Secular and Islamic Feminist Critiques in the Work of Fatima Mernissi (Women and Gender: the Middle East and the Islamic World)

Secular and Islamic Feminist Critiques in the Work of Fatima Mernissi

Women and Gender The Middle East and the Islamic World

Editors

Margot Badran Valentine Moghadam

VOLUME 9

Secular and Islamic Feminist Critiques in the Work of Fatima Mernissi By

Raja Rhouni

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Detailed Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data are available on the Internet at http://catalog.loc.gov

ISSN 1570-7628 ISBN 978-90-04-17616-4 Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints BRILL, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

À ma maman À mon papa À mon mari À tous ceux que je porte dans mon cœur Avec tendresse

CONTENTS Preface ................................................................................................. Acknowledgments .............................................................................. Mernissi as a Point of Entry into Islamic Feminism ................................................................. Mernissi and Her Critics .............................................................. Engaging Islamic Feminist Theory through the Case of Mernissi ...................................................................................... Laying Bare My Assumptions ..................................................... Mernissi and Islamic Feminism .................................................. Rise of a Movement(s) and Birth of a Term ............................ Islamic Feminism: An Oxymoron? ............................................ Problematizing ‘Islamic Feminism’: What’s in a Name? ....... Organization of the Book ............................................................

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Introduction

1 1 11 13 20 22 27 31 38

PART ONE

MERNISSI’S SECULAR CRITIQUE: WRITING THE GENDERED SUBALTERN HISTORY OF MOROCCO Chapter One

Multiple-Front Postcolonial Feminist Critique .................................................................... Revisiting French Colonialism and the ‘Emancipation of Women’ ...................................................................................... Deconstructing Nationalist Discourse of ‘Women’s Liberation’ ............................................................... Uncovering the Political and Economic Instrumentality of Traditional Gender Roles to a Neopatriarchal System .......

Chapter Two A Subaltern Critic Unveils the Intersection between Gender and Class Biases in Modernization Policies ......................................... Mernissi’s Subaltern Narrative and Conflicts with a Dogmatic Marxist Discourse ..................................................

47 47 55 66

77 79

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Problematizing Modernization through a Subaltern Narrative ..................................................................................... Foregrounding ‘Subaltern Consciousness’: Can the Subaltern Be Heard by Mernissi? ............................................................. Decentering Feminism, Demystifying the Harem, and Revising ‘Muslim History’ ........... Decentering Feminism ................................................................. Demystifying the Harem Using a Double-Front Critique ..... In the Silent Margins of Muslim History .................................

86 102

Chapter Three

119 119 131 147

PART TWO

BETWEEN SECULARIST AND ISLAMIC FEMINISM Chapter Four The Secularist Moment ....................................... Beyond the Veil .............................................................................. Woman in the Muslim Unconscious ...........................................

165 165 178

Chapter Five Revisiting Islam from ‘Within’ ......................... L’Amour dans les pays musulmans ............................................. The Veil and the Male Elite ......................................................... Islam and Democracy ....................................................................

195 195 201 236

Conclusion

Toward a Post-foundationalist Islamic Feminism

251

Glossary ............................................................................................... Bibliography ........................................................................................ Index ....................................................................................................

275 277 287

Writing . . . is the act of a lost soul; the approach is that of someone fragile, who has no message, someone in search of herself, someone sure of nothing, except that something isn’t right and it hurts. Writing is an admission of impotence, but one reinforced and buttressed by an incredible generosity and marvelous faith in humanity and its grandeur which derives from its being perfectible. Fatima Mernissi, “Writing is Better Than a Face-Lift,” in Women’s Rebellion and Islamic Memory

PREFACE When I first heard the name Fatima Mernissi, I was an undergraduate student (1991–95) in the department of English at the Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, Université Mohammed V, Rabat, Morocco. One of my professors mentioned Mernissi as the Moroccan feminist par excellence. Though I was quite sensitive to gender inequalities in general, the name did not catch much of my attention. I had been introduced to feminism a year or two before in a literary course, which, despite its value, often focused on American or French feminisms; the issues we covered seemed to me, and I presume to a lot of my classmates, far away from Moroccan reality. The disinterest and often distrust of feminism by my classmates, especially my male classmates, largely stemmed from this particular focus. With hindsight, I think that Mernissi’s work, if taught, would have significantly changed my classmates’ negative assumptions about feminism, especially the commonly held idea that feminism describes a war against men and Islam, waged by Western and Westernized bourgeois women, advocating sexual promiscuity. If my classmates and I had studied, for instance, Mernissi’s Doing Daily Battle: Interviews with Moroccan Women, based on her pioneering interviews with mostly rural and poor urban women, we would have realized that her work is for the most part about foregrounding the voices of underprivileged Moroccan women, subject to a combination of class and gender marginalization.1 This aspect of Mernissi’s scholarship was one of my motivations, among many, to write a dissertation on her work. As a young educated woman, living in a patriarchal, though changing, society, I was obviously most intrigued by her works on Islam and gender.2 This was another (and the most important) incentive behind 1 Mernissi, Doing Daily Battle: Interviews with Moroccan Women, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (London: The Women’s Press, 1988). The book was originally published in Morocco in 1984 under the French title Le Maroc raconté par ses femmes [Morocco narrated by its women] (Rabat: SMER, 1984). It was republished in France as Le Monde n’est pas un harem: paroles de femmes du Maroc [The world is not a harem: Voices of Moroccan women] (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991). I will be using the English translation, Doing Daily Battle, throughout this book. 2 One of the most significant changes in Morocco is certainly the new family code (Moudawana), issued in 2004, which significantly moved toward greater gender equality

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my project. Reading Mernissi’s Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society, I could not but agree with its intransigent critique of gender discrimination in Islam.3 I had been saturated with clearly gender discriminating laws, to which I was painfully introduced in courses on Islamic education during high school. Women’s secondary status in areas of inheritance and witness-giving made me come to the painful awareness that I, a profoundly religious teenager, was in fact a second-class believer. As a postgraduate student reading Beyond the Veil, I discovered that Mernissi’s secularist position and her criticism of what she saw as the misogynist message of Islam matched mine. Yet reading Mernissi’s Le Harem politique: le Prophète et les femmes (The political harem: The prophet and women) (published in English in 1991 as The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam), with its ‘new’ vision of Islam as a religion with a message of gender equality, aborted because of deep-rooted cultural misogyny and male political interests, somehow shook my

and is considered today “to be the most gender-egalitarian sharia-grounded civil code” (Margot Badran, “Islamic Feminism Revisited,” Al-Ahram Weekly Online, no. 781, February 9–15, 2006, Al-Ahram Organization, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/781/ cu4.htm). Among the significant changes it brought is the abolition of the patriarchal family. Whereas the former Moudawana, also called Le Code du Statut Personnel (Personal Status Code) conceived of the family as being headed by the husband, the new family code states that the family is under the equal responsibility of both the husband and wife. The law also abolished the institution of matrimonial tutorship, wilaya (from wali, male tutor). Today, it is no longer mandatory for an adult woman to have a tutor sign her marriage contract. In addition, the amendments brought serious restrictions on polygamy, unilateral divorce, and precocious marriages. For the text of the new Moudawana, see the Ministry of Justice’s Web site, http://www.justice. gov.ma/MOUDAWANA/Frame.htm. An unofficial English translation was prepared by Global Rights in 2005, http://www.globalrights.org/site/DocServer/MoudawanaEnglish_Translation.pdf?docID=3106. These legal changes are in line with social changes, like women’s growing access to education and employment, the emergence of women as heads of household, and the increase of the age at first marriage. For an excellent discussion of social changes and new political dynamics in general in Morocco, see Taieb Belghazi and Mohammed Madani, L’Action collective au Maroc: de la mobilisation des ressources à la prise de parole [Collective action in Morocco: From mobilization of resources to taking the floor] (Rabat: Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, 2001). For a discussion of the new Moudawana, its limitations, and problems with its implementation, see Souad Eddouada, “Implementing Islamic Feminism: The Case of the Family Code Reform in Morocco,” in Islamic Feminism: Current Perspectives, ed. Anitta Kynsilehtto (Tampere: Tampere Peace Research Institute, 2008), 37–46. 3 I will be using the 1987 edition of Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society, rev. ed. (1975; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

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secularist convictions.4 It, indeed, eased some of the aching anger I had felt against what after all constituted one of the most important identity components for a Muslim woman like me. As Ziba Mir-Hosseini argues: “If we are Muslims, whether or not believing or practicing, Islam is part of our identity, our way of life, a culture, a system of values. We may be at ease with it or find our position painful and ambiguous.”5 However, Mernissi’s book did not have satisfactory answers to all of my questions regarding the existence of discriminatory ‘laws’ in the foundational texts of Islam, such as the ones pointed out by Beyond the Veil. For a long time, then, I felt caught between these two powerful, yet very different texts, the first speaking to my mind, the second to my heart. Indeed, the reconciliation with this important identity constituent was not yet to come. This confusion and uneasiness soon disappeared with my decisive encounter with historian of Islamic thought Mohammed Arkoun, who gave regular lectures in Morocco in the late 1990s and the beginning of the twenty-first century.6 Arkoun’s insistence on the importance of history, or the comparative history of religions, in understanding and studying Islam; his call for the incorporation of the human sciences methodologies; his criticism of literal readings of founding texts and foundationalism in Islamic thought; and his assertion of the plurality of meaning were revelations to me. Surprising as it may seem, I came back to Islam through comparative history of religions, literary criticism, and linguistics. Though Arkoun has never dealt with gender issues in Islam in his work, his insights opened new avenues to me both as a person, for whom religion has always mattered, and as a young scholar, trying to make sense of gender in Islam. Equipped with the analytical tools

4 Mernissi, Le Harem politique: le Prophète et les femmes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1987); Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1991). A British edition is also available, under the title Women and Islam: An Historical Enquiry and Theological Enquiry (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991). I will be referring to the American edition, The Veil and the Male Elite. 5 Mir-Hosseini, Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 4. 6 I came across Arkoun during his talk at the Institut Français, Rabat. Arkoun, “AlIslah: réforme, ou subvertir la clôture dogmatique” [Al-Islah: Reform, or subversion of dogmatic closure] (lecture, Institut Français, Rabat, October 16, 2000). Three years later, I had the opportunity to personally meet him and discuss with him my work on Mernissi, during a conference organized by the Centre Jacques Berques, Rabat, in which I took part.

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provided by Arkoun and other progressive Muslim scholars, later, I was at last able to put my finger on the origin of my dilemma by articulating an ‘alternative’ approach to Islam, which eventually would constitute the central thesis in my doctoral dissertation. With the decisive help of my advisor, Moroccan critical theorist Taieb Belghazi, I registered in 1997 the first doctoral thesis on Mernissi’s work in a Moroccan university.7 My project was within the framework of the doctoral program Culture and Development, which followed the cultural studies MA program that Belghazi and other professors had initiated in the department of English of the same faculty.8 This program aimed to train students in interdisciplinary critical analysis through exposure to cultural studies with its numerous theories, like postcolonialism, postmodernism, and gender studies. I was lucky enough that within the same year, Mernissi, who had stopped teaching at the university, gave a talk at a conference organized by the faculty, on “Women and Madness.”9 I was very excited to put a face to a name and to hear her in person at last. I sat in the front with my notebook, prepared for what I expected to be an academic lecture on the subject. There stood in front of me an elegant woman in her late fifties, with makeup and beautiful jewelry, which, I later learned, she designs herself. “She is a different feminist,” I thought. The image of the other icon of Arab feminism, Nawal El Saadawi, who had been invited to give a lecture two or three years before, was still vivid in my mind. Saadawi wore jeans and a hat, with no makeup or ornament. Unfortunately, the subject of Saadawi’s lecture escapes my memory, only a strong impression remains that it was a powerful and assertive speech. In contrast, Mernissi’s talk, that day, was definitely light and humorous. I was so driven by her anecdotes about the Rabat Office of Telecommunication—her huge phone bill, which drove her “insane,” and the way she dealt with it through clever correspondence with the

7

The dean of the faculty at that time expressed his disagreement to this registration, because he did not see the relevance of studying Mernissi’s work, worse still, writing a doctoral thesis on her scholarship. Therefore, this work could not possibly have seen light without Belghazi pleading my case. 8 Lahcen Haddad and Fakhreddine Berrada, to whom I am deeply indebted for his invaluable teachings in cultural studies, also took part in introducing this program. Said Graiouid and Hasna Lebbady are two other important scholars in the field of cultural studies at the university. 9 Mernissi is now linked to the Institut Universitaire de la Recherche Scientifique, Université Mohammed V, Rabat.

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office—that I completely forgot to take notes. Her charm came from a combination of a good sense of humor and, I would say, a ‘feminine charisma.’ In fact, in all of her talks that I had the chance to listen to, Mernissi subjugated her audience through speeches combining humor with the use of darija, the Moroccan Arabic dialect, which is rarely used in intellectual gatherings (standard Arabic is typically preferred). This is part of her rebellious and dramatic personality, as well as part of a conscious strategy to fully catch the attention of her listeners and deliver more effectively her message, eschewing what would be an unattractive serious academic style delivered in classical Arabic. In that, I believe, she has been successful. After the talk, I approached the diva timidly and introduced myself. I told her about my project, to which she amusingly responded with an interjection resembling an ‘Oh my God!’ I smiled. One of her amusing statements that I had read in the introduction to one of her books had immediately crossed my mind. It states: À quoi donc sert se genre de livre si ce n’est à donner à l’auteur l’impression qu’il est important? Et me sentir importante est une drogue vitale pour moi, car tout me prouve à chaque minute le contraire. Alors, comprenez mon horreur de toute autoévaluation. Comprenez ma répudiation unilatérale de toute réflexion sur ce que je fais. Et surtout pourquoi je résiste violemment à quiconque essaie de me persuader du contraire, et pourquoi je ne suis inscrite dans aucune « union des écrivains », soit-elle arabe ou chinoise. J’évite comme la peste d’allez dans les séminaires ou on essaye de « se pencher sur mes œuvres ». J’admire en fait ceux qui tentent ce genre de plongée, car l’idée suffit à me donner le vertige. What is the value of this kind of book if not to give the author the impression that she is important? Feeling important is a vital drug for me, because everything proves to me at every moment the opposite. Therefore, do understand my repulsion of any self-evaluation, my unilateral repudiation of any reflection on what I am doing; especially why I violently resist anybody who tries to persuade me of the opposite, and why I am not subscribed to any “union des écrivains” [writers’ union], be it Arab or Chinese. I avoid like one avoids the plague attending seminars that try to “delve into” my work. I admire those who attempt this kind of plunging since the simple idea is enough to give me vertigo.10

I then expressed my wish to have an interview with her, thinking that it is worth trying after all. I was not alone in requesting to speak to her. 10 Mernissi, Le Monde n’est pas un harem, 8. This introduction does not appear in Doing Daily Battle, the English translation of the original book Le Maroc raconté par ses femmes. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

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Next to me was standing a young woman, who had introduced herself in a confident way as a journalist for a local daily newspaper, and who expressed the same wish. Mernissi asked for our contact information and promised to get in touch with both of us soon. I was, of course, not surprised when she did not. Given her self-declared distaste for discussions about her work, I could easily understand how a woman of her stature, solicited all over the world and involved in so many projects, could not have time for further interviews.11 To date, I have been unsuccessful in such an endeavor. I must confess that I have not really insisted, partly because of my reserved nature, but mostly because I believe the work of people largely speaks for them. Besides, Mernissi has expressed a lot of her ideas and is no doubt tired of having to explain herself time and again, as suggested by her statement above. I can perfectly imagine and understand this lassitude. I had enough material, including some published interviews, to attempt this ‘vertiginous’ enterprise. This I was determined to undertake with respect, but also with critical eyes, because I believe that criticism is not always about debasing people’s work, but can rather be a way of celebrating them by arguing with them and possibly also pushing their projects and landmark critiques toward new avenues.

