Women in Islam
by the Rev. Colin Bossen, March 20, 2011
This morning, I want to begin in what might seem an odd place for a sermon on Islam. I want to begin with a quote, probably falsely attributed to Paul, from the Christian New Testament: "As in all the churches of the saints, women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church."
I offer this quote as a reminder. Christianity and Judaism can be just as oppressive to women as Islam can be. Yet, images and stories in the mass media tend to focus on how oppressive Islam is to women. If asked many of you what comes to mind you hear the words Islam and women together I suspect that you would visualize burquas and head scarves. You might remember stories of Muslim women being stoned to death for adultery or being murdered by their fathers or brothers in honoring killings for engaging in allegedly illicit sexual activities.
Alternatively, you may be familiar with the writings of feminist critics of Islam such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ali, a Muslim turned atheist, is originally from Somalia. She was a fundamentalist as a youth. She immigrated to the Netherlands and eventually served as a member of Dutch parliament before coming to the United States to escape death threats she received for her outspoken views. She has used her political position to speak out against the danger she perceives Islam posing to Western civilization writing such things as "Islam is imbued with violence, and it encourages violence." And after offering of catalog of the offenses that Islam has propagated against women--including honor killings, arranged marriages and genital mutilation--she describes her former religion, in relation to women, as a "culture of oppression."
Such words, images and stories represent a portion of the experience of women in Islam but they are not the sum of it. There is as much diversity in the experience of Muslim women as there is in either the Christian or the Jewish communities. Islam and Islamic fundamentalism do not have an exclusive claim in repressing women. Almost all religions have traditions within them that seek to oppress women. And almost all religions have liberating traditions as well.
One of our readings from this morning came from Nawal El Saadawi, who might be described as the matriarch of contemporary Arab feminism. In that reading Saadawi calls Arab and Muslim women to unveil their minds. This is a call that should resonate with us as Unitarian Universalists. One of the central charges our religious tradition makes to its adherents is to free the mind from the fetters of oppressive creed and tradition. As the 19th century Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing put it, "I call that mind free which sets no bounds to its love, which is not imprisoned in its self or in a sect, which recognizes in all human beings the image of God..." Like Saadawi we, as a religious community, understand that true freedom comes from unveiling our minds from ignorance.
Ignorance is frequently used to oppress. I know several women who work at abortion clinics. Over the years they have shared stories with me about women who come into the clinics terrified for their souls and ignorant about their own sexuality. Many of these women received little sexual education from their parents, their schools or their religious communities. Often the little information that they received was patently false. Possibly, they were encouraged to practice abstinence outside of marriage.
But people are sexual beings. Our sexuality is constitutive of who we are. Our culture bombards us with sexual images. The lyrics of popular songs are sexually suggestive and, not infrequently, graphic. So, despite the fact that people are encouraged to practice abstinence, they have sex. And because they do so in ignorance of birth control methods, women get pregnant. Some, for a variety of reasons, then seek to have an abortion. Maybe they know that they cannot afford to support a child. Or maybe their partner is abusive. Whatever the reason many of them arrive at abortion clinics with conflicted feelings. Not only has their religious tradition taught them little about what it means to be a sexual being, it has also taught them that abortion is immoral and sinful.
When confronted with such a situation, some abortion providers try to counter the religious rhetoric that has been used to oppress women with more positive religious language. They assert the universalist view that God loves everyone or share that the Bible itself has little to say about abortion. Whatever they say the objective is clear, to educate women seeking an abortion that there are a variety of religious teachings about abortion. Some of those teachings support a women's right to choose. Frequently, education is the first step to overcoming oppression.
The truth about religion is that it can be used as a force for either repression or liberation. It is one of our responsibilities as Unitarian Universalists to both remember this and spread this message. One way we can do this is by challenging our own ignorance. I am not sure where it comes from, but a favorite quote of mine is: "The most radical thing we can do is introduce people to one another." Getting to know people from other cultures breaks down the barriers between us. This teaches us that as humans we are more alike than we are different.
This is a lesson that I have learned, in part, directly from Muslim women. Over the years I have been blessed to have a number of close friendships with women who either currently were or once had been Muslim. In fact, many of the texts that I read in preparation for writing this sermon were suggested to me by a female friend who was raised Muslim in the Arab world. Her politics are as progressive as mine. I know that it was important for her to push my readings of women in Islam beyond the obvious popular choices. She suggested that I read not just feminists like Ayaan Hirsi Ali who had been Muslim but writers like Nawal El Saadawi and Fatima Mernissi who still identified as Muslim and criticize the tradition from within.
