Womens Human Rights and Islam: A Study of Three Attempts at Accommodation by Jonas Svensson

Women in Islam: The Western Experience by Anne Sofie Roald

Medicines of the Soul: Female Bodies and Sacred Geographies in a Transnational Islam by Fedwa
MaltiDouglas
Womens Human Rights and Islam: A Study of Three Attempts at Accommodation by Jonas
Svensson; Women in Islam: The Western Experience by AnneSofie Roald; Medicines of the
Soul: Female Bodies and Sacred Geographies in a Transnational Islam by Fedwa MaltiDouglas
Review by: A.HollyShissler
Signs, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Autumn 2005), pp. 241-247
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/432745 .
Accessed: 12/05/2014 18:00
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
.
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Signs.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 193.190.253.150 on Mon, 12 May 2014 18:00:27 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
S I G N S Autumn 2005 241
while Farmers work both expands our understanding of medieval poverty
and reinforces the broad caution within gender history against essential-
izing gender stereotypes. Both are welcome additions to the study of
premodern European women and gender.
Womens Human Rights and Islam: A Study of Three Attempts at
Accommodation. By Jonas Svensson. Lund, Sweden: Studies in the History
of Religion, Lund University, 2002.
Women in Islam: The Western Experience. By Anne Soe Roald. London:
Routlege, 2001.
Medicines of the Soul: Female Bodies and Sacred Geographies in a
Transnational Islam. By Fedwa Malti-Douglas. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001.
A. Holly Shissler, University of Chicago
T
oday the woman question is a battleground both inside and outside
the Muslim world. That is, the woman question raises the sharpest
criticism of Islam and Muslim societies from the outside and is at the
same time one of the most hotly debated areas within Islamic and Islamist
circles. This situation is reected in the three books under review here,
each of which looks at howMuslimvoices engage with a secular, globalized
Western world as seen through the lens of womens rights and womens
proper role in society.
Womens Human Rights and Islam: A Study of Three Attempts at Ac-
commodation is fascinating and is the most successful of the three works.
Jonas Svensson assesses how three very different public intellectuals at-
tempt to reinterpret Islam in ways that make it compatible with womens
human rights as expressed in various international instruments, most no-
tably the 1979 United Nations Womens Convention. Svenssons subjects
have in common that they are Muslims who hail from predominately
Muslim societies, have received extensive Western-style academic training,
have published widely on the topics in question, and actively participate
in international academic and human rights forums. In their work all three
emphasize approaching religious questions on the basis of the earliest,
most fundamental sources of Islam, mainly the Quran, at the expense of
the established schools of Islamic law, the madhahib. They all champion
This content downloaded from 193.190.253.150 on Mon, 12 May 2014 18:00:27 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
242 Book Reviews
a broader ethical understanding of the Quran, and they insist on the
essential message of equality in Islam. There are also important differences,
however. Fatima Mernissi, the renowned Moroccan feminist and aca-
demic, accepts as a given that secularism is the social ideal to strive for.
Her reinterpretations of Islamic scripture and history are overtly aimed
at facilitating a gradual move in Muslimsocieties toward that goal, whereas
the other two authors are committed to the idea of working for fully
Islamic societies that subscribe to and enforce Islamic law, albeit Islamic
law interpreted according to each authors lights. Riffat Hassan, a U.S.-
based Pakistani woman and self-described feminist theologian, approaches
the interpretation of the Quran by insisting on its internal coherence.
This leads her to defend womens equality in Islam through the idea of
complementarity between the sexes, positing an essential and biologically
determined difference in social function between men and women. Thus
she accounts for the different rights accorded to men and women in Islam
while still maintaining that there is a principle of equality. By contrast,
Sudanese exile and specialist in comparative law Abdullahi Ahmed an-
Naim follows the teaching of his spiritual mentor Mahmud Muhammad
Taha in asserting that the Quran has two messages: one, a timeless ethical
message of equality embodied in the Meccan revelations, the other, a
temporally located message embodied in the Medinan revelation and con-
taining regulations that helped the rst Muslim community ourish in
specic circumstances. Therefore an-Naim rejects all of the specic reg-
ulations and legal restrictions directed at woman on matters such as lead-
ership, divorce, marriage, and so forth, as pertaining to the Medinan
period, and he argues that in modern times the larger Meccan message
of total equality should prevail.