11 Many scholars interested in her work, like the Swedish Jonas Svensson or the Moroccan Ahmed Cherrak, also have been unsuccessful in getting in touch with her. See Svensson, Women’s Human Rights and Islam: A Study of Three Attempts at Accommodation, Lund Studies in History of Religions, vol. 12 (Lund: Religionshistoriska avdelningen, Lunds universitet, 2000), http://kundweb.netatonce.com~u21805/ Ladda%20ner_files/Avh.pdf, which mainly focuses on Mernissi’s work; and Cherrak, Al-Khitab al-nissa’i fi al-Maghrib: namoudhaj Fatima Mernissi [Feminist discourse in Morocco: The case of Fatima Mernissi (Casablanca: Afrique Orient, 1990).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is first of all dedicated to Professor Taieb Belghazi, without whom my work literally would not have seen light. Besides initiating me to the field of cultural studies, his kindness, honesty, and passion for research have enlightened and inspired the lives of many of his graduate students at Université Mohammed V, Rabat, Morocco. I am grateful to Margot Badran, coeditor of the Brill series Women and Gender: The Middle East and the Islamic World, not only for encouraging this project but also for her invaluable comments, which often challenged many of my assumptions. My thanks also go to Badran’s coeditor of the series, Valentine Moghadam, and to the anonymous reader of Brill for constructive suggestions and comments, which immensely contributed to the development of my argument in this book. Brill editors Sasha Goldstein and Nicolette van der Hoek provided much-appreciated help and patience. I am grateful to Basia A. Nowak for her professional copyediting, for her invaluable comments and suggestions, and for her patience in the process. My correspondence with miriam cooke was particularly useful in articulating the thesis of this dissertation. I am therefore grateful for her modesty and intellectual generosity. Youssef Yacoubi’s rigorous comments on a paper in which I summarized the second part of my doctoral thesis were also extremely valuable. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Alisa Perkins for bravely and generously editing the first draft of my dissertation and for offering detailed comments and important suggestions that helped me articulate my point more clearly. I am indebted to Rachida Ghazali for editing the final draft of my dissertation. Although I cannot name all of the scholars who have provided invaluable comments, imparted important knowledge, and encouraged me along the way, I would like to especially mention Hasna Lebbady, Fakhredine Berrada, Lahcen Haddad, and Said Graiouid from Université Mohammed V. I appreciate Renata Pepicelli, Anitta Kynsilehtto, and Abdelkarim Khatibi for their encouragement. I am most grateful to my longtime friend, Souad Eddouada, for her friendship, solidarity, collaboration, and endless conversation; this book is without doubt the fruit of ongoing discussions with her. For their help, I would like to thank the librarians at La Source (The Source), Centre Jacques Berque

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(Jacques Berque Center), Fondation du Roi Abdul Aziz Al Saoud (King Adul Aziz Foundation), the Moroccan American Commission for Educational and Cultural Exchange, and the Bibliothèque Nationale (National Library). I would like to thank the following institutions for grants that allowed me to pursue this project. The Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, and the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin sponsored the research program, “Europe in the Middle East—The Middle East in Europe,” in which I served as fellow during the academic year 2006–2007. As a fellow in the fascinating city of Berlin, my work was enriched by discussions with my peer fellows and friends, Eli Bar-Chen, Özlem Biner, Magdi Guirguis, Erol Köroglu Dana Sajdi, Oded Schechter, Shaden Tageldin, Muhammad Vasfi, and Zafer Yenal. I am grateful to Christine Hoffman for her friendship during my stay in Berlin. Special thanks go to Georges Khalil, the program coordinator, especially for getting me involved in organizing the inspiring conference “Reconsidering ‘Islamic Feminism’: Deconstruction or the Quest for Authenticity?” held in Berlin on April, 26–28, 2007. Meeting with young scholars and activists, in addition to prominent figures of Islamic feminism, like Amina Wadud, Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid, Kecia Ali, and Sa’diyya Shaikh, Umaima Abu Bakr, and Abdenur Prado, during the conference has also greatly influenced the ideas of this book. I appreciate Gudrun Krämer from the Institute of Islamic Studies, Freie Universität, Berlin, for her collaboration in organizing the conference and especially for giving me the opportunity to discuss my work with scholars of Islamic studies at the institute. Although the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA), Program of African Studies, at Northwestern University, granted me a fellowship from April to June to 2004, I unfortunately was unable to use it due to commitments at my university. Last but not least, my family, especially my adored parents Smail Rhouni and Naima Boumelha who have dedicated their lives to their children, has offered unconditional love and relentless support for which I am grateful. I also dedicate this book to my beloved husband and life companion, Mhammed Sebbata, for his persistent love and incredible faith in me. I likewise offer special dedication to my dearest brothers and sister Kenza, Kamal, and Rachid Rhouni. I appreciate two great men who gave me the taste of freedom, my grandfather Mostafa Boumelha and my uncle Ali Boumelha, and my grandmother Fatima Boumelha

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who has offered immense affection. I mention with love family members Jamal-Eddine Gharbi (my second father), Abdelmoughit and Abdelkrim Bencherki, Mounir Hosni, Mohammed El Bos, and Abdelkrim, Aziza, Zoubir, and Hanae Sebbata; aunts and uncles Hassan, Nadia, Samia, Dalila, Malika, Izdihar, and Ahmed Boumelha; and my cousins Omar, Chafik, Lamia, Meryem, Malik, Achraf, Aicha, Adam, Zineb, Zakaria, Wassim, Fahd, Walid, Inas, Mimi, Aya, Ziad, and Anissa. Finally, I also dedicate this book to my much-loved first nephew, Eliaz Rhouni Surzur, and his father Vincent.

INTRODUCTION

MERNISSI AS A POINT OF ENTRY INTO ISLAMIC FEMINISM Mernissi and Her Critics Mernissi’s work has rarely been extensively (with a few exceptions, of course) examined or deeply analyzed, even when widely cited in works dealing with gender in Islam or Muslim majority societies.1 The few critics who have attempted such an endeavor typically have addressed only one aspect of her work at the expense of another, which, most of the time, results in major inaccuracies. For instance, some scholars have criticized Mernissi’s alleged lack of addressing issues of class disparities and global capitalism, founding their arguments exclusively on her work on gender and Islam.2 These critics have often ignored her more sociological work, mostly published in Morocco during the 1970s and 1980s, which primarily strived to criticize development policies and global capitalism and their impact on subaltern women. With respect to her work on Islam, some scholars have criticized her unsympathetic position toward Islam, basing their arguments exclusively on her earlier books.3 Indeed, in feminist scholarship dealing with Islamic

1 One of the few scholars interested in her work is Jonas Svensson, who analyzes Mernissi’s work along with work by Riffat Hassan and Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, as examples of what he terms an “accommodation-position” within a contemporary international debate on women’s human rights in his Women’s Human Rights and Islam. 2 For example, see Anouar Majid, “The Politics of Feminism in Islam,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 23, no. 2 (1998): 321–61; and Abdessamad Dialmy, Sexualité et discours au Maroc [Sexuality and discourse in Morocco] (Casablanca: Afrique Orient, 1988). 3 For example, see Mervat Hatem, “Class and Patriarchy as Competing Paradigms for the Study of Middle Eastern Women,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 29, no. 4 (1987): 811–18; and Asma Barlas, “Qur’anic Hermeneutics and Women’s Liberation” (paper presented at the International Congress on Islamic Feminism, Barcelona, Spain, October 29, 2005), http://www.asmabarlas.com/TALKS/Barcelona.pdf. In defense of Hatem, at the moment that she wrote her article, the English translation of Mernissi’s Le Harem politique was not yet available. Mernissi’s other book, which inaugurates her second-stage feminism, L’Amour dans les pays musulmans [Love in Muslim countries] (Casablanca: Editions Maghrébines, 1986), has never been translated into English.

2

introduction

feminism, Mernissi’s work is either highly praised or categorically criticized, but rarely deconstructed with some rare exceptions, like Lamia Ben Youssef Zayzafoon’s excellent study of Mernissi’s publications.4 However, despite Zayzafoon’s interesting deconstruction, her analysis does not distinguish between the ‘secularist’ and ‘Islamic’ feminist moments in Mernissi’s scholarship, which represents another limitation into which some critics fall when discussing Mernissi’s work. Zayzafoon devotes her first chapter, “A Semiotic Reading of Islamic Feminism: Hybridity, Authority, and the Strategic Reinvention of the ‘Muslim Woman’ in Fatima Mernissi,” to Mernissi. As the title suggests, she examines Mernissi’s construction, or “reinvention,” of the category ‘Muslim woman.’ She observes the way this category appears as a plural signifier in Mernissi’s work, which contradicts both Orientalist and conservative Muslim monolithic constructions. She praises Mernissi’s double project to protect the rights of ‘Muslim women’ against the rising Islamism, on the one hand, and to respond to the increasingly anti-Islamic feeling in the West, on the other hand. Yet Zayzafoon also sheds light on some major flaws in Mernissi’s work, such as the continuity of her discourse with those two discourses. She argues that by presenting “her reinvention of early Muslim society and the ideal of gender equality in Muhammad’s time as the truth that has been hidden or ‘veiled’ by the Muslim male elite,” Mernissi reproduces and, therefore, reinforces the conservative position by espousing the logic of religious truth. For her, Mernissi “paradoxically endorses the notion of truth from which the [H]adith derives its authority and hence reinforces the power of tradition to reinscribe and perpetuate itself.”5 This criticism is in line with the one presented here with a major difference: I do not espouse Zayzafoon’s (Islamic feminist) position that refuses to engage the Hadith,6 and her concentration on the Qur’an on grounds that the latter is more authentic and represents God’s authorial intent 4 For examples of praise, see Miriam Cooke, Women Claim Islam: Creating Islamic Feminism through Literature (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Margot Badran, Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009). For highly critical analysis of Mernissi’s work, see Barlas, “Qur’anic Hermeneutics”; and for a more balanced view, see Lamia Ben Youssef Zayzafoon, The Production of the Muslim Woman: Negotiating Text, History, and Ideology (New York: Lexington Books, 2005), esp. chap. 1. 5 Zayzafoon, Production of the Muslim Woman, 22. 6 I will be writing ‘Hadith’ with a capital letter to refer to the whole corpus of hadiths or Prophet’s sayings. When spelled with a lowercase, ‘hadith’ means a narrative record of the sayings and customs of the Prophet.

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more faithfully. I do not share this eclecticism simply because, as I see it, the problem does not so much lie in the texts, but in the approaches used to read these texts. Choosing to concentrate on the Qur’an does not make things easier. But I do agree with Zayzafoon when she argues that “Mernissi reproduces the Islamist originary narrative locating the origin of culture and civilization in the early years of Islam.”7 The major flaw of Zayzafoon’s analysis is that it confuses Mernissi’s secularist and Islamic feminist writings. She reproaches Mernissi for her adherence to a colonialist notion of culture by writing about “the territorialized oppressive Islamic culture of the Maghreb,” without taking into consideration the cultural heterogeneity of the region. And she states that “the so-called Islamic culture that Mernissi denounces is in fact nothing but a current ideological or political invention that masquerades as an authentic Islamic tradition.”8 This criticism is certainly relevant to Beyond the Veil, but not to The Veil and the Male Elite. Indeed, she treats the two books as if they were in continuity with each other, ignoring their huge differences of arguments and positions. This approach leads Zayzafoon to conclude that major contradictions exist in Mernissi’s work. It also results in Zayzafoon arguing in 2005 that Mernissi believes today that Islam condemns love. If this describes the thesis of Beyond the Veil, The Veil and the Male Elite puts forward an antithetical thesis, presenting the Prophet as a lover, who sought his wives’ advice in all matters. In addition, Mernissi also published in 1986 a book entitled L’Amour dans les pays musulmans (Love in Muslim countries), in which she precisely argues that love is central to Islam, but is one of its repressed or forgotten aspects. This makes an analysis like Zayzafoon’s, which aims to deconstruct the category of ‘Muslim woman’ in Islamic feminism (at large) through the (single) example of Mernissi’s work (treated in a monolithic way), rest on rather shaky grounds. Another scholar who confuses Mernissi’s two stances is Asma Barlas, who stated in a talk in 2005: Thus, one of the most prominent Muslim feminists can claim that Islam is a patriarchal and even misogynistic religion that “professes models of hierarchical relationships and sexual inequality and puts a sacred stamp [onto] female subservience.” These are the words of Fatima Mernissi and

7 8

Zayzafoon, Production of the Muslim Woman, 2. Ibid., 8.