What I found interesting reading Saadawi and Mernissi is just how similar their critiques and their methods were to those of their feminist Christian and Jewish counterparts. Take Mernissi, for example: she begins her text "The Veil and the Male Elite" with a story about an encounter she had with misogyny in a grocery store in Morocco.
One day, Mernissi asked her neighborhood grocer, "Can a woman be a leader of Muslims?" "I take refuge in Allah!" he replied. "May God protect us from the catastrophes of the times!" said a customer standing next her. Finally, a second customer ended all discussion with a Hadith, "Those who entrust their affairs to a woman will never know prosperity!"
Hadiths are sayings or deeds attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. Their authority in Islam is considered to be second only to the Qur'an. The customer who recited the Hadith ended the discussion because the authority of the Hadith trumped all speculation. Once said, there was nothing more to be discussed about the subject.
But, of course, there was. Just as a feminist scholar of the Bible probes the text for a feminist interpretation, Mernissi tracked down the origin of the Hadith. Her objective was to prove that its sentiment is not, in fact, original to Muhammad but rather a later teaching designed to silence woman.
This is, interestingly, exactly what feminist scholars of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians concluded about the passage I began my sermon with. After carefully examining the text, feminist scholars of the Christian New Testament now regard it as not original to the text but as a later addition.
In Mernissi's case she attacks the Hadith by uncovering its origin. Like the Gospel stories, the Hadith were passed on as oral tradition for years before they were collected and recorded as text. Hadiths are the stories and the words the Companions remember about the Prophet. Each Hadith is traceable to one of the Muhammad's Companions, the people who composed the first Muslim community and lived side-by-side with the Prophet.
Part of studying Hadith is evaluating their validity. This rests upon understanding the context in which the Hadith was first uttered and the trustworthiness of the Companion to whom it is originally attributed. Mernissi tracks her case back to Abu Bakra, an early convert to Islam who Muhammad had liberated from slavery.
She also discovered that the Hadith was first offered in the midst of a political controversy between the followers of 'Ali, the fourth caliph, or leader of the Muslim community, and 'Aisha, Muhammad's favorite wife. This controversy eventually led to the Shi'a/Sunni split. Abu Bakra sought to remain neutral in the conflict. When ‘Ali and his followers occupied the city where Abu Bakra lived he was asked why he did not join the other side, since he did not explicitly support ‘Ali. Abu Bakra is said to have replied to this with a Hadith, which he had heard from Muhammad twenty-five years earlier, "Those who entrust their affairs to a woman will never know prosperity!"
For Mernissi, this means that the context of the Hadith is suspect. To her, it seems convenient that Abu Bakra would remember a previously unknown Hadith at a politically opportune time. Additionally, she argues that Abu Bakra in general cannot be regarded as a reliable source for Hadiths. In a different circumstance, he was punished for slander. Based upon the principles of much Hadith scholarship, this should render any Hadiths attributed to him as suspect or, if unverified elsewhere, void. If he was caught spreading slander than how could any Hadith attributed to him be considered valid?
What is interesting about Mernissi's approach to the misogynist Hadith is how closely it mirrors the efforts of Christian feminist biblical scholars to recover their tradition from Christian fundamentalists. In both cases the argument is similar. Each seeks to prove that the founder of the religion--Jesus or Muhammad--was not particularly misogynistic. He might have even held progressive views about the role of women in society. The problem was the people who came after the founder corrupted his teaching and injected their own misogynist views in the faith. The solution is to remove these later additions and uncover the progressive core of the faith.
Another common strategy shared by some feminist biblical scholars and feminist Muslims share is seeking to uncover the religious tradition’s early women leaders. Among Christians there have been efforts to claim Mary Magdalene as Jesus’s favorite disciple. In the Jewish tradition Miriam, Moses’s sister, is often held up as an important religious leader. And in Islam there are Khadija and ‘Aisha.
Khadija was Muhammad’s first wife. ‘Aisha is said to have been his favorite. Muhammad married Khadija when he was twenty-five and she was forty. She was a successful merchant. He was her employee. She recognized something special about him. She proposed marriage to him. He accepted and later when the revelation of the Qur’an came to him she became the first convert to Islam.
Throughout their more than twenty years of marriage Khadija and Muhammad were monogamous. It was only after her death that he became polygamous; between the death of Khadija and his own death, Muhammad married another ten women. Among these was ‘Aisha.
