to Shiʿi views, which not only denigrated ʿAʾisha but celebrated their (male) imams as the true custodians of Muhammad’s teachings. At the same time, Ibn al-Athir seems to be concerned about the possibility that 108

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free (and most likely, elite) women might utilize ʿAʾisha’s example in order to transcend some of the gendered limits placed on them. Through delimiting what types of ‘male’ activities or characteristics they can permissibly aspire to, he reaffirms his claim (and by extension, the claims of his fellow male scholars) to hegemonic masculinity and therefore to rightful authority.

Some Basran masculinities: enslaved man, mudhakkara, sā ʾiba, elite freeborn male Abu l-ʿAliyya al-Riyahi: his name was Rufayʿ. A woman from the Banu Riyah freed him sā ʾiba. ʿArim b. al-Fadl—Hammad b. Zayd—Shuʿayb b. al-Habhab—Abu l-ʿAliyya said: A woman bought me. She wanted to manumit me. Her paternal uncle’s sons said to her, ‘If you free him, then he will depart to Kufa, and separate.’ (Abu l-ʿAliyya) said: She brought me to a place in the mosque—if you want, I will show it to you—and she said, ‘You are sā ʾiba.’ Abu l-ʿAliyya made a will for the entirety of his wealth. Hajjaj b. Nusayr—Abu Khalda—Abu l-ʿAliyya said: ‘Whatever gold or silver or property that I leave behind (after I die, I bequeath) a third of it in the path of God, a third of it for the household of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, and a third of it for the poor of the Muslims. And give my wife her due.’ Abu Khalda said: I said to him, ‘That is up to you—but where are your patrons?’ (Abu l-ʿAliyya) replied, ‘I will tell you my story. I was a slave of a m-dh-k-ra Bedouin. She met me on Friday and said: ‘Where shall we go, slave? I replied: Let’s go to the mosque. She asked: Which of the mosques? I responded: The central mosque. She said: Come, slave.’ (Abu l-ʿAliyya) said: So she went, and I followed her, until she entered the mosque. The imam met us at the pulpit. She grasped me by the hand and said, ‘O God, preserve him with You as a treasure. Bear witness, o people of the mosque, that he is sā ʾiba for the sake of God. Nobody has any claim against him beyond what is commonly accepted as fair.’ Then she let go (my hand) and left. We did not see each other again. Abu l-ʿAliyya said, ‘And the sā ʾiba resides wheresoever he wishes’ (Ibn Saʿd, 2001, vol.9, pp.111–112) In his Tabaqat, a well-known biographical compendium on early Muslims, Muhammad b. Saʿd (d. 845) begins the entry for the Basran Successor, Qur’an reciter and jurist Abu l-ʿAliyya b. Mihran al-Riyahi (d.ca. 712) by briefly identifying him by name and status. These are intertwined, as ‘al-Riyahi’ refers the tribe—the Banu Riyah, which was a branch of Tamim (Al-Dhahabı̄ , 1981, vol.4, p.207)—of the person who manumitted him, which marks him as a mawla in two senses. A ‘mawla’ means a formerly enslaved man who had been set free, but in early Muslim history it also referred to a non-Arab inhabitant of the newly conquered territories who had (or whose forebears had) affiliated himself to an Arab tribe as a client. These clients (mawā lı̄ ) were deemed part of the early Muslim community, but Arabs often looked down upon them. There were consequential distinctions of status among formerly enslaved persons. Abu l-ʿAliyya is described here as a sā ʾiba, meaning that his owner had set him free without clientage (walā ʾ). The two retellings of the story of his 109

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manumission, both ostensibly recounted in his voice, explain how he attained that status, vividly describing the process of transformation from enslaved man to freedman of a particular type. In the first retelling, Abu l-ʿAliyya is purchased by an unnamed woman, who subsequently wishes to free him. Her paternal cousins object that he will head to Kufa and ‘separate’ – which in this context appears to mean that he will move to that bustling garrison town and effectively disappear, so that she would not be able to exercise her right as his patron to inherit from him. Nonetheless, she takes him to a mosque and declares that he is now sā ʾiba, meaning that she relinquishes any rights over him. Mirroring his enslaved status, Abu l-ʿAliyya is the apparently silent and passive object of others’ actions, discussions, and decisions, as he is purchased, debated about, brought to the mosque, and finally emancipated. It is only after he is freed that he speaks, retelling his story. Furthermore, his status as a sā ʾiba enables him to perform a symbolically laden act: making a will in which he disposes of all his property as he wishes. While Kecia Ali has shown that slavery is integral to constructions of marriage and legally legitimated sex in classical Muslim legal texts (2010), the role of slavery in constructions of gender categories has received scant attention to date. The first retelling provides an example of the role of slavery in shaping the category of ‘free woman’ in these sources, who if she has the means to do so can wield economic and social power through buying and selling enslaved persons, extracting labor and services from them, and exercising mastery over them. The second retelling begins with Abu l-ʿAliyya making his will. But his interlocutor asks where his patrons are – meaning, how can he as a freedman divide up all of his property without acknowledging their rights over any part of it? This question reminds Abu l-ʿAliyya (and the audience/reader) that a freedman is not a freeborn man’s equal in all aspects of life, while also creating an opening for him to explain how it is that he acquired the freedom to make such a will. Abu l-ʿAliyya recounts the story of how he was manumitted by his former owner, who he describes as an ‘aʿrā biyya m-dh-k-ra’ – literally ‘a masculine female Bedouin.’ While the 2001 edition of Ibn Saʿd vocalizes the latter word as ‘mudhkara,’ an earlier undated edition renders it as ‘mudhakkarra’ (the extra ‘r’ is evidently a mistake) and refers the reader to a well-known classical dictionary, the Lisā n al-ʿArab, which defines ‘mudhakkara’ as a woman who resembles men, or a female camel that behaves like a male one (Ibn Saʿd, n. d., vol.7, p.128; Ibn Manẓū r, 1955-56, vol.4, p.309; for the printing history of Ibn Saʿd’s Tabaqat see Lucas, 2004, pp.205–206). The meaning appears to be the same regardless of the vowelling; ‘mudhakkara’ will be employed here. The progression of the tale mirrors the momentous shift between the modes of masculinity that Abu l-ʿAliyya is permitted to inhabit. Beginning from the abject position of an enslaved man, he is finally able to lay claim to the autonomous masculinity of a sā ʾiba. Perhaps with a nod to his imminent change in status, his owner elects to ask for his opinion as to where they should go in order to carry out his manumission, and when he selects the main mosque (likely so there will be many witnesses), s/he accepts this. Nonetheless, his subordinated status remains clear in he/r address to him as ‘slave’ and his silent following of he/r to the mosque and up to the pulpit. There, s/he grasps his hand and pronounces a formula for the emancipation of a sā ʾiba before the imam and the congregation. The change in his status is immediate; s/he relinquishes his hand, departs, and ceases to have any rights over him. As Abu l-ʿAliyya triumphantly declares, a sā ʾiba can live where he pleases. Now, he is free to settle wheresoever he chooses in the new and expanding empire. 110

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Several masculinities are depicted or implied in these two retellings. Enslaved masculinity is unambiguously presented as a subordinated category which Abu l-ʿAliyya gladly transcends. Whether the masculinity imputed to his owner in the second retelling refers to attire, rough mannerisms, physical features, not marrying (no husband or children are mentioned), an aggressive personality, or another factor is unclear. That there is no suggestion that this figure is deemed impious or unsuited to enter the mosque and speak before the congregation is interesting. If Abu l-ʿAliyya’s owner is to be read as female, this might reflect an accepting attitude to women’s mosque attendance in 7th-century Basra (for women and mosques, see Katz, 2014). But if ‘mudhakkara’ refers to another gender category, then the imam, the congregants and/or later transmitters might have deemed the debates about women’s and men’s roles within mosques irrelevant to this particular situation. It is also possible that the audience/reader is presumed to understand that other concerns would have taken precedence, such as the need for urban Muslims to be forbearing when uncouth Bedouins enter sacred space, or the merits of facilitating the freeing of an enslaved person – especially an expert Qurʾan reciter. Whatever the case, it should be noted that in the second retelling, this figure is made visible and exercises power through their ownership and control of an enslaved man. For his part, Abu l-ʿAliyya’s transformation is marked by a decisive and publicly witnessed break with the mudhakkara, another now-transcended lesser form of masculinity – though a trace of this no-longer-existent tie nonetheless persists in his name. The tension between the subordinated masculinity to which the mawali were relegated and the hegemonic masculine ideal of the freeborn Arab tribesman haunts both retellings – and it is the latter against which all other masculinities are implicitly measured in this text. Ibn Saʿd’s entry goes on to recount an incident in which Abu l-ʿAliyya pays a visit to the governor of Basra, ʿAbdallah b. ʿAbbas (d. 686–7), a prominent Companion who was also one of the Prophet Muhammad’s cousins. Ibn ʿAbbas takes him by the hand and seats him at his side, on the same level. A man from the tribe of Tamim who is apparently taken aback exclaims, ‘He is a client!’ (Ibn Saʿd, 2001, vol.9, p.113). Here, this text depicts a contest over whose ideal of masculinity can rightfully lay claim to hegemony – that of freeborn Arab elites who claimed noble descent, or of leading religious scholars, even those who were mawali. This anecdote likely ‘originally’ reflected mawali resentment against the discrimination they suffered (a situation that famously contributed to the success of the Abbasid revolution in 660). Another version of it makes the point even more bluntly: the seat Ibn ʿAbbas provides for Abu l-ʿAliyya is higher than those given to the members of Quraysh who are present. When the Quraysh mock Abu l-ʿAliyya, Ibn ʿAbbas responds that knowledge increases the nobleman’s nobility and places even the slave on an elevated seat (e.g. Ibn Abı̄ Ḥā tim, 1952, vol.3, p.510; Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, 2013, vol.2, p.34).

Concluding remarks Utilizing questions suggested by gender and queer theory when analysing classical Muslim texts such as hadith compilations and other tradition-based writings calls attention to a number of significant features of them which have not received sufficient attention. What may at first glance seem to constitute a ‘straight’ classical tradition which is heteronormative and based on a binary and inflexible genitally determined understanding of gender is revealed as significantly more complex. It becomes apparent that gender categories in texts of this type are not ‘natural,’ or above history, or monolithic. Nor do they stand alone; they are relational, and as such cannot be studied in isolation. 111

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Nor can representations of gender minorities or gender nonnormativity be treated as incidental or dismissed as irrelevant to how the categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’ are constructed, or to major themes of the text. On the contrary, references to or depictions of gender minority as well as gender nonnormative figures in the texts examined here perform important types of cultural labor. Gender minority and gender nonnormative figures play noteworthy roles in these textual constructions of other genders and claims to hegemonic masculinity, as well as of ritual spaces, household order, social status, intracommunal boundaries, and religious authority. Taking such figures into account suggests a significantly different set of research questions to ask about much-discussed issues such as gender and prayer leadership, women’s attire, marriage, and women’s religious authority – as well as new ways of approaching other topics which have received less scholarly attention and/or tend to be seen as having little to do with gender. The relationship of gender to power is apparent in the texts examined here, as well as in contemporary readings of them. This includes the power to name and categorize (or ignore) wielded by classical authors and compilers, as well as by academics, translators, and authors writing from confessional perspectives today. In these sources, gender serves as a way to express, negotiate, and voice anxieties about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ relations of power. Economic, political, and social realities, such as imperial systems of governance and practices of slavery, as well as beliefs about how power should function, whether cosmically, politically, socially, and ritually shape the ways gender categories are constructed and are in turn shaped by them. Making such considerations a central focus of analysis is a step towards making the histories we write more reflective of these texts’ gendered complexities.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Marion Holmes Katz and Walid Saleh for their respective comments on some issues related to the translation and interpretation of texts quoted in this chapter. All errors are mine alone. My thinking about how gender categories and same-sex sexual desires work in classical Muslim texts continues to be influenced by various people’s work from within the academy, and at times outside of it. Some years ago, Bernadette Brooten’s Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) led me to begin thinking about some of these issues. Among more recent sources of questions to ask when queering history was Kent Monkman’s art exhibition on Indigenous history in Canada at the University of Toronto in the spring of 2017 entitled ‘Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience’ (last accessed Jan. 9, 2020). 2 The matter-of-fact discussion in this article of how enslavement is portrayed in these sources should not in any way be taken as normalizing this historical horror. 3 In the interests of clarity, I have slightly adjusted the translation. 4 I owe this point to Walid Saleh.

Further reading Babayan, K., and A. Najmabadi, eds., 2008. Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Harvard University Press.This now-classic collection of articles examines the ways that sexuality and gender are constructed in select classical literary and historical texts as well as in some poetry. Geissinger, A., 2017. ‘Are Men the Majority in Paradise, or Women?’ Constructing Gender and Boundaries in Muslim b. al-Ḥajjā j’s (d. 261/875) Kitā b al-janna, in Roads to Paradise: Eschatology and Concepts of the Hereafter in Islam, eds. S. Günther and T. Lawson, Leiden and Boston: Brill, vol.1, pp.311–340.This article pioneered the use of gender theory in reading classical hadith compilations as well as hadith commentaries.

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Gesink, I., 2018. Intersex Bodies in Premodern Islamic Discourse: Complicating the Binary, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 157–173.This article is an important corrective to previous scholarship on the ways that classical Muslim legal texts position intersex persons within the community. Gesink points to evidence that some jurists recognized three or perhaps five genders. Najmabadi, A., 2006. Beyond the Americas: Are Gender and Sexuality Useful Categories of Historical Analysis? Journal of Women’s History, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 11–21.This foundational article calls attention to some of the problems and misreadings that result from presumptions that gender has always and everywhere been understood as binary.

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7 INTERSEX IN ISLAMIC MEDICINE, LAW, AND ACTIVISM Indira Falk Gesink

Introduction Pre-modern Muslim authors recognized the existence of a third sex, ‘khunthā ,’ which described people whose physical sexual characteristics were ambiguous. Lexicographers, jurists, physicians, and biographers acknowledged that sexual ambiguity was one natural outcome of conception. Jurists crafted rulings to help khunthā s integrate into gendered societies, physicians described procedures for gender-confirming surgeries, and biographers extolled the mastery of scholars whose wisdom helped khunthā s. The most commonly discussed ambiguities were those in which a person developed external genitalia that were both male and female (Al-Qudū rı̄ 1953 213), and aplasia in which neither penis nor vagina developed (Al-Ṭū sı̄ 1970: 356-357; Rispler-Chaim 2007: 105–106). The word khunthā was also used more broadly for persons with varied conditions: males who appeared to urinate in the feminine manner due to displacement of the urinary meatus to the underside of the penis, the scrotum, or the perineum (hypospadias); masculineappearing women with penis-like clitorises and scrotum-like labia, heavy musculature, facial hair, and male pattern baldness (congenital adrenal hyperplasia); persons with ambiguous phallus, vagina and testes, and breasts (partial androgen insensitivity syndrome); or persons who appeared to be female at birth but developed male secondary sexual characteristics at puberty (5-alpha-reductase deficiency). Many jurists generally understood such persons to be functioning with a disability (Rispler-Chaim 2007: 70; Scalenghe 2014: 124–125), as God appeared to address Himself through the Qurʾan to males and females. However, the Qurʾan was not the sole source informing the conceptual world of premodern Muslim intellectuals, who often sought to harmonize what they found in scriptural sources with cultural precedent (Sadeghi 2013: xii), including Hellenic medicine, in the process conceptualizing sex as non-binary and fluid (Zeʾevi 2006: 16–47). By the 12th century, this conceptualization affected even Qurʾan interpretation. From the earliest documented cases, jurists allowed intersex persons to choose a legal sex by which they then functioned socially, from three options: male (khunthā ), complex or ambiguous (khunthā mushkil), or female (khunthā ). I place ‘khunthā ’ in parentheses to indicate that a khunthā ’s legal sex was always subtextually inscribed as fluid – khunthā sex could change. Physicians described treatments to assist intersex patients achieve comfort in their

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sexual roles. When sexual reassignment surgery became more widely practiced in the late 20th century, jurists ruled such surgeries permissible. This legacy of non-binary, fluid sex characterization provides a rich archive from which activists may draw to promote intersex and trans* rights and protection of children from involuntary sex assignment.

Earliest original sources and the problem of attribution The earliest documentary source that describes the term khunthā is a late 8th-century Arabic dictionary attributed to Khalı̄ l ibn Ah ̣mad, the Kitā b al-ʿAyn. Its entry for the Arabic roots kh-n-th states: ‘The khunthā is that which is neither male nor female [al-khunthā : wa huwwa alladhı̄ laysa bi-dhakar wa lā unthā ] and from which is derived mukhannath’ (Ibn Ah ̣mad 1984: 248), or effeminate male. This passage is usually read as referring to a person who is neither male nor female (Rowson 1997: 63). The passage suggests that the word itself, which ends in ā lif maqsū ̣ ra, is indeclinable and has no inherent masculine or feminine gender (see also Al-Bustā nı̄ 1987: 257). The entry explains that the root connotes doubling, as in the upper and lower molars or the folded neck of a waterskin, or delicacy, as in having folded the waterskin’s neck too often (see also Al-Zabı̄ dı̄ 1969: 242; Ibn Manz ̣ū r 1997: 320). Ibn Ah ̣mad then goes on to explain how one would vowelize the root if addressing a man, woman, or mukhannath. The word khunthā as referring to intersex is widely attested in other sources from the same region and time period (see below), suggesting that the term was already in common use. Later literature mentions incidents prior to the Kitā b al-ʿAyn in which a leading Muslim figure is approached to rule on cases of ambiguous sex, but as we have no contemporary documentary evidence of those cases, we must treat them as attributions, whose purpose was either polemical or to justify customary rulings, rather than as verbatim transmissions (Calder 1993: 13, 17–18, 37, 44, 49, 53, 54, 78, 82, 84, 104, 179). These attributions introduce the issue of intersex rights as a problem of inheritance. Islamic legal tradition assigned daughters half the inheritance of sons, as the Qurʾan directed males to support females. How then should a khunthā inherit? These kinds of legal questions were resolved by petitioning a jurist, who would formulate an answer based on local custom, perusal of relevant primary texts such as Qurʾan, hadith, and, if available, rulings of prior jurists, and consideration of the social good of various outcomes (Sadeghi 2013). If a case became notorious, those involved might be called before the local magistrate for investigation, or even before the caliph. Jurists also liked to ponder hypothetical legal questions, for which ambiguous sex provided a good case study. Jurists whose attributed rulings came to form the core of the Ḥanafı̄ school of legal reasoning (madhhab) were the first to debate intersex inheritance rights. A man had died leaving behind one son and one khunthā : how should the man’s property be divided? Abū Ḥanı̄ fa (d. 775), the eponymous founder of the Ḥanafı̄ legal school, reportedly assigned the khunthā a daughter’s share, with three shares total, two for the son and one for the daughter. The khunthā was not male unless proven to be so (attribution in Al-Ḥalabı̄ 1989: 336; Al-Qudū rı̄ 1953: 215–217). A 12th century jurist, al-Marghı̄ nā nı̄ , rationalized that Abū Ḥanı̄ fa wished to establish the khunthā ’s right to at least the share of the daughter. The khunthā ’s right to inherit the son’s share being subject to doubt due to sex ambiguity, the inheritance should be treated the same as any case in which there was doubt: the smaller of the possible shares should be granted, in this case the share of a daughter (Al-Marghı̄ nā nı̄ 1990: 673–674). Abū Ḥanı̄ fa’s ruling that only two inheritance options were possible, son or daughter, upheld the Qurʾanic binary sex paradigm. 117

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Abū Ḥanı̄ fa ’s protégé, Abū Yū suf, reportedly disagreed with him. Abū Yū suf, who served as chief qadi (judge) under the ʿAbbasid caliph Hā rū n al-Rashı̄ d and died in Baghdad in 798, ruled the property should be divided into seven shares, four shares for the son and three shares for the khunthā . Then Abū Yū suf’s own protégé, Muh ̣ammad al-Shaybanı̄ (chief qadi in the new capital Raqqa, from Abū Yū suf’s death until 803) ruled that the property be divided into 12 shares, seven shares for the son and five for the khunthā . Both these rulings awarded the khunthā half the son’s share and half the daughter’s share (Al-Ḥalabı̄ 1989: 317; Al-Marghı̄ nā nı̄ 1990: 672–673; Al-Qudū rı̄ 1953: 217; Al-Sarakhsı̄ 2001: 103–106; Ibn Qudā ma 1972: 115–118). Abū Yū suf and Muh ̣ammad al-Shaybanı̄ constructed the khunthā as a medial sex, as described in the contemporary Kitā b al-ʿAyn, neither male nor female, but somewhere in the middle, somehow both. Abū Ḥanı̄ fa may not have initiated this debate. Some Ḥanafı̄ jurists claimed that Abū Yū suf and al-Shaybanı̄ were simply fleshing out the mathematics of a ruling already offered by al-Shaʿbı̄ , a hadith transmitter born in Medina a decade after the Prophet’s death (AlḤalabı̄ 1989: 317; Al-Qudū rı̄ 1953: 217; Al-Sarakhsı̄ 2001: 103). Ibn Qudā ma, a Ḥanbalı̄ jurist, claimed the medial sex ruling for the progenitor of the Ḥanbalı̄ legal school, Ah ̣mad ibn Ḥanbal (d. 855), based on transmitted dicta from al-Shaʿbı̄ , Ibn ʿAbbā s, Ibn Abı̄ Laylā , al-Thawrı̄ , al-Luʾluʾı̄ , Sharı̄ k, Ḥasan ibn Ṣā lih ̣, Yah ̣yā ibn ʿĀdam, and the folk of Mecca and Medina, with Abū Yū suf and Abū Ḥanı̄ fa at the end of the list (Ibn Qudā ma 1972: 115). However, the authors making these claims lived hundreds of years after these debates took place, and no documentary evidence remains to us other than their attributions. The early Ḥanafı̄ jurists are also said to have pondered what a khunthā should wear on pilgrimage. Abū Yū suf admitted that he did not know, because the ritual requirements for male and female pilgrimage dress were mutually exclusive. Men had to wear garments with no sewn seams (izā r and ridā ʾ, sheets wrapped around the waist and shoulders). Women could not wear izā r and ridā ʾ, but had to wear sewn seams (attribution in Al-Marghı̄ nā nı̄ 1990: 668; AlSarakhsı̄ 2001: 119). Muh ̣ammad al-Shaybanı̄ argued that a khunthā should dress as a woman on pilgrimage because that was the more restrictive of the two options: a woman had to ‘cover nakedness’ to remain ritually pure, whereas if a khunthā later became a man, his failure to wear izā r and ridā ʾ on a prior pilgrimage could be excused as an exceptional circumstance (Al-Marghı̄ nā nı̄ 1990: 668; Al-Sarakhsı̄ 2001, 119; see also Al-Ḥalabı̄ 1989: 335). We can infer from these early debates that jurists were concerned about the rights and religious obligations of khunthā s. Khunthā s were not monstrosities as construed in later European societies; they were simply people who could not easily be identified as male or female (see for example Ibn Ah ̣mad 1984, 248; Ibn Qudā ma 1972: 115; Al-Marghı̄ nā nı̄ 1990, 12:663; Al-Qudū rı̄ 1953: 213; Al-Sarakhsı̄ 2001, 30: 116–118). In European societies, people with intersex genitalia were figured as hermaphrodites, semi-mythical beings who merged male and female in one body. In the 19th century, European physicians policed sexual binaries by reassigning sexes based on medical exams that revealed hidden testicles, and media whipped up social paranoia about intersex as a disguise for homosexuality (Dreger 1998). The sources in my survey evidence no such paranoias before the late 19th century and no attempts to alter legal sex against the self-asserted identity of an intersex individual (for example, see discussion of intersex minor marriages and court-sanctioned sex changes, below). However, these sources cannot tell us whether individual khunthā s lived their lives undisturbed. Because many rights, obligations, and social rules were gendered, a khunthā ’s life would be easier if the khunthā inclined toward male or female sex. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many khunthā s lived socially as males or females until some obstacle appeared: inability to have intercourse, inability to conceive, or suspicion that the person 118

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was claiming a right to which they were not entitled (for the latter, see Ibn al-Ḥimsı̄ ̣ 1999: 99). In such cases, or when the sex of a child was ambiguous, jurists recommended a number of tests to see whether the khunthā inclined toward one sex or the other. In the earliest such tests described, the caliph ʿAli (d. 661) proposed determining sex by casting lots or observing whether the khunthā could direct the flow of urine. The ʿIbadi jurist Jā bir ibn Zayd (d. circa 721) proposed that the khunthā urinate against a wall. If the khunthā could direct urine at the wall, the khunthā was male. If not, the khunthā was female (Al-Ṭū sı̄ 1970: 353-354, 355-356; Ibn Qudā ma 1972: 115). In the urine-direction test, someone possessing a penis with a displaced meatus (hypospadias) could be considered female. The Ḥanbalı̄ imam Ah ̣mad ibn Ḥanbal preferred methods derived from scriptural reports, so he suggested counting the ribs. A male should have one fewer than a female, as Adam had donated one of his ribs to create Eve (Ibn Qudā ma 1972: 115). ʿAli was said to have employed this method to grant a khunthā ’s claim to male legal sex (Al-Nuʿmā n 1969: 388; Al-Ṭū sı̄ 1970: 354-355). Neither of these methods conferred certainty, however. By the 10th century, jurists advised direct observation of the urinary exit. If the khunthā had a penis and a vulva, a witness would observe the person urinating, on the assumption that functioning urination indicated functioning sexual organ. If the urine exited from a meatus in the penis, the khunthā inclined toward maleness and could claim male legal sex. If the urine exited from a meatus in the vulva, the khunthā inclined toward femaleness and could claim female legal sex. If the urine exited from both a penis and a vulva at the same time, or if the khunthā had no external genitalia indicating sex (as in genital agenesis), the khunthā would be assigned the legal sex of khunthā mushkil, meaning ‘complex khunthā ,’ as in an ambiguous complex of male and female (Al-Ḥalabı̄ 1989: 334; Al-Qudū rı̄ 1952: 213; Al-Sarakhsı̄ 2001: 115–116; Al-Ṭū sı̄ 1970: 354). The 10th-century Fā timid Ismā ʿı̄ lı̄ judge al-Nuʿmā n attributed this test of urination to ̣ the caliph ʿAli (d. 661). Five brothers whose father had died approached ʿAli. One of the brothers had two urinary exits: one in his penis and another in his perineum. His brothers claimed that he should inherit as a daughter because of the perineal exit. ʿAli ruled that if urine exited first from the penile meatus, the brother inherited as a man; if from the perineal meatus, as a woman; and if the urine came from both at the same time, he inherited half the male and half the female share (Al-Nuʿmā n: 388). This echoes the Ḥanafı̄ rulings on inheritance from the previous century, and the story’s absence in al-Ṭū sı̄ , who reported Imā mı̄ Shiʿı̄ rulings, suggests that the story is a polemical attempt to claim juristic precedent for the Ismaʿili Shiʿi legal lineage. Writing a few decades later, in Baghdad, the Ḥanafı̄ jurist al-Qudū rı̄ claimed that the Ḥanafı̄ s had initiated the test of urination: Abū Ḥanı̄ fa, Abū Yū suf, and Muh ̣ammad alShaybā nı̄ had disagreed as to whether the legal sex of a complex khunthā should be determined by amount of urine coming from the organ or by first exit (Al-Qudū rı̄ 1953: 213). The 11th-century Persian jurist al-Sarakhsı̄ would likewise claim this test for the Ḥanafı̄ legal lineage but projected its origins further into the past. According to al-Sarakhsı̄ , the test of urination was based on a narration by Abū Yū suf, from Al-Kalbı̄ , from Abū Sā lih ̣, from Ibn ʿAbbā s, from the Prophet Muh ̣ammad himself, who was asked to rule on the inheritance portion of a child born without external genitalia. Muh ̣ammad reportedly told the family to determine sex by the site of urination, though commentators judged that chain of narration weak. Al-Sarakhsı̄ also related that the phrase, yarithu min haythu yabū l, or ‘one inherits by the place of urination,’ appears in narrations by ʿAli, Jā bir ibn Zayd, Qatā da ibn Nuʿmā n, and Saʿı̄ d ibn al-Musayyib, and that it was a pre-Islamic practice (2001: 115–116, 119

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notes 1 and 2). Like Al-Qudū rı̄ , al-Sarakhsı̄ claimed that the early Ḥanafı̄ jurists elaborated the details of the test. Abū Yū suf and Muh ̣ammad al-Shaybā nı̄ had ruled that if the khunthā urinated from both organs, legal sex would be assigned by the organ with the strongest flow (117). Al-Sarakhsı̄ wrote that Abū Ḥanı̄ fa had rejected that on two counts: first, that amount of urine might result from wideness of the exit, and the female meatus is generally wider than a male’s, so that method was insufficient, and second, that ‘greater’ and ‘lesser’ amounts of urine are characteristics of urination rather than the place of urination (117; see also Al-Marghı̄ nā nı̄ 1990: 663–664). Al-Sarakhsı̄ then related a conversation in which Abū Ḥanı̄ fa took Abū Yū suf to task over adjudicating this based on insufficient evidence (2001: 117). For our purposes, who elaborated the test and whether it existed in pre-Islamic times has less significance than the fact that these debates existed – that intersex was acknowledged to exist and that intersex people had rights and obligations just as men and women did. Furthermore, al-Qudū rı̄ and al-Sarakhsı̄ both acknowledged that khunthā sex could change. Al-Qudū rı̄ wrote: If the khunthā reaches maturity and grows a beard, or has intercourse with women, he is a man, and if there appears on him breasts like the breasts of women, or the breasts lactate, or he menstruates or becomes pregnant or is able to have vaginal intercourse, he is a woman. If none of these signs appear, he is a khunthā mushkil. (Al-Qudū rı̄ 1953: 213) Unlike al-Qudū rı̄ , al-Sarakhsı̄ ruled that ambiguity ended at puberty. Al-Sarakhsı̄ wrote that functioning urination indicated that the other organ was ‘extra’ and not indicative of sex (2001: 116). He also ruled that legal sex could not be altered by proof of urination from the ‘extra’ organ (116). Khunthā sex was therefore an aberration. Furthermore, at puberty a khunthā would manifest signs that would remove any ambiguity, such as a beard, nocturnal emission, feminine breasts, menstruation, vaginal sex, lactation, or pregnancy (117, 126). AlSarakhsı̄ reported that he had never witnessed any evidence of persistent ambiguity (117), and he was commenting on the Mukhtasaṛ al-kā fı̄ of Muh ̣ammad al-Marwā zı̄ (d. 945), which stated a khunthā would not be ‘mushkil’ after signs of sex appeared (126). Unlike al-Qudū rı̄ , al-Sarakhsı̄ ruled that a khunthā who developed none of these signs was legally male, ‘because failure to grow breasts is legal evidence that he is a man’ (126). Given that a khunthā might have no external genitalia, this meant that it was possible for a khunthā to be declared legally male without a penis. The ruling that a non-urinating penis was ‘extra’ also meant that possession of a penis did not make one male. Such extremes had profound legal implications. According to al-Sarakhsı̄ , if a khunthā committed a crime that entailed a payment in lieu of retaliation (qisā ̣ s),̣ such as murder or severing of a limb, the victim’s family would be unable to claim the payment, because there was no such thing as a mature adult khunthā , and prepubescent minors were immune from retaliation (2001: 121). Al-Sarakhsı̄ was also at pains to reconcile the existence of the khunthā with Qurʾanic addresses to men and women. ‘It is known,’ he wrote, ‘that God Most High created the children of Adam male and female,’ as stated in the Qurʾan: ‘He dispersed among them many men and women’ and ‘He grants to whom He wills females and He grants to whom He wills males.’ The Qurʾan had rules for men and rules for women and He did not establish rules for a person who is male and female, and so we know from that that He did not join the two characteristics together in one person, for 120

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how could He, there being between them such difference as to be opposites of one another. (2001: 103) There being no evidence that God had created such a person, it could not be so; therefore God had created each person with sufficient signs to determine a provisional sex until puberty eliminated the doubt (103).

Conception and medical literature Al-Sarakhsı̄ remained a minority voice on the question of khunthā medial sex, along with jurists who took Qurʾanic binarism as their starting point, such as al-Shā fiʿı̄ (1987: 98). But even the 12th-century Ḥanafı̄ al-Marghı̄ nā nı̄ , who ruled that functioning urination indicated ‘true sex,’ also ruled that ambiguity could persist after puberty (1990: 663, 665). By his time, Muslim authors had begun describing models of conception derived from Hellenic philosophy as well as regimes for surgical treatment. Hellenic theorists of conception acknowledged that both the father and mother of a child contributed ‘semen’ to its development, although they differed on the mechanism of contribution. According to Hippocrates and Aristotle, if the mother’s semen was stronger, the child would be female. If the father’s was stronger, the child would be male. If either parent failed to dominate, the child might be intersex, an effeminate male, or a masculine female, or it might resemble the parent of the opposite sex (Aristotle 1953; Hippocrates 1978: 322; Musallam 1983: 43–45). According to Galen and Muslim physicians who accepted Galen’s ideas, a foetus that grew on the right (drier, hotter) side of the uterus would be male, on the left (wetter, colder) side, a female, and in the middle, any possibility between all-male and all-female (Galen 1992: 187, 191; Ragab 2015: 436–437; Zeʾevi 2006: 16–47). Hadith reflected these ideas as well (Ragab 2015: 434). Such ideas about conception provided ready explanations of non-binary sex. One might therefore read al-Sarakhsı̄ ’s insistence that God had not created anything between male and female as defence of the Qurʾan against an intellectual discourse that increasingly accepted other texts as sources of legitimate knowledge. For example, the famed Persian physician Ibn Sı̄ nā stated in 1025 that a child would resemble the parent whose semen dominated the womb (1593: 570). The physician al-Rā zı̄ (d. 1210) stated that failure of either to dominate produced intersex (khinā th) (Rosenthal 1978: 54). The Mamluk lexicographer Ibn Manz ̣ū r (d. 1312) explained, in the entry for dh-k-r in his dictionary, Lisā n al-ʿArab, that male sex resulted when the father’s semen dominated the womb (1997: 465), and, in his entry for khn-th, Ibn Manzur explained that a khunthā ‘was not limited to male or to female’ but ‘had what was male and female both’ (1997: 320), the position al-Sarakhsı̄ explicitly rejected. The physician Ibn Sı̄ nā also suggested medical treatments for patients whose conditions affected their sexual functioning. He warned that inability to satisfy lust could cause patients to seek satisfaction outside the legal options (Ibn Sı̄ nā 1987: 1613). Thus his recommending these treatments should not be seen as policing sex boundaries but rather as assisting in restoration of pleasurable intercourse. His masterwork Qā nū n fı̄ al-tibb ̣ discusses intersex conditions in the chapter on the male reproductive system: some patients have no sexual organ and some have organs of both sexes. In the latter, the organs may be hidden inside the body or obstructed in some way, or they may all function sufficiently to allow both insertive and receptive vaginal intercourse. In cases where one of the organs does not function, it may be surgically excised (Ibn Sı̄ nā 1987: 1612). Ibn Sı̄ nā also discusses similar conditions in the 121

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chapter on female reproductive organs: obstructions of the vaginal opening or clitoral enlargement sufficient to ‘approximate penetrative sex,’ both of which could be treated with surgery: banding of flesh that obstructs the vagina and excising the penis-like clitoris ‘from its base in order to prevent hemorrhage’ (Ibn Sı̄ nā 1593: 595). Ibn Sı̄ nā does not appear to recognize the clitoris as necessary for female orgasm, but he also does not mandate excision. These surgeries were to allow patients to feel comfortable as women. Abū al-Qā sim al-Zahrā wı̄ , an Andalusian physician of the same time period, describes three types of khunthā patients. One ‘male’ khunthā had a penis, testicles, and an opening like a vagina in the perineum. Another ‘male’ khunthā urinated from the skin of the scrotum (penoscrotal hypospadias). A ‘female’ khunthā had a vagina and small appendages resembling penis or testicles (Albucasis 1973: 455). Like Ibn Sı̄ nā , al-Zahrā wı̄ also described a ‘female’ condition in which the clitoris grows ‘beyond the natural order until its appearance becomes loathsome and ugly: in some women, it grows greater until it becomes erect like the male organ to the point where it is capable of coitus’ (Albucasis 1973: 457). For the male with a perineal opening and the female with extra appendages, al-Zahrā wı̄ and Ibn Sı̄ nā were writing from the same playbook: ‘extra flesh’ could be surgically excised (Albucasis 1973: 455). For the ‘loathsome’ clitoris, al-Zahrā wı̄ advised physicians to grasp the superfluous part of the clitoris [faḍl al-baz ̣ar] with your hand or a hook and excise it. Do not overdo the excision, especially at the bottom of the shaft, in order to prevent hemorrhage. Then treat it as any surgical wound until it heals. (Albucasis 1973: 457) Patients identifying as male also sought surgery for unperforated labia and swollen breasts (Albucasis 1973: 363, 459). Both physicians exhibited concern for patients’ safety, performance of unobstructed vaginal intercourse, and comfort in their gender roles.

Qurʾan commentary Awareness of intersex conditions eventually influenced interpretation of the Qurʾan. At issue are the very verses that al-Sarakhsı̄ quoted as evidence that God created only males and females. The Qurʾan chapter known as Sū rat al-Shū ra, verses 49–50, reads: God has dominion over the heavens and the earth. He creates what He wills. He grants to whom He wills females, and He grants to whom He wills males. Or He pairs them male and female (yuzawwijuhum dhukrā nan wa inā than), and He makes those whom He wills to be ineffectual (ʿaqı̄ m). Indeed He is the Knowing, the Powerful. Prior to the 11th century, Qurʾan interpreters always glossed these verses the same way: God gives to some people all daughters, some all sons, some daughters and sons, and some none (Al-Thaʿlabi 2002: 324). The most elaboration offered examples of offspring of prophets – Lot had only daughters; Abraham had only sons; Muh ̣ammad had sons and daughters; Jesus had none (Al-Thaʿlabi 2002: 325). No one had yet suggested that ‘pairing’ of male and female might occur in one body. However, the Andalusian Mā liki jurist Abū Bakr ibn al-ʿArabı̄ , who wrote his Ah ̣kā m alQurʾā n a century after Ibn Sı̄ nā and al-Zahrā wı̄ , cited hadith literature on conception and sex of the foetus to inform his interpretation – hadith literature that is not cited in earlier 122

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tafsı̄ r and that echoes the ideas of Ibn Sı̄ nā and al-Zahrā wı̄ . Ibn al-ʿArabı̄ wrote that whereas God created the world from nothing, human acts of creation come from something. The Prophet said: ‘If the fluid of the man precedes the fluid of the woman, [the foetus] will be male, and if the fluid of the woman precedes the fluid of the man, [the foetus] will be female’ (qtd. in Al-Qurtubı ̣ ̄ 2006: 503), or alternatively, ‘If the fluid of the man dominates [ʿalā ] the fluid of the woman, the child will resemble its paternal line, and if the fluid of the woman dominates the fluid of the man, the child will resemble its maternal line’ (503, citing the Sah ̄ ̣ıh ̣, note 3 attributes the second hadith to Thawbā n). Ibn al-ʿArabı̄ elaborated that if a man’s fluid was emitted first, and the woman’s was emitted second but was of greater amount, the child would be male but resemble its mother’s family, and vice versa. Ibn al-ʿArabı̄ , however, did not mention intersex. One hundred years after Ibn al-ʿArabı̄ , the Mā liki jurist al-Qurtubı ̣ ̄ (who was born in Cordoba but moved to Cairo) elaborated upon Ibn al-ʿArabı̄ ’s tafsı̄ r. Al-Qurtubı ̣ ̄ reported that Mā likı̄ ʿulā mā connected Ibn al-ʿArabı̄ ’s discussion specifically to Sū rat al-Shū ra 50, to the phrase ‘He pairs them male and female.’ ‘There was,’ al-Qurtubı ̣ ̄ wrote, ‘during the Jā hiliyya a physiognomy [khilqa] that was at once male and female, the khunthā .’ He then related the hadith in which the Prophet Muh ̣ammad was asked to determine the inheritance of a khunthā infant, and stated that the test of urination the Prophet recommended was a pre-Islamic practice. He also asserted that there were khunthā among the Ansar of Medina. He claimed that the hadith reports of Muh ̣ammad’s intersex ruling (absent in earlier juristic discussions) were widely transmitted (Al-Qurtubı ̣ ̄ 2006: 506), and were taken up by the early formulators of Islamic legal precedents, especially Mā lik ibn Anas, Muh ̣ammad alShaybā nı̄ , Abū Yū suf, and al-Shā fiʿı̄ (Ali 2011, loc. 268 and 334; Al-Qurtubı ̣ ̄ 2006: 506). Al-Qurtubı devoted half his explication to conception theories and accounts of khunthā s, ̣ ̄ which allowed his readers to come to a very different conclusion than al-Sarakhsı̄ had offered: that ‘He pairs them male and female’ could mean that God gives daughters, sons, and intersex (503–506). Law historians Norman Calder and Behnam Sadeghi have argued that jurisprudence was less derivation of law from sources and more use of sources to justify existing legal practice (Calder 1993; Sadeghi 2013). Al-Qurtubı ̣ ̄ ’s interpretation of al-Shū ra 49–50 provides Qurʾanic sanction for juristic and medical practices that recognized nonbinary sex.

Postformative legal tradition It should be clear by this point that there were at least two strands of thinking about intersex in premodern Islamic societies. One, epitomized by al-Sarakhsı̄ , considered intersex a temporary condition that would always resolve into male or female, which meant a jurist had to take every available step to assign male or female sex and rule on issues relevant to the pre-pubescent khunthā mushkil, such as inheritance. The second and more widespread strand of thinking considered intersex to be one of at least three possible natural outcomes of conception that persisted after puberty, which meant that jurists had also to elaborate social rules for adult khunthā s that would enable them to obtain their rights and perform their religious obligations without violating ritual purity for others in the community. The topics discussed included (in addition to inheritance and pilgrimage dress) circumcision, communal prayer, required and forbidden items of dress, travel, manumission, adult and child marriage, blood payment, positioning for burial prayer, and burial in a common grave. On these topics, jurists of different sects and legal schools from the 11th to the 16th centuries expressed relative unanimity, although not all jurists ruled on all issues. 123

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Circumcision posed a problem because men typically circumcised boys, and women girls, to avoid opposite-sex exposure of genitals. Exposure of the genitals was problematic for sex identification as well, but the Shiʿı̄ imam ʿAli al-Hā dı̄ (d. 868) had proposed a solution – viewing the genitals through a mirror (Al-Qurashi 2014: 142). Mirrors being unwieldy for circumcision, the jurist al-Qudū rı̄ ruled that a bondmaid be purchased for the child’s circumcision. If the child had insufficient resources, the slave should be purchased with funds from the state treasury and then sold (Al-Qudū rı̄ 1953: 215). Al-Marghı̄ nā nı̄ agreed, adding the rationale that a female could view a female’s genitals without shame, and a slave could view her master’s genitals (Al-Marghı̄ nā nı̄ 1990: 227). This was still the consensus view by the time the Syrian jurist al-Ḥalabı̄ included these rulings in his legal manual, Multaqā alabh ̣ur, in the 16th century (Al-Ḥalabı̄ 1989: 335). Jurists also agreed that khunthā s should be able to pray in community with others, but because women had to stand behind men, khunthā s should stand in between the lines of men and the lines of women (Abū Bakr Effendi 1971: 67; Al-Ḥalabı̄ 1989: 335; AlQudū rı̄ 1953: 215). Ḥanafı̄ jurists reasoned that medial positioning would ensure the khunthā ’s presence did not accidentally nullify the prayers of those in the same row or his/her own prayers, in the event that emerging secondary sexual characteristics would later clarify sex as male or female (Al-Marghı̄ nā nı̄ 1990: 665–667; Al-Sarakhsı̄ 2001: 120). On clothing, as with the ritual dress of pilgrimage, jurists felt it prudent for a khunthā mushkil to observe the stricter requirements for women (male-inclined khunthā s would be legally male and dress as males). According to al-Marghı̄ nā nı̄ , a khunthā mushkil should veil during prayer and prostrate in prayer like a woman, for if he is a man, this is merely a deviation from custom that is generally permissible [an interesting comment], but if he is female, failure to do so would be reprehensible, for covering [satr] is required for women. If he prayed without a veil [qinā ʿ], it would be best for him to repeat the prayer because of the possibility he may be female, this being the most prudent course, though the prayer is still valid if he does not. (1990: 666–667; see also Al-Ḥalabı̄ 1989: 335; Al-Sarakhsı̄ 2001: 119) Some jurists also required the khunthā to veil while mixing with marriageable men – as women generally did – and while mixing with women, as men did not (Al-Ḥalabı̄ 1989: 335; Al-Sarakhsı̄ 2001: 122). However, silk and jewellery were makrū h (reprehensible) for khunthā s rather than h ̣arā m (forbidden) as for men (Al-Ḥalabı̄ 1989: 335; Al-Marghı̄ nā nı̄ 1990: 667; Al-Sarakhsı̄ 2001: 119, 122 has ‘gold or jewellery’). Khunthā s were also generally subject to travel restrictions on women: they could not travel without the company of a spouse or unmarriageable relative (Al-Ḥalabı̄ 1989: 335; Al-Sarakhsı̄ 2001: 122). But khunthā s clearly were not women – only potentially women. Al-Marghı̄ nā nı̄ and alḤalabı̄ reported Ḥanafı̄ consensus that a manumission document that stated ‘all my male slaves are free’ or ‘all my female slaves are free’ would not manumit a khunthā , because a khunthā ’s sex was always in doubt (Al-Ḥalabı̄ 1989: 336; Al-Marghı̄ nā nı̄ 1990: 668). AlMarghı̄ nā nı̄ clarified that if the manumission document read ‘all my male and female slaves are free,’ the khunthā would be manumitted, for the khunthā was at least one or the other (1990: 668), but that clarification is absent in al-Ḥalabı̄ ’s later text. Both jurists were summarizing what they felt to be consensus of the Ḥanafı̄ school, and neither provides any context for these rulings. However, their overriding concern appears to be advice to those 124

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scribing manumission documents so as to prevent accidental injustice to a khunthā slave whose owner intended manumission. On marriage, the jurists differed. Most Ḥanafı̄ jurists tacitly accepted khunthā marriage when they ruled on cases in which khunthā s inherited from spouses (Al-Ḥalabı̄ 1989: 335; Al-Ramlı̄ 1857: 207–208). Al-Sarakhsı̄ dealt explicitly with the question, objecting only to marriage of khunthā minors, since they might mature as the same sex as the spouse, resulting in a legal quandary as to which spouse was responsible for maintaining the other (2001: 104, 119). Only the Ḥanbalı̄ Ibn Qudā ma denied the khunthā mushkil the right to marry (Ibn Qudā ma 1972: 74). If a khunthā died without claiming male or female sex, the body could not be washed by man or woman but would be purified with sand. Al-Sarakhsı̄ explained that this was analogous to the situation of a woman who died among men, where there was no other woman to wash her body (Al-Sarakhsı̄ 2001: 118). Even another khunthā could not wash the body, for that khunthā ’s sex was mutable too. If the funeral service included other bodies that were male and female, the male body was to be positioned closest to the imam, the khunthā next, and the female farthest, in accordance with a hadith that said the ‘most favored’ (afḍal) among them should be closest to the imam. Men, according to al-Sarakhsı̄ , were more worthy (ah ̣aqq) of this honor than women (2001: 120). If the khunthā were buried in a common tomb with men and women, the bodies should be separated by layers of cloth or barriers of earth, to preserve modesty even in death (Al-Sarakhsı̄ 2001: 118, 121). Al-Sarakhsı̄ stated that a khunthā ‘had no sex’ or had ‘unknown sex’ (Al-Sarakhsı̄ 2001: 118). But sex is not merely biological fact: sex is also cultural construction (Butler 1993). When jurists positioned the khunthā in communal mosque prayer in a line between the men and the women, the khunthā is positioned as medial sex. Publicly and iteratively, the khunthā performed a medial role that told the khunthā and the public where that sex fitted into the social hierarchy; likewise in burial, and in the recommendation to always veil, and in public discussions that positioned the khunthā as something other than merely male or female.

Intersex as cultural work Khunthā s also figure in polemics and biographical anecdotes. Shiʿı̄ texts relate a case that stumped the qadi of Kufa, Shurayh ̣ ibn al-Ḥarı̄ th. A wife had petitioned for separation from her husband on grounds that she was a man. Inquiry revealed that the petitioner was a khunthā , and that ‘she’ had impregnated a female slave. The judge consulted with the Commander of the Faithful, ʿAli, who called the husband and wife in for questioning. The husband confirmed his wife had impregnated the slave girl, but he wished to remain married. ʿAli then summoned two women to count the khunthā ’s ribs, and they reported that the khunthā had only eleven ribs on the right side. ʿAli proclaimed the greatness of God, dissolved the marriage, and declared the khunthā a man (Al-Nuʿmā n 1969: 387-388; Al-Ṭū sı̄ 1970: 354-355). We may interpret this case as an example of legal fiction (Ali 2015: 83), in which a case is resolved in a way calculated to avoid severe punishment of crimes, in this case sex between women. However, khunthā s often appear in this kind of literature as a problem whose resolution proves the solver’s great wisdom. Notably, this particular anecdote appears only in Shiʿı̄ sources that seek to depict ʿAli as the ideal adjudicator. Sixteenth-century accounts of a Shā fiʿı̄ Sufi ascetic named Muh ̣ammad ibn Salā ma also employ the khunthā in polemics. In 1506, Ibn Salā ma got married. Suspicion surfaced, 125

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however, as to the sex of the bride, and a complaint reached the local amir, Ṭarā bā y. When the couple appeared before the amir, the bride claimed to be a khunthā . The amir ordered investigation of the bride’s sex, concluded that the bride was male, and ordered the bride beaten to death. Cairene historian Ibn al-Ḥimsı̄ ̣’s account of this event favoured the couple, stating that the bride was ‘an obvious khunthā woman’ (1999: 99) and highlighting the amir’s unjustified brutality. The account of Damascene historian Ibn Ṭulū n, however, placed the story in the context of campaigns against Sufi gazing cults: Muh ̣ammad ibn Salā ma had been associating with Sufis who contemplated the Divine as reflected in the faces of beautiful beardless youths, and his bride had in fact been one of those youths. The bride’s claim of khunthā identity had been an attempt to legitimize marriage between men: he had even wounded the base of his penis so that he would appear to be menstruating. In Ibn Ṭulū n’s telling, the amir had used the incident to rile up the public against the Sufis and plunder their property (Ibn Tulun 1962: 297–298). The story was told a third time by biographer al-Ghazzı̄ , who was himself a supporter of gazing cults (Al-Ghazzı̄ 1979: 51; ElRouayheb 2005: 83); he framed Amir Ṭarā bā y’s brutal response as a warning that the amir would not tolerate ‘gazing’ that crossed the line into illicit sex. The biographical dictionary of al-Muh ̣ibbı̄ (d. 1699) employs khunthā s to promote the image of Ottoman legal scholars as ideal Muslims, guiding and protecting the community with their wisdom. His accounts highlight the mutability of khunthā sex. Women grow beards, penises, and testicles, sometimes on their wedding nights, and bearded men turn out to be women. Al-Muh ̣ibbı̄ ’s biography of the judge Muh ̣ammad Akmā l al-Dı̄ n tells how the court resolved the case of ʿAlı̄ ibn al-Rifā cı̄ , a beardless bookbinder from Damascus who fell in love with a man. Court investigation revealed that ʿAlı̄ was a khunthā whose vulva was obstructed by a ‘protuberance.’ The obstruction was surgically removed, and ʿAlı̄ assumed female legal status under the name ʿAlı̄ ya. ʿAlı̄ ya married her lover and bore ‘numerous’ children (Al-Muh ̣ibbı̄ 1867: 341–342). Sometimes jurists presented their own fatwas on khunthā s as evidence of their superior abilities. The Palestinian mufti Khayr al-Dı̄ n al-Ramlı̄ (d. 1671) related how he had upheld a khunthā ’s claim to be male despite inability to urinate from his penis. The khunthā had grown a beard and emitted semen; hence al-Ramlı̄ determined that the khunthā was actually male with an ‘obstructed’ penis. In a case of minor marriage between two khunthā s, the ‘groom’ had matured as female and the ‘bride’ as male. The family had asked a jurist whether the marriage was still valid, but the jurist had been unable to determine the answer and had sent the case to al-Ramlı̄ . Al-Ramlı̄ ruled the marriage valid but used the fatwa as an opportunity to explain why khunthā s should not marry before puberty (Al-Ramlı̄ 1857: 207–208; Scalenghe 2014: 143–146). Once again the khunthā was a complexity, the resolution of which demonstrated someone’s claim to great wisdom.

Premodern scholarship as a platform for new activism Perhaps these scholars wrote about khunthā s because intersex births tend to be more prevalent in regions that practice consanguineous marriage (Lubani et al. 1990: 391; Özbey et al. 2004; Soheir et al. 2012: 284). Medical reports suggest that most intersex children born in Middle Eastern countries now undergo surgical sex assignment (Dessouky 2001; Özbey et al. 2004; Taha and Magbool 1995). However, since the late 1990s, a global activist consensus has emerged that intersex infants should not undergo surgical ‘correction’ or other irreversible procedures before reaching an age of consent but should rather receive counselling. In the 2010s, various international organizations described involuntary sexual ‘correction’ as torture that should be illegal under international law 126

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(Human Rights Watch 2017). United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raʿad Al Hussein made the following statement at the Human Rights Council: Far too few of us are aware of the specific human rights violations faced by millions of intersex people. Because their bodies don’t comply with typical definitions of male or female, intersex children and adults are frequently subjected to forced sterilization and irreversible surgery, and suffer discrimination in schools, workplaces and other settings. (Raʿad Al Hussein 2015) Muslim activists have tended to frame intersex in terms of sexual assignment surgery, using rationales that play on the binary sex paradigm and construct transsex as illness (Whitaker 2016) or as deviance undeserving of the same consideration as intersex (Alipour 2017b; Dessouky 2001: 500, 513). Jurists responding to sexual reassignment petitions, such as Shaykh al-Ṭantā ̣ wı̄ ’s now-famous response to Sayyed/Sally ʿAbdullah, have characterized transsex as an illness or physical disability justifying surgical ‘treatment’; in the Sayyed/Sally case, an Egyptian court ruled that transsex could be considered ‘psychological intersex,’ despite media hysteria about surgeons making men into ‘hermaphrodites’ or ‘artificial women’ (Skovgaard-Petersen 1995). Physicians attempt to advocate for patients, but against a background of social preference for male or female assignment (Dessouky 2001; Kuhnle and Krahl 2002: 94; Özbey et al. 2004) and Qurʾanic binarism, which promote determining of ‘true’ sex by chromosomal analysis (Zainuddin and Mahdy 2017). Rarely do reports advocate cultural responses that permit flexible gender roles (Kuhnle and Krahl 2002: 94–95), although Ayatollah Khomeini reportedly advised that an intersex petitioner for surgery could remain intersex and ‘practice Islam as such’ (Alipour 2017a). However, if we engage ‘the Islamic’ position on intersex as a debate, in which jurists might recognize as many as five sexes, binary sex was a minority paradigm until the 20th century, courts permitted individuals to live in their chosen socio-legal sex, and these permissions constructed those who authorized them as wise, ideal Muslims – that engagement would provide a powerful platform for both intersex and trans advocacy.

Further reading Alipour, M. 2017b. ‘Transgender Identity, the Sex-Reassignment Surgery Fatwas and Islamic Theology of a Third Gender.’ Religions & Gender 7, no. 2: 164–179. Insightful discussion of sex reassignment and intersex fatwas and the possibility of considering these as a third gender. Ragab, A. 2015. ‘One, Two, or Many Sexes: Sex Differentiation in Medieval Islamicate Medical Thought.’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 24, no. 3: 428–454. Describes medieval theories of conception and sex differentiation, with particular attention to the ideas of al-Rā zı̄ . Sanders, P. 1991. ‘Gendering the Ungendered Body: Hermaphrodites in Medieval Islamic Law.’ In Keddie, N. and Baron, B., eds. Women in Middle Eastern History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 74–95. Although Sanders reached different conclusions than those presented here, this was the first study to point out that jurists ‘gendered’ intersex bodies. Scalenghe, S. 2014. ‘The Khunthā .’ In: Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500–1800. New York: Cambridge University Press. A compelling case for considering khunthā as a disability.

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Albucasis. 1973. Kitab al-Tasrif: Albucasis on Surgery and Instruments; A Definitive Edition of the Arabic Text with English Translation and Commentary. Spink, M. and Lewis, G. eds. and trans. Berkeley: University of California Press. Al-Bustā nı̄ , B. 1987. ‘Kh-n-th.’ In: Muh ̄ ̣ıt ̣ al-muh ̄ ̣ıt.̣ Beirut: Maktabat Lubnā n. https://ia800502.us.arch ive.org/6/items/waq71540/71540_text.pdf Al-Ghazzı̄ , N. 1979. Al-Kawā kib al-sā ʾira bi ʿayā n al-miʾa al-ʿā shira. Vol. 1. Beirut: Dā r al-Afā q al-Jadı̄ da. Al-Ḥalabı̄ , I. 1989. Multaqā ʾ al-abh ̣ur. Vol. 1. Beirut: Muʾassasa li-al-risā la. Ali, K. 2011. Imam Shafiʿi. London: Oneworld. Kindle. Ali, K. 2015. Sexual Ethics and Islam. London: Oneworld. Kindle. Alipour, M. 2017a. ‘Islamic Shariʿa Law, Neotraditionalist Muslim Scholars and Transgender Sexreassignment Surgery: A Case Study of Ayatollah Khomeini’s and Sheikh al-Tantawi’s fatwas.’ International Journal of Transgenderism 18, no. 1: 91–103. Al-Marghı̄ nā nı̄ , B. 1990. Al-Hidā ya, with al-ʿAini, Banā ya fı̄ sharh ̣ al-hidā ya. Vol. 12. Beirut: Dā r al-Fikr al-ʿArabı̄ . Al-Muh ̣ibbı̄ , M. 1867. Khulasā t al-athā r fı̄ tarā jim ahl al-qarn al-hā di-ʿashar. Vol. 3. Cairo. http://babel.hathi trust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89038439782. Al-Nuʿmā n, A. 1969. Daʾā ʾim al-islā m wa dhikr al-h ̣alā l wa al-h ̣arā m wa al-qaḍā yā wa al-ih ̣kā m ʿan ahl bayt Rasū l Allā h .Vol. 2. Cairo: Dar al-Maʿā rif. Al-Qudū rı̄ , A. 1953. Le statut personnel en droit musulman hanefite. With Arabic text. Bousquet, G. and Bercher, L., trans. Paris: Recueil Sirey. Al-Qurashi, B. 2014. The Life of Imam ʿAli al-Hadi: Study and Analysis. Qom: Ansariyan. Al-Qurtubı ̣ ̄ , A. 2006. Tafsı̄ r al-Qurtubı ̣ ̄ : Al-jā miʿ li-ah ̣kā m al-Qurʾā n. Al-Turkı̄ , ʿA., ed. Vol. 18. Beirut: Al-Risā la. Al-Ramlı̄ , K. 1857. Al-Fatā wā al-khayriyya li nafʿ al-barriyya. Vol 2 of 2 vols. in 1. Cairo: n.p. Al-Sarakhsı̄ , A. 2001. Kitā b al-mabsū t.̣ Vol. 30. Beirut: Dā r al-Kitā b al-ʿIlmiyya, 103–127. Al-Shā fiʿı̄ . 1987. Risala. Khadduri, M. trans. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society. Al-Thaʿlabı̄ , A. 2002. Al-Kashf wa al-bayā n ʿan tafsı̄ r al-Qurʾā n. Vol. 8. Beirut: Dā r al-Ih ̣yā al-tura ̣ ̄ th al-ʿArabı̄ . Al-Ṭū sı̄ , A. 1970. Tahdhı̄ b al-ah ̣kā m. Vol. 9. Tehran: Dā r al-Kutub al-Islā miyyah. Al-Zabı̄ dı̄ , M. 1969. Tā j al-ʿArū s. Vol. 5. Kuwait: Matba ̣ ʿat al-Ḥukū ma. Aristotle. 1953. Generation of Animals. Peck, A. trans. Rev. and repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Butler, J. 1993. Bodies that Matter. London: Routledge. Calder, N. 1993. Studies in Early Muslim Jurisprudence. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dessouky, N. 2001. ‘Gender Assignment for Children with Intersex Problems: An Egyptian Perspective.’ Egyptian Journal of Surgery 20, no. 2: 499–515. Dreger, A. 1998. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. El-Rouayheb, K. 2005. Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500–1800. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Galen. 1992. On Semen. De Lacy, P., ed. and trans. Berlin: Akademie. Hippocrates. 1978. ‘The Seed.’ I. Lonie, I. trans. In Lloyd, G., ed. Hippocratic Writings. London: Penguin, 317–323. Human Rights Watch. 2017. ‘A History of Intersex Activism and Evolution of Medical Protocol.’ www. hrw.org/video-photos/interactive/2017/07/25/history-intersex-activism-and-evolution-medicalprotocol (accessed 25 June 2018). Ibn Ah ̣mad, A. 1984. Kitā b al-ʿayn. Vol. 4. Qom: Dā r al-Hijra. Ibn al-Ḥimşı̄ , A. 1999. Hawā dith al-zamā n wa-wafayā t al-shuyū kh wa al-aqrā n. Vol. 3. Beirut: al-Maktaba al-ʿAsriyya. Ibn Manz ̣ū r. 1997. ‘Kh-n-th’ and ‘dk-k-r’. Lisā n al-ʿArab. Vol. 2. Beirut: Dā r al-Ṣadr. Ibn Qudā ma, M. 1972. Al-Mughni wa al-sharh ̣ al-kabı̄ r. Vol. 7. Beirut: Dā r al-Kitā b al-cArabi. Ibn Sı̄ nā . 1593. Al-Qanū n fı̄ al-tibb. ̣ Vol. 3, pts. 20–21. Rome: In Typographia Medicca. http://ddc.aub. edu.lb/projects/saab/avicenna/contents.html. Ibn Sı̄ nā . 1987. Al-Qanū n fı̄ al-tibb. ̣ Al-Fash, E. ed. 3rd ed. Vol. 3, pt. 20. N.p.: Muʾassassat ʿIzz al-Dı̄ n. Ibn Ṭulū n. 1962. Mufā kahā t al-khillā n fı̄ hawā dith al-zamā n, tarı̄ kh Misṛ wa al-Shā m. Musṭ afa, ̣ M. ed. Vol. 1. Cairo: Al-Muʾassassa al-Misriyya al-ʿAmma li al-Taʾlı̄ f wa al-Tarjama. ̣ Kuhnle, U., W. Krahl. 2002. ‘The Impact of Culture on Sex Assignment and Gender Development in Intersex Patients.’ Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 45, no. 1: 85–103.

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8 SEXUALITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS Actors and arguments Anissa Hélie

In December 2018, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) celebrated its 70th anniversary. With the United Nations (UN) General Assembly’s endorsement of UDHR in 1948, the international community asserted that every person, everywhere, by virtue of their being human, should be granted a set of rights. This collective articulation of rights – which the UDHR defined as ‘universal, inalienable, interdependent, indivisible and interrelated’ – was nothing short of revolutionary then and has continued to inform various struggles from the mid-20th century onwards. These struggles have been fought in arenas as diverse as anti-colonial efforts and self-determination claims post 1945 to, more recently, women’s rights or disabled people’s rights. Since 1948, countless advocates around the globe have worked, and continue to work, in order to make human rights – both in their focus and impact – more relevant to our evolving world. While certainly not perfect in terms of their implementation, human rights nevertheless constitute a powerful and valuable international framework. The UN system was established to ensure that every person be protected in the enjoyment of their human rights, and in order to equip those seeking redress with tools to hold accountable perpetrators of human rights violations, no matter how powerful these perpetrators may be. Indeed, human rights have enabled people throughout the world to contest discrimination, legitimize their claims and mobilize to demand justice. Human rights defenders have used the UN system creatively, as well as relied on human rights values outside the UN system – leading to great achievements, but also expanding the reach of the human rights framework in the process. Those drafting the UDHR in 1948 were keen to ensure that fundamental human rights be achieved for the widest possible constituencies: ‘without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status’ (UNDHR 1948: Art. 2). Yet, they most likely could not foresee, for example, that trans and intersex people would claim their human rights half a century later, including through using UN mechanisms in innovative ways. A key strength of the human rights system is precisely that it is fluid enough to incorporate the claims of social actors who are starting to organize collectively. It is an evolving framework, shaped by state and non-state actors alike – both those attempting to restrict its reach, and those relying on it to build a world ‘free from discrimination, coercion and violence’.1

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However, human rights abuses continue to be deeply entrenched globally, with people being especially vulnerable on account of their sex and sexuality, gender and gender identity, bodies, class, wealth, ethnicity, religion and a host of other factors. Women and nonconforming people remain particularly at risk, especially where sexual conduct and gender expression are concerned, and despite the fact that many countries formally provide guarantees of gender equality (including, for some, trans and intersex rights). Indeed, while international law asserts states’ obligation to protect both individuals and groups from abuse, state actors regularly criminalize not only victims but also human rights defenders, with women human rights defenders being frequently targeted. This chapter focuses on women from Muslim backgrounds and on their sexual and bodily rights, in recognition of the fact that women are overwhelmingly affected by systemic inequalities, and that sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) remain among the most contested rights. Many commentators assume that sexual control is exercised more severely on women from Muslim communities, but in fact such restrictions apply throughout the world. Three recent examples from North America, Asia and Africa remind us that misogyny, homophobia and impunity are rife in all regions. In the United States, in October 2018, the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court (DAWN 2018) evidenced how little progress had been made – since the time of the Clarence Thomas appointment to that Court in 1991 (Pruitt 2018) – by women seeking to expose sexual violence. In Indonesia, in November 2018, the Supreme Court imposed a six-month prison sentence and a fine on a woman who documented her employer’s consistent sexual harassment (Paddock and Suhartono 2019) – again demonstrating that the highest institutions often fail to uphold women’s claims to equality. In Tunisia, in February 2019, a young man who filed a police complaint for attack and robbery was forced to undergo an anal test, then sentenced to six months in prison for ‘sodomy’ (Ghoshal 2019). However outrageous these cases may seem – with state actors blatantly engaging in victim-blaming – they are representative of injustices that occur daily across the world. In the face of injustices that are so deeply ingrained as to seem immutable, a key question is: how can we defend human rights principles and obtain redress when most national judicial systems are effectively biased? This chapter starts from the premise that international human rights often offer broader protections than national legal frameworks. However, human rights are being challenged across local, national, regional and global fora. The current political climate undermines the values of equality, solidarity and human dignity that are at the core of international human rights and we also witness major national leaders questioning commitments to justice both domestically and internationally. At this juncture, it is all the more necessary to examine some arguments and actions directed against the principles embodied in human rights, as well as the ongoing struggles for their protection and realization. First, I address arguments that are frequently used within and outside Muslim communities against the values of human rights, and especially against the principle of universality. Those arguments often invoke ‘culture’ and ‘Islamic traditions’, and juxtapose West and South in its challenge of the UN system and international agreements. Second, I offer examples of the ways advocates from Muslim contexts have promoted SRHR over the past 25 years. I envisage some advances within the UN system before referring to human rights principles and values as they find meaningful expressions outside the UN system, including as part of progressive interpretations of Islam. By doing so, I intend to show that the efforts deployed by human rights defenders constitute both a recognition that abuses persist on a large scale, as well as a powerful response to the criticisms expressed in in the first section of the chapter.

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It may be worth mentioning here that by sexuality, in this chapter, I refer to power relations, notions and practices that underpin both everyday realities and institutional arrangement of women’s (and men’s) lives. Thus I refer to both gendered hierarchies of and assumptions about female and male sexualities, as well as to the hierarchies and assumptions that regulate heteronormativity. Both aspects of sexuality – female/male distinctions, and hetero/homo distinctions – are embedded in the various international human rights frameworks, UN human rights resolutions and institutions. Both are under continuous attacks from various corners of secular and religious conservative and rightwing political actors, and both are consistently addressed in women’s struggles across the world. It is also worth citing the World Health Organization (WHO) (2010) broad understanding of sexuality, as being ‘influenced by the interaction of biological, psychological, social, economic, political, cultural, ethical, legal, historical and religious and spiritual factors’. Conversely, sexuality is interwoven with countless aspects of our lives. Yet, because our lives are gendered, female bodies and desires are more scrutinized than male bodies and women’s agency constantly restricted by dominant notions of morality or modesty. As a result, women (along with non-conforming people) bear the brunt of punishment imposed by communities and governments for alleged sexual transgressions. A fact already noted in 2002 by the first Special Rapporteur on violence against women, Radhika Coomaraswamy, who pointed that: ‘Women who transgress the boundaries of appropriate sexual behavior are subject to direct violence of the most horrific kind’ and ‘the killing of women with impunity for these transgressions is perhaps the most overt example of the brutal control of female sexuality’ (UN 2002 E/CN.4/ 2002/83:para.100). Most recently, in 2017, the Human Rights Council expressed ‘serious concern that the application of the death penalty for adultery is disproportionately imposed on women’ (UN 2017 A/HRC/36/27: 3).

Criticisms of the human rights framework: challenging universality Despite the fact the HDHR vision is far from realization, over the past three decades, the human rights framework has been dismissed by many state and non-state actors keen to promote the notion of cultural relativism, at the expense of the principle of universality. These attacks have coincided to some extent with the unprecedented organizing around women’s human rights that occurred during, and following, the UN Decade for Women (1976–1985) which created opportunities for women from all over the world to identify issues of common concerns and network for change. It must be noted that the backlash against universality of human rights has been particularly fierce where women’s and LGBTTI2 rights are concerned. I briefly examine here three of the avenues through which human rights opponents operate to promote their conservative political agendas: (1) they undermine the universality principle by constructing human rights as an attack on non-Western cultures, religions and traditions; (2) they attempt to by-pass the UNDHR by proposing alternative frameworks, as is the case with the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights; and (3) various governments of Muslim-majority countries co-opt human rights mechanisms while rejecting gender equality, with the ‘reservations’ to the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) providing a useful example.

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Undermining universality, promoting cultural relativism The current UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, Karima Bennoune (a US citizen of Algerian heritage), remarks that women’s human rights are a key area of tension between human rights advocates and their opponents: As noted in a joint statement by United Nations human rights experts, in June 20173: Women’s rights are facing an alarming backlash in many parts of the world … We need more than ever to protect the fundamental principle that all rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated … Despite this unbreakable principle, upheld in the 1993 Vienna Declaration on human rights, we are witnessing efforts by fundamentalist groups to undermine the foundation on which the whole human rights system is based. Some of these efforts are based on a misuse of culture, including religion and tradition. (UN 2017 A/72/15517) Indeed, advocates of cultural relativism bolster their criticisms by claiming human rights are ‘foreign’ to a given nation, region, culture or tradition. While not all efforts to weaken the universality principle originate from Muslim-majority states, the most blatant opposition in the UN arena is often spearheaded by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). The OIC promotes its conservative agenda by forging alliances across culturo-religious divides (including with the Vatican delegate at the UN, the Holy See, or representatives of the Christian right) and by relying on arguments of national sovereignty or about ‘preserving culture’. Under the guise of cultural rights or religious freedom, conservative and extremist social actors on local, national and international stages, aim at justifying harmful practices, which may be condoned by religion or culture, and which disproportionately affect women. Proponents of the Muslim right deploy such arguments as part of a two-fold strategy: first, they construct women’s human rights as foreign to all and any Muslim context – hence delegitimizing feminist aspirations arising from their own communities; second, they posit culture and traditions as static, hence delegitimizing any progressive attempt to promote societal change. Such arguments should be scrutinized by critically interrogating whose interests such claims serve, and by seeking responses formulated by feminist voices (past and present) originating from Muslim contexts. Various scholars have documented histories of women’s activism in Muslim contexts (Badran and Cook 1990; Mernissi 1994), with Pakistani sociologist and former UN Special Rapporteur, Farida Shaheed (2011a: xi, xiii, xxxiii), highlighting women’s struggles from the 8th to the mid-20th centuries in order to challenge the common misconception that feminism originated in the West: There is a dangerous myth, which must be challenged, debunked, and laid to rest. [It] suggests that women’s struggles for rights are alien to societies that have embraced Islam … this myth enjoys a surprising degree of credibility not merely outside but also within Muslim contexts … While contemporary concepts of ‘universal human rights’ are a distinctly 20th century development, there is ample evidence of women’s initiatives to promote or defend rights throughout history, even if the terminology as well as the understanding of rights differed … Labelling all rights discourses and attendant actions as inherently ‘western’, alien and of the 133

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Other, is an insidious way of suppressing women’s demands for rights and justice … [Yet] the strong and determined women, engaged in the struggle for women’s rights, emerging from the pages of history …, effectively refute the myth of the silent, cloistered, and acquiescent women of popular imagination. Historical examples of women’s rights advocates from Muslim backgrounds undermine conservative suggestions that cultures are fixed and frozen in time. Thoraya Obaid (2008), a Saudi UN advocate for global women’s rights,4 also notes: Culture is created by people, and people can change culture … Communities have to look at their cultural values and practices and determine whether they impede or promote the realization of human rights. Then, they can build on the positive and change the negative. Obaid recognizes that ‘values and practices that infringe human rights can be found in all cultures’ and advocates for ‘culturally sensitive approach’ that ‘encourages change from within’. But she warns that: ‘Cultural sensitivity and engagement do not mean acceptance of harmful traditional practices, or a free pass for human rights abuses’ – far from it. Understanding cultural realities can reveal the most effective ways to challenge harmful practices and promote human rights. Citing an example of female genital mutilation (FGM), she explains: ‘This harmful practice carries significant cultural meaning – it is seen as part of a girl’s transition to womanhood. Today, we are working with community leaders to keep the celebratory aspects of the tradition and remove the harmful aspect of cutting’. Shaheed (2011b: 2–3), former UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, points at structural power hierarchies when she deplores that ‘Women rarely – if ever – define the dominant culture, because they do not have the economic, social or political power to do so’. Hence, Shaheed calls for women to be recognized as active agents of culture ‘on an equal basis with men’, asserting that ‘Women have the right to access, participate in and contribute to all aspects of cultural life’, as well as to ‘actively engage in identifying and interpreting cultural heritage and deciding which cultural traditions, values or practices are to be kept intact, modified or discarded’ (UN 2012 A/67/287). She also reminds us that ‘No society ever has a singular culture. Each society, and every community, has both a dominant culture and multiple subaltern cultures’ (Shaheed 2011b: 3). Shaheed’s remark, of course, also applies to dominant sexual culture. Scott Long (2005: 2) – a pioneering sexual rights advocate, who researched the persecution of Egyptian men accused of same-sex conduct – pointed, over a decade ago, to the larger issues that fight against universal application of sexual rights target: A spectre is stalking the arenas where human rights activists work … The forces in question define themselves most often by what they claim to defend – and that shifts from time to time and territory to territory: ‘culture,’ ‘tradition,’ ‘values,’ or ‘religion.’ What they share is a common target: sexual rights and sexual freedoms. These are most often represented by women’s reproductive rights, the assault on which continues. The most vividly drawn and violently reviled enemy typically is homosexuality. ‘Gay and lesbian rights,’ the dignity of people with different desires, the basic principle of non-discrimination based on sexual orientation: all these are painted as incompatible with fundamental values, even with humanity itself. The target is chosen with passion, but also precision and care. Movements for the rights 134

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of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender people, along with movements that assert sexual rights more generally, are arguably the most vulnerable edge of the human rights movement. In country after country they are easy to defame and discredit. But the attack on them also opens space for attacking human rights principles themselves – as not universal but ‘foreign,’ as not protectors of diversity but threats to sovereignty, and as carriers of cultural perversion. His arguments remind us that giving up the struggle for universality of one set of rights – such as sexual rights – endangers the values of all rights. The next example shows this clearly.

By-passing: the Cairo Declaration In 1990, conservative Muslim-majority countries joined to promote the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights. This initiative constitutes a deliberate challenge to the universality of human rights, and an attempt to delegitimize international human rights principles and institutions (Mayer 1994). The Cairo Declaration subjects human rights to be subordinated to shariʿa – i.e. Muslim jurisprudence – by positing shariʿa as ‘the only source of reference’. This is problematic on at least two counts. First, it betrays a common misconception regarding shariʿa, by ignoring the fact there is no homogeneous interpretation of Muslim laws which apply uniformly across Muslim-majority nations. In other words, there is no consensus among religious scholars regarding the ‘correct’ interpretation of shariʿa. In part because Islam has, over time, merged with local cultures and thus its postulates, scriptures and prescriptions are interpreted in a number of ways, differing according to contexts. To take one example among many, proponents of the Cairo Declaration would be hard pressed to identify one single ‘shariʿaapproved’ approach related to abortion. Using legal data from 42 Muslim countries, I highlighted the wide range of prescriptions regarding abortion – ranging from complete prohibition to allowing abortion for various reasons: either to preserve the woman’s mental or physical health, or on the basis of socio-economic factors, or even without any restriction, i.e. on request (Hélie 2012a). Second, proponents of the Cairo Declaration insist on religion being central to all individuals of Muslim heritage. This is a familiar trope, challenged by sociologist Maxime Rodinson (2002: 60) almost 50 years ago, when he denounced the essentialist approach to Muslim societies exemplified by the myth of homo islamicus: In the 19th century, the Oriental became something quite separate, sealed off in his own specificity … This is the origin of the homo islamicus, a notion widely accepted even today. [S]cholars believed that they could deduce the characteristics of the ‘Muslim mind,’ based on the assumption that all Muslims, from the rise of Islam until the present, were constrained to think and believe and act within the rigid limits set by the essential character of the civilisation to which they belonged – the ‘essential character’ here being Islam. Despite widespread claims positing Islam as the key marker of identity in Muslim communities, religion is far from being the only parameter impacting norms and practices (gendered, sexual or otherwise) in Muslim communities. Palestinian-American legal scholar Abu-Odeh (2017: 7) warns us that ‘turning the “Muslim” – a complex social being – into 135

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a homo Islamicus – a bearer of identity – is an islamist5 project’. Whether deployed within or outside the UN arena, it is clearly a political project promoted by the Muslim right. The insistence on a presumed ubiquitous relevance of religion which transcends borders and centuries, as well as race, class and gender – has direct implications for women, including their ability to enjoy bodily and sexual rights. Despite the diverse ways Islam is interpreted, legislated and practiced, the policing of sexuality is often justified through discourses of moral codes, cultural ‘authenticity’ and religion. In Muslim communities around the world, conservative forces and actors linked to the religious right rely on selective interpretations of Islam to oppose sexual diversity and gender equality. (Hélie 2012b: 3) Thus, understanding the (cultural, political, religious) diversity in ideas, everyday and legal practices, jurisprudence and contexts that exist among, and within, Muslim contexts is central to debunking arguments about the specificities of Islam as a religion that allegedly prohibits the universality of human rights.

Co-opting human rights: implications of ‘reservations’ to CEDAW The idea that ‘local cultures’ are inimical to universality of human rights (and hence should not be interfered with), and that Islam is the over-determining force in the lives of all people of Muslim descent, everywhere, are not promoted just by conservative or islamist forces. They are also a staple of Western right-wing politics, and sadly, also of many liberal and left-wing actors. Some Western liberal actors fall into the trap of supporting conservative, even extremist, constituencies because they believe their claims that gender hierarchies and discrimination are acceptable in Muslim countries and communities. Ironically, it is in the name of respect for other cultures and religions that such actors help legitimize opponents of women’s and LGBTTI rights. By so doing, they bolster the (mis)use of religion within the UN arena to promote political agendas that clearly undermine human rights values. Nowhere is this blindness clearer than in the case of religion-based reservations to the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). While it is worth noting that (among just a handful of countries) the USA has not yet ratified CEDAW, most Muslim-majority countries have – yet many undermine the Convention’s very spirit by introducing ‘reservations’, in other words by limiting its applicability. For example, Algeria, where Islam is the state religion, ratified CEDAW in 1996 but attached reservations to: Article 2 (general goal of tackling violence against women); Article 15(4) (freedom of movement or residence); and Article 16 (marital and family life) on the basis that these provisions contradict the national Family Code, itself inspired by a restrictive interpretation of Islam. Those ‘reservations’ to key CEDAW provisions face strong opposition from Algerian women’s groups and several discriminatory laws have been amended,6 although a long struggle against them still remains. However, the very fact that UN institutions tolerate governments paying lip service to human rights in general while rejecting those pertaining to women, thus eviscerating international instruments from their very meaning, raises serious accountability questions (Mayer 1996; Musawah 2011, on religion-based reservations to CEDAW). 136

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Outside the UN, too, some Western-based human rights and left organizations endorse islamist activists whose ideologies are antithetical to human rights (Tax 2012: 28–29, 55, 67–69). By doing so, they become complicit to a wide range of abuses justified on grounds of religion or culture, and undermine the work of local human rights defenders. Further, whether UN actors or mainstream human rights groups, these liberal entities participate in legitimizing a trend that feminists from Muslim backgrounds have denounced since the late 1990s, i.e. the shrinking spaces for secular politics. Interestingly, this same trend is noted again in locale as diverse as the UK and Israel, with British activist and author Pragna Patel (2008) deploring that: Civil society is actively encouraged to organize around exclusive religious identities, and religious bodies are encouraged to take over spaces once occupied by progressive secular groups and, indeed, by a secular welfare state. In the process, a complex web of social, political, and cultural processes are reduced by both state and community leaders into purely religious values, while concepts of human rights, equality and discrimination are turned on their head. For Israeli professor of constitutional law and religion-state relations Gila Stopler (2017: 474), the issue is widespread: ‘In recent years, many countries are experiencing a process of de-privatization of religion in which religions seek to strengthen their power and status in the public sphere as well as to gain more authority over their own adherents’. Indeed, reservations to CEDAW appear linked to a broader political agenda.

Summary Previous criticisms levied against the human rights system were primarily politically motivated, i.e. linked to attempts to undermine the universality principle. But one criticism – centering on who lectures whom about their human rights records – points to the power dynamics being levelled on a global scale and to the role played by discourses about human rights. There is no denying that human rights can be used, when politically expedient, to assert political dominance, as was seen when Laura Bush helped legitimize the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan by casting it as a ‘fight for the rights and dignity of [Afghan] women’. The deployment of human rights discourse as a tool of domination is clearly a threat to human rights values, and to women’s human rights in particular, especially given that many Westerners have, since colonial times, associated Islam with the subjugation of women, and stereotyped Muslim men as oppressive and Muslim women as submissive. The discursive constructions of a threatening, sexist and homophobic Islam – be it through discourses of ‘saving Muslim women’ or homonationalism – only add fuel to the backlash against human rights. As (former UN Special Rapporteur) Coomaraswamy points out: The fight to eradicate certain cultural practices that are violent to women is often made difficult by what may be termed ‘the arrogant gaze’ of the outsider. Many societies feel that the campaign to fight cultural practices if often undertaken in a way as to make the third world appear as the primitive ‘other,’ denying dignity and respect towards its people. (UN 2003 E/CN.4/2003/75) 137

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Noting the ‘message propagated by human rights groups and the media [asserting that] Muslim women need to be rescued’, anthropology professor Abu-Lughod (2002) denounces ‘the resonances of contemporary discourses on equality, freedom, and rights with earlier colonial and missionary rhetoric on Muslim women’. She argues against the impulse to ‘save’ Muslim women, and points at ‘the superiority it implies and the violence it would entail’. Her argument can be extended to the urge to ‘save’ Muslim lesbians or trans women: they may welcome external solidarity but they can think and save themselves, and have been engaged in many struggles for self-determination. Yet – despite their deployment in strategically hypocritical, geopolitical and domestic right-wing schemes – human rights offer the only international forum whose aim is to hold states accountable for upholding and protecting both individual and collective rights. However imperfect, human rights can only be what social actors make of it. As shown in the next section, many harmful practices and discriminatory legal provisions in Muslim countries and communities have been successfully challenged by local advocates using the human rights framework, often struggling against powerful state and non-state actors.

Promoting SRHR: global stages and local struggles In many contexts, women’s demands for autonomous decision-making about reproductive rights and sexuality – including challenges to heteronormativity – are met with strong opposition, demonstrating that sexual repression is not only acceptable but also enforced through various coercive measures. However, recent mobilizations in favour of sexuality, reproduction and gender-related rights have led to increased protections in the SRHR field, as articulated in various UN instruments (including at regional level7). While not all UN documents are binding, they provide necessary guidelines upon which human rights defenders can build to improve regional and national legal frameworks.

Significant advances on global stages Given this chapter’s limited length, only a few ground-breaking examples can be mentioned here and, reflecting back on my over three decades of engagement with SRHR advocacy, I can identify three defining trends at the international level. These trends, which I briefly address, include: the strengthening of women’s human rights movements; the emergence of sexual and bodily rights advocacy; and the recognition of the roles played by non-state actors. I start with the (second) UN World Conference on Human Rights (WCHR), held in 1993 in Vienna, where an unprecedented, bottom-up, global campaigning and networking effort forced the WCHR to finally, officially recognize women’s human rights. Successful international feminism mobilization, under the banner ‘Women’s Rights are Human Rights’, addressed the UN failure to acknowledge women or to recognize any specific gender aspects of human rights in its resolution mandating the holding of a WCHR (Bunch and Reilly 1994). A worldwide petition called upon the UN to ‘comprehensively address women’s human rights at every level of its proceedings’, and demanded that ‘gender violence be recognized as a violation of human rights requiring immediate action’. The petition gathered nearly half a million signatures (including fingerprints from illiterate women!) from 124 countries – before the generalization of internet and online petitions. It was translated into 24 languages and sponsored by over 1,000 groups, including advocates mobilizing across Muslim contexts to ensure that feminist voices from Muslim communities would 138

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provide testimonies to the Tribunal, also held in Vienna. Overall, these combined efforts were crucial in ensuring that the UN appointed, in 1994, its first Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences. Around the same time, another major development took place: in 1992, homosexuality ceased to be listed as a disease by the UN WHO. Transsexuality remained stigmatized for another 25 years but, as of 2018, is no longer considered a mental illness by the WHO. Meanwhile, in 2001, six UN Independent Experts and Special Rapporteurs issued a joint statement urging activists in LGBT8 circles to assist with documenting violations – an unprecedented move at the time. A decade later, in 2012, the UN Human Rights Council hosted its first-ever high-level panel on violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI)9. Then Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon delivered a pioneering message: Like many of my generation, I did not grow up talking about these issues. But I learned to speak out because lives are at stake – and because it is our duty, under the United Nations Charter, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to protect the rights of everyone, everywhere … To those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, let me say, you are not alone … Any attack on you is an attack on the universal values the United Nations and I have sworn to defend and uphold. Today, I stand with you, and I call upon all countries and people to stand with you, too. A historic shift is under way. More states see the gravity of the problem … We must tackle the violence, decriminalize consensual same-sex relationships, ban discrimination and educate the public … I count on this Council and all people of conscience to make this happen. The time has come. (UN 2012 SG/SM/14145-HRC/13) How controversial these issues remain at the UN was evidenced when, during the Secretary-General’s speech, delegates from the OIC and various African countries staged a walk out. Nevertheless, ‘the time had come’: in 2015, a second UN SOGI report alerted to a pattern of ‘pervasive, violent abuse, harassment and discrimination affecting LGBT and intersex persons in all regions’ and insisted that ‘States have well-established obligations to respect, protect and fulfil the human rights of all persons within their jurisdiction, including LGBT and intersex persons’ (UN 2015 A/HRC/29/23: 20, 5). In 2016, the first Independent Expert on SOGI was appointed, marking an important milestone in the LGBTTI struggle. Another crucial step was achieved in UN circles when threats to women’s human rights posed by non-state actors were recognized. Historically, human rights had been statefocused, because the UN system privileged political rights over economic, social and cultural rights. But, thanks to the painstaking work of documenting abuse (often carried out by civil society groups), violations by family members, employers, religious and community leaders, private companies, militias or armed groups, etc. became impossible to ignore. Holding private actors accountable proved key for safeguarding women’s SRHR. An example of early such documentation is a ‘shadow report’ submitted in 1999 to the CEDAW Committee by US feminist lawyers and the International Solidarity Network Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML/IWHRLC 2000: 5–6, 15, 18). It called attention to a grave threat facing Algerian women in the 1990s: islamist armed groups. These non-state actors terrorized civilians, targeting women especially through non-judicial killings and widespread sexual slavery. Authors deplored the human rights system’s ‘focus 139

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on … violations by the state’ leading ‘the international community [to] largely ignore the fundamentalist campaign of violence and atrocities.’ They insisted that ‘It is particularly urgent that this [CEDAW] Committee examine the impact of the fundamentalist insurgency’ given that ‘a cornerstone of the fundamentalist agenda is the imposition of genderapartheid’ and that Algerian women endure ‘rape, torture … including burnings, beatings and the mutilation of breasts and genitals’. The three trends identified here clearly result from ongoing efforts deployed by coalitions of women and gender rights activists. Such advances have been of immense importance for many regional coalitions involving advocates from Muslim contexts (such as the Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies, Maghreb Egalité 9510 and many more). Their battles have been hard-fought – and remain a work in progress – but demonstrate the power of solidarity forged by like-minded human rights defenders across religious, cultural and ethnic boundaries.

Upholding human rights principles, localizing women’s human rights Activists are well aware that UN-based work is fuelled by local resistance against abuse. Former head of Amnesty International’s Gender Unit, Gita Sahgal (2004), highlighted the synergy between human rights advocacy at the international and domestic levels. Referring specifically to violence against women, she noted: The human rights framework assists our [local] work. It gives us a set of principles to act upon. Our work informs the human rights framework internationally as we are in turn informed by it, in the cases we bring to courts, when using CEDAW or other human rights tools. It is a two-way street. It is therefore crucial to recognize the expertise and agency of local actors: they must be given precedence in terms of identifying the most pressing issues and designing the strategies they see most fit. In polarized environments, using UN mechanisms may expose activists to increased pressure (from the authorities or civil society opponents). Nevertheless, where explicit references to the UN system appear too risky, people draw inspiration from human rights principles. I bring here examples, from different regions, of local struggles that have claimed SRHR against state and non-state actors in communities where ‘culture’ and ‘Islam’ have been put forward as justifications for restrictions and/or violations of those rights. In Chad in 1995, film director Zara Yacoub was facing threats as well as a fatwa, because her film11 depicted an FGM scene and was deemed blasphemous by the imam of the Grand Mosque of Ndjamena. An association, the Union of Young Chadian Muslims, declared the film was ‘against good morals, human values and divine law’. Once alerted, WLUML launched an Alert for Action (i.e. urgent mobilization to try uphold the human rights of an individual at risk). In October 1995, the Alert was circulated to WLUML’s contacts, with a focus on African and Muslim countries. It emphasized that Yacoub had simply ‘exercised her right to freedom of expression, one of the fundamental human rights recognized by the UN and the Constitution of the Republic of Chad’ and appealed to the government to protect Yacoub’s work because it upheld the rights of young women and girls potentially subjected to FGM. This targeted international support was ultimately ‘very effective’, according to Yacoub’s subsequent report: while ‘there was no official reaction’, she no longer felt the need to take security precautions given that ‘the President of the Republic told the imam to calm down and forget his case’.12 140

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This example from 1995 demonstrates that feminists from Muslim contexts have endorsed and used human rights for decades. They continue to do so through countless initiatives, adapting human rights values to their environments, whether battling sexual harassment and assault in Egypt (Nazra 2014), or creating women-friendly spaces in Pakistan as a way to address gender-based violence in the aftermath of environmental disasters (Shirkat Gah 2011). Besides cases where the struggles for human rights are triggered directly by violations of SRHR, there are other ways people in Muslim communities contribute to the recognition of sexual rights. One of those is research. Researchers have made sexuality more visible by unearthing evidence of a less sexually repressive past. For example academics, such as Palestinian scholar of gender and sexuality Samar Habib (2007), have written about homoeroticism and same-sex practices previously suppressed by mainstream historians (see also Ali 2006; Kugle 2010). Others link academia and documentation of current violations – such as the conference on ‘Prosecuting crimes committed by ISIS against women and LGBT persons’, held in New York in 2017 and involving the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda. While academic works are not necessarily accessible to those who most need this knowledge, numerous local non-governmental organizations are popularizing human rights values, including by producing comic books or short videos on social media. For example, since 2017 IraQueer offers short online (Arabic/Kurdish) videos aimed at youth which, it is claimed, have reached over 150,000 people. Topics include denouncing extra-judicial killings of LGBTTI Iraqis, but also reconciling one’s religion and sexuality, as illustrated in the following dialogue: I believe in God! But being Muslim and a lesbian is against each other. No it’s not! Being Muslim is about your relationship with God. Being a lesbian is about having feelings for someone else. Religion should be a source of peace and love, not a source of terror and fear. Real Muslims are the ones who promote peace.13 Another strategy for upholding SRHR within Muslim communities and resisting discourses positing Islam and human rights as incompatible are feminist and gay-friendly interpretations of Islam, as well as highlighting recognition of human right values in religious texts. There are nowadays several openly gay imams – such as imam Hendricks (2010: 34, 32), leader of the Inner Circle (a South African queer Muslim organization), who rejects ‘patriarchal views on gender and masculinity’ and stresses ‘the Quran’s inclusive nature which promotes equality and freedom of choice’. Other imams supportive of women’s and LGBTII rights include Daayiee Abdullah, who celebrates same-sex marriages in the US, renowned US scholar amina wadud and Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed, of French-Algerian descent. Creating community remains key: over the past 15 years, worship places have sprouted that are more women and LGBTTI friendly, for example, the gender-equal Unity Mosques promoted in Canada, since 2003, and in the US, or the feminist-centred Inclusive Mosque Initiative, operating since 2012 in the UK, with affiliates in Malaysia, Switzerland and Pakistan. Meanwhile, Indonesian theologian Musdah Mulia (2009: 1), known for her opposition to polygamy and whose deep knowledge of Muslim jurisprudence informs her analysis, upholds values of equality and non-discrimination in ways that embrace the broadest constituencies:

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We must be uncompromising and passionate in our efforts to decrease stigma and improve access to service, to increase recognition of sexuality as a positive aspect of human life. Marginalized groups such as young people, transgender people, sex workers, people who are gay, lesbian or bisexual, child brides and girl mothers particularly need our compassion. Too often denied, and too long neglected, sexual rights deserve our attention and priority. Whether privileging strategies within or outside a religious framework, initiatives promoting SRHR in Muslim contexts are too numerous to name – an indication that local activists are translating gains at the international level into domestic settings, initiating debates within civil society and developing strategies grounded in their political realities. Conversely, local advocates remain instrumental in pressing UN institutions and mainstream human rights organizations to address violations faced by women, LGBTTI people or sex workers. Hence, human rights-affirming efforts at local, national, regional and international levels are complementary and offer promising responses to widespread gender discrimination.

To each according to hirs (consensual) desires? In conclusion, both a celebratory note and a word of caution are in order. First, the broadening of SRHR over the past three decades is indeed worth celebrating. A 1994 statement by the network Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML 1994: 3) acknowledged the crucial need to address sexuality: Recognizing the important role that sexuality can play in the construction of self, we see how the silence that envelops these questions ultimately creates for us, as for women elsewhere, true barriers that prevent our full enjoyment of human rights and development as human beings. Clearly, 25 years later – and thanks to the efforts of dedicated advocates within and outside the UN – the silence has been broken in many arenas previously mute on ‘these questions’. Yet, we must remain alert for the principle that human rights apply to all humans – no matter their sex, gender, body, gender expression, sexual orientation, health, wealth or status – to become a reality. Threats to women’s human rights are ongoing and there is a great need to resist the rise of identity politics, the assaults on universality and states’ accommodation of religion (including in diaspora communities, see Ashe and Hélie 2014). These serious challenges can be only met through building strong coalitions across our differences. As suggested by Tax (2012: 105): ‘How about recognizing that we all face an emerging conservative front in which Washington and the Muslim Brotherhood are more likely to be allies than adversaries, and human rights are no concern to either?’ In this difficult context, the strength of our solidarity will be invaluable.

Notes 1 As expressed in relation to ‘decisions related to reproduction’ in the ICPD Programme of Action. 1994. A/CONF.171/13, Para. 7.3. 2 LGBTTI: acronym referring to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual and intersex people. 3 Bennoune, in her July 2017 report, refers to ‘UN experts call for resistance as battle for women’s rights intensifies’ (28 June 2017).

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4 Obaid’s decades-long UN career led her to serve as the UN Population Fund under-secretary general and executive director from 2001 to 2010. 5 It is necessary to distinguish between the terms Muslim (people, believers in Islam), Islamic (that pertains to religion) and islamist (an ultra-conservative political stance). 6 The revised Family Code lifted some provisions that contradicted CEDAW, e.g. duty of obedience by wife to husband was deleted while the transmission of nationality via mothers is allowed. 7 Regional human rights instruments can offer robust protections. A relevant example being the Maputo Plan of Action 2016–2030 for the Operationalisation of the Continental Policy Framework For Sexual and Reproductive Health And Rights. The African Union Commission. 8 Note that the category had not yet expanded to englobe LGBTTI people. 9 Proof of the evolving nature of human rights debates, the initial focus was on ‘sexual orientation’ (SO), followed by the inclusion of ‘gender identity’ (GI). This is currently being expanded by intersex activists to include issues of sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sexual characteristics (SOGIESC). 10 Since its inception in 1991, the Collectif 95 Maghreb-Egalité has grown into a network of over 80 organizations. A publication series, the Guide (2003), was developed to ‘respond to those who justify discrimination against women based on Islam’; with each Guide detailing ‘the current law, followed by religious, human rights, sociological, and domestic legal arguments for reform supported by relevant data’. https://learningpartnership.org/resource/guide-equality-family-maghreb-transla tion-series-book-english 11 Yacoub’s film was entitled ‘Dilemne au Feminin’ (‘Feminine Dilemna’). It is worth noting that the ten-year-old actress was also threatened and her ability to attend school was affected. 12 Both WLUML Alert and Yacoub’s letter thanking WLUML for mobilizing international support was, circa 2005, part of WLUML archives, to which the author had access. 13 Iraqueer, 2mns, www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpShtgafZ2g&list=PLVmqDH3ec6DqL0EF2C_qVKFRRlDqYp9k

Further reading ARROW for Change. (2017). ‘Intersections: The Politicisation of Religion and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights’. 23:1. http://arrow.org.my/publication/afc-religion-srhr/. This offers useful activist references and a feminist, intersectional, transnational glimpse at concrete struggles for SRHR in the Asian region, highlighting the threats posed by religious extremism. Justice for Iran/6Rang. (2014). Diagnosing Identities, Wounding Bodies – Medical Abuses and Other Human Rights Violations against Lesbian, Gay and Transgender People in Iran. JFI and 6Rang. This in-depth report into the pressures facing Iranian LGBTTI people provides a grounded critique of policies that criminalizes cross-dressing and adult consensual same-sex relations while encouraging sex reassignments surgeries. Mir-Hosseini, Z. and Hamzić, V. (2010). Control and Sexuality – The Revival of Zina Laws in Muslim Contexts. London: WLUML. Laws criminalizing zina (loosely referring to sexual relations outside marriage) are examined from a historical and cross-cultural perspective, as part of a feminist enquiry into the use of culture and religion to restrict gender justice. Musawah. (2011). CEDAW and Muslim Family Laws: In Search of Common Ground. Sisters in Islam: Petaling Jaya. www.musawah.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/CEDAW-MuslimFamilyLaws_En. pdf. Based on extensive reviews of governmental reports before the CEDAW Committee (2005–2010), this research critically examines discriminatory provisions and patriarchal justifications for states’ failure to promote gender equality while formulating more egalitarian proposals for Muslim women.

References Abu-Lughod, L. (2002). ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others’. American Anthropologist, 104:3, pp. 783–790. Abu-Odeh, L. (2017). ‘Who Cares about Islamic Law?’. Al-Jumhuriya. 20 June. Ali, K. (2006). Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur'an, Hadith and Jurisprudence, Oxford: Oneworld Publications.

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Anissa Hélie Ashe, M. and Hélie, A. (2014). ‘Realities of Religio-Legalism: Religious Courts and Women’s Rights in Canada, UK, and US’. UC Davis Journal of International Law & Policy, 20:2, pp. 139–209. Badran, M. and Cook, M. (eds.), (1990). Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana Uni. Press. Bunch, C. and Reilly, N. (1994). Demanding Accountability: The Global Campaign and Vienna Tribunal for Women’s Human Rights. CWGL/UNIFEM, NY/NJ. www.cwgl.rutgers.edu/docman/coalition-build ing-publications/283-demand-accountability/file DAWN. (2018). ‘Kavanaugh Sworn in as US Supreme Court Justice as Protesters Chant Outside’. Oct. 7. www.dawn.com/news/1437426 Ghoshal, N. (2019). ‘Victim Lands Behind Bars in Tunisia’. Human Rights Watch. [Online] 13th Feb. www.hrw.org/news/2019/02/13/victim-lands-behind-bars-tunisia [Accessed 14/02/19]. Habib, S. (2007). Female Homosexuality in the Middle East: Histories and Representations. New York: Routledge. Hélie, A. (2012a). ‘The Politics of Abortion Policy in the Heterogeneous “Muslim World”’. Ravaghavan, C. and Levine, J. (eds.), Self-Determination and Women’s Rights in Muslim Societies. Boston: Brandeis University Press, pp. 3–36. Hélie, A. (2012b). ‘Introduction: Policing Gender, Sexuality and ‘Muslimness’’. Hélie, A. and Hoodfar, H. (eds.), Sexuality in Muslim Contexts: Restrictions and Resistance. London: ZED Books, pp. 1–14. Hendricks, M. (2010). ‘Islamic texts: A source of acceptance of queer individuals into mainstream Muslim society’, Equal Rights Review, 5, pp. 31–51. www.equalrightstrust.org/ertdocumentbank/ muhsin.pdf [Accessed 10/11/18]. Kugle, S. S. (2010). Homosexuality in Islam: Critical Reflection on Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims, Oxford: Oneworld Publications. Long, S. (2005). ‘Anatomy of a Backlash: Sexuality and the ‘Cultural’ War on Human Rights’. Human Rights Watch. www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k5/anatomy/anatomy.pdf Mayer, A. E. (1994). ‘Universal Versus Islamic Human Rights: A Clash of Cultures or a Clash with a Construct?’. Michigan Journal of International Law, 15:307. https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjil/ vol15/iss2/1 Mayer, A. E. (1996). ‘Cultural Particularism as a Bar to Women’s Rights: Reflections on the Middle Eastern Experience’. WLUML Dossier, 16, pp. 21–32. http://wluml.org/english/pubsfulltxt.shtml? cmd%5B87%5D=i-87-3204. Mernissi, F. (1994). Hidden from History: The Forgotten Queens of Islam. Lahore: ASR publications. Musdah Mulia, S. (2009). ‘Understanding LGBT Issues in Islam – Promoting the Appreciation of Human Dignity’. 2nd CSBR Sexuality Institute Proceedings. Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies. (11-18 Sep.). Nazra for Feminist Studies. (2014). ‘‘Qanun Nashaz’ – A Campaign on the Legal Issues Associated with Violence against Women in Both Public and Private Spheres’. Nazra Position paper, Cairo. http:// nazra.org/en/node/388 Obaid, T. (2008). ‘The State of the World Population 2008’. The United Nations Population Fund. November. www.raonline.ch/pages/bt/ecdu/bt_ecostats002.html Paddock, R. C. and Suhartono, M. (2019). ‘She Recorded Her Boss’s Lewd Call. Guess Who Went to Jail?’. New York Times. [Online] 12th Jan. www.nytimes.com/2019/01/12/world/asia/indonesiasexual-harassment.html [Accessed 15/1/2019]. Patel, P. (2008). ‘Defending Secular Spaces’. New Stateman, 4 August, n.p. www.newstatesman.com/ukpolitics/2008/08/religious-state-secular Pruitt, S. (2018). ‘How Anita Hill’s Testimony Made America Cringe—And Change’. History, Sep. 26. www.history.com/news/anita-hill-confirmation-hearings-impact.html Rodinson, M. (2002). Europe and the Mystique of Islam. London: I.B. Tauris. Sahgal, G. (2004). ‘Raising Standards to Tackle Violence against Black and Minority Women’. Southall Black Sisters conference. London, (15 Nov.). Shaheed, F. (2011a). Great Ancestors: Women Claiming Rights in Muslim Contexts. Karachi: Oxford University Press. Shaheed, F. (2011b). ‘Cultures, Traditions and Violence against Women: Human Rights Challenges’. Geneva, Panel March 7 (convened by IWRAW AP, PLD, AWAID, VNOC). Shirkat Gah. (2011). Keeping Adrift: Documenting Best Practices for Addressing Gender Based Violence from the Platform of Women Friendly Spaces. Lahore: SG.

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9 MIXITÉ, GENDER DIFFERENCE, AND THE POLITICS OF ISLAM IN FRANCE AFTER THE HEADSCARF BAN Kirsten Wesselhoeft

The so-called ‘Muslim question’ looms large in French public discourse and policymaking (Hajjat and Mohammed 2013). Islam is regularly invoked as a social problem to be solved. It is used as an explanatory factor for social segregation, a justification for policing, suspicion, and discrimination, and as a way of indexing myriad forms of difference: not simply of religion, but of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. Islam forms the grounding for what many critics have termed ‘respectable racism’ – exclusionary and discriminatory views that are embraced in polite society because of their justification through culture and religion rather than phenotype (Bouamama 2004; Wolfreys 2018). In these discourses, Islam is invariably gendered in ways that draw on longstanding Orientalist and colonial anxieties and fantasies about virile men and submissive women. Two figures stand out most prominently. On the one hand, there is the ‘urban youth’, imagined as Arab or Black, hypermasculine, sexist, and dangerous, whether through his delinquency or through his piety. His feminine counterpart is the ‘veiled young woman’, imagined as alienated from her femininity by virtue of the patriarchal culture to which she has been subjected, beset by false consciousness, aggressive in the political intrusion of her visible difference into French space, and yet potentially available for liberation through French gender norms (Guénif-Souilamas 2006). Both of these characters are framed as ‘difficult’ subjects who pose real threats to ‘public order’. They are placed outside the bounds of civility and thus of cultural citizenship. In an effort to tame to these unruly Muslim subjects, correct performance of French norms of gender difference and sexual expression has become the central component of the racial project of integration in France (Amiraux 2008). The racial project of integration is a component of the broader ‘French racial project’ (Beaman 2017). It refers to the pedagogical efforts of political elites to articulate and impose a ‘French way of life’, targeted at racial and ethnic minorities but not at white immigrants, for example. This conceptualization of the French way of life goes beyond canonical Republican values of freedom, equality, and solidarity to encompass ‘consumer citizenship’. Authentic Frenchness is claimed to

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be marked by particular cultural practices, foods, media, leisure activities, articles of clothing, and gendered habits of embodiment and interaction. Analogous political patterns can be observed in many Western multicultural societies. Whether in the United States, the Netherlands, or Germany, public discourse on Islam is likewise often inflammatory, nationalist, and motivated by gendered anxieties. And yet, France retains a certain specificity with respect to public attitudes towards Muslim women’s modest dress, especially but not only the Islamic headscarf or hijab. Since the 1990s, there has been an overwhelming focus in French culture on the headscarf, and on other forms of modest dress ranging from the face veil (niqab) to maxi skirts. Observers from other countries, especially the United States, often profess smug bafflement at this particular French preoccupation as a way of claiming liberal innocence and openmindedness, despite the long record of Islamophobic policymaking and sentiment in the United States. Correspondingly, French Muslims sometimes idealize the ‘openness’ to religion that they imagine or experience in Anglophone societies where, despite widespread Islamophobia, modest dress produces somewhat less of a political spectacle. The difference, many French and American observers say, is laïcité – a term that is often taken, by its partisans and its critics alike, to be so uniquely French as to be untranslatable. Laïcité, the French term for secularism, refers to ‘the separation of church and state through the state’s protection of individuals from the claims of religion’ (Scott 2007: 15), and carries an emphasis on state blindness to citizens’ religious identities, as opposed to the American secular emphasis on free religious expression and the protection of religion from government interference or preference. In France, the legal principle of secularism originated in the 1880s through a series of educational reforms, when free and obligatory national education was established, disentangled from the Catholic Church. Over the past three decades, however, the meaning of secularism has become inextricable from the logic of opposition to the headscarf, not only in the traditionally secular spaces of public schools and government buildings, but in myriad domains of French society. Critics of this new formulation of secularism have identified the emergence of a ‘radicalized’, ‘exclusionary’, or ‘identitarian secularism’, marked by an insistence on the absence of religion in public life and a particular preoccupation with Islam, distinct from the historical secular commitment to neutrality and freedom of conscience (Almeida 2017; Bauberot 2015). However, an exclusive focus on secularism misses the heart of the problem. French objections to Muslim modest dress are made primarily in terms of gender equality and appropriate male–female relations, of which secularism is framed as the only guarantor. But as Joan Scott has decisively shown, the foundational discourses of secularism not only did not include gender equality, but also produced new conceptualizations of women’s inferiority, including the feminization of religion and the relegation of both women and religion to the private sphere (Scott 2017: 30–43). In fact, the idea that secularism both entailed and was necessary for women’s equality only emerged late in the 20th century, through the ‘clash of civilizations’ paradigm and in relief against a Muslim other, at once imagined and, in the colonial North African context, highly concrete. In this context, the specifically French understanding of secularism became fused with another claimed ‘French singularity’ – a version of feminism that depended upon celebrating sexual difference, rather than undermining or minimizing it. In the 1990s and the early decades of the 21st century, during and after the heyday of the ‘headscarf affairs’, a new articulation of French gender values emerged, focused on giving greater depth and valence to the heterosocial interactions that the headscarf was understood to threaten. 147

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The value of mixité, or the normative principle of co-mingling between the sexes, rose in prominence in political discourse. In a 2018 interview, French President Emmanuel Macron, founder of the center-left party La République en Marche, made this connection explicit: Why does it bother us, this veil? It’s because it is not in conformity with the civility that we have in our country. That is, it doesn’t conform to the relations between men and women in our country … We can’t understand this difference, this distance, this separation. That’s what the veil is, and that’s what unsettles our deep philosophy, our common existence. So we have to explain it, we must convince, we must use the pedagogy of the school. (Macron 2018) The contemporary mixité that Macron invokes here is an amalgam of French gender discourses from the 15th century to the 1990s, including some that have historically been opposed to one another. This is not to say that mixité is a timeless Gallic trait, but rather that it draws on a deep historical repertoire of the shifting meanings of sexual difference in French political history in order to construct a pastiche of the moral and political goods served by heterosocial interaction. Mixité is not simply a way to describe social mixing between men and women. It is a normative valuation of heterosociality – an assertion that certain patterns and qualities of social interaction between men and women as men and women are not incidental, but that these patterns of interaction themselves constitute an important social good, carrying moral benefits for men, women, and shared political culture. Mixité is framed variously (and often simultaneously) as a pedagogy, an aesthetic, an important element of manners and civility, the guarantor of women’s rights, and an eroticized experience. Unlike laïcité, mixité is a term with no obvious translation into English. In the primary sense of mixing of the sexes used here, the closest English equivalent is ‘coeducation’, as gender mixité long referred exclusively to school settings. However, the contemporary discourse of mixité goes well beyond the question of educating girls and boys together, referring to a whole range of social interactions, or to the precise qualities of those interactions. In a different sense, mixité refers to co-mingling between any heterogenous groups, notably social classes and racial and ethnic groups, and is close to the English term ‘diversity’. In this context, mixité is opposed to ‘communalism’ (communautarisme), which invokes a set of racialized fears about ‘ethnic enclaves’ and ‘Anglo-American multiculturalism’. This other sense of the term is often implicit in discussions of gender mixité and Muslim dress, as these discussions carry racialized implications. In this chapter I use mixité, gender mixing, and heterosociality interchangeably. There are complex intersecting reasons for the politicization of Muslim women’s dress in France, including the long colonial legacy of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism, and the related Republican suspicion of ‘communalism’. More recently, the politicization of Islam has contributed to the development of an ‘antipolitics’ of retreat from French society among a minority of French Muslims, further reinforcing a cycle of exclusion (Parvez 2017). In the years since the 2004 law on religious signs, however, political discourse has consolidated around mixité, gender equality, and sexual difference as the primary grounds on which to critique Muslim practices and develop a new conception of secular public order that these practices would menace. The 2010 Gerin Report that led to the total ban on the face veil (niqab) already understood that the principle of secularism provided inadequate legal justification for the type of policies that many lawmakers envisioned, designed to regulate broad 148

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spheres of society (Wesselhoeft 2011, 2019). The authors of the Gerin Report thus developed a focus on femininity, sexual difference, and gender mixing as part of the new legal and political critique of Islam. The move to both enlarge and transcend secularism is further developed in the 2016 Jouanno Report, and in a wide range of discourses by political and media elites over the past five years. Recent controversies over modest dress have focused on contexts that are not currently regulated by secularism, such as private workplaces, universities, beaches, and the consumer market, and cultural artifacts that are not inherently ‘religious’, such as maxi skirts and women’s gyms. Attending to mixité situates these recent incidents in a French model of heterosociality as a set of behaviors and sentiments that underscore embodied sexual difference and the latent eroticization of male–female relations, behaviors and sentiments that have been claimed as part of mythic national identity at various moments in the history of the Republic. These identity claims are entwined with the long history of colonial management of male–female relations among Muslim subjects, ranging from public unveilings to social welfare policy. Modest Muslim dress and patterns of homosocial interaction challenge the ‘French conjugal model’ and the normative performance of gender difference. This is the case despite the fact that many Muslim women who dress modestly do so precisely in order to cultivate and perform their femininity as a virtue and a psychosocial resource, and despite the fact that many feminist activists in France are working to articulate and enact alternate understandings of gender difference, offering intersectional critique of the racial and gender ideologies of dominant state discourses, and making secular arguments for non-mixité. In what follows, I offer a brief timeline of the politicization of Muslim modest dress in France, with a focus on the new frontiers and discursive developments of the 2010s. I situate these incidents in a longer history of gender discourses in France, and show how contemporary discourses of mixité draw on diverse and competing ideas about male–female relations, the place of the erotic in democracy, and consumer culture. I show how mixité underpins the emergent reconceptualization of public order. Finally, I show how a range of feminist actors have challenged these understandings of gender difference, and organize around ‘sartorial freedom’ and women’s rights. The contemporary discourse of mixité shows how social norms and political discourses of gendered secularity, while they have emerged against the foil of the modestly dressed Arab Muslim woman, shape the behavior, dress, and interactions of people of all genders, ethnicities, and religions who appear in French public space. As we will see, mixité requires the participation of all in heterosocial norms of public interaction, in order to produce a successful gendered pedagogy of the social body.

History of the politicization of Muslim women’s dress in France Since 1989, political controversies over Muslim women’s dress have been a constant feature of French political life. France is home to a significant Muslim minority population, the result of decades of colonial rule over Muslim-majority societies. Large numbers of migrants from former French colonies in North Africa arrived in France in the 1960s and 1970s, first as male manual labor and then as families, with later waves of immigration from West and Central Africa. Most immigrants from North Africa, and many from West and Central Africa, were of Muslim heritage. Virtually all were coming from countries with a French colonial past, in which the Code de l’indigénat created a legal hierarchy between ‘natives’ (indigènes), in some cases specifically ‘Muslim natives’, and French citizens. Among all the French colonies, Algeria played an especially prominent role, both during the colonial period and since independence. Algeria was often the laboratory for 149

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colonial policies implemented elsewhere. It was home to the largest number of resident French colonists, was the last colony to gain independence, and sent the largest number of immigrants to mainland France. Long after the end of formal colonial rule, France maintained special policies towards Algerians living in France, often in continuity with the colonial ‘civilizing mission’ (Lyons 2013). As immigrant families arrived in France in larger numbers after the family reunification law of 1975, many were housed in new social housing projects in the banlieues, or ‘outer cities’, of major French cities. The working-class banlieues, isolated from the economic and social capital of the center cities, struggled with high unemployment and aggressive policing. This racial, ethnic, and economic segregation produced a cluster of political, media, scholarly and activist discourses on Islam and the banlieues in the latter part of the 20th century. By the mid-1980s, the political contours of the ‘Muslim problem’ and the ‘problem of the banlieues’ were established, framed through anxieties about hyper-masculine ‘virilism’ and women’s oppression (Mack 2017). In this context, the headscarf served as ‘convenient short-hand for a wider field of gendered practices, from seclusion and arranged marriage, to polygamy and sexual violence’ (MacMaster 2010: 126). State actors, particularly school administrators, saw the headscarf as a growing practice among teenage girls that needed to be curtailed. Scattered prohibitions on wearing head-coverings in school culminated in the 2004 ban on ‘ostentatious religious signs’ in public schools. While the law banned students from wearing Jewish yarmulkes and Sikh turbans as well as Muslim hijabs, it was framed from the beginning around the headscarf, and is widely referred to as the ‘headscarf ban’ by supporters and detractors alike. Since 2004, the scope of legislation concerning Muslim women’s modest dress has expanded. Once focused on public schools and government buildings, policies and legislation circumscribing Islamic dress now encompass public beaches, educational field trips, and workplaces in the private sphere, which are permitted to discriminate on the basis of religious expression (see the timeline below). The expansion of these policies shows no signs of stopping. In recent years, prominent politicians have called for a ban on headscarves in French universities and even in public space generally, either of which would almost certainly require constitutional amendments. Laws curtailing Islamic dress enjoy bipartisan consensus in the French political establishment, and widespread support in the French public (Beyer and Leclerc 2013). A timeline of French laws and policies on Muslim modest dress1 is as follows: 1989 Three Muslim girls in Creil, a suburb of Paris, are suspended for refusing to remove their headscarves at school. This is followed by a series of similar events in schools around the country in ensuing years. 1994 A directive issued by Minister of Education François Bayrou clarifies that ‘religious signs so ostentatious as to separate certain students from the shared life of the school’ are unacceptable in public schools. This directive leaves enforcement to individual administrators, and encourages them to try to ‘convince rather than constrain’. Nevertheless, over 100 girls wearing the headscarf are suspended from schools around the country. Similar incidents continue over the ensuing decade, although the French High Court (Conseil d’Etat) clarifies that students should only be suspended if they abstain from classes or cause unrest, but not for covering their hair with a ‘light scarf’ or bandana. 2004 After an investigation and report by the ‘Stasi Commission’, the French National Assembly passes a law that bans ‘ostentatious religious signs’, including any form of head-covering, in public schools, in line with the interpretation of secularism offered by the Bayrou directive. 150

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2008 Fatima Afif, an employee at Baby Loup, a private preschool, is fired after she begins wearing a headscarf to work. The Baby Loup case moves through the French court system for the next six years, with several decisions overturned on appeal, raising legal debates about the extension of secularism or religious neutrality to private workplaces. 2010 After an investigation and report by the Gerin Commission, the French National Assembly passes a law banning the wearing of the face veil in all public spaces in France, arguing that the face veil poses a threat to public order. Under this law, women wearing the face veil will be given a ticket and punished by a 200 euro fine and a citizenship class. Men found guilty of ‘forcing another person to cover her face by reason of her sex’ will be punished by a 20,000 euro fine and a year in prison, rising to 30,000 euros and two years in prison if the crime concerns a minor (Assemblée Nationale 2010; Gerin et al. 2010). 2013 The Paris Appeals Court rules against the employee in the Baby Loup case, arguing that because of the public service mission of the preschool, Baby Loup can be considered a ‘business of conviction’, and is allowed to impose religious neutrality on its employees in order to ‘avoid confronting young children with ostentatious manifestations of religious belonging’, and in order to ‘transcend the multiculturalism of the people it serves’ (Cour d’Appel de Paris 2013). This ruling is confirmed by the Cour de Cassation in 2014. 2015 Over the course of the year, over 150 Muslim students are sent home from school for wearing maxi skirts, on the grounds that these skirts, like headscarves, constitute ostentatious signs of religious belonging. 2016 Throughout the summer, numerous Muslim women wearing full-coverage bathing outfits known as ‘burkinis’ are refused access to public pools and beaches across France, and mayors pass local ordinances banning full coverage bathing costumes. In one incident, on a beach in Nice, police force a woman to remove her bathing outfit. An image of this confrontation is widely publicized, causing controversy in France and abroad. The French High Court rules that the ‘burkini bans’ are unconstitutional infringements on personal freedoms. Prominent politicians, such as Prime Minister Manuel Valls, express sharp dissent. 2016 After chairing a research commission into social confrontations over modest dress and male–female relations, Senator Chantal Jouanno prepares a report on this subject, outlining legislative recommendations for the further regulation of mixité and modest religious dress in France. 2018 The Ministry of Education issues a report clarifying that long skirts and ample garments can be forbidden in public schools, if ‘worn not simply out of aesthetic concerns, but out of the will to manifest a religious belonging’ (Ministère de L’Education Nationale 2018: 18). On the series of ‘long-skirt cases’ in public schools, see Wesselhoeft (2017). 2019 Major French athletic retailer, Decathlon, plans to begin selling a ‘running hijab’, already on the market in its stores in Morocco. Faced with immediate boycotts and critique from French people opposed to the normalization of the headscarf, they reverse their decision and do not sell the running hijab in France. 2019 The French Senate passes a law with an amendment prohibiting women wearing the headscarf from accompanying their children’s classes on field trips, on the grounds that they are temporary agents of the state during these trips. This amendment is struck down one month later by another Senate vote (Senate 2019).

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Across these 30 years of policies, a few patterns stand out. First, local administrators and functionaries are often the vanguard of national policymaking. By enacting bans that are within a grey area of current law, but are guaranteed to have a certain amount of public and political backing, local officials produce momentum for a national conversation that often ends in new legislation that first restrain, then eventually reaffirm, their exclusionary policies. We see this pattern in the case of the headscarf in schools, the long skirt cases, the field trip cases, and the burkini cases. In the Baby Loup case, we see the same pattern at work in the private sector and judicial system as well. Second, there has been a progressive expansion of the terrain regulated by secularism – both an expansion of the spatial settings where legal secularism applies and an expansion of the type of comportments that contravene it. The fact that this expansion is historically disconnected with secularism as articulated in French constitutional law does not concern its strongest contemporary proponents, who argue explicitly for this evolution of secular legal logic. Third, we see the introduction of several new or reimagined concepts in order to progressively develop the legislative resources to curtail the individual liberties of Muslim women. These include the idea of a ‘business of conviction’ that, by virtue of the type of value-based work it performs, or the perceived vulnerability of its public, is permitted to discriminate on the basis of religious expression; the understanding of a garment’s ostentatious religiosity in terms of its wearer’s inner motivations, which must nonetheless be externally determined; and a conception of public order that has not only ‘material’ dimensions, such as safety and security, but ‘immaterial’ ones, such as a certain understanding of moral values, that must be protected by law. We also see across this legislation the persistence of certain arguments, for example that modest Muslim dress is itself a moral argument and performed speech that functions, whatever its wearer’s stated intentions, to proselytize a particular view of virtue and to indirectly stigmatize other forms of dress as ‘immodest’.

Mixité, gender difference, and public order While the specific policies and ideological justifications shift, the practical effect remains the same: to marginalize and diminish the phenomenon of modest Muslim dress, and to encourage Muslim and Arab women to dress and behave in the manner of an ideal-typical ‘française’, who embraces her femininity, understands it as a source of power in heterosocial environments, and feels comfortable showing a bit of skin. In this discourse, the style of the idealized Frenchwoman is often emblematized by the short skirt. As a direct sartorial counter to the headscarf, the skirt is understood to both stand for and cultivate an array of heterosocial attitudes – patriotic friendship, romantic flirtation, mutual respect shot through with erotic tension, political parity, consumer domesticity – that are all components of gendered citizenship in France. This understanding of French gendered/sexual citizenship itself only emerged through the colonial encounter. Todd Shepard argues that the French ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s and 1970s was defined through the Republic’s contentious relationship with Algeria – that ‘highly sexualized claims about “Arabs” were omnipresent in important public discussions in France, both those that dealt with sex and those that dealt with Arabs’ (Shepard 2017: 1). Algerian women, during and after colonial rule, were encouraged to adopt French femininity through the avenues of political theatre and domestic consumption. Through welfare services, education, incentives, and at times violent physical constraint, Muslim women were urged or forced to abandon coverings and adopt European patterns of dress and domesticity. This mission of transforming Algerian society through its women’s 152

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domestic and sartorial practices was crucially important for colonial governance: ‘a wide range of colonial actors insisted that “it is through women that we can get ahold of the soul of a people” and “bring frenchification to their hearth”’ (Lyons 2013: 5). Neil MacMaster (2010) describes the deployment of both ‘soft’ persuasion and violent coercion in the political production of elaborate public unveiling rituals, in which young women were offered incentives, such as the freeing of a brother from prison, if they would publicly remove and even burn their head-coverings. Amelia Lyons (2013) details how the same project of transforming the performance of sexual difference was continued by the French welfare state through the years following Algerian liberation. The uncovering of Algerian Muslim women was also embedded in racialized sexual fantasies that fueled the demand for men’s visual access to women’s forms (Alloula 1986). Contemporary discourses of heterosociality, forged through this quickly forgotten recent past, continue to use sexual difference and sexual expression as a barometer of cultural and political belonging, even as their authors would sharply disavow the sexual culture of colonial rule. A 2016 Senate report on secularism and male–female equality, prepared by Senator Chantal Jouanno, offers a window into current state discourse on mixité and Islam in France, drawing together numerous public controversies over modest dress and sex separation in the years since the 2004 law banning religious signs in schools. The Jouanno Report is grounded in the claim that in order to better prevent and sanction the attacks on male-female equality that are currently multiplying, there must be a more rigorous application of the rule of law, when it exists, and an adaptation of legal texts when that becomes necessary. (Jouanno 2016: 13) The report is wide ranging: it analyses YouTube sermons that enjoin wifely obedience, considers ‘worrying’ developments such as the rise in prominence of female athletes wearing headscarves and the growth of the ‘modest fashion’ industry, and addresses a wide variety of workplace regulations and hypothetical problems concerning male–female relations, including the Baby Loup case. It makes legislative recommendations aimed at curtailing sex segregation, religious dress, and religious discourses of sexual difference in diverse domains of French society, from hospitals to the internet to a potential Paris Olympics (111–119). The report is quite conscious of the history, detailed by Joan Scott and others, in which secularism was long opposed to the cause of women’s rights, and has only recently been mobilized to defend them (90–95). It recognizes the ideological shifts that have happened in recent years, including the development of novel, expanded understandings of secularism and public order, and the use of mixité and gender equality as markers of both (95–101). While the report is framed in terms of secularism and religious neutrality, it argues that secularism needs to be clearly linked to reimagined understandings of public order, gender equality, and gender mixing in order to provide adequate legal grounds for the kind of policies limiting modest dress that the authors envisage, and it recommends constitutional and legal amendments to this end. Drawing together an examination of the range of controversies over modest Muslim dress and sex separation (at swimming pools and gyms, for example) that have marked French political discourse since the 2004 headscarf ban, the Jouanno Report argues that The exclusion of women from public space is linked to the question of sartorial prescriptions and habits consisting of hiding women’s bodies, so that women are 153

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only authorized to leave the private domain of the home if they wear outfits that shield them from the regards of others. (Jouanno 2016: 43) In the report, Danielle Bousquet, president of the High Council on Equality, emphasizes ‘the political question posed by modest fashion, [which] constitutes one more instrument in service of a social project that is not only sexist, but that seeks the enclosure and the control of women’s bodies’ (45). The Jouanno Report makes clear that the sartorial value of modesty, whether or not it includes head-covering, is deleterious to a public sphere characterized by open male–female interaction, and is part of a ‘commercial offensive’ (45) of the modest fashion industry. It quotes a 2016 press release opposing modest fashion, signed by numerous feminist organizations, asserting that ‘neither the elegance, color, nor size, neither the richness of the fabrics nor their texture will be able to change the meaning of this symbol’ (46). This emphasis on the symbolic meaning of modest Muslim dress recalls the language of the 2010 Gerin Report, which was specifically focused on the face veil. ‘What does the burqa signify?’ asked André Rossinot, long-time French politician, in his testimony, quoted in the Report: It signifies that a woman is the property of her husband, of her father, or of her brother, and that she should not be seen by other men. It indicates that women are not owners of their image, that they are not free to show themselves, to exist for the exterior world, even less to seduce. (Gerin et al. 2010: 110) This ‘freedom to seduce’ was linked to the emblem of the short skirt as the idealized alternative to modest dress. The skirt, symbolizing an openness to gender mixing and civilized flirtation, was not only threatened by the headscarf, but also by girls’ masculine dress. Feminist activist Olivia Cattan and philosopher Elisabeth Badinter both testified in the report about the paucity of skirts among Arab and Muslim girls in middle and high schools of the banlieues (Wesselhoeft 2011). In Cattan’s words, ‘In a class of twenty students, there might be one girl in a skirt. The girls comport themselves like boys, because they have no choice’ (Gerin et al. 2010: 135). In a more recent example, prominent journalist Jean Quatremer posted the following on Twitter, in the midst of the Decathlon running hijab controversy: What does the veil signify? The absolute refusal of mixing, and the rejection of the other. This woman proclaims in public space that she will never have a sexual or romantic relationship with a non-Muslim. It’s violent. In short, the exclusion is not where people claim it to be. Quatremer’s tweet repeated the language of the Gerin Report about the importance of the veiled woman being ‘seen by other men’, and inverting accusations of ‘exclusion’, framing the modestly dressed woman as excluding non-Muslim men. This commentary recalls the racialized sexual logic of the colonial unveilings and erotic representations analysed by Alloula (1986). The focus on the short skirt and traditionally feminine dress as a key component of mixité has not been limited to political reports and social media. From 2009 to 2016, the Springtime of the Skirt and Respect (PJR), a pedagogical program to combat sexual harassment and promote mixité, was organized annually in middle and high schools across the 154

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Lyon area. The Springtime of the Skirt and Respect was inspired by the 2008 film Journée de la Jupe (Skirt Day), in which a school teacher in the Parisian banlieues holds her class hostage at gunpoint over her simmering outrage at the sexual harassment she endures when wearing a short skirt. The programming of PJR encompassed a wide range of youth-led conversations around sexuality, dating, gender relations, and, in the later years of the program, gender and sexual identity. In many of the promotional materials for PJR, the program is symbolized by an image of a light-skinned young man and one or more brown-skinned young women wearing mini skirts, exchanging friendly and flirtatious glances.2 This racialized imagery of mixité, while it may not reflect the pedagogical content of the program, reinforces the emphasis of certain French intellectuals and politicians on the ‘freedom to seduce’ and the value of the latent eroticization of gender-mixed social space as a distinctively French social experience. This understanding of mixité as eroticized socialization that shapes a distinctive national culture has been developed by numerous French intellectuals of the late 20th century, nostalgically recalling the era of courtly gallantry and the salon culture of the 18th century. For historians such as Claude Habib and Mona Ozouf, heterosocial flirtation was the very foundation of French civility and intellectual culture. ‘The society of women’, Ozouf writes of the 18th century salons, ‘was a school for intelligence and mores, where the desire to please sharpened the mind unbeknownst to itself … In short, feminine arts civilized men, and from one end of the social ladder to the other’ (Ozouf 1997: 231). Ozouf emphasizes the importance of romantic and erotic tension for the production of civility, echoing Norbert Elias’s understanding of the ‘civilizing process’ as a process that develops through the sublimation of inter-group tensions and rivalries, or the internalization of self-restraint. Echoes of this model can be heard in the pairing of ‘the skirt’ and ‘respect’ as corresponding feminine and masculine rights and responsibilities. For advocates of mixité in this sense, male civility and respect cannot be properly developed or expressed if women behave too modestly. Women’s dress and behavior is not only a marker of their own freedom, it has a pedagogical role for men in their society, producing a dynamic of desire that elicits their moral and intellectual best. The notion of heterosocial interaction as a ‘French singularity’ is also linked to consumer practices and framed as a national export. French femininity was understood as an important national resource not only in the intellectual culture that Ozouf discusses, but in the arena of ‘consumer citizenship’ (Tiersten 2001). France became known as ‘the country that gave the bikini to the world’ (quoted in Wolfreys 2018: 88), a status that has been repeatedly invoked in controversies over Muslim women’s full-coverage swimwear. The Jouanno Report invokes this consumer sense of gender difference when it describes the ‘commercial offensive’ of the modest fashion industry, which the report portrays as seeking profit from wealthy Middle Eastern (i.e., Muslim) consumer markets at the expense of upholding French gender values (Jouanno 2016: 45). At the same time, many of the contemporary partisans of mixité would strongly denounce the mythology of French courtly civility and gallantry, as well as the consumerist version of feminine difference. For some French feminists, the importance of mixité is instead anchored in the access to power that it provides to women in a male-dominated society. In the 1990s, a revolutionary law on electoral parity mandated equal numbers of male and female candidates in virtually all elections in France. For the advocates of parity, sex segregation, even when motivated by feminist political projects, played directly into the hands of patriarchy: ‘Nothing would be more dangerous’, wrote Michelle Perrot, ‘than the establishment of separate domains … new ghettos where women, enjoying the pleasure of being together, 155

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avoided confrontation and as a result, lost all influence’ (Perrot 1984, quoted in Scott 2006: 355). These activists formulated a new conceptualization of feminine sexual difference, not as the pedagogical frame of men’s moral cultivation, nor as the fruitful territory for consumer nation-building, but as a universal and unchangeable embodied condition. Through the parity law and the surrounding debate, binary gender difference was enshrined in French law as prior to, and more natural and universal than, any other form of difference, whether of race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation. This only intensified the longstanding dynamic in which gender difference, properly expressed, served an important index for all other differences. As we can see, the contemporary discourse of mixité and gender difference draws on multiple ideas about gendered citizenship, some of which have historically been opposed to one another. This generates internal contradictions that actually strengthen the concept of mixité by allowing it to appeal to many constituencies – the political right, left, and center, overt defenders of the patriarchy and ardent feminists, elite and working-class French. For some, mixité marks the principled alternative to ‘multiculturalism’, for others, it offers a framework for multicultural harmony. Increasingly, this malleable concept of mixité has become a linchpin of an emergent understanding of ‘public order’ in the political discourse around modest Muslim dress. The Jouanno and Gerin Reports both note the difference between the traditional ‘material conception of public order’, which they describe as ‘narrow’, guaranteeing peace, health, and safety, and a novel ‘immaterial conception of public order’, focusing on ‘the notion of attack on the dignity of the human person, and which would perhaps permit [the courts] to offer … greater protection for women’ (Jouanno 2016: 49). It was only after the French High Court had declined to ban the face veil, judging that it did not pose a threat to ‘material public order’, that the National Assembly took the issue up, in the name of the broader ‘immaterial public order’, which could include a moral understanding of human dignity that would include particular views on embodied gender difference (Alouane 2014; Fredette 2015). In her work on pious fashion, Elizabeth Bucar offers a useful framework for understanding this new conception of public order in the French context. She describes how in Iran, where the hijab is compulsory, modesty is not simply an individual virtue to be cultivated by those who value it. Rather, it is a social virtue whose success depends on all the bodies present in a given society, regardless of their personal views. These social virtues have a significant effect on the moral perception of everyone who engages with them – as Bucar describes, becoming accustomed to the sex segregation of Iranian society produces a jarring feeling upon arrival in a different country, like Turkey, where these norms are not observed in the same way. ‘Despite my lack of intention’, Bucar writes, ‘wearing hijab had made me more modest, or at least more aware of modesty’s social role … My clothing is just as important for public modesty as that of the most pious Iranian Muslim’ (Bucar 2017: 17). In other words, it is not enough to remark, as many have, that Iran oppresses women by imposing the hijab and France oppresses women by forbidding it. Instead, we should notice how both societies have a conception of public order that relates to authoritative views on how women should dress, and how men and women should interact, through gaze, touch, and conversation. The ethics of public mixité in France, just like the ethics of public modesty in Iran, depend on the participation of every person who appears in society, regardless of her personal beliefs. Embodying mixité, by women exposing skin and form, and men interacting freely and sometimes flirtatiously with them, is a way of teaching everyone in society how to behave ‘Frenchly’, in the same way as women’s mandatory hijab in Iran has

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a pedagogical function for everyone, man or woman, Muslim or non, who appears in public space.

Sartorial freedom and feminist coalitions The successive initiatives to regulate Muslim women’s dress have shaped the educations and political consciousness of two generations of Muslim women in France. Over the course of the past three decades, Muslim women and their allies have organized in response to these laws, and more broadly for social issues that concern them, from workplace discrimination to police violence. Building on earlier intersectional activist work, new feminist networks have developed in the past decade, mobilizing opposition to individual policies restricting Muslim women’s dress and developing a structural analysis of gendered Islamophobia. Prominent feminist intellectuals such as Christine Delphy have publicly critiqued the imbrication of sexism and racism in the various headscarf affairs. More recently, a range of feminist actors in France have been responding to the politicization of mixité. They are drawing connections between defending the rights of Muslim women to dress as they prefer, challenging sexual harassment through the #MeToo movement, and critiquing the gender binary as an organizing social principle. Secular feminists are defending and advocating non-mixité (in both a gendered and a racial sense) for many of the same reasons that some Muslim women do: as a way to cultivate sentiments, virtues, and pleasures that contribute to women’s flourishing, and as a way to establish safety in a social environment where women remain disproportionately exposed to sexual harassment and assault. Gender-based organizing among French Muslims will continue to emphasize the headscarf as long as this issue is repeatedly weaponized by political elites. The Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), which was founded in 2003 and has been increasingly active since 2010, issues an annual report tallying Islamophobic incidents reported to their organization, in which women are disproportionately targeted. They draw together scattered local cases across France, provide legal support for those who wish to file discrimination complaints, and speak publicly in support of the rights of women to wear modest or religiously marked dress. Mamans Toutes Egales (All Moms Are Equal), founded in 2011, focuses on defending the rights of mothers wearing headscarves who want to accompany their children’s field trips, which has been subject to a ban that was quickly reversed. Lallab, a feminist organization focusing on Muslim women’s experiences founded in 2014, has offered a multi-pronged critique of the stigmatization of modest dress in French law and public discourse, including a high-profile televised debate between one of its organizers, Attika Trabelsi, and Prime Minister Manuel Valls, as well as the cultivation of single-sex spaces. These and other initiatives simultaneously combat individual anti-covering policies and offer a robust critique of the singular focus on Muslim women’s modest dress in French political discourse.

Conclusion Despite the various arguments that the partisans of mixité make to establish it as part of French national identity, mixité is not a timeless Gallic trait. Instead, it is a relatively recent discourse and social ethos, produced through a pastiche of numerous gender discourses from different strands of French history, and framed through the long colonial and post-colonial encounter with gendered and sexualized Muslim bodies. While arguments in favor of 157

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curtailing modest Muslim dress are often made in terms of secularism, in fact it is the parallel call for mixité – for a social ethos of male–female interaction anchored by the visible feminine body – that is most directly relevant to the politics of regulating modest dress. As French jurisprudence and legislation on modest dress evolves beyond the 2004 ban on headscarves in schools, and beyond public educational settings, mixité is becoming ever more important, bound to new articulations of public order and of human dignity itself. While a range of French activists critique and oppose these discourses, they command sufficient popular and political support that they are likely to continue to develop for the foreseeable future, in an endeavor to structure a gendered social space defined through the absence of Islam and the visibility of skin and hair.

Notes 1 Special thanks to Megan Wang for her assistance in researching this timeline. 2 See the archives of the Printemps du Jupe et de la Respect, especially years 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2013. www.printempsdelajupe.com/archives.php

Further reading Guénif-Souilamas, Nacira. 2006. ‘The Other French Exception: Virtuous Racism and the War of the Sexes in Postcolonial France’, French Politics, Culture & Society 24(3): 23–41. This article shows how gendered ideals and norms are profoundly racialized in postcolonial France. By focusing on four gendered stereotypes that produce the belief that there is a form of sexism unique to segregated, majority non-white neighbourhoods, and that this sexism is ameliorated through Republican identity. Mack, Mehammed Amadeus. 2017. Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture. New York: Fordham University Press. This book explores the politics of Islam and sexuality in contemporary France. It shows how widespread stereotypes about the virility and hypermasculinity of Arab and Muslim men contribute to a redefinition of France and Frenchness through secular feminism, gay-friendliness, and the condemnation of working-class machismo. Scott, Joan. 2017. Sex and Secularism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. This large-scale transnational history shows how the development of secularism was not linked to gender equality but rather produced new conceptualizations of women’s inferiority. Rather, Scott argues, it was not until Islam became framed as the dominant cultural threat to European and North American societies that gender equality became a primary feature of the discourse of secularism.

References Alloula, Malek. 1986. The Colonial Harem. Translated by Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Almeida, Dmitri. 2017. ‘Exclusionary Secularism: The Front national and the reinvention of laïcité’, Modern and Contemporary France 25(3): 249–263. Alouane, Rim-Sarah. 2014. ‘Bas les masques! Unveiling Muslim Women on behalf of the Protection of Public Order’, in The Experiences of Face Veil Wearers in Europe and the Law, edited by Eva Brems, 194–205. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Amiraux, Valérie. 2008. ‘De l’Empire à la République: à propos de l’‘islam de France’’, Cahiers de recherche sociologique 46: 45–60. Assemblée Nationale de France. 2010. ‘Loi interdisant la dissimulation du visage dans l’espace public’. October 11, 2010. Bauberot, Jean. 2015. Les sept laïcités françaises: Le modèle français de laïcité n’éxiste pas. Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Beaman, Jean. 2017. Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Mixité, gender, and Islam in France Beyer, Caroline and Jean-Marc Leclerc. 2013. ‘Une majorité de français contre le voile islamique à l’université’, Le Figaro, August 9, 2013. www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2013/08/08/0101620130808ARTFIG00457-une-majorite-de-francais-contre-le-voile-islamique-a-l-universite.php Accessed August 1, 2019. Bouamama, Said. 2004. L’affaire du foulard islamique: la production d’un racisme respectable. Paris: Éditions Le Geai Bleu. Bucar, Elizabeth. 2017. Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cour d’Appel de Paris. 2013. ‘Arrêt du 27 novembre 2013’. Fredette, Jennifer. 2015. ‘Becoming a Threat: The Burqa and the Contestation over Public Morality Law in France’, Law and Social Inquiry 40(3): 585–610. Gerin, André, et al. 2010. Document No 2262: Rapport d’Information fait en application de l’article 145 du Règlement au nom de la Mission d’Information sur la pratique du port du voile integral sur le territoire national [Informational Report in Application of Article 145, in the name of the Informational Mission on the practice of wearing the full-face veil on national territory]. http:// www.assemblee-nationale.fr/13/rap-info/i2262.asp Last accessed July 7, 2020. Guénif-Souilamas, Nacira. 2006. ‘The Other French Exception: Virtuous Racism and the War of the Sexes in Postcolonial France’, French Politics, Culture & Society 24(3): 23–41. Hajjat, Abdellali and Marwan Mohammed. 2013. Islamophobie: comment les élites françaises fabriquent le ‘problème musulmane’. Paris: La Découverte. Jouanno, Chantal, dir. 2016. ‘Rapport d’information fait au nom de la délégation aux droits des femmes et à l’égalité des chances entre les hommes et les femmes sur la laïcité et l’égalité femmes-hommes’. Lyons, Amelia. 2013. The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole: Algerian Families and the French Welfare State during Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mack, Mehammed Amadeus. 2017. Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture. New York: Fordham University Press. MacMaster, Neil. 2010. Burning the Veil: The Algerian War and the ‘Emancipation of Muslim Women’, 1954–62. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Macron, Emmanuel. 2018. ‘Interview with Jean-Jacques Bourdin and Edwy Plenel’. www.bfmtv.com/ mediaplayer/video/retrouvez-l-integralite-de-l-interview-d-emmanuel-macron-sur-bfmtv-rmc-med iapart-1060153.html Accessed August 1, 2019. Ministère de L’Education Nationale. 2018. ‘Vademecum sur la laïcité à l’école’. Ozouf, Mona. 1997. Women’s Words: Essay on French Singularity. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Parvez, Fareen. 2017. Politicizing Islam: The Islamic Revival in France and India. New York: Oxford University Press. Scott, Joan. 2006. ‘Women’s History’, in The Columbia History of Twentieth Century French Thought, edited by Lawrence Kritzman, 355–358. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2007. Politics of the Veil. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2017. Sex and Secularism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Senate of France. 2019. ‘Projet de loi: pour une école de confiance’. Shepard, Todd. 2017. Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962–1979. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tiersten, Lisa. 2001. Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-siècle France. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wesselhoeft, Kirsten. 2011. ‘Gendered Secularity: The Feminine Individual in the 2010 Gerin Report’, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 31(3): 399–410. ———. 2017. ‘On the ‘Front Lines’ of the Classroom: Moral Education and Muslim Students in French State Schools’, Oxford Review of Education 43(5): 626–641. ———. 2019. ‘Constraints of Choice: Secular Sensibilities, Pious Critique, and an Islamic Ethic of Sisterhood in France’, Sociology of Islam 7(4): 226–244. Wolfreys, Jim. 2018. Republican Islamophobia: The Rise of Respectable Racism in France. New York: Oxford University Press.

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PART III

Gendered authority and piety

10 GENDERING THE DIVINE Women, femininity, and queer identities on the Sufi path1 Merin Shobhana Xavier

Introduction I am sitting in the bi-weekly gathering of the Canadian Institute of the Sufi Studies, a Rifaʿi Sufi community, in Toronto, Canada. The community, led by Murat Coskun, is a Sufi space that welcomes Muslims and non-Muslims. It is also a gender and LGBTQ-affirming space. Salat (ritual prayer), when it is completed, is mixed-gender, and often a female member performs the call to prayers (adhan) or leads the prayers. Still, notwithstanding these gender egalitarian practices, on this particular night as I listened to sohbet (mystical discourse), it is the question of gender and femininity that led to a robust dialogue. The question raised was whether there are differences between males and females on the Sufi path. The responses to this question dithered around ideas of biological or essential features that could be ascribed as feminine or masculine in nature, which many disciples highlighted were attributes that are in fact socially constructed and thus not real. Other students added that gender is fluid, and not dependent on ones’ sex or biology. After an intense discussion, which included some disagreements with these above points, the shaykh finally concluded that one’s gender ultimately does not matter on the Sufi path. I relay this dialogue to start our conversation on gender and Sufism because it magnifies the continued relevance of this topic under discussion. Furthermore, the vignette also highlights that the discussions we are entering below continue to be debated and are part of a wider complex and continually lived process, that is both individually and collectively negotiated. One of the challenges of studying gender and Sufism (or any religious tradition for that matter) is locating non-heteronormative voices amidst a tradition that has been penned by male teachers, scholars, leaders, and writers. Within Sufism, commonly known as the mystical, esoteric, contemplative, and spiritual tradition and expression of Islam, another layer of paradox emerges when women and femininity are discussed. On the one hand, the feminine ideal, both as a creative and theophanic principle, has been central to many Sufi thinkers’ theologies and metaphysics, as it has been interpreted as a necessity in cosmology (Elias 1988; Dakake 2002, 2000; Murata 1992; Murata, nodate; Shaikh 2012; Schimmel 1997). On the other hand, the necessity of the feminine as a principle in the cosmos and part of the divine plan did not, however, readily translate into gender equity for women as earthly, biological, and social creatures embedded in Islamic societies and cultures. These two

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simultaneous processes of understanding females and femininity resulted in dual and complex methodologies in the study and treatment of gender, sexuality, and women in Sufism, both in historical and contemporary contexts. Gendered norms in Sufism, thus, have been and continue to be ambivalent and are often instable, especially when it comes to the feminine and the female, in relation to the masculine, male, and the Divine (Allah).

Women in the history of Sufism When one examines early textual sources associated with the development of Sufism, there tends to be a clear discrepancy when it comes to female representation. There are instances where many male writers consciously included lives of women in their narratives. These inclusions are not without challenges, however, especially when read from our present-day lens of feminism and gender egalitarian frameworks, which are anachronistic to the sources under consideration (Shaikh 2012). Simply then the ‘voices’ of women in the history of early Sufism have been transmitted through male writers of hagiographies (narratives of holy and exemplary peoples). For instance, early mystic women or proto-Sufis, such as Rabiʿa alʿAdawiyya (d. 801), were deemed exceptional on the basis that they were ‘truly men’ because they transcended their ‘women-ness’ through rigor in mystical and ascetic devotion (Buturović 2001: 144; Cornell 2019). Farid ad-Din ʿAttar’s (d. 1230) Memorial of the Friends of God is one text in which Rabiʿa is memorialized. In this text, he calls attention to Rabiʿa as a woman who was part of the ‘ranks of men’ (saff-i rijal) (quoted in Sells 1996: 152). In Rkia Cornell’s monumental study of the textual and mythical legacies of Rabiʿa, she reminds us that the legacy of Rabiʿa is defined by the agendas of the authors who wrote about her, such as ʿAttar. As such, it is nearly impossible to definitively claim any historical details about Rabiʿa from such hagiographies (2019). What we do end up learning about are the intentions, agendas, and leanings of the hagiographers themselves. Rabiʿa and the different tropes constructed about her have come to define popular Sufism, both historically and at present. For instance, Rabiʿa was the first mystic figure introduced into Europe via literature, which was part of a broader literary trend in the colonial extraction of Sufism for a non-Muslim European audience, which framed Sufism as a non-Arab non-Islamic perennial Persian tradition (Cornell 2019; Schimmel 1975: 8). Another example of hagiographies written by males is found in Rkia Cornell’s (1999) groundbreaking translation of the 11th century Persian mystic Abu ʿAbd ar-Rahman alSulami’s (d. 1021) Early Sufi Women (Dhikr an-niswa al-mutaʿabbidat as-Sufiyyat). This text records many instances of Sufi women and their pieties, practices, and relationships (both human and divine). Though Sufi women’s narratives may be found in classical texts, they are by no means central. Abu al-Faraj Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 1200), the author of Sifat al-safwa, critiques authors of Sufi hagiographical texts, such as Abu Nuʿaym (d. 1038) and his Hilyat al-awliya, for not including more women in their respective texts, explaining that the ‘omission of Sufi women is … detrimental to accounts of male Sufis’, who were connected to them (Küçük 2015: 109). There are instances where manuals were written or compiled by women. One example is of ʿAishah al-Baʿuniyyah (d. 1517) of Damascus, who compiled the Principles of Sufism as a guide to those on the path of Sufism (Homerin 2016). In hagiographies that include women’s lives, an interesting pattern is discernible, one that is noted by Arezou Azad in her article on this topic. According to Azad, one way in which Sufi women were framed by male biographers was through ‘reverse genderizations’ or by categorizing them as ‘being a man’ (2013: 81). This tendency to explain women on the path as truly men (i.e., ‘reverse genderizations’) has also been noted in other studies of Sufi 164

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women, such as by Jamal Elias (1988). Due to their extreme practices of self-discipline and asceticism, early women’s biological sexuality was reduced and thus they were viewed as asexual or gender-less (read men). Elias notes that women who reached a state of perfection were often said to have achieved the status of a man, such as the Indian saint Farid al-Din Ganj-i Shakar (d. 1266) who spoke of a ‘pious woman’ as ‘a man sent in the form of a woman’ (1988: 211). It must be noted that though hagiographies were written by men, they were transmitted mostly through oral history (i.e., music and storytelling) by women. Gender norms were implicated by other sociological factors, which demarcated women as mothers, wives, and daughters and it is within these gendered identities that Sufi women asserted their identity (Buturović 2001: 148; Silvers 2015: 29). As Amila Buturović explains ‘Sufi women’s participation in the mystical path was never simple: rather … it was predicated on their ability to navigate … social constructions – Sufi and non-Sufi alike – of gender and public/private space’ (2001: 135). These opportunities for female participation, even informally and in private domains, have been a well-documented tendency within the development of Sufism. For example, in the Bektashi Order in Ottoman Turkey, female participation was popular in Sufi ritual activities and was on par with men (Schimmel 1975: 423). Notable, in these references to the studies of Sufi women in historical contexts, is that men’s Sufi identities were not marked by ‘maleness’ as a biological and social category while ‘for a woman, however, the story is rarely told without reference to the dynamics of gender’ (Flueckiger 2006: 9). Laury Silvers adds that the ‘sheer number of extant reports of men compared to women in the formative literature means that some are read as marginal to the development, transmission, and preservation of Sufi practices, knowledge, and teaching’ (2015: 25). However, despite these varying social factors that have impeded access to voices of female Sufis in historical contexts, it must be recognized that pious, mystic, and Sufi women were engaged socially with one another. They visited each other at home, met at gatherings, travelled to spend time with each other, passed along accounts of each other’s knowledge or practices, worshipped with one another, and caught up with each other’s news. (Silvers 2015: 48) If unearthing the lived reality of Sufi women was one approach to studying women in classical and textual Sufism, theorizing the feminine principle as a cosmological reality was another.

The feminine ideal on the path Whereas the lives of historical Sufi women were usually qualified when included in the narratives of classical texts, the idea of the feminine was alternatively, at times, glorified. The feminine ideal was aptly put forth in the writings of the Arab Andalusian Sufi mystic, theologian, and philosopher, Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi (d. 1240), known also as al-shaykh al-akbar (supreme master). Ibn ʿArabi was known for having studied with formidable female Sufi teachers, including, Fatima of Cordoba, of whom he wrote: I served as a disciple of one of the lovers of God, a Gnostic a lady of Seville called Fatimah bint Ibn al-Muthanna of Cordova. I served her for several years, she being over ninety-fine years of age … She used to play on the tambourine and show such great pleasure in it. When I spoke to her about it she answered, ‘I take joy in 165

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Him Who has turned to me and made me one of His Friends (saints), using me for His own purposes. Who am I that He should choose me among mankind? He is jealous of me for, whenever I turn to something other than Him in heedlessness, He sends me some affliction concerning that thing.’ … With my own hands I built for her a hut of reeds as tall as she was, in which she lived until she died. She used to say to me, ‘I am your spiritual mother and the light of your earthly mother.’ When my mother came to visit her, Fatimah said to her, ‘O light, this is my son and he is your father, so treat him filially, and dislike him not.’ (quoted in Sultanova 2011: 44–45) Ibn ʿArabi presented the ‘celestial woman as a feature of the divine’ who stood above the male (Corbin 1998; Elias 1988: 217). Accordingly, then, to contemplate Eve, ‘the perfect image of God embodied,’ was for the mystic to contemplate the Divine (Elias 1988: 217; Dakake 2000, 2002; Hirtenstein 1999; Shaikh 2012). For Ibn ʿArabi the ‘spiritual woman’ epitomized the ultimate example of union with the Divine (Elias 1988: 216; Shaikh 2012). Figures, such as Maryam (Mary) the mother of ʿIsa (Jesus) and Fatima the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, became both real and symbolic examples in theological and literary traditions (i.e., the works of Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273) and Ibn ʿArabi) of this ideal of a ‘celestial woman’ (Murata 1992). For instance, references to Maryam in the Qurʾan have resulted in a rich tradition of Qurʾanic exegesis (tasfir) (Ali 2017). Many scholars and theologians have debated Maryam’s role as a prophet in line with other prophetic figures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Jaʿfar al-Sadiq (d. 765), the prominent Shiʿa imam, jurist, and theologian, and held by some Sufis as a qutb (axial pole), writes in his Qurʾanic commentaries that Maryam’s role is significant for her absolute servantship. Her womb was the sacred vessel that brought forth the ‘divine-logos’ or the ‘nabi-kalimah’ (prophet-logos). Al-Sadiq understands her role as that of a prophet (quoted in Mayer 2011: liii). Her status as prophet is necessary to his ‘interfaced-hierarchy’ that is developed as part of God’s ‘divine display’ of Light which ‘erupts in a powerfully whirling vortex: Mary, Muhammad, Abraham, Moses, Joseph, all “muhammad” [praised] perfect ʿubudiyah, reascending to rububiyah whence they poured down’ (quoted in Mayer 2011: liv). The Andalusian jurist Ibn Hazam (d. 1064) claimed that Maryam, along with Moses’ mother and Asiyah (the wife of the Pharaoh) were all said to be prophets (Sands 2006). Many traditions developed, particularly in esoteric Islamic traditions, that portrayed Maryam as the soul in complete submission to Allah; for similar reasons Maryam has also been given the status of a saint. Though these theological debates about the exact nature of the status of Maryam persist in Islamic theology, in some Islamic mystical traditions, Maryam was distinctively married within a cosmological and metaphysical discourse. She became one of the exemplars of the nature of the feminine ideal, an ideal that led ʿAttar to write the following in his discussion of Rabiʿa: the holy prophets have laid it down that ‘God does not look upon your outward forms.’ It is not the outward form that matters, but the inner purpose of the heart, as the Prophet said, ‘the people are assembled [on the Day of Judgment] according to the purposes of their hearts’ … So also ʿAbbas of Tus said that when on the Day of Resurrection the summons goes forth, ‘O men,’ the first person to set foot in the class of men [i.e., those who are to enter Paradise] will be Maryam, upon whom be peace. (quoted in Smith 1994: 59) 166

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The above source has been significant to confirming the presence of women in Sufism historically and in contemporary contexts. In that it was indeed possible to be a woman following the path, as Maryam’s exemplary model was a state to be aspired to by all humans. Many women in classical periods aspired to the ideal state of Maryam or were associated with her, especially as seen in portrayals of Rabiʿa, who is mentioned by ʿAttar as the ‘one accepted by men as a second spotless Mary’ (quoted in Smith 1994: 21). And yet, even today in places like Pakistan, Rabiʿa is nicknamed ‘aadha qalandar’ (half a mystic) because of her gender. Still, this passage connecting Maryam and Rabiʿa motions us towards distinct esoteric traditions of Maryam that developed amongst Sufi thinkers, such as Rumi and Ibn ʿArabi. For Ibn ʿArabi, Maryam becomes, as Henry Corbin writes in his commentary, ‘the feminine [who is] invested with the active creative function in the image of the divine sophia’ (1969: 162). This sophia (wisdom) is necessary to participate in the ‘dialectic of love’ and so sophia (Maryam) is ‘theophany par excellence’ resulting in her manifestation of the divine qualities of ‘Beauty’ and ‘Compassion’ (1969: 145). Corbin continues: That is why feminine being is the Creator of the most perfect thing that can be, for through it is completed the design of Creation, namely, to invest the respondent, the fedele d’amore, with a divine Name in a human being who becomes its vehicle. That is why the relation of Eve to Adam represented in exoteric exegeses could not satisfy the theophanic function of feminine being: it was necessary that feminine being should accede to the rank assigned by the quaternity [group of four], in which Maryam takes the rank of creative Sophia. (1969: 164) Thus, where Eve and Adam represented ‘exoteric exegeses’ according to interpretations by Ibn ʿArabi, Muhammad and Maryam complete the quaternity – the primordial and eternal cosmic plan. In such interpretations, Maryam is no longer only the mother of ʿIsa, a model of chastity, purity, and an exemplar of absolute servitude to God, but her role according to these esoteric thinkers can only be seen wholly when understood in the larger cosmic plan. Maryam’s perfected status (kamal) is dependent on her being the fulfillment of the necessary creative feminine that God needs to complete creation. Though the above thinkers have framed insan al-kamil, or the perfected human being, in relation to figures that have outwardly been male (i.e., Prophet Muhammad) and female (i.e., Maryam), and inwardly having perfected femininity as a mode of serving the divine, one must note that in its ideal state, the perfected being is non-gendered, as it is a state that transcends any duality (Sharify-Funk, Dickson, and Xavier 2017). It is for this reason that the feminine in Islam, as discussed by Annemarie Schimmel, was not deemed the same as female in Islam (1997). The veneration of the celestial woman is complicated by the fact that the ‘perfect woman as Sophia or the creative feminine’ was not equal to the female human being because woman was also a mirror who reflects man’s contemplation of the Divine (Elias 1988: 218; Shaikh 2012). In the writings of early Sufis (such as hagiographies and poems), one sees the ‘role of the physical woman as human being … minimized so that she becomes an accessory to the course of events in mystic life’ while concurrently encountering the veneration of the ‘celestial woman as the ideal, the creative feminine’ (Elias 1988: 219). For example, in some Sufi poetic traditions, the feminine quality was sexualized or represented the lower nafs or ego (Schimmel 1997). We see this pattern in the works of Rumi, who employs women through multiple frameworks, at times venerating them, such as the Virgin Mary, as the most exemplary human being, while at other times equating women with the lower soul (nafs) and the world of the mundane, 167

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flesh, and wickedness (Küçük 2015: 117). Despite the use of varying gendered tropes in Rumi’s poetry, within Rumi’s order of the Mawlawi (Mevlevi), the transmission of the lineage (silsila) includes both males and females (chalabis [celebis], descendants of Rumi), and also female shaykhs (Küçük 2015:118). In other instances, male Sufi authors evoked the feminine voice as the ideal lover of God. The latter is evident when those on the path to God were referred to as brides of the ultimate groom and the beloved, God (Ahmed, Abbas, and Khushi 2013; Petievich 2007; Schimmel 1997). So, although the male as human being may hierarchically remain below the ‘ideal woman,’ he is, nevertheless, above the female human being (Elias 1988: 220). It is this complex hierarchical relationship between God, the ideal woman, man as Adam, and woman as Eve embodied in social gender norms that is crucial to grasp in the representation and experiences of Sufi women, and the literary discourses that surround them. These discussions and framings were further dependent upon cultural notions of patriarchy and implicated by religious ideals of purity and modesty. Still, the latter biological privileging of men in a metaphysical hierarchy did not stop some women from holding maleness accountable in similar genres of texts and historical sources. For instance, the 14th century Lalla, a poetess from Kashmir, was said to have walked around naked, because there was no man in front of whom she felt ashamed, that is until she met Sayyid ʿAli Hamadani (d. 1385), after which she began to wear clothes: ‘She had never before met a man, only people in masculine form who were in fact women’ (Murata 1992: 326). The 13th century Najm al-Din Razi relays a story of the famous Sufi saint Husayn b. Mansur al-Hallaj’s (d. 922) sister, who walked around Baghdad with only half her face covered. When asked about it, she reputedly replied: ‘You show me a man, and I will cover my face. In the whole of Baghdad there is only half a man, and that is [my brother] Husayn. Were it not for him, I would leave this half uncovered too’ (Murata 1992: 326). Male Sufis also subverted expected gender norms by wearing women’s clothing and referring to themselves as the bride of God or in the feminine form in literary and oral traditions, as seen in this line of poetry from the Punjabi Sufi Bulleh Shah (d. 1758): ‘I was a naïve little girl in my parents’ home/When he stole my heart away’ (quoted in Singh 2017: 186). These poems are still recited and sung today at Sufi shrines, especially in Pakistan, and have been popularized through Qawwali music globally, especially by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (d. 1997). The above examples signal us towards another critical way in which gender in Sufism was ambivalent, that is, how it has queered gender norms.

Queering historical Sufism The study of gender and Sufism has generally been synonymous with women, but this approach is a restrictive way to understand gender in historical Sufism. Sufi poetry readily evoked samesex, often male, sexual relations as an expression or metaphor for accessing divine love. The latter also manifested in ‘admiring male beauty’ as a conduit to experiencing and witnessing (shahid) the divine beauty, which led to focusing on ‘the beauty of male youths’ in literary traditions and also in societies (Najmabadi 2005; Penrose 2006). These literary traditions and societal practices reflect the reality of these problematic practices, which seem to range from gazing upon beautiful boys to actually engaging in illicit sexual relations with underage male youths (Penrose 2006). Other times one does see same-sex relations premised around spiritual practice and discipline unfolding between two consenting adults. Although the term ‘queer’ has been a result of modern gender and sexual discourses, it has been utilized to frame and understand historical Sufis such as Bulleh Shah and Madhu 168

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Lal Hussein (d. 1599), who were known for their homoerotic poetry, as well as poems that advocate religious pluralism and gender justice (Ahmed, Abbas, and Khushi 2013; Shaukat 2013; Singh 2017). When these poetic traditions were and are performed at Sufi shrines, male musicians at times utilize the falsetto voice as a means to represent the female voices evoked in the poetry, while cross-dressing was another common practice by male Sufis as a means to destabilize gender norms (Najmabadi 2005; Petievich 2007; Sultanova 2011: 47). This position of queer or non-gendered identity in the performance of Sufi poems, such as by Bulleh Shah, is maintained by the Qawwali singer Abida Parveen, who holds that gender does not limit access to the beloved (Dalrymple 2005b). More scholars are advancing our understandings of the ways in which non-binary genders and sexualities were experiences of some Sufis in historical contexts, as seen in the works of Scott Kugle. Sufis and Saints Bodies: Mysticism, Corporeality and Sacred Power in Islamic Culture (Kugle 2007) explores both male and females’ experiences in the path of Sufism, while surveying how same sex sexual intimacies and love between male disciples, as in the case of Shah Hussayn (1539–1599 C.E), a Punjabi Qadiri Sufi poet who subverted sexual norms, was employed to access divine love and mystical knowledge. Other scholars, such as Sara Haq, have also been formative in bringing to the forefront relationships between Sufi tropes and queerness via the third gender, or hijra, communities in places like India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (Haq 2012). Thus, when considering classical literary and historical sources, we can note that there generally have been differing ways in which gender norms manifested both in texts and lived practices. These have included instances of glorifying the feminine (i.e., Maryam and Rabiʿa) particularly through a cosmological framework, which also led to and at times endorsed the ambivalence of women and men’s roles in everyday societal contexts, such as cross-dressing and the use of the female voice in poetic traditions. As we shift towards contemporary lived and embodied experiences of Sufis, these tendencies of complex gendered expressions continue to manifest, and are reinforced.

Rituals, shrines, and families: negotiating female presence and authority Contemporary studies of Sufi women across varying regions have been invested in documenting the complex ways in which Sufi women maintain and create leadership roles as they unfold within negotiated spaces and relationships, such as in and around Sufi shrines (Bellamy 2011; Flueckiger 2006; Hill 2010, 2018; Kugle 2007; Raudvere 2002; Schielke 2008). In South Asia, the role of female Sufi leaders has been an area of study which has gained much momentum, be it in the representations of female presence in ritual spaces and ritual activities (Bellamy 2011; Pemberton 2000, 2004) or as leaders in their own right, often due to familial ties to a male Sufi leader (Flueckiger 2006). Kelly Pemberton’s work calls attention to the role of women as ‘ritual specialists’ in the South Asian context, especially as they take place at Sufi shrines, but one that has not been without its criticisms: Although centuries-old debates over the nature of these ritual activities have never been settled among Sufis, or between Sufis and their critics, Sufism itself has really been condemned wholesale by those who decry its contemporary manifestations. Within the framework of devotion to Sufi saints, however, women’s ritual activities have, more often than not, been regarded as problematic. (2004: 4)

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Women, both historically (i.e., Ottoman Empire) and at times at present, are often read and found at the ‘periphery of Sufi activities’ and not at the center, which was itself a response to ‘exoteric scholars’ (jurisprudential and theological) response to Sufism (Küçük 2015: 115). Women’s bodies in Sufism have been valorized, and at times weaponized, as a means to ascertain legitimacy of Sufism itself, and its relationship to Islam (that is, is Sufism Islamic?) (Xavier 2018). Despite the historical amnesia that prompts this discussion, it is a question that nevertheless continues to unfold today and affects women the most. As evident in how women historically have had access to sacred spaces, such as Sufi shrines, but no longer do. This restrictive practice is a result of what some scholars have referred to as the talibanization of Islam (Sharify-Funk, Dickson, and Xavier 2017). Despite these contemporary theological debates of authenticity, Sufi shrines have been formative for women. By the 8th century, Sufi women were connected to shrines and centers, such as the tekke (Turkish for Sufi lodge) or zawiyah (Sufi space of worship, institution and/or shrine), and held positions of authority in them. For instance, it was reported that Hafsa bint Sirin (d. 719 or 728) did not leave her tekke for over 30 years (Küçük 2015:112). On the other hand, the above discussed esoteric interpretations of Maryam have been promoted by contemporary Sufi teachers such as Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (d. 1986) and Muzaffer Ozak (d. 1985), who were significant to the dissemination of Sufism in America (Ozak 1991). For example, not only did Bawa Muhaiyaddeen teach about Maryam to some of his senior disciples in America and Sri Lanka, he also dedicated a masjid to her in northern Sri Lanka (Xavier 2018). Many local Tamils, who are mainly Hindus and Muslims, along with his American disciples, hold that this is the resting place of Maryam and so perform pilgrimages to her shrine-mosque. While shrines such as Bibi Pak Daman, in Lahore, Pakistan are also believed by some to be the resting place of Fatima and her handmaidens, Bibi Pak Daman is a prominent site of pilgrimage for Shiʿa Muslims and many female pilgrims. The importance for female authority and participation in relation to Sufi shrines has been documented in Ethiopia and Eritrea (Bruzzi and Zeleke 2015), Indonesia (Birchok 2016), and Nigeria (Starratt 1995). This is not to suggest that all Sufi shrines are accessible to women. Some shrines in South Asia do not allow women to enter the main sanctuary where the tomb is located or have separate rooms for women altogether, such as the sanctuary of Nizam al-Din Awliya (d. 1325) in New Delhi, India. The latter trends may also be seen in other parts of the Islamic world, such as in Alexandria, Egypt (Schielke 2008). It must be said that Sufi shrines historically and at present have immense political power, especially for the families who are the keepers of the dargahs, as it not only enables them with spiritual prestige, but it is also a sign of immense wealth and social capital. We see this in contemporary contexts, where they have been sites of anti-Sufi violence, but also political tools for public figures, such as Imran Khan, the prime minister of Pakistan and his wife, Pinky Peerni (Ingram 2018). As such, women who have various authority and access to sacred spaces in Sufism maintain such power. Accessibility to Sufi shrines also differed across socio-economic class for women. For instance, the Mughal Princess Jahanara (1614–1681), the daughter of Shah Jahan (d. 1666) (who built the Taj Mughal), was deeply involved in Sufi traditions and institutions, even writing biographical works on Sufi saints (Ernst 1999). She is buried outside Nizam al-Din Awliya’s shrine, with the following inscription:

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He is the Living, the Sustaining. Let no one cover my grave except with greenery. For this very grass suffices as a tomb cover for the poor. The annihilated faqir Lady Jahanara, Disciple of the Lords of Chisht, Daughter of Shahjahan the Warrior (may God illuminate his proof). (Ernst 1999: 194–195) Shrines have been formidable spaces of access for Sufi women, lower-class women, transpeople, and everyday women, who themselves have tended to be buried in such spaces, attracting further veneration from Muslim and non-Muslim adherents. Still, shrine visitations, or ziyaram, especially to local shrines by variously positioned women, is ‘a ritual practice simultaneously suspect and beloved,’ as ‘Men tend to frequent larger, more important shrines that are considered formally legitimate by religious authorities. Women predominate at small, back-street shrines, often ramshackle sanctuaries of doubtful antecedents, mocked by men’ (Betteride 1993: 227). Another way in which female Sufis negotiated their authority or participation in Sufism was through their familial ties. Such an example may be found with Nana Asmaʾu (d. 1864), the daughter of Usman dan Fodiyo (d. 1817), a Qadiri Sufi shaykh, in what is modern-day Nigeria. Asmaʾu was educated in Islamic traditions and texts, which she then trained her numerous students, especially female students, in. Her importance and fame would travel with those who were enslaved across the transatlantic ocean, and resulted in a formative influence for the AfricanAmerican community, especially in Pittsburgh (Boyd and Mack 2000). Similarly, Joseph Hill’s studies explore the role of muqaddama (feminine of muqaddam which means spiritual guide of the Tijani Sufi order) (2010, 2014, 2018). These female Sufi leaders are able to maintain authority due to their relationships with a male family member (i.e., husband or father) who is a muqaddam. Females develop leadership roles in which they may have disciples or even lead rituals, such as dhikr (prayer of remembrance), roles that have often been limited to males in this cultural context. But by oscillating between ‘domesticity’ and ‘publicity’ Hill highlights how female Sufis act as leaders in contemporary Senegal, based on the discretion or approval by a male Sufi shaykh in the order (2010: 383). Similar studies have also noted the importance of female Sufi leaders in Somalia (Declich 2000). In the above section, we moved from classical and textual manifestations of Sufism to lived and spatial experiences of Sufi women and marginalized peoples. Despite this shift, we continued to observe the tendency of instability in terms of gender norms in Sufism, especially in social and sacred spaces (i.e., shrines). These dynamics were also implicated by socio-economic status and familial affiliations, which further complicated the ways in which women practiced their Sufism. Another notable pattern in the above discussion was the ways in which binary gender norms were at times subverted, while other times they were reinforced. In the next section, we turn to contemporary examples of female Sufi leaders, as well as queer Sufi experiences.

Contemporary global female Sufi leaders Some scholars and adherents of Sufism have suggested that Sufism in Europe and America are more gender egalitarian as a result of Westernization, and not because of Sufism itself. The prevailing reasoning that Sufi women have more accessibility and mobility in comparison to Islam is rather reductive and pejorative, as it reduces the traditions of Islam and Sufism, and the experiences of Muslims and Sufis, especially women. The latter argument is not representative of the accessibility and flexibility that has existed in Sufism historically, as explored 171

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above. Be it in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, North Africa, United States, or Turkey and beyond, female Sufi leaders are leading the charge. They work with other male Sufi teachers, they travel, cater to their communities both locally and globally, publicly and privately. They have blog pages, Facebook groups, Twitter handles, and Instagram accounts. No longer are they being written about, they are speaking for themselves, and those who are interested are able to access them directly, and not through male mediators (usually). These realities are not necessary novel. Rather, they may be seen as continuous of some of the trends observed in classical and pre-modern eras, as explored above. Some of modes of leadership are indeed innovative, largely due to new forms of technology and how these tools have influenced how authority may be disseminated and experienced. The examples noted below continue to reflect the ways in which Sufi women negotiate their ever-evolving context, not merely in private spaces, but public ones too. Although in no way meant to be exhaustive, this section turns to surveying some examples of contemporary female Sufis globally.

Sri Lankan Sufism The presence of Sufism in Sri Lanka is one that has mostly been undocumented. This lacuna is in large part due to marginal treatment of Sri Lanka in the context of South Asian Islamic studies. But across the island, there are various Sufi tombs dedicated to numerous Sufi women and their handmaidens, many whose names have now been lost to the annals of history. In Slave Island, a district embedded in the capital city of Colombo, one finds a Sufi shrine to the Malaysian saint Hussein Bee Bee (dated to 1875), who according to oral history was believed to be the patron saint of Slave Island. This space is part of a broader mosque complex that includes a school, prayer hall, and much more. Spaces such as these remain a central site of veneration and activity for women, not only for Muslims, but Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians cultivating a religious pluralism that Sufis have been associated with. Additionally, the current trustee of Dafther Jailani, a significant pilgrimage site dedicated to Abdul Qadir al-Jilani (d. 1166) in central Sri Lanka, is Roshan Aboosally. Aboosally is a Colombo lawyer by profession who inherited the office of chief trusteeship of Dafther Jailani from her father M. L. M. Aboosally (McGilvray 2016: 71). In recent years she has received push-back from Muslim communities in Colombo whose organizations are run mainly by males, not only because she is a female Muslim authority, but also because of Dafther Jailani’s Sufi significance. Since Sri Lanka is officially a Buddhist state, Dafther Jailani is nationally understood as a Muslim site. As a result, this site has received attention from Buddhist fundamentalist groups who see it as threatening Sri Lanka’s Buddhist hegemony (Xavier and Amarasingam 2016). Aboosally’s authority has received criticism not only from Muslims with anti-Sufi orientations, but also from the state and Buddhist nationalists’ groups who espouse Islamophobia. The latter pushbacks are in addition to the challenges she faces as a female Muslim Sufi leader. Still, despite these challenges, she has continued to maintain her spiritual, political, and legal authority over this important Sufi shrine in Sri Lanka.

Cemalnur Sargut of the Turkish Rifaʿi Turkey is another example of a country with longstanding relationships with Sufism, one that in the modern period has turned far more tenuous, as evident in Kemal Mustafa Atarkuk’s (d. 1938) outlawing of Sufism during his secularization project. Despite the fact that 172

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Sufism remains officially banned in Turkey, one can find numerous female Sufi authorities and activities. One of these women includes Cemalnur Sargut of the Turkish Rifaʿi of Kenan Rifaʿi (1867–1950). Sargut was first introduced to the traditions of Sufism as a child from her mother, Mesküre Sargut (d. 2013), but was also guided by other teachers, such as Samiha Ayverdi (d. 1993), who was a student of Kenan Rifaʿi, particularly through Rumi’s teachings (Buehler 2016; Sharify-Funk, Dickson, and Xavier 2017; Thaver 2017). Sargut is the president of the Turkish Women’s Cultural Association (TURKKAD). She lectures at universities globally, has published numerous books in Turkish, and hosts radio programs. Her teachings were translated into English, entitled Beauty and Light: Mystical Discourses by a Contemporary Female Sufi Master (Thaver 2017). Sargut established an Islamic Studies chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009, where she regularly gives lectures and is working towards establishing a similar chair at Peking University in China. Sargut’s students have been predominately female, but she also has male students.

Shaykha Fariha Friedrich and Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi order Grand Shaykh of the Halveti-Jerrahis, Muzzaffer Ozak (d. 1985), initiated two American disciples in the Masjid al-Farah in New York City: Lex Hixon (d. 1995), who later became known as Nur Al-Anwar al-Jerrahi in Sufi circles, and Phillipa Friedrich. Friedrich took the name shaykha Fariha al-Jerrahi and she currently leads the New York City center of this community, the Dergah al-Farah, embedded in the trendy neighborhood of Tribeca, Manhattan. They host regular Thursday evening gatherings, which includes dhikr, whirling, and salat, which are all gender egalitarian. Visitors are invited to participate within their levels of comfort, which includes flexible practices of veiling and participation in salat. The center hosts various events and lecture series, such as ʿurs (death anniversary of a Sufi saint) celebrations for Rumi and Ozak, as well as community lectures by religious leaders and academics on various Sufi topics. There are also monthly whirling classes offered by one of Fariha alJerrahi’s female students. This community is transnational and includes sites across America and globally, such as in Germany, Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. One of the students, Amina Ortiz, or shaykha Amina Teslima, was given permission to teach from authorities in the movement led by pir (teacher) Nureddin al-Jerrahi in Istanbul, Turkey and also studied with shaykh Nur al Anwar al-Jerrahi for 13 years. She is the leader of the center in Mexico City where she is active in interfaith work.

Female Sufi activists Sufi women remain active in public and civic spaces. An important modern example is of Noor Inayat Khan (d. 1944), whose father was Inayat Khan (d. 1927). Noor Inayat Khan became involved in the resistance movement against Nazi Germany by joining the British Special Operations Executive, and was eventually assassinated while in captivity. The Inayati Order, led by her nephew, Zia Inayat Khan, has been central in memorializing her teachings and life, as seen through the recent publications of her books and a documentary on her life (Garnder 2014). Zia Inayat Khan is also one of the leading contemporary Sufi teachers who initiates female leaders to teach, a continuation of his grandfather’s initiation practice which he introduced when he first arrived to the United States in 1910. One of the current leaders of the Toronto, Canada, Inayati Order is Ayeda Husain, a South Asian Canadian who leads regular mixed-gender dhikr sessions.

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Contemporary examples of such activism in public spheres include that of Dr. Nahid Angha, the daughter of Moulana Shah Maghsoud, a 20th century Persian Sufi of the Uwaiysi School of Sufism, who established a center in Novato, California. Angha, from Tehran, Iran, is an author and founder and leader of the International Association of Sufism (IAS) and also the founder of the International Sufi Women Organization (SWO) (Buehler 2016: 200). She is an activist who engages with Sufism and peace building, by speaking at various forums and conferences, such as at the United Nations. There are many Sufi women who are active beyond formal Sufi communities and spaces. Including those in the academy and translators of Sufi and Islamic texts, such as Laleh Bakhtiar, Gray (Aisha) Henry (of Fons Vitae), and Daisy Khan, the Executive Director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA). The brief examples highlighted in this section showcase some of the ways that Sufi women negotiate their ever-evolving complex contexts, not merely in private spaces, but also public and political spheres. The next section introduces another way in which gender norms are challenged in embodied Sufism in contemporary context, that is through ritual practice of whirling.

Whirling against gender norms Suleyman Loras (d. 1985), a Mevlevi Sufi master, was one of the early teachers who taught women to whirl in North America (Los Angeles and Vancouver), breaking with historical precedent that often did not allow for women to whirl, at least not publicly. There are some traditions that hold that Rumi taught his female family members (i.e., daughter-inlaw) to whirl (Reinhertz 2001). The tradition of whirling, associated with the Mevlevi order of Rumi in Turkey, has steeped into popular culture and tourism, especially with the popularity of Rumi and his poems in the global West. Other contemporary Sufi leaders, such as Kabir and Camille Helminksi of the Threshold Society, a Mevlevi Sufi Order which is headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, with centers in Canada, Mexico, and the United Kingdom, and shaykha Fariha, are also part of this process of disseminating the tradition of Sufism through Rumi and the contemplative ritual practice of whirling, while reinforcing gender egalitarianism. The latter practice is most evident with the leadership and efforts of the IranianCanadian semazan (whirling dervish) Farzad AttarJafari. AttarJafari, who is based in Toronto, Canada, inherited the tradition of Sufism, especially of Rumi, from his father. He has studied with many Sufi teachers, including the Helminskis and Zia Inayat Khan. He is the head of Rumi Canada, which organizes various events around the life and legacy of Rumi across Canada, but also globally. One of his teachers is Raqib Brian Burke, the Canadian sama‘ master based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Burke has been a whirling dervish for over three decades and also trained his daughter, Mira Burke (Dalrymple 2005b). It is his training and connections with Burke that led to a revolutionary practice of not only initiating female whirlers, but also whirling as mixed-gender, which he and his students now do regularly in various public and private events throughout Canada and beyond. In the early stages of this mixed gendered whirling, Sufi leaders in the Toronto community were initially displeased with this practice. When AttarJafari was invited to whirl at various Sufi community events, he refused to whirl without his female students, stating that in the deepest movements of this meditation one’s outer form does not matter, but only one’s inner state. Reflecting a similar argument, we found in our introduction when the historical ‘Attar qualifies that Rabiʿa’s outward form does not matter, only her inner state. For AttarJafari and his understandings of the teachings of 174

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Rumi, he sees no duality, just oneness that pushes him forward in his gender egalitarian practices in sama‘ traditions. After years of practicing mixed-gender whirling, AttarJafari expresses that leaders have slowly become more open to mixed-gender whirling. AttarJafari’s audience is not only Sufi communities and orders. Rather, they also include public and cultural spaces, such as museums and auditoriums, like the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, which is part of the Ismaili Shiʿa community that has provided a platform to share poetry of Rumi and the whirling dervishes. Tanya Evanson is one of the female whirlers that can be seen with AttarJafari regularly. She is an Antiguan-Canadian whirler based out of Montreal, Quebec. She is a poet, performer, and arts educator and director of the Banff Centre Spoken Word Program. She studied for 15 years under the Turkish Rifaʿi Marufi Sherif Baba Çatalkaya and Burke. She has whirled in public events in Europe, Turkey, Japan, India, and Kazakhstan with Vancouver Rumi Society, Rumi Canada and the disc jockey Mercan Dede, and the Iranian-American music group Niyaz. Evanson holds regular whirling workshops and meditation in Montreal (‘Mother Tongue’). Thus, popular interests in the traditions of Rumi (albeit in a Westernized manner) have given semazans, such as AttarJafari, a germinal platform to disseminate a form of Sufism that he understands as gender egalitarian, which may not have unfolded in the Turkish or Iranian context, where he has ties. Rumi’s prominence does not dwell only in the realm of ritual whirling, but has also been significant for the LGBTQ community and various social justice platforms, which the final section of this chapter discusses.

Queering contemporary Sufism Sufism and queer identities have been central to many grassroots movements with an emphasis on social justice. The Tanzanian-born Canadian refugee and immigration lawyer and activist, El-Farouki Khaki, orients his activism and human rights discourse within Sufi Islam. He was one of the co-founders of el-Tawhid Juma Circle Unity Mosque, which is an LGBTQ affirming mosque space in Toronto. For many contemporary Muslim and non-Muslims within the LGBTQ community, Rumi has even been hailed as one of the torchbearers ‘of homoeroticism and spirituality’ (Dalrymple 2005a). On blogs, such as ‘5 Queer Muslims in History,’ Rumi is often featured with Shams, his spiritual master, while Rumi and Shams appear on the list of ‘5 Queer Couples in Islamic History’ (Jama 2015). Similarly, on the ‘Gay Community Forum’ on Beliefnet community, one may find many posts about Rumi as empowering LGBTQ identity, rights, and spirituality. Similar blogs are written on ‘The Wild Reed’ which are ‘thoughts and reflections from a progressive, gay, Catholic perspective.’ Other forums such as ‘Maulana Rumi Online: Rumi on Gays and Lesbians’ or ‘thepersiancloset’ also focus on Rumi as a means to affirm diverse sexual and gender identities. Rumi is featured on websites like ‘LGBT History Month,’ and the ‘Jesus in Love Blog’ which is a space for ‘LGBTQ spirituality and the arts. Home of gay Jesus and queer saints. Uniting body, mind and spirit. Open to all’, on September 30, 2016, in honor of Rumi’s birthday, posted a blog entitled ‘Rumi: Poet and mystic inspired by same-sex love’ (Sharify-Funk, Dickson, and Xavier 2017; Unknown 2016). Aside from Rumi, the rich cultural and ritual lives of hijras in regions such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iran, and more, continue to be important in this discourse on Sufism and queer identity (Najmabadi 2005). The latter significance was evident in the outpouring of responses with the legalization of homosexuality in India in September of 2018. 175

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Many on social media platforms highlighted that laws against homosexuality were the result of colonial and imperial legal discourses, on cultures where non-binary genders and sexualities had existed already, pointing to examples of Sufi traditions to support their argument, as mentioned above. Despite the fact that these discussions around sexuality and Sufism historically need to be further nuanced, it is important to highlight the ways in which Rumi and Sufi queer identities are utilized and (re)read in the discourse of LGBTQ rights in the contemporary contexts, especially in popular culture and social media by Muslims and nonMuslims.

Conclusions Sufi women have been significant to the development of Sufism historically, and continue to be in contemporary times, though their voices and experiences often have not been centralized. The lack of representation is not because they have not been present, rather it is because they have been silenced. This contribution has then explored some of the ways in which Sufi women were framed in literary traditions and the ways in which such literary traditions and genres were complicated by metaphysical discourses on the ideals of the creative feminine in classical and pre-modern periods. As I shifted towards contemporary examples of Sufism, I engaged with transnational expressions of contemporary Sufi women, especially through lived reality, such as at Sufi shrines and rituals. In discussions of the presence of women, spaces are one critical lens through which to understand how Sufi women negotiate their religious and spiritual identity within particular social locations. This trend was found in studies mentioned above of Sufism and gender in Turkey, North Africa, and South Asia, while familial ties were also an important factor to accessibility and authority for Sufi women, such as in Senegal. Finally, though limited, this contribution also began to call attention to the ways in which queerness has been employed in Sufi expressions, either in literary voices and same-sex relations or in contemporary contexts, such as the example of the hijra community. Throughout this discussion of gender and Sufism I maintained that gendered norms in Sufism have been and continue to be ambivalent and often instable, because the feminine and female were differentially placed in relation to the divine, which then resulted in complicated manifestations in every day spaces for women and non-binary peoples. Thus, there is no singular pattern that is discernible when studying the terrain of women and gender in the development of Sufism. Rather, what can be said definitively is that it is complicated and dependent on various external factors, such as space, class, location, familial ties, and much more. Furthermore, because of the metaphysical and literary interpretations of the feminine (versus the female), both as tropes and fundamental cosmological ideals, gender norms were often subverted in every day spaces as critiques of established societal gender norms. That said, it is important to make clear that gender norms were subverted for deeply spiritual reasons, that is to access the divine through self-annihilation (fana). So, in the end, according to Sufis, these identities, forms, and social constructs that create duality are not real.

Note 1 A special thank you to Justine Howe, Zabeen Khamisa, Sara Haq, and William Rory Dickson for reading earlier versions of this draft and for their helpful feedback.

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Further reading Murata, Sachiko. (1992). The Tao of Islam: A Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought. New York: SUNY Press. This book provides a comprehensive exploration of gender in the Qurʾan and early literary traditions, especially of classical Sufism. It captures juristic, theological, and metaphysical treatments of women and the feminine. Shaikh, Saʾdiyya. (2012). Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn ʿArabi, Gender and Sexuality. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. The book explores the hermeneutical traditions of Ibn ‘Arabi, especially his views on gender and its significance and consequence for Muslim women and discourses of Islamic feminism. Cornell, Rkia Elaroui. (2019). Rabiʿa: The Many Faces of Islam’s Most Famous Woman Saint, Rabiʾa AlʿAdawiyya (ca. 717–801 CE). London: Oneworld Publications. In this monumental work, Cornell explores the various historical and contemporary narratives and traditions that surround the life and enduring legacies of the Rabiʿa. ʿAʾishah al-Baʿuniyyah. (2016). The Principles of Sufism. Translated by Emil Homerin. new York: NYU Press. This Sufi manual on comportment and practice was compiled by the 15th century Damascene ʿAʾishah al-Baʿuniyyah. Selections or excerpts may be a useful resource to expose undergraduate students, especially to practice close reading of excerpts as a class exercise. Scott, Kugle. (2007). Sufis and Saint’s Bodies: Mysticism, Corporeality, and Sacred Power in Islam. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Kugle’s book situates the study of historical Sufism through embodiment of various saints. By examining parts of human bodies, such as the heart, of various Sufi saints across North Africa and South Asia, Kugle queers the ways in which we discuss gender, sexuality, and Sufism.

References Ahmed, Zia, Abbas, Zubia, and Khushi, Qamar. (2013). Reimagining Female Role in Divine/Sufi Writing. Pakistan Journal of Islamic Research, 12, pp. 105–188. Al- Ba‘uniyyah, A’ishah. (2016). Emil Homerin trans. The Principles of Sufism. New York: New York University Press. Ali, Kecia. (2017). Destabilizing Gender, Reproducing Maternity: Mary in the Qurʾan. Journal of International Qurʾanic Association, 2, pp. 89–110. Azad, Arezou. (2013). Female Mystics in Medieval Islam: The Quiet Legacy. Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, 56(1), pp. 53–88. Bellamy, Carla. (2011). The Powerful Ephemeral: Everyday Healing an Ambiguously Islam Place. Berkeley, CA: University of California. Betteride, Anne H. (1993). Muslim Women and Shrines in Shiraz. In: D. Bowen and E. Early, eds., Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East Early. Bloomington, IN and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 227–289. Birchok, Daniel Andrew. (2016). Women, Genealogical Inheritance and Sufi Authority: The Female Saints of Seunagan, Indonesia. Asian Studies Review, 40(4), pp. 583–599. Boyd, Jean, and Mack, Beverly. (2000). One Woman’s Jihad: Nana Asma’u: Scholar and Scribe. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Bruzzi, Silvia, and Zeleke, Meron. (2015). Contested Religious Authority: Sufi Women in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Journal of Religion in Africa, 45, pp. 37–67. Buehler Arthur, F. (2016). Recognizing Sufism: Contemplation in the Islamic Tradition. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Buturović , Amila. (2001). Between the Tariqa and Shari‘a: The Making of the Female Self. In: F. Devlin-Glass and L. Mcredden, eds., Feminist Poetics of the Sacred: Creative Suspicions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 135–260. Corbin, Henry. (1969). Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Corbin, Henry. (1998, 1962). Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cornell, Rkia E., trans. (1999). Early Sufi Women: Dhikr an-Niswa al-Muta’abbidat as-Sufiyyat. Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae Publishers.

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Cornell, Rkia E. Rabi‘a. (2019). Rabi‘a: The Many Faces of Islam’s Most Famous Woman Saint, Rabi’a Al‘Adawiyya (ca. 717–801 CE). London: Oneworld Publications. Dakake, Maria Massi. (2000). ‘Guest of the Inmost Heart’: Conceptions of the Divine Beloved among Early Sufi Women. Journal of Comparative Islamic Studies, 3(1), pp. 72–97. Dakake, Maria Massi. (2002). ‘Walking upon the Path of God Like Men?’: Women and the Feminine in the Islamic Mystical Tradition. Sophia: The Journal of Traditional Studies, 8(2), pp. 117–138. Dalrymple, William. (2005a). What Goes Round … The Guardian. Available at: www.theguardian.com/ books/2005/nov/05/featuresreviews.guardianreview26 [Accessed November 4, 2018]. Dalrymple, William et al. (2005b). Sufi Soul: The Mystic Mystic of Islam. Brighton: Electric Sky. Declich, Francesca. (2000). Sufi Experience in Rural Somali. A Focus on Women. Social Anthropology, 8(3), pp. 295–318. Elias, Jamal. (1988). Female and the Feminine in Islamic Mysticism. The Muslim World, 78(3–4), pp. 209–224. Ernst, Carl., trans. (1999). Teachings of Sufism. Boston, MA: Shambhala. Evanson, Tanya. Mother Tongue. Available at: www.mothertonguemedia.com/ [Accessed November 9, 2018]. Flueckiger, Joyce Burkhalter. (2006). In Amma’s Healing Room: Gender and Vernacular Islam in South Asia. Bloomington, CA: Indiana University Press. Garnder, Robert H. (2014). Enemy of the Reich: The Noor Inayat Khan Story. Baltimore, MD: DVD. Haq, Sara. (2012). Beyond Binary Barzakhs: Using the Theme of Liminality in Islamic Thought to Question the Gender Binary. Fairfax, VA: George Mason University. Hill, Joseph. (2010). ‘All Women are Guides’: Sufi Leadership and Womanhood among Taalibe Bay in Senegal. Journal of Religion in Africa, 40, pp. 375–412. Hill, Joseph. (2014). Picturing Islamic Authority: Gender Metaphors and Sufi Leadership in Senegal. Islamic Africa, 5(2), pp. 275–315. Hill, Joseph. (2018). Wrapping Authority: Women Islamic Leaders in a Sufi Movement in Dakar. Senegal and Toronto: University of Toronto. Hirtenstein, Stephen. (1999). The Unlimited Mercifier: The Spiritual Life and Thought of Ibn ‘Arabi. Oxford: Anqa Publishing. Ingram, Brannon D. (2018). Revival from Below: The Deoband Movement and Global Islam. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Jama, Afdhere. (2015). 5 Queer Muslims in History. LGBT Muslims: Information on Sexual Diversity in Islam. Available at: http://islamandhomosexuality.com/5-queer-muslims-history/ [Accessed December 23, 2016]. Küçük, Hülya. (2015). Female Substitutes and Shaykhs in the History of Sufism: The Case of the Mawlawiyya Sufi Order from its Early Phase to the Eighteenth Century. Mawlana Rumi Review, 4, pp. 106–131. Kugle, Scott. (2007). Sufis and Saint’s Bodies: Mysticism, Corporeality, and Sacred Power in Islam. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Mayer, Farhana. (2011). Spiritual Gems: The Mystical Qurʾan Commentary Ascribed to Ja‘far al-Sadiq as Contained in Sulami’s Haqa’iq al-Tafsir from the text of Paul Nwiya. Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae. McGilvray, Dennis. (2016). Islamic and Buddhist impacts on the Shrine at Daftar Jailani. In: D. Dandekar and R. Tschacher, eds., Islam, Sufism and Everyday Politics of Belonging in South Asia. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 62–76. Murata, Sachiko. (1992). The Tao of Islam: A Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought. New York: SUNY Press. Murata, Sachiko. (no date) “Women of Light in Sufism”. The Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society. Najmabadi, Afsaneh. (2005). Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Ozak, Muazaffer Al-Jerrahi. (1991). Blessed Virgin Mary. Trans by Muhtar Holland. Westport, CT: Pir Publications. Pemberton, Kelly. (2000). Women, Ritual Life, and Sufi Shrines in North India. PhD. Columbia University. Pemberton, Kelly. (2004). Muslim Women Mystics and Female Spiritual Authority in South Asian Sufism. Journal of Ritual Studies, 18, pp. 1–23. Penrose, Walter. (2006). Colliding Cultures: Masculinity and Homoeroticism in Mughal and Early Colonial South Asia. In: K. O’Donnell and M. O’Rourke, eds., Queer Masculinities, 1550-1800: Siting Same-Sex Desire in the Early Modern World. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 144–165.

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Petievich, Carla. (2007). When Men Speak as Women: Vocal Masquerade in Indo-Muslim Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Raudvere, Catharina. (2002). The Book and the Roses: Sufi Women, Visibility and Zikr in Contemporary Istanbul. Sweden: Bjärnums Tyrckeri. Reinhertz, Shakina. (2001). Women Called to the Path of Rumi: The Way of the Whirling Dervish. Chino Valley, AZ: Homn Press. Sands, Kristen Zahra. (2006). Sufi Commentaries on the Qurʾan in Classical Islam. New York: Routledge. Schielke, Samuli. (2008). Mystic States, Motherly Virtues, Female Participation and Leadership in an Egyptian Sufi Milieu. Journal for Islamic Studies, 28, pp. 94–126. Schimmel, Annemarie. (1975). Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina. Schimmel, Annemarie. (1997). My Soul Is a Woman: The Feminine in Islam. New York: Continuum Publishing. Sells, Michael. (1996). Early Islamic Mysticism: Sufi, Qurʾan, Mi’raj, Poetic and Theological Writings. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. Shaikh, Sa’diyya. (2012). Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn ‘Arabi, Gender and Sexuality. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Sharify-Funk, Meena, Dickson, William Rory, and Xavier, Merin Shobhana. (2017). Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge. Shaukat, Usman. (2013). Sufi Homoerotic Authorship and its Heterosexualization in Pakistan. In: C. Chris and D. A. Gerstner, eds., Media Authorship. New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 105–120. Silvers, Laury. (2017). Early Pious, Mystic Women. In: L. Ridgeon, ed., The Cambridge to Sufism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 24–52. Singh, Nikky-Guninder Kaur. (2017). Two Beloved Sufi Poets of the Punjab: A Case of “Hearing without Listening”. In: C. Bennett and S. Alam, eds., Sufism, Pluralism and Democracy. Sheffield and Bristol, CT: Equinox Publishing, pp. 177–200. Smith, Margaret. (1994). Rabi’a: The Life and Works of Rabi’a and Other Women Mystics in Islam. Oxford: Oneworld. Starratt, Priscilla E. 1995. “The Veneration of Sufi Women Saints in Kano, Nigeria”. Issue 115 of Papers Presented at the Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association. Sultanova, Razia. (2011). From Shamanism to Sufism: Women, Islam and Culture in Central Asia. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Thaver, Tehseen ed., (2017). Beauty and Light: Mystical Discourses by a Contemporary Female Sufi Master. Louisville, KT: Fons Vitae. Unknown. (2016). Rumi: Poet and Sufi Mystic Inspired by Same-sex Love. Jesus in Love Blog. Available at: http://jesusinlove.blogspot.ca/2016/09/rumi-poet-and-sufi-mystic-inspired-by.html [Accessed December 28, 2016]. Xavier, Merin Shobhana. (2018). Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism. London: Bloomsbury Press. Xavier, Merin Shobhana and Amarasingam, Amarnath. (2016). Caught between Rebels and Armies: Competing Nationalisms and Anti-Muslim Violence in Sri Lanka. Islamophobia Studies Journal, 7, pp. 22–43.

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11 GENDER AND THE KARBALA PARADIGM On studying contemporary Shiʿi women Edith Szanto

Introduction What is different about the study of Shiʿi women other than the fact that they are not Sunni, not members of the majority of Muslims in the world? Looking at the body of literature, which constitutes the academic study of Shiʿi women, we see a common allegory: Sayyida Zaynab and the Karbala Paradigm. This chapter explains the Karbala Paradigm, looks at how the interpretations of the Karbala Paradigm have changed over time, its applications to the study of Shiʿi women, and at the trope of Sayyida Zaynab and its various appropriations. In general, scholars of Shiʿism tend to draw on a specific paradigm, namely the Karbala Paradigm. According to this paradigm, Muharram practices and discourses can be interpreted in one of two modes, they can either reify or seek to change the status quo. The study of Shiʿi women, predictably, tends to look at how women appropriate Muharram practices and discourses in reference to these two modes. Interestingly, this approach exemplifies the approach that the late anthropologist, Saba Mahmood, calls for in her foundational work, Politics of Piety. Mahmood called upon scholars of Muslim women to look at the ways they inhabit, rather than subvert norms. This chapter argues that Mahmood’s call ought to be widened: scholars of the anthropology of women in Islam ought to also pay attention to the ways in which the very ideas of piety and religious norms change over time. The unrefined allegorical use of the Karbala Paradigm constitutes a parroting of informants’ views, rather than its analysis. This chapter consists of two main parts: first, it will discuss the Karbala Paradigm – its emergence and its role in the study of Shiʿism. Then, it will review the literature to date on Shiʿi women. In the second part, it will demonstrate how the trope of Sayyida Zaynab is used in sermons, political rhetoric, as a focal point for a changing town, and as a role model. The study of women in contemporary Shiʿism began roughly in the 1980s, following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which sparked interest in contemporary Shiʿism more generally. Since then numerous works have focused on Shiʿi women’s rituals, such as the sofre, women’s pilgrimages, and their interpretations of female saints, especially Fatima al-Zahra and Sayyida Zaynab. Geographically, most studies on Shiʿi women have focused on Iranian women, though much of the work on Iranian women does not focus on Shiʿism as such. Concurrently, there has been a growing body of literature on Shiʿi women’s pious practices

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in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Kuwait, Bahrain, and even the United States. Suffice it to say, there is a relatively large and growing literature on popular Shiʿi mourning practices. Sayyida Zaynab’s role has been interpreted as political and active or as emotional and passive and has been drastically reinterpreted on several occasions since the 1970s in Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran. In Iran in the late 1970s and early 1980s Zaynab supported the Islamic Revolution and the Islamic Republic. In Lebanon Zaynab opposed the Israeli occupation, while in Kuwait she supported social progress and charities. From 2003 to 2009 in Syria Sayyida Zaynab was primarily seen as a woman who sought to educate those around her. After the Syrian Uprising began, Zaynab was portrayed as a defenceless woman who must be protected by Shiʿi militias. This latter interpretation mobilized Iraqi and Lebanese Shiʿa to join the fight in Syria. Portraying Zaynab as a defenceless sister whose honour was both communal and personal tugged on the strings of pious young men’s hearts. Lastly, this chapter will briefly examine the role that two other female characters from the Karbala narrative have played in Syria from 2003 to 2009. In general, the approach this chapter takes is a rather functionalist one. Sayyida Zaynab’s role has been interpreted as active and political or as passive and emotional and has been drastically reinterpreted on several occasions since the 1970s in Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran. What it is demonstrating here is that diachronic examinations of Shiʿi feminine ideals reveal a wide range of possibilities. Moreover, these exceed an easy binary view that many academics have adopted regarding Shiʿi discourses and rituals.1

The Karbala Paradigm The Karbala Paradigm is the single most important theoretical contribution by and in Shiʿi studies to date. Importantly for this chapter, the contribution of the Karbala Paradigm here is that it has been adapted to aid the analysis of Shiʿi women’s piety and their ritual practices. Before examining the intersections gender and the Karbala Paradigm, let us examine the Karbala Paradigm and its preceding formation in Shiʿi studies. How rituals and discourses are analysed is often a question of what anthropological theories are popular at the time and how context shapes both the ritual and the ethnographer. Early works such as those by Mahmoud Ayoub and Peter Chelkowski compared Muharram rituals to Catholic penitentiary practices and passion plays. Those were the days of comparative religion with regard to ritual. Muharram rituals and discourses have been a favourite topic of discussion among historians, anthropologists, and political scientists specializing in Shiʿi Islam. In the South Asian context, scholars have generally emphasized the communal and salvific aspects of Muharram mourning rituals (Schubel 1993; Pinault 1999, 2001; Howarth 2005). In the Middle Eastern context prior to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, academics usually framed their analysis in terms of the ‘Passion of Karbala,’ which they treated as a Shiʿi genus of the passion play common in Christian Easter observances (cf. Chelkowski 1979). Following the Revolution, however, scholars became interested in the politicization of Shiʿi Muharram practices and discourses at the hands of religious scholars and intellectuals, like ʿAli Shari‘ati. In 1981, the anthropologist Michael Fischer was the first to coin the phrase, the Karbala Paradigm, in order to distinguish Shiʿi Muharram practices from those of Catholic penitents. His construction pointed to the narrative’s rhetorical operation, dramatic form, and significance in differentiating Shiʿa from other surrounding communities, especially Sunni Muslims. The paradigm, according to Fischer, ‘provides models for living and a mnemonic for thinking about how to live’ (Fischer 1980: 21). By 1983, historian Nikki Keddie cast these 181

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models in terms of a duality with relationship to politics. ‘Quietism versus revolution’ became the dualism through which scholars came to view the Karbala Paradigm. Comparing Iran with Lebanon, anthropologist Michael Gilsenan referred to politically quietist versus revolutionary as passive versus active modes of piety (1982: 61). More recent studies have adopted these politically focused and dichotomous views of the Karbala Paradigm and have argued that there has been a shift over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century from traditional and salvific to modern and revolutionary interpretations (cf. Aghaie 2004; Deeb 2006; Pandya 2010). The dichotomous concepts these academics have employed largely mirror those of the religious Iranian ideologue ʿAli Shari‘ati (d. 1975), who in the decades prior to the revolution interpreted the Karbala narrative as a revolutionary manifesto. Shari‘ati proposed that there were two types of Shiʿism: the first type was the just, pure, and populist Shiʿism of ʿAli ibn Abu Talib, the first imam. The second was Safavid Shiʿism, the worldly, complacent, and corrupt piety of religious scholars. The clerics’ worldly Shiʿism implied that they were more concerned with the details of ritual observance than struggling against the corrupt regimes that had co-opted them (Aghaie 2004: 100–105). By holding up ʿAlid Shiʿism as the pure form of Shiʿism and delegitimizing scholarly authority, Shari‘ati called on Shiʿis to actively emulate Husayn and rebel against corrupt rulers. He transformed the Battle of Karbala from a religio-historical account, central to salvific practices, into an ongoing moral and political obligation to revolt against injustice (Aghaie 2004: 109–110). Shari‘ati’s dichotomy works well when analyzing Iran before the Revolution of 1979. At that time there were two kinds of scholars: quietist and traditional versus revolutionary and modern, who dealt with a secular ruler. Here, tradition not only implied political quietism, but also Judeo-Christian notions of otherworldly salvation, sacrifice, and the forgiveness of sins (cf. Ayoub 1978; Pinault 1999, 2001; Howarth 2005). Shari‘ati’s binary shows up in the rhetoric of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei, along with their Lebanese protégés, Hezbollah and Ayatollah Fadhlallah. They think of themselves as modern, rational, and politically revolutionary. They imply that their opponents are traditional, even backwards, irrational and emotional, and politically passive. Applying Gilsenan’s categories, Hezbollah is active, while the Amal Movement is passive. Similarly, the Shirazis in Syria are passive and non-political, but even they – as I will explain in a moment – can be considered active if we widen the definition of what counts as political action. Hence, the binary interpretation of the Karbala Paradigm does not suffice for analysing Shiʿism in Syria where the traditional Shirazis appropriated and propagated bloody forms of selfflagellation, which they claimed induced healing, in order to rebel against Khamenei.

Studying Shiʿi women Shari’ati’s binary holds for gender ideals as well. The common analytical axis is to distinguish between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ forms of female piety or ‘revolutionary’ and ‘traditional’ interpretation of saintly ideals. Mary Elaine Hegland was one of the first to describe Shiʿi women in an Iranian village and later on the northern Pakistani frontier in the late 1970s and early 1980s as empowered by Zaynab’s example (1998: 240–266). Hegland’s general diagnostic of empowerment of women through Karbala rituals and discourses was soon adopted as the main methodological approach. According to Kamran Aghaie, there was a shift in the 1960s and 1970s in Iranian notions regarding womanhood. Aghaie writes that the previous ideal was Fatima Zahra, the subservient quiet daughter of the Prophet, and the sacrificing mother of Imam al-Husayn. 182

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Leading up to and following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the new female ideal became Zaynab, the revolutionary heroine (Aghaie 2004: 113–130). Lara Deeb describes a similar shift in Lebanon. Moreover, in Lebanon, Deeb describes an emergent fascination with Zaynab as a rational, modern example to be emulated (2009: 242–257). Deeb distinguishes how Shiʿi women versus men interact with saints: women ‘emulate’ Zaynab, while men aim to ‘embody’ Husayn. To emulate Zaynab is to be a rational, progressive, modern, but religious woman. Sophia Pandya identifies the same singular shift in Bahrain (2010). Pandya argues that in Bahrain women have, similarly to the women Deeb studied in Lebanon, reinterpreted Zaynab through a modernist lens. This, according to Pandya, explains the importance of social transformation and progress is central to their understanding of Karbala practices and discourses. Social progress, in other words, becomes the barometer according to which ‘religious activism’ is measured. More recently, this author has argued elsewhere that the very dichotomy of ‘modern, authenticated, and revolutionary’ versus ‘traditional, emotional, and soteriological’ is a false dichotomy (Szanto 2013a). First of all, a ‘traditional’ interpretation is always already a ‘neotraditional’ reading because it has already become aware of other options and has not remained unchanged. Second, even those that call for ‘emotional’ interpretations are politically motivated. ‘Revolutionary’ readings are not automatically ‘modern’ or ‘authentic’ – merely ‘authenticated’ by a particular group pursuing specific ends. In short, this author would like to draw attention to the reasons we as researchers and our interlocutors label some practices and discourses the ways we or they do. The reason Shiʿa themselves create such categories has both local contextual reasons and wider historical basis. Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as contemporary young Shiʿis in North America, have a vested interest in differentiating themselves from followers of their rival Shiʿi party, the Amal Movement in Lebanon, or their parents’ attitudes in the case of North America.2 Similarly to those following Shari‘ati, those following such ‘revolutionary’ and ‘rational’ interpretations are making judgement calls, implicitly describing their political engagement as superior and as more in line with Zaynab’s historic precedent than their opponents. What they are not doing is actually analysing original accounts and wading through the complexity of the materials. Studying Sayyida Zaynab’s changing role in Syria, however, can allow us to see this distinction more clearly and it permits us to see a more complex picture, which does not simply rely on Shari‘ati’s binary. In what follows below, this chapter will be examining the two important aspects to consider when studying Sayyida Zaynab: her discursive uses and her spatial expansion. There are more and less politically acceptable interpretations of particular hagiographic accounts. And there is the shrine town and the physical tomb where rituals and discourses take place (Abu-Zahra 1999; Zimney 2007: 695–703). I begin with the stories about Sayyida Zaynab as told from the Shirazis’ perspective. Their version is interesting because it opposes the hegemonizing discourse of the Iranian government, which is influential broadly across all Shiʿi communities in the Middle East.

Sayyida Zaynab’s story: the Shirazi version In the 1970s and 1980s, the Shirazis founded the first and biggest network of scholars, preachers, schools, and bookstores in the Syrian shrine-town of Sayyida Zaynab. And they told the story of Karbala as follows. When the first Umayyad caliph Mu‘āwiyah ibn Abi Sufyan died in 680 CE, his son Yazid wanted to consolidate his power. He wanted to force important men throughout his 183

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empire to pledge their allegiance to him. He especially sought the loyalty of Imam alHusayn, but he refused. In the meantime, Imam al-Husayn received letters from the people of Kufa. The Kufans opposed Umayyad rule and said they would revolt against Umayyad if Imam al-Husayn came to lead them. After first dispatching his cousin, Muslim bin ‘Aqīl, Imam al-Husayn left Medina for Kufa. Unbeknownst to Imam al-Husayn, Yazid had sent his troops to Kufa to intimidate the people and his plan worked. His cousin, Muslim bin ‘Aqeel, was killed and the people of Kufa did not come to help Imam al-Husayn. When Imam al-Husayn went to Iraq with his sister, his wives, his children, and his men, he knew he would be killed. After all, the imam knows the future. At least that was the Shirazis’ claim. Why would Husayn take along his family, including his sister and her sons, and his own wives and children, if he knew he was going to be killed? To make a statement, that is the Shirazi answer. Husayn would have done so to draw attention to the plight of the Prophet’s family, to increase the pathos, to turn it into a spectacle of a sacrifice. Therefore, the Shirazis’ aim was to also put on a sacrificial spectacle, to be seen by Shiʿis as well as the wider world. On ʿAshuraʾ, the tenth day of Muharram, Yazid’s imperial army massacred Imam alHusayn and his small group of men, with the exception of the next imam who was but a sick child. After the men had all been killed, they took the women and children to Damascus as prisoners. On the way, Sayyida Zaynab hit her forehead with a spear in grief. Imam Zayn al-ʿAbidīn saw it and did not prevent her. The Shirazis read this as tacit consent. Once in Damascus, Zaynab led morning gatherings in memory of her brother. In Damascus, Sayyida Zaynab ‘spoke truth to power.’ At Karbala, Zaynab lost both of her sons, her brothers, and her nephews. She witnessed the battle and lived to pass on the message to others. Umm Haydar al-Shiraziyya often told her students: ‘Sayyida Zaynab was the first to lead mourning gatherings in remembrance of Husayn’s martyrdom. And if it had not been for Sayyida Zaynab, the story of the Battle of Karbala would never have reached us. Islam would have died out!’ When the Shirazis tell the story, they emphasize that Sayyida Zaynab hit herself until she bled. They themselves also flagellate and ask others to do it, too. They flagellate – or perform taṭbīr – in order to show their undying devotion to Sayyida Zaynab and through her, Imam al-Husayn. It is demonstrative. The Shirazis also use this story and interpretation to protest against the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei who banned bloody forms of self-flagellation in the 1990s in Iran (Azizi 2015). They regularly call upon Shiʿis outside of Iran to perform taṭbīr as a form of protest. In 2009 they successfully convinced a group of South Asians residing in Sayyida Zaynab, who usually followed Ayatollah Khamenei, to perform taṭbīr. The South Asians wanted to emphatically show their disagreement with Khamenei’s backing of Ahmadinejad as presidential candidate for Iran (Szanto 2013a). The practice of bloody flagellation was also forbidden under Saddam Hussein in Iraq and then returned with vengeance as soon as Saddam was deposed in 2003. In Syria, taṭbīr was not only allowed but promoted by the Shirazis. They propagated it as the proper way of imitating Sayyida Zaynab, even though she is not maʿṣūm, that is infallible. At the Shirazi seminary, teacher ʿAliya once rhetorically asked: ‘Why should we follow Sayyida Zaynab?’ For Sunnis, Prophetic sayings and practices are a crucial source of jurisprudence, second only to the Qurʾan. Shiʿa widen this category to include the sayings and practices of all of the 14 infallibles: Prophet Muhammad, his daughter Fatima, her husband ʿAli, their sons Hasan and Husayn, and another nine imams. However, Zaynab is not one of the 14 infallibles. ʿAliya explained: 184

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Strictly speaking, Zaynab was not infallible. However, she was the granddaughter of the Prophet, the daughter of two infallibles, and the sister of two infallibles. Living with infallibles all your life leaves traces on you and shapes you. She was with them and one of them and that is why we say that she had minor infallibility. And since Imam ʿAli Zayn al-ʿAbidīn was present when Zaynab hit herself on the forehead, he would have stopped her if he’d disagreed with the practice. (Fieldnotes 2009) For ʿAliya, the ritual bears the endorsement of an imam, making it legal. By imitating Sayyida Zaynab and promoting her exemplary practice of flagellation, the Shirazis portrayed themselves as particularly pious Shiʿis who display their loyalty to the family of Prophet Muhammad not only by recognizing the semi-infallibility of Zaynab and but also by physically performing their loyalty by self-flagellating. Through these practices, they display their dedication and devotion and implicitly contrast themselves with their rivals, whether Khamenei or Hezbollah, who eschew these practices. Given especially Iran’s hegemonic power over Shiʿa in the Middle East, given their financial, institutional, and political resources, the Shirazis paint the official stance of the Iranian government as something akin to Yazid’s stance, while the Shirazis represent the underdog, i.e. Husayn’s camp. Around 2009, the Shirazis particularly encouraged women to flagellate, but not in public. In contrast to Lebanon, where female members and sympathizers of the Amal Movement will occasionally flagellate in public, the Shirazis organized for devoted women to do so in the privacy of a closed basement. There, women cut themselves, mourned, and walked with bare feet across hot coal. By organizing and participating in these women’s practices, the Shirazis once again portrayed themselves as the true followers of Zaynab, who defy public and governmental disapproval in order to emulate her example, while simultaneously upholding female modesty by organizing for women to flagellate in private. In short, the Shirazis promoted a particular narrative about Zaynab, which was ‘revolutionary’ but ‘traditional’ at the same time. It fundamentally opposed the official Iranian stance, which was being preached at the prayer hall of the shrine of Sayyida Zaynab.

The shrine and town of Sayyida Zaynab To further show their dedication, the Shirazis maintain a large seminary in the shrine-town of Sayyida Zaynab. As for the shrine, there are questions as to where Zaynab is really buried (Zimney 2007; Szanto 2013b). Some think she is buried in Cairo, while others think she is in Syria. Both shrines appear in medieval travel literature. The Andalusian traveller Ibn Jubayr (d. 1217 CE) reported that when he visited the Syrian shrine of Sayyida Zaynab, he noticed that Shiʿa outnumbered Sunnis. A century later, Ibn Battuta (d. 1368/69) mentioned Zaynab’s mausoleum near Damascus. While many Muslims recognized the grave in Syria as belonging to Sayyida Zaynab, the granddaughter of the Prophet, others doubted the tomb’s authenticity. For instance, the Sufi ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi (d. 1731 CE) wrote about the Syrian shrine, though he was convinced that Zaynab lies buried in Cairo (Mervin 1996; Zimney 2007). Some of the Iraqis I spoke with were convinced that Zaynab lies neither in Cairo, nor in Damascus, but in Iraq. In the end, however, these doubts stopped them neither from visiting her shrine, nor from beseeching her for help (Szanto 2013b).

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In the 12th century, the shrine was renovated and expanded, beginning under the leadership of Muhsin al-Amin (d. 1952). In 1935, the notable Syrian Nizam family renovated the building by the west entrance. In 1950, following the recovery of his son, a Pakistani businessman, Muhammad ʿAli Habib, donated the grids decorating the tomb to fulfil a religious vow he made to Zaynab. Later, an Arab merchant from the Gulf paid for the mosaic, which covers the two minarets of the shrine. The shrine itself was donated by Iran and the golden door located at the western entrance of the tomb, which is now reserved for women, was a gift from an Iranian businessman (Mervin 1996). Unlike other religious sites, including the shrine of Zaynab’s niece, Sayyida Ruqayya, which lies within a few hundred metres of the Umayyad mosque, the shrine of Sayyida Zaynab was not directly run by the Syrian Ministry for Religious Endowments. The Murtadha family has managed it since the 14th century. Concurrently, both Zaynab’s and Ruqayya’s shrines were funded, renovated, and expanded by the Iranian government, especially following the Islamic Revolution of 1979 (Mervin 1996). Friday sermons at both shrines’ prayer halls are said in the name of the Iranian supreme leader and Khamenei even has offices at the shrine of Sayyida Zaynab, where Shiʿi men and women can come to ask legal questions. Khamenei’s preferred location is ultimately a show of solidarity between the Syrian state and Iran. Over the years, the shrine town has changed drastically. Virtually unknown in the first half of the 20th century, it grew as a place of pilgrimage, we well as refugee starting in the 1940s until the first decade of the 21st century. After 2011, however, the shrine town began its quick decline and transformation into a battlefront. Even before the Syrian Uprising, native Twelver Shiʿis were only a small minority in Syria at around 2 per cent of the population. Yet, the million or so Iraqi Shiʿi refugees that came to Syria from Iraq, as well as seminary students and their teachers, and pilgrims from all over the world, increased their numbers. The alliance with ʿAlawites, who make up between 10 and 15 per cent of Syria’s population, gave the Twelver Shiʿis added political and economic weight.3 The shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab is not a historic Shiʿi site. Prior to 1948 when Palestinian refugees settled in the area, it was no more than an unimportant shrine in the midst of farmlands and olive groves. Syrian internally displaced people (IDPs) from the Golan Heights were settled just to the north of the Palestinian camp in 1967. The town remained largely Sunni until Shiʿis started to congregate there in the 1970s. These first waves of Shiʿis included thousands of Iraqis whom Saddam Hussein accused of being ethnically Iranian. An estimated 40,000 were forced to leave Iraq and while some of those went to Iran, many came to Syria. In a sense, the shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab constituted a heterotopia. Foucault defines heterotopia as a ‘space of otherness,’ which exists in relation to normal spaces. They ‘have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect’ (Foucault 1967: 2). He enumerates several categories, which include heterotopias of crisis that are inhabited by individuals undergoing life altering transformations (e.g., boarding schools, pregnancy, military service) and heterotopias of deviation (e.g., asylums and hospitals). The shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab constituted a Foucauldian heterotopia of crisis because it inverted Damascene religious, social, economic, and political norms. It was a ‘traditional’ place in the sense that it memorialized history and celebrated tradition, though it did not have a long history. Like Damascus, Sayyida Zaynab constituted a space that was tied to religion and power. Yet, the shrine town also mirrored and reflected Damascus, the 186

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imperial Umayyad city, as its opposing other. Damascus was the city of thriving Syrian citizens, while Sayyida Zaynab was the city of stateless refugees, asylum seekers, and religious tourists. Damascus was Sunni, stable, and modern, while Sayyida Zaynab was Shiʿi, constantly changing, both traditional and postmodern. One could say that while Damascus looked to the West in idealizing ‘modernity,’ Sayyida Zaynab was oriented to the East, towards Iraq and Iran, commemorating ‘tradition.’ Both Damascenes and inhabitants of the shrine town contrasted and distinguished the two spaces religiously, socially, economically, aesthetically, and legally. I had classmates from the seminary who would wear a face-veil and Iraqi abaya in Sayyida Zaynab, but remove it in Damascus and downgrade from an abaya to a manteau, a more close-fitting long coat. The first Shiʿi seminary in Sayyida Zaynab was established by Sayyid Hasan al-Shirazi (b. 1934–d. 1983), who fled Karbala in 1970 because of his opposition to the Iraqi Baʿth Party. Several Afghan students who had been expelled from Iraq soon followed and they helped erect the Zaynabiyya seminary in 1973.4 The Shirazi brothers derived their religious authority from their learning and their ʿAlid lineage. But their support for transgressive rituals, such as bloody forms of self-flagellation and their populist writings, marked them as secondtier scholars at best in the eyes of the Shiʿi scholars of Najaf and Qum (Louër 2008: 88–96). After founding the Zaynabiyya, Hasan al-Shirazi did not stay in Syria but settled in Beirut where he was assassinated in 1983. Hasan’s elder brother Muhammad then inherited the Shirazi network including the Zaynabiyya, though he never lived in Syria. Instead, he relocated first to the Gulf and later to Qum, where he died under house arrest in 2001 (Mervin 1996). Following the establishment of the Zaynabiyya seminary, several Shiʿi scholars, such as Ayatollahs ʿAli Khamenei and Muhammad al-Sadr (d. 1999), followed suit and founded seminaries in Sayyida Zaynab. Aside from seminaries, Shiʿi scholars built offices and hospitals in order to attract followers. For instance, Ayatollah Muhammad al-Sadr, the father of Muqtada al-Sadr, intended to help lay Shiʿis in Syria by building the first hospital in the town less than 50 metres from the shrine.5 More recently, Khamenei also sponsored a hospital about one kilometre south of the shrine. By the time the Iraq war began in 2003, the shrine town was divided into two Sunni areas: the Palestinian camp, which was established in 1948, and the Golani area built in 1967 called Hijera. Both stood to the east of the main road connecting the shrine of Sayyida Zaynab to Damascus. To the west of the main road stood the two predominantly Shiʿi areas: an Iraqi and an Iranian neighbourhood. The Iraqi area grew with every wave of refugees until the tide turned in roughly 2009 and 2010.6 By 2011, the Iraqis had largely returned to Iraq. The Iranian area consisted of mostly hotels and markets geared towards working-class and elderly tourists. Many of the Iranians were visitors and they usually stayed in Sayyida Zaynab for less than a fortnight. The Iraqis settled for years, as did the South Asians and Afghans. Shiʿis from the Eastern Gulf typically came for a couple of months in the summer in order to escape the heat, visit the shrine, and take summer classes at seminaries. Those that remained for longer periods of time were most likely to attend seminaries, where stories about Sayyida Zaynab and other female figures from the Karbala narrative featured prominently. Moreover, large sections of Sayyida Zaynab were not Shiʿi, but Syrian and Palestinian Sunnis. In this aspect, the shrine-town is somewhat unique among other Shiʿi seminary towns.

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Having discussed the fact that the focus in the anthropology of Shiʿism has changed over time, and having contextualized the shrine and town of Sayyida Zaynab, let’s move on to the next question. How has Sayyida Zaynab as a symbol been re-appropriated over time?

Re-interpreting Zaynab’s role How have the roles of women in the Karbala narratives been re-interpreted over time? Historian Kamran Aghaie tells us that prior to the 1960s in Iran, Fatima al-Zahra was considered the ideal woman. She was the ideal figure Shiʿi women should try to emulate. At this time, Fatima was interpreted as a passive woman who watched the Battle of Karbala from heaven above, weeping over her son’s death. Ritually crying signified empathy with saints. By arousing sympathy, by enlisting a saint’s help, believers hope to attain what they desire. In the 1960s and 1970s, ʿAli Shari‘ati portrayed the family of the Prophet as proto-leftist political activists. For him, Imam al-Husayn and Sayyida Zaynab fought against political and social injustice. The shift from viewing Imam al-Husayn’s death at Karbala as a metaphysical sacrifice to a political tragedy went hand in hand with the shift from Fatima, the quietly suffering mother, as the ideal woman to Zaynab, the activist, as the ideal woman. During the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Zaynab was portrayed mainly as a political and rights activist who would support the revolution. When Iran became the Islamic Republic, Zaynab became a supporter of the Iranian government. She became the ideal female citizen: pious, submissive, and yet revolutionary – at least rhetorically. In Bahrain and Lebanon, there was a shift over the last half a century from Zaynab and Fatima who cry over the loss of Imam al-Husayn and his men to a socially active Zaynab who is engaged in community improvement (Deeb 2006: 165–203; Pandya 2010). To some extent, scholars also reflect local discourses in their works. For example, for Lara Deeb’s Hezbollah-sympathizing Shiʿis in Lebanon, it was crucial that their form of piety be described as authenticated (muḥaqiq), revolutionary, and modern. True to her interlocutors, Deeb sublimated those terms and used them as analytical categories. In Syria, there were changes in the ways in which Zaynab’s actions were interpreted. Nevertheless, Zaynab’s actions remained an ideal for pious women to imitate. The changes in how Zaynab’s role was interpreted reflect larger transformations. Right after 2003, when Shiʿi and other Iraqi refugees poured into Syria, Zaynab was the suffering but still dignified Iraqi female refugee. There was even a Syrian film about her, ‘Mawkib al-Ibaʾ’ (or ‘Caravan of Pride’), which was released in 2005. It portrays the events following the Battle of Karbala. It was immediately banned, but was distributed online and was sold at the bookstore of the Shirazi seminary. The Iraqi women I conversed with viewed the film and its prohibition as a desire on behalf of Syrian Sunnis (for whose sake the movie was presumably banned) to hide their culpability and iniquity. Concurrently, they downplayed the historic role Iraqis played in the tragedy of Karbala, for instance, by skipping lines cursing Iraqis when reciting mourning poetry in ritual gatherings. By identifying with Zaynab, as well as the women and the children of Karbala, Iraqi Shiʿis in Syria conflated a historical event with myth and blurred the lines between past and present. Between roughly 2007 and 2010, after a downturn in the Syrian economy, Zaynab became the beneficent wife and mother. Umm Zahra was one of the most famous and sought after mullayāt in the shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab. Umm Zahra lead mourning gatherings at husayniyyāt and at private homes. She would always give a short lesson as part of her ceremony and often talked about Zaynab. For her, Zaynab was an ideal to be 188

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emulated because Zaynab mourned the dead, but also tried to practically contribute to the improvement of the situation. Zaynab was an engaged citizen, a helpful neighbour, and a teacher, while also embodying the pinnacle of virtue. One evening, Umm Zahra explained that like Zaynab, we should all care about the education of children. We should gather the children in the neighbourhood and tell them religious stories. Why? Because we should value education – like Zaynab did. According to Umm Zahra, Zaynab cared for education and communal improvement because she performed mourning gatherings, which Umm Zahra considered to be a mode of learning. This shows how a religious story has been utilized to propose modern values like universal education and development. The Shirazis continued to depict Zaynab like a saint, at whose shrine miracles sometimes occur. They emphasized that she was the first who self-flagellated. She is a minor infallible, whose precedent is to be followed. For them, self-flagellation signifies strength and piety, but it also signifies masculinity, raw muscle, youth, and power among young Shiʿis, especially among the working class. Since 2011, however, Zaynab has suddenly become a figure that symbolizes feminine weakness. She is now portrayed as a defenceless woman who needs to be protected by Shiʿi militias. This latter interpretation helped mobilize Iraqi and Lebanese Shiʿis to join the fight. They are primarily funded by Iran and generally side with the Syrian regime. ‘[T]he early presence of Iraqi [Shiʿi] fighters in Syria was largely heralded by a music video containing combat footage and set to Ya Zainab, a song by the Iraqi … singer Ali Muwali, who is associated with’ the al-Youm al-Mawud Battalion (Smyth 2015: 4). Since then, the video has been distributed on YouTube, where it bears the logo of the Abu alFadl al-‘Abbas Brigade in the top left corner (Ya Zainab [Zaynab] 2014). In the video, Shiʿi fighters symbolically take the place of Imam Husayn’s men. Meanwhile both Zaynab and real women are left out. In posters, Zaynab is symbolized by the dome of her shrine and surrounded by Shiʿi fighters. She is no longer a heroine but a place to be defended. ‘Labayka ya Zaynab!’ (‘We are here for you, oh Zaynab!’) has become their battle cry (Yonker 2013: 3). The poster clearly depicts a changed reality on the ground. Actual Shiʿi women are out of sight. Most left and returned to Iraq or travelled westward. But those that are left now are defenceless women in a warzone, who need fighters to protect them. It is an apt metaphor for the Syrian Civil War. In Syria and in other parts of the Middle East then, Zaynab – as the ideal female – has been reinterpreted in multiple ways. However, both within the academy and also among Muslim students in North America, Zaynab and the Karbala Paradigm continue to be seen in binary terms, which allows for young, rebellious, second or third generation immigrants to express their leftist political views (cf. Takim 2009).

Conclusion What does the anthropology of Shiʿi studies and specifically, the study of Shiʿi women have to offer to the study of women in Islam more broadly? The study of Sunni Muslim women has, as the late anthropologist Saba Mahmood noted, often focused on the veil, oppression, and the twin questions of agency and resistance (2005). To rectify this, Mahmood called upon scholars to examine the ways in which Muslim women inhabit norms. To some extent, scholarly works on Shiʿi women have already answered Mahmood’s call by analysing women’s Muharram observances. 189

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It should further be noted that following Mahmood, and her teachers, the anthropological study of Muslim piety has often conceptualized Islam as a method for cultivating pious subjectivities. This narrow view is another assumption that can easily be challenged by the study of Shiʿi women. This is so, not because cultivating pious selves isn’t important to Shiʿis, but it isn’t always a primary concern to even conservative Shiʿis in places like Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain, and Lebanon. Though it can be the case, as Torab found in Iran (2006). War, violence, and the importance of the community can interrupt any simplistic understanding of Islam as a private, singular, and uni-directional method for self-cultivation. As such, this chapter not only provides a review of the state of Shiʿi women’s studies, but also suggests ways in which the study of Shiʿi women enriches the study of Muslim women in general. Furthermore, Shiʿi studies has something unique to offer with regards to its central focus and the most important theoretical contribution is the Karbala Paradigm, which allows divergent and also binary interpretations of the Karbala narrative. The Karbala narrative can be and has been interpreted in different ways in order to support particular political and social goals. This is particularly well illustrated by the example of Sayyida Zaynab. Sayyida Zaynab is central to the Karbala narrative, but she is also the centre of a once-thriving town. There, at the Syrian shrine and town of Sayyida Zaynab, female saints and symbols remain central to Shiʿi piety. For example, Zaynab’s role can be interpreted as politically active or as emotional and passive. It has been drastically reinterpreted on several occasions since the 1970s in Syria. From 2003 to 2009, Zaynab was primarily seen as a woman who sought to educate those around her. After the Syrian Uprising began in 2011, Zaynab was portrayed as a defenceless woman who must be protected by Shiʿi militias. This latter interpretation mobilized Iraqi and Lebanese Shiʿis to join the fight in Syria, as well as Iranian troops. Overall, this analysis shows that the development of interpretations of the Karbala Paradigm does not constitute a simple move from a ‘traditional’ model to a ‘modern’ model wherein self-cultivation becomes central, but that the story is much more complex.

Notes 1 It exceeds typical binary readings of the Karbala Paradigm, which argues that Shiʿa ought to either strive for otherworldly salvation or for a this-worldly revolution. 2 For an example of this modern authenticated approach among young North American and European Shiʿa, see: Inloes (2015). 3 The alliance between ʿAlawite leaders and Twelver Shiʿa in Lebanon and Iraq dates back to the 1910s and is rooted in their shared suffering under Ottoman Sunni administrative practices. Until then, the ʿAlawites were known as Nusayris and the question of whether they belonged to the fold of Islam was disputed. Under the French, the ʿAlawites gained a degree of self-rule, though they were divided into two groups: those who favoured autonomy and those who wanted to join a united Syria. By 1936, ʿAlawites were recognized as part of the Muslim community by the mufti of Jerusalem. By 1952, just six years after Syrian independence, ʿAlawite religious leaders became recognized as belonging to the Ja‘fari (or Twelver Shiʿi) school of law by the Syrian mufti (Mervin 2013). The Syrian government began supporting Twelver Shiʿism massively in the 1970s when the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood disputed the legitimacy of Hafez al-Asad’s presidency on the grounds that ʿAlawites are not Muslims and that the president had to be Muslim (Seale 1995: 173). 4 In theory, the marāja ‘al-ṭaqlīd are religious scholars who have attained the highest degrees of learning. In practice, however, personal, familial, economic, and political connections, as well as charisma, are crucial. Moreover, while the scholarly elites are theoretically open elites and there are always new scholars who join the ranks of the ayatollahs, the scene is dominated by large scholarly families, such as the Hakims, the Shirazis, the Khu’is, the Ha’iris, and the Sadrs.

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5 Muhammad al-Sadr had also sponsored hospitals and other institutions in Baghdad’s slums, which allowed him to gain popularity among Iraq’s poor urban Shiʿa. 6 In the 1980s it was ‘Iranian’ Iraqis who came. In the 1990s, Iraqis of all backgrounds fled as sanctions made life in Iraq difficult. After 2003, Sunnis as well as Shiʿa arrived. Many had been connected in one way or another to the Baʿth Party, though they seldom admitted it. Also, there were Baghdadis and religiously mixed families.

Further reading Aghaie, K., ed. (2005). The Women of Karbala: Ritual Performance and Symbolic Discourses in Modern Shiʿi Islam. Austin: University of Texas at Austin Press. This edited volume consists of articles on a variety of interpretations of the trope of Sayyida Zaynab. Szanto, E. (2013). Beyond the Karbala Paradigm: Rethinking Revolution and Redemption in Twelver Shiʿa Mourning Rituals. Journal of Shiʿa Islamic Studies, 6(1), pp. 75–91. This article explains the Karbala Paradigm and critiques static binary interpretations of the Karbala Paradigm. Szanto, E. (2019). The ʿAlimahs of Sayyida Zaynab: Female Shiʿi Authority in a Syrian Sanctuary. In: M. Künkler and D. Steward, eds., Female Religious Authority in Shiʿi Islam: A Comparative History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 307–322. This book chapter draws on the German sociologist Max Weber in order to classify religious authority among Twelver Shiʿa in Syria.

References Abu-Zahra, N. (1999). The Pure and Powerful: Studies in Contemporary Muslim Society. Reading: Ithaca Press. Aghaie, K. (2004). The Martyrs of Karbala: Shiʿi Symbols and Rituals in Modern Iran. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Ayoub, M. (1978). Redemptive Suffering in Islam: A Study of the Devotional Aspects of “Ashura” in Twelver Shiʿism. New York: Mouton. Azizi, A. (2015). Iran targets ‘MI6 Shiites’. [online] Al-Monitor: Iran Pulse. Available at www.al-monitor.com/ pulse/originals/2015/04/iran-shia-shirazi-movement-secterian.html. [Accessed 28 February 2019]. Chelkowski, P., ed. (1979). Ta‘ziyeh: Ritual and Drama in Iran. New York: New York University Press. Deeb, L. (2006). An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shiʿi Lebanon. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Deeb, L. (2009). Emulating and/or Embodying the Ideal: The Gendering of Temporal Frameworks and Islamic Role Models in Shiʿi Lebanon. American Ethnologist, 36(2), pp. 242–257. Fischer, M. (1980). Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution. Madison: University of Wisconsin. Foucault, M. (1967). Of Other Spaces [online], J. Miskowiec, trans. Available at www.opa-a2a.org/dissensus/ wp-content/uploads/2008/03/foucault_michel_des_spaces_autres.pdf. [Accessed 13 August 2011]. Gilsenan, M. (1982). Recognizing Islam: Religion and Society in the Modern Middle East. New York: I.B. Tauris. Hegland, M. (1998). Flagellation and Fundamentalism: (Trans)Forming Meaning, Identity, and Gender Through Pakistani Women’s Rituals of Mourning. American Ethnologist, 25(2), pp. 240–266. Howarth, T. (2005). The Twelver Shiʿa as a Muslim Minority in India: Pulpit of Tears. New York: Routledge. Inloes, A. (2015) In The Footsteps of Sayyida Zaynab: Journey to Karbala – Episode 1. [online] Youtube Safeer Television. Available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUNpXb9KuHw&list=PLN39J1A47cwpUHz Mur7jvIUO9un2h8ZOU&index=4&t=0s&ab_channel=SafeerTelevision. [Accessed 28 February 2019]. Keddie, N. (1983). Religion and Politics in Iran: Shiʿism from Quietism to Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press. Louër, L. (2008). Transnational Shia Politics: Religious and Political Networks in the Gulf. New York: Columbia University Press. Mahmood, S. (2005). The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Berkley: University of California Press. Mervin, S. (1996). Sayyida Zaynab: Banlieue de Damas ou nouvelle ville sainte chiite? Cahiers d́ etudes sur la Mediterrane ́ e orientale et le monde turco-iranieni: Arabes et Iraniens, 22, pp. 149–162. Mervin, S. (2013). L’étrange destin des alaouites syriens. Le Monde diplomatique, 706(1), p. 10.

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Pandya, S. (2010). Women’s Shiʿi Ma‘atim in Bahrain. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 6(2), pp. 31–58. Pinault, D. (1999). Shia Lamentation Rituals and Reinterpretations of the Doctrine of Intercession: Two Cases from Modern India. History of Religions, 38(3), pp. 285–305. Pinault, D. (2001). Horse of Karbala: Muslim Devotional Life in India. New York: Palgrave. Schubel, V. (1993). Religious Performance in Contemporary Islam: Shiʿi Devotional Rituals in South Asia. Columbia: South Carolina University Press. Seale, P. (1995). Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East. Berkley: University of California Press. Smyth, P. (2015). The Shiite Jihad in Syria and Its Regional Effects. Policy Focus 138. Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Szanto, E. (2013a) Beyond the Karbala Paradigm: Rethinking Revolution and Redemption in Twelver Shi‘a Mourning Rituals. Journal of Shi‘a Islamic Studies, 6(1), pp. 75–91. Szanto, E. (2013b). Contesting Fragile Saintly Traditions: Miraculous Healing among Twelver Shiʿis in Contemporary Syria. In: A. Bandak and M. Bille, eds., Politics of Worship in the Contemporary Middle East: Sainthood in Fragile States. Leiden: Brill, pp. 33–52. Takim, L. (2009). Shiʿism in America. New York: New York University Press. Torab, A. (2006). Performing Islam: Gender and Ritual in Iran. Leiden: Brill. Yonker, C. (2013). Iran’s Shadow Warriors: Iraqi Shiʿi Militias Defending the Faithful in Syria and Iraq. Tel Aviv Notes, 7(23), pp. 1–5. Youtube. (2014). Ya Zainab [Zaynab]. [online] Available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv5Bzo vaaHo. [Accessed 28 February 2019]. Zimney, M. (2007). History in the Making: The Sayyida Zaynab Shrine in Damascus. ARAM, 19, pp. 695–703.

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12 THE STABILIZATION OF GENDER IN ZAKAT The margin of freedom and the politics of care Danielle Widmann Abraham

The practice of taking care of those who are vulnerable is foundational to Islam. The Qurʾan obliges all of those who believe in God to give a portion of their wealth as zakat in order to provide for others, including those who are needy, those who are destitute, orphans, those who are on a journey far away from their own people, those who are in debt, and those who can be ransomed from slavery (Q9:60, 2:177). Contemporary calculations determine zakat as 2.5% of certain kinds of wealth that a person has held for more than a year, so zakat draws from surplus resources in order to make the lives of others more secure. In multiple verses in the Qurʾan, care of vulnerable people is conjoined to prayer, and these are named as dual actions of people who are steadfast in their faith. They express steadfast faith because they make that faith steadfast: both prayer and care establish, embody, and express Islam in the world. Care defines in part what it means to surrender to the divine, and there is no way to be Muslim without taking care of others. According to the Qurʾan, other normative obligations – prayer, pilgrimage, fasting, witnessing to the oneness of God – are incomplete without giving zakat in order to take care of the humans with whom we share our world. It is worth emphasizing that Qurʾanic care is embodied, material care. It is not a feeling, even a good feeling, or an affective experience. Care in the Qurʾan is provision, taking on the responsibility of redistribution, a need-based transfer of resources that makes a material difference in bettering the circumstances of a person’s life. To define oneself as a Muslim is to throw one’s lot in with those who are vulnerable by giving what one must to provide the necessities of human life. Zakat establishes the provision of care as a definitive act of Islam, yet while zakat is obligatory, it is also open. With the exception of those places where zakat is collected by the state, people have the latitude to decide how to give it and to whom (Zysow, 2002). Historian Kambiz GhaneaBassiri notes that we are witnessing a period of dynamic development of Muslim institutions and communal relations in the United States, and that can also be said of Muslims in India (GhaneaBassiri 2010, p.375). This chapter looks at three zakat projects which have emerged in recent years in order to trace how the construction of gender is negotiated in providing for others. In one zakat project from India, representations of women’s poverty serve to emphasize the dangers of a status quo which makes people’s live precarious. Another zakat project in Boston, in the United States, invokes women as aspirational strivers, establishing an ideal gendered subjectivity that seems to hold therapeutic potential for homeless women. Finally,

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the last zakat project considered here contextualizes women’s experience within an abolitionist project of transformation. These zakat projects from India and the United States, both places where Muslims are a minority, demonstrate that zakat constitutes a site of profound religious and social creativity in contemporary Islam. The projects described here fulfil the Qurʾanic mandate of care for others, while simultaneously reflecting their unique local, national, cultural, and organizational contexts. They reveal that Islamic practices of care emerge within a space in which people make choices about how best to respond to human suffering. This chapter demonstrates that in our contemporary moment, the obligation of giving zakat and caring for the poor stands as a foundation for the reconstruction of social bonds in the face of marginalization, structural violence, and state-induced vulnerability. Within these reparative efforts, defined gender roles function to emphasize and to inspire transformative ethical action. Each of the three zakat projects described here configures a distinct politics of care that centres particular experiences of violence and state failure. These projects engage gender through a logic of stabilization: they communicate and concretize a particular construction of gender as a significant element in their interventions of transformation and repair. When concretized representations of gender roles are shaped within the redistribution of resources through zakat, these fixed gender constructions are held out both analytically and practically as a way of entering into the ethical labour of responding to the suffering of others. In other words, the stabilization of gender clarifies the moral stakes of the broader zakat project. To trace gender in contemporary zakat practices is to understand that Islamic tradition is the ground for a plurality of gender constructions. Islamic studies scholarship in recent decades has occasioned the emergence of historical studies that describe the experience of Muslim women’s lives across geographical, cultural, and temporal contexts (Ahmed 1992; Badran 1994; MirHosseini 2000; Mahmood 2005; Deeb 2006; Karim 2008; VanDoorn-Harder 2010; Rasmussen 2010; Abdul Khabeer 2016, among others). Muslim feminist scholars have generated new normative expressions of Islam that support egalitarian interpretations of Islamic scripture, ethics, and ritual practice (Wadud 1999, 2006; Barlas 2002; Engineer 2004; al-Hibri 2005; Ali 2010, 2016; Chaudhry 2014; Hidayatuallah 2014; Mir-Hosseini 2015; Lamrabet 2016, among others). Scholars of Islamic textual traditions such as Kecia Ali have worked to ‘destabilize gender’ by offering interpretations of texts that push against ‘seemingly fixed boundaries’ of gender and sexual identity (Ali, 2017). These egalitarian interpretations of Islamic tradition stand in tension with prevailing notions of gender complementarity that have characterized patriarchal interpretations of Islam in the contemporary period (Chaudhry 2014, p.8). All of these scholarly interventions, including new studies of sexuality and masculinity (Kugle 2010, 2013, 2016; De Sondy 2014; Semerdijan 2016), have greatly broadened our understanding of how Islam impacts the variety of lived experiences of gender. To this growing body of scholarship on gender in Islam, this chapter adds an analysis of zakat practices from the perspective of existential anthropology. Michael D. Jackson defines existential anthropology as the ‘attempt to explore human lifeworlds as the sites of a perennial struggle for existence’, tracing the ‘dynamic relationship between the human capacity for life, and the potentialities of any social environment for providing the wherewithal of life’ (2005, p.xii). When we focus on ‘the problem of creating viable forms of existence and coexistence’, we can see people determine through experimentation how they can (and cannot) exercise the ‘“existential imperative” to convert givenness into choice, and live the world as if it were our own’ (Jackson 2005, p.xii, xxii). Framing the way that gender constructions are stable inside zakat projects brings into relief the existential work of gender as a means of navigating the struggle to be and coexist in a lifeworld with others. In 194

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a ‘world where being is mutable and unstable’, this analysis of zakat situates gender as a potentially stabilized mode of being (Jackson 2005, p.xx). As a practical transfer, zakat compels interdependence among Muslims. As an obligation, zakat frames the transfer of resources as a categorically moral act. To give the poor and the vulnerable their due is necessary and right. Within this ethical matrix of zakat, these projects present bounded representations of gender to propel Muslim attempts to redress oppression, marginalization, and violence. While we describe the everyday realities of Muslim women’s lives and feminist discourse about Islamic normativity, we can identify another aspect that is part of the gender plurality of Islamic tradition when see in the context of zakat: Islam affords the construction of gender as a way to stabilize acting morally in the world. Zakat projects stabilize gender in rebuilding lifeworlds disintegrated by long-term structural violence. Although these projects emphasize different intersections of religion and violence, they all take the creation of security in our neoliberal age of pervasive insecurity as an ethical commission in Islam. This methodology of analysing distinct practices of zakat side by side reflects the reality of lived Islam in our contemporary world: these different Muslim projects exist in the world, alongside each other, embodying distinct interpretations of Islam and gender. They all work within the ethical matrix, established through zakat, of providing for the vulnerable, and they stabilize gender as a way of activating that ethical matrix as they intervene in a particular structure of violence in the world, but they do so in unique ways. Recognizing the distinct constellations of Islam and gender in zakat helps to resist the temptation to represent Islamic ethics and practice in essentialized or singular terms. Instead, this intra-Islamic comparative methodology explicitly attests to the diversity of Islamic practices and Muslim constructions of gender. This comparative method also discloses the way that zakat connects to the possibility of human freedom: these different projects result from choices made by Muslims who are committed to living Islam in the context of their everyday contingent lives, which for them means negating the effects of intersecting structures of marginalization, domination, and violence.

‘Hands that help are holier than lips that pray’: The Imam-e Zamana mission In 1985, Twelver Shiʿa Muslims in Hyderabad, India founded the Imam-e Zamana Mission (IZM) to distribute direct monetary aid and medical assistance in slum areas in the city, many of which had large Muslim populations and were marginalized in the postcolonial surge of urbanization (Sherman 2015, p.19). The broad rubric of zakat allows us to consider projects from different interpretive communities of Islam. Twelver Shiʿas practice zakat, but there are also other modes of pious redistribution in Shiʿi tradition, including khums, a fifth of income surplus which is divided between descendants of Muhammad and religious leaders, and zamini, a payment given in thanks after prayers for protection and well-being (Aleem et al. 2004). IZM collects funds for these different categories of distribution from Muslims locally, in India, and globally, from Shiʿas in Canada and the United States. Like many religious projects in different Muslim contexts and across other religious traditions, IZM redistributes their funds to directly assist people who are poor while simultaneously trying to change the conditions of inequality which trap people in enduring poverty. Their construction of gender is related to these two interlocking dimensions of providing care for the vulnerable: helping the poor while transforming poverty. The following description of their redistribution shows how gender becomes stabilized in IZM’s zakat project as a means 195

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of communicating the importance of both immediate assistance to the poor and long-term transformation of poverty as ethical practices of Islam. The designated recipients of zakat include the poor and the needy – people who are in chronic conditions of need and people who have been thrown into circumstances that overwhelm their material resources. Prophetic sayings about ethical and pious action emphasize the value of providing care, characterizing those who help widows and orphans as being like those who struggle in the way of God or who pray at night and fast during the day (Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2982). IZM follows this prophetic virtue of taking care of orphans, widows, and others in need, along with the Shiʿa obligation to provide for poorer members of the Prophet’s family. Their social media accounts include first-person testimonies of women – widows and wives – who are recipients of monthly financial assistance (IZM 2015). These testimonies begin with an account of the genealogy of a person’s poverty. One woman narrates how her husband, an autorickshaw driver, died of a heart attack. Another woman describes caring for her disabled husband and son. Each of these first-person accounts is presented by IZM as a ‘case’ and each case is designated with a number. These descriptive markers indicate to the media audience that IZM is tracking the distribution of resources (the number) as well as following a particular family’s hardship (the case). A representative of IZM prompts the woman to recount the story of her family’s poverty and also her day-to-day efforts to provide for her household. All of the women speak to their conditions of difficulty and deprivation, acknowledging that they do not have enough money to feed, clothe, and shelter their families. They close by saying exactly how much money they have been given by IZM and for how long – often, this monthly assistance continues over years. These are some of the first-person narratives presented in IZM’s online media; together the recorded stories of these women create a visual archive of the daily gendered reality of a subaltern Muslim underclass. There are a couple of such narrative videos of men, but most are of women and the details of their narratives bring into view the specific circumstances of everyday survival in contemporary India. One woman mentions that she does not have a ration card, which allows poorer people across India to buy food staples at a subsidized rate. She describes having her sister, who does have a ration card, help her buy rice to cook, thus showing the constant navigation of relationships and resources that people living in poverty undertake to survive. Even with the financial help from IZM, she has to find a work-around through family to buy affordable food. Another IZM case narrator describes her workplace injury: while making shoe boxes, she suffered an injury to her hand that resulted in the loss of several fingers. The genealogy of her poverty involved injury and lack of affordable medical care or worker’s compensation. The narratives of several women reveal the precarity of patriarchal family structure in which a woman works inside the house raising children and managing the household while her husband works for wages outside the home. When their husbands suddenly die or are disabled, these women are faced with the challenge of raising their children and providing for their household without preparation and sometimes without skills to find wage work themselves. And as one woman’s narrative reveals, even steady wage work may not be sufficient to provide for her family if it is labour in a feminized, low-compensation field such as embroidering or tailoring. IZM published these videos as a way of chronicling their provisioning, but these same videos also show us the everyday reality of India’s economy for the people who make up the poorest demographic in the country – Muslims (Prime Minister’s High Level Committee 2006). IZM produced this media archive of subaltern women’s narratives as a way of establishing their commitment to transparency, the current mechanism of legitimacy for any public organization (Lehr-Leonhardt 2005). They want people who give to see the people who 196

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get, thus shaping and satisfying a desire on the part of the givers to know the route their zakat travels and to whom it arrives. Tellingly, there is no media archive of narratives of givers. The narratives presented are from people who represent the Qurʾanic and prophetic categories of recipients, and they are all shown in their homes. At times, the video pans the walls and the IZM interlocutor will comment on the small size of the room or the conditions of disrepair. The record of their experience and genealogy of poverty also work to build a visual archive of the material conditions of the underclass. People in middle-class homes around the world can thus look into the conditions of a home in what are formally considered to be slums (Government of India 2013). At worst, this can be voyeurism into the condition of inequality. At best, it can occasion gratitude for material well-being. Such videos can be viewed by anyone in the world who has the technology to access the internet, something that is not available to many of India’s poorest people, both in terms of owning a device and affording connectivity. Recounting the difficulties of procuring food, medical care, housing, and education, these women narrators communicate the multidimensional experience of poverty as one of constant struggle. The visual record of seeing people in their homes evinces a sense of intimacy and concreteness. In both discursive and visual regimes, IZM’s media aesthetic is a realist one that seeks to present a true ‘case’. While all of the women profiled in their organizational media are legitimate recipients of material help according to Islamic tradition, they also speak to gendered family experiences of responsibility and provision (feeding and educating children) that are common across class and national boundaries. The struggles of IZM’s women recipients are comprehensible because the narratives describe trying to fulfil basic needs and common desires of parents the world over. Narratives of assisting widows and mothers anchor IZM’s zakat project in Islamic scripture and the legacy of the Prophet. They thus prove IZM’s commitment to fulfilling the obligation to provide material help to the vulnerable that Islam places upon Muslims, and to the distinct ways of fulfilling this obligation according to Shiʿa tradition. IZM has organized their redistributive project in recent decades to include schools. Building educational institutions thus extends their provision into intervening in the structures of poverty. In this regard, IZM is like many other Muslim projects in postcolonial contexts where people are grappling with transforming economies and seeking possibilities to expand well-being – or, in economic terms, seeking ‘opportunities’ to generate income and mobility. IZM has built four schools that educate boys and girls from kindergarten through grade ten (the completion of secondary education in India). This push to develop education is grounded in the struggle to counter the precarity of the Indian Muslim underclass. The struggle against precarity is also anchored in scripture and the legacy of the Prophet. According to IZM’s board members, there was ‘no concept of education’ in many slum areas of Hyderabad in the past – in part because there were no functional schools, and in part because many children started working for wages to help their families as soon they could (IZM 2017). Education is seen as crucial for moving people and communities out of chronic, endemic poverty (Jones 2006, p.62). As one board member put it, ‘spoon feeding charity is not the solution to poverty’ (IZM 2017). This statement reveals how Muslims living in the contemporary world, including in India where the Muslim minority makes up the poorest demographic group, see themselves in terms of a dual responsibility: to care for the poor and to transform poverty. We could, of course, collapse the transformation of poverty, its ‘solution’, under the rubric of providing material assistance: no doubt, eradicating poverty – making a world where no one struggles to provide the basic necessities for living – is first-order material assistance to the poor. Yet 197

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in communicating the work of their project to donors through first-person accounts, IZM presents the two aspects of help and transformation as distinct. The video narratives of women recipients – widows, poor women from Muhammad’s family, wives of disabled men – are a separate genre from IZM’s presentation of student ‘success stories’ (www.izm.in/success-stories.html). Narratives of success chronicle the progressive steps in a girl’s education, and often include economic terms such as ‘career’ as well as details about chosen fields of study and employment. Taking on the project of building schools, employing teachers, and funding schools, IZM has developed and institutionalized education in Muslim communities in Hyderabad. They are not alone in this work; other Muslim organizations from across the variety of Islamic communities have taken to building schools and colleges, both in the contemporary period and throughout the city’s history. But the development of schools from the ethical matrix of providing care for the vulnerable results in an approach that emphasizes education as an efficacious solution to poverty. IZM appeals to potential donors of zakat, sadaqa, khums, and zamini to sponsor a child in school as well as to provide financial assistance to widows, orphans, differently abled, and poor people. They affirm that enabling them to provide this material care brings blessings by Almighty Allah in the now and the herafter (www.izm.in/ index.html). But the potential of education to bring about ‘success’ is communicated in contrast to the lived experiences of poverty narrated by widows and wives of disabled men. Women’s testimonies of their gendered experiences of managing their families’ survival confirm the provision of assistance by IZM and therefore legitimize their pious redistributions, but these same testimonies function as a kind of cautionary example of what life is like if education doesn’t work (succeed, so to speak) to transform the circumstances of poor people. Stabilizing gender through the narratives of poor women struggling to survive and provide for their families communicates the stakes of IZM’s broader project of education as a strategy of poverty transformation. The experiences of poor women illustrate the damage and pain caused by the status quo, the wreckage of inequality on individual lives and families. Fixing representations of women’s lives through their narratives of unending efforts to cobble together necessities and their gratitude for the provisions given to them by IZM emphasizes the intractability of their poverty while simultaneously heightening the stakes of the transformation of poverty for the generation coming up. The women’s realities are contrasted to their children’s possibilities. They suffer, but students might succeed. The urban landscape that is being transformed by the information economy is also being held back by the failure of the state to develop equal social and physical infrastructure for all its citizens. Whatever success from education might look like, it does not look like what we see in the video of a woman struggling to buy rice without a ration card. Women’s narratives of poverty stabilize poverty and inequality, and not gender, as the primary social reality that needs to be transformed. The way their daily lives are represented secures a relationship between Muslims that affirms interdependence and the Islamic value of providing care for others. It does not secure discursive space or a lived, embodied social analysis of how their experiences have been shaped by patriarchy or misogyny – either in their lives more broadly or in their experience of their poverty. Representations of women reinforce IZM’s zakat project as pious action and as legitimate and moral redress of poverty, yet the stabilized presentation of women’s experiences forecloses any analysis of the operations of patriarchy and gender and its transformation. Within this project, it seems that gender must be stabilized without being analysed so that poverty can be destabilized and transformed. 198

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The charity of hope: Amal House for women In 2017, Islamic Circle of North America Relief opened its fourteenth transitional house for homeless women in Boston, Massachusetts. ICNA is one of the Muslim organizations that emerged out of Muslim student groups on U.S. campuses in the 1970s (GhaneaBassiri 2010, p.353). Its relief organization aims to provide services to the ‘underprivileged’ in the U.S. and to victims of natural disasters worldwide. Like Islamic Relief, another Muslim humanitarian organization, ICNA has emerged in a civil society in which religious organizations from many different traditions work in partnership with government agencies to provide social services (Occhipinti et al. 2010). ICNA Relief coordinates food pantries, shelters, medical clinics, disaster assistance, and programs that support children in school. This profile focuses on the opening of the Amal House in Boston, a transitional shelter for homeless women in order to look how the ethical matrix of zakat stabilizes gender through the figure of a self-improving aspirational woman. This aspirational gendered figure represents personal success and further symbolizes the success of Islam in the United States. For ICNA Relief, providing transitional housing for women is a way of fulfilling Islamic ethical ideals while also responding to community needs. In addition to the practical work of housing women who are trying to move out of homelessness, the opening of the shelter does the cultural work of demonstrating that Islam makes a community better. Providing services and humanitarian assistance thus attests to the capacity of Islamic tradition to build a viable lifeworld. The Amal House project comes out of the ethics of provision that is the core of zakat, yet in the contemporary context, service provision in the United States plays an important role of integrating diverse Muslim groups with each other and with the urban neighbourhood. ICNA Relief collects zakat and sadaqa from congregations and individuals to fund their various programs. Amal House was funded through the contributions of multiple local mosque communities. When the house was remodelled into a transitional housing shelter, each bedroom was funded as an independent project, and plaques affixed to the door designate the sponsor of the room. One bedroom was sponsored by ‘The Egyptian Community of Malden’ (a suburb of Boston), another by a group of Turkish Muslims, and another is sponsored in memory of a family’s late matriarch, so the room bears her name. The large multi-purpose room on the ground floor was funded by donations from the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, the largest mosque in the northeast. These sponsorships are marked by plaques and signs throughout the building, so the space embodies the greater collectivity of Muslims in metropolitan Boston, tracing its multiple ethnic roots, congregations, and family legacies. The shelter becomes a home for local Muslim cultural diversity. It is a built environment that integrates a wide variety of groups, a shelter for unsheltered women and a cultural home for the various strands of Islam that sustain Boston’s Muslims. At the opening of Amal House, donors as well as colleagues from other religious communities were invited to preview the facilities, and to come together to pray for blessings on the work of helping women move out of homelessness. One of the talks addressed to the gathered crowd recounted the history of the place and building in order to situate the project in the cultural legacy of Muslim Americans. A white Muslim woman ICNA Relief staff member noted that they leased the building from Masjid al-Qurʾan, a majority Black congregation which is next door. She then went on to trace the history of the building, initially the home of a rabbi when the mosque next door was still a synagogue. The synagogue and the house were bought by the Nation of Islam, which used the house as living quarters for religious leaders. Malcolm X stayed there during his visits to Boston, as did 199

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Louis Farrakhan (ICNA Relief 2017). Muhammad Ali is also reported to have stayed there while passing through Boston. Recounting this series of transformations of the ownership of the building connected ICNA Relief’s project to the legacy of Black Muslim history. The ICNA Relief staff described their work as ‘paying homage’ to this history by ‘reviving the legacy’ of a ‘vibrant indigenous Muslim community’. Such words frame this effort as an evolutionary transformation of living Islam in Boston. The house substantiates both the ethical mandate to care for the vulnerable and multiple racial, cultural, and national legacies of Muslim Boston, thus situating ethics and history in one space. ICNA Relief’s description of the purpose of Amal House locates women in a discourse of self-improvement and upward mobility. Unsheltered women and their children can stay in the house as they transition their way to permanent housing. While they are at Amal House, they will be able to avail counselling for trauma, career development, and job training. Women who want to stay at Amal House must apply and are accepted after screening. Women who need treatment for substance abuse and women who are domestic violence victims are not eligible to stay at Amal, although case managers can help such women find appropriate resources for treatment and advocacy. A South Asian male ICNA Relief intern articulated the transformation that Amal aims to facilitate, stating that women ‘could come here and recognize this is somewhere they can go to better themselves on a daily basis’. This bettering-of-self would enable women to be ‘self-sufficient, sustainable, goal-oriented’. The intern went on to characterize this transformation as ‘executing that spirit of ihsan [beautification, excellence] that we have when we follow the Prophet’, which is a ‘spirit of great ambition’. The intern continued by imagining such a woman speaking of her own transformation: ‘We want to give them that ambition, that really “I can accomplish anything that I want to accomplish and I gain that spirit here at Amal. I gain that hope and vision”’. The intern’s words elaborate the prophetic example with a discourse that mixes self-help, (economic) optimism, and Islam. The possibility of making this ideal, self-transforming woman real is at the centre of Amal House. She is the figural embodiment of hope given as charity. When ICNA Relief describes itself as ‘zakat in action!’, a woman’s transformational selfimprovement testifies to the efficacy of action – both the organization’s and hers. ICNA Relief staff presented a vision of the possible transformation of women from homeless to self-actualized successes. After their short speeches constructed this shared purpose among those gathered to open Amal House, the event shifted into two distinct collective episodes. A question and answer about the practical logistics of the program followed first. Those gathered from the various congregations that sponsored the remodelling of the house asked about security, children, registration for subsidized long-term housing in the city, low-income housing access, community development corporations, whether women of all faiths would be welcome (yes), and whether the Muslim women would have space to pray (also yes, in the multi-purpose room). Questions came one after another, and those gathered in Amal House generated their own informal community-based education about social services and municipal low-income housing policy, sharing information and experiences related to how to help unsheltered people move into a home. The Amal House opening morphed into an impromptu civic education academy. Following this open exchange, ICNA Relief staff welcomed the imam of Masjid alQurʾan to ‘do a dua not only for the project, but for everyone who has supported the project and the women who will come to live here’. The Masjid al-Qurʾan congregation next door is a Black majority one and its imam is a Black man who has served the Boston neighbourhood of Dorchester for decades. His prayer was welcomed as a link between space and 200

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history, intention and action, donors and recipients, present and future. The Imam prayed first in Arabic and then translated his prayer into English: Oh Allah distribute between us the unnerving faith that is necessary to minimize the tribulations of this world. Oh Allah, sustain our hearing, our sight, our strength for us as long as we live, and make it so that when we have gone, those who we have benefitted amongst us remember to pray for us. And place our vengeance on those who have wronged us, and give us victory over our enemies, and try us not our faith. Neither make this world our greatest concern or the extent of our knowledge. Lord, give us power over those who would oppress us. Allah, give us good in this world and good in the hereafter and protect us from the eternal fire. Amin. The Imam’s prayer closed the opening of Amal House. After he prayed, people moved into the dining area for treats and chai. His closing discourse stands in contrast to that of the ICNA Relief intern that occurred at the physical and temporal centre of the gathering. Whereas the intern spoke of a self-actualized striving woman, the imam prayed against the oppressor. The intern spoke of ambition and accomplishment, while the imam prayed to minimize tribulation. The difference between their discursive registers was marked by gender – the intern’s discourse was a gendered one, speaking to the vision of what women might experience while staying at Amal, while the imam’s prayer did not explicitly mention gender or another marker of identity. What the imam did explicitly include in his prayer was strength, being remembered for benefitting others, and power over those who oppress. The imam was a Black man speaking as the leader of congregation of Black Muslims. The intern was a South Asian man speaking to the vision of an Islamic organization. There was no attempt to connect or reconcile their speech. They were laid out separately, as distinct ethical and devotional strands. At the Amal House opening gathering, ICNA Relief stabilized gender to create ‘the aspiration to strive’ as the core of Muslim community (Khan 2012, p.9). This stabilization of gender contrasted with the invocation of a Black Muslim legacy, and with the prayers of a local Black Muslim leader. Gender thus stabilized a fragmented, disintegrated understanding of Muslim lives and community: some Muslims were racialized, while other Muslims were gendered, and still others referenced in terms of ethnicity. Some Muslims were oriented to aspire, achieve, and overcome, while other Muslims were inspired to struggle, resist, and remember. Implicitly, success was discursively bifurcated into success as economic progress and success as transformation of oppression. Sister Clara Muhammad was acknowledged in terms of her Blackness, but not in terms of her gender, and she was not invoked as a possible model woman for the aspirations of women who would come live in Amal House in the future; the recollection of her life was paradoxically a gesture of anti-Black erasure. The imaginary future figure of a formerly unsheltered woman was invoked solely in terms of gender – as a woman – even though the women who were part of the gathering included women of different races, ages, marital status, class, and religious backgrounds. Those who spoke on behalf of the Amal House project thus referenced women in a onedimensional fashion, and did not analyse nor speculate about the forces that produce homelessness as a social reality in urban Boston (or the United States), although the women who heard the discourse of the ideal aspirational woman were women with complex social identities. While those gathered did exchange knowledge about public housing policy, it was only the Black male imam who mentioned in his prayer the mechanism of power to 201

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dispossess and to dominate: oppression. While this was an important and culminating moment, the Amal House opening mirrors the IZM project in eliding analysis about gender and the structural forces of power that produce women’s vulnerability to precarity.