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introduction she’s certainly not alone in holding such views. Muslim feminists almost universally consider Islam misogynistic because they view God “himself” as being oppressive. Because many Muslim feminists don’t believe in the divine, they do not find it meaningful to engage the Qur’an, or even to read it. But this doesn’t keep some of them from making false claims about it.9

Mernissi’s words that Barlas quotes are taken from her Women’s Rebellion and Islamic Memory, which, though published in 1996, is actually a collection of some of her essays written in the late 1970s and beginning of the 1980s.10 The citation is precisely from an essay entitled “Morocco: The Merchant’s Daughter and the Son of the Sultan,” which is an English translation of one of Mernissi’s earliest works— Qui l’emporte la femme ou l’homme? conte populaire Marocain recueilli par Fatima Mernissi (Who wins woman or man? A folktale collected by Fatima Mernissi)—originally published in 1983.11 It indeed belongs to her ‘secularist’ stage situated in the 1970s and early 1980s. The publication of this early essay in a book issued in 1996 may account for Barlas’s confusion. In the Moroccan academic context, rarely have critics seriously engaged Mernissi’s work. I should, nonetheless, mention an interesting conversation initiated by Moroccan sociologist Abdessamad Dialmy with Mernissi, through his book Sexualité et discours au Maroc (Sexuality and discourse in Morocco), which is noteworthy for its discussion of essentialism in Mernissi’s feminist discourse and its suggestion of other theoretical avenues for her feminism, as discussed in part 2 of this book.12 Another Moroccan scholar who provides an interesting discussion of Mernissi’s work is Abdellah Labdaoui. Labdaoui devotes a whole chapter to Mernissi in his book Les Nouveaux intellectuels

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Barlas, “Qur’anic Hermeneutics,” 11. Mernissi, Women’s Rebellion and Islamic Memory (London: Zed, 1996), 13–14. 11 Mernissi, Qui l’emporte la femme ou l’homme? conte populaire Marocain recueilli par Fatima Mernissi (Casablanca: Mu’assassat binashrat lial-tiba’a wa al-nashr, 1983). It appears as “Morocco: The Merchant’s Daughter and the Son of the Sultan,” in Sisterhood is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Doubleday, 1984): 447–53. It is also translated by Miriam Cooke and Eliose Goldwasser as “Who’s Cleverer: Man or Woman,” in Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing, ed. Margot Badran and Cooke (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 317–27. I will be using the version in Mernissi’s book Women’s Rebellion and Islamic Memory, under the title “Morocco: The Merchant’s Daughter and the Son of the Sultan,” 13–20. 12 Dialmy, Sexualité et discours. 10

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arabes (New Arab intellectuals). His chapter is interestingly entitled “Mernissi et le féminisme islamique” (Mernissi and Islamic feminism), and he is thus the first critic to identify her latest work on Islam as ‘Islamic feminist.’13 One also needs to mention Naima Chikhaoui, a Moroccan anthropologist, who published an interesting article on Mernissi’s two positions in 1997.14 Chikhaoui aims to demonstrate the flaws of Mernissi’s second-stage feminism, which she perceives as ‘soft,’ in contrast to her earlier more radical feminism. In the same line of critique, in their study, Rebecca Barlow and Shahram Akbarzadeh also identify Mernissi’s newer position on Islam to be ‘soft.’ Barlow and Akbarzadeh categorize Mernissi’s two positions as “reconstructionist” (or “revolutionary”) to describe Mernissi’s ‘secularist’ moment, and “reformist” to describe her ‘Islamic feminist’ moment. In their contextualization of Mernissi’s shift, they interpret this evolution as primarily an ideological shift following ideological transformation sweeping the Muslim world. Thus, for them, “the rise of the reformist approach has been congruent with the growth of broad social disillusionment with the Western model of development and a popular desire to return to Islam as the epitome of pure national/ cultural and religious authenticity.” It is against this background that Mernissi “tones down her revolutionary message,” which advocated a major “overhaul of Muslim societies to address the plight of Muslim women.” Speaking disapprovingly of Mernissi’s ‘new’ methodology, they write: “the reformist approach is by definition locked in a perpetual battle to reinterpret and expand the boundaries of acceptability.” They add that “it is far from certain that this approach has any better chances of improving the lot of Muslim women than the more ambitious reconstructionist alternative.” Barlow and Akbarzadeh also reproach Mernissi for her eclectic methodology in The Veil and the Male Elite. For them, She is effectively asking her Muslim readers to ignore these verses and the misogynistic traditions that they have created, on the premise that they do not pertain to the greater spiritual message of Islam. But this reformist reading of the Quran is highly problematic. It invites Muslims to ignore unpalatable verses even though all Quranic verses are God’s

13

Abdellah Labdaoui, “Mernissi et le féminisme islamique,” in Les Nouveaux intellectuels arabes (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993), 175–210. 14 Naima Chikhaoui, “La Question des femmes vue par Fatima Mernissi” [Women’s issue as seen by Fatima Mernissi], Prologues 9 (1997): 16–23.

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introduction own words and by definition, cannot be doubted. Mernissi’s choice to revert back to the Islamic framework imposes significant restrictions on the implementation of her vision. An approach to establishing women’s human rights that remains within the Islamic framework could have adverse effects. By attempting to validate the past in Islamic terms, Mernissi’s reformist approach could result in the reinforcement of those traditional patterns of authority that are undeniably patriarchal, antidemocratic and unrepresentative.15

I agree that an aspect of her discourse, which emphasizes truth and authenticity, might reinforce the discourse that she comes to oppose, as I discuss in part 2. However, the assumption behind their statement is that the Qur’an is primarily a text of law (that you either accept or reject wholesale). This argument ignores the complexity of the concepts of the ‘Word of God’ and ‘revelation.’ In this book, I analyze the two moments of Mernissi’s work neither to foreground the existence of some major contradiction in it nor to privilege one aspect of her critique at the expense of another. I rather look at the shift in Mernissi’s position in terms of evolution and in light of changing social and political dynamics or contexts. I also critically assess her two feminist positions equally in a way that identifies the enabling and disabling strategies in both moments, with the aim of contributing to the discussion on Islamic feminism as a theory and social project. Another, more extreme case of the lack of (seriously) engaging Mernissi’s work in the Moroccan context is Rachid Benzine’s Les Nouveaux penseurs de l’islam (New thinkers of Islam).16 In contrast to Labdaoui’s study, Benzine’s book merely mentions en passant Mernissi’s name (in addition to that of Amina Wadud) as one of the new thinkers of Islam without presenting further developments, while he devotes the rest of his book to male scholars. Mernissi’s important contribution to the project of intellectual renewal through her original gender approach does not find echo in this much-admired scholarly book (especially among the local secular or modernist elite),17 neither does any other of the numerous works of ‘Islamic feminists.’ It

15 Barlow and Akbarzadeh, “Women’s Rights in the Muslim World: Reform or Reconstruction?” Third World Quarterly 27, no. 8 (2006): 1489, 1483, 1493, 1483, 1493, 1491–92. 16 Benzine, Les Nouveaux penseurs de l’islam (Casablanca: Tarik édition, 2004). 17 Benzine was even invited to a program on one of the Moroccan channels to discuss his book, pointing to the popularity of his work among the elite.

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is untenable, in a book that claims to examine contemporary Islamic thought, not to discuss Islamic feminism as a major development, which has introduced gender as a category of thought and analysis to the study of Islam. One of the arguments of this book is that Islamic feminism is indeed affiliated with and builds on contemporary Islamic thought as represented by such male scholars as Mohammed Arkoun, Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid, and Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, whose works Benzine analyzes. Islamic feminists are the granddaughters (or rather grandchildren, since not all Islamic feminists are women) of Islamic modernist or reformist thought born in the last decade of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century as represented by Egyptian jurist and religious scholar Muhammad Abduh (1849– 1905).18 The issues they raise show that they are also affiliated with the ‘classical’ stage of Islamic thought as portrayed by the eighth-century rationalist school of theology, the Mu’tazila, which Mernissi mentions in Islam and Democracy.19 This might even justify identifying them as ‘neo-Mu’tazilites,’ as I do in my concluding chapter.20 I argue that

18 For a discussion of Islamic feminism and its place within the wider reform movement in Islam, see Qudsia Mirza, “Islamic Feminism: Possibilities and Limitations,” in Law after Ground Zero, ed. John Strawson (London: Cavendish, 2002), 108–22. 19 Mernissi, Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1992). Mu’tazilism emerged at the same time as Sunnism and Shi’ism, the two main schools of Islam today, but independent of them. It disappeared (though, not completely) in the thirteenth century, beaten by Sunnism. John L. Esposito writes: The Mutazila emerged as a formal school of theology during the Abbasid period. . . . Influenced by the influx of Greek philosophical and scientific thought during the Abbasid period, with its emphasis on reason, logical argumentation, and study of the laws of nature, they relied on reason and rational deduction as tools in Quranic interpretation and theological reflection. See Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path, 3d. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 71–72. I further discuss this issue in my section on Islam and Democracy. 20 I am indebted to Iranian scholar of Qur’anic studies Mohammed Vasfi for making me aware of this new term and for the possibility of describing Mernissi as a ‘neo- Mu’tazilite.’ However, although I argue that Wadud and Mernissi take up the issues raised by the Mu’tazila, which might justify this description, my aim is not to thoroughly discuss the concept of ‘neo-Mu’talism’ or the reemergence of Mu’tazilite theory in today’s Islamic thought. Thomas Hildebrandt’s book Neo-Mu’tazilismus? Intention und Kontext im modernen arabischen Umgang mit dem rationalistischen Erbe des Islam [Neo-Mu’tazilism? Intention and context in modern Arab contact with the rationalist heritage of Islam] (Leiden: Brill, 2007) might be illuminating in this respect, though I am not sure it discusses the work of Mernissi or Wadud, as suggested by the English description of the book on Brill’s Web site http://www.brill.nl/product_id25666.htm. I am impatient to see the English translation of the book.

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scholars like Mernissi and Wadud, for instance, are not only ‘adding the female’ to this tradition but also resuming the conversations inside Islamic thought, ancient and contemporary, contributing to its dynamics and refreshing its thought by bringing up a new element: gender as a category of analysis. The absence of a discussion of Mernissi’s scholarship in Benzine’s book is even more critical as Mernissi has stopped producing scholarly works on gender in Islam since the second half of the 1990s. The fact that Mernissi has not produced work on gender and Islam since the late 1990s might have at least triggered some critical reviews that would have contributed to the flourishing of the ongoing discussions on gender issues and on approaches and methodologies in the study of Islam. This is without mentioning the relevance of this scholarship for the revision of the Moroccan Moudawana, which became a public issue from 1999 to 2004 (the year of the introduction of the new family code), and which is probably the period of gestation of Benzine’s book.21 A word is in order here with respect to Mernissi’s departure from the scholarly religious front in the second half of the 1990s, which might (logically) suggest her lack of commitment to revisit Islam originating in an uneasiness with upholding a faith-based position. I would like to complicate this allegation by shedding light on an important aspect of Mernissi’s work: its incessant shift of interests. I insist on using the verb ‘to complicate’ because I am not interested in producing one truth about Mernissi, her work, or her position. In fact, I am not sure I am able to do that. She voices and embraces various positions, at times contradictory, in different moments, which precludes any attempt at summing her up. Her work (like any other) obviously lends itself to multiple readings and has been inspiring to a number of people with different agendas, which she might share or reject. What I hope I am doing here is hinting at various (and complicated) facets of her work. The moment of her shift comes after the publication of her trilogy, Le Harem politique (The Veil and the Male Elite) in 1987, Sultanes oubliées: femmes chefs d’état en Islam (The Forgotten Queens of Islam) in 1990, and La Peur-modernité: conflit Islam démocratie (Islam and

21 Belghazi and Madani write, in this respect, about a process of the “feminization” of politics taking place in Morocco in Belghazi and Madani, L’Action collective, 27.

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Democracy: Fear of the Modern World) in 1992.22 Following this trilogy, Mernissi shifted her interest from scholarly books to fiction. In 1994, she published her first novel, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood.23 In 1997, she published a study on a model nongovernmental organization (NGO) created by villagers in the High Atlas region, under the title Les Ait débrouille: Haut Atlas, an amusing title that mixes the Berber patronym ‘Ait,’ with the French noun ‘débrouille,’ from the verb ‘se débrouiller’ (manage, cope) and that could be translated as “The Ait resourceful of the High Atlas.”24 The study sheds light on a rural community that has succeeded in converting its traditional value system based on solidarity and trust into strategic ‘social capital,’ instrumental in ensuring the success of promising projects. In 2001, she published another book in the United States, Scheherazade Goes West, a book on Western constructions of the harem, which is said to be triggered by the Western reception of her novel Dreams of Trespass.25 Today, her activities center on civil society; she aims to strengthen civic initiatives by allowing leaders to network and collaborate, as advertised on her Web site.26 At present, one of the main projects in which she is involved is an ongoing writing workshop, “Synergie Civique” (Civic Synergy), in which she plays the role of facilitator to enhance the communication skills of some actors of civil society and to help them in the process of writing and publishing books promoting human rights issues, like domestic violence, sexual harassment, and child abuse. She also supports young writers who work on the subject of former women political prisoners, or wives and mothers of former political detainees,

22 Mernissi, Le Harem politique; Mernissi, Sultanes oubliées: femmes chefs d’état en Islam [Forgotten sultans: women heads of state in Islam] (Casablance: Le Fennec, 1990); and Mernissi, La Peur-modernité: conflit Islam démocratie [The Fear-modernity: Conflict Islam democracy] (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992). All three works have been translated into English. Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite; Mernissi, The Forgotten Queens of Islam, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): and Mernissi, Islam and Democracy. 23 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (New York: AddisonWesley, 1994). 24 Mernissi, Les Ait débrouille: Haut Atlas (Casablanca: Le Fennec, 1997). 25 Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems (New York: Washington Square Press, 2001). A preliminary version was published as Etesvous vacciné contre le harem [Are you vaccinated against the harem]. Casablanca: Le Fennec, 1998. Scheherazade Goes West was also published in French as Le Harem et l’Occident [The harem and the West]. Paris: Albin Michel, 2001. 26 See her Web site www.mernissi.net.

