Lejla Ahmet Women of Islam PDF

W.E.B.
Du Bois Institute
The Women of Islam
Author(s): Leila Ahmed
Source: Transition, No. 83 (2000), pp. 78-97
Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute
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( Position
T H E WOME N OF I S L A M
L eila A hmed
When I arrived in the United A rab E mi-
rates,
a small
country
of
spectacular
deserts, mountains,
and oases on the shal-
low,
vivid blue Persian
Gulf,
it was in the
middle of the most momentous trans-
formation of its
history.
A few
years
ear-
lier
Zayed,
the sheikh of A bu
Dhabi,
had
offered to use his oil wealth to finance
education, housing,
and medical treat-
ment for all the
people
of the
region (in-
cluding neighboring emirates)
that was
now united under his titular
leadership.
A nd thus the
people
of the
region,
a no-
madic Bedu
people,
were in the
process
of
being
settled;
and the
country
as a
whole was
being catapulted
almost in-
stantaneously
into
modernity.
T o
provide
its
people
with these new
amenities,
the U.A .E . had had to look to
other countries for skilled
personnel,
and
they
looked above all to other A rab
countries.
By
the time I
got
there, foreign
A rabs-E gyptians,
Palestinians, S yrians,
Jordanians,
and others-outnumbered
the local Bedu
population
six to one.
T hese other A rabs were
architects,
doc-
tors and
nurses,
teachers and headmasters
and headmistresses. T o house this vast
and,
as it
were,
invading population,
as
well as the local
people,
cities had arisen
almost
overnight
out of the sands. T en
years
earlier there had been no con-
structed
building
in A bu
Dhabi,
which
was now the
capital, only
tents and reed
huts;
no
building
other than the
solitary
whitewashed fortress that now stood in
the middle of a
city
of
towering high-
rises.
A bu Dhabi had the air of a
place
con-
jured
out of the sands
overnight.
S ilhou-
ettes of cranes stood
against
the horizon
in
every
direction,
two or three
buildings
going up
at once
alongside
each other.
Nearby
there were still other new-look-
ing buildings; beyond
these one saw
structures that were at at once new-
looking
and derelict. Blocks had
gone up
too fast.
Many buildings
had to be aban-
doned after two or three
years.
T here
was one such
apartment
block that I
passed
in
my
afternoon walks
along
the
corniche: a
grand
blue-and-white tower
78 T RA NS I T I ON I S S UE 83
F uad A l-F utaih,
Untitled. Pencil
etching
4
I i
P--
I ) ?
L .
-/ ",r
i?r;
E E -:~~~~~~~~~~.;- I --
f.
I '.'
I
t
:ala<'^ .."'c~~':k,,l"A ,/,~.
>
..1,;./ ',. ..,
%\ 14~s
that stood like a
ship,
with a command-
ing
view of the
sea;
gleamingly
new and
completely
uninhabitable. I would hear
the sea wind that
always
blew
here,
whis-
tling
and
moaning through
its
gaping,
darkening
windows and
doors, whining
and
whistling
and
tugging
and
fidgeting
as if to
pick
it
apart.
I was often conscious in A bu Dhabi
of the
foreignness
of all this-modern
high-rises, higgledy-piggledy
construc-
tion
cranes,
new and derelict
buildings,
and this invasion of other A rabs from
abroad-their cultures
smothering
and
overwhelming
the local Bedu culture. A ll
in the name of
modernity
and educa-
tion. I t often seemed like
something-
dream,
nightmare-conjured
just
yester-
day
out of the
sands,
and that would
any
moment
pass away.
L eft to
nature,
to the
deft,
steady workings
of
desert, sea,
and
wind,
all of this
surely-I 'd
find
myself
thinking-would
soon
disappear,
the
old desert
simplicity
once more restored.
I t was not an
unpleasing thought.
I n all of A bu Dhabi there was
only
one
place
that had its own intrinsic love-
liness: the old whitewashed fortress built
in the local
style,
with its
ancient,
stud-
ded wood door, beside it a cluster of
F uad A l-F utaih,
Black F ace.
Mixed media
sheltering palms
and a small thicket of
vivid, yellow-flowering
shrubs.
A nd so I sensed even then that I was
witnessing
loss: the
vanishing
of Bedu
culture,
its banishment to the
edges
of
life,
its
smothering by
a
supposedly
su-
perior
culture
bringing
"education." I
sensed this but I didn't
quite
understand
or trust
my
intuition. A fter
all,
wasn't all
this-education, modernity, progress-
a
necessary
and incontrovertible
good?
I
don't know the answer even now. But I
do believe that I was
right
in
my feeling
that I was
witnessing
the
imposition
of
a
profoundly
different-and in
many
ways
inferior-culture.
A s soon as I arrived in the
country,
I was
placed
on a committee
charged
with
overseeing
the
development
and reform
of education
throughout
the E mirates.
I n the
preceding
few
years
schools had
opened
fast,
without much
planning,
and
we now had to revise and rationalize the
curricula.
My
fellow committee mem-
bers were
E gyptians
like
me,
or Pales-
tinians. T here were no locals on the
committee, although
we
reported
as a
committee to the minister of
education,
who was from A bu Dhabi. T his
arrange-
ment was
typical.