Svensson analyzes quite incisively the authors use of various rhetorical
and argumentative strategies to achieve accommodation and to garner
authority, and he makes a clear exposition of the implications of those
approaches for womens human rights. About Hassans framing of gender
equality in Islam, he notes, for example, There is no notion of a right
for women to freely express their sexuality. . . . The institution of mar-
riage, and intercourse within the framework of marriage is given a telos
in relation to a view of society that is organic (107).
The book contains a useful discussion of how international human
rights documents are formulated and then locally contested, drawing at-
tention to how the intellectuals under study straddle two worlds and speak
to two audiences. What Svensson terms the positive emotive charge
(19) carried by the term human rights, together with the ever-increasing
globalization that makes such ideas widely available around the world,
This content downloaded from 193.190.253.150 on Mon, 12 May 2014 18:00:27 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
S I G N S Autumn 2005 243
render it difcult for governments and even religious groups to completely
reject these discourses. At the same time, claims of self-determination and
cultural relativism make it hard for the international human rights com-
munity to ignore local voices. Thus these globe-trotting intellectuals,
whose origins give their voices authenticity and whose training allows
them access to the political capital of human rights discourse, wield in-
uence in both camps and cannot be ignored even by their critics. What
Svensson explicitly does not do in this work is make any evaluation of the
Islamicness of his authors or their arguments, because, as he says, that
would amount to participating in the debate (11).
By contrast, Anne Soe Roalds Women in Islam: The Western Ex-
perience is a mixture of sociological study and cultural intervention.
Roald attempts to examine change and changing processes in the in-
terpretation of social issues in the Islamic sources (79). This she seeks
to understand through interviewing and distributing questionnaires to
Muslims living in Western Europe in order to see how attitudes to
women and gender relations change in the cultural encounter between
Islam and the West (79).
The voices heard in this book, of educated, devout Muslims living in
the West and striving to make accommodations between their best un-
derstanding of the faith and the realities of their daily lives, are fascinating.
Roalds discussion of their understanding of questions such as the nature
and adaptability to historical circumstances of the Sharia, or the proper
meaning of Quranic passages referring to mens stewardship over women,
allows those voices to come through clearly while also giving a good sense
of the larger international and historical discourse to which these indi-
viduals are responding. Often Roald also offers her own interpretation on
such issues, as she does with the Sharia (1034).
However, in explaining the choice of target group for her study, in
outlining her criteria for selecting her respondents and interviewees, and
in identifying intellectual trends she deems important, Roald makes many
problematic assertions and allows her own commitments to structure her
work. The parameters she establishes amount to a religious or theological
judgment about who a real Muslim is, and they reveal a certain arabo-
centric prejudice. For instance, she identies four movements or trends
among Islamists as the most important and therefore the focus of her
study: the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Liberation Party, the sala
movement (the movement to return to the sourcesthe Quran and the
Sunnaand to interpret them directly without deferring to tradition),
and what she terms the post-ikhwan trend (3757). The post-ikhwan
trend and the Muslim Brotherhood are further singled out because she
This content downloaded from 193.190.253.150 on Mon, 12 May 2014 18:00:27 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
244 Book Reviews
claims they have more potential for change (97). But she offers no
evidence for these claims. What is true is that the four movements she
chooses are based in the Arab world and advocate a return to the pure
and original sources of Islamthe Quran and the Sunna of the
Prophetat the expense of the madhahib or of other trends that give
importance to leaders, such as the sheykhs of Su orders or the ayatollahs
of Shii Islam. In terms of her respondents and interviewees, the study is
limited to Arab-speaking Sunni Islamist intellectuals living in the West.