Zakat, structural violence, and social justice: Believers Bail Out In 2018, a small group of Muslim women scholars and activists in the United States initiated a project during the month of Ramadan to use zakat to pay the bail bonds of Muslims who were in detention while awaiting trial. Dr. Suad Al-Khabeer, Dr. Kecia Ali, and Dr. Maytha al-Hassen were inspired by the Black-led and Black-centred National Bail Out collective which had started a campaign to #FreeBlackMamas (Bucar and Randone 2018). Drawing on the abolitionist politics of the bailout collective, these Muslim women activists and academic scholars of Islam came together to explore ways that Muslim communities in the United States could draw on Islamic tradition to join efforts to end mass incarceration (Abdul-Haqq 2018). Believers Bail Out (BBO) emerged from their desire to join the political work of abolition to the ongoing formation of Islamic ethics and Muslim practice. Although the Qurʾan specifies that zakat should be used to ransom captives from slavery, the use of zakat to pay bail of people who are awaiting trial was unprecedented in the United States. The Muslim women who started BBO wanted to extend abolitionist thought and politics in Muslim communities, and simultaneously re-centre the abolitionist ethics and practices that are foundational yet under-emphasized acts of worship in Islam. BBO founders thus learned from grassroots Black social justice movements committed to struggling against the systemic, structural violence which decimates Black and Brown communities – the prison-industrial complex, antiMuslim racism, and anti-Blackness – and focused on mass incarceration as a critical site of abolition (Believers Bail Out 2020). The formation of this zakat project is a result of what scholar Sa’diyya Shaikh calls a ‘tafsir of praxis’, the ‘expanding human conceptions of justice and equality’ which form the ‘social texts of Islam’ (2007, p.67). Unlike IZM, which began with the distribution of zakat and khums and then developed a broader program of education, and unlike Amal House, which came out of a national Muslim organization that provides social services and humanitarian assistance as a way of enculturating Islam in the U.S. public, BBO was formed out of a dialectic of political analysis and the desire to embody Islam. Compared to other zakat projects, BBO has a unique genesis as an extension into Muslim communities of Black-centred political struggle of abolition and liberation. BBO’s connection to Black abolitionist politics and its emergence out of praxis has influenced the way gender becomes stabilized as a commitment to intersectional solidarity and organization. Gender, in BBO’s project, is not separated from race, religion, class, carceral status, sexuality, ability, family obligation, community responsibility, moral obligation, and even political labour. The project thus reflects an intersectional analysis of oppression which ‘accounts for the multiple grounds of identity when considering how the world is constructed’ (Crenshaw 1991, p.1245). Gender is stabilized in the Believers Bail Out zakat project only insofar as intersectionality is stabilized – as a foundational commitment, as a strategy to counter anti-Black violence, and as a matter of value, principle, and practical organization. From its inception, BBO has positioned itself as a project that invites the participation of others. Their online social media presence enabled people to fill out a Google form to express their interest and indicate how they could possibly be involved. This inclusion of the public structures a different kind of relationship than merely giving zakat for BBO to distribute. BBO wants, rather, to involve people in multiple dimensions of their efforts, 202

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thus making theirs a new model of grassroots zakat movement building. They offered online instructions (a ‘toolkit’) for hosting an iftar gathering to break Ramadan fasting in order to promote education about the effects of mass incarceration (Believers Bail Out 2020). They encouraged people to volunteer beyond just paying their zakat, since there are many ways to assist people once their bail is paid and they are released from detention. One of the ways that BBO facilitates the development of a grassroots Muslim public is through the constant affirmation of their position as learners. Like IZM and Amal House, BBO places a value on education but their definition of education is different. IZM supports formal education for children who lack access to quality schools. Amal House explicitly describes the acquisition of knowledge in terms of the development of employability, while also creating space for informal knowledge building about public policy. BBO, however, broadcasts webinars (watched by thousands) about the various dimensions of mass incarceration, and they teach by learning – or learn by teaching – about the bail system, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the history of the carceral politics of racism (MPower Change 2017). A ‘recent updates’ blog post describes their efforts to establish means of communication with detainees, and includes an invitation to ‘Stay tuned for an upcoming article from us about what we’ve learned through that process’ (BBO 2019). This kind of ongoing non-formal education builds a common knowledge base and a shared socio-political analysis amongst those involved in BBO. It is the kind of knowledge building that gives social justice movements momentum since it broadcasts to partner organizations that BBO is interested in learning from them, both practically and ideologically, and is committed to the constant refinement of their understanding of the structural forces of violence and oppression. In their initial year, BBO collected thousands of dollars in zakat and focused on bailing out Muslims in Chicago. In 2019, BBO sought to branch out to other cities in the Midwest and East Coast, partnering with community organizations to end bail. All signs indicate that BBO will continue in the future, sustaining their efforts to bail out believers as well as educating Muslim communities about the reality of the wreckage of mass incarceration. Their work of building a shared analysis of the structural forces of precarity and state violence serves a similar function of intra-Muslim integration seen in the Amal House project. There is an important difference in the logic of this integration. In the Amal House project, multiple Muslim constituencies joined together in a common project of intervention with an identifiable object – homeless women. BBO, however, wants to promote intra-Muslim integration through a reflexive praxis that established a goal of understanding what was happening to people in the community. There is no external object of understanding or intervention. Instead, there is a circle of belonging – defined by believing – that encompasses the Muslim public as a forum for socio-political analysis of anti-Blackness, anti-Muslim racism, and the workings of the prison-industrial complex. BBO is a nascent project, but it seems likely that it will continue to expand and develop, in part because of its collaboration with Muslim advocacy groups such as MPower Change, and in part because it embodies a new model of intersectional Muslim movement for liberation. Its praxis of reflexive learning and its interpretation of zakat in terms of a response to structural violence have brought a dynamic new model of how to configure a Muslim public committed to social justice and liberation.

Zakat and the margin of freedom The elaboration of zakat demonstrates how the ethical matrix of Islamic tradition is animated in different contexts. IZM, Amal House, and BBO stabilize particular constructions of gender: through narratives of negotiating poverty, as an ideal of aspirational striving, and 203

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as intersectional praxis. Each project fulfils the Islamic obligation to provide for the vulnerable and needy. Yet they are very different. Their engagement of gender differs, as do their organizational forms, as well as their struggles to exist and coexist in the world, marked as it is by violence and injustice. These projects have elaborated Islamic obligation into projects that attempt to ‘transform the world through praxis’ (Jackson 2005, p.xxii). Such projects indicate that the obligation to provide for others encourages experimentation with how to live Islam as a moral truth in a balky world. The elaboration of zakat into projects that attempt to build a lifeworld not foreclosed by violence and suffering attempts to bring into being the justice, beauty, and devotion that Islam holds God wants for humanity. These projects further reveal how contemporary practices of zakat thus mark out in Islamic terms a space of human freedom. Through zakat projects, Muslims move into ‘“the margin of freedom”, wherein new possibilities are envisaged and struggles take place “over the sense of the social world, its meaning and orientation, its present and its future”’ (Jackson 2005, p.xxi) These projects can be characterized in terms of human freedom because they demarcate and crystallize the way that choice and action shape the dialectic of social life: they mark how the possibility of social reproduction intersects with the possibility of social transformation. They define a space in which people choose to either make history through repair or be made by history as damage. Islam defines zakat as worship of God. The praxis of zakat establishes the possibility of human freedom – not as unlimited power, but as the recognition of human subjectivity endowed with the capacity to act in the limits of finitude. ‘Life cannot be meaningful in a world in which the idea of God negates … freedom’, noted Indian Muslim thinker Alam Khundmiri. ‘The word of God needs an interpretation which does not totally restrict human freedom’ (Ansari 2001, p.298). These zakat projects are experiments of human creativity shaped by Islamic ethics. Providing material care for the vulnerable and freeing humans from captivity calls Muslims to engage the ‘external conditions’ of the world in the name of Islam (Jackson 2005, p.143). The Qurʾan states that in ‘freeing a human from bondage’ (Q90:13) a person draws closer to God, but the effort of abolition also positions a person in relation to the lived social world. Abolition itself is a project of rejection and refusal. It positions the abolitionist against the violent imposition of a status quo that tries to make our predatory, extractive social order seem like a natural one. ‘With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth’, noted political theorist Hannah Arendt (2019, p.176). Zakat occasions this insertion for those Muslims who take up the work of care and abolition that is, in Islam, also a restoration to the grounds of our own being.

Gender and the politics of care The Islamic obligation to provision care affords Muslims latitude in deciding which others to care about and how to provide for them. There are specific categories of people who are legitimate recipients of zakat, but these categories must be translated into specific contexts and onto particular human lives. Such decisions, made in freedom out of a sense of responsibility, bring Islam into being in the world. Zakat grounds projects of social transformation, provisioning material care as a refusal of bondage, homelessness, and precarity. These projects shape constructions of gender that animate the ethical work of responding to suffering and violence. The figure of the woman struggling in poverty in IZM’s work communicates a sense of urgency in the ongoing efforts to dismantle the effects of inequality in the lives of Muslim children living in Indian slums. The striving woman invoked by ICNA staff at the 204

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Amal House opening is a spectral figure, an imagination of an ideal subjectivity that is efficacious, persistent, and achievement-oriented. She is a representation of mobility in a gendered human form. She has goals, momentum, and a trajectory that are her ‘shelter’ in the world. She is the optimism that haunts those who want to help others thrive. Believers Bail Out configures women in terms of a multi-dimensional self, engaged in the liberatory praxis of community as it arises out of intersecting identities and histories. Muslims operationalize zakat to transform ‘geographies of violence’ through moral action (Kitchin Dahringer and Brittain 2017). The minority status of Muslims in both India and the United States likely influences their interventions, all of which take up the provisioning of care in the shadow of the state: they move out of the ethical matrix of Islam to respond to the suffering in the margins and interstices of state neglect. They provision care to people who have been failed by the state with different degrees of resulting damage. The politics of care of IZM is shaped by the context of subalternity in which Muslims form India’s underclass. IZM fulfils the mandate to care for the poor, but theirs is a project of refusal – a rejection of entrenching inequality for Muslims marginalized in contemporary India. Amal House has been built to assist women living on the streets, who fall through the cracks of a thinning social safety net. These are women whose lives have been made vulnerable in a society of great wealth where government social provision is still deeply contested. BBO provides material assistance to those who are ground down by a criminal (justice) system, untrapping those who have been caged and disempowered of choice in the legal system. The women served by Amal House are held to be in need of support and opportunity, whereas those who are bailed out are in need of release. When these projects are compared, it brings into relief that some zakat projects operate independently of the state, provisioning care without explicitly indicting the limitations of the state, as in the case of IZM and BBO. Other projects seek to exercise their influence on local governance, such as ICNA does with Amal House, as their staff now participate in formal groups tasked with policy making around homelessness and social services. Considering zakat in terms of the state demonstrates that the provision of care and the securing of basic goods cannot be taken for granted by citizens who are Muslim minorities, but it can also reveal how liberal democratic states are failing their citizens on a broader level. The politics of care in Islam are, like its gender constructions, variegated. Different projects present different critiques of violence and state failure, and some not at all. This may be unsatisfying to those who seek to find in Islamic tradition a series of resolutions, of answers and templates and infallible maps of action. In relationship to God, Islam does offer such affirmative and definitive holds on the imagination. The gestures and words of prayer are formalized and specific. The Qurʾan affirms rewards for piety and devotion. But in relationship to other humans, in that social world where we hope to be given the wherewithal of life, the margin of freedom is marked by uncertainty and ambiguity. It is, however, that same margin of freedom that makes ethics possible, when we chose to fulfil our responsibilities to others, and it is the possibility of ethics that makes Islam a source of vitality in human community. Religious studies scholars note that religion takes shape in social, economic, cultural, and political contexts (Moore 2007). Perhaps the contextual formation of religion involves a parallel contextual formation of gender. In some expressions of Islamic tradition, gender becomes the primary frame of action and understanding. In the zakat projects addressed here, however, gender is a mode of stabilizing – communicating and animating – the ethical work of responding to suffering, even when that suffering is not necessarily analysed in terms of gender. This does not mean that gender cannot be a primary focus of zakat 205

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projects. It can be and sometime it is. But it shows us that zakat animates an ethical matrix in which gender constructions can greatly vary, both analytically and practically. The variegated moral geography of gender in zakat reflects the margin of freedom and the struggle over how to coexist in a shared world. The construction of gender in zakat thus works as both an affirmation and a negotiation of the truth of human interdependence. The ethical matrix of Islam does not yield a template of provision to be applied universally. Instead, we see that Muslims draw on zakat, even think with zakat, in defining the context of their lives as a moral domain. The freedom to establish the provision of care includes the freedom to make the analysis of power – including a gender analysis of power – explicit, or not. The provision of care is obligatory and good, everywhere and always. But the categories of legitimate recipients of zakat are multiple – one can give to orphans, or to the hungry, or to those who should be freed from bondage. Zakat brings together charity and freedom in a multifaceted ethical matrix which marks out space for moral reflection on the relationship between giving and liberation. This means that Islam offers multiple ways to fulfil the obligation of zakat, and this multiplicity is part of what establishes a margin of freedom and generates different politics of care. The ethical matrix of Islam thus holds against the resolution of Islam, including the resolution of gender in Islam. Instead, that matrix establishes Islam as a living force of human creativity in that it calls forth the ethical imagination of Muslims to respond to suffering, violence, precarity, and vulnerability. Within this ethical matrix, constructions of gender help make the world existentially legible because they work to provide us with moral traction in the struggle for coexistence.

Further reading Burkhalter Flueckiger, J (2006) In Amma’s Healing Room: Gender and Vernacular Islam in South India. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. An ethnographic study of lived Islam focused on a woman practitioner of ritual healing in the urban landscape of Hyderabad, India. Hill, Joseph (2019) Wrapping Authority: Women Islamic Leaders in a Sufi Movement in Dakar, Senegal Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Traces the emergence and negotiation of women as authorities within the broader organization of Sufism in Dakar. Focuses on the ways in which Muslim women in urban landscapes mark out spaces and roles to include women in religious community. Khoja-Moolji, S (2018) Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia Berkeley: University of California Press. Thoughtful analysis of the way in which education becomes positioned as the hallmark achievement of both gender and modernity in the postcolonial context of Pakistan. Mittermaier, A. (2019) Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times Berkeley: University of California Press. An ethnographic study of food, solidarity, and the theological imagination that brings them together as evinced during the Arab Spring.

References Abdul-Haqq, K. 2018, ‘Believers Bail Out’ https://sapelosquare.com/2018/07/24/12330/ [accessed February 8, 2020]. Abdul Khabeer, S. 2016, Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States. New York: New York University Press. Ahmed, L. 1992, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate, New Haven: Yale University Press. Aleem, S. et al. 2004, http://www.anthropology.uci.edu/~wmmaurer/courses/anthro_money_2004/ ImamZamin.htm [accessed February 13, 2020].

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Mahmood, S. 2004, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mir-Hosseini, Z. 1999, Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mir-Hosseini, Z., Al-Sharmani, M., and Rumminger, J. 2015, Men in Charge?: Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition. London: Oneworld Academic. Moore, D. 2007, Overcoming Religious Illiteracy: A Cultural Studies Approach to the Study of Religion in Secondary Education, Palgrave Macmillan, New York. MPower Change. 2018, https://www.facebook.com/MPowerChange/videos/believers-bail-out-webi nar/1665291363584402/ [accessed February 2, 2020]. Prime Minister’s High Level Committee. 2006, Social, economic, and educational status of the Muslim community of India. (Cabinet Secretariat) New Delhi, India: Government of India. Occhipinti, L., Adkins, J. and Hefferan, V. (eds.) 2010, Not by Faith Alone: Social Services, Social Justice, and Faith-Based Organizations in the United States, Lanham: Lexington Books, United States. Rasmussen, A. 2010, Women, the Recited Qur’an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia, Berkeley: University of California Press. Ṣaḥı̄ ḥ Muslim. 2982. https://sunnah.com/muslim/55/51 [accessed February 6, 2020]. Semerdijan, E. 2016, ‘Off the Straight Path’: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Shaikh, S. 2007, ‘A Tafsir of Praxis: Gender, Marital Violence, and Resistance in a South African Muslim Community’. In Violence Against Women in Contemporary World Religions: Roots and Cures, ed by Dan Maguire and Sa’diyya Shaikh. Ohio: The Pilgrim Press, 66–89. Sherman, T.C. 2015, Muslim Belonging in Secular India: Negotiating Citizenship in Postcolonial Hyderabad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. VanDoorn-Harder, P. 2006, Women Shaping Islam: Reading the Qur’an in Indonesia, Champaign: University of Illinois Press. wadud, a. 2006, Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam. London: Oneworld Publications. Zysow, A. 2002, ‘Zakat,’ Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., Leiden: Brill. II:409.

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13 MUSLIM CHAPLAINCY AND FEMALE RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY IN NORTH AMERICA Sajida Jalalzai Definitions of Islamic authority are vast and diverse, as are Muslim conceptions of gender. The relationship between gender and authority in Islam is, therefore, complex. Generally, however, Muslims have understood men and women to be essentially different, both in terms of biology and character traits. ‘Sex’, the biologically determined differences between men and women based on external genitalia and reproductive functions, and ‘gender’, the socially and culturally defined differences between men and women, are thus conflated in traditional Islamic discourses. Furthermore, the qualities associated with ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ (discussed later) are understood to be complementary. Domestic and social harmony result from members of both sexes carrying out their corresponding roles and responsibilities. Within this general division of labour, men occupy roles of public leadership, including positions of religious authority, based on what is thought to be their natural leadership potential. Thus, I argue that Muslim conceptions of gender and authority are mutually constitutive; religious authority is traditionally coded as masculine, while masculinity is also configured as essentially authoritative. Additionally, new forms of professional religious authority, such as Muslim chaplaincy, represent ground-breaking avenues for female religious leadership. However, by requiring qualities often coded as ‘feminine’, such as sensitivity, empathy, and compassion, the role of the chaplain further reinscribes traditionally held notions of femininity. As a result, chaplaincy destabilizes traditional notions of masculinity customarily associated with power, judgement, and action while maintaining traditional conceptions of femininity. This chapter first examines different definitions of authority in Islam, before advancing to a discussion of traditional conceptions of gender. With these definitions in place, I examine the relationship between gender and authority, outlining the ways in which women have historically been excluded from public religious leadership. The following section then analyses Muslim leadership in the contemporary North American context, surveying gendered negotiations around a particularly significant type of Muslim leader, the imam. The remainder of this chapter examines a new form of religious authority gaining traction in Muslim communities, Muslim chaplaincy. While chaplaincy affords Muslim women new leadership opportunities, the role simultaneously reinscribes socially constructed notions of ‘femininity’, while at the same time expanding and complicating traditionally held notions of Muslim masculinity. 209

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Authority in Islam Definitions of religious authority in Muslim communities are wide-ranging. For example, the Qurʾan (in Arabic, literally, ‘the Reading’ or ‘Recitation’) represents an example of scriptural authority, as Muslims believe it to be the literal speech of God, providing divine guidance for humanity. Prophets (anbiyaʾ) and saints (awliyaʾ) signify charismatic human authorities who have a unique intimacy with the divine, as do Shiʿi conceptions of the imam, understood to be a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and rightful spiritual leader of the Muslim community. Religious scholars (ʿulama) and jurists (fuqahaʾ) earn their authority through education in various Islamic sciences, such as the Qurʾan, Qurʾanic exegesis (tafsir), studying the life and example of the Prophet Muhammad (hadith), and training in religious law (fiqh). Political leadership, represented most clearly by the figure of the caliph (khalifa) indicates yet another form of authority. While this list is far from comprehensive, it describes various forms of religious authority derived from different sources, experiences, and ‘areas of expertise’ that characterize the Islamic tradition. Therefore, while Sunni Islam is often cited as a religion ‘without clergy’, given that there is no one clear authoritative religious hierarchy or body as there is in Shiʿi Islam or Catholicism, various forms of religious leadership do indeed exist and remain important to the formation of the Islamic traditions. These varied forms of leadership have been produced by the particular needs and challenges of fluid, complex traditions that span centuries and geographic locations.

‘And the male is not like the female’: Islamic constructions of gender While the aforementioned types of Islamic authority are indeed diverse, one common feature is that public leadership roles are reserved for Muslim men. Restrictions on female public authority are, in part, a product of Islamic understandings of gender. Islamic conceptions of gender vary in different geographical and temporal contexts, but the majority of classical Muslim scholars, reliant on the Qurʾan, hadith literature, and fiqh traditions, recognize both a biological and essential difference between men and women, while arguing for gendered complementarity. As stated in Sura Ali ʿImran: ‘And the male is not like the female’ (3:36). And classical scholars argue that while males and females are distinct, their differences do not necessitate a gender hierarchy per se, since traditional gender characteristics (and the subsequent roles that men and women play based on these characteristics) complement one another. In the Qurʾan, God states that he ‘creates everything in pairs’ (51:49). While exegesis of this verse does not restrict these ‘pairs’ to human sexual reproductive relationships, it nonetheless suggests the complementary nature of creation as proof of the existence of God and His perfection. Night and day, moon and sun, woman and man, each in their own way attest to the balance and parity of creation. In fact, the differences between women and men are imagined to reflect the diverse attributes of God, who is both majestic (Jalal) and beautiful (Jamal). These seemingly dualistic qualities, namely, the qualities of power and of tenderness, resolve themselves in the absolute oneness of God (tawhid). Similarly, many scholars uphold the belief that men and women should ideally play distinct but equally important functions in Muslim society, working in tandem to create harmonious families, communities, and societies at large. While Qurʾan 3:36 does not designate a hierarchization of genders, some scholars appeal to other verses of the Qurʾan, such as 4:34, to make the case for male dominance. The classical Muslim jurisprudential tradition cites this verse to affirm men as ‘guardians’ of 210

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women (qawwamun), requiring devout women to be obedient (qanitat) to their husbands. Likewise, Qurʾan 2:228 argues that men have a ‘degree’ (daraja) over women, which for many classical commentators indicated male superiority and responsibility over women. Omaima Abou-Bakr traces the historical development of these ideas in exegetical literature, beginning with al-Tabari (d. 923) and continuing throughout the classical period with alZamakhshari (d. 1144), al-Razi (d. 1209), al-Qurtubi (d. 1273), Ibn Kathir (d. 1373), and into the 20th century with the works of Muhammad ʿAbduh (d. 1905) and Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966) (Abou-Bakr, 2015: 46–56). Historically, legal traditions connected with this verse thus rest on an ‘ancient idea: men are strong, they protect and provide; women are weak, they obey and must be protected’ (Mir-Hosseini, Al-Sharmani and Rumminger, 2015: 1). Power and rationality are traditionally viewed as masculine characteristics, while femininity is associated with passivity and emotionality. In short, according to dualistic framings of gender, men exhibit natural leadership qualities that women lack, thus women should be excluded from positions of religious authority. amina wadud contends that the complementarity discourse, ‘while positively stressing relationships [between genders] … keeps their inequality central … leaving the relative power and privilege to men and male roles’ (wadud, 2006: 28). Muslim men are promoted not only as the guardians of their wives and children, but also the primary stakeholders in religious, political, and economic power. Women are barred from religious, community, and juridical leadership because of their supposed deficiencies in necessary authoritative qualities. According to the classical commentators, men are naturally equipped with more reason, wisdom, and strength, making them natural leaders. Women, in their perceived excessive emotionality and physical weakness, lack the rationality and biological strength to lead communities. This is the reason, according to these exegetes, that God only granted the status of prophethood to men, and granted all men the greater rights of inheritance, as well as the right to polygamy and unilaterial divorce (Lamrabet, 2015: 80). Indeed, according to medieval commentators, upsetting the ‘natural, divinely ordained order between the sexes’ was thought to threaten the ‘correct functioning of society’ at large (Bauer, 2015: 285). The constructions of gender and religious authority are therefore co-constitutive in classical Islamic frameworks. Those qualities configured as most essential for leadership are those that are used to define masculinity.

Muslim authority in contemporary North America I now turn to the particular context of contemporary North America, where one of the most prominent and influential forms of Muslim authority is the figure of the imam. In Arabic, the term ‘imam’ literally means ‘one who stands in front’. For Sunni Muslims, the term ‘imam’ is an honorific title for someone chosen by a congregation to lead prayers (salat), based on their knowledge of the Qurʾan and the Arabic language, as well as Islam more generally. The imam’s role in facilitating congregational life and worship ties them to the mosque (masjid) and mosque culture, requiring at the very least knowledge of the Qurʾan and the ability to lead prayers. Imams are influential in North America for a number of reasons, including the importance of the mosque as a central Muslim institution in the United States and Canada, which reflects and follows the history of congregational religious life in America. While the primary function of the imam, as stated above, is the facilitation of congregational life and worship, in most cases, the responsibilities of the imam in North American congregations extend well beyond liturgical matters. Imams are often expected to act as 211

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individual and family counsellors, Islamic educators, and community outreach specialists, whether or not they are actually trained or equipped to function in these roles. Historically, Islamic societies distributed many of these communal responsibilities in more diffuse ways, for example, amongst extended family members and society’s elders, who offered counselling, emotional support, and conflict mediation to individuals (Barakat, 1993). However, in the North American context, such social networks tend to be more limited, with more focused attention on the ‘nuclear’ family, compelling a reconceptualization and reorganization of traditional social norms. In this restructuring, the North American imam assumes many new social responsibilities outside of the purview of liturgical leadership. The history of immigration has also impacted the development of Muslim religious leadership in the United States. A series of laws passed by the U.S. Congress in the early 20th century drastically reduced immigration from Muslim-majority countries. However, in 1965, the Immigration and National Act (or, Hart-Celler Act) lifted immigration quotas from non-European countries. The Act, however, gave preference to skilled workers. As such, more of the Muslim immigrants that came to the United States after 1965 were white-collar professionals, physicians and engineers, rather than religious scholars and specialists. A lack of ‘classically trained’ religious professionals in North America thus led to what commentators have called a ‘crisis of Muslim leadership’, motivating some Muslim communities to ‘import’ trained imams from Muslim-majority nations in pursuit of what they considered authentic Islamic knowledge (Grewal, 2014: 133). While such figures may be recognized as authoritative based on their Islamic educational background, these ‘imported’ imams often lack the cultural awareness and sensitivity required of religious leadership in the United States and Canada. In spite of the image of Islam as a ‘universal’ religion, these barriers – both cultural and, sometimes, linguistic – divide imams from their communities, and signal the need for more culturally sensitive authorities. North American Muslims have dealt with the challenge of cultivating competent and culturally relevant leadership in multiple ways. For some, the solution has involved sending North American pupils to study in historically renowned institutions of Islamic education in the ‘Muslim world’, such as al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, the Islamic University in Madinah in Saudi Arabia, or various Shiʿa seminaries in Iran and Iraq, after which the graduates return to work in North American mosques. Another approach involves the establishment of Islamic seminaries in the West, such as the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIIT) or the American Islamic College (AIC). Yet others argue for the need of new forms of religious authority, such as chaplaincy (discussed later), to diversify the types of leadership available to Muslim communities, and to meet the unique needs of Muslims living in the North American context.

Women and mosque leadership The importance of imams in configurations of Islamic authority has motivated scholars and activists alike to question the permissibility of women leading congregational prayers. Prominent figures in North American Muslim communities range in their opinions about whether or not women can lead prayers. In a public demonstration of support for womanled prayer, scholar-activist amina wadud led a mixed-gender congregational prayer at the Synod House of the Cathedral of St. John of the Divine in New York City on March 18, 2005. In analysing the significance of this event, Juliane Hammer points out the prayer’s major departures from existing Islamic ritual norms. First, the imam was a woman, as was the deliverer of the sermon (khateeba), and the person giving the call to prayer (muʿezzin). 212

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Finally, the congregation itself was not segregated by gender. In these distinctive elements, this ritual prayer became an ‘embodied performance of gender justice in the eyes of its organizers and participants. They symbolically challenged the exclusively male privilege of leading Muslims in ritual prayers and at the same time blurred the lines of gender segregation in ritual prayers’ (Hammer, 2012: 15). While this prayer was neither the first nor the only occasion during which Muslim women have led congregational prayers in North America, it nonetheless represents a symbolic moment for those advocating for the inclusion of women in Muslim understandings of religious authority. Some scholars, such as Nevin Reda, situate women’s prayer leadership in classical Islamic traditions. She contends that while the custom of restricting prayer leadership to men goes unchallenged in the North American context, ‘research from the Qurʾan and the customs of Prophet Muhammad demonstrate that there is no prohibition precluding women from leading mixed-gender prayer and, further, that Prophet Muhammad approved the practice of women leading mixed-gender prayer’ (Reda, 2005). Reda provides evidence for the acceptance of female prayer leadership in the hadith literature, in the example of Umm Waraqa, who purportedly led mixed-gender congregational prayers in her household. She also cites the Qurʾanic portrayal of the Queen of Sheba in Surat al-Naml as evidence of women’s ability to act in leadership roles. With her essay, which was posted online a number of days before the famous March 15th prayer, Reda thus challenges Muslim women to reclaim their place as ‘intellectual and spiritual leaders’ of the Muslim community (Reda, 2005). Opponents of the event, such as American convert to Islam, Imam Zaid Shakir, referred to the woman-led prayer and mixed gender congregation as a fitna, a ‘trial’ or ‘strife’ in the Muslim community, completely unsanctioned by Sunni Islamic law (Shakir, 2009: 239). He refutes the analyses of scholars like Reda, questioning the soundness of the hadith of Umm Waraqa. Even were it found to be a sound hadith, considered legitimate, with a chain of trustworthy narrators, and free of irregularities, Shakir questions whether it is application to the question of women-led mixed-gender congregational prayer. While he acknowledges that women are sometimes neglected, degraded, and oppressed within the context of their religious communities, he nonetheless encourages Muslim women to exercise patience. He argues, human ‘fulfillment does not lie in our liberation, rather it lies in the conquest of our soul and its base desires’ (Shakir, 2009: 245). Therefore, while some want to include women in positions of religious authority, Shakir contends that the effort is misguided and dangerous to the stability of the community at large. One North American effort to incorporate women as ritual leaders of the Muslim community has avoided the contentiousness of mixed-gender congregations, the Women’s Mosque of America. Founded in 2014 by M. Hasna Maznavi, the Women’s Mosque of America is the first woman-led, woman-only congregation in the United States and offers monthly congregational prayers and sermons facilitated by female imams and khateebas. Maznavi contends that gender segregation is not necessarily evidence of inequality, and states that women’s mosques are a longstanding historical tradition in different parts of the world, including China, Syria, India, Egypt, Palestine, and Yemen (Maznavi, 2015). While the Women’s Mosque and other all-female congregations evade the controversial issue of women leading men in prayer, some scholars nonetheless take issue with women leading other women in prayer. In their opinion, ‘female-only gatherings do not meet the legal requirements for congregational prayer; a proper jumuʿa … has to include a certain number of male worshippers’ (Maznavi, 2015).

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Other Muslim scholars and activists are petitioning for Muslim women’s leadership in forums other than the mosque. Ingrid Mattson, the first woman to serve both as vice president and president of the Islamic Society of North America, affirms the need for Muslim women to occupy more public leadership roles, but shifts the focus of this pursuit from prayer leadership to other types of religious authority. ‘When … religious leadership does not include women’, argues Mattson, ‘their experiences, concerns and priorities will not be well represented’ (Mattson, 2005). According to Mattson, while women’s feelings of alienation are legitimate, focusing single-mindedly on pursuing the role of the imam only reifies one type of authoritative role at the expense of other potential avenues of women’s empowerment. Rather than conserve this model of ‘concentrated’ leadership, Mattson explores the possibility of asserting influence in more diffuse and democratic ways, determine by the local community. Indeed, Mattson’s election as the first female leader of one of the most prominent Muslim organizations in North America signifies a symbolic movement toward the acceptance of women in certain leadership capacities. Through such negotiations of communal authority, Mattson argues for the possibility of new professional fields like chaplaincy to decentre the figure of the imam, and to open up new leadership opportunities for women such as chaplaincy, which we will discuss here. Mattson calls her own approach to Muslim authority ‘conservative’, because it maintains existing norms about male leadership of mixed-gender congregational prayers. ‘I am keenly aware’, Mattson states, of the possibility of eliciting suspicious or negative responses from some Muslims because of the conservative principles I have identified as so important in Islamic thought. This is particularly true when it comes to worship, where adherence to the prophetic sunnah is essential. (Mattson, 2005) This statement implicitly addresses the fact that Mattson never overtly advocates woman-led prayer outside of very specific contexts (including all-female congregations or mixed-gender congregations within one’s household), given what she considers a lack of textual support for this practice. She thus leaves the question open for discussion within Muslim communities themselves. In the development of women’s ‘alternative’ authoritative structures, Mattson upholds the dominant and normative understandings of ritual leadership as the domain of male authority.

Muslim chaplaincy in North America Over the last several decades, the profession of chaplaincy has become increasingly pervasive for Muslim communities, particularly those living in North America and parts of Europe. While there is some overlap between the functions of imams and Muslim chaplains, including religious education and spiritual counselling, chaplains are distinctive as religious professionals in that they work in institutional settings, such as prisons, universities, hospitals, and the military which are not, by definition, religious. Another major difference between chaplains and imams is that chaplains also serve clients from diverse religious backgrounds, as well as those that come from no faith background at all. Therefore, while chaplains may sometimes serve in liturgical contexts, performing relevant religious rituals, their primary function is to facilitate religious life and offer spiritual counsel to members of diverse faith

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communities. The chaplain is therefore not seen as a ‘replacement’ of the imam, but rather, a distinct and complementary leadership figure. One of the primary responsibilities of chaplains is providing ‘pastoral’ or ‘spiritual care’ to their clients. This objective connects to the chaplain’s role as a spiritual companion, offering what Winnifred Fallers Sullivan refers to as a ‘ministry of presence’ (Sullivan, 2014: xii), rather than a directive, top-down form of leadership. As such, chaplains are somewhat ambiguous figures, spiritual authorities who ‘lead from behind’, simultaneously connected to and separate from traditional religious communities, bodies, and institutions (Sullivan, 2014: 13). Some of the main roles of chaplains include ‘grief, loss, and end of life [counselling], advocating for religious freedom and rights, advising institutions on religious and cultural accommodations, providing ethics guidance, representing Islam at the institutional level, and providing instruction in Islamic sciences’ (Association of Muslim Chaplains, no date). The historical origins of chaplaincy are indisputably Christian. Yet, for various reasons that are beyond the scope of this chapter, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccans, and atheists have increasingly invested in training and employing chaplains as important community leaders. Most individuals that I interviewed in the course of my research on Muslim chaplaincy now consider both the term, ‘chaplaincy’, and the field, more generally, religiously neutral and/or multifaith in orientation. Given the traction of chaplaincy in nonChristian communities throughout American history, some Muslims consider the establishment of the field of Islamic chaplaincy an important step in the institutionalization of Islam as a North American religion.

‘The next best thing’: the gender question and the establishment of Muslim chaplaincy training programs Fields like chaplaincy arguably open new spheres of religious authority to women, providing them with unprecedented opportunities to serve publicly as Muslim leaders. Timur R. Yuskaev and Harvey Stark argue that women’s involvement in the field of chaplaincy corresponds with a general increase in women’s participation in Muslim institutions (Yuskaev and Stark, 2014: 58). These new leadership roles for women indicate a groundbreaking reconsideration of gender difference and authority in Islam. Shenila Khoja-Moolji examines the institution of Muslim chaplaincy on American university campuses as part of the Pluralism Project sponsored by Harvard University. She argues that, ‘Muslim chaplaincy … provides a remarkable opportunity for women to exercise public religious leadership’ in unique and innovative ways (Khoja-Moolji, 2011: 6). Khoja-Moolji clarifies that while Muslim women have historically occupied informal positions of religious authority in Muslim societies, such as religious teachers or spiritual counsellors, the profession of chaplaincy grants an unprecedented level of formal and public recognition to female authority figures. The institution of chaplaincy therefore opens up a space for Muslim women in public positions of religious leadership without in any way challenging dominant structures of male ritual authority. There exists little (if any) resistance to the idea of Muslim women serving as chaplains, since chaplains and spiritual caregivers are considered ‘facilitators’ of religious life, and do not necessarily function in ritual capacities, as I explore below. My research focuses on the first and most prominent Muslim chaplaincy training programs in the United States and Canada. I argue that the establishment of these programs is intimately tied to the issue of women’s empowerment as religious leaders. The three programs featured in my research are Hartford Seminary in Hartford, Connecticut, Emmanuel 215

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College of Victoria University in the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada, and Bayan Claremont at Claremont School of Theology in Claremont, California. They represent the first accredited programs offering degrees and certifications for Muslim chaplaincy in North America. Ingrid Mattson, mentioned above, founded and developed the first accredited program for Muslim chaplains at Hartford Seminary. In an interview I conducted with Mattson in 2012, she states, ‘I wasn’t going to develop a program that excluded women’. Mattson was hopeful that Hartford Seminary would be an ideal centre to pursue her vision of developing leadership programming for Muslim communities, in part due to the seminary’s focus on religious leadership education within other marginalized communities: It made me really excited, because I saw what [Hartford Seminary was] doing with [their programming on] urban African American leaders, Hispanic ministries, the women’s leadership program … Developing programs for people who are marginalized by the existing education structures or endorsing structures, I just really love that idea. Mattson therefore flags the marginalization of Muslim women as a central issue in the establishment of the Muslim chaplaincy program at Hartford Seminary. Whereas Mattson explains that the founding of Hartford Seminary’s Islamic Chaplaincy Program was intertwined with a broader effort to empower Muslim women, Nevin Reda, one of the founders of the Masters of Pastoral Studies for Muslims at Emmanuel College, directly attributes the failures of local mosque leadership as prompting her desire to establish training programs for Muslim authorities sensitive to gender-related issues. In an interview, Reda told me that as a regular attendee of a masjid in Mississauga, Ontario she did not have access to the imam. There was a barrier in order for [her] to speak to the imam. [She] had to go through the difficulty of crossing the barrier, dealing with all the men between [her] and the imam, and that was not easy to do. On top of this lack of access to the mosque leadership, she mentions hearing troubling statements related to gender being preached during several Jumʿah sermons, which prompted her to complain to the leaders and board of the masjid. Reda’s friend and colleague, Susan Harrison, suggested approaching the Toronto School of Theology (TST) to establish an imam-training program. The two proposed an educational program for Muslim leaders, which eventually developed into the program at Emmanuel College. While issues related to gender and authority were not as foundational to the creation of Bayan College as they were in the cases of Hartford Seminary and Emmanuel College, they still represent a major concern for the founding figures and faculty associated with the program. In a promotional video for the college, dean of Bayan College, Jihad Turk, states: Bayan Claremont aims to produce intellectuals. Religious leaders and scholars that are well prepared and very qualified to be relevant to our youth, to integrate women into our communities, and to best represent Islam and Muslims to the society in which we live. (Bayan Claremont, 2015)

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Turk mentions the integration of Muslim women within their communities as one of the main goals of the college. In a 2013 interview with me, he also mentions the issue of woman-led prayer as relevant to Bayan’s long-term goals: We are hoping to develop a think tank and we are hoping to start tackling some of these issues [related to women and authority], and do it in a way that does not alienate the institution [from Muslim communities] … That is a long term policy … but part of our vision. Turk’s concern over ‘alienating’ mainstream Muslim communities regarding women’s ritual authority sheds light on deeply entrenched assumptions about the controversial nature of female religious leadership, namely, that the issue of woman-led prayer is an alienating subject for most Muslim communities. Further, this is an example of how those hoping to transform norms regarding gender and ritual authority in Islam must proceed with caution to avoid estranging those invested in upholding existing norms. Many students that I interviewed likewise noted that they considered gender a relevant factor when they chose to enrol in both of the above-mentioned programs, specifically, and their pursuit of the field of Muslim chaplaincy, more broadly. Some female students indicated that they had reservations about women functioning as imams, but found chaplaincy a fulfilling alternative. One Muslim student at Hartford Seminary, Laura,1 told me that she pursued the degree in chaplaincy because of the absence of another ‘clearly trodden path for women’ in Muslim leadership. Latifah, another Hartford student, explicitly upheld classical notions of male liturgical leadership as prompting her interest in chaplaincy: ‘Why chaplaincy?’ she reflected in our 2013 interview. ‘Well, I can’t be an imam. This is the next best thing’. In a somewhat different vein, Emmanuel College student, Roya, explains the appeal of chaplaincy in her evaluation of mosque-based leadership as limiting. For her, chaplaincy opened up new opportunities for Muslim women beyond the enclosed space of the masjid: To me [being an imam] is not a very important thing … If you go and work in the mosque, you are limited. You cannot achieve independence. But if you work outside of the mosque, you are more independent, you have more of a chance to reach society. Each of these students make connections between the field of chaplaincy and leadership opportunities for Muslim women, even while their motivations greatly differ.

The case of Hanan: chaplaincy and Muslim femininity As indicated above, the profession of Muslim chaplaincy opens new doors for Muslim women to act as recognized public religious authorities. While this new professional field certainly affords women new opportunities, I ask here: do these new leadership opportunities challenge traditionally conceived notions of gender in Islam? If, as I argue above, gender and authority are mutually constitutive, does this new form of religious authority impact Muslim understandings of femininity or masculinity? I argue that the existence of female Muslim chaplains does not necessarily alter traditional Muslim conceptions of femininity. Women – socially constructed as innately in touch with the realm of emotions – are expected to deploy their empathetic skills in productive ways as chaplains. Instead of 217

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meeting their clients with rational judgement (a ‘masculine’ response), they are assumed to be capable of offering patience and support, a ‘ministry of presence’ that takes advantage of their ‘feminine’ qualities. During my fieldwork, I met Hanan, a Muslim woman who graduated from Hartford Seminary and who, at the time of our conversation, worked as a university chaplain in New England. She related the story of how she got hired, mentioning that a male Muslim colleague at the university wanted to hire a female Muslim chaplain to work with him in the Office of Student Life. Initially, I assumed that his goal to have both a male and a female Muslim chaplain must have stemmed from a desire to provide specialized spiritual care to the Muslim women on campus, but Hanan quickly corrected my misinterpretation. She clarified that the hiring of a female Muslim chaplain was: not for the sisters, but for the brothers, because sometimes [her male colleague] feels like brothers can open up to sisters a whole lot easier … When you’re with a guy, you have to talk about ‘guy things …’ The woman is not interested in football, or talking about video games, and so they are kind of forced to start speaking about themselves. The presence of female chaplains, according to Hanan, compels Muslim men to ‘open up’, discuss their emotions, and move beyond what Hanan portrays as stereotypically male points of connection. Here, Hanan stresses women’s ‘innate’ emotional acuity, along with their ability to coax men not only into confronting their emotions, but sharing them as well, both of which are easily avoided when only in the company of other men. In its supportive and empathetic sensitivity, the presence of women encourages openness, an absolute requirement according to existing models of the spiritual care relationship. Interestingly, while interviewing for her university chaplaincy position, Hanan was asked by the hiring committee, which was comprised of both Muslims and non-Muslims, about her interest in the ‘woman-led prayer’ issue. She responded that this was not a concern for her, personally, although she could train the Muslim male students to act as prayer leaders and sermon givers. Once hired, she composed an instructional reference document for male students that outlined the proper format for a Friday sermon (khutbah). Although men retained ritual religious leadership, Hanan explained that they often send her drafts of their sermons in advance of weekly prayers, ‘just to make sure that everything is sound’. Hanan thus recognizes herself as a knowledgeable authority, well-versed not only in the legal injunctions required to conduct congregational prayer, but also equipped to evaluate the content of religious sermons. At the same time, this religious knowledge does not necessitate her assuming ritual authority over her male students. Hanan thus upholds the stance that salat must be led by men, but exercises her authority and influence through the training and education of male student leaders. For her, this approach is not simply about gender and religious legalities, but rather, a pastoral technique of empowering her students to act as leaders of their own community. Her actions thus decouple ritual leadership, intellectual scholarship, and pastoral caregiving. Hanan’s example illustrates the ways in which chaplaincy provides Muslim women with public religious leadership opportunities while at the same time reaffirming traditional conceptions of femininity – characterized by the qualities of sensitivity, empathy, and compassion. These sentiments are, perhaps, best summed up by another Hartford Seminary chaplaincy student, Latifah: ‘We [women] carry the love. We are hardwired for it. [With Islamic chaplaincy], now we can be credentialed for it’. 218

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The case of Aadam: chaplaincy and Muslim masculinity Given that qualities of patience, compassion, and empathy are so often associated with essentializations of the feminine, are Muslim men less equipped to function as chaplains? The presence of Muslim male chaplains from the early days of Islamic chaplaincy, as well as the presence of male students enrolled in the programs I research, indicate Muslim men’s interest and abilities in the field of chaplaincy, also. On what basis, then, do Muslim men derive their authority as chaplains? My respondents cite the example of the Prophet Muhammad as their pastoral model. While Muhammad was certainly known for typically ‘masculine’ virtues, such as discerning judgement, executive power, and military skill, Muslim male chaplains rely more on other qualities, his empathy, mercy, and sensitivity, again, traditionally construed as ‘feminine’ qualities, as their professional inspiration. Aadam, a graduate of the Muslim chaplaincy program at Hartford Seminary and university chaplain, talked to me about the ways in which the Prophet Muhammad provided the ideal model for his professional work. He explained: [Muhammad] would listen to his companions … And even if they were sinning … he would not come down on them hard. He would oftentimes not even cite religious law, but he would give them advice in a way that would teach them that what they were doing was wrong, and they would desire to leave it. The presentation of Muhammad’s character here sets a precedent for new possibilities of Muslim masculinity. His authority, as Aadam argues, relies not only on strength and judgement, but gentleness, patience, and understanding, even when confronted with sinful behaviour. Chaplains require this skill set, providing spiritual care and a ‘ministry of presence’ to their clients in the midst of their spiritual journeys. While Muslims often approach difficult spiritual questions through the lens of Islamic jurisprudence, inquiring about the legal permissibility of various actions, Aadam emphasized that the role of the chaplain, as distinct from that of an imam, is to provide emotional, spiritual, and practical support. He recounted a story in which one of his clients spoke to him about feelings of depression and suicidal thoughts. Rather than underline the impermissibility of suicide in Islamic legal traditions, which Aadam stressed would be the ‘fiqh-oriented’ response, he explained that these types of issues require pastoral care. He clarified, ‘The person is asking a counselling question, and they’re [often] being given a fiqh answer’. While religious authorities would be justified in reinforcing ‘correct’ thought and behaviour with reference to Islamic jurisprudence, the Muslim chaplain approaches issues with patience, compassion, and care, following the model of the Prophet Muhammad. Here, the example of the Prophet Muhammad thus offers a more complex expression of masculinity than often portrayed in classical Islamic scholarship (De Sondy, 2014: 118). Muslim chaplaincy, while potentially reasserting traditional conceptions of femininity, therefore provides an opportunity to challenge and expand existing norms about Muslim masculinity.

Conclusion This chapter has offered an examination of historical constructions of authority and gender in Islam, and has provided an analysis of the relationship between both. The normative understanding of religious authority in Islam as necessarily masculine continues in the contemporary North American context, as evidenced in the Sunni understanding of the imam. 219

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Nonetheless, modern reformers are looking to authoritative sources, such as the Qurʾan and sunna, to argue for the inclusion of women in existing forms of religious authority. While some Muslims support women as congregational prayer leaders, or imams, others are focused on the empowerment of women as religious leaders in other professions, such as Muslim chaplaincy. Indeed, the establishment of the first accredited educational programs in Muslim chaplaincy made the inclusion of women one of their central concerns. While Muslim chaplaincy certainly provides new public leadership roles for Muslim women, Hanan’s story, discussed above, reveals that gendered discourses in the field of chaplaincy do little to problematize the historical essentializations of women. That said, Aadam’s example reveals that Muslim chaplaincy has the power to complicate existing essentializations of masculinity. New forms of religious authority, such as chaplaincy, thus invite reconsiderations of Islamic gender constructions, norms, and relationships.

Note 1 Names of students have been changed to protect confidentiality.

Further reading Fallers Sullivan, Winnifred. (2014). A Ministry of Presence. Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care, and the Law. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Sullivan examines the profession of chaplaincy in the United States, providing a rich analysis of the relationship between law, religion, and government regulation. She flags the importance of spiritual care as the primary methodology in the field of chaplaincy, and highlights the complicated relationships between church and state that arise from an examination of the profession. Grewal, Zareena. (2014). Islam is a Foreign Country. American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority. New York: New York University Press. Grewal examines the construction of local and global Islamic intellectual networks and genealogies, and the pursuit of ‘traditional’ and ‘authentic’ Islamic knowledge in modernity, as exhibited by ‘student travellers’ in pursuit of an imagined ‘real Islam’. Hammer, Juliane. (2012). American Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism. More than a Prayer. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hammer offers an in-depth analysis of the 2005 mixed-gender congregational prayer led by amina wadud, exploring the circumstances that led to the event, as well as the debates that followed it. Mir-Hosseini, Ziba, Mulki Al-Sharmani, and Jana Rumminger, eds. (2015). Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition. London: Oneworld. The authors in this edited volume examine the historical discrimination against Muslim women based on legal exegesis of key Qurʾanic verses, such as Qurʾan 4:34. While the tradition of Islam has been dominated by men, the contributors indicate the potential for religious reform focused on gender equality. wadud, amina. (2006). Inside the Gender Jihad. Women’s Reform in Islam. Oxford: Oneworld. wadud, a scholar/activist at the forefront of feminist reform in Islam, examines the textual and traditional foundations of gender justice in Islam.

References Abou-Bakr, Omaima. (2015). ‘The Interpretive Legacy of Qiwama as an Exegetical Construct’. In Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Mulki Al-Sharmani, and Jana Rumminger, eds. London: Oneworld, pp. 46–56. Association of Muslim Chaplains. (no date) ‘A Spiritual Care Profession’. https://associationofmuslimcha plains.org/what-is-islamic-chaplaincy/ Barakat, Halim Isber. (1993). The Arab World: Society, Culture, and State. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bauer, Karen. (2015). Gender Hierarchy in the Qur’an. Medieval Interpretations, Modern Responses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Muslim chaplaincy and female authority ‘Bayan Claremont- An Introduction to the Islamic Graduate School’. (May 26, 2015). www.youtube. com/watch?v=2C5jjmcuUjw De Sondy, Amanullah. (2014). The Crisis of Islamic Masculinities. New York: Bloomsbury. Grewal, Zareena. (2014). Islam is a Foreign Country. American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority. New York: New York University Press, 133. Hammer, Juliane. (2012). American Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism. More than a Prayer. Austin: University of Texas Press. Khoja-Moolji, Shenila S. (2011). An Emerging Model of Muslim Leadership: Chaplaincy on University Campuses. Cambridge: The Pluralism Project at Harvard University. Lamrabet, Asma. (2015). ‘An Egalitarian Reading of the Concepts of Khilafah, Wilaya and Qiwama’. In Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Mulki Al-Sharmani, and Jana Rumminger, eds. London: Oneworld. Mattson, Ingrid. (2005). ‘Can a Woman Be an Imam? Debating Form and Function in Muslim Women’s Leadership’. http://ingridmattson.org/article/can-a-woman-be-an-imam/ Maznavi, M. Hasna. (May 20, 2015). ‘9 Things You Should Know about the Women’s Mosque of America- And Muslim Women in General’. HuffPost. Mir-Hosseini, Ziba, Mulki Al-Sharmani, and Jana Rumminger, eds. (2015). Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition. London: Oneworld. Reda, Nevin. (2005). ‘What Would the Prophet Do? The Islamic Bases for Female-Led Prayer’. www. muslimwakeup.com Shakir, Zaid. (2009). ‘An Examination of the Issue of Female Prayer Leadership’. In The Columbia Sourcebook of Muslims in the United States. Edward E. Curtis IV, ed. New York: Columbia University Press. Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers. (2014). A Ministry of Presence. Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care, and the Law. Chicago: Chicago University Press. wadud, amina. (2006). Inside the Gender Jihad. Women’s Reform in Islam. Oxford: Oneworld. Yuskaev, Timur and Harvey Stark. (2014). ‘Imams and Chaplains as American Religious Professionals’. In The Oxford Handbook of American Islam. Yvonne Y. Haddad and Jane I. Smith, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 48.

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14 MALAMA TA CE!1 Women preachers, audiovisual media and the construction of religious authority in Niamey, Niger Abdoulaye Sounaye The political and economic reforms initiated across Africa in the 1990s created among other things, the conditions for alternative media outlets, generally referred to in Francophone Africa as “médias privés”. Comprising of TV and FM radio stations, these media emerged in a newly liberalized public space where they sought to provide an alternative to statesponsored media. In many local contexts, this process has freed initiatives and made it possible for many actors previously marginal or even invisible, to take social roles, engage in entrepreneurship and assume leadership positions (Augis, 2009; De Witte, 2003; Gomez-Perez and Madore, 2013; Hackett and Soares, 2015; Hill, 2018; LeBlanc and Gosselin, 2016; Meyer, 2006, 2015; Savadogo and Gomez-Perez, 2011; Schulz, 2011, 2012; Sounaye, 2013). Niger is one such context that illustrates this process. By the mid-1990s, the deregulation of the media that came with liberalization was already effective and had led to a proliferation of FM radio and TV stations in several urban areas. As a result, Niamey, the capital city, and the focus of this chapter, became a field of waves while media initiatives mushroomed and provided various public actors a stage where they devised and promoted social, political and moral agendas. Among these actors were male Muslim leaders who took advantage of these platforms to advance a religious reform agenda, locally known as Izala. Interestingly, even though women’s status was central to the debates that took place, female figures were generally absent from these platforms, mostly because, as many Muslim scholars have argued, their role should be circumscribed to the domestic arena. Eisenlohr argued that in the Muslim world media can serve as “systems of discursive dissemination with their own modes of exclusion and inclusion, sometimes establishing new spheres of discursive exchange and public debate” (Eisenlohr, 2006: 30). Such a point on the possible connection between media practices and moral economy can validly apply to Niger where developments in the media landscape in the last two decades have not only contributed to the shifting dynamics within both the religious and the public spheres, but they have also served and illustrated competing claims about gender roles and women’s status. In fact, one of the striking developments in recent years has been the emergence of Muslim female figures on TV and radio stations, despite the claims that their role should remain within the domestic arena. Challenging conventional arrangements within media and Islamic practices, women preachers have taken the role of speaking for Islam and for

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themselves, using spaces they have conquered and secured on TV and radio stations in part due to a committed audience and the techno-infrastructural development that reshaped the media landscape. Through a series of programs centering on family law, women’s rights, Islamic learning and other household matters, women preachers have now consolidated their presence in the public arena prompting new debates and contributing to redraw the contours of Muslim gender politics. Within the broader context of religious pluralism and associationism, building authority by using and claiming Islamic agendas and social platforms became a common practice among women. The examination of Islam and gender dynamics in Niger has highlighted three distinctive trends. In her book Engaging Modernity, and while exemplifying the first trend, Alidou (2005) analyzes the spaces female Muslim leaders have created to promote a culture of learning, particularly in urban context. She shows how these women who, a few years ago, were at the margin of public life have risen to become leaders (Malama) of significant communities. In this case, and while building on a new knowledge economy, women in Niamey have not only contributed to popularize Islam, they have also broken taboos that kept them until recently under the status of mere recipients of Islamic learning (Sounaye, 2016a, 2016b, 2011). Now producers of Islamic learning, they have created their own learning centers (Makaranta) and have developed various strategies to build their own spaces and make their voice heard, especially in matters related to women’s social status and political representations (Alidou, 2005; Kang, 2015). Building on the argument that Islamic revival at the beginning of the 1990s has affected not only the urban context, but also the rural and semi-urban Niger, the second trend analyzes women’s resistance, their intervention in the Islamic sphere, and emphasizes how they develop a social pragmatism that shapes their role and status within local contexts (Masquelier, 2009; Sounaye, 2011). A third trend sought to understand the gendering of the public space in Niger, by emphasizing how particular ideas and norms of social life in Islam became a major catalyst of transformations both within Islam and the society in general. This trend is illustrated by studies that have also sought to underline the growing public debate around the role and status of women in public space (Cooper, 2006, 1997; Kang, 2015). The debate has been if not mostly, at least significantly “religious” as it mobilizes religious values and actors eager to influence policies and counter feminist initiatives promoting women’s rights (Alidou and Alidou, 2008; Alio, 2009; Kang, 2015; Sounaye, 2016c). Kang in particular points to the ways in which religious discourse and norms through contemporary appropriations of Islam affects this debate. Indeed, as interesting and insightful as these studies may have been, they hardly engaged the central role media play in the public sphere and particularly the way women using the media have reconfigured Muslim practices and the media landscape. Central to my argument is that with a growing public access to Islamic institutions such as preaching, the concomitant end of the monopoly of men on these institutions, the deregulation of the media and the impact of women’s entrepreneurship, gendered configurations of the media and religion have occurred, making media and religion two privileged loci for an insight into the current historical, ideological and societal transformations in Niger. The case I introduce here illustrates the significance of what I termed the religion and media complex (Sounaye, 2014) among public actors and with social spaces which have until recently remained not only male dominated, but closed to women. Is resistance enough to capture such dynamics and the expectations that lie behind these interventions? The cases below show how Muslim women use mass media not only to 223

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challenge conventional perceptions of their role and space, but also to claim a role in a socioreligious process that has proved critical to the moral economy of Nigerien society. As they claim, their initial goal was not to counter a male hegemony, but serve the popularization of the sunna, a responsibility that, according to Muslim activists, befalls all Muslims, regardless of their status. This has been a powerful narrative among disenfranchised Muslims, especially in urban contexts where the mediascape has proved dynamic and Islamic associationism has become a major trend. In fact, the women I discuss have been part of this process of organizing and making Islam through active involvement in teaching and preaching activities. In many contexts, and as I shall show, attitudes have also sought to defend Islam and promote a sunna-inspired life. Defense and promotion have been key concepts used among the women I discuss here as they invest energy, time and resources to popularize the Sunna of the Prophet Muhammad and a Salafism that has gradually, but steadily become normative among urbanite women. For the women-led promotion of Salafism too, media presence and savviness have played a major role. As I shall show, one needs only look at the number of TV and radio programs that feature self-appointed women issuing legal rulings (fatwa)2 on matters that go from domestic issues to current political situation including the Boko Haram crisis. As they emerge at the intersection of specific Islamic reform discourses and media culture, women’s fatwa practices illustrate a second phase of restructuring of the Islamic sphere in Niger. Moreover, in centering on socioreligious institutions and spaces, this phase has given way to female preachers increasingly vocal and “makers of contemporary Islam” in Niamey. This contribution is located at the intersection of media, religious and gender studies and seeks to add to the scant literature on gender, media and religion in contemporary Niger. It is based on fieldwork I have been conducting in Niamey since 2008, as I examine women’s intervention as they appropriate radios and TV platforms to construct religious authority and offer new interpretations of gender spaces and being Muslim. In the first section I draw a picture of the context within which these interventions occur. The second section is concerned with the ways in which Islam’s presence on the media becomes gendered through the interventions of women preachers. Two individuals are introduced in this section to illustrate this gendering trend of Islam and media. In the third section, I elaborate on the connection between religion, public space and women’s status.

A note on religion, media and democratization A vehicle for both social change and social control, religion plays a dual role that may prove contradictory. While providing many communities around the world a discursive framework for liberation and resistance against hegemonic and dominant powers, institutions and ideologies, religion has also been used to dominate, abuse and maintain gender inequality, in particular in the way its discourse conceives of and distributes social roles or strengthens exclusion. For example, in many religions prophecy is the preserve of men, while women are excluded from teaching, preaching or other major positions. Within a modernist framework and looking at the recent scholarly and feminist engagements with religion, perhaps, no other source of norms and values has received more criticism for its negative influence on social interactions and political orders. The rise of what many have referred to as radicalism in Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, for example, illustrates this dimension of religion across the globe. 224

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Generally perceived as a discourse of an established order, Islam in the Nigerien society has played a major role in the configuration of gender roles (Cooper, 1997; Kang, 2015; Masquelier, 2009; Sounaye, 2013). This became particularly visible and of public interest with the rise of the Islamic organizations in the early 1990s as a political liberalization process was getting rid of the one-party rule that had characterized governance in the country since independence in 1960. As political parties multiplied, so did Islamic organizations, breaking the monolithic Islamic sphere (Niandou-Souley and Alzouma, 1996) dominated until then by the state-sponsored Association Islamique du Niger, created shortly after Kountché’s military regime took over in 1974.3 For more than 15 years (1974–1990), this organization remained the sole voice authorized to speak for Islam in the country. At the beginning of the 1990s, however, a trend of democratization began and helped many marginalized and underprivileged actors to gain prominence and assume public roles. Political pluralism became a reality while the Islamic sphere restructured, giving way to numerous Islamic organizations (Glew, 1996; Niandou-Souley and Alzouma, 1996). Illustrating this trend, government statistics show that more than 70 Islamic organizations have registered with the Ministry of Interior from 1990 to 2010. More than 100 are still active today. This increased presence of organized Islam in the public sphere has prompted an islamization of the audiovisual media, particularly visible in the last decade through various TV and radio programs. Part of the public sphere, the mediascape also restructured following these initiatives, which eventually led to the end of the monopoly of the state media. Until 1993, the two main mass-media outlets, La Voix du Sahel and Télé Sahel, were both controlled by the state and therefore reflected primarily the opinion of the government. They promote government policies and serve its agenda. However, media deregulation in 1994 propelled the number of media outlets to more than 200 today. In comparison, a study on medias and religions in West Africa (Bathily, 2009), for example, listed for Niger 148 medias outlets (143 radio and five television). Since this study, the numbers have significantly increased with the addition of several non-state TV channels, community radios and urban FM stations. In August 2019, in Niamey alone, there were 15 non-state-sponsored local TV stations. Media initiatives such as Groupe Bonferey, Groupe Dounia, Groupe Saraounia and Groupe Ténéré, all headquartered in Niamey with antennas across the country, are major components of the mediascape as they combine radio and television to become media powerhouses. Through these initiatives, media practitioners consolidated and expanded their social, political and religious influence, as they branched out across the country and offered valid alternatives to the state-sponsored outlets accused of being mere propaganda tools and at best too supportive of state policies. Until recently, these platforms were hardly accessible to women. Télé Sahel and Voix du Sahel are still the main outlets for government related news, but in the broad areas of religion and entertainment, for example, non-state sponsored media have become the privileged avenues where religious entrepreneurs seek to build up constituencies and subsequently reinforce their authority. In fact, many preachers have seized that opportunity and have become media figures and religious pop stars. Media deregulation played a significant role in the democratization process of religion itself. It helped restructure the Islamic sphere, providing competing Islamic discourses and entrepreneurs with a stage for various truth claims and therefore dynamic public presence. The Salafi reform movement, known as Izala, a trend that promotes Islamic practices strictly in line with the Qurʾan and the Sunna (the tradition of the Prophet Muhammad) and insisting on the Prophet as the template for Muslim life, emerged within this context, now that the public sphere has opened up to multiple and often opposing perceptions of Islam, 225

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governance, social institutions and gender roles (Masquelier, 2009, 1999; Sounaye, 2009). The genealogy of Izala shows how this movement was able to devise strategies and capitalize on the transforming mediascape by developing systematic preaching campaigns and fatwas programs (Sounaye, 2011). In many ways, the expanding mediascape allowed Izala to acquire presence in the public arena, establish itself as an alternative to the Sufi groups, but also to fight back against critics who have portrayed them as troublemakers. Mass mediated, especially through the network of urban FM radios, Izala easily reached large numbers of urban dwellers, the primary target of its reform agenda, and managed to establish itself as a valid and normal Islamic discourse and trend. Scholars have consistently highlighted the structural changes that democratization and liberalization have brought in Africa (Diouf, 2013; Piot, 2010; Schulz, 2011; Soares and Otayek, 2007; Sounaye, 2010). More often than not, the significance of these changes is intricately linked to economic policies, new ideological attitudes, political cultures and moral economies that emerged in the mid-1990s. How media appear within these processes led scholars to suggest that we pay attention to how mass media become the infrastructural basis that shapes sociocultural life (Hackett and Soares, 2015; Larkin, 2008; Meyer, 2015). The media world in that sense is primarily a cultural one, where Muslims expose, claim and contest norms and values of public life. From this perspective and to draw to a close this background section, I will observe that media became important in Niger’s democratization process in part because the overarching preoccupation revolved around the moral order. What order and what normative framework should shape the democratization process became the two key questions that drove activism into the broader public sphere. Gender in particular became central to the attempts by political actors, religious figures, feminist and human rights activists to answer these questions (Hamani, 2001; Kang, 2015). Within this context, it is also worth noting how views expressed sometimes in a passionate manner led to the polarization of the public: on the one hand, secularist activists who pursue a human rightist agenda and hope to promote women’s rights and gender equality based on secular principles; on the other hand, Islamic organizations heavily influenced by newly formed Salafi groups which, in their rejection of what they view as a rampant secularization inspired by French laïcité,4 demanded the implementation of political norms strictly in line with the Qurʾan and the Sunna.5 It must be said that these views challenged the normative framework of the democratization process and targeted its symbolic sites such as the constitution, the school system, and the liberal promotion of women’s status. In their criticism of the “so called democratic norms”, as one of my interlocutors states, Muslim activists have generally pointed to the foreignness of state norms and their unfitness to Nigerien society. More specifically, these views translated first into the hostility of Islamic associations to the family law reform that initiated the Projet de Code de la Famille in 1993 (Alio, 2009; Villalón, 1996; Zakari, 2009), then into their opposition to family planning initiatives and the Convention for the Elimination of Discriminations Against Women (Kang, 2015; Sounaye, 2005), and their rejection in 2007–2008 of the Maputo Protocol, an international initiative that seeks to promote gender equality across Africa. More recently, Islamic organizations of Salafi leaning again opposed the government’s initiative to vote a “liberal law” that will make it unlawful for families to drop their girls out of school before the age of 16. In a country where early marriage is a major issue and often portrayed as the main reason for low Human Development Index (HDI), schooling of girls was thought a priority, especially for its impact on family and community wellbeing. In many ways, women’s status has kept the public sphere

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in Niger busy, making gender one of these sites of symbolic confrontations, to use Cruise O’Brien’s term (Alidou and Alidou, 2008; O’Brien, 2004).

Gendering Islam’s media presence As I have argued, the end of monolithic religious authority and discourse consolidated the ongoing restructuring of the public sphere in Niger. The rise of alternative Islamic organizations eager to be part of public debate complicated the picture of Islam in this sphere. The conjunction between the deregulation of the media that followed the end of the monopoly of the state-sponsored media and women’s religious entrepreneurship resulted in an increased presence of women on TV and radio. In the last ten years, the use of these media to preach, issue fatwas and popularize an Islamic reform discourse has proved decisive for many women who are seeking to change the gendered conditions of their lives and Islam. As Aulette and Wittner note, “sociologists use the term agency to describe the ways that people seek to change their social circumstances, to dismantle existing ways of thinking and acting, and to create new ideas and new social institutions” (Aulette and Wittner, 2014: 9). It is precisely this agency that I intend to illustrate. Indeed, in a religious sphere still dominated by patriarchal norms, radio and TV are giving women preachers and self-proclaimed muftis the tools and the stage to introduce new norms and construct religious authority. Seeing women discuss and speak for Islam on TV was rather uncommon and certainly unexpected in a city where traditionally Islam meant male space, authority and influence. When women appeared on religious programming, it was usually to break the hegemony of male figures, especially on the state-owned TV. Thus the new development has challenged both the propensity of media houses to privilege male voices and the restriction of preaching activities and fatwa, two major modes of contemporary religious discourse, to male ulama (clerics). To stress the significance of this change, it is worth noting that in Niger and most of the Muslim world, until recently, these two institutions were the preserve of the male religious elite. In the paragraphs below, I present two cases that illustrate not only how male hegemony is broken up, but also how marginal actors in the Islamic sphere found a way to speak up. First, I introduce Malama Huda, a prominent figure in the Islamic sphere and who finds the time to devote to several radio and TV programs despite her numerous commitments. Then, I present Malama Bushara, younger than Huda, but nonetheless equally active and committed to assert women’s voice in the religious sphere. Despite the generational gap, both women have articulated views that have contributed to a gender redefinition of religious discourses and media practices in Niamey. As such, they illustrate both the feminization of the Islamic sphere and the gendering of particular media practices. Malama Ta Ce, a Hausa phrase that translates “The (woman) scholar said”, is intended to highlight the feminization of Islamic scholarship and the renewed presence of women’s voice on media. Media and religion share a feature of publicness that has been even more evident in the last two decades in Niamey.

Malama Huda: pathbreaking, solidarity and self-empowerment More than her teaching responsibilities in a secondary school in Niamey, it was her appearance on national TV (Télé Sahel) that propelled Malama Huda to fame and made her one of the most vocal promoters of an Islamic moral order in Niger. A prominent media and religious figure, she uses her airtime to promote Islam conscious citizenship as she defends 227

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a women’s agenda. For a long time, she was the only female speaking for Islam on the media, and in that capacity, she was sometimes the guest of “Émission islamique”, a program on which she answered questions and issued fatwas on social and political issues. She has consistently discussed marriage, divorce, raising children, good morality and social responsibility, her main concern these days. A few years ago, she was caught in a heated argument with a male scholar who was defending mut’a, the Shiʿa practice of temporary marriage, on another TV station. A promoter of a Muslim Brotherhood type activism, she consistently urges women, youth and leaders to “change their behavior” and “work for Islam”, taking inspiration from Muhammad, his wives and followers. Her primary target is urban dwellers, those that have been trained in the public school system and developed a modernist outlook on life and society. Giving a fatwa, much like most of the functions in the practice of Islam, is a role male ulama, the expected spokespersons of Islam, have traditionally assumed. Thus, when Malama Huda took the stage and began to make public fatwa on TV and radio, she put many conservative male ulama in an uncomfortable position. As one may expect, for these Muslim leaders, she should have declined the invitation and devoted her time to the Union des femmes Musulmanes du Niger (UFMN), an organization she co-founded and for which she has become an inspirational model. In 2008, she was the main figure leading Muslim women’s opposition to the Maputo Protocol, an initiative that was intended to secure more rights, public visibility and political participation to women across the continent. Within the democratization era, she gained more prominence, moving from a secondary figure on national TV to a very visible one on the non-state sponsored media. She became the independent voice who “dared” to challenge conventions and practices well established by the ulama. As a Muslim scholar, her public interventions concentrated on three media outlets: Télé Sahel, the state-run TV station which broadcasts across the country; Ténéré, a complex of radio-TV station broadcasting only in the main urban areas of the country; and R et M, the first non-state sponsored radio on which she now runs a popular program every Friday morning. Her tone and arabized-Hausa accent made her a recognizable voice on all these media. Many refer to her affectively as “Mamma” (mother) to show her respect. In return, she addresses her followers claiming seniority. “Diya ta” (my daughter) and “kangnwa ta” (my little sister) are two of the most frequent Hausa phrases she uses, especially during “Courrier Musulman”, her program on TV Ténéré which has drawn her both appreciation and harsh criticisms. The invocation of this affective relationship speaks to the audience she intends to reach, i.e. the women she seeks to educate and encourage in their daily Islamic practices. Educating Muslim women has been one of the major responsibilities she has carried since she teamed up with friends and followers to create a formal Islamic organization. But, it is primarily the audiovisual media that gave her the ideal stage from where she leads a social transformation trend. That is why her interventions have usually focused on women in Islam, but also on household management, stressing the obligation for a good Muslim to live in conformity with the prescriptions of the Sunna (tradition of the Prophet Muhammad). In making a case for women and children’s wellbeing, she criticizes women’s behavior at odds with the Sunna and the Qurʾan as she invokes the “inspiring models” of the wives and daughters of the Prophet Muhammad. She promotes mutual understanding, respect, loyalty and sharing responsibility in raising children, but most importantly, she calls for solidarity among women:

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See, it is a shame; it really is. Many well to do, especially women would take their money and send their children to Morocco, USA or France for holidays while thousands of less fortunate ones suffer everyday the consequences of the current drought.6 Can these women be sensitive to the sufferings of their people? Aren’t they living with this community? (Huda, R. and M., April 2010) In her view, these attitudes should be the concern of any moralizing enterprise of the society. Solidarity and care are key values that should inform the society Malama Huda envisions. Thus, while the promotion of both values should be the preoccupation of the community as a whole, their enactment among women should be the priority for the society. Characteristic of her discourse on social interactions in Niger, solidarity and care are at the center of her perception of women’s role, social positions and struggles to build a morally good society. And as she constantly reminds her audience, Islam is the reference and Muhammad the model to follow. In fact, during several of her media appearances I followed, she reiterated the same criticism while calling women to “show up” and resist the natural, immoral and “unreligious temptations” of selfishness: “your community is not just your [nuclear] family”. Religious conviction, according to her, should translate into daily solidarity vis-à-vis the broader community. The sense of responsibility she promotes requires then developing a consciousness that makes the family, both nuclear and extended, the primary institution where religiosity is demonstrated, nurtured and transmitted. In this specific context, one injunction she makes constantly is “djara adininka”, a Hausa phrase that translates into “take care of your faith [religiosity]”. The phrase is in no way exclusive to Malama Huda; rather it is part of the most common ways Muslim preachers and particularly Salafi, address people in Niamey today. In street preaching or on TV, this injunction has become a common place, testifying to the concern about correct and productive sociability while also translating particular visions of the social commerce, expectations and experiences of contemporary Muslim life. Individuals strive to appropriate this concept and implement it into their daily interactions and social existence. This explains why Malama Huda has been an active member of the Union des Femmes Musulmanes du Niger, one of the most dynamic women’s Islamic organizations in Niger today. With such an understanding of religion and views on the social world, Malama Huda promotes a shift in social practices that could contribute to the betterment of women’s living conditions. Islamic political thought and ideologies have relentlessly stressed the key notion of a global Muslim community (umma) that should inspire Muslims across the globe and create a bound among them. In contrast, Malama Huda emphasizes the local, the immediate family and the gendered ties, which, in her view, should be the primary social space where women express their religiosity. This articulation of her discourse echoes the heated debate on women’s conditions that has preoccupied civil society in Niger in the last two decades (Alidou and Alidou, 2008; Kang, 2015; Sounaye, 2005). She states: You, my sister, daughter … Allah gave you the opportunity to get an education and even higher learning. Why don’t you spend a week or two each year in the countryside helping your [female] cousin who didn’t have the chance to get an education, know about healthcare, hygiene, etc.? 229

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Or simply, why don’t you send her some money to deal with the hardship and the scarcity of everyday life in the village? You earn a salary every month, but don’t seem to care about your sisters’ life conditions. (Huda, R. and M., April 2010) There is no doubt that Malama Huda has managed to capitalize on the pluralism of the mass media and their open access, although she is now gradually retiring from TV programs, leaving this space to disciples who are now following in her footsteps. Today, her appearances on the media are minimal, though she is still invited to make fatwa and run occasional conversation programs. The activities of her organization keep her busy and leave her with little time for preaching and TV programs, as she remarks. Nevertheless, she hangs on her role as a Muslim scholar on the path of aikin adini, a Hausa concept she frequently uses to stress the obligation for Muslims, in particular the learned ones, to promote pious practices. This notion, which shapes many Muslims’ participation in social initiatives, encompasses activities such as preaching, teaching and learning, whose impact on the contemporary Islamic culture in Niger has been transformative. Malama Huda is well aware of the importance of audiovisual media for her socioreligious agenda. Convinced that the betterment of women’s conditions is primarily a women’s issue, she keeps a few Islamic programs, those she sees as essential and socially effective for her quest of a morally fit Muslim society. Now in her 60s, media outlets continue to play a significant role in maintaining her authority in the Islamic sphere and most importantly, in providing Muslim women with an example of public presence and role fully assumed by a woman. In fact, in the foyer she initiated with the help of her Islamic organization and besides her religious and media activities, she has developed a computer training program targeting young girls and women in need of digital literacy to increase their chances of employment in the modern sector. As she said, “this will help them secure a job” (Huda, May 2010). Malama Huda’s impact on both the public and the religious spheres is already perceptible, as numerous young women generally trained at the Islamic University of Say, Niger, and following in her footsteps, have acquired media presence through TV and radio programs. Bushara, the next figure I introduce illustrates precisely how Malama Huda has been emulated by women in Niger, even those who do not share her theological orientation.

Malama Bushara: erecting the pulpit in the studio I use the pulpit in the studio as a metaphor for the increasing visibility preaching Islam has gained on the audiovisual media. This encounter between religion and media has proved instrumental in making many women authoritative voices in Niamey. Malama Bushara is precisely one of those young scholars who, while promoting Islamic learning, has also used media to gain a public presence. In approaching the problematic of gender from the intersection of religion and media practices, I want to highlight how Islam’s increasing visibility of Islam and Muslim public actors has provided many women with the opportunity to redraw gender borderlines as far as religious authority, practices and leadership are concerned. Most striking in the last decade has been the emergence of women authoritative voices who use TV as a platform to disseminate a discourse of moral rectitude, piety and ethical transformation. But they have also promoted a women-based view of these practices. As a conservative trend among Muslim scholars has insisted that women should “remain at home”, regardless of their 230

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degree of Islamic learning, Malama Bushara, a graduate of the Islamic University of Niger, has challenged this view in organizing public lectures, but also in hosting a talk show on radio Bonferey, the first openly “Islamic radio”, as people refer to it in Niamey. Her approach to emphasize the role women played in the first Muslim community made her a key contributor to the debates on issues pertaining to women and Islam in Niger. Her anti-hegemonic standpoint is well known and conveyed through a phrase she consistently invoked during one of our conversations: “No one has exclusive rights on Islam, so let’s not drive Muslims astray!” Convinced that women should keep this principle in mind, she has actively called them to learn and teach the Qurʾan to other women. “Learning opens your mind; it liberates you”, as she states. Putting to work this philosophy, she has initiated a Makaranta (informal learning group) in one of the suburbs of Niamey where she managed to build a significant community of learners. Both the Makaranta and the radio program have become for Bushara the spaces where she popularizes views on Islam and Nigerien society. Her effort to reveal women’s public role in classical Islam is intended to show that in contemporary Niger too, women have a fundamental public role to play. As is the case with many women leaders in the religious sphere in Niger, with Bushara too, women’s role in the formative period of Islam is set as a template for women’s presence and participation in the public sphere in contemporary Niger. Insisting on this chapter of the history of Islam, she intends to silence critics, in particular men, who have opposed women taking public roles, especially on TV. In the 1990s, there were only two women (Malama Huda and Malama Zainab) who would sporadically take the stand on TV, mostly to discuss women and/in Islam. Thus, male ulama overwhelmingly dominated the debate around the promotion of women’s rights and the delineation of women’s role and social status according to the Islamic tradition. “Women in Islam” was primarily a male concern as male ulama set up the interpretative framework and the conditions within which women’s status should be discussed and decided. In the last few years, however, numerous young women, generally trained at the Islamic University of the country have led a trend of public address, taking the role of preachers and contributing to what they view as daʿwa (call to Islam), not only for women, but for all Muslims. Malama Bushara, for example, sees her involvement in the daʿwa as a “work”, a religious endeavor that would help Muslims better understand their religion and organize their society. But she is even more concerned about women’s position in society, in particular the socioeconomic and political conditions within which they achieve their status. In Niamey, access to the Bonferey media complex has propelled her to the public stage and has provided her with such a visibility that she is regularly invited to participate in fora, gatherings and seminars mainly devoted to Islam. I first heard about her when, attending an Islamic seminar, I asked some colleagues whether I could interview some young Muslim leaders involved in preaching. A woman who overheard my request immediately suggested: “Bushara is the person you need to speak with”. I have never heard about her before, but quickly realized that she was a prominent voice on radio. As I would discover later, Malama Bushara is a media personality who has made a name for herself in hosting a religious program on Bonferey. She actually inherited the program from Hawa, another prominent female figure who spent several years advocating for women’s religious rights. Involved in the popularization of Islam, and focusing on women’s role in Islam, Hawa has regularly argued that women are abused and their rights are not recognized. She is in no way the secular feminist who allies with the liberal human rightist discourse. But, taking inspiration 231

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in a women-oriented discourse, she construes women’s rights systematically as the most sacred domain of Islam. Hawa has since retired and handed over the program to Bushara (Sounaye, 2011). Following in the footsteps of her mentor, articulate and learned, Malama Bushara has gradually climbed the ladder of their Islamic organization and has become a major voice among female preachers. Her program centers on the biography of the Prophet Muhammad, with a particular emphasis on female figures that shaped his life. Being Muslim means primarily and exclusively following the Prophet and embracing the models of women around him. Every Saturday afternoon, she receives calls from an audience expecting to find answers to their questions related to Aisha, Khadidja and Fatima,7 all women whose lives were intricately linked to that of the Prophet. Men too have regularly called in to contribute comments and ask questions in order to learn from her expertise. As Malama Bushara observes: “people don’t know much about Islam’s female figures … and don’t be mistaken: I have many male listeners in my audience.” She is aware of the challenge she represents in an Islamic sphere where controlling women’s voice and presence has become a major preoccupation as they disrupt established orders and norms. Obviously, the issue is further aggravated because of the religious institution women similar to Malama Bushara are appropriating and the taboos they break. For, until recently, preaching has always been the preserve of the male ulama, the spokespersons and prime public figures of Islam. Thus, a young woman such as Bushara challenges the traditional practice and role distribution of this institution. She brought up the issue in one of our conversations and argued: I think, this [prohibition of women from preaching on the media] can be interpreted as the result of [male’s] jealousy. It really is. This has been a recurrent issue. Last week, a friend of mine faced the same issue … They [male ulama] keep bringing it up … A few years ago there was a conference to resolve the issue, we thought it was over … and now people are bringing it up again. Those who oppose women’s preaching have no arguments … they can’t provide any sound justification of this prohibition … we had a conference at Palais des Congrès in Niamey. I was among the presenters … we were only two female participants. The day of the presentation of my colleague, some male participants didn’t want her to speak. They refused to give her the floor for her presentation, arguing that as a woman, Islam forbids her from speaking in public. The next day, I got to address the participants and did my presentation anyway. Afterwards, a man stood up and made some remarks [against my presence]. But he gave no justification why women should not preach. Elaborating further, she added: It is true a woman stays home; but whenever necessary, she can go out. The only thing is that she cannot go out and forget about her household duties. Women are allowed to go out, there is no question about that. There are clauses under which she can do it, she just needs to respect them. Following the episode at Palais des Congrès, more voices objected to the presence of women preachers on audiovisual media. According to Bushara, the controversy escalated to the point that: 232

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A few weeks ago, a cleric took the stand and insulted all women preaching on TV. We are just asking that they show us the scriptures that forbid women from public preaching. We are just asking them to show us that God has made it unlawful … let’s see the hadith if it does exist … Of course, we have some people who translate the verses of the Qurʾan as they like and who could fabricate whatever suits them … no, we are just asking to be shown the scriptural proof … we are asking to be persuaded. On our side, we know many women have contributed to the development of Islam. These statements further illustrate not only the challenges she has faced, but also how Bushara seeks to build her authority and promote learning among Muslim women. As she claims that arguments should be resolved through a careful consideration of the scriptures, she makes a case for the cultivation of Islamic learning and implicitly suggests that men who have opposed women’s voices on the screen or in the studio are yet to fully understand the Islamic tradition. In particular when she invokes Aisha and Khadidja, wives of the Prophet Muhammad, and Fatima, his daughter, Bushara seeks to legitimate examples that authorize her presence and that of many female preachers on the media. These paradigmatic cases of the Sunna (tradition of the Prophet Muhammad), according to Bushara, are sufficient justifications for a gendered public Islam. She points to the inconsistency of the criticism and suggests that if women were authorized public roles during the prophetic time, why would they be refused such positions now? Thus, a Sunna inspired life in contemporary Niger should imply that Nigerien learned women take on the mission to teach not only their fellow women, but all Muslims. For Bushara, when you read the Hadiths, you will notice that many have been transmitted by Aisha, the wife of the Prophet. Honest and learned Muslims know that. I think, it is not about the fact that we [women] endanger Islam … that’s not true. Bushara’s views are not uncommon in the Islamic sphere where, since 2003, a second wave of restructuring has begun with the emergence of women’s Islamic organizations, which aim to correct Muslims’ views and practices. The rise of these organizations followed an increased interest among female activists to voice a women’s view on Islam. But it may also be viewed as a normal process of the historical development of the public sphere and the way this development affects religious discourse and practice in particular. Bushara’s radio program gives her the opportunity to stress what she sees as a biased and groundless interpretation of Islam’s position on women’s roles and status; it gives her also the opportunity to debunk prescriptions that, according to her, have nothing to do with the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. That this debate mobilizes shows in many ways that the issue is not always about knowledge and the prescriptions of the Qurʾan or the Sunna.

Religion, public space and women’s status Taking the stands they have taken is highly symbolic for both Malama Bushara and Malama Huda, who are now convinced that there will be no women’s rights without women’s voice. In its initial steps, the main issue in the democratization process in Niger revolved around the type of governance that should inspire the ongoing political reform. The challenge in this process was less political or religious pluralisms, and more the moral content of various contested notions of public life. Women’s status was one of them. Sociologically, 233

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however, the challenge translated into what kind of gender relations the process should inform, support and promote. Political and religious reform projects have often revolved around this issue making women’s status a domain of key symbolic confrontations (Alidou and Alidou, 2008; Kang, 2015; Sounaye, 2005). The cases I discussed confirm the permanence of this problematic with the specificity that, while at the beginning of the process the issue opposed those who might be called the Defenders of Islam and the Radical Secularists, now it seems that the same challenge has emerged within the Islamic sphere along gender lines. This speaks to a Nigerien society in which Muslim practices and institutions are increasingly transforming, not only in their structures, but also in ideology and sociological configurations as female actors, voices and entrepreneurs are gendering media spaces and religious institutions. Who speaks for women and how to speak for them have become central questions for Muslim leaders, but also for the broader public sphere. The creative use of media and Islam has provided women with increased visibility, and a voice and a stage where their views and social initiatives could target gender relations and therefore alter the distribution of social roles and status. In a way, this is already happening with the increasing number of women Muslim preachers who promote “conversion on screen”, to use Krings’ formula (Krings, 2008), as they become prominent religious figures and “mothers of Islam”, as an interlocutor referring to Malama Huda had it. Following this trend that brought visibility to women in the religious sphere, in Niamey alone, more than 30 women now take the stage on audiovisual media, as I have found in a recent personal count. Overall, I will remark that though seeking to popularize the Sunna, a move that is associated with Salafism, especially with the izala movement in Niger and Nigeria (Masquelier, 2009; Sounaye, 2005; Zakari, 2009), the women I have focused on in reality promote also a social reform concerned with women’s status while emphasizing their rights to assume Islamic leadership. They also seek gender equity when it comes to Islamic learning and access to the pulpit, hence the rise of the social category of the Malama, the female Muslim leader. Of course, the literature has constantly stressed the ways in which contemporary Muslim societies read their experiences and make sense of their conditions in reference to the formative era of Islam. In Niger, Malama Bushara is one of the first to draw upon this archeology of the Muslim community and what it means to Muslim women. Malama Huda resorts to the same approach to history. Thus, both actors propose new articulations of religious discourse, while they claim also new roles and spaces, a trend that is characteristic of social conditions both material and ideological, of Muslim religiosity in contemporary Niger. In fact, for these two public figures, the popularization of the Sunna, which has become their credo, should work against ahistorical and exclusive readings of the Islamic tradition, though they themselves may also promote other forms of exclusivism. In their attempt to restore an authentic interpretative framework, they challenge the established order and therefore the ideologies that have defined the role and status of women in society. Women, as they both claim, were already part of authentic Islam, so why silence that historical truth?

Conclusion The democratization of the early 1990s and the subsequent proliferation of Islamic organizations have made women’s status one of their central preoccupations. Within the Islamic 234

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sphere and because of the configuration of the organizations speaking for Islam, women hardly had the chance to take the stage and speak for themselves, even though their status and gender attributions were central to the debates in the public space. In fact, for both the secular and the Islamic civil societies, two sets of organizations that emerged within the democratization context, women’s rights and status were major concerns. A number of initiatives intended to respond to those concerns became contentious. In particular, the attributes of the Association des Femmes du Niger (AFN), the sole women’s organization through the end of one-party rule in 1989, the rejection by Islamic organizations of the Family Code project in 1993, an initiative that newly formed women’s and human rights organizations expected to provide more social space for women, but perceived as too secular, all these became subject to passionate debates among contending visions of democratization, modernity, Islam and social norms. Although many of the debates continued, a shift began at the end of 1990s with the gradual restructuring of the religious sphere and the emergence of women’s Islamic organizations. With the two figures presented here, one sees how political, religious and social reforms combine to trigger a gendering process that was unthinkable just a decade before. Democratization has provided the context for such process, media proliferation, the stage and women’s entrepreneurship the agency (Alidou, 2005; Kang, 2015; Sounaye, 2016a). That religion is gendered through platforms that rely on audiovisual media should not come as a surprise to anyone who follows politics or simply the ongoing restructuring of the public sphere and associational life in the region. In other words, to understand public religion in Niger, one has to consider the possibilities of mediation the public sphere offers to Islam and the space of discourse and practice it opens to women and more globally to segments of the society which were until recently silent or invisible. Through their media interventions, the two Muslim leaders exemplify the shifting dynamics within the religious sphere in Niger. Their positions may be ambivalent, especially if we read them through the lenses of a liberal and progressive ideology. In that sense, their theological standpoint may actually hinder the liberal and secular feminist agenda. Still, what their emergence shows is precisely how women’s agency can reconstruct the terms of public debate. They illustrate also how media have become the platform for a public debate within which religious claims have provided women with the opportunity to construct their authority against specific arrangements of gender roles and positions. Thus, what should be under consideration is not only how people put religion to work in the public arena, but also how gendered religion becomes a valid frame of reference for Islamic practice and public life. In that regard, how the active presence of the Malama affects Muslim media cultures is worth investigating. Furthermore, the examination of gender in this contribution should not overlook or silence a generational shift that is already perceptible among women preachers. While in the 1990s only a few women spoke for Islam, today a growing number of women preachers have access to TV and radio, but have also become guest speakers at conferences and seminars on various matters. This is the doing of a dynamic generation, mostly Salafi, which emerged recently, carving a socioreligious space for itself while providing a template for social action and intervention in the mediascape. This trend has made Salafi views even more normative in a country where being good Muslim through the popularization of the Sunna, especially among women, has helped engineer many communities. 235

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Notes 1 Malama Ta Ce translates in Hausa as “The [woman] scholar said”. It connotes authoritative voice, especially since only a few are expected to speak for Islam. The phrase signals a key development in public Islam in Niamey, complementing and even offering an alternative to the traditional formula, Malam Ya Ce (“The male Muslim scholar said”), to which the media are used. 2 A legal ruling based on Islamic law. Traditionally, this function is men’s preserve. A person issuing fatwa is referred to as mufti. 3 Seyni Kountché led the first military regime that ruled Niger from 1974 to 1987. His strict rule prevented the development of any organizations besides those his regime authorized. 4 Laïcité is the French version of secularism. Stricter than the American or British secularisms, it goes as far as to prohibit wearing religious signs in the public space. A legacy of the French colonial rule, in Niger laïcité is equated to an anti-religion ideology. 5 The picture can be further complicated, and thus I do not claim that these groups are homogenous. 6 She is referring here to the drought that affected Niger and part of the Sahel in 2010. 7 Aisha and Khadija were two wives of the Prophet Muhammad. Fatima was his daughter.

Further readings Hill, J., 2018. Wrapping Authority: Women Islamic Leaders in a Sufi Movement in Dakar, Senegal. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, Toronto, Buffalo and London. Wrapping Authority illustrates how in a particular Muslim Sufi context, women assume leadership and redraw the gender frontiers. Focusing on a group of women in Dakar, a dynamic urban area, the book works against the broad assumption that leadership in Islamic context is a male preserve. The book ethnographically shows how women shape Islamic authority. Masquelier, A., 2009. Women and Islamic Revival in a West African Town, First edition. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. The overall theme of this book is resistance. Masquelier is concerned with describing and analyzing how women in a Nigerien local Muslim context build and deploy strategies in the face of Islamic reform discourses that seek to define, control and regulate both their womanhood and Muslimhood. It adds to the slim scholarly work on women’s role in the changing faces of Islam in contemporary Niger.

References Alidou, O., 2005. Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. Alidou, O. and Alidou, H., 2008. Women, Religion, and the Discourses of Legal Ideology in Niger Republic. Afr. Today 54, 21–36. Alio, M., 2009. L’Islam et la femme dans l’espace public au Niger. Afr. Dév. XXXIV, 111–128. Augis, E., 2009. Jambaar Or Jumbax-Out? in: Diouf, M. and Leichtman, M.A. (Eds.), New Perspectives on Islam in Senegal: Conversion, Migration, Wealth, Power, and Femininity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. 211–233. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230618503_10 Aulette, J.R. and Wittner, J., 2014. Gendered Worlds, Third edition. Oxford University Press, New York. Bathily, A., 2009. Médias et religions en Afrique de l’Ouest. Institut Panos Afrique de l’Ouest, Dakar. Cooper, B., 1997. Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900-1989. Heinemann, Portsmouth and Oxford. Cooper, B., 2006. Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis. De Witte, M., 2003. Altar Media’s Living Word: Televised Charismatic Christianity in Ghana. J. Relig. Afr. 33, 172–202. Diouf, M., 2013. Tolerance, Democracy, and Sufis in Senegal. Columbia University Press, New York. Eisenlohr, P., 2006. As Makkah is Sweet and Beloved, So is Madina: Islam, Devotional Genres, and Electronic Mediation in Mauritius. Am. Ethnol. 33, 230–245. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2006.33.2.230 Glew, R., 1996. Islamic Associations in Niger. Islam Sociétés Au Sud Sahara 10, 187–204. Gomez-Perez, M. and Madore, F., 2013. Prêcheurs(ses) musulman(e)s et stratégies de communication au Burkina Faso depuis 1990: Des processus différentiés de conversion interne. Théologiques 21, 121. https://doi.org/10.7202/1028465ar

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Hackett, R.I.J. and Soares, B.F. (Eds.), 2015. New Media and Religious Transformations in Africa. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis. Hamani, A., 2001. Les femmes et la politique au Niger. Hill, J., 2018. Wrapping Authority: Women Islamic Leaders in a Sufi Movement in Dakar, Senegal. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, Toronto, Buffalo and London. Kang, A.J., 2015. Bargaining for Women’s Rights: Activism in an Aspiring Muslim Democracy. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Krings, M., 2008. Conversion on Screen: A Glimpse at Popular Islamic Imaginations in Northern Nigeria. Afr. Today 54, 45–68. Larkin, B., 2008. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Duke University Press Books, Durham. LeBlanc, M.N. and Gosselin, L.A., 2016. Faith and Charity: Religion and Humanitarian Assistance in West Africa. Pluto Press, London. Masquelier, A., 1999. Debating Muslims, Disputed Practices: Struggles for the Realization of an Alternative Moral Order in Niger, in: Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa. Chicago University Press, Chicago, pp. 219–250. Masquelier, A., 2009. Women and Islamic Revival in a West African Town, First edition. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Meyer, B., 2006. Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Meyer, B., 2015. Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana. University of California Press, Oakland. Niandou-Souley, A. and Alzouma, G., 1996. Islamic Renewal in Niger: From Monolith to Plurality. Soc. Compass 43, 249–265. https://doi.org/10.1177/003776896043002008 O’Brien, D.B.C., 2004. Symbolic Confrontations: Muslims Imagining the State in Africa. C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd, London. Piot, C., 2010. Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Savadogo, M. and Gomez-Perez, M., 2011. La médiatisation des prêches et ses enjeux. Regards croisés sur la situation à Abidjan et à Ouagadougou. ethnographiques.org. Schulz, D.E., 2011. Muslims and New Media in West Africa: Pathways to God. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Schulz, D.E., 2012. A Fractured Soundscape of the Divine: Female “Preachers”, Radio Sermons and Religious Place-Making in Urban Mali, in: Prayer in the City: The Making of Muslim Sacred Places and Urban Life. Transcript, Bielefeld, pp. 239–264. Soares, B.F. and Otayek, R., 2007. Islam and Muslim Politics in Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Sounaye, A., 2005. Les politiques de l’islam dans l’ère de la démocratisation de 1991 à 2002, in: L’islam Politique Au Sud Du Sahara, edited by Muriel Gomez-Perez. Karthala, Paris, pp. 503–525. Sounaye, A., 2009. Izala au Niger: Une alternative de communauté religieuse, in: Les Lieux de Sociabilité Urbaine Dans La Longue Durée En Afrique. L’Harmattan, Paris, pp. 481–500. Sounaye, A., 2010. Muslim Critics of Secularism: Ulama and Democratization in Niger. LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing, S.l. Sounaye, A., 2011. “Go Find the Second Half of Your Faith With These Women!” Women Fashioning Islam in Contemporary Niger. Muslim World 101, 539–554. Sounaye, A., 2013. Alarama is all at once: Preacher, Media Savvy and Religious Entrepreneur. J. Afr. Cult. Stud. 25, 88–102. Sounaye, A., 2014. Mobile Sunna: Islam, small media and community in Niger. Soc. Compass 61, 21–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/0037768613514309 Sounaye, A., 2016a. Walking to the Makaranta: Production, Circulation, and Transmission of Islamic Learning in Urban Niger, in: Islamic Education in Africa. Indiana University Press, Indianapolis and Bloomington, pp. 234–252. Sounaye, A., 2016b. Let’s Do Good for Islam: Two Muslim Entrepreneurs in Niamey, Niger, in: Cultural Entrepreneurship in Africa. Routledge, New York, pp. 37–57. Sounaye, A., 2016c. Islam et Modernité: Contribution à l’Analyse de la Ré-Islamisation au Niger. L’Harmattan, Paris. Villalón, L.A., 1996. The Moral and the Political in African Democratization: The code de la famille in Niger’s Troubled Transition. Democratization 3, 41–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510349608403466 Zakari, M., 2009. L’islam dans l’espace nigérien: Tome 2, De 1960 aux années 2000. L’Harmattan, Paris.

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PART IV

Political and religious displacements

15 GENDER, MUSLIMS, ISLAM, AND COLONIAL INDIA Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst

On September 6, 2018, the Indian Supreme Court reversed a 2013 decision on Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which outlawed sexual activity ‘against the order of nature’ (Indian Penal Code Section 377) thereby decriminalizing what was, in practice, a ban on gay sex (Rajagopal, 2018). In theory, while Section 377 could be used to prosecute any sex that could be seen as ‘unnatural’, it had been predominately used to criminalize same-sex sexual activity, especially between male partners. The law dates to 1861, during British rule of India, and a particular post-Rebellion moment in which the British solidified and codified legal rule over South Asia. Celebrations across India followed and international media heralded the September 6 ruling as a victory for India’s LGBTQ+ communities (Wamsley et al., 2018). Mere weeks later, on September 27, 2018, the Indian Supreme Court similarly ruled to strike down Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code, which made adultery illegal. The code, which dates to 1860, made it a crime to engage in sex with another man’s wife ‘without the consent or connivance of that man’ (Indian Penal Code, Section 497). The court noted that the ‘archaic law’ treated women like ‘chattel’, ‘a husband as the master’, and ‘does not square with constitutional morality’ (Shine v. India). While Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the conservative, Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) argued to alter the law to be gender-neutral – but maintain criminal ramifications for adultery – others, especially those in the more leftist Congress Party, heralded this as a win for women in India. Two rulings in one month may seem like a fluke, but this Court had also weighed in on another law codified during British Rule a year prior: the so-called ‘instant divorce’ for Muslim men, otherwise known as ‘triple talaq’ (Neuman and Domonoske, 2017). As of August 22, 2017, the ability for a Muslim man to declare ‘talaq’ (lit., ‘repudiation’) thrice and thus legally divorce his wife was rendered illegal. Until then, the practice was allowed under the auspices and continuance of the colonial era Muslim Personal Law Application Act, enacted in 1937, which itself was a replacement for the so-called Anglo-Muhammadan Law that allowed Muslim law to govern personal matters after 1860. Writing in 2017, the Indian Supreme Court found that the application of ‘triple talaq’ violated the Indian Constitution on the grounds that it violated Article 14, equality before the law (Shayara Bano and others v. India and others).

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Each of these laws stemmed from colonial ideas about gender – and religion. That each of these laws have been considered and reconsidered so recently prove, as well, that the colonial era lives on. Its impacts have been literal, as in the continuation of the Penal Code, an 1860 document that remains more or less intact as enforceable law, and against which activists of varying political leanings, backgrounds, and identities must argue. Its impacts have been figurative, as well: what might it mean to imagine citizenship and national identity in a context in which some religious actors have provisions that accommodate religious law? Would that herald a polyvocal, multireligious landscape, where citizens have access to religious freedom? Would that herald a set of secular laws as opposed to religious laws and a system that valued secular or religious differently? Or perhaps would that encourage an imagination of constitutionally defined citizens, for whom all the rules applied, and a group of Others? These colonial and post-colonial legal structures uniquely position Muslims. British insistence upon fundamental differences between religious subjects reified boundaries between religions and marked Muslims as separate. Muslim Personal Law exemplifies this dynamic and is significant for questions of gender – a point I develop further below in terms of marriage and divorce. Colonial laws continue to impact Muslims whenever Muslim Personal Law, as a religious rather than secular law, is credited (or blamed) for establishing Muslims’ right to oversee familial decisions. Some Muslims have found these legal structures to be protective and others discriminatory. This short chapter cannot possibly shed adequate light on all the nuances, effects, and debates of Muslim Personal Law. Nor can it adequately survey the asymmetrical way in which other laws and rulings are or have been applied to Muslims. Yet it is deeply important to underscore from the start that colonial legal distinctions continue to inform Indian laws. As part of the secular state’s delineation of religious law, these legal distinctions single out Muslims and prescribe normative gender ideologies. 2017 and 2018 were big years for colonial rule in India and they affected Muslims in gendered and specific ways. Thus, any reading of contemporary India is incomplete without a direct confrontation of colonial legacies; these are alive and well, palpable iterations of British rule. This chapter assumes that we care about how gender and Islam were constituted in the colonial period precisely because its effects linger into the postcolonial period. The Indian Penal Code, as mentioned above, is but one example of how colonial ideas and laws continue to impact Indians today: the Penal Code stands as law, edited and adapted of course, but law nevertheless. Muslim Personal law, too, is an adapted and extant legacy of the colonial period. These legacies are not merely sociocultural that say nothing of how vital mores, rhetoric, or attitudes shape gender or religious constructs. This chapter seeks to elucidate the ways in which gender in colonial India was mediated for Muslims. I purposefully examine avenues that resonate beyond the colonial period for two reasons: first, there is no shortage of these historic-and-yet-contemporary examples; second, far too often I am asked what the value of studying colonialism might be – by students, by colleagues, by folks trying to make sense of what professors actually do, by well-meaning but grossly misinformed people who want ‘colonialism’ to be encased in monument and history texts – so demonstrating its ongoing effect is crucial. Gendered definitions, especially those codified in both de jure and de facto ways, are not easily boxed into ascribed historical eras. Colonial definitions of gender, in other words, did not disappear after August 15 and 16, 1947, the official dates that contemporary India and Pakistan were granted independence from Britain; nor did Bangladesh’s independence some 25 years later shatter the colonial strongholds preserved in law. Gender – as others in this volume have already mentioned – is as fluid as its definitions are varied. But in colonial South Asia, gender was typically mediated through an 242

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understanding of a biological binary where one’s genitalia determined one’s identity as either ‘man’ or ‘woman’, and in turn, these identities were understood vis-à-vis essentialist qualities that dictated proper behavior, social mores and norms, and official conceptualization. For example, understanding men as persons with penises and thus inherently sexual beings that require physical satisfaction allowed for the East India Trading Company to sanction the use of sex laborers for its military regimens – even as the Company and Empire fretted about sexually transmitted infections. Men were afforded sexual satisfaction as a natural and important element of their gender, but women, per the Contagious Disease Acts (CDA) of the mid-19th century, were simultaneously understood as the bodies that could satisfy needs but that ultimately were the repositories of infection based upon their (assumed) possession of vaginas. The CDA registered women as sex workers, demanded their submission to (invasive) medical examination, and held them uniquely culpable for venereal diseases (Pivar, 1981). The conceptualization of gender, sex, and sexuality in this instance shaped legal categories, health policies, and more theoretical notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sexual practice (Jung, Hunt, and Balakrishnan, 2005). Similarly, as mentioned above, a conceptualization of a woman as the domain of her legal partner allowed for the adultery laws that place criminal sanction upon the man involved in adultery – because he, presumably, engaged in theft. In both of these examples, assumptions about gender – men’s sexuality is unfettered and inconsequential, unless it is with another man’s legal wife – influence official policies about men and women’s bodies, freedoms, and responsibilities. Gender affects anyone with a body, even if gendered legal practices have historically negatively impacted women and non-conforming men. Some of the below focuses exclusively on women, which is not to suggest a formula in which gender = women. Rather, the gendered nature of power means that men, ensconced in a patriarchal system, have obfuscated their gender in terms of neutrality while simultaneously highlighting the gender of women through institutional structures, like (but obviously not limited to) law. There is much that could be said about colonial iterations of gender: how can we compare definitions of masculinity assigned to differing religious groups? What are we to make of the role of white women in the subjugation of brown men? How can we account for liberatory movements aimed at colonized Indian women while Britain enforced patriarchal and anti-women laws at home? What roles did traditional authorities within religious groups play in mediating colonial regulations that dealt with or defined gender? These questions could be endless. This chapter cannot! So, instead, it is primarily about how gender is written upon the bodies of Muslims in colonial India and what that meant – or might still mean. To get at this matrix of religion, politics, and gender, I will first provide a short overview of British history in India as it relates to these issues. Then I will discuss two cases in which gender and Islam were obviously implicated in and impacted by colonial practices. These are the Contagious Diseases Act and triple talaq law, since both of these was a major set of laws and regulations that asymmetrically impacted men and women, defined gender roles, and assumed religious belonging as a key element of people’s lives.

(Gendered) historical overview: the Charter Act of 1813, the Great Rebellion of 1857, and the Indian Penal Code of 1860 Condensing a few centuries of history into a section of a short chapter is neither for the faint of heart nor should be considered anything but superficial. Yet in order to understand the depth of impact made by British colonial laws upon South Asians and, for our purposes, 243

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South Asian Muslims, I ought not assume the reader has familiarity with this history. The most simplified overview is this: as part of a global set of economic, social, religious, gendered, and racialized ideals, norms, and practices, European empires seized territory across the world, largely to extract resources, expand influence, and dominate non-white populations. This was done under many guises: Christian missionizing and soul-saving; civilizational progress; paternalism; tropes of war and conquest; tropes of racial, ethnic, and religious superiority. British India was no different: justified in different ways over its long history, colonial and imperial practices changed but always reflected an understanding that Indians were essentially religious, were incapable of self-rule (i.e., demanded the outside, paternalistic rule of Britons), and that that religio-racial difference from Britons as well as each other fundamentally indicated a difference in humanity. The 19th century typically marks the time of major, formalized control of South Asia, despite British presence in India as far back as the 17th century, and even though other European colonizers laid claims physically to land as well as enacted economic influence from near and far. This is because of three specific 19th-century moments: the first is decidedly less exciting and has to do with a legal shift in the East India Company’s rule of India; the second is the often-sensationalized Great Rebellion of 1857; the last is the passing and implementation of the Indian Penal Code. Taken together, however, these three moments point toward how the British ruled first their colonies from the metropole and later their empire on the ground. Furthermore, it is important to note that I am arguing that of the three major contexts one needs to understand gender, religion, Islam, and colonial India, two of them are institutional paradigms that enacted epistemological change and violence. Of the very many sites of physical, racialized, gendered, and religiously identified violences of empire in South Asia, it is my sense that these two sets of legal frameworks, and a failed Rebellion that finalized the transition from Mughal to British rule, did the most work in reframing our subject. These events merit brief overview so that we can then parse the role of gender and Islam, within this imperial structure – as in the cases we will examine, how gender and religion became enforced, legally, for Muslims under British rule. Chartered in 1600 by Queen Elizabeth I, the East India Company (EIC) has both a famed and infamous history. Its presence in South Asia, among other places, marks a colonial project rooted in the extraction of resources – in this case, typically goods for sale, cheap and sometimes indentured or enslaved labor, and the control of ports (to yield control of the land as well as taxation on others). The EIC was originally a joint-stock trading company and was established through parliamentary and royal order to solidify Britain’s financial and political holdings in Asia. It was not necessarily conceived of as a religious force for native peoples; in fact, early on in its history, many EIC officials and policies reflected an understanding that to meddle in the religious affairs of Indians – perhaps especially Muslims – would be bad for business (Powell, 1993).1 Instead of functioning as a missionary arm of empire, the EIC, from its founding on, functioned as a company-state, establishing not only trade routes, partners, and products, but also functional and selfsufficient governmental apparatuses, like tax collection, armies, and other civic institutions (Stern, 2012). Our first major historical shift occurred in 1813, when Parliament passed the Charter Act, and this formally and fundamentally altered the EIC’s and the Crown’s relationship to South Asia. The Charter Act expressly established the Crown’s sovereignty over India and, significantly, ended the East India Company’s monopoly on trade.2 It also ushered in a period in which missionaries were allowed to do their work formally and with permission, and indeed under the guise, of Britain. 244

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This Charter Act sets up the legal framework in which India came to be ruled and religion was a major component of the debates about the Act. Namely, Islam and Muslims were a major concern for British officials and lawmakers. Would increasing the power of the Crown over South Asia cause a religious war? Would missionaries force a violent reaction from Muslims, a feared demographic minority but the extant, if waning, ruling powers? Already present in these questions is a notable, gendered assumption: Muslims were assumed to be violent zealots, unable to control their anger once affronted. This is an ascription of hyper-masculinity – vicious, frenzied, and dangerous. This dangerous, imagined Muslim man needed controlling. After the Charter Act, the East India Company established laws that specifically targeted Islam based on these gendered notions, despite its long-standing policies of staying out of religion. While change was slow, we see an increase of debates, attempts at legal regulation (as in the proposal of statutes that addressed religion and specifically Islam), and the occasional passing of those laws. For example, the Charter Act paved the way for mission schools, which later would be named as a way to ameliorate Islam’s zealotry and violent influence in India: if their children were educated by Christian Britons, Muslims would cease to be as Muslim, and thus be less of a threat (Hunter, 1872). As but one other example of the effects of the Charter Act, by 1830, laws set by Mughal rulers and other, local ruling elites on the basis of shariʿa (an idealized Islamic law3) and fiqh (jurisprudence) had already seen formalized and significant changes. Some of these changes were cast in specifically gendered terms (as in re-educating Muslim boys, imagined within a framework of eventual hyper-masculinity, to be less fanatical), while other laws were inspired by gendered ideas of appropriate masculinity as protective of women, in particular Muslim women (as in the Shariat Act, which will be discussed below). This was a source of pride for many. Courteney Smith, a British attorney, testified that ‘Mohamedan criminal law has, to a great extent, been altered by the Regulations [of the East India Company]’ (Minutes of Evidence, 1830). He stated that these laws had been modified, citing that Mutilation has been put an end to, and some rules of evidence have been modified; the rule about female evidence has been modified. The Mohamedan law of evidence requires two women for one man; but according to our practice, a woman is thought as good as a man for a witness. (Minutes of Evidence, 1830) As early as 1830, we see Britons making alterations in British criminal courts that are meant to correct Mughal law’s Muslim influences in the name of ‘correct’ practices. This fits well within the imperial project of ‘saving’ Muslim women from Muslim men (Abu-Lughod, 2015). In Smith’s comment, he articulated how the British criminal system purports to elevate women to equal standing, and offers us a look at the double-gendering of Muslims. Muslim women are portrayed as needing saving from Muslim men, who are boorish and inherently unjust. Muslims emerge both as feminized objects that require male protection as well as inherently domineering and unreasonable, traits associated with uncontrolled masculinity. Where the Charter Act of 1813 sets up a legal landscape in which to redefine gender and religion, the Great Rebellion of 1857–1858 rewrites the legal standing of India vis-à-vis its colonizers. I could write a lot about the deployment of gender during the Rebellion, but this is outside the purview of this short chapter.4 For our purposes, what matters about the 245

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Rebellion is that it formalized British rule in India in unprecedented ways. The failed Rebellion established Queen Victoria as the Empress of India. It eliminated any official remnants of Mughal rule, however impotent they may have been by the mid-19th century. It also rewrote and entrenched racialized definitions of Muslims (Morgenstein Fuerst, 2017). Importantly, after the Rebellion Britain asserted its dominance over South Asia through courts and with the impositions of laws. Often, these were scripted with notions of inherent racialized and gendered differences between Hindus and Muslims in mind. For example, after the Rebellion, Muslims were barred from re-entering Delhi for far longer than Hindus, owing to racialized understandings of responsibility for the revolts, allegiances to the former rulers, and propensity for future violence based, in part, on notions of Muslims as hyper-masculine and bloodthirsty and Hindus as effeminate and passive (Morgenstein Fuerst, 2017). In 1860 – mere months after revolutionary fighting stopped in some regions – British officials passed the Indian Penal Code (IPC). In short, the Indian Penal Code continues to do work on Indian citizens, 70-plus years after India and Pakistan became their own nationstates, with the ability to (re)write their laws. As we saw in the contemporary Supreme Court rulings above and will see again below, the IPC dictates quite a lot of law, policy, and legal thinking in India today. Despite, perhaps, our progressivist inclination to see 1860 as a distant, immaterial historical moment, it would be ridiculous to suggest that this constellation of mid-19th century laws is irrelevant, antiquated, or a mere relic of colonialism – they are living remnants of British rule, British notions of religion and gender, colonial artefacts that have pressing and meaningful impacts on how bodies are governed. The IPC, like the Charter Act of 1813, demonstrates how institutional shifts have done and continue to do real, epistemological work – violence, often – on South Asians. I cannot overstate how important this is: while I am setting up an historical context so that readers can follow how and why the case studies could exist, the reality is far more complicated, because even if individual laws are struck down, legal frameworks persist. In the so-called triple talaq case, for example, contemporary Muslim women were forced to navigate the ways that British imperial authorities interpreted and sought to appease particular Muslim authorities, where such appeasement was cast through lenses of gender, race, and religion. Agency, subjectivity, self-articulated definitional schemes, notions of freedom, equity, or independence – all of these have to be negotiated through colonial and imperial precedent, lenses, ideas in addition to postcolonial iterations of law and legal reasoning and assumptions about gender, race, caste, ethnicity, and, of course, religion. The IPC has its own fairly complicated history, of course. Originally drafted in 1834 by the First Law Commission and revised multiple times thereafter, it finally passed in 1860 and was implemented across India in 1862, though India’s princely states – where nominal local rulership was maintained – had varied relationships to it (Patra, 1961). The IPC addresses many types of issues: crimes against persons, crimes related to marriage, property, religion, armed forces, defamation, and more. Today, it includes many sorts of definitions that are relevant to our study: ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘gender’, and ‘person’ are each simplistically defined with reference to biological sex. The masculine pronoun ‘he’ is used to refer to any person, and ‘male persons’ and ‘female persons’ are the definitions offered for ‘men’ and ‘women’, for example (Indian Penal Code II.8).5 While the IPC defined its terms within British worldviews with some intersection with elite Indians (Sankaran, 2008), its original authors took seriously – as many colonial officials did – the boundaries of religious sentiment and law, especially perhaps those of Muslims. As such, the IPC created space for religious

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freedom, as evidenced by clauses and sections that are meant to protect an individual’s and a group’s religious practices (Indian Penal Code, XV). The goal of the IPC – and why I suggest it as a third, necessary part of the gendered history of British India – was to create a unified set of standards for criminal offenses across India. The unification and imagination of India as a cogent whole that ought to agree on what offenses were criminal and how criminals ought to be punished is a crucial element of colonialization and imperialism. The IPC thus also demonstrates how formalizing laws during imperial rule eliminates local, regional, and (in this case) non-British conceptualizations of crime and proper punishment. In other words, the IPC tells us two things about the institutionalization of imperial law. First, it defines proper action and seeks to implement those definitions across regional, linguistic, religious, ethnic, and racial boundaries. Second, it ensconces those definitions within a system that becomes hegemonic – to change those definitions requires acting within the system itself. This system enshrined perceived, imposed, and functional gendered definitions in India. Britain enacted imperialism in South Asia through economic, social, political, militaristic, and legal order. The Charter Act of 1813, the 1857 Rebellion, and the passing and implementation of the Indian Penal Code are all major historical events; they are also gendered events that both solidified and created notions of the correct definition, practice, and performance of gender. These often presumed toxic masculinity as an inherent trait of Muslim men; it assumed that practices of veiling and seclusion (purdah) spoke to Muslim women’s sexual appetites and again demonstrated the virulence of Muslim men. British rule developed over time, paid attention to religion and Islam differently in different eras, inscribed gender as part of its policies and laws. The legacies of these de jure and de facto regulations, norms, and mores, then, are not merely a subject for history buffs looking to demonstrate game-show mastery of factual tidbit. British rule and its institutions are part of lived reality for Indians, seven decades and counting after its demise. In the next two sections, I discuss particular examples of British imperialism and legal structures in India and its effects upon gender, Islam, and Muslims.

Contagious Diseases Acts, gender, and Islam The Contagious Diseases Acts (CDA) were a set of four laws passed between 1864 and 1869 and aimed to limit the spread and prevalence of venereal disease (what we now term sexually transmitted infections) among the British armed services. CDA, to be clear, did not target Muslims specifically, though they did have unintentional ramifications within the realm of religious identity and definition. What makes the CDA compelling as a case study is how their implementation (1) demonstrates inherent gendered assumptions about bodies, their uses, their needs, and their capabilities; (2) demonstrates how rules and regulations thought to be universal often reverberated within racialized religious communities; (3) demonstrates how imperial rules and definitions come to influence globalized imperial subjects. In this section, I explore the CDA and their relationship to gender and Islam. In so doing, I hope to shed light on the ways in which colonial law influenced religious identity even when ‘religion’ wasn’t a focus. The CDA gave police officers the authority to arrest any woman they deemed a prostitute. Interestingly enough, in a system obsessed with categorization, ‘prostitute’ was never explicitly defined. But such a glaring lack, as scholar Phillipa Levine succinctly put it, ‘in no way inhibited either the passing of laws or the issuing of regulations designed to control the lives of those engaged in this seemingly undefinable pursuit’ (Levine, 2003: 188). 247

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Once arrested, the accused woman would be brought before a magistrate. Should he agree with the officer’s assertion, he would then order the woman to register as a prostitute and undergo a medical examination, the purpose of which was to ascertain whether or not she had a sexually transmitted infection. If she indeed had a visible infection, she was typically sent to a hospital (where she could be detained for three months or more at doctors’ discretion). Refusing the invasive medical exam or refusing to go to the hospital of her own accord could lead to imprisonment, hard labor, or both (Hamilton, 1978; Report of the Royal Commission, 1871). The CDA came into existence for a number of reasons, but primary among them was the concern about a healthy army and navy. There is a bit of an inherent and classic gendered paradox at play: British officers, stationed in large garrisons and cantonments, were thought to need sex in order to be productive, healthy men; Indian women, while simultaneously ensuring those health needs were met, were at the same time risking the health and wellbeing of Britons because of their uncleanliness, disease, and impurity. The high rates of what the British Empire termed venereal disease made health – reliant upon sex and vulnerable to it – a key note of import, management, and control. The CDA are therefore also directly linked to British classificatory and criminal systems, wherein power stems from and insists upon – as many other scholars have proven – definitions to assert dominance (Cohn, 1996; Gottschalk, 2013). Historian Ann Stoler insists that studies of colonialism, classification, and power attend to how gender and sexuality were a central place where colonized peoples were managed (Stoler, 2002). Prostitution, at once defined as a moral and social problem, became a place of management within racialized, gendered systems of colonial control; the CDA are but one place to explore this control. In British India, as elsewhere, notions of cleanliness and hygiene were tied to ideals of femininity; at the same time, notions of scientific racism that dwelt upon the purity of whiteness and the dirtiness of blackness supported notions of how prostitution, sexually transmitted infection, and unsanitary conditions were tied to racialized identities. In India, as elsewhere, racialization was never so simple as colorism, as it assumed caste, religion, ethnicity, language, and, yes, skin color (Morgenstein Fuerst, 2017). Despite or perhaps because ‘prostitute’ had no specific definition, it became more than just a subject of concern for colonial officials – it became a subject of study. As colonial officials tried to understand the sex trade and sexuality writ large, they documented everything. Levine argued: They counted, enumerated, and categorized, producing estimates of how many women worked in prostitution, of how many willingly registered as such, of how many presented symptoms of disease. They logged appearance, race and nationality, and religion. (Levine, 2003: xxiii) She continued: ‘British officials elusively sought knowledge of indigenous sexual conditions, but in the process actively created indigenous sexual identities’ (Levine, 2003: xxiii). These identities, I suggest, are rooted to notions of ethno-religious, racialized religious identities: ‘Hindu’ was, after all, a different category than ‘Muslim’, and in gendered, sexualized identities, these primary divisions remain. The CDA highlight a process of colonial governmentality that stresses definitions, classifiable difference, and consequences. Women were cast inherently as carriers of disease and able to ‘fall’ – as in the rhetoric of the ‘fallen woman’ – from states of (relative) purity, 248

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cleanliness, and correct performance of sex, gender, and sexuality (Braun, 2015). Racialized subjects, too, were uniquely culpable for lack of hygiene owing to their classifiable differences and were suspect bodies precisely because of their susceptibility for contagion. The CDA, in part, reflect prevailing understandings of science and science’s inherent racisms: ideas about the transmitability of both venereal diseases and race cannot be separated. It is well documented that racialized characteristics defined against a perceived notion of ‘pure’ whiteness was a significant concern in colonial contexts globally – as but one example, whole terminologies were developed to reflect so-called mixed-race offspring of multiracial sexual partnerships. Here, too, the CDA draw upon ideas that are, at once, entrenched and unfolding: racialized stereotypes about the unfettered, oversexualized, undomesticated woman inform the writing and application of these Acts, meant to control aberrant sexuality of an aberrant population (Levine, 2003). Adding further layers to racialized assumptions, Muslim women were thought to be distinctively at risk for maltreatment by their fanatic husbands, fathers, and brothers. Additionally, Muslim women were understood as forcibly cloistered and hyper-sexualized within the contradictory notions of Orientalist fantasy. In India, many colonial officials were concerned with purdah, gender separation and female seclusion, and its related notion, the harem, either a space that allowed women to observe purdah or the women (wives, concubines, servants) in purdah themselves. In and even beyond India, in British cultural and literary production, the harem took on a life of its own (Paxton, 1999). The existence of harems in Mughal India sparked the interest – salacious sometimes, disgusted other times – of Britons, and helped to solidify notions of Muslim male and female sexuality that was, rather simply, imagined as inappropriate. It also speaks to the ways in which sexuality, sex outside of (appropriately defined) marriage, and gender intersect with notions of racialized religion. In short, Muslim women were understood to be susceptible to the control of hyper-sexual Muslim men, a sexual appetite that was inappropriately gendered (i.e., too much and thus lacking in femininity), and – relevant to the CDA – predisposed to transmitting disease. Hindu women, as a majority population, were charged and registered under the CDA at proportionally higher rates than Muslims. The Contagious Diseases Acts did not directly reference Islam or Muslims. In fact, they did not directly reference any particular race, caste, or religion. Yet, in their application, colonial officials scrutinized prostitutes for precisely these categories of identification. They tallied the ways in which, against the whiteness of the soldiers the CDA in India were meant to protect, these sexualized bodies were liabilities to empire. Supposedly helpless women – regardless of race, religion, and caste – were also responsible for their own ‘fallen’ natures but the potential felling of an army. Thus, the CDA demonstrate how even when religion is not expressly mentioned, targeted, or perhaps even considered, notions of religion loom in expectations of how religiously identified persons act. Muslim men were gendered as problematically sexual, troublingly controlling of ‘their’ women; Muslim women were imagined as in need of protection from ‘their’ men and, at the same time, seen within a framework of sexualized seclusion and harem culture. In policing and criminalizing women involved in the sex trade, notions of religion inevitably came to inform its application. Unlike the CDA, however, some colonial-era legal institutions were directly written with Islam and Muslims in mind.

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Triple talaq: multiple gendered stereotypes, multiple political ramifications In 2017, the Indian Supreme Court ruled on the so-called ‘triple talaq’ case, ultimately striking it down. The Court said in its ruling that triple talaq ‘is not integral to religious practice and violates constitutional morality’ and is ‘not part of Islam’ (Supreme Court Judgment, ‘Triple Talaq’, 2017). The Supreme Court effectively decided what was appropriately religious – which perhaps strikes some as an unexpected role to play by a supposedly secular national court. Yet, the Court, in determining what was civilly appropriate and reasonably religious, stood in a long line of religiously inflected and religiously aimed laws, policies, and court decisions. As we saw above, the IPC defined religion; the CPA did not define religion but traded on notion of race, religion, ethnicity, caste, and gender as part of a health campaign. Both of these examples led to the criminalization of bodies, wherein having a particular sort of body assumed certain behaviors, predilections, and criminal possibilities. Beyond criminal examples, however, laws and policies defined religious practice and enshrined particular religious ideas (as well as ideologies). The 2017 triple talaq case demonstrates this fact: Muslim divorces are adjudicated by the state, and as such, ‘proper Islam’ effectively becomes part of the state’s jurisdiction. The laws governing who had access to what kinds of marriages and divorces stem, of course, from the colonial period and, as they deal with matters usually relegated to the home and family, disproportionately affect women. They are, to put it simply, deeply gendered on top of being deeply politicized. Under the Mughal Empire (r. 1526–1858), Muslims could expect religious definitions to be upheld; there is much debate about the degree and kind of religiosity the Mughal Empire expressed, who had access to these religious frameworks, and how much authority – religious or imperial – really came to impact the lives of so-called average Muslims. It is not the purview of this chapter to examine how gender, law, and religion were crafted under the Mughals – the rule by Muslims does not equate to Muslim rule, nor does Muslim rule inherently translate to Islamic theocracy, nor would Islamic theocracy mean one, identifiable set of laws, policies, or ideals. Further, Mughal-era legal frameworks were different in meaningful ways from those that followed under the British. Notably, the major difference lies in the modern understanding of ‘nation’, wherein a particular geographic space would be simultaneously static and subject to one, overarching legal system. That said, British understandings of Islam fundamentally affected how colonial legal systems treated Muslims. The rule of law and Muslims’ inherent status as beholden to it is one of the most striking British (and, more broadly, European) assumptions about Islam. There were many consequences for this type of thinking. Many colonial-era interlocutors wrote about Islamic law as if it would neatly predict Muslim behavior in real time – shariʿa became a roadmap of sorts for the British, a singular thing to be studied so as to strategically manage an unruly segment of the population. Relatedly, many fixated on how British rule in India would or could transgress Islamic law, making religiously inspired war (jihad) mandatory for all Muslims within South Asia. The ability for Muslims to practice religion freely – but not so freely that jihad could or would be waged against the British – was a crucial line in early British colonization through the early 20th century. And, as the 19th century closed and the 20th began, the British built upon notions of what we might now call religious freedom in their imperialized landscapes. Taken together, British definitions of Islam as essentially lawbased and a desire to ensure religious freedom as part of colonial processes of control created institutional possibility for legislating religions. 250

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The East India Trading Company’s policies in the 18th century toward religion were rather laissez-faire. Generally speaking, the Company wanted no part in meddling with Hindu or Muslim religious affairs and had informal and formal policies demanding that religious authorities settle religious matters. This is most evident in Regulation 11 of 1772, in which Hindus and Muslims were both afforded the rights to their texts and their texts were assigned primary positions. For Hindus, the śastras, and for Muslims, the Qurʾan became the only way to arbitrate in issues of ‘inheritance, succession, marriage and caste and other religious usages or institutions’ (Rocher and Davis, 2014: 103).6 In 1822, the Privy Council, effectively defining Sunni and Shiʿa as legally distinct, afforded Shiʿa Muslims the right to their own laws, as well. These two pre-Rebellion laws affected personal spheres as well as criminal and, importantly, set the tone for later imperial laws and policies. Under British rule, in two phases, and after Independence under Indian Constitutional Law, Muslim religious law was protected and enshrined in imperial/state law. In 1937, the Shariat Act delineated two primary things: first, that ‘Muslims’ were subject to this act; and second, the host of issues to be governed by the act. Simple enough, on the surface. ‘Muslim’ is not defined, and perhaps suggests an ongoing concern to prioritize customary and cultural practice. The Shariat Act of 1937 covered issues of inheritance (unrepresented succession, special property, women, and gifts), issues of marriage (including marriage itself, various ways divorce may occur, dower, guardianship, and maintenance), and financial issues (like trusts). Interestingly, the Shariat Act excludes agricultural land and charities (waqf), both of which were seen as having import religiously, but ultimately the state’s interests superseded those religious concerns. In 1939, responding in part to Muslim critique of the Shariat Act, the British passed the Dissolution of Muslim Marriage Act. The purpose of this Act was to expressly state the ways and reasons that a wife may legally seek and obtain a divorce from her husband. The rationale includes an explanation that assumes Islamic jurisprudential logic: because the major schools of Sunni law differed in how a woman might obtain a divorce, the British law needed to be broader in order to accommodate all possibilities of Muslim expression. This Act only affects the dissolution of marriage when sought by a woman. It is inherently gendered and it demonstrates, too, the ways in which the Shariat Act was gendered: a correction would have been unnecessary should the law have been ‘neutral’. The practice of triple talaq itself is hotly debated. Many ascribe it to a particular set of circumstances, as it is located within South Asian, Sunni communities who largely follow the Hanafi maddhab or legal school: it is religiously binding in this community but also the extant nation-state legal institutions foster its practice. Scholars of Islamic law point out that all four major Sunni schools agree that the practice is ‘not permissible’ but that the effect of triple talaq is ‘binding in law’ (Munir, 2013). This may seem confusing: how can something ‘not permissible’ also be legally binding? The nuance of how fiqh functions – how something undesirable can still yield consequences – is not necessarily the topic here. But it is important to remember what this might tell us about the application of religious law to secular law, that is both stable and heavily disputed. The practice of triple talaq is also hard to track in terms of prevalence and influence. As legal historian Mitra Sharafi has argued, most studies of colonial law only discuss a law’s enactment, not how it was enforced or adjudicated. On the topic of triple talaq, she argues that British officials may have mediated the effects of talaq by imposing a notion of chivalry, undermining Muslim husbands’ ability to unilaterally and inconsequentially to divorce (Sharafi, 2009). Other colonial law experts have suggested, however, that the enforcement of triple talaq directly upheld religious and secular, Muslim and British patriarchal structures. 251

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For example, Michael Anderson argued that ‘most Muslim wives were formally subject to the husband’s power to invoke a unilateral talaq’ (Anderson, 1993: 93). We know, in other words, that triple talaq was practiced and, sometimes, found its way to court settings beyond just having been decreed law. We also know that Muslim women distinctively bore the brunt of the law that was written about them but not for them. Whether to solidify paternalistic, patriarchal notions of appropriate gender roles or to appease Muslim elites and orthodoxies, British officials and, later, Indian lawmakers, nearly all of whom were non-Muslim men, wrote and rewrote policies that affected Muslim women. The issue of triple talaq rose to recent prominence, in many ways, because of Shah Bano. Her case highlights the complex landscapes of religion, gender, and national politics in India. She was divorced via triple talaq in 1978 and subsequently sued for alimony via criminal law in 1985. Initially, the Court sided with her and demanded that she be given alimony; this ruling angered Muslim orthodoxies, who claimed that this violated Islamic law. The Congress government hastily passed Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986 that only entitled women to alimony for a specific period (iddat). Social justice advocates of many stripes – Muslim, secular, feminist, opposition parties to Congress – argued that this unjustly denied Muslim women the alimony legally entitled to non-Muslim women. The case, which became part of the 2017 suit that ultimately wrote the law off the books, highlights the resonances of colonial-era definitions of legal gender and sex: the cases build upon colonial-era law. As part of the logic of Muslim Personal Law, which traced its practice to the East India Company’s policy and to colonial practices of ruling religious minorities, Muslim rules about divorce remained civic concerns until very recently. Muslim Personal Law and its related constellation of legal institutions have a long history rooted in British ideas that Muslims were (1) inherently litigious; (2) uniquely susceptible to rebellion; and (3) required concessions of their own laws in some matters in order to prevent discord in others. For Muslims, this meant a variety of issues became fodder for legal inquiry, subject of policy, part of parliamentary debate, and, of course, written into civil and criminal codes.7 It also meant that British officials were keen to ‘protect’ Muslims’ ability to govern their lives according to what they (and many elite Muslims, in particular) saw as religious concerns to be dealt with by the community. Notably, these issues include issues of family: marriage, inheritance, divorce, and their related issues, like alimony, custody, and dowry. In short, these issues largely affected the gendered space of a family.

Conclusion Colonialism casts a long, dark shadow. There is little that colonial rule did not affect, including gender and religion. In many ways, colonial and imperial practices function circularly: expectations about the colonized shaped the colonizer’s policy; in turn, those policies set parameters for actions, created the possibilities for being, acting, and reacting. For Muslims, colonialism crafted legal, institutional, and juridical definitions about proper practice, gender roles, and normative relationships. Colonialism also substantiated and solidified those practices, roles, and relationships. Muslims were impacted because they were Muslim: Muslim Personal Law, the Shariat Act, and Dissolution of Marriage Act are colonial-era policies that defined how the law would see, treat, and adjudicate matters related to Islam and families. Muslims were impacted because they were imperial subjects: the Contagious Diseases Acts, the Indian Penal 252

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Code, and the bans on homosexual sex defined who was criminally unhealthy, criminally liable, criminally sexually deviant. In each of these categories – the ones that directly name Islam or Muslims and the ones that do not – gender, too, is mediated through colonial practices, specifically law. How Muslim women may get divorced, to what they are entitled by state law thereafter, what kinds of sexual behaviors Muslim women and men could engage in – all of these were reified by colonial (and later, Indian) law. Colonial definitions were, of course, political. Labeling Muslim men hyper-sexual or hyper-masculine and imagining Muslim women as paradoxically hyper-sexual and yet utterly in need of male protection has lasting effect. In 2017, when triple talaq was overturned, many did not see this as a simple victory for women’s rights or Muslim equity. In fact, scholars and activists alike called attention to the ways in which an energized and powerful Hindu right urged for changes to Muslim marriage specifically in terms of protection. Some suggest that leaders of India’s BJP pushed for Muslim women’s equity in the form of triple talaq’s overturn because of the ways it supports anti-Muslim stereotypes – the capriciousness and cruelty of Muslim men, for example (Agnes, 2018; Sur, 2018). Gendered definitions, like colonial legacies, have mattered to religion and their impact lingers.

Notes 1 Cf. Avril A. Powell, Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-mutiny India. London Studies on South Asia; No. 7 (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1993). 2 The practical effects of the Charter Act were manifold, and included the increased presence of Britons in South Asia; an increased imperial presence, especially with regard to judiciary concerns; formal permission for British, Christian missionaries to work in South Asia; and funds reserved for the education of Indians. See, as examples: The Law Relating to India, and the East-India Company; with Notes and an Appendix. 2nd ed. (London: W. H. Allen, 1841); Anthony Webster, ‘The Strategies and Limits of Gentlemanly Capitalism: The London East India Agency Houses, Provincial Commercial Interests, and the Evolution of British Economic Policy in South and South East Asia 1800–50,’ Economic History Review 59, no. 4 (2006): 743–64; and Nancy Gardner Cassels, Social Legislation of the East India Company: Public Justice versus Public Instruction (New Delhi and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2010). 3 While shariʿa has made it into contemporary parlance as ‘Islamic law’, it does not neatly line up with state-based conceptions of law, an immobile cannon, or one unique thing. See Marion Katz, ‘Pragmatic Rule and Personal Sanctification in Islamic Legal Theory,’ in Law and the Sacred, Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas and Martha Merrill Umphrey, ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 91. Cf. Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 167–177 and Carl W. Ernst, Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 104. 4 For relevant work on the Great Rebellion and gender, especially women’s roles in it and effects for women, see: Aarti Johri, ‘The Indomitable Begum Hazrat Mahal 1820–1879’, India Currents 30, no. 3 (2016): 40–41; Seema Alavi, ‘“Fugitive Mullahs and Outlawed Fanatics”: Indian Muslims in nineteenth Century Trans-Asiatic Imperial Rivalries,’ Modern Asian Studies 45, no. 6 (2011): 1337–1382; Penelope Tuson, ‘Mutiny Narratives and the Imperial Feminine: European Women’s Accounts of the Rebellion in India in 1857,’ Women’s Studies International Forum 21, no. 3 (1998): 291–303; Joyce Lebra, The Rani of Jhansi: A Study in Female Heroism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1986); Harleen Singh, The Rani of Jhansi: Gender, History, and Fable in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 5 Indian Penal Code, II.8 ‘Gender’ is defined as: ‘The pronoun “he” and its derivatives are used of any person, whether male or female’ and II.10 ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ are defined as ‘The word “man” denotes a male human being of any age; the word “woman” denotes a female human being of any age’ and II.11, ‘Person’ is defined as ‘The word “person” includes any Company or Association or body of persons, whether incorporated or not’. http://ncw.nic.in/acts/theindianpenalcode1860.pdf 6 Cf. Journal of the East India Association (1868). Part 39, Volume 2, Issue 1. n.p.

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Further reading Levine, Phillipa. (2003) Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire. London and New York: Routledge. This book is a comprehensive overview of how British laws and officers policed Indians, especially women, due to scientific-medical understandings of race, gender, and disease. Khurshid, S. (2018) Triple Talaq: Examining Faith. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. This recent book provides a good overview of this complex case and its related issues, tracing multiple cases, sets of issues, and histories with an eye toward religion and religious logics. It also helpfully reproduces key excerpts of legal decisions in part in its final chapter.

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16 ISLAM AND GENDER ON THE SWAHILI COAST OF EAST AFRICA Nathaniel Mathews

This chapter aims to help the ordinary college reader to understand two complex and interlocking topics: Islam and gender in the regional context of the Swahili coast of East Africa. In this chapter I will primarily engage in historicizing the transformation of gender relations on the Swahili coast, mainly over the 19th and 20th centuries, especially with respect to changing relations of slavery, ethnicity, race, class and status, women’s entry into the labour market and formal education for women. Historicizing is a methodology of reconstructing historical fragments as evidence for past human social transformations and changes. Historicizing gender, slavery, and religion together gives us a lens on contemporary dynamics of Islam on the Swahili coast. Slavery on the coast was both a source of derision and exclusion, and a route to belonging, especially for the free offspring of a free man’s marriage to his slave. The abolition of slavery provoked a long crisis in social relations between Muslims, as the emancipated asserted space in the urban labour market, the mosque, and the farm. The abolition of slavery became later a metaphor for understanding national independence, reigniting debates about the relations between ex-slaves and ex-masters. Today, a unique confluence of circumstances – including unresolved class tensions, neoliberal economic policy, and increasingly strident assertions of religious exceptionalism in the public sphere – have produced a form of hyper-patriarchy within and among Muslims, that exists alongside increasing opportunities for women of a certain class today on the Swahili coast of East Africa. This patriarchy is neither a purely exogenous, nor purely indigenous product, but rather is entangled with the coast’s cosmopolitan history in complex ways (Berman 2017). I suggest that scholars should avoid trying to find ‘easy targets’ for superficial reforms, but take seriously the historic and contemporary role of the judiciary for Muslims at the coast, and study the existing spaces for co-existence and genuine pluralism among Muslims and between Muslims and other residents of the postcolonial nation-state. The Swahili are a group of people who have historically resided on the Swahili coast, a stretch of territory on the eastern edge of the African continent, facing the Indian Ocean. Here, in the trading cities of East Africa’s Indian Ocean coast, groups of fisherman, merchants, and blacksmiths, and later overseas traders, came to speak the language now called Kiswahili. Today Kiswahili speakers may also contextually identify as Kenyan, Tanzanian, Somali, Omani, Yemeni, or Indian (Mugane 2015). Millions speak Swahili as a second

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language throughout East and Central Africa. East African cities, by virtue of their trading opportunities, also contained (and contain) many travellers and long-term residents who are connected to transoceanic and upcountry networks in India and the Gulf. These cosmopolitan connections are what have been termed the ‘global worlds of the Swahili’ (Loimeier and Seesemann 2006). Any study of gender for this complex and variegated transnational space must first face the enormity of designating all the gendered scripts, symbols, and discourses in this social universe. How does one translate ‘gender’ into Kiswahili? In many languages, Kiswahili among them, there is not an exact distinction made between gender and sex, as jinsia can be a type of either kind. In Kiswahili a man is called mwume and a woman mke. Kiswahili also has words for men and women at various stages in their life cycle; for instance a young man is mvulana and a young woman is msichana. Gender may be assigned at birth and recognized in language, but gendered experiences emerge from a multiplicity of small social acts.

Islam One common way to understand ‘the Swahili’ as a people is through an understanding of the complexities of Muslim identity. The majority of people on the coast follow the Shafiʿi madhhab, something they share with large parts of Southeast Asia. There have also been Ibadhi, Shiʿa Ithnaasheri and Ismaili minorities on the coast since at least the 19th century (Anthony 2002). These madhāhib are schools of thought within Islam, about how to interpret the shariʿa: how to pray, how to purify, how to divide inheritance, etc. Learned scholars within these madhāhib interpret written treatises, compendiums of the schools opinions or eponymous texts. Though Islam is a discursive tradition, customary ‘unspoken’ mores and bodily dispositions - such as food preparation and forms of dress – also define Muslims as a group. While ‘Muslim-ness’ is a common identity trait of the Swahili over many centuries, it does not mark an exact boundary between the coast and upcountry today, as some coastal people still imagine (Caplan 2007). There have been migrations to the coast from inland from non-Muslim Bantu speakers since at least the 1st century CE. Beginning in small fishing and hunting settlements along the coast from 700 CE or earlier, these coastal towns of East Africa gradually attracted an influx of rural and overseas migrants, and became burgeoning centres of trade (Fleisher 2010). By 1000 CE, many of the East African coastal towns had a number of fine stone houses built of coral, a town mosque, and schools for learning the Qurʾan. A few of these settlements were wealthy kingdoms, where rulers patronized poetry, music, and Islamic learning (Hamdun and King 1994 (1975)). The richest of these, at Kilwa and Zanzibar, contain an enormous palace complex for the ruler and places of residence for wives, concubines, and slaves. Wealthy families often raised their status in their urban community by intermarriage to outsiders, who could even become kings, continuing a long political tradition of stranger kings across East and Central Africa. A great many Arab migrants and their offspring learned Kiswahili through these marriages. Arabic language offered a literate tradition and an alphabet that could be adapted to write Swahili as well. A rich written poetic tradition grew from this, including a profound meditation on death and the fungibility of human existence. The historical accounts of the Swahili cities describe a genteel, plural and cosmopolitan cultural space, where refined patrician poetry became common proverb. Many other religious adherents shared the urban space of the towns from at least the 18th century, 257

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including Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, and Christians. Rituals, beliefs, and ideas flowed into Islam from other, non-Muslim African communities, even when some austere ‘scriptural reformers’ condemned or critiqued such practices. Islam evolved on the Swahili coast of East Africa within local tensions of class and status, as well as regular exposure to the literate knowledge of the tradition as it changed elsewhere (in places such as Cairo, Damascus, or Hadhramaut). It responded as well to the changing dynamics of local custom and to other exigencies of the day. Culture flowed both from the elite to the enslaved, and vice versa. Dances once only performed by slaves were appropriated by the wealthy elite, while exslaves sought to remake themselves as respectable townspeople, often by taking on the names of elite Arab nisbas. The literate tradition of Islam is often more easily transmittable than many forms of local custom, though it requires literacy in Arabic for full comprehension and mastery to be achieved. The literate tradition, with its emphasis on basic matters of aqidah, or religious praxis, made it possible to imagine a basic and shared attribute distinguishing Muslim communities: their attempts to submit oneself honourably to live by the legacy of the Prophet Muhammad and the Qurʾan. There has historically been a deep embodied respect shown to the learning that emanates from this imagination. There is a remarkable passage in Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari’s Customs of the Swahili People, in which Mtoro is translated as saying the following: If a man comes from a long distance to live in a place as a teacher and says, ‘I am a teacher, I know the Qur’an and elimu,’ but the people do not know him, they set him questions; and if he answers them, he is accepted as a genuine teacher. (Bakari 1981, p. 32) The question of this literate tradition’s ‘patriarchal’ biases is an ongoing point of contention in Islamic studies (Ali 2010). For centuries women also esteemed Qurʾan and hadith memorization and were highly involved in its transmission (Nadwi 2013; Sayeed 2013). On the East coast of Africa we have fragmentary records of women like Asha Ngumi and Mwana Mwema, who rose to rule some of the Swahili city-states, but much less evidence of women involved in scholarly transmission of the Islamic tradition (Askew 1999, p. 83). Yet most recent scholarship on Islamic law on the coast has challenged the assertion that Islamic law is uniquely patriarchal and disadvantages women (Stiles 2009; Stockreiter 2015). This scholarship also point out that discourses of law can be tools of both men and women in a dispute, and that legal cases before modern qadis in places like Zanzibar are not mere reproductions of androcentric privilege. In a recent ethnography of Muslim women in Kenya, Ousseina Alidou portrays Muslim women in Kenya as leaders in their communities (Alidou 2013). Patriarchal ideas of masculinity and femininity do not always emerge directly from formal legal discourse, but rather insinuate themselves into everyday life through customary usage. Katrina Daly Thompson’s study of the popobawa myth in modern Zanzibar shows how anxieties about patriarchal masculinity can find their way into violent rumours, politics, and a number of other domains (Thompson 2017). Nadine Beckmann observes that, ‘Shyness, respect and passivity are regarded as ideal female features and make for tabia nzuri, “good character”, which is highly desired in terms of marriageability’ (Beckmann 2010, p. 620). Such learned shyness can sometimes find its way into courtroom proceedings, but there is little systemic evidence that qadis automatically favour men because they are more loudly assertive. Gendered anxieties show up not only in court cases themselves, but in how 258

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Muslim communities in Kenya and Tanzania perceives state-appointed Muslim women judges like al-Aroni, interviewed by Ousseina Alidou. Al-Aroni’s comments on the veil reveal that the community exerts pressure for her to be seen publicly in it as a symbol of who she belongs to (Alidou 2013, p. 138). But she is also proud to wear it and represent that community with their many needs, to use her power as a Muslim advocate to aid and uplift all women in Kenya.

Gender, Islam, and patriarchy: then and now What does it mean to say something is ‘gendered’? Gender as a term is used here mainly to signify the full range of social meanings that humans give to the biochemical processes which create sex differentiation in the broader animal kingdom of which they are a part. A big part of this is sex assignation; assigned by human social norms, because of what sexual organs one is born with. This is the recognition of sexual difference at the core of meanings of gender. Gendering begins in society, with the recognition that certain types of people are male and thus to be raised, socialized, and treated as boys and then men, and that others are female and are to be also uniquely raised, socialized, and treated as girls and then women. This also involves children and the relationships within and among different genders and age groups. Gender thus incorporates a dizzying array of other social arenas, including religion. The Qurʾan speaks of male–female relations at length. At its core, the Qurʾan robustly affirms the equality and interdependence of men and women. It also endorses gendered hierarchies of protection and obedience, in which men have a degree of authority over women (Barlas 2002). It has also (controversially) been interpreted as giving sanction to sex with female war captives, a practice that led to the sanctioning of enslaved concubines. Much of the Islamic material beyond the Qurʾan, especially the hadith, draws on and also assumes the customs current at the time of the Prophet Muhammad. These customs are clearly gendered. There is a controversial hadith in which the Prophet declares women to be ‘deficient in intelligence’ and another in which he says women will be ‘the majority of those in hell,’ for being ungrateful to their husbands. Another hadith states that women will be the majority of those in paradise, although as first and second wives of pious men. But the original sin of religio-patriarchal domination doesn’t have an easily traceable textual geneaology to the Qurʾan or Islam. Local non-Islamic custom in East Africa more broadly, even if matrilineal, was highly patriarchal; for many if not most women, the route to societal prestige lay in producing offspring, especially male offspring, for their husbands (Alpers 1983). Even in matrilineal societies, intense conflicts could arise over control over women’s reproduction and offspring (Wright 1993). Although sexual segregation and veiling was not as widely practiced as it became in the early 20th century, women on the coast, as elsewhere in East Africa, struggled against gendered customs as much as, if not more than, they did the strictures of Islamic law. The original ‘source’ of patriarchal custom could lie in a number of antecedents, including transformations from ritual to kingly rule, shifts in the mode of production, and a predominant male focus on women as vehicles of social reproduction through offspring.

Gender and slavery in 19th century East Africa Slaves and slavery were a part of the coastal towns since the 11th century, and perhaps earlier. Slavery from the late 18th century expanded on the coast as part of a broader series of commercial and ideological transformations in coastal life. Enslaved Africans from the 259

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interior were bought or caught in the interior and brought in great numbers to the coast, where they were put to work on the burgeoning plantation sector, growing cloves, coconuts, and grain (Cooper 1997; Sheriff 1987). Profits from the plantation sector helped fund expeditions into the interior to hunt and trade for ivory, which was exported from Zanzibar, usually to India, Europe, and the Americas. Slavery helped 19th century men in East Africa to assert their patriarchal dominance over older, matrilineal forms of affiliation. In matrilineal societies, there is often tension between husbands and their wives’ brothers over who will have primary authority and control over offspring. In the 19th century, new forms of commercial wealth enabled ambitious men, frustrated by matrilineal control, to buy and marry female slaves. By marrying slaves, men ensured their authority over any offspring, for a slave was most commonly characterized as an individual without kinship relations, what Orlando Patterson terms, ‘natal alienation’ (Patterson 1982). This new patriarchal mode of kinship affiliation was allied to the new forms of wealth-making. At the coast in the 19th century, a new Omani Arab ruling elite was also engaged in this process of marrying female slaves, or turning them into concubines who produced free Arab offspring. The Omanis governed through local liwalis stationed in each of the coastal towns; these liwalis owned slaves and often married locally, and took concubines. The royal household of Seyyid Said, the first sultan of Zanzibar, contained both eunuchs and some 70 concubines from Circassia and Ethiopia. In fact Seyyid Said had no children by his legal wives; all were the children of concubines (Ruete 1907; Ruete and van Donzel 1993). The Omanis instituted the growing of cloves in Zanzibar, and 19th century Zanzibar became a centre of credit and debt. Islamic law guaranteed the freedom for women to own property, and some elite coastal women were guarantors for their husbands who sought credit (McDow 2018, p. 137; Stockreiter 2015, p. 141). Elite intermarriage with enslaved women may have guaranteed the freedom and elite lineage of the offspring, but it did not always guarantee the security of the women themselves. Marriage is already a gendered relationship in Swahili language, where men marry (kuoa) and women are married off (kuolewa). The latter verb is the passive form of the former, and indicates how women were ‘given’ by appointed male elders to a groom from another family. Historian Jon Glassman notes the vulnerability of women in these marriages. Like the stories of women in the East African interior explored by Marcia Wright, coastal women could gain protection through these marriages. But they could also find themselves without close kin within the household, and this made them more subject to patriarchal control by their husbands (Glassman 1995). Non-elite women successful enough to transcend concubinage to become the recognized wife of a powerful man could still face animus from the husband’s extended kin, including and especially his freeborn wife. The requirement that a woman marry someone equal in status to her is called kafa’a, and it is variously enforced among the various Islamic legal schools. In slavery times on the East African coast, kafa’a made it nearly impossible for men of low status, even if they were converts to Islam, to marry upper status women in the towns. But it could also affect higher status men too. Abdalla bin Hamed was the Omani born liwali of Lamu in the 1870s. When he approached the family of a sharifa woman, that is a free noble woman descended from the Prophet, they initially rejected his request. Eventually the marriage was agreed to, after the liwali agreed to follow the Shafiʿi madhab. The family of the sharifa women continued to trace the offspring of the marriage through both patrilineal and matrilineal lines (Romero 1997, p. 116). 260

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The marriage of lower status women on the coast to higher status men has been referred to ‘ascending miscegenation,’ as it produced locally born free offspring who were part of elite Omani patrilines (Mazrui 1973). As mentioned, non-elite women who married into elite households often faced the additional obstacle of lack of kin to call on in marital disputes. Nevertheless, some of these women became quite wealthy, whether through inheritance or the profit of their children. They could thus, Stockreiter (2015) observes, accumulate wealth through dependents and own slaves themselves. Elite women could own slaves and abuse them, just as men could. The German traveller Oscar Baumann describes residing in Zanzibar next to the widow Fatme binti Msellem bin Amri el-Barwani, whose household was filled with her personal attendants and grandchildren. The grandchildren were raised by female slaves, and according to Baumann, these enslaved women were made to bear the brunt of punishment for their charges’ indiscretions (Baumann 1900). In slavery times and after, both men and women of lower status attempted to establish themselves by aspiring to the lifestyles of the slaveholding elite. They sought to gain their manumission through independent labour, or, for women, marriage to a powerful patron. Enslaved men sought to purchase their own slaves and concubines and create polygynous households. Enslaved women, who were distinguished from free women by being unveiled, used the veil to establish themselves as pious members of the community.

The abolition of slavery In 1894, British Consul Arthur Hardinge wrote with concern about abolition, noting it would cause grave social changes because ‘every householder is a slave holder.’ Hardinge feared that masters would release their slave concubines into the streets, and they would become prostitutes (Strobel 1979). Slavery was formally abolished in Zanzibar in 1897, and on the Kenya coast in 1907. Its end wrought far-reaching transformations in coastal societies. After abolition, women gained limited access to the wage labour market, although they often worked out of dire necessity, rather than personal fulfilment. Women in urban areas aspired to become property owners and landladies. Abolition did increase the autonomy of women overall, but it also increased their vulnerability to the market. The urban space of the towns offered ambitious women the prospect of gaining both financial independence and social respect outside of the usual route of marriage and motherhood. On the other hand, colonial officials worked through ‘indirect rule’ and strove to placate the opinion of elite and knowledgeable townsmen, who viewed abolition as a threat to social reproduction and public order. These men sought to keep women ‘in place’ in the traditional patriarchy, but the new colonial taxation made that increasingly difficult, placing pressure on ordinary households to acquire cash. Abolition was thus part of a colonial restructuring of East African societies, a process that was multifaceted and incorporated legal, social, and economic change. Abolition did not resolve the growing tensions of coastal society, but rather exacerbated them. Some qadis refused to sanction the marriage of ex-slaves without the consent of their masters, one-time concubines attempted to demand a share of inheritance from deceased men as legal wives, and the families of former slaves attempted to escape the families of former masters’ legal claims on their wealth. There was little attempt by colonial authorities to reform land ownership or to address the wealth inequality created by slavery. As Elke Stockreiter notes, a large part of the prestige of pre-colonial Islamic law was its personal, intimate, and flexible nature, and the learning and prestige of individual qadis (Stockreiter 2015, p. 53). In Zanzibar and the Kenya coast, the British acted to restructure 261

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the judiciary by formalizing functions and roles and by ‘rationalizing’ Islamic law through codification of various rulings across different legal schools. Perhaps the courts did become more bureaucratically efficient (Hardinge certainly thought so). But the increasingly alien bureaucratic nature of the legal system disadvantaged non-literate and poor litigants, women especially. Economic changes in the towns also propelled a variety of changes in women’s attitudes towards divorce, both subaltern and elite. Women took men to court around issues of mahr/dower. Men were recruited by the Zanzibar colonial state for the new colonial wage labour market. Many of the smaller coastal towns lost population and sank into economic depression, while locales like Mombasa and Zanzibar grew enormously in size, swelled by the migration of foreigners and ex-slaves, seeking wage labour on the clove plantations, on the docks, and in elite homes (Cooper 1997; Glassman 1995). In Zanzibar, the colonial state was committed to propping up indebted landowners and to maintaining the production of cloves for export, and thus encouraged ex-slaves to renegotiate labour arrangements with former masters so as to provide continuity. Many joined sailing vessels and became part of an Indian Ocean group of mobile subalterns (Ewald 2013; Stanziani 2014). Elizabeth McMahon’s study of slavery and abolition on Pemba shows the importance of attending to local context for understanding the different paths ex-slaves took after abolition there. McMahon argues that instead of a mass out-migration, most ex-slaves settled down and attempted to create smallhold farms for themselves. They became part of the Pemban community through their ability to accrue social capital in the form of heshima, a Swahili word meaning social respect. Such integration is also attributed by McMahon to the nature of residence in Pemba, where slaves were fewer and lived in closer proximity, both residentially and socially, to the larger community (McMahon 2013). The end of slavery also brought a transformation in ethnic relations. In coastal society, knowledge of Islam was a route to social prestige, especially for locally born slaves. But after abolition, low status Muslim men continued to be denied marriage to high status women, based on their descent from slaves. Indeed, it must have been particularly galling for them to be deemed free Muslims under law, but to be still looked down upon in this manner. As Stockreiter notes, ‘the stigma of illegitimacy and kinlessness was a mechanism that impeded the social mobility of ex-slaves decades after the abolition’ (Stockreiter 2015, p. 212). Colonially introduced abolition created different categories of ex-slaves, one category that had achieved manumission through Islamically legal means and another that had been granted free status by the colonial government. Joining ex-slaves at the coast were new upcountry migrants, who retained links with their home area and consequently felt much less need to attach themselves to the kin groups of the elite. The new migrants were also relatively more open to marrying ex-slaves than were locally born Arabs or Swahili. By the 1930s, the coastal towns were home to burgeoning forms of ethnic and popular associations with links to the rural hinterland. Both new migrants and ex-slaves felt a growing frustration with colonial racism and the chauvinism they experienced from wealthier urban residents.

Gender and decolonization Colonial officials had originally governed with a fundamental distinction between native and non-native, later to be replaced by hierarchically graded ethnicity, with Arabs at the top. Arab identity in colonial East Africa brought with it exemption from certain onerous colonial taxes. Fiscal crises in the colonial state periodically reanimated the tensions of these designation. Conflicts over land and resources intensified so that when the first nationalist movements in Zanzibar emerged in the 1950s, they too, bore the imprint of the unresolved 262

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tensions around the social integration of slaves in coastal society (Glassman 2011). Muslim reformist discourses, through an emphasis on purifying Islam, tried to combat these fissiparous tendencies, but tended to exacerbate divisions between newer and older Muslims (Mathews 2013). Ultimately privileges from the colonial state had roots in unresolved conflicts of status stemming from slavery. During decolonization these unresolved conflicts informed growing tensions of ethnicity, race, and religion. In the decades preceding decolonization, there were disagreements about the education of girls in secular, government schools. Many elite men had been educated there, and gradually educational reformers convinced parents that sending their girls to a Muslim school was an acceptable action. Muslim reformist discourse, prevalent at the coast through the efforts of Shaykh Al-Amin Mazrui, opened the space for Muslim women to pursue secular education. However, according to Erin Stiles’s research in Zanzibar: No women of my acquaintance attended secular schools before the revolution. Among female interviewees over 50, any type of school attendance was rare and they reported that there was very little value placed on secular education for girls and, in some families, boys. People cited a number of reasons for the lack of education. (Stiles 2009, p. 113) Secular education was multi-ethnic and could be a profound social leveller, but poor families could many times not afford it, and elite families stayed away for fear of culturally apostasizing their children. Coastal women in colonial Tanganyika were nevertheless major participants in nationalist movements. Bibi Titi Mohamed, one time lead singer of a Dar-es-Salaam musical group, was a mobilizer for the Tanganyikan African National Union (TANU). Historian Suzanne Geiger notes that Mohamed’s participation in TANU, like other women, was based on already existing solidarities in the coastal towns (Geiger 1997). In Tanzania, Muslims played a central role in the freedom struggle, as the nationalist movement arguably began in the coastal towns and spread through the whole country. In Kenya, on the other hand, coastal leaders harboured separatist desires to join the region with Zanzibar, and were marginal to the core of the nationalist leadership in KANU. Some Muslims formed independent political parties in the decade before formal independence, but were ultimately unsuccessful. By 1964, both countries were sovereign and independent, and all coastal people, including those on the island of Zanzibar, now belonged to either Kenya or Tanzania (a postrevolution union between Zanzibar and Tanganyika). On Zanzibar, the Zanzibar Revolution, the violent culmination of nationalist politics, overthrew the island’s ruling elite, expelled many prominent ulama and ended the dream of Zanzibar as an independent Muslim state. Many Islamic organizations were banned, and the new ruling party attempted to forcefully deal with the vestiges of feudal Arab oppression, breaking up large estates and taking over some of the larger houses in town. However there was also violence against poor rural Arabs who were small landholders or traders. Elements of the Revolutionary Council attempted to eliminate the more conservative Muslim elders cultural imprint on the island, and many local people believe that in the years after the Revolution it had corrupted the qadis and made them functionaries of the state. Zanzibar imported theories of the state from East German and Chinese theorists, and created, for the first time, a modern security/intelligence service responding to the president. The new 263

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revolutionary state was not only characterized by increasing freedom for women from colonial rule, but also by intensified anxiety about their bodies and public presence. From 1964 to 1972, Zanzibar’s government was under the rule of Abeid Karume. After his assassination, Aboud Jumbe was president until 1984, when he was forced to resign by CCM, the ruling party. Later Ali Hassan Mwinyi became president of Zanzibar, and subsequently, of Tanzania. Under his rule, Tanzania entered a period of economic liberalization, after reluctantly accepting loans from the International Monetary Fund to meet its revenue needs. Economic liberalization meant a new opening for religious entrepreneurs to build Muslim and Christian private schools, as the state was forced to drastically cut its budget for public education. The late 1980s thus saw the re-emergence of Muslim activism for education. There were also new scholarships to study in Saudi Arabia and other areas of the Middle East (Wortmann 2018). Among the generation of Tanzanian Muslims who came of age in the late 1980s, resentment of the secular state grew out of many sources, including feelings of religious marginalization, the collapse of socialism, the perception of Christian domination of the state, and the rise of new globally assertive dawah preachers, who, it was alleged by Christians, inflamed interfaith relations. In Tanzania, the country’s first multiparty elections occurred in 1990. In Kenya, the Moi regime was forced to allow multiparty elections in 1991. Muslims in Kenya used this new public space to push for the enshrinement of qadi courts in the constitution, a push involving many women (Alidou 2013). In both Kenya and Tanzania, the new few scholars with education outside local Islamic networks increasingly challenged local Muslim leadership in the language of a global, purified Islam (Becker 2016). Muslim organizations like WARSHA were filled with young men who had not achieved success in the ordinary networks of education and patronage, and turned to a more assertive and anxious Salafism to fill the void left by the fiscal crisis within the state. Both Salafis and their opponents tried to define a more specifically Muslim public sphere in opposition to Christian evangelizing on the coast.

Islam and ‘anxious’ patriarchy Modern Islamic patriarchy in East Africa today, in spite of its oft-cited Qurʾanic justifications, is more of a kind of Franken-monster mashup of colonial codification of Islamic law, anger at corrupt secular governance, and anxious masculinity, than a faithful representation of Islamic ethics. It bears only superficial resemblance to traditional Islamic masculinity and is usually ill-equipped with the virtues necessary for living in a plural society. Employing modern methods of hyper-rational textual interpretation, this anxious and angry patriarchy may place a disproportionate burden on women to uphold Islamic piety in the public sphere, while actually disadvantaging women in relation to themselves and their own bodies moving through the world. In her study of Swahili-language hotubas (Ar. khutbah), anthropologist Felicitas Becker (2016, pp. 160–161) notes that: the sermons characterise ideal domestic manhood in terms very close to classical definitions of patriarchy … focusing on men as dependents, as ‘father-rulers’ in the original sense of the term ‘patriarch’. They also identify reproduction, fatherhood, as a central pillar and problem of such families … All but one of the sermons on gender relations that I have consulted anchor men’s patriarchal authority over women in the former’s asserted superior mental, physical, and moral faculties. They do this in part by elaborating the specific flaws of women, and in part by 264

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elaborating on gender difference. Overall, these statements amount to a complex mixture of scriptural, legal, sociopoitical, and biological arguments. Contemporary assertions of patriarchy as superiority in a Tanzanian public sphere can thus enact what Bourdieu calls ‘symbolic violence,’ in which ‘durable inclinations of the socialized body are expressed and experienced in the logic of feeling or duty, are merged in the experience of respect and devotion, and may live on long after the disappearance of their social conditions of production’ (Swartz 2013, p. 95). Bourdieu asserts that such transforming action is all the more powerful for being most invisibly enacted. Women may feel pulled in contradictory directions by this discourse in modern times, where they may need to enter the wage labour market in order to survive. Nadine Beckmann notes: An emphasis on gender segregation and the restricted movement of women in the public sphere aims at limiting the opportunities for men and women to meet, but is often unsustainable in an economic climate that requires women increasingly to engage in paid work outside the house. (Beckmann 2010, p. 621) Moreover, in an age of anxious patriarchy, ideas about purity conceptually extend themselves to a much broader arena of women’s public presence and sexuality, becoming an entire ‘purity discourse.’ In theory, purity discourse is supposed to guarantee women’s innocence, to protect her from a ravaging male public by placing her virtuous body ‘off-limits’ to non-mahram. In practice, the prohibitions generated by purity discourse usually disadvantaged women’s freedom of public movement and put much greater moral pressure on a woman’s ‘pure’ body than a man’s. In an age of mass anxiety, a woman’s body itself, its presence, is conceived of as uniquely a site of temptation and vulnerability. Women themselves can hold and perpetuate these ideas of gender are closely related to ideas of sex and sexuality. Beckmann observes: long-standing notions of modesty in behaviour and dress, obedience of the young to the elders and of women to men, virginity at first marriage and the selection of suitable marriage partners by parents are highly valued and young people today have to negotiate a terrain that is characterised by a heightened sense of uncertainty. (Beckmann 2010, p. 621) All of this should cause scholars to pause before mapping too readily into the past gendered forms of socialization taken for granted by Muslims in East Africa today. Scholars should be chary of asserting a blanket patriarchy inextricably tied to Islam, that must be removed through outside reform. Muslims in East Africa have benefited from and will continue to benefit from an open, plural, and free public sphere. As in the past, economic anxiety is also psychological anxiety, and it manifests in the form of worrying about the comportment and control of certain bodies. While Muslims might worry about losing patriarchal control, the state in Tanzania and Kenya is increasingly surveilling Muslims. In state politics, a growing frustration with corruption in both countries has produced an embrace of authoritarian leadership, in which undesirable others are prevented from speaking. Scholars of East African Islam are undertaking new assessment of the ways ‘everyday’ Islam looks for Muslims in East African courts, mosques, markets, and media. These studies 265

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don’t engage in reductive denunciations of a context-free patriarchy, but neither are they apologists for patriarchal power dynamics. We can’t understand the interpretation of Islamic law on the coast today in terms of some ‘return’ of a pristine and patriarchally gendered Islam. Rather, today’s resurgence of patriarchy is driven by modern anxieties about being a Muslim minority, a limited but growing space for public sphere assertion, and a desire by Muslim men and women both to gain religious literacy in both secular law and the shariʿa.

Further reading The reader who reads this chapter and still has questions might want to consult an English translation of the Qurʾan (the best one in my opinion is Muhammad Asad, The Message of the Qur’an. Gibraltar: Dar al-Andalus Ltd., 1980), Toshiku Izutsu’s God and Man in the Qurʾan: Semantics of the Qur’anic Weltanschauung (Kuala Lumpur: Islamic Book Trust, 2002) and Fazlur Rahman’s Major Themes of the Qurʾan (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009). It would help to have a basic knowledge of what ‘Islamic law’ is; a great historical introduction is Wael Hallaq, An Introduction to Islamic Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). They would also benefit from having read Joan Scott’s excellent book, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Stiles, Erin. An Islamic Court in Context: An Ethnography of Judicial Reasoning. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Through thick description of qadi court cases in Zanzibar, Erin Stiles shows how a Zanzibar qadi rules in cases of divorce and troubled marriages, by combining precedent with knowledge of local conditions. Stiles, Erin and Thompson, Katrina Daly, eds. Gendered Lives in the Western Indian Ocean: Islam, Marriage and Sexuality on the Swahili Coast. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015. The authoritative resource on gender in Swahili coast contexts, with contributions from across the disciplines. Stockreiter, Elke. Islamic Law, Gender and Social Change in Post-Abolition Zanzibar. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. A path-breaking historical work on how abolition transformed gender and social relations in Zanzibar.

References Ali, Kecia. Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2010. Alidou, Ousseina. Muslim Women in Post-Colonial Kenya: Leadership, Representation and Social Change. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. Alpers, Edward A. “The Story of Swema: Female Vulnerability in Nineteenth-Century East Africa,” in Claire Robertson and Martin A. Klein (eds.), Women and Slavery in Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983, pp. 185–219. Anthony, David H. “Islam In Dar es Salaam,Tanzania.” Studies in Contemporary Islam 4, no. 2 (2002): 21–40. Askew, Kelly M. “Female Circles and Male Lines: Gender Dynamics along the Swahili Coast.” Africa Today 46, no. 3/4 (1999): 67–102. www.jstor.org/stable/4187285. Askew, Kelly. Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Bakari, Mtoro bin Mwinyi. The customs of the Swahili people: The Desturi za Waswahili of Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari and other Swahili persons. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Bang, Anne. Sufis and Scholars of the Sea: Family Networks in East Africa, 1860–1925. London; New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003. Bang, Anne. Islamic Sufi Networks in the Western Indian Ocean, (c. 1880–1940). Leiden: Brill, 2014. Barlas, Asma. “Believing Women” in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Becker, Felicitas. Becoming Muslim in Mainland Tanzania. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Becker, Felicitas. “Patriarchal Masculinity in Recent Swahili-language Muslim Sermons.” Journal of Religion in Africa 46 (2016): 158–186. Beckmann, Nadine. “Pleasure and Danger: Muslim Views on Sex and Gender in Zanzibar.” Culture, Health and Sexuality 12, no. 6 (August 2010): 619–632.

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Berman, Nina. Germans on the Kenya Coast: Land, Charity and Romance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. Bonate, Liazzat J. K. “Matriliny, Islam and Gender in Northern Mozambique.” Journal of Religion in Africa 36, no. 2 (2006): 139–166. www.jstor.org/stable/27594374. Bromber, Katrin. “Mjakazi, Mpambe, Mjoli, Suria. Female Slaves in Swahili Sources,” in Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller (eds.), Women and Slavery. Volume One. Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007, pp. 111–128. Caplan, Pat. “Perceptions of Gender Stratification.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 59, no. 2 (1989): 196–208. www.jstor.org/stable/1160488. Caplan, Pat. “‘But the Coast of Course, Is Quite Different’: Academic and Local Ideas about the East African Littoral.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 1, no. 2 (July 2007): 305–320. Caplan. “Two Weddings in Northern Mafia: Changes in Women’s Lives since the 1960s,” in Erin Stiles and Katrina Daly Thompson (eds.), Gendered Lives in the Western Indian Ocean. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015, pp. 85–114. Cooper, Frederick. From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997. Decker, Corrie. “Love and Sex in Islamic Africa: Introduction.” Africa Today 61, no. 4 (2015): 1–10. Decker, Corrie. Mobilizing Zanzibari Women: The Struggle for Respectability and Self Reliance in Colonial East Africa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Ewald, Janet. “African Bondsmen, Freedmen, and the Maritime Proletariats of the Northwestern Indian Ocean World, c1500–1900,” in Robert Harms, Bernard Freamon, and David Blight (eds.), Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition. New Haven: Yale University Press, October 2013, pp. 200–222. Fair, Laura. “Dressing Up: Clothing, Class and Gender in Post-Abolition Zanzibar.” The Journal of African History 39, no. 1 (1998): 63–94. www.jstor.org/stable/183330. Fair, Laura. Historia ya jamii ya Zanzibar na nyimbo za Siti binti Saad. Dar-es-Salaam: Tweweza Communications, 2013. Fleisher, Jeffrey B. “Swahili Synoecism: Rural Settlements and Town Formation on the Central East African Coast, A.D. 750–1500.” Journal of Field Archaeology 35, no. 3 (September 2010): 265–282. Fugelsang, Minou. Veils and Videos: Female Youth Culture on the Kenyan Coast. London: Coronet Books, 1994. Eastman, Carol M. “Women, Slaves, and Foreigners: African Cultural Influences and Group Processes in the Formation of Northern Swahili Coastal Society.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 21, no. 1 (1988): 1–20. Gearhart, Rebecca. “Ngoma Memories: How Ritual Music and Dance Shaped the Northern Kenya Coast.” African Studies Review 48, no. 3 (December 2005): 21–47. Geiger, Susan. TANU Women: Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan Nationalism, 1955–1965. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997. Giles, Linda L. “Possession Cults on the Swahili Coast: A Re-Examination of Theories of Marginality.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 57, no. 2 (1987): 234–258. www.jstor.org/stable/ 1159823. Glassman, Jonathon. Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995. Glassman, Jonathon. War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Gower, Rebecca, Salm, Steven, and Falola, Toyin. “Swahili Women since the Nineteenth Century: Theoretical and Empirical Considerations on Gender and Identity Construction.” Africa Today 43, no. 3 (1996): 251–268. www.jstor.org/stable/4187108. Hamdun, Said and King, Noel. Ibn Battuta in Black Africa. New York: Markus Weiner, 1994 (1975). Hirsch, Suzanne. Pronouncing and Preserving: Gender and the Discourses of Disputing in an African Islamic Court. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Larsen, Kjersti. “Pleasures and Prohibitions. Reflections on Gender, Knowledge, and Sexuality in Zanzibar Town,” in Erin E. Stiles and Katrina Daly Thompson (eds.), Gendered Lives in the Western Indian Ocean: Islam, Marriage, and Sexuality on the Swahili Coast. Ohio University Press, 2015, pp. 209–242. Loimeier, Roman and Seesemann, Ruediger (eds.). The Global Worlds of the Swahili: Interfaces of Islam, Identity and Space in 19th and 20th-Century East Africa. Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2006.

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Loimeier, Roman. Between Social Skills and Marketable Skills: The Politics of Islamic Education in 20th Century Zanzibar. Leiden: Brill Press, 2009. Mathews, Nathaniel. “Imagining Arab Communities: Colonialism, Islamic Reform and Arab Identity in Mombasa, Kenya, 1897–1933.” Islamic Africa 4(2). Winter 2013. Mazrui, Ali. “The Black Arabs in Comparative Perspective: The Political Sociology of Race Mixture,” in Dunstan Wai (ed.), The Southern Sudan: The Problem of National Integration. London: Frank Cass, 1973, pp. 47–81. McDow, Thomas. Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018. McMahon, Elizabeth. Slavery and Emancipation in Islamic East Africa: From Honor to Respectability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Morton, Fred. “Small Change: Children in the Nineteenth-Century East African Slave Trade,” in Gwyn Campbell (ed.), Children in Slavery through the Ages. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009, pp. 55–70. Mugane, John M. The Story of Swahili. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015. Mwinyihaji, Esha Faki. “The Sharia and Muslim Women’s Participation in the Public Sphere.” Sharia Debates in Africa. sharia-in-africa.net/pages/staff/mwinyihaji.php. Nadwi, Mohamed Akram. Muhaddithat: The Women Scholars in Islam. Oxford: Interface Publications, 2013. Nimtz, August H. Islam and Politics in East Africa: The Sufi Order in Tanzania. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Pouwels, R. L. Horn and Crescent: Cultural Change and Traditional Islam on the East African Coast, 800–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Prestholdt, Jeremy. Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Geneaologies of Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Reese, Scott Steven. Renewers of the Age: Holy Men and Social Discourse in Colonial Benaadir. Boston: Brill, 2008. Romero, Patricia. Lamu: History, Society and Family in an East African Port City. Princeton, NJ: Markus Weiner Publishers, 1997. Ruete, Emily. Memoirs of an Arabian Princess: (Salamah bint Saïd; Sayyida Salme, Princess of Zanzibar and Oman) (1844–1924), trans. Lionel Strachey. New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1907. Ruete, Emily and van Donzel, Ed. E. An Arabian Princess between Two Worlds: Memoirs, Letters Home, Sequels to the Memoirs: Syrian Customs and Usages. Leiden: Brill, 1993. Sayeed, Asma. Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Sheriff, Abdul. Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy 1770–1873. London: James Currey, 1987. Stanziani, Alessandro. Sailors, Slaves and Immigrants: Bondage in the Indian Ocean World, 1750–1914. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Stockreiter, Elke. Islamic Law, Gender and Social Change in Post-Abolition Zanzibar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Strobel, Margaret. Muslim Women in Mombasa, 1890–1975. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Swartz, David L. Symbolic Power, Politics and Intellectuals: The Political Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, May 2013. Thompson, Katrina Daly. Popobawa: Tanzanian Talk, Global Misreadings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. Turner, Simon. “‘These Young Men Show No Respect for Local Customs’: Globalisation and Islamic Revival in Zanzibar.” Journal of Religion in Africa 39 (2009): 237–261. Wortmann, Kimberly T. “Omani Religious Networks in Contemporary Tanzania and Beyond,” Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, 2018. Wright, Marcia. Strategies of Slaves and Women: Life Stories from East/Central Africa. London: James Currey, 1993.

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17 MUJAHIDIN, MUJAHIDAT Balancing gender in the struggle of Jihadi-Salafis Nathan S. French

Tracing mujhāhidāt from al-Qaʿida to ISIS: introducing a woman fighter’s role In late 2003, the al-Qaʿida Arabic-language magazine Voice of Jihad (Ṣawt al-Jihā d) published a brief parable penned by an anonymous author writing under the kunya (assumed honorific), ‘Mother of a Martyr’ (Umm al-Shahı̄ d). Entitled, ‘Father, Why won’t you go to jihad?’ the article tells the story of a young girl who shames her father for not fighting. The father responds, playing to her desire for a sibling: ‘If I went for jihad, then I would be killed and your father would never become a father of any other children.’ The young girl, whom Umm al-Shahid names ‘the Little Fighter’ (mujā hida), responds: ‘If you were killed, then that would be best because then you would be a martyr, you would enter paradise, and we would be able to enter with you’ (Umm al-Shahid, 2003). In the paragraph following, Umm al-Shahid praises the inspirational zeal of the young child, noting that she was born in the purest form of steadfast faith, and then adding: Such submission to the command of God embodied (tujasid) in the attitude of that little girl is that which is needed today in the training of our sons and daughters. We want to train them in the jihadi faith. We must begin by implanting within them the correct creed (ʿaqı̄ da ṣaḥı̄ ḥa) – one devoid of impurities and of the deviations of self-serving flatterers and hypocrites … They are part of a single Islamic umma. They are the hope of this umma – after God Himself – for its deliverance from the clutches of shame and humiliation and from the nations of this Earth that have disbelieved. (Umm al-Shahid, 2003) Umm al-Shahid concluded her discussion with a supplication to God to ‘repair’ the sons and daughters of those men who fight (mujahidin), instructing women to teach their children to shame hesitant husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers for their refusal to answer the call. Two years later, Abu Musʿab al-Zarqawi (1966–2006) invoked a theme similar to that of Umm al-Shahid: the responsibility of women to shame men and provide for the spiritual health of their families. In this statement, al-Zarqawi outlined the role of a female fighter, 269

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declaring that ‘the mujahidah woman is she who raises her child not to live, but to fight and then die so that he may live and be free’ in the afterlife (2005, cited in Winter and Margolin, 2017). The need for this, he noted, was a result of a generation of men abandoning their obligations: ‘Is it not a disgrace on the sons of my ummah that our virtuous, pure sisters ask to carry out martyrdom operations while the men of my ummah are sleeping in their slumber ad playing in their amusement?’ (2005, cited in al-Tamimi, 2017). Several women would answer the call. Shortly after delivering his remarks, al-Zarqawi permitted women to fight. In early September, an unidentified woman detonated an explosive belt outside a military recruitment centre in Tal Afar, Iraq. She was followed by two attacks, one by Myrium Goris (d. 2005) and another by Sajida Mubarak al-Rishawi (1970–2015) (Stone and Patillo, 2011: 164–169). Unlike Goris, who was the first female bomber in Iraq of Belgian descent, Rishawi failed to detonate her device in Jordan. While in Jordanian custody, Rishwa described her pathway to seeking martyrdom. In 2003, shortly after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, U.S. forces in Fallujah killed two of her brothers and a brother-in-law – all of whom had joined Zarqawi’s Organization of the Principle of Jihad. Like Goris, whose husband was killed by U.S. forces, Rishawi made contact with Zarqawi’s organization after the death of her close family and hoped to join the fight against U.S. citizens or soldiers by whatever manner she could. Her failure aside, Zarqawi considered the attacks a success. Yet, the response from Usama bin Ladin and the al-Qaʿida movement in Afghanistan was swift: open condemnation of Zarqawi’s transgression of the boundaries delimiting the legitimate usage of violence against the invader (Warrick, 2015: 192–205). Rishawi would remain in Jordanian custody for the next decade. She would not fade into obscurity. On 24 December 2014, while flying a sortie against suspected forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a Jordanian strike aircraft lost control, its pilot ejecting. Captured by nearby ISIS fighters, the pilot appeared in the sixth and seventh issues of the Islamic State’s English-language magazine, Dabiq (‘The Capture of a Crusader Pilot,’ 2015 and ‘The Burning of the Murtadd Pilot,’ 2015). For the release of the pilot, ISIS demanded the release of Rishawi, whom ISIS described as a ‘mujā hida,’ a female fighter in the cause of God, even though she had never pledged any allegiance to Abu Bakr alBaghdadi’s self-declared caliphate in Raqqa. By late February, the Kingdom of Jordan, which had thought it was negotiating in good faith learned the truth: the ISIS demands for Rishawi were false. The pilot had been executed. Jordanian King Abdullah II ordered Rishawi, along with another imprisoned militant, executed in retaliation.

Women, martyrdom, and violent struggle in Jihadi-Salafi thought Rishawi and Goris were neither the first nor the last women to volunteer to fight alongside men seeking martyrdom in defence of what they consider upholding God’s divine unity and the righteous defence of God’s divine law – two hallmark principles of Jihadi-Salafism.1 The first recorded death of a female in an operation described by non-Jihadis as a ‘martyrdom seeking’ (istishhā dı̄ ) occurred in 1985 (Von Knop, 2007: 398). In 2000, the first known Russian ‘black widow’ female bomber, Khava Barayeva, became one of the earliest known women to die in what Jihadi-Salafi fighters, including Yusuf al-ʿUyayri – who was fighting against Russian forces in Chechnya and would later lead al-Qaʿida in the Arabian Peninsula – would label a ‘martyrdom operation’ (al-ʿUyayri, 2000). From the earliest women in combat and support roles through the self-proclamation of an ISIS caliphate, the legitimacy, legality, and roles for women in Jihadi-Salafi discourses of jihad and martyrdom remain

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unsettled among al-Qaʿida and ISIS-sympathetic supporters (Cook, 2005, 2015: 145–156; Lahoud, 2014, 2017; O’Rourke, 2009; Speckhard, 2008). The lack of agreement among Jihadi-Salafi fighters, however, has not limited attempts by media and policy makers to develop possible approaches to the study of the phenomenon of women joining, affiliating, or supporting Jihadi-Salafi movements. At times, such attempts result in media narratives that define the subjectivity and agency of these women against those of their husbands and children. Thus, women joining ISIS are not defined relative to their selfunderstood – or performed roles – but instead are ‘Jihadi brides,’ ‘ISIS wives,’ ‘ISIS widows,’ or are ‘ISIS mothers.’ These titles simplify the complex push/pull factors for these women, which change relative to location, religious identity (e.g. conversion narratives), socioeconomic status, and various other factors (Bloom, 2011; Bloom and Horgan, 2019; Jacques and Taylor, 2008; Peresin, 2015; Peresin and Cervone, 2015; Speckhard, 2008). Rather than countering these studies, this chapter complements the work of Cook (2005) and Lahoud (2014, 2017) by tracing the evolution Jihadi-Salafi discussions of ‘women who struggle,’ the mujā hidā t. Women are not bystanders in Jihadi-Salafi fighting. However, the role as those who struggle represents an ongoing negotiation of gendered identities and social roles. To evaluate this negotiation, this chapter begins with the pre-Jihadi-Salafi writings of Hasan al-Banna (1906–1948) and Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), then examines the thought of Egyptian Islamic Jihad fighters, the Arab-Afghan experience fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and concludes with the negotiated roles for women within the rise and split of al-Qaʿida and ISIS. This evolution reveals three roles for mujā hidā t in the cause of God: a passive femininity requiring purification, the woman as active participant, and the woman as embodiment of renunciative ideals. Discourses invoking the passive femininity of women use the threat of their insidious corruption by disbelievers as a call to arms for believing men. As Blaydes (with Linzer, 2011, 2013) argues, the assumption of such gender inequality and the tie of a woman’s purity with social control is a characteristic shared by Islamist movements more broadly. Jihadi-Salafis tie appropriate Islamic belief and practice to the social placement of women under patriarchal care. Usama bin Ladin (1957–2011), for example, condemned the United States for its hypocritical claim to protect women, instead describing the U.S. as ‘a nation that exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools, calling upon customers to purchase them … [to use them as] strangers to increase your profit margins’ (Bin Ladin, cited in Lawrence, 2005: 168). This idea of women as necessitating the communal action of the nation (umma) – or in the case of ISIS, the state (dawla) – is a logic critiqued elsewhere by Badran (1995), Baron (2005), and, more recently, Abu-Lughod (2013) in which ‘men’ or the ‘nation’ present the female body as requiring masculine protection as an act of justifying war, colonialism, neo-colonialism, and nation-building. The active participant roles played by the mujā hidā t in Jihadi-Salafi discourse are best identified by evaluating the systemic approach Jihadi-Salafis use to delineate their collective state of emergency. Such factors drive a female martyrdom-seeking behaviour that pushes against gender stereotypes. Mia Bloom locates the broader framework of these factors beyond the simple categories of revenge or relations to include a desire for a ‘redemption’ recovering lost, yet respected social value and to cleanse a moral stain (perhaps those from sexual liaisons) and the pursuit of the ‘respect’ of Jihadi-Salafi communities where women can ‘demonstrate that they are just as dedicated and committed to the cause as men’ (Bloom, 2011: 235–236). Margaret Gonzalez-Perez argues that by justifying women as active participants, Jihadi-Salafis ‘legitimize acts that are strategically and militarily utilitarian’ with little regard for Islamic legal traditions (Gonzalez-Perez, 2011: 62). Yet, these ideas of 271

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redemption and respect, I argue, play an important role in the mobilization of women to Jihadi-Salafi causes: they are a guide toward appropriate embodiment of gendered norms. The third of the roles played by women in Jihadi-Salafi culture is as the gendered embodiment of a performed moral uprightness, at times modelled on the earliest generations of female Muslims, whether in combat or the household. Here, I follow the work of Saba Mahmood who, in her Politics of Piety, argues that the women participating in Islamist cultural politics whom she observed in Cairo ‘did not regard trying to emulate authorized modes of behaviour as an external social imposition that constrained individual freedom. Rather, they treated socially authorized forms of performance as the potentialities … through which the self is realized’ (Mahmood, 2004: 31). These women, possessing a particular agency, are those – like the stylized ‘Umm Shahid’ and her daughter in the introduction – who act as the moral guides for the family through their self-renunciation (zuhd) of this world (dunyā ). Consider the example identified by David Cook (2018: 156) of Abu Maryam al-Afghani, a fighter killed in the Bosnian conflict in 1992 whose wife, originally German, grew happy when she learned that he had gone forth to fight in God’s cause: Abu Maryam’s brother wanted to marry her [i.e. Umm Maryam]. She said: Whoever marries me has to fulfil one condition, that he will stay with me for 15 days, and the he will go for jihad. Abu Maryam’s brother refused. Her sister, who used to be a non-Muslim, accepted Islam when she saw the patience she had, she is married and her husband is in the jihad. (Cook, 2018: 156) As Cook writes, the reward of the wife of the fighter is not always as one engaged in physical combat, but instead, one whose ‘spiritual reward will come as a result of the ṣabr or patience that she exemplifies by giving up worldly familial pleasures’ (Cook, 2018: 156). To have patience (ṣabr) in one’s affairs when faced with struggle in the cause of God is a theme seen throughout the literature describing the Companions and Followers of Muhammad, as described by Afsaruddin (2013) in her analysis of jihad and martyrdom in Islamic thought. In the contemporary rhetoric of al-Qaʿida and ISIS, Islamic State calls for self-renunciation and patience reveals a potential bifurcation in Jihadi-Salafi approaches to the gendered roles of mujā hidā t, culminating most recently in the bureaucratization of a gendered division of labour in the state-building project of ISIS.

Hasan al-Banna (1906–1948), Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), and a woman’s role in society Writing and organizing at a time of substantial social and political change in Egyptian society, Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb viewed their reform of Egyptian society as upholding a complementarity of the genders in which men were the guarantors of women who had accepted an embodied and gendered inferiority. In the 1930s, al-Banna worked to establish the Institute for the Mothers of the Believers in Ismailiyya – a successor to what would become known as the Muslim Sisterhood. From its inception, al-Banna intended for the organization to elevate the status of women as the fundamental instrument for reforming the family and, therefore, society (Mitchell, 1969: 175). Though neither al-Banna nor Qutb identified as JihadiSalafis, their social and political projects established several foundational positions from which later Jihadi-Salafi thinkers, such as ʿAbdullah ʿAzzam, would take influences.

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The threat to women, in the estimation of Qutb, was the disruptive threat posed by increases in female participation in social, political, and business life after World War I. Qutb did not seek to remove women from the workplace, but instead sought a harmony between reason and revelation that addressed the problems of social discord created by the unleashing of women’s sexuality (Calvert, 2010: 109). Women and men, Qutb writes, should be considered complementary in human rights and sexual difference, equal in economic and financial competency, but differentiated by their embodied responsibilities (Qutb, cited by Shepard, 1996: 61–68). Fatherhood, Qutb argues, liberates men from maternal obligation and the ‘emotional and passionate side’ that compromises female rationality (Qutb, cited by Shepard, 1996: 62). Any disruption of Egyptian society emerged, Qutb argues, as a result of imbalances introduced into Muslim societies by Western moralities. The misalignment of the relations of genders made manifest underlying flaws in the capitalist and communist modes of economic organization in Western societies. As Qutb argues: We must also remember that the freedom that the materialistic West has granted to women does not arise from this honorable source nor were its motives the innocent motives of Islam … It is well to remember that the West made women leave the home to work because the men there had shirked their responsibility to support their families, and made their women pay the price of their chastity and their honor. Only thus were women driven to work. (Qutb, quoted in Shepard, 1996: 65) The unfettered pursuit of radical material gain, in the case of Western capitalism, and radical material equality, in the case of Soviet communism, reveals to Qutb civilizational projects that displace the necessity of the divinely ordered family. In this idealized society, women accepted their natural work: the role of ensuring the moral self-formation of the children – the next generation of the vanguard of Muslims who would restore the Islamic system to its rightful place above the flawed, man-made systems of the West. In producing this declaration, Lamia Shehadeh (2000) notes that Qutb ignores centuries of female Muslim leaders, spiritual guides, warriors, and Sufi mystics, and instead attempts to blend his own interpretation of anatomical findings with spiritual revelation. What remains is a world in which women, protected by men, embody mastery of the home – but are responsible for little else.

Muhammad ʿabd al-Salam Faraj (1954–1982), Sayyid Imam (Dr. Fadl or ʿAbd al-Qadir bin ʿAbd al-ʿAziz, b. 1950), ʿAbdullah ʿAzzam (1941–1989), and negotiating the individual’s ‘neglected duty’ Like Qutb, the Neglected Duty (al-Farı̄ ḍa al-ghā ʾiba) of Muhammad ʿAbd al-Salam al-Faraj does not have a sustained discussion of a woman’s active role in struggle. Women, he writes, have no direct role to play against unjust and un-Islamic governments. Citing a narration from Muhammad, Faraj assumes a masculine readership and demands that ‘a Muslim must not be content today to be in the ranks of women. Did the Messenger of God – may God’s peace be upon Him – not say that their jihad is the Hajj and the ʿUmra?’ (Faraj, n.d.: 29)2 Men, Faraj suggests, must not take the effeminate path of least activity and instead answer their duty as Muslims and as men to fight in God’s cause. Women would play a role in Faraj’s narrative, however. Khalid al-Islambouli (1955–1982) worked with Faraj to plan the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. In an interview following the assassination – a copy of which was found among Usama bin Ladin’s 273

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personal possessions in Abbottabad, Pakistan – Umm Khalid, identified as the mother of Islambouli, recorded an audiocassette at the behest of his supporters. In her description, Umm Khalid unknowingly performs her role as an embodiment of a gendered rebuke of the Egyptian officials holding her son’s body, proclaiming that his faith in Islam shook the guards to their core (Umm Khalid cited by Miller, 2015: 70). As she left the prison, Umm Khalid chastises those who would call her son a hero: ‘No, I am the mother of the martyr … who revived religion after you all disgraced it. You have trampled God’s religion under foot’ (cited in Miller, 2015: 71). As Flagg notes in his commentary on Umm Khalid’s performance, in the wake of al-Faraj’s neglected duty, ‘women could honour the dead as well as shame the living, proving heroes to Islam’s forsaken majority’ (cited in Miller, 2015: 71). Islambouli’s body is reconfigured in Umm Khalid’s public embodiment of morality. Following Umm Khalid’s embodied renunciation of worldly powers and the broader community, Faraj and Islambouli’s co-conspirator, Dr. Fadl (also known as Sayyid Imam or ʿAbd al-Qadir bin ʿAbd al-ʿAziz) wrote his Mainstay for the Essentials for Preparing for Jihad in the Path of God (al-ʿUmda fı̄ Iʿdā d al-ʿUdda li-l-Jihā d fı̄ Sabı̄ l Allā h) in 1988. Fadl, who was close to eventual al-Qā ʿida commander Ayman al-Zawahiri while the two were members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, wrote a multi-dimensional exploration into the necessities of preparation for struggling in God’s cause – including conversations on military training, spiritual exercises, and the legal requirements placed upon those seeking to fight – the ʿUmda represented al-Sharif’s attempt to establish a firm program for those future generations who would fight in God’s path against the injustice and tyranny of disbelievers. As for whether that path included an individual obligation for women to pursue jihad, Fadl remained reserved. Reading sources from Sunni legal history, Fadl argues that were a woman to fight, it would be out of necessity and, further, while only a few jurists permit a woman of sound mind and body to fight, they did not permit her to engage in the same style of fighting as men. Were the enemy to fight its way into the country – invading lands and homes – then women may fight in defence of their homes and families (Imam, 1988: 23). Such were the examples provided by Umm Sulaym (during the Battle of Hunayn) and Safiyya bint ʿabd al-Muttalib (during the Battle of the Trench, ca. 627 CE) (Imam, 1988: 29). Nor does the lack of obligation mean that women have no role to play in combat. Fadl speaks favourably of the example of Umm Sulaym, who, along with other older women, accompanied Muhammad on raids to provide water, food, and medical treatment for those fighting (Imam, 1988: 29). Ultimately, Fadl concludes, on the basis of the precedent of the Salaf, that the legal tradition permits women to fight if they find themselves beset by enemy forces, but only if a male guardian (maḥram) provides training for such emergent conditions. This is among the earliest gestures from Jihadi-Salafis toward the active participation of women. Perhaps the most expansive argument for an individual struggle in God’s cause, representative of a substantial advancement of Jihadi-Salafi thought, emerged from the arguments of the one-time Muslim Brother and Azhar-educated legist and theologian, ʿAbdullah ʿAzzam. In 1979, three years before Umm Khalid excoriated Egyptians for the martyrdom of her son, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. It remains unclear how many women accompanied the 10,000 to 35,000 foreign fighters migrating to Afghanistan to join the fight and evidence is scant of their participation in frontline combat or support roles (Donnelly et al., 2015: 5). However, there appears to have been some attempt by recruiters to appeal to women joining the jihad against the Soviets. For ʿAzzam, whose recruitment efforts forged the Jihadi-Salafi networks and partnerships that would eventually lead to his contact with Usama bin Ladin, the struggle in Afghanistan 274

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fulfilled the Islamic legal requirements necessitating jihad as an individual obligation (farḍ ʿayn) upon each Muslim, male or female, around the globe (ʿAzzam, 1984). This was a panIslamic call, one that was welcomed and fostered by the nascent Saudi Arabian promotion of pan-Islamism as a counter to the waning influence of pan-Arab nationalism (Hegghammer, 2010). ʿAzzam encouraged Muslim women to answer this pan-Islamic responsibility toward the global umma and suggested that they mobilize and set forth to assist, but, in a fashion similar to Fadl, with a carefully defined role. Those women hoping to join would require an escort and would need to dress appropriately – both forms of embodied renunciation. He laid out his concern in his ‘Presenting the Virtues of Jihad to God’s Servants’ (Itḥā f al-ʿibā d bi-l-faḍā ʾil al-jihā d): The participation of women in jihad is stipulated in the Shariʿa, but it is necessary to observe its legal conditions, such as the presence of a male guardian (maḥram), observing the separation of the sexes, and guarding against temptation. Women should not be young or beautiful. She should cover her face in the presence of men or when carrying out the role of a man in times of urgent need … Yet, opening the door to this entire question presents a profound possibility of corruption. (ʿAzzam, n.d. 32) Were a woman to fulfil these conditions, a woman’s role was still limited. Her work, ʿAzzam suggested in his Join the Caravan (Ilhā q bi-l-qā fila), was specialized: education, nursing, or providing aid for those migrating to the front (muhā jirı̄ n) (1987: 31). As for fighting, ʿAzzam proclaimed women unsuitable for combat, adding, ‘even Afghan women do not fight’ (1987: 31). In answering their individual obligation to fight, women must work within appropriate gendered labour roles and away from the front. Yet, this does not lift the personal obligation to migrate to Afghanistan, which ʿAzzam frames as a hijra. Having migrated, a woman would only be permitted to move in public space if adequately covered and to make contact with men in structured contexts – such as administering medical treatment to a wounded male without a maḥram, for example, only because there is no pleasure gained by either in the act of care (ʿAzzam, n.d.: 11). In all circumstances, the woman must understand her role as a struggle complementary but unequal to that of men.

Usama bin Ladin, Ayman Zawahiri, the Shuʿaybi School, al-Qaʿida, and ISIS: women as self-defending renunciants and guardians of the family In the wake of the 7 July 2005 bombings in London undertaken by Hasib Husain, Mohammed Sidique Khan, Germaine Lindsay, and Shehzad Tanweer, al-Qaʿida’s al-Sahab media outlet released a short film splicing quotes from then-second-in-command Ayman alZawahiri and from Khan, who considered his acts a form of self-renunciation: ‘I and thousands like me are forsaking everything for what we believe. Our driving motivation doesn’t come from tangible commodities that this world has to offer’ (Cowell, 2005). Lost amid the coverage attempting to link the bombers to al-Qaʿida was Samantha Lewthwaite, the wife of Lindsay who, though she initially condemned the attacks, would soon self-identify as sympathetic to Jihadi-Salafism, earning her the sensationalized sobriquet ‘the White Widow.’ In the pages of her diary, seized after a raid on her home in Mombasa, Lewthwaite

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traced her own self-understanding of self-renunciation in the service of her family and her struggle in God’s cause: Recently, my husband gave a talk to my eight-year-old son and my five-year-old daughter. What do you want to be when you are older? Both had many answers but both agreed to one of wanting to be a Mujahid. When a man comes home – wife beautiful, food prepared, kids clean – immediately he will forget the pain of his day, he will always want to come home. When the wife would hear her hubby, she would take his coat and shoes, feed him. Allah blessed me with the best husband for me … I asked for a man that would go forth, give all he could for Allah and live a life of terrorizing the disbelievers as they have us. (Williams, 2014) Lewthwaite’s scattered notes offer a limited glimpse into the emergence of a complementarity of gender roles in contemporary Jihadi-Salafi discourse. Men, Lewthwaite’s notes suggest, are those who must go forth and struggle, but they are also a complement to their wives, who stay behind, preparing the family for the wars ahead and providing spiritual and moral support. Years later, in the pages of their Rumiyah magazine, an English-language replacement for Dabiq, an unnamed ISIS author would argue the same in greater detail. In the May 2017 issue, in an article entitled ‘The Woman is a Shepherd in Her Husband’s Home and Responsible for Her Flock,’ the unnamed author describes the role of mothers and wives in detail: The mother should likewise cultivate within her children that this dunya (world) is a place of journey and that the Hereafter is the place of permanent settlement. Allah states upon the tongue of the believer from among the family of Firʿawn, ‘O my people, this worldly life is only [temporary] enjoyment, and indeed, the Hereafter – that is the home of permanent settlement’ (Ghafir 39). As such, these children should practice zuhd with respect to this fleeting dunyā , so that the worldly life becomes trivial to them, with the mother nurturing them upon a difficult life and some aspect of rough living. (Anonymous, 2017: 19) The article concludes noting that in addition to teaching her children the truths of the importance of affirming God’s divine unity (tawḥı̄ d) and struggling in God’s cause, parents should familiarize children with the weapons and equipment used by ISIS fighters by having them out around the home. These post-2001 discussions of the appropriate roles for mujā hidā t within Jihadi-Salafi discourse portray a synthesis of two of the three roles for women: passive femininity requiring purification and an embodiment of renunciation. The third, however – the active participation for women – remains a subject of ongoing negotiation. Consider, for example, the description by an ISIS author writing under the nom de plume Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajirah in the 11th (September 2015) issue of Dabiq of the gendered roles for mujahidin and mujā hidā t. ‘My Muslim sister,’ she writes, ‘indeed you are a mujā hidah, and if the weapon of the men is the assault rifle and the explosive belt, then know that the weapon of the women is good behaviour and knowledge’ (Umm Sumayyah, 2015b: 44). One year later, this language seemed in contrast to the description of the acts of three women in Mombasa, Kenya whose attack on a police station is described by an unnamed author in the 47th (September 2016) 276

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issue of ISIS’s Arabic-language newspaper al-Nabā ʾ neither as martyrdom-seeking (Istishhā d) nor immersion (inghimā s) – titles reserved to men – but instead a mere attack by ‘devoted granddaughters’ of the caliphate (3). This is in stark contrast to their description of Rishawi. Yet, in statements included in the article, the women describe their acts as one of denial of a corrupt world – they continually label the Kenyan state as ‘defiled’ (anjā s) – and as a denial of their self-identity that had been affected by its corruption. Within a year, however, as airstrikes expanded, the tone of al-Nabā ʾ shifted. In a onepage article in the 100th (October 2017) issue, the author signals a change in attitude toward women in combat: ‘Today, we are surrounded by this war against the Islamic State … and it is mandatory for Muslim women to do their duty, at all levels of support, to assist the mujā hidı̄ n in this battle.’ This includes, the author argues, the need for a woman to reflect upon her soul (nafs), struggling in the cause of God (mujā hidā t fı̄ sabı̄ l Allā h) so that she might defend her religion (dı̄ n) through acts of self-redemption. This shift was subtle. For some observers, the shift in language was a sign of desperation (Winter and Margolin, 2017) and a signal of a new campaign of female bombers. Others disagreed (Bloom and Cottee, 2017). Yet, from a discursive perspective, the inclusion of women as combatants – even as the territory of the caliphate collapsed, signalled a synthesis of all three modes: purification, active participation, and embodiment of renunciation that had been emerging since post-11 September 2001. Unlike ʿAzzam and Fadl, neither Usama bin Ladin nor Ayman Zawahiri outlined a participatory role for women in combat and, at times, Ayman al-Zawahiri critiqued others for the same (Zawahiri, 2009). Bin Ladin, in a cassette tape recorded in the Hindu Kush mountains in August 1996, argued that women were expected ‘to carry out their role [in jihad] by practicing asceticism from the world (zuhd fı̄ dunyā ) and by boycotting American goods’ (Bin Ladin, cited in Miller, 2015: 233). These acts of renunciation, Bin Ladin argued, would follow the examples set by Fatima (the daughter of al-Khattab), Asmaʾ (daughter of Abu Bakr), and Nusaiba bint Kaʿb, who each in turn, he argues, suffered wounds, provided moral support, and, when needed, fought alongside the men of the Salaf to protect the Muslim community. For Bin Ladin, the idea of women being present with and supportive of their families and husbands while fighting was not a hypothetical circumstance – Bin Ladin, Ayman Zawahiri, and several other al-Qaʿida fighters lived with their families in Afghanistan prior to the events of 11 September 2001 (Levy and Scott-Clark, 2017). The necessity of a male maḥhram remained in the arguments of those sympathetic to alQaʿida’s efforts post-September 11. Nasir al-Fahd (b. 1968) and ʿAli Khudayr al-Khudayr (b. 1954), two students of the al-Qaʿida sympathetic mufti Hamud bin ʿUqlaʾ al-Shuʿaybi (d. 2001), wrote lengthy non-binding legal decisions (fatā wa, sing. fatwā ) on the question of female participation in jihad (al-Fahd, n.d.; al-Khudayr, n.d.). In their decisions both authors reaffirmed the need for a guardian to accompany a woman, the need for a supportive role for women, and the biological and spiritual weakness women face on the battlefield. Yet, al-Khudayr concludes, the possibility remains open for a woman to set aside her role as a trainer in the ‘spirit of jihad’ if the battlefield commander decides. The productions of al-Qaʿida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and its affiliates signalled a broadening of possible roles for women at war. In two lengthy fatwas, Yusuf al-ʿUyayri – the one-time veteran of the wars in Chechnya and commander of AQAP – argued for an obligatory (wā jib) role for women in the struggle against disbelief (al-ʿUyayri, n.d., 2000). Like Bin Ladin, al-ʿUyayri understands that practices of asceticism as a form of selfrenunciation are an essential attribute of those wishing to cultivate the soul in preparation for struggle in God’s cause (al-ʿUyayri, n.d.: 2). This love of the world (dunyā ), he writes, 277

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has preyed upon the hearts of the Islamic umma since its inception 14 centuries ago (alʿUyayri, n.d.: 4). In the modern world, the failure of women to uphold this renunciation is a result of their obsession with the commodities and the images of a global marketplace that intoxicates them with the latest goods. This theme of the necessity of women boycotting Western goods, an idea first raised by Usama bin Ladin, carries across both al-Qaʿida and ISIS publications as part of a broader outreach to women hoping to train as mujahidā t. The first attempt at female specific outreach by al-Qaʿida in Saudi Arabia was al-Khansaa magazine, an Arabic-language digital magazine of limited run published in 2004. In the first volume of the magazine, which took its name after a female poet favoured by Muhammad in his lifetime who had lost all four of her sons in battle, offered women advice on how best to raise children, cited a brief text from Sayyid Qutb about the role of women in the household, and offered cautions to a woman that she needed to prepare her mind and body with spiritual and military training if she sought to fight as a mujā hida (Umm Badr, 2004: 18). Seven years later, this was followed by al-Shamikha magazine, a publication of al-Qā ʿida in the Arabian Peninsula. Al-Shamikha, an Arabic expression for a proud or distinguished woman, included content similar to al-Khansaa. Among the articles in the first issue was an article by an author writing under the kunya, ‘Mother of Walid alMakiyya’ (Umm Walı̄ d al-Makiyya), entitled ‘Gaining Superiority over the Ruins’ (Umm Walid, 2010: 13). In the article, Umm Walid cautions women against their love of the world (ḥubb al-dunyā ) and calls for them to realize the truth that a true struggle in God’s cause emerges from the cultivation of the heart through pious renunciation. Such renunciation of the world remained a common theme in the English and Arabiclanguage material of the ISIS’s media apparatus. Yet, in the territory controlled by the fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, women wishing to struggle were included within the bureaucracy of the state. At least 42,000 international citizens from 80 countries sought and gained affiliation with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, with Cook and Vale (2018) estimating that 4,761 of those joining were women. Some of these women answered the call of ISIS author Umm Sumayyah, who remarked in the eighth (March 2015) issue of Dabiq that while some women chose to migrate (hijra) to the Caliphate with a maḥram, others did so without – especially those women whose male family members restricted their transit (Umm Sumayyah 2015a, 35). Once in the caliphate, women were largely restricted to their gendered roles in the home, yet as part of maintaining and patrolling public morality, ISIS jurists and morality police (ḥisba) expected men and women living under the authority of ISIS’s proclaimed caliphate to adhere to patterns of behaviour that would keep relations between the genders pure – including gendered patterns of dress. This required the creation of a female police force, the Khansā ʾ Brigades, whose role was to support women who had migrated with adaptation to the roles of women in al-Baghdadi’s caliphate (Winter, 2015). At the time of this writing, the territorial demise of ISIS is oft repeated on the headlines. Yet, as the above discussion suggests, the effect ISIS may have had on future directions of mujā hidā t in Jihadi-Salafism continues to unfold. For the first time, ISIS attempted – in limited fashion – to synthesize the roles of women wishing to struggle in active participation, as a passive body requiring protection, and in an embodied form of renunciation. While former ISIS affiliates, such as Boko Haram, may pursue a more instrumentalised approach to women in combat (Pearson, 2018), women in Syria and Iraq – including women who arrived as foreign migrants – may, along with men, keep and preserve the embodiment of piety that will be developed by the next generation of Jihadi-Salafi mujahidin and mujā hidā t.

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Notes 1 In this chapter, I follow the definition for Jihadi-Salafism established by Shiraz Maher in his SalafiJihadism (2016, 14). 2 Faraj does not give a direct attribution to the ḥadı̄ th literature for this claim. One possible narration to which he is referring might be narrated on the authority of ʿAʾisha (d. 613/614 CE), Muḥammad’s youngest wife, in which she asks whether jihā d is obligatory for women. He responds, ‘yes, a jihā d without fighting is obligatory for them: Hajj and ʿUmra’ (Ibn Majah, n.d., 968). For an English-language text see Jansen (1986, 207).

Further reading Bloom, M 2011, Bombshell: Women and Terrorism, University of Philadelphia Press, Philadelphia. Among the first comparative studies of the phenomenon of female fighters that also considers the plurality of motivations for women joining militant movements ranging from Northern Ireland, to Sri Lanka, to al-Qaʿida. Cook, D 2005, ‘Women Fighting in Jihad?’ Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 28, no. 5, pp. 375–384. A survey examining Islamic theological and legal debates on the legitimacy of and roles for women in combat. Cook, J and Vale, G 2018, From Daesh to ‘Diaspora’: Tracing the Women and Minors of the Islamic State, International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, London. As part of an emerging field of study, this report problematizes the affiliation of women and minors by developing new empirical frameworks for analysing women who fought, supported, or affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. Lahoud, N 2014, ‘The Neglected Sex: The Jihadis’ Exclusion of Women from Jihad,’ Terrorism and Political Violence 26, no. 5, pp. 780–802. Written as ISIS emerged, this journal article explores how al-Qaʿida authors, and their sympathizers, excluded women from front-line combat and therefore may undermine their calls for defensive jihad. Sjoberg, L and Gentry, C (eds.) 2011, Women, Gender, and Terrorism, University of Georgia Press, Athens. A collection of comparative essays analysing the role of women in combat within a critical perspective. Of particular interest to readers will be parts one (‘Historical Perspectives on Women and Terrorism’) and two (‘Women, Gender, and al-Qaeda’).

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Mitchell, R 1969, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, Oxford University Press, New York. O’Rourke, L 2009, ‘What’s Special about Female Suicide Terrorism?’ Security Studies 18, pp. 681–718. Pearson, E 2018, ‘Wilayat Shahidat: Boko Haram, the Islamic State, and the Question of the Female Suicide Bomber,’ in Boko Haram Behind the Headlines, CTC West Point, viewed 1 September 2018, . Peresin, A 2015, ‘Fatal Attraction: Western Muslimas and ISIS,’ Perspectives on Terrorism 9, no. 3, June, pp. 25–38. Peresin, A and Cervone, A 2015, ‘The Western Muhajirat of ISIS,’ Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 38, pp. 495–509. Shehadeh, L 2000, ‘Women in the Discourse of Sayyid Qutb,’ Arab Studies Quarterly 22, no. 3, pp. 45–55. Shepard, W 1996, Sayyid Qutb and Islamic Activism: A Translation and Critical Analysis of Social Justice in Islam, Brill, Leiden. Speckhard, A 2008, ‘The Female Jihad: Al-Qaeda’s Women,’ Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30, no. 5, pp. 397–414. Stone, J and Patillo, K “Al-Qaeda’s Use of Female Suicide Bombers in Iraq: A Case Study,” in Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry, eds., Women, Gender and Terrorism Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011, pp. 159–175. ‘The Burning of the Murtadd Pilot,’ 2015 (1436), Dabiq, no. 7, pp. 5–8, viewed 15 July 2018, . ‘The Capture of a Crusader Pilot,’ 2015 (1436), Dabiq, no. 6, pp. 34–37, viewed 15 July 2018, . Umm al-Shahid 2003, ‘Father, Why Won’t You Go to Jihā d (Abı̄ li-mā dhā lā tadhhab li-l-jihā d)?’ Ṣawt al-Jihā d, no. 4, p. 39, viewed 12 September 2018, . Umm Badr 2004, ‘Obstacles on the Path of the Female Mujā hid (ʿUqā bā t fı̄ ṭarı̄ q al-marʿa al-mujā hida),’ alKhansā ʾ, no. 1, p. 18, viewed 12 September 2018, . Umm Sumayyah 2015a, ‘The Twin Halves of the Muhā jirūn,’ Dabiq, no. 8, pp. 32–37, viewed 1 September 2018, . ——— 2015b, ‘A Jihā d without Fighting,’ Dabiq, no. 11, pp. 40–45, viewed 1 September 2018, . Umm Walid 2010, ‘Gaining Supremacy over the Ruins (al-Istiʿalā ʾ ʿalā al-ḥuṭā m),’ al-Shā mikha, no. 1, p. 13, viewed September 2018, . Von Knop, K 2007, ‘The Female Jihad: Al-Qaeda’s Women,’ Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 32, no. 5, pp. 397–414. Warrick, J 2015. Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, Doubleday, New York. Williams, Z 2014, ‘The Radicalisation of Samantha Lewthwaite, the Aylesbury Schoolgirl Who Became ‘The White Widow,’ The Guardian, 27 June, viewed 12 September 2018, . Winter, C 2015, Women of the Islamic State: A Manifesto on Women by the Al-Khansaa Brigade, Qulliam, viewed 1 September 2018, . Winter, C and Margolin, D 2017. ‘The Mujahidat Dilemma: Female Combatants and the Islamic State,’ CTC Sentinel, 10, no. 7, pp. 23–28, viewed 6 June 2018, . Zawahiri, U 2009, A Letter to the Muslim Sisters (Risā la ilā al-akhawā t al-muslimā t), Minbar al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, viewed 6 June 2018, .

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18 MODELLING EXILE Syrian women gather to discuss prophetic examples in Jordan Sarah A. Tobin

Introduction The Syrian refugee crisis has been difficult in Jordan (Sullivan and Tobin 2014). UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) asserts that, as early as September 2014, there were 646,000 registered Syrians in Jordan. The Jordanian government has stated that the number is 1 million or more, believing that some 400,000 Syrian refugees did not seek formalization of their status as refugees with UNHCR and remain unregistered. Twenty percent of the Syrians in Jordan live in one of six refugee camps, including Za‘atari. Za‘atari, which opened in 2012, has been home to about 80,000–100,000 of those refugees at any given time, which makes it the second largest refugee camp in the world, the fourth largest ‘city’ in Jordan, as well as one of the most widely reported camp settings. Eighty percent of the Syrians in Jordan live in urban areas, with a majority having settled in the north near the Syrian border. Most Syrian refugees in Jordan are from the nearby southern Syrian region of Daraʿa, where the uprising began in 2011. The Jordanian government and populace share many concerns about this large influx and settlement of ‘foreigners’. These refugees are believed to be a comprehensive and robust drain on economic resources (The Impact of Syrian Refugees 2016), noticeable and tangible users of precious natural resources (Farishta 2014), and increasingly seen as a security threat (Carefully Watched 2014). Debates within Jordan about the voluminous influx of refugees are not dissimilar to at least some of the debates within Europe that occurred during 2015, which portrayed Syrians as a demographic threat to democratic institutions and liberal lives and lifestyles (Park 2015). Simultaneously, Syrians are also portrayed as passive (and feminine) victims of a war beyond their control in need of ‘care’ (Baines 2004; Carpenter 2003), especially in the popular media. Recent academic literature has shined a light onto the ways that Syrians have coped with their displacement and cultivated resilience through their actions and agency (Lenner and Turner 2019), even despite the ways that the national and international communities and humanitarian aid providers may treat them (Turner 2019). Outside of conditions of migration, one way that actions and agency have been captured in recent studies of Islam is through the paradigm of self-cultivation and self-making. Inspired by the interventions of Talal Asad (1993, 2003), Saba Mahmood (2004), and Charles Hirschkind (2006), Islamic piety can be about the cultivation of a state of submission, rather than

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‘liberation’. This paradigm helps us to understand that submission and conformity to a religious ethic and set of moral ideas can also be an expression of agency and resilience, especially in contemporary Islamic religiosity. Contemporary Islamic religiosity has also been examined and captured through the particular practices that have emerged as representative of piety, and in particular women’s gendered forms: new veiling practices (Goekariksel 2009); attending mosque (Ferrero 2018); new Islamic authority and education and media technologies (Jouili 2008); Islamic moral renewal (Schulz 2008); the recounting and employment of piety stories (Karimova 2014); and Islamized economic life (Tobin 2016). In this chapter I attempt to merge two fields through the case of Syrian refugees in Jordan – studies of agency in contemporary migration and of particular Islamic pious practices in contemporary religiosity. In this research, I found that Syrian women reported experiencing religious isolation and individual religious practice in Syria before the war due to the high presence of secret police and crackdowns on Islamic piety. The women reported pre-war practices of what I call ‘architectural piety’ as a means of engaging individually their Islamic piety in Syria. By architectural piety I mean individual religious experience formed by visiting significant and historical mosques, which opens an individualized space for prayer and contemplation. By contrast in exile in Jordan, the women reported greater freedoms and interest in practicing Islam publicly and in a more social fashion. In particular, the Syrian women reported more frequent experiences recounting the narratives of the Qurʾan and prophetic examples in social circles. Through three focus group discussions with Syrians in urban areas of northern Jordan and in two religion classes in a Syrian refugee camp, this chapter demonstrates that the Prophetic examples and narratives employed by the Syrian women in Jordan represent a meaningful and gendered way to engage agency in new forms of sociality and community in exile, with important implications for resilience.

Islamic ethical self-making in exile Frequently the literature on contemporary Islamic belief and religious practice assumes a relatively static national context in which difference, divergence, and diversity are emphasized (Fernea and Fernea 1972; MacLeod 1991: 2). In the context of migration and without a static national context, therefore, we can expect to find evidence of emergent formations of solidarity and community, rather than simply a direct reproduction of religious life found in the country of origin (Dill and Zambrana 2009; Ferrero 2018: 21). We can also expect to find new cleavages of difference (Warner and Wittner 1998). The role and practices of Islam in the everyday lives of Muslim refugee women constitute a small but growing body of literature, where a bulk of the work focuses on Muslim migrants to non-Muslim host countries (Ferrero 2018: 21; Ghorashi 2010; Jouili 2015; Marranci 2007; Salih 2003; Tilikainen 2003). In addition to expanding the context for study, the intersection of Islam and migration also requires paying attention to new formations of engagement and renegotiation (Ferrero 2018: 21), especially where the nuances and emphases of Islamic practice may differ. This is particularly true for those who might otherwise be excluded from such studies, including married women (Palriwala and Uberoi 2008: 23–25). Much literature has been written on refugee governance and policies that derive from ethical principles in the Qurʾan, which is another area in which contemporary Islamic studies intersects with migration studies. For example, Brun (2010) has a comprehensive discussion about the principles of hospitality employed in several refugee governance approaches, including the act of welcoming strangers, the moral and legal obligation in Islam to grant 283

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asylum and refuge, and the Islamic inspiration to locate oneself as either part of the migrants (muhā jirun) or supporters (’ansā r) as discussed in the story of the first Muslims flight from Mecca to Medina. Allen et al. (2018) highlight the definitional challenges raised when Turkish governance regimes refer to Syrian refugees as ‘guests’ or ‘brothers’ rather than refugees; President Erdogan emphasized the role of the umma for these Muslim brothers or guests (misā fir) as a means of amplifying his moral leadership (Albayrak and Turan 2016; El-Abed 2014). The Islamic ethic of welcoming strangers has also been important in the reception of Syrian refugees in Jordan, especially as a means to securitize the state without compromising an Islamic ethic of hospitality (Brun 2010; El-Abed 2014: 84–85). Inspired by Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety (2004), the recent literature on women’s pious self-cultivation and on socially-significant piety groups has bloomed (Mittermaier 2012). A cursory search of the sheer diversity of works finds that they span every region of the globe – from Sri Lanka (Haniffa 2008) to Central Asia (Ali 2011; Hasan 2015), and to Africa (Bolton 2014; Schulz 2008). Further, the work has been applied not only to Muslim piety, but also to Christian (Reinhardt 2014) and Jewish movements (Stadler 2009). This work has also begun expanding into the context of Muslim women migrants, where religious study groups help women look for practical solutions to everyday life, even in a non-Muslim context (Ferrero 2018: 25). The ethical self-cultivation or self-making in these groups results in ‘applicable knowledge’ (Jouili 2015: 51), which women can utilize for socio-cultural comfort in community in exile. Further, the groups have enabled women to claim greater spaces for engagement with and acquiring of knowledge and awareness of Islam, which they can use to exert new forms of agency in their everyday lives (Hafez 2011: 78). The literature demonstrates that, especially for women, Islam constitutes a ‘framework for making sense of their current way of life’ (Ferrero 2018: 25; Marranci 2007: 89). It also enables greater avenues for agency and action in conditions of exile. Such piety groups have been attributed with extraordinary acts of agency including democratizing the religious sphere (Mahmood 2004: 2), and enabling new forms of Islamic leadership through women’s selfdiscipline and theological knowledge (Werbner 2018). Despite these advances in the literature, few works focus on the content of the pious narratives and classes utilized by those displaced and how they speak to topics of keen interest for women migrants. Further, they rarely examine how the migrants themselves employ such texts or narratives in their everyday lives. In addition, such studies often focus on a displaced Muslim population experiencing and making lives and livelihoods as religious minorities in a new country. Fewer works speak to the idea of migrants moving to a relatively similar religious context as the one that they have just left and, thus, not experiencing life in diaspora as a religious minority but rather as part of the religious majority that may still be substantively different in Islamic practices such as use of physical space and mosques.

Islam and placemaking through ‘architectural piety’ in Syrian mosques Through three focus group discussions we are able to better understand the ways that physical space played a key role for Syrian women in their ethical self-making endeavors, both in Syria and in Jordan. I conducted three focus group discussions in the northern Jordanian cities of Mafraq and Irbid. Mafraq is a Jordanian city approximately 15 km from the Syrian border (Backhaus 2019). Before the Syrian civil war, it was a small border town of 90,000 people with strong pro-Jordanian national sentiments in which one would stop for a quick coffee or gasoline fill up while en route to the Syrian border and onwards to Damascus or other Syrian locations. Mafraq was one of the earliest sites for Syrian refugees to congregate 284

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in Jordan, given its proximity to southern Syria, where the anti-regime demonstrations were quickly and violently repressed. Mafraq is now home to over 200,000 people, many or most of whom are Syrians, and it is known for urban crowding (Tiltnes, Zhang and Pedersen 2019). Mafraq city is approximately 15 km from Za‘atari, the world’s largest Syrian refugee camp. The first focus group discussion in Mafraq was of ten women between the ages of 20 and 55, and the second was of 11 women in the same age ranges. Similarly with Irbid, which was the site for the third focus group discussion with Syrian women, in this instance the group was composed of five women between the ages of 24 and 35. Prior to the influx of Syrian refugees, Irbid was the second largest urban area in the country (after the capital city of Amman), and was well-known for both urban crowding and a large number of institutions for higher education. Now, approximately 30 percent of Jordan’s Syrians live in Irbid (UNHCR 2016), and the average annual income for Syrians in Irbid is equal to that of Jordanians: 3,000 Jordanian dinars (US$4,230). In Mafraq it is approximately 30 percent lower (Tiltnes, Zhang and Pedersen 2019). Despite these two different urban settings, the Syrian women interviewed in focus group discussions had two strikingly common elements of their religious trajectories that revealed important aspects about the role physical space played in their Islamic practice and piety. The first shared element was a strong discussion about the presence of secret police in Syria (mukhā borat) and the ways that state surveillance and sanctioned religious materials prompted women to quietly practice Islam individually or with immediate family or closest friends at home. After the rise of the Baʿth party in 1963 and the installment of the authoritarian father–son al-Assad regime, members of the ʿAlawite (Shiʿi) sect occupied important positions in the security forces in greater numbers, which prompted many Sunnis to feel that they were under sectarian scrutiny (Pinto 2003: 4–5). Between the military participation in the Lebanese Civil War in 1976 and the massacres in Jisr al-Shughur and Aleppo, as well as Hama in 1982, Islamic practices that did not adhere to the regime’s program became securitized and criminalized (Pinto 2003: 6). This is resonant with the experiences of other religious groups in Syria, such as Sufis, where non-political, ‘quietist’ and individualized expressions of Islam affect the balance of state and society in ways that can provide practitioners with more autonomy and less state interference (Pinto 2003: 1, 4), such as mosque attendance or veiling (Pinto 2003: 6). In other words, avoiding state surveillance required highly individualized and non-political or quiet religious practice. As a result, nearly all of the women said they rarely attended formal religious classes or gatherings in pre-war Syria, and if they did they would only go for one hour per week in someone’s home, maybe two hours per week maximum. One woman who attended some visits at a friend’s house said, ‘We used to attend Qurʾanic recitation sessions cautiously. There was no religious freedom, so we used to practice at home so as not to be a target to official intelligence reporters’. One added, ‘We were afraid to do this’. Beyond fear, one woman even reported feeling ‘ashamed’ of wanting to learn more about Islam in Syria. Furthermore, nearly all of the women I spoke with indicated that they did not discuss religion in Syria with others. ‘The walls have ears’, one said. One woman went into detail: As for religious life in Syria, it was really difficult. We used to attend religious sessions in mosques, but under surveillance. We also used to make these sessions at home but again under surveillance of the Syrian government. Also the religious material was limited and the books were also specific [sanctioned]. Some were completely banned. Those allowed were under surveillance. When we came here

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to Jordan, we found that there were lots of mistakes [in the materials]; probably the information was perverted knowingly. Thus, as a result of the secret police and surveillance, religious sociality and the kinds of women’s piety groups often the subject of studies in Islamic ethical self-cultivation were not to be found in Syria. What then was a primary form of religious practice for Syrians before the war? It is this second aspect the women in the focus group discussions shared that demonstrates a primary form of religious engagement in pre-war Syria. The women shared many fond memories of visiting the historic and well-known mosques in Syria. A number of the most prominent and famous mosques in Syria date back to the 7th and 8th centuries. The Sayyidah Zaynab mosque in Damascus, is a Shiʿa mosque named for the remains it houses of the granddaughter of the Prophet Mohammed and daughter of Ali and Fatima. It dates to 682 CE. The Umayyad Mosque of Damascus is one of the largest and oldest mosques in the world, which was built on the site of a Christian basilica in which the head of John the Baptist is held. The mosque dates to 715 CE. The Great Mosque of Aleppo dates to 715 CE and holds the shrine to the father of John the Baptist. There are a number of other historically significant and visibly stunning mosques around the country, some of which have been lost to bombing and fighting during the Syrian Civil War. These historical and architecturally-adorned mosques of Syria were often mentioned as particular spaces of personal religious importance. Mosques were also ‘safe spaces’. As statesanctioned spaces for religious life, the fears of surveillance were more limited. Thus, women referenced such ideas that visiting Syria’s mosques are ‘like no other experience’ and ‘the only way I could truly practice Islam’. ‘The mosques we used to visit had a real effect on us. The mosques in one’s own country are truly different’. One even went as far as to equate the power of visiting Syria’s mosques with that of Ramadan as ‘the most important parts of my religious life in Syria’. Still the women were all quick to stress that ‘we did not exchange religious stories in the mosques’. One woman went into detail about the individualized nature of her pre-war Islamic practice in Syria, especially attending mosque: I used to fast Ramadan in Syria, but I was not fully committed to it. I wasn’t fully committed to saying my prayers. I don’t know… I didn’t feel the spiritual act of worship in it. I didn’t exchange religious stories with others. I went to the mosque because it was a beautiful space. It was the only place I really felt like I was a Muslim. Nothing equals that experience. I argue this practice of attending mosques as a highly individualized religious and spiritual practice for these Syrians in pre-war Syria as a kind of ‘architectural piety’. The women found that in the context of an authoritarian regime, the only space in which they did not feel fear for their religious practice was in quiet, individual contemplation in the mosque or in other state-sanctioned activities within the mosque space. In fact, the grounding of one’s pious life in the physical structure of the mosque was so important to the focus group discussants that it was the most common aspect of their religious life in Syria that they missed. One added, ‘We wish we could visit the Umayyad mosque again. We do not have such mosques here in Jordan’. While Jordan has a large number of mosques, an overwhelming majority of them were built or rebuilt during the 20th century as part of state-building endeavors (Neveu 2010). 286

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It is notable that piety – architectural piety, as I call it, – in Syria was a primary form of religious practice for these women. It is notable as a widespread practice because, though there is overwhelming consensus that the Prophet allowed and supported attendance for women, the practice itself is not typical for women in most Islamic communities (Haddad et al. 2006: 62; Ferrero 2018: 26), especially in rural areas (MacLeod 1991: 79). As one woman said, ‘We were forced to suppress our religion in in Syria. This is why our religious life there was so different from now in Jordan’.

‘Learning Islam’ in Jordan The Syrian women in the focus groups described the ways the lack of state surveillance and enhanced opportunities for learning and practicing Islam in Jordan have served to enhance the possibilities for and access to, as well as interest or desire for, Islamic self-cultivation, especially in community. The idea that Jordan has more religious freedom than Syria was echoed by all interviewed. ‘In Jordan, it is far more secure to learn about religion. Unlike in Syria, here you go [to religion classes] with no fear, no worries’. Another woman echoed, ‘Here in Jordan, there is far more freedom. One feels that she is not under surveillance’. And another added, ‘All in all, the religious situation in Jordan is far better than that in Syria’. As these quotes illustrate, Jordan has ‘more freedom’ to practice religion than they had in Syria. ‘Freedom’ was understood and articulated in terms of both material support, as there are more centers, classes, and books and learning materials for religious learning in Jordan, and in terms of assistance or classes dedicated to memorizing the Qurʾan in Jordan, which was often cited as a particularly desirable way to engage Islamically in Jordan. Centers for such learning are some of the few spaces and opportunities for women to meet in groups outside the home (Warner 1993), which is desirable for personal strength and empowerment within the family (Brasher 1998; Haddad and Lummis 1987; Predelli 2004). This is vital, of course, in conditions of displacement. Many women reported feeling like they were learning about Islam for the first time in Jordan: ‘In Daraʿa, Syria, I never attended religion teaching classes either at home or anywhere else. In Jordan, I have finally started learning about religion’. Most of the women indicated that they attend religious classes and visit centers for learning multiple times per week and do so with their children, especially their daughters, and that they can enter and participate ‘freely’. ‘When we came to Jordan, we didn’t have fear anymore. We can walk openly and without shame to learn about our religion’. In addition to the feelings of ‘freedom’ to explore and practice Islam more openly in Jordan, the women indicated that they needed to protect themselves – not from the police as in the case of Syria, but rather from evils and dangers in society; they indicated that they could now and should now pursue living on the ‘right path’. ‘It’s like my eyes have opened: now I know. So I have to do the right things. We have more opportunities [to learn about Islam], but also more responsibility [to live rightly]’. Another added: We were encouraged to go to centers in Jordan because other Syrian women felt more aware here and conscious of Allah and themselves. They felt the need to protect themselves. So we did too. You then you feel the need to protect your children by choosing the right path. According to another participant, ‘The religious upbringing in Syria depended on the parents. In Jordan, though, we have a whole community that you can talk to and learn from’. 287

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In contexts where women are the primary adherents to Islamic norms of conduct, they can feel more responsible for the behavior of their children and their family’s social and religious identity (Ferrero 2018: 24; Salih 2003: 71), and they may fear that displacement prompted a deep sense of loss – both cultural and religious (Ferrero 2018: 26; Jouili 2015: 49). For example, many women from the focus groups indicated that they did not wear the headcovering (hijab) in Syria, but they do so in Jordan. Some reported doing so because most Jordanian women do (Tobin 2016: 74–102). A few indicated that they do so because they learned ‘that a woman’s body is sacred and is seductive’. Some women during a focus group debated the face covering, the niqab, and one woman said: We live in a different age [than the time of the Qurʾan] and it’s not necessarily required. But the way that people are now implies that we should wear it. I know it’s not mentioned specifically, but this is the conclusion that some of us have come to based on our knowledge and our new context. Here the woman hints at the idea that society is not safe enough to go out without the niqab. As one woman added: We were good Muslims in Syria before we came to Jordan. As good as we could be anyway. But becoming refugees here and our forced migration has made us more patient and more religious, and part of a stronger community that helps each other out and teaches each other to live in the way of Islam. This aversion to moral danger in conditions of exile is often part of the migration experience (Haddad et al. 2006: 14).

Religious freedoms for socially oriented Islamic practice in Jordan: religion classes It is not only amongst urban Syrian refugees that such learning occurs socially and in groups. I attended two religion classes on several occasions in the Syrian refugee camp of Cyber City in Jordan, as part of a larger research project in the camp. The women were always warm and welcoming toward me, and I developed a strong rapport with them. The topics in the classes ranged from Islamic ideas of women to the character of the Prophet Mohammed. Each class was taught at a middle-school level, which is not dissimilar to the levels of a typical Sunday sermon in the U.S. or a Friday khutba in Jordan, and classes were typically offered every day. There was a core group of about 30 women who all attended regularly. The classes provided an important window into understanding how the Syrian women in Jordan are encouraged and encourage each other to pursue Islamic ethical selfmaking in community and social settings. The refugee camp in which these classes occurred was Cyber City. Cyber City was part of a complex of Qualified Industrial Zone (QIZ) buildings that were rented out by the Jordanian government to host the growing number of refugees (Alahmed 2015). The residence consisted of six stories, two units, and two communal kitchens per floor, and 12 rooms in each unit. The building had the capacity to hold around 480 people. Surrounding the building, there were about 14 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), such as UNHCR and Save the Children, who provided basic needs and services to the refugees. In addition, the

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small area also contained a mosque, two supermarkets, a playground, and an activity center. The entire camp was under the management of the Jordanian Ministry of Interior. At its maximum the number of refugees in Cyber City reached 397, which was around 90 families, who consisted of either completely Palestinian members or Syrians mixed with Palestinian families from Syria; 50 per cent of the refugees were Palestinians. Residents of Cyber City came from the Yarmouk and Daraʿa Palestinian refugee camps, the Daraʿa region, and elsewhere. Two sisters were from Homs and had arrived in Jordan via a lengthy trip across the eastern desert. Life in Cyber City was deemed to be a tough one, as rules and regulations for those in the camp were becoming stricter and more constrained, due to the increased securitization of Palestinians from Syria (Gavin 2013; Morrison 2014: 41–42). Palestinians and their families were not allowed to attain any formal identification card or a Ministry of Interior (MoI) card, which would define their status as refugees and render the benefits due to them. They were extremely isolated. This was the context for Cyber City prior to its closure in late 2016. The instructor or sheikha for the classes was Umm Mohammed, a Jordanian woman from the nearby town of Ramtha. She had a degree in Islamic Sciences from a local, public university (as all religious teaching in Jordan falls under the MoI Endowments, or Awqaaf). Umm Mohammed came to Cyber City every day to work with the women, and offered a daily religion class or dars deen. In the opening to one of the classes, Umm Mohammed said: The goal of our program is to cleanse before Ramadan, to welcome Ramadan. We spoke last time about diseases related to the heart and diseases of the tongue. What did we say are the diseases of the heart? Hatred, envy, anger, stinginess. What did we say are the diseases of the tongue? Lying, backbiting, gossiping. What else? We spoke about interfering where one does not have a place to do so, and speaking words to others with no benefit to them. What else? We spoke about the pests of the tongue like delving into vanities, and to make judgments without knowing. While these specific references derive from Islamic ethics, they are examples of the kinds of practices and comportment that can make living in close quarters in a small and marginal refugee camp a bit more bearable. The ethical self-making here includes aspects that go beyond a basic theological discussion and enter into moral practices that promote healthy and positive community. In addition to discussing Islamic ethics that inspire positive community in a practical, everyday fashion, the theme of overcoming the precarity of displacement often defined the classes that Umm Mohammed gave (Tobin 2018). In early 2016, the Jordanian government began issuing work permits for Syrian refugees through the Ministry of Labor and cooperating labor associations (Tobin and Alahmed 2019). Despite its successes on some fronts, reliance on intermediaries and other aspects of the system have compromised access to meaningful work for segments of the Syrian refugee population, especially women. Thus, despite some legal and bureaucratic relaxations that would make working in Jordan easier, Syrian women have continued to struggle to find meaningful labor. It is to these tensions that the women feel when Umm Mohammed said: Is she forbidden from working? No, Islam has allowed her to work, in the limits of protecting her dignity. My dears, the most important thing in Islam for women is that it protected her dignity; she is honored in Islam. She is not an object for 289

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men to use and then throw away … She is brought in to protect you and to create a family and a real Muslim home that helps build a society and produce contributing members. Umm Mohammed went on to say that women should get an education and work outside the home as long as it did not detract from their primary duties in the home. She outlined that the Syrian refugees should seek employment in ways that do not promote mixing of the genders, nor in ways that exceed the ambitions of their husbands. She went on to indicate that doing so is a fulfilment of one’s permissible potential in accordance with the terms of Islam. Umm Mohammed was using Islamic ideas to help facilitate the movement of the Syrian women into the workforce in Jordan. In addition to pragmatics, the classes routinely invoked historical and theological examples to reflect upon for socio-cultural and personal comfort. In one class Umm Mohammed referenced the person of Aisha, who was one of the Prophet Mohammed’s wives. Umm Mohammed said: Aisha was the only one [of the wives] who was young, a virgin, and the daughter of his friend. He married her for her wittiness and smartness. She wasn’t educated in school but she was very clever. She used to memorize poems and she was only nine. She was very knowledgeable. He also saw the opportunity that a girl like her can easily memorize the Qurʾan and the hadeeth. Meaning that she was suitable to be his companion. And that is not wrong. The Prophet is a human being with a heart. He can love and hate. And that is not a flaw. So he loved her dearly, and she recited many hadeeth after that. Here, Umm Mohammed painted a picture of Aisha as a highly deserving girl who is still ‘in need’ of what the husband can provide. She is clever, but she is still incomplete without some help. In a rhetorical twist that asks the audience to identify themselves with Aisha, Umm Mohammed said: In the goodbye speech by the Prophet, what did he say? He ordered men to take care of women, because they are weak among you … The Prophet died demanding that you are taken care of, just like you would say if your father died and he demanded that you are taken care of because he loves you a lot. The Prophet loves me more than my father, more than my mother and the family. And Allah loves me even more. When Adam was lonely in heaven, Allah created for him a woman, because women are precious partners. In these passages we see that Umm Mohammed was invoking Islam to promote three different social outcomes. The first was about resolving the pragmatics of living socially in close quarters as refugees in a marginal refugee encamped space. Admonitions against backbiting and gossiping – especially in the name of cleansing before Ramadan – are both Islamically sound and vitally important for maintaining a supportive community. The second was about endorsing Islamically the participation of refugee women in the local Jordanian workforce. There were stipulations that she suggested, such as prioritizing one’s family and primary duties in the home. However, the general thrust was that integration into the Jordanian workforce was endorsed by Islam. Finally, Umm Mohammed invoked the story of Aisha to prompt individual reflection that also served to reinforce the idea that the immense demands 290

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that the women in Cyber City were under – the need to be a strong mother, a strong wife, etc. – was because ‘Allah loves me even more’. This is an individual reflection that provides comfort in taxing forms of community and conditions of displacement.

The story of Maryam and the role of gender Several stories from the Qurʾan and Prophetic traditions that serve as sources of comfort in conditions of displacement were also commonly reported amongst the women in the focus group discussions. One woman, Fatima, discussed how her religious life had changed since becoming a Syrian refugee in Jordan. She said, ‘I came to Mafraq five years ago. Back in Syria the religious centers, well, we said “the walls have ears”. There was no “red line”, and anything that we said could turn us into criminals. I avoided any possibility of this, and I avoided the religious centers’. Similar to the other respondents, Fatima found Jordan an easy and comfortable home for religious life and expression. She said: I learned everything here. I went to a religious center and learned everything I could. I wasn’t afraid; here we’re free. I memorized the Qurʾan. I started wearing niqab. And now I am a teacher. I work in the center teaching Qurʾan and life skills, and I teach children’s classes too. When I asked Fatima where she finds spiritual guidance and relief during her time in protracted displacement, she said that she turns to the story of Maryam. In the Qurʾanic story (Qurʾan Academy 2017), Maryam is the mother of Jesus. She is the only woman mentioned by name in the text, and she is referred to as the ‘greatest of all women’. Chapter (Surah) 19 is named after her, though her story is also related in Chapters 21 and 23. Maryam was born in Jerusalem into a family of priests. Some sources advocate the idea of Maryam growing up in temple service (Qurʾan Academy 2017), though not all agree on this. Still, sources do agree that Maryam was quickly identified as a particularly special girl. She received a message from the angel Gabriel that Allah had chosen, purified, and preferred her above all the women of the world. She was divinely appointed to conceive miraculously a chosen son named Jesus. Maryam asks how she can conceive when no man has touched her (Qurʾan 19:20–22), to which the angel Gabriel reassures her that all things are easy for God, and Jesus’ birth is a sign for all humankind. Later (Qurʾan 19: 27–33) the Israelites questioned Mary as to how she had become pregnant without being married, which was followed by Jesus speaking from the cradle. Fatima especially likes reflecting on the story of Maryam because it reminds me to be strong when being wrongly accused of something. Syrians are blamed for everything bad in Jordan now. Sometimes people are unkind to us or they don’t trust us. But Maryam reminds me to persevere in the face of this injustice. Other women echoed Fatima’s reflections on the story of Maryam. One woman said: This is a very special story to think about. It talks about special miracles, which reminds me that Allah can do anything. Allah can help you no matter what you’re going through because he has already shown all these miracles of Maryam and Jesus. 291

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Another added that the story of Maryam reminded her to give charitably because ‘Allah gives, even when you don’t think he will. So I need to give too, even at times when I think I can’t’. For Deeb (2015) and Schielke (2015) piety and the everyday are two mutually constitutive parts of Muslim women’s lives. Deeb has argued that ‘normative religiosity, moral norms and everyday life infuse one another; they must be understood together’ (2015: 95). I argue that this explains the importance of the story of Maryam for these Syrian women. The isolation of migration and trauma of displacement for Syrians, combined with the social and symbolic (as well as real and religious) opportunities in Jordan motivate new forms of sociality and new relationships. This requires applying a new Islamic framework for inspiration and practical application, which is inherently gendered. Syrian women turn to stories of women and stories of sociality in order to best inform their migration experiences in new everyday environs.

Conclusion It is notable that the most important story of migration in the Qurʾan was not mentioned once by the Syrians I interviewed, nor was it mentioned in the religious classes in Cyber City that I attended. The story is that of the Muhā ajirun or Emigrants. In this story, the first converts to Islam and the Prophet Mohammed’s advisors and relatives emigrate from Mecca to Medina. This event, the migration or Hijra, occurs because of political and economic oppression of the Muslims, and it also marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar. The saga of the Hijra is presented in a series of caravan raids and warfare, and ultimately into brotherly relations between the Medinans (or ʾansā r) and the Meccans (the muhā jirun) as they build a life together in Medina. In discussions of Islamic practice among Syrians displaced to Jordan, one might expect to find more recitation of this story and reflection upon it. However, I argue that the absence of this story and the presence of the other narratives and forms in Islamic practice – participating at religious center and in classes, sharing pragmatic Islamic ethics for living in a new community, encouraging integration into Jordan through Islamic ideas, and providing comfort and encouragement in displacement through Islamic models – represents a new formation of Islamic piety for these Syrians, which is only created through the unique circumstances in Jordan. Furthermore, these elements of Islamic practice in Jordan are gendered. The selection of the stories of Aisha and Maryam is important, as they represent two of the most notable female figures in the Prophetic traditions, even over and above the more related, but quite ‘masculine’, stories of warfare, caravans, and ‘brotherhood’ through the Hijra. In a moment of what I understand as self-reflection, Umm Mohammed discussed the practice of turning to the prophets for help. She was not only discussing the importance of reflecting on the prophetic narratives, but doing so in a way that was within certain ethical parameters. She said: Saying ‘Oh Prophet of Allah, please help me out of this tough situation or problem’. This is asking the Prophet for help. The Prophet – Peace be Upon Him – is the best human. This is well-known. Prophets are on a higher level than the rest of humanity. Me saying ‘Oh Prophet Mohammed’, or any Prophet for that matter – Isaac, Moses, Noah, and so forth – is asking them to help lift a problem or bad thing off of me to help resolve the problem. This is not right. Why? Because the Prophet – Peace Be Upon Him – cannot help me. The Prophet could not even help himself. If he could, he 292

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would have helped himself when bad things came upon him as well … The Prophet, when he was in trouble, used to go to whom? To Allah to ask to be saved. The Prophet used to save himself by praying to Allah When we heard the story of Israa and Miraj, what did the Prophet say? He said, ‘Allah I complain to you my weakness and my inability to make anything happen, and my need to depend on someone …’ So we can see that if the Prophet could be a savior he would then save himself. But he turned to Allah to ask for a saviour. This turn in her lesson to a discussion of the ethical parameters of asking for divine intervention or help is also instructive, as it demonstrates that – even Islamically speaking – ultimately the Syrian women need to exert their own agency in their religious practice and take control of their own well-being and engage their own community in displacement. This has the potential to push the burdens for resilience as a refugee even more strongly on the shoulders of the refugees themselves (as has been well documented in other texts, see, for example Tobin and Campbell 2016 or Betts and Collier 2017). In particular, this shouldering of the burdens of displacement is sure to fall unevenly on the shoulders of women. It is sure to be overwhelming and difficult. And such lessons from these forms of Islamic practice teach us that even the Prophet Mohammed had to ask for help from Allah, and so too do the Syrian women.

Further reading Mahmood, S., 2004. Politics of piety. The Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. This groundbreaking work features a women’s piety movement in Cairo, Egypt. The women are part of a larger process of moral reform that is often understood as non-political. The book also serves as a critique of assumptions that all people want and seek liberal ideas of freedom and autonomy. Predelli, L.N., 2004. Interpreting gender in Islam. A case study of immigrant Muslim women in Oslo, Norway. Gender & Society, 18 (4), 473–493. doi:10.1177/0891243204265138. This article explores the case of immigrant Muslim women in Oslo, Norway, as they interpret and practice gender relations from within an Islamic framework, including family relations and the labor market. Islam, it is argued, is a flexible resource that assists pragmatically, socially, and symbolically for these women. Salih, R., 2003. Gender in transnationalism: Home, longing and belonging among Moroccan migrant women. New York: Routledge. This gendered account of transnational migration highlights the construction of ‘home’ as it resides between Morocco and Italy. It provides a ‘lived-experience’ perspective of an important migrant group. Turner, L., 2019. Syrian refugee men as objects of humanitarian care. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 21 (4), 595–616. This article focuses on the ‘other side’ of the ‘womenandchildren’ gender construction to that of men. It looks at how humanitarian workers in Jordan relate to Syrian refugee men and masculinities. In particular, it argues that the refugee has often become a ‘feminized subject’ and that seeing men as equal objects of humanitarian care would disrupt many of the gendered ways that care is understood and administered.

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Allen, W., Anderson, B., Van Hear, N., Sumption, M., Düvell, F., Hough, J., Rose, L., Humphris, R. and Walker, S., 2018. Who counts in crises? The new geopolitics of international migration and refugee governance. Geopolitics, 23 (1), 217–243. Asad, T., 1993. Genealogies of religion: Discipline and reasons of power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Asad, T., 2003. Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity. Stanford: University Press. Backhaus, A., 2019. Refugees in Jordan: ‘They’ll cut your throat’ [online]. ZEIT online. Available from: www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2018-12/refugees-jordan-mafraq-bashar-al-assad-syria-war-povertyimprisonments-english. Baines, E.K., 2004. Vulnerable bodies: Gender, the UN and the global refugee crisis. London: Routledge. Betts, A. and Collier, P., 2017. Refuge: Transforming a broken refugee system. London: Penguin. Bolton, C., 2014. Islam, youth, and modernity in the Gambia: The Tablighi Jama’at. African Studies Quarterly, 14 (4), 98. Brasher, B., 1998. Godly women: Fundamentalism & female power. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Brun, C., 2010. Hospitality: becoming ‘IDPs’ and ‘hosts’ in protracted displacement. Journal of Refugee Studies, 23 (3), 337–355. Carefully Watched. 2014. The Economist. June 18. Available from: www.economist.com/pomegranate/ 2014/06/18/carefully-watched. Carpenter, R.C., 2003. ‘Women and children first’: Gender, norms, and humanitarian evacuation in the Balkans 1991–95. International Organization, 57 (4), 661–694. doi:10.1017/S002081830357401X. Deeb, L., 2015. Thinking piety and the everyday together: A response to Fadil and Fernando. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5 (2), 93–96. doi: 10.14318/hau5.2.007. Dill, B.T. and Zambrana, R.E., eds, 2009. Emerging intersections: Race, class and gender in theory, policy and practice. Piscataway: Rutgers University Press. El-Abed, O., 2014. The discourse of guesthood: Forced migrants in Jordan. In: A. H. Fábos and R. Isotalo, eds, Managing Muslim mobilities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 81–100. Farishta, A., 2014. The impact of Syrian refugees on Jordan’s water resources and water management planning. Master’s Thesis, Columbia University, New York, pp. 1–36. Ferrero, L., “Gendering Islam through migration: Egyptian women’s gatherings in a mosque in Turin (Italy).” Contemporary Levant 3, no. 1 (2018): 20–31. Fernea, E.W. and Fernea, R.A., 1972. Variations in religious observance among Islamic women. In: N. Keddie, ed. Scholars, saints and sufis. Muslim religious institutions in the Middle East since 1500. Berkeley: University of California Press, 385–401. Gavin, D.W., 2013. Conflict in Syria compounds vulnerability of palestine refugees. Forced Migration Review, 44 (September), 79. Ghorashi, H., 2010. From absolute invisibility to extreme visibility: Emancipation trajectory of migrant women in the Netherlands. Feminist Review, 94 (1), 75–92. Goekariksel, B., 2009. Beyond the officially sacred: Religion, secularism, and the body in the production of subjectivity. Social and Cultural Geography, 10, 657–674. Haddad, Y., et al., 2006. Muslim women in America. The challenge of Islamic identity today. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haddad, Y. and Lummis, A., 1987. Islamic values in the United States: A comparative study. New York: Oxford University Press. Hafez, S., 2011. An Islam of her own: Reconsidering religion and secularism in women’s Islamic movements. New York: New York University Press. Haniffa, F., 2008. Piety as politics amongst Muslim women in contemporary Sri Lanka. Modern Asian Studies, 42 (2–3), 347–375. Hasan, N.Z., 2015. Unscripting piety: Muslim women, Pakistani nationalism, and Islamic feminism. PhD Dissertation, Ontario: York University. Available from: https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/ xmlui/bitstream/handle/10315/32188/Hasan_Nadia_Z_2015_PHD.pdf?sequence=2. Hirschkind, C., 2006. The ethical soundscape: Cassette sermons and Islamic counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Jouili, J.S., 2008. Re-fashioning the self through religious knowledge. In: A. Al-Hamarneh and J. Thielmann, eds. Islam and Muslims in Germany. Leiden: Brill, 465–486. Jouili, J.S., 2015. Pious practice and secular constraints. Women in the Islamic revival in Europe. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Negotiating law, ethics, and normativity

19 TRANSGRESSING THE BOUNDARIES Zinā and legal accommodation in the premodern Maghrib Rosemary Admiral

Introduction This chapter investigates cases of sexual transgressions in premodern North African legal sources, demonstrating that the boundaries of sex and sexuality in the premodern context were negotiated within intimate relationships and within communities in conversation with (and not in opposition to) legal principles and legal authorities. Legal disputes related to illicit sexual intercourse (zinā) did not centre on issues associated with women’s sexuality, such as honour, virginity, or the modern preoccupation with women’s dress. The primary concern was not regulating women’s (or men’s) sexuality through punishment, but rather bringing illicit sexual activity within a legally recognized relationship. Zinā was not, as in the Ottoman case, ‘a terrain of debate over the moral regulation of the family and of the social order as a whole’ (Peirce, 2003: 357). The parties involved, including the disputants, community members, and legal authorities, were primarily concerned with bringing about a valid marriage or determining the paternity of children conceived outside of a licit relationship, and focused on the practical steps necessary to achieve these goals. These cases reveal a complex web of social relationships that determined the approach to zinā cases by all parties involved, including jurists and community members. The most important goal in cases related to zinā was getting the participants back into a legal framework, even if sexual transgressions had occurred or were suspected. Notably, the discourse of the jurists and the actions of family and community members largely avoid the preoccupations associated with the recent interest of modern states in regulating zinā (Mir-Hosseini and Hamzić , 2010) and the discourse on women’s sexuality in Islamic legal doctrine. Although in the modern period extremist groups and states have embraced ḥadd punishments, including for zinā , in an effort to demonstrate their ‘authentic’ Islamic credentials, historical studies show very few instances of the ḥadd being carried out for zinā , and in most cases it was only because of a voluntary confession. Rudolph Peters identifies only one known instance of stoning to death in the Ottoman Empire, in an exceptional case that occurred in Istanbul in 1680 (2005: 93). This is because of the strict evidentiary rules mandated by the Islamic legal tradition, in addition to the jurists’ directive to try to avoid this

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punishment (and in the Ottoman case, judges recommended more lenient sentences such as lashing or imposition of fines). Some modern states, such as Pakistan and Nigeria, have codified the concept of zinā and its punishment; however, at the same time states such as Pakistan have incorporated different rules for evidence, for example accepting circumstantial evidence, which makes conviction for this crime significantly easier (Quraishi, 1997: 310–313). The source of these cases is collected volumes of legal opinions (fatwas) issued by scholars (muftis) located in Fez and neighbouring cities across the Maghrib, from approximately the mid-13th to mid-15th century. This genre of legal text largely features responses to real cases, and the responses reflect the practical engagement of jurists with situations occurring in their own towns or nearby communities. In each case, a community member or a local legal official asks a question, and a mufti issues an opinion. A legal opinion (fatwa), while influential, was not legally binding unless parties agreed to follow it or a judge ruled to enforce it. A common feature of North African fatwas was the amount of detail included in the question section, describing the events that occurred before the dispute reached a point where parties sought formal legal intervention, even if this information was not considered legally pertinent. In their responses, the jurists simply ignored any extraneous detail and responded to the legally relevant facts of the case; however, the questions provide a rich backdrop to the everyday lives and interactions of ordinary people. A distinct feature of North African legal culture at this time was the dominance of one school of Islamic legal thought, the Maliki school. The dynasties that ruled the Islamic West at the time, the Marinids from Fez (1250–1465), the Hafsids from Tunis (1229–1574), and the Nasrids from Granada (1230–1492), all patronized this school of law and its legal scholars. In Egypt around the same time, the ruling Mamluk Dynasty (1250–1517) instituted a system of four chief judges, one from each of the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and the population was likewise more legally diverse than the primarily Maliki Islamic West (Rapoport, 2003). Even when the Ottoman Empire instituted the Hanafi school as the empire’s official school of law, legal pluralism did not end, and the rulings of the other legal schools were still considered valid until the implementation of mid-19th-century reforms (Cuno, 2015: 125–129). The flexibility that resulted from the legal pluralism of the central Middle East was not, however, completely lacking in the largely Maliki North Africa, as differences of opinions within the Maliki school itself provided opportunities for flexible outcomes that accommodated the needs of society. Wael Hallaq sees the increase of fatwa preservation from the 10th century onward as ‘a telling example of the importance of fatwas as legal decisions and precedents’ (Hallaq, 1984: 18). Scholars compiled fatwas issued by legal scholars across the Islamic West into large collections, such as one source for this study, al-Miyʿar, compiled by Ahmad al-Wansharisi (d. 1508), which includes fatwas from the early days of the Maliki school in North Africa up until around the time of his death (Powers, 2002: 5–6). Other scholars compiled the fatwas of a single mufti into one volume, such as two of the sources consulted here by Marinid jurists Abu al-Hasan al-Sughayyir (d. 1320–1321) and Abdullah al-ʿAbdusi (d. 1445). The story these fatwas tell through cases of sexual transgressions is that the boundaries of sexual norms were more fluid than it would appear from reading the theoretical legal doctrine alone. Situations that strayed outside of legal or social norms were navigated and negotiated at the level of intimate partnerships, extended families, neighbours, community, and local and regional legal scholars. The issue at hand here is not a lack of legal knowledge or a broader disregard for legal regulations. Ordinary people were aware of the boundaries, just as jurists were aware of the technicalities surrounding these issues, and the jurists helped 300

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people navigate the law or return to a legally recognized framework after transgressing the law. What these social and legal interactions show is what happened when textual boundaries were translated to real life situations, and how communities and scholars constructed legally inflected social norms (or perhaps socially inflected legal norms). Furthermore, these cases reveal intimate details of real relationships, and how people engaged with the law in their everyday lives and disputes.

Finding the boundaries The boundaries of licit sexual relations are set out clearly in Islamic law: sexual relations between a man and a woman are sanctioned by a marriage contract or between a male slave owner and his female slave by nature of the ownership relationship (Ali, 2010). Real life is not always that straightforward, however, and jurists discussed a wide variety of exceptional cases in hypothetical terms and in response to cases that arose in society, some of which will be discussed below. Sex outside of the boundaries of a marriage or slave concubinage fell under the category of zinā , or illicit sex, which could refer to either fornication or adultery, and which carried different punishments depending on the marital status of the parties involved, among other factors. The cases examined here deal with sexual contact between free consenting adults; Hina Azam’s recent work, Sexual Violation in Islamic Law, explores the legal discourse on rape (Azam, 2015). Zinā was considered among the crimes against God (ḥudūd) requiring the severe ḥadd punishment, a category of crime which targeted activities destabilizing to the public order, such as theft, highway robbery, drinking alcohol, and a range of sexual crimes. In the case of fornication, the punishment according to the Maliki school was 100 lashes followed by a year or more of exile for the man; in the case of adultery, stoning to death (Peters, 2005: 60). Peirce suggests that the ‘threat of drastic punishment was thus intended more as preventative than as penalty’ (Peirce, 2003: 333). Indeed, evidentiary rules made this crime nearly impossible to prove. Establishing and proving an accusation of zinā required that four reliable male witnesses testify to observing the act of penetration; moreover, bringing claims of zinā with anything less than this proof would result in severe corporal punishment for the accusers (Peters, 2005: 14–15). Additionally, a prophetic hadith advised avoiding the ḥadd punishments in cases where there was any doubt (shubha), and jurists relied on this principle to avoid implementing these punishments where possible (Peters, 2005: 22). One other means of establishing zinā was by confession, although a confession could later be revoked to avoid the ḥadd punishment. However, no one was ever obligated to confess to this crime, and confessions of zinā were discouraged based on prophetic example (Peters, 2005: 68). Historical studies show very few instances of the ḥadd being carried out for zinā , and in most cases it was only because of a voluntary confession (Peters, 2005: 93; Quraishi, 2011: 178 FN13). This is because of the strict evidentiary rules mandated by the Islamic legal tradition, in addition to the jurists’ directive to try to avoid this punishment. Delfina Serrano Ruano also notes that no instances of punishment of zinā by stoning have been found in the premodern Islamic West (Serrano, 2005: 469).

Transgressing the boundaries Given the clearly defined sexual boundaries and the strict punishments laid out in Islamic law, it is perhaps surprising that legal sources contain many examples of activities taking place outside of these boundaries, or on the margins of what was legally and socially acceptable. This feature is not unique to North African legal sources, however. Ottoman court 301

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records and fatwas also addressed cases involving illicit sex (or allegations thereof), as seen, for example, in Leslie Peirce’s work on 16th-century Ottoman Anatolia, Morality Tales (Peirce, 2003) and Elise Semerdjian’s study of Ottoman Aleppo in the 16th through 19th centuries, ‘Off the Straight Path’ (Semerdjian, 2008). In the North African fatwa records, extra-marital relationships were mentioned or hinted at in a number of different types of cases in which zinā was not the main focus of the fatwa. Most of these cases clearly lacked the evidence required to punish the crime of zinā . Often, if a record mentioned that zinā occurred, but that piece of information was not legally relevant to the specific question, the responding mufti would simply ignore issue altogether. In the case of Marinid fatwas, most disputes in which zinā was brought up resulted in marriage. This is perhaps not surprising, as parties to a relationship who were not seeking a marriage would have no incentive to bring their activities to the attention of the legal system, and a third party risked punishment for bringing an accusation without meeting the high evidentiary standards. The muftis in these cases focused on ensuring that the marriages were legally valid, which mainly involved observing the waiting period after zinā (istibrā ʾ) and ensuring the groom paid a proper dower. Other cases occurred in the context of marriage, such as a man improperly remarrying his wife after a divorce, and these cases focused more on the technicalities of marriage and divorce rules, rather than zinā . Examples of other cases that mention zinā include wives remarrying when their husbands had been absent for long periods of time, or moving to a new location and remarrying; a husband denying paternity of his wife’s child; a woman giving birth less than six months after marriage; and a husband claiming that at the time of consummation of the marriage he found his wife was not a virgin. Enough ambiguity exists in these cases that punishment was almost never discussed, and instead the focus of the jurists was directed at the specific legal aspect of the case, such as assessing the validity of a marriage or determining paternity of children (which had implications for inheritance).

A scandal in Taza In the middle of the 14th century, in Taza, a town near Fez, a young woman ran away from her family (al-Wansharisi, 1981: 3:59–82). She hid in the house of the local judge, Isa al-Turjali (d. ca. 740/1339), and asked him to allow her to marry her neighbour, Ibn alTurjuman, despite her father’s objection. In an effort to remove her father’s authority over her marriage arrangements, the daughter made a number of claims, among them that she had committed zinā (fornication) and therefore was no longer a virgin. As the Maliki school of Islamic law only allowed a father to compel his daughter into a marriage if she were a virgin, this confession had the potential to clear the way for her marriage. After some time had passed, and the father, Ibrahim al-Anbaki, refused the judge’s urging to allow the marriage, the judge issued a ruling that allowed the marriage to go forward without the father’s approval. The marriage resulted in a legal battle that lasted several years, drawing in the most prominent jurists of Fez and even the Marinid Sultan Abu al-Hasan (r. 1331–1351). However, the father’s fight to overturn the marriage by alleging judicial misconduct in removing his right to oversee his daughter’s marriage was ultimately unsuccessful, and the couple was still married when the documentary evidence in their case ended. Although this case was exceptional in many ways, it allows us to observe some common features in the ways in which communities and legal systems dealt with the crime of zinā . Specifically, it shows how community members relied on legal principles in approaching 302

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sexual transgressions; the additional legal techniques and methodologies that the jurists drew on to resolve complex or contentious cases; and how punishment was rarely a focus in the discourse of the jurists, even in the case of a voluntary confession.

Community involvement The involvement of the local community in intimate domestic disputes was relatively common. Local legal scholars also offered advice and helped people navigate legal regulations in all areas of the law (Admiral, 2018). In the case from Taza, neighbours had originally intervened in the dispute that led to the daughter, whose name is never mentioned in the sources, running away. Her father had allegedly caught her suitor, Ibn al-Turjuman, leaving the house after spending time with the daughter. In the events that followed, Ibn alTurjuman had community members relay a marriage proposal to the father; however, he rejected the proposal. Other community members later came forward as witnesses to the abuse the daughter alleged against her father. The judge also consulted local legal scholars about the case before seeking an opinion from a mufti in Fez, and it is clear from the daughter’s careful construction of her case that she had received advice about some of the more nuanced legal technicalities. In a number of cases, neighbours provided a safe space in which a woman could observe a waiting period to ensure that she was not pregnant in cases where zinā was suspected or even a possibility, after which she was free to marry. In one such case presented to alSughayyir, an orphaned woman ran away to the house of a man to avoid marrying another man (al-Sijilmasi, 2011: 1:82–84). The people of her town removed her from this man’s house and brought her to the leader (shaykh) of the tribe. An orphan, like a non-virgin, was not subject to the coercive capacity of a father in marriage, and this could provide more room for negotiation or challenging the validity of a particular marriage guardian. Although there was no accusation or even suggestion of improper conduct, observing a waiting period was a standard precaution that occurred in many cases, and the young woman in this case was provided a safe space to complete her waiting period. At that point she authorized the shaykh (who was also a distant relative) to perform her marriage to the man with whom she ran away. While the community and legal system worked together to facilitate this marriage of the woman to the man she wanted to marry, the story did not have a happy ending, as the rejected suitor raped and impregnated the bride before the consummation of her marriage to her chosen husband (al-Sijilmasi, 2011: 1:82–84). Although the community had known how to handle a situation involving an elopement and possible zinā , the rape and resulting pregnancy created confusion over the validity of the original marriage contract and required consultation with a more highly trained legal official. Neighbours could also provide a neutral space in the midst of a conflict between father and daughter. In addition to the case from Taza, the fatwa collections contain other stories of runaways and elopements; however, in most cases, the families were eventually swayed by community interventions and the daughter’s actions into accepting her choice or refusal of a husband, unlike in the case from Taza, where the father continued to press for annulment of his daughter’s marriage. In a case presented to Abdullah al-ʿAbdusi in the 15th century, a woman was also removed from the house of the man she ran away with and completed her waiting period in the house of a neighbour, after which her father reluctantly agreed to marry her to the man after the completion of her waiting period (al-Muhammadi, 2015: 205–206). However, the father demanded a large gift from the groom for the marriage celebration, including ‘around 20 handfuls of butter, two animal loads of flour, a bull, 303

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clothes valued at thirty gold dinars, and eight dinars of food,’ which the groom had trouble providing, delaying consummation of the marriage (al-Muhammadi, 2015: 205–206). The bride ran away for the second time to her new husband’s house, and he gave her the clothes he had promised her in the marriage contract, and she remained in his house at the time of the complaint. In this case, al-ʿAbdusi ruled that it was permissible for her to stay with her husband if the marriage had already been consummated, and if her husband provided her with a dower adequate for someone of her status (ṣaḍaq al-mithl), completing the marriage requirements. A marriage could not be considered valid until a proper dower had been paid, but instead of holding the husband to the high dower he had promised originally, the mufti said he only needed to pay a dower that someone of her social status could expect to receive in order to legitimize the marriage. In this, as in other cases, the mufti was concerned with assessing the validity of the marriage, and he did not address the issue of zinā .

Legal solutions Families and community members were familiar with basic legal regulations, and often knew what actions to take to resolve a transgression and return the parties to a status that was recognized by the law; however, when a dispute escalated to the point where more significant intervention was needed, people (including local legal authorities) posed their questions to the prominent muftis of the area. These authorities, based in regional centres such as Fez, Tunis, Tlemcen, Bijaya, or Granada, were asked to weigh in on contentious and complex cases often involving the legality of a marriage or the paternity of children. The task of the mufti was restricted in scope: to evaluate the question and supporting evidence presented to him and to issue a legal opinion that answered the question. This is not to say that muftis always limited their responses to the main legal points; at times they certainly focused on less significant issues raised by the question or admonished certain parties or critiqued previous legal proceedings. Nevertheless, as in the case of the woman who ran away twice, the second time after her marriage had been contracted, the jurists rarely commented on the issue of zinā when it was not the key focus of the question. In the case from Taza, the outrage of the jurists was directed at the local judge, al-Turjali, for not following proper procedures before allowing the young woman to marry. Although she had confessed to zinā , she had later withdrawn her confession (which was not only acceptable but encouraged by prophetic example). The muftis also argued that this initial confession was not enough to remove her father’s marriage guardianship over her, and that al-Turjali was mistaken on this point, as there was disagreement on the ruling in the Maliki school. As mentioned above, competing opinions within the Maliki school allowed the jurists a certain amount of flexibility, which often benefited women. However, despite the confession to zinā , al-Turjali had not required her to wait for three menstrual cycles before marrying Ibn al-Turjuman. Other fatwas from North Africa at this time show that the waiting period (istibrā ʾ) was a key step in returning a woman to a legally legible position in which a marriage could be contracted on her behalf. Therefore, al-Turjali’s omission of this step was a significant oversight (or perhaps a strategic calculation). People who were not legal specialists had enough legal knowledge to navigate a range of issues that arose, including implementing a waiting period after a case of suspected zinā before allowing a marriage to proceed. However, they did not always understand the complexities of the laws or how to implement them. In one case, al-Sughayyir was asked about the validity of a marriage in which a man and a woman committed zinā , after which they contracted a marriage. The woman observed a waiting period of one menstrual cycle before 304

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they consummated their marriage (al-Sijilmasi, 2011: 1:127–130). Al-Sughayyir answered that the marriage was not only invalid because it was contracted during the waiting period, but also that the waiting period should have been three menstrual cycles, not one. The root of this confusion possibly lay in the origins of the concept of istibrā ʾ, which was a period of one menstrual cycle that an enslaved woman was required to observe when changing owners, as male owners were permitted sexual access to their enslaved women and the paternity of resulting children was a concern (Mir-Hosseini, 1993: 178). The remainder of al-Sughayyir’s answer dealt with the issue of whether the couple could remarry after the marriage was annulled, and he listed several competing opinions in the Maliki school on this matter, meaning they had a legal pathway to remarry from among the different opinions. Similar to the cases of the runaways, neither zinā nor its punishment was the focus of this case; rather, the task of al-Sughayyir was to determine the legal status of the marriage and any resulting children.

Discourse of punishment The muftis rarely discussed the ḥadd punishment in cases of zinā , and when they did reference it, it was often due to exceptional circumstances. In the case from Taza, only one mufti out of the six who responded (some of them multiple times) mentioned punishment. His comment came in the context of the withdrawn zinā confession, and he noted that while the withdrawal of the confession was enough to avoid punishment, the doubt caused by the original confession should still trigger a waiting period (al-Wansharisi, 1981: 3:64). Another situation in which a mufti might mention punishment was if the question explicitly asked about it. In a case answered by a group of al-Sughayyir’s students based in Fez in the early 14th century, a woman had been married for five years before a man appeared claiming he was her first husband and that they had never divorced (al-Wansharisi, 1981: 2:430–432; 3:37–39). She said that she thought he was dead, and that was why she remarried. It was unclear from the jurists’ answers how they evaluated the status of her second marriage. The question (clearly written by her first husband or someone sympathetic to him) directly asked whether she should be punished for her alleged adultery. The response was that this would only happen if she confessed to that specific crime, as her understanding that her husband was dead created enough doubt to avoid any penalty in her act of marrying another man while still married to the first. It appears that outside of the nearly unattainable evidence required to punish cases of zinā , or a valid confession, legal officials needed a very good reason (or provocation) to even mention the ḥadd punishment in a fatwa. An example of this type of provocation was the case of a man who confessed to zinā in the 14th century in or near Bijaya, in today’s Algeria, as a strategy to get around a divorce caused by a broken oath. A divorce oath was an oath sworn by a husband that if a particular event or condition occurred, his wife would be divorced. This type of oath, which was often invoked to demonstrate the seriousness of the oath taker, was binding and his wife was immediately divorced if the condition occurred, even if it was completely unrelated to the marriage itself (for example, contingent on a business dispute) (Rapoport, 2005: 89). In the audacious incident that took place near Bijaya – and that irritated jurists as far away as Tunis and Tlemcen – a man who was infamous for making divorce oaths claimed that he could not be triply divorced from his wife as a result of his broken oath because their entire marriage was invalid (al-Wansharisi, 1981: 3:58–59; 4:275–276; 4:308; 4:476–477; 4:478–479). This was because he stated that he had committed zinā with his wife when they ran away together before they were married, and 305

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he had continued his relationship with her while she was supposed to be observing her waiting period at her father’s house. Therefore, she never completed a proper waiting period and their marriage was invalid from the start, which meant that he could not be permanently barred from marrying her as a result of his broken oath. In attempting to preserve his legal right to marry (or remarry) his wife, he implicated them both in the crime of zinā . The muftis clearly recognized the man’s attempt to manipulate the law for his own purposes, and the flaunting of legal norms prompted one mufti to bring up the issue of punishment. A mufti from Tlemcen, Abu al-Fadl Qasim al-Uqbani (d. 830/1427), suggested that if the man really wanted to use zinā as an excuse to avoid the triple divorce, he should likewise accept the consequences for zinā , i.e. the ḥadd punishment (al-Wansharisi, 1981: 4:476). This rare mention of the ḥadd by the mufti was brought on by his exasperation with the man’s actions. The response of a mufti from Bijaya offered a possible explanation, as he noted that there existed a widespread societal problem of men trying to legitimize sex with women who they had technically divorced through broken oaths (al-Wansharisi, 1981: 4:476). Other exceptional cases illustrate circumstances in which jurists recommended or even carried out punishment in a zinā case. Serrano examined a case from 12th century alAndalus, where the prominent Cordoban jurist Ibn Rushd (d. 1126) recommended stoning a woman in a case presented to him from Almeria. However, Serrano argued that his main legal strategy was to change the venue of the case and remove it from the local judge, as he stated that only the chief judge had the authority to impose such a sentence (Serrano, 2005: 456). Had it reached the chief judge, the evidence in the case against the woman would likely not have stood up to the strict standards needed to impose this punishment. In a case that David Powers analysed from early 14th century Fez, the jurist Musa al-Haskuri was accused of improperly continuing relations with his wife after divorce (al-Wansharisi, 1981: 4:493–509; Powers, 2002: 53–94). Abu al-Hasan Al-Sughayyir recommended lashing as punishment for zinā , but not stoning. He also recommended life imprisonment for the illicit behaviour in light of al-Haskuri’s status as a scholar and position as a mufti (Powers, 2002: 62–65). Another mufti was consulted and recommended death by stoning, outraged that a fellow jurist would recommend what he saw as a lighter sentence; however, the judge went with al-Sughayyir’s opinion and the offending jurist was merely lashed (Powers, 2002: 81). The outrage in this case was directed at the accused jurist, and there was no discussion of punishment for his wife. This was an atypical case because of the status of the offender and because the jurists agreed that his crimes clearly warranted punishment; however, the evidence in the case would not have met the evidentiary standards for the ḥadd punishment for zinā , and if al-Haskuri had not been a mufti in a position of moral authority issuing fatwas for others to follow, his case most likely would have been treated very differently. Even an explicit claim of having committed zinā would not necessarily elicit recommendations for the ḥadd punishment on the part of the muftis. A case from 15th century Algiers involved a strange confession of zinā from a woman who became pregnant three years after her husband died (al-Wansharisi, 1981: 4:477–478). The woman said she was pregnant from zinā , and her dead husband was not the father of the child. The husband’s brother, however, said that obviously the child belonged to his deceased brother, and alleged that the wife was only confessing to zinā because they had bad blood between them. The question was complicated and contested, and was circulated to several prominent figures in Algeria and Tunisia, including the compiler of a great Tunisian fatwa collection, Abu al-Qasim al-Burzuli (d. 1438). The Maliki school, unlike the other schools, allowed a child born up to five years after the death of a husband or divorce to be attributed to his father’s lineage. The woman could have concealed her transgressions by claiming the child belonged 306

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to her late husband; however, keeping the child away from her husband’s family was clearly her priority, even if it meant confessing to zinā . The issue the jurists debated was whether the child should be considered a part of the dead husband’s lineage, and although they did not agree on the answer, the matter of zinā or its punishment was not addressed by any of them; it was simply not relevant to the central legal concern. Peirce suggests that in the context of Ottoman Anatolia, zinā confessions may have been a way of seeking out a lighter punishment from the court, such as a fine, in order to avert the punishment that might be meted out by the family in a so-called honour killing (2003: 364–365). This extrajudicial form of punishment found in the central Middle East, however, did not exist as a social or legal category in the Islamic West, and therefore zinā confessions in North Africa would not have served a similar purpose. It is clear from the context of the runaways, and other cases of zinā , that the parties judged that the risk of punishment would be low if these transgressions were brought to the attention of the legal authorities. It is somewhat surprising to find cases of confession to zinā , such as the case of the widow mentioned above or of the woman from Taza, as a confession of zinā was one of the few instances where application of the h ̣add punishment has been observed historically. However, in these cases the parties were either not concerned or the desired outcome was worth the potential risk.

Conclusion Islamic legal procedure made zinā almost impossible to prove. The legal system of premodern North Africa overwhelmingly seemed to give the benefit of doubt in zinā cases, and not only through the legal doctrine of doubt (shubha). Cases were not sought out to prosecute, and accusations were rare, due to the severe punishments for false or unproven accusations of zinā . When zinā did come to the attention of the law, it was almost always in the context of a couple on a path to marriage. For married people, the stakes would have been much higher, as the punishment of zinā for married people was death, and there would be little incentive to come forward with a voluntary confession. However, even in the case of the widow who confessed to zinā in Algiers, the jurists only addressed the question posed by the petitioner, which was about the paternity of her child. Unique to the North African context was the extensive discussion of the mechanism of a waiting period, the istibrā ʾ, for making a legal marriage after the possibility that sexual transgressions had occurred. When zinā did occur, jurists imposed a waiting period so there would be no doubt over the paternity of later children, similar to the waiting period (ʿidda) imposed after a divorce or death of a husband. Most cases where zinā was an issue involved couples that families, communities, or the jurists if necessary helped put on a path to a legally recognized marriage. Additionally, jurists dealt with the more complex questions surrounding the paternity of children resulting from these cases. The focus of the jurists was on resolution of these crises when they occurred in society, and not on punishment or making an example, except in extreme cases such as that of the jurist from Fez who flaunted the law for his own purposes. As in the cases of runaways, zinā often seemed to be part of a strategy to bring about a marriage, and society and law found ways to accommodate these actions. Although women were largely excluded from the realm of legal interpretation and implementation, women in these cases made their mark on the law through the law’s accommodation of their actions and efforts to seek legal paths to resolution through the tools available in the Islamic legal tradition. Concerns brought by women and the solutions provided by 307

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the muftis to these questions were gathered in fatwa collections, which in turn could be used as a source for updating jurisprudential texts, often in the form of commentaries (Hallaq, 1994: 61). In this way, women’s concerns were preserved in the legal and historical record of the Islamic West. The legal system that developed in Marinid Fez and the greater Maghrib responded to the needs of society, including the concerns brought by women, and accommodated women’s needs through sophisticated engagement with the Islamic legal tradition. This legal accommodation did not mean that the law was being improperly implemented by jurists, or that there was a large gap between theory and practice. For example, when it came to zinā , the jurists understood the legal theory, but they also understood the evidence needed to establish this crime. Therefore, the focus shifted to bringing the situation back into a legal framework, which in this context usually meant bringing about a legally valid marriage. Legal theory was deployed in practice to respond to the real-life situations that arose in the community, and to the needs of the members of society. Jurists approached these transgressions in a pragmatic way that focused on finding a solution that restored order to the community, instead of occupying themselves with concerns over punishment or the regulation of women’s sexuality. Even when women went outside of legal boundaries, the law remained the defining feature of both the actions of the women and reactions on the part of the family, the community, and the jurists. The actions taken by the women, from running away to confessions of zinā , were subversions of family authority and manipulations of the legal system; however, it was also through legal avenues that the cases were ultimately brought back into a framework of a marriage that was recognized by the community and the law. Through their actions, women forced jurists and the legal system to deal with situations that had not been clearly elaborated in Islamic law, such as elopement, and in this way helped shape the law through the preservation of their actions in the legal records.

Further reading Ali, Kecia. Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. This book investigates how the environment of the early Muslim jurists impacted their elaboration of legal doctrine. Through the example of jurists using the language of slavery and sales contracts in their discussion of marriage, it highlights the historically contextualized human element in the elaboration of Islamic legal doctrine. Azam, Hina. Sexual Violation in Islamic Law: Substance, Evidence, and Procedure. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. This study examines the evolution of the doctrine of rape in the Hanafi and Maliki schools of Islamic law. Although rape was classified as a type of zinā (‘zinā by force’), Azam argues that the Maliki school’s approach to female sexuality as a commodity and thus rape as a property crime allowed for more nuance in procedure and better protections for victims. Peirce, Leslie. Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. This book explores the connectivity of law to local needs, regional politics, and imperial demands through the case study of the Anatolian Ottoman town of Aintab in the mid-16th century. Peirce uses court records from a single year to show the flexible nature of the local legal context, particularly with regard to gendered norms that could put women at a disadvantage. Powers, David S. Law, Society and Culture in the Maghrib, 1300–1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. This study highlights the key role of the mufti in the dynamic legal system of Marinid Morocco through the analysis of a number of cases appearing in al-Wansharisi’s fatwa collection, alMiyʿar.

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Transgressing the boundaries Semerdjian, Elyse. “Off the Straight Path”: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008. This book investigates law and society in Ottoman Aleppo from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Through analysis of sexual crimes in court records, Semerdjian shows that the local community had a role in co-producing law which led to a flexibility in practice that met the needs of that particular time and place.

References Admiral, Rosemary. “Living Islamic Law: Women and Legal Culture in Marinid Morocco.” Islamic Law and Society 25, no. 3 (2018): 212–223. Ali, Kecia. Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. al-Muhammadi, Hisham. Ajwibat al-‘Abdusi. al-Mamlaka al-Maghribiyya: Wizarat al-Awqaf wa’l-Shuʾun al-Islamiyya, 2015. al-Sijilmasi, Ibrahim Ibn Hilal. al-Durr al-Nathir ‘ala Ajwiba Abu al-Hassan al-Sughayyir. Edited by Ahmed bin Ali Abu al-Fadl al-Diamati. 2 vols. Casablanca: Markaz al-Turath al-Thaqafi al-Maghribi, 2011. al-Wansharisi, Ahmad ibn Yahya. Al-Mi‘yar al-Mu‘rib wa al-Jami ‘al-Mughrib ‘an Fatawi Ahl Ifriqiyah wa alAndalus wa al-Maghrib. Edited by Muhammad Hajji. 13 vols. Rabat: Wizarat al-Awqaf wa al-Shu’un al-Islamiyya lil-Mamlaka al-Maghribiyya, 1981. Azam, Hina., Sexual Violation in Islamic Law: Substance, Evidence, and Procedure. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Cuno, Kenneth M. Modernizing Marriage: Family, Ideology, and Law in Nineteenth- and Early TwentiethCentury Egypt. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015. Hallaq, Wael B. “Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?” International Journal of Middle East Studies 16, no. 1 (1984): 3–41. ———. “From Fatwas to Furuʿ: Growth and Change in Islamic Substantive Law.” Islamic Law and Society 1, no. 1 (1994): 29–65. Mir-Hosseini, Ziba. Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Family Law: Iran and Morocco Compared. London: I.B. Tauris, 1993. Mir-Hosseini, Ziba and Vanja Hamzić . Control and Sexuality: The Revival of Zina Laws in Muslim Countries. London: Women Living Under Muslim Laws, 2010. Peirce, Leslie. Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Peters, Rudolph. Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law: Theory and Practice from the Sixteenth to the TwentyFirst Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Powers, David S. Law, Society and Culture in the Maghrib, 1300–1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Quraishi, Asifa. “Her Honor: An Islamic Critique of the Rape Laws of Pakistan from a Woman-Sensitive Perspective.” Michigan Journal of International Law 18, no. 2 (1997): 287–320. ———. “What if Sharia Weren’t the Enemy? Rethinking International Women’s Rights Advocacy on Islamic Law.” Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 22, no. 1 (2011): 173–249. Rapoport, Yossef. “Legal Diversity in the Age of Taqlid: The Four Chief Qadis under the Mamluks.” Islamic Law and Society 10, no. 2 (2003): 210–228. ———. Marriage, Money and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Semerdjian, Elyse. “Off the Straight Path”: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008. Serrano Ruano, Delfina. “La Lapidación como Castigo de las Relaciones Sexuales No Legales (zina) en el Seno de la Escuela Malikí: Doctrina, Práctica Legal y Actitudes Individuales Frente al Delito (ss. XI y XII).” Al-Qanṭara 26, no. 2 (2005): 449–473.

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20 WOMEN AND ISLAMIC LAW Decolonizing colonialist feminism Lena Salaymeh

What is colonialist feminism? Colonialist feminism, also known as imperialist feminism, is feminism that supports or legitimates colonialism. Colonialism occurs when a state exerts political, economic, or geographic control over an external state, territory, or group. Contemporary colonialism is often referred to as neocolonialism because formerly colonized states have formal independence but largely remain under the control of colonial states. Colonialist feminism replicates the power dynamics of colonialism; it informs and supports a variety of colonial tactics to ‘liberate’ women in the global South. Simultaneously, colonialist feminism misrepresents women in the global North as ‘liberated.’ Colonialist feminism is a well-documented phenomenon and the subject of multiple studies (Power, 2009; Toor, 2012). Gayatri C. Spivak famously defined colonialist feminism as an ideology that claims white men (and women) can and should ‘save’ brown women from brown men (Spivak, 1988; Wolfe, 2002). Colonialist feminism also manifests itself in secular feminism and liberal feminism. For example, Joan W. Scott illustrated that the assertion that secularism produces gender equality is both inaccurate and used to justify colonialism (Scott, 2017). Notably, ‘colonialist feminist’ is not an identity category because ‘colonialist’ is not equivalent to ‘Western’ or to ‘white.’ Indeed, some of the most vitriolic colonialist feminists today are self-proclaimed ‘former Muslims’ and some colonialist feminists identify as Muslim or live in Muslim-majority regions (Bayoumi, 2015, 99–118). ‘Colonialist feminist’ is a useful shorthand for a particular collection of ideological positions that promote colonialism and prejudice against the global South in the name of feminism. Colonialist feminism frequently portrays women in the global South as not having autonomy, which means that they do not have agency, or choice, or the ability to consent. Colonialist feminism may be classified as a form of so-called ‘choice feminism,’ which falsely presumes that women have more freedom when they have more choices or when they appear to be making autonomous decisions (Kiraly & Tyler, 2015; Power, 2009). In contrast to the choice feminism often present in colonialist feminism, dominance feminism recognizes that having more choices under a system of domination does not constitute freedom. Dominance feminism focuses on structural and substantive inequality, as well as on macro systems of power (rather than micro choices). Thus, dominance feminism recognizes that colonialism is more harmful to women than any small-scale opportunities supposedly provided to women by colonialism. Similarly, colonialist feminism frequently stereotypes colonized societies as patriarchal. The notion that

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one society is more patriarchal than another is not a descriptive observation; rather, it is an ideological claim.1 Patriarchy manifests itself differently in the global North and global South, but it cannot be quantified. (Several measures allegedly quantify levels of patriarchy, but these are the subject of intense debate and likely measure women’s economic conditions rather than patriarchy. See, for example, Permanyer, 2013.)

How does colonialist feminism portray Muslim women? Colonialist feminism generates a problematic caricature of Muslim women that miriam cooke identified as Muslimwoman; cooke uses Muslimwoman to refer to the islamophobic stereotyping of Muslim women as singular and homogenous (cooke et al., 2008). Colonialist feminists allege that the Muslimwoman needs to be liberated from her ‘patriarchal’ culture through colonial intervention – whether in military or in civil forms. Many scholars have challenged colonialist feminist portrayals of Muslimwoman (Abu-Lughod, 2002, 2011; Ahmed, 1992; cooke et al., 2008; Lewis & Mills, 2003; Mohanty, 2003; Nader, 1989; Toor, 2011, 2012). In a separate article, I proposed that colonialist feminism mischaracterizes Muslim women in three ways (Salaymeh, 2019). First, colonialist feminists engage in decontextualized comparisons, frequently comparing women in the global North to the Muslimwoman, without comparing Muslim men and women or comparing non-Muslim men and women. These inconsistent comparisons are the source of significant misrepresentations of the Muslimwoman and of Islamic law, as elaborated below. Second, colonialist feminists imagine and construct Muslimwoman by viewing Muslim women through the ‘male gaze.’ I use the term ‘male gaze’ to account for Berger’s observation that ‘men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ (Berger et al., 1973, 47). This gaze is implicitly heteronormative (Mulvey, 1999). That is, when colonialist feminists assess Muslim women’s practices or Islamic laws about women, they often look through the lens of heterosexual men in the global North. Third, colonialist feminists incorrectly presume that women in the global North enjoy full autonomy or fail to recognize that women everywhere do not enjoy full autonomy. The combination of inconsistent comparisons, the heteronormative male gaze, and the myth of liberal autonomy operate together to shape the Muslimwoman.

How does colonialist feminism influence scholarship about Muslim women? Much scholarship about Muslim women engages with (even if explicitly trying to disprove) the stereotype of Muslimwoman. There are (at least) three problematic tendencies in scholarship about Muslim women. First, scholars often erroneously depict a specific legal issue (for instance, divorce) as a ‘woman’s issue,’ despite it involving men as well. Second, scholars of Muslim societies may focus on women in one region or from one socio-economic class and erroneously claim that this particular group is representative of all Muslim women. ‘Muslim women’ is a diverse and expansive category that currently encompasses more than half a billion women living in nearly every part of the world. The very reduction of women as a unified category of analysis is deeply problematic and harmful. Third, scholars in Islamic studies may compile textual references to one specific women’s issue from all available Islamic texts, from the beginning of the Islamic movement to the present. This word-search approach removes a specific women’s issue from its varied historical contexts. Islamic sources should be historicized and contextualized in order to account for temporal, geographic, 311

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cultural, and class distinctions among Muslim women. Exploring historical or contemporary issues pertaining to Muslim women necessitates thinking critically about how to use gender as an analytical category. Moreover, not every scholar of Islam is qualified to produce scholarship about Muslim women.

How does colonialist feminism influence scholarship about women’s status under Islamic law? Colonialist feminism generates several inaccuracies about the situations of women under Islamic law. Islamic law does not constitute the ‘essence’ of Muslim societies because the very understanding and application of Islamic law varies across the vast expanse of the Muslim world. The status of women under Islamic law is a historically and situationally contingent one because Islamic law is always changing, across both time and space. Thus, the status of women under Islamic law must always be qualified by where, when, and who. No one area of law represents the realities of women’s lives; Islamic law pertaining to the family does not represent women’s status under Islamic law and women’s legal issues cannot be limited to personal status matters. It would be misleading to concentrate on one specific Islamic legal doctrine or ruling concerning women because such a study misrepresents how law actually functions. Every legal doctrine is related to a set of other doctrines, so any analysis of one should consider how the entire legal order operates. We cannot understand, for instance, women’s inheritance shares without considering dower payments, divorce settlements, custody, and other legal doctrines that reflect the historical differences in women’s and men’s economic conditions. Contrary to colonialist feminist presumptions, Islamic law neither explains nor causes the varied situations of Muslim women.

How do inconsistent comparisons, the male gaze, and the myth of liberal autonomy influence debates about the headscarf? Colonialist feminists stereotype Muslimwoman as dressing ‘modestly,’ particularly by wearing a headscarf. This oversimplification ignores the not insignificant number of Muslim women who do not dress modestly or wear headscarves; it also neglects the non-Muslim women who dress modestly for a variety of reasons (not only culture or ‘religion’). More importantly, this reduction fails to recognize that modest dress is a cultural practice that includes both men and women, albeit distinctly. Social expectations of modest dress for Muslim women correspond to expectations for Muslim men. When we compare men and women in Muslim societies (where modest dress is a norm) with men and women in the global North (where modest dress is not the norm), we observe more remarkable differences between men and women in the global North than between Muslim men and women. Consider, for example, formal wear in the global North: men wear suits or tuxedos that cover their entire bodies, while women wear dresses that often display cleavage, thighs, form, or the back. Colonialist feminists focus on the clothing differences between Muslim and non-Muslim women rather than on the differences between women and men among non-Muslims and Muslims. Contextualizing women’s clothing within specific social settings also highlights that women’s clothing is not merely a matter of autonomy (or ‘choice’) because it involves social norms, market pressures, politics, and men. Social norms about dress are gendered in both Muslim and non-Muslim societies, but in different ways. The market’s clothing supply and the fashion industry together limit women’s dress options and thereby determine which 312

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body parts should be uncovered/covered and how. Wearing a headscarf can be a fashion choice for Muslim women, just as hairstyles or wearing hats is a fashion choice for nonMuslim women. Moreover, the male gaze both benefits from and demands modesty, nonmodesty, or something in between. Colonialist feminists largely ignore the pressures placed on women to dress non-modestly. When colonialist feminists allege that modest dress is a sign of oppression, they fail to recognize the oppressiveness of non-modest dress and thereby legitimate the male gaze. Colonialist feminists claim that Muslim women lack autonomy and do not choose to wear the headscarf but rather are coerced to do so by families or social expectations. In addition to being inaccurate, this attribution of false consciousness to Muslim women is ironic given the failure to consider that women in the global North may not choose to style their hair but rather may be coerced to do so by consumerist pressures or social expectations. Colonialist feminists ignore that consumerist pressures and social demands to conform to hair-styling norms are comparable to social expectations of head coverings. As dominance feminists have demonstrated, ‘choice’ is often an illusion, and having ‘choices’ does not result in liberation.

How do inconsistent comparisons, the heteronormative male gaze, and the myth of liberal autonomy influence debates about female circumcision? Colonialist feminists stereotype Muslimwoman as a woman who is circumcised against her will. Female circumcision is commonly (and erroneously) associated with the Muslimwoman. Yet, both non-Muslims and Muslims practice female circumcision. Moreover, the majority of Muslims do not practice female circumcision; those Muslims who do practice female circumcision do so for multiple reasons, including adherence to customary practices and local traditions. Female circumcision in the global South should be compared to female genital surgery (both cosmetic and non-cosmetic) in the global North. Female genital surgery encompasses a broad range of surgical interventions that reshape and resize female genitalia for aesthetic or medical purposes (Braun, 2010). These surgeries are very similar to female circumcision (Braun, 2010, 1400; Davis, 2002; Johnsdotter & Essén, 2010). In addition, it is important to compare female genital surgery to male genital surgery, as well as female circumcision to male circumcision (Darby & Svoboda, 2007, Massad, 2015, 203–204; Salaymeh, 2016, Ch. 4). Male and female circumcision are more similar to each other than contemporary male and female cosmetic genital surgery (PPAN, 2012, 23). Kirsten Bell observed that ‘the conceptual separation underlying Western treatments of male and female circumcision is alien to many Africans, who consider these operations to be fundamentally related in both their functions and effects’ (Bell, 2005, 128). Male circumcision is more prevalent than female circumcision, but female cosmetic genital surgery is more prevalent than male cosmetic genital surgery. Further elucidating the inconsistency in their advocacy, most colonialist feminists criticize neither female cosmetic genital surgery nor male circumcision. In short, proper comparisons between female circumcision and female genital surgery reveal that ‘female genital mutilation’ is a propaganda term used to describe varied customary practices that are prevalent primarily in the global South. Women in the global North who undergo cosmetic genital surgery probably adopt a male gaze when they determine that their genitalia should be altered. Researchers have demonstrated that much of the demand for female genital cosmetic surgery is the result of 313

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social and commercial pressures, as well as aesthetic expectations based on pornography (McBride, 2016). Specifically, digitally altered female genitalia appearing in pornography has created unrealistic expectations about ‘normal’ or ‘beautiful’ genital appearance (Braun, 2010, 1400–1401). A woman’s ‘choice’ to undergo genital cosmetic surgery is a reflection less of autonomy than of conformity to the male gaze. In addition, colonialist feminists construct ‘androcentric notions of female sexuality’ when they identify ‘the clitoris as the female penis’ (Bell, 2005, 135; Bordo, 1997, 201). The very terms of the colonialist feminist attack on female circumcision incorporate the male gaze. Colonialist feminists might allege that the difference between female circumcision and female genital cosmetic surgery is that only consenting, autonomous adults pursue the latter procedure. Yet the notion of autonomy is inapplicable to any type of cosmetic surgery because coercion and domination underlie women’s decisions to undergo cosmetic surgery (Morgan, 1991, 38). Comparing female genital cosmetic surgery and female circumcision illuminates that analogous dynamics of choice, aesthetics, and social and commercial pressures underlie both procedures (Braun, 2009, 243). Colonialist feminists construct a false binary between women in the global North and women in the global South based on the myth of liberal autonomy (i.e., ‘choice’), rather than on the reality of partial autonomy.

What is decolonial feminism? Decolonial feminism opposes both colonialism and coloniality in the name of feminism. Whereas colonialism is the socio-political domination of a territory, coloniality is a universalizing mode of thought that legitimizes colonialism and neo-colonialism (Quintana, 2008). Catherine Walsh explained that coloniality is ‘a matrix of global power that has hierarchically classified populations, their knowledge, and cosmological life systems according to a Eurocentric standard’ (Walsh, 2018, 184). Because coloniality is not limited to colonized regions, decolonization is necessary in both colonial centres and colonized (or formally post-colonial) regions. Decolonial feminist María Lugones emphasized that colonialism fundamentally altered pre-colonial constructions of gender (Lugones, 2010). Consequently, any study of gender that encompasses both pre-colonial and colonial/postcolonial societies must account for colonialism’s role in reshaping gender relations. Decolonial feminist Xhercis Mendez explained that the category of gender functions as a colonizing force (Mendez, 2015). As Breny Mendoza elaborated, In the process of colonization, women and men in the colony were both racialized and sexualized as gender was deployed as a powerful tool to destroy the social relations of the colonized by dividing men and women from each other and creating antagonisms between them. (Mendoza, 2015, 116) Whereas colonialist feminists use notions of autonomy, choice, and consent as tools for perpetuating both colonialism and coloniality, decolonial feminists establish the importance of resisting simplistic explorations of gender and of recognizing when gender analysis serves coloniality.

How does decolonial feminism approach scholarship about Islamic law? Decolonial feminism shows that coloniality’s notions of autonomy obfuscate complicated power dynamics that intersect with gender. Contrary to the misconceptions of colonialist 314

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feminists, we must ask much more precise and historicized questions about Islamic law, Muslim women, and sexuality. The coloniality of the notion of autonomy becomes evident when we examine pre-colonial legal texts. By way of example, we might examine precolonial legal discussions of Muslim women’s sexuality in order to demonstrate the incongruence of colonialist notions of autonomy. In addressing the topic of women’s sexual fulfilment, medieval orthodox Muslim jurists understood a wife’s sexual fulfilment as obliging a husband to provide conjugal duties upon the wife’s demand (al-Kā sā nī , 1986, 2:331). In addition, there was a consensus among medieval orthodox Muslim jurists that husbands are obligated to provide their wives with orgasms.2 Along with specific attention to a woman’s orgasm, al-Ghazā lı̄ (d. 1111; Iran) asserted that ‘intimate relations should be more or less frequent in accordance to her need to remain chaste, for to satisfy her is his duty’ (al-Ghazā lı̄ , 2012, 126). The Ḥanbalī jurist Ibn Qudā mah (d. 620/ 1223; Syria) described sexual intercourse as the husband’s obligation and noted that husbands are required to request permission from their wives before practicing coitus interruptus (Ibn Qudā mah al-Maqdı̄ sı̄ , 1997, 10:239–240). Shā fiʿı̄ jurist al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277; Syria) identified sex as a default, minimum obligation that a husband must provide his wife (al-Nawawī , 2005, 459). Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728/1328; Syria), another Ḥanbalı̄ jurist, suggested that husbands are obligated to have sex with their wives generously, claiming that providing sexual fulfilment is a greater obligation than providing food (Ibn Taymiyyah, 1997, 32:170). An 11th/ 17th-century Ḥanbalı̄ jurist indicated that a woman has a right to sexual intercourse with her husband even without his permission and even if he is asleep (al-Buhū tī , 1993, 3:52). These brief references indicate that medieval, orthodox Muslim jurists recognized that husbands are obligated to provide sexual fulfilment to their wives, such that husbands do not have full sexual autonomy. Thus, both husbands and wives do not have unfettered sexual autonomy. To expect historical figures to have or to conceptualize a modern notion of autonomy is a form of coloniality. These references to women’s sexual fulfilment in orthodox Islamic texts do not negate the gender inequality that was normative in all premodern societies. No legal text from any premodern tradition implements the modern aspiration for gender equality. Premodern juristic recognition of a wife’s sexual rights cannot resolve the inequality that is inherent to the socio-historical and economic situations of women throughout the world. If we were to compare juristic discussions of men’s sexual fulfilment with those of women’s sexual fulfilment, we probably would not find parity; being men, jurists understood and prioritized male sexuality over female sexuality. Nevertheless, medieval, orthodox Muslim jurists did not view men or women as having unfettered sexual autonomy. Orthodox Islamic legal texts indicate that medieval Muslim jurists did not construct women’s sexuality or women’s sexual autonomy in ways that conform to colonialist feminist notions of autonomy. Historical texts cannot conform to entirely modern ideals of sexual equality or sexual choice. Although returning to pre-colonial gender relations is impossible, decolonial feminism points to the importance of recovering pre-colonial gender relations as alternatives to the hegemony of gender coloniality.

How can decolonial feminism redirect scholarship about Muslim women and Islamic law? This chapter demonstrated that colonialist feminism fabricates the Muslimwoman in order to legitimate colonialism and to perpetuate coloniality. Decolonial feminism redirects scholars to recognize that women are not more oppressed in the global South than in the global North and that colonialism and coloniality contribute comprehensively to the oppression of 315

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women (and men) in the global South. Resisting colonialist feminism begins with a pluriversal (i.e., non-universal) stance: there is no superior model for gender relations and no society should dictate gender relations for other societies.

Notes 1 In other words, any attempt to quantify patriarchy is yet another example of what Talal Asad described as the manipulation of complex social dynamics for the purposes of political intervention. Asad, T. 1994. Ethnographic Representation, Statistics and Modern Power. Social Research, 61, 55–88. 2 I do not use the term ‘right’ in its modern sense. On the ‘orgasm right,’ see (Bowen, 1981, 325).

Further reading Abu-Lughod, L. 2002. Do Muslim women really need saving? Anthropological reflections on cultural relativism and its others. American Anthropologist, 104, 783–790. This short and accessible article carefully dissects the notion of ‘saving’ Muslim women, with particular attention to headscarves. Kiraly, M. & Tyler, M. 2015. Freedom fallacy: the limits of liberal feminism, Ballarat, Vic, Connor Court Publishing. This edited volume introduces critiques of liberal feminism using a wide array of contemporary case studies. Contributors show how arguments about ‘choice’ serve to uphold the status quo. MacKinnon, C. A. 1991. Toward a feminist theory of the state, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. This monograph is a significant contribution to critical feminist political theory. Although the text is controversial, the author’s critique of liberalism is insightful. Mendoza, B. 2015. Coloniality of gender and power: from postcoloniality to decoloniality. In: Disch, L. & Hawkesworth, M. (eds.) The Oxford handbook of feminist theory, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 100-119. An accessible and informative article on decolonial feminist theory and its relationship to postcolonial feminism. Toor, S. 2012. Imperialist feminism redux. Dialectical Anthropology, 36, 147–160. Taking U.S. imperialism in the Muslim world as a starting point, the author analyzes how liberal feminists simultaneously espouse liberal values and advocate for violence in the name of feminism.

References Abu-Lughod, L. 2002. Do Muslim women really need saving? Anthropological reflections on cultural relativism and its others. American Anthropologist, 104, 783–790. Abu-Lughod, L. 2011. Seductions of the ‘honor crime’. differences, 22, 17–63. Ahmed, L. 1992. Women and gender in Islam: historical roots of a modern debate, New Haven, Yale University Press. al-Buhū tı̄ ı̄ (d. 1641; Egypt), M. 1993. Daqā ʾiq ulı̄ al-nuhá li-sharḥ al-muntahá, Beirut, ʿĀlam al-Kutub. al-Ghazā lı̄ ı̄ (d. 1111; Iran), A. 2012. Marriage and sexuality in Islam, Kuala Lumpur, Islamic Book Trust. al-Kā sā nı̄ ı̄ (d. 1189; Syria), A. 1986. Badā ʾiʿ al-sana ̣ ̄ ʾiʿ fı̄ ı̄ tartı̄ ı̄ b al-sharā ʾiʿ, Beirut, Dā r al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyyah. al-Nawawı̄ ı̄ (d. 1277; Syria), A. 2005. Minhā j al-tā ̣ libı̄ ı̄ n wa-ʿumdat al-muftı̄ ı̄ n, Beirut, Dā r al-Minhā j. Asad, T. 1994. Ethnographic representation, statistics and modern power. Social Research, 61, 55–88. Bayoumi, M. 2015. This Muslim American life: dispatches from the war on terror, New York, NYU Press. Bell, K. 2005. Genital cutting and Western discourses on sexuality. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 19, 125–148. Berger, J., Blomberg, S., Fox, C., Dibb, M. & Hollis, R. 1973. Ways of seeing, London, British Broadcasting Corportion and Penguin Books. Bordo, S. 1997. Braveheart, babe, and the contemporary body. In: Parens, E. (ed.) Enhancing human traits: ethical and social implications. Washington, DC, Georgetown University Press, 189–221. Bowen, D. L. 1981. Muslim juridical opinions concerning the status of women as demonstrated by the case of ʿazl. Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 40, 323–328. Braun, V. 2009. ‘The women are doing it for themselves’: the rhetoric of choice and agency around female genital ‘cosmetic surgery’. Australian Feminist Studies, 24, 233–249.

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Braun, V. 2010. Female genital cosmetic surgery: a critical review of current knowledge and contemporary debates. Journal of Women’s Health, 19, 1393–1407. cooke, m., Ahmad, F., Badran, M., Moallem, M. & Zine, J. 2008. Roundtable discussion: religion, gender, and the Muslim woman. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 24, 91–119. Darby, R. & Svoboda, J. S. 2007. A rose by any other name? Rethinking the similarities and differences between male and female genital cutting. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 21, 301–323. Davis, S. W. 2002. Loose lips sink ships. Feminist Studies, 28, 7–35. Ibn Qudā mah al-Maqdı̄ sı̄ (d. 1223; Syria), M. 1997. al-Mughnı̄ ı̄ , Riyadh, Dā r ʿĀlim al-Kutub. Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328; Syria), A. M. 1997. Majmū ʿat al-fatā wá, Riyadh, Maktabat al-ʿAbī kā n. Johnsdotter, S. & Essén, B. 2010. Genitals and ethnicity: the politics of genital modifications. Reproductive Health Matters, 18, 29–37. Kiraly, M. & Tyler, M. 2015. Freedom fallacy: the limits of liberal feminism, Ballarat, Vic, Connor Court Publishing. Lewis, R. & Mills, S. (eds.) 2003. Feminist postcolonial theory: a reader, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. Lugones, M. 2010. Toward a decolonial feminism. Hypatia, 25, 742–759. Massad, J. 2015. Islam in Liberalism, Chicago, Chicago University Press. McBride, H. 2016. Aesthetic labiaplasty is never just a ‘choice’. feminist current, January 14. Mendez, X. 2015. Notes toward a decolonial feminist methodology: revisiting the race/gender matrix. Trans-Scripts, 5, 41–59. Mendoza, B. 2015. Coloniality of gender and power: from postcoloniality to decoloniality. In: Disch, L. & Hawkesworth, M. (eds.) The Oxford handbook of feminist theory, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 100-119. Mohanty, C. T. 2003. Feminism without borders: decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity, Durham and London, Duke University Press. Morgan, K. P. 1991. Women and the knife: cosmetic surgery and the colonization of women’s bodies. Hypatia, 6, 25–53. Mulvey, L. 1999. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. In: Braudy, L. & Cohen, M. (eds.) Film theory and criticism: introductory readings. New York, Oxford University Press, 833–844. Nader, L. 1989. Orientalism, occidentalism and the control of women. Cultural Dynamics, 2, 323–355. Permanyer, I. 2013. A critical assessment of the UNDP’s gender inequality index. Feminist Economics, 19, 1–32. Power, N. 2009. One-dimensional woman, Winchester, UK, O Books. PPAN, Public Policy Advisory Network (On Female Genital Surgeries in Africa). 2012. Seven things to know about female genital surgeries in Africa. The Hastings Center Report, 42, 19–27. Quintana, M. M. 2008. Colonialidad Del Ser, Delimitaciones Conceptuales. Editorial Biblos Lexicón, www.cecies.org/articulo.asp?id=226. Salaymeh, L. 2016. The beginnings of Islamic law: late antique Islamicate legal traditions, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Salaymeh, L. 2019. Imperialist feminism and Islamic law. Hawwa, 17, 97–134. Scott, J. W. 2017. Sex & secularism, Princeton, Princeton Unversity Press. Spivak, G. C. 1988. Can the subaltern speak? In: Nelson, C. & Grossberg, L. (eds.) Marxism and the interpretation of culture. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 271–313. Toor, S. 2011. Gender, sexuality, and Islam under the shadow of empire. The Scholar and Feminist Online, 9. Toor, S. 2012. Imperialist feminism redux. Dialectical Anthropology, 36, 147–160. Walsh, C. 2018. Development as Buen Vivir: institutional arrangements and (de)colonial entanglements In: Reiter, B. (ed.) Constructing the pluriverse. Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 184–194. Wolfe, P. 2002. Can the Muslim speak? An indebted critique. History and Theory, 41, 367–380.

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21 THE EMERGENCE OF WOMEN’S SCHOLARSHIP IN DAMASCUS DURING THE LATE 20TH CENTURY Feryal Salem

One of the notable developments of the post-1970s is the production of a series of important works by a range of erudite female religious scholars based in Damascus. What distinguished their achievements was that they were not only pioneers as women in publishing Islamic books during a time when this was a realm primarily dominated by men, but through their work they also reframed the way many of the traditional fields of Islamic study were discussed. While a number of studies have been recently published noting the rise in women’s movements in Damascus that have helped us better understand the shifting dynamics of gender roles led by religious women’s movements in Syria, there is a scarcity of studies examining the contribution these women have made to Islamic scholarship.1 It is unclear why recent scholarship on these modern Islamic women’s movements have often given such limited attention to the contents of their publications and intellectual contributions. One explanation may be based on research tendencies that focus on women’s appearances through highlighting external behaviors and dress as an object of academic inquiry, while a parallel scrutiny of the dress and behavior of observant Muslim men and religious leaders is notably absent. Other studies may focus on examining forms of women’s leadership that models that of men, as this is regarded as a ‘novelty.’ One danger of this approach is that it tends to center male structures of leadership as standards by which other leadership forms are judged in cultures that have historically defined the roles of inner and outer spaces through a standard that starkly differs from the Western cultural lens through which they are often being examined.2 As a result, this approach may not only exoticize Muslim women in visible leadership roles, but also overlook prominent leadership roles both Muslim women and men have continuously played in closed and private spaces that have had a significant impact well beyond private quarters. This study examines a lacuna in our understanding of the published works of contemporary Muslim women in Damascus through outlining their contributions to Islamic thought at the end of the 20th century.

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Starting in the 1970s, women in Damascus have produced books on fiqh, Qurʾanic sciences, hadith sciences, theology (ʿaqı̄ da), supplications, spirituality, the prophetic biography (sı̄ ra), and more. Among the earliest of these books was a title on the Islamic laws related to worship compiled by Duriyya al-ʿAyta.̣ The work Fiqh al-ʿibā dā t is a book that outlines the laws of ritual purity, prayer, fasting, zakā t, and Hajj according to the Shā fi‘ı̄ school of law. The 19th and 20th centuries saw a transition in the Arab world from a system of learning based in the memorization of texts to a dependence on written materials taught in modern educational frameworks that mirrored European learning models. The prevalence of print and mass publication also changed the way knowledge was preserved and acquired. A great many people found difficulty or even a lack of interest in what many perceived as an outdated mode of learning religious studies through the memorization of poetry known as mutū n. A new way of transmitting and preserving Islamic knowledge was viewed as necessary to maintain the relevance of Islamic learning to a new generation of Muslims who were often urban and educated in European-influenced educational institutions that became prevalent in much of the Arab world in the 20th century. The new texts that were produced by these women scholars presented foundational Islamic knowledge extant in classical texts in a modern format that was accessible to this new generation of students. One of the solutions offered during the same period was that of publications of reformminded thinkers, commonly inspired by Muhammad ʿAbduh’s thought, to produce simple texts that bypassed many of the legal debates and differences in the Sunnı̄ schools of practice. Fiqh al-sunna, written by Sayyid Sā biq, could be characterized as such a work.3 This text was a response to the growing antipathy, among a wide array of Muslims, with what they viewed as an ossification of classical Sunnı̄ legal schools and the methods of transmission associated with them. It was also a response to the realities of a growing disinterest with religion as a whole during much of the first half of the 20th-century Arab world. Many members of traditional scholarly circles were critical of Sā biq’s efforts and regarded Fiqh al-sunna as being methodologically flawed in that it lacked any standard hermeneutic (usū ̣ l al-fiqh) for deriving Islamic law as well as determining which legal opinions were included and excluded in this work. Seeing the need to produce a simple work that made fiqh accessible to the lay person who had neither the time and commitment nor the specialized training to decipher traditional mutū n or treatises of Islamic law, while maintaining the integrity of the hermeneutics through which fiqh is derived, Ḥā jja Duriyya (as she was known) published her single volume book, Fiqh al-ʿibā dā t, according to the Shā fiʿı̄ legal school. This book presents the essential aspects of ritual worship according to the Shafiʿı̄ school of law in a simplified prose format that uses titles, subtitles, lists, and diagrams. In her foreword she explains that she has compiled the contents of classical works of Shā fiʿı̄ fiqh into a single volume, paying attention to avoid including lengthy discussions on legal details that are not relevant to a non-specialist’s daily practice. Thus, the author indicates that her work is intentionally structured in a style that simplifies the presentation of the basic ritual practice related to daily worship in accordance with mainstream positions of the Shā fiʿı̄ legal school, through eliminating superfluous material that can be found in further resources if desired. She also writes in her foreword that in order to make her work as accessible as possible, she has utilized a format similar to that of textbooks which includes a numbering scheme, with chapters, subsections, and lists.4 Her style is consistent and predictable throughout the work. In addition, she includes evidence from the Qurʾan and h ̣adith to demonstrate proofs which the Shā fiʿı̄ school of law has used in their legal rulings. The presentation of these are similarly clear and accurately cited to enable the reader to easily learn these proofs and do further research in more detailed classical works if one seeks to do so. 319

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In addition to the Fiqh al-ʿibā dā t being a distinctive work in that it makes classical information accessible in a non-classical format, this book of Islamic law is also distinguished for being authored by a woman. Ḥā jja Duriyya was a student of fiqh of the late Damascene scholar ʽAbd al-Karı̄ m al-Rifā ʽı̄ at a time when it was rare for women to study Islamic sciences. Many male scholars at the time even refused to teach women altogether. Shaykh ʿAbd al-Karı̄ m al-Rifā ʿı̄ was one of the most pre-eminent scholars of Damascus and his decision to counter the exclusion of women from religious learning would have a significant consequence, whose full extent he would not live to see. The young Duriyya al-ʿAytạ was among a group of women who studied the core classical texts of the Shā fiʿı̄ school, which included: al-Muqaddimat al-Had ̣ramiyya, Sharh ̣ al-Bayjū rı̄ , Sharh ̣ al-tah ̣rı̄ r, Mughnı̄ al-muh ̣tā j, Rawdat al-tā ̣ libı̄ n, and al-Majmū ʿ. She became the leading student in her class and used the expertise and permission (ijā za) she received to teach Shā fiʽı̄ fiqh to compose this contemporary book, Fiqh al-ʿibā dā t. With the publication of her work, Ḥā jja Duriyya played a leading role in initiating an intellectual revolution among women whom she taught, and produced a generation of teachers who would also teach fiqh to tens of thousands of other women and girls whose generation of mothers had limited access to traditional systems of classical Islamic learning, as they were institutions commonly dedicated to male students. Interestingly, this new access to Shā fiʿı̄ texts and teachers also led to a mass conversion of women raised as Ḥanafı̄ s in predominantly Ḥanafı̄ urban centers to accepting the Shā fiʿı̄ school of practice. As a result, it is not uncommon to find many families in places like Damascus where the male members of the same family are Ḥanafı̄ s and the women are Shā fiʿı̄ s. In addition to accessibility, many women intellectuals of this movement in Syria intentionally preferred the Shā fiʿı̄ school of law for what was perceived to be its more egalitarian approach to women’s issues in family life and religious practice. For example, while it is strongly discouraged (makrū h tah ̣rı̄ man) in the Ḥanafı̄ school for women to be imams in leading women in congregational worship, the Shā fı̄ ʿı̄ school regards the imamate of women leading women in prayer as both permissible and praiseworthy. This legal difference alone was sufficient cause, for a movement of religious women leading women, to give preference to adherence to the Shā fiʿı̄ school of law. Ḥajjā Duriyya’s Fiqh al-ʿı̄ bā dā t book was so well received that it went through several printed editions after each was sold out. In addition, this book led to a series of Fiqh alʿibā dā t books according to each of the four legal schools. Each of these books used the same simple and accessible format as the original Fiqh al-ʿibā dā t and each of the authors of this series were also qualified female scholars in the legal schools they wrote about. Fiqh alʿibā dā t according to the Ḥanafı̄ madhhab was published by Najā h ̣ al-Ḥalabı̄ . Fiqh al-ʿibā dā t according to the Mā likı̄ school of law was authored by Kawkab ʿUbayd, and finally Fiqh alʿibā dā t according to the Ḥanbalı̄ madhhab was authored by Suʿā d Zarzū r. Two other famous works compiled in 1994 and 1995 are: al-Jā miʿ fı̄ al-sı̄ rat al-nabawiyya and al-Mukhtasaṛ al-jā miʽ fı̄ sı̄ rat al-nabawiyya by Samira Zā yid. Samira Zā yid could arguably be considered one of the foremost scholars of this women’s movement in Syria as well as one of its key leaders. Her knowledge was encyclopedic, and her intellectual achievements were as renowned as was her spiritual discipline. Those who knew her said of her that she slept only a few hours at night and dedicated the entirety of the rest of her day to worship, scholarship, and teaching. The extent of her impact is immeasurable, as she taught countless numbers of students while serving as a spiritual mentor for even more women from around the world.

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Her closest students went on to be distinguished scholars in their own right, including the first woman to receive an ijā za or a certification in an unbroken chain of recital and mastery of the ten Qurʾanic recitations (ʿashr qiraʾā t) as well as another ijā za in the seven books of h ̣adiths, including their chains of transmitters (isnā ds) thus receiving the title, alḤā fiz ̣a al-Jā miʿa al-Muh ̣additha Shaykha Samar al-ʿAshsha, whose work will be mentioned below. Shaykha Samira’s magnum opus was her Jā miʿfı̄ sı̄ rat al-nabawiyya, which took approximately 20 years to research. It is made up of six oversized volumes that may equal around twice the number of bound texts by regular book standards today. What the author has done is collect every narration, h ̣adith, and/or report related to the biography of the Prophet, as well as any other information of historical relevance, into one single multivolume reference work organized chronologically by topic. This is not only an extraordinary scholarly achievement but also the first time all of these reports have been brought together in such a comprehensive manner. If one considers the tens of thousands of reports related to the prophetic biography (sı̄ ra) in the hundreds of volumes of h ̣adith-related works (prophetic traditions) such as the six canonical h ̣adith books, in addition to a variety of other similar sources such as the Musnads or h ̣adith compilations of Ah ̣mad b. Ḥanbal, Daraqatnı ̣ ̄ , Ibn Ḥibbā n, al-Haytamı̄ , and then adds hundreds if not thousands of volumes of other classical texts including biographical dictionaries such as Sı̄ rat al-Ḥalabiyya, Ṭabaqā t Ibn Saʽd, Usd alghā ba, the works of al-Ṭabarı̄ , Abū Zurʿa, and many others at a time when electronic databases were not available, it becomes clear why this work’s completion was regarded as such a significant accomplishment. After collecting every report in the classical texts into one place, Zā yid meticulously categorizes them chronologically and then divides them with subtitles based on subject. Each report has its full isnā d (chain of transmission) and matn (body of the report) variations as well as detailed footnotes with citations of each individual report as well as reports similar to it. Thus the Jā miʿ has become an unprecedented source for the prophetic biography in which a scholar seeking what the classical texts say about any particular incident in the life of the Prophet such as the ‘migration’ or ‘hijra’ can look up the incident in this work that is fully indexed (and has a seventh volume composed solely of historical maps) and can find what the various reports on this incident are by looking in one place. In addition, one can use the Jā miʿ to find the specific citations for where to find various reports on any topic related to the sı̄ ra as well as to examine the chain of transmission of the report and its strength. Her two volume abridgement of the multi-volume reference work is a more commonly used source because it brings together the reports within the Jā miʿ fı̄ al-sı̄ ra al-nabawiyya into two large volumes and is more appropriate for an advanced student of the prophetic biography who is looking for a linear narrative rather than a reference work. The Mukhtaṣ aṛ aljā miʿ fı̄ al-sı̄ rat al-nabawiyya does away with the chains of transmission (isnā ds) of each report (though their sources are still cited in footnotes), gives preference to strong reports when there is a contradiction with a weak one, and quotes fewer reports that depict similar incidents with minor variations. For further research on a particular historical event with a detailed exposition of the variant narratives and isnā ds, one can refer to the original unabridged work: al-Jā miʽ fı̄ al-sı̄ rat al-nabawiyya. The late Islamic scholar, Ramad ̣ā n al-Bū tı̄ ̣, who was Zā yid’s advisor at the University of Damascus’ Department of Islamic Law from which she received her doctorate of philosophy, writes a foreword to her abridgement of this work saying that ‘it is an effort that has surpassed—with thanks to God—those of the men of this era.’5 321

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The explicitly gendered language in al-Bū tı̄ ̣’s introduction is unusual. This type of an endorsement also appears in the introduction of other works by female Muslim scholars such as that of Samar al-ʿAshsha, which will be seen below. Perhaps one of the motives behind the gendered language in these types of endorsements by some of the most prominent male Muslim scholars was to break barriers that women faced in publishing their works in male-dominated scholastic fields, as well as to dissuade scepticism and unwarranted critique in societies influenced by implicit gender biases towards female scholarship. Zā yid later published another large work titled, Durū s min Sı̄ rat al-Nabawiyya or ‘Lessons from the Life of the Prophet.’ This work is a lengthy commentary and exegesis of much of the biographical material she cites in her earlier research. The three works of the Jā miʿ, Mukhtasar, ̣ and Dū rus combine to form what may qualify as the most comprehensive research on the biography of the Prophet Muhammad available today. Suʿā d Maybar is another female scholar in Damascus who composed a book on Islamic theology titled, ʿAqı̄ dat al-Tahwh ̄ ̣ıd.6 The book follows the main theological framework followed by the Ashʿarı̄ school of Sunnı̄ theology. Its format is similar to the Fiqh al-ʿibā dā t in terms of presentation in which much of the specialized polemics and theological debates are omitted in favor of limiting its content to essential information for the educated nonspecialist seeking a foundational understanding of Islamic theology. The book also uses prose in modern standard Arabic and explains much of the theological concepts such as the attributes of God and Islamic beliefs about the unseen in a clear discussion style presentation. This too is in contrast with the style of classical theological treatises which were commonly considered inaccessible to the common population whose models of learning had been shaped by modern education that no longer emphasized the memorization of mutū n or poetic treatises. Thus, the style of simplified written composition employed by the women scholars of Damascus, and many others who later emulated their success, was regarded as necessary to maintain the relevance of Islamic knowledge to an entirely new generation living in a modern era that marked a shift in the educational systems of a majority of Muslims in the post-colonial Arab world. Another publication is a compilation of biographical chapters on the Companions of the Prophet entitled, al-Nujū m fı̄ falak al-nubuwwa by Asmā ʾ Ṭabbaʿ which translates into ‘Stars in the Orbit of the Prophet,’ alluding to the oft-cited h ̣adith: ‘My Companions are like stars. Whichever you follow, you will be guided.’ The modern book commonly referenced for information about the prophetic Companions was al-Rijā l h ̣awl al-Rā sū ̣ l or ‘Men Around the Messenger.’7 As indicated by the title, these types of books tended to focus on the struggles and achievements of men during the lifetime of the Prophet while excluding women who were also central to supporting the Prophet Muhammad’s early mission. The new work which was printed in 2004 creates a significant paradigm shift in the presentation of this aspect of early Islamic history. One such shift is that it examines the important roles of early Muslim figures irrelevant of their gender. Additionally, it does not divide sections of the book by gender as some classical texts do, but rather integrates biographical entries of the men and women evenly throughout the work. This paradigmatic shift in views of early Islamic history that results from women’s Islamic scholarship is apparent from the onset where the first Companion listed is Khadı̄ ja, who was the wife of the Prophet. As the chapter elucidates, her being chosen as the first biography in a compilation of biographies of the Companions (sah ̣ ̣ā ba) is due to her rank as being the first prophetic Companion. While other books have framed Khadı̄ ja as being the first to convert to Islam among the women or they have framed her as the first of the ‘mother of the believers (wives of the Prophet),’ she is framed here as simply the first Companion, which is 322

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in fact accurate. Khadı̄ ja’s gender is irrelevant to her biography in this text. She is presented as the first person to ever believe in the Prophet’s message and the first to love and support him in his mission to teach Islam. What is also interesting in this work’s presentation of Khadı̄ ja’s role is her portrayal as not a passive participant in the call to Islam who happened to become ‘lucky’ when her husband became a Prophet, but rather that she sought Muh ̣ammad out as a young man and took the initiative to marry him because she in fact believed that he might be the long awaited Prophet. Ṭabbā ʿ introduces the biography of Khadı̄ ja with an often overlooked tradition in Ṭabaqā t Ibn Saʿd which states a man (presumably a monk or a wanderer) came near a group of women gathered around the Kaʿba and said to them, ‘O women of Tayma, a prophet named Ah ̣mad will be sent from your city with the message of God. Whosoever of you has the ability to be his wife, should not hesitate.’8 The narrative goes on to state that some of the women mocked him and others cursed him. However, among this group of women was Khadı̄ ja, who was the only one who listened attentively and reflected on his words. This type of framing is reflective of the way gender balance in the production of religious scholarship can often be transformative through offering new perspectives that are more inclusive of women’s historical roles. This is evidenced in the reference above that has been present in classical texts for over a millennium, and yet has been commonly absent in narratives by male biographers of Khadı̄ ja. Other examples of this type of reframing that occurs through women’s scholarship is the way in which Khadı̄ ja’s nobility is portrayed by her later biographers. Prior to marrying the Prophet, Khadı̄ ja’s examination of her future husband’s character is often presented in other sources as a reflection of the ethical virtues of Muh ̣ammad. While this is not denied in Ṭabbā ʿ’s book, as a biography of Khā dı̄ ja, the author frames her presentation differently by highlighting Khadı̄ ja’s own sagaciousness and her decision to pursue Muh ̣ammad in marriage as being a deliberate decision on her part by a twice-widowed wealthy woman who had no need to remarry except for her having seen in Muh ̣ammad’s character a good man with potentially an extraordinary future as the long-awaited prophet of Arabia. When Muhammad spends lengthy periods of time in retreat prior to the advent of his prophecy, Khadı̄ ja’s support is emphasized and her unusually tolerant response to the long absences of her husband is suggested as further possible evidence that she was expecting his prophecy. The case for Khadı̄ ja’s expectation is made even stronger with the presentation of her supportive response to her husband’s claim that he had received divine communication while in the cave of Ḥirā ʾ as well as her resolve in her reassurance of Muh ̣ammad when he seeks consolation in his wife. The biography in this book, Nujū m fı̄ falak al-nubuwwa, relies on the same well-known h ̣adiths or reports often quoted from sources like Ibn Hishā m’s Sı̄ ra or the Ṭabaqā t al-kubrā of Ibn Saʽd, but the author interprets them from a perspective that views Khadı̄ ja’s role as being one which was proactive and decisive, rather than passive and unplanned. She is a woman who actively believes and seeks out Muhammad in marriage not only because she is impressed with his personal qualities, but also for his potential as the awaited Prophet that had been predicted. The book highlights that she was the first to believe in Muhammad even before he believed in himself. She is then foundational in her support of the early Muslim community when they were weak and in dire need of her. In this text, she is framed as the bedrock upon which the Prophet depended upon for support and thus also foundational to the growth of the nascent Islamic community. This presentation of a strong woman who was an essential figure in the Prophet’s mission is a radical departure from the way women were commonly portrayed as marginal figures in other popular works and some classical texts. 323

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Furthermore, what is significant about the work by Ṭabbā ʿ is the way she comprises her research in which she presents women as central figures from the same historical reference works such as biographical dictionaries and h ̣adith literature, which have been used by male Muslim scholars for centuries while often overlooking significant aspects of these references that highlight these women. In other words, Ṭabbā ʿ did not create new materials but rather discovered historical information on Muslim women that was always there in the sources but had commonly been overlooked by male scholarship. The difference in the way women’s roles and contributions are both portrayed and highlighted demonstrates the distinctive contributions that women make not only as historians and scholars but also as interpreters of those histories and religious texts which can often be reframed with the presence of women’s voices once they have access to the production of Islamic scholarship. Finally, another foundational female scholar who has made critical scholarly contributions in the late 20th century in Damascus is Samar al-ʿAshsha. In the late 1990s, she published her magnum opus, al-Bast fı̄ al-qiraʾā t al-ʿashr (The Simplification of the Ten Readings), which is a distinguished reference work consisting of six hefty volumes that details the Qurʾan verse by verse, outlining the ten variant readings of each verse, through the use of color coding and charting. This new way of presenting the information present in classical poems of major Qurʾanic scholars, such as al-Jazarı̄ or al-Shā tibı ̣ ̄ , has made learning the ten readings (qirā ʾat) significantly more accessible to the contemporary student whose reliance on writing has made visual presentation an integral part of his or her learning process. AlʿAshsha’s multi-volume book has been regarded as an invaluable contribution to the field of Qurʾanic sciences. Additionally, many of the most prominent reciters and scholars of the Qurʾan wrote forwards to her work praising and recommending it including Shaykh Muh ̣yiddı̄ n al-Kurdı̄ , Shaykh Kurayyim Rā jih ̣, Shaykh Ayman Swayd, Shaykh ʿAbd alRazzā q al-Ḥalabı̄ , and Shaykh Nū r al-Dı̄ n al-ʿItr. Shaykh Kurayyim Rā jih ̣ writes: The esteemed author, sister Samar Ḍiyā al-ʿAshsha has expended an intense amount of effort into this … her style is both easy and brilliant. It neither bores the specialist nor overwhelms the beginner. Her efforts are one proof among many proofs of a vast intellectual revival among Muslim women, particularly in the blessed land of Damascus. This revival brings back the learning that the women of the S ̣ah ̣aba (Companions of the Prophet), the Tā biʽı̄ n (Followers of the Companions), and their followers had during the first [Islamic] centuries, in terms of faith, [proper] creed, enlightened thinking, sophisticated Qurʾanic understanding, constructive knowledge, and work … I recommend this book to be published … because of what is in it from great benefit and precise accuracy, as well as what it reveals about the ability of a woman, upon receiving the proper Islamic training, to be equal to a man in her contribution to the fields of Islamic knowledge and possibly even surpass him.9 In addition to her mastery of the Qurʾan and her rank as a reciter of the ten canonical readings, Samar al-ʿAshsha has also achieved another milestone for women through her scholarship in the field of h ̣adith studies. Al-ʿAshsha memorized and studied the six canonical h ̣adith books of al-Bukhā rı̄ , Muslim, al-Tirmidhı̄ , Abū Dā wū d, al-Nasā ’ı̄ , and Ibn Mā ja along with al-Muwattạ ̄ ̣ ʾ of Imam Mā lik. She also memorized and mastered the knowledge related to each of the transmitters in the chains of transmission (isnā ds) of each h ̣adith in these books. Upon examination, al-ʿAshsha became the first woman known of in the 324

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contemporary period to receive an ijā za of mastery in each of these h ̣adith compilations through one of the few remaining h ̣adith transmitters (muh ̣addiths): Nū r al-Dı̄ n al-ʿItr who was the son-in-law and most prominent student of the late h ̣ā fiz ̣ and muh ̣addith, ʿAbd Allā h Sirā j al-Dı̄ n. Thus, Samar al-ʿAshsha herself earned the title of ‘muhadditha’ (h ̣adith master) and later devoted her attention to forming an institute to train selective groups of promising women as muhaddithas and scholars of h ̣adith. In the past two decades, due to her efforts and the circle of students she personally trained in h ̣adith to work with her, the number of women muh ̣addithas trained under her can be estimated to number in the hundreds. In the field of h ̣adith, Samar al-ʿAsha has thus far written al-Taysı̄ r fı̄ h ̣ifz ̣ al-asā nı̄ d: asā nı̄ d sah ̣ ̄ ̣ıh ̣ al-imā m Bukhā rı̄ (The Facilitator in Memorizing Chains of Transmission: the Chains of Imā m Bukhā rı̄ ). This large two volume work facilitates the memorization and mastery of the individual transmitters through the use of color codes, symbols representing transmitters, and an illustrated charting system that helps the student of h ̣adith in visualizing and remembering individual transmitters and their students in all of the chains of transmission found in al-Bukhā rı̄ ’s compilation of sound traditions. She has also written al-Madkhal ilā dirā sat alh ̣adı̄ th wa al-sunna (An Introduction to the Study of Ḥadith and Sunna), as well as Muqtafa ̣ ̄t min kutub al-shurū h ̣ (Excerpts from Books of Commentaries). Finally, she has a small book of supplications known as Majā lis al-nū r fı̄ al-sala ̣ ̄ tı̄ ‘alā al-rasū ̣ l or ‘Gatherings of Illumination in Sending Blessings upon the Best of Creation.’ In 2006, Shaykha Samar al-ʿAshsha opened a distinctive women’s h ̣adith training academy in the quarters of old Damascus. After obtaining permission from the Ministry of Endowments for its use, she had a valuable section of abandoned rooms that are a part of the Umayyad Mosque renovated. This new institute became known as, Madrasat al-Ḥadı̄ th al-Nuriyya li-l-Inā th or the Nuriyya Ḥadith Institute for Women, which is named after Nū r al-Dı̄ n al-Zanjı̄ , who had originally designated part of this building, among other similar structures he had supported by religious endowments, as a center of learning for students of sacred knowledge in the 12th century. Among the reasons this school is distinctive is because it includes in its structure the cell that al-Ghazā lı̄ is known to have retreated in during his sojourn in Damascus, which prompted him to write his foundational work: Ih ̣yā ʾ ʿulū m al-dı̄ n. Al-Ghazā lı̄ ’s cell is currently used as a library in which women come to study, research, and transmit the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad. Perhaps, it is symbolic of the intellectual progress made by Muslim women scholars in the past decades that alGhazā lı̄ ’s cell is the same space in which future women h ̣adith specialists (muh ̣addithas) who are ready to be tested for certification (ijā za) in the various books of hadith meet with prominent male and female h ̣adith scholars of Damascus who visit the institute and use this room to assess their mastery of the prophetic tradition.

Notes 1 For studies on women’s Islamic movements in Syria see: Islam, S., 2011. The Qubaysiyyā t: The Growth of An International Muslim Women’s Revivalist Movement from Syria 1960–2008. In: M. Bano and H. Kalmbach, eds., Women, Leadership, and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Authority, 1st ed. Leiden: Brill, pp.161–183; Kalmbach, H., 2008. Social and Religious Change in Damascus: One Case of Female Islamic Religious Authority. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 35(1), pp.37–57; and Imady, O., 2016. Organisationally Secular: Damascene Islamist Movements and the Syrian Uprising. Syrian Secularism: Intellectual and Organisational Narratives, 8(1), pp.66–90.

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2 For a related discussion of inner and outer spaces as conceived in many Muslims lands as well as the spatial dimensions of gender and power see: Peirce, L., 1993. The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.8–12. 3 See: Sabiq, S., 1969. Fiqh Al-Sunna. Beirut: Dā r al-Kitā b al-ʿArabı̄ . 4 For the author’s methodology see: al-ʿAyta,̣ D., 1989. Fiqh Al-ʿibā dā t ʿalā Madhhab Al-Shā fiʿı̄ . Damascus: Matbaʿat al-Sabā h ̣, pp.3–4. ̣ 5 See: Ramad ̣ā n al-Bū ti’s ̣ introduction in, Zayid, S., 1995. Mukhtasaṛ Al-Jā miʿ Fı̄ Sı̄ rat Al-Nabawiyya. Damascus: Matbaʿat al-ʿIlmiyya, p.12. ̣ 6 There is limited biographical information available about this author. The book has recently been reprinted and edited under the name of Samira Zā yid mentioned earlier. Women in Damascus sometimes did not use their own names on their publications due to safety concerns. It is possible that this was the case with this particular text. 7 See: Khā lid, K., 2000. Rijā l Ḥawl Al-Rasū l. Beirut: Dā r al-Fikr. This text has been commonly used in the Muslim world as a contemporary source on the lives of the disciples of the Prophet. 8 Saʿd, M., 2001. In: A. ʿUmar, ed., Ṭabaqā t al-kubrā . Cairo: Maktabat Khā njı̄ , 8, p.15. 9 ʿAshsha, S., 2004. Al-Basṭ Fı̄ Al-Qirā ʾā t Al-ʿashr. Damascus: Maktabat al-Salam, pp.7–8. This quote is in a separate introductory volume labeled as ‘al-Muqaddima.’

Further reading Bano, M., 2017. Female Islamic Education Movements: The Re-democratisation of Islamic Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This book explores the educational networks of women in Syria, northern Nigeria, and Pakistan, which facilitate serious textual study among educated women. Bano, M. and Kalmbach, H., 2012. Women, Leadership, and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority. Leiden: Brill. This edited volume explores recent developments in female religious authority in global Muslim contexts. Sayeed, A., 2013. Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This book explores the historical roles that women have played in cultivating Islamic learning and spreading traditional Islamic knowledge.

References al-ʿAyta,̣ D., 1989. Fiqh Al-ʿibā dā t ʿalā Madhhab Al-Shā fiʿı̄ . Damascus: Matbaʿat al-saba ̣ ̄ h ̣, pp.3–4. ʿAshsha, S., 1998. al-Taysı̄ r fı̄ h ̣ifz ̣ al-asā nı̄ d: asā nı̄ d sah ̣ ̄ ̣ıh ̣ al-imā m Bukhā rı̄ . 2 vols. Damascus: Maktabat alsalā m. ———, 1999. al-Madkhal ilā dirā sat al-h ̣adı̄ th wa al-sunna. Damascus: Maktabat al-salā m. ———, 2004. Al-Basṭ Fı̄ Al-Qirā ʾā t Al-ʿashr. Damascus: Maktabat al-salā m, pp.7–8. ———, 2012. Gatherings of Illumination in Sending Blessings upon the Best of Creation. Translated from Arabic by F. Salem. Chicago: Nur Publications. Ḥalabı̄ , N., 1986. Fiqh al-ʿibā dā t ʿalā madhhab al-Ḥanafı̄ . Damascus: Maktabat al-salā m. Imady, O., 2016. Organisationally Secular: Damascene Islamist Movements and the Syrian Uprising. Syrian Secularism: Intellectual and Organisational Narratives, 8(1), pp.66–90. Islam, S., 2011. The Qubaysiyyā t: The Growth of an International Muslim Women’s Revivalist Movement from Syria 1960–2008. In: M. Bano and H. Kalmbach, eds., Women, Leadership, and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Authority, 1st ed. Leiden: Brill, pp.161–183. Kalmbach, H., 2008. Social and Religious Change in Damascus: One Case of Female Islamic Religious Authority†. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 35(1), pp.37–57. Khā lid, K., 2000. Rijā l Ḥawl Al-Rasū l. Beirut: Dā r al-Fikr. Maybar, S., n/d. ʿAqı̄ dat al-tawh ̄ ̣ıd fı̄ -l-kitā b wa al-sunna. Damascus: Maktabat al-salā m. Peirce, L., 1993. The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.8–12. Sabiq, S., 1969. Fiqh Al-Sunna. Beirut: Dā r al-Kitā b al-ʿArabı̄ . Saʿd, M., 2001. In: A. ʿUmar, ed., Ṭabaqā t al-kubrā . Cairo: Maktabat Khā njı̄ , p.15. Ṭabbā ʿ, A., 2004. Al-Nujū m fı̄ falak al-nubuwwa. Damascus: Maktabat al-salā m. ʿUbayd, K., n/d. Fiqh al-ʿibā dā t ʿalā madhhab al-Malikı̄ . Damascus: Maktabat al-salā m. Zarzū r, S., n/d. Fiqh al-ʿibā dā t ‘ala madhhab al-Ḥanbalı̄ . Damascus: Maktabat al-salā m.

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22 HUMAN RIGHTS, GENDER, AND THE STATE Islamic perspectives Shannon Dunn

Arguments about Islam and human rights have had a charged history. Anti-Muslim polemicists declare the incompatibility of Islam and human rights, in order to assert Western cultural superiority and at times, to defend Western political intervention in Muslim lands. Muslim critics of rights discourse often highlight the hypocrisy of Western countries in their selective implementation of rights. Some scholars have minimized the relevance of human rights discourse in Islamic thought and politics, on account of the association of human rights with colonial or neo-colonial projects. These characterizations belie the complexity of human rights discourses within Islamic thought, however. If we want to understand the relationship between Islam and human rights, we need to account for the interactions between the state, Muslim communities, and how people within those groups interpret and apply human rights principles. This chapter examines international human rights discourse among Muslim thinkers, specifically in terms of arguments about the nature and scope of women’s rights. Debates regarding gender roles and women’s rights form a key part of the contemporary discourse on international human rights and Islam. This component is integrally related to practices of family law, the codification of the Shariʿa, and the emergence of postcolonial political Islam in the latter half of the 20th century. Rather than treat the topic of Islam and human rights abstractly, it is necessary to look at the historical events and political and social developments that have shaped the present arguments on Islam and human rights. In particular, I focus on the interrelated nature of arguments about women’s rights and the political and religious rights of the Muslim community to self-determination. In political philosophy, self-determination is often related to state sovereignty, or the notion that the discrete nation-state in which one lives – and not a particular religious institution or another authority – is the sole legal and political authority. This concept presupposes that there exists a distinct group of people who embody the nation as citizens, and that the nation represents the collective will of its citizens. Many Muslim communities were forced to relinquish control of their legal and political structures during the colonial period, which had consequences for the importance many Muslims have placed on selfdetermination in the postcolonial period. One way to think about this issue is that political

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self-determination in places like Palestine (and in other former colonies) has attracted a lot of attention, particularly in Islamic theologies that argue for the theo-political necessity of some kind of Islamic ‘state’. The chapter begins with the origin and reception of international human rights texts among Muslims in the mid-20th century, noting the tensions that arose during international drafting sessions and in the production of Islamic texts on human rights. I then highlight the ongoing role of personal status or family law as a site in which Muslim women’s relationship to the larger Muslim community is negotiated. Arguments regarding women’s rights in the tradition have been refracted through the lens of Islamic identity and politics since the colonial period. Finally, I address how a few prominent Muslim intellectuals have utilized human rights discourse to advocate for women’s rights in light of the complex political and theological realities Muslims face.

Islamic engagement with human rights discourse after the Universal Declaration The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted in 1948, after the atrocities of the two world wars, the gross abandonment of the rule of law in Nazi Germany, and the decimation of the European Jewish population. The Declaration was a novel concept in European political rights, insofar as it applied to persons regardless of nation or territory. Although the UDHR had a precedent in the European tradition of the rights of man, the seven drafting sessions of the document involved representatives from non-European, and several Muslim-majority, countries. Despite their participation in the drafting of the Declaration and the two international covenants that followed,1 representatives from Muslim-majority countries expressed concerns about global disparities between colonizing and colonized countries. There were several areas of tension between Muslim-majority countries and their European counterparts directly and indirectly related to colonial history: freedom of religion, gender equality, and self-determination. The concern about freedom of religion stemmed from the history of Christian missionaries in Islamic lands, particularly in the context of colonial domination of Muslim populations. Colonizers had criticized Muslims for their ‘backwards’ ideas about women’s roles in society, often hypocritically (for example, women in Britain were not allowed to vote until 1916). In Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights, Roland Burke traces the influence of the process of decolonization on the human rights program more generally. His basic argument is that the politics of anti-colonialism both advanced and obstructed the progress of international human rights (2010, 6). Representatives from Arab, Asian, and African nations played a major role in advancing the human rights program of the 1950s and 1960s, making arguments for the right of self-determination of colonies but also for the universality of human rights. Burke points out that these representatives, such as Bedia Afnan of Iraq, articulated strong reasons for adopting universal human rights and rejecting cultural relativism. In fact, cultural relativism ‘was once a favorite argument of Western colonial powers, who feared universal human rights as a threat to their rule’ (2010, 143). This period stands in contrast to that of the later 1960s and early 1970s, with the rise of more authoritarian governments in Asia and Africa. Coinciding with the development of authoritarian politics were arguments about self-determination that more fully embraced forms of cultural relativism, which involved backsliding from human rights commitments.

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In terms of Muslim responses to political changes in the late 1960s, Ann Elizabeth Mayer (1999) argues that concerns about Western hegemony came to fruition during the Arab– Israeli War of 1967. Western military powers were consolidated and Western countries widely criticized secular pan-Arab movements. From that point, Muslim participants in the international human rights discourse began to utilize Islamic sources, in particular the Qurʾan, in their thinking about international human rights. This shift also corresponded with the growth of Islamism, a twentieth-century political movement in which interpreters looked to the Qurʾan and the Shariʿa as offering an alternative framework for government (hakimiyya) to secular regimes. The Charter of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which had 57 member states, was founded in 1972; 40 of these countries are Muslim-majority countries, and the OIC claims authority as the mouthpiece of the Islamic world. This group authored the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in 1990, a document which draws heavily on the Qurʾan and hadith as primary sources for human rights.2 In the Cairo Declaration, the authors affirm the civilizing role of Islam in human life, and they incorporate earlier criticisms of the UDHR, specifically dealing with articles pertaining to gender, religious freedom, and self-determination.3 In contrast to the UDHR’s Article 16 stressing gender equality in marriage, Article 6 of the Cairo Declaration maintains that men and women have distinct rights and duties, which follows from the classical tradition of Islamic law. Article 6 asserts a concept of gender complementarity in contrast to a concept of gender equality. Khaled Abou El Fadl (2003) explains the deleterious effects the practice and memory of colonialism has had on the Islamic reception of human rights. Through Western ‘civilizing missions’, many Muslims learned to distrust the European natural law tradition, and came to view rights as entirely political and plagued by Western hypocrisy. According to thinkers like 20th-century Egyptian dissident Sayyid Qutb, human rights were a tool for the promotion of Islamic inferiority. Islamic rights documents, such as the Cairo Declaration, were issued to refute this sense of inferiority and assert Islamic superiority, which Abou El Fadl argues did little to actually develop resources on human rights within the Islamic tradition. From the inception of international human rights discourse, the question of women’s rights was an area of contention among international delegates. The issue of women’s equality was situated among other issues related to colonialism and post-colonialism: the right of Muslim states to self-determination, and later, these states’ ability to govern according to Islamic principles. The Cairo Declaration expresses a wider nexus of concern related to suspicion about Western control and hegemony, and gender figures prominently in this debate.

Muslim women’s human rights and personal status (family) law Debates about women’s human rights are rarely only about defining, preventing, or redressing harm to women. In the context of Muslim disagreement with secular conceptions of gender equality, other grievances have been at play. Why have women’s rights been a consistent focal point for debate in discourses dealing with international human rights? The narrative about the incompatibility of the Islamic tradition and women’s human rights fails to differentiate the discrete elements involved: the role of the state, the activism of ordinary citizens (whether religiously or secularly informed), and the influence of both nonstate institutions and other states. Thus within Muslim communities there are radically different ideas about women’s human rights – what they entail, how they are best protected, and so on – and this diversity of views is rarely acknowledged by the voices considered the 330

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most authoritative. This serves as a reminder to think critically about whose work and ideas are considered authoritative when it comes to human rights in the Muslim context. Documents such as the Cairo Declaration articulate a particular view of the relationship between Islam, human rights, and gender, but do not acknowledge the variety of perspectives inherent in the Islamic social, political, and intellectual milieu. In postcolonial Islamic contexts, we must address the critical role that family law (understood as part of the Shariʿa) has played in defining women’s roles and how some Muslims have understood it as the basis for authentic Islamic identity in the postcolonial world. Several scholars working in law and anthropology have drawn attention to the symbolic capital women have as the preservers of culture. Women’s rights as a category have functioned as a site of symbolic contest over the interpretation of culture and tradition in the postcolonial period. In Muslim South Asia in the second half of the 20th century, Bruce Lawrence observes that women came to represent cultural values for men and women alike. Furthermore, ‘court cases involving women’s legal rights not only reflect boundary issues between Muslims and other communities, they also heighten tensions about the maintenance of these boundaries’ (1994, 165). In examining the infamous case of Shah Bano in India, Lawrence shows the positioning of religious identity against gender, a not-uncommon postcolonial reality. Shah Bano’s case highlighted the role of secular courts in arbitrating divorce and spousal maintenance in India in the 1980s. Her husband exploited Muslim Personal Status Law to absolve himself of financial responsibility that was required by secular law, and the secular court allowed him to do so. Shah Bano fought the court rulings that disadvantaged her, but with little success. This legal confrontation between the rights of Shah Bano as a member of a religious minority group in India, on the one hand, and the rights of Shah Bano as a woman, on the other, had been a long time in the making. During European colonization, the methods of Islamic Shariʿa were altered by the colonial structures of governance through codification.4 This process resulted in the loss of interpretive flexibility within Islamic jurisprudence. While colonial administrators and Muslim national assemblies modernized most areas of the law, family or personal status law did not undergo substantial reform. Anver Emon argues that this neglect of family law reform ‘arguably placated Islamists who felt threatened by modernization and considered the preservation of traditional Islamic family law to be necessary to maintain an Islamic identity’ (2012, 207). Thus, both colonial powers and local governing bodies paved the way for inevitable conflict when Muslim women sought greater rights within the so-called private sphere: rights pertaining to divorce, child custody, maintenance, and so on. The concept of the private sphere, as a space distinct from public political life, is a modern social construct that frequently often operates in ways contrary to the expansion of women’s rights. In Western liberal democracies, for example, the divide between the public and private spheres has historically allowed for male heads of household to have more control over matters within the home.5 Since the colonial era, Muslim personal status law created a space under the control of Muslim male heads of household.6 Alison Boden observes, ‘Human rights laws are significantly less effective in their applicability to the private sphere, and national and local governments frequently show themselves unwilling to prosecute rights violations that happen to women within their families or communities’ (2007, 5). Even the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) addresses discrimination against women mainly within the public sphere.7

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When discussing the legal challenges of regulating behavior in the private sphere, we encounter the question of whether, and in what capacity, the state may intervene in family affairs. As noted in the colonial context, the imperial powers took a ‘hands-off’ approach to family law, with the compliance of local Muslim authorities. This move designated authority to the Muslim community, and specifically to Muslim male elites within it, to implement and enforce religious and cultural traditions and customs. But, as in the case of Shah Bano, this separate sphere of authority could be exploited to deny women the ability to divorce or receive adequate maintenance after divorce. The democratic state is responsible for protecting individuals before the law in an equal manner. This equality pertains to persons regardless of gender and religious identity, but how is it possible for the state to enforce equality when it has effectively abdicated its power in the private sphere? Secular democratic states have often imperfectly managed the tension arising from the need to respect religious pluralism and multiculturalism, on the one hand, and to pursue gender equality for citizens, on the other. With regard to Muslim populations specifically, some democratic states have considered allowing for religious arbitration courts to deal with matters of family law, such as Ontario, Canada. Shariʿa courts function as alternative dispute resolution mechanisms for Islamic couples, promising to ensure a degree of religious authenticity separate from the secular state. Ostensibly, by granting these communities a measure of freedom in determining family matters, the state exhibits religious tolerance and may exert some regulating force over the rulings. Religious arbitration courts in Western democracies do not have much legal power, though they may have some cultural capital for the communities they serve. Samia Bano’s (2012) study of South Asians in Britain examines Muslim women’s use of shariʿa councils to obtain divorce. As Bano argues, these courts are guided by norms dictated by ethnic kin networks as well as Islamic law.8 Ontario, Canada has allowed families to use arbitration with regard to disputes, but ruled against permitting religious courts this power. Notably, the Canadian Council of Muslim Women was active in circumscribing the power of Shariʿa tribunals out of fear that they would undermine women’s equality before the law. Explicit legal rulings against religious courts may have the effect of driving the practice of religious arbitration underground, outside of the purview of the state. Ayelet Schachar has argued that unregulated religious arbitration courts represent the challenge of privatized diversity, in which ‘members of religious minorities rely on private law mechanisms to import religious norms into dispute resolution between consenting parties occurring under the jurisdiction of the secular state’ (2010, 115). Muslim women are often at the center of debates involving the authority of the secular state, citizenship, and the nature of Islamic community and identity. Schachar maintains that the state, as it foremost has an interest in protecting women as equal citizens, should not outright ban religious arbitration courts. Rather than an either/or situation in which Muslim women are forced to choose membership in their religious community over the rights guaranteed by the state, Schachar suggests a way for cooperation between the two entities to ensure the best outcomes for women. The shape of family law tends to look different in Muslim-majority countries, insofar as the shariʿa is not relegated to only the private sphere. In these countries, the state plays more of a direct role in interpreting Islamic law than a secular state, which is also a modern phenomenon. Even in Muslim-majority countries, however, family law serves as a major site for the production and preservation of Islamic identity, and the Islamic content of family law is not neatly separable from cultural and kinship customs.

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Take, for example, Morocco. Morocco’s legal system was divided under French colonial rule, with family law falling under the umbrella of the shariʿa. Kinship networks form an integral part of how personal status law (the mudawwana) has been interpreted by the state since its promulgation after Moroccan independence. Muslim women’s grassroots activism – both in secular and religious forms – has had to address these various dimensions of the law in order to enact reforms to the law. Zakia Salime argues that the monarchy used the mudawwana to legitimate its own authority and to create a national identity: The monarchy, backed by nationalist leaders, managed to place the religious identity of the state at the heart of the Moroccan family, and to make any change to family law a threat to the unity of the small family before the big one, the nation. (2011, 204) The monarchy’s control of family law would eventually be challenged by several parties – secular feminists, the ʿulama (traditional scholars of Islam), and Islamist groups. Ziba Mir-Hosseini observes a larger pattern among family law reforms within Muslimmajority countries in the 20th century. She maintains that: the effect of these reforms was not only to give the state unprecedented authority to enforce its chosen prescription for marriage procedures and family practices, but also to entrench patriarchal interpretations of the sacred texts and the legal and ethical assumptions behind them. (2015, 19) In other words, these legal reforms authorized the state-as-interpreter of the Islamic tradition, and in the process promoted and solidified the state’s interest in preserving patriarchal authority. The mid-20th century also saw the rise of a global Islamic political movement and transnational secular feminism, which reacted differently to secular state authority in the Muslim world. While secular feminists employed explicitly the language of international human rights to make claims, Islamists utilized a conception of their religious tradition in order to critique the status quo. Any salient discussion of women’s rights in postcolonial Islamic contexts must account for arguments related to family law and related reforms in various national settings. Specifically, family law operates as a site of Islamic identity formation that may be mobilized to affirm or deny the state’s authority and legitimacy. Activists appropriate a concept of human rights, grounded in secular or religious traditions, to make claims against state abuses within the realm of family law as well as within other spheres of life (economic, religious, etc.). Muslim feminists may also utilize a rights-informed hermeneutics to challenge their coreligionists’ patriarchal interpretations of sacred texts and the political actions that follow from these interpretations. The relationship between state authority, Muslim identity, and women’s human rights is complex. In light of this, I wish to emphasize two points. First, legal articulations of women’s rights are a product of negotiation and debate, sometimes between secular and religious factions, but also among diverse Muslim religious authorities and groups. This pertains to a larger question about the nature of religious authority itself in the postcolonial world, which Qasim Zaman defines as a matter of ‘unrelenting contestation’ (2012, 33). Debates about women’s human rights have become, among other things, representative of contestations of power. Second, some Muslim scholars, while acknowledging the reality of claims 333

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to authority that underlie human rights questions, have attempted to distinguish human rights as a religious imperative that cannot be reduced to questions of political interest and authority. Their arguments do not render Zaman’s observation invalid, of course. Rather, they seek to make a distinction between human rights discourse and discourses pertaining to political interest and self-determination. In the following section, I will address their arguments.

Formulating human rights in Islam: distinguishing women’s rights from questions of political self-determination David Little (2015) has argued that international human rights provides one of the best mechanisms for criticizing state abuses of power, given its independence from national interests. But the limits of implementation, and at a very basic level, the reality of state hypocrisy in respecting human rights, can be vexing for human rights advocates. Without getting into a detailed discussion of the origins of sovereign nationhood and its strengths and weaknesses, it is necessary to point out that the state remains at best an imperfect instrument for rights implementation and protection. The rule of law can be a mechanism for limiting arbitrary rule and dictatorship, but nevertheless, the state may deny rights to a minority group for the benefit of the majority, for example, or limit women’s rights in the interest of patriarchal power. State rulers often prioritize their interests and preserve their power as the political system allows. The United Nations or other states may have limited ability to stop abuses of power, and this remains a major practical difficulty for supporters of international human rights. Nevertheless, it is important not to strictly identify the project of human rights with the success or failure of a state’s practice regarding rights. Both supporters and ethical critics of human rights may agree on at least one element behind the rise international human rights: the tendency of state power to be corrupt, and its propensity to deny its citizens (and those of other nations) their human or natural rights. Islamists who are skeptical of human rights as promoting Western power are often skeptical on account of the way that powerful Western nations have propped up corrupt state leaders in the Arab world in order to promote Western interests. They turn to an interpretation of the Islamic tradition as offering an alternative to the current political arrangement, and their interpretation is informed by a nexus of concerns we have been addressing: concerns about self-determination and the role of women and the family in authenticating Islamic identity. For many Islamists, the antidote to the corruption of the postcolonial state is better adherence to a pure Islamic tradition, and they invoke a version of the shariʿa that suits their political and religious goals. Documents like the Cairo Declaration assert an Islamist political vision, which includes a particular definition of gender roles. The conditions of colonialism and postcolonialism helped to engender a hyper-patriarchal vision of Islam in which Islamic identity is bound up with neo-traditional gender roles, and is articulated over and against statist and/or secular formulations of gender and the family (Chaudhry 2013). It is important to keep in mind that this is not the only possible way to interpret the Islamic tradition, however, and that Muslim advocates of human rights have located foundations for rights within their tradition. Thus, we should attend to scholarship on human rights in Islam which emphasizes the dynamism between Islamic teachings and international human rights. The authors of this scholarship do not acquiesce to the political status quo of corruption and abuses, but rather envision critical syntheses between the tradition of human rights and Islamic theological mandates. Their respective views of women’s 334

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rights, in particular, demand our attention because they are central to their vision of a just order. Most critically, they work to disentangle the question of human rights from political self-determination. As we have seen, the yoking of self-determination with strict gender roles has been a hallmark of Islamist discourse on human rights.9 Abdullahi An-Naʿim has argued for the place of international human rights within Islam, but has rejected an apologetic approach characteristic of some Muslim discourses around rights. Instead of arguing for the supremacy of the shariʿa as a system of rights, An-Naʿim (1990) confronts the inconsistencies between shariʿa as a pre-colonial system of law and the modern human rights regime. He notes that Islamist political programs have made the adoption of the shariʿa a litmus test for Islamic authenticity in several Muslim-majority states. Due to the ways in which shariʿa was codified, and to factors involving the lack of reform of the shariʿa – particularly in terms of matters related to gender equality and religious freedom – An-Naʿim emphasizes the discontinuity between the norms of the shariʿa and those of international human rights law. Another aspect of difference pertains to the historical and foundational differences between the shariʿa and human rights. Rights in the former system are given based on religious and gendered classifications, whereas human rights are granted on the basis of one’s human dignity. In focusing on the human rights of women in Islam specifically, An-Naʿim identifies as problematic the teachings on qawama (male guardianship of women) and hijab (veiling). These teachings, he observes, have the potential to exclude women from participation in public life, and contribute to a sense that women are at least socially inferior to their male counterparts. He argues that the influence of shariʿa within the home, related to the codification of family law, has made it difficult for many Muslim-majority countries to ratify human rights instruments (1990, 95). An-Naʿim importantly notes that Islamic views of the authority and correct place of the shariʿa in the contemporary world are guided by conflicting impulses. For example, it is important to acknowledge the role that this system of law and ethics has played historically, and to recognize its place in authenticating Islamic identity in the postcolonial world as a form of political guidance (in the form of legislation or even an Islamic state). He points out, however, that many Muslims harbor the suspicion that an Islamic state, based on the shariʿa, is neither workable nor desirable (1990, 33). This is due in part to the disjuncture between the pre-colonial norms regarding gender roles and religious identity, and the norms embodied in a postcolonial human rights-centered legal paradigm. In his later work (2008), An-Naʿim makes the case for secularism in Islam for several reasons, including the need to protect religious minorities human rights. An-Naʿim advocates for the reform of the shariʿa, and primarily in terms of the interpretation of the Qurʾan and Sunna, in conjunction with human rights principles. He postulates that an adequate reform methodology is needed in order to accomplish this task: one which emphasizes certain texts over others in light of discerning the intention behind the text. For example, he suggests that the prior justification for qawama is no longer applicable, as many women work outside of the home (for example). Instead of treating women’s human rights as an extension of the question of political selfdetermination in the Islamic community, An-Naʿim deals with them as a separate ethical questions. He does this, however, with recognition that questions of political and religious self-determination drive politics in many Muslim-majority countries and Muslim minority political contexts, and knowledge that colonialism and Western domination is a continued source of anxiety for many Muslims. By arguing for a new way to read Qurʾanic texts and

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shariʿa principles, he sees the potential for meaningful reform of the shariʿa so that it can persuasively guide Muslims in postcolonial contexts. Islamic legal scholar and theologian Khaled Abou El Fadl is critical of both the apologetic stance against human rights and what he calls the ‘puritan’ interpretation of Islam that has prevailed in the last half-century (2003). The latter interpretation has envisioned an Islamic universalism that is a self-contained and self-sufficient system that is opposed to the ‘corrupt’ world (2003, 309). This has entailed the rejection of human rights principles as unIslamic and Western. An educated Muslim elite educated in the West contributed to the marginalization of human rights within Islamic discourses, insofar as they adopted secular language and did not engage with Islamic principles. Like An-Naʿim, Abou El Fadl maintains that Islamic reform of the theological and legal traditions is necessary for Muslims to better engage with human rights. But it need not be on the terms set by secular cultures. Abou El Fadl’s solution is to reimagine the covenant with God, and think of human relationship with God as not simply adhering to divine commands. Rather, the task is for faithful Muslims to strive for justice in their interpretations and applications of the divine law, and to recognize their efforts as imperfect. Shariʿa is thus understood in an Islamic polity as ‘a symbolic construct for the divine perfection that is unreachable buy human effort’ (2003, 325). It is a set of principles and a methodology, not positive law. The notion of an Islamic state, he argues, is a contradiction in terms. Abou El Fadl argues for human rights as a theological construct, with foundations in Islamic teachings about compassion and justice. While rights have political implications, he maintains that it is a mistake to view rights as entirely political – mainly for the reason that this perception has led to the dismissal of human rights as hypocritical. By making an argument for the transcendence of rights commitments in Islam, Abou El Fadl is suggesting that protecting human rights is part of the process of imperfectly striving for justice and mercy in relation to God’s divine order. Similar to An-Naʿim, Abou El Fadl criticizes the violations of human rights by Muslim leaders who view themselves as arbiters of God’s law and embrace an ahistorical methodology for interpreting Shariʿa. Effectively Abou El Fadl distinguishes the postcolonial political questions of self-determination and Islamic identity from a principled theological commitment to human rights. By doing so, he demarcates the exercise of political power from the practice of imagining ethical commitments – treating them as posing two distinct sets of questions, although they certainly overlap in practice. The implications that follow for women’s rights in Islam means that women’s rights are not contingent upon, or defined by, the manifestation of a particular Islamic identity in the public sphere. Abou El Fadl and An-Naʿim both distinguish the issue of women’s human rights from questions of Muslim political self-determination and identity. This is in contrast to Islamists like Mawdudi and Qutb, who argued for the necessity of an Islamically governed state to ensure proper rights (including rights defined by gender). Muslim feminists have made signal contributions, both directly and indirectly, to the advancement of human rights in their treatments of Islamic law, theology, and politics. amina wadud (1999) pioneered feminist Qurʾanic hermeneutics, raising important questions about the relationship of the reader to the text. Kecia Ali’s work (2006, 2010) has been instrumental in articulating how a concept of Islamic political authenticity in the postcolonial world constrains questions of women’s rights within the family, and very often perpetuates abuses. Work by Ayesha Chaudhry (2013) on Qurʾanic interpretation of verse 4:34 delineates the different worldviews that informed pre-colonial and postcolonial interpreters, 336

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and the ways in which pre-colonial assumptions about gender hierarchy have functioned to limit women’s rights in the contemporary context. In the growing body of Muslim feminist scholarship, there is consistent attention to how interpretations of women’s rights within the tradition are all-too dependent on prevailing political and social norms. Despite the predicaments for human rights created by colonialism, Western hypocrisy, and Islamist political interventions, these scholars see a way forward for women’s rights by engaging in a critical evaluation of the Islamic tradition. Scholars like Abou El Fadl, An-Naʿim, Ziba Mir Hosseini, and Kecia Ali have argued that God requires the practice of justice and mercy from human beings. As part of this understanding, they make distinctions in their work between the ongoing human interpretation and practice of Islam, and God’s perfect justice. Any human political interpretation or manifestation of Islam is always fallible and imperfect, and thus subject to revision. This type of argument approaches postcolonial Islamic political programs (frequently associated with state power) with suspicion, particularly insofar as such programs imbue themselves with divine authority. While the argument for justice and mercy does not translate directly into an argument for human rights, Abou El Fadl has persuasively argued that it can become the basis for thoughtful and principled Muslim engagement with human rights. When considering the implications of this mode of thinking for women’s human rights in particular, these scholars have found it helpful to distinguish the quest for national and/or Islamic self-determination, on the one hand, and the issue of women’s rights, on the other. This is difficult, since their fusion is in large part a product of both colonial rule and later autocratic regimes. Colonial practices surrounding family law helped to foster the idea that Islamic identity was strongly tied to the role of women and the family, and they functioned to preserve hierarchical gender roles within the family and society. Moreover, colonizers were among the earliest proponents of arguments for cultural relativism, which supported unequal and often unjust treatment of persons (Burke 2010). In seeking to disentangle questions of political power and control from principled arguments for human rights, and women’s human rights specifically, these scholars find areas of synthesis and dialogue between human rights discourse and Islamic thought in ways that avoid the perils of both political persecution and authoritarianism.

Conclusion The question of how to understand and interpret women’s human rights in Islamic contexts has driven the work of many postcolonial Muslim scholars and activists. Some Muslim intellectuals have developed nuanced accounts of international human rights in part due their own experiences with, and repudiation of, authoritarian state governments. Perhaps for several of them, international human rights expresses a theological conviction that values diversity and human freedom of expression, in contrast to a vision focused on securing theological certainty and political self-determination. In any case, arguments about women’s human rights in the Muslim world challenge the notion that there is any singular position of ‘Islam’ on human rights. Instead, expanding on the work of Zaman, we should view human rights discourse as a field of contestation among religious (both intrareligious and interreligious) authorities as well as secular authorities. This does not mean that all Muslim positions vis-à-vis human rights have equal merit, however. Muslim communities continue to work out their values and ethical commitments through engagement with sacred texts as well as contemporary political arguments. (For a recent account of such an argument, see Ibrahim 2016.) There are 337

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better and worse uses of concepts, and it is necessary to evaluate how communites and scholars employ concepts, such as human rights. Ultimately, all communities of interpreters are charged with the task of determining which arguments are persuasive and consistent with ethical traditions, and/or which represent important and necessary interventions into received traditions. As noted in this chapter, the on-the-ground practical issues of postcolonial family law and its reform presents a complicated picture of ‘women’s’ rights in Islam. Examining the history, it becomes clear that women’s rights are bound up with the very complex expressions of national identity, transnational Islamic identity, and the changing economic and social role of women in the postcolonial period. What is needed to address this matter is not an ahistorical treatment of women’s rights, or a grand theory of rights in Islam, but attention to how concepts are used, and to what ends they are used. Regarding the concept of human rights in relation to Islamic texts and traditions, An-Naʿim and Abou El Fadl provide persuasive argumentation in support of international human rights generally, and women’s human rights specifically. For any Muslim community of interpreters, these scholars delineate helpful clarifications around the use of human rights concepts that may serve as a guide. Are human rights articulated in such a way to preserve the political goals of the community? Or, are human rights the basis for a universal conception of human flourishing, to which political authorities must be held accountable? By arguing in favor of human flourishing and accountability, they highlight the risks for any community which fuses human rights with national (or political-religious) goals. This is not to say that, for example, the goal of political self-determination is unimportant; rather, they might argue that self-determination ought not to occur at the expense of other values – like human flourishing. They show that human rights discourse can be a vehicle for articulating alternative visions to the political status quo, and as a basis for critical discussions of reform within the Islamic tradition.

Notes 1 The UDHR does not have legally binding power as a declaration, in contrast to international covenants. 2 In 1981, prior to the Cairo Declaration, the Islamic Council (London) issued the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights. The UIDHR was more explicit in its grounding of human rights in the Shariʿa, but it also directly criticized the persecution of Islamic dissidents by the Arab state. See Masud 2012. 3 The Saudi delegate who participated in the drafting of the UDHR, Jamil Baroody, for example refused to vote in favor of it over articles 16 and 18: gender equality in marriage and freedom of religion. See Waltz 2004. 4 Anver Emon explains that codification resulted in the transformation of Islamic law from a relatively open and diverse system to ‘a set of positivist legal assertions divorced from the historical, institutional, and jurisprudential context that contributed to its flexibility’ (Emon 2012, 206–207). 5 For an excellent discussion of how a concept of privacy was used to allow wife-beating in Anglo American law, see Siegel 1995. During a time in which wives were no longer legally defined as male property, a notion of privacy gave male heads of household the legal cover to abuse their wives. 6 This is not to suggest that male control of marriage and family is something novel in the colonial era. For a detailed discussion of male dominance in pre-colonial Muslim marriage practices, see Ali 2010 and Chaudhry 2013. 7 www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/cedaw.htm (accessed 11.10.18). It is also notable that several Muslim majority countries issued reservations to CEDAW based on a perceived conflict with the Shariʿa.

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8 Bano 2012 further notes that within Islamic jurisprudence historically, there is no precedent for a Shariʿa council or court, as a religious institution within a secular state (95). 9 One of the major influences on Islamism and gender roles is Sayyid Abul Aʾla Mawdudi. For a discussion of Mawdudi’s use of gender in his conceptions about human rights and Islam, see De Sondy 2015.

Further reading An-Naʿim, A., ed. 2002. Islamic Family Law in a Changing World: A Global Resource Book. Zed Books. This book contains case studies of family law from around the world, showing both patterns in Islamic family law (Shariʿa) and differences based on regional interpretations. Dunn, S., 2018. Islamic Law and Human Rights. Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law, 819–842. Oxford University Press. This article outlines historical approaches to the question of Islam and human rights in the postcolonial world, noting the emergence of four distinct patterns. Euben, R. and Zaman, M.Q., 1999. Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from alBanna to Bin Laden. Princeton University Press. This collection of primary sources, with a helpful introduction written by the editors, provides a range of 20th-century Islamist thinking. Readers get the sense of Islamism as a global political phenomenon, which crosses national as well as Sunni/Shiʿa boundaries. Hogan, L., 2015. Keeping Faith with Human Rights. Georgetown University Press. Hogan employs an approach that affirms human rights but which is critical of problematic Western foundationalist claims. The author employs postcolonial feminist critique in order to make critical revisions to human rights discourse. Reinbold, J., 2016. Seeing the Myth in Human Rights. University of Pennsylvania. Reinbold highlights the persuasive elements of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, showing how this document has functioned in ways both mythic and mythological. The book draws important attention to the political construction of human rights, and the malleability of rights as tools for solidarity and meaning.

References Ali, K., 2006. Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qurʾan, Hadith, and Jurisprudence. Oneworld Press. Ali, K., 2010. Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam. Harvard University Press. An-Naim, A.A., 1990. Human Rights in the Muslim World: Socio-Political Conditions and Scriptural Imperatives. Harvard Human Rights Journal, 3, 13–52. An-Naim, A.A., 2008. Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari‘a. Harvard University Press. Bano, S., 2012. Muslim Women and Shari‘ah Councils: Transcending the Boundaries of Community and Law. Palgrave MacMillan. Boden, A. 2007. Women’s Rights and Religious Practice: Claims in Conflict. Palgrave MacMillan. Burke, R., 2010. Decolonization and the Evolution of Human Rights. University of Pennsylvania. Chaudhry, A.S., 2013. Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition. OUP Oxford. De Sondy, A., 2015. The Crisis of Islamic Masculinities. Bloomsbury. El Fadl, K.A., 2014. The Human Rights Commitment in Modern Islam. In Human Rights and Responsibilities. Edited Joseph Runzo and Nancy Martin, 301–364. Oneworld Publications. Emon, A., 2011. The Paradox of Equality and the Politics of Difference. In Gender and Equality in Muslim Family Law: Justice and Ethics in the Islamic Legal Tradition. Edited by Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Kari Vogt, Lena Larsen, Christian Moe. I.B. Tauris. Emon, A., 2012. Islamic Law and the Canadian Mosaic: Politics, Jurisprudence, and Multicultural Accommodation. Debating Shari‘a: Islam, Gender Politics, and Family Law Arbitration. Edited by A. Korteweg and J. Selby, 192–230. University of Toronto. Ibrahim, A., 2016. A Not-So-Radical Approach to Human Rights in Islam. Journal of Religion, 96 (3), 346–377.

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Lawrence, B.B., 1994. Woman as Subject/Woman as Symbol: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Status of Women. Journal of Religious Ethics, 22 (1), 163–185. Little, D., 2015. Essays on Religion and Human Rights: Ground to Stand On. Cambridge University Press. Masud, K.M., 2012. Clearing Ground: Commentary to Shari‘a and the Modern State. Islamic Law and International Human Rights Law: Searching for Common Ground? Edited by A. Emon, M. Ellis, and B. Glahn, 104–114. Oxford University Press. Mayer, A.E., 1999. Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics. Hachette. Mir Hosseini, Z., M. Al-Sharmani and J. Rumminger eds., 2015. Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in the Muslim Legal Tradition. Oneworld Publications. Salime, Z., 2011. Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Shari‘a Law in Morocco. University of Minnesota Press. Schachar, A., 2010. State, Religion, and the Family: The New Dilemmas of Multicultural Accommodation. Shari‘a and the West. Edited by R. Ahdar and N. Aroney, 115–133. Oxford University Press. Siegel, R.B., 1995. The Rule of Love: Wife-Beating as Prerogative and Privacy. Yale Law Journal, 105, 2117–2207. wadud, amina, 1999. Qurʾan and Woman: Reading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective. Oxford University Press. Waltz, S., 2004. Universal Human Rights: the Contribution of Muslim States. Human Rights Quarterly, 26 (4), 799–844.

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PART VI

Vulnerability, care, and violence in Muslim families

23 TWO ‘QUIET’ REPRODUCTIVE REVOLUTIONS Islam, gender, and (in)fertility Marcia C. Inhorn Introduction Over the past three decades, fertility rates have plummeted across the Muslim world – a fertility decline that has been profound, even revolutionary. For example, by 2012, nearly half of the world’s top 15 fertility declines had occurred in Muslim-majority nations (United Nations 2012), reflecting both the increased use of contraceptives and married couples’ willingness to have fewer children. Yet, this dramatic fertility decline is not the only reproductive revolution taking place across the Muslim world. From Morocco to Malaysia, the Muslim world has seen the growth of one of the world’s largest in vitro fertilization (IVF) sectors, designed to overcome Muslim couples’ infertility problems. Infertility treatment via assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) has been encouraged by Islamic authorities in both Sunni and Shiʿa-majority Muslim countries (Inhorn and Tremayne 2012). Furthermore, some Middle Eastern governments, such as Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, have subsidized ARTs for their citizens (Gürtin 2016; Inhorn 2015). This chapter attempts to trace the connection between two seemingly disparate Muslim reproductive revolutions. The first is the massive fertility decline, achieved in part through religiously condoned contraceptive technologies, as well as by Muslim couples’ own desires for smaller family sizes. The second is the massive infusion of ARTs into the Muslim world, and particularly the Muslim Middle East. Whereas contraceptive technologies have helped Muslim couples to control their number of births and their birth spacing, ARTs have helped Muslim couples to overcome their infertility problems and thus their involuntary childlessness. The first half of this chapter focuses primarily on the Arab world, where these reproductive revolutions have been particularly profound. In the Arab world, the pronounced fertility decline began in Egypt in the 1960s, but took off in other Arab countries by the mid-1980s. Just as contraceptives were taking off, ARTs entered the region. Thus, the second half of the chapter focuses on the period from 1986 to the early 2000s, when these two reproductive revolutions converged. In this section, the role of Iran is highlighted, for it is there that Shiʿa religious authorities made possible an ‘Iranian ART revolution’ (Abbasi-Shavazi et al. 2008), the results of which have affected infertile Muslim women’s lives in a number of important ways. 343

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Yet, these religiously condoned, reproductive transformations in Muslim women’s lives have been ‘quiet’ revolutions, insofar as they have been overlooked in popular media, academic circles, and policy reports. Today, the Muslim world is still routinely conceived of as a region of high fertility – attributable to men’s patriarchal control over women’s bodies (Ali 2002) and religiously fueled pronatalism (Inhorn 1996). As will be seen in this chapter, however, this portrayal of Muslim hyper-fertility and male oppression is both outdated and inaccurate. Not only are many Muslim men supporting their wives in reproductive decision-making (Inhorn 2012), but the fertility declines and ART uptakes undertaken by Muslim couples over the past 30 years (1988–2018) have been profound (Johnson-Hanks 2006) – ‘quiet revolution[s] … hiding in plain sight’ (Eberstadt and Shah 2012, pp. 43–44). How did these revolutions happen? The introduction of reproductive technologies – both contraceptives and ARTs – is an important part of this story, as we shall see. But access to reproductive technologies is not the key factor. Instead, attitudinal change and human agency – or the desire for fewer children and the willingness to act upon this desire on the part of both men and women – has led to what anthropologists working in the Muslim Middle East have called the ‘new Arab family’ (Hopkins 2004). Today, this ‘new’ family is a ‘small’ family, usually consisting of two or three children at the most, and two parents who aspire to support and educate them.

Fertility and family planning Where did it all begin? Concerns over Arab fertility date back to the post-World War II period. A growing rhetoric of ‘overpopulation’ in the ‘underdeveloped’ world led Western population analysts to recommend government interventions into fertility (Bier 2008). With implementation of national family planning programs, it was argued, governments in the ‘Third World’ could effectively curb their high rates of population growth, thereby mitigating ‘resource shortages, economic catastrophe, and social and political instability’ (Bier 2008, p. 59). In this post-war period, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), the Population Council, the Ford Foundation, and the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), later renamed the United Nations Population Fund, were formed to initiate population control activities. In the Arab world, the initial focus was on Egypt, a purportedly ‘overpopulated’ country with a projected population doubling rate that was deemed alarming (Mitchell 1991). In particular, Egypt was said to suffer from a problem of ‘geography versus demography’ – namely, a rapidly expanding population that would eventually outstrip its arable, habitable land mass along the Nile. Although prima facie evidence of this Egyptian ‘population explosion’ was questionable (Mitchell 2002), the Egyptian government was nonetheless inclined to accept Western advice and UNFPA support for a state-sponsored population control program, the first Middle Eastern Muslim country to do so (Stycos and Sayed 1988). It is important to note that the introduction of contraceptive technologies in Egypt received early support from Egypt’s grand mufti, who stated that Islam does not object to family planning, so long as it is practiced within the general guidelines of Islamic family life (e.g., marriage), is recommended by a trustworthy physician, and is not harmful when practiced. The grand mufti also argued that family planning is acceptable for ‘hygienic,’ economic, and social reasons, and when the husband and wife agree to use it. This permissive view of family planning was upheld by a fatwa (an authoritative religious decree) from Egypt’s famed religious university, Al-Azhar, which stated that family planning does not contradict Islamic teachings, and can be used to delay birth until a married couple is able to properly care for a child (Al-Azhar Islamic Research Academy 1988). 344

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Given this early Islamic support, Egypt experimented with many different ‘scientific’ forms of family planning, including diaphragms, foam tablets, contraceptive jelly, douches, and eventually birth control pills, all of which are considered to be ‘female-controlled’ methods (Bier 2008). This early effort to promote female (as opposed to male) contraception was soon replicated in several other Arab countries. The North African nations of Tunisia and Morocco were the first to follow the Egyptian lead, establishing national family planning programs in 1964 and 1966 respectively (Lapham 1972). By 1980, nine other Arab nations had instituted either direct government family planning programs (i.e., Algeria and the two halves of a divided Yemen), or had agreed to establish ‘voluntary’ family planning associations supported by IPPF (i.e., Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Sudan, and Syria) (Faour 1989). In the Arab countries with IPPF-sponsored programs, contraceptive information and guidance were provided freely, and low-cost contraceptives were offered to women who could not otherwise afford them. By 1984, 15 Arab nations had endorsed the Mexico City Declaration on Population and Development, an international agenda supporting the ‘right’ of all individuals and couples to decide freely about contraception. However, as of 1984, less than half of all Arab nations had family planning programs. Two Arab nations, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, still restricted access to contraception, while the majority had refused to endorse family planning on a national level. Thus, in a region-wide evaluation of Arab family planning programs undertaken in the early 1980s, family planning program efforts were deemed to be ‘weak,’ ‘very weak,’ or ‘nonexistent’ in most Arab countries (with the exception of Tunisia, which received a ‘moderate’ rating) (Faour 1989). In fact, it was noted that several Arab countries, especially those in the Gulf, were opposed to family planning, because their governments hoped to increase population growth rates as a solution to perceived ‘under-population’ in their nations. Table 23.1 provides an overall picture of fertility rates and fertility policies in 18 Arab nations during the 1980s. As shown in Table 23.1, total fertility rates (TFRs) – or the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime – were quite high across the region as of 1988, with several Arab nations manifesting TFRs of more than seven children per woman. During this period, population growth was occurring in every single Arab country except wartorn Lebanon, which was considered exceptional in population circles because of its ‘replacement fertility’ level of only two children per Lebanese woman (Courbage 1999).

The rise of female contraception Given the high total fertility rates shown in Table 23.1, it should come as no surprise that contraceptive prevalence rates across the Arab world at the time remained very low. In a survey of 11 Arab countries conducted in 1982, the mean contraceptive prevalence rate was only 19 per cent (Lapham and Mauldin 1985). Egypt, which had put the most effort into a direct government program, had only achieved a contraceptive prevalence rate of 30 per cent. Even in Lebanon with its low total fertility rate, slightly more than half (53 per cent) of Lebanese couples reported using contraceptives. Several Arab countries lacked any form of contraceptive prevalence data, or reported rates that were very low, ranging from 1 to 10 per cent (e.g., Algeria, Syria). By 1985, however, female contraceptive prevalence rates began to increase significantly in several Arab countries, even in the absence of explicit family planning information or country-wide policies (Lapham and Mauldin 1985). In Jordan, for example – a country with no specific fertility policy (to either raise or lower population growth) and without any 345

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Table 23.1 Fertility levels in Arab countries: the 1980s Country

Population in 1988 (millions)

Total fertility rate (per woman)

Annual rate of population increase (%)

Country’s fertility policy

Family planning program

Algeria Bahrain Egypt Iraq

23.9 0.5 50.3 17.6

6.7 4.6 4.6 6.7

3.2 2.8 2.5 3.6

Lower None Lower Raise

Jordan Kuwait Lebanon Libya Morocco Oman Qatar Saudi Arabia

4.0 2.1 2.8 4.0 23.5 1.4 0.4 13.0

7.4 6.2 3.8 7.2 5.1 7.1 6.8 7.1

3.7 3.6 2.0 3.5 2.5 3.3 3.4 3.3

None Raise None None Lower Maintain Maintain Raise

Sudan Syria Tunisia United Arab Emirates Yemen Arab Republic Yemen Democratic Republic

23.5 12.0 7.6 1.5

6.6 7.2 4.8 5.9

2.9 3.8 2.3 2.6

None None Lower Raise

Direct government IPPF member Direct government IPPF member, but restricted contraceptive access IPPF member None IPPF member None Direct government None None None; restricted contraceptive access IPPF member IPPF member Direct government None

7.5

7.0

3.0

Lower

Direct government

2.3

6.8

3.0

Lower

Direct government

Sources: Faour (1989); Lapham and Mauldin (1985); United Nations (1986, 1987)

direct government family planning program – the contraceptive prevalence rate nonetheless rose from an average of 40 per cent in 1990 to 60 per cent in 2009. By then, 82 per cent of ever-married Jordanian women aged 15 to 49 had used contraception at some point in their reproductive lives, with the average Jordanian woman able to describe nine different contraceptive methods (Cetorelli and Leone 2012). It is fair to say that by the beginning of the new millennium, knowledge of contraceptive methods among Arab women had become widespread (Cetorelli and Leone 2012). Surveys showed that between 90 and 98 per cent of married Arab women reported knowing about at least one modern method of contraception. Ten years on, a 2010 survey of the 22 Member States of the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region showed that at least one of seven core components of successful family planning programs (e.g., integrated services and delivery, promotion of family planning, evaluation and monitoring) were available in 94 per cent of the 18 Member States that responded to the survey (Chikvaidze, Madi, and Mahaini 2012). As shown in Table 23.2, more than half of Middle Eastern countries responding to the survey had all seven core components of successful family planning programs in place. 346

Two ‘quiet’ reproductive revolutions Table 23.2 Number of essential components of successful family planning: 18 countries of the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region Countries

No. essential components present (max.=7)

Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Syrian Arab Republic, Yemen Oman, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Sudan Bahrain, Somalia United Arab Emirates Djibouti, Kuwait, Libya, Tunisia

7 6 5 3 NA

Source: Chikvaidze, Madi, and Mahaini (2012)

Despite these national efforts, contraceptive usage among married women aged 15–49 exceeded 40 per cent in only nine Arab nations, and 20 per cent in nine others (Tabutin and Schoumaker 2005). A female ‘contraceptive revolution’ characterized by rapid adoption of a variety of methods was taking place in only four Arab countries (Tabutin and Schoumaker 2005) – the three North African Arab nations of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, as well as Lebanon, which, by this time, had emerged from 25 years of civil war and occupation. In the most recent survey (in 2010), the authors noted that ‘although progress has been made towards improving FP services in many countries of the EMR, the prevalence of use of modern contraceptives remains low’ (Chikvaidze, Madi, and Mahaini 2012, p. 912). This was especially true in eight countries (Afghanistan, Djibouti, Iraq, Morocco, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen), where maternal mortality rates were also ‘unacceptably high.’

The Arab fertility decline In the absence of widespread female contraception, how did the Arab world ultimately achieve the dramatic fertility declines that began in the 1980s? Part of the answer lies in the family planning support offered by Arab husbands – not only of female contraceptive methods, but of male-controlled methods as well. Studies conducted in a variety of Arab countries demonstrated men’s strong advocacy of male-controlled birth control – not with condoms, which were shown to be negatively perceived in a variety of Arab countries (Kulczycki 2004), but rather through the time-tested method of ʿazl (withdrawal, or coitus interruptus) (Myntti et al. 2002). ʿAzl has played an important role in the history of Islamic societies (Musallam 1983). Not only does ʿazl receive support within the Islamic scriptures as a viable means of male-enacted contraception, but Arab men tend to prefer withdrawal as a ‘safe’ method of family planning that is more ‘natural’ than most female-controlled methods (Myntti et al. 2002). That men and women together have enacted a reproductive revolution in the Arab world is evident in the numbers. Table 23.3 charts the momentous decline in Arab fertility levels. When TFRs were first recorded in the 1975–1980 period, women in all 17 Arab nations had TFRs far exceeding the world average of 3.85 children per woman at that time. Seven Arab countries – including Algeria, Kuwait, Libya, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen – had TFRs greater than 7.0, with the highest recorded TFR of 8.58 in Yemen (United Nations 2018). Today, only three of these Arab countries – Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen – have TFRs above 3.0, and two others – Iraq and Sudan – above 4.0. In nine Arab countries – including Algeria,

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Table 23.3 Decline in Arab fertility levels over 30 years Country

World Algeria Bahrain Egypt Iraq Jordan Kuwait Lebanon Libya Morocco Oman Qatar Saudi Arabia Sudan Syria Tunisia United Arab Emirates Yemen

Population (millions)

Total fertility rate

1988 5,100 23.9 0.5 50.3 17.6 4.0 2.1 2.8 4.0 23.5 1.4 0.4 15.2 18.9 11.7 7.9 1.7 11

2017 7,550 41.3 1.49 97.6 38.3 9.7 4.1 6.1 6.4 35.7 4.6 2.6 32.9 40.5 18.2 11.5 9.4 28.2

1975–1980 3.85 7.18 5.23 5.5 6.8 7.38 5.89 4.23 7.94 5.90 8.1 6.11 7.28 6.92 7.32 5.69 5.66 8.58

2000–2005 2.53 2.72 2.98 2.98 4.38 3.64 2.71 1.58 2.67 2.38 2.89 2.21 3.03 4.83 3.19 2.05 1.97 4.91

2010–2015 2.45 2.82 2.10 2.79 4.06 3.27 2.60 1.51 2.38 2.78 2.91 2.05 2.68 4.46 3.0 2.02 1.82 4.15

2015–2020 2.47 2.65 2.00 3.15 4.27 3.26 1.97 1.7 2.21 2.42 2.54 1.88 2.48 4.43 2.84 2.15 1.73 3.84

Sources: United Nations (2012, 2018)

Jordan, Libya, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen – TFRs have declined by nearly four births per woman. For example, an Algerian woman in 1980 would have expected to have more than seven children on average. But an Algerian woman today has only two to three – four to five less than her mother. Of the world’s top 15 fertility declines occurring between 1950 and 2010, seven Arab countries could be counted (United Nations 2012). In each of these countries, fertility levels declined by more than 60 per cent, as shown in Table 23.4, with Libya showing the largest fertility reduction of nearly 70 per cent. Table 23.4 Arab countries in the top 15 for fertility decline over 60 years Country

Libya United Arab Emirates Oman Tunisia Qatar Lebanon Algeria

Total fertility rate 1975–1980

2005–2010

7.94 5.66 8.10 5.69 6.11 4.23 7.18

2.67 1.97 2.89 2.05 2.21 1.58 2.72

Source: United Nations (2012)

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Difference

Percentage decline

-4.39 -3.69 -5.21 -3.64 -3.90 -2.66 -4.45

69.9 65.2 64.3 63.9 63.8 62.8 62.0

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What is most impressive about this Arab fertility decline is that it has occurred even in resource-poor Arab nations. As noted by demographers, most Arab countries have fewer resources (i.e., income, education, urbanization, modern contraception) than the ‘more developed regions with which their fertility levels currently correspond today’ (Eberstadt and Shah 2012, p. 35). Put another way, the Arab world has achieved its reproductive revolution with few preexisting resources or advantages. The decline has occurred largely through human agency – namely, the actions of Arab couples wanting fewer children to love and support.

The Muslim ART revolution Arab couples have also accepted alternative forms of baby-making. While the world’s first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, was born in England exactly 40 years ago (in 1978), it took less than ten years for the Muslim world’s first test-tube baby, Heba Mohammed, to be born in Egypt (in 1987) (Inhorn 2003). IVF, the ART used to conceive both of these children, rapidly globalized in the 1990s, subsequently spreading to many parts of the Muslim world. For example, Egypt was the first country to open an IVF clinic in 1986, followed by Saudi Arabia and Jordan. By the mid-1990s, Egypt was experiencing an IVF ‘boom period,’ with more than 50 IVF clinics eventually opening up in Cairo, Alexandria, and other major cities (Inhorn 2003; Inhorn and Patrizio 2015). Other Middle Eastern countries soon followed suit. By the mid-2000s, the Middle East boasted one of the largest and most successful IVF industries in the world (Inhorn and Patrizio 2015). As shown in Table 23.5, among the 48 countries performing the most ART cycles per million inhabitants, eight Arab nations could be counted. This eager uptake of IVF across the Middle East has been due in large part to the permissive attitudes of both Sunni and Shiʿa Islamic religious authorities (Inhorn and Tremayne 2012), who have viewed ARTs as biomedical tools to overcome human suffering. In the now rich scholarship on Islam and ARTs in Egypt (Inhorn 2003), Iran (Tremayne 2006; Tremayne and Akhondi 2016), Lebanon (Clarke 2007, 2009; Clarke and Inhorn 2011; Inhorn 2012), and Turkey (Gürtin 2011, 2016), anthropologists have demonstrated how the continuous emergence of new ARTs has led to a concomitant emergence of mostly supportive Islamic bioethical discourses and religious decrees (fatwas) on how these technologies should be used appropriately by Muslim physicians and their patients.

Table 23.5 Middle Eastern countries performing the most ART cycles per capita Country

Rank in top 48

Lebanon Jordan Tunisia Bahrain Saudi Arabia Egypt Libya United Arab Emirates

6 8 25 28 31 32 34 35

Source: Adamson (2009)

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Islamic support for IVF began with Egypt’s early entrance into assisted reproduction (Inhorn 2003; Serour 2008). The Grand Shaykh of Al-Azhar issued the first widely authoritative fatwa on assisted reproduction on March 23, 1980 – only two years after the birth of the first IVF baby in England, but a full six years before the opening of Egypt’s first IVF center. Forty years later, this original Al-Azhar fatwa has proved to be quite authoritative and enduring across the Sunni Muslim world. It has been reissued many times in Egypt, and subsequently reaffirmed by fatwa-granting authorities in other parts of the Sunni Muslim world, from Morocco to Saudi Arabia to Malaysia. In general terms, the Sunni Islamic religious authorities have been very permissive in granting use of ARTs to Muslim IVF physicians and their patients. The Sunni fatwas on ARTs have deemed the following techniques halal, or religiously permissible: (1) Artificial insemination with a husband’s sperm; (2) In vitro fertilization of an egg from a wife with the sperm of her husband; (3) Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), in which the sperm of a husband is injected into the egg of his wife; (4) Cryopreservation, or freezing, of any excess embryos, as well as sperm and eggs to be used later by a married couple; (5) Post-menopausal pregnancy using a wife’s own cryopreserved embryos or oocytes, in combination with the sperm of her husband; (6) Preimplantation genetic diagnosis for couples at high risk of genetic disorders in their offspring, or for couples with children of only one sex, who wish to pursue gender selection for the purposes of family balancing; (7) Multifetal pregnancy reduction, a form of selective abortion, which eliminates one or more fetuses in a high-risk IVF pregnancy with triplets, quadruplets, or beyond. In general, Islam is permissive when it comes to therapeutic abortion, especially when preventing harm or loss of life of either the mother or remaining fetuses; (8) Embryo research on excess embryos that are donated by couples for the advancement of scientific knowledge and the benefit of humanity; and (9) Uterine transplantation, a newly emergent technique in which a healthy uterus is transplanted from a willing donor to another woman who is lacking a competent uterus. Initially tried in Saudi Arabia, the goal of this procedure is to achieve a successful IVF pregnancy in the transplanted uterus (Fageeh et al. 2002). This clearly represents a substantial list of permissions, thereby fueling the development of a robust IVF industry across the Sunni Muslim world, which constitutes about 90 per cent of the world’s Muslims, including in the Middle Eastern region (Inhorn and Tremayne 2012). However, Sunni religious authorities have not condoned every possible ART practice. The list of ART restrictions is equally long, with the following techniques considered haram, or religiously forbidden: (1) Third-party donors are not allowed, whether they are providing donor sperm, eggs, embryos, or uteruses, as in surrogacy. Even with no physical touch or gaze, the use of a third party is considered tantamount to zinā (illicit intercourse, adultery). (2) Similarly, all forms of surrogacy are strictly forbidden. (3) A donor or surrogate child conceived through any of these illegitimate forms of assisted reproduction cannot be made legitimate through adoption. The child who results from

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(4) (5)

(6)

(7)

a forbidden method belongs to the mother and is considered to be a walad al-zinā , or an illegitimate child. Assisted reproduction cannot be performed on an ex-wife or widow using sperm from a divorced or dead husband (i.e., posthumous reproduction). Sperm banks for the purposes of sperm donation are forbidden. Sperm may only be used when cryopreserved before cancer treatment and then employed later in life by that same individual. Genetic alteration of embryos for the purpose of trait selection (i.e., ‘designer babies’) is forbidden. However, in the future, gene therapy may be approved to remediate inherited genetic diseases and pathological conditions. Human reproductive cloning for the creation of a cloned child – who would theoretically be the genetic twin of the cloning parent – is forbidden.

This is a long list, but it clearly summarizes which technologies are haram, or forbidden in Sunni Islam. Most important from a clinical perspective, all forms of third-party reproductive assistance are haram, including sperm donation, egg donation, embryo donation, and surrogacy. As noted by Islamic legal scholar Ebrahim Moosa (2003), In terms of ethics, Muslim authorities consider the transmission of reproductive material between persons who are not legally married to be a major violation of Islamic law. This sensitivity stems from the fact that Islamic law has a strict taboo on sexual relations outside wedlock (zinā ). The taboo is designed to protect paternity (i.e., family), which is designated as one of the five goals of Islamic law, the others being the protection of religion, life, property, and reason. (p. 23) With regard to the first issue, Islam is a religion that can be said to privilege – even mandate – heterosexual marital relations. As is made clear in the original Al-Azhar fatwa, reproduction outside of marriage is considered zinā , or adultery, which is strictly forbidden in Islam. Although third-party donation does not involve the sexual body contact (‘touch or gaze’) of adulterous relations, nor presumably the desire to engage in an extramarital affair, it is nonetheless considered by most Islamic religious scholars to be a form of adultery, by virtue of introducing a third party into the sacred dyad of husband and wife. It is the very fact that another man’s sperm or another woman’s eggs enter a place where they do not belong that makes donation of any kind inherently wrong and threatening to the marital bond. The second aspect of third-party donation that troubles marriage is the potential for incest among the offspring of anonymous donors. If an anonymous sperm donor, for example, ‘fathers’ hundreds of children, the children could grow up, unwittingly meet each other, fall in love, and marry. The same could be true for the children of anonymous egg donors. Thus, moral concerns have been raised about the potential for incest to occur among donor children who are biological half-siblings. The final moral concern is that third-party donation confuses issues of kinship, descent, and inheritance. As with marriage, Islam is a religion that can be said to privilege – even mandate – biological inheritance. Preserving the nasab, or genealogical ‘origins’ of each child, meaning his or her relationships to a known biological mother and father, is considered not only an ideal in Islam, but a moral imperative. The problem with third-party donation, therefore, is that it destroys a child’s nasab and violates the child’s legal rights to known parentage, which is considered immoral, cruel, and unjust. 351

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Sunni Muslim IVF patients use the term ‘mixture of relations’ to describe this untoward outcome. Such a mixture of relations, or the literal confusion of lines of descent introduced by third-party donation, is described as being very ‘dangerous,’ ‘forbidden,’ ‘against nature,’ ‘against God’ – in a word, haram, or morally unacceptable. It is argued that donation, by allowing a ‘stranger to enter the family,’ confuses lines of descent. For men in particular, ensuring paternity and the ‘purity’ of lineage through ‘known fathers’ is of paramount concern. This is because virtually all Muslim societies are organized patrilineally – that is, descent and inheritance are traced through fathers and the ‘fathers of fathers’ through many generations. Thus, knowing paternity is of critical concern (Clarke 2009). Accordingly, at the ninth Islamic law and medicine conference, held under the auspices of the Kuwait-based Islamic Organization for Medical Sciences (IOMS) in Casablanca, Morocco, a landmark five-point declaration included recommendations to prohibit all situations in which a third party invades a marital relationship through donation of reproductive material (Moosa 2003). Such a ban on third-party reproductive assistance is effectively in place in the Sunni-dominant countries. Not a single Sunni Muslim-majority country in the Middle East allows third-party gamete or embryo donation or surrogacy. Couples who need these technologies are often told firmly that third-party donation is ‘against the religion,’ or they are encouraged to travel outside the Middle Eastern region to pursue these forms of third-party reproductive assistance (Inhorn 2015). However, in the 1990s, Shiʿa clerics in Iran began supporting third-party reproductive assistance, particularly egg donation, but sometimes also sperm donation (Tremayne 2006, 2009, 2015; Tremayne and Akhondi 2016). Indeed, most leading Shiʿa clerics have allowed thirdparty reproductive assistance over the past 20 years. This includes the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Khameneʾi, the hand-picked successor to Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, who issued an authoritative fatwa effectively permitting both egg and sperm donation to be used (Tremayne and Akhondi 2016). Ayatollah Khameneʾi‘s fatwa justified these donor technologies as a ‘marriage saviour,’ preventing the ‘marital and psychological disputes’ that would otherwise arise from remaining childless indefinitely. Indeed, these Shiʿa fatwas have led to what some scholars have described as an ‘Iranian ART revolution’ (Abbasi-Shavazi et al. 2008). Since the new millennium, all forms of sperm donation, egg donation, embryo donation, and gestational surrogacy are taking place in Iran. Iran is also leading the way into a Middle Eastern stem cell industry (Saniei 2012). This ‘millennial moment’ in Iran has also had a major impact in Shiʿa-dominant Lebanon (Clarke 2007, 2009; Clarke and Inhorn 2011; Inhorn 2012). By 2003, one of the major Shiʿa-serving IVF clinics in Beirut had developed a full-fledged egg donation program, and had begun to cater to so-called ‘reproductive tourists’ coming from other parts of the Sunni-dominant Middle East. Soon, other IVF clinics in Lebanon began providing egg donation services, as market demand increased among both Shiʿa and Sunni Muslims, as well as Middle Eastern Christian couples (Inhorn 2012). Indeed, it is fair to say that the development of third-party reproductive assistance programs in both Iran and Lebanon has weakened the regional Sunni Muslim ban on donor technologies, as infertile Sunni Muslim couples increasingly turn to other countries to solve their infertility problems through the use of third-party donors (Inhorn and Tremayne 2012, 2016).

ARTs and Muslim women’s lives These divergent stances of Sunni and Shiʿa religious authorities toward ARTs and thirdparty reproductive assistance have had significant gender effects, impacting the lives of 352

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Muslim women in various ways. The religiously supported emergence of a variety of ARTs in both Sunni- and Shiʿa-dominant Middle Eastern countries has created new hope for infertile couples, encouraging them to pursue these technologies in their quests for conception (Inhorn 1994). Overall, increasing access to ARTs across the Middle East appears to be changing gender relations in several positive ways through: 1) increased knowledge of both male and female infertility among the general population; 2) normalization of both male and female infertility problems as medical conditions that can be overcome; 3) decreased stigma, blame, and social suffering for both men and women, and particularly women, who bear the major social burden of infertility when they do not become pregnant; 4) increased marital commitment as husbands and wives seek ART services together; and 5) increased male adoption of ARTs, especially for male infertility problems, which are involved in at least 60 per cent of all cases of childlessness in the Middle Eastern region (Inhorn 2012). In other words, the coming of ARTs to the Middle East has had major, salutary impacts on marriage and on gender relations more generally (Inhorn 2003, 2012). As infertile Middle Eastern couples remain together in their searches for ARTs, the demand for these services also grows, fueling the continual expansion of the Middle Eastern IVF sector. Having said that, some ART gender effects have impacted the lives of Middle Eastern women in either ambiguous or in clearly negative ways. First, the success rates of IVF and other ARTs continue to be low (e.g., 20–40 per cent), leading to endless rounds of fruitless repetition for many couples. For women, IVF involves a physically grueling procedure, as it is highly dependent upon the complicated hormonal stimulation and extraction of healthy oocytes (i.e., eggs) from women’s bodies. Unfortunately, women’s fertility is highly age sensitive, with oocyte quality diminishing at later stages of the reproductive lifecycle (i.e., slightly at age 32, but significantly at age 37). Thus, older women may ‘age out’ of IVF, causing highly gendered, life-course disruptions surrounding women’s ‘biological clocks.’ Sunni Muslim women whose egg quality has declined irrevocably are not allowed to use donor eggs, effectively ending any possibility of biological motherhood and increasing their risk of marital dissolution. Given this potentiality, egg donation has been cast as a ‘marriage saviour’ in Shiʿa bioethical discourses, with the majority of Shiʿa jurists now allowing the practice. For infertile women who receive a donated egg, the fact that they can gestate, give birth to, and breastfeed the egg-donor child creates the bonds of ridaʾ or milk kinship (Al-Torki 1980; Khatib-Chahidi 1992). Thus, husbands sympathetic to their wives’ infertility problems may become active participants in obtaining donor eggs, sometimes engaging in mutʾa, or temporary marriages (Haeri 2002), in order to undertake egg donation within the remit of a temporary polygynous marriage (Inhorn 2012). This use of temporary marriage as a way to make egg donation morally permissible is a creative Shiʿa solution to the challenges posed by third-party reproductive assistance within an Islamic framework (Tremayne and Akhondi 2016). Perhaps not surprisingly, many infertile Shiʿa Muslim couples prefer to use their close relatives, especially same-sex siblings, for egg donation, as well as gestational surrogacy. Thus, sisters donate their eggs or uteruses (via surrogacy) to their infertile sisters and sistersin-law. But, if a sister donates her eggs to her brother’s infertile wife, the child so produced would be the biological offspring of the actual brother and sister – a form of biological incest not only in Islamic societies, but in most if not all societies around the world. Furthermore, under Islamic law, this kind of intrafamilial donation may lead to peculiar forms of relatedness and the possibility of committing incest or adultery according to the Islamic laws governing association between the sexes (Tremayne and Akhondi 2016). Increasingly, 353

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intrafamilial egg donation and gestational surrogacy are leading to bioethical conundrums (i.e., biological incest) and social repercussions for women. For example, once a donor-egg or surrogate child is born, the infertile woman may be asked to relinquish the child to other family members who decide to stake their biological claims. Such difficult cases have increased over time in Iranian ART clinics, leading to virulent family disputes that are not easy to resolve (Tremayne 2018). As a result, legislation is currently being drafted in Iran to make all third-party reproductive assistance strictly anonymous, thereby avoiding the complexities of ‘known’ donation between family members (Tremayne 2018). With or without third-party reproductive assistance, infertile Middle Eastern women’s lives can be affected for better or for worse, depending upon a woman’s particular circumstances, her religious affiliation, and the supportiveness of her husband and other family members. Access to ARTs can be a great boon to infertile Middle Eastern women when they become mothers of IVF offspring (Inhorn 2003, 2015). But as described above, ARTs can also produce profound difficulties, disappointments, and bioethical conundrums for Middle Eastern women and for societies as a whole. For example, one of the most disturbing bioethical consequences of ARTs that is now beginning to be seen across the Middle East is the emergence of so-called ‘gender selection’ (Inhorn 2018). Although son preference and daughter discrimination are anathema in Islam – with the Prophet Muhammad explicitly forbidding the pre-Islamic practice of female infanticide – the emergence of ARTs, particularly preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), is leading to a new form of female ‘embryocide’ in the Muslim world. Namely, in some Middle Eastern IVF clinics, couples who want sons, especially after the birth of only daughters, are using IVF with PGD to perform sex selection, culling IVF-created female embryos in an attempt to produce male-only progeny (Inhorn 2015, 2018; Serour 2008). Furthermore, new forms of ‘feticide’ are also occurring in many Middle Eastern IVF clinics, through selective abortion of fetuses in high-order multiple pregnancies (i.e., triplets and beyond), when too many embryos are returned to a woman’s uterus during an IVF cycle (Inhorn 2015; Serour 2008). Like the ART-abetted forms of biological incest occurring in Iran, these ‘selective’ reproductive practices of embryo and fetal ‘culling,’ especially of female embryos, are deeply disturbing (Wahlberg and Gammeltoft 2018). However, these are part of the ‘bioethical aftermath’ of ARTs in the Muslim Middle East, a world where the widespread acceptance and use of ARTs has not been entirely unambiguous (Inhorn and Tremayne 2016). Indeed, the emergence of ARTs has led to a bioethical ‘slippery slope,’ where technologies intended for one use may morph into another, as shown in the case of PGD-assisted sex selection, which may be leading to new instantiations of son preference and daughter discrimination, as well as irremediable alterations in male-to-female sex ratios (Inhorn 2018).

Conclusion As in any revolution, future outcomes are never entirely clear. At the present time, the introduction of ever newer reproductive technologies to the Muslim world is bringing with it both hope and trepidation. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that overall, the introduction of both contraceptive technologies and ARTs has been a great boon to the Muslim world, and especially to Muslim women. As shown in this chapter, massive fertility declines have been facilitated by family planning programs and the influx of female contraceptive technologies into the region. But ‘human factors’ have also been important, including support from male religious leaders and the reproductive behaviour of Muslim couples themselves, not only wives, but also husbands. Today across 354

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the Arab world, women are using a variety of female contraceptives to plan their smaller families. This family planning revolution has clearly been effective. Today, most Arab nations are close to achieving ‘replacement fertility’ – or two children for every two parents. This dramatic decline in fertility is not the only reproductive revolution taking place across the region. Over the past three decades, the Muslim Middle East, both the Sunni- and Shiʿa-dominant nations, has also seen the growth of one of the largest ART sectors in the world. Infertility treatment via ARTs has been encouraged by both Islamic authorities and has been supported by Muslim men, who have embraced ART-assisted family building with the wives they love. Increasing access to ARTs across the region has led to the births of thousands of Muslim IVF babies in countries such as Egypt (Inhorn 2003), Lebanon (Inhorn 2012), the United Arab Emirates (Inhorn 2015), and many other nations in the Muslim world (Inhorn and Patrizio 2015). In other words, not all ‘revolutions’ in the Muslim world are political. As shown in this chapter, across the Muslim Middle East, two reproductive revolutions have quietly taken place, and forever more, have changed the lives of Muslim women.

Further reading Ali, Kamran Asdar. 2002. Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies, New Selves. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. This critical study examines the ways in which Egyptian family planning programs, heavily influenced by Western agencies and funding, attempt to shape local practices of contraception and family building. Ethnographic vignettes focus on experiences of Egyptian men, women, and midwives as they attempt to respond to family planning discourses and demands. Eberstadt, Nicholas, and Apoorva Shah. 2012. ‘Fertility Decline in the Muslim World: A Demographic Sea Change Goes Largely Unnoticed.’ Policy Review 173: 29–44. This article is the first to clearly address the rapid decline in fertility levels across the Muslim world. It characterizes this fertility decline as a ‘quiet revolution … hiding in plain sight.’ The article also looks to the future, addressing the policy implications of significantly lower fertility levels across the region. Hopkins, Nicholas, ed. 2004. The New Arab Family. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. This edited volume showcases the work of anthropologists, demographers, psychologists, and sociologists, who explore new configurations of family life across the Arab world. With a focus on Egypt, chapters examine emerging patterns of marriage, divorce, and reproduction, focusing on how individuals attempt to renegotiate their relationships to larger familial and social structures. Inhorn, Marcia C., and Soraya Tremayne, eds. 2012. Islam and Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Sunni and Shia Perspectives. New York: Berghahn. This edited volume highlights the development of burgeoning IVF and ART sectors across the Muslim Middle East. Designed to overcome the problem of infertility, these technologies are now practiced in radically different ways in Sunni- versus Shiʿa-majority Muslim countries, for reasons that are explored in depth by anthropologists, historians, and legal scholars in this volume. Kanaaneh, Rhoda Ann. 2002. Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. This ethnographic study focuses on the reproductive aspirations of middle-class Palestinian couples in the Galilee, who now opt for ‘quality’ over ‘quantity’ of children. This study of Palestinian family life is set against a backdrop of demographic contestation, where relative ‘strength in numbers’ matters to both Israeli and Palestinian nation building.

References Abbasi-Shavazi, Mohammad Jalal, Marcia C. Inhorn, Hajiieh Bibi Razeghi-Nasrabad, and Ghasem Toloo. 2008. ‘“The Iranian ART Revolution”: Infertility, Assisted Reproductive Technology, and Third-Party Donation in the Islamic Republic of Iran.’ Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4: 1–28. Adamson, G. David. 2009. ‘Global Cultural and Socioeconomic Factors that Influence Access to Assisted Reproductive Technologies.’ Women’s Health 5: 351–358. Al-Azhar Islamic Research Academy, Fatwa Committee. 1988. ‘Al-Azhar Fatwa Committee’s Points of View on Birth Planning.’ Population Science 8: 15–17.

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Ali, Kamran Asdar. 2002. Planning the Egyptian Family: New Bodies, New Selves. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Al-Torki, Soraya. 1980. ‘Milk Kinship in Arabic Society: An Unexplored Problem in the Ethnography of Marriage.’ Ethnology 19: 233–244. Bier, Laura. 2008. ‘From Birth Control to Family Planning: Population, Gender, and the Politics of Reproduction in Egypt.’ In Family in the Middle East: Ideational Change in Egypt, Iran, and Tunisia, edited by Kathryn M. Yount and Hoda Rashad, pp. 55–79. London and New York: Routledge. Cetorelli, Valeria, and Tiziana Leone. 2012. ‘Is Fertility Stalling in Jordan?’ Demographic Research 26: 293–318. Chikvaidze, P., H.H. Madi, and R.K. Mahaini. 2012. ‘Mapping Family Planning Policy and Programme Best Practices in the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region: A Step towards Coordinated Scale-up.’ Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal 18: 1–9. Clarke, Morgan. 2007. ‘Children of the Revolution: ‘Ali Khamenei’s ‘Liberal’ Views on in Vitro Fertilization.’ British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 34: 287–303. Clarke, Morgan. 2009. Islam and New Kinship: Reproductive Technologies and the Shariah in Lebanon. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Clarke, Morgan, and Marcia C. Inhorn. 2011. ‘Mutuality and Immediacy between Marja’ and Muqallid: Evidence from Male IVF Patients in Shi’i Lebanon.’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 43: 409–427. Courbage, Youssef. 1999. ‘Economic and Political Issues of Fertility Transition in the Arab World— Answers and Open Questions.’ Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 20: 353–379. Eberstadt, Nicholas, and Apoorva Shah. 2012. ‘Fertility Decline in the Muslim World: A Demographic Sea Change Goes Largely Unnoticed.’ Policy Review 173: 29–44. Fageeh, Wafa, Hassan Raffa, Hussain Jabbad, and A. Marzouki. 2002. ‘Transplantation of the Human Uterus.’ International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics 76: 245–251. Faour, Muhammad. 1989. ‘Fertility Policy and Family Planning in the Arab Countries.’ Studies in Family Planning 20: 254–263. Gürtin, Zeynep B. 2011. ‘Banning Reproductive Travel: Turkey’s ART Legislation and Third-Party Assisted Reproduction.’ Reproductive BioMedicine Online 23: 555–564. Gürtin, Zeynep B. 2016. ‘Patriarchal Pronatalism: Islam, Secularism and the Conjugal Confines of Turkey’s IVF Boom. Reproductive BioMedicine & Society Online 2: 39–46. Haeri, Shahla. 2002. Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Shi’i Iran. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Hopkins, Nicholas S., ed. 2004. The New Arab Family. Cairo: American University Press. Inhorn, Marcia C. 1994. Quest for Conception: Gender, Infertility, and Egyptian Medical Traditions. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Inhorn, Marcia C. 1996. Infertility and Patriarchy: The Cultural Politics of Gender and Family Life in Egypt. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Inhorn, Marcia C. 2003. Local Babies, Global Science: Gender, Religion, and in Vitro Fertilization in Egypt. New York: Routledge. Inhorn, Marcia C. 2012. The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Inhorn, Marcia C. 2015. Cosmopolitan Conceptions: IVF Sojourns in Global Dubai. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Inhorn, Marcia C. 2018. ‘Fertility Decline, Small Families, and Son Selection in the Muslim World: The Controversial Convergence of Contraceptive and Reprogenetic Technologies.’ Paper presented at ‘Family Structure in the Wake of Genetic and Reproductive Technologies,’ Georgetown University in Qatar, October 7. Inhorn, Marcia C., and Pasquale Patrizio. 2015. ‘Infertility around the Globe: New Thinking on Gender, Reproductive Technologies, and Global Movements in the 21st Century.’ Human Reproduction Update 21: 411–426. Inhorn, Marcia C., and Soraya Tremayne, eds. 2012. Islam and Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Sunni and Shia Perspectives. New York: Berghahn. Inhorn, Marcia C., and Soraya Tremayne. 2016. ‘Islam, Assisted Reproduction, and the Bioethical Aftermath.’ Journal of Religion and Health 55: 422–430.

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Two ‘quiet’ reproductive revolutions Johnson-Hanks, Jennifer. 2006. ‘On the Politics and Practice of Muslim Fertility.’ Medical Anthropology Quarterly 20: 12–30. Khatib-Chahidi, Jane. 1992. ‘Milk Kinship in Shi’ite Islamic Iran.’ In The Anthropology of Breastfeeding: Natural Law or Social Construct, edited by Vanessa Maher, pp. 109–132. Oxford: Berg. Kulczycki, Andrej. 2004. ‘The Sociocultural Context of Condom Use within Marriage in Rural Lebanon. Studies in Family Planning 35: 246–260. Lapham, Robert J. 1972. ‘Population Policies in the Maghrib.’ Middle East Journal 26: 1–10. Lapham, Robert J., and W. Parker Mauldin. 1985. ‘Contraceptive Prevalence: The Influence of Organized Family Planning Programs.’ Studies in Family Planning 16: 117–137. Mitchell, Tim. 1991. ‘America’s Egypt: Discourse of the Development Industry.’ Middle East Report 21: 18–36. Mitchell, Tim. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Moosa, Ebrahim. 2003. ‘Human Cloning in Muslim Ethics.’ Voices across Boundaries Fall: 23–26. Musallam, Basim F. 1983. Sex and Society in Islam: Birth Control before the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Myntti, Cynthia, Abir Ballan, Omar Dewachi, Faysal El-Kak, and Mary E. Deeb. 2002. ‘Challenging the Stereotypes: Men, Withdrawal, and Reproductive Health in Lebanon.’ Contraception 65: 165–170. Saniei, Mansooreh. 2012. ‘Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research in Iran: The Significance of the Islamic Context.’ In Islam and Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Sunni and Shia Perspectives, edited by Marcia C. Inhorn and Soraya Tremayne, pp. 194–217. New York: Berghahn. Serour, Gamal I. 2008. ‘Islamic Perspectives in Human Reproduction.’ Reproductive BioMedicine Online 17: 34–38. Stycos, J. Mayone, and Hussein Abdel Aziz Sayed. 1988. Community Development and Family Planning: An Egyptian Experiment. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Tabutin, Dominique, and Bruno Schoumaker. 2005. ‘The Demography of the Arab World and the Middle East from the 1950s to the 2000s.’ Population 60: 505–615. Tremayne, Soraya. 2006. ‘Not All Muslims Are Luddites.’ Anthropology Today 22: 1–2. Tremayne, Soraya. 2009. ‘Law, Ethics and Donor Technologies in Shia Iran.’ In Assisting Reproduction, Testing Genes: Global Encounters with the New Biotechnologies, edited by Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli and Marcia C. Inhorn, pp. 144–164. New York: Berghahn. Tremayne, Soraya. 2015. ‘Whither Kinship: Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Relatedness in Iran.’ In Assisted Reproductive Technologies in the Third Phase: Global Encounters and Emerging Moral Worlds, edited by Kate Hampshire and Bob Simpson, pp. 69–82. New York: Berghahn. Tremayne, Soraya. 2018. ‘Third Party Gamete Donation in Iran: The Shift from “All in the Family” to “Going It Alone”.’ Paper presented at ‘Family Structure in the Wake of Genetic and Reproductive Technologies,’ Georgetown University in Qatar, October 7. Tremayne, Soraya, and Mohammad Mehdi Akhondi. 2016. ‘Conceiving IVF in Iran.’ Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online 2: 62–70. United Nations. 1986. World Population Prospects: Estimates and Projections as Assessed in 1984. New York: United Nations. United Nations. 1987. World Population Trends and Policies: 1987 Monitoring Report. New York: United Nations. United Nations. 2012. World Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision. New York: United Nations. United Nations. 2018. World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision. New York: United Nations. Wahlberg, Ayo, and Tine Gammeltoft, eds. 2018. Selective Reproduction in the 21st Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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24 AGING AND THE ELDERLY Diminishing family care systems and need for alternatives Mary Elaine Hegland

Introduction As in aging populations elsewhere, the proportion of older people in the Islamic world is growing dramatically, and gender greatly impacts the experiences of the elderly. This contribution is based mainly on my research in an Iranian community, Aliabad,1 located near the south-western provincial capital of Shiraz in Fars Province, Iran, and among some elderly of the many Iranians residing in California’s Santa Clara Valley where I have lived for 30 years. Depending on levels of modernization, economic resources, and younger women’s ability to focus attention on self, elderly in other Muslim countries are facing trends similar to those described here. Dramatic transformations in men’s work, lifestyles, and family and kinship dynamics over the last 50 years in Aliabad and elsewhere in Iran have drastically affected the lives of elderly women. Fifty years ago, Aliabad women always lived with others: they married young and spent their lives caring for husband and children, and then, as elderly women, rose to positions of household authority, lived in the same courtyard with one or more sons and their wives and children and then were cared for by them and by daughters. Now, instead of extended families, Aliabad people live in nuclear family homes, and elderly widows are often left alone in their own, sometimes neglected homes. More independence and autonomy for brides and younger wives translates into near reversal in power relations and decline of care for older women, especially widows. Although better-off widows living alone appreciate access to piped water and appliances, they miss the busy, full households under their management of the old days. Family systems of care for the elderly are breaking down, and means to collaborate with family support for elderly widows are needed. The sections below provide discussion on conditions for elderly women in the 1970s, the transformed lives of elderly women in the 21st century, and the advantages and challenges of the present for Aliabad elderly women. The first section provides background information about this community in southwestern Iran and then the chapter outlines the lives of elderly women during my 18 months of research during the 1970s. Next, I present the dramatic transformations for the elderly brought about by improvement in living standards, modernization of lifestyles, and the change from agriculture to wage and salary-based work for men, with an emphasis on the transformation from extended families to nuclear families. Improvements in

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autonomy for younger wives has resulted in a decline in the authority of mothers-in-law. As preparing children for lives in the transformed world became more expensive, children demanded more resources, and responsibilities of parents became much greater. After parents had expended resources for children’s upbringing, education, weddings, and marital homes, young wives wanted their husbands’ time, attention, and resources to be reserved for their own families, children, and homes rather than going to support their husbands’ aging parents. Elderly widows, not accustomed to living alone, had to find new ways of combating loneliness and finding ways to socialize. Two new benefits of 21st century living for Aliabad widows have been offered by the greatly expanded religious, educational, and ritual opportunities and their husbands’ retirement benefits they can claim after his death, although the latter may decline due to the outsourcing of government work and increasing use of contractors rather than permanent, formal employees. Next the chapter discusses current financial and economic problems of the elderly, particularly of elderly women: the greater freedoms of younger women resulting in less time, attention, and material assistance for elderly women who have lost much of their power and influence; migration resulting in fewer family members available to tend to the elderly; and the greatly expanded settlement that is filled with many in-migrants who are strangers for older people, which makes it difficult for elderly to see family, relatives and friends. Several ways of dealing with declining family support for elderly people of Aliabad and nearby Shiraz are then presented. The chapter goes on to discuss reasons for leaving Iran and the challenges facing elderly Iranians living in California’s Santa Clara Valley, based on the author’s research among this migrant group. Finally I explain how Aliabad elderly women as well as many other older Iranian women were born into one world and lived part of their lives in that world but then experienced old age in a transformed, modern world that makes them feel left behind and challenged to find new ways of coping.

The community of Aliabad During my dissertation research for 18 months in Iran from June 1978 to December 1979, Aliabad was a village of some 3,000 people. Men earned a living for themselves and their families as agriculturalists and lower-level traders. A large number of younger men had begun working in factories, construction, and services outside of the village. Only a handful of women lacking an able-bodied male provider worked outside of the home, although some girls worked in the new carpet factory until they became engaged. Rapid change occurred after that time. By the time of my fieldwork in the next century, with the last visit in 2018, Aliabad had become a large, formally incorporated suburb of Shiraz. Most residents, especially younger ones, considered themselves to be Shirazis. Although many people had moved into Shiraz, usually maintaining their Aliabad ties, many more people from outlying rural areas and elsewhere in Iran as well as Afghans had come to live in Aliabad, increasing the population to at least 12,000. Aliabadis who had stayed in town and who I had known in 1978 and 1979, along with their descendants, lived much like middle- and upperclass Shiraz urbanites. They traveled into Shiraz often, sometimes moved back and forth, and usually sent their children to school in Shiraz rather than to local schools where, they felt, Afghans and rural migrants caused a decline in learning and social atmosphere.

Aliabad aging and the elderly in 1978–1979 Although most older people then were illiterate and did not have ‘hobbies,’ they worked as they could. Older men, usually financially assisted by their sons’ incomes from jobs, 359

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sometimes sat in open areas with their peers to chat and watch comings and goings when not doing agricultural day labor or tending their vineyards and dry-land wheat fields. Older women, more restricted to household and courtyard, might gather with other women on an old rug in a secluded alleyway, when not busy with household chores, to chat and fashion the uppers for shoes valued by nomadic tribesmen. In those days, socializing provided the only entertainment for women. Only two families owned a television set by the time I left, and even a radio was a luxury. Forty years ago, Aliabad living standards were low; people lived in mud-brick houses and courtyards, walls covered with a mixture of mud and straw. Only relatively recently, elementary education, piped gas, electricity, piped water, and a daily bus service into Shiraz had been instituted. Courtyard out-houses featured a hole in the ground, and wastewater coursed through small gutters in the middle of alleyways. Fortunate people had access to a cold-water spigot in their courtyard. People went to the village bathhouse once every two weeks or more. Kitchens were no more than an aladin kerosene burner in the room in winter and the courtyard in summer or, for those somewhat better off, a two-burner gas stove on the ground or a low shelf. Two village men owned a car, and other men traveled by bus or factory transportation to work. Medical facilities for Aliabadis were not readily available. People rarely took elderly relatives to doctors because their health problems were blamed simply on old age. Especially for poor Aliabad people – the great majority 40 and 50 years ago –– death came relatively early. Although care for elderly could be a heavy burden for women, generally it was not for a long time. Village life in 1978–1979 differed a great deal from life in urban upper- and uppermiddle-class families. If their sons and daughters had moved to other homes after marriage, as they would have been able to do financially, the parents left behind had servants for assistance and companionship. They also had the advantages of literacy, wider social circles, media, transportation, and much better health and medical care. In some ways their lives were close to lives of American middle-class elderly. The modernization programs and infrastructure development during the Pahlavi shahs’ governments had produced a growing middle-, upper-middle-, and upper-class population, with men and some women working in the military, education, medical fields, and administration. (Many of them left during the revolutionary period, not wanting to give up their modern, secular, advantaged lives.) These advances had not spread to the rural and lower classes whose elderly continued to live without good housing, nutritious diet, mobility, literacy, medical benefits, or varied entertainment. In Aliabad, getting older, bringing children, brides, and grandchildren into the household brought respect and authority to both men and women, although women remained under the formal control of husbands and sons. I often visited homes where older men were waited on and given respect and obedience, and older women busied themselves with housework and hospitality. In one home, the grandmother sometimes came to visit her daughter, also a grandmother by then, from her usual place at her son’s home. Although I didn’t understand her heavily accented Persian, clearly all were telling stories, chatting, and laughing – having a great time being together. Mothers and daughters generally enjoyed an especially close relationship throughout life. Since males were somewhat older than females at marriage, and remarried not long after losing a wife, wives cared for an older husband who was losing his strength. As teachers and mentors of their sons in agriculture, trading or crafts such as carpentry, men maintained a higher social position and respect than aging women. Often, sons hoped to take over their 360

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fathers’ positions, shops, property, or rights to agriculture activity and thus were motivated to maintain good relations with their fathers. Young women did not have such motivations when caring for their husbands’ mothers, but although daughters-in-law might not be as devoted as expected, daughters were usually close to their own mothers and wanted to care for them as best they could. This was not always easy because husbands controlled their wives’ activities, and wives were restrained by the taboo against using their husbands’ resources to help their own parents; very few women had outside jobs that provided them with their own monetary resources. In the 1960s and 1970s, sons brought their brides into their parental courtyards to live under the sometimes harsh supervision of their mothers. Most moved out sooner or later, but at least one son and his family continued to live with his parents, eventually taking over the home. In 1978–1979, I knew of no elderly person in Aliabad, man or woman, who lived alone (see Figure 24.1). Some families maintained large courtyards where each nuclear family had one or more rooms. In these cases, an elderly couple lived in the same courtyard with their sons and their brides. In less advantaged families, a son brought his wife into the parental home with perhaps a separate room for the new family. Sons were expected to carry the residential and financial burden of supporting elderly parents, and their wives were expected to do the care work. Forty and more years ago social pressure for the care of the aging and ailing carried great weight, and daughters-inlaw usually followed expectations to care for in-laws, more or less, whether their hearts were in it or not. Women seldom worked outside of the home, so this service was physically possible. Daughters were far more emotionally attached to their own aging mothers. Often, when an older woman needed personal care, the daughters came to the brother’s home and tended the mother. While I was there, a group of sisters took turns caring for their seriously sick mother, even staying nights with her. Even if they sensed the lack of dedication from

Figure 24.1 With the assistance of another widow, a recent widow bakes bread for her multi-generational family

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a daughter-in-law, by living in the homes of sons, elderly parents were comforted by the familial social setting, by the presence of the son and his children, and by other grandchildren who often visited and helped with their care. Although in rural areas, both women and men could build up their status and authority as they became older, when their physical or mental ability decreased, generally they did not receive the same levels of respect and attention. As elderly people lost the ability to interact, visits from relatives and friends dwindled until only close family members dropped by, and rarely so. In 1978–1979, the elderly were enclosed in their families. Although most elderly grandparents had only minimal nutrition, health, mobility, hearing and vision aid, medical care, entertainment, and exercise, they lived in a community and a culture familiar and comfortable for them and could count on services provided by those around them. At the very least they were in familiar settings and in close proximity to those they cared about.

Aliabad aging and the elderly in the 21st century As an anthropologist, I am interested in people’s actual behavior rather than in expectations and teachings of Islamic authorities and the Islamic Republic government. Regarding eldercare, the Islamic saying, ‘Heaven lies at the feet of mothers,’ is popular in Iran, but actions do not always follow ideals. Rather, social, cultural, economic, religious, and political conditions and changes greatly influence behavior, including actions and attitudes regarding aging and the elderly. Dramatic social transformations have taken place in Iran in the last half century, and these have greatly changed the lives of the elderly.2 When I returned to Aliabad in 2003 after an involuntary absence of almost 24 years and on later visits, I asked older people which times they liked better, the earlier, ‘old’ times or now. They nearly always responded that although they appreciated the ease brought by better living conditions, they missed the old times and the earlier tightly-knit community and closeness among relatives. People complained that brothers saw each other hardly more than once a year, that people now lived behind closed doors while in the past their doors were always open. One elderly woman complained about her ‘bad nerves,’ saying ‘Why shouldn’t my nerves be bothering me? I used to live in a home surrounded by sons, daughters-in-law, children and grandchildren. It was filled with people and lively. Now I am all alone.’ Farming had become almost non-existent in Aliabad. The great majority of men had received insufficient irrigated land from the 1962 land reform to make grain cultivation profitable. As they could not use this land for commercial agriculture, many planted a small orchard or built a house and courtyard on it, or sold it and used the money for children’s marriage expenses, funded a trip to Mecca to become a hajji, bought a car for carrying passengers, or set up a business. With the sale of land received from the 1962 land reform or turning the land into orchards, men who had worked all of their lives as agriculturalists no longer had the occupation they knew how to do so well; they could only earn a little from day wage work on the wheat land of the largest owner. Work in fields and orchards was no longer respected, and the men who had done it were not much respected either. Men especially complained about the decline of agriculture and animal husbandry: ‘Before, we were producers; we produced every sort of crop. Now we are just consumers.’ For women, especially young women, hard domestic work, handling animals and their products, and cooking for unexpected guests no longer were a source of self-worth. They preferred to take it easy and to have time to go out for chats with friends and relatives, although older women looked down on them for their lack of competence and work ethic. 362

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Changes impacting the elderly Although in times past, the lives of the older and younger generations did not differ much, now a gap was developing between the worlds of older and younger in lifestyles, expectations, and views. 3 Change in Europe and North American had taken a couple of centuries; in Aliabad it was compressed into a couple of generations, causing the elderly to feel – and to be – pushed to the side. The aspirations and desired lifestyles of the younger generation directly impacted the elderly. Men now left the village to work and developed shops, services, and money-making projects right in Aliabad, turning it into a hub for the area and a place of opportunity for people from other places. People came from elsewhere to live in Aliabad, including many Afghans and Lurs from adjacent tribal/ethnic areas. Both were looked down upon and avoided as much as possible by ‘native’ Aliabad people, who now felt like strangers in their own town. Furthermore, as sons married, post-marital residence became an issue. Whereas parents dearly wanted their sons to live with them, or at least on another floor in the same house, brides were not willing to marry without a separate home, and expected the parents to provide fully furnished modern houses or apartments.

Responsibilities of parents From selling land accruing to them from land reform and the real estate business as well as working and doing business in the oil-enriched economy, fathers in the early 21st century tried to fulfill expectations of spending money for their children’s futures and also to maintain their own reputations as caring, well-off parents. Parents provided off-spring with everything needed to maintain their status and point them towards success in this new economy and materialistic world – special classes, good education, clothing, cars for boys, and make-up, jewelry, and hair styling for girls. For children’s marriages, parents spent for extravagant wedding celebrations and provided their children with homes fully furnished from rugs to well-stocked refrigerators and freezers, from sofa-sets to spices and cleaning materials, even if they needed to borrow money for these expenses. In fact, for Iranians in the new century, debts became common and increased in the declining economy due to lack of jobs, ever-increasing lifestyle expectations, government mismanagement, inflation, corruption, competition from China in manufactured goods, and, later, economic sanctions.

Lives and expectations of the younger generation Younger wives wanted to reserve their husbands’ earnings for their own nuclear family, household, and reputation as a well-off family. They were adamant about not staying in their husbands’ parents’ home, even only for the wedding night. In this new era, parents accept that children require much higher expenditures and much more effort than in previous generations to give them a chance for success. Even girls, who in the past had much less schooling than their brothers, now expect and get a few years of higher-level schooling and college degrees, although few women in Aliabad have jobs, in line with the general low participation of women in the labor force in Iran. Girls expect their parents to pay for cosmetic surgery such as nose jobs and for beauty products, travels, chic clothes, and entertainment. Boys, who expect a car or at the very least a motorcycle and spending money, cost even more to raise. Wives do not want their husbands’ resources – time, attention, or financial – to go to their elderly mothers. A widow, according to Islamic rules, is allowed only one-eighth of 363

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her husband’s property – and that was usually usurped as well. This makes her dependent on help with visits to a doctor or hospital when she needs it, but often elderly women were left without much attention, money, and help with chores and repairs to her home.

Elderly parents – especially women – left on their own When children moved away upon marriage, parents were left behind alone. The aging mother had less housework to do with only herself and her husband at home, but then, as they grew older, women – generally a few years younger than their husbands – had to care for declining husbands without help. If a wife died, the husband would shortly remarry a woman usually quite some years younger than he and from a poorer family in an outlying area, sometimes a widow. These women had the disadvantage of being far from their own relatives and having to face the distrust of their husbands’ sons and their wives, who did not want any decline in their own resources and inheritance due to her presence or – worse – due to any resulting children.4 By 2004, I was shocked to see that the majority of elderly widows lived by themselves – in great contrast to no elderly what-so-ever living on their own in 1978–1979. Several, I noticed, suffering from dementia, lived on their own, were lonely and not adequately cared for, even when they stayed in their own old courtyard or a son’s courtyard with a room of their own. At best, a daughter-in-law or a daughter would bring them a plate of food for meals. In contrast, elderly men in Aliabad did not live alone but were provided with companionship, food, domestic work, and assistance, whether by a long-time wife or, as widowers, by a new wife. I knew of only one elderly man who lived alone in his old home, the village mullah, a widower who did not follow the normal practice of widowers to remarry. He was cared for well by his married daughters who brought him food and did his domestic chores.

Ventures to combat loneliness Widows who maintained better mental and physical health, even while rather lonely in their own homes, could spend time chatting with neighbors. They could visit children and relatives and sometimes stay overnight with sisters. A few opened a home-based or nearby small shop and found some entertainment, social activity, and a bit of income that way. Some elderly widows visited sons for longer periods. The house of one elderly woman in Aliabad had no central heating, no bathroom or kitchen, and an outhouse in the courtyard – typical for its construction year. It was chilly and so she stayed in the home of a son in Shiraz during the winter. His wife treated her with due respect and deference, unlike the other sons’ wives. She even spent hours scrubbing her mother-in-law in the bath. But eventually even this wife began to complain about her mother-in-law’s demands and her rather imperious ways. Such behavior by mothers-in-law used to be quite typical in the past, at least among the more advantaged Aliabadi older women toward their daughters-in-law and children. Grandchildren often visit a grandmother who lives alone and sometimes stay with her for a period, especially if they are experiencing conflict with their own parents. The ideal these days is that grandchildren should take turns staying overnight with a grandmother who lives alone, especially one who has mobility problems. Although this ideal is not always met, even for much-liked grandmothers, relations with children and grandchildren are the mainstay of elderly widows’ lives. When children live far away and visit rarely, some widows are able to make new friends in their neighborhoods. 364

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New advantages for the elderly in the 21st century Along with the transformations in all other areas of life for Aliabadis from 1978 to 2018, the elderly have experienced dramatic changes in their lives, some of which have brought new benefits.

New religious opportunities especially for older women Older women have been among the most ardent and faithful of participants at mosque congregational services; mourning gatherings in the mosques, other religious buildings, and cemeteries; Qurʾan classes; gatherings hosted by other women to make requests of or thank the Karbala saints for granting a favor; and mourning gatherings for the martyrdom of the Shiʿi Muslim ‘saints’ at Karbala (in present-day Iraq, 680 CE) and women’s imprisonment in Damascus by Omar and his supporters. As Aliabad women, in contrast to women living in Shiraz, had not enjoyed any access to religious gatherings 40 years ago, these possibilities constituted new and much appreciated opportunities for elderly women who are able to get around. Forty years ago, they had no access to literacy and not to the now ubiquitous religious gatherings hosted by women, especially during the two months of mourning – Muharram and Safar – to commemorate the Karbala martyrs and hostages. Before the revolutionary period, only a few especially pious elderly women – who would not be suspected of flaunting themselves in front of men – attended Friday services in the mosque. Now the number of religious buildings in the community has increased to seven, and women actually attend services in greater numbers than men. Celebrations and mourning events are held at many points of the Shiʿi Muslim calendar. Religious prayer gatherings are often hosted by various people at the mosques and shrines, and during the month of fasting, food is prepared and distributed after the evening break of the fast. Several events in public places are reserved for women only, such as the day commemorating the death of Ali Akbar, the youngest martyr of Karbala during which mothers and grandmothers bring babies and children to the shrine hoping to receive blessings and protection from the martyred infant. Only women and some children attend the celebration of the birthday of Fatima Zahra, the daughter of the Prophet Mohammad and mother of the illustrious Imam Hussein, Imam Hasan, and their sister Holy Zahra at a shrine a little way outside Aliabad, complete with a sermon from a mullah and breakfast. During my first return visit back to Aliabad in September 2003 and during later visits, I remember how surprised I was to observe at women’s gatherings or the women’s curtained-off sections of a mosque or shrine, that booklets were distributed and read or used to follow prayer texts and readings. I had never before seen Aliabad women reading religious material. More recently, when I have attended many Aliabad women’s religious gatherings in homes or public spaces, where women sit in curtained-off areas if men are also present, only a few older women sit – clearly uncomfortable with their illiteracy – and only listen. Religious opportunities in Aliabad, in Shiraz, and elsewhere in the area have proliferated, at neighbors’ and relatives’ homes and in public. As these activities and gatherings are seen as religious, they are meritorious rather than frivolous, and elderly, socially conservative women feel comfortable participating. During Muharram, several religious gatherings are held every day in women’s homes, attended only by women and usually led by either a local woman or a woman specialist from Shiraz. Hostesses invite their neighbors as well as relatives and friends, and announce the home-based ritual gatherings widely, so that women feel free to attend them. Elderly women can keep busy going to the various religious gatherings that usually also include tea, 365

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fruit, and pastry or even a full breakfast or meal. Often elderly widows will walk to these gatherings in the company of a friend or two from the neighborhood. Widows of more advantaged families, however, do not attend public gatherings that they consider to be crowded with low-status Lurs who have moved into town from elsewhere and attend religious gatherings for the sake of the provided food and refreshments. These women stick to private rituals held in homes to which they are personally invited. In addition to numerous Shiʿi-calendar ritual gatherings now available to women, many more mourning rituals for the deceased are held in mosques: on the burial day, the third and seventh day after death, one month later, on the 40th day, after three months, one year, and yearly from then on, many of them attended by women only. Refreshments – juice, cake, and tea – are provided at each such occasion. On the day of burial, women also go to the cemetery, whereas 40 years ago this was not allowed. As was usual 40 years ago, women and now some men as well go to the cemeteries Thursday afternoons to pray for the dead and offer food to others in hopes for their prayers for the souls of their deceased. A widow and her children should take fruit to the cemetery on Thursday afternoons for one year to secure prayers for the husband’s and father’s soul. For older women, any travel is still connected to a pilgrimage, but some younger families enjoy travel without a religious purpose, in the area, elsewhere in Iran, and even abroad. Widowed grandmothers are sometimes included in day trips and pilgrimages. Now elderly local women, widows or accompanying their husbands, far more often go on pilgrimages than they did 40 years ago, including even making the hajj to Mecca. A few active and enterprising widows in Aliabad with an income planned pilgrimages with friends or with a Shiraz caravan to Iran’s large shrine complexes, to Mashad, Qom, and even to Karbala in Iraq, to Damascus in Syria, and to Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia, bringing them excitement, higher status, and fame in the neighborhood as well as religious rewards. Widows who are well off financially may make pilgrimages once a year or more that provide them with high points in their lives and may be filmed. Later, they can play the video documents of these travels for relatives and friends to relive and show off the journeys. These days, just as conservative families are willing to let their girls attend universities, because now the universities are ‘Islamic,’ offering religious teachings and requiring girls to wear conservative modest dress – hijab – elderly women feel enabled to participate in activities and gatherings deemed ‘Islamic.’ Because many elderly women in Aliabad and in many other Iranian areas are socially conservative, the Islamization of life in the Islamic Republic has provided them with additional opportunities to participate in public and religious events.

Financial benefits: retirement incomes for some One new benefit for the elderly compared with 1978–1979 has been the retirement payments for men from government or private jobs. In 1978–1979, most men had retired from work in agriculture or in trade – which did not carry retirement benefits. Only three teachers were receiving retirement payments then; nobody else had yet retired from work at factories, companies, or services, or from the government. At the time, however, many young men found public or private jobs that carried good retirement benefits. By 2018, many older Aliabad men above about age 55 – or their widows – received retirement payments almost as high as their pre-retirement salaries, with health benefits and increasing with inflation. Such financial influx brought the elderly some sense of self-sufficiency and satisfaction. Without them, agriculturalists and traders who were no longer working had been 366

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forced to depend on sons for financial support; this was not a good feeling for either sons or their parents. With these incomes and benefits, elderly widows were able to travel, feel some independence and pride, and occasionally could contribute a chicken to their families’ dinners. While I was in Aliabad in May 2018, an elderly widow, who could no longer walk with comfort, treated all of her children, their spouses, and children to a meal of kebab with all the trimmings ordered from one of the growing numbers of local kebab restaurants/takeouts. Her income from her deceased husband’s retirement fund enabled her to host and enjoy her family once in a while, although she was no longer able to cook large amounts of food. She could reciprocate their hospitality. The situation and status of many retired people and their families in Iran improved a great deal from these government and private retirement benefits. In addition to helping them out financially, these funds also improve relations with their children and grandchildren. Studies conducted by Iranian researchers and published in Iranian journals say that elder abuse, particularly neglect, is relatively high in Iran, but that old people who have an income suffer from abuse much less.

Challenges for aging and the elderly Precarious financial and economic conditions A scandalous story making the rounds in Aliabad in 2018 illustrates the potential neglect that a widow without resources may suffer. A woman from a tribal/ethnic area had moved to Aliabad more than 40 years earlier. I knew her as the woman who came to the courtyard of the largest landowner in Aliabad to milk the cow, which would have been too demeaning a job for the well-off wife. This woman, trying to raise her sons, did many kinds of work in the community, including serving as midwife. The last time I saw this still stately woman, dressed in an elegant regional costume, was at a wedding at least ten years earlier. She had provided her sons with what they needed to become successful, which had included managing and financing their marriages to local women. When her abilities declined with advancing age, she looked to her sons to take her in. The one son said the other should do it, and that one’s wife objected until one day she was seen leaving Aliabad by bus. Later, people were sure that a woman featured on a TV program, explaining the uses of various herbs she used for her local practice in a village quite a distance away, was the missing grandmother. Later yet, people heard that she had died. But her sons, denying that this woman was their mother, failed to travel there to pay their final respects. She had worked hard all of her life to raise her sons and provide good lives for them, but in the end, they neglected her. Lacking any income of her own as well as any relatives in Aliabad other than her sons, she apparently felt abandoned and decided to find a place to live elsewhere. Although I do not know further details, the story illustrates the precarious position of elderly widows’ dependence on family and/or funds and the possible outcomes for those who have the support of neither. All indicators point to better lives for the elderly when they have a stable, independent source of income. These days, government offices are out-sourcing most work to contractors who hire temporary workers. Such workers do not enjoy retirement benefits; in the future, it seems, retirement benefits for men will decline sharply and then when husbands die, there will be no retirement benefits for their widows to take over. Many elderly people’s lives in Aliabad improved after the 1978–1979 Revolution directly or indirectly from the sale of land they got title to earlier during the land reform; from the 367

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booming real estate business in Aliabad; from the expanding job market in government offices, construction, service industries, and import businesses, legal or illegal; or from smuggling, which was a lucrative enterprise. Living standards rose dramatically due to the influx of cash, fueled by the oil economy, and most Aliabad elderly now lived in better homes with better facilities. However, especially with the downturn of the economy since about 2005, money has been getting tighter again, and this affects the lives of the elderly too. Families are strapped to provide their children with the advantages young people have come to expect, such as expensive, elegant weddings, cars and lovely homes, and to keep up their own high living standards they deem necessary for maintaining their family reputations and social status. This tightening of purse strings will most likely lead to fewer resources being available to ease life for the elderly, especially for elderly women. The coronavirus pandemic and its negative impact on the economy will hurt the elderly even more.

Younger people, and especially women, finding selves, realizing wishes, striving for personal advancement and development These developments coincide with the influence of global culture on a great many people in the Islamic world. People want to have higher standards of living, reputations as well-off families, and all possible advantages for their children. They want to choose how to live, unencumbered by control and demands of the older generations. Women do not want interference from their husbands’ parents; they want to run their own households free of the burdens of caring for their husbands’ elderly or infirm parents. In Aliabad, Shiraz, and elsewhere in Iran, during the last half century – and even earlier in the modernizing and Westernizing middle classes during the two Pahlavi shahs’ regimes – older people have lost status, respect, and position. I well remember how, 40 and 50 years ago, people stood up when an older person entered the room, and provided other demonstrations of respect as well. Even middle-aged men would not smoke a cigarette in front of their fathers, out of respect. In front of his parents, a man would not touch his wife, look at her or talk to her to avoid showing lack of respect to the elders. Before economic and technologic modernization transformed agricultural and trading economies and opened paid jobs for men, young men in Aliabad like many young men elsewhere in Iran received a home for themselves and their wives and children and the means for making a livelihood through their fathers. This dependence encouraged respect for their fathers. (In earlier times, young men owed respect, obedience, and labor also to their wives’ fathers in gratitude for giving them their daughters in marriage.) Paradoxically, younger women in the Islamic Republic of Iran, in spite of laws, rules, and ‘Islamic’ culture to control them, are coming into their own. Many younger women frequent the internet and social media routinely; women constitute more than 60 percent of university students; they want to find romantic, devoted partners; they use make-up more than women in any other country except Saudi Arabia and use plastic surgery extensively to make themselves ‘more beautiful'’; they are outspoken, lively, and even argumentative, love to travel and go out, and don’t want to be bothered much by cooking, housework, children, and obediently waiting on aging in-laws. In spite of the Islamic Republic officials’ stringent expectations for female modesty and separation from males, early marriage, the importance of virginity, immediate and frequent pregnancies, and obedience to husbands and in-laws, today’s young women are resisting all such impositions. Sexual relations before marriage are increasing, as are couples who live together without formal marriage, especially in Tehran. These changes mark Iranian 368

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women’s development of self, and these ideas are beginning to spread to Aliabad women. They lead to a drastic decline in power and authority for aging people and the elderly, especially for women, to less socially enmeshed, satisfactory lives. For illiterate women who have worked hard all their lives and not had opportunities to develop interests other than family, household, and visiting with relatives and a few friends, this can be a hard blow.

Migration – friends and relatives leaving and outsiders coming in Migration from rural to urban areas, from one part of the country to another, and to other countries, challenges Aliabad elderly as well as many old people in the wider Middle East. Many younger Aliabad people moved into Shiraz so men would be closer to their workplaces. A few women found jobs there, too. Some people from Aliabad are moving to other countries and are then even further away from aging parents. In one family, for example, two sons moved to Europe and all other sons but one moved into Shiraz. The wife of the remaining son made it clear she did not want to host the aging mother, even for a night, and that she wanted no part in caring for her. Out-migration aside, Aliabad became a center of opportunity for work, investment, and engaging in the real estate boom for thousands of outsiders who moved into Aliabad. The local elderly feel lonely among strange neighbors and the many strangers they pass in the street. Now, instead of living nearby siblings and children, elderly women often live quite a distance even from relatives who live somewhere else in the expanding suburban town that covers former fields and pastures. Elderly people do not drive and generally find it difficult or impossible to walk to distant homes of relatives. They have become dependent on others to bring them back and forth or hire a taxi they can ill afford, given their limited financial resources.

Potential replacements for the waning family care system for elderly In Tehran and other cities, government bodies have opened homes for the elderly. Smaller, private care centers in homes have also been established. A well-known private establishment, Kahrizak, located a little way out of Tehran, houses disabled and elderly who do not have other resources, providing activities and even training, and is run with donations. However, putting an elderly relative in a home would severely harm a family’s reputation, even today. No one from Aliabad lives in a home for the elderly, as far as I know. In one family, one daughter remained unmarried and continued to live with her aging mother, ready to take care of her when she no longer can. In another family, the mother even declared she would keep one daughter unmarried to tend to her in old age. When she did marry eventually, she continued to live close to her mother and her siblings to help out if needed. A divorced daughter moved with her own daughter back to her widowed mother’s home and earned some money as a seamstress to supplement the retirement income taken over by her mother from her deceased father’s employment. When an elderly widow was left alone in her marital courtyard, she rented out a room. Then, later, when she needed assistance, and daughters-in-law did not care to host her permanently, the children found a ‘nurse’ to care for her. The strategy of finding a woman to live with and care for one’s elderly parent has become rather common in Tehran for those who can afford it and have an extra room. The distancing of family members, people’s preference for independence, and skyrocketing housing prices, especially in the larger cities, have made apartment-sharing arrangements attractive for some unattached younger women. Apparently, 369

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assistance from a live-in companion in a woman’s own home does not carry the same social censure of offspring as placing an aged parent in an institution for old people.

Iranian elderly living outside of the country Because of declining opportunities and increasing unemployment in Iran, a few young people of Aliabad origin are moving outside of the country, even as far as to Australia. Young men especially want to leave. Many a young man whose father could afford it, managed to get smuggled out before doing the required military service. In the future, out-migration might become more common, making problems worse for the elderly left behind. Elsewhere in Iran, many people had earlier left for education and for political reasons during and after the Revolution of 1978–1979. Since the late 1970s especially, Iran’s brain drain has increased from all career areas. Some younger Iranians living abroad – usually successful, well-educated professionals – want their parents to join them. Quite a number of Iranians, then, are experiencing old age outside of their home country. Some elderly, creative expatriate Iranians, especially those with resources and language fluency, are able to construct fulfilling and interesting lives for themselves. Some had moved to the US for education earlier in life, had found work and adjusted well to the new environment. Although I know of only three elderly Aliabadis who live outside of the country, I have worked with many other Iranians seniors who live in California’s Bay Area.5 In the US, many elderly Iranians live in the same cities as one or more of their children. The children feel more comfortable about the welfare of their parents when they are in close reach; but this arrangement may present some challenges. Although some Iranian elderly have been able to blossom and take advantage of the many opportunities the less restrictive environment offers, most of the immigrant Iranians who come when they are elderly find it difficult to cope with their new environment. The great majority of elderly Iranians in the Santa Clara Valley do not know English. Some move in with children, but living with a daughter-in-law, especially if she is not from Iran, may not work for long. However, whether they live with children or not, often old people are lonely. Children and grandchildren are caught up in the rush of American life and are running to fulfill all of the appointments on their schedules. Parents work hard to obtain the material life they expect and to provide all amenities and advantages their children need to succeed. Grandchildren may not even speak enough Persian to converse with their grandparents. If the elderly live away from children, they may have a difficult time fulfiling their needs. As most are not able to speak English and to drive, they cannot talk with neighbors and are dependent on other Iranians or strangers to take them around. They may be lonely and depressed and miss Iran and all their social ties and activities there. Many are limited by the perception common in Iranian culture that older people cannot learn or do new things. In the Bay Area, a club for Iranian grandparents and a senior citizen day care and activity center have provided community and rewarding social activity for the displaced Iranian elderly. Mrs Mahin Roudsari, a former teacher, started the club for elderly Iranians – the Iranian Grandparents Club of Northern California – but unfortunately found no successor to organize events after she had to retire for health reasons. Once a month, a large crowd of older Iranians came together to listen to an Iranian-American doctor give a talk in Persian about a medical issue relevant to elderly, listen to Persian music, perhaps watch a group of 370

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young Iranian-Americans performing Iranian dance, and talk non-stop in Persian while treated to tea, Iranian pastry, and dinner. I loved attending these club evenings and observing the delight of the Iranian grandparents as they felt welcomed in this uplifting environment. Another initiative providing welcome entertainment, support care, nutrition, and socializing to the Iranian American elderly has been the Grace Center, located in San Jose. It offers health and medical facilities, breakfast and lunch with Iranian food, afternoon snacks, Persian programs on television, poetry classes, and exercise classes. About 200 elderly who have health issues come to the Center, paid for by county funds for those who qualify, using transportation provided inside of a certain perimeter. I visited the Center regularly for a year, teaching an English class to help seniors make their way around in their foreign environment. One term I brought students from my Anthropology of Aging and the Elderly class to the Center, each student matched up with a senior to interview for a class paper. Upon entering the building, one’s ears are assailed with noise of talking and laughter, testifying to the delight with which seniors enjoy their time in their Persian-speaking, Persian-culture home away from home. One man who had recently lost his wife spoke of crying at home each evening, but then going to sleep with the hope of returning to the Grace Center and his friends there the next day. Mosques and religious organizations have sponsored gatherings, celebrations, and mourning sessions to appeal to the more religious among the Iranian American elderly. Several poetry groups serve elderly as well as younger Iranian Americans; Iranians love poetry. An Iranian American painter, Fariba Nejat, has long worked to establish organizations for Iranians, classes in Persian, the English for the elderly that I taught on Sundays for some years, as well as planning gatherings such as monthly afternoon tea seminars and celebrations for Noruz – the Iranian New Year in March, and Shab-e Yalda, the longest night of the year. These appeal to senior citizens who appreciate attention to their well-loved holidays. Networks of people develop, and people try to come together on a regular basis with friends for meals, poetry, Persian music and dancing, and – always – conversation in Persian. Seniors who have the resources, especially those who have children in Iran and the US, travel back and forth to see friends and relatives in Iran while also staying close to their children and relatives in the US. These elderly are among the well situated who had the resources to leave Iran.

Conclusion The dramatic increase of the elderly population in Iran, and throughout the world, has brought about a state of emergency, the more so as family care systems are shrinking at the same time. Households are transforming from extended to nuclear arrangements with little extra room for aging relatives. Desires of younger generations for upwardly mobile standards of living, greater freedoms and independence of daughters-in-law, and more mobility – both internal and external migration – make for additional challenges to caring for elderly. Given that men always relied heavily on women as household managers, the new social circumstances place particularly heavy burdens on female caretakers of elderly men and diminish attention and resources for elderly women, especially those who are single or widowed. This means that alternatives or at least support for family help are desperately needed to provide the kind of elderly care that lives up to Islamic teachings and culture. The Aliabad elderly of these few decades are caught between two worlds. They were raised and lived their adult lives in one world where they lived with others, busy with work and household. Although men working as traders might go into Shiraz and other rural areas, 371

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women’s only entertainment consisted of talking with people close to them, attending relatives’ weddings, going to the cemetery to pray for the souls of the departed, and, for the better-off, occasionally a pilgrimage to a shrine. Now as elderly individuals, they live in a different, foreign world filled with educated, independent young people, computers, social media, televisions with satellite disks bringing programs subtitled into Persian – often shocking in content for older persons – from all over the world, smartphones always in the hands of the younger generations, grandchildren who may not show the expected respect, and inattentive sons and daughters-in-law. Now, literacy and education are spreading to almost everyone in Iran. Today’s economically comfortable people have smartphones, computers, the internet, and travel. They will enjoy more resources as they grow older (although one can feel apprehensive about negative effects for the elderly from a troubled economy), and they will not feel so much the sharp separation from the worlds of younger generations that many current elderly Iranians do. This separation was visually represented to me during a 21st-century wedding. While young people, dressed in often revealing Western-style clothes and dancing to Western-inspired music with rather wild, Western-inspired moves, a couple of elderly ladies sat quietly on the sidelines in their regional long skirts and tunics, shawls covering heads and shoulders. They looked like uncomfortable strangers from another world (see Figure 24.2).

Figure 24.2 At a wedding, two widows, with chadors (veils) wrapped around their bodies, look uncomfrable as they watch Western-style dancing

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Notes 1 This fieldwork was conducted in 1978–1979, 2003, 2004, 2005–2006, 2008, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2018, for a total of about three years of research in Iran. 2 For more discussion about the transformations in Aliabad society from 1978 until the early decades of the 21st century, see Hegland 2004, 2009a, 2011. 3 For more discussion about Aliabad elderly, see Hegland 2005, 2007, 2008. 4 According to Erika Friedl, in her research site, Sisakht, ‘A widower's daughters, though, were more likely to support their father’s re-marriage: it relieved them of having to care for him when their brother’s wife neglected him, and they did not have good expectations for inheritance anyway’ (personal communication, 15 June 2020). This would likely be the case in Aliabad as well. 5 For more discussion of Iranian elderly living in the Santa Clara Valley of California, see Hegland 2006, 2009b.

Further reading Boggotz, Thomas (2011) Growing Old in Egypt: The Supply and Demand of Care for Older Persons. Cairo, Egypt, The American University in Cairo Press. Based on extensive research in Cairo, this book discusses attitudes about both family and formal care systems from the perspectives of both care seekers and care givers, in the midst of the dramatic demographic shift to an older population in this country. Hussein, S. and M. Ismail (2017) Ageing and elderly care in the Arab region: Policy challenges and opportunities. Ageing International [Online] 42(3), 274–280. Available from: https://link.springer. com/article/10.1007/s12126-016-9244-8 [Accessed 31st January 2019]. This article discusses the aging populations in the Arab world and the challenges that will face the family care system, putting a great deal of burden on caretaker women and suggests ways to face long-term care responsibilities. Khan, W. A. (2018) Responsibilities of Muslim youth Towards Aging Parents. Uxbridge, London, Dr. W. A. Khan. Written from a Muslim perspective, this book discusses old age and the ideally honored status of mothers and parents in Islamic society, expected to be a community of compassion and caring. The author explains how children should treat and care for elderly parents, with lessons from Islamic history and according to Muslim teachings, and honor them even after their deaths. Omidian, P. (1996) Aging and Family in an Afghan Refugee Community. New York, Garland Publishing. Anthropologist Patricia Omidian conducted fieldwork among forced Afghan migrants in Northern California, investigating the roles of elderly persons and intergenerational relations and conflicts in the new environment, after fleeing from war and violence in their homeland. Parkash, J., M. Younis and W. Ward (2015) Healthcare for the ageing populations of countries of the Middle East and North Africa. Ageing International [Online] 40(1), 3–12. Available from: https://link. springer.com/article/10.1007/s12126-012-9150-7 b [Accessed 31st January 2019]. Pointing to the increasing percentage of the elderly population in this region and the types of medical issues facing them, this article emphasizes the need for developing health systems to focus on the elderly. Detailed study will help find ways to provide elderly with better opportunities for lives more integrated into society. Salama, R. and F. Abou El-Soud (2012) Caregiver burden from caring for impaired elderly: a cross-sectional study in rural Lower Egypt. Italian Journal of Public Health. [Online] 9(4). Available from: https://ijphjournal.it/article/download/8662/7820 [Accessed 31 January 2019]. Questionnaire research in two Egyptian villages found mainly wives and then daughters caring for incapacitated elderly men at home. As in Aliabad, the population is aging and life expectancy is increasing, placing heavy burdens on caretaker women. Sokolovsky, J. (ed.), 2008. The Cultural Context of Aging: Worldwide Perspectives. Third Edition. Santa Barbara, CA, Praeger. This volume of articles about aging and the elderly in different countries around the world provides an excellent introduction to issues facing elderly and their families under today’s changing conditions with which to compare to issues for the elderly in the Islamic world. Different articles may be found in the three editions with a fourth edition published in 2019.

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Ward, W. B. and M. Z. Younis (2013) Steps toward a Planning framework for Elder Care in the Arab World. New York, Springer. Reviewing the literature, this book provides information on demographics, living conditions, demands for care services, and recommendations regarding elderly in the Arab world. It presents some of the problems and barriers for developing systems to improve the health and welfare of Arab elderly and some additional health problems caused by improved transportation and a turn to fast-food consumption.

References Hegland, M. E. (2004) Zip in and zip out fieldwork. Journal of Iranian Studies, 37(4), 575–583. Hegland, M. E. (2005) Women, gender and aging as a segment of life cycle: Iran/Afghanistan. In: Joseph, S. (ed.) Encyclopedia of women and Islamic cultures, Vol. III. The Netherlands and Herndon, VA, Brill, pp. 7–9. Hegland, M. E. (2006) Iranian–American elderly in California’s Santa Clara Valley: Crafting selves and composing lives. In: Moghissi, H. (ed.) Muslim diaspora: Gender, culture and identity. London, New York, Routledge, pp. 205–219. Hegland, M. E. (2007) Independent grandmothers in an Iranian village. Middle-East Journal of Age & Aging, 4(1), 28–30. Hegland, M. E. (2008) Modernization and social change: Impact on Iranian elderly social networks and care systems. Anthropology of the Middle East, 2(2), 55–74. Hegland, M. E. (2009a) Educating young women: Culture, conflict, and new identities in an Iranian village. Iranian Studies, 42(1), 45–79. Hegland, M. E. (2009b) Losing, using, and crafting spaces for aging: Iranian American seniors in California’s Santa Clara Valley. In: Solokovsky, J. (ed.) The cultural context of aging, worldwide perspectives, Third Edition. Westport, CT, Bergin & Garvey, pp. 301–323. Hegland, M. E. (2011) Aliabad of Shiraz: Transformation from village to suburban town. Anthropology of the Middle East, 6(2), 21–37.

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25 DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND US MUSLIM COMMUNITIES Negotiating advocacy, vulnerability, and gender norms Juliane Hammer

No one wants to talk about domestic violence (DV). The harrowing statistics on domestic abuse rates and their repercussions in the form of loss of life, medical costs, and economic shortfalls, published and republished, especially during Domestic Violence Awareness Month every October, highlight domestic violence as one of the most acute problems in US society. Yet, there is obvious and persistent resistance to acknowledging the issue. One reason for this resistance is the difficulty of accepting just how many people, especially women in this society, regardless of socio-economic status, are affected by this scourge. More explicitly, they are injured, maimed, scarred, and killed by the mostly male perpetrators of domestic abuse, be it through physical violence, or other forms of abuse, including psychological violence, economic abuse, as well as threats, intimidation, and social isolation. The silence itself on the issue contributes to the perpetuation of cycles of abuse and the ongoing exertion of power and control. The same silence on DV also erases the important and courageous work of those who, at great risk and cost to themselves, participate in social, political, legal, educational, and other efforts against DV in American families and communities. In this chapter, I provide a sketch of such efforts by a specific group of advocates against domestic violence, namely those who identify as American Muslim advocates and focus their efforts on ending domestic abuse in Muslim families and communities. I draw on a larger research project on American Muslim efforts against domestic violence that appear in much more detail in my book, Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts against Domestic Violence (Hammer, 2019a). In the book, I chronicle the efforts, stories, arguments, and strategies of individuals and organizations doing Muslim anti-domestic violence work in the United States. In analysing connections among ethical practices, gender norms, and religious interpretation, I demonstrate how Muslim advocates mobilize a rich religious tradition in community efforts against domestic violence, identifying religion and culture as resources or roadblocks to prevent harm and to restore family peace. For this research project, I conducted over 60 interviews, attended over 50 events, and analysed a large number of textual sources ranging from books, articles, and blogposts, to YouTube speeches, and organizations’ brochures and websites.1 375

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Here, conscious of the limitations of a book chapter in an edited volume, I want to focus on the interplay between the broader US context and the specific parameters and experiences of Muslim communities as well as Muslim anti-DV advocates. I argue that Muslim advocates and service providers have to negotiate the negative representations of their communities and their religious traditions, the complex relationship of the mainstream anti-domestic violence movement with religious traditions, communities, and advocates, as well as a complicated discursive structure of gender norms interlinked with American society, Muslim communities, and intersectional notions of gender, race, religion, and culture. Their negotiations are explicitly not situating them between US society on one hand and Muslim communities on the other, somehow drawing them in one or the other direction: I explicitly avoid such binaries in my analysis. Rather, they influence and are simultaneously influenced by the different dimensions, layers, maps, and structures of DV advocacy work. Muslim DV advocates draw intentionally and creatively on ethical resources, quantitative and qualitative research data, religious texts and interpretations, and political capital in order to provide the most effective and powerful resources for their work. They also share in the frequent setbacks, the dangers of emotional and professional burnout, the perpetual lack of funding, and the culture of silence experienced and battled by advocates in the mainstream American DV movement. What sets them apart is both their engagement with “Islam” as a resource against domestic violence in Muslim communities and their focus on Muslim communities and families. Or to put it yet another way: Muslim anti-DV efforts are simultaneously uniquely Muslim and thoroughly embedded in the structures as well as limitations, boundaries, and problems of the larger American society they are a part of. Therefore, it is important to neither isolate their work from the mainstream nor assume that such a thing as the mainstream is something other than a complicated and diverse movement that Muslims are an integral part of as well. It is both in Muslim advocates’ references to Islam and Muslim tradition, and in their differential treatment by mainstream society, that the specificity of their “Muslim” approaches and framework is created and continuously redefined. This chapter offers insights into the complex ways in which gender norms and ideas are constructed and just how contextual such formulations are: gender norms and practices deemed Islamic or un-Islamic by Muslim DV advocates are particular constructions that are intentionally referencing American norms, laws, and societal practices as well as very carefully determining how to create authoritative discourses that unequivocally reject domestic abuse in all its forms while not necessarily disavowing patriarchal gender and marriage norms within and beyond religious frameworks. The centrality of rejecting and ultimately ending domestic abuse in Muslim communities and families (as well as society at large) leads to a framework for thinking about gender, marriage, and sexuality that cannot easily, or without further discursive effort, be expanded from its DV context to produce a broader liberator Islamic gender and sexuality framework. However, at the same time, seeds for such a broader framework certainly exist in this contextualized work and should be acknowledged and nurtured. This chapter aims to highlight and center the work of Muslim DV advocates in its complexity and complicatedness, while also advocating for an end of to all forms of domestic violence, an explicitly prescriptive and political position I take as the author. In what follows, I provide a brief overview of the work and the Muslim DV advocates I have been studying since 2010, followed by a discussion of the broader context in which this work takes place, namely the ubiquity of anti-Muslim hostility, the complicated relationship between the DV movement and religion(s), and the landscape of state intervention 376

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and interaction of the DV movement with the state. In the second part of the chapter, I reflect on a set of intersections: I am interested in the ways in which anti-DV efforts, both practical and discursive, require at least some discussion and application of gender discourses, ideas about religion, and the important ways in which race and culture are embedded and embroiled in DV work. I take the notion of intersections seriously in the ways in which Black feminist thinkers, among them Kimberlé Crenshaw, have identified intersectionality as a set of overlapping and indeed, intersecting systems and forms of oppression that are perpetuated by societal, political, legal, and other hierarchies (Crenshaw, 1993; Nash, 2019). I conclude the chapter with a short reflection on what Muslim DV advocates might mean when they argue that there is an Islamic solution to domestic violence while also insisting that DV itself is not a uniquely Muslim problem.

The work and the advocates My book, Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts against Domestic Violence, emerged from earlier research on American Muslim women activism for gender justice, specifically through debates about woman-led prayers, women’s leadership, and women’s spaces in American Muslim spaces. I combined ethnographic and textual research methods to explore religiously framed advocacy and service work, by self-identified Muslim advocates and service providers, to address domestic violence in American Muslim communities. I focused on individuals, organizations, and networks who engaged in one or more of the following three projects: to raise awareness of domestic violence in Muslim communities; to provide services to victims and survivors, including shelter, counselling, job training, legal support, and long-term housing; and to provide training and information about Muslim victims, families, and communities to law enforcement, lawyers, service providers, and medical professionals outside Muslim networks, aka the mainstream. These three strands of Muslim anti-DV work are often carried out by the same people: specific organizations might engage in awareness work through workshops and trainings in Muslim community contexts while also offering direct services such as access to pro bono lawyers, case workers, and counsellors. Or they might focus their efforts on establishing transitional housing or shelter while at the same time educating mainstream shelters and social workers about the specific experiences and needs of Muslim survivors. There is, of course, also a deep and abiding connection between awareness work and the provision of frontline services: the latter are informed by the former as much as the observations, experiences, and needs in direct services often define the parameters of frameworks for addressing DV as an issue in Muslim communities. It is an interdependent relationship between ideas and practices, rather than ideas being put into practice. At times, DV work might be carried out by organizations that also do other social justice or charitable work, and a significant portion of Muslim DV efforts is carried out by mosques, community boards, and committees, as well as, and this is significant, dedicated individuals in and around communities who are not attached to specific organizations or networks. In addition, I have found that there are Muslim-identified individuals who work, professionally or in a volunteer capacity, in the mainstream DV movement and/or in service organizations. All of them make up the sum of American Muslim efforts against domestic abuse. Also important is the nature of such Muslim anti-DV work in its complexity, and, as I describe in much more detail in the book, as a landscape without a map. Muslim organizations and networks are, like others, in flux, and because they are focused on the one goal to 377

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eradicate domestic abuse in Muslim families, they often work in the moment, in response to the continuing DV crisis, and in emergency mode at all times. The project’s and then book’s focus on religiously framed Muslim efforts against DV allowed me glimpses into adjacent areas of research on other religious efforts against DV (Christian and Jewish in particular), the overlap between DV work in Muslim communities and immigrant/ ethnic communities in the United States, as well as ongoing debates about feminist approaches to domestic violence, and state practices regarding violence against women and intimate partner violence. Such overlaps and intersections only reinforce my argument that Muslim efforts against domestic violence can only be understood as embedded in broader DV efforts in the same way that Muslim communities are embedded in and thus part of American society. In the end, networks and organizations are made up of individuals, and DV work is carried out by human beings. The lack of a map of the landscape of Muslim DV efforts, ironically, helped me focus my research design on Muslim advocates as people: I was interested in their motivations, their experiences, their struggles, and their stories. As will become clear from a different angle later in this chapter, there is work to be done to continue to emphasize the full humanity of Muslims, and shining the spotlight of Muslim advocates against DV is one way to do so. That focus does not take away the maddening fact that some members of our society need to be humanized in the first place, both to recognize them as full members of society and to protect them from further discrimination and harm. So, who are Muslim advocates against DV? Or who were they, between 2010 and 2017 when I carried out the bulk of my research? One important research result was that every advocate I met, interviewed, and observed at events, had a unique trajectory, a story all their own, and a deep and profound commitment to ending DV. No two people’s experiences, motivations, ideas, and struggles were the same, yet, they were united, in some ways, by their common goal. Working in the DV movement is also taxing and incredibly hard, thus not everyone can continue doing such work indefinitely. Many, but not all Muslim DV advocates I interacted with were themselves survivors of domestic abuse; some were open about that experience while others were motivated to work against DV but would not disclose their own DV history publicly. Yet others had witnessed domestic abuse in their own family or community and their work constituted bearing witness to the injustice they had seen. Their reasons for engaging in efforts against DV as Muslims could be linked to the way in which their lives were connected to Muslim communal structures and to the ways in which their faith provided them with an ethical framework for challenging domestic abuse. For others, it was the experience or witnessing of DV that prompted them to turn to Islam as a source for responses and answers. The above discussion of individual advocates needs to be amended to address the fact that the vast majority of, but not all, Muslim advocates against DV are women. There are men involved in some capacities, most obviously as religious leaders and authority figures who provide authoritative religious interpretations of texts such as the Qurʾan, but also the sunna and, occasionally, Islamic legal materials. Not all, but the vast majority of victims of domestic abuse, especially spousal and intimate partner abuse, are women, despite a wave of anti-feminist backlash that has manifested itself in claims that men are equally often abused by women in marital settings.2 The definition of domestic abuse I employ in this chapter focuses on spousal and intimate partner violence, while acknowledging that child abuse, elder abuse, abuse of family members with different abilities, and abuse by members of the extended family are all adjacent forms of abuse, as are many incidents of sexual violence, within and outside of marriage and committed relationships.3 378

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The context Anti-Muslim hostility and Muslim DV work Neither domestic abuse nor the multi-faceted work against it, take place in a societal or political vacuum. While it would be reductive to describe and analyse US Muslim efforts against the DV as entirely determined by a climate of enduring and widespread anti-Muslim hostility,4 the existence of systemic forms of discrimination, othering, and various forms of violence inflicted on Muslim Americans, should also not be discounted as a determining factor. When I began my research in 2010, American Muslim communities were still reeling from the murder of Aasiya Zubair, a mother of two and executive at the Muslim TV station Bridges TV in Buffalo, New York, in February 2009. Zubair was brutally killed by her husband, Muzzammil Hassan, after she had separated from him and filed for divorce.5 Media reported on a history of domestic abuse in Zubair’s marriage to Hassan but also uncovered abuse in his earlier marriages. The murder brought into sharp relief a deep reluctance among Muslim communities, shared by other minority and oppressed communities, to avoid public acknowledgment of DV as a communal issue. They responded by fostering public discussion of the issue and the danger of silence in the face of this threat to Muslim women and families. The very public soul-searching triggered by Zubair’s murder prompted the creation of more Muslim organizations addressing DV by raising awareness and renewed efforts, built on earlier work by Muslim advocates, to provide services to Muslim victims of domestic abuse.6 The media focus on the fact that the killer was Muslim, and even more so the almost immediate appearance of Islamophobic pundits arguing that the murder was in fact an honor killing, brought to the fore the many ways in which American Muslims have been represented as violent, foreign to the United States, and as a security threat. Edward Curtis and Sylvester Johnson have both convincingly argued that anti-Muslim hostility has always been deeply linked to racism, especially anti-Black racism and that post 9/11 forms of it, including state surveillance and infiltration, entrapment by law enforcement, and state violence against Muslims, have a deep history in the 20th century (Curtis, 2013; Johnson, 2015).7 Anti-Muslim hostility can also be the rejection of Islam on the grounds that it is an inferior religion to Christianity or the denial of the status of a religion to Islam altogether. Both are perpetually inscribed on the bodies of Muslims, be it in the form of hate crimes, discrimination for wearing headscarves or having Muslim names, denial of religious accommodation, and profiling at airport security to name a few examples. One staple of anti-Muslim hostility is the representation of Muslim men as inherently violent and of the religion of Islam as condoning if not encouraging violence. The supposed inclination to and encouragement of violence extends beyond being a threat to American society, “the West” or “Western civilization” and is, according to such representations, also directed at Muslim women and children. It is thus logical that Muslim women as oppressed, silenced, and victimized by male violence, constitute the other side of the same coin. It is easy to see how such representations and perceptions, which are prevalent in US society and permeate media discourses as well as public policy, would be an important piece of the contextual framework for Muslim efforts against DV. The essentializing othering of Muslims as inherently more prone to violence, which also absolves non-Muslims from recognizing shared causes of DV in Muslim and non-Muslim families and societal patterns that extend to all strata of American society, makes the work of Muslim DV advocates all the much harder. They are stuck between the rock of Muslim 379

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community concerns about further discrimination if they acknowledge DV as a problem and the hard place of working with mainstream DV organizations and advocates who share such Islamophobic assumptions and project them onto Muslim survivors as well as Muslim advocates. One central element of anti-Muslim hostility is the obsession with Muslim women’s oppression and the attendant need to save them from their oppression by Muslim men and their religion. Lila Abu-Lughod has poignantly asked whether Muslim women need saving and answered her question with the nuanced argument, that rather than seeking to “save” others (with the superiority it implies and the violences it would entail) we might better think in terms of (1) working with them in situations that we recognize as always subject to historical transformation and (2) considering our own larger responsibilities to address the forms of global injustice that are powerful shapers of the worlds in which they find themselves. (Abu-Lughod, 2002: p. 783)8 In an analysis of gendered anti-Muslim hostility since 2013, I have argued that less and less Muslim women can be saved through this particular facet of anti-Muslim discourses as fewer women qualify for the supposed honour. Refugee women’s access to the United States is denied with the argument that all Muslims pose a security threat; Muslim women have been implicated in terrorist violence such as the Orlando massacre at the Pulse Club in 2016 and the San Bernardino shooting in 2015; and lastly, vocal Muslim women activists such as Linda Sarsour have been targeted as too outspoken and espousing the wrong political positions (Hammer, 2019b). At a deeper level though, this is also a debate about the relationship between Islam and feminism, Islam and women’s rights, and religion and feminism. Anti-domestic violence legislation, the creation of the Violence against Women Act and Office, and the very recognition that domestic violence is an American problem that needs to be addressed on the political, legal, as well as social level, were a product of the feminist movement of the mid20th century. This is why DV efforts are already interlinked with feminist critiques of patriarchal violence and societal structures that enable the oppression of women.9 In regards to Muslim anti-DV efforts, it becomes clear that the relationship between feminist critiques of patriarchal structures and norms that enable violence against women on the one hand, and on the other hand, the complex relationship between secular feminisms and religion need to be considered at least in some form in order to recognize how the relationship between DV work and religious communities has played out in the US context.

Domestic violence work and religion In a widely used textbook on domestic violence, which has been revised and reprinted since the 1990s, religion appears in the following quote: Historically, domestic violence was considered a normal part of some intimate relationships and a part of everyday life for some women. This historical context of violence against women is neither of a short time span nor of a sporadic one. It often has been explicitly stated in pronouncements and codified into numerous laws, becoming an endemic feature of most societies from the ancient world until very recent times. Religion, being a key component of, and justifying much of, 380

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social and legal attitudes towards women, has reinforced such history, although in modern times religion has shown that it can be part of the solution. (Buzawa, Buzawa & Stark, 2012: p. 80) This approach to religion is quite representative of mainstream literature on the topic and it is not difficult to see how such a framing of religion as mostly part of the problem rather than a potential resource would impact not only attitudes towards religious women victims in search of resources within their religious traditions and communities, but also selfidentified religious DV advocates including Muslim ones. The feminist movement has been largely secular if not outright hostile to religion as a deeply entrenched patriarchal system and set of institutions, and feminist frameworks for recognizing and addressing DV are no exception. There are, however, segments of the feminist movement that are deeply invested in the disentanglement of the patriarchy from religious traditions and such religious feminists have, since the inception of feminist thought and practice, sought to locate gender justice and gender equality within the foundational sources and practices of their respective traditions.10 One example of an organization that directly addressed domestic abuse from within religious resources and in religious community contexts is the FaithTrust Institute.11 The Institute described its mission as providing “faith communities and advocates with the tools and knowledge they need to address the faith and cultural issues related to abuse,” and described its vision of the world as one where all persons are free from violence in relationships; faith is fundamental to ending violence; religious institutions create a climate in which abuse is not tolerated; faith communities become sanctuaries of safety, worthy of our trust; and all of us experience justice and healing in our communities.12 Several of the Muslim organizations I studied have been involved in the work of the FaithTrust Institute and/or have used resources developed for religious contexts and communities. The Institute has played an important role in advocating for the necessary training of religious leaders, including imams in Muslim communities, to be able to address domestic abuse situations because they are often approached as frontline providers. It has produced films, brochures, and literature that have been distributed to such religious leaders and their communities.13 Such important work by religious organizations, including Muslim ones, has only slowly been changing attitudes to religion in the mainstream. It is thus still common to hear mainstream service providers especially only recognize religion as a roadblock to addressing DV issues and thus refusing to see it as a possible resource. This, too, is part of the context of Muslim DV efforts and thus needs to be taken into consideration as part of our assessment of advocacy work and the specific vulnerabilities and challenges Muslim DV advocates are facing.

Domestic violence work and the state A third important facet of the context in which Muslim advocates carry out awareness and service work is the ways in which anti-DV efforts are related to, funded by, and regulated by the state. While lobbying for recognition of domestic violence as a societal issue and for the passing of legislation that criminalized such abuse was a central feature of feminist work 381

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in the 1970s and 1980s, which continues, the criminalization of domestic abuse as well as the institutionalization of services are also extremely complicated arenas (Sack, 2004). One aspect that has attracted the attention of critical activists and scholars is the marginalization and re-victimization of women of color in DV services as well as criminal proceedings against perpetrators of color, the pathologizing of communities and families of color based on a white middle-class model of family and sexual respectability, and the central role of law enforcement and the law in deterring and punishing domestic abuse. Despite the criminalization of DV, mandatory arrest policies, and even longer prison sentences for convicted domestic abusers, reported rates of DV in American families have not decreased statistically. Both the application of white centered and middle-class centered policies and frameworks to lower-class communities and families of color, and the reliance on criminalization have impacted Muslim communities in specific ways (Sharma, 2001; Smith et al., 2006; Yoshioka & Choi, 2005). Once example is a reluctance to call law enforcement into domestic abuse situations. Muslims have good reason to be suspicious of law enforcement, which has been targeting, surveilling, and infiltrating their communities since the early 20th century and again after 2001. Muslims of immigrant backgrounds often came from countries were the state also could not be trusted to advance their interests and protect them. Related to this fear of institutional (and legal) anti-Muslim hostility, Muslim women might fear that mandatory arrest will deprive their families of their breadwinner and thus create additional risk to the family, including children, thereby outweighing the benefit of removing an abuser from the home. Lastly, on the level of financial support for anti-DV, the American state’s mandate to be secular has made it difficult for religious organizations, including Muslim ones, to obtain funding for their anti-DV efforts. They then have to rely on fundraising within their communities, which has its own challenges. Muslim community fundraising and the constant suspicion that Muslims will support supposed terrorist organizations through philanthropic efforts brings this segment of the chapter concerned with the broader political, legal, and theoretical context of Muslim anti-DV efforts full circle. It also makes clear that there is a deep connection between the practical challenges of working in a complicated political environment that treats Muslims differently from other members of society, and the theoretical and conceptual frameworks that inform, shape, and often also limit Muslim anti-DV efforts.

Intersections and crossings Gender and religion, and increasingly race and culture, have been at the center of my research for many years. The project on Muslim efforts against domestic violence is no exception. I identify not only as a gender studies scholar but as a Muslim feminist scholar, so the conceptual framing of my research is always organically linked to my commitment for change in society, in this particular project, an end to domestic violence. In this second part of the chapter, I lay out some of the ways in which Muslim DV advocates have negotiated concepts and constructs such as gender, Islam, and culture in their work. Here again, the confines of a chapter only allow for sketches of what are nuanced and profound debates and negotiations in Muslim communities and advocacy circles. I focus on gender norms as related to feminism and marriage, and on the ways in which both Islam and culture, and to a lesser extent race, emerge as potential resources or roadblocks in Muslim DV work. 382

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One very important finding of my research was the fact that the advocates I studied most often directly engaged with religious texts and sources rather than looking to scholars and their interpretations to then apply to the DV work in particular. In Peaceful Families, I argue further that Muslim advocacy work emerges from an ethic of non-abuse that prioritizes practice over discourses and engages religious and textual sources in order to bolster the authoritative claim that God (or Islam) does not condone or allow domestic abuse.

Gender: marriage, norms, and feminism What do societal norms for gender and sexuality have to do with religion, specifically Islam? Depending on who one asks, the gender binary, heteronormativity, and the institution of marriage are either at the core of norms for society that have been laid out by God in the Qurʾan and prophetic guidance, or they are a specific and clearly patriarchal interpretation of these sacred sources that are a product of the interpreters’ historical contexts and thus open to reinterpretation. And rather than a binary itself, these two positions constitute the endpoints of a spectrum on which many different positions and approaches are possible and embraced by different Muslims. The majority of advocates I interviewed embraced the notion that marriage is a Godsanctioned institution and that a good and healthy Islamic marriage should not include any form of abuse. Some acknowledged that the Islamic conception of marriage, as enshrined in Islamic law, is an at least somewhat hierarchical institution with the husband and father as the head of the family with the authority to make decisions. This authority in turn obliges the husband/father to be benevolent and protective of his wife (or wives) and children, thereby fulfilling the mandate of patriarchal authority. This conception of Islamic marriage has no room for physical, psychological, economic, or spiritual abuse because such abuse would violate the mandate of the just and benevolent patriarch. I will admit that as a feminist and social justice advocate I struggle with this notion of benevolent patriarchy and the ways in which any hierarchical societal structure, including the family, at least potentially enables abuse of power because an imbalance in access to power and agency is built into its very structure.14 Some of the advocates acknowledged the potential for abuse in a hierarchical structure but did not openly question this Muslim family model because they recognized that the Muslim communities they engage with have tended to embrace this model as normative. In order to be effective in their awareness work, some of the advocates compromised on their own gender values and gender justice commitments in order to work in the most useful ways on their shared goal to end domestic violence. The cognitive dissonance between feminist commitments to gender justice and a hierarchical if also potentially just and protective family model was more pronounced in my conversations with some of the advocates than in others. A feminist critique of heteronormative marriage, whether framed in secular or religious terms, can easily and effectively lead to a deconstruction and thus rejection of the institution of marriage. However, it is safe to say that the majority of American Muslims are not moving in that direction and would thus reject moving that way. The relationship between Islam and feminism has been discussed extensively and cannot be accounted for here in more detail.15 Suffice it to say though that Muslim feminist scholars and activists have deeply engaged with questions of marriage and hierarchy as well as with the issue of domestic violence.16 What was eye opening to me in my conversations with grassroots advocates was the fact that several knew about such Muslim feminist works and even embraced some of their critiques and arguments but were reluctant to 383

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acknowledge them as sources in the resource materials they were developing. The charge of being a Muslim feminist has the potential to marginalize advocates in Muslim communities, which would make their work impossible.17 In some ways then, what plays out as a debate over best approaches and practices to ending domestic abuse, is always also a broader debate about Islam and gender norms, and an even larger debate about the role of religion in the contemporary moment, and as more than a privatized relationship with a God of our construction. The specific goal of Muslim DV advocates makes their deliberations about these broader questions focused on DV, thereby contextually producing interpretations and frameworks that fit this goal. Or to put it differently, the advocates’ goal of ending domestic violence is neither an inherently feminist project that requires, in their view, the deconstruction of marriage, nor is it necessarily a progressive project of establishing gender justice and equality by reforming but not destroying the Muslim family.

Islam as a resource or roadblock The language of roadblocks and resources as employed in the context of Muslim DV efforts is relying on the roadblock/resource model from the mainstream DV movement. This model allows advocates to identify facets of a survivor’s life, including family, friends, finances, job, education, and others as helpful in addressing the DV issue. Not surprisingly, many of these facets can be either/or, such as when some family members can provide support for the survivor while others side with the perpetrator. An assessment of these factors can make the difference between escaping an abusive situation and staying, and sometimes between life and death. As I discussed earlier, religion has, for the most part, in mainstream DV work only been identified as a roadblock, for several reasons: religious notions of patriarchal families in which husbands/fathers have both the right and the responsibility to discipline their spouses; the reluctance and lack of awareness among religious leaders about DV; especially Christian notions of forgiveness for perpetrators rather than acknowledgment of abuse; and a pronounced reluctance to endorse separation and divorce as the only avenues for protecting victims.18 Muslim advocates have turned to the Qurʾan for inspiration and are emphasizing specific passages in the Qurʾan, most prominently, Q 30:21, a verse that describes the ideal Islamic marriage as one in which spouses live in tranquillity and nurture between them love and mercy.19 This verse is part of virtually every Islamic marriage ceremony and it is no coincidence that many advocates see it as the blueprint for Muslim marriage. The emphasis on this verse also wrestles with the existence of another verse in the Qurʾan, Q 4:34, which seems to allow for the physical disciplining of wives by their husbands, at least under certain circumstances, which has earned the verse the moniker of the “beating verse.”20 Q 4:34 has occupied both premodern and modern exegetes and there is a robust as well as extensive literature on the interpretation of the verse.21 For Muslim DV advocates, the existence of the verse in the Qurʾan and the possibility of a spectrum of readings and interpretations poses a profound dilemma: how can they argue that Islam does not allow domestic violence when in this verse God tells husbands to beat their wives? The “problems of conscience and hermeneutics,” as Ayesha Chaudhry has described the modern Muslim engagement with the verse, are also a practical impasse for grassroots activists (Chaudhry, 2006). More pressingly, their dilemma is not solved by recognizing a broad spectrum of possible interpretations because the very existence of a spectrum precludes the kind of authoritative 384

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and necessarily singular reading of the Qurʾan as God’s command to humanity, and that command cannot possibly be to beat one’s wife in case of disobedience. Laury Silvers has read the existence of the verse as an ethical test for the Muslim reader of the Qurʾan, which I find very convincing and helpful but which, arguably, is still too ambivalent for the purposes of stopping an abuser (Silvers, 2006). It is here that the sunna plays a significant role, both through reports of the Prophet Muhammad having struggled with the revelation of Q 4:34 and in his own life example and utterings which pointed to his self-distancing from any kind of physical disciplining including an oft-quoted hadith that “the best of you will not strike” their spouses. The advocates’ reliance on the Qurʾan and sunna as Muslim sacred sources with significant authority, which they often find and interpret themselves rather than looking for scholarly work, is augmented by support from prominent American Muslim leaders. Some of them have been active participants in anti-DV work, promoting organizations and projects, appearing at awareness events as speakers, endorsing funding drives, and lending their religious authority to support certain interpretations. In summary then, Muslim advocates have relied on the Qurʾan and sunna to produce a framework for “what Islam says about domestic violence,” which is an unequivocal rejection of domestic abuse as un-Islamic and against Muslim ethical norms (Abugideiri & Alwani, 2003). As a logical corollary to this Islamic rejection of DV, what is often described as “culture” is then identified as a possible source of DV justifications.

Religion vs. culture? Culture itself appears as either a roadblock or a resource in at least some mainstream DV approaches.22 In Muslim DV contexts, and in order to protect Islam from Islamophobic accusations (and most importantly for the purpose of maintain religious certainty and faith), it is quite common to hear advocates blame even tacit support for domestic abuse practices on culture or different cultures, especially from the countries of origin of Muslim immigrants to the United States. Such blame placed on culture, rather than religion, has the unfortunate and certainly unintended side effect of confirming the notion that Muslims are foreign to the United States and do not really belong or fit into American society. The notion of “barbaric” or un-American practices, as evidenced in the claim that domestic violence murders in Muslim communities are honour killings that have nothing to do with “normal and American” domestic violence, is of course closely linked to hierarchical racial constructions in which non-white people are identified as inferior in their culture, their civilization, and their racialized Brown and Black bodies. A younger and perhaps more radical generation of Muslim activists has embraced antiracist notions of social justice activism that are organically informed by Muslim ethics while also allowing for the acknowledgment that both Islam and culture can be utilized, productively and critically, in the fight against domestic violence. They also recognize domestic violence as but one form of systemic violence inflicted on the most vulnerable members of American society, thus allowing for a systemic critique and fight against all forms of violence, in families, communities, domestically and internationally. In their perspective, the critique of all forms of violence as systemically connected and part of oppressive hierarchies – which is where intersectionality reappears forcefully as an analytic – does not preclude the particularity of working in Muslim communities and with a sharp focus on domestic violence. The existence of a wide range of approaches, frameworks, interpretations, and methods to address domestic violence among Muslim families and communities is 385

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a reflection of the diversity and complexity of Muslim communities and to me, appeared as a strength rather than a weakness in the work of the advocates I studied.

Conclusion: an Islamic solution but not a Muslim problem American Muslim efforts against domestic violence have taken place and have been shaped by the agency of the advocates involved in such efforts as well as by the specific political, social, and religious context they live in. Armed with at least some statistical support, they often emphasize that domestic violence is not a Muslim problem any more than it is a Christian or Jewish problem, a problem in middle-class or lower-class families, a problem in families with drug or alcohol abuse, or a problem in Black, white or any other community and identity category.23 Domestic violence affects all strata of society which supports the argument that Islam is not the, or even a, cause of it. However, in religiously framed Muslim efforts against DV, there is a strong claim to “Islam” offering resources if not being the solution to the problem. The engagement, if not always agreement, with the mainstream DV movement, the work of Muslim advocates in interfaith alliances against DV, and even the negotiation of religious interpretation and authority, mark US Muslim efforts against DV as both thoroughly Muslim and as an integral part of American society’s efforts to address this important issue. American Muslims are thus, and hopefully unsurprisingly, both American and Muslim; and their efforts against DV are shaped by gender debates and negotiations in Muslim communities as well as American society at large, and by racialized, anti-Muslim, multi-religious, politically divided, anti-racist communal and activist networks that are subject to the same political, social, cultural, and religious forces that affect all other Americans. The focus on domestic violence creates an issue-driven dynamic in which religious resources are arranged around the goal of ending domestic violence while also creating openings for changes in broader Muslim gender, sexuality, and family practices.

Notes 1 There is important research on domestic violence in American Muslim communities that forms one of the corner stones for my project on efforts against domestic violence. See for example, Abu-Ras, 2007; Abu-Ras, Gheith & Cournos, 2008; Adam & Schewe, 2007; Ayyub, 2000; Faizi, 2001. 2 See for example, Boba & Lilley, 2009; Dragiewicz, 2008. 3 This is a complicated discussion in its own right and it also relates to violence against women, see below discussion of the US state and domestic violence. For the Center for Disease Control’s definition, see www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/intimatepartnerviolence/definitions.html. 4 I use the term anti-Muslim hostility rather than the more common “Islamophobia” because the latter term obscures the systemic nature of the phenomena associated with it as well as focusing on an individualized fear rather than the hate, hostility, and rejection as fully human that are the hallmarks of it. See my work on gendered anti-Muslim hostility as well as important work on “Islamophobia” in the United States, Hammer, 2013; and all other chapters in Ernst, 2013. 5 For some of the media coverage of her murder, see Liz Robbins, “Upstate Man Charged with Beheading His Estranged Wife,” New York Times, 2/18/2009; Joshua Rhett Miller, “Muslim Television Channel Founder Charged with Beheading His Wife,” Fox News, 2/16/2009; Sandra Tan, Gene Warner, and Fred O. Williams, “A History of Abuse Preceded Orchard Park Beheading,” Buffalo News, 2/22/2009. In many of the news reports Aasiya Zubair was identified as Aasiya Hassan or Aasiya Zubair Hassan. Muslim activists and others started referring to her as Aasiya Zubair in an attempt to disconnect her name from that of her killer and husband, Muzzammil Hassan. I follow this reasoning and refer to her as Aasiya Zubair throughout.

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6 Examples include Muslims Men against Domestic Abuse, www.mmada.org/, as well as several networks of existing anti-DV organizations and advocates that aimed to streamline and coordinate efforts as well as share resources (Muslim Advocacy Network against Domestic Violence, MANADV, https://peerta.acf.hhs.gov/content/muslim-advocacy-network-against-domestic-vio lence-manadv). These efforts had mixed success in the sense that it turned out to be challenging to maintain these efforts while also continuing the grassroots awareness and service work. 7 See also the “Islamophobia is Racism” public syllabus from 2017, https://islamophobiaisracism. wordpress.com, by Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Arshad Ali, Evelyn Alsultany, Sohail Daulatzai, Lara Deeb, Carol Fadda, Zareena Grewal, Juliane Hammer, Nadine Naber, and Junaid Rana. 8 See also her book, Abu-Lughod, 2013. 9 The literature on this topic is vast, see for example, Abrar, Lovenduski & Margetts, 2000; Barrett, Almanssori, Kwan & Waddick 2015; Bumiller, 2010; Pleck, 1987. 10 On the level of religious feminist theory the efforts of Feminist Studies in Religion, an organization founded in 1983, have to be recognized as providing a forum for Christian and Jewish, and later also Muslim women to engage their traditions while also advancing feminist theory (www.fsrinc. org/about-fsr/). The work of trailblazers such as Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza and Judith Plaskow is noteworthy here. Womanist ideas and Mujerista feminisms also explicitly acknowledged the importance of religion and spirituality. See for examples, Floyd, 2006; Moraga & Anzaldua, 2015. 11 See www.faithtrustinstitute.org. 12 www.faithtrustinstitute.org/about-us/guiding-principles, last accessed June 10, 2017. 13 Films and accompanying materials included: Broken Vows: Religious Perspectives on Domestic Violence (1994), To Save a Life: Ending Domestic Violence in Jewish Families (2009); Garments for One Another: Ending Domestic Violence in Muslim Families (2007); see https://store.faithtrustinstitute.org/collec tions/domestic-violence-resources. 14 I have discussed this discomfort and its connection to meaningful critique further here: Hammer, 2016. 15 See these two articles by Fatima Seedat for an overview: Seedat, 2013a, 2013b. 16 See for some of the most prominent examples, Ali, 2016; Barlas, 2002; Chaudhry, 2014; Hidayatullah, 2014; Mir-Hosseini, Al-Sharmani & Rumminger, 2015; wadud, 2006. 17 Attacks against Muslim feminist scholars and activists have increased on social media and elsewhere over the past years – as I will explain in the next section, the claim that “Islam” provides a stable notion of gender norms which in turn keeps the religion itself anchored and certain, has become a significant mainstream viewpoint as gender norms and practices in and beyond Muslim communities are rapidly changing. Muslim feminists are routinely accused of trying to destroy Islam and undermine Muslim communities, sometimes even as agents of American imperialism. 18 The idea that someone who is once a perpetrator of domestic abuse, they will always be an abuser does not allow for the preservation of the family/marriage; it also does not allow for the possibility of self-reform which has been embraced by some religious communities as an alternative to divorce and thus dissolution of the family. Along with these contradicting approaches by the mainstream and some religious including Muslim communities, Muslim DV efforts have re-emphasized the Muslim family over the individual Muslim as a victim and survivor. 19 One translation of Q 30:21 I saw often in resource materials reads: And among His signs is this, that He created for you spouses from among yourselves, that you may live in tranquility with them, and He has put love and mercy between your (hearts) – verily in that are signs for those who reflect. 20 Because translation is always also interpretation I do not share a particular translation here – too much hinges on the spectrum of possible interpretations. 21 See Chaudhry, 2014; Ali, 2006; and Bauer, 2006. 22 One caveat here is the fact that only certain communities, on the margins and in the minority, are identified to have “culture.” Like the category of whiteness, normative American culture goes unmarked and can thus neither be a roadblock or a resource. Following Uma Narayan, Zareena Grewal has captured this dynamic in the phrase “death by culture,” which I explore in much more detail in my book. Grewal’s article by the same title is important as an intervention in the media debate around the murder of Aasiya Zubair, and bears the poignant subheading, “how not to talk about Islam and domestic violence.” See Grewal, 2009; Narayan, 2006.

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23 Statistics on DV are not easy to come by but they play an important role in policy work and carry significant political and explanatory power. Sharifa Alkhateeb is often credited with having carried out the first small survey in Muslim communities in the 1990s, see Alkhateeb, 1999. A factsheet of DV statistics can be found here, compiled by the National Coalition against Domestic Violence: https://ncadv.org/assets/2497/domestic_violence.pdf.

Further reading Chaudhry, A. (2014) Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press. This book provides a thorough analysis of the Muslim textual tradition with regards to Qurʾan 4:34. Chaudhry assesses both premodern and modern texts in the tafsir, hadith, and fiqh genres. Grewal, Z. (2009) Death by Culture: How Not to Talk about Islam and Domestic Violence. Washington, DC: Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, www.ispu.org/wp-content/ uploads/2017/07/2009_Death-by-Culture.pdf. Produced in the aftermath of the murder of Aasiya Zubair in 2009, Grewal addresses the political challenges of discussing domestic violence in Muslim communities without fueling anti-Muslim hostility. Hammer, J. (2019) Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts against Domestic Violence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. This is the book-length study of American Muslim efforts against all forms of domestic violence that this chapter draws on.

References Abrar, S., Lovenduski, J., & Margetts, H. (2000) Feminist Ideas and Domestic Violence Policy Change. Political Studies 48(2), 239–262. Abugideiri, S., & Alwani, Z. (2003) What Islam Says about Domestic Violence: A Guide for Helping Muslim Families, 2nd ed. Herndon, VA: FAITH. Abu-Lughod, L. (2002) Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? American Anthropologist 104, 783–790. Abu-Lughod, L. (2013) Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Abu-Ras, W. (2007) Cultural Beliefs and Service Utilization by Battered Arab Immigrant Women. Violence against Women 13(10), 1002–1028. Abu-Ras, W., Gheith, A., & Cournos, F. (2008) The Imam’s Role in Mental Health Promotion: A Study of 22 Mosques in New York City’s Muslim Community. Journal of Muslim Mental Health 3(2), 155–176. Adam, N., & Schewe, P. (2007) A Multilevel Framework Exploring Domestic Violence against Immigrant Indian and Pakistani Women in the United States. Journal of Muslim Mental Health 2(2), 5–20. Ali, K. (2006) “The Best of You Will Not Strike”: Al-Shafi’i on Qur’an, Sunnah, and Wife-Beating. Comparative Islamic Studies 2(2), 143–155. Ali, K. (2016) Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence, 2nd revised ed. Oxford: Oneworld. Alkhateeb, S. (1999) Ending Domestic Violence in Muslim Families. Journal of Religion and Abuse 44(1), 49–59. Ayyub, R. (2000) Domestic Violence in the South Asian Muslim Immigrant Population in the United States. Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless 9(3), 237–248. Barlas, A. (2002) “Believing Women in Islam”: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretation of the Qur’an. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Barrett, B., Almanssori, S., Kwan, D., & Waddick, E. (2015) Feminism Within Domestic Violence Coalitions: A Quantitative Content Analysis. Affilia 31(3), 359–371. Bauer, K. (2006) “Traditional” Exegeses of Qur’an 4: 34. Comparative Islamic Studies 2(2), 129–142. Boba, R., & Lilley, D. (2009) Violence against Women Act (VAWA) Funding: A Nationwide Assessment of Its Effects on Rape and Assault. Violence against Women 15, 168–185. Bumiller, K. (2010) The Nexus of Domestic Violence Reform and Social Science: From Instrument of Social Change to Institutionalized Surveillance. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 6, 173–193. Buzawa, E., Buzawa, C., & Stark, E. (2012) Responding to Domestic Violence: The Integration of Criminal Justice and Human Services. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

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Chaudhry, A. (2006) The Problems of Conscience and Hermeneutics: A Few Contemporary Approaches. Comparative Islamic Studies 2(2), 157–170. Chaudhry, A. (2014) Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press. Crenshaw, K. (1993) Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review 43, 1242–1299. Curtis, E. (2013) The Black Muslim Scare of the Twentieth Century: The History of State Islamophobia and Its Post-9/11 Variations. In: C. Ernst (ed.) Islamophobia in America. New York: Palgrave, pp. 75–106. Dragiewicz, M. (2008) Patriarchy Reasserted: Fathers’ Rights and Anti-VAWA Activism. Feminist Criminology 8(2), 121–144. Ernst, C. (ed.) (2013) Islamophobia in America. New York: Palgrave. Faizi, N. (2001) Domestic Violence in the Muslim Community. Texas Journal of Women and the Law 10(2), 209–233. Floyd, S. (ed.) (2006) Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society. New York: NYU Press. Grewal, Z. (2009) Death by Culture: How Not to Talk about Islam and Domestic Violence. Washington, DC: Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, www.ispu.org/wp-content/ uploads/2017/07/2009_Death-by-Culture.pdf. Hammer, J. (2013) Center Stage: Muslim Women and Islamophobia. In: C. Ernst (ed.) Islamophobia in America. New York: Palgrave, pp. 107–144. Hammer, J. (2016) Gender Matters: Normativity, Positionality, and the Politics of Islamic Studies. Muslim World 106, 655–670. Hammer, J. (2019a) Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts against Domestic Violence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hammer, J. (2019b) Muslim Women, Anti-Muslim Hostility, and the State in the Age of Terror. In: M. Khalil (ed.) Muslims and US Politics Today. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 104–123. Hidayatullah, A. (2014) Feminist Edges of the Qur’an. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnson, S. (2015) African American Religions, 1500-2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mir-Hosseini, Z., Al-Sharmani, M., & Rumminger, J. (eds.) (2015) Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition. Oxford: Oneworld. Moraga, C., & Anzaldua, G. (eds.) (2015) This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 4th ed. New York: SUNY Press. Narayan, U. (2006) Cross-Cultural Connections, Border-Crossings and “Death by Culture”. In: E. Hackett & S. Haslanger (eds.) Theorizing Feminisms: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 62–78. Nash, J. (2019) Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pleck, E. (1987) Domestic Tyranny: The Making of American Social Policy against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Sack, E. (2004) Battered Women and the State: The Struggle for the Future of Domestic Violence Policy. Wisconsin Law Review 1657–1739. Seedat, F. (2013a) Islam, Feminism, and Islamic Feminism: Between Inadequacy and Inevitability. Feminist Studies in Religion 29(2), 25–45. Seedat, F. (2013b) When Islam and Feminism Converge. Muslim World 103(3), 404–420. Sharma, A. (2001) Healing the Wounds of Domestic Abuse: Improving the Effectiveness of Feminist Therapeutic Interventions with Immigrant and Racially Visible Women Who Have Been Abused. Violence against Women 7(12), 1405–1428. Silvers, L. (2006) “In the Book We Have Left Nothing Out”: The Ethical Problem of the Existence of Verse 4:34 in the Qur’an. Comparative Islamic Studies 2(2), 171–180. Smith, A., Richie, B., Sudbury, J., White, J., & the INCITE! Anthology Co-editors. (2006) The Color of Violence: Introduction. In: Incite! Women of Color against Violence (eds.) Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, pp. 1–10. wadud, a. (2006) Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam. Oxford: Oneworld. Yoshioka, M., & Choi, D. (2005) Culture and Interpersonal Violence Research: Paradigm Shifts to Create a Full Continuum of Domestic Violence Services. Journal of Interpersonal Violence 30(4), 513–519.

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26 #VOICEOUT Sufi hardcore activism in the Lion City Sophia Rose Arjana

Domestic violence is a worldwide problem whose incidence increases every year. ‘Violence is … a sign of the struggle for the maintenance of certain fantasies of identity and power. Violence emerges, in this analysis, as deeply gendered and sexualized’ (Merry 2003: 343, 350). Violence against women is of particular concern in the context of religious systems, which are often modeled on patriarchal models of authority. This chapter discusses domestic violence in Singapore, the Lion City, and specifically the work of the Sufi organization Sout Ilaahi, whose advocacy for victims is rooted in Islamic notions of care for the community. The vast majority of these victims (90 percent) are women (Amirthalingam 2005: 686). Violence against women is not restricted to Muslim-majority countries or to Muslim communities; it is a major social issue in North America, where it results in economic losses of US$7 billion annually (Arief 2018: 2). In the Islamic context, domestic violence rates are higher in the MENA (Middle East/North Africa) region than in Southeast Asia, but remain a significant issue in the latter region; as in the case of Indonesia, where 259,150 cases of domestic violence were reported in 2016 (Arief 2018: 2). Domestic violence among Muslims is often attributed, in part, to Qurʾanic verse 4:34, which is often translated in a way that seems to excuse or validate men hitting or beating their wives. The linking of domestic violence in Muslim communities to verse 4:34 has been a problem of concern for both scholars and activists in recent years. Even in cases where the sunna indicates a stance of nonviolence against women, it reveals a patriarchal ordering of the society from which Islam emerges. In one hadith recorded in the Sahih Muslim collection, a reference to the Prophet never hitting women or slaves suggests that ‘these two groups would be the obvious recipients of violence’ (Chaudhry 2011: 420). Resisting the patriarchal readings of the verse, scholars have analyzed the verse and argued for a liberational reading. Islamophobia also affects people’s views of domestic violence in Islam. Scholars like Juliane Hammer have pointed out how assumptions about Muslim men are at play in these conversations. In her analysis of a photograph that accompanies a 2008 article in the New York Times, she writes, ‘In this singular insistence on establishing media frames, this one newspaper article illustrates the pervasive power of established and entrenched notions and opinions about Islam, Muslim women, and religious communities’ (Hammer

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2016: 102–103). These presuppositions are based on an Islamophobic casting that locates all Muslims in a ‘culture’ such as Arab, Asian, or Middle Eastern. The extent to which Muslim men are identified with violence has been examined by numerous scholars, including in my own work (Arjana 2015). The discourse about Islam is often focused on the rescue of women from the clutches of abusive men, to such an extent that it can impact victims of violence in alarming ways. In a 2017 German court case, a Muslim woman seeking a divorce requested that the court speed up the divorce due to the severe abuse she was subjected to; in response, the judge refused the woman’s request and stated that wife-beating was so common in Moroccan culture that it did not rise to an ‘unreasonable hardship’ for the woman (Dunn and Kellison 2010: 120). As it turns out, While there may be a correlation between violence and certain cultures, academic research suggests that there is not necessarily a causal link. The link, if any, can be explained by reference to larger structural factors based on the gender analysis of power differentials. (Amirthalingam 2005: 699) The question of Muslim violence is further complicated by the fact that most Muslims live in Southeast Asia, a region often neglected by those who attribute violence to Muslim men, and also understudied by many scholars studying domestic violence in Muslim contexts. This chapter focuses on domestic violence in Singapore, where a minority Muslim population lives alongside Chinese, South Asians, North Americans, and Europeans. Despite the large numbers of Muslims in Southeast Asia, Islam in this part of the world remains an understudied academic topic in comparison to the large number of studies on the Middle East and North Africa. Islam has a voice in the region, but it is not the same voice found in other parts of the world – a result of cultural and historical contingencies. While modern states like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore are often shaped by religious actors, something seen both in the colonial and post-colonial eras, they are also fairly diverse societies that reflect the social and political dynamics within the region. Strong critiques of colonialism, patriarchy, and the limits of the modern state affect the activism in the region, seen in global women’s organizations like Musawah, which was launched in Malaysia. Sout Ilaahi does not seek an exclusivist solution to the problem of deomestic violence, precisely because it is located in a nation whose identity is inclusive, tolerant, and modern. This chapter discusses the work of one Muslim organization in Southeast Asia, the Singaporean group Sout Ilaahi, focused on the problem of domestic violence. The work of Sout Ilaahi suggests one way in which Muslims and their fellow community members can raise awareness of domestic violence, offer resources, and work with others to provide avenues for the care of victims and rehabilitation of offenders. However, Sout Ilaahi rejects an exclusivist religious solution to the problem of domestic violence and instead advocates for a kind of spiritual realism that utilizes therapeutic models for rehabilitation. The organization, cofounded by a Muslim woman, Ainun Harun, and staffed by numerous female (and male) volunteers, illustrates a middle path between religious devotion and practical realism. Of interest are the ways in which a contemporary Muslim Sufi community offers aid to female victims of violence through engagement with Islamic principles of justice and care for society. In addition to secondary literature, I conducted an extensive survey of Sout Ilaahi’s presence in social media and conducted interviews with the co-founders of the organization in January 2019. 391

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Qurʾan 4:34: the beating verse Verse 4:34 is often referred to as ‘the beating verse’ and it presents a significant problem for scholars of Islam. The Malaysian organization Sisters in Islam takes the position that it should be considered contextually, as a sign of the time and social milieu – in this case, 7thcentury Arabia. They advocate viewing 4:34 as a restriction on the violence against women that was rampant during Prophet Muhammad’s lifetime, and not as an instruction to beat one’s wife (Amirthalingam 2005: 701). Laleh Bakhtiar’s translation of the Qurʾan also reflects a more charitable reading of the verse. While Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s translation of the verse reads, ‘As to those women on whose part you fear disloyalty and ill-conduct [nushuz], admonish them (first). (Next) refuse to share their bed. (And last) beat them (lightly)’ (Ali 2002). Bakhtiar’s translation reads, ‘Those (f) whose resistance [nushuz] you fear, then admonish them (f) and abandon them (f) in their sleeping place, then, go away from them (f)’ (Bakhtiar 2011: 432). The most important scholar to take on the issue of translation and offer a path for liberational readings of the Qurʾan is amina wadud. In her view, the female voice has been silenced in respect to the Qurʾan. Historically, male jurists monopolized classical Islamic law. For centuries, these jurists explained women’s legal positions and imposed norms without the contribution of women. With the passage of time, these norms and attendant cultural assumptions have become codified and are now considered integral principles of Islamic law. (Behrouz 2005–6: 163) Verse 4:34 is important because of the tendency to understand it as giving permission to wife-beat, when in fact, Islamic texts are often in tension with each other. Hadith state the Prophet never struck anyone, while others suggest it was permissible to hit one’s wife, but that these acts were indicative of a poor Muslim spirit. As Ayesha Chaudhry points out, ‘The versatility of hadith literature is especially visible here, where mutually contradictory reports often co-existed in the corpus of widely accepted hadith texts’ (Chaudhry 2011: 421). Ultimately, this is a question of hermeneutics, which is fully laid out in wadud’s writings, such as, Although social hegemonies have existed for centuries, this – like the single lens of our Qurʾanic vision – can be changed in this era. One part of that change would result from replacing the historical silence of the female voice with an integration of that voice into Qurʾanic hermeneutics. (Wadud 1995–6: 49) In response to Aysha Hidayatullah’s book Feminist Edges of the Qurʾan (2014), wadud writes, ‘She [Hidayatullah] blames God for what men do with the revelation. It is a much more radical act to “unread” patriarchy’ (Wadud 2016: 130–131). Ultimately, wadud moves away from an interpretative strategy to one of rejection. As she puts it, ‘I have finally come to say “no” outright to the literal implementation of this passage’ (Wadud 2006: 200). Other scholars see the verse as a problematic revelation that reflects the patriarchy and violence evident in numerous religious traditions. In other words, they consider the verse as 392

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something Muslims must wrestle with. This concern over re-framing the Qurʾan as a modern text includes the possibility of ‘virtual abrogation’ or ‘abrogative suspension’ advocated by Mohamed Mahmoud, who sees 4:34 in the following way: ‘This is one of those rare instances when a believer feels that he/she stands on a different and higher moral plane than that which the sacred scripture prescribes’ (Mahmoud 2006: 537). Exegetical treatments of the verse also acknowledge the contestation evident in evaluating religious texts. In her work, the late scholar Fatima Mernissi contends that the verse must consider the debate over the status of women in the early Muslim community because it represents the tensions between the Prophet’s position (no beating of wives) and Umar’s position (wife-beating as an extension of male authority) (Dunn and Kellison 2010: 20). While most scholars claim the Prophet never beat his wives, Laury Silvers points to a hadith (considered weak by some) in which he reportedly hit Aisha in the chest after she spied on him, and afterwards, when 4:34 was revealed, ‘he was so disturbed, he did not want to recite it’ (Silvers 2006: 176). Silvers grounds her analysis in the work of Ibn Arabi, whose open hermeneutic suggests, ‘God may intend all meanings, but it does not follow that He approves of all meanings’ (Silvers 2006: 172). The verse’s ambiguous nature is intentional – a way of forcing humans to be responsible for their own behavior (Dunn and Kellison 2010: 23). As she puts it, ‘In this light, I argue that the purpose of existence of the verse would be to remind human beings of the extraordinary burden of freedom’ (Silvers 2006: 172). One hadith (with numerous variations) states that when men complained about being prohibited from beating their wives, the Prophet acquiesced to their demands. Later when the sounds of the beatings were heard, the Prophet drew attention to his own behavior – which was, with the exception of the Aisha episode, one of non-violence at all times except during warfare (Chaudhry 2011: 432). Mernissi’s opinion on the matter is that although the Prophet agrees that men have permission to beat their wives, it is not, according to the Prophet, behavior fitting a good Muslim (Mernissi 1987: 157). In response to accepting the Qurʾan as a patriarchal and at times, problematic (and even abusive) text, other scholars argue that the text has ‘feminist edges’ (Rahmaan 2016: 143). Such analyses take the following position: ‘The conclusion that the Qurʾan is an incurably patriarchal text that cannot be expected to deliver gender justice is premature and based on a superficial and limited engagement with it’ (Rahmaan 2016: 143). These responses reflect an effort by Muslim scholars to address the problems of translation and interpretation in the hopes of offering a pathway to understanding how the crime of domestic violence can be reduced and ultimately eliminated in Muslim communities. The efforts to address the problem of violence against women in Muslim communities go far beyond these exegetical treatments of 4:34. Women’s organizations and other groups have often been the most active in the efforts to address this problem. Hammer’s 2013 study considers many of the American Muslim organizations focused on domestic violence, including the Peaceful Families Project, Project Sakinah, the Islamic Social Services Association, the Domestic Harmony Foundation, and Muslimat al-Nisaa (Hammer 2013: 239). Outside of North America, numerous other organizations are engaged in efforts to educate communities on women’s rights, domestic violence, and other forms of abuse. As one example, Musawah is a global movement committed to advocacy, education, and change on women’s issues in 44 different countries around the world. Juliane Hammer’s work on domestic violence among North American Muslim communities is extensive. One particular episode from her fieldwork illuminates the ways in which patriarchy can show itself, even in places dedicated to women’s rights and safety. Hammer was confronted with a banner at a fundraiser for a Muslim women’s shelter that quoted 393

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4:34, the verse at the center of contemporary debates on Islamic texts and domestic violence (Hammer 2013: 246). Here, an organization highlighted the patriarchal reading of the chapter: men protecting women while insisting that wife-beating is wrong and unIslamic. As Hammer states, In this narrative, the leaders of Muslimat al-Nisaa take the first part of 4:34 ‘men are the protectors/maintainers of women’ (which also inspired the title of this Chapter) as a command for husbands. They define protection and maintenance as a responsibility rather than a right or privilege; and thus, they endorse a complementary and hierarchical gender model whole maintaining that domestic violence is un-Islamic and against the normative Islamic marriage model. (Hammer 2013: 247) From the foregoing analysis, it is apparent that relying on religious prescriptions for the crime of domestic violence is challenging, if not impossible. Scholars have diverging opinions on the usefulness of exegetical projects. Kecia Ali, for one, takes the position that any translation of Arabic involves an interpretation, a move that suggests no one version will be accepted by all Muslims (Hammer 2013: 243).

Islam in Singapore The history of Muslims in Singapore is tied to the currents of Malay Islam, which saw its first sultanate in the late 13th century in Sumatra. As Anthony Johns points out, epigraphic evidence suggests the date of the first sultan, but Islam had been circulating for a while in the region, A sultanate, barring coups or/and assassinations, is a hereditary institution and given a measure of stability, and a succession of able rulers, is able to expand its area of authority. At some stage, this happened in Sumatra, and the culmination of the process of silent Islamization is marked in the first evidence of a sultan on the island, the gravestone of Sultan Malik al-Saleh at Pasai with an inscription giving as the date of his death a year corresponding to 1297 or 1307, depending on how the inscription is interpreted. (Johns 1995: 174) Today, Muslims are a minority in Singapore, in a region dominated by Muslim states like Malaysia (which borders Singapore) and Indonesia, located only a short airplane flight away. According to a 2010 census, Malays account for 13.4 percent of the population, with Indians at 9.2 percent, and the majority Chinese population of 74.1 percent (Mostarom 2014: 566). Malays account for most of the nation’s Muslims, 98.7 percent, with small numbers of South Asian Muslims, Chinese converts, and Arabs comprising the remainder of the Muslim population in Singapore (Mostarom 2014: 566). South Asian culture is evident at tourist sites like the Jamae Mosque in Chinatown, which is almost 200 years old. Many Arab merchant homes are now boutique hotels and cafes, reminders of a past in which numerous Arab Muslims occupied a sector of the city (Weyland 1990: 223). In the past, Arab commercial activity was stronger, seen in the pilgrimage business of the Alsagoff family, as well as in the presence of a Southeast Asian community in Mecca (Weyland 1990: 223). Today, Arab culture is most visible in the neighborhood that includes Arab Street, 394

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which includes several old, historic buildings, halal food restaurants, and numerous souvenir shops selling Orientalist merchandise. The surrounding neighborhood also features the Sultan Mosque and the famous bookseller Wardah Books. Malays comprise the majority of Singaporean Muslims, in a city-state where religious harmony is part of the overall vision of social unity espoused by the government (Lee 1999: 90–91). As one example, the public broadcasting of the call to prayer has shifted to the use of radio broadcasts, in essence privatizing Islam and employing ‘media technology to maintain collectivity in a pluralistic society’ (Lee 1999: 95). While this attention to new communication technologies works as a mechanism to help mediate complex negotiations of religious identities, it is not overriding. The focus on pluralism in Singapore does not entail Muslims abandoning or altering their religious practice. In the 1980s Islam saw a resurgence, in part through ulama who studied abroad and returned to raise awareness of ritual aspects of Islam like dress and prayer (Osman 2012: 8). More Muslim women began wearing hijab, eating halal food, and praying five times a day, but this was not a transition toward Wahhabism; in fact, the ulama in Singapore are often leaders of Sufi orders (tariqah) (Osman 2012: 9–10). As Mohamed Osman explains: These ulama were traditionalist in their religious orientation in that they subscribed to the three strands of traditional Islamic belief: tauhid (belief in God and Muhammad’s Prophethood), fiqh (acceptance of traditional Islamic laws) and tasawwuf (oriented towards Sufism). While these imams believed strongly in the importance of Islamic laws, they also saw the need for local practices and customs to be accommodated within the Islamic rituals. (Osman 2012: 10) The vibrant nature of Islam in Singapore is seen in the activities of the ulama in halal certification, but also in Muslims serving in Parliament and in communities of asatizah, or religious teachers, whose activities often include supporting ‘the development of a moderate and progressive Muslim community that is able to maintain good relations with other religious communities in the city-state’ (Mostarom 2014: 571). Ulama, asatizah, and other religious actors are involved in numerous sectors of society promoting welfare of the public, and are involved in issues like poverty, drug rehabilitation, and the problem of domestic violence. Sufism has long been a part of Islam in Singapore and involves a number of sites that serve as the focus of saint-veneration. The vast majority of these are Malay, dating from before the founding of Singapore in 1819, and include such places as the Keramat Habib Noh (Tschacher 2006: 227). As scholars like Sharon Siddique have explained, Malay graves in Singapore that are connected to a saint often carry the name of keramat, or miracle, a word that is applied both to the gravesite and to living saints (Siddique 1979: 228). Sufism is also seen today in numerous organizations and more informal gatherings, such as Sout Ilaahi. The presence of Sufi tariqah in Malaya dates from the 14th and 15th centuries, at times mixing with local traditions, and in other cases challenging reformist Islamic movements that seek a purified form of Muslim tradition and practice (Weyland 1990: 226). A number of Sufi organizations focused on dawah (missionary activity and the spread of Islam) and charity are part of Singapore’s history, including Jamiyah, founded by a charismatic shaykh (a Sufi teacher or leader) who claimed to be a relative of Abu Bakr (Weyland 1990: 223). As Petra Weyland notes, ‘He was always dressed in a wide, flowing Arab gown and wore the sū fı̄ green turban. He had a long, white beard and often had 395

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a flower chain around his neck’ (Weyland 1990: 223). Like many Sufi organizations in Indonesia, the Jamiyah was involved in many charitable endeavors, much like Sout Ilaahi today. Sout Ilaahi is, in a sense, part of this larger tradition of activist Islam that is focused on social justice. Erroneously, in both public discourse and some academic circles, Sufism is often set apart from so-called ‘orthodox’ Islam (Arjana 2017). This is a false binary that neglects a consideration of the textual traditions of tasawwuf (Sufism) and its embeddedness in Islamic law and tradition. Individuals like the reformist Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) claimed that Sufis are antithetical to the religious establishment. This has been exaggerated by other Arab modernists and then adopted by Western scholars. Anthony Johns writes, During this period (eleventh–eighteenth centuries) Sufism should not be thought of as distinct or separate from the vast body of jurisprudence it complimented and alongside which it grew out of the primary sources of the Qurʾan and the sunna, notwithstanding that the house of Islam has long been divided in its attitude to the Ibn ʿArabi tradition of theosophical Sufism. (Johns 1995: 182) Islam’s liberational theology, which includes a strong emphasis on helping the poor and oppressed, is also a central feature of many Sufi organizations. Sout Ilaahi is one among many Muslim voices in Singapore, voices that include popular preachers, female activists, and ulama. Ustaz Ali is a male preacher who insists Muslim women don’t need feminism despite the ‘salience of patriarchy in Muslim cultures globally,’ because taqwa, or piety, provides the path to a happy life (Jamil 2016: 553). Ali’s insistence that the husband is in control of his wife’s body was met with consternation by some of his students, who see Allah, not their husbands, as the regulating authority in their lives (Jamil 2016: 554). The Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE) is a Singaporean organization similar to Malaysia’s Sisters in Islam (SIS), in its focus on women’s rights and legal reforms, which include the problem of Qurʾanic translations of verses such as 4:34 (Jamil 2016: 556). Sout Ilaahi takes a different approach to the problem of domestic violence, one rooted in education, therapy, and rehabilitation, and Islamic values focused on justice.

Sout Ilaahi and the #VoiceOut campaign Sout Ilaahi was founded by Khalid Ajmain and Ainun Harun, in 2010 when Ajmain returned from his studies at a pesantren (a religious school). In 2019 I conducted a series of interviews with Khalid and Ainun. Khalid told me that his exposure to zikr (a Sufi ritual of the remembrance of Allah) and qasidah (sacred music) influenced his decision to found Sout Ilaahi (interview, Ajmain 2019). From the beginning, Sout Ilaahi was focused on how to deal with the ‘self,’ which later turned to the question – what does the community need? (interview, Harun 2019) In 2013, Khalid and Ainun started seeing the emergence of themes including stress and depression. The participants in their annual conference included excons, single mothers, and victims of abuse, and the annual gathering, which was centered on the self, led to their work on the problem of domestic violence in the context of a larger community focus on issues related to stress and depression. One person, a very successful businessman, who attended the Sacred Path of Love conference stated, ‘I felt like I should have died,’ a comment that Khalid characterized as being common among attendees who 396

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have lost ‘their sight in life’ (interview, Ajmain 2019). While Sout Ilaahi continues to help Singaporeans with stress management, depression, and other mental health issues, domestic violence is a core part of their mission. The concern with domestic violence emerged organically, out of discussion at the 2013 Sacred Path of Love annual meeting, discussed in more detail below. Sout Ilaahi built their membership through their annual event, the Sacred Path of Love, as well as through other gatherings. As Khalid and Ainun explained, people often gravitate to their events at times of crisis – sickness, divorce, a death in the family, or debt – needing to refocus (interview, Ajmain and Harun 2019). These individuals and others, including those interested in learning more about Islam or Sufism, become the volunteers who are the backbone of the organization (interview, Harun 2019). As Ainun put it, ‘Volunteers are our strength’ (interview, Harun 2019). The focus on community, a kind of mini-umma (a religious community) of conscious and caring individuals, is also reflected in the way that Ainun talks about the volunteers and their impact. In one instance, she said ‘they have the heart to serve the community,’ a community that includes ex-convicts and ex-prostitutes (interview, Harun 2019). One remarkable quality of the co-founders of Sout Ilaahi, as well as their membervolunteers, is their stance of non-judgment about people’s lives. Khalid put it in these words, ‘There’s no such thing as failure. Life is continuity’ (interview, Ajmain 2019). The Sufi teachings that inspire their work lie at the center of this stance of loving acceptance, and may also be influenced by Khalid’s earlier life as a music producer in what he calls the ‘hardcore’ (metal) music seen in Singapore (interview, Ajmain and Harun 2019). Khalid reported that many of his musician friends look to him as an example, ‘Many of them looked at me. We can lean on him’ (interview, Ajmain 2019). His so-called ‘hardcore’ was long ago shifted to what I term a ‘Sufi hardcore’ – modeling an open heart for individuals suffering from mental illness, physical harm, and substance abuse. It is this hardcore Sufism that guides the mission of Sout Ilaahi and the #VoiceOut campaign they launched to address domestic violence. Sout Ilaahi, like many Sufi communities, is not wholly situated in Malay or Singaporean tradition. In other words, Malay shaykhs are not the only religious figures who are praised. The multi-ethnic character of Singapore’s Muslim population helps to explain why tasawwuf has a fluid and multi-cultural character. For Tamil Muslims in Singapore, for example, saints with an Indian heritage (or genealogy) are venerated, but so are Malay saints. One largely Tamil Sufi group, a branch of the Qadiriyya brotherhood whose shaykh resides in Bangalore, has chosen this site [the grave of Habib Noh] to conduct their zikr sessions, as they considered Habib Noh to be the greatest saint of Singapore. (Tschacher 2006: 237) In Sout Ilaahi’s case, the shaykh who serves as the guiding light for much of the organization’s work is Shaykh Mahy Cisse. Shaykh Cisse, a Tijani shaykh from Senegal, has a close relationship with Khalid and Ainun, as well as a growing community of followers in Singapore. His teachings are foundational to much of the organization’s work. Cisse’s lectures cover numerous subjects, but his meditations on love for Allah, Prophet Muhammad, and God’s creatures are among the most beautiful. In one lecture, he writes, ‘The human soul does not attain intimacy except with the one she loves. The spirits of men are like recruited soldiers. Those that have 397

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known each other become connected and those that have not known each other part ways’ (Cisse 2012: 36). In social media posts and other spaces, Sout Ilaahi often includes images of the shaykh and quotes from his teachings. On Instagram and Facebook, one can easily find posts from Sout Ilaahi that include words from Prophet Muhammad and other Muslim figures – all reflecting the values of love and compassion. Ainun remarked to me that in the past, Sufism was stronger but had been in decline due to the influence of Salafism and the fast-paced life Singaporeans lead; in her view, salat and juma are ‘not enough’ (interview, Harun 2019). Ainun sees Sufism as an integral part of Muslim modernity – a necessary component of a healthy spiritual life that includes zikr, as well as therapy if one is in distress (interview, Harun 2019). The annual Sacred Path of Love is a weekend conference organized in a series of lectures, a question and answer session, lunch, zikr, and additional lectures, and on day two, workshops and small group discussions, all aimed at the question, ‘How can they build a relationship with Allah and the Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him?’ (interview Ajmain 2019). Ainun sees it as the beginning of a journey that leads to understanding Sufism as ‘about your own life,’ and something that ‘helps you understand how to deal with your issues’ (interview, Harun 2019). It iss important to understand that while Islam is at the core of this organization and its work, the co-founders of Sout Ilaahi are clear that zikr alone will not solve one’s problems (interview, Ajmain and Harun 2019). As Khalid puts it, ‘Zikr won’t solve your problems. Joining a tariqah won’t solve your problems’ (interview, Ajmain 2019). Blaming jinn or other sources for your issues also won’t provide a path forward, and while Sufism can help you understand the self, it will not cure you – hence the need for therapy, community support, and other avenues of rehabilitation and care (interview, Ajmain 2019). Islam’s teachings are directly linked to Sout Ilaahi’s work, including on domestic violence. As Khalid told me, ‘We purify ourselves to get to the level of sincerity of self, then serving the other’ (iterview, Ajmain 2019). Sufi rituals like salat, salawat (which, in the Malay context, may include singing and other forms of praise), and dhikr/zikr (remembrance of Allah) are important practices linked to the purification of the heart that leads to doing good works. As Khalid remarked to me, ‘Sufism is part of Islam through ihsan. When you worship, you see Allah’ (interview, Ajmain 2019). Sout Ilaahi uses social media, including Facebook and Instagram, to reach an audience both in Singapore and the region, as well as far afield in Europe and North America. Singapore is a city-state often identified with modernity, a vision of a Southeast Asian future dominated by wealth, progress, and technology. Popularized for the international audience in 2017 by the film Crazy Rich Asians, it features a number of impressive architectural and man-made wonders, including the Marina Bay Sands Skypark, which appears as a giant cruise ship atop a 679-foot building. Technology is also an important part of the religious lives of Singaporeans, including Muslims. As Tong Soon Lee points out, ‘We might say that Muslims are “traditionalizing” media technology, and that they are defining its social significance’ (Lee 1999: 95). Sout Ilaahi is an example of this traditionalizing of social media, which is seen in other areas of modern life, including social media. Islamic emoticons present another case of this phenomenon. In the case of the Muslim emoji app, ‘The full body emoticons are depicted either with sunglasses on or faceless. There are also images of an open Qurʾan, prayer beads, a prayer rug, the Mecca clock tower, halal and haram signs, and similar images’ (Stanton 2017: 154). 398

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Sout Ilaahi launched the #VoiceOut campaign after their annual Sacred Path of Love Meeting in 2013. It emerged out of conversations at their annual conference, the Sacred Path of Love, which first took place in 2010. The idea behind the Sacred Path of Love, initially, was to bring scholars from abroad and locally to focus on spirituality and daily life. Khalid and Ainun remarked on several occasions to me that life is fast and stressful in Singapore, and in one sense, this annual meeting is seen as a way to deal with this reality. Among the teachers who attend and give lectures are Shaykh Cisse, Dr. Afifi Akiti (a Malaysian who is a professor at Oxford), Shaykh Afeefudin al-Jailani (from Iraq), Shaykh Muhammad al-Ninowy (from the U.S.), and Shaykh Abdul Aziz Fredricks (from Glasgow, Scotland). As is common in Sufi contexts, the majority of teachers most years are men. As the problem of domestic violence became a central focus of Sout Ilaahi’s work, more female scholars and other experts have been included. Sout Ilaahi is an organization with strong female voices. Ainun is the director of Sout Ilaahi and judging from my interviews with her, she is the person in charge. As the first follower of Shaykh Cisse, and as the person who directs the operations of the organization, she works with Khalid to develop programs that benefit the community – from drug addicts to victims of domestic violence. In my interviews, Ainun also revealed a deep understanding of domestic violence issues and spoke of the support male scholars offer to participants. Sout Ilaahi is also staffed by volunteers, many of whom have benefited from the Sacred Path of Life program and the scholars it features. These volunteers, which include many women, also give input on the direction of furture programs. In 2013, a female speaker from New York was invited and questions from participants emerged that were largely focused on abuse, both physical and sexual (interview, Ajmain 2019). The general attitude with domestic violence is one that insists on silence and strength on the part of women and other victims, a stance that was unacceptable to Khalid, Ainun, and others involved in Sout Ilaahi (interview, Ajmain and Harun 2019). The #VoiceOut campaign focused on educating the people around the victims, because victims are ‘often in turmoil’ (interview, Harun 2019). In other words, it is important for the larger community to understand that domestic violence, sexual abuse, and other forms of physical abuse are present in Singapore, and their victims need community support. The leaders of Sout Ilaahi are unequivocal about the immorality of violence against women. In social media posts on Instagram and Facebook, Khalid and Ainun often present teachings about Islamic morals like kindness, compassion, and a gentle spirit. The gentle nature of Prophet Muhammad is often invoked, as are Muslims who follow him, including the spiritual leader of Khalid and Ainun, whose spiritual center is one modeled on love. It is important to note that in the context of the sunna (the Prophet’s customs, known as the ‘tradition’), domestic violence is absent from the Prophet’s behavior. ‘We know from the earliest biographies of the Prophet’s life that he never beat anyone’ (Bakhtiar 2011: 433). In the context of the Prophet’s character, this is an important fact, because ‘For the Muslim, the Prophet is the living Qurʾan’ (Bakhtiar 2011: 433). Domestic violence in Singapore has been considered under the definition of ‘family violence’ and includes emotional harm, which in Section 64 of the Singaporean Women’s Charter includes ‘any act causing continual harassment with intent to cause or knowing that it is likely to cause anguish to a family member’ (Amirthalingam 2005: 690). Legislative initiatives like the Family Violence Bill of 1995 and amendments to the Women’s Charter in 1997 were accompanied with changes in policing as a combined effort to tackle the problem of domestic violence in Singapore (Ganapathy 2006: 179). The outcome of ‘nonarrest’ is linked to the victim failing to file an official report (Ganapathy 2006: 188, 189). This 399

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problem is shaped by the focus on family, which is considered the ‘cornerstone of Singaporean society’ (Ganapathy 2006: 192). The focus on family cohesion is one of many issues that came up in the #VoiceOut campaign, which is why education became a cornerstone of their work and focused on the families and friends of victims, as well as being directed toward the larger community (interview, Ajmain 2019). The government has programs for victims, but Sout Ilaahi’s focus on the community acknowledged something important about Singaporean society – the importance of family and the need for an education campaign on domestic violence that did not create social strife or accuse one community or another of being more violent. Some mosques in Singapore talked about the campaign, while others neglected the problem of abuse, even though local scholars had often been clear that 4:34 was not an instruction to abuse women (interview, Ajmain and Harun 2019). It was not enough, however, because victims were resistant to come forward, suggesting a public campaign was needed. Khalid acknowledged the extreme duress that victims are under when he remarked, ‘Wife’s price of her life is losing her sanity?’ (interview, Ajmain 2019). As part of the campaign, Sout Ilaahi leaders and volunteers had a street festival and held a concert to help raise awareness. The street festival included flyers, pamphlets, the reading of poetry, and music (interview, Harun 2019). It also included the production of items like tote bags bearing the #VoiceOut hashtag (see Figure 26.1).

Figure 26.1 Tote bag

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One of the issues Sout Ilaahi wrestles with in its work is the question of cause – why do men harm women they are in a relationship with? Feminist scholars have suggested that power is often confused with violence. The first two types [of domestic violence] are clearly negative forms of power and the first is arguably violence simply confused for power; in other words, it involves a person who needs to be violent to overcome a sense of insecurity, real or perceived. (Amirthalingam 2005: 697–698) Khalid and Ainun agree on this point, telling me that in many cases, the victims of domestic violence are educated, employed women with good careers whose partners may be less educated or less financially secure than they are. Sout Ilaahi takes a multi-layered approach to the problem of domestic violence. Education, through social media and in their organization, is key. The concern over domestic violence, which for Sout Ilaahi includes both wife-beating and other forms of physical and sexual abuse within the family unit, first emerged in the 2013 Sacred Path of Love meeting. This is when the focus on Sufism shifted to a focus on Sufism combined with therapeutic models, assistance, and cooperation with government agencies. According to Ainun, they felt strongly that religion was not the sole answer; in fact, it was clear that mental health support was absolutely necessary. This led to the inclusion of scholars who were versed in both Islam and mental health such as Shaykh Abd Aziz Fredrichs, a principal for special needs students, a shaykh, and a therapist (interview, Harun 2019). Dr. Omar Mahmoud is another scholar that Sout Ilaahi brought in to provide support to victims and educate community members (interview, Harun 2019). Sout Ilaahi continues to address the problem of domestic violence and other forms of violence in a number of ways, including suggesting resources and avenues for assistance. Casa Raudha, a women’s shelter that has a secret location is a safe place for victims that come forward to volunteers of Sout Ilaahi; victims also have the option of filing a PPO (Personal Protection Order) (interview, Aijman and Harun 2019). Sufi practices offer support for victims in other ways, primarily by offering ways to unlearn, relearn, and find healing, ‘through the understanding that no one is perfect,’ and stressing that rehabilitation of offenders is a necessary part of recovery (interview, Aijman 2019). As Khalid remarked, the Sufi path does not offer healing in the form of forgiveness, ‘A monster will be a monster’ (interview, Ajmain 2019).

Conclusion Earlier in this chapter I suggested that domestic violence cannot be remedied by exegetical treatments of texts alone, and furthermore, that therapeutic models are a necessary strategy in addressing the problem of violence. In the case of Sout Illahi, we have an Islamic-centric model that insists on resources like therapy, law enforcement, and the legal system in a holistic approach to intra-family violence. Sympathetic readings of Islamic textual traditions can be important in the rehabilitation of victims in as much as they confirm the fact that violent offenders need rehabilitation and that violence is unacceptable. It is important not to discount the diverse voices in Sout Ilaahi. In many ways, this organization and its work on the problem of domestic violence reflect transnational Islamic traditions – Khalid was educated in Indonesia, Shaykh Cisse is African, many of the Sacred 401

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Path of Love’s teachers are European, American, or from outside Southeast Asia. Sout Ilaahi is also shaped by Sufi understandings of the human condition, which privilege love, compassion, and forgiveness. When we discussed the ways in which domestic violence is seen in the context of Islam, Ainun offered the example of Aisha, who when she raised her voice, was struck by Abu Bakr. The Prophet’s response was to say, ‘This is not how we do things in Islam’ (interview, Harun 2019).

Further reading Hammer, J. (2019) Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts against Domestic Violence, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hammer’s monograph focuses on the varied work on anti-domestic violence in the United States. Chaudry, A. (2014) Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. This study of domestic violence in Islam focuses on religious texts and their interpretations. Dickson, W. R. and Sharify-Funk, M. (2017) Unveiling Sufism: From Manhattan to Mecca, London: Equinox Publishing. This book details the global reach of Sufism, from its history to a number of case studies.

References Ali, A. (2002) The Meaning of the Holy Qurʾan, Beltsville: Amana Publications. Amirthalingam, K. (2005) ‘Women’s Rights, International Norms, and Domestic Violence,’ Human Rights Quarterly 27: 683–708. Arief, H. (2018) ‘Domestic Violence and Victim Rights in Indonesia Law Concerning the Elimination of Domestic Violence,’ Journal of Legal, Ethical and Regulatory Issues 21: 1–7. Arjana, S. (2015) Muslims in the Western Imagination, New York: Oxford. Arjana, S. (2017) Pilgrimage in Islam: Traditional and Modern Practices, London: Oneworld. Bakhtiar, L. (2011) ‘The Sublime Quran: The Misinterpretation of Chapter 4 Verse 34,’ European Journal of Women’s Studies 18: 431–439. Behrouz, A. (2005–6) ‘Women’s Rebellion: Towards a New Understanding of Domestic Violence in Islamic Law,’ Journal of Islamic & Near East Law 5: 153–177. Chaudhry, A. (2011) ‘“I Wanted One Thing and God Wanted Another”: The Dilemma of the Prophetic Example and the Qurʾanic Injunction on Wife-Beating,’ Journal of Religious Ethics 39: 416–439. Cisse, C. (2012) Islam the Religion of Peace: Selected Speeches of Cheikh Tidiane Ali Cisse, Singapore: Light of Eminence. Dunn, S. and Kellison, R. (2010) ‘At the Intersection of Scripture and Law: Qurʾan 4:34 and Violence against Women,’ Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26: 11–36. Ganapathy, N. (2006) ‘The Operational Policing of Domestic Violence in Singapore,’ International Criminal Justice Review 16: 179–198. Hammer, J. (2013) ‘“Men Are the Protectors of Women”: Negotiating Marriage, Feminism, and (Islamic) Law in American Muslim Efforts against Domestic Violence,’ in M. Failinger, L. Schiltz, and S. Stabile (eds.) Feminism, Law, and Religion, London: Ashgate. PP. 237256. Hammer, J. (2016) ‘Roundtable on Normativity in Islamic Studies, to Work for Change: Normativity, Feminism, and Islam,’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 84: 98–112. Jamil, N. (2016) ‘“You Are My Garment”: Muslim Women, Religious Education and SelfTransformation in Contemporary Singapore,’ Asian Studies Review 40: 545–563. Johns, A. (1995) ‘Sufism in Southeast Asia: Reflections and Reconsiderations,’ Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26: 169–183. Lee, T. (1999) ‘Technology and the Production of Islamic Space: The Call to Prayer in Singapore,’ Ethnomusicology 43: 86–100. Mahmoud, M. (2006) ‘To Beat or Not to Beat: On the Exegetical Dilemmas over Qur’ā n, 4:34,’ Journal of the American Oriental Society 126: 537–550. Mernissi, F. (1987) The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam, Reading: Addison-Wesley Publishing.

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#VoiceOut Merry, S. (2003) ‘Rights Talk and the Experience of Law: Implementing Women’s Human Rights to Protection from Violence,’ Human Rights Quarterly 25: Page Numbers Needed. 343381. Mostarom, T. (2014) ‘The Singapore Ulama: Religious Agency in the Context of a Strong State,’ Asian Journal of Social Science 42: 561–583. Osman, M. (2012) ‘The Religio-Political Activism of Ulama in Singapore,’ Indonesia and the Malay World 40: 1–19. Rahmaan, Y. (2016) ‘Feminist Edges of Muslim Feminist Readings of the Qurʾan,’ Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 32: 142–148. Siddique, S. (1979) ‘Report on a Preliminary Survey of Keramat Graves in Singapore,’ conference paper for the Persidangan Antarabangsa Pengajian Melayu (copy available at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore). Silvers, L. (2006) ‘“In the Book We Have Left Out Nothing”: The Ethical Problem of the Existence of Verse 4:34 in the Qurʾan,’ Comparative Islamic Studies 2: 171–180. Stanton, A. (2017) ‘Islamic Emoticons and Religious Authority: Emerging Practices, Shifting Paradigms,’ Contemporary Islam 12: 153–171. Tschacher, T. (2006) ‘From Local Practice to Transnational Network — Saints, Shrines, and Sufis among Tamil Muslims in Singapore,’ Asian Journal of Social Science 34: 225–242. Wadud, A. (1995–6) ‘Towards a Qurʾanic Hermeneutic of Social Justice: Race, Class and Gender,’ Journal of Law and Religion 12: 37–50. Wadud, A. (2006) Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam, Oxford: Oneworld Publications. Wadud, A. (2016) ‘Can One Critique Cancel All Previous Efforts?’ Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 32: 130–134. Weyland, P. (1990) ‘International Muslim Networks and Islam in Singapore,’ Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 5: 219–254.

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PART VII

Representation, commodification, and popular culture

27 HIJAB, ISLAMIC FASHION, AND MODEST CLOTHING Hybrids of modernity and religious commodity Faegheh Shirazi

Much has been written about the importance of dress as a non-verbal communicator, a visual gender identifier, a creator of first impressions, and its influence in many aspects of our daily lives. Clothing is a signifier of authority and empowerment. Dress and dress codes serve political agendas, religious requirements, cultural heritage, and at the same time can be used to silently defy and disobey. Dress fulfils purposes for activism in local, national, or international agendas. What clothing can signify is variable, based on social and political currents of a society. A Muslim woman’s veil is a good example of how its meaning can change from a cultural and religious meaning in the past to what it means now with many more additional layers of meaning. Clothing is versatile both in purpose and in its meanings (Shirazi, 2001). Compulsory dress codes for the lay citizen, particularly those established by a government like that in Iran, allow for some room for personal taste and modifications such as choice of material, color combinations, or silhouettes. While uniforms (particularly military uniforms) traditionally do not leave much room for modification, they too are subject to change in recent years due to keeping up with changing regulations and expressing religious liberty in our societies. In recent years in the American military, we have witnessed some changes within the strict boundaries of military uniforms, although in military forces outside the United States, accommodation for religious observances has been adopted years before its adoption in the USA. Such changes to American military dress codes have resulted after a long debate about religious freedom granted to all in the American Constitution. Religious followers can now wear and incorporate some non-military items of clothing in combination with their military uniforms. Additionally, for members of the American military, some of the strict facial and hair grooming rules have been subject to modifications to accommodate religious requirements. Changes relating to various religious accommodations for military men’s and women’s uniforms have transpired. In 1998, one of the first changes visible in military uniforms was insignias1 denoting Christian, Muslim, and Jewish chaplains. Published by the online news site Army Times, a caption of an image of Simran Lambda, along with

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his fellow regiment, clearly shows the incorporation of a required religious item on the military uniform: Lambda is the first enlisted Soldier to be granted a religious accommodation for his Sikh articles of faith since 1984. Sikhism, a 500-year-old religion founded in India, requires its male followers to wear a turban and beard and keep their hair uncut. Army policies since 1984 had effectively prevented Sikhs from enlisting by barring those items. But Lambda was granted a rare exception because he has skills the Army wants – the Indian languages Hindi and Punjabi. (Myers, 2017) The directive issued regarding the updates to the Army’s regulations on grooming and appearance allows observant Sikhs and conservative Muslim women to wear religious head coverings. In earlier years the kippa of the Jewish faith was granted permission to be worn on the condition that it be worn under the military hats. According to Army News, as early as 2009 a number of religious accommodation requests related to the Muslim hijab and a Sikh turban and patka (Sikh tight head covering worn under the turban). Another religious accommodation granted in recent years involved an American soldier who practices a Norse Pagan faith, who wanted to grow a beard. Permission was granted in 2017, and ‘beards with approved accommodations must be less than 2 inches long, measured from the bottom of the chin, and cannot be groomed with any petroleum-based products,’ (Myers, 2018) a known fire hazard that could endanger the life of the solider.

The politics of Islamic fashion in Iran Muslim women’s garments play a strong role in fashion in trendy clothing designed and manufactured for Muslim consumers and marketed as ‘halal,’ ‘Islamic,’ and even ‘Muslim’ clothing2. This profitable relatively new consumer’s market follows a regular updated look with trendy, chic and innovative designs that follow the seasonal fashion styles and trends. Large numbers of clothing shops exist online and sell from any corner of the world, catering to the taste, age, and budget of specific clientele. These online shops appeal to not only Muslim consumers but also to non-Muslims who prefer to buy modest but trendy fashions. In fact, a number of conservative Jews and Christians also surf the same online shops that cater to Muslim women (Murray, 2015; Willett, 2015). Now, we are witnessing a growing community of Muslim, Christian, and Orthodox Jewish women using the internet to redefine what it means to dress modestly. Modesty means different things to different religious groups, people, and places. One thing most modest fashion followers have in common is that whatever they wear is not too form-fitting. Respecting their religions comes with rules, and they abide by those rules (Murray, 2015; Willett, 2015). Based on the popularity and growth of modest fashion, one could conclude that it is possible to dress modestly and look fabulous too, and in addition that there are some consumers who prefer to dress modestly not for religious purposes but for themselves. The Iranian government, which is so restrictive about many aspects of the lives of its citizens, particularly when it concerns the subject of the women’s hijab, has always attempted to block Western fashions and has created a negative reputation about Western lifestyles, particularly what is perceived as the indecency of women’s dress and the free mixing of genders. In an effort to stop the young generation from dressing in Western styles, where the individual is free to follow any style of clothes, the Islamic Republic 408

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openly condemns young Iranian girls who dress their bodies in fashionable, stylish, and colorful garments, created by designers as street fashion worn with beautiful, long, narrow shawls on the head. The hijab patrol morality police or gasht ı̄ ershad (‫ )ﮔﺸﺖ ﺍﺭﺷﺎﺩ‬agency are busy arresting and fining those for the crime of ‘improper hijab.’3 However, such frequent arrests does not stop the fashion craze among the young women who also use their hijab in many ways to outwardly and silently express their disapproval of the rigidity of the Iranian government about the compulsory hijab.4 It is over 40 years since the Islamic Republic of Iran was established in 1979. The issue of the compulsory hijab has always been a part of the political discussion at the center of political gendered debates. In recent years, various political movements in Iran also used the women’s hijab for activism. Young Iranian women, despite arrests for wearing improper hijabs in public, continue to step out in public arenas dressed in trendy and chic colorful outer gowns and stylish headcovers, disapproved of by the hardliners who are opposed to Western influences. The hardliners do not see such women’s clothes as sufficiently covering and, more importantly, as being in line with what they view as a proper hijab. One must be covered in the most traditional style of hijab in the color black. The hardliners refer to hijabs preferred by young women following trendy, fashion styles as ‘Westernized hijab,’ a term with a negative meaning. Modest dress should be a choice, not a government mandate. For example, in Iran today, the hijab is compulsory for all women, even for tourists who visit Iran. Upon the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, the hijab rule became part of immediate changes that were clearly visible. The compulsory hijab has always created aggression between government officials and various political factions as well as those among the population who do not believe clothes should be regulated and enforced by any government. Very often in the news we hear how Iranian women (mostly young) get into trouble by the hijab patrol (gasht ı̄ ershad) authorities over what is deemed to be an improper hijab, that is, the young women appeared in public in colorful, trendy, stylish, fashionable clothing, or with more hair showing through loosely wrapped scarves draped over the head. At times disobedient women are given tickets (similar to traffic tickets), fining women with various fees depending on what was marked as ‘improper’ by the officer. The hijab arrests continue today, while the intensity of the harshness and easing off the strictures are dependent upon the internal political pulse of the government. One must be aware that the enforcement of the dress code rule in Iran never stays the same, and the method of enforcement changes from time to time. For example, in December 2017 the Wall Street Journal reported that the: country’s conservative interpretation of Islamic dress code, which includes a ban on wearing nail polish, heavy makeup or loose headscarves. Instead, violators will be ordered to take police-instructed classes on ‘Islamic values,’ while repeat offenders could still be subject to legal action. (Eqbali & Fitch, 2017) In a Women In The World (WITW) staff report, General Hossein Rahimi, Tehran chief of police stated: ‘Those who do not observe the Islamic dress code [including wearing nail polish, heavy makeup, or donning loose headscarves] will no longer be taken to detention centers, nor will judicial cases be filed against them’ (WITW, 2017). Rather than being arrested, the violators must take police-instructed classes on ‘Islamic values.’5 Repeat offenders face the legal actions set by the authorities.

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Today, youth and urban Iranians do not support the compulsory hijab, since it is becoming more difficult to accept the notion that they are not free to choose. Ironically, even the religious Iranian women who prefer to dress conservatively do not agree with the gasht ı̄ ershad hijab patrols and find their actions and behavior toward women very distasteful. In recent years the government of Iran has been promoting Islamic fashion through in a yearly event called the Fajr International Fashion Festival, and in 2019 this fashion and clothing festival celebrated its 8th anniversary. Compared to its earlier years, the last festival was much more colorful and showed improved creativity of designs around the restrictions imposed by the government and requiring approval within the code of modesty in Iran – every creation must be approved by inspection before its display. The Iranian ‘fashion industry’ is, in fact, a kind of coverup term for an industry controlled by the government authorities. The censorship of designs limits the creativity of the artists. There is a group, created by the Iranian Parliament, whose task is to help organize the clothing and fashion industries ‘making it compatible with Islamic standards. It is headed by a deputy minister of Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance [a man] and its members are mostly government officials [mostly men] with a handful of representatives from the fashion industry’ (Serjoie, 2014). Parliamentary groups assigned to oversee the fashion and clothing of citizens are surely rare. By analyzing the poster created for the 7th Fajir International Fashion and Clothing Festival (2018), a number interesting facts can be noted (Tehran Times 2018) (see Figure 27.1). The poster is created against an arabesque, geometric tile work with horizontal-running green patterns. A mix of calligraphic styles in addition to various colors are used in the

Figure 27.1 7th Fajir International Fashion and Clothing Festival, 2018 Photo credit: ‘Fajr festival to put spotlight on fashion, clothing.’ January 30, 2018 www.tehrantimes. com/news/420841/Fajr-festival-to-put-spotlight-on-fashion-clothing

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calligraphy (black, purple, and white) that make the poster appear more as an Islamic calligraphic artwork rather than a poster for fashion and clothing; perhaps this was done intentionally. There is no image of any type of clothing displayed on a woman’s body, on the body of a mannequin, or even on a clothes hanger that might be interpreted as a compromise between the hardliners, who are in control of final decisions, and the other more progressive factions among the parliamentary members. Announcing the event, there is a central blue background banner with English text in white, much smaller in font size compared to the huge, dominating Persian/Kufic and Naskh Arabic script. In Iran, Nastaʿliq and Shekasteh are the most common styles of script and not Kufic or Naskh. Several noticeable points of difference appear between the 2018 and 2019 posters for the same event (Lu, 2019) (Figure 27.2). The most obvious change is the font size and style of script. The 2019 poster script is identified as the Iranian national script known as Nastaʿliq, which is one of the main calligraphic hands used in writing the Persian alphabet. Nastaʿliq is traditionally the predominant style in Persian calligraphy and is also adopted by some other non-Arabic-speaking people. In addition to Nastaʿliq, the Shekasteh script is also used as an aesthetic element incorporated into trendy and fashionable clothes. I emphasize this point because no Arabic-speaking person is taught in school how to write in the Nastaʿliq or Shekasteh scripts. I question the prime motivation of the usage of some uncommon scripts used in Iran on a poster advertising an Iranian fashion festival.6 In the 2019 poster, white and yellow are used on a plain dark purple background. Nastaʿliq and Shekasteh are used in white for the Persian scripts while yellow is reserved for the English. This fashion poster does not include any clothes worn by a model or draped on a body form or on a clothes hanger similar to the previous 2018 fashion poster, but there are differences between the 2019 and 2018 posters. The outside border design of the 2019 poster contains a traditional Mokran hand embroidery. Mokran is an area in the province of Baluchistan on the eastern border of Iran. This event was held in the area of Chabahar, which is a city and capital of Chabahar County, Sistan and Baluchestan Province, Iran. Chabahar is an officially designated Free Trade and Industrial Zone by Iran’s government on the coast of the Gulf of Oman. The choice of this less popular location in Iran is clearly

Figure 27.2 8th Fajir International Fashion and Clothing Festival (2019) – the outside border contains a traditional hand embroidery of Mokran in the province of Baluchistan on the eastern border Photo credit: Iran Press Mahdieh Baharmast

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a marketing decision as well as a political strategy decision. This region of Iran is known for beautiful hand embroideries that are still a strong tradition in this part of the country. For the 2019 festival of fashion, promoted by the government, the artwork and handicrafts of this region were incorporated into clothes by the Iranian fashion designers. According to Iranian governmental reports, as a result of this festival, the participating embroiderers from this impoverished region would be provided more economic opportunities, and the event would introduce of this highly developed art to international participants (18 countries displayed and participated in this event). In addition to the beautiful traditional colorful costumes and rich hand embroideries of this region, the city of Chabahar is also a free port with strategic geographic opportunities that the government is promoting. Chabahar is situated at the mouth of the Gulf of Oman on the Iranian Mokran coast, with a direct access to the Indian Ocean: India has formally taken over operations at Iran’s strategic Chabahar Port. The port on the Indian Ocean, inaugurated last year [2017], is being built largely by India and is expected to provide a key supply route for Afghanistan while allowing India to bypass rival Pakistan to trade with Central Asia. (Tehran Times 2018) Thus, the 8th Fajir Fashion Festival in Iran fulfils many objectives that are not only artistic and economic, but also political. In the case of Iran, the fashion festivals bring attention to a country that is known around the world to be in tight control of women’s lives, as covered by the media in the West. The government acts as the guardian of the women and controls every aspect of their public lives. At the same time, Iran is under a huge weight of international economic sanctions, and so any access to the international market bypassing sanctions is welcome news. Hence, for Iran, any fashion-related subject involving the government’s hand in organizing the event is another propaganda opportunity to control women’s image, implement censorship of designs, while claiming they are not anti-fashion, only anti-Western. First and foremost, the government is fulfiling a political agenda.

Islam and commodities Most production of commodities disguised under the label of Islam ‘is profit-driven, exploiting the rise of a new Islamic economic paradigm, and not necessarily created with the objective of honoring religious practice and sentiment’ (Shirazi, 2016, p. 1). It is mostly assumed that Muslim women are indifferent to fashion. However, my research reveals that Muslim women are not different from any other women in the world; they are interested in how they look and the clothes they wear. Islamic fashion is a rapidly growing lucrative business that is reshaping the religious, cultural, and economic lives of Muslims not only in the Muslim majority nations but also globally as well. Muslims spent $266 billion on clothing and footwear in 2013. That’s more than the total fashion spending of Japan and Italy combined, according to a recent report from Thomson Reuters. The report also notes that that figure is expected to balloon to $484 billion by 2019.7 To trace the start of Islamic clothing as a commodity in the West, one should go back and examine the history of small ethnic grocery stores established during the 1970s and the 412

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1980s when the number of Muslim immigrant settlements in the Western countries was increasing. With the increase in the number of people coming from diverse parts of the world, the new immigrants created demand for not only ethnic restaurants, but also specific types of groceries that would be uncommon in regular food suppliers to buy in addition to small commodities from the home countries such as clothing or decorative objects. Muslim women during that time were not able to purchase clothes from department stores that specifically catered to modest clothing or hijabi women. The conservative Muslim women had to create their own style of clothing that was not only modest but somewhat fashionable. Ethnic grocery dealers in Western Europe and the United States began importing modest fashion clothing along with other items for the Muslim population, which proved to be lucrative business. Meanwhile, a global resurgence of religions began happening. One of the notable phenomena was the piety of the middle class that gave rise to new potential economic markets. For instance, in Indonesia ‘the role of spiritual lifestyle agents played a pivotal role in helping and shaping the new urban middle class who consume Islam to mark their Islamic identity’ (Utama, 2016, p. 114). The spiritual revival obviously influences the consumers in many ways relating to material culture. Thus, Islamic symbols declaim a new form of outward spirituality and identifier as being a Muslim. When marketing ‘Islamic fashion,’ the hijab is a logical starting point, while using Islam as a portal for selling modest and stylish clothing. In Brand Islam, I write of using Islam as a brand name focusing on ‘marketing campaign in the realm of women’s fashion that capitalizes on the very core of Islamic precepts: Sharia [the Islamic law]’ (Shirazi, 2016, p. 144). Now Islam for the consumer is very much appealing to the Muslim lifestyle, modesty, and enjoyment. In fact, the marketers have created a direct relationship between Islam and capitalism that appears not as a dichotomy, but as complementary. Islam is a symbolic commodity as scholars have studied the relationship between consumption and religion (McDannell, 1998). That religion is commercially viable is not a new discovery; however, Muslims were ignored as a significant profitable segment with market potential. The evidence is clear even in the number of academic journals that exclusively study the Muslim consumer and related marketing strategies. Islamic marketing and consumerism are new fields of study. For example, a number of authors have measured Muslim consumer attitudes towards Islamic fashion (Salam, Muhamad, & Leong, 2018). Another author (Abalkhail, 2018) has measured the traditional degree of religiosity of Muslim female consumers in purchasing Islamic fashion. Two authors (Grine & Saeed, 2017) have measured Malaysian Muslim women’s attitude to Islamic fashion. Three more authors (El-Bassiouny, 2018; Hassan & Harun, 2016) measured the hijab phenomenon and ‘hijabista culture’ among the Muslim youth. All such continuous interest in Muslims as a potential consumer is an indicator of the economic gain that should not be missed. By now due to Muslim’s purchasing power, the traditional journals in psychology relating to Muslim consumer behavior, advertising, and marketing have become mainstream publications. The Muslim women who consume ‘Islam’ also follow the Islamic regulations regarding halal (permissible by Sharia, opposite of haram, not permissible), which in principle is analogous to what kosher is to Jews. Those regulations include food items, cosmetic and hygienic products, abstaining from behaviors and actions, to using halal hospitals, or choosing halal hotels and halal tours for the travel destination. In order to demonstrate how, for example, a clothing manufacturer uses Islamic terminology to sell, one only needs to pay attention to the motto used. Among such companies is a Malaysian clothing manufacturer called KIVITZ Brand. This company uses the phrase ‘Syarʾi and Stylish,’ which is a very clever way of pairing the word Syaʿri (Sharia) with Stylish, giving the message that their clothes are not only stylish, but are also within the code of modest clothing laid out by the Islamic 413

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Figure 27.3 Turkish Belemir Moda clothing tag Photo credit: Kubra Babaturk

Religious Regulation of the Sharia. Many other clothing companies are using a similar technique to advertise for modest clothes appealing to the Muslim consumer with catch phrases such as the word hijab as a tag on every piece of clothing they produce. As shown in Figure 27.3, the brand words Belemir Moda are used that mean ‘Hijab is a New Style.’ The word Belemir is also a very careful choice based on the Turkish/English dictionary and is a reference to ‘a plant with a bluish-tinge of blue flowers growing up on the fields in Central Anatolia, the prophet’s flower, the blue cantoron (Cephalaria syriaca)’ (Turkish/English Dictionary Online). The abaya,8 another Arab woman’s traditional outerwear, is now an offering among the fashionable and modest clothing for women, particularly women in the Arab nations of the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia. Momin Libas is one of the most recognizable brands in luxury fashion offering abayas created in the Persian Gulf region. Again, this brand name is a strategic choice of name and eye catcher. Momin Libas are words are recognizable not only to Arabic speakers but also by most Muslims, translated as ‘Garment of the Believer.’ Fashion weeks displaying modest clothing and the latest hijab styles are now wellestablished events that happen in various places around the world, including Paris, London, and New York, either independently or as part of regular fashion shows devoted to creative fashion designers. This inclusion has benefited various fashion manufacturers of ready-towear garments, while serving as a platform showcasing the best of the designers of modest/ Islamic exclusive lines of clothing. The Modest Fashion Week of 2019 scheduled for April 414

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in Istanbul, Turkey, focused on national and international designers catering to the needs of women who purchase modest fashion. There is no doubt that such modest fashion shows are part of a growing demand by consumers and becoming established business. The suppliers and sellers of modest fashion must understand that the consumers do not compromise their modest standards, no matter how attractive the clothes may be. This relatively new industry still requires research and understandings of the clienteles’ taste or specific religious requirements. An expert designer would know the regional differences for what would sell in a specific geographic location, budget concerns, and be aware of the social status of those who would be the ultimate consumers. For example, an abaya is not a hot sell for ordinary everyday use in Turkey, Malaysia, or Iran, while it is a perfect choice for the women in the Arab nations in the Persian Gulf nations. The marketing strategy for this type of consumer is the same for any good business and identical in nature and mission to Western fashion industries: anything from exclusive haute couture, boutique buyers, to popular readymade garments mass produced and priced differently. In 2017 The Modist brand was established, founded by Ghizlan Guenez (Algerian born but a Dubai resident for many years). The brand promotes Net-a-Porter modest fashion (Schirrer, 2017). Guenez is listed as one of the 500 people who are ‘shaping the global industry’ (Stock, 2017). Her work is appreciated for its contribution to the modest fashion market. The Modist brand has already been established in London and Dubai and 120 other countries, making Guenez’s creations accessible to many women around the world. She has said that one of her missions in life is to educate people about modest fashion preferences for women, and that she does not belong to any specific religious group. Over time both national and international designers have participated in fashion, production, and sale of ‘chic Islamic fashion’ in fashion venues. The Islamic fashion shows are known by various names and sometimes they are part of other regular fashion shows. Contemporary Muslim youth around the globe have unlimited access to internet and Islamic consumer products. They are exposed to a huge number of advertisements and online shopping information offering an endless choice of fashion and clothing, even for women who are restricted to following fashion trends of the Western world and must observe the rule of hijab implemented by their respective governments, such as in Saudi Arabia and Iran. Economic prosperity, in part because of profits from oil and natural gas, is manifest in many material lifestyles in the Middle East. ‘Muslim women have engaged in personal expressions of wealth and status through dress for decades, wearing haute couture beneath their abayas’ (Lindholm, 2014, p. 45). The fashion abaya has become a signifier of luxury, extravagance, and high quality for women who could afford them. Thus, the class stratification is more visible now compared to the days of simple black abayas and ordinary plain hijabs. Of course, the religious class and particularly the religious scholars see the trendy abayas in a negative light. However, for those who follow fashion or do not seem to be bothered by the influence of contemporary fashion on a very traditional symbol of the Muslim Arab woman in the Persian Gulf region, they are glad and welcome any new change. From this perspective one strong argument stands: ‘they [Arab women] are pursuing a global and modern abaya, and not a western [abaya]’ (Sarwar, 2017). One of the most noticeable changes in the silhouette within the traditional abaya that became very popular is al-ʿabaya al-Mukhassara, which is a ‘waisted’ version of this loose gown (Al-Qasimi, 2010). It is not unusual to find in many Saudi and other Persian Gulf nations among middleclass strata an interest in the fashion scene and fineries including the latest makeup, brand names in fine accessories, or expensive and rare French scents. These women have access to purchase such goods not only online but also in many fashion stores in shopping malls and 415

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boutiques in their own home countries. Some of the finest selections of the hijab are produced in the Persian Gulf regions. Dubai is one of the locations where local designers create stylish abayas. The traditional abaya serves as a symbol of Islamic identity and national dress for women of the Persian Gulf region of the Arabian Peninsula. The black loose-fitting garment became prevalent in the early 1930s in Saudi Arabia, when King Abdul Aziz Al Saud circulated them to tribal leaders. The abaya was later imposed as part of the official dress code by the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (Almazroiu). The abaya has since transformed into the abaya-as-fashion, a stylish, glamorous, and personalized robe for women of the Gulf region. (Sarwar, 2017) The modern, contemporary abaya does not need to be black. The younger generation of Arab women in the Persian Gulf region wear different styles of abayas in contemporary, fashionable colors with various embellishments, in combination with the accessories that make it very different from their mother’s black, traditional abaya. Meanwhile, a number of Arab nation governments and other Muslim countries are worried about the effects of globalization on the traditional lives of their nations, particularly concerning Islamic values that are cherished by a large population in those regions of the world.

Creation of trendy designer’s hijab In our contemporary era, the hijab is appearing more frequently in the Western, modest street fashion and on the runways of the fashion shows. Jihane Hajby states: as modest fashion is gradually capitalized on, where is the line between empowerment and profit from one of the most visible Islamic symbols of modesty? You’d think the use of hijab-wearing models is a nod to inclusiveness, but it has to be more complex than that. (Hajby, 2017) From the moral perspective in the eyes of believers, the use of marketing in the name of Islam to sell material goods is wrong and even sinful. On the one hand, to include the hijab in the mainstream of clothing culture could be considered a positive action. On the other hand, some are bothered by the power of advertising to sell the iconic emblem of a Muslim woman to make profits. I have made this same point in Brand Islam, which is that most of the mundane products that are redressed and advertised as Islamic are for profit. ‘The erroneous belief [is] that entry to halal [Islamic] markets require just a simple step: take an item, as mundane as it can be, market it as ‘Islamic’ – as if Islamic is generically and mechanically defined – and voila’ (Shirazi, 2017). Modest fashion and the fashionable hijab are more tolerated now compared to the past, but in fact they are still not acceptable to a large number of people, mostly in the Western world. The following gives a clear example. Pierre Bergé (business partner for Yves Saint Laurent fashion house in France) made some inflammatory comments regarding the subjects of the fashion hijab, the role of designers, established clothing manufacturers that create designs and promote the clothes to satisfy hijabi consumers:

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‘creators should have nothing to do with Islamic fashion.’ According to The Guardian, he continued: ‘Designers are there to make women more beautiful, to give them their freedom, not to collaborate with this dictatorship which imposes this abominable thing by which we hide women and make them live a hidden life.’ He criticized designers for taking part in what he calls an ‘enslavement of women.’ (Fernandez, 2016) Pierre Bergé’s comments are problematic in several ways. First, his comment about ‘making women more beautiful’ is subject to interpretation. His idea of beauty is concentrated on the amount of exposed skin of the woman. His standards of beauty are obviously culturally self-centered and quite different from the hijab-wearing or modestly dressed women of other cultures or upbringings. Second, Bergé’s comments rests on the assumption of the superiority of Western clothing designs over the ‘other’ designs created for hijabis or the modestly dressed consumer. A wise marketer caters to the taste of consumer clientele. Bergé’s comments are a product of a xenophobic and stereotypical attitude of cultural superiority to people who once were colonized by France, such as the large number of Muslim populations from North Africa who are living in France. Bergé’s comments betray the notion and belief in the superiority of French clothing designers, along with an attitude that no Muslim hijabi woman could be considered chic no matter how fashionable her hijab. In the opinions of Bergé and his like-minded type, being a muhajaba (woman who wears the hijab) is equated with a host of negativities, inclusive of being old-fashioned and backward, and not worthy of creating designs to accommodate her hijab in an updated contemporary fashion. In a surprising move in September 2016 (about five months after Pierre Bergé’s insulting comments about the Muslim hijab), the house of Yves Saint Laurent (YSL) displayed a model wearing a hijab. This was a well-crafted strategic move to publicly demonstrate that YSL has nothing against Muslim hijabi women. This move might have been an indirect public apology for Bergé’s remarks or, more importantly, damage control in order to not jeopardize the business of wealthy Arabs and Muslim hijabi loyal customers in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf nations. Based on Euromonitor International: ‘designer clothing is by far the biggest segment of the luxury goods industry representing 42 percent of overall luxury goods sales in the United Arab Emirate (UAE), the biggest buyer among Gulf states, with women’s designer dresses and skirts leading the way’ (Wendlandt & Fuchs, 2011). Based on this record it was worth $930 million a year. Saudis, Kuwaitis, Qataris in addition to nationals of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and royal families of the Middle East are buying haute couture designer fashions. Most of the women who buy such fineries do not hesitate to spend lavishly on luxury clothes when they attend weddings (which average at several times a year) or other events where men and women are segregated (Wendlandt & Fuchs, 2011). These women dress up in their latest and their finest designer garb not just to please themselves, but also to show off their good taste and wealth to other women attendees. Despite YSL damage control for the 2016 campaign, another issue surfaced and was exposed to the public, creating yet another disappointment in the campaign when it was revealed that the model wearing the hijab (Ms Isamaya French) was not Muslim. Selina Bakkar comments: ‘a Muslim hijab-wearing woman rocking that white hijab fur and red lipstick would have been revolutionary’ (Bakkar, 2016). Hiring a Muslim fashion model who could model for the YSL 2016 fashion campaign would have been easy. And so Bergé’s incendiary remarks were not exactly put to rest. 417

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In 2014, some well-known Western clothing brands such as Hermes, Dorothy Perkins, and DKNY experimented with an exclusive, timely, marketed line of clothing with long sleeves and maxi dresses during the time of Ramadan when Muslims undergo a one-month period of fasting. At the end of Ramadan, all Muslims celebrate Eid Al Fitr. It is believed that during Ramadan the Qurʾan was revealed to mankind through the Prophet Muhammad. This strategy helped UK retailers in London [to enjoy] enjoyed an influx of 25 percent in summer spend. According to data from WorldPay, UK payment service, Middle Eastern visitors spent an average of 152.40 pounds per transaction in August 2013, with visitors from Qatar spending an average of 288.17 per transaction. (Hendrikz, 2015) Other designers and companies such as Tommy Hilfiger, Dolce & Gabbana, Oscar de la Renta, and Mango also joined the trends in catering to Muslim women’s fashion, offering special designs based on specific Muslim calendar events for celebrations. Creating fashion for Muslims is lucrative and, according to the State for Global Islamic Economy report, there will be more retailers who prefer to focus on clothing for Muslim women (Hendrikz, 2015). The purchasing power of the Muslim population has been on the rise due to several factors. First, Muslims are the fastest growing religious group, population-wise, and they are the youngest. Based on the Pew Research Center, Muslim births will outpace Christians by 2030. The same report indicated that ‘Between 2010 and 2015, births to Muslim families made up 31% of all births,’ and in addition to the growth of population ‘Muslims spent $1.9 trillion across sectors in 2015, a figure projected to grow to $3 trillion by 2021’ (Cass, 2017). Muslim consumers are also reported to spend an estimated $243 billion on clothing annually alone, which is projected to grow to $368 billion by 2021 (Cass, 2017).

Activism: anti-hijab Iran and Western fashion platforms The My Stealthy Freedom (azadi i yavashaki ‫ )ﺁﺯﺍﺩﯼ ﯾﻮﺍﺷﮑﯽ‬campaign, which began in 2014, is an online movement created by Masih Alinejad, an Iranian-born journalist and activist. Alinejad stated: ‘I called it “stealthy freedom,” which means you create your own freedom in secret.’9 Alinejad’s protest against Iran’s compulsory hijab rule has numerous followers around the world. Any woman inside Iran can join this campaign by posting a picture of themselves not wearing the hijab. Some participants, to not risk being identified, remove their hijab but turn their faces away from the camera, showing their exposed hair from the back. Some women pose while still wearing their hijabs but hold signs with some statements about the hijab. In the most recent postings, many women not only remove their hijab freely in front of the camera, but also speak directly to the recording camera and walk unveiled in public. What Masih Alinejad started in 2014 has taken another route with an emphasis on weekly, silent protests in the streets of Iran by women (and some men as well) who are fed up with the compulsory hijab. This turmoil has lent itself to a new campaign called White Wednesdays (‫)ﻫﺎﺭ ﺷﻨﺒﻪ ﻫﺎﯼ ﺳﻔﯿﺪ‬, which is yet another movement for the Iranian woman’s freedom of choice to veil or not to veil. Masih Alinejad is a supporter of this movement too.

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High-profile people in the public eye use their status to express political opinions and to engage in activism relating to political and social events important to the world. Movie stars and fashion designers are just two examples among many other groups that relay their political messages during the big events and gatherings when the cameras are rolling. An example is Christian Sirano’s 2017 Fall/Winter show, which surprised the spectators with a black t-shirt with the white script: ‘People are People.’ He and some of his models on the runway were wearing the same t-shirt. This action hit a political chord in people’s minds and hearts, who responded to this message of equality. Other big names in the fashion industry also promoted the message were Dior, Diane von Furstenberg, Prabal Gurung, and others. When a t-shirt with a political message hits the public streets, it can create the most effective form of activist message, such as: ‘We Should All Be Feminists,’ or famous female Saudi fashion designer Arwa Al Banawi messages (inscribed in both Arabic and English) on t-shirts ‘We are nation’ and ‘the suitable woman’ (Jaber, 2017). Among other fashion designers who incorporate activist messages as part of their incorporated fashion statement is Yasmeen Mjalli, who was inspired by the ‘Me Too Movement,’ and came out with her message of ‘Not Your Habibti’ denim jackets, translating to ‘Not Your Sweetheart,’ and thereby sending a message of social and cultural resonance to all the Palestinian and Arab people of the world (Jaber, 2017). These are just a small token of growing trends among the fashion designers to support feminism, multi-culturalism, and equality for all.

Conclusion In this chapter I have demonstrated that clothing, in terms of its social significance, is versatile even in its most rigid form, as reflected in military uniforms. With the resurgence of all forms of religion since the 1970s onward, clothing has adapted to change too. Some military uniforms around the world reflect this as well. The U.S. military has accommodated several changes in military uniforms based on the challenges they faced by court decisions relating to religion and freedom of practice. The Sikh turban, the Muslim hijab, and the Jewish kippa are allowed to be worn with the military uniform, as set by guidelines from the military. Facial beards and hair, as religiously required by an individual believer, are now allowed within a certain length instructed by the guidelines. Islamic fashion and its rising popularity can be attributed to several reasons: the rise of the Muslim population, the higher level of education that results in better jobs, in addition to a large population of practicing Muslims who are modern and forward looking in their outlook. The market has reacted positively to the needs of these young consumers by catering specifically to them. Islamic fashion not only fulfills the appetite for consumer products, but also bridges the theological rise of self-identity and rejection of the dominant power of religious communalism in the rise of Muslim women’s visibility in public arenas. Muslims increasingly are engaged in ‘modernity and the resulting hybridity’ (Cevik, 2017). In Iran in recent years, an active scene has existed against the compulsory hijab. Supporters of the My Stealthy Freedom and White Wednesdays movements are women and men who are defying the imposition of the hijab on women. Despite the arrests and harsh treatment for civil disobedience, they continue their efforts and publicize their pictures in social media. Clothing and fashion events also serve activism as shown in the example presented on t-shirts: ‘people are people’ or ‘we are one nation,’ and others, which signify human equality. Certain colors of clothes can unite political opposition, in this case to a ruling 419

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government, as we witnessed public actions such as the Green Movement in Iran when women in favor of a particular presidential candidate wore a green hijab. The war on terror and the political engagements of the Western world meddling in the Muslim-majority nations have galvanized the consumer market to use Islam as a commodified brand catering to Muslims. While Muslim women are visibly present in consumer culture, yet they face discrimination and violence in anti-Muslim environments. Rashmee Kumar states: ‘In order to tap into the multibillion-dollar potential of the U.S. Muslim consumer market, large retailers have positioned themselves as socially conscious havens for Muslims, operating on a profit motive rather than a moral imperative’ (Kumar, 2017) However, this is only one perspective on a subject that is timely and can be argued from multiple perspectives. We should remind ourselves that America is a capitalist and consumer-driven society, thus targeting newly discovered Muslim consumers does not go totally against the capitalist system. Rather, I argue that Muslims choose to lead a life of faithfulness combined with the convenience of modernity. They believe there is no clash between modernity and remaining true to their religious beliefs. Islamic consumption is not simply buying religious commodities, it includes the icon of piety as well.

Notes 1 Insignia is ‘a badge or distinguishing mark of military rank, office, or membership of an organization; an official emblem.’ Webster’s Dictionary online. 2 The term Muslim means the person who follows Islam. An object such as dress could not be a Muslim. 3 In recent years the hijab patrol stopped issuing tickets to those deemed to be wearing an improper hijab. There has been a new solution to fining people; now they make the guilty party attend an educational class to learn about the virtue of the hijab. 4 This was especially in 2009 during the Green Movement uprising, also known as the Persian Awakening or Persian Spring by the Western media. Green was the color of a presidential campaign for Mir Hossein Mousavi in opposition to then president Ahmadinejad who was accused of rigging the votes. Women wore green headscarves or green wristbands to express their support for Mir Hossein Moussavi. Another protest by Iranian women is known in Persian as azadi yavashaki zanan/ My Stealthy Freedom: an online movement that began in 2014 by Masih Alinejad, an Iranian-born journalist and activist based in the United Kingdom and the United States. This movement started from a Facebook page, My Stealthy Freedom, where women from Iran post their photos without scarfs, and by the end of 2016 the page surpassed 1 million Facebook likes. https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/My_Stealthy_Freedom. The next protest against the compulsory hijab is an offshoot of My Stealthy Freedom and is called the White Wednesdays or in Persian, chaharshanbeh e sefid. In this movement, Iranian women in Iran wore white scarves or white clothes and white scarves and went into public places to quietly express their disapproval of compulsory hijab, and some of them also for five minutes would stand in a busy street on a platform and remove their head scarves and place it on a stick and wave it in the air. During this time of silent protest, they did not speak or carry any sign with them. Seewww.youtube.com/watch?v=R3lrkEobGbQ. 5 However ‘Islamic values’ is a flexible term, which means different things in different situations. 6 One could conclude that there is even politics used in the choice of selected scripts not commonly used in everyday lives in Iran – I interpret this as a deliberate and strategic choice to visually still be connected to what Islam means to the current government in Iran. 7 www.businessinsider.in/dolce-gabbana-just-debuted-a-couture-hijab-collection/muslims-spentabout-266-billion-on-clothing-and-shoes-in-2013-more-than-retail-spending-in-italy-and-japan-com bined-that-year-fortune-reports-that-amount-is-projected-to-nearly-double-by-2019-/slideshow/ 50476017.cms 8 The abaya is a loose-fitting full-length robe worn by some Muslim women mostly in Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf nations. 9 www.nhpr.org/post/iran-exposing-hair-public-stealthy-freedom#stream/

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Further reading Hafsa Lodi (2020). Modesty: A Fashion Paradox: Uncovering The Causes, Controversies and Key Players Behind the Global Trend to Conceal Rather than Reveal, Neem Tree Press. The global fashion industry welcomes a newcomer, the modest fashion with its multi-billion-dollar business. Modest fashion describes the consumers, the designers, and the social political reasons for this attractive market segment. Jill D’Alessandro & Reina Lewis (2018). Contemporary Muslim Fashions, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. An illustrated book about Muslim fashion, looking at the contemporary modest style that is a major part of today’s fashion industry. This book showcases contemporary works of Muslim fashion designers. Paul Temporal (2011). Islamic Branding and Marketing: Creating A Global Islamic Business, Wiley & Sons. The global Muslim market is now approximately 23 percent of the world’s population, and is projected to grow by about 35 percent in the next 20 years. If current trends continue, there are expected to be 2.2 billion Muslims in 2030 that will make up 26.4 percent of the world’s total projected population of 8.3 billion. This book focuses on various aspects of how to capture Muslim market and creating brands with careful strategic steps to capture this lucrative growing market.

References Abalkhail, T.S. (2018). Traditional Cultural Values vs. Religiosity: Saudi Female Purchase Intention of Turkish Islamic Fashion. International Journal of Islamic Marketing and Branding. Vol. 3. No. 3. pp. 196–208. Al-Qasimi, N. (2010). Immodest Modesty: Accommodating Dissent and the ‘AbAya-as-Fashion in the Arab Gulf. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies. Vol. 6. No. 1. pp. 46–74. Bakkar, S. (2016). YSL Hijab Campaign, Seriously? !? www.amaliah.com/post/6587/ysl-hijab-campaign (Accessed: March 1, 2019). Cass, M. (2017). The World’s Fastest-growing Religious Group Is Making Its Influence Felt across Consumer Categories. www.jwtintelligence.com/2017/04/new-muslim-consumer-landscape/ (Accessed: March 3, 2019). Cevik, Neslihan. (2017). Halal Markets as Sites of Cultural Hybridity: Moral Agency and Public Participation. March 7. https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/theorizing-modernities/halal-marketssites-cultural-hybridity/ (Accessed: March 6, 2019). El-Bassiouny, N. (2018). The Hijabi Self: Authenticity and Transformation in the Hijab Fashion Phenomenon. Journal of Islamic Marketing. Vol. 9. No. 2. pp. 296–304. Eqbali, A. & Fitch, A. (2017). Tehran Police to End Arrests for Breaching ‘Islamic Values. The Wall Street Journal. www.wsj.com/articles/tehran-police-to-end-arrests-for-breaching-islamic-values1514401780 (Accessed: February 21, 2019). Fernandez, C. (2016). How Should Designers Approach Creating Fashion for Muslim Women? https://fashion ista.com/2016/04/pierre-berge-muslim-fashion (Accessed: March 1, 2019). Grine, F. & Saeed, M. (2017). Is Hijab a Fashion Statement? A Study of Malaysian Muslim Women. Journal of Islamic Marketing. Vol. 8. No. 3. pp. 430–443. Hajby, J. (2017). Why We Need to Discuss: The Hijab in Western Fashion. www.allure.com/story/hijabsin-western-fashion (Accessed: March 1, 2019). Hassan, S.H. & Harun, H. (2016). Factors Influencing Fashion Consciousness in Hijab Fashion Consumption among Hijabistas. Journal of Islamic Marketing. Vol. 7. No. 4. pp. 476–494. Hendrikz, V. (2015). The Demand for Muslim-fashion Continues to Grow. https://fashionunited.uk/news/ fashion/the-demand-for-muslim-fashion-continues-to-grow/2015052016466 (Accessed: March 1, 2019). Jaber, Yara. (2017). Female Designers Stitching Fashion Activism on the Arab Side of the World. www. abouther.com/node/17581/people/leading-ladies/female-designers-stitching-fashion-activism-arabside-world (Accessed: March 8, 2019). Kumar, R. (2017). Marketing the Muslim Woman: Hijabs and Modest Fashion Are the New Corporate Trend in the Trump Era. https://theintercept.com/2018/12/29/muslim-women-hijab-fashion-capitalism/ (Accessed: March 6, 2019).

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Lindholm, C. (2014). Cultural Collision: The Branded Abaya. Fashion, Style, & Popular Culture. Vol. 1. No. 1. pp. 45–55 www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/fspc/2013/00000001/00000001/ art00005# (Accessed: March 1, 2019). Lu, Y.. Fajr. (2019). Festival Celebrates Iranian Art and International Designers. Global Times. www.glo baltimes.cn/content/1139638.shtml (Accessed: March 4, 2019). McDannell, C. (1998). Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. New Haven: Yale University Press. Murray, R. (2015). Why Covering up Is Cool: Inside Fashion’s Modesty Movement. www.today.com/style/ why-covering-cool-inside-fashions-modesty-movement-mormon-style-bloggers-t12216 (Accessed: March 8, 2019). Myers, M. (2017). New Army Policy OKs Soldiers to Wear Hijabs, Turbans and Religious Beards. www.army times.com/news/your-army/2017/01/05/new-army-policy-oks-soldiers-to-wear-hijabs-turbansand-religious-beards/ (Accessed: February 13, 2019). Myers, M. (2018). A Soldier Just Got Authorization to Wear a Beard because of His Norse Pagan Faith. www. armytimes.com/news/your-army/2018/04/25/this-soldier-just-got-authorization-to-wear-a-beardbecause-of-his-norse-pagan-faith/ (Accessed: February 14, 2019). Petrilla, M. (2015). The Next Big Untapped Fashion Market: Muslim Women. http://fortune.com/2015/07/ 15/muslim-women-fashion/ (Accessed: March 1, 2019). Radio Free Europe. (2018). India Takes over Iran’s Strategic Chabahar Port. www.rferl.org/a/india-iranafghanistan/29674982.html (Accessed: March 7, 2019). Salam, M.T., Muhamad, N. & Leong, V.S. (2018). Muslim Consumers’ Attitudes toward Fashion Advertising: A Conceptual Framework. International Journal of Islamic Marketing and Branding. Vol. 3. No. 3. www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/abs/10.1504/IJIMB.2018.095843. Sarwar, E.L. (2017). A Cosmopolitan Islam: Abaya as Fashion. https://gareviewnyu.wordpress.com/2017/ 11/15/a-cosmopolitan-islam-the-abaya-as-fashion/ (Accessed: March 1, 2019). Schirrer, J. (2017). The Modist Aims to the Net-a-Porter of Modest Fashion. https://digiday.com/mar keting/modist-aims-net-porter-modest-fashion/ (Accessed: March 3, 2019). Serjoie, K.A. (2014). Despite a Crackdown, Iranian Fashion Keeps Pushing Boundaries. http://time.com/ 3012471/iran-fashion-official-crackdown/ (Accessed: March 3, 2019). Shirazi, F. (2001). The Veil Unveiled: Hijab in Modern Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Shirazi, F. (2016). Brand Islam: The Marketing and Commodification of Piety. Austin: University of Texas Press. Shirazi, F. (2017). Brand Islam: Response to Reviewers. Contending Maternities. https://contendingmoder nities.nd.edu/theorizing-modernities/brand-islam-response/ (Accessed: March 6, 2019). Stock, S. (2017). Ghizlan Guenez Is One of the Most Influential Names in Fashion Today. www.abouther. com/node/14146/people/leading-ladies/ghizlan-guenez-one-most-influential-names-fashion-today (Accessed: March 8, 2019). Tehran Times. (2018). Fajr Festival to Put Spotlight on Fashion, Clothing. www.tehrantimes.com/news/ 420841/Fajr-festival-to-put-spotlight-on-fashion-clothing (Accessed: March 4, 2019). Turkish English Dictionary online. https://educalingo.com/en/dic-tr/belemir Utama, W.S. (2016). Incorporating Spirituality and Market: Islamic Sharia Business and Religious Life in PostNew Order Indonesia. http://journal.ui.ac.id/index.php/mjs/article/viewFile/4798/pdf (Accessed: February 28, 2019). Wendlandt, A. & Fuchs, M. (2011). Out of Public Eye, Arab Women Power Haute Couture. www.reuters. com/article/us-fashion-middleeast/out-of-public-eye-arab-women-power-haute-couture-idUS TRE7942YG20111005 (Accessed: March 3, 2019). Willett, M. (2015). Modestly Dressed Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Women are Starting a Fashion Revolution Online. www.businessinsider.com/modestly-dressed-religious-fashion-bloggers-2015-9 (Accessed: March 8, 2019). WITW Staff. (2017). Police in Tehran Say Women Will No Longer Be Arrested for Not Wearing a Hijab. https://womenintheworld.com/2017/12/29/police-in-tehran-say-women-will-no-longer-bearrested-for-not-wearing-a-hijab/ (Accessed: March 5, 2019).

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28 CONSTRUCTING THE ‘MUSLIM WOMAN’ IN ADVERTISING Kayla Renée Wheeler

Muslims are projected to spend US$368 billion on clothes by 2021 (State of the Global Islamic Economy Report, 2016, p. 5). This increase in buying power is coupled with a growing desire to buy clothes from Muslims that are designed with Islamic modesty in mind. According to Ogilvy Noor vice president, Shelina Janmohamed, over 90 percent of Muslims state that their religion affects their consumption practices (Janmohamed, 2013). Fashion is part of larger system that Banu Gökarıksel and Ellen McLarney call the ‘Islamic culture industry’ that includes food, banking, and leisure activities (Gökariksel and McLarney, 2010, p. 1). Consumption of Islamic products is central to constructing a Muslim identity. This is a result of what Minoo Moallem calls ‘Islamic transnationalism,’ which is a commitment to creating a unified Islamic ethnicity (Moallem, 2005, pp. 119–120). Women are active participants in the Islamic culture industry, especially in fashion and beauty, as both consumers and producers. Muslim-owned fashion companies often show a greater diversity in Muslim dress compared to their non-Muslim competitors. However, as I will show throughout this chapter, diverse representations of Muslim women’s dress practices do not always lead to diverse representations of Muslim women themselves. In this chapter I investigate how fashion advertisements produced by Muslim-owned companies help construct the standard image of the ‘the Muslim woman.’ I argue that these advertisements often construct racialized hierarchies of Muslim women that privilege thin light-skinned non-Black women. I conducted a feminist critical discourse analysis of fashion advertisements posted on the social media platform, Instagram, between January 2019 and June 2019 from four large Muslim-owned fashion companies to explore how the image of ‘the Muslim woman’ is produced. These four stores – SHUKR, EastEssence, Modanisa, and Verona Collection – were chosen based on their popularity, which I defined based on the number of annual visits to website, collaboration with major brands, and the number of countries that they retailer shipped to. The companies have been cited as leaders in the Islamic modest clothing industry in the State of the Global Islamic Economy Report, which is produced annually by Reuters and the Dinar Standard. These companies are committed to the idea that Islam, fashion, and modernity are all compatible, which is evident in their Instagram advertisements.

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Fashion advertisements do more than sell clothes – they sell aspirations and ideals to consumers. They also play an important role in constructing, negotiating, and policing identities. As Schroeder and Zwick note, ‘Advertising discourse both reflects and creates social norms’ (Schroeder and Zwick, 2004, p. 24). Despite serving a racially and ethnically diverse customer base, these companies’ advertisements privilege covered, thin, light-skinned, and usually non-Black models in their advertisements. This reflects the colorism and antiBlackness that is common within many Muslim communities and contributes to creating new beauty norms rooted in fatphobia (Lewis, 2019). I start with a brief overview of early Muslim fashion beginning in the mid-20th century in Europe and North America to contextualize the rise of global Muslim-owned fashion companies, as all four companies were founded in either North America or Europe. Next, I provide an overview of the four stores: SHUKR, EastEssence, Modanisa, and Verona Collection. Finally, I analyze the advertisements using feminist critical discourse analysis. I will show how these advertisements have been used to both create and maintain racialized and gendered hierarchies (Lazar, 2007).

Early Muslim fashion There have been at least three overlapping stages of the Islamic fashion industry beginning in the mid-20th century in North America and Europe. The first stage was fashion at the local level. Second was the proliferation of catalogues and mail-order services, as well as the introduction of large brands. The third was a shift to online shopping. This is not to say that Islamic fashion began in the 20th century or that Muslims have only recently viewed themselves as consumers. Rather, the scale of these fashion enterprises and the goals behind them, ‘to produce modern and ordinary citizens … who engage with markets and material life,’ are fairly new (Jafari and Sandikci, 2016, p. 6). The industry emerged in response to anti-Black racism, xenophobic, and Islamophobic structural violence as a form of critique and resistance, as well as a means of building community and expression of religious identity. Turkey is one of the largest clothing and textiles exporters, making the country a leader in global fashion and Islamic fashion. However, Turkish Muslim women’s relationship with modest clothing in the public sphere has much in common with Muslim women in the United States and the United Kingdom. Beginning in 1980s, Turkish women’s dress practices have taken on a more prominent role in state politics, with some government officials seeking to restrict women from wearing Islamic clothing in official state spaces to maintain Turkey’s commitment to secularism (Çarkoğ lu, 2009, p. 451). In response to the dress restrictions, Turkish women began looking for clothing that allowed them to maintain their physical modesty while accessing public space, which expressed their commitment to a Muslim middle-class urban identity. These university-educated women with surplus income rejected their mothers’ and grandmothers’ dress practices, the baş örtüsü (loosely wrapped scarf), as well as the chador (long scarf wrapped around head and upper body) (Lewis, 2015, p. 67). Instead, they favored tighter fitting and tailored clothes, usually in bright colors. They believed the bright colors would challenge beliefs that covered women were backwards and oppressed (Lewis, 2015, p. 67). Dark-colored Islamic clothing, especially abayas became associated anti-Western sentiment as images of women during the Iranian Revolution were circulated by the mainstream western media. Designers introduced the tesettür – a large scarf wrapped tightly around the neck and face – that is often paired with an ankle-length overcoat called 424

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a pardesü (Lewis, 2015, p. 71). In addition to creating new styles, several large companies were founded that catered to Turkish women’s evolving tastes such Tekbir and Armine (Gökariksel and Secor, 2010, p. 321). Muslim women living in Muslim-majority regions, like Turkey, can usually find clothing that meets their definition of sartorial modesty in brick-and-mortar stores. However, Muslim women living as religious minorities, like those in North American and Western Europe, often have fewer options. Many are often limited to small Islamic clothing stores, usually in or near a mosque, markets, and small-scale designers who make custom orders. Those who lived in non-urban areas without large Muslim communities have even fewer options. Some ask their loved ones living in Muslim-majority settings to send clothes to them. Another option is to buy clothes while travelling to Muslim-majority regions, like when completing hajj. Perhaps the most popular solution is to layer clothing or make alternations to clothing bought from mainstream clothing stores. The one exception to this trend is the Nation of Islam in the United States. The national office operated a clothing factory and clothing store in Chicago, Illinois and members of the Nation ran their own businesses in their local communities. The Nation of Islam saw these enterprises as central to Black self-determination, building selfsustaining Black communities that would not need to rely on support from the U.S. government. While the factory and official clothing store have since closed, members of the Nation of Islam have continued to build their own clothing stores across the U.S. and support Black-owned business as a means of honoring their commitment to Black economic empowerment. Seeing how Muslims living as religious minorities have had limited clothing options, it is not surprising that many of the early Muslim e-commerce innovators, beginning in the mid-1990s, were in Europe and North America. Online stores have made modest clothing more accessible to women. They provide affordable and diverse styles and typically have a faster turnaround than print catalogues and feature more product diversity. However, the low prices and quick delivery time is often made possible through exploitative labor practices and sourcing practices that are harmful to the environment (Katebi, 2017). Online shopping is the a rapidly growing field. Across the globe, clothing accounts for most online purchases. According to Pew, 79 percent of Americans have made at least one purchase online (Smith and Anderson, 2016). In the UK, 77 percent of adult internet users have made a purchase online (‘Internet Access’, 2017). The rise of online shopping has changed how fashion brands market their products and communicate with their customers. With a greater shift towards online shopping, both online and brick-and-mortar stores have begun to use social media to advertise their products. Social media advertisements are often cheaper to produce than traditional forms of advertisements, such as catalogues and television commercials. They also have a broader reach, more easily crossing geographical borders to build brand awareness and communicate with their customers (Çukul, 2015, p. 119). Much of the social media advertising takes place on Instagram, which is was founded in 2011. Instagram is a video and photo-sharing platform that allows users to include captions. Many people use hashtags that connect their posts to larger trends and communities. The social media platform includes filters, which coupled with editing applications, allows for companies to quickly produce marketing content. Instagram has emerged as one of the most popular social media platforms for fashion companies, especially online retailers, with most top 100 brands having an account (Çukul, 2015, p. 118). Islamic clothing stores are not an exception. 425

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E-retail overview Below, I provide an overview of SHUKR, EastEssence, Modanisa, and Verona Collection. These four companies are some of the most popular fashion companies who have a diverse customer base that spans the globe. After detailing each company’s history and goals, I provide a feminist critical discourse analysis of the companies’ social media advertisements posted on Instagram between January 2019 and June 2019. I argue that through their social media advertisements, these four companies contribute to the production of an ideal Muslim woman that is covered, thin, non-Black, and light skinned. While Muslim-owned companies often position themselves as an ethical alternative to mainstream European and North American fashion companies, they can reproduce the same narrow definition of womanhood that excludes most women around the world.

SHUKR SHUKR, which is Arabic for ‘gratitude,’ was founded by Anas Sillwood and Jaafar Malik in 2001 in the United Kingdom and is the first international online Islamic clothing retailer. The company started off as a men’s wear brand before it branched out to women’s wear in 2002, which goes up to size 3XL. Its mission is ‘to provide contemporary modest clothing which meet the aesthetic and cultural needs of the new generation of Muslims living in the West.’1 The company continues to sell products for both Muslim men and women, as well as its growing non-Muslim customer base. While SHUKR is committed to serving Muslims in the West, the company’s headquarters are in Jordan, where it has multiple physical retail stores. SHUKR consults with Muslim scholars to make sure their products are Shariah compliant, as well as with Muslims in the West to make sure their clothing is aesthetically pleasing (Moors, 2013, p. 32). For Sillwood, it was important to produce ‘culturally compatible’ clothing that would challenge stereotypes about Muslims being anti-modern and perpetually foreign. The goal is to give non-Muslims a positive image of Islam. I would argue that some of this desire to find a balance between Muslimness and Westernness is due to Sillwood being a white convert. His whiteness allows him to more fully integrate into mainstream British culture than Muslims of color. Sillwood argues that Muslims should adopt to the local culture while maintaining a commitment to Islam to create an ‘authentic selfidentity’ (Tarlo, 2016, p. 157). Reina Lewis describes this as the ‘glocalization’ of fashion, where brands adjust their products in terms of color, shapes, and fabrics based on the tastes of their diverse consumer base (Lewis, 2019, pp. 4–5). The company’s clothing draws inspiration from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, primarily featuring abayas, jilbabs, and modified salwar kameezzes. Their clothing has clean lines, muted colors (blacks, greys, blues, browns), and intricate embroidery; they are well-tailored yet loose-fitting. The company is committed to practicing Islamic business ethics, which includes avoiding interest, ethically sourcing their material, and conducting ethical labor practices. SHUKR products are created in non-sweatshop settings and all their workers are paid a living wage.2 SHUKR is committed to itqan, or perfection – organic materials, a diverse range of fabrics (wool, silk, linen, Modal), and professional staff including a head designer who graduated from the Parsons School of Design. As such, compared to the three other companies discussed in this chapter, SHUKR’s products are the most expensive. Muslim scholars play a major role in SHUKR, not only guiding the company to maintain ethical business practices, but also using their popularity to help the company gain more 426

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credibility. The website features endorsements from Imam Omar and Shaykh Faraz Rabbani. Their ‘What We Believe In’ section includes an abridged hadith narrated by Abdullah ibn Masʾud, ‘The Divine is beautiful and loves beauty.’3 This hadith is used to justify Sillwood’s entrance into the fashion world. SHUKR is the most overtly Islamic website discussed in this chapter. In addition to the hadiths and endorsements from Muslim scholars, SHUKR also gives its products Islamic names. Heather Akou notes that companies often emphasize their commitment to Islam as a means of gaining authenticity by giving them obviously Islamic names (Akou, 2007, p. 414). Several of the company’s abayas are named after important female figures in early Islam including Qutaylah (Abu Bakr’s first wife) and Safiyyah (one of the prophet’s wives), as well as Halimah, and Thuwaybah who were the prophet’s wet nurses.

EastEssence EastEssence was founded in 2007 in Silicon Valley by Krupa Kilam and Sunny Kilam. The company is a not-for-profit business, which nets over $48 million per year.4 The founders do not draw a salary from the company; after paying for operation expenses, the rest of the profits are used to fund community initiatives. Their clothing features ‘an amalgamation of various cultural heritages under the umbrella of Islam’ in a ‘hybrid collection’.5 The company is committed to serving Muslims who are invested in both modernity and modesty. Like SHUKR, EastEssence products are certified as sweat-free. The company sells clothing for women (including a substantial maternity wear selection), men, and children, as well as prayer items and books. EastEssence does not have a category for plus-size. However, their abayas go up to 7XL, which includes a $12.99 fee, likely because of the additional fabric that is used. They begin charging more after XL. The company has over 250,000 customers, most of whom are in North America and Europe.6 Wholesalers in Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Libya, Iraq, Malaysia, Singapore, and Australia also carry the company’s products.7 Its largest presence outside of the United States is in India, where the company’s warehouse and five of its factories are located, to keep product prices low (Malviya, 2015). For example, casual abayas start at $9.95. The company’s relationship with India is also reflected in their products. In addition to abayas and jilbabs, East Essence also sells kurtis, sarees, and salwar kameezzes.

Modanisa Modanisa was founded in 2011 by Turkish entrepreneur Kerim Ture and retail consultant Lale Tüzün. The company is the world’s largest online modest wear retailer. Modanisa’s website receives 20 million visitors per month, making it one of the most visited Islamic websites in the world, and the company’s goal is ‘to meet modest women’s desire to wear the clothes that fit the life and times they live in.’8 Unlike the other companies discussed in this chapter, Modanisa does not explicitly define its main customer base as Muslim women. However, Modanisa is recognized as one of the leading Islamic fashions store in the world. In 2017, the company was won the Islamic Economy Award from the Dubai government and in 2018 Modanisa won the International Business Excellence in the E-Commerce and Digital Experience category. The company sells over 30,000 products – including shoes, cosmetics, purses, swimwear, evening wear, and hijabs – from 650 unique brands, many of which are small companies run by women (Pitel and Espinoza, 2019). Modanisa ships its products to 140 countries. Saudi Arabia, U.A.E., Jordan and Egypt represent the largest 427

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customer bases (Ture, 2015, p. 102). In addition to its online store, Modanisa has four physical stores in Turkey. Although Modanisa sells plus-size clothing, it uses thin women to model the clothing. In response to the large interest from Arab customers, Modanisa partnered with Dubaibased fashion designer, Rabia Z, to create an exclusive line for the company. This is one of many collaborations that the company has initiated is it has continued to grow in popularity over the past five years. In 2017, Modanisa collaborated with the Islamic Fashion and Design Council and hosted Istanbul Modest Fashion Week, which was Turkey’s first fashion week dedicated to Islamic fashion (State of the Global Islamic Economy Report, 2016, p. 118). Halima Aden partnered with the company for a special hijab collection, called Halima X Modanisa, which includes 47 diverse pieces ranging from sportswear to shawls and ‘instant scarves’ (ready-wrapped scarves). This advertisement appears on the homepage. This is a far cry from the 2017 Dubai Modest Fashion Week, where only two Black women were listed as guests: Halima Aden and Muna Jama (Dahir, 2017). This erasure inspired Najwa Umran to create the hashtag, #BlackMuslimahExcellence, to highlight Black Muslim fashionistas.

Verona Collection Verona Collection was founded by Lisa Vogl, a fashion photographer, and Alaa Ammuss, a fashion designer, in 2015. It is the only brand discussed in this chapter that was solely founded by Muslim women. The co-founders position Verona Collection as part of a larger movement to highlight Muslim women as fashion producers, rather simply fashion consumers. Their website states that Vogl and Ammuss ‘stand for women’s empowerment and taking pride in one’s Muslim identity … . Having a purpose beyond selling clothes doesn’t just make them successful, but it also sets Verona Collection apart from their competitors as a distinct and meaningful brand.’9 They are committed to creating affordable and accessible clothing for both Muslim and non-Muslim women. The company is part of a growing trend amongst previously religiously specific companies that are shifting towards a broader ‘modest fashion’ audience, much like Modanisa, to include women from other religions. There is a similar trend happening amongst Pentecostals, Jehovah Witnesses, and Orthodox Jewish women. The company’s clothes range in size from XS to 3XL. In 2016, the company became one of the first Islamic clothing stores to be in a mainstream American shopping mall when they opened a store in Orlando, Florida (Abdelaziz, 2018). In February 2018, Verona Collection debuted a collaborative line with Macy’s, which features maxi dresses, cardigans, and activewear. This marked Macy’s first collection explicitly targeting Muslim women. The collection is only available online. The partnership is part of a larger Macy’s initiative called, The Workshop at Macy’s, which supports businesses owned by people from marginalized groups (Wang, 2018). In April 2019, ASOS announced that it was launching a partnership with Verona Collection, which includes jumpsuits, dusters, hijabs, and maxi dresses. The British-based company has a much larger reach than Macy’s, allowing Vogl and Ammuss’s designs to reach a new global customer base.

Visual analysis The media has played an active role in constructing the image of the Muslim women. Scholars such as Evelyn Alsultany have observed how the images of covered Muslim women in fictional drama television shows and public service announcements have shifted 428

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how people perceive Muslim women and Islam. Muslim women, especially those who wear a hijab, are viewed as redeemable, capable of assimilating into American and European culture if they perform their national identity properly. This means wearing bright colors or national flag hijabs to appear modern and patriotic. Much of the research has been focused on non-Muslim depictions of Muslim women. Far less has been written on the role that fashion advertisements play in constructing normative images of Muslimness. Schroeder and Zwick argue that advertisements are aesthetic objects and social-political artifacts, which operate within a ‘system of visual representation that creates meaning with the circuit of culture’ (Schroeder and Zwick, 2004, p. 24). Advertisements communicate existing social hierarchies, as well as create new hierarchies. Advertisements also serve as an important pedagogical tool, showing people how to properly perform normative gendered or racialized roles. Michelle M. Lazar argues that studying advertisements allows scholars to observe ‘relations of power and ideology as they appertain to cultural processes and practices in the public sphere’ (Lazar, 2007, p. 156). Below, I highlight how fashion advertisements construct normative feminine behavior for Muslim women. After that, I examine the ways in which advertisements produced by Muslim-owned Islamic clothing stores produce narrow views of Muslim womanhood that privilege young thin light-skinned non-Black women.

Creating Muslim women In addition to examining which bodies are included and privileged in Instagram advertisements, it is also important to look at how they are presented. Connecting religion with fashion goes beyond selling clothes that are readily read as ‘Islamic.’ It also includes showing customers how to properly perform ‘Muslimness’ through their styling choices and poses. The meaning of advertisements often moves beyond the photographer and brand’s intentions. All the women featured on the SHUKR website are wearing Shayla hijab, which are wrapped in such a way to cover the neck, ears, and cleavage. SHUKR differs from the other three brands discussed in this chapter because the website does not ever show their models’ full faces. Instead, models are photographed from either the chin down or when advertising hijabs, from the back of their heads. This advertising technique allows them to avoid claims of idolatry and to prevent the objectification of their models. As their founder states, SHUKR is dedicated to redefining fashion images, which influence perceptions of beauty.10 This includes the way clothing is advertised. In a section on their homepage entitled, ‘SHUKR: What we Believe in,’ the company makes their commitment clear, ‘We believe that the beauty of women lies in the depth of their hearts and minds and that marketing shouldn’t exploit female physical beauty.’ The company incorporates Islamic values in their photography, emphasizing the beauty of the clothing, rather than the beauty of the model. According to co-founder Anas Sillwood, this advertising technique gives potential customers a more realistic outlook of what the clothing would look like on them. Modifying a model’s appearance was a common practice for early online Islamic clothing stores (Akou, 2007, p. 416). Another common practice, especially for advertising scarves, was to photograph the product without anyone wearing it. While the former example has fallen out of style among newer brands, the latter remains common. SHUKR models are primarily photographed outdoors, never in urban areas. In the background are large columns, archways, geometric carvings, and domes all of which help communicate the company’s commitment being in the world, not of the world. The company’s prayer clothes feature women praying, which allows potential shoppers to 429

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seen how the clothes look while moving. The models for Modanisa were photographed in a studio, in the city, and in rural settings. The images in the city communicate ‘urban woman on-the-go’: drinking coffee at a café, window shopping at the mall, and going to the theater. Modanisa also partners with social media influencers and burgeoning style icons like Dina Tokio and Halima Aden to produce special collections of clothing and hijabs, who appear in their Instagram posts. Verona Collection also favors the ‘urban woman-on the-go’ aesthetic and rural settings with their Instagram advertisements. Models are photographed in diverse locations including at coffee shops, standing in the middle of busy intersections, and on a beach. Most of the company-produced advertisements on EastEssence’s Instagram page are photographs of models taken in front of empty screens, presumably in a studio. However, the company also includes pictures sent in by satisfied customers. It is often difficult to tell which images are produced by the company and which are produced by social media influencers. The poses are staged, the makeup and styling are perfect, and the cameras are high quality. Such pictures ignore the labor that goes into making these photographs, like driving to the scene and figuring out the perfect pose. Several of EastEssence’s advertisements do not show the model’s faces. However, this seems to be more of an artistic decision than an ethical one, as there are several models who are not wearing hijabs – interestingly, none of their full faces are shown – and models in form-fitting leggings. Between January 2019 and June 2019, all of Verona Collection’s advertisements had their models’ faces fully exposed. In fact, many of their advertisements featured models showing their hair and wearing form-fitting, although fully covered, clothing. This reflects the brand’s commitment to sell to any woman interested in modest fashion, regardless of their religion. While none of the companies explicitly tell their customers how to dress or style their clothes, their advertisements still play an important role in drawing the boundaries of proper Muslim womanhood through specific sartorial practices and poses, as well as what bodies are selected to represent the clothing brands.

Colorism and anti-Blackness Islam is a racially and ethnically diverse religion. The top five largest Muslim countries in terms of population are in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Western Africa. However, this racial and ethnic diversity is not represented by the aesthetics or the models presented in four of the largest online Muslim fashion retailers. Black and darker-skinned women of color are underrepresented in all four Instagram campaigns, which reflects a larger trend within the American and European fashion industries. As Elizabeth Wissinger notes, Brownness as an aesthetic is ‘in fashion,’ often at the expense of dark-skinned models, and presumably Black models (Wissinger, 2015, p. 41). During the six months covered in this chapter, EastEssence only featured one Black Muslim woman in its Instagram page, beauty blogger, Hafsah Abdul-Rahim. She is also the largest model featured during this time frame, despite the brand going up to size 7X. Conversely, Modanisa’s Instagram page featured a racially diverse array of models, including several Black models. However, the company only featured two professional Black models. The remaining women were influencers, including Basma K. and Osob. Verona Collection, which is the only company discussed in this chapter that specifically targets American Muslims, where Black Muslims represent nearly one-third of all Muslims, featured five Black women in their advertisements. However, only two of them are models; the other three are fashion and beauty influencers. 430

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Relying on fashion and beauty influencers to sell clothes is common among fashion brands, especially those who do most of their business online. These brand sponsorships are mutually beneficial for influencers and fashion companies. For the latter, it helps build consumer trust and for the former it provides them with a sense of legitimacy. As Karen de Perthuis and Rose Findlay note in their study of fashion advertisements on Instagram, their success lies in being an accessible aspiration for consumers, someone people can see themselves in. They write: a familiar figure wears these familiar clothes: the fashionable ideal, repackaged … . She is like us! At the same time, she embodies the qualities recognized within the industry as ideal: young, slender, conventionally beautiful, able bodied, and, most often, a cisgender woman. (de Perthuis and Findlay, 2019, p. 221) I would add, she is often light-skinned and non-Black. While the use of social media influencers may have been an attempt to make the brand more relatable to their consumers, showing that anyone can wear their products, the absence of Black Muslim models reflects a larger trend in the Islamic fashion industry of excluding Black people. For example, the 2017 Dubai Modest Fashion Week, which Modanisa co-sponsored, only featured two Black Muslim models. It is important to note that one cannot always accurately determine a person’s race by looking at them; relying on phenotypes provides a very limited view of race. Race is a social construct, not a biological reality. What is clear about all these websites is that lightskinned women are overrepresented and dark-skinned women of all races are marginalized. From a marketing perspective, limiting the number of Black models is not a profitable strategy for companies who are targeting a U.S. American audience. Including more racially and ethnically diverse models in advertisements does not negatively impact sales in the U.S.; more research outside of the U.S. needs to be conducted to determine if this is the case elsewhere (Meyers, 2008, p. 26). As sociologist Ashley Mears notes, commercial models are supposed to be ‘conventionally attractive,’ ‘manicured,’ ‘wholesome,’ and ‘classic’ (Mears, 2010, p. 29). These models appeal to the broadest possible audience. In a Muslim context, this often means ‘brown,’ which is imagined as neutral.

Thinness All the companies carry plus-size clothes. However, the plus-size selections are limited, with SHUKR and Verona Collection only going up to size 3XL and EastEssence charging more for plus-size clothing. Despite all four companies selling plus-size clothing, only EastEssence featured a plus-size woman in one of their Instagram advertisements. She is a social media influencer, not a paid model. As fashion studies scholar Reina Lewis notes, fat Muslim women remain under-served in the Muslim fashion industry (Lewis, 2019). Part of this has to do with negative stereotypes associated with fat people, including laziness and lack of self-control (Lewis, 2019, p. 9). To be fat is to be morally inferior and immodest. Fat people are viewed as inherently less fashionable by both fashion designers and consumers (Peters, 2014, p. 48). In mainstream fashion, this usually means producing plus-size clothes that cover up the wearer in order to contain the wearer. Privileging thinness is the norm for mainstream North American and European fashion brands and many Muslim-owned brands that cater to Muslim women in the United States and 431

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Europe have followed suit. As Roel Pieterman notes, ‘fat’ is a socially constructed category (Pieterman, 2007, p. 309). In the United States and Western Europe, fatness is viewed as unfeminine and abject (Conte, 2018, p. 29). However, in many Muslim majority regions, including Mauritania, Nigeria, and Niger, fatness is seen as a sign of beauty and femininity. Black Muslims in the United States also have broader definitions of beauty that include bigger bodies. Reina Lewis argues the erasure of Black models is connected with the erasure of fat models in the fashion industry (Lewis, 2019, p. 244). Both marginalized groups fall outside the bounds of normative femininity. Fat Black women’s bodies are sexualized, drawing from the legacy of Sarah Baartman, which further contributes to beliefs about fat women being immodest. This exclusion of plus-size models from fashion advertisements creates unrealistic body standards and inaccurate understandings of health and wellness. Czerniawski notes, what the fashion industry considers to be plus-size are the same weight as the average American woman, around 160 pounds (Czerniawski, 2012, p. 128). By not including plus-size models in their Instagram advertisements, these companies are isolating a key buying demographic and making moral judgments about whose bodies are valuable. These companies are also preventing fat Muslim women from fully cultivating and expressing their identity (Lewis, 2019, p. 256). While fashion advertisements including Muslim women have played an important role in democratizing the fashion industry, there are still limits placed on who is allowed to represent Islam.

Conclusion miriam cooke developed the term, ‘Muslimwoman’ to describe the post-9/11 phenomenon in which covered Muslim women became the face of Islam. In North America and Western Europe, the hijab has become the most visible representation of Islam. Covered Muslim women’s bodies have taken on new significance because the hijab is the most visible symbol of Islam. As such, the Muslimwoman has become the ‘cultural standard of the Umma’ (cooke, 2007, p. 141). While many Muslim women have challenged this narrow view of their womanhood, a large number have used fashion to reclaim the image to show that Islam, modernity, and capitalism are compatible. Representation matters. For Muslim youth, seeing oneself positively depicted in the media can contribute to positive self-esteem and feelings of belonging. Yet, we must ask what bodies are produced through this representation and who is left out: primarily Black people and dark-skinned non-Black people of color. And those who do make it into the advertisements are either barely visible or placed in hyper-feminine settings. The Islamic fashion industry is contributing to the widening of hegemonic beauty norms providing space for covered Muslim women and more non-white women to be viewed as fashionable and modern. However, the Islamic fashion industry is not dismantling hegemonic beauty norms. Certain bodies are still privileged: light-skinned, young, cis, thin, and able-bodied. The Instagram advertisements produced by Verona Collection, SHUKR, Modanisa, and EastEssence reinscribe hegemonic beauty standards and show the limits of relying on fashion to provide new identities for marginalized people.

Notes 1 ‘Genuine SHUKR’, SHUKR [online]. Available at: https://shukronline.com/genuine-shukr (Accessed 11 June 2020). 2 ‘Is SHUKR Expensive?’, SHUKR [online]. Available at: https://shukronline.com/is-shukr-expen sive (Accessed 21 February 2020).

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Constructing the Muslim woman in ads 3 ‘Genuine SHUKR’, SHUKR [online]. Available at: https://shukronline.com/genuine-shukr (Accessed 11 June 2020). 4 ‘Silicon Valley Is Home to the World’s Largest Seller of Modest Clothing’, (2016) My Salaam, 14 September [online]. Available at: www.mysalaam.com/en/story/silicon-valley-is-home-to-theworlds-largest-seller-of-modest-clothing/SALAAM14092016044257 (Accessed 1 March 2019). 5 ‘About Us’, EastEssence [online]. Available at: https://eastessence.com/pages/about-us (Accessed 2 May 2019). 6 ‘Silicon Valley Is Home to the World’s Largest Seller of Modest Clothing’, (2016) My Salaam, 14 September [online]. Available at: www.mysalaam.com/en/story/silicon-valley-is-home-to-theworlds-largest-seller-of-modest-clothing/SALAAM14092016044257 (Accessed 1 March 2019). 7 ‘FAQ’s’, EastEssence [online]. Available at: https://eastessence.com/pages/faqs (Accessed 2 May 2019). 8 ‘About Us’, Modanisa [online]. Available at: www.modanisa.com/en/about-us.page (Accessed 10 June 2020). 9 ‘About Us’, Verona Collection [online]. Available at: www.verona-collection.com/pages/our-story (Accessed 1 January 2020). 10 ‘About SHUKR’, SHUKR [online]. Available at: https://shukronline.com/about-shukr (Accessed 10 June 2020).

Further reading Bucar, E. (2017). Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. This book explores the complex motivations and values at play in how Muslim women dress modestly in Iran, Turkey, and Indonesia. Gökariksel, B. and McLarney, E. (2010) ‘Introduction: Muslim Women, Consumer Capitalism and the Islamic Culture Industry’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 6(3), 1–18. This article examines the crucial role of consumer capitalism in shaping what it means to be Muslim in the contemporary world. Lewis, R. (2015) Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press. This book examines Muslim modest fashion as part of transnational youth culture, shaped by a range of social actors, including shop owners, designers, and bloggers.

References Abdelaziz, R. (2018) ‘One of the Largest Retailers in the U.S. Is Launching a Hijab-Friendly Fashion Line’, Huffington Post, 1 February [online]. Available at: www.huffpost.com/entry/macys-islamic-fash ion-verona-collection_n_5a6b4f08e4b06e2532670054 (Accessed 7 March 2019). Akou, H. (2007) ‘Building a New World: “World Fashion”: Islamic Dress in the Twenty-first Century’, Fashion Theory 11(4), pp. 403–421. Çarkoğ lu, A. (2009) ‘Women’s Choices of Head Cover in Turkey: An Empirical Assessment’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29(3), pp. 450–467. Conte, M.T. (2018) ‘More Fats, More Femmes: A Critical Examination of Fatphobia and Femmephobia on Grindr’, Feral Feminisms 7, pp. 25–37. cooke, m. (2007) ‘The Muslimwoman’, Contemporary Islam 1, pp. 139–154. Çukul, D. (2015) ‘Fashion Marketing in Social Media: Using Instagram for Fashion Branding’, Proceedings of the 1st Business & Management Conference, International Institute of Social and Economic Sciences Vienna, pp. 1–14. Czerniawski, A.M. (2012) ‘Disciplining Corpulence: The Case of Plus-Size Fashion Models’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 41(2), pp. 127–153. Dahir, I. (2017) ‘Muslim Women are Calling Out Dubai’s Modest Fashion Week for a Lack of Diversity’, Buzzfeed, 17 December [online]. Available at: www.buzzfeed.com/ikrd/muslim-womenare-calling-out-dubais-modest-fashion-week-for (Accessed 1 March 2019). de Perthuis, K. and Findlay, R. (2019) ‘How Fashion Travels: The Fashionable Ideal in the Age of Instagram’, Fashion Theory 23(2), pp. 219–242. Gökariksel, B. and McLarney, E. (2010) ‘Introduction: Muslim Women, Consumer Capitalism and the Islamic Culture Industry’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 6(3), pp. 1–18.

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Kayla Renée Wheeler Gökariksel, B. and Secor, A. (2010) ‘Islamic-ness in the Life of a Commodity: Veiling-Fashion in Turkey’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35(3), pp. 313–333. Jafari, A. and Sandikci, Ö. (2016) ‘Introduction’, in Jafari, A. and Sandikci, Ö. (eds.) Islam, Marketing, and Consumption: Critical Perspectives on the Intersections. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–17. Janmohamed, S. (2013) ‘Marketing to Muslim Tourists’, FT, 1 February [online]. Available at: www.ft. com/content/0b0899b6-3256-3d06-b1e6-00b3632270c2 (Accessed 30 May 2019). Katebi, H. (2017) ‘No Representation in Sweatshops: Ethical and Muslim-Owned Alternatives to Nike’s “Pro-Hijab”’, Joojoo Azad, [online]. Available at: www.joojooazad.com/2017/03/ethical-muslimowned-alternatives-to-nike-pro-hijab.html (Accessed 15 March 2019). Lazar, M.M. (2007) ‘Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis: Articulating a Feminist Discourse Praxis1’, Critical Discourse Studies 4(2), pp. 141–164. Lewis, R. (2015) Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press. Lewis, R. (2019) ‘Modest Body Politics: The Commercial and Ideological Intersect of Fat, Black, and Muslim in the Modest Fashion Market and Media’, Fashion Theory 23(2), pp. 1–31. Malviya, S. (2015) ‘World’s Largest Islamic Clothing Co to Partner Snapdeal and Set up Store on Their Portal’ The Economic Times, 14 May [online]. Available at: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/ industry/services/retail/worlds-largest-islamic-clothing-co-to-partner-snapdeal-set-up-store-ontheir-portal/articleshow/47274652.cms (Accessed 15 March 2019). Mears, A. (2010) ‘Size Zero High-End Ethnic: Cultural Production and the Reproduction of Culture in Fashion Modeling’, Poetics 38(1), pp. 21–46. Meyers, Y.J. (2008) Effect of African American Skin Tone on Advertising Communication. dissertation: University of Texas at Austin. Moallem, M. (2005) Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics of Patriarchy in Iran. Berkeley: University of California Press. Moors, A. (2013) ‘Discover the Beauty of Modesty: Islamic Fashion Online’, in Lewis, R. (ed.) Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies, Mediating Faith. London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 17–40. Peters, L.D. (2014) ‘You Are What You Wear: How Plus-Size Fashion Figures in Fat Identity Formation’, Fashion Theory 18(1), pp. 45–71. Pieterman, R. (2007) ‘The Social Construction of Fat: Care and Control in the Public Concern for Healthy Behaviour’, Sociology Compass 1(1), pp. 309–321. Pitel, L. and Espinoza, J. (2019) ‘“Modest Fashion” Looks to Move from Niche to Mainstream’, FT, 19 January [online] Available at: www.ft.com/content/3380fa18-19bc-11e9-9e64-d150b3105d21 (Accessed 1 March 2019). Schroeder, J.E. and Zwick, D. (2004) ‘Mirrors of Masculinity: Representation and Identity in Advertising Images’, Consumption, Markets and Culture 7(1), pp. 21–52. Smith, A. and Anderson, M. (2016) ‘Online Shopping and E-Commerce’, Pew Research Center, 19 December [online]. Available at: www.pewinternet.org/2016/12/19/online-shopping-and-e-com merce/ (Accessed 2 May 2019). State of the Global Islamic Economy Report 2015/16 [online]. Available at: https://ceif.iba.edu.pk/pdf/ ThomsonReuters-StateoftheGlobalIslamicEconomyReport201516.pdf (Accessed 2 May 2019). State of the Global Islamic Economy Report 2016/17 (2016) [online]. Available at: https://ceif.iba.edu.pk/ pdf/ThomsonReuters-stateoftheGlobalIslamicEconomyReport201617.pdf (Accessed 2 May 2019). Tarlo, E. (2016) ‘Refashioning the Islamic: Young Visible Muslims’, in Hamid, S. (ed.) Young British Muslims: Between Rhetoric and Realities. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, pp. 151–170. Ture, K. (2015) ‘Turkey on Top of the Global “Modest Fashion” Market’, in State of the Global Islamic Economy Report 2015/16 [online]. Available at: https://ceif.iba.edu.pk/pdf/ThomsonReuters-Sta teoftheGlobalIslamicEconomyReport201516.pdf (Accessed 2 May 2019). Wang, E. (2018) ‘Macy’s Will Start Carrying Verona Collection, Its First Modest Fashion Line’, Glamour, 2 February [online]. Available at: www.glamour.com/story/macys-verona-collectionmodest-fashion-line (Accessed 1 March 2019). Wissinger, E.A. (2015) This Year’s Model: Fashion, Media, and the Making of Glamour. New York: New York University Press.

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29 FRENCH MUSLIM WOMEN’S CLOTHES The secular state’s religious war against racialised women Shabana Mir

Hijab and burqa: issues for public debate In September 1989, a few months after Khomeini delivered his fatwa on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, French headmaster Eugene Cheniere expelled three Muslim schoolgirls for wearing headscarves at school. Cheniere and his allies framed headscarves as ‘an intrusion of religion into the sacred secular space of the schoolroom, the crucible in which French citizens are formed’ (Scott, 2005: 90) responsible for ‘creating France as a nation one and indivisible’ (ibid: 106–107). Muslim women’s distinctive clothing could, it seemed, attack women’s status and the French state’s secular foundations, the very ‘future of the nation, the unity of the social body’ (ibid: 90) at the same time. Given the stakes, it was no wonder that the headmaster went on to make a political career in a center-right party, foreshadowing the growing role of anti-Muslim fearmongering in the rise of fascist forces. A few years later, the Minister of Education Francis Bayrou issued a memorandum in 1994 banning ‘ostentatious,’ not discreet, religious symbols in government schools, symbols that were ‘in themselves, elements of proselytism.’ The ban applied to ‘visible signs, such as large crosses, headscarves, or [Jewish skullcaps]’ but would not extend to smaller ‘discreet signs’ such as medallions or pendants consisting of small crosses, stars of David, Hands of Fatima or miniature Qurʾans (Jones, 2012: 228). Headscarves were classified as preeminently ostentatious symbols, and the effect of the circular ‘was to “rebrand” the headscarf, confirming that it could now be regarded as an ostentatious and divisive sign that constituted in itself an element of proselytism and discrimination’ (ibid: 222). The notion of symbols having a proselytizing effect – independent of the wearer’s actions – harmful and powerful enough to be preemptively contained in private spaces – implies hostility to the symbols. After the 1994 ban 69 Muslim girls were expelled for wearing headscarves, and headscarves were attacked for being anti-laïcité, anti-feminist, and anti-French (Scott, 2007: 27–28), reviled for representing ‘allegiance to foreign powers,’ and construed as an ‘emblem of an international Islamist movement reaching to France from Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia’ (ibid: 131). The legal trajectories of individual Muslim students’ expulsion cases in the courts give the impression that the Conseil d’État’s 1989 legal opinion may have allowed

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for at least some ambiguity and balance between laïcité and religious freedom. The 2004 law, however, eliminated any flexibility, imposing so categorical a ban on wearing visible religious symbols that administrative courts were left with little discretion in evaluating individual cases (Jones, 2012: 236). After 2004, regardless of whether or not they engaged in ‘ostentatious or protesting’ religious behavior at school, Muslim girls wearing the headscarf could be expelled forthwith (ibid). The controversy continues unabated today, only changed in the heightened intensity and rancor that Muslim women’s clothes seem to generate. In the past two decades, French attention has turned with even greater ire than before from headscarfed schoolgirls to women wearing face-veils in general public spaces. Hijab (the headscarf), then niqab (the face-veil), and then burqinis (swimwear that is a cover for the body and head), were cited as an attack on the secular bodypolitic, national unity, cultural integration, women’s emancipation, and the quality of social interaction, and were also cited as a danger to public security and symbolic of terrorism. For those excited about the widespread impact of a burqa ban, knowing exactly how many women in burqas (a fullbody robe that covers the body and face except the eyes) incited public rage in European countries can be anti-climactic. Full and partial burqa bans respectively have been instituted in Austria and the Netherlands for just 150 burqa-wearing women each (Mohdin, 2017) and in Belgium for a number of women too small to be estimated. The Bulgarian town of Pazardzhik instituted a ban for a mere 12 women (Ahmed, 2017). Unwarranted by scale or impact, the European fixation with Muslim women’s clothes is exposed for what it is – testimony to the growing gendered Islamophobia in the continent. With overwhelming approval (355 to 1 in the National Assembly and 246 to 1 in the Senate), a bill to ban the burqa that affected only about 0.01 percent of Muslims, or 367 niqab-wearing women was passed in France in 2010 (Ahmed, 2017; Erlanger, 2010). Prime Minister François Fillon decreed in 2011 that niqab was banned in all public places except for worship in a religious space and for passengers in cars. Niqab-wearing women would be fined €130 and required to take a citizenship class (Chrisafis, 2013). When the ban was challenged in the European Court of Human Rights, the Court supported the ban citing ‘a certain idea of “living together”’ as the ‘legitimate aim’ of the French government. A national conversation about burqinis reflected the discursive construction of ‘appropriate’ Western sociability and leisure, positioning Muslim religious behavior on the outside of Western European leisure (see Mir, 2014). Municipal bans on burqinis in some towns followed (Weaver, 2018). In 2016, after the Nice terror attack, the mayor of Cannes banned the swimwear which he described as ‘the symbol of Islamist extremism’ (Slotkin, 2016). From being a symbol of ‘ostentatious religion’ disruptive of secular public life, hijab, burqa, niqab, and burqini had become controversial for an array of different reasons, including symbolic of a group of murderous terrorists. Muslim women’s clothing as an issue, which started with the humble headscarf in France, is far more than a sartorial question. Buttressed by a burgeoning white nationalist movement and anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rage (Benhabib, 2017), the European jihad against Muslim women’s modest clothing continues to spread throughout Europe today.

Gendered Islamophobia Whenever the words hijab, niqab, or burqa are used outside Muslim settings, Muslims are confronted with an implicit challenge. This challenge, widely accepted as the framework for any discussion on Muslim women, is that Muslims are uniquely sexist, or that patriarchy is a uniquely (or even exclusively) Muslim problem. While the meaning of veiling is complex 436

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and situational, most European discussions represent Muslim women’s religious garb as ‘fixed in its meaning’ (Bracke and Fadil, 2012: 49), conveying foreignness and the inferiority of Islam/Muslims. Such discussions position women’s clothing (rather than rampant intimate partner abuse, for example) as exhibit A for sexism, positing Muslim women’s modest clothing as a practice of primarily oppressive import. The purported ‘superiority of “European” gender relations over “Islamic” ones’ (Almila, 2017: 8) is a central tool in the armory of Islamophobic forces, experiencing a greater surge of power and popularity across Europe than before. In France, ‘the divide between “us” and “them” is maintained and reproduced by social constructions of manhood and womanhood and of sexuality deemed appropriate to the nation’ (Bracke and Fadil, 2012: 45–46). The perpetual discursive attacks on Muslim ways of doing gender (focused especially but not exclusively on the visible artifacts of headscarves) inform and fix European identity and gender, so that ‘certain kinds of concern with the position of Muslim women are functional to the constitution of Western European national identities’ (ibid: 45). An antipathy to headscarves and burqas is rooted in a gender imaginary that posits Muslim men as sexist and Muslim women as oppressed in contrast to enlightened, pro-feminist ‘European’ men and women. Muslim women’s body practices, such as sartorial modesty, are cited as evidence of the cultural otherness and, concomitantly, the inferiority of immigrants and refugees. Gendered anti-Muslim hatred has focused on Muslim women’s clothes and has manifested in bans on hijab, burqa, niqab, and burqinis in recent decades. The best-known and the harshest such legislation has been implemented in France (Almila, 2017: 8), which at 5.7 million, or 8.8 percent of the total population in 2016 (Hackett, 2017) also has the largest Muslim population in Europe. Contemporary Europe can be generally described as in the grip of anti-hijab and anti-burqa fever, especially since the 1980s. This chapter investigates bans on headscarves, burqa, face-veils, and burqini swimwear specifically in France. French Muslim women who wear religiously identified attire are designated as a threat to the French nation, the government, secular ideology, cultural integrity, the well-being of girls and women, and even young children. Armed with headscarves and swimwear, bearing down upon beleaguered secularity and hard-won feminist prizes, French Muslim women are imagined as societal Others. I examine gendered Islamophobia in France through the lens of campaigns and legislative actions that target Muslim women who wear hijab, burqa, niqab, or burqini.

Veiling secularity: religious freedom As early as the 19th century, anti-veiling movements foreshadowed a secularizing stigmatization of Muslim women’s sartorial practices. Muslim cultures were described by imperialist powers as regressive and in need of modernization and Westernization (Cronin, 2014). Imperialist propaganda campaigns and growing state control co-opted and weaponized liberal gender agendas, highlighting women’s ‘modern’ outfits and public visibility as embodying and signaling social progress, secularity, modernity, and Westernization (Almila, 2017: 5). Muslim women’s veils continue to be interpreted as a contagion for the fragile body of secularism today. Laïcité refers to religion–state separation and state neutrality in religious matters. In France, it is rooted in the post-1789 French struggle against the Catholic Church (Riemer, 2016). The purposes of this historic struggle were to dismantle the political power of the Church – reserving power, authority, legitimacy, and total loyalty for the republic, 437

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‘relegating to a private sphere the claims of religious communities’ and offering ‘state protection of individuals from the claims of religion’ (Scott, 2005: 92). Laïcité has been ‘institutionalized through a vigilant removal of sectarian religious symbols, signs, icons and items of clothing from official public spheres’ (Benhabib, 2010: 457). Before the ban in 1989, headscarves, yarmulkes, and turbans were permitted in French schools. ‘It was Islam that provoked the call for restriction – Islam defined as a singular culture, at once politically dangerous and personally oppressive … essentially theocratic in its aspirations,’ and therefore treated differently from other faiths (Scott, 2005: 127). State neutrality toward religion has therefore taken on an anti-Muslim character; so that defending secularism has served as ‘but another mask for racism’ (ibid: 98). The appallingly antiMuslim cartoons of the magazine Charlie Hebdo, outrageous to non-French observers, are ‘explained – and, in fact, celebrated – as manifestations of a distinctively French secularism and anticlericalism. The right to ridicule Islam has become a de facto symbol of the republic itself’ (Riemer, 2016). Technically, ‘even in its most virulent forms [laïcité] is designed to manage rather than deny diversity of beliefs’ (Hunter-Henin, 2012: 616–617), and certainly its mandate is not to eradicate any religion. The 1905 law, which proclaims the separation between religion and state, also includes the principle of freedom of conscience (ibid: 619). Not all French people, however, deem freedom of conscience and religious liberty incompatible with hijab bans. Not only does the French state retain the unremarkable right to curb religious freedom for considerations of public order (Jones, 2012: 226), but the French Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights conceptualize religious liberty in terms of interiority – belief and conscience – rather than in terms of exterior practices (Fernando, 2012: 72). In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, too, religious freedom ‘hinges on a distinction between the right to belief, which is absolute, and the right to practice, which is conditional’ (Jacobsen, 2017: 550). Moreover, the French National Assembly report (Secularism and Schools) ‘conceded that the private rights of individual conscience must be respected and that the neutrality of the state must be maintained in relation to the diversity of religious beliefs among its population;’ however, respect for religious belief ‘could not outweigh considerations of national unity. In any contest between individual rights and state sovereignty, the interests of the state must prevail’ (Scott, 2005: 90). According to these legal readings, the heart is free, but the body must reflect the state’s all-powerful will. To be unable to wear headscarves in public is for many Muslim women a deprivation of the freedom to live a full life or to comply with Divine law. While some may consider religious expression a luxury, for many Muslim women, hijab is religious obligation (akin to the Sikh turban) rather than optional religious expression (akin to the wearing of a crucifix or a Star of David). In other words, while Islamophobes worry about the coded messages they think they are getting from Muslim women’s hijabs, Muslim women may, in fact, be busy living their own religious lives without constantly communicating to non-Muslims through their scarves. Many Muslim women who do not consistently wear the headscarf wear it on occasion (when visiting a mosque or a Sufi shrine, for instance), experiencing it as constitutive of sacred moments. The importance of pious sartorial observance to religious individuals is often not simply in their symbolic messages to others ‘but in the work they do in constituting the individual’ (Mahmood, 2005: 29). Hijab can be part of spiritual praxis of taqwa or pious remembrance, where a headscarf works as a mnemonic device to remind the wearer of correct religious action (Mir, 2014: 73, 124), and is part of the ‘furniture’ that facilitates a religious life. 438

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However, to secular French observers, religious attire that shapes or restricts undesirable behavior is non-emancipatory as it does not enable a secular life and secular choices. To many observant Muslims, the freedom sought is for religious discipline, pious remembrance, and chastity, not for personal desire, hedonism, carnal freedom, or sexual availability (as on U.S. college campuses, as I show in Mir, 2014, where some Muslim women find that they have the unwanted freedom to drink or to date but the freedom to not engage in alcohol or dating culture is harder to obtain). For the French state and liberal feminists, Muslim women in hijab must be saved from their misinformed religious agency; they must be granted secular agency and freedom from religion, especially Islam. Religion appears to be conceptualized here as an accretion, even a pollutant, over the essential, primordial, prereligion republican individual.

Bad agency The 2004 ban on religious symbols in schools, widely regarded as the headscarf ban, was based on the twin rationale of defending laïcité and protecting Muslim girls from coercion to wear headscarves. The French government positions itself as defender of infantilized Muslim women and girls from their Muslim families and males – since Muslim families and Muslim men are allegedly uniquely authoritarian. The Stasi Commission’s report emotively asserted that ‘[t]he Republic cannot remain deaf to the cries of distress from these young women’ – Muslim girls forced to cover by the males in their families and religious communities (Choudhury, 2007: 202). To many French people, burqas are reminiscent of ‘archaic practices which diminish the feminist achievements of the twentieth century’ (Hunter-Henin, 2012: 627). The burqa ban was therefore premised on the argument that burqas socially isolate and marginalize women as well as deprive them of identities (Hunter-Henin, 2012: 626) – identities being conceptualized as something that emerge in a public societal setting outside the (minority) family. The decades-long debate over Muslim women’s agency and their modest clothing is inconclusive because no amount of defensive argumentation, or ‘stories of strong, emancipated women who consciously chose to wear the veil,’ can dislodge the racist and Orientalist assumptions about Muslims (Bracke and Fadil, 2012: 47). Merely speaking of the headscarf (or the niqab or the burqini), ‘either in its affirmation or negation, contributes to the way this sartorial practice becomes singled out from other practices, to be attributed a status of exceptionality’ (ibid: 49). Perhaps the writing of this chapter, too, turns the headscarf into an object of debate anew, reminding us of ‘the paradoxical role we play as scholars, attempting to defend the voices of the women who are too often singled out as a problem’ but in effect ‘sustaining the very conditions and terms through which such an interpellation of “veiled women” occurs’ (ibid: 47–48). The imaginary threat posed by headscarves to Muslim women and girls is extended even to the most vulnerable of populations: infants and young preschool aged children. In 2004, when the headscarf ban was widely criticized, the Stasi Commission defended itself by claiming that this restriction of religious expression was meant for ‘protecting minors against external pressures.’ Some years later, it took a long legal battle for the court to find in favor of Fatima Afif, an employee at a daycare center dismissed for wearing a headscarf to work. And after that battle, widespread outrage was expressed over the court’s defence of Afif because ‘headscarves worn in private childcare centres could be a danger to impressionable young children’ (Chrisafis, 2013). The ‘nanny law’ banning headscarves in childcare centers was marketed as protective of children, offering ‘the same “protection” from religious 439

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influence as older pupils were said to be granted by the hijab ban in educational institutions’ (Jacobsen, 2017: 548). The nanny law unmistakably discursively echoes language descriptive of sexual predators, so that physical proximity to the veil becomes a danger defined broadly. The veil itself could even indoctrinate or brainwash young children, rendering children unsafe in turn. Hijab is therefore quarantined and removed as a dangerous germ from children. In the secular bodypolitic, the ‘natural,’ secular state of minors must be protected from the influence of Muslims. Where the possibility of coercion by Muslim males had positioned Muslim women as objects of pity in danger, the later nanny law now positioned Muslim women themselves as a danger.

Unveiling women’s agency It is hardly possible to properly appreciate French attitudes to the veil without historical awareness of French colonial animosity to it. The veil played such a powerful role in the Algerian revolution against French occupation that French soldiers took to ‘violat[ing] women first by forcibly removing their veils and then by raping them’ (Scott, 2005: 65). Forced unveiling continues to be a discursive trope in French political commentary on Muslim women’s clothing. It is not surprising, then, that by means of niqab bans, the French state engages in ‘production and promotion of mixité—the comingling of men and women in society—as an ethical and Republican value’ (Wesselhoeft, 2011, p. 400). Disturbingly reminiscent of colonial fantasies of unveiling exotic Muslim women, the French demand to unveil Muslim women is colored by an ‘intense repugnance’ which ‘is paradoxically about desire’ (Razack, 2018: 170). This violent demand to make Muslim women sexually available is explicit in the Danish politician Søren Espersen’s comment, made during a debate on multiculturalism, ‘I want to be allowed to see Muslim women’s nice breasts.’ In this construction of the white supremacist state, part of its role is to offer sexual access to Muslim women through policy and law (Andreassen, 2013: 220). While women’s and girls’ agency are touted as a state concern, paradoxically their bodies are required by force of the bully pulpit and the law to become available to all. The denunciations of hijab and niqab transmit implicit messages about who a real French femalecitizen is and how sexually available she should be. So mixité is ‘a principle that is predicated upon the maintenance of the difference between them [men and women]’ (Wessselhoeft, 2011, p. 401). In other words, mixité is a Republican ideal that demonstrates the equality of women through maintaining gender difference (ibid). For many Islamophobic French commentators ‘the fully-veiled woman is not readable as a bearer of human rights—much less as a citizen of France!—until she reveals her face and form’, and possesses the ‘freedom to seduce’ (ibid, p. 407).

Secular liberal agency vs religious agency The politician Françoise Laborde offered the following explanation for women who choose to wear burqas: ‘In a way, it’s the same question as prostitution. There are choices which are non-choices’ (Chrisafis, 2013). Burqa bans paternalistically surmise ‘that women cannot make free choices for themselves’ (Hunter-Henin, 2012: 626–627), maligning women for practicing an unacceptable form of agency. The charitable interpretation of burqa bans is that the French state must

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forcibly rescue brainwashed and infantile Muslim women from their supposed sartorial captivity. Like Laborde, France’s then-Minister for Families, Children, and Women’s Rights, Laurence Rossignol, shocked many when he combined misogynoir, Islamophobia, and profound ignorance in his remarks about the burqini: ‘Of course, they are women who make the choice … there were also … American negroes who were in favour of slavery.’ We may argue in favor of Muslim women’s free choice of clothing, but when speaking of hijab-wearing Muslim women’s ‘autonomous will,’ the liberal discursive framework on coercion and agency has its own problems (Bracke and Fadil, 2012: 52). The hijab debate and bans restrict both advocates and opponents of hijab to problematic liberal frameworks. A liberal framework assumes that we know what coercion, agency, women’s emancipation, and freedom of religion mean. To engage in these debates, even to defend Muslim women’s religious freedom, arrests their on-going unfolding and puts a definite claim on their signification. The challenge becomes then to put veiled women and the headscarf to the test of that liberal framework in order to deliberate over their integration in the space of citizens. (ibid: 52) In many ways, the controversies create understandings of laïcité and gender emancipation. Advocates of the ban posit hijab as being antithetical to liberal premises of thought while anti-ban people argue that headscarfed women can be and are liberal ‘and can perfectly integrate into the public space which is defined according to these liberal terms’ (ibid: 52). When we center ‘a liberal normative framework’ we take ‘a number of concepts (such as the emancipation of women, the separation of church and state, and freedom of speech) as the kernel of what counts as “modern” or “European”’ (ibid: 52). The liberal framework itself remains unexamined, as do our understandings of what we mean when we speak of women’s agency, secularism, Islam, and Europeanness. Veiling seems alone to raise problems of ‘power and regulation;’ not-veiling and unveiling, on the other hand, ‘are taken to be the reflection of an immanent and autonomous will)’ (Bracke and Fadil, 2012: 51). The liberal secular frames of the hijab debates ‘regulate notions of cultural and religious difference’ and work as ‘operations of power that occur on an ontological, epistemological and ethical level’ (ibid: 41). These frames generate the questions (such as: is hijab oppressive or not?) accompanied by their underlying assumptions (religion is oppressive, Islam is more oppressive than other religions, Muslim women are oppressed, France is a nation of liberty and equality, modernity and secularity are emancipatory, Muslim immigrants and refugees are anti-modern and unenlightened, Islam is antimodern and anti-secular, more clothing is oppressive, less clothing is freeing, etc.) We fail to ask difficult questions such as why we even interrogate hijab and no other sartorial practices for compatibility to liberalism. The debates block such questions as: why is the removal of a headscarf important or relevant to Europeanness? And why is women’s agency primarily related to the adoption of a headscarf rather than to other indicators of practice? Why do Muslim women, and no others, end up under the microscope, tested for sufficient levels of agentic power? Besides, in French secular discourse on the hijab, the notion of agency ‘is already premised on the understanding that the subject needs to shed her “particular” (cultural, religious, and so forth) attachments’ (Bracke and Fadil, 2012: 54). French political thought is based on ‘the autonomous individual who exists prior to his or her choices of lifestyle, values, and 441

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politics’ (Scott, 2005: 12) – such as religious belief or practice. The secular or non-veiled person, in contrast to the veiled one, then becomes a natural person, a ‘pre-religious’ primordial individual, a palatable Muslim woman in the Goldilocks spot – just Muslim enough and no more. Moreover, it makes little sense to ask if hijab is either a) freely chosen or b) chosen under pressure, when power mediates everything in our lives, and ‘all “choices” or bodily practices are considered as emanations of prevailing normative ideals or regulative structures’ (Bracke and Fadil, 2012: 51). Indeed, ‘if we were to discard influenced decisions as not being the exercise of genuinely free choices, how many – if any – of our decisions would still qualify as expressions of free will?’ (Hunter-Henin, 2012: 625). All actions and decisions are contextual, and the interpretive frameworks employed determine how decisions are evaluated as agentic or otherwise. Therefore ‘a piece of clothing cannot in itself be oppressive or emancipatory’ (Bracke and Fadil, 2012: 52), so ‘hijab in itself is void of social meaning’ (ibid: 48).

Pitting Muslim women against Islam Muslim male dominance has long been a pretext for benevolent imperialism. In the words of Spivak, ‘White men are saving brown women from brown men’ (1994: 92). Numerous American feminists supported U.S. military violence in Afghanistan because it was cloaked in gender emancipatory claims related to the powerful symbol of the Afghan blue burqa (Hirschkind and Mahmood, 2002; Toor, 2012). Time and time again, Muslim women are deployed against their faith, their homelands, and their families. As they watch the destruction of their lands, homes, and communities they are exhorted to applaud for the downfall of Muslim patriarchal domination. Fixating on hijab and burqa, Westerners (liberal and illiberal alike) create noise that blocks important conversations for improving the day-to-day lives of women worldwide – such as protection from armed violence and gender violence. Women’s clothes, marriages, and lives seem to provide the way in to ‘establishing hegemony, a method of representing the foreign invaders as good’ (Zakaria, 2015). The overemphasis on Muslim women’s sartorial conduct (and the assumed coercion by Muslim men) distracts from systemic patriarchal violence against women and predatory capitalist exploitation of societies. In France, government machinery uses the language of Muslim women’s victimhood and clothing to oppress black and brown communities. Unlike Muslim women who fight the French state for the right to wear hijab, Muslim women who fight Muslim patriarchy are pushed into hyper-visibility by their Western champions. Ironically, such women are often deprived of legitimacy in their local communities due to their perceived proximity to Western imperialism. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work on behalf of girls’ education, Malala Yousufzai is celebrated in the West and her words are frequently amplified, yet her advocacy on behalf of Pakistan and especially Swat was blocked from cable news. Her invited visit to the White House was covered extensively on U.S. news, but her concern expressed to President Obama that drone strikes were fueling terrorism did not make it into most of these stories at the time (Hart, 2014). The state and its instruments seek to remove from view entirely such French Muslim women as refuse to be saved from burqas and headscarves by the Islamophobic state. Muslim women who refuse visibility on the French state’s terms are rejected from its embrace entirely, shunned like the stereotypical authoritarian parent. As Hunter-Henin puts it dryly, ‘Penalizing women who wear the burqa does not liberate them’ (2012: 627). As 442

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there is no authoritarian parent like the neoliberal modern state, and no father more capable of total control, French Muslim women who wear headscarves, face-veils, and burqinis have been shunned from various public leisure, educational, and work spaces, leading to numerous difficulties in their life circumstances. The debate over Muslim women’s clothes brings attention to the ‘insensitivity of secular authorities to the voices of religious women and girls’ (Choudhury, 2007: 294). Religious Muslim girls and women are always talked about. When talked to, their words are not heard, but are interpreted as representing false consciousness and sinister, foreign agendas. Rather than isolate gender and hijab alone as a political issue, French Muslim feminists have initiated an intersectional struggle against the French state’s violence against poor racial and religious minorities, male and female, recognizing a shared community struggle since ‘Muslim males find themselves in the crosshairs of the police, [and] Muslim women have been the targets of legal Islamophobia’ (Fernando, 2016: 40). These activists criticize police violence against youths of color as well as the 2004 ban as Muslims in France are targeted based not only on religion but race as well (ibid: 39). They also critique the secular blindness of French feminism to anti-Muslim racism and sexism (ibid: 38), since such laws as the 2004 headscarf law and the 2010 niqab ban ‘were passed in the name of gender equality and with fullthroated support from most mainstream feminist organizations’ (ibid: 39). Muslim feminists challenge secular French feminists, since ‘any feminism that sees itself as pluralist and that recognizes that emancipation can take many forms needs to also take seriously non-secular ways of conceptualizing oneself’ (Fernando, 2012: 45).

Muslim women and cultural integration In France, the practice of hijab and niqab is frequently pathologized as failures of cultural integration. The presence or absence of visible identity markers like headscarves serve as the basis of everyday evaluations of Muslims as ‘bad’ or ‘good’ respectively (Mamdani, 2004) – pro- or anti-Western, insiders or outsiders. French insistence on cultural assimilation (Scott, 2005: 12) faces its ultimate defeat in the veil which has ‘long been a symbol of the irreducible difference and thus the inassimilability of Islam’ (ibid: 45). The not-veiling or unveiling Muslim woman (Fadil, 2011) is deemed normal, neutral, and culturally harmonious in the secular bodypolitic, while the veiling Muslim woman is abnormal, anti-secular, and culturally disruptive. State and societal intolerance to any material sign of Islamic adherence exposes the reality of cultural integration. French bans on Muslim garb ‘express the refusal to be in proximity, the refusal to be made awake to the Other’s difference’ (Razack, 2018: 185). Ten years ago, anti-burqini fever raged in France under the guise of concerns about safety, hygiene, social responsibility, and gender equality (Goodman, 2016), though fear of the burqini stemmed from how this outfit was ‘a visual sign of the disease – Islam – that right-wingers wish to eliminate from the bodypolitic’ (Mir, 2009). The Muslim integration envisioned in Europe is not really a polite ‘fitting in;’ it is a vanishing, the erasure of any symbols perceived as Muslim, whether they happen to be Muslim garb or halal meat. For the far-right Australian politician Fraser Anning, the very presence of Muslims in society is adequate cause for a massacre like the Christchurch mosque attack in March 2019. Though Muslim cultural integration in Europe is often extolled as a possible strategy to earn racial safety (Mir, 2014: 179), integration does not render Muslims insiders, safe from stigma and violence. To the contrary, the integrated Muslim is often typified as the hidden enemy (Nussbaum, 2013: 37–39) and an insidious germ. The conditional, swiftly revoked acceptance of the 443

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integrated Muslim was illustrated by the meteoric rise and fall of Mennel Ibtissem, a contestant on The Voice-France. The blue-eyed Ibtissem, wearing a graceful blue bandanna, charmed audiences with her rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah in English and Arabic. Viewers proceeded to hunt down Ibtissem’s hidden identity as Muslim, and to ‘publicly expose Mennel’s “true” identity in the days that followed the audition: the French-Syrian belle was, in fact, a “radical” Muslim’ (Fadil, 2018). Maligned and savaged on social media for pro-Palestinian politics, Ibtissem eventually resigned from The Voice. Unlike the Muslim female victim who allows herself to be saved, this Muslim woman is ‘a threatening figure who has been chased away from one of the commercial temples of the Republic after being exposed as untrustworthy,’ and ‘a cunning figure who is threatening by virtue of her innocence’ (ibid). The Muslim woman’s seeming feminine vulnerability gives her access to the inner sanctum of the bodypolitic. That is what renders her a great threat and that is why Muslim women have ‘become one of the privileged sites of governmental interventions’ (ibid). In much the same way, the ‘bland, unremarkable depiction of the Muslim characters’ in the U.S. reality show All-American Muslim generated a firestorm of outrage, leading to the cancelation of the programme (Mir, 2014: 13). This same fear and outrage against an imagined hidden enemy explains why the presence of Muslim women in burqinis enjoying the sun and the sea was met with disproportionate law enforcement power. After Nice banned the burqini on beaches in 2016, one day armed police surrounded a woman wearing a burqini on a Nice beach, until she removed her long-sleeved top that she was wearing over a sleeveless top. Another woman fined for wearing leggings and a headscarf on a Cannes beach was issued a ticket saying she was not wearing ‘an outfit respecting good morals and secularism’ (Chrisafis, 2013; Quinn, 2016). Former prime minister Manuel Valls described the burqini as not merely swimwear but ‘the expression of a political project, a counter-society, based notably on the enslavement of women’ (Kroet, 2016). A Muslim woman freely enjoying leisure on a beach is not an emancipated woman but a Trojan horse, bearing a foreign, sinister agenda as she wades through the waves.

Conclusion The secular state is cast as the eternal friend to all gender egalitarian causes, while the Muslim religion is cast as the enemy to girls and women in this French drama of scarves and veils (Scott, 2009). But the secular state is no friend to women who challenge its power. Women who do not applaud the Islamophobic state find its power mobilized against them. Muslim women who fight Western control of their bodies and their families are vilified as anti-Western extremists on the one hand and disparaged as brainwashed non-agents on the other. Such women are then banned from schools, public places, and beaches, fined and subjected to citizenship education, derided as outsiders, and hated as hostile enemies. Muslim women’s clothing translates for us what the power of the supposedly secular political regime means for Muslims, when secularity is brought down with full force upon Muslim women. Through the clothes they wear, their bodies are punished and are shown the door. Though it would be racist for the republic to declare war upon brown and Black communities, sexist to declare war on women, and it would non-secular to declare a war on Muslims as a religious group, a war on Muslim women’s clothes can veil these animosities under campaigns combating the burqa, the hijab, and the burqini. Via the veil of these stigmatized clothes, the state can conduct warfare against Muslims, women, and racialized people.

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Further reading The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism. By Mayanthi L. Fernando. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Interrogates how the French state seeks to control Muslims and contends that its endeavor is as much about the ‘unsettled’ nature of French laïcité as it is about Muslims in France. Formations of the Secular. By Talal Asad. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Critiques common assumptions about secularity with reference to historical shifts in Middle Eastern and Western societies. Sex and Secularism. By Joan W. Scott. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Argues that contemporary political discourse that mingles gender and secularism and informs a ‘clash of civilizations’ is a vehicle for Islamophobia. The Veil in Their Minds and On Our Heads: The Persistence of Colonial Images of Muslim Women. By Homa Hoodfar. RFFI/DRF, 22(3/4), Fall/Winter 1992, pp. 5–18. A piece that remains relevant today; interrogates persistent ignorance and stereotyping among Westerners about veiling practices, and the deploying of ‘racism against sexism.’

References Ahmed, Nilufar. 2017. So Few Muslim Women Wear the Burqa in Europe that Banning It Is a Waste of Time. The Conversation, August 30, 2017. At https://theconversation.com/so-few-muslim-womenwear-the-burqa-in-europe-that-banning-it-is-a-waste-of-time-82957 Almila, Anna-Mari. 2017. Introduction: The Veil across the Globe in Politics, Everyday Life and Fashion. In The Routledge International Handbook to Veils and Veiling, Anna-Mari Almila and David Inglis, eds., 1–28. London: Routledge. Andreassen, Rikke. 2013. Take off that Veil and Give Me Access to Your Body: An Analysis of Danish Debates about Muslim Women’s Head and Body Covering. In Gender, Migration and Categorisation, Marlou Schrover and Deirdre M. Moloney, eds., 215–229. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Benhabib, Seyla. 2010. The Return of Political Theology: The Scarf Affair in Comparative Constitutional Perspective in France, Germany and Turkey. Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 36, nos. 3–4, 451–471. Benhabib, Seyla. 2017. The Return of Fascism. September 29, 2017. At https://newrepublic.com/art icle/144954/return-fascism-germany-greece-far-right-nationalists-winning-elections Bracke, Sarah and Nadia Fadil. 2012. ‘Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?’ Field Notes from the Multicultural Debate. Religion and Gender, vol. 2, no. 1, 36–56. Choudhury, Nusrat. 2007. From the Stasi Commission to the European Court of Human Rights: L’affaire Du Foulard and the Challenge of Protecting the Rights of Muslim Girls. Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, vol. 16, no. 1, 199–296. Chrisafis, Angelique. 2013. France’s Headscarf War: ‘It’s an Attack on Freedom’. The Guardian, July 22, 2013. At www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/22/frances-headscarf-war-attack-on-freedom Cronin, Stephanie. 2014. Anti-veiling campaigns in the Muslim world: gender, modernism and the politics of dress. Ed. Stephanie Cronin. London & New York: Routledge, p. 287, 2014. Erlanger, Steven. 2010. Parliament Moves France Closer to a Ban on Facial Veils. New York Times, July 13, 2010. At www.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/world/europe/14burqa.html Fadil, Nadia. 2011. Not-/unveiling as an Ethical Practice. Feminist Review, vol. 98, 83–109. Fadil, Nadia. 2018. Taming the Muslim Woman. The Immanent Frame: Social Science Research Council, May 24, 2018. At https://tif.ssrc.org/2018/05/24/taming-the-muslim-woman/ Fernando, Mayanthi L. 2012. Belief and/in the Law. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, vol. 24, no. 1, 71–80. Fernando, Mayanthi (2016). Liberte, Egalite, Feminisme? Dissent, Fall 2016, 38–46. Goodman, Leah McGrath. 2016. Burkini Swimsuits Spark Anti-Muslim Outrage – And Fast Sales. Newsweek, August 8, 2016. At www.newsweek.com/2016/08/19/burkini-swimsuits-spark-antimuslim-outrage-sales-488138.html

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Hackett, Conrad. 2017. 5 Facts about the Muslim Population in Europe. Pew Research Center, November 29, 2017. At www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/11/29/5-facts-about-the-muslimpopulation-in-europe/ Hart, Peter. 2014. Missing Malala’s Message of Peace: Drones Fuel Terrorism. FAIR, October 14, 2014. At https://fair.org/home/missing-malalas-message-of-peace-drones-fuel-terrorism/ Hirschkind, Charles and Saba Mahmood. 2002. Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of Counter-insurgency. Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 2, 339–354. Hunter-Henin, Myriam. 2012. Why the French Don’t like the Burqa: Laicite, National Identity, and Religious Freedom. International and Comparative Law Quarterly, vol. 61, July 2012, 613–639. Jacobsen, Christine. 2017. Veiled Nannies and Secular Futures in France. Ethnos, vol. 83, no. 3, 544–566. Jones, Nicky. 2012. Religious Freedom in a Secular Society: The Case of the Islamic Headscarf in France. In Freedom of Religion under Bills of Rights, Paul Babie and Neville Rochow, eds., 216–238. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press. Kroet, Cynthia. 2016. Manuel Valls: Burkini ‘Not Compatible’ with French Values. Politico, August 17, 2016. At www.politico.eu/article/manuel-valls-burkini-not-compatible-with-french-values/ Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mamdani, Mahmood. 2004. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. New York, NY: Doubleday. Mir, Shabana. 2009. The Deadly Burqini, or What Exactly Is an “Islamic Swimsuit?” Religion Dispatches, August 13, 2009. At http://religiondispatches.org/the-deadly-burqini-or-what-exactly-is-an-islamicswimsuit/ Mir, Shabana. 2014. Muslim American Women on Campus: Undergraduate Social Life and Identity. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Mohdin, Aama. 2017. Austria Just Slapped a Burqa Ban on the 150 Women Who Dare to Wear One. Quartz, October 1, 2017. At https://qz.com/1090885/austria-just-slapped-a-burqa-ban-on-the-150women-who-dare-to-wear-one/ Nussbaum, Martha C. 2013. The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Quinn, Ben. 2016. French Police Make Woman Remove Clothing on Nice Beach following Burkini Ban. The Guardian, August 23, 2016. At www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/24/french-policemake-woman-remove-burkini-on-nice-beach Razack, Sherene H. 2018. A Site/Sight We Cannot Bear: The Racial/Spatial Politics of Banning the Muslim Woman’s Niqab. Canadian Journal of Women & the Law, vol. 30, no. 1, 169–189. Riemer, Nick. 2016. The Roots of Islamophobia in France. Jacobin, August 29, 2016. At www.jacobin mag.com/2016/08/burkini-ban-islamophobia-valls-france-secularism-islam/ Scott, Joan W. 2005. Symptomatic Politics: The Banning of Islamic Head Scarves in French Public Schools. French Politics, Culture & Society, vol. 23, no. 3, Special Issue: French Cinema and Globalization (Winter 2005), 106–127. Scott, Joan Wallach. 2007. The Politics of the Veil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scott, Joan Wallach. 2009. ‘Sexularism.’ Ursula Hirschmann Lecture. Florence: European University Institute. Slotkin, Jason. 2016. French Riviera City Bans Specialty Swimsuit for Muslim Women. National Public Radio, August 12, 2016. At www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/08/12/489777580/frenchresort-city-bans-muslim-bathing-suit Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1994. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., 66–111. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Toor, Saadia. 2012. Imperialist Feminism Redux. Dialectical Anthropology, vol. 36, nos. 3–4, 147–160. Weaver, Matthew. 2018. Burqa Bans, Headscarves and Veils: A Timeline of Legislation in the West. The Guardian, March 31, 2018. At www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/14/headscarves-andmuslim-veil-ban-debate-timeline Wesselhoeft, Kirsten M. Yoder. 2011. Gendered Secularity: The Feminine Individual in the 2010 Gerin Report, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, vol. 31, no. 3, 399–410. Zakaria, Rafia. 2015. Clothes and Daggers. Aeon, September 8, 2015. At https://aeon.co/essays/banthe-burqa-scrap-the-sari-why-women-s-clothing-matters

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30 FEMALE FILMMAKERS AND MUSLIM WOMEN IN CINEMA Kristian Petersen

‘Women are always present, even if their presentation may not have any significance. Often, they are presented to be “seen.” Very few films are about women “seeing”’ (DönmezColin, 2004: 187). This quote from film scholar Gönül Dönmez-Colin gestures at the key thematic divide in thinking about women, Islam, and cinema (the title of her essential book on the subject): Muslim women are represented on screen but these presentations are often not from their perspective (Dönmez-Colin, 2004). In the 15 years since the publication of Women, Islam and Cinema, men still dominate the cinematic gaze and most often occupy the director’s chair. However, a number of women filmmakers are shepherding a new phase of film that gives sight to women protagonists with agency and vision. In laying out an analytical route for exploring the relationship between Muslim women and film, I modestly build upon Dönmez-Colin’s approach in considering women as filmmakers and women as film subjects.1 The chapter first delineates some methodological challenges and future possibilities for doing research on Muslim women and film. Then I outline thematic patterns in the cinematic lives of Muslim women. Next, I model an interpretive strategy that revolves around national and regional contexts, through a brief introduction to Muslim women, both in front of the camera and behind it, in Southeast Asian cinemas.2 Finally, I offer a theoretical framework for approaching ‘transnational’ cinema that disrupts analysis of cinema in easily recognizable categories, such as national, regional, or ethnic. Altogether, the goal is not to be comprehensive in regional film analysis but rather chart a terrain and prompt further exploration in global cinema.

Studying Muslims in film Scholarship on cinematic representations of Muslims generally occurs within two distinct disciplinary subfields: research on ‘national cinema’ and ‘religion and film.’ Scholars working on national cinema come from a variety of disciplinary training, such as area studies or media studies, but often focus on a single country (e.g. Indonesia, Pakistan, France, etc.), region (e.g. South Asia, North Africa, Central Asia, etc.), or ethnic group (e.g. Arab, Turkish, etc.). In many of these contexts, local interpretations of Islam and the deployment of religiously inflected social norms and practices shape cinematic production, thematic or genre audience preferences, and

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narrative storylines. However, for many of these scholars Islam is of secondary concern within their analysis. That being said, knowledge of Muslim customs and discourses are necessary to comprehend cinematic production in local environments. In order to create a global portrait of the relationship between Muslims and film it will be necessary to rely on the work of experts within local, regional, and national domains while turning a perceptive eye to questions of religious practice, thought, and identity that may be unavailable as the primary concerns of current scholarly trajectories. The other body of scholarship that focuses on Muslims in film extends from a subfield of religious studies referred to as ‘religion and film.’ Early scholarship through the 1970s and 1980s often focused on theological readings of European art films, and more popular Hollywood films in the 1990s (Lyden, 2003: 11–35; Plate, 2017: xiv–xvi; Wright, 2006: 11–32). As it developed some scholars utilized analytical tools from cultural and media studies in addition to theologically rooted viewing but across these approaches most research still primarily ‘reads’ film as ‘text’ with the primary objective being understanding what the film’s narrative and images mean. This type of scholarship gained traction in the 1990s with the establishment of The Journal of Religion & Film and has flourished since the 2000s, with numerous books and several handbooks focused on the subject (Blizek, 2013; Lyden, 2009; Mitchell and Plate, 2007). More recently, calls for integrating perspectives and issues from cinema studies into scholarship on religion and film demonstrate the value of considering medium-focused analysis, such as editing, sound, cinematography, camera angle, and mise-en -scène also affect the viewer’s interpretation, and what we can learn through the tension of film script versus film form (Downing, 2016; Hamner, 2011; Watkins, 2009). Scholarship on Muslims in film fits in between and across these disciplinary concerns and histories making for a broad but seemingly scattered body of literature. Since few focus on Muslims and film globally we must draw together the work of many scholars whose research is either primarily situated on one community that is largely made up of Muslims or in cinematic settings where Muslims are a minority. The difficulties in delineating a broad picture of Muslims in film are compounded by the fact that creators in both contexts construct the meaning of Islam in different ways. In national cinemas in Muslim majority contexts, films depicting social life will be steeped in Islamic traditions but filmmakers may not accentuate these features nor make their appearance central to the story’s narrative or visuals; rather depictions of Muslims are included because they are part of an everyday lived religious ethos. Viewers also may not be arrested by religious components but simply interpret these as typical regional social behaviors, ways of speech, and environmental features. In film settings where Muslims are minorities their depiction takes a rather different course. Euro-American cinematic history generally reflects an orientalizing of Muslims that later intertwines with stereotypes of violence and extremism (Shaheen, 2001). There are disrupters who push back on these representations but access to resources and the limited voice minorities have traditionally been given in writing or producing mainstream films have largely required filmmakers to create independent films, which gain limited audiences leading to the restricted ability to dismantle popular depictions of Muslims.

Methodological challenges and possibilities Since authorial intent, viewers’ interpretation, regional production, and transnational circulation will be locally anchored we need to approach film within the ever-shifting constellations of creators and audiences. Because of this it is difficult to outline a single analytical framework for which we can delineate a global outline of Muslims and film. Much of the 448

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previous scholarship has focused on textual readings of films, organized around themes, auteur directors, regions, or genres. Very little has focused on gender or women in general but several pieces of work explore specific filmic repertoires that are central to understanding Muslim women’s role in film. Other directions in the study of Muslims in film explore the social context of filmmaking, including producers and funders, audience reception, the global circulation of film, film festivals, and Muslim movie stars; all areas that would be productive for future analysis. Other avenues of exploration could include the study of paratextual media-related practices, such as social media discourse, the remixing and afterlife of film images, transmedia storytelling, or emerging screen cultures, as well as the social contexts of participatory culture and fandom. Whatever investigatory route one ventures down, I maintain that we must account for the social worlds of the producers of film, the mediators of its production, and the audiences who it is intended for and beyond.3 In the social constellations of these various subjects the signifier ‘Muslim’ can take on many forms. Therefore, in approaching film in social contexts where Islam is the dominant tradition, I see ‘Muslim’ as a location of self-making that is both contradictory and harmonizing in the formation of Muslim subjectivity. The definitional boundary of ‘Muslim’ identity will always be contested and its cinematic image heterogeneous but its performance is rooted in experiential repertoires of the ‘memories they encode’ (Hall, 1992: 27), what we might think of as the mediation of local and global strands of ‘tradition.’ In Muslim-minority contexts, ‘Muslim’ identity most often follows formulaic stereotypes long developed within nationalistic myths and pictured in public culture. In this cinematic space, recognizing Muslimness is based on ‘legibility,’ where subjects are only ‘read’ as ‘Muslim’ if they meet certain audience expectations, such as have speaking accents, wear particular sartorial items, or are perceived as being part of specific racial groups (Petersen, 2017).4 If subjects do not abide by these prerequisites they will be rendered illegible to the viewers. The reverse phenomenon also happens, taking non-Muslims as Muslims, and can be seen in the cinematic conflation between Arabs and Muslims. The filmic subjectivity of ‘Muslim women’ is ‘directly linked to social and political evolutions in which religion and religious customs play an important role’ (Dönmez-Colin, 2004: 7) and is delineated through ‘the contestations concerning women’s roles in the public sphere’ (Izharuddin, 2017: 86). Muslim women are most often signified through locally meaningful narrative conventions and across most cinematic domains the ‘visual discourse is marked by a familiar article of clothing and metaphor: the veil’ (Izharuddin, 2017: 86). Overall, when considering ‘Muslim’ subjects in film or behind the camera, I am not concerned with measuring fealty to an ‘authentic’ form of Islam but rather understand Muslimness as ‘an assemblage that is spatially and temporally contingent’ (Puar, 2007: 204).5 Even complex cultural representations can be deficient, incomplete, or contested when they emerge in a diverse field of authorial creation, industrial production, audience consumption, and mediated circulation.

Principal themes in the representation of Muslim women and female filmmakers The cinematic life of Muslims is rendered through social norms and privileges depending on the national context, historical time period, and ideological leanings of the filmmakers. Islam is variously depicted as an oppositional force that helps dominate and restrict women, a powerful discourse that shapes social norms and actions, a source of strength for liberation, or fount of inspiration for pious behavior and morals. Often we see women caught in between long-standing interpretations of Islam (i.e. ‘tradition’) and so-called ‘modern’ 449

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conventions that seemingly contradict or displace these positions and behaviors. This dialectic may be constructed around intergenerational friction, class and social differences, religious adherence versus secular dispositions, or cultural clashes within émigré and diasporic experiences. Many films explore the role of women in society through familial relationships and their attending responsibilities. The family is often used to symbolize ethnic or national aspirations and articulates a vision of national identity or ethnic homogeneity. Representation of female dispositions are often defined by their association to male figures, as wife, mother, daughter, sister, etc., and accompanying practices of obedience, caregiving, or being dutiful, submissive, sexually available, etc. Women are sometimes depicted as being removed from these social contexts for the performance of pious practice but women’s social duty to the family is most often prioritized as their primary obligation. By extension, films often offer a vision of what they see as an appropriate construction of femininity, including representing proper dress, male–female interactions, sexual expression, the regulation of space, and gendered responsibilities and expectations. The general sanctity given to women in the majority of cinematic culture is sometimes interrupted by representations of violence towards them. Sexual violence and its consequences, often murder or suicide of the victim, have also been a significant strand in narrative cinema. Associated with this, women have also been presented as sexual objects through both soft erotic film in the second half of the 20th century and more recently fetishized in explicit pornography, in Western contexts usually merging of exotic desire and anti-Muslim sentiment. The depiction of Muslim women is also structured by local production restrictions and social boundaries. How do we shoot women? What is appropriate to reveal in terms of bodies or intimacies? Can we deal with non-binary gendered identities? What role does same-sex sexuality play in our social context? These questions have direct effects especially on women filmmakers, who are often the ones to challenge stereotypical or limited representations that exist in the archive and give voice to a broader range of women’s stories. Of course, women often face more challenges in cultural production because of gender bias, whether due to material hurdles, social taboos not to be discussed, or conservative reactions that effect popular reception of films. It can be difficult for women to gain financial support for filmmaking in some societies. If funding is available it may be complicated to use male skilled workers and crew in intimate female-only settings. These types of challenges have urged some Muslim filmmakers to produce their films abroad and solicit foreign funding from established film industries or funding agencies, such as the American Sundance Institute, which can thereby affect the intended audience of the film. In terms of the narrative and visual priorities, women filmmakers are often understood to produce counter cinema, which goes against dominant ideological and formal film strategies (Johnston, 1973). Their features shift the dominant representational strategy, which primarily has women playing a supporting role within the social fabric of films, as an object of desire or disdain, or of no significance to the main plot. Centering women’s stories requires the negotiation of national, religious, and gender identities. For example, globally we witness a spectrum of interpretations of the goals and results of female liberation. Elsewhere directors and screenwriters challenge the legacies of colonial injustice or post-independence despondency by tackling the dichotomy between former colonizer and colonized subjects. Postcolonial narratives must also parse out the gendered social roles and subjective agency of women in societies in constant flux. These questions are captured in a variety of forms. Some filmmakers produce period dramas revisiting historical narratives to understand the present in new ways. Others rely on genre conventions, such as horror or comedy, to defuse prickly social commentary. Some use the affective wrenching of melodrama to sway audience 450

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opinion about certain subjects. Overall, many Muslim women filmmakers directly deal with the power of subjugation inherent to patriarchal structures, either in their imaging of film subjects, the creation of narrative details, or in the material concerns of cinematic production itself.

Women, Islam, and Southeast Asia cinema Southeast Asia has a rich cinematic history that explores many of the themes above, which are shaped by various local historical contexts and diverse religious communities in which Muslims exist. Indonesia’s dense Muslim population, for example, has distinct viewing expectations about what can be screened in terms of actors’ dress, social interactions, demeanor, etc. There are also social constraints, shaped by public discourses about the proper nature of Islam, through which ‘Islamic’ films (film Islami) have been viewed as a useful means for contemporary proselytization (dakwah) and producing a model of ideal Muslim subjectivity (Izharuddin, 2017). Several Indonesian women have been able to produce films between these social and religious constraints (Hughes-Freeland, 2011; Michalik, 2015). Malaysian cinema is reflective of internal debates about national identity but is also structured by the country’s multicultural population. While Islam is the dominant tradition there are significant populations of Buddhists, Christians, and Hindus. There is also a history of ethnic tensions between Malays and Malaysian Chinese. Local filmmakers have both skirted around these issues and taken them head on. On the other end of the spectrum, Muslims in the Philippines make up only a small percentage of the population (under 10 percent), and live primarily in the southern part of the country, so their representation in film has generally been framed as minoritized ‘other.’ Recent independent Filipino filmmakers have broadened this portrait through narratives about how Islam shapes social life, both for the good and bad. Since the mid-20th century Islam has been a central feature of much of Indonesian cinema but it was not until the late 1970s to early 1980s that it began to gain a wider viewing audience (Sasono, 2013).6 Mainstream success for films presenting Islamic values as a primary theme wouldn’t arrive until the 2000s, after the collapse of the New Order regime of President Suharto (1966–1998). This was prompted by the record-breaking box office sales of Hanung Bramantyo’s 2008 feature Ayat-Ayat Cinta (The Love Verses), which sparked a surge of film Islami. New commercial success for films with Islamic content led to several big budget features being produced in the following years (Izharuddin, 2017). These types of films generate a model performance of a desirable Muslim public self that is rooted in piety and the consumer culture of an Indonesian middle class (Paramaditha, 2010). Of course, many Indonesian Muslims did not find these films to be representative of an authentic practice of the tradition (Heryanto, 2011). One salient issue for several filmmakers has been questioning the merit and suitability of polygamy as a way of organizing domestic life through their films. The 2006 Berbagi Suami (Love for Share), by female director Nia Dinata, exposes how women are victimized by polygamous marriages and narratively affirms the moral superiority of monogamy (Imanjaya, 2009; Schmidt, 2017). The Love Verses itself revolved around a melodramatic love-triangle where an Indonesian student in Egypt is depicted as being ‘forced’ to have more than one wife due to their desperate social circumstances. Other films, such as the more recent 2015 Surga yang Tak Dirindukan (The Heaven that is Not Longed For), continued to narrate the debate about polygamy in Indonesian society with nuance and ambiguity (Barker, 2020). The 2016 Athirah (Mother (Emma)), by well-known Miles Films 451

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collaborators, director Riri Riza and producer Mira Lesmana, offers a historical take on the issue, emphasizing polygamy’s disruption of domestic space and family unity, and the resistance to it by upending localized social norms in the home. Through these features we see a spectrum of positions on the issue. Love for Share and Athirah are staunchly antipolygamy and present activist perspectives that are rooted in the liberation of women’s suffering caused by polygamous relationships, whereas The Love Verses and The Heaven that is Not Longed For rely on romantic love as the affective impetus behind anxiety toward polygamy rather than some inherent deficiency in the arrangement. While polygamy is only practiced by a small percentage of Indonesians today (less than 10 percent), cinema enables local filmmakers to weigh in on the subject and give audiences a narrative field in which to couch their debates. Malaysia cinema has a long history of film production and exhibition but the industry has been growing significantly since the 1990s, moving from releasing around ten films or less a year to dozens each year (Khoo, 2005; van der Heide, 2002).7 Due to its multiethnic population the local film industry produces multilingual films (Malay, Tamil, Mandarin, English), and the feature’s primary language usually reflects the intended audience or social vantage point. Audience preferences also shape the types of films directors produce, who often chose popular genres such as comedy and action. The most commercially successful Malaysian films in recent years are in the horror genre. Many local horror films revolve around the pontianak figure, a powerful undead evil female entity. These monstrous figures are often seeking revenge for a wrongful or untimely death, usually the death of a mother and/or an unborn child. While the pontianak has long been a part of traditional Southeast Asian folklore, media representations have incorporated Euro-American conventions of the portrayal of vampires in its imaging (Lee, 2016).8 Muslim women in Malaysia films are frequently depicted as passive and weak so the pontianak disrupts the local social renderings of female power. These monstrous figures can be read as an embodiment of female agency when it’s not performed through prescribed patriarchal norms. Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam (Pontianak of the Tuber Rose, 2004)9 and Chermin (The Mirror, 2007), by female directors Shuhaimi Baba and Zarina Abdullah respectively, draw the tensions around the socially and politically governed female body by showing ‘women in Malaysian horror can resist their fetishization through their direct alignment with the grotesque, the supernatural foreclosure of patriarchal dominance, and strong mother–daughter bonds’ (Izharuddin, 2015: 149). However, what we see over and over in pontianak features is that the supernatural empowerment of women requires suppressions or extinction in order to maintain an ordered society. The most popular horror films are Munafik (Hypocrite, 2016) and its sequel Munafik 2 (Hypocrite 2, 2016), which was the highest grossing Malaysian film of all time (Zainal, 2018). The films could be understood as having an underlying theological message, deriving its title from the Qurʾanic designation for people who outwardly practice Islam but privately reject or secretly go against the tradition. The film’s characters are discursively and visual marked as Muslim and the narrative is filled with spirit possession, recitations from the Qurʾan, and calls to defend Islam. Women in the Munafik series parallel the pontianak theme in that they are victims (of jinn occupation, of evil attacks, of their own weakness, etc.) or their powers as aggressors are to be subdued in order to gain harmony. It may be that part of why Malaysian horror is so popular is because it regulates gender boundaries through supernatural means, and therefore allows publics to address it indirectly. The genre destabilizes women’s transgressive power in society by classifying femininity as monstrous and evil in nature. 452

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Female directors have also used cinema to probe Malaysian society, the role of Islam, and Muslims’ place within the multicultural environment. The most widely known is independent filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad (1958–2009) who confronted social norms, especially those directed at women, in her films. Ahmad’s films generally tackled contentious social issues that reflected a spectrum of lived experiences of Malaysia’s cultural diversity, and therefore were often controversial among Muslim viewers and leadership. In general, her oeuvre unsettles Malay nationalist visions of social homogeneity that are undergirded by Islamic piety. Her narratives and characters push the boundaries of quotidian conventions, communal interactions, religious hypocrisy, or sexual appropriateness and permissibility (Omar, 2011). Her characters are multiracial and multilingual (Bahasa Melayu, English, and Mandarin) and deal with tensions arising from racial stereotypes, especially about ethnic Chinese Malays. She is most widely known for her trilogy of films revolving around the young Malay girl, Orked (Hee and Heinrich, 2014; Sim, 2009, 2018). In Sepet (Chinese Eyes, 2004), Orked falls for Jason, a Chinese boy from a working-class family, very different from her affluent parents. The film probes the tricky social differences that arise between class, ethnic, and religious differences. Altogether, Ahmad reveals the social logic of stereotypes of racialized communities by showing their inconsistencies (Koh and Ekotto, 2011). The sequel, Gubra (Anxiety, 2006), is set several years later with very different circumstances. Orked, now married to an unfaithful older man, reminisces about her love with Jason. In a parallel story, two young women, Temah and Kiah, work as sex workers and try to navigate Muslim life. Overall, the film interrogates the complexity of leading an ethical life guided by love and compassion, where what seems right does not always align with what is assumed to be outlined by the tradition (Khoo, 2010). The final film in the trilogy, Mukhsin, 2006), is a prequel where the young Orked innocently discovers what love can be. It is a nostalgic take on the cross-cultural connections that shape the girl’s local Malaysian life (Bernards, 2017). Yasmin Ahmad’s legacy shines through all her films, also including Rabun (My Failing Eyesight, 2003), Muallaf (The Convert, 2008) and Talentime (2009), which challenge limited notions of Islam and a narrow sense of Muslim identity that exist in Malaysian popular culture. Historically Filipino Muslims, often dubbed ‘Moros’ following Spanish colonizers, have been viewed as a disruptive threat by American occupiers and later the Philippine governments, which is reflected in early (sometimes American-produced) film (Angeles, 2016). The colonial legacies of the Moro image, especially from 20th century American administrative reports and print media, shape much of their cinematic screen presence where Muslims are presented as villainous heathens (Angeles, 2010). More recently, ethnic Filipino Muslims, reappropriating the term Moro, sought to reconstruct Muslim representation through film. Filmmakers today contend with issues of Christian–Muslim relations, radicalization of the Muslim community, and Muslims discrimination in the country. Once only depicted as secondary filmic characters needing protection and guidance, Muslim women have more recently been framed as revolutionary subjects who lead their families and communities (Angeles, 2020). Teng Mangansakan’s Limbunan (Bridal Quarters, 2010) deals with patriarchal social norms related to marriage, polygamy, family, and gendered roles, through women who both conform or resist but always do so through their own agency. Arnel Mardoquio’s Sheika (2010) centres female narratives dealing with social inequality and being a minority within heated Christian–Muslim tensions (Angeles, 2020). Mardoquio’s Ang Paglalakbay ng Mga Bituin sa Gabing Madilim (The Journey of the Stars in the Dark Night, 2012) provides a localized Muslim perspective of the political nature of social unease by putting women at the forefront of a Muslim secessionist movement (Tan, 2017). Bagong Buwan (New Moon, 453

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2001), directed by Marilou Diaz-Abaya, points to the domestic effects of military resistance on women in the context of the destruction and displacement caused by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) (Nubla, 2011). Mangansakan’s Mga Bai Nu Sambolayang Mawalaw (Daughters of the Three-Tailed Banner, 2016) tackles many of these issues by producing a complex social world inhabited by strong women, including transgendered women, from the village to the city (Angeles, 2020). What is gained through an investigation of national and regional cinema of Southeast Asia is a portrait of popular audience preferences, the reoccurrence of industry support, and important local themes that influence film culture. Through this type of analysis narrative and aesthetic contours start to emerge that can be further examined in relation to broader social and cultural circumstances (domestic life, politics, athletics, legal systems, fashion, etc.) in those social settings. But filmic patterns of national life can be reflective of both the realistic and aspirational contexts of life. Therefore, we must remember that often it depends on who is in power to produce images. There will likely be at least two different vantage points, and likely more, which produce a variety of cinematic subjectivities. Women frequently offer a counter narrative to mainstream representation but, in addition to gender, resistance to homogenous film images may also be reflected in social dichotomies of race, religion, citizenship, and national belonging. Filmmakers in diaspora, émigré, and transnational contexts also muddle the seemingly clear picture gained through exploration of a regional and national cinematic context.

Transnational and accented cinema in industry and aesthetics A further complication in producing a comprehensive portrait of the cinematic lives of Muslims is the growing nature of transnational flows of people, capital, and religious customs and habits. We should consider this from two perspectives because it unsettles terminological assumptions in both disciplinary domains outlined above. Scholarship on transnational religious communities emphasizes modes of circulation and movement between two geographies that shapes how traditions are understood, reproduced, and practiced.10 These studies reveal the diversity of cultural narratives and disrupt monolithic presentations of communities or traditions through the discourse of ‘transnationalism.’ In this line of examination, considering film as a cultural product emerging from within transnational practices and organizations points to how the specificity of a particular local experience of a global tradition shapes the cinematic poetics and narrative forms of that work of art. Religious studies scholarship helps us understand cultural products as first being detached from their host context, organized and classified for movement, then carefully redefined and married to both the new context and place of origin, and finally established as authentic within the assumptive interpretive matrix of the receiving audience.11 Cinema scholarship, on the other hand, focuses on transnational as an expression of filmmakers’ social position within narrative and aesthetic repertoires. On the other hand, several scholars have deployed useful terminology and alternative frameworks that help move towards a more comprehensive understanding of artistic projects. Hamid Naficy examines media expressions that are created and/or consumed by diasporic, exilic, or postcolonial subjects, which shape their production as ‘accented.’ Accented cinema derives its accent from its artisanal and collective production modes and from the filmmakers’ and audiences’ deterritorialized locations. Consequently, not all accented films are exilic and diasporic, but all exilic and diasporic films are accented. If in linguistics 454

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accent pertains only to pronunciation, leaving grammar and vocabulary intact, exilic and diasporic accent permeates the film’s deep structure: its narrative, visual style, characters, subject matter, theme, and plot. (Naficy, 2001: 23) Cultural productions also lie outside national discourses and may rather be framed within cultural or religious contexts. For Laura Marks ‘intercultural’ indicates a context that cannot be confined to a single culture. It also suggests movement between one culture and another, thus implying diachrony and the possibility of transformation. ‘Intercultural’ means that a work is not the property of any single culture, but mediates in at least two directions. It accounts for the encounter between different cultural organizations of knowledge, which is one of the sources of intercultural cinema’s synthesis of new forms of expression and new kinds of knowledge … The difference [with Naficy’s model] is that many intercultural filmmakers, though they identify with more than one cultural background, live in the country in which they were born. (Marks, 2000: 6–7) Geographies, according to Randall Halle, can therefore be understood as an ‘interzone’ of numerous possibilities in cultural formation, rather than a limiting structure of nationalistic identity. For contemporary postcolonial or diasporic filmmakers ‘interzonal possibilities expand because of the withdrawal of the nation-state from the singular privileged organizing position it had acquired over especially geopolitical definitions of space’ (Halle, 2014: 9). With the decreasing value of fossilized national identities, our approach to Muslim cinemas would benefit from a move ‘from cartographies to chronotopes,’ as Ayça Tunç Cox suggests (Cox, 2014). Cultural products extending from these types of communities reflect what Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (2003) call ‘multichronotopic links’ – the spatial and temporal relations that disrupt the erection of borders implicit in transnational framing (Shohat and Stam, 2003). Parallel to Halle’s interzone, this approach centers intercultural affiliations rather than clear classification of space. Artistic expressions can extend from individuals who are invested in regions but do not necessarily inhabit them in practice or reflect their dominant articulation. Rather they place cultural elements (real or imagined) in dialogue. In this imaginative cultural terrain we might look at transnational film as a ‘cinema of transvergence.’ Will Higbee suggests a filmmaker’s identity is in a continuous process of fluid negotiation in relation to their social context and their proximity to centers and margins (i.e. geographies, cultures, film forms, production norms, etc.). Therefore, cinema of transvergence proposes a clear understanding of the discontinuity, difference and imbalances of power that exist between various filmmakers, film cultures and film industries as well as the elements of interconnectedness that may bind a filmmaker to a given film culture or national identity at a given time. (Higbee, 2007: 87) Due to the growing reliance of filmmakers on funding from various international constituents and training in dominant cinematic industries, they often create multinational productions that are aimed at international festivals and audiences. The detaching or affixing to particular social, religious, or national identities of a filmmaker will fluctuate across time, 455

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making the character of a given cultural product reflective of the mediation of these elements inherent in the process of transvergence. Altogether these classifications are complimentary and point to new notions of belonging and registers of identification within the material contexts of filmmaking in contemporary cinematic industries. In our analysis, attending to the multichronotopic relationships in accented or intercultural cinema emerging from interzonal possibilities witnesses the reimagining of global pasts and futures, which thus reorients the present for artistic producers and consumers. Films produced within the creative promise of these intercultural interzones are exciting because they interrupt and suspend various audience expectations about the role of Islam within the emergence of a filmmaker’s authorial voice, visual style, or directorial intentions. Religion is often central to identity within postcolonial contexts (both through the hardening of personal fidelity or the shunning of its influence) and cinematic histories reveal this tension because Islam can serve as an alternative signifier as opposed to a national consciousness rooted in territory, intricately connected to empire and colonization. Many ‘transvergent’ filmmakers are both reckoning with the traumatic colonial legacies of their ancestral homes and navigating inclusion as émigré subjects (even still as second-, third-, or forthgeneration citizens) in multicultural imperial centers. While we might think of this cinema as part of a transnational genre that embodies shared artistic practices and cultural narratives, we must also think of films transnationally in terms of their production. Transnational films also challenge the character of a national cinematic heritage because of the multinational nature of modern filmmaking, which relies on well-established cinematic industries, skilled institutional production, screenings in international festivals, and global distribution. Filmmakers often receive training abroad, use experienced crews, and obtain funding from multiple philanthropic resources. The artistic products are marked by both local and global influences and interests, and echo dominant film patterns, whether it be a model from Britain, France, Bollywood, or Hollywood. Filmmakers must also be conscious of the relationship between industry distribution and viewer reception in order to make films available to audiences, which may influence how writers and directors frame their films past the immediate local context as they hope to offer a universally resonate story for international viewership. Accented, transvergent, or transnational filmmakers speak to questions of cosmopolitan visions of the contemporary world that are simultaneously rooted in local and global symbols, sounds, ideals, and problems. Often these types of films expand the definitional boundaries of being Muslim by depicting a vast expanse of religious, cultural, or ethnic expressions. While ethnicity does not correlate to religious fidelity (Gueneli, 2014), it often does correspond with structured responses from public and state entities that read certain ethnic signifiers as ‘Muslim.’ So for some audiences, film characters may be understood as Muslim even if they may be depicted as non-Muslim. We might witness this through the confluence between categories of Arab and Muslim in America, Turkish and Muslim in Germany, (South) Asian and Muslim in Britain, or Maghrebi and Muslim in France. This is a product of the racialization of Muslim identity (Morgenstein Fuerst, 2017). One example of this dynamic is the debut film of director Cherien Dabis, Amreeka (2009). In the film a Palestinian Christian family who emigrated to America after the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq are seen as Muslim to their new neighbors (and maybe even the audience for the first half of the film) and illegible as Christian. Eventually the viewer discovers that they are in fact Christian, however, they face the same social challenges as Muslim Americans. Alternatively, in British screenwriter Ayub Khan-Din’s award winning film East Is East (1999) and its sequel West Is West (2010), characters’ Muslimness is assumed by both family 456

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members and the public but often deemed either too religious or Islamically unsophisticated depending on the insider or outsider vantage point (Nobil, 1999; Chambers, 2020; Trech, 2017). In Ali’s Wedding (2017), written by lead actor Osamah Sami, we witness the tensions that arise from both intracommunal tensions while also navigating the consequences of broader Australian stereotypes about Muslims. While the film is centred on the male protagonist, Ali’s Wedding portrays a variety of women’s experiences, young and old, immigrant and first-generation Australian, domestic and academic. While it does rely on some limiting romantic comedy genre conventions, Muslim women are shown to be dynamic, diverse, and independent (Krayem, 2020). Wadjda (2012) is an interesting example of transvergent cinema because without any knowledge of the film’s background it is seemingly part of a national cinema and obscures its transnational construction. The film is the story of a young girl trying to get a bicycle. A simple story that also subversively critiques gender politics, women’s rights, and religious hypocrisy in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (Bazzano, 2020). While the film was the first to be shot exclusively in Saudi Arabia with local actors, the film’s development was international: Saudi Arabian writer and director Haifaa al-Mansour went to film school in Australia, now lives in Bahrain, was selected for a Sundance Institute writer’s lab in Jordan. Wadjda received funding from Italy and Dubai, was produced by Saudi and German companies, and has international distributors in France, the UK, Netherlands, and Sony Pictures Classics in North America. Since at the time of production Saudi Arabia had no movie theaters, Wadjda was certainly aimed at international audiences, being screened at several film festivals. Al-Mansour’s 2019 film The Perfect Candidate follows the same path of international support and distribution while also securing the first official support from the government’s new Saudi Film Council (Vivarelli, 2018). The films again center’s women’s role in Saudi society and how they can navigate patriarchal structures obstructing their success. Similarly, À mon âge je me cache encore pour fumer (I Still Hide to Smoke, 2017) is in all respects an Algerian story. But France-based, Algerian writer and director Rayhana Obermeyer is certainly a transvergent filmmaker. Her debut feature takes place in mid-1990s Algiers after ultra-conservative Muslim political leaders have taken over governing the community. The picture is a series of conversations, often explicit and frank, among women of all ages, body types, and dispositions at a female only hammam (public bath). The film stars Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass, one of the most internationally recognized Muslim actresses (who is also featured in Amreeka). Obermeyer’s film critiques her home country but also Islamic maximalism more generally, and patriarchal social dominance more specifically. She does this both through the dialogue and by having an all-female cast, many of whom reveal their naked body in a non-sexual manner, thus disrupting the normative displays of cinematic femininity framed for the male gaze. Her critique seeks female liberation from male supremacy and domination, as she states ‘my movie, its for women, but especially for men. And then men can see themselves. What they do with us’ (Obermeyer, 2017). I Still Hide to Smoke’s narrative and visual disruption also required it to be filmed abroad (primarily in Greece), use a female crew, and be screened primarily at film festivals and through international distribution. Overall, one of the film’s main messages, succinctly put by one actresses: ‘Your Islam is not our Islam,’ is seen as revolutionary in many respects and, thereby, prohibited the film from screening in Algeria. Films like these underline both the transnational aspect of modern filmmaking, in terms of international development, production, and distribution, and the accented perspective of many Muslim filmmakers, who examine Islam in their own cultural or national context from a global perspective that is informed by the religious variety they have experienced in 457

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new social contexts where Muslims embody the tradition in alternative ways. There is also a rich tradition of accented cinema by filmmakers of Muslim background in Europe and North America, which has been gaining broader support and audiences in recent years. For example, Turkish-French writer-director Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang (2015) and Moroccan-French writer-director Houda Benyamina’s Divines (2016) were even nominated and won several of France’s César Awards, as well as numerous international recognitions, and center women’s experiences through depiction of the varieties of Islam in diasporic communities (Handyside, 2019). European and North American filmmakers depict a full range of Muslim identities, from those traditionally centred on piety, ritual, and dominant symbols of religiosity, through embodiment of Muslimness as a form of cultural recognition, family heritage, or publicly recognized persona. Accented cinema in these contexts enables us to witness the diverse ways Muslim filmmakers outline how to engage the tradition, including both sharing in local familial practices and being expressed through global discourses and materialities.

Conclusion An examination of the cinematic lives of Muslim women, as both images and image-makers, requires combined efforts of scholars of film and scholars of Muslim communities. From various sites of analysis a broad portrait can begin to take shape through the combination of research on national contexts in conversation with the consideration of transvergent filmmakers who break out of the territorial hold of regional domains. Issues of representation will continue to be central to this type of study but in order to get a holistic understanding of the relationship between Muslims and cinema, greater emphasis needs to be put on investigations of film production, industry operations, global distribution, and audience reception.

Notes 1 Dönmez-Colin employs this framework in her most recent book (2019). Eylem Atakav proposes a useful analytical structure that explores film history, film genres, and film reception, which also centers women filmmakers. See Atakav, 2016. 2 I focus on Southeast Asian film industries because it is comparatively underrepresented in scholarship related to the study of Islam and film (for example compare with research on North African, Iranian, Turkish, the Levant, or South Asian cinema). The great diversity in Southeast Asian national contexts also allows us to explore the utility and limitations of drawing out regional trends versus more local movements and preferences. 3 Staiger offers a popular approach in film scholarship, what she calls context-activated reception, which examines the intent of production, context of viewing, audience expectations. Staiger, 1992. 4 On the role of race and gender in producing the ‘legibility’ of American Muslims see also Abdul Khabeer, 2017. 5 I rely on Puar’s understanding of Queerness here, which she sees as neither an identity nor an anti-identity, and extend it for thinking about the category ‘Muslim.’ 6 For overviews of the history of Indonesian cinema see Barker, 2019; Hanan, 2017; Heeren, 2013; Heider, 1991; Heryanto, 2014; Sen, 1994. 7 For background on earlier periods of cinematic history see, Khoo, 2005; van der Heide, 2002. 8 The pontianak, or kuntilanak in Indonesian, figure is found throughout Southeast Asia and its local film productions. One of the earliest Malaysian films is Pontianak (1957). Lee, 2016. 9 Pontianak of the Tuber Rose was the first Malay horror film produced after a 30 year ban. Ng, 2009. 10 Key works include Beliso-De Jesús, 2015; Csordas, 2009; Foxen, 2017; Lucia, 2014; Mitchell, 2016; Palmer and Siegler, 2017; Urban, 2016. 11 The most useful theoretical model for understanding transnational religious communities is Srinivas, 2010.

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Further reading Atakav, Eylem. (2014) Women and Turkish Cinema: Gender Politics, Cultural Identity and Representation. New York: Routledge. This book explores the shifting social and political contexts of Turkey since the 1980s and how that affects the representation of women in Turkish cinema. Dönmez-Colin, Gönül. (2004) Women, Islam and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books. The first book to focus on the subject of Muslim women in film. It provides a strong framework for exploring women as both filmmakers and through representation. Examples are primarily from Iran, Turkey, Central and South Asia. Ghorbankarimi, Maryam. (2015) A Colourful Presence: The Evolution of Women’s Representation in Iranian Cinema. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book outlines the changing representations of Iranian women from the 1960s through the contemporary period. Hillauer, Rebecca. (2006) Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. This resource briefly introduces numerous filmmakers from West Asia and North Africa, which could serve as the basis for further in depth exploration. Kealhofer-Kemp, Leslie. (2016) Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. This book explores the representation of first-generation Muslim women from the Maghreb in contemporary French screens cultures.

References Abdul Khabeer, Su’ad. (2017) ‘Citizens and Suspects: Race, Gender, and the Making of American Muslim Citizenship’, Transforming Anthropology 25(2): 103–119. Angeles, Vivienne. (2010) ‘Moros in the Media and Beyond: Representations of Philippine Muslims’, Contemporary Islam 4: 29–53. Angeles, Vivienne. (2016) ‘Philippine Muslims on Screen: From Villains to Heroes’, Journal of Religion & Film 20(1). http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol20/iss1/6 Angeles, Vivienne. (2021) ‘Philippine Muslim Women on Screen: From Sheltered Daughters to Revolutionaries’, in Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology, ed. Kristian Petersen. Cambridge: Ilex Foundation and Harvard University Press. Atakav, Eylem. (2016) ‘Women, Islam, and Cinema-Gender Politics and Representation in Middle Eastern Films and Beyond’, in The Routledge Companion to Cinema & Gender, eds. Kristin Lené Hole, Dijana Jelača, E. Ann Kaplan, and Patrice Petro. New York: Routledge, 227–236. Barker, Thomas. (2019) Indonesian Cinema after the New Order: Going Mainstream. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Barker, Thomas. (2021) ‘Debating Polygamy in Indonesian Cinema’, in Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology, ed. Kristian Petersen. Cambridge: Ilex Foundation and Harvard University Press. Bazzano, Elliott. (2021) ‘Subverting Stereotypes through a Saudi Film: Wadjda, Gender, and Islam’, in Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology, ed. Kristian Petersen. Cambridge: Ilex Foundation and Harvard University Press. Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha. (2015) Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion. New York: Columbia University Press. Bernards, Brian. (2017) ‘Reanimating Creolization through Pop Culture: Yasmin Ahmad’s Inter-Asian Audio-Visual Integration’, Asian Cinema 28(1): 55–71. Blizek, William L., ed. (2013) The Bloomsbury Companion to Religion and Film. New York: Bloomsbury. Chambers, Claire. (2021) ‘“Then It Was 1989, the Year the World Changed”: Shifting Representations of British Muslims before 9/11’, in Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology, ed. Kristian Petersen. Cambridge: Ilex Foundation and Harvard University Press. Cox, Ayça Tunç. (2014) ‘Habitats of Meaning: Turkish-German Cinema and Generational Differences’, in Imaginaries Out of Place: Cinema, Transnationalism and Turkey, eds. Gökçen Karanfil and Serkan Şavk. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 37–55. Csordas, Thomas, ed. (2009) Transnational Transcendence: Essays in Religion and Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Dönmez-Colin, Gönül. (2004) Women, Islam and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books. Dönmez-Colin, Gönül. (2019) Women in the Cinemas of Iran and Turkey: As Images and as Image-Makers. New York: Routledge. Downing, Crystal. (2016) Salvation from Cinema: The Medium Is the Message. London: Routledge. Foxen, Anya P. (2017) Biography of a Yogi: Paramahansa Yogananda and the Origins of Modern Yoga. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gueneli, Berna. (2014) ‘Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media’, Colloquia Germanica 47(1/2): 59–82. Hall, Stuart. (1992) ‘What Is This “Black” in Black Popular Culture?’ in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent. Seattle: Bay Press, 21–33. Halle, Randall. (2014) The Europeanization of Cinema: Interzones and Imaginative Communities. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Hamner, M. Gail. (2011) Imaging Religion in Film: The Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hanan, David. (2017) Cultural Specificity in Indonesian Film: Diversity in Unity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Handyside, Fiona. (2019) ‘The Politics of Hair: Girls, Secularism and (Not) the Veil in Mustang (Ergüven) and Other Recent French Films’, in Religion in Contemporary Thought and Cinema, eds. Libby Saxton and Anat Pick. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 351–369. Hee, Wai Siam and Ari Larissa Heinrich. (2014) ‘Desire against the Grain: Transgender Consciousness and Sinophonicity in the Films of Yasmin Ahmad’, in Queer Sinophone Cultures, eds. Howard Chiang and Ari Larissa Heinrich. New York: Routledge, 179–200. Heeren, Katinka. (2013) Contemporary Indonesian Film: Spirits of Reform and Ghosts from the Past. Leiden: Brill. Heider, Karl G. (1991) Indonesian Cinema: National Culture on Screen. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Heryanto, Ariel. (2011) ‘Upgraded Piety and Pleasure: The New Middle Class and Islam in Indonesian Popular Culture’, in Islam and Popular Culture in Indonesia and Malaysia, ed. Andrew N. Weintraub. London: Routledge, 60–82. Heryanto, Ariel. (2014) Identity and Pleasure: The Politics of Indonesian Screen Culture. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. Higbee, Will. (2007) ‘Beyond the (Trans)national: Towards a Cinema of Transvergence in Postcolonial and Diasporic Francophone Cinema(s)’, Studies in French Cinema 7(2): 79–91. Hughes-Freeland, Felicia. (2011) ‘Women’s Creativity in Indonesian Cinema’, Indonesia and the Malay World 39(115): 417–444. Imanjaya, Ekky. (2009) ‘The Curious Cases of Salma, Siti, and Ming: Representations of Indonesia’s Polygamous Life in Love for Share’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 51. www.ejumpcut. org/archive/jc51.2009/LoveforShare/index.html Izharuddin, Alicia. (2015) ‘Pain and Pleasures of the Look: The Female Gaze in Malaysian Horror Film’, Asian Cinema 26(2): 135–152. Izharuddin, Alicia. (2017) Gender and Islam in Indonesian Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Johnston, Claire. (1973) ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema’, in Notes on Women’s Cinema, ed. Claire Johnston. London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 24–31. Khoo, Gaik Cheng. (2005) Reclaiming Adat: Contemporary Malaysian Film and Literature. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Khoo, Gaik Cheng. (2010) ‘Cinema: Films Made by Women Screenwriters, Directors, and Producers: Malaysia’, in Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures: Supplement I, ed. Suad Joseph. Leiden: Brill. https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopedia-of-women-andislamic-cultures/cinema-films-made-by-women-screenwriters-directors-and-producers-malaysiaEWICCOM_0646. Koh, Adeline and Frieda Ekotto. (2011) ‘Frantz Fanon in Malaysia: Reconfiguring the Ideological Landscape of Negritude in Sepet’, in Land and Landscape in Francographic Literature: Remapping Uncertain Territories, eds. Magali Compan and Katarzyna Pieprzak. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 123–138. Krayem, Mehal. (2021) ‘Muslims in Australian Cinema: The Future of Listening across Difference’, in Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology, ed. Kristian Petersen. Cambridge: Ilex Foundation and Harvard University Press.

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Female filmmakers & Muslim women in cinema Lee, Y.B. (2016) ‘The Villainous Pontianak? Examining Gender, Culture and Power in Malaysian Horror Films’, Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities 24(4): 1431–1444. Lucia, Amanda. (2014) Reflections of Amma: Devotees in a Global Embrace. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lyden, John. (2009) The Routledge Companion to Religion and Film. New York: Routledge. Lyden, John C. (2003) Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, and Rituals. New York: NYU Press. Marks, Laura. (2000) The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press. Michalik, Yvonne. (2015) ‘Indonesian Women Filmmakers: Creating a New Female Identity?’, Indonesia and the Malay World 43(127): 378–396. Mitchell, Jolyon and S. Brent Plate, eds. (2007) The Religion and Film Reader. New York: Routledge. Mitchell, Scott. (2016) Buddhism in America: Global Religion, Local Contexts. London: Bloomsbury. Morgenstein Fuerst, Ilyse. (2017) Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels, and Jihad. London: I.B. Tauris. Naficy, Hamid. (2001) An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ng, Andrew Hock-Soon (2009), ‘Death and the Maiden: The Pontianak as Excess in Malay Popular Culture’, in Draculas, Vampires, and Other Undead Forms: Essays on Gender, Race, and Culture, eds. John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart. Toronto: The Scarecrow Press, 167–185. Nobil, Ali. (1999) ‘Is East … East?’, Third Text 13(49): 105–107. Nubla, Gladys. (2011) ‘Managing the ‘Moro Problem’: Fractured Nation/Narration in Bagong Buwan’, positions 19(2): 393–420. Obermeyer, Rayhana. (2017) ‘Rayhana Obermeyer Director of “I Still Hide to Smoke” Speak Out | IFFK 2017’, Asianet News, Video, December 12. www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkKbVqyL2qI Omar, Noritah. (2011) ‘Sexing Islam: Religion and Contemporary Malaysian Cinema’, in Islam and Popular Culture in Indonesia and Malaysia, ed. Andrew N. Weintraub. London: Routledge, 158–165. Palmer, David and Elijah Siegler. (2017) Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Paramaditha, Intan. (2010) ‘Passing and Conversion Narratives: Ayat-ayat Cinta and Muslim Performativity in Contemporary Indonesia’, Asian Cinema 21(2): 69–90. Petersen, Kristian. (2017) ‘Hollywood Muslims in Iraq’, Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 29(2): 87–103. Plate, S. Brent. (2017) Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-creation of the World. New York: Columbia University Press. Puar, Jasbir K. (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press. Sasono, Eric. (2013) ‘Islamic Revivalism and Religious Piety in Indonesian Cinema’, in Performance, Popular Culture, and Piety in Muslim Southeast Asia, ed. Timothy P. Daniels. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 45–75. Schmidt, Leonie. (2017) Islamic Modernities in Southeast Asia: Exploring Indonesian Popular and Visual Culture. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Sen, Krishna. (1994) Indonesian Cinema: Framing the New Order. London: Zed Press. Shaheen, Jack. (2001) Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press. Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. (2003) ‘Introduction’, in Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, eds. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1–17. Sim, Gerald. (2009) ‘Yasmin Ahmad’s ‘Orked’ Trilogy’, Film Quarterly 62(3): 48–53. Sim, Gerald. (2018) ‘Postcolonial Cacophonies: Yasmin Ahmad’s Sense of the World’, positions 26(3): 389–421. Srinivas, Tulasi. (2010) Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalization and Religious Pluralism through the Sathya Sai Movement. New York: Columbia University Press. Staiger, Janet. (1992) Interpreting Film: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tan, Katrina Ross. (2017) ‘Constituting Philippine Filmic and Linguistic Heritage: The Case of Filipino Regional Films’, in Citizens, Civil Society and Heritage-Making in Asia, eds. Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, Hui Yew-Foong, and Philippe Peycam. Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 137–163.

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Kristian Petersen Trech, Caroline. (2017) ‘Heritage or Rupture in Two British Asian Films: East Is East and West Is West’, in Heritage and Ruptures in Indian Literature, Culture and Cinema, eds. Cornelius Crowley, Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, and Michel Naumann. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 203–215. Urban, Hugh. (2016) Zorba the Buddha: Sex, Spirituality, and Capitalism in the Global Osho Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press. van der Heide, William. (2002) Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film: Border Crossings and National Culture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Vivarelli, Nick. (2018) ‘Haifaa Al-Mansour’s ‘The Perfect Candidate’ Is First Pic Backed by Saudi Film Council,’ Variety, May 10, 2018. https://variety.com/2018/film/global/haifaa-al-mansours-the-per fect-candidate-is-first-film-supported-by-saudi-film-council-1202805556/ Watkins, Gregory. (2009) ‘Religion, Film and Film Theory’, in The Bloomsbury Companion to Religion and Film, ed. William L. Blizek. New York: Bloomsbury, 80–88. Wright, Melanie J. (2006) Religion and Film: An Introduction. London: I.B.Tauris. Zainal, Hanis. (2018) ‘Record Box Office Numbers Prove Renewed Interest in Malaysian Flicks’, The Star Online, November 19, 2018. www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2018/11/19/its-boom-timefor-local-films-record-box-office-numbers-prove-renewed-interest-in-malaysian-flicks/

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31 GENDER, RACE, AND AMERICAN ISLAMOPHOBIA Megan Goodwin

This chapter addresses anti-Muslim actions and attitudes – often called Islamophobia – as a gendered and racialized phenomenon, especially in the contemporary United States. The last decade has seen a sharp increase in violence and hostility toward Muslims, underscoring the pressing need for a nuanced understanding of so-called Islamophobia and its operations. Anti-Muslim hostility must be understood as a gendered mode of religious intolerance. However, gender-centred analyses of anti-Muslim hostility cannot exhaust understandings of this phenomenon: gender and religion intersect in significant ways with race/ethnicity and relationship to nation-state, as well as with other categories of embodiment. A comprehensive analysis of anti-Muslim hostility in the United States as a gendered and racialized mode of religious intolerance does not simply highlight American Muslim women’s vulnerability to religio-racist harassment and violence, nor to the collapsing of American Muslim masculinity into terrorism and domestic abuse. Rather, any analysis of American anti-Muslim hostility requires acknowledging white women’s complicity in perpetuating that hostility, noting the elision of Christianity with American whiteness, and observing how the Islamophobia industry obscures white men as the true face of terrorist violence in the contemporary United States. In what follows, I consider the ways gender and race have shaped the language, history, adjudication, and material effects of American anti-Muslim hostility. I survey statistics on recent increases in anti-Muslim violence and sentiment, provide definitions for key terms, review the timeline of anti-Muslim rhetoric and actions throughout US history, and consider several key incidents in recent anti-Muslim hostility as it pertains to gender and race.

Identifying and defining anti-Muslim hostility Anti-Muslim hostility includes overt and subtle forms of violence, ranging from passing comments and vandalism to physical and verbal assaults to structural disadvantages, including employment discrimination, anti-Muslim political campaigning and protests, and state- and federal-level legislation and policies that affect Muslim communities. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), more Muslims were assaulted in 2015–16 than directly following the events of September 11th, 2001 (2017). This report shows anti-Muslim hate crimes

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on the rise for two years in a row and a ‘near-tripling’ in the number of anti-Muslim hate groups recorded by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2016 (2017). Anti-Muslim intimidation in the US also increased from 2015 to 2016 (Kishi 2017). The Huffington Post attempted to track anti-Muslim incidents in 2015; according to reporter Christopher Mathias, ‘in less than two months, the list became so long the webpage often wouldn’t load’ (2015). This increase in anti-Muslim harassment and violence in the United States is in keeping with broader global trends. Anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United Kingdom are at an alltime high (Hall 2018); Muslim minorities are experiencing state-level persecution in Myanmar and China; a New Zealand man killed 51 people at two Christchurch mosques in March 2019 and faces the country’s first charge for a ‘terrorist act’ (Hollingsworth 2019). A preliminary note about language: identifying anti-Muslim hostility as ‘Islamophobia’ is inaccurate, insufficient, and functionally works against accurate analysis of this mode of religious intolerance. Islamic studies scholar Juliane Hammer has been particularly critical of the term. ‘Islamophobia,’ Hammer insists, ‘is not about innate or natural fear of Islam or Muslims’ (2013a: 108). She argues that classifying anti-Muslim actions and attitudes as a phobia reduces religious intolerance to pathology, an involuntary reaction to difference that escapes human agency (2013a: 107–108, 2013b: 29–36). She recently offered instead the German term Islamfeindlichkeit, which signals enmity or hostility toward Islam and toward Muslims – emphasizing not merely sentiment but attitudes, discourses, and actions that do real material harm and violence in the world. This brief treatment of gender, race, and American Islamfeindlichkeit attempts to resist familiar classifications of religious intolerance and to think more and more precisely about anti-Muslim practices, speech-acts, and modes of thought. Any useful analysis of antiMuslim hostility requires us to focus on more than feelings: whether or not non-Muslim Americans fear Muslims is of far less significance than how they adjudicate, execute, express, or otherwise act upon their antipathy toward Muslims.

Intersectionality and religio-racism It should require no justification or explanation to state that everything we study and encounter is in fact gendered: marked by constructed categories of gender; socially and historically constructed and negotiated gender roles; and gendered positionality of researchers, journalists, and writers (Hammer 2013a: 107–108). For this reason alone, any inquiry into anti-Muslim hostility should and must account for gender. But gender as a lens of scholarly analysis pertains particularly to the study of American Islamfeindlichkeit, as this form of religious intolerance is so frequently expressed in binarily gendered terms. American anti-Muslim hostility is often expressed as violence against Muslim women, paradoxically and precisely because Americans imagine Muslim women to be especially endangered by Islam and Muslim men (Abu-Lughod 2013; Hammer 2013b). This focus on ‘saving’ Muslim women can put them at greater risk of sexual violence and disrupt aid to Muslim women and children in countries that find themselves the objects of US military aggression (Hirschkind and Mahmood 2002: 346). It can undermine Muslim women’s political goals and activism (Hoodfar 2001: 435–436). It also erases men as targets of anti-Muslim violence (Bridge Initiative 2018); glosses over complex transgender Muslim identities (Bucar 2010; Najmabadi 2013); occludes Muslim women’s sexual agency and differences in sexual practices, including lesbianism and polygyny (Bucar and Shirazi 2012; Majeed 2015); and obscures cultural and historical shifts in the complex ways different Islamic cultures have understood gender and sexual expression (Najmabadi 2005; Massad 2007). 464

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Anti-Muslim hostility is an irrefutably gendered phenomenon – not only because the objects of that hostility experience it on explicitly gendered terms, but also because anti-Muslim rhetoric frequently deploys tropes of white female fragility to inspire aggression against Muslim men and Muslim majority nations. As such, Islamfeindlichkeit must be understood not merely as a gendered but also as a white supremacist phenomenon. Here I use ‘white supremacy’ to signal not merely white identity extremism (such as that perpetrated by groups like the Ku Klux Klan or the Proud Boys), but rather the privileging of whiteness over other forms of racial expression at every conceivable level of American institutions. Gender informs but does not exhaust the operations of anti-Muslim hostility; parsing Islamfeindlichkeit also requires careful attention to race and racialization. For this reason, intersectionality – a mode of analysis named by critical race scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw and theorized most notably by sociologist Patricia Hill Collins – is a helpful lens in considering the operations of anti-Muslim hostility. Intersectionality demands acknowledgment of overlapping modes of oppression. As activist Dorothy Allison puts it, ‘class, gender, sexual preference, and prejudice – racial, ethnic, and religious – form an intricate lattice that restricts and shapes our lives’ (1994: 23). Understanding one form of oppression, such as religious intolerance, requires us to consider how that form intersects with other modes of oppression, such as gender and race. We cannot fully understand Americans’ suspicion of and violence toward Muslims if we are not also thinking about race, if we fail to consider American Islam as racialized, if we don’t take into account that, in fact, ‘Muslim’ has always been a racial as well as a religious or religio-racial identity in the United States. Historian Judith Weisenfeld offers religioraciality as space in which history, racial identity, and the relationship of religion to racial collectivity enmesh and inform one another (2016: 13). American Islam is one such religioracial space. Islam, of course, is not a race. But as a religion, Islam has been racialized throughout the American experiment as not-white, not (fully) American. ‘Muslim’ has never been merely a designation of American religious identity; it is rather, as anthropologist Su’ad Abdul Khabeer notes, ‘a racialized designation, which mediates access to and restrictions on the privileges of being an American, itself also a racialized category’ (2016: 24). Racialization here refers to the assigning of supposedly essential qualities to a group of disparate people based on an assumption of shared behaviors and physical attributes (Joshi 2006: 211–212; Morgenstein Fuerst 2017: 5–8). Through this lens, longstanding perceptions of Islam as a religion antithetical to America and to whiteness become a form of religio-racism (to adapt Weisenfeld’s term).

A brief history of American Islamfeindlichkeit The recent surge in anti-Muslim hostility has deep roots in American religio-racial intolerance (Gottschalk 2019). Religion has played an intimate role in the construction of race throughout American history. In the colonial period, colonizers justified violence toward and exploitation of non-Christians – enslaved or Indigenous precisely because they were not ‘saved.’ Once slave owners began forcing enslaved and Native persons to convert to Christianity, religious difference could no longer justify chattel slavery (Sweet 2008: 143). This is when we see arguments about the essential, biological superiority of whiteness over all other racial categories emerge – when we see American whiteness created to justify the commodification of Black bodies and the eradication of Native bodies. 465

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Religion in the United States has also always been a racialized category. While the Founding Fathers went some distance to enshrine religious liberty in the Constitution, the operating definition of what qualifies as American religion has always been informed by white Christian sensibilities. Here again, Black Christianity and Native Christianity needed to be essentially inferior to white Christianity to justify land theft, forced relocation, enslavement, and attempted genocide. These white supremacist attitudes continue to inform Americans’ legal and cultural understandings of ‘religion.’ When Americans speak of ‘religion’ as an undifferentiated, unmarked category, ‘religion’ usually signals ‘what white Christians do.’ (Or, as womanist ethicist Emilie Townes styles it, ‘somehow, [American] Christianity became linked with complexion’ (1995: 94).) That is, American religion is a religio-racial category that assumes both whiteness and Christianity. American religious intolerance must thus be understood as a form of religio-racism. American Islam is indelibly intertwined with the history of slavery. Islam came to the North American continent with the trans-Atlantic slave trade: the first American Muslims were enslaved people, forcibly taken from their homes in West Africa – a region in which Islam had thrived for centuries – and brought to what is now North America. Tens of thousands of African Muslims (roughly 20 percent of those enslaved in the US) carried their Islamic practices and beliefs with them across the Atlantic, and continued to pray daily, recite the Qurʾan, and preserve Muslim naming practices. The American Muslim population remained relatively small throughout the 19th century. Muslims were mostly invoked in Orientalist terms, as anti-Americans, opposed to freedom and civility as evidenced by the religious permissibility of polygamy within Islam (Marr 2006: 203). For most 19th-century white Americans, Islam represented a perverse and threatening foreign-ness, even while comparatively few Muslims lived in the United States. Though this was not an explicit aim of the legislation, the 1924 Immigration Act severely curtailed Muslim immigration to the United States, as most of the world’s Muslims lived (as they still do) in Asia. But the restriction of Asian immigration did not eliminate Islam from the American religious landscape. Until the mid-20th century, Black Muslims were the face of American Islam. Connections between Black American religious innovation and struggles for Black liberation were of some concern to state and federal government officials (Johnson 2015: 399). The FBI, as early as the 1930s, had engaged American Muslims as ‘a racial population whose interests and aspirations contravened the imperatives of the United States as a racial state’ (Johnson 2015: 395). The Moorish Science Temple and later the Nation of Islam (NOI) emerged as spaces of intense Black religious innovation. NOI leaders went so far as to declare that Islam was created for Black people (Weisenfeld 2016: 5). Both the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation allowed members to resignify their own Blackness by claiming ties to Islam, to locate themselves in histories other than those of oppression and enslavement (Weisenfeld 2016: 6, 14). Islam was a significant element in struggles for Black empowerment throughout the 20th century. White supremacist rhetoric at this time reflected convictions that America was properly understood as both white and Christian; the Ku Klux Klan’s ‘numerical zenith’ in 1958 coincided with the height of American civil rights struggle (Corrigan and Neal 2010: 204–205). To illustrate, in 1957, a Klansman from Tennessee named Jesse Stoner wrote that Islam is a nigger religion … Islam is a product of the coloured race. Islam is a dark religion for dark people … America is a white Christian nation and no infidelic religion such as Islam, [sic] has a right to exist under the American sun. Your Islam, your Mohammedanism is not a white religion. The white race will never accept it, so take it back to Africa with you. (Corrigan and Neal 2010: 205) 466

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Given this mid-20th century white supremacist rancor about Black Islam, it might seem strange that Americans coded Islam as distinctly Arab a mere 30 years later. While African Americans constituted a statistically significant portion of American Muslims in the mid-tolate 20th century, US military conflicts in Muslim-majority areas and immigration reforms contributed to the late-20th century racial coding of American Islam as brown, rather than black (or white, for that matter). Military conflicts contributed to Americans’ conflation of the Middle East and Southwest Asia, not Africa, as ‘the Islamic World.’ The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 further contributed to the reracialization of Islam. These reforms lifted restrictions on Asian immigration and led to a boom in the United States’ Asian Muslim population. This influx of Muslim immigrants contributed both to increased conflation of Islam with Arab identity and a surge in nativist sentiment.1 For the first time, American Muslims were predominantly South Asian immigrants, not Black folks born in the United States. Many Middle Eastern and Central Asian Muslims also immigrated, including tens of thousands of Iranians who came to the US to study. Many of these students remained in the US following the tumult of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. After the Revolution, the Islamic Republic of Iran imprisoned employees of the former US embassy in Iran. For 444 days, Iranian militants held more than 60 American embassy workers hostage in Tehran. The Iran hostage crisis, as it came to be known, was one of the most widely televised events in US history, sustaining nightly audience interest for more than a year (McAlister 2005: 198). The Iran hostage crisis in 1979–80 and the Reagan-Bush administration’s sustained assertion of US political and military influence in the Middle East and Southwest Asia reinforced Americans’ imaginings of Muslims as foreign, as neither white nor American (despite the fact that Iranians are phenotypically white), and as hostile toward the American nationstate.2 But it was the events of September 11th, 2001, that cemented Americans’ conceptualization of Muslims as phenotypically Arab, and as a violent terrorist threat to the United States. The primary racialization of American Muslims has shifted from Black to Brown in the 21st century. White supremacist rejection of Islam as fundamentally not-white, not-religion, and notAmerican has intensified in the past 18 years. As Khabeer notes, ‘the [American] Muslim is known through specific bodies … and behaviours … [T]hese bodies and behaviours are not just markers of racial difference but also signals of the Muslim as a threat’ (2016: 24). American Islam can exist and has existed as a religio-racial identity in defiance of white supremacy, as a resignification of Blackness outside enslavement and oppression. At the same time, Islam has not been practiced in the Unites States outside the exercise of state surveillance, regulation, and the legal institutionalization of white supremacy. In a nation that strongly identifies with white Christianity, American Islam’s connection to Black and Brown-ness, to slavery and immigration, and to a monotheism not centered on Jesus, has led to widespread anti-Muslim religio-racism. America treats Muslims as though they are not Americans – as though they are a threat.

Illustrating Islamfeindlichkeit An exhaustive catalogue of religio-racist and sexist incidents in recent American history well exceeds the scope of this entry. However, three events from the past several years illustrate how race and gender inform and complicate anti-Muslim hostility.

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Shepard Fairey’s ‘WE THE PEOPLE are greater than fear’ (January 2017) The election and inauguration of the 45th president of the United States inspired Shepard Fairey, the street artist responsible for Obama’s iconic HOPE presidential campaign posters, to create a poster series to appeal to Americans’ ‘human dignity and fairness’ (Stein 2017). With artists Jessica Sabogal and Ernesto Yerena, Fairey produced three red, blue, and beige images of minoritized American women – one Black, one Latina, and one Muslim – for free distribution as posters and large banners in advance of the inauguration. The images were also printed as poster-formatted full-page ads in the Washington Post. Of the three images in Fairey’s ‘We the People’ poster series, the one featuring a Muslim woman garnered the most public response. This poster adapts photographer Ridwan Adhami’s ‘I Am America,’ a striking image of Munira Ahmed expressing American patriotism through pious fashion (see Figure 31.1). In a graphic style reminiscent of his Obama/HOPE image, ‘WE THE PEOPLE are greater than fear’ shows a Muslim woman covering her head and shoulders in the stars and stripes of an American flag. Many people carried this image during nation-wide Women’s Marches in January 2017 to protest the 45th president’s inauguration. Some celebrated this image for acknowledging Muslim women’s American identities. Republican lawyer Saba Ahmed, who famously wore an American flag hijab to appear on Fox News, said the scarf ‘best represented [her] patriotism and faith’ (Sayej 2017). But many criticized Fairey for being a white man depicting a Muslim woman rather than promoting

Figure 31.1 ‘WE THE PEOPLE are greater than fear’ Artwork by Shepard Fairey for Amplifier.org

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the work of Muslim women artists, for reducing the diversity of Muslim identity to ‘women of cover’ (to use George W. Bush’s term), and for suggesting Muslims need to support American militarism and imperialism to be ‘truly’ American. Fairey responded that ‘artists won’t always get it right’ and that he would not ‘be intimidated by people or identity politics’ (Zara 2017). Some critics condemned the poster for encouraging performances of being a ‘good Muslim,’ one who supports the American nation-state regardless of American hostilities both toward Muslim-majority countries and toward American Muslims (Mamdani 2004). As Muslim fashion blogger Hoda Katebi asserts, Know that Muslims are tired of having to ‘prove’ they are American [and] know that one does not need to be American to deserve respect, humanity, dignity, equality, rights and freedom from hate and bigotry. An over-emphasis on being American as a prerequisite of deserving respect is harmful for immigrants and refugees. (Sayej 2017) This image offers insight into the complicated web of forces that comprise American Islamfeindlichkeit as a raced and gendered mode of religious intolerance. The women – many of them white, many of them Christian – who marched while carrying ‘WE THE PEOPLE are greater than fear’ to protest the 2017 inauguration might not have intended to demand overt performances of self-negating patriotism from American Muslims. But as we have established, anti-Muslim hostility is about more than feelings and intentions. White women comprise some of the strongest voices in overt American anti-Muslim rhetoric, it is true (SPLC 2015). But white women carrying images that compel American Muslims to drape themselves in the colors of a country responsible for drone strikes on Muslim-majority countries, a country that disproportionately surveils and polices American Muslims, is a subtler but no less pernicious form of raced and gendered religious intolerance.3

The execution of Domineque Ray (February 2019) The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) notes that denial of accommodations for Muslim prisoners or detainees was the most common form of anti-Muslim bias incident reported in 2018. Perhaps no incident underscores the gravity of this form of anti-Muslim hostility more clearly than the Supreme Court’s decision to deny Muslim death row prisoner Domineque Ray the right to die in the presence of his imam. Clergy who attend state executions in Alabama must be employed by its Department of Corrections, a regulation unique to the state. Ray’s imam wasn’t officially sanctioned to be in the execution room because Alabama only employs Christian ministers in its prisons. The events leading up to Ray’s execution betray an indifference, if not an outright hostility, to the Muslim inmate’s right to final religious accommodations. The state specified that Ray had been given a Qurʾan and, ‘incidentally,’ was allowed a prayer mat in his holding cell. But according to Justice Elena Kagan, ‘the prison refused to give Ray a copy of its own practices and procedures,’ so Ray was not told until January 23 that his imam could not be in the chamber with him. Having his imam by his side, instead of looking on from a viewing room, allegedly constituted a security risk. The American legal system’s problem with Muslims is not, of course, unique to Alabama’s Department of Corrections. Muslims comprise roughly 1 percent of the US population, but 469

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estimates by prison chaplains suggest Muslims make up about 9 percent of incarcerated people. Chaplains surveyed by the Pew Research Center also say Muslims are currently the most underserved religious group in American prisons. Only 7 percent of American chaplains are Muslim. Given the staggeringly incommensurate incarceration of Black men in the United States as well as the disproportionate incarceration of American Muslims, the Ray case highlights the American carceral system as a site of notable anti-Muslim religio-racism.

The Muslim ban(s): executive Orders 13769 & 13780 (January, March 2017) and Trump v. Hawaii (June 2018) The current president of the United States, who once told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that ‘Islam hates us,’ has tried to restrict immigration from Muslim-majority countries three times. The grounds for these executive orders were nominally ‘protecting the nation from foreign terrorist entry,’ despite no Muslim immigrants from the banned countries having perpetrated terrorist attacks on US soil. (As sociologist Charles Kurzman observes, ‘for a decade or more, Americans have been warned about widespread plots of Muslim extremism, and these warnings have proven hollow’ (2019a: 6).) The first two attempts, Executive Orders 13769 and 13780, both highlight so-called ‘honor killings’ among the justifications for these proposed restrictions: EO 13769: ‘The United States should not admit those who engage in acts of bigotry or hatred (including “honor” killings, other forms of violence against women, or the persecution of those who practice religions different from their own) or those who would oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation.’ EO 13780: pledges to collect and disseminate ‘information regarding the number and types of acts of gender-based violence against women, including so-called “honor killings,” in the United States by foreign nationals.’ A plain text reading of these executive orders reveals that the current administration is arguing that Islam is too intolerant a religion to be tolerated by Americans and that this administration views Muslims as inherently racist, sexist, and violent – especially toward women. The Supreme Court recently upheld the president’s third attempt to restrict immigration from Muslim-majority countries in Trump v. Hawaii (2018). In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor cited a statement the president issued in 2015 ‘calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,’ as well as numerous occasions upon which the president announced his plans for a so-called ‘Muslim ban.’ Sotomayor’s dissent condemns the administration’s anti-Muslim rhetoric, saying such statements allege that Islamic law ‘authorizes … unthinkable acts that pose great harm to Americans, especially women.’ Depicting Muslim men as a specific threat to women broadly is a well-established tactic in the history of American nativist rhetoric, which frequently uses (white) women’s bodily vulnerability to express anxieties about domestic sovereignty (Goodwin 2016, 2020). Using ‘honor killings’ to render domestic violence in Muslim families as especially heinous and specifically religious is also a standard tactic among anti-Muslim pundits (Hammer 2013a: 122–124). Such rhetoric has also been used to justify Western imperialism and aggression against Muslim majority nations – what Gayatri Spivak memorably called ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ (1988: 297). 470

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This kind of speech and the policies it justifies are notable not only for their overt religious intolerance toward Islam and Muslims, but also for the violences they obscure. Kurzman notes that in 2016, ‘Americans were less likely to be killed by Muslim extremists (1 in six million) than for being Muslim (one in one million)’ (2019b). (The 2015 murders of Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha in Chapel Hill, NC, gruesomely illustrate this statistic.) What is more, the primary terrorist threat currently facing the United States is not Muslim extremism, but angry white men with guns and histories of domestic abuse (Kurzman and Schanzer 2015; Traister 2016). The Bridge Initiative at Georgetown University reports that since 2015, Muslim men are twice as likely to be physically assaulted and 11 times more likely to be murdered than Muslim women (2018). At the same time, a Human Rights Commission report on religiously based harassment found that Black Muslim women in the Bronx were the most likely targets of religiously intolerant physical assault in New York City (Nasa 2018). American Muslims are at risk of bodily harm merely for being – or appearing to be, as many Sikh Americans can attest – Muslim in public. Rhetoric and policies that depict Muslim men as inherently violent toward women and essentially dangerous also distract from the abuse of women ‘indigenous’ to the United States (Abu-Lughod 2013: 83). There is nothing specifically religious about violence toward American women – it is an epidemic affecting the entire nation (NOW 2019). American women are far more likely to suffer domestic abuse than terrorist attacks: as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof hauntingly observes, ‘husbands are deadlier than terrorists’ (2017). The intimation that Islam condones sexual violence toward women is particularly specious, given Americans staggering and well-established tolerance of sexual assailants (Green 2018). As Islamophobia scholar Todd Green notes: To be sure, Muslim women are among the survivors of sexual assault and violence. But narratives of oppressed Muslim women suffering from a violent and sexually abusive religion have often functioned as a distraction, a means of keeping the attention of our elected leaders on the presumably greater threat posed by lecherous Muslim men so that they need not come to terms with the full extent of the physical and sexual abuse women in the United States experience, nor with the ways white evangelicals contribute to the conditions facilitating this abuse. (2018) As attorney and author Jennifer Zobair observes, ‘[her] rape and the culture in which it occurred were very non-Muslim affairs’ (2014). At the same time, Zobair credits her Muslim community for contributing to her survival after assault. Narratives that blame religion – any religion – for the overwhelming prevalence of gender-based and sexual violence in the US exculpate Americans for that violence while attempting to justify religious intolerance and reaffirm white Christian supremacy.

Conclusion The so-called Muslim ban, the execution of Domineque Ray without the benefit of an imam’s presence, and Shepard Fairey’s ‘WE THE PEOPLE are greater than fear’ all illustrate the varied and complex ways American anti-Muslim hostility operates as a racialized and gendered mode of religious intolerance. Islamfeindlichkeit continues to manifest in American 471

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policy, which demonizes Muslims and excludes them from national belonging. Such stories lay plain the co-construction of race, gender, and religion and reveal the prevalence of white Christian supremacy in the United States.

Notes 1 While the Arabic language serves an important religious function in the lives of many Muslims, relatively few Muslims are ethnically Arab. 2 The Reagan-Bush administrations conducted a US military intervention in Lebanon (1981–3), provided military support for Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War (1980–3), sold arms to Iran in the Iran-Iraq War (known as the Iran-Contra deal, 1983–5), bombing Libya (1986), and expanded arms sales to Saudi Arabia (1985–8) (McAlister 2005: 199, 233). 3 Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton similarly compelled ‘Good Muslim’ behaviors during all three 2016 presidential debates, calling on American Muslims to be on the ‘front lines’ to prevent attacks on Americans and to be the ‘eyes and ears’ of American national defense. (In fact, Secretary Clinton only discussed Muslims in terms of domestic and international security during these debates.)

Further reading Abu-Lughod, L. (2013) Do Muslim women need saving? Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Abu-Lughod expands on her field-changing 2002 article ‘Do Muslim women really need saving?’ to lay plain the western imperialist assumptions undergirding attempts to liberate Muslim women from Islam. Elfenbein, C. (2018) Mapping Islamophobia [Online]. Available at: http://mappingislamophobia.org (Accessed 1 June 2019). Elfenbein’s project surveys reports of anti-Muslim hostility in the United States from 2008–2018, organizing data into interactive maps of Islamophobia by year, type, and gender, as well as how anti-Muslim sentiment affects Muslim American participation in public life. Hammer, J. (2013) ‘Center stage: gendered Islamophobia and Muslim women,’ in Ernst, C. (ed.) Islamophobia in America: the anatomy of intolerance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 107–144. Hammer surveys key incidents in recent anti-Muslim rhetoric and action, demonstrating the key role gender plays in this form of religious intolerance. Johnson, S. (2015) African American religions 1500–2000: colonialism, democracy, and freedom. New York: Cambridge University Press. Johnson offers sharp insight into the racialization of American Muslims, especially with regard to Black American Muslims in the 20th and 21st centuries.

References Abu-Lughod, L. (2013) Do Muslim women need saving? Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Allison, D. (1994) ‘A question of class,’ in Skin: talking about sex, class, and literature. Ann Arbor: Firebrand Books. Bridge Initiative. (2018) When Islamophobia turns violent: the 2016 U.S. presidential elections [Online]. Available at: https://bridge.georgetown.edu/research/islamophobia-turns-violent/ (Accessed 1 June 2019). Bucar, E.M. (2010) ‘Bodies at the margins: the case of transsexuality in Catholic and Shia ethics,’ The Journal of Religious Ethics 38(4), pp. 601–615. Bucar, E.M. and Shirazi, F.S. (2012) ‘The “invention” of lesbian acts in Iran: interpretative moves, hidden assumptions, and emerging categories of sexuality,’ Journal of Lesbian Studies 16(4), pp. 416–434. Corrigan, J. and Neal, L. (2010) Religious intolerance in America: a documentary history. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Council on American-Islamic Relations. (2018) CAIR report: anti-Muslim bias incidents, hate crimes spike in second quarter of 2018 [Online]. Available at: www.cair.com/cair_report_anti_muslim_bias_incident s_hate_crimes_spike_in_second_quarter_of_2018 (Accessed 1 June 2019). Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2017) 2016 hate crime statistics: victims [Online]. Available at: https://ucr. fbi.gov/hate-crime/2016/topic-pages/victims (Accessed 1 June 2019). Goodwin, M. (2016) ‘“They do that to foreign women:” domestic terrorism and contraceptive nationalism in not without my daughter,’ The Muslim World 106(4), pp. 759–780.

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Goodwin, M. (2020) Abusing religion: narrative persecution, sex scandals, and American minority religions. New Brunswick: Rutgers. Gottschalk, P. (2019) Hate crimes associated with both Islamophobia and anti-Semitism have a long history in America’s past [Online]. Available at: https://theconversation.com/hate-crimes-associated-with-bothislamophobia-and-anti-semitism-have-a-long-history-in-americas-past-116255 (Accessed 1 June 2019). Green, T. (2018) ‘The Islamophobia industry,’ [Online]. Available at: https://sojo.net/articles/islamopho bia-industry (Accessed 1 June 2019). Hall, J. (2018) Anti-Muslim hate crime in the UK is at an all-time high, study shows [Online]. Available at: www.indy100.com/article/anti-muslim-hate-crime-islamaphobia-study-racism-uk-8459971 (Accessed 1 June 2019). Hammer, J. (2013a) ‘Center stage: gendered Islamophobia and Muslim women,’ in Ernst, C. (ed.) Islamophobia in America: the anatomy of intolerance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 107–144. Hammer, J. (2013b) ‘(Muslim) women’s bodies, Islamophobia, and American politics,’ Bulletin for the Study of Religion 42(1), pp. 29–36. Hirschkind, C. and Mahmood, S. (2002) ‘Feminism, the Taliban, and the politics of counter-insurgency,’ Anthropological Quarterly 75(2), pp. 339–354. Hollingsworth, J. (2019) Christchurch mosque shooter faces terrorism charge [Online]. Available at: https://edi tion.cnn.com/2019/05/21/asia/mosque-shooting-nz-terrorism-charge-intl/index.html (Accessed 1 June 2019). Hoodfar, H. (2001) ‘The veil in their minds and on our heads: veiling practices and Muslim women,’ in Castelli, E. (ed.) Women, gender, religion: a reader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 420–446. Johnson, S. (2015) African American religions 1500–2000: colonialism, democracy, and freedom. New York: Cambridge University Press. Joshi, K.Y. (2006) ‘The racialization of Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism in the United States,’ Equity & Excellence in Education 39(3), pp. 211–226. Khabeer, Su’ad Abdul. Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States. New York: NYU Press, 2016. Kishi, K. (2017) Assaults against Muslims in U.S. surpass 2001 level [Online]. Available at: www.pewresearch. org/fact-tank/2017/11/15/assaults-against-muslims-in-u-s-surpass-2001-level/ (Accessed 1 June 2019). Kristof, N. (2017) Husbands are deadlier than terrorists [Online]. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2017/02/ 11/opinion/sunday/husbands-are-deadlier-than-terrorists.html (Accessed 1 June 2019). Kurzman, C. (2019a) Muslim-American involvement with violent extremism, 2001–2018 [Online]. Available at: https://sites.duke.edu/tcths/files/2019/01/2018_Kurzman_Muslim-American_Involvement_ with_Violent_Extremism.pdf (Accessed 1 June 2019). Kurzman, C. (2019b) Muslim-American terrorism [Online]. Available at: https://kurzman.unc.edu/muslimamerican-terrorism/ (Accessed 1 June 2019). Kurzman, C. and Schanzer, D. (2015) The growing right-wing terror threat [Online]. Available at: www. nytimes.com/2015/06/16/opinion/the-other-terror-threat.html (Accessed 1 June 2019). Majeed, D. (2015) Polygyny: what it means when African American Muslim women share their husbands. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Mamdani, M. (2004) Good Muslim, bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the roots of terror. New York: Pantheon Books. Marr, T. (2006) The cultural roots of American Islamicism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Massad, J. (2007) Desiring Arabs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mathias, C. (2015) Six rules of Islamophobia in America [Online]. Available at: www.huffpost.com/entry/ islamophobia-america_n_587cf491e4b0e58057ff98e0 (Accessed 1 June 2019). McAlister, M. (2005) Epic encounters: culture, media, and U.S. interests in the Middle East since 1945. Berkeley: University of California Press. Morgenstein Fuerst, I.R. (2017) Indian Muslim minorities and the 1857 rebellion: religion, rebels and jihad. London: I.B. Tauris. Najmabadi, A. (2005) Women with mustaches and men without beards: gender and sexual anxieties of Iranian modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Najmabadi, A. (2013) Professing selves: transsexuality and same-sex desire in contemporary Iran. Durham: Duke University Press. Nasa, R. (2018) In New York, intolerance has become routine [Online]. Available at: www.propublica.org/ article/in-new-york-intolerance-has-become-routine (Accessed 1 June 2019).

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National Organization for Women. (2019) Violence against women in the United States: statistics [Online]. Available at: https://now.org/resource/violence-against-women-in-the-united-states-statistic/ (Accessed 1 June 2019). Sayej, N. (2017). Muslim women respond to Shepard Fairey’s American flag hijab poster [Online]. Available at: www.artslant.com/ew/articles/show/47290-muslim-women-respond-to-shepard-faireys-americanflag-hijab-poster (Accessed 2 January 2020). Southern Poverty Law Center. (2015). Women against Islam [Online]. Available at: www.splcenter.org/ fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2015/women-against-islam (Accessed 1 June 2019). Southern Poverty Law Center. (2017). Hate crimes rise for second straight year; anti-Muslim violence soars amid President Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric [Online]. Available at: www.splcenter.org/news/2017/11/13/ hate-crimes-rise-second-straight-year-anti-muslim-violence-soars-amid-president-trumps (Accessed 1 June 2019). Spivak, G.C. (1988) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ in Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. (eds.) Marxism and the interpretation of culture. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, pp. 271–314. Stein, P. (2017) The artist who created the Obama ‘Hope’ posters is back with new art this inauguration [Online]. Available at: www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2017/01/20/the-artist-who-created-theobama-hope-posters-is-back-with-a-new-art-this-inauguration/ (Accessed 2 January 2020). Sweet, J.W. (2008) Bodies politic: negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Townes, E. (1995) In a blaze of glory: womanist spirituality as social witness. Nashville: Abindgdon Press. Traister, R. (2016) What mass killers really have in common [Online]. Available at: www.thecut.com/2016/ 07/mass-killers-terrorism-domestic-violence.html (Accessed 1 June 2019). Weisenfeld, J. (2016) New world a-coming: black religion and racial identity during the Great Migration. New York: New York University Press. Zara, J. (2017). Shepard Fairey: “I’m not going to be intimidated by identity politics” [Online]. Available at: www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/nov/14/shepard-fairey-new-exhibition-la-damaged (Accessed 2 January 2020). Zobair, J. (2014) The religion of my rape [Online]. Available at: https://thefeministwire.com/2014/11/reli gion-rape/ (Accessed 1 June 2019).

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INDEX

In classifying entries of persons and titles no account has been taken of the Arabic prefix al-.

abayas 414, 415, 416, 424 ʿAbd al-Karı̄ m al-Rifā ʿı̄ 320 AbdoulKarim, Iman 65 ʿAbd al-Razzā q al-S ̣anʿā nı̄ 43, 46, 53, 106–107 ʿAbduh, Muhammad 4–5 Abdullah, Daayiee 141 Abdullah, Zarina 452 Abdul-Rahim, Hafsah 430 abolition of slavery in East Africa 261–262 Aboosally, Roshan 172 abortion 135, 350, 354 Abou-Bakr, Omaima 211 Abraham 76, 122 Abū Ḥanı̄ fa 50, 117–118, 119, 120 Abu-Lughod, Lila 138, 271, 380 Abu-Odeh, L. 135–136 Abū al-Qā sim al-Zahrā wı̄ 122 Abū Yū suf 118, 119, 120 al-ʿAdawiyya, Rabiʿa 2, 164, 166–167 Aden, Halima 428 Adhami, Ridwan, ‘I Am America’ 468 Admiral, Rosemary 11 adultery laws 241, 243; see also zinā (illicit sex) Afghanistan 137, 274–275, 347, 442 Afif, Fatima 439 African American Muslims: anti-Muslim religioracism and 464–467, 469–470; colorism in Muslim women’s advertising 431; historical background 466; social justice and Black empowerment 64–66, 199–203, 425, 466 Afsaruddin, A. 272 Aghaie, Kamran 182–183 aging and the elderly in Aliabad, Iran: introduction 358–359; in the 21st century 362–369; in 1978-

1979 359–362, 361, 367–368; advantages for 365–367; challenges for 367–369; family care and potential replacements for 369–370; Iranian elderly living abroad 370–371 Ahmad, Yasmin 453 Ahmed, Leila 11 Ahmed, Munira 468 Ahmed, Saba 468 Aisha (Muhammad’s wife) 27, 28, 107–109, 290–291, 402 Ajmain, Khalid 396–397, 399, 400, 401 akhlaq (ethics), gender hierarchy and 64 Akou, Heather 427 al-Azhar University 212, 344, 350 Al Banawi, Arwa 419 Algeria: family planning in 346, 347, 348; French colonial rule and 149–150, 152–153, 440; women filmmakers 457; women’s rights in 136, 139–140 Alhamdu (film) 65–66 Aliabad, aging and the elderly in see aging and the elderly in Aliabad, Iran Ali, Abdullah Yusuf 392 Ali Bhutto, Zulfikar 65, 66 Alidou, Ousseina 223, 258 Ali, Kecia 4, 25, 31, 32, 33, 58, 61, 91–92, 93, 202, 336, 337, 394 Alinejad, Masih 418 Ali’s Wedding (2017) 457 Ali, Usatz 396 All-American Muslim 444 Allen, W. 284 Allison, Dorothy 465 al-Qaʿida 203, 270, 277, 278

475

Index

Alsuntany, Evelyn 428–429 Amal House 199–202, 205 Ammuss, Alaa 428 Amreeka (2009) 456 Anderson, Michael 252 Angha, Nahid 174 An-Naʿim, Abdullahi 335, 336, 337 Anning, Fraser 443 anti-Muslim hostility: hijab and burqa bans as 436–438; and the integrated Muslim 443–444; Islamic gender relations as sexist and violent 379–380, 390–391, 436–437; in the US 379–380, 385–386, 463–472, 468 ʿAqı̄ dat al-Tahwh ̄ ̣ıd (Maybar) 322 Arab countries, fertility in see fertility in Arab countries Arab settlement in East Africa 257–261 Arendt, Hannah 204 Aristotle 121 al-ʿAshsha, Samar 324–325 assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) 349, 349–354 Association Islamique du Niger 225 Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE) 396 Athirah (Mother (Emma)) 451–452 ʿAttar, Farid al-Din 164, 166, 167 AttarJafari, Farzad 174–175 Aulette, J. R. 227 Averroes 306 Avicenna 121–122 al-Awzā ʿı̄ , Abū ʿAmr ʿAbd al-Rah ̣mā n 46–47 Ayat-Ayat Cinta (The Love Verses) 451 al-ʿAyta,̣ Duriyya 319–320 Ayubi, Zahra 12, 93 Azad, Arezou 164 Azam, Hina 89 ʿazl (coitus interruptus) 315, 347 ʿAzzam, ʿAbdullah 274–275 Baba, Shuhaimi 452 Badawi, Jamal 85, 86, 87 Badinter, Elisabeth 154, 156 Badran, M. 271 Bagong Buwan (New Moon, 2001) 453–454 Bakari, Mtoro bin Mwinyi 258 Bakhtiar, Laleh 392 Bakkar, Selina 417 Al Banawi, Arwa 419 Ban Ki-Moon 139 banlieues 150 al-Banna, Hasan 272–273 Bano, Samia 332 Barayeva, Khava 270 Barlas, Asma 24, 25, 59 Baron, B. 271

al-Bast f ı̄ al-qiraʾā t al-ʿashr (al-ʿAshsha) 324 Bauer, Karen 23, 24–25, 31 Baumann, Oscar 261 Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, Muhammad Raheem 170 bayt al-tā ̣ ’a (house of obedience) 84 al-Baʿuniyyah, ʿAishah 164 “beating verse” (Q. 4:34) 26, 31–35, 384–385, 390, 392–394 beauty standards: in Muslim women’s advertising 430–432; Western attitudes towards fashion hijab 416–417 Becker, Felicitas 264–265 Beckmann, Nadine 258, 265 Bektashi Order ritual activities 165 Belemir Moda 414 Believers Bail Out (BBO) 202–203, 205 Bell, Kirsten 313 Bello, Muhammad 3 Bennoune, Karima 133 Benyamina, Houda 458 Berbagi Suami (Love for Share) 451, 452 Bergé, Pierre 416, 417 Berger, J. 311 binary sex/gender 7–9, 104 Bin Ladin, Usama 270, 271, 274, 277 birth control, withdrawal method of 54, 315, 347 Black Muslim women and colorism 430–431 Blaydes, L. 271 Bloom, Mia 271 Boden, Alison 331 Bourdieu, Pierre 265 Bousquet, Danielle 154 Bramantyo, Hanung 451 Brand Islam 413, 416 British India, Islam and gender in: introduction 241–243; Charter Act of 1813 244–245, 247; Contagious Diseases Acts 243, 247–249; East India Trading Company 243, 244, 245, 251; Great Rebellion of 1857 243–244, 245–246, 247; Indian Penal Code of 1860 241–242, 243–244, 246–247; Muslim Personal Law 241–242, 251–252, 331–332; triple talaq 241, 246, 250–252, 253 Brown, Jonathan 26 Brun, C. 283–284 Bucar, Elizabeth 6, 156 al-Bukhā rı̄ 105–106, 325 Burke, Raqib Brian 174 Burke, Roland 329 burqa controversy 151, 154, 156, 435–436, 440–442 burqinis 151, 436, 441, 444 Bush, Laura 137 al-Bū tı̄ ̣, Ramad ̣ā n 321–322 Buturović , Amila 165

476

Index

Cairo Declaration of Human Rights 135–136, 330, 331, 334 Calder, Norman 32, 123 Canada, religious arbitration courts in 332 Cattan, Olivia 154 chaplaincy, Muslim 214–220 charity see zakat, gender and Charlie Hebdo magazine 438 Charter Act (1813) 244–245, 247 Chaudhry, Ayesha 24, 30, 31, 34, 336–337, 384, 392 Cheniere, Eugene 435 Chermin (The Mirror, 2007) 452 Chinese Eyes (Sepet, 2004) 453 choice feminism 310 Christian-Muslim comparative feminist theology 71, 74–77 Christian missionaries 244, 245 cinematic production see filmmaking, Muslim women and circumcision 124, 134, 140, 313–314 Cisse, Mahy 397–398, 399 Clark, Patricia 25 Clooney, Francis X 71 clothing, as social signifier 407, 419–420 clothing, Muslim women’s see Muslim women’s modest dress coitus interruptus (ʿazl) 54, 315, 347 Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) 157 colonialism: Arab settlement in East Africa 257–261; defined 310; French colonial rule in North Africa 149–150, 152–153, 440; and Islamic engagement with human rights 328–337; see also British India, Islam and gender in colonialist feminism: and decolonial feminism 314–316; defined 310–311; liberal autonomy and female circumcision 313–314; liberal autonomy and hijab 312–313; and scholarship about Muslim women 311–312 coloniality, defined 314 colorism in advertising 430–431 community: ethics of care towards 64–65; umma, Muslim identity and 5 Companions of the Prophet 322–323 comparative feminist theology 71–77 complementarity, gender 58–59, 61, 86, 93, 209, 210–211, 273, 330 conception, premodern theories about 121–122 concubines, slaves possessing 49 consent of women to marriage 46–47, 48–49, 54 consumption and Islamic marketing 413–418, 414, 423–426; Muslim women’s fashion brands and social media advertising 426–432 Contagious Diseases Acts (CDA) 243, 247–249 contraception, female 345–347

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) 136–137, 331 Cook, David 272 cooke, miriam 311 Cook, J. 278 Coomaraswamy, Radhika 132, 137 Copeland, M. Shawn 75 Cornell, Rkia 164 cosmetic genital surgery 313–314 Cox, Ayça Tunç 455 cross-dressing 168, 169 cultural integration in Europe 146–147, 443–444 cultural relativism and human rights 133–135, 329, 337 Curtis, Edward 379 Cyber City, Jordan 288–289 Czerniawski, A.M. 432 Dabiq magazine 270, 276, 278 Dabis, Cherien 456 Dafther Jailani shrine 172 Damascus, women scholars of 318–325; Asmā ʾ Ṭabbā ʿ 322–324; Duriyya al-ʿAytạ 319–320; Samar al-ʿAshsha 324–325; Samira Zā yid 320–322; Suʿā d Maybar 322 dan Fodiyo, Usman 1 Daughters of the Three-Tailed Banner (2016) 454 de Beauvoir, Simone 7 decolonial feminism 314–316 Decolonization (2010) 329 Decuir, Amaraah 64, 65 Deeb, L. 183, 188, 292 Delphy, Christine 157 de Perthuis, Karen 431 De Sondy, A. 12 Diaz-Abaya, Marilou 454 Dinata, Nia 451 disobedience, in marriage see nushū z of spouses Divines (2016) 458 divorce: bayt al-tā ̣ ’a concept and 84; definition and modes of 46; oaths 305–306; Shah Bano case 252, 331; triple talaq in India 241, 246, 250–252, 253; waiting period before remarriage 50, 51, 52–53 Doi, Abdur Rahman 85, 86, 87, 93 domestic violence in American Muslim communities: introduction 375–377; awareness work and advocates 377–378; gender, religion, and cultural influences 380–381, 382–386; Islamophobia and 379–380; law enforcement and 381–382 domestic violence in Singapore Muslim communities: introduction 390–391; Islam in Singapore 394–396; Qurʾan 4:34 (“beating verse”) 392–394; Sout Ilaahi and the #VoiceOut campaign 396–401

477

Index

dominance feminism 310, 313 Durū s min S ı̄ rat al-Nabawiyya (Zā yid) 322 East Africa see Swahili coast of East Africa East Essence 427, 430, 431 East India Trading Company 243, 244, 245, 251 East Is East (1999) 456–457 Egypt, fertility and family planning in 344–345, 346, 347, 348, 349 Eisenlohr, P. 222 elderly women see aging and the elderly in Aliabad, Iran Elias, Jamal 165 Emmanuel College, Toronto 216 Emon, Anver 331 Engaging Modernity (2005) 223 Engineer, Asghar Ali 85, 86, 87 Erdogan, Recep 284 Ergüven, Deniz Gamze 458 Espersen, Søren 440 ethics see Islamic gender ethics European colonialism: French rule in North Africa 149–150, 152–153, 440; and Islamic engagement with human rights 328–337; racial hierarchies and orientalism 9–10; see also British India, Islam and gender in Europe, Muslim cultural integration in 146–147, 443–444 Evanson, Tanya 175 face-veil controversy 151, 154, 156, 435–436, 440–442 Fadl, Dr. (Sayyid Imam) 274 El Fadl, Khaled Abou 32, 33, 330, 336, 337 al-Fahd, Nasir 277 Fairey, Shepard, ‘We the People’ 468, 468–469 FaithTrust Institute 381 Fajr International Fashion Festival 410–411, 410–412 family law see personal status (family) law family planning see fertility in Arab countries Faraj, Muhammad ʿAbd al-Salam 273 al-Faruqi, Maysam 24, 25 fashion advertising to Muslim women see marketing fashion to Muslim women fashion designers as social activists 418–419 fashion hijab 413, 416–418 fashion shows, Islamic 410–411, 410–412, 415 Fatima al-Zahraʾ (Muhammad’s daughter) 5, 182 Fatima of Cordoba 165–166 fatwas: on family planning and reproductive technologies 344, 349–352; on female participation in jihad 277; on historical zinā cases 300–308; on intersex 125–126; in Islamic jurisprudence 60–61; on subservience for wives 54; women issuing 228 female circumcision 124, 134, 140, 313–314

female contraception 345–347 feminine characteristics, men with 102–106 feminine ideal in Sufism 163–164, 165–168 femininity: French concept of 154–156, 416–417, 440; light skin and thinness as normative 430–432; patriarchal and traditional concept of 210, 211, 217–218, 258–259, 265; rajulas, women lacking 106–109 feminism: ethics of care and social justice 64–66; feminist readings of the Qur’an 58–60; gender hierarchies in kalam and akhlaq 62–63; Islamic jurisprudence and equality 60–62; and mixité in France 154–155, 157; Muslima theology 68–77; and Sufism 62–63 Feminist Edges of the Qurʾan 25, 392 fertility in Arab countries: introduction 343–344; assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) 349, 349–354; family planning and fertility decline 344–349, 346, 347, 348 Filipino Muslim filmmakers 451, 453–454 Fillon, François 436 filmmaking, Muslim women and: introduction 447; cinematic representations of Muslims 447–449; principal themes concerning 449–451; Southeast Asia cinema 451–454; transnational and intercultural cinema 454–458 Findlay, Rose 431 Fiqh al-sunna (Sā biq) 319 Fiqh al-ʿibā dā t (al-ʿAyta ̣) 319–320 fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) and gender ethics 60–62, 89–90 Fischer, Michael 181 fitrạ (human nature) 75, 76 fornication see zinā (illicit sex) Foucault, Michel 186 France, politicization of Muslim women’s dress in: as anti-Muslim hostility 436–437; hijab, burqa and burqini bans 435–436, 440–442, 444; history of 149–152; integration, citizenship and laïcité 146–149, 443–444; laïcité and religious freedom 147, 437–439; prescribing female sexuality 440; women’s agency and 439–442 Francis, Bayrou 435 Fredericks, James 72 French colonial rule in North Africa 149–150, 152–153, 440 Friedrich, Fariha 173, 174 Galen 121 Geiger, Suzanne 263 Geissinger, Aisha 27 Geissinger, Ash 59–60 gender: binary views of 7–9, 104; complementarity 58–59, 61, 86, 93, 209, 210–211, 273, 330; defined 259 Gendered Morality 58, 64, 66 gender ethics see Islamic gender ethics

478

Index

gender mixing see mixité (gender mixing) gender selection via IVF 354 gender theory and pre-modern sources: introduction 101–102; enslaved vs. freeborn masculinity 109–111; gender nonnormative persons 102–109; see also intersex genital surgery, female 313–314 Gerin Report (2010) 148–149, 151, 154, 156 Gesink, Indira 7 GhaneaBassiri, Kambiz 193 al-Ghazā lı̄ , Abū Hamid 315, 325 al-Ghazzı̄ , N. 126 Gilligan, Carol 64 Gilsenan, Michael 182 Glassman, Jon 260 God, characteristics of 63 Gökarıksel, Banu 423 Gönül Dönmez-Colin, Gönül 447 Gonzalez-Perez, Margaret 271 Goris, Myrium 270 Great Mosque of Aleppo, Syria 286 Great Rebellion of 1857 243–244, 245–246, 247 Green, Todd 471 guardianship of women (qiwā ma) 26, 47, 61, 210–211, 335; for female jihad fighters 274, 275, 277, 278 Gubra (Anxiety, 2006) 453 Guenez, Ghizlan 415 Habib, Claude 155 Habib, Samar 141 h ̣add punishments 299–300, 301, 305–306 hadith: on alms-giving 196; on female consent to marriage 48–49; gender ethics and 4, 58–60, 259; gender nonnormativity and intersex in 102–109, 119, 122–123; on h ̣add punishments for zinā 301; on orphans and multiple marriages 27, 43–44; theories about conception and biological sex in 121, 122–123; transmission, authority, and authenticity 44, 102; used in Islamic fashion advertising 427; on wife-beating 33, 385, 390, 392, 393; women scholars of 321, 324–325 Hagar/Hajar 77 hagiographies of Sufi mystics 164–165 Hajby, Jihane 416 al-Ḥalabı̄ , I. 124 al-Ḥ ̣ alabı̄ , Najā h ̣ 320 Hallaq, Wael 300 Halle, Randall 455 Hammer, Juliane 212, 390, 393–394, 464 Ḥanaf ı̄ legal school: on khunthā s (intersex) 117–118, 119–120, 121, 124–125; triple talaq in 251; on women’s consent to marriage 45; women’s scholarship in 320

Ḥanbalı̄ legal school: on khunthā s (intersex) 118, 119, 125; on the sexual fulfilment of wives 315; women scholars of 315; on women’s consent to marriage 45 Hardinge, Arthur 261 harems 249 Harrison, Susan 216 Hartford Seminary Islamic Chaplaincy Program 215, 216 Harun, Ainun 396, 397, 398, 399, 401, 402 al-Haskuri, Musa 306 hate crimes against Muslims 463–464, 471 headscarves see hijab Hegland, Mary Elaine 182 henna, self-adornment with 106–108 al-Hibri, Azizah 25, 87–89, 90 Hidayatullah, Aysha 10, 25, 27, 36, 59, 71, 392 hierarchy: vs. gender equality 47–48, 63–64, 104, 168, 259, 383; in medieval societies 25 Higbee, Will 455 high heel shoes, gender practices and 8 hijab: French politicization of 150, 151, 154, 156–157, 435–444; in Iran 409–410, 418–419; patriotic 429, 468; Syrian refugees in Jordan and 288; trendy and designer 413, 416–418; Western stereotypes concerning 312–313, 436–437, 439–440, 442, 443–444 hijab patrol (gasht ı̄ ershad) 409–410 hijras 175 Hijra story 292 Hill Fletcher, Jeannine 75, 76 Hill, Joseph 11, 171 Hippocrates 121 Hixon, Lex 173 Hoel, Nina 75 homoerotic poetry 168–169 homo islamicus, myth of 135–136 homosexuality: criminalization/decriminalization of 175–176, 241; in Sufi history 168–169; UN ceases to list as disease 139 honour killings 307, 470 human nature (fitra) ̣ 75, 76 human rights, Islamic approaches to: introduction 328–329; family law and women’s rights 330–334; political self-determination and women’s rights 334–337; Universal Declaration vs. Cairo Declaration 329–330 human rights, sexuality and: introduction 130–132; criticisms of the human rights framework 132–138; sex assignment surgery 126–127; sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) 138–142 Hunter-Henin, Myriam 442 Husayn ibn Ali (Muhammad’s grandson) 183, 184, 188 Al Hussein, Zeid Raʿad 127

479

Index Ibn Abı̄ Rabā h ̣, ʿAtā ̣ ʾ 33, 35, 36 Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49–51, 52–54, 55 Ibn Hazam, Abū Muhammad 166 Ibn al-Ḥimsı̄ ̣, A. 126 Ibn Jarı̄ r, Muhammad al-Ṭabarı̄ 27–28, 30–31, 35 Ibn al-Jawzi, Abu al-Faraj 164 Ibn Jurayj, ʻAbd al-Malik 53 Ibn Manz ̣ū r, Muhammad 121 Ibn al-Mundhir, Muhammad b. Ibrā hı̄ m 44 Ibn Qudā mah al-Maqdı̄ sı̄ 315 Ibn Saʿd, Muhammad, Tabaqat of 109–111, 323 Ibn Sı̄ nā , Abu Ali (Avicenna) 121–122 Ibn Sı̄ rı̄ n, Muhammad 49 Ibn Taymiyyah, Taqı̄ al-Dı̄ n 315 Ibn al-ʿArabı̄ , Abū Bakr 33–34, 36, 62, 122–123 Ibn ʿArabi, Muhyiddin 165–166 Ibn ʿĀshū r, Muhammad al-Ṭā hir 33 Ibtissem, Mennel 444 ICNA Relief, Amal House project 199–202, 205 Imam-e Zamana Mission (IZM) 195–198, 205 imams: in contemporary North America 211–212; female 212–214, 320; openly gay 141; training programs for 216–217 immigration: to France from former colonies 149–150; of Iranians to Western countries 370–371; to US from Muslim-majority countries 212, 466, 467, 470 Immigration and National Act (1965) 212 India: British colonial rule in (see British India, Islam and gender in); zakat projects in 195–198, 205 Indian Penal Code of 1860 241–242, 243–244, 246–247 Indonesian cinema 451–452 inheritance: kinship concerns and 302, 351–352; rights of intersex 117–118, 119, 123 Inhorn, Marcia 11 Inside the Gender Jihad 58 Instagram, women’s fashion advertising on 425, 429–431 integration of Muslims in Europe 146–147, 443–444 interreligious feminist engagement 71–77 intersectionality, anti-Muslim hostility and 465 intersex 7; introduction 116–117; conception theories in medical literature 121–122; as cultural work 125–126; earliest sources and the problem of attribution 117–121; in European societies 118; inheritance rights of 117–118, 119, 123; postformative legal tradition 123–125; premodern scholarship and contemporary activisim 126–127; Qur’an commentary 122–123 Iran: aging and the elderly in Aliabad (see aging and the elderly in Aliabd, Iran); compulsory hijab and Islamic dress in 156, 408–412, 410, 411; fertility and family planning in 347, 352,

354; homoerotic practices in 8; Shiʿism 180–185, 186, 188 Iran hostage crisis, 1979–80 467 Iraq 186, 187, 270, 278, 345, 346, 347 Irbid, Jordan 285 al-Islambouli, Khalid 273–274 Islamfeindlichkeit, defined 464 Islamic Circle of North America Relief 199 Islamic dress see Muslim women’s modest dress Islamic fashion shows 410–411, 410–412, 415 Islamic gender ethics: introduction 57–58; ethics of care 64–65, 66; hierarchies in kalam and akhlaq 63–64; love ethics 65–66; Qur’an and hadith 58–60; Sufism and 62–63 Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) and gender ethics 60–62, 89–90 Islamic law: colonialist feminism and women’s status in 312; decolonial feminism and 314–316; early legal tradition and literature 43–44; on illicit sexual relations (see zinā (illicit sex)); intersex in 117–118, 124–125; marriage law, overview of 45–46; in the Ottoman Empire 300; personal law in India 241–242, 250–252; Sharia 84–85, 89–90, 94, 135, 245, 250, 331–337, 332; women scholars of 318–320 Islamic law reform and gender: introduction 83–84; early scholarship on 85–87; ethics-based approach to 91–93; gender-based approaches to 87–91; sex differences, narratives of 93 Islamic legal schools (madhhab): Ḥanaf ı̄ 45, 117–118, 119–120, 121, 124–125, 251, 320; Ḥanbalı̄ 45, 118, 119, 125, 315; Maliki 103, 122–123, 300, 301, 304, 306, 320; Shā fiʿı̄ 33, 36, 45, 46, 49, 257, 315, 320 Islamic Masculinities 12 Islamic state, desirability of 335, 336 Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) 270, 271, 272, 278; publications 276–277, 278 Islamic women scholars of Damascus 318–325 Islamophobia see anti-Muslim hostility Islam, overview of 3–4 istibrā ʾ (waiting period) see waiting period I Still Hide to Smoke (2017) 457 IVF, fatwas concerning 349, 349–354 Izala movement 225–226 Jackson, Michael D. 194 Jahanara, Princess 170–171 al-Jā mi ʿf ı̄ al-sı̄ rat al-nabawiyya (Zā yid) 321 Janmohamed, Shelina 423 al-Jerrahi, Nur Al-Anwar (Lex Hixon) 173 jihadists, female see mujhā hidā t in Jihadi-Salafism Johns, Anthony 394, 396 Johnson, Sylvester 379 Jordan: family planning in 345–346, 346, 347, 348; Syrian refugee crisis and (see Syrian women refugees in Jordan)

480

Index

Jouanno Report (2016) 149, 151, 153–154, 155, 156 Jumbe, Aboud 264 justice, Islamic law reform and 89–92 kafa’a requirement 260 kalam (theology), gender hierarchy in 63 Kang, A. J. 223 Karbala Paradigm 181–182 Karume, Abeid 264 Katebi, Hoda 469 Katz, Marion 9, 91, 103 Keddie, Nikki 181–182 Kenya: abolition of slavery in 261–262; decolonization in 264; female jihadist attacks in 276–277 Khabeer, Su’ad Abdul 467 Khadı̄ ja (Muhammad’s wife) 322–323 Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali 182, 184, 186, 187, 352 Khan-Din, Ayub 456 Khan, Mohammed Sidique 275 Khan, Noor Inayat 173 al-Khansaa magazine 278 Khansā ʾ Brigades 278 Khan, Zia Inayat 173 khilafah (vicegerent of God) 63, 64, 75 Khoja-Moolji, Shenila 215 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah 127, 182 Khoo (2010) 453 al-Khudayr, ʿAli Khudayr 277 Khundmiri, Alam 204 khunthā s see intersex Kilam, Sunny and Krupa 427 Kristof, Nicholas 471 Kugle, Scott 169 Ku Klux Klan (KKK) 466 Kurayyim Rā jih ̣, Muhammad 324 Kurzman, C. 471 Laborde, Françoise 440 laïcité 147, 152, 153, 437–438, 439, 441 Lallab 157 Lamptey, Jerusha 59 Lawrence, Bruce 331 Lazar, Michelle M. 429 Lebanon, fertility and family planning in 345, 346, 347, 348, 352 Lesmana, Mira 452 Lessons from the Life of the Prophet (Zā yid) 322 Levine, Phillipa 247, 248 Lewis, Reina 426, 431 Lewthwaite, Samantha 275–276 LGBT rights 126–127, 139, 141–142, 175–176, 241; see also intersex Limbunan (Bridal Quarters, 2010) 453 Little, David 334 Long, Scott 134

Loras, Sulayman 174 love ethics 65–66 Love for Share (Berbagi Suami) 451, 452 Lover, The 62 Love Verses, The (Ayat-Ayat Cinta) 451 Lugones, María 314 Lyons, Amelia 153 MacMaster, Neil 153 Macron, Emmanuel 148 Macy’s, Islamic fashion at 428 madhhab see Islamic legal schools (madhhab) Mafraq, Jordan 284–285 Mahmood, Saba 11, 180, 272, 282, 284 Mahmoud, Mohamed 393 Majeed, Debra 5 Malama Bushara 230–233 Malama Huda 227–230 Malamas (women scholars), rise of 227–234; Malama Bushara 230–233; Malama Huda 227–230 Malaysia: cinema 451, 452–453; Muslim women’s fashion 413–414 male guardianship of women 26, 47, 61, 210–211, 335; for female jihad fighters 274, 275, 277, 278 male superiority 58–59, 63, 210–211 Maliki legal school 103, 122–123, 300, 301, 304, 306, 320 Malik, Jaafar 426 Mangansakan, Teng 453 al-Mansour, Haifaa 457 Mardoquio, Arnel 453 al-Marghı̄ nā nı̄ , Burhā n al-Dı̄ n 124 marketing fashion to Muslim women 412–414, 414, 416–418; online retail and social media advertising 425–432 Marks, Laura 455 marriage 4–5, 45–46; bayt al-tā ̣ ’a (house of obedience) concept 84; Cairo Declaration and gender complementarity in 330; combining multiple wives 50, 52–53; consent of women to 46–47, 48–49, 54, 302; contractual conditions for 45–47, 61; disobedience (nushū z) and wifebeating 26, 30–36, 384–385, 390, 392–394; dissolution of 46; dowers 303–304; of intersex persons 125, 126; legal reform of 87, 88, 91, 93; loving ideal of 384; of minors 126; and orphans 27–30, 303; overview of marriage law 45–46; with People of the Book 51–52; polygynous 4–5, 24, 26–30; rights and duties of spouses 30–31, 36, 37, 87–88, 330; sexual intercourse in 53–54; and slavery 47–51, 260–261; status, intermarriage and the kafa’a requirement 260–261; temporary (mutʾa) 353; waiting period condition 303, 304–305, 307; zinā disputes and 302–305

481

Index

married women see wives martyrdom, female see mujhā hidā t in Jihadi-Salafism Maryam (mother of Jesus) 166–167, 170, 291–292 masculine characteristics, women with 106–109 masculinity: enslaved vs. freeborn in early Islam 109–111; Muslim chaplaincy in North America and 219–220; traditional and patriarchal notions of 209, 210, 211, 258–259, 264–265 Mattson, Ingrid 34, 214, 216 mawā l ı̄ 109, 111 Maybar, Suʿā d 322 Mayer, Ann Elizabeth 330 Maznavi, M. Hasna 213 McLarney, Ellen 423 McMahon, Elizabeth 262 Mears, Ashley 431 media see Niger, audiovisual media and religious authority in; social media advertising and Islamic fashion Memorial of the Friends of God 164 Mendez, Xhercis 314 Mendoza, Breny 314 menstruation, sex during 54 Mernissi, Fatima 11, 74, 393 Mexico City Declaration on Population and Development 345 Middle Eastern countries, fertility in see fertility in Arab countries milk kinship (ridaʾ) 53, 353 Mipsterz 65–66 Mir-Hosseini, Ziba 61, 87, 89–91, 333, 337 Mirror, The (Chermin) 452 misogyny, classical Qur’anic exegesis as 23–24, 25 mixité (gender mixing) 148–149, 152–158 Mjalli, Yasmeen 419 Moallem, Minoo 423 Modanisa 427–428, 430 modest women’s dress see Muslim women’s modest dress modesty, female 265 Modi, Narendra 241 Mohamed, Bibi Titi 263 Mohammed, Heba 349 Momin Libas 414 Moorish Science Temple 466 Moosa, Ebrahim 351 Morocco: family planning in 345, 346, 347, 348; legal system 333 mosques: feminist and LGBT-friendly 141; presence of women in 9, 111, 286–287; women’s leadership of 212–214, 217 Motzki, H. 44 Mubarak, Hadia 12–13 mudhakkara (man-like female) 110–111 Mughal Empire laws 245, 250 Muhā ajirun story 292

muh ̣addithas 324–325 Muhammad, Prophet 3–4; biographical compilations on 321–322; Companions of 322–323; on female subordination to men 259; and the hadith tradition 102; on man-like women (rajulas) 106–108; model for Muslim chaplaincy 219; and wife-beating 392, 393, 399, 402 Muharram 181, 184–185, 365–366 al-Muh ̣ibbı̄ , M. 126 mujhā hidā t in Jihadi-Salafism: introduction 269–270; Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, and women’s role in society 272–273; necessity and conditions for participating in jihad 273–275; women as self-defending renunciants and guardians of the family 275–278; women, martyrdom, and violent struggle 270–272 mukhannaths 102–104, 105–106 Mukhsin (2006) 453 Mulia, Musdah 141–142 Munafik (Hypocrite, 2016) 452 muqaddamas 171 Musannaf: of Ibn Abı̄ Shayba 54–55; of ʿAbd aḷ Razzā q 43–44, 46, 53, 106–107 Muslima theology: as comparative feminist theology 71–73; defined 68–69; divine words, theological anthropology and 74–77; as intervention and response 69–71 Muslim chaplaincy in North America 214–220 Muslim-Christian comparative feminist theology 71, 74–77 Muslim cultural integration in Europe 443–444 Muslim men, Western stereotypes about 137, 245, 249, 379–380, 390–391, 436–437, 470–471 Muslim Personal Law in India 241–242, 251–252, 331–332 Muslim societies, essentialist approach to 135–136 Muslimwoman stereotype 311, 313 Muslim women: colonialist feminism and scholarship on 310–314; decolonial feminism and scholarship on 314–316; Islamic law reform and 85–93; in need of “saving” 137–138, 245, 249, 311, 380, 391, 439, 464, 470 Muslim women’s modest dress: abayas 414, 415, 416, 424; availability in Western countries 424, 425; burqas and niqabs 151, 154, 156, 435–436, 440–442; burqinis 151, 436, 441, 444; colonialist feminist stereotypes about 312–313; e-commerce and social media advertising by Muslim-owned companies 425–432; fashion shows 410–411, 410–412, 415; in Iran 408–412, 410, 411, 418–419; market growth of 408, 412–418, 414; politicization in France (see France, politicization of Muslim women’s dress in); trendy designer’s hijab 413, 416–418; in Turkey 414, 424–425, 428; women’s agency and 6, 312–313, 439–440 Mustang (2015) 458

482

Index

Mutahhari, Murtaza 85, 86, 87 Muwattaʾ 103 Mwinyi, Ali Hassan 264 My Stealthy Freedom campaign 418 al-Nabā ʾ magazine 277 Naficy, Hamid 454–455 Naguib, Shuruq 35 Najmabadi, Afsaneh 8 Nana Asma’u 1–3, 171 Nasr, Seyyed Hossein 74 Nation of Islam (NOI) 425, 466 al-Nawawı̄ , Muh ̣yı̄ al-Dı̄ n 315 Neglected Duty (Faraj) 273 New Moon (Bagong Buwan, 2001) 453–454 Niger, audiovisual media and religious authority in: introduction 222–224; democratization of media outlets 224–227; women TV and radio personalities 227–233 nikā h ̣, defined 46 niqab 288, 436, 439 Noddings, Nel 64 non-binary sex see intersex North Africa, historical zinā cases in see zinā (illicit sex) North America, Muslim chaplaincy in 214–220 al-Nujū m f ı̄ falak al-nubuwwa (Ṭabbaʿ) 322–324 Nuriyya Ḥadith Institute for Women 325 nushū z of spouses: defined 26; gendered notions of 30–31; husbands guilty of 30–31, 35–36; wifebeating and 26, 31–35, 384–385, 390, 392–394 Obaid, Thoraya 134 obedience, of wives 48–49; bayt al-tā ̣ ’a (house of obedience) concept 84; see also nushū z of spouses Obermeyer, Rayhana 457 Omani rule in East Africa 260 online shopping 425 Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) 133 Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) 330 orientalism 10, 249 orphans: alms-giving for 196, 198; consent to marriage of 303; multiple marriages and 27–30 Ortiz, Amina (shaykha Amina Teslima) 173 Osman, Mohamed 395 Ottoman Empire 299–300, 301–302, 307 Ozak, Muzzaffer 170, 173 Ozouf, Mona 155 Pandya, Sophia 183 Parveen, Abida 169 Patel, Pragna 137 paternity, attribution of 46, 299, 302, 305, 306–307, 352; and assisted reproduction 351–352

patriarchy: “benevolent” 383, 393–394; in Islamic East Africa 259, 264–266; as pre-Islamic cultural practice 87–88; Qur’anic exegetical tradition and 23–26; Western stereotypes about 70, 249, 310–311 Peaceful Families (2019) 375, 377, 383 Peirce, Leslie 301, 302, 307 Pemberton, Kelly 169 People of the Book 51–52 Perfect Candidate, The (2019) 457 Perrot, Michelle 155–156 Persian Gulf states, women’s fashion in 415–416, 417 personal status (family) law 241–242, 251–252, 330–334 Peters, Rudolph 299 philosophical ethics (akhlaq), gender hierarchy and 64 Pierce, Leslie 11 Pieterman, Roel 432 piety groups for women 284 ‘pious fashion’ concept 6, 156 poetry, homoerotic 168–169 Politics of Piety (2004) 180, 272, 284 polygyny: cinematic representations of 451–452; colonialism and shifting views on 4–5; contemporary Muslim women embracing 5; contractual stipulations against 46; pre-modern Qur’anic commentaries on 24, 26–30 Pontianak of the Tuber Rose (film) 452 poverty reduction projects 195–202 Powers, David 306 preaching and prayer, women-led 212–213, 217, 218, 223, 227, 232–233, 235, 320 private sphere, state intervention in 331–332 Progressive Muslims (2003) 91 prostitution in British India 243, 247–248 purdah 249 purity discourse, patriarchy and 265 qiwā ma see guardianship of women (qiwā ma) Quatremer, Jean 154 Al-Qudū rı̄ , A. 119, 120, 124 queer theory and pre-modern sources: introduction 101–102; enslaved vs. freeborn masculinity 109–111; gender nonnormative persons 102–109 Quraishi, Asifa 89 Qur’an 3–4; “beating verse” (Q. 4:34) 31–35, 384–385, 390, 392–394; classical exegesis, overview of 23–26; feminist vs pre-modern readings of 10–11, 23–26, 36–37, 58–60, 87–89; gendered hierarchy in 10–11, 23–26, 58–60, 259; on intersex 122–123; medieval exegesis on women 26; nushū z of spouses 26, 30–36, 392–394; pre-modern commentaries on polygyny 4, 26–30

483

Index al-Qurtubı ̣ ̄ , A. 31, 123 Qutb, Sayyid 272–273, 330, 336 Rabiʿa of Basra 2, 164, 166–167 racism: and American anti-Muslim hostility 379, 463–472, 468; colorism in Muslim women’s advertising 430–431; European colonialist 9–10, 248–249; and French anti-Muslim hostility 146–147, 148; social justice work against 202–203, 424 rajulas (man(like) females) 106–109 Rapoport, Yossef 36 Ray, Domineque 469–470 al-Rā zı̄ , Fakhr al-Dı̄ n 31, 33, 34, 36, 121 Raʿad Al Hussein, Zeid 127 Reda, Nevin 213, 216 refugees, Islamic principles concerning 283–284 religion classes 285, 287, 288–291 religious arbitration courts 332 religious authority in Islam: imams in contemporary North America 211–212; varied forms of 210; women exercising 210–211, 215–217 religious freedom: and American military dress codes 407–409, 419; and French laws on religious signs 150–151, 435–436, 437–439, 438, 439, 440–442; of Syrian women refugees in Jordan 285–288, 291 religious study groups 284 renunciation, as jihadist virtue 277–278 reproductive rights see sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) ridaʾ (milk kinship) 53, 353 al-Rifā ʿı̄ , ʿAbd al-Karı̄ m 320 al-Rijā l h ̣awl al-Rā sū ̣ l 322 al-Rishawi, Sajida Mubarak 270 Riza, Riri 452 Rodinson, Maxime 135 Rossingnol, Laurence 441 Rossinot, André 154 Rowson, Everett 103 Rumi, Jalal al-Din 167–168, 174–175, 176 Rumiyah magazine 276 Sā biq, Sayyid 319 Sabogal, Jessica 468 Sadeghi, Behnam 123 al-Sadiq, Jaʿfar 166 sah ̣ ̣ā ba literature 322–323 Sahgal, Gita 140 Said bin Sultan 260 Salafism 225–226; female jihad fighters (see mujhā hidā t in Jihadi-Salafism); in post-conlonial Kenya and Tanzania 264; women-led promotion of 224 Salime, Zakia 333 Salvatore, Armando 84 Sami, Osamah 457

al-Sarakhsı̄ , A. 119–121, 123, 125 Sargut, Cemalnur 172–173 Saudi Arabia: al-Qaʿida in 278; fertility and family planning 345, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350; filmmaking/filmmakers 457; women’s fashion 414, 416, 417 Sayyida Zaynab, Syria 185–188 Sayyid Imam (Dr. Fadl) 274 Schachar, Ayelet 332 Schielke, Samuli 292 Schroeder, J. E. 424, 429 Scott, Joan 147, 153, 310 secular education of girls 263 secularism (laïcité) 147, 152, 153, 437–438, 439, 441 Seedat, Fatima 12 self-flagellation (tatbı̣ ̄ r) 184–185 Sepet (Chinese Eyes, 2004) 453 Serrano Ruano, Delfina 301, 306 sex reassignment surgery 117, 126–127 sex selection via IVF 354 sexual abstinence see waiting period sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) 138–142 Sexual Ethics and Islam 58, 91 sexual intercourse: birth control and permitted acts 53–54; combining women 52–53; fulfilment of wives by husbands in 30–31, 53, 315; gendered vocabulary regarding 48; illicit sex (see zinā (illicit sex)); licit sex, defined 45; slaves and 45, 49–51, 259, 305 sex workers in British India 243, 247–248 Seyyid Said, Sultan 260 Shā fiʿı̄ legal school: in East Africa 257; on female consent to marriage 45, 46; on the sexual fulfilment of wives 315; on slaves and concubinage 49; on wife-beating 33, 36; women scholars of 315, 320 al-Shā fiʿı̄ , Muhammad ibn Idrı̄ s 33, 36, 49, 52, 123 Shah Bano case 252, 331 Shaheed, Farida 133–134 Shaikh, Sa’diyya 60, 62, 75, 92–93, 202 Shakir, Zaid 213 al-Shamikha magazine 278 Sharafi, Mitra 251 Sharia: arbitration courts in Western democratic states 332; Cairo Declaration and human rights 135; colonial-era engagement with 84–85, 94, 245, 250, 331; family law and women’s rights 89–90, 331–334; justice and the reform of 89–90; political self-determination and women’s rights 334–337 Shariat Act (1937) 251 Shari‘ati, ʿAli 182 al-Shaybā nı̄ , Muh ̣ammad 45, 118, 119, 120, 123 Shehadeh, Lamia 273

484

Index

Sheika (2010) 453 Shepard, Todd 152 al-Shirazi, Muhammad 187 al-Shirazi, Sayyid Hasan 187 Shirazis, Sayyida Zaynab and 182, 183–185 Shiʿi Islam: fatwas on reproductive technologies 352–354; Karbala Paradigm 181–182; pious practices of women in Aliabad 365–366; Sayyida Zaynab and Shiʿi womanhood 182–183; Sayyida Zaynab, the Shirazi version 183–189; zakat tradition in 195 Shohat, Ella 455 shrines: Sayyida Zaynab, Iran 185–188; Sufi, in South Asia 169–171, 172 SHUKR 426–427, 429, 431 Siddique, Kaukab 85, 86, 87 Siddique, Sharon 395 Sillwood, Anas 426 Silvers, Laury 32, 33, 62, 165, 385, 393 Singapore, domestic violence in see domestic violence in Singapore Muslim communities Singapore, Islam in 394–396 Sirano, Christian 419 sı̄ ra (prophetic biography) 321–322 slavery/slaves: in 19th century East Africa 256, 259–262; American Islam and the trans-Atlantic slave trade 466; emancipation of 109–111, 261–262; marriage and sex with 45, 47–51, 259, 260, 305 Smith, Courteney 245 social justice projects: Amal House for women 199–202; Believers Bail Out 202–203; ethics of care and love ethics 64–66; gender and the politics of care 204–206; human freedom in Islamic ethics 203–204; Imam-e Zamana Mission 195–198; zakat as the context for 193–195 social media advertising and Islamic fashion: introduction 423–424; Islamic fashion and the rise of online retail 424–425; Muslim-owned companies, overview of 426–428; visual analysis of 428–432 Sokoto caliphate 1, 3 Sonbol, Amira 84, 88 Sotomayor, Sonia 470 South Asia, Sufism in 169–171, 172; zakat projects in India 195–198, 205 Southeast Asian cinema 451–454 Sout Ilaahi 391, 396–401 Spivak, Gayatri 310, 442, 470 Springtime of the Skirt and Respect (PJR) 154–155 SRHR (sexual and reproductive health and rights) 138–142 Sri Lanka, Sufism in 170, 172 Stam, Robert 455 Status of Women in Islam (1981) 86 Stiles, Erin 263

Stockreiter, Elke 261, 262 Stoler, Ann 248 stoning to death 299–300, 301, 306 Stopler, Gila 137 Struggle of Muslim Women, The (1994) 86 Sufis and Saints Bodies (2007) 169 Sufi shrines 169–171, 172 Sufism: as antithetical to ‘orthodox’ Islam 396; contemporary global female leaders in 171–174; female participation in ritual activities 169–171, 174–175; the feminine ideal in 5, 163–164, 165–168; gender ethics of 62; LGBTQ community and 175–176; literary tradition, gender and sexuality in 168–169; in Singapore 395–396, 397–398; Sout Ilaahi and the #VoiceOut campaign 391, 396–401; in Sri Lanka 172; West African women Sufis 1–3, 11, 171; women in the history of 1–3, 164–165, 171 al-Sughayyir, Abu al-Hasan 303, 304–305, 306 al-Sulami, Abu ʿAbd ar-Rahman 164 Sunna, women-led promotion of 224, 228 Sunni fatwas on reproductive technologies 349, 349–353 Surga yang Tak Dirindukan (2015) 451, 452 Swahili coast of East Africa: Arab settlement and Islam 257–259; decolonization and gender 262–264; modern Islamic patriarchy 264–266; slavery and gender in the 19th century 259–262 Swahili language 256–257, 260 Syrian women refugees in Jordan: introduction 282–283; Islamic ethics of granting asylum 283–284; Maryam and the role of gender 291–292; piety groups and ethical selfcultivation 284; religious freedom and learning in Jordan 287–288, 291; religious practices in pre-war Syria 284–287 Tabaqat of Muhammad b. Saʿd 109–111, 323 al-Ṭabarı̄ , Muhammad Ibn Jarı̄ r 27–28, 30–31, 35 Ṭabbā ʿ, Asmā ʾ 322–324 tafsı̄ r (exegesis) see Qur’an al-Ṭā hir ibn ʿĀshū r, Muhammad 33 Tal Afar attack (2005) 270 talaq (repudiation) 46; triple talaq in India 241, 246, 250–252, 253 Tanzania, decolonization in 263, 264 tatbı̣ ̄ r (self-flagellation) 184–185 tawhid (Divine unity) 63 Tax, M. 142 Teslima, shaykha Amina 173 al-Thawrı̄ , Sufyā n 53, 118 The Modist brand 415 theological anthropology 74–77 theology, feminist see Muslima theology theology, gender ethics and 63 thinness, as beauty ideal 431–432 Thompson, Katrina Daly 258

485

Index

transgendered, mukhannaths as 102–104 triple talaq in India 241, 246, 250–252, 253 Trump v. Hawaii (2018) 470–471 Tucker, Judith 11, 31, 34, 36, 93 Turabi, Hassan 85, 86, 87 Ture, Kerim 427 Turkey: Muslim women’s fashion 414, 424–425, 428; Sufism 172–173 Turk, Jihad 216–217 al-Ṭū sı̄ , Muhammad Abū Jaʿfar Ibn Ḥasan 28–29 Tüzün, Lale 427 Twelver Shiʿas 186, 195 ʿUmar ibn al-Khatṭ ab ̣ (caliph) 51, 52 Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, Syria 286 Umm Sulaym 274 United Nations (UN): Universal Declaration of Human Rights 130, 329–330, 438; women’s and LGBT rights 138–139, 140; World Conference on Human Rights (1993) 138–139 United States: anti-Muslim hostility in 379–380, 385–386, 463–472, 468; Bin Ladin criticisms of 271; domestic violence in Muslim communities 375–386; immigration from Muslim-majority countries 212, 466, 467, 470; Iranian immigrant communities in 370–371; Islamic women’s fashion and advertising 430, 431; military dress codes and religious observances 407–408, 419; Muslim authority in 211–212; Muslim chaplaincy in 214–219; women and mosque leadership 212–214; zakat and social justice projects 199–203 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 130, 329–330, 438 ʿUthmā n ibn ʿAffā n, Caliph 50 al-ʿUyayri, Yusuf 270, 277 Vale, G. 278 Valls, Manuel 444 Vermes, G. 31 Verona Collection 428, 430, 431 violence against women see domestic violence in American Muslim communities; domestic violence in Singapore Muslim communities virgins, consent to marriage of 46–47, 48, 302 Vogl, Lisa 428 Voss Roberts, Michelle 72, 73 Wadjda (2012) 457 wadud, amina 10, 25, 32–33, 58, 59, 63, 64, 65, 69, 77, 141, 211, 212–213, 336, 392 waiting period: after divorce 50, 51, 52–53; after illicit sex (zinā ) 302, 303, 304, 305–306, 307; of slave women newly purchased 50–51, 305 Walsh, Catherine 314 Weisenfeld, Judith 465

West Africa, female Sufi leaders in 1–3, 11 Western fashions, restrictions on 408–409 Western materialism, critiques of 272, 273, 278 West Is West (2010) 456–457 Weyland, Petra 395, 398 whirling dervishes, mixed-gender 174–175 widows: in Aliabad, Iran 358, 363–364, 366, 367; alms-giving to 196, 198; waiting period before remarriage 51 Williams, Delores S. 75, 77 Wissinger, Elizabeth 430 Wittner, J. 227 wives: duties of, misinterpreted 87–88; nushū z and wife-beating 26, 30–36, 384–385, 390, 392–394; obedience of 48–49, 84; repudiation of (talaq) 46; self-adornment by 106–108; sexual fulfilment by husbands of 30–31, 53, 315 women: gender hierarchy vs. equality with men 58–59, 63–64, 210–211, 259; human rights of 131–132, 133–134, 136–141; male guardianship of 26, 47, 61, 210–211, 335; medieval exegesis on 23–37; religious leadership by 210–211, 212–214, 215; see also Muslim women; wives Women and Gender in Islam (1992) 11 Women and Islam (1999) 86 Women in Shariʾah (1989) 86 Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) 139–140, 142 women preachers 223, 227–233, 232, 235 Women’s Mosque of America 213 working women 289–290 Yacoob, Saadia 91 Yacoub, Zara 140 Yerena, Ernesto 468 Yousufzai, Malala 442 Yuskaev, Timur R. 215 Yves Saint Laurent 416–417 Za‘atari refugee camp 282 Zahed, Ludovic-Mohamed 141 zakat, gender and: introduction 193–195; Amal House for women 199–202; Believers Bail Out (BBO) 202–203; gender and the politics of care 204–206; Imam-e Zamana Mission (IZM) 195–198, 205 al-Zamakhsharı̄ , Mah ̣mū d ibn ʿUmar 29, 31 Zanzibar: abolition of slavery in 261–262; decolonization 262–264 Zanzibar Revolution 263–264 al-Zarqawi, Abu Musʿab 269–270 Zarzū r, Suʿā d 320 al-Zawahiri, Ayman 274, 275, 277 Zā yid, Samira 320–322

486

Index

Zaynab, Sayyida 180–181, 183–189; shrine-town of 185–188 Zayn, Kassam 71 zinā (illicit sex): introduction 299–301; assisted reproductive techniques as 350–352; combining women 52–53; community involvement 303–304; discourse of punishment 305–307; a legal case from Taza

302–303, 304, 305; legal solutions 304–305; proscriptions and punishments 301; transgressing the boundaries 301–302; waiting period after 302, 303, 304, 305– 306, 307 Zobair, Jennifer 471 Zubair, Asiya 379 Zwick, D. 424, 429

487