A dvisers and
advisory
committees were made
up
of
foreign
A rabs,
but the
people
who held the
highest posts
were local. T he latter
were drawn from
among
those few who
had had a formal education-there was
only
a small handful in the
country-
and from
among
the sons of
important
families.
A ll the other members of the com-
mittee were men. I n those
days
there
were no more than three or four
people
in the entire
country
with
Ph.D.'s,
and I
was one of them. I t was this that had
made it
possible
to
appoint
me,
a
woman,
to such a
high-level
committee.
Nobody
in the
world-except maybe
academics and textbook writers-sits
around the fireside
telling
stories in
standard A rabic.
We
began
our work
by polling
the
locals about how
they
wanted to see ed-
ucation
developed.
We also visited
schools,
observed
classes,
and interviewed
teachers and students. I met with local
women to hear how
they
felt about
women's education. Of course I was the
only
member of the committee who
could do
this,
since the local Bedu soci-
ety
was
strictly segregated-women
did not meet with men who were not
relatives.
Mariam,
one of the first women I in-
terviewed,
was a member of one of the
ruling
families. I sat
waiting
for her in the
reception
room at the women's center
with
my companion,
Gameela,
an
E gyptian
who had been in the Gulf for
several
years.
S he had been
assigned
to be
my interpreter,
for to
begin
with, Gulf
A rabic was
scarcely intelligible
to me. I n
the corner sat a
heavy figure completely
hidden in a black
'abaya.
We both as-
sumed that this was some
simple
woman
waiting
to meet with
Mariam,
but she
turned out to be Mariam herself. I went
through
the
questionnaire, asking
her
about women and education. S he was
probably
in her
fifties,
and she was non-
literate.
Of course women should have the
right
to education
up
to the
highest
lev-
T H E WOME N OF I S L A M 81
els,
she said. A nd of course
they
should
be able to
pursue
whatever
profession
they
wished.
What about-I
asked, moving
on to
the next item on the
questionnaire-
women's role in
I slam,
and the
require-
ments of I slam?
Who founded I slam? Mariam in-
stantly
retorted. A man or a woman?
S tartled,
my companion,
who was
dressed in
E gyptian-style
robes and a
head veil of strict
piety,
murmured,
"T he
Prophet
Muhammad, peace
and
mercy
be
upon
him!"
"E xactly!"
said Mariam. "A nd whose
side do
you
think he was on?"
Mariam told us she was
engaged
in an
argument
with
F atima,
the
principal
wife
of
Zayed,
the
ruler,
and with other
women,
as to what should be the em-
blem of women's centers in the E mi-
rates. A
gazelle
had been
proposed, partly
to honor
Zayed,
whose
emirate,
A bu
Dhabi,
meant "father of
[place of]
the
A s the A rab culture of
literacy
marches
inexorably onward,
local cultures
continue to be erased their
linguistic
and
cultural
creativity
condemned to
permanent,
unwritten silence.
gazelle."
Mariam wanted it to be the face
of an unveiled
woman,
with some
sign
indicating
that she was a doctor or
engi-
neer. A
gazelle
sounded like a nice
idea,
she
said,
but it associated women with
animals,
nonhuman
creatures,
and that
was a
dangerous thing
to do.
Mariam was
among
the most remark-
able and
forthright
of the women I
would meet in A bu Dhabi. But all of
them shared her
passion
about the im-
portance
of education for women and
many
had those same
qualities
of
strength,
directness, clarity,
and secure
confidence in their own vision. T here
was
Moza,
a cousin of the ruler. I n her
late twenties-too old to have benefited
from the
country's
educational revolu-
tions-she attended
literacy
classes un-
til a few
days
before she
gave
birth. I n
fact,
she had founded and endowed
the Women's A dult E ducation
Center,
where she took the classes. A woman of
enormous
wealth,
she wanted other
women to be able to
pursue
an educa-
tion. Women's centers
offering literacy
classes
(and
childcare for the women
who took
them)
existed
throughout
the
E mirates, many
of them funded
by
local
women.
T hose
qualities
of
resolve,
spiritedness,
and
passion
were
there, too,
in the new
generation.
H issa was a
youngster
of fif-
teen when I met
her;
she had been re-
moved from school and married off
against
her will when she was twelve. S he
appealed
her case to the
president,
through
his wife S heikha F atima: H issa
insisted that I slam
gave
her the
right
not
to be married without her consent and
the
right
to
education,
and she de-
manded both. S he won. A s we strolled in
the
schoolyard,
with its white colonnades
and
splashes
of
bougainvillea,
she told
me she intended to become a
petroleum
engineer.
H issa's
story
was
unusual,
but
the schools were full of
young
women as
spirited
as she:
they
had
every
intention
of
going
on to become
engineers,
archi-
tects,
scientists. F ew wanted to
major
in
literature and the
humanities,
the
subjects
that
girls
are steered toward in other
countries.
F uad A l-F utaih,
Woman in Red Dress.
Mixed media
I t soon became
ordinary
for me to en-
counter these
extraordinary
women each
day,
to observe the
clarity
and forth-
rightness
with which
they expressed
their
opinions
and went about their
lives,
the sense of humor and
quick laughter
that
they brought
to their
gatherings.