In justifying her focus on Arab speakers to the exclusion of the non-Arab
Muslim majority, Roald makes the argument that due to having the Arabic
language as their mother tongue, Arabs feel greater condence and have
greater facility in consulting the original sources. She claims that the move-
ment to return to the original sources is most prominent in the Arab
world and that this shows that Arabs continue to exercise an important
leadership role in the Islamic world. She further asserts that she has ob-
served that non-Arab Muslims rely more on religious leaders and tradi-
tional legal schools than do Arabs. She attributes this to their not knowing
Arabic and deduces that these communities will be less likely to produce
innovative and inuential approaches to social issues (3132, 59). But is
this true? Her attitude ignores the centuries of rich contributions made
by non-Arabs to Islamic thought and civilization, on the one hand, and,
on the other, it overlooks the fact that, by her own account, there are
both ulama (religious scholars) from the traditional legal schools and Su
sheykhs taking a reformist or hermeneutic approach to Islamic law and
theology. Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, one of the originators of the pro-
gressive-minded return-to-the-sources trend Roald praises, was neither an
Arab nor a Sunni.
Similarly, when Roald stipulates that her women respondents must wear
some form of head covering and that respondents in general must obey
the Islamic commandments, she is making a religious judgment about
who can rightly be considered, if not a Muslim, then an Islamist (21,
6162). But is it true that all women who view Islam as a comprehensive
approach to life wear some form of head covering? Indeed, one might
further ask why, if she wants to study change in interpretation, Roald
limits herself to Islamists? In all religions, many people who consider
themselves believers and pious nevertheless have a secular way of life and
outlook. Roald claims that those who fall within her stipulations are those
likely to have the greatest impact on the reformist debate currently taking
place within the Muslim world, but again, is this true? Or is it true that
such people are likely to have the greatest impact on others like themselves?
Implicit in all of this is the notion that secular Muslims are not really
This content downloaded from 193.190.253.150 on Mon, 12 May 2014 18:00:27 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
S I G N S Autumn 2005 245
Muslims, and therefore their opinions cannot or should not have an impact
on the interpretation of Islam. The book focuses on Arabic-speaking Is-
lamists in the West and in the Arab world in a way that creates the illusion
of a two-dimensional debate between a secular West and an Islamist Arab
world, and it tends to atten the range of views toward religion common
in the West, as well as the truly cosmopolitan nature of Muslimand Islamist
social discourse.
Very different in tone and style from the above works is Fedwa Malti-
Douglass study of three autobiographies by Muslim women relating their
spiritual transformation from a secular life as nominal Muslims to a reli-
gious awakening and life as practicing Muslims. Malti-Douglas employs
the tools of literary criticism effectively in showing how these stories,
though ostensibly womens stories, are permeated with male authority.
The womens texts are framed by validating introductions, conclusions,
or both by male authority gures. The title page of Belgian-born Sultana
Kouhmanes book actually lists her husband as coauthor, even though the
book is her memoir and purports in places to consist of extracts from her
diary. Leila Lahlous account of her struggle with breast cancer and mi-
raculous cure following her journey to Mecca is sandwiched between
introductions by a medical doctor and by the king of Morocco and an
appendix containing medical documents. Kar man Hamzas description
of her evolution from Egyptian bourgeoise to Islamically garbed media
personality incorporates extensive passages from the works of her spiritual
guide and also carries a male-authored introduction and conclusion.
1
Malti-Douglas notes (in interesting counterpoise to Roalds work) the
stories Su or mystical overtonesall three protagonists are deeply af-
fected by true dreams that either set them on their spiritual quests or
signal the fulllment of those quests. Hamzas story, in fact, follows the
basic structure of a Su journey toward enlightenment, with each phase
in the progressive covering of her body standing for a stage on her mystical
journey. Similarly, Kouhmanes trip to the Atlas with her husband and her
gradual acceptance of sex segregation as a natural social order where men
occupy the public sphere and women the private, follows in some ways
the pattern of a Su journey in which the external, material, and false are
1
The works discussed by Malti-Douglas are Kar man Hamza, Rihlat min al-Sufu r ila
al-Hija b (Cairo: Dar al-Itisam, 1981); Layla al-Hulw, Fala Tansa Allah (Casablanca:
Matbaat al-Najah al-Jad da, 1984), and the French language ed., Le la Lahlou, Noublie pas
Dieu (Casablanca: Imprimerie Najah El Jadida, 1987); and Cheikh Mohammed Saghir and
Kouhmane Sultana, LIslam, la femme, et lintegrisme: Journal dune jeune femmme euro-
peenne (Brussels: Edition Al-Imen, 1991). (The authors names are transliterated from the
Arabic differently in these publications than in Medicines of the Soul.)