‘Aisha and Muhammad married when she was perhaps nine or ten. Though scandalous in our culture, such a marriage would not have been too out of the ordinary in Muhammad’s. Despite their significant age difference, Muhammad respected ‘Aisha’s intellect. The feminist writer, Nawal El Saadawi, who we heard from earlier, describes ‘Aisha as having “a powerful intelligence which sometimes was a match even for the inspired and gifted Prophet of Allah.” On occasion, ‘Aisha even opposed and contradicted to him. One story about her is that when a revelation came to Muhammad that he was allowed to marry as many women as he desired she commented, “Allah always responds immediately to your needs.”
Comments like these do not appear to have diminished Muhammad’s respect for ‘Aisha. One Hadith that Saadawi relates tells of Muhammad sitting in a circle of men, pointing to ‘Aisha and saying, “Draw half of your religion from this ruddy-faced woman.”
It could not be realistically said that most Christians, Jews or Muslims draw half their religion from any woman. All three are in some real sense patriarchal religions. The major religious figures of all three—Moses, Jesus and Muhammad—are men. Yet, all three contain women whose spiritual lives, religious leadership and engagement in the struggle for justice is inspiring. One of the ways that religious traditions become more empowering for women is by uncovering the women from those traditions who were leaders in the past. This is partially what Saadawi means when she calls for the unveiling of the mind. Unveiling the mind means drawing back the mental covering that obscures the truths that human beings are more alike than we are different, that no gender has a special claim to a relationship with the divine, and that the oppression of women is a product of human patriarchal culture, not inherent in religion itself.
It means celebrating women mystics like Rabia, the early Sufi, whose poetry we heard a little earlier. For someone like her, the God of Islam was not oppressive. God was the Beloved, the ultimate with which she sought union and spiritual release.
It also means lifting up the strong contemporary women within them. One such woman is Malalai Joya. Joya, some of whose words our puppeteers shared earlier, was the first woman and youngest member of the Afghani parliament elected after the Taliban was driven from power. She is a critic of the U.S. occupation of her country, the Taliban and the current government of Afghanistan, describing many of its members as “ruthless murderers.”
She challenges the notion that Western powers are interested in supporting women’s rights in her country. She writes that U.S. claims to support the rights of women in Afganistan “is all a lie, dust in the eyes of the world.” The rhetoric of women’s rights and democracy is not the reason why our country is occupying hers. That rhetoric obscures the real reason, which has more to do with energy policy and the perceived interests of the United States than human rights and democracy.
Joya does not want outsiders to come in and rescue Afghan women from oppressive fundamentalists. She believes that only they can rescue themselves, arguing “no nation can donate liberation to another nation.” Powerful words and ones well worth considering as the United States and its Arab and European allies attack Libya.
The basic point that women like Joya, Saadawi and Mernissi all make is that the problem is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is religious fundamentalism of any kind. From their perspective, religious fundamentalism, not a particular religion, is what is oppressive to women.
Here in Cleveland there are certainly religious fundamentalists who are oppressive to women. Many of them are Christian. I frequently drive by the abortion clinics on Shaker Blvd. Almost every time I do there is a battery of protestors—the majority of whom are men—outside harassing women, usually in the name of religion, when they come to the clinic for an abortion. While it certainly not true of all anti-abortion religious fundamentalists, quite of a few of them are misogynist. There is a definite linkage between those who oppose abortion and those who believe that a woman’s place is in the home.
Equally troubling, on a national level, there are efforts by religious fundamentalists to defund Planned Parenthood, a national network of women’s health care facilities, and to push for abstinence only education. And I am not sure what it says about our country’s views of women—and relationship to religious fundamentalism—that the United States, along with the theocratic state of Iran, remains one of a handful of countries that is not a signatory to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. The Convention, incidentally, is supposed to guarantee women access to education and facilities for family planning.
As religious liberals, we should be troubled by attempts by religious fundamentalists to interfere with women’s health care. And as religious liberals we should seek out others who are equally troubled. A slogan from the 1930s labor movement was “Black and White, Unite and Fight!” Today the words would be different but the sentiment remains the same. If we are serious about protecting women’s rights then we are charged to seek out those in other traditions who would do the same.
And there are Muslim women who are committed to protecting and expanding the rights of women and human rights in general. In one of her essays, Saadawi charges her readers “to create enlightened interpretation of different religions.” This has long been the task of our religious community. And our efforts are enriched whenever we reach beyond the boundaries of our tradition, unveil our minds, and discover that we are not alone, or even, isolated in our struggles.
May it be so and Amen.