Only
a handful of local women had had
formal education
and,
like the local ed-
ucated
men,
they
held
responsible posi-
tions
(though they
were less
public
and
less
powerful
than the
men)-as
head-
mistresses, say,
or
regional
educational di-
rectors. I t became
ordinary
too, then,
to
wait in an office or
reception
room and
observe one of the
younger, formally
ed-
ucated women
arrive,
wrapped
in the
black
'abaya.
Once in the
privacy
of an
all-women's
space,
she would let it
drop
to reveal an
elegant pantsuit. Naturally
it
was soon
quite
obvious to me that the
local culture bred
people
who needed no
instruction from
anyone
in the
qualities
of
strength, clarity,
vision, understanding,
or
imagination.
A s the
responses
to our
questionnaire
began
to come
in,
it
quickly
became ev-
ident that it was not
only
the women
here who
supported
women's education.
T he local
men, too,
were overwhelm-
ingly
in favor of
equal
education for
women.
T hey
believed that women
should be able to
qualify
for
any profes-
sion.Whatever either sex felt about
seg-
regation
and about women's
pursuing
professional
lives within a
segregated
context,
they
did not want to see women
held back
intellectually
or
prevented
from
pursuing
the
professions they
wished.
T hese
views,
I
discovered,
were not
those of the committee. A s we reviewed
the
responses
and
prepared
to reformu-
late the
country's
educational
goals,
Dr.
H aydar,
the chair of the
committee,
in-
structed us to set aside the local
people's
views
regarding equal
education for
women. T he
majority
of our
respon-
dents were uneducated
people,
he
pointed
out; most,
in
fact,
were illiterate.
T hey
had nice
hopes
and wishes about
equal
education for
women,
but their
lack of education meant
they
didn't have
the
knowledge
or
capacity
to foresee the
consequences
of
policies
in the
way
that
educated
people
could. T hat was
why
they
had us
here,
to tell them of those
consequences,
to tell them how best to
develop
their
society rationally.
H aydar,
a L ebanese who had studied
in
E gypt
and
A merica,
was a
compli-
cated man. T he notion of women's
equality
was
deeply
antithetical to
him;
a
sneering,
bitter tone
crept
into his words
whenever he
spoke
of it.
I nvariably,
his
example
of how
things spun
out of con-
trol and into destructive chaos when so-
cieties treated women as
equal
was
A merica, where,
I
surmised,
he had suf-
fered some awful
rejection.
I n
A merica,
he once
said,
they
were
giving
women
the
right
to serve in the
army, including
positions
where
they
would have men
serving
under them.
"Can
you imagine
a
pregnant
woman,"
he
said,
making
the
gesture
of a swollen
belly
before
him,
"giving
orders to her
soldiers!" H e looked at each of us in
turn,
laughing
a
humorless,
scandalized
laugh. L aughter
ensued from all around
me. T hat moment has stuck with me.
I f women had
degrees
in
engineering
or some such
subject,
he
asked,
would
they
still be
willing
to be the servants of
society?
I f
we,
the
committee,
gave
the
locals what
they wanted,
the entire basis
of
society
would be
destroyed.
F or soci-
ety depends
on women's role in the fam-
ily,
and on their
willingness
to be the ser-
vants of men. H ad the local
people
thought
of such
things?
Of course not!
Our
job
was to think of these
things
and to
plan
an educational future for the
country
consonant with the I slamic
principles
on which the
society-and
the national constitution-was based.
H aydar was,
he told
us,
an atheist him-
self.
(I
knew no one else in the E mirates
who
openly
declared his
atheism;
it was
a
courageous act.)
But his
personal
be-
liefs were
irrelevant,
he
insisted;
it was
simply
his
professional duty
to see to it
that we came
up
with an educational
program
that conformed to the
princi-
ples
of the
country,
and I slamic
princi-
ples
were
completely
clear as to the role
of women.
H aydar's
comments met with nods and
general approval
from the committee.We
should
begin, H aydar
then
proposed, by
cutting
down on math and science in
F uad
A l-F utaih,
Blue F ace.
Mixed media
girls'
schools and
substituting, say,
home
economics.
T his
appalled
me,
of
course,
and the
situation seemed
hopeless-I
was
totally
outnumbered.
Brooding
on the
gray-faced
men on
the
committee,
who were so
casually
preparing
to
blight
the
hopes
of the lo-
cal
women,
and on the fact that these
men were nonlocals from other A rab
cultures who were now
imposing
the
narrow, bigoted
ideas of their own back-
grounds,
I decided to talk to
I brahim,
the
director of education. H e was a local and
my
immediate boss. H e had been the
person responsible
for
my appointment
to the committee.
I knew I brahim was
strongly
in favor
of
equal
education for women. A s a
boy
he had attended the
only
school in the
region
before the oil
boom,
an
E nglish
school funded
by
the British
govern-
ment. T hen he had won a
scholarship
to
E ngland,
where he earned a B.A .
F uad
A l-F utaih,
Girl in Blue and Red.
Mixed media
H e listened to what I had to
say
and
suggested
that I tell Moza and the other
local women what the committee was
planning.
S o I
stopped by
the Women's
Center that
evening
and told Moza
about
H aydar's plan
over a
glass
of tea.
Within a week or
two,
the committee
got
a directive frohm above
instructing
us
to
drop
this scheme. A fter
that,
I didn't
much
worry
when
H aydar
came
up
with
some similar idea. I 'd listen and
mildly
demur-or even
appear
to
agree-and
then let one of the women know what
was afoot. I t
always
worked. I must con-
fess that I
enjoyed
the bemused look on
H aydar's
face whenever he announced-
as if
despairing
of these
foolish,
unpre-
dictable locals-that he had
got
a call or
a note from the minister
telling
him that
the committee was not to do this or that.
I am sure now that in
appointing
me to
that
committee,
I brahim had
hoped
I
would serve
precisely
the role that I did.
I was recruited to be his
ally against
the
stifling
attitudes that had inundated the
E mirates from other A rab countries.
A s director of
education,
I brahim had
considerable
power.
But he was not a
member of an
important family
and,
as
these
things
still
counted,
he had to use
his wits to
bring
about the outcomes he
wanted. H is
superior,
the minister of ed-
ucation,
was from a
prominent family
and had a B.A . from
Cairo;
he had the
power
to override his decisions and ac-
cept
the recommendations of our com-
mittee. H e was much more ambivalent
than I brahim on the
question
of
equal
education for women.
T he divide on this
question,
as I
grad-
ually
came to
understand,
was not at all
a
straightforward
divide between women
and men. While the nonlocal A rab men
on the committee were
opposed
to
equal
F uad
A l-F utaih,
S ura
A l-F atihafrom
the
H oly
Koran
Collage.
Mixed media
education,
the local men as a
group
were
not.
I brahim,
educated in
E ngland,
was
in favor of it-but so were
others,
among
them the nonliterate and the
barely
literate,
including Zayed,
the
pres-
ident of the
country
and a nonliterate
man,
who had committed
funding
to
men's and women's education in
equal
measure.
A mong
local
men,
there was a divide
between those who were ambivalent
about or
opposed
to
equal
education for
women-mostly
men educated in the
A rabic and
primarily
in the
E gyptian
ed-
ucational
system-and
those who
sup-
ported equal
education. A small minor-
ity
of the latter
group
had been educated
in the
E nglish system;
the rest were non-
literate or
barely
literate-in other
words, they
were men who
belonged
fully
to the
oral,
living
culture of the re-
gion.
A t the time the
only thing
clear to me
was that there seemed to be
something
distinctly
more
oppressive
toward
women in the attitudes of nonlocal A rab
men,
and that the
A rabic,
E gyptian-in-
spired
educational
system
seemed to have
a
perceptibly negative
effect intellectu-
ally.
I t seemed to close minds instead of
opening
them
up-close
minds in all
sorts of
ways,
but
particularly
with
regard
to women.
What I was
observing,
I realize
now,
was the
profound gulf
between the oral
culture of the
region,
on the one
hand,
and the A rabic culture of
literacy,
on the
other. Oral cultures here in the Gulf-
indeed,
oral cultures
everywhere-are
the creations of communities of men
and
women; they represent
the
ongoing
interactions of these communities with
their
heritage,
beliefs, outlook,
circum-
stances,
and so on. But the A rabic culture
of
literacy-a
culture whose
language
nobody,
no
living community,
ordinar-
ily speaks-clearly
isn't the
product
of
people living
their lives and
interacting
with their environment and
heritage.
T he
Kenyan
writer
Ngugi
wa
T hiong'o
has
pondered
the
relationship
between
mother
tongue
and written
language.
H e
describes his mother
tongue
as the lan-
guage
that
people
used as
they
worked in
the
fields,
the
language
that
they
used to
tell stories in the
evenings
around the
fireside. I t was a
language
alive with "the
words and
images
and with the inflection
of the voices" of the
people
who made
up
his
community,
a
language
whose
words had "a
suggestive power
well be-
yond
the immediate and lexical mean-
ings.
Our
appreciation
of the
suggestive
magical power
of
language
was rein-
forced
by
the
games
we
played
with
words
through
riddles,
proverbs, transpo-
sitions of
syllables,
or
through
nonsensi-
cal but
musically arranged
words. S o we
learned the music of our
language
on
top
of the content. T he
language,
through images
and
symbols, gave
us a
view of the world."
A ll of
Ngugi's
words
apply
to Gulf
A rabic and
E gyptian
A rabic and to the
many
varieties of vernacular
A rabic,
none of which
currently
has a written
form. But
Ngugi's
words do not
apply
to
standard
A rabic,
the
only
written form of
A rabic that there is.
Nobody
in the
world-except maybe
academics and
textbook writers-sits around the fire-
side
telling
stories in standard
A rabic;
no
one
working
in a field
anywhere
in the
A rab world
speaks
that
language;
no chil-
dren
anywhere play
word
games
and tell
riddles and
proverbs
in standard A rabic.
But if this
language
and its culture are
not the
language
and culture of a
living
community,
whose culture is it that is be-
ing
disseminated
by
the culture of liter-
acy
that A rab
governments
are
zealously
imposing
on their
populations through
schools and universities? Rooted in no
particular place
and in no
living
culture,
from whom does this culture emanate
and whose values do its texts
embody?
Presumably they
are the values and
worldviews of
government
bureaucrats
and textbook writers and the literate
elites of
today, along
with those of the
A rabic textual
heritage
on which text-
books and the
contemporary
culture of
literacy
still draw. T he A rabic
literary
heritage
was
produced
over the centuries
primarily by
men:
mainly
middle-class
men who lived in
deeply misogynist
so-
cieties.
Perhaps
it is their
perspective,
re-
cycled today
in textbooks and
throughout
the A rabic culture of
literacy,
that im-
parts
to that culture its
distinctly negative
disposition
toward women.
Whatever its sources and whoever its
creators,
it
is,
as I observed
it,
a sterile and
oppressive
culture. I remember
my
un-
easy feeling
in A bu
Dhabi,
as I watched
E gyptians
and Palestinians trained in this
prevailing
culture of
literacy
inculcate it
in their
young charges,
that I was wit-
nessing
the
tragic imposition
of a ster-
ile, inferior,
bureaucratic culture on
young
minds-and the
gradual
erasure
of their own
vital,
local
culture,
a culture
much richer and more humane. A nd this
was
being
done in the name of educa-
tion.
T he
imposition
of this culture of liter-
acy throughout
the A rab world amounts
to a kind of
imperialism-a linguistic
and cultural
imperialism
conducted in
the name of
education,
A rab
unity,
and
the oneness of the A rab nation.
T hrough-
out the A rab
world,
as this A rab culture
of
literacy
marches
inexorably
onward,
local cultures are
erased,
their
linguistic
and cultural
creativity
condemned to
permanent,
unwritten silence. A nd we
are
supposed
to
applaud
this,
not
protest
it as we would if it were
any
other form
of
imperialism
or
political
domination.
T his
variety
of domination
goes by
the
name of
"nationalism,"
and we are
sup-
posed
to
support
it no matter what is de-
stroyed
in its wake.
* * *
My
time in A bu
Dhabi-especially my
days
of conversation with its women-
recalled the world of
my
childhood.
T he women of
my family,
too,
had
their own
understanding
of
I slam,
an un-
derstanding
that was different from offi-
cial I slam. F or
although
it was
only
Grandmother who
performed
all the
regular
formal
prayers, religion
was an es-
sential
part
of the
way
all the women of
the house made sense of their lives. I t
was
through religion
that one
pondered
the
things
that
happened, why they
had
happened,
and what one should make of
them,
how one should take them.
I slam,
as I learned
it,
was
gentle, gen-
erous,
pacifist,
inclusive,
somewhat
mys-
tical-just
like these women themselves.
Mother's
pacifism
was
entirely
of a
piece
with this sense of the
religion. Being
Muslim was about
believing
in a world
in which life was
meaningful,
in which
all events and
happenings
were
perme-
ated with
meaning
even if it was not al-
ways
clear to us.
Religion
was above all
about inner
things.
T he outward
signs
of
religiousness,
such as
prayer
and
fasting,
F uad A l-F utaih,
Untitled. Mixed media
F uad
A l-F utaih,
T ihama Women.
Pencil
etching
might
be
signs
of true
religiosity.
But
they equally
well
might
not.
T hey
were
certainly
not what was
important
about
being
Muslim. What was
important
was
how
you
conducted
yourself
and how
you
were in
yourself
and in
your
attitude
toward
others,
and in
your
heart.
What it was to be Muslim was
passed
on
quietly-not,
of
course,
wordlessly,
but without elaborate sets of
injunctions
and threats and decrees and dictates
about what we should do and be and be-
lieve. What was
passed
on,
besides the
general
basic beliefs and moral ethos of
I slam
(which
are also those of its sister
monotheisms),
was a
way
of
being
in the
world. A
way
of
holding
oneself in the
world-in relation to
God,
to
existence,
to other human
beings.
T his the women
passed
on to us most of all
through
their
being
and
presence, by
the
way they
were
in the
world,
conveying
their
beliefs,
ways, thoughts,
and how we should be in
the world
by
a
touch,
a
glance,
a word-
prohibiting,
for
instance,
or
approving.
T heir mere
responses
in this or that sit-
uation-a
word,
a
shrug,
even a
pos-
ture-passed
on to
us,
in the
way
that
women
(and
also
men)
have forever
passed
on to their
young,
how we should
be. A nd all of these
ways
of
passing
on
attitudes, morals, beliefs,
knowledge-
through
touch and the
body,
in words
spoken
in the
living
moment-are
by
their
very
nature subtle and evanescent.
T hey shape
the next
generation,
but
they
do not leave a record in the
way
that
someone who writes a text about how
to live or what to believe leaves a record.
Nevertheless, they
leave a far more im-
portant living
record.
Beliefs, morals,
and
attitudes,
impressed
on us
through
those
fleeting
words and
gestures,
are written
into our
lives,
our
bodies,
our
selves,
even
into our
physical
cells and into how we
live out the
script
of our lives.
* * *
I t was Grandmother who
taught
me the
fat-ha (the opening
verse of the
Quran,
and the
equivalent
of the Christian L ord's
Prayer), along
with two or three other
short suras.When she took me
up
to the
roof of our house in A lexandria to watch
for
angels
on the
twenty-seventh night
of
Ramadan,
she recited the sura about
that
special night,
a sura that was also
about the miraculousness of
night
itself.
I t is still
my
favorite
sura;
even now I re-
member its loveliness.
I don't remember
receiving
much
other direct
religious
instruction,
from
Grandmother or from
anyone
else. S it-
ting
in her
room,
the windows
opening
behind her onto the
garden,
the curtain
billowing, my
mother once
quoted
to
me the verse in the
Quran
that she be-
lieved summed
up
the essence of I slam:
"H e who kills one
being"-nafs,
self,
from the root
nafas,
breath-"kills all of
humanity,
and he who
revives,
or
gives
life
to,
one
being
revives all of human-
ity"
I t was a verse that she
quoted
often,
F uad A l-F utaih,
Untitled. Mixed media
that came
up
in
any important
conversa-
tion about
God,
religion,
those sorts of
things.
I t
represented
for her the essence
of I slam.
When I was
thinking
about all
this,
I
happened
to be
reading
the
autobiogra-
phy
of Zeinab
al-Ghazali,
one of the
most
prominent contemporary
Muslim
women leaders. A l-Ghazali founded a
Muslim Women's
S ociety
that she even-
tually
merged
with the Muslim Brother-
hood,
the "fundamentalist" association
that was
particularly
active in the forties
and fifties.
T hroughout
her life she
up-
held the
legitimacy
of
using
violence in
the cause of I slam. I n her
memoir,
she
F uad
A I -F utaih,
Blue, Red,Yellow
F ace. Mixed media
writes of how in her childhood her fa-
ther told her stories of the heroic
women of
early
I slam who had written
poetry eulogizing
Muslim warriors and
who themselves had
gone
to war and
gained
renown as fearless
fighters.
Mus-
ing
about all this and about the differ-
ence between al-Ghazali's I slam and
my
mother's
pacifist understanding,
I found
myself falling
into a meditation on the
seemingly
trivial detail that
I ,
unlike al-
Ghazali,
had never heard stories about
the women of
early
I slam,
heroic or oth-
erwise,
as a
young girl.
A nd it was then
that I
suddenly
realized the difference
between al-Ghazali and
my
mother and
between al-Ghazali's I slam and
my
mother's.
T he reason I had not heard such sto-
ries as a child was
quite simply
that back
then,
those sorts of stories were to be
found
only
in the ancient classical texts
of
I slam,
texts that
only
men who had
studied the classical I slamic
literary
her-
itage
could understand and
decipher.
T he entire
training
at I slamic universi-
ties-the
training,
for
example,
that al-
Ghazali's
father,
who had attended al-
A zhar
University,
had received-con-
sisted
precisely
in
studying
those texts.
A l-Ghazali had been initiated into I slam
and had
got
her notions as to what a
Muslim was from her
father,
whereas I
had received
my
I slam from
my
mother,
as she had from her mother. S o there are
two
quite
different
I slams,
an I slam that
is in some sense a women's I slam and an
official,
textual
I slam,
a men's I slam.
I ndeed,
it is obvious that a far
greater
gulf
must
separate
men's and women's
ways
of
knowing,
and the
ways
in which
men and women understand
religion,
in
the
segregated
societies of the Middle
E ast than in other societies-and we
know that there are differences between
women's and men's
ways
of
knowing
even in
nonsegregated
societies such as
A merica. Besides the fact that women
often could not read
(or,
if
they
were lit-
erate,
could not
decipher
the I slamic
texts,
which
require years
of
specialist
training),
women in Muslim societies did
not attend
mosques. Mosque-going
was
not
part
of the tradition for women of
any
class
(that is, attending mosque
for
congregational prayers
was not
part
of
the
tradition,
as distinct from
visiting
mosques privately
and
informally
to of-
fer
personal prayers,
which women have
always done).Women
therefore did not
hear the sermons that
many
men heard.
A nd
they
did not
get
the orthodox
(male,
of
course) interpretations
of reli-
gion
that
many
men
got every F riday.
T hey
did not have a man trained in the
orthodox
(male) literary heritage
of I s-
lam
telling
them week
by
week and
month
by
month what it meant to be a
Muslim,
what the correct
interpretation
of this or that
was,
and what was or was
not the essential
message
of I slam.
Rather, they figured
these
things
out
among
themselves:
they figured
them
out as
they
tried to understand their own
lives,
talking
them over
together among
themselves,
interacting
with their
men,
and
returning
to talk them over in their
communities of women. A nd
they fig-
ured them out as
they
listened to the
Quran
and talked
among
themselves
about what
they
heard. F or this was a
culture,
at all levels of
society
and
throughout
most of the
history
of I s-
lamic
civilization,
not of
reading
but of
the recitation of the
Quran.
I t was re-
cited
by professional
reciters,
women as
well as
men,
and listened to on all kinds
of occasions. T here was merit in
having
the
Quran
chanted in
your
house and in
hearing
it chanted wherever it was
chanted,
whereas for women there was
no merit attached to
attending mosque,
an
activity
indeed
prohibited
to women
for most of
history.
No wonder non-Muslims think I slam is such
a backward and
oppressive religion:
what
the sheikhs made of it is
largely oppressive.
T he women I knew didn't feel that
they
were
missing anything by
not hear-
ing
the exhortations of
sheikhs,
nor did
they
believe that the sheikhs had an un-
derstanding
of I slam
superior
to theirs.
A lthough occasionally
there
might
be a
sheikh who was
regarded
as a man of
genuine insight
and
wisdom,
the women
I knew
generally
dismissed the views and
opinions
of the common run of sheikhs
as mere
superstition
and
bigotry.
T hese
were not Westernized women: Grand-
mother,
who
spoke only
A rabic and
T urkish,
almost never set foot outside her
home,
and never even listened to the ra-
dio. T he dictum that "there is no
priest-
hood in
I slam"-meaning
that there is
no
intermediary
or
interpreter,
and no
need for
one,
between God and each in-
dividual Muslim-was
something
these
women and
many
other Muslims took
seriously
as a declaration of their
right
to
their own
understanding
of I slam.
T he I slam I received from the women
among
whom I lived was
part
of their
particular
subculture: there are not
just
two or three different kinds of
I slam,
but
many
different
ways
of
being
Muslim.
But what is
striking
to me now is not
how different or rare the I slam in which
I was raised
is,
but how
ordinary
and
typ-
ical it seems to be. A fter a lifetime of
meeting
and
talking
with Muslims from
all over the
world,
I find that this I slam
is one of the common
varieties-per-
haps
even the common or
garden
vari-
ety-of
the
religion.
I t is the I slam not
only
of
women,
but of
ordinary
folk
generally,
as
opposed
to the I slam of
sheikhs,
ayatollahs,
mullahs,
and clerics. I t
is an I slam that doesn't
necessarily place
emphasis
on ritual and formal
religious
practice;
it
pays
little or no attention to
the utterances and exhortations of official
figures.
Rather,
it is an I slam that stresses
moral conduct and
emphasizes
I slam as a
broad
ethos,
a
way
of
understanding
and
reflecting
on the
meaning
of one's life
and of human life more
generally.
T his
variety
of I slam
(or,
more
exactly
perhaps,
these familial varieties of
I slam,
existing
in a continuum across the Mus-
lim
world)
consists above all of I slam as
essentially
an aural and oral
heritage
and
a
way
of
living
and
being-and
not a
textual,
written
heritage,
not
something
studied in books or learned from men
who studied books. T his latter
I slam,
the
I slam of the
texts,
is
quite
different: it is
the I slam of the
arcane,
mostly
medieval
written
heritage
in which sheikhs are
trained;
it is men's I slam. More
specifi-
cally still,
it is the I slam erected
by
that
minority
of men who have created and
passed
on this
particular
textual
heritage
over the centuries: men
who, although
they
have
always
been a
minority
in so-
ciety
as a
whole,
have
always
made the
laws and wielded enormous
power (like
the
ayatollahs
of
contemporary I ran).
T he I slam
they developed
in this textual
heritage
is similar to the medieval L atin
textual
heritage
of
Christianity-ab-
struse, obscure,
and dominated
by
me-
dieval, exclusively
male views of the
world.
I magine believing
that those me-
dieval texts
represent
the
only
true and
acceptable interpretation
of
Christianity.
T hat is
exactly
what the sheikhs and
ay-
atollahs
propound,
and this is where
things
stand now in much of the Mus-
lim world: most of the texts that deter-
mine Muslim law date from medieval
times.
What remains when
you
listen to the
Quran
over a lifetime are its
recurring
themes, ideas,
and
words,
its
permeating
spirit: mercy, justice, peace, compassion,
humanity,
fairness, kindness, truthfulness,
charity.
I t is
precisely
these
recurring
themes and this
permeating spirit
that are
for the most
part
left out of the medieval
texts or smothered and buried under a
welter of obscure and abstruse "learn-
ing."
One would
scarcely
believe,
read-
ing
or
hearing
the laws these texts have
yielded, particularly
when it comes to
women,
that the words
justice, fairness,
compassion,
or truth ever occur in the
Quran.
No wonder non-Muslims think
I slam is such a backward and
oppressive
religion:
what these men made of it is
largely oppressive.
T he men who wrote
the foundational texts of official I slam
were
living
in societies and eras rife with
chauvinism,
eras when men believed that
God had made them
superior
to
women,
and that God
fully
intended them to
have dominion over women. A nd
yet,
despite
such beliefs and
prejudices,
here
and there in the texts
they created,
in the
details of this or that
law, they
wrote in
some
provision
or condition
that,
aston-
ishingly,
does
give
justice
to women. S o
the
Quran's recurring
themes filter
through-if only
now and then-in a
body
of law
overwhelmingly
skewed in
favor of men.
I am
sure, then,
that
my
foremothers'
lack of
respect
for the sheikhs was not
coincidental. Generations of
astute,
thoughtful women,
listening
to the
Quran,
understood its essential themes
and its faith
perfectly
well. A nd
looking
around
them,
they
understood
perfectly
well what a
travesty
men had made of it.
L eaving
no written
legacy-written
only
on the
body
and in the
scripts
of
our lives-this oral and aural tradition of
I slam no doubt stretches back
through
generations,
as ancient as
any
written
tradition.
One
might
even
argue
that the oral
tradition is intrinsic to I slam itself. T he
Quran
was
originally
recited to the com-
munity by
the
Prophet
Muhammad.
T hroughout
his
life,
and for several
years
after his
death,
it remained an aural text.
Moreover,
a bias in favor of the heard
word, the word
given
life and
meaning
by
the human
voice,
the human breath
(nafas),
is
there,
one
might say,
in the
very
language.
I n A rabic
script,
as in
H ebrew,
no vowels are set
down,
only
consonants.
A set of consonants can have several
meanings;
it
only acquires
a
specific,
fixed
meaning
when
given
vocalized or silent
utterance,
unlike words in
E uropean
scripts,
which have the
appearance, any-
way,
of
being
fixed in
meaning.
Until life
is
literally
breathed into
them,
A rabic and
H ebrew words on the
page
have no
par-
ticular
meaning.
I ndeed,
until then
they
are not words but
only potential
words,
a chaotic
possibility
of
meanings.
I t is as
if the
scripts
of these
languages,
mar-
shaling
their bare consonants across the
page,
hold within them vast
spaces
where
meanings
exist in a condition of
whirling
potentiality
until the moment that one is
singled
out and uttered. A nd so
by
their
very scripts,
H ebrew and A rabic seem to
announce the
primacy
of the
spoken,
living
word;
they
announce that mean-
ing
can
only
be here and now. H ere and
now in this
body,
this breath
(nafas),
this
self
(nafs)
encounters the
word,
gives
it
life. Without that
encounter,
the word
has no
life,
no
meaning. Meaning always
only
here and
now,
in this
body,
for this
person.
T ruth
always only
here and
now,
for this
body,
this
person.
Not
something
transcendent, overarching, larger, bigger,
more
important
than life-but here and
now and in this
body
and in this small
and
ordinary
life.
We seem to be
living through
the
steady, seemingly
inexorable erasure of
the oral and ethical traditions of lived I s-
lam,
and the
ever-greater
dissemination
of written
I slam,
textual
I slam,
men's I s-
lam. Worse
still,
we are
witnessing
the
unstoppable spread
of fundamentalist
I slam-textual I slam's narrower and
poorer
descendant. Practitioners of the
older,
learned I slam
usually
studied
many
texts; they
knew that even in these me-
dieval texts there were
disagreements
among
scholars, differing interpretations
of this or that sura. But
today's
funda-
mentalists,
literate but often
having
read
perhaps
a
single
text,
take it to be defin-
itive,
the one and
only
truth.
T hus,
literacy
has
played
a baneful role
both in
spreading
one form of
I slam,
and
in
working
to erase oral and
living
forms
of the
religion.
F or one
thing, many
of
us
automatically
assume that those who
write and who
put
their
knowledge
down in texts have
something
more
valuable to offer than those who
simply
live their
knowledge
and use it to inform
their lives. A nd we assume that those
who
interpret
texts in
writing-the
sheikhs and
ayatollahs-must
have a bet-
ter, truer,
deeper understanding
of I slam
than the untutored Muslim. But the
only
I slam that the sheikhs and
ayatollahs
have
a
deep understanding
of is their own
gloomy,
medieval version.
F uad
A l-F utaih,
Woman
L ooking
to the Mirror.
Mixed media
T he A rt of F uad A -F utalh
F uad A l-F utaih was born to aYemeni fa-
ther and a S omali mother in
I 948.
When he was four
years old,
his
family
moved to
A den,
then one of
many
British
protectorates
in S outh
Yemen,
where A l-F utaih became
something
of
a bookworm. I n
1962,
he went to
study
E nglish
literature in
Cairo,
a
city
then
enlivened
by
Gamal A bdel Nasser's Pan-
A rabic and Pan-A frican dream. A l-F u-
taih
stayed away
from radical
politics,
but
he did
occasionally
attend
speeches
at
the Riche Cafe and often found him-
self in conversation with the
writers,
journalists,
and intellectuals who were its
patrons.
I n
I 967,
A l-F utaih left
E gypt
amid
the A rab-I sraeli tension that would
spark
the S ix
Day
War. But he arrived home
to find that S outh Yemen was
hardly
at
peace,
either: the British crown was in
the
process
of
handing
the
territory
over
to the Communist-backed National
L iberation F ront I n the
city
of
S an'a,
A l-
F utaih heard over the radio that he had
won a
scholarship
to
study
theater in
E ast
Germany,
but he found himself
trapped
as
Royalists
and
Republicans
waged
their war over the
city. By
the
time he
managed
to
escape,
his scholar-
ship
had been awarded to someone else.
E ventually,
A l-F utaih studied
graphic
design
and
painting
in Diisseldorf. I n
1977,
he married I lona
Kline,
a German
woman,
and
began exhibiting
his
paint-
ings
in Berlin and elsewhere. A n exhibi-
tion in
Baghdad caught
the attention of
the
I raqi ministry
of
education;
A l-F u-
taih found himself
illustrating
children's
books for
I raq.
I n
1980,
he became the
first director of fine arts in the Yemen
Ministry
of
Culture,
but he would soon
resign
to concentrate on
painting
full-
time. E xhibitions
throughout E urope,
A merica,
and the Muslim world fol-
lowed.
A l-F utaih's art does not adhere to the
strict conventions of traditional A rab
art,
which tends to be in thrall to
antiq-
uity,
full of
calligraphy
and
arabesque.
F or hundreds of
years
after the advent of
I slam,
A rabic art was defined
by
the fact
that artists were not allowed to
paint
God or
man,
only trees, flowers,
and
inanimate
objects.
I n A l-F utaih's
paint-
ings,
on the other
hand,
the female im-
age
is at the center: his women
appear
subdued but
dignified; they speak
their
condition
through
the
strong spirit
in
their
eyes,
the
explosive
sexuality
in their
shape-the very
elements that tradi-
tionalYemeni
society
treats as taboo. H is
paintings
chronicle the
perennial strug-
gle
between
spirituality
and
eroticism;
they
evoke the
spiritual mythology
of
the A rab world.
-T ijan
M. S allah

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