This content downloaded from 193.190.253.150 on Mon, 12 May 2014 18:00:27 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
246 Book Reviews
renounced in favor of inner truths. Missing from all these womens ac-
counts, however, is any mention of female mystics or prominent contem-
porary Islamist women who might have served as inspiration. Each
womans voyage to enlightenment is entirely inspired and guided by men.
As Malti-Douglas emphasizes, the degree to which womens bodies
constitute the terrain on which piety and religious practice, especially social
religious practice, are dened is striking in these accounts. A greater in-
terpretative effort at thinking about why this should be the case would
have enriched this work, however. These women, through their awak-
enings and the subsequent publication of their conversion stories, have
entered into a heated public debate in Islam and Islamic revivalism about
the proper role of women in society. Malti-Douglass exposition clearly
demonstrates this, and she casts her authors as examples of a new kind of
Islamist intellectual engage, but her failure to situate any of these women
precisely in terms of the Islamic and Islamist movements active in the
contemporary world or to address the question of who the audience for
these works is and how the works have been received and answered in
other quarters leaves the reader unable to evaluate them as cultural in-
terventions or to see their transnational character in any meaningful an-
alytical sense.
A common feature among many of the thinkers treated in these books,
one that is present also in some of the authors of the books themselves
(Hassan, Kouhmane, Roald, among others) is the tendency to essentialize
women based on natural biological function, to view the family rather
than the individual as the basic unit of society, and to emphasize that
there is equality within the harmonious acceptance of natural or divinely
ordained gender roles. This is a set of attitudes familiar from other con-
texts, such as organic nationalism, and the corporativist movements that
arose between the World Wars, in particular. It is an outlook that employs
the language of love, not rights, and asserts that in fullling his or her
proper function, each member of society nds happiness and contributes
to social harmonyends that cannot be achieved through a model of
rights and adversarial or competitive interaction. Like corporativism, this
form of Islamism should be understood as a radical modernizing move-
ment that rejects tradition, on the one hand, and seeks to offer an alter-
native to classical liberal models based on formal equality and individual
self-interest, on the other. The woman question is one piece of terrain
where this alternative vision of modernity is articulated particularly, and
it may serve as one explanation for why the topic is so fraught. It is to
be hoped that authors writing on questions relating to women and Islam
will dedicate more time to considering not only the articulation of the
This content downloaded from 193.190.253.150 on Mon, 12 May 2014 18:00:27 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
S I G N S Autumn 2005 247
woman question in various contexts but the reasons for its centrality and
hotly contested nature.
Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties. By Sheila Rowbotham.
London: Verso, 2001.
Shaky Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks. By Alice Echols. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002.
Myra Marx Ferree, University of WisconsinMadison
T
he time of reection has arrived. The 1960s as a period of personal
as well as social transformation has now entered into the category of
the past, which many believe makes it merit individual and collective
stocktaking. These two feminist historians now offer an intriguing com-
bination of professional scrutiny of their own individual history and an
attempt to make some sense of the changes of the period in some larger
way. Each book is quite different, yet only in part because of the authors
social locations. Sheila Rowbotham is older, experiences the sixties in Paris
and London, and is deeply involved in socialist politics long before she
ever begins to think of feminism; Alice Echols experiences already active
womens studies communities on the fringes of American politics in Min-
nesota and New Mexico and studies the 1950s and 1960s in order to
make sense of what she lives through in the 1970s. Rowbothamis engaged
in an explicitly autobiographical project in which she deploys historical
tools to try to make sense of the context of her own life, hoping to convert
its raw experience into a more self-conscious and critically evaluated life
fromwhich she and others can learn. Echols aims instead to write historical
assessments of the period, some of its personae, and its politics, while
reecting on the life context in which she wrote the various essays that
are collected here and bringing her own life story to bear on the events.
The authors can, therefore, hardly avoid questions of to what extent
the personal is political and vice versa. Rowbothams memoir is deeply
personal, discussing in depth such events as her schooling, her parents
deaths, and her various affairs and trying to evaluate just what they meant
to her. Like a good session of psychoanalysis, her stories about her past
are frank and thoughtful. Writing them must have been tremendously
useful to her as she worked through what meaning she wished to give to
This content downloaded from 193.190.253.150 on Mon, 12 May 2014 18:00:27 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions