Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (36 page)

preted the badith about a woman being �aura to mean that interaction be.. tween men and women was prohibited, this is how she responded:

Does this Q.adith prove that ikhtilat is prohibited in all its forms ? Or that it should be severely restricted so that it becomes almost impossible for women and men to work together? In order to answer this, we must return to what the Prophet
[rasul]
and his female Companions
bal)abiyyii
did because they are the ones we should refer to in all matters.41 There are personal opinions or points of view
[hunak

wighat an..-na?: riyya shak�iyyan]
that refer to specifi kinds of interests and fears. But as a community of Muslims, when we decide what is prohibited and permitted
[}J am wa l)ala ,
we must return to the community of Muslims who lived around the Prophet. For everyone has the freedom
[�urriyya)
to prohibit unto himself what he does not like: for example, one may say I don't like to eat green beans so he does not eat it. But we can't say that the sharfa says that green beans are prohibited [Q.aram]. It depends on one's temperament, not the sharfa. . . . So our source of authority
[marjriyya]
is not personal likes and dislikes, but it is what Allah and His Prophet have said.

The issue of intermixing between men and women is very clear [in Islam] . There are etiquettes of mixing that the sharfa has spelled out. So when we say there are etiquettes, it also means that there is ikhtilat, but it must be done in accord with certain rules. So when God says
"ghu#u min ab�arukum"
[lower your gaze] , it doesn't mean that a woman should not go out from her house. If she is not to go out of her house at all, then what is the point of having all the instructions about wearing modest dress
[libas m�tashim] ?
Neither does it mean that women and men cannot make eye contact when they work together, for example, or when they buy and sell from each other, or in an educational setting. Now, tell me, did the Prophet not meet and talk to women? Did women not pray directly behind men in the mosque without any partition/separation [Q. between them? We know the answers to these questions because we have had lessons on this. What is prohibited, as you know, is a woman meeting a man alone
[khalwa] .
Yet we also know that the Prophet visited some of his female Companions [�ab. when they were alone, and so did many of his male Companions, didn't they? So there is

41
Note Hajja Faiza's unusual use of the term
�al) iyyli
to refer to Muhammed's female kin as well as to other virtuous women who were not directly related to him but lived close to him.
$a- Qabiyyli
is the female form of the more common term
�al)a
which is used to refer to

Muhammed's male Companions. The traditional term used for Muhammed's female kin and asso.. ciates is
bait al..nabuwwa
(household of the Prophet). Hajja Faiza's usage of this new term indicates a growing awareness among the more educated daciyat that the women in the Prophet's life are an

important source of information about his actions and should therefore be treated in the same manner as his male Companions.

debate [ka even about this issue of a woman and man interacting alone without supervision
[khalwa] .

Here Hajja Faiza vvent through a long list of examples from Muhammed's and his Companions' lives that illustrated their interactions with women. An.. ticipating the audience's response to her argument, she said, "Of course we say that these were very pious people
[mittaq in]
and we are not like them, but these examples also show that ikhtilat is permitted
[j �iz]
. . .
.
Yes, there are limits
[�udud]
to and etiquettes for interaction between women and men. But if we were to say that there is no interaction between men and women, this would make for great hardship
[mashaqqa shadzda] .
God did not order us to do this, so why say He did?"

There are clear differences between Hajj a Faiza's approach to the issue of ikhtilat and the attitude of the Nafi daeiyat. Not only do they differ about whether women and men should avoid all eye contact when conducting business, but also about the role the social circumstances under which the early Muslim community lived should play in interpreting the b. Hajja Faiza insists that a proper understanding of the Prophetic tradition does not depend solely upon the advice contained in the text of a particular badith, but must be understood in relation to the life of the Prophet in its entirety and, in this sense, to the whole body of the b.adith that makes that life avail.. able to generations of Muslims who have followed the Prophet. Thus, even though the Nafi daeiyat and Hajja Faiza share the idea that the authorita.. tive source (marj riyya) for structuring a Muslim life is the exemplary con.. duct of the Prophet and his Companions, they differ in the relative weight

they accord to the immutability of the text of a badith.
42
Fu
r
thermore , in

contrast to the Nafi daeiyat, Hajja Faiza is willing to acknowledge the ambi.. guity and contradictions entailed in the accounts given of the lives of the Prophet and his Companions, thereby implying that even those injunctions that seem to be immutable (such as the prohibition on a man and a woman interacting alone without others being present) may be more flexible than is often conceded.

The differences between these two points of view are signifi , both for the d�tiyat and for members of the mosque movement who closely follow these debates. But there is also a substrate of assumptions and presuppositions, shared among these interlocutors, that must be examined because they reveal

42
It would be a mistake to assume that the Nafi da(iyat are therefore "literalists," because they often take the larger context of the tradition into account. See, for example, the response Hajj a Samira gives to Rabia above .

how these disparate positions constitute part of the same discursive fi d.43 To begin with, note that Hajj a Faiza does not cast doubt upon the validity of the

Q. that describes women as eaura; indeed, since the Q. is attributed to a reliable source, questions regarding its legitimacy cannot be made the grounds for Hajja Faiza's disagreements, given her strict abidance by the terms of the juristic discourse.44 Instead, she criticizes the conclusion that is derived fr this Q. and made the basis for either severely restricting the practice of ikhtilat or prohibiting it. In her arguments, Hajja Faiza stresses the criteria that her middle.. to upper..middle.- lass audience must bear in mind, and the measures they must take, when negotiating the contradictory demands of their lifestyles ( including women's pursuit of profe.ssional careers, which brings them considerable public exposure) and the requisites of a virtuous life. Far more signifi ntly, however, Hajja Faiza shares with the Nafi daeiyat two interrelated assumptions that are at the core of the debate about ikhtilat in the daewa circles. One is the principle, unanimously upheld by Muslim ju.. rists, that interactions between women and men who are unrelated by imme.. diate kin ties ( ghair mal). rim) are a potential source of unvirtuous conduct and illicit relationships.45 While women and men are both urged to discipline their sight, behavior, and thoughts so as to prevent the stirring of illicit sexual passions (see Quranic verse 30 of Sii al.-Niir), it is women who bear the pri.. mary responsibility for maintaining the sanctity of relations between the sexes. This is because the j uristic Islamic tradition assumes that women are the objects of sexual desire and men the desiring subjects, an assumption that has come to justify the injunction that women should "hide their charms" when in public so as not to excite the libidinal energies of men who are not their immediate kin. It is noteworthy that Islam, unlike a number of other or.. thodox religious traditions ( for example, strands of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity), does not place a high premium on the practice of sexual absti.. nence and regards the pursuit of sexual pleasure (within the bounds of a mar..

ital relationship) a necessary virtue both for women and men.
·
In this moral worldview, illicit sexual relationships are understood to create social discord and sedition (fitna in a community, and are regarded as signs of its moral de..

43
Moreover, an analysis of these shared assumptions also puts into question any simple parceling of Hajja Faiza's and the Nafisa dtiyat's views into liberal or conservative categories, precisely because such an analysis demonstrates their mutual imbrication.

44
This l).adTth is part of one of the six most authoritative collections of Muhammed's deeds and sayings,
$a�1� al�Tirmazi.
For a scholarly opinion along the lines of Hajj a Faiza's argument, see Abu Shuqqah
1995, 3:38.

45
In Lane's
Lexi
the word
rna/.t
(plural:
mal). im)
is conceptually related to that which

signifi honor, possession, and a relationship in the name of which one can seek protection and hold another accountable for its violation (Lane
1984, 5 54-55).
Note the linguistic connection between
"aura
and
�ram;
both signify a certain relationship to honor and possession.

1 1 0

generacy.46 The injunctions for women to veil, dress modestly, avoid eye con.. tact with men, and so on, all constitute the practical strategies through which the danger women's sexuality poses to the sanctity of the Muslim community is deterred.

Even those religious scholars who provide extensive doctrinal elaboration in
support
of women's participation in the public realm regard these presump..

tions as immutable.47 For example, Abd al..Halim Abu Shuqqah (d. 1995), a well..respected Islamic scholar, wrote an extensive six..volume study aimed at combating interpretations of Quranic verses and ab.adith, popular among con.. temporary Muslims, that restrict women's participation in economic, politi.. cal, and social domains (Abu Shuqqah 1995 ) .48 Abu Shuqqah meticulously goes through scholarly debates and counterexamples from the lives of Muham.. med, his female kin, and his Companions, questioning the authenticity of many of the canonical sources used to buttress these claims in order to show that women have the right to participate in the umma's productive life, to have sexual pleasure, and to pursue various kinds of social relationships that are often considered to be reserved only for men in popular culture. It is strik.. ing, however, that even though Abu Shuqqah makes these arguments, he continues to uphold the principle that women's physical appearance is a threat to the integrity of the Muslim community and that men are more libid.. inal and sexually charged than women.49

46
One of the primary meanings of
fi
is "rebellion against divine law," or "civil war and re.. volt" in which the believers' faith and unity of community is put in grave danger.
Fitna
can also mean "temptation," "attractiveness," or "infatuation." Muslim jurists, in discussing female sexual.. ity, use the verb
yuftinu
(from the root
fatana,
the same root from which
fitna
is derived), which

literally means "to charm or enamor someone"; these jurists thereby intimately connect seduction with sedition. For an insightfu discussion of the layered meanings entailed in the term
fi
see

Pandolfo 1997, 156-62.

47
In addition to Abu Shuqqah, see, for example, M. al..- 1996; Z. al..- 1996b; al.. Qaradawi, 1996.

48
Abu Shuqqah, an Egyptian by birth, lived most of his adult life in Doha and Qatar. He was well known in Islamist circles, and founded the well..- Islamist intellectual journ
al..