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during the 1960s through the 1980s, known in Morocco as ‘les années de plomb’ (years of lead). Mernissi is thus contributing to the writing of an important episode of Moroccan history marked by violent state repression against dissidents from women’s perspectives. This commitment to human rights is not new; Jonas Svensson, for example, notes that “Mernissi was one of the founding members of the Moroccan Organization for Human Rights.”27 Another recent project deals with women carpet weavers in the Moroccan High Atlas region. Within this framework, Mernissi, accompanied by a woman carpet weaver, took part in a project called “The Casablanca Dream,” initiated by Indian scholar and activist Devaki Jain during an international meeting in Casablanca in 2007. This project, involving women from all over the developing world and from different backgrounds, aims to rethink development and globalization and their impact on women living in poverty in the South. Its objective is also to produce a “revised analytical framework for looking at development experience with special reference to women in poverty and their quest for equality and justice.”28 To highlight Mernissi’s intellectual mobility, I also need to recall the other direction of her work prior to the late 1980s, which explains her departure from her work on Islam. Her early research was dedicated to revisiting development policies in Morocco and bringing to the forefront the voices of illiterate and rural women, and those of women workers. She developed this research in the context of economic and social crisis, provoked by Structural Adjustment Policies, which were dictated by the International Monetary Fund.29 This constant movement complicates the idea that Mernissi is uneasy with a faith-based position or lacks commitment in an important project like Islamic feminism. Mernissi’s utmost commitment seems to be primarily to social change, and, for that, she is ready to invade new spheres, to seize new tools borrowed from different disciplines, and to adopt new perspectives. She is, in Taieb Belghazi’s portrayal, an example of what Antonio Gramsci calls an “organic intellectual,” who follows her society’s moves.30 Mernissi has always been a rebellious

27

Svensson, Women’s Human Rights and Islam, 114. The Casablanca Dream, http://www.casablanca-dream.net/index.html. 29 See Barlow and Akbarzadeh, “Women’s Rights in the Muslim World,” 1486. 30 Belghazi used this term in his informative discussion during my thesis defense in 2005. 28

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intellectual, always on the move, refusing to be prisoner to one single area of research, breaking the boundaries of disciplines, and rejecting labels and theoretical confinements. She had written three books that demonstrate the compatibility of Islam with women’s rights and their political empowerment, opening new avenues for ‘Muslim feminisms.’ It was time for her to move to other areas of research (as the ones described above). Mernissi’s present projects go against Zayzafoon’s criticism of Mernissi as a scholar who is essentially concerned with proving the compatibility of Islam to modernity and women’s rights, neglecting women’s political empowerment. Zayzafoon writes: The real challenge for Muslim feminists today is not simply to prove Islam’s compatibility with women’s rights, but how to empower and include women in the political apparatus of the postcolonial Islamic state, which remains for the time being (with few exceptions) inaccessible to the Muslim masses, male and female alike.31

This statement ignores not only Mernissi’s work prior to her research on gender in Islam but also, and even more so, the direction of her work today. Engaging Islamic Feminist Theory through the Case of Mernissi The present book seeks, then, to pay tribute to Mernissi’s work by examining her scholarship almost in toto in the hope of providing a more comprehensive and more accurate view of her significant work. Most important, my central objective in examining her scholarship is to engage in the ongoing discussion on ‘Islamic feminist theory,’ significantly initiated by the works of Margot Badran, Miriam Cooke, Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Valentine Moghadam, Afshaneh Najmabadi, and many others. I use as a strategy the deconstruction of Mernissi’s work in comparison with other scholarship described as Islamic feminism, especially the work of Leila Ahmed, Amina Wadud, Kecia Ali, Asma Barlas, and Sa’diyya Shaikh. I also examine Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid’s and Khaled Abou El Fadl’s scholarship pertaining to this issue. Focusing on Mernissi as an example to engage Islamic feminism is not fortuitous. Mernissi is considered the first major producer of

31

Zayzafoon, Production of the Muslim Woman, 26.

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Islamic feminist texts with the publication of her Le Harem politique in 1987. Most important, what makes Mernissi’s work so significant is the shift in her approach and perspective toward Islam, which epitomizes the two main trends in Muslim feminisms or the intellectual developments of Muslim feminisms. As Barlow and Akbarzadeh write in their study devoted to Mernissi: The debate between Islamic and Muslim feminisms is not new. The Muslim Middle East has witnessed the ebb and flow of these competing movements for the past four decades. Nowhere are the dynamics of these two paradigms more evident than in the writings of Fatima Mernissi. Over the extended course of her community and intellectual work on women in Muslim societies, Mernissi has come to personalise the evolution of feminism from a movement premised on the rejection of the status quo to one of accommodation and reform.32

Another reason behind my choice of Mernissi is that, besides being a pioneer in the field of Islamic feminism, Mernissi’s work is, to my mind, one of the most innovative in the field of Islamic feminism. In this respect, The Veil and the Male Elite presents an original and indispensable contextualizing methodology to approach gender in Islam, which foregrounds the historicity of Islamic texts and the contingency of some gender norms. The Veil and the Male Elite presents an interesting example of the contextual reading of gender in Islam. In this book, Mernissi’s approach departs from the simplistic methodology of selectively invoking Qur’anic passages that support gender equality and/or providing for other interpretations that are more ‘womanfriendly.’ I use Mernissi’s work to point to some of its enabling moments, but also to submit this scholarship, in addition to the work of the other Islamic feminist figures mentioned above, to a constructive critique, thereby contributing to the theorization of the field labeled ‘Islamic feminism.’ In this book, however, I particularly problematize ‘Islamic feminism’ as theorized and practiced, and I build a case for what I call a ‘post-foundationalist islamic feminism,’ transcribed with a small ‘i,’ as I explain below. My position and approach is informed by frameworks and approaches developed in the work of Muslim reformist thinkers, namely Arkoun, Abu Zaid, and Abou El Fadl.

32

Barlow and Akbarzadeh, “Women’s Rights in the Muslim World,” 1482.

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Laying Bare My Assumptions Following Mir-Hosseini in her Islam and Gender, which urges scholars “to bring (their) own perspectives and agendas to the surface,” and following the example of Abou El Fadl in his Speaking in God’s Name, I also think that it is important to lay out from the outset the assumptions made in this book.33 Unlike Abou El Fadl, who stresses that he is writing as a believer rather than a social scientist, I do not make such a division. Of course I understand that Abou El Fadl makes this distinction to depart from the descriptivist position of a social scientist studying Islam as a social phenomenon with no commitment, or reformist, agenda. His aim is to assert a normative or prescriptive standpoint that strives to intervene in issues pertaining to his faith community. But it is important for me to make the statement that the position put forward here is that of a believer, trained in the social and human sciences. Both (identity) components inform my arguments. This is important, I believe, in understanding the critical position I adopt in this book vis-à-vis Mernissi and Islamic feminism in general. Like Abou El Fadl, “I do believe in the authenticity of the Qur’an as God’s uncorrupted and immutable Word.”34 And like him and other progressive Muslim scholars, I think that the concept of ‘revelation,’ or ‘Word of God,’ is complex and invites rethinking, and has indeed intrigued Muslim theologians since the beginning of Islam. With respect to gender, I think that the Qur’an contains two moments, which can support two opposing perspectives. As a believer who sticks to equality and justice above all, I see these values to be the core of Islam. There are clear moments in the Qur’an that support this vision. But objectively, I can also see that the Qur’an contains an androcentric language, and, therefore, cannot adhere to an easy, naïve discourse that declares Islam or the Qur’an as feminist, or that gender equality is normative in the Qur’an. Following Arkoun, Abu Zaid, and Abou El Fadl, I do not wish to impose on Islam an authoritative meaning, regardless of my progressive agenda or good intentions. Unlike Riffat Hassan, who believes that “the Qur’an is the Magna Carta of human rights,” I believe that the Qur’an is not a repository book of law that feminists

33 Mir-Hosseini, Islam and Gender, 4; and Khaled Abou El Fadl, Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001). 34 Abou El Fadl, Speaking in God’s Name, 6.

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can easily use to advocate women’s rights.35 Emphasizing the spiritual gender equality of the Qur’an should not lead to avoidance of dealing with its patriarchal discourse. Like Ali, I believe that its androcentric discourse should be confidently addressed without apologies.36 Saying this does not discard the faith position of considering the Qur’an as a source for guidance in the “gender jihad,” to use Wadud’s phrase.37 The Qur’an remains a book that incites the search for justice and social transformations. Addressing the androcentric aspect of the Qur’anic discourse does not weaken the struggle for women’s rights in Islam; on the contrary, it has the potential of strengthening it. Like Arkoun and Abu Zaid, I believe in the virtues of the contextual approach to the founding texts. However, this approach should be consistent throughout. I do not agree with the methodology that chooses to give a more progressive, or egalitarian, meaning to a verse and presenting it as the truth, when it has the means to do so, while resorting to the idea that such and such verse needs to be contextualized in order to discover its contingency, when it reaches a semantic dead-end. To put it clearly, I disagree with the approach that reinterprets verses to invest them with a more modern and more egalitarian meaning, on the one hand, and that resorts to a historical and contextual reading when no progressive meaning can possibly be invented, on the other hand. Islamic feminists should not produce more mystifying scholarship about Islam even when driven by good intentions. Islamic feminism, as I see it, needs to contribute to radical change in prevalent understandings of Islam through producing scholarship that restores to Islam its historicity. As Mir-Hosseini rightly observes in the conclusion to one of her studies: In my view, instead of the search for an Islamic genealogy for feminism or human rights—the main concern of those who operated within the Western discourse—we need to move beyond such a quest by placing the emphasis on understandings of religion, and how religious knowledge is produced. In this respect, the works of the new wave of Muslim

35 Hassan, Women’s Rights in Islam: From the I.C.P.D. to Beijing (Louisville: NISA Publications, 1995), 19, quoted in Svensson, Women’s Human Rights and Islam, 71. 36 Kecia Ali, Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006). 37 Amina Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam (Oxford: Oneword, 2006).

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intellectuals, such as Abdolkarim Soroush, can be of immense importance and relevance.38

Islamic feminism should not be concerned solely with highlighting the egalitarian moments of Qur’anic discourse as much as deconstructing prevalent approaches to the Qur’an and contributing to strengthening the contextual approach as another viable reading. I also agree with Ali when she criticizes Islamic feminism’s methodology of “picking-and-choosing.” She continues: As we engage more deeply with the intellectual heritage of centuries of Muslim thinkers, we must neither romanticize the tradition as it stands nor be blindly optimistic about prospects for transformation within it. Most importantly, as we expose reductive and misogynist understandings of the Qur’an and [H]adith, refusing to see medieval interpretations as coextensive with revelation, we must not arrogate to our own readings the same absolutist conviction we criticize in others. We must accept responsibility for making particular choices—and must acknowledge that they are interpretative choices, not merely straightforward reiterations of “what Islam says.”

Ali argues that we need to defend the necessity of equality as a component of justice not simply assert it as Qur’anic. Simplistic invocations of justice and equity in the Qur’anic text are insufficient.39 Like Mir-Hosseini, “I do not claim to be a detached observer.”40 As a believing woman, I consider equality as the core of Islam and the androcentric language of the Qur’an as minor. But I also advocate, following Ali, “the freedom to treat the Qur’an and hadith not as repositories of regulations to be applied literally in all times and places but as sources of guidance.” Like Ali, I see Qur’anic regulations “as only a starting point for the ethical development of the human being, as well as for the transformation of human society.” I also agree with Ali when she proclaims the importance of asserting a consciousness of history and an acceptance of the role of the individual conscience in addition to the authority of texts.41

38 Ziba Mir-Hosseini, “The Construction of Gender in Islamic Legal Thought: Strategies for Reform,” Hawwa: Journal of Women in the Middle East and the Islamic World 1, no. 1 (2003): 23. 39 Ali, Sexual Ethics and Islam, 151, 153, 154–55. 40 Ziba Mir-Hosseini, “Muslim Women’s Quest for Equality: Between Islamic Law and Feminism” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 1 (2006): 632. 41 Ali, Sexual Ethics and Islam, 156, 150, 149.

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Insights of literary criticism, linguistics, comparative history, and anthropology of religions, as deployed in the works of Arkoun, Abu Zaid, Abou El Fadl, and others, also heighten such understanding. These insights allow me to enhance my faith rather than diminish or doubt it. They enable me to see androcentrism (which is no different from the one that informs Christian and Jewish religious texts) as contextual, in symbiosis with and contemporary to a prevalent patriarchal culture prior to the advent of Islam. The tools of literary criticism and linguistics help me to see the Qur’an as a divine text, which uses a human language that is informed by the idioms and commonsense of the time. The androcentric discourse of the Qur’an appears, then, as the product of the mentality and worldview of the first recipients of the Qur’anic message rather than the reflection of the authorial intent. Consequently, I firmly believe that the Qur’an did not come to establish gender inequality, but rather came to reform this situation. Even when I objectively recognize that gender equality is not a norm established by Qur’anic discourse, I see it as a horizon or trajectory pointed at by the Qur’an. As a believing woman, I see Islam as an unfinished project of social justice and gender equality. Consequently, I consider Islamic feminism an important project in diffusing this awareness through the production of knowledge, which struggles against mystifying discourses and restores to Islam its historicity and its dynamism, rather than participating in the mystifying discourses on Islam. Like many progressive Muslims, I see the literal and authoritarian readings of the Qur’an as being one of the main causes of discriminating laws against women in fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). Like Arkoun and Abu Zaid, I believe that one way to fight these literalist, mystifying, and ideological readings is to produce scholarship that restores the historicity of foundational texts. This historicizing approach, of course, does not contradict the sacred or transcendental dimension of the Qur’an. In fact, early Muslim scholars already understood the importance of the historical context, as demonstrated by the methodology of asbab al-nuzul (occasions of revelation), which sought to present the text in its historical background. From this perspective, I revisit Mernissi’s work on Islam with the goal of assessing what I see as the enabling and disabling moments in order to engage Islamic feminism as a theory and project. With respect to Mernissi’s Islamic feminist methodology, I make the criticism that, despite her innovative contextual approach, her work nevertheless falls prey to essentialism, search for truth, or what I call ‘foundationalism.’

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Foundationalism refers to the postulate of Islamic feminism, which also constitutes its paradigm, that gender equality is rooted in the Qur’an. Not only do these limitations impede the analysis of Islamic feminists, but they are also articulated in some theorizations of Islamic feminism. By examining the limitations of Mernissi’s methodology and some of the major theorizations of ‘Islamic feminism,’ the book’s chief contribution is to suggest an alternative theoretical path for ‘Islamic feminism,’ one that I describe as ‘post-foundationalist,’ as I further explain in the last chapter of this book. Post-foundationalism refers to the idea of going beyond the limitations of the foundationalist paradigm of Islamic feminism. It is a concept inspired by Arkoun’s work, especially his idea of the impossibility of foundationalism in Islamic thought or his problematization of the concepts of asl (origin, foundation) and ta’sil (foundationalism).42 To briefly summarize his argument, Arkoun deplores the way ta’sil, the search for the asl of a law by relating it to God, from the thirteenth century had ceased to be a genuine practice of ijtihad (independent reasoning) as it had been during what he identifies as “the Classical Age of Islam.” For Arkoun, the Classical Age of Islam is an intellectual era in which a spirit of munazara (disputation, or disputatio) prevailed, involving different scholars with different tendencies using all tools of analysis available to them. He often argues that today’s Muslims should at least follow the example of these early scholars by using all available analytical tools in the modern era, especially those provided by the human and social sciences. This early period of Islam saw a fair dispute between advocates of literal readings of the sources (like Ahl al-Hadith who preferred adding the Sunna of the Prophet as a second source of ta’sil) and proponents of reason and philosophy, like the Mu’tazila. Arkoun insists that the triumph of those who promoted literal readings is more political than intellectual. In fact, during the caliphate of Abu al-Abbas al-Ma’mun (813–33), the Mu’tazila’s thought and doctrines were mainstream and dominant. However,

42 Mohammed Arkoun, Al-Fikr al-usuli wa istihalat al-ta’sil: nahwa tarikh akhar li al-fikr al-islami [Foundationalist thought and the impossibility of foundationalism: Toward another history of Islamic thought], trans. Hachem Saleh (Beirut: Dar al-Saqi, 1999), esp. 7–16. The term ‘ta’sil’ is derived from the term ‘asl.’ It is a methodology by which the fuqaha (experts in the fiqh) relate a certain law to an asl that usually exists in the Qur’an or the Sunna.

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during the rule of Caliph Ja’far al-Mutawakkil (847–61), the Mu’tazila were persecuted.43 The end of ta’sil as a scholarly quest and the beginning of taqlid (imitation), which in Sunni Islamic thought is referred to as ighlaq bab al ijtihad (the closure of the gate of independent reasoning), is what Arkoun identifies as the beginning of the “dogmatic enclosure” (la clôture dogmatique). He identifies the beginning of this enclosure when the fuqaha (plural of faqih [expert in fiqh, or jurist]) accepted the classification of usul al-fiqh (foundations of fiqh) by the ninth-century jurist Muhammad b. Idriss al-Shafi’i in his well-known book al-Risala (The message). Al-Shafi’i’s classification of the sources of jurisprudence as the Qur’an, the Sunna, qiyas (reasoning by analogy), and ijma’ (scholarly consensus) put constraints into ta’sil and signals the moment of the marginalization of philosophy at that time and of human sciences today.44 He points out, in this respect, that we cannot be content with the imitation of early scholars’ ta’sil, since every statement uttered by a scholar with the aim of ta’sil is informed by the social, historical, linguistic, and political frameworks within which the scholar operates. This is what he refers to as the levels of the thinkable, the unthinkable, and the unthought. Arkoun defines the ‘thinkable’ by what is possible to think for the speaker. This level is related to the language that the speaker uses and the specific means possessed by the language chosen. It is also related to the thought, images, and doctrines of the group to which the speaker belongs, or which he addresses, and the specific historical period to which this group belongs. It is likewise related to

43 However, as Arkoun points out, the Mu’tazila were themselves persecutors. See Arkoun, Al-Fikr al-usuli, 10. Esposito also writes: The Mutazila were especially strong during the reign of the Caliph Mamun (reigned 813–33), who attempted in vain to force their theological position on the majority, initiating an inquisition that persecuted and imprisoned its opposition. One of its most famous victims was Ibn Hanbal, the traditionalist leader and legal scholar. Esposito, Islam, 71. But for Arkoun, the Mu’tazila should not be discarded on this basis. The issue that they raised about the metaphorical dimension of the Qur’an, which the majority of Muslims today refuse, and which, at another level, illustrates the unthinkable in Islam, lays the basis for the historicization of the Qur’an. Mohammed Arkoun, “Comment étudier la pensée islamique” [How to study Islamic thought?] (paper presented at the Institut Français, Rabat, January 21, 2003). I discuss this further in the section dealing with Mernissi’s Islam and Democracy in part 2. 44 A translation of the al-Shafi’i’s al-Risala is available in English. Al-Shafi’i, Al-Shafi’i’s Risala: Treatise on the Foundations of Islamic Jurisprudence, trans. Majid Kadduri (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1987).

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the political power in the society and nation with which the speaker is affiliated. In contrast, the ‘unthinkable’ refers to what is impossible to think about because of the limitation of reason or its closure at a certain stage of knowledge. He gives the example of how the fuqaha and philosophers during the Middle Ages and until the eve of modernity were unable to think of the concept of ‘citizenship’ in its present-day meaning, that is, citizenship as a space of equality regardless of race, religion, or gender. The unthinkable is also due to what is prohibited by religious power, political power (the state), or commonsense, when it agrees on a given set of doctrines and values, which are sacralized and made the basis of authenticity. The example of Mu’tazili thought, which was considered the state doctrine at one historical moment and heretical under other political circumstances, is a case in point. He also explains that when thought continues during a long period to be content with rehearsing what language, dogmatic texts, cultural symbolisms, consensus of the nation, and interests of the state allow, this thought becomes inflated and overloaded. Then what has not been thought by that language, in that epistemological framework and in that historical period, takes the upper hand. This is what Arkoun refers to by the ‘unthought.’45 He thus argues that by considering these three levels in revisiting this scholarship, the focus would be on what has been silenced rather than on ta’sil itself. Arkoun’s project ‘applied Islamology’ (islamologie appliquée) is precisely a critique of the unthought in Islamic thought; he describes the project as shedding light on its concealed debates and as aiming to subvert its dogmatic closure through the incorporation of human sciences’ methodologies. According to him, contrary to what he identifies as Classical Islamology (by which he means Orientalist European Islamology), applied Islamology—which submits Islam to history, anthropology, linguistics, etc.—is an instrument that allows Islam to be liberated from ideologization.46 For him, it is only through openness

45

Arkoun, Al-Fikr al-usuli, 9–12. Arkoun defines his project as a new area of research in the domain of anthropology of religions, which strives to transcend the limitations of ‘Classical Islamology.’ For him, ‘European Islamology,’ in spite of its important scholarship on Islam and Islamic thought, has remained descriptive and descriptivist, that is, only concerned with the depiction of Islamic legal schools and the differences in their doctrines for a Western audience. Though he insists on the significance of this scholarship, he is critical of its ethnocentrism, which he sees in its refusal to engage in a critique of Islamic thought through the use of human sciences’ approaches and tools of analysis. 46

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to new approaches that Islamic thought could regain its dynamics and fecund debates and polemics. He refuses to consider Islam as a ‘separate’ religion that should be cautiously studied because in essence it is intolerant of critique and inimical to modern approaches. Islamic feminism is, I think, a major contribution to this global epistemological project. It proposes to shed light on the androcentric assumptions of Islamic jurisprudence. The notion that there has been consensus on ighlaq bab al-ijtihad is problematic. Scholar of Islamic studies, Wael B. Hallaq, for instance, has demonstrated that there has never been an ijma‘ on ighlaq bab al ijtihad.47 Muhammad Qasim Zaman, another Islamic studies scholar, adds that even taqlid should not be viewed as blind imitation, since historically it has been a concern of ijtihad and actually represented a platform for change.48 What I retain from Arkoun’s argument is his problematization of ta’sil as a methodology and the need for integrating human and social science approaches in the study of Islam. This is particularly relevant for Islamic feminism, which lacks confidence in asserting new approaches, as in the case of Mernissi, discussed below. Arkoun’s argument and project provides an interesting framework for an Islamic feminism that uses new analytical tools, like gender and patriarchy, as well as new approaches, like the contextual approach. Mernissi and Islamic Feminism But first, why read Mernissi’s position as ‘Islamic feminist,’ and what is exactly meant by this phrase? It is important to mention from the outset that Mernissi has never self-identified as ‘Islamic feminist.’ In fact, as Margot Badran points out, Mernissi is “one of the earliest to He writes: “si l’islamologie classique n’a jamais entraîné une redistribution quelconque du savoir occidental, c’est que la plupart de ses praticiens sont restés solidaires de la vision historiciste et ethnocentriste” (if classical islamology has never led to any sort of redistribution of Western knowledge, it is because most of its practitioners have remained faithful to the historicist and ethnocentric vision). Quoted in Mohammed Chaouki Zine, “Mohammed Arkoun et le défi critique de la raison islamique” [Mohammed Arkoun and the critical challenge of Islamic reason], Oumma.com, May 2001, http://oumma.com/Mohammed-Arkoun-et-le-defi. 47 Hallaq, “Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?” International Journal of Middle East Studies 16, no. 1 (March 1984): 3–41. 48 Zaman, “Ijtihad and Religious Authority in Modern Islam: The Discourses of the Sunni ‘Ulama” (paper presented at Centrum Modernes Orient, Berlin, Germany, May 24, 2007).

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articulate Islamic feminism without taking on an Islamic feminist identity.”49 In this book, I choose to identify Mernissi as ‘Islamic feminist,’ to which she most likely would not agree because of her avowed aversion of labels and theoretical framing. I do this not to prescribe a fixed or constraining identity on Mernissi. I am obviously aware of the fluidity of her thinking and intellectual activism. By this identification, I make deliberate (and legitimate) use of a helpful analytical category that serves to describe a particular “speaking position,” in Miriam Cooke’s sense, to engage in this new area of feminism called ‘Islamic feminism,’ which Mernissi’s work serves to initiate, regardless of whether she agrees to it or not.50 I am not going to attempt a general definition of ‘Islamic feminism.’ I will rather follow the definitions provided by Abdellah Labdaoui, Cooke, and Badran (to name only a few), who identify Mernissi’s latest work on Islam as exemplifying an ‘Islamic feminist’ position.51 For Labdaoui, ‘Islamic feminism’ refers to Mernissi’s rereading of the foundations of legal gender inequality and her reinterpretation of the Islamic tradition from an egalitarian perspective.52 Cooke, who includes Mernissi as one of the Islamic feminists in her important book, identifies ‘Islamic feminists’ in the following terms: Whenever Muslim women offer a critique of some aspect of Islamic history or hermeneutics, and they do so with and/or on behalf of all Muslim women and their right to enjoy with men full participation in a just community, I call them Islamic feminists.53

In her book Feminism in Islam, Badran defines ‘Islamic feminism’ as “a feminist discourse and practice articulated within an Islamic paradigm. Islamic feminism, which derives its understanding and mandate

49

Badran, “Islamic Feminism: What’s in a Name?” Al-Ahram Weekly Online, no. 569, Al-Ahram Organization, January 17–23, 2002, http://weekely.ahram.org. eg/2002/569/cu1.htlm. This article has been republished (with a few modifications) as a chapter in Badran’s new book Feminism in Islam, chap. 10. 50 Cooke, Women Claim Islam, xxvii. 51 Labdaoui, “Mernissi et le féminisme islamique”; Cooke, Women Claim Islam; and Badran, Feminism in Islam. 52 Labdaoui, “Mernissi et le féminisme islamique,” 176. 53 Cooke, Women Claim Islam, 61. One might observe the essentialist conception of this broad, though useful, definition. However, even when Cooke restricts her research to female Muslim feminists, she later admits that Islamic feminism is not restricted to women. Miriam Cooke, e-mail message to author, January 27, 2003.

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from the Qur’an, seeks rights and justice for women, and for men, in the totality of their existence.”54 I find these intersecting definitions particularly relevant and useful to describe Mernissi’s latest work on Islam and gender. In this book, I also use these definitions to engage Islamic feminist theory, and to problematize its project of authenticity and retrieval of truth, as practiced by Mernissi and others and as theorized by some observers. Rise of a Movement(s) and Birth of a Term In her Islam and Democracy, the last book of her trilogy on Islam and gender equality, Mernissi observes: What we are seeing today is a claim by women to their right to God and the historical tradition. This takes various forms. There are women who are active within the fundamentalist movements and those who work on a reinterpretation of the Muslim heritage as a necessary ingredient to our modernity. Our liberation will come through a rereading of our past and a reappropriation of all that has structured our civilization.55

Writing this in 1992, Mernissi became one of the first observers of a movement or a trend, in which she obviously participates, that has increasingly been referred to as ‘Islamic feminism’ since the 1990s. Generally, as suggested by Mernissi’s statement, ‘Islamic feminism’ is a catch-all, umbrella term encompassing different actors with different political agendas, who may or may not accept the label. But as an analytical term it can identify the position of a secular intellectual or sociologist, like herself, who does not support the project of the ‘Islamic state’ advocated by Islamists. It can designate the position of a theologian, like Farida Bennani, to remain in the Moroccan context.56 The term can also describe the position of a Moroccan Islamist militant, like Nadia Yassine, who declared in an interview for Oumma

54

Badran, Feminism in Islam, 242. See also Badran, “Islamic Feminism.” Mernissi, Islam and Democracy, 160. 56 Bennani is one of the few female theologians in Morocco. She is the author of Taqsim al-‘amal bayna al-zawjayn fi daw’ al-qanun al-Maghribi wa al-fiqh al-Islami: al-jins mi’yaran [Division of labor between the spouses according to Moroccan legislation and Islamic jurisprudence: Gender as a criterion] (Marrakesh: Publications de la Faculté des Sciences Juridiques, Economiques et Sociales 1993). One of the limitations of this book is that it does not do justice to all the Moroccan scholars working in the field of feminism or Islamic feminism. 55

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TV in 2003 that “La Jurisprudence musulmane est machiste” (Muslim jurisprudence is macho), even when she refuses the label ‘Islamic feminist.’57 Yassine, the daughter of Sheikh Abdessalam Yassine, the leader of the banned (but tolerated) Islamist group Adl wa al-Ihssan (Justice and Charity), argued that fiqh is only an ijtihad and should not be considered sacred. Writing from an Islamic feminist position might be either from ‘a position of faith’ (or a deep conviction of the Qur’an’s egalitarian global ethics), or from a strategic or scholarly position that often seeks to contextualize what have been considered as ‘Islamic gender norms’ to suggest the historical contingency and cultural constructedness of these norms. ‘Strategic’ should not always be distrusted as denoting an opportunistic, hypocritical, attitude that participates in the instrumentalization of religion. Strategy can also be dictated by a given situation and can actually emanate from the beneficial position of scholars, who we might designate as “organic intellectuals,” in the broad sense of the Gramscian phrase, and who, to continue influencing their societies, cannot but follow its moves and engage in its issues, while refusing to stay in the elitist ivory tower of ‘enlightened secularist intellectuals.’ This is not to suggest that Mernissi’s Islamic feminist position is a strategic rather than a ‘genuine’ one. The truth about this matter should not be a real concern, I believe. By the late 1980s, observers, like Badran and Ziba Mir-Hosseini, noticed “the emergence of a new consciousness, a new way of thinking, a gender discourse that was and is feminist in its aspiration and demands, yet Islamic in its language and sources of legitimacy.”58 Their work, in addition to others, has since then (and even before) been dedicated to tracing the emergence and evolution of this new trend in Iran, Egypt, and other parts of the world, in an effort to emphasize the way “the feminisms Muslim women have created are feminisms of their own. They were not ‘Western;’ they are not derivative.”59 Since the 1960s, Badran has been devoted to writing the history of Egyptian feminisms and tracing its evolution. Her translation of Huda Sha’rawi’s

57 Yassine, “La jurisprudence musulmane est machiste,” Oumma.com, October 10, 2003, http://www.nadiayassine.net/fr/thema/11.htm; and Yassine, “Le Féminisme islamique: Combats et Résistances” [Islamic feminism: Struggles and resistances], Oumma.com, December 20, 2008, http://www.nadiayassine.net/fr/thema/11.htm. 58 Mir-Hosseini, “Muslim Women’s Quest for Equality,” 640. 59 Badran, Feminism in Islam, 2.

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memoirs under the title of Harem Years and her Feminists, Islam and Nation, for instance, tell the story of Egyptian “women’s agency and their insistence upon empowerment.”60 Mir-Hosseini describes her Islam and Gender as “a book on indigenous forms and expressions of feminist consciousness.”61 Cooke’s Women Claim Islam also highlights elements of creativity and agency, which are so often denied to Muslim women, frequently portrayed as submissive by Orientalist discourses both today and in colonial times. Badran is particularly careful to emphasize that Islamic feminism is not born in a vacuum, but is the manifestation of an evolution of feminist thinking or consciousness in Muslim societies. Her more recent Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences comes, as the title suggests, “to underscore that feminism exists within Islam—that is, within Islamic discourse and among Muslims” and to emphasize the existence of “what is conventionally understood as both ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ within the feminisms that Muslim women have created.”62 In her essay “Feminism and the Qur’an,” she argues that Muslim women have created two basic paradigms, which she identifies as “Feminism with Islam” and “Islamic feminism.” The first, Badran points out, is “rights-centered,” born in the late nineteenth century. The discourse of these early feminists was marked by what Badran calls “Qur’an consciousness.” Those women linked feminism with the Qur’an, saying it gave them rights withheld from them. They “incorporated intersecting Islamic, nationalist and humanitarian (later) human rights, and democratic discourses.”63 In the 1990s, a feminism grounded exclusively in religious discourse with the Qur’an as its central reference saw light, referred to as ‘Islamic feminism.’ In her recent book, Badran particularly insists that ‘secular’ and ‘Islamic’ feminisms are not “hermetic entities” or “oppositional forces,” and that ‘secular’ and ‘Islamic feminists’ have engaged in a “constructive conversation” and are working “side by side in productive synergy.”64

60 Badran, Feminists, Islam and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 3. See also Huda Shaarawi, Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, trans. and introduced by Badran (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1986). 61 Mir-Hosseini, Islam and Gender, xi. 62 Badran, Feminism in Islam, 5. 63 Badran, “Feminism and the Qur’an,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 201. 64 Badran, Feminism in Islam, 2, 6, 12.

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Badran explains this shift of paradigm by the changing social and political configurations of these societies in postcolonial times. The new feminism appeared in late post-coloniality and a time of deep disaffection over the inability of the nation-states to deliver democracy and foster broad economic prosperity. Islamic feminism surfaced earliest in parts where Islamism, or political Islam, has been longest in evidence—for example in Egypt where Islamist movements first emerged in the late 70s and in Iran a decade after the installation of the Islamic Republic (and following the demise of [Ayatollah] Khomeini).65

In this passage, Badran describes one of the main factors behind the emergence of this feminist movement. It developed as a response to rising Islamist movements, which have become more and more vocal in Muslim majority societies at least since the late 1970s, with their often conservative discourses on women’s rights and gender relations. For Mir-Hosseini, Islamic feminism is thus the “rebellious child of political Islam.”66 In this respect, scholars like Mernissi, Mir-Hosseini, and others have realized that Islamists “have already succeeded in Islamizing the terms of reference of public discourse in most Islamic societies,” to use the words of Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im.67 In other words, the new scholars have recognized that the struggle has to be waged within a religious framework, and that there can be no advancement of women’s rights if the model of the family and gender relations constructed by fiqh are not seriously questioned and openly debated. As Mir-Hosseini writes: Secular feminism in the Muslim world fulfilled its historical role by paving the way for women’s entry into politics and society in the early twentieth century. But since the rise of political Islam in the second part of the century, the battle between tradition and modernity in which Muslim women are still caught must be conducted in a religious language and framework, where jurisprudential constructions of gender can be reexamined and the patriarchal mandates of fiqh can be challenged. The legal gains and losses of women in Iran, and now in Afghanistan and Iraq, testify to the fact that there can be no sustainable gains

65

Ibid., 302. Mir-Hosseini, (discussion at the international workshop, “Reconsidering ‘Islamic Feminism’: Deconstruction or the Quest of Authenticity,” Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin, Berlin, April 26, 2007). 67 An-Na’im, “The Dichotomy between Religious and Secular Discourse in Islamic Societies,” in Faith and Freedom: Women’s Human Rights in the Muslim World, ed. Mahnaz Afkhami (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 59. 66

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I should reiterate here that Badran argues otherwise, observing the way secular and Islamic feminism are collaborating with each other. However, Islamic feminism cannot be exclusively seen as the offspring of Islamism, first, because, as Badran, Qudsia Mirza, and others point out, it is epistemologically linked to Islamic reformism, especially the work of Muhammad Abduh.69 Second, some of these scholars do not like to see their work and activism reduced to a mere punctual and tactical response to political Islam. In Inside the Gender Jihad, Wadud makes it clear that her endeavor is not “a by-product reacting to Islamist discourse.”70 For Sa’diyya Shaikh, her work emanates from a “spiritual imperative.”71 Third, Islamic feminism is also a reaction to the Orientalist discourse of some Western feminists, whose writings on the Middle East and North Africa, according to Marnia Lazreg, have produced ‘Islam’ as the only explanatory factor behind the deplorable conditions of subaltern women in these societies.72 Indeed, like ‘Black feminism,’ Islamic feminism might be seen as a new revision of the universalism of feminism, introducing another element of diversity. It is a new kind of reappropriation of feminist language, or, to use Lazreg’s phrase, a “decentering of feminism” from its Western location/center where it is supposed to have originated.73 It claims its own modality of practicing feminism by staying away from the secularist trajectory of some feminists, Western and Muslim alike, and most often by refusing to forsake ‘a faith position,’ especially after the stigmatization to which Islam has been most subject since 9/11.

68

Mir-Hosseini, “Muslim Women’s Quest for Equality,” 644. Badran, Feminism in Islam, esp. chap. 13; and Mirza, “Islamic Feminism.” 70 Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 11. 71 Shaikh, “Cultivating Feminist Trajectories in Islamic Ethics” (paper presented at the international workshop, “Reconsidering ‘Islamic Feminism’: Deconstruction or the Quest of Authenticity,” Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin, Berlin, April 26, 2007). 72 Lazreg, The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 15. 73 Ibid., 8. 69

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Islamic Feminism: An Oxymoron? Different actors have indeed contested the term ‘Islamic feminism.’ Surprisingly, the resistance to this term came from both secularists and conservatives. In fact, secularists and religious conservatives can be, at times, two sides of the same coin, since both groups reify religion and often have an implied or unstated assumption about either ‘Islam’ or feminism; both in Mir-Hosseini’s depiction are “fundamentalists.” In the discourse of conservatives, feminism, “this Western movement promoting sexual promiscuity and moral depravation,” cannot be associated with Islam’s moral values and social vision.74 For secularists, especially some Iranian expatriate feminists, who represent the strongest source of rejection, ‘Islam’ cannot possibly be the ground for feminist claims.75 In her article “Who’s Afraid of Islamic Feminism,” Badran comments: “we find strange bedfellows joining in decrying Islamic feminism.”76 A perfect personification of Badran’s expression is the shared position of ‘secularist’ Haideh Moghissi and Islamist Yassine who both rail against the term as being oxymoronic.77 Cooke’s Women Claim Islam, which is one of the earliest books that attempts to theorize the term, precisely addresses this issue. To

74

Mir-Hosseini, “Muslim Women’s Quest for Equality,” 641. See, for example, Cooke, Women Claim Islam; and Nayereh Tohidi “Islamic Feminism: Perils and Promises,” Mews 16, nos. 3/4 (Fall 2001/Winter 2002), http:// www.amews.org/review/reviewarticles/tohidi.htm. See also Valentine Moghadam, “Islamic Feminism and Its Discontents: Towards a Resolution of the Debate,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27, no. 4 (2004): 1135–71. 76 Margot Badran, “Who’s Afraid of Islamic Feminism?” Al-Ahram Weekly Online, no. 609, Al-Ahram Organization, October 24–30, 2002, http://weekly.ahram.org. eg/2002/609/li1.htm. 77 For Yassine, “‘Féminisme islamique’ est l’oxymoron par excellence” (‘Islamic feminism’ is the oxymoron par excellence). Yassine’s position appears dogmatic and manipulative, since she opposes the term ‘feminism,’ and prefers “revendication féminine au sein de l’Islam” (feminine advocacy inside Islam and Islamism), which amounts to the same thing, but is only a play on words. The last lines of her rather long article make more sense and express a more comprehensible position. She suggests that she would avoid the term ‘feminism’ to avoid provoking “résistances inutiles” (useless resistance). She would not refuse to use ‘feminism,’ in the sense of a struggle for women’s rights, which “il conviendrait parfaitement à notre vision des choses” (perfectly suits our vision of things), but would demarcate herself from a term that refers to “des incendies postcoloniaux pas encore éteints, revivifiés par un contexte international qui, s’il favorise d’une part l’ouverture, crée aussi du repli identitaire” (postcolonial fires not yet extinguished and revivified by an international context which, though favors openeness, on the one hand, is creating identity retreats). See Yassine, “Le Féminisme islamique.” 75

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her secular (or rather secularist) feminist detractors, mostly from Iranian background (as Valentine Moghadam points out), Cooke contends that ‘Islamic feminism’ is not an oxymoron. She rightly argues that opponents of the term oppose two inflexible ideologies, which are mutually exclusive of each other. For Cooke, Feminism is much more than an ideology. . . . Feminism provides for analytical tools for assessing how expectations for men’s and women’s behavior have led to unjust situations, particularly but not necessarily only for women.

She points out that Islam “is not gender-specific but rather a faith system and way of life open equally to women and men.”78 Cooke also argues that Islam, like other religions, is equally not an ideology. According to Arkoun, religion exceeds what is referred to as ideology in Marxist thought. Religion is “transhistorique, transocial, et transculturel” (transhistorical, transocial, and transcultural), that is, it goes beyond and is not specific to one society, a particular time, or culture. Linguistically and semiotically, he continues, the religious discourse mobilizes myth, symbol, parabola, and metaphor, which ensure it a semantic richness not yet exhausted after centuries of rereadings.79 Most important, these multiple meanings have yielded what amounts to different Islams for women, as Ahmed argues.80

78 Cooke, Women Claim Islam, 59, ix–x, xiv. See also Moghadam’s important article, devoted to the Iranian issue, “Islamic Feminism and Its Discontents.” 79 Mohammed Arkoun, interview by Yves Lacoste, “L’Islam et les islams: entretien avec Arkoun” [Islam and islams: Interview with Arkoun], Hérodote 35 (1984): 20. 80 Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Ahmed indicates that, already in the first centuries, different interpretations and understandings of Islam produced different meanings of women’s rights and status. She mentions that for the Khariji sect, for example, the jihad was identified as a duty for both women and men. Another sect, the Qarmatians (or Qarmates, a controversial group of Shi’a who rebelled in the tenth century against the Sunni Abbassid caliphs) refused concubinage and the marriage of nine-year-old girls, even when the Prophet practiced it when he married the nineyear-old Aisha. In addition, the Qarmatians banned polygamy and the veil. On the one hand, within mainstream schools of jurisprudence, Ahmed emphasizes that the Maliki legal school gives a woman the right to judicial divorce not only in the case of her husband’s sexual impotence but also in cases of desertion or cruelty. On the other hand, the Hanafi law is distinguished by acknowledging a woman’s right to sign her own marriage contract and stipulate conditions. Ibid., 66, 91. One can also add the case of the Ghurabiyya, who give the entire heritage to the daughter in homage of the memory of Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter, violating the Sunni law that grants the daughter half the inheritance of the son. See Mernissi, Forgotten Queens of Islam, 99.

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In fact, to contend that Islamic feminism is oxymoronic not only is to be imprisoned within an essentialist vision that gives specific (though most of the time unspecified) meaning to either or both ‘Islam’ and ‘feminism,’ but is also to be overconcerned with the question of (fixed) identity. Cooke solves this problem by arguing that Islamic feminism is “not an identity but rather one of many possible speaking positions.” The adjective ‘Islamic’ in Cooke’s terminology is interestingly differentiated from both the adjectives ‘Muslim’ and ‘Islamist.’ Cooke points out that, if ‘Muslim’ describes an ascribed identity, and if ‘Islamist’ denotes an achieved identity, the adjective ‘Islamic,’ in contrast, bridges these two identifications and is, therefore, a “selfpositioning” that allows “Muslim women” to be “committed to questioning Islamic epistemology as an expansion of their faith position and not a rejection of it.”81 However, the liberal idea of the compatibility of feminism with Islam underlying the definition of ‘Islamic feminism’ is not very convincing, especially to some of the identified actors of Islamic feminism, who constitute another source of the resistance to the term. Sometimes, these actors express a discontent with the label ‘feminist’ seen as imposed by ‘Western feminists.’ To the allegation that the term is imposed from Western feminists, Badran rightly points out: It was from the writings of Muslims that I discovered the term. Iranian scholars Afsaneh Najmabadeh and Ziba Mir-Hosseini explained the rise and use of the term Islamic feminism in Iran by women writing in the Teheran women’s journal Zanan [Women] that Shahla Sherkat founded in 1992. . . . Already by the mid-1990s, there was growing evidence of Islamic feminism as a term created and circulated by Muslims in farflung corners of the global umma [Muslim community].82

Indeed, with respect to Mernissi, for instance, the first time her position was labeled ‘Islamic feminist’ was by the Moroccan Abdellah Labdaoui, as mentioned before, not by a Western feminist.83 Badran also correctly states that one must concentrate on the content and goals of Islamic feminism rather than getting “bogged down with distracting issues about who has the right to think/analyse and

81

Cooke, Women Claim Islam, xxxvii, 61, emphasis in original. Badran, Feminism in Islam, 243–44. For a theorization of the term ‘Islamic feminism’ and an interesting analysis of the scholarship and rising movement, see Cooke, Women Claim Islam. 83 Labdaoui, “Mernissi et le féminisme islamique.” 82

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to speak.” She adds: “Let us not be too defensive or proprietary about Islamic gender equality, about Islamic feminism. The way I see it, Islamic feminism is for all.”84 Islamic feminism is obviously not the exclusivity of Muslims, as shown by the work of Badran, Cooke, and other Western observers who contribute to Islamic feminism. Islamic feminists who decry modes of authoritarianism and exclusion, to which they have been victims, cannot logically reproduce them with respect to others. The heart of the resistance to the term comes precisely from a rejection of the label ‘feminist,’ which originates in a contention over the meaning of ‘feminism.’ Pakistani-American scholar Asma Barlas, who produces important hermeneutical works on the Qur’an, clearly expresses this resistance. My resistance to feminism stems not from its central premise that women and men are equally human and deserving of equal rights, but from two facts: First, I dispute the master narrative of feminism that claims this insight as a peculiarly feminist discovery. In my own case, for instance, I came to the realization that women and men are equal as a result not of reading feminist texts, but of reading the Qur’an. In fact, it wasn’t until much later in my life that I even encountered feminist texts. But I do owe an intellectual debt to feminist theorizing about patriarchy and for having given me the conceptual tools to recognize it and talk about it. Second, it seems to me that, for the most part, feminism has secularized the idea of liberation itself such that feminists often assume that to be a believer is already to be bound by the chains of a false consciousness that precludes liberation.85

Barlas’s statement indicates that what is most of the time rejected is not feminism as a cluster of tools of analysis as much as feminism, conceived by her as a Western master narrative. As if responding to Barlas, Badran states that even though the term ‘feminism’ originated in the West, specifically in France, it is not Western. “Egyptian feminism,” she continues “is not French and it is not Western. It is Egyptian, as its founders attested and as history makes clear.”86 Badran argues that feminism should be understood as “a mode of analysis that includes: (1) the recognition of gender equality and of women’s rights that a particular religion, nation, society or

84 85 86

Badran, Feminism in Islam, 250. Barlas, “Qur’anic Hermeneutics.” Badran, Feminism in Islam, 243.

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culture may affirm in its basic tenets but withhold in practice, and (2) the identification of ways to secure the practice of such rights by women and men alike.”87 Badran’s contribution to the theorization of the term as a discourse that draws on an “exclusively Islamic paradigm,” “deriving its mandate from the Qur’an,” was crucial to the relative acceptance of the label today by some of its actors, who had previously rejected it, like Barlas.88 As a result, Barlas states: “if this is Islamic feminism, then clearly, I am an Islamic feminist.”89 However, a definition like Badran’s is based on a problematic assumption and approach, which views the Qur’an as the solution to the gender issue, since it advocates gender equality as a norm. In what follows, I will problematize ‘Islamic feminism’ as a concept mainly through deconstructing Badran’s and Cooke’s definitions or theorization of ‘Islamic feminism.’ Problematizing the term should not be understood as a debasement of Cooke’s or Badran’s work. Their definitions, of course, correspond to the producers of Islamic feminism’s own perceptions of their projects. My focus is not so much the definition as much as the practice of ‘Islamic feminism.’ Engaging critically the theorization of Islamic feminism is a point of entry to engage the practice of Islamic feminism, as in Mernissi’s work, and foregrounding its disabling strategies. Problematizing ‘Islamic Feminism’: What’s in a Name? Though I problematize the content of ‘Islamic feminism,’ I retain the word ‘feminism.’ As Cooke and Badran argue, I believe that feminism is not a Western master narrative, but a cluster of indispensable tools of analysis. Besides, as Mir-Hosseini maintains: Although some Muslim women feel uneasy with the term ‘feminism,’ I retain it because I believe that it is important to locate women’s demands in a political context that is not isolated from women’s movements and experiences elsewhere in the world. Feminism is part of twentieth-century politics, and only through participation in this global feminist politics can Muslim women benefit from it and influence its agenda. Moreover, since 1992 there has been a growing movement among women in Iran (such as those in Zanan) who remain involved in the politics of the 87 88 89

Badran, “Feminism and the Qur’an,” 199. Badran, Feminism in Islam, 242. Barlas, “Qur’anic Hermeneutics.”

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introduction Islamic Republic and call themselves feminist, making no apologies for using the term and drawing on Western feminist sources.90

To hold on to feminism in the appellation is also to break down barriers. As Badran argues, “Islamic feminism transcends and eradicates old binaries. These include polarities between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ and between ‘East’ and ‘West.’ ”91 The term ‘Islamic feminism’ is also useful, as Badran, Cooke, and others assert, to indicate that Islam is not inimical to gender equality, which is the inherent goal of feminism. It is also enabling in underscoring the way scholars from Muslim backgrounds have ‘decolonized’ or “provincialized” (to use Dipesh Chakrabarty’s word) feminism.92 Another tacit reason that some scholars reject the label ‘feminist’ is to confer on themselves some legitimacy, and to ward off accusations of being Western agents and enemies of Islam. However, rejecting the label does not guarantee people identifying you as ‘feminist’ in this sense, nor does it guarantee legitimacy. For instance, Mernissi never self-identified as ‘feminist,’ yet this did not prevent Abdessamad Dialmy from calling her a “féministe révoltée” (rebellious feminist) or even “féministe enfiévrée” (overexcited feminist).93 Nadia Yassine, who opposes the label ‘feminist,’ is nonetheless the object of a death fatwa (religious opinion or ruling) declaring her an apostate after her open statement against the sacredness of fiqh, which makes it clear that demarcating oneself from the label does not confer on oneself more legitimacy.94 Feminism, therefore, is an important project of social justice, to which one can adhere, like the Iranian women of Zanan, without apologies. The incident with Yassine proves that Islamic feminism should not focus exclusively on legitimacy nor define itself as a quest of authenticity. Instead, Islamic feminism needs to contribute to restore to Islam not its truth but its plurality and historicity.

90

Mir-Hosseini, Islam and Gender, 6–7. Badran, Feminism in Islam, 245. 92 Chakrabarty, Provinicializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 93 Dialmy, Sexualité et discours, 74, 79. 94 According to Yassine, the fatwa was issued by the Salafiya al-jihadiya, an extremist underground Islamist organization repressed by the state, after the terrorist attacks of May 16, 2004, in the city of Casablanca. See Yassine, “Toutes voiles dehors” [Full sail], interview by Radio France Internationale, February 10, 2003, http://nadiayassine .net/fr/thema/11.htm. 91

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My problem with the term ‘Islamic feminism’ is essentially with the adjective ‘Islamic,’ which I would like to deconstruct to lay bare its problematic premises. In most theorizations, despite their undeniable value in stressing the importance of this new trend in feminism, the qualifier ‘Islamic’ is most often defined in essentialist terms, which unwittingly reinforce foundationalism. One might concede that the practitioners’ refusal of the label ‘feminist,’ and their insistence of the indigenous nature and Islamic ground of their endeavor, constitute indirect pressures that may push theoreticians of the term to unwittingly construct Islamic feminism (or the ‘Islamic’ adjective more particularly) in purist terms.95 Thus, although Badran is aware of the theoretical and methodological crosspollination characterizing Islamic feminist scholarship, she nonetheless states that Islamic feminism is speaking from an “exclusively Islamic paradigm.” However, before one begins to wonder about the content of that paradigm and its parameters, Badran rightly adds, between brackets, that “even this is complicated.” This nuance refers to the fact, which she actually comes to underline, that scholars of Islamic feminism often use methodologies borrowed from the human sciences as well as ‘classical’ Islamic studies.96 The tendency toward a certain essentialism is most clear in Cooke’s theorization. For Cooke, the adjective ‘Islamic’ is related to the defense of a faith position, as I will develop further in my conclusion. However, this definition can be, to my mind, exclusionary and inadequate. First, it excludes both non-Muslims and secular scholars of Muslim background from this critical project. Islamic feminism is open to the contribution of any critics, regardless of their religious background, who strive to contribute to the revitalization of Islamic thought through an approach that does not stigmatize Islam and recognizes its egalitarian scope. The salutary works of secular American scholars, like Cooke and Badran (in addition to many others), which seek to emphasize this new type of feminist scholarship against the grain, is a case in point.

95 For instance, Wadud insists that she is operating within “an indigenous Islamic worldview.” She is also adamant in claiming “the need for an indigenous Muslim theoretical and practical reconstruction in the human rights discourse.” Wadud celebrates “the most recent prevalence of Islamic theory as the fundamental basis for the struggle of women’s full humanity.” Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 10, 8, 264. 96 Badran, “Islamic Feminism.”

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Second, this definition ignores the complexity of the concept of iman (faith) in contemporary Islamic thought and the way ‘Islamic feminists’ (consciously or unconsciously) challenge, or redefine, the concept. One might ask: how and who determines the parameters of faith? If most gender critics speak from a legitimate position of an intimate belief in social and gender justice as being the core of Islam’s message, their faith might be and is actually often questioned, as is the case with Mernissi and Yassine, subject to accusations of apostasy and death fatwas. Yassine’s case shows, for instance, that for her detractors, criticizing fiqh invalidates her iman. This leads to questions about the parameters of faith in Islam. As Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid explains, in Islam, iman is defined as the combination of both aqida (the belief in the unity of God, the angels, God’s scriptures [kutubihi], his prophets, and the day of judgment) and what the Qur’an refers to as shari’a (divine law).97 However, shari’a, referred to in the Qur’an in broad terms, is often confused with Islamic jurisprudence, fiqh. The fact that fiqh is only an interpretation of shari’a and is of human origin (it was undertaken by mostly men in the ninth and tenth centuries) is often forgotten. This confusion may explain the two fatwas. It also indicates that Islamic feminism is necessarily inscribed within a problematization or redefinition of the concept of ‘faith’ itself within contemporary Islamic thought.98 But what is more problematic, I think, is the tendency to put forward the project as essentially one of retrieval, retrieving the egalitarian truth of Islam that was buried, rather than a project of critique and deconstruction. Cooke, for instance, identifies ‘Islamic feminism’ as the task of ‘Muslim women,’ who are “speaking out against patriarchal distortions of the values and norms of the founding umma.” This is premised on the idea of Muslims’ “easy access to pure origins.” Islam provides the symbolic capital otherwise unavailable to today’s new nations. In contrast with nationalist claims for ‘pure blood,’ which critics reject as spurious, Muslims can invoke and indeed do have access

97 Abu Zaid, “Qadiyat al-mar’ah bayna sindan al-hadatha wa mitraqat al-taqalid” [The women issue between the anvil of modernity and the hammer of traditions], in “Gender and Knowledge: Contribution of Gender Perspectives to Intellectual Formations,” ed. Ferial J. Ghazoul, special issue, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics Series, no. 19 (1999): 29–65. 98 On the subject of the constructedness of the concept of ‘faith’ in contemporary Islamic thought and especially in Islamism, see ibid.

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to the pure origins of the Islamic nation. No matter how contaminated by foreign domination, Muslims seeking an unadulterated past have the scriptures as recourse. Islam as a religion may evolve and change as interpretations of its texts proliferate, but the sources of these interpretations remain intact.99

This supposes the possibility of retrieving ‘pure founding norms’ and values that are untainted by pre-Islamic patriarchal culture, seventh-century Arabian patriarchy, or contemporary androcentric discourses. Of course, Cooke is aware that the task is more complex than simply retrieving ‘a lost truth’ or ‘extracting’ more egalitarian laws. Besides, one might acknowledge that Cooke’s definition is drawn from the very practice of scholars, like Mernissi, who also, at times (if not always), define their task as part of a project of ‘recovering the truth of Islam.’ However, such conceptions may lead to foundationalism—in the sense of a search for truth—which I find to be one of the limitations of this emergent scholarship, as I will indicate through the example of Mernissi. The major flaw of Islamic feminism is its central assumption of recovering gender equality as a norm established by the Qur’an, ignoring the way Qur’anic discourse contains at least two competing voices regarding women, one egalitarian (ethical) and the other hierarchical (practical), as pointed out by Ahmed.100 This entails that Islamic feminism cannot be simply a project of truth retrieval. It is, first of all, a long-term project of deconstruction, seeking the dismantling of the androcentric assumptions of fiqh, which has focused on the less egalitarian side of Islam and outlawed other readings by declaring the doors of the ijtihad closed; and, second, it is an open-ended project of construction, which intends to reactivate the dynamics of Islamic thought as critical thinking. Such conceptions simplify the task of what I prefer to call ‘islamic feminism,’ written with a small ‘i,’ and, most important, might support foundationalism. Let me first explain my preference for the term ‘islamic feminism,’ written with a small ‘i.’ In my usage, the adjective ‘islamic’ is not an essentialist qualifier, hence its transcription in a small letter. This is inspired by Arkoun’s transcription of Islam with an i, by which he contests any essentialization of Islam. Arkoun declares that such

99 100

Cooke, Women Claim Islam, 153, xxii. Emphasis mine. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 66.

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transcription allows him to problematize both the essentialist construction of ‘Islam,’ written with a capital letter, by what he refers to as ‘Orientalist Islamology’ and political science, on the one hand, and the canonical construction of ‘Islam,’ also with a capital letter, by orthodox Muslim theologians and jurists, who refuse to consider its plurality and open-endedness. Arkoun argues that the two ideological constructions do not take into consideration the sociocultural construction of belief and its metamorphosis throughout history. He criticizes the term ‘Islam’ because it glosses over an immense era in which abound the most diverse and the most irreducible ethnic and cultural groups, languages, systems of belief, sociological and anthropological structures of imaginaries, and collective memories. In this depiction, he continues, Islam becomes “un monstre ideologique” (an ideological monster), which serves to operate the polarization Islam/ Orient versus West/secular/democratic/modern. Written with a small letter, ‘islam’ refers to “une formation religieuse parmis d’autres et ses diverses manifestations dans l’histoire” (a religious formation among others and its diverse manifestations in history).101 In line with Arkoun’s thinking, the adjective ‘islamic’ has nothing inherent in it, since I believe that there is no such a thing as a monolithic ‘Islamic paradigm’ or an ‘Islamic methodology.’ It is also not a hermetic qualifier, which would not allow for interdisciplinarity and crosspollination with other ‘religious feminisms,’ first, because, as mentioned above, the new gender critics are using new approaches and reading tools; and second, because some of these scholars, like Wadud or South African Sa’diyya Shaikh, actually borrow reading tools not only from modernist scholars of Islam and secular feminists but also from biblical feminist scholars.102 Crosspollination does not function only one way; that is to say, it does not exclusively refer to islamic

101

Mohammed Arkoun, Humanisme et islam: combats et propositions [Humanism and Islam: Struggles and suggestions] (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 2005), 82–83, 82. 102 Shaikh stresses interdisciplinarity and the applicability of a number of tools of analysis provided by both secular and religious feminism. Particularly, in this study, she declares using the feminist hermeneutical model of biblical scholar Gerald West, along with the intellectual insight of modernist scholar of Islam Fazlur Rahman. See Shaikh, “Exegetical Violence: Nushuz in Qur’anic Gender Ideology,” Journal for Islamic Studies 17 (1997): 49–73. Such instances of interdisciplinarity and crosspollination are not specific to Shaikh’s case; they can be found in a number of studies by islamic feminist scholars.

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feminist scholars borrowing from biblical feminists. A title of a paper significantly reads: “Reading the Bible with Islamic Feminists Reading the Qur’an: Comparative Feminist Hermeneutics,” which suggests that crosspollination between the ideas of Islamic feminist scholars and biblical feminists goes in both directions. The writer, Franz Volker Greifenagen, puts forward the argument that feminist hermeneutics of the Bible can fruitfully be informed by Islamic feminist readings of the Qur’an.103 To further clarify my point and spell out the content of the qualifier ‘islamic,’ I also need to address what is often considered to be its Other, the adjective ‘secular.’ I make a fundamental distinction between a secularist position, on the one hand, and a secular position, on the other hand. The first, ‘secularist,’ describes a militant-like standpoint against the religious, undermines religion, or approaches religious texts in an ahistorical and literalist way in order to demonstrate its misogynist essence, for instance. The second, ‘secular,’ describes an antidogmatic position, which, while wary not to stigmatize Islam, does not approach religious texts apologetically or cautiously without considering, for instance, their historicity and without seeking to unveil the suppressed issues and taboos that Islamic thought has erected in the name of ‘true Islam.’ This distinction is in line with Edward Said’s definition of the ‘secular critic,’ who, according to the interpretation of Bruce Robbins, is characterized by “the refusal of orthodoxy and dogma . . . who submits to no authority.”104 In my view, the adjectives ‘islamic’ and ‘secular’ are not conflicting or mutually exclusive. In other words, writing from an islamic feminist position does not disqualify one from writing from a secular position as shown in Mernissi’s work. This is a key distinction in the conceptualization I am making about islamic feminism.

103 Greifenagen, “Reading the Bible with Islamic Feminists Reading the Qur’an: Comparative Feminist Hermeneutics” (paper presented at the Feminist Hermeneutics of the Bible seminar, Toronto, 2002). Significantly, the paper was presented at a seminar of Feminist Hermeneutics of the Bible, a section of the Society of Biblical Literature, described as “the oldest and largest international scholarly membership organization in the field of Biblical Studies.” See their Web site, http://www.sbl-site. org. 104 Robbins, “Secularism, Elitism, Progress, and Other Transgressions,” Social Text 40 (1994): 28.

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The two main aspects of Mernissi’s work motivating this study, her work with subaltern women and her work on Islam, serve as broad frameworks for the two parts that structure this book. The first part, “Mernissi’s Secular Critique: Writing the Gendered Subaltern History of Morocco,” is mainly devoted to her less-known, though very important and still relevant, work published in the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, which sought to foreground the voices of underprivileged women in rural and urban Morocco. This work explores the ways this considerable category of ‘Moroccan women’ has been subject to both class and gender discrimination, namely, in the state’s modernization and development policies. Mernissi’s pioneering interviews, I argue, form a subaltern narrative that brings into crisis the official hegemonic history of Morocco by giving voice to a different woman from the one portrayed in the 1957 family code, the Moudawana. In this part, I argue that Mernissi was able to shed light on gaps within Moroccan history using a secular critique. By ‘secular critique,’ I mean a critical unorthodoxy and resistance to dogmatism whether religious or philosophical. This particular meaning broadly follows the Saidian conceptualization of the ‘secular critic’ who refuses orthodoxy and dogma.105 It is this meaning of ‘secular,’ in the sense of unorthodox or heterodox, which also informs my conceptualization of a ‘post-foundationalist islamic feminism,’ grounded on a secular (rather than secularist) position, which the present book proposes. This particular meaning explains part of the book’s title, which refers to this first part and this particular aspect of Mernissi’s work rather than to an antireligious position as it might be understood. In fact, I examine Mernissi’s less friendly position toward Islam in the second part and identify it instead as secularist. The phrase “secular and Islamic feminist critiques,” found in the book’s title, points to the two major parts of this project. The title in this sense is deliberately, yet usefully, misleading. Far from adhering to a dichotomous division of feminist studies of Islam into secular and religious, I am, on the contrary, critical of the reductionist logic behind such divisions. This kind of division obscures their

105

Ibid.

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enmeshments and points of convergences, as Badran argues.106 This binarism in Muslim feminism also often finds strategies of mutual exclusions and demarcation among scholars of Islam and gender. Although I personally divide Mernissi’s work into two stages, the purpose is neither to demonstrate a fundamental contradiction in Mernissi’s scholarship nor to privilege one moment or position against the other. Rather, I hope to extract the approaches and methodologies that she used and to emphasize what I see as the enabling and disabling strategies in both stages in order to sketch an alternative path for Islamic feminist theory. I believe that a book like Beyond the Veil with its radical critique of Islam’s misogyny is an important contribution to the study of gender in Islam. Beyond its secularist position and its stigmatizing approach to Islam, the book should be seen as a critique of Islamic legal thought. It may also be seen as representing a stage in the formative process of islamic feminism, as exemplified by the evolution of Mernissi’s thought. Insisting on the word ‘secular’ (as opposed to ‘secularist’) to describe Mernissi’s position is to celebrate her heterodoxy and subversiveness. The subversive aspect of Mernissi permeates her scholarship, in which different genres, approaches, and styles intersect. Mernissi’s work transcends the disciplinary boundaries of sociology, the initial domain of her academic formation, and incorporates the closed domain of religion and experiments with fiction. Her style mixes fictional devices, autobiographical materials, humor, and scholarly analysis. Her approach often borrows tools of analysis from feminism and Marxism, while suspicious of theoretical fundamentalism. Part 2, “Between Secularist and Islamic Feminism,” is devoted to Mernissi’s work on Islam and gender, and its two moments, with the aim of sketching a new theoretical path that bridges the two approaches that Mernissi used. I identify the first as ‘secularist,’ and the other as ‘Islamic feminist’ (and sometimes ‘islamic feminist’), following, among others, Labdaoui, Cooke, and Badran. I explain the social and political background of each moment and approach her shift of positions as a development rather than a contradiction. The first chapter is devoted to an assessment of the secularist moment or the exterior approach, through an examination of Beyond the Veil and Fatna Ait Sabbah’s

106 See especially Badran, “Between Secular and Islamic Feminism/S: Reflection on the Middle East and Beyond,” in Feminism in Islam, chap. 13.

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Woman in the Muslim Unconscious as a way to foreground what I consider enabling strategies in addition to pitfalls.107 I justify the use of Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, published under a pseudonym, by arguing that it is Mernissi’s work. The second chapter deals with Mernissi’s Islamic feminist position in L’Amour dans les pays musulmans, and more clearly in The Veil and the Male Elite and Islam and Democracy. I outline the points of strength and disabling moments of Mernissi’s ‘Islamic feminist position’ mainly through comparing it with the positions of other scholars, like Ahmed, Wadud, and Shaikh. In this chapter, I present analysis that praises Mernissi’s innovative contextual approach, yet criticizes her tendency toward the search for truth and foundationalism, to which she falls prey. The concluding chapter rethinks ‘Islamic feminism’ and proposes to go beyond its theoretical framework toward what I call a ‘post-foundationalist islamic feminism,’ written with an i, to avoid the essentialism and foundationalism impeding Islamic feminist theory. I further demonstrate flaws and limitations of the ‘Islamic feminist’ approach, with its normative egalitarian paradigm, through a comparison with Wadud, Abu Zaid, and Ali. These comparisons allow me to clarify the alternative path for ‘Islamic feminism,’ which is inspired by the work of scholars like Mernissi, Wadud, and others.

107 Ait Sabbah [Mernissi], Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (New York: Pergamon Press, 1984). It was originally published in French as La Femme dans l’inconscient musulman (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1982).

PART ONE

MERNISSI’S SECULAR CRITIQUE: WRITING THE GENDERED SUBALTERN HISTORY OF MOROCCO

This part discusses the way Mernissi’s work incorporates the history of gendered subalternity in Morocco through a secular critique. By ‘the history of gendered subalternity,’ I refer to Mernissi’s work in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which was interested in presenting voices of underprivileged women in rural and urban areas of Morocco and exploring the ways in which they were subject to both class and gender discrimination. Mernissi’s interviews with these women form a subaltern gendered narrative that questions the ‘official’ history of Morocco, dominated by a bourgeois male elitism, by giving voice to working class women whose narrative subverts the notion of women the 1957 Moudawana represented. In fact, Mernissi engages in (re)writing Moroccan history from the perspective of the female subaltern: peasant women, women laborers, clairvoyants, factory workers, maidservants, and illiterates, in sum, “those written out of history,” to borrow Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s phrase.1 This project is perhaps best epitomized by the title of one of Mernissi’s books: Le Maroc raconté par ses femmes (the original French title for Doing Daily Battle), which can be translated as “Morocco narrated by its women.” I argue that Mernissi’s work could shed light on the gaps of Moroccan official history through the adoption of what can be called a secular gaze, or secular critique. By ‘secular critique,’ I do not refer to Mernissi’s inimical position to religion; rather, I point to an ideal critical unorthodoxy and resistance to dogmatism whether religious or philosophical in the Saidian sense. Mernissi emerges as a secular intellectual as her work displays a hybrid approach, which consists of borrowing tools of analysis from different theories while refusing ‘theoretical fundamentalism’ prone to put boundaries and constraining frameworks on her analysis. To emphasize gendered subalternity, Mernissi uses a heterodox approach, which is attentive to both gender and class, while resisting orthodox or dogmatic theoretical affiliations to either Marxism or feminism, hence my depiction of her position as secular. Her use of both Marxist and feminist approaches demonstrates that she breaks the restraining confines of theories.

1 Mohanty, “Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 11.

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Mernissi’s engagement in writing the history of Moroccan gendered subalternity falls within Mohanty’s description of the “cartography” of third world feminisms’ role. Constructing such histories often requires reading against the grain of a number of intersecting progressive discourses (e.g., white feminist, third world nationalist, and socialist), as well as the political regressive racist, imperialist, sexist discourses of slavery, colonialism, and contemporary capitalism.2

Mernissi is one of numerous third world feminists who has engaged in this multiple-front critique, targeting not only a totalizing narrative like colonialism but also ‘progressive’ discourses like nationalism, Marxism, and feminism. Her multiple-front critique also supports my depiction of her position as an example of a secular critique, one that refuses all types of orthodox theoretical affiliations. Part 1, therefore, indicates how Mernissi’s critique targets not only colonialism, nationalism, and the postcolonial state with respect to their narratives of the ‘Moroccan woman,’ but also Marxism and feminism in their dogmatic versions. ‘Secular critique’ also refers to her worldly scholarship, or her more sociological work, as opposed to her work engaging with religion (with which I deal in the second part of this book). It refers here to her original training as a sociologist and her scholarly production that strives to present the history of laywomen. Mernissi’s avowed agenda is to make audible to state planners subaltern women’s voices that speak about or reveal real issues—illiteracy, minimum wage, and social security, for instance.3 Indeed, one of Mernissi’s aims is to shift the gender issue away from rhetoric, that is, its depiction as a religious and cultural issue, and to compel decision makers to confront what they try to avoid—its economic nature. Chapter 1 examines the first aspect of this secular critique, her multiple-front revision of colonialism and its myths of progress and liberation, especially with respect to women; nationalism and its bourgeois essentialist discourse on ‘female liberation’; and the postcolonial “neopatriarchal” state and its accommodation with gender hierarchy.4

2

Ibid., 4. Mernissi, Women’s Rebellion, xii. 4 I borrow the term ‘neopatriarchal’ from Hicham Sharabi, Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 3

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The word ‘secular’ refers here to a critique that seeks to demystify these discourses, problematizing a project like ‘female liberation’ by unveiling its mythical structure. I also point to a theorization of gender in a Muslim country that is, above all, historical and anti-essentialist in the sense that it does not identify one single factor or discourse as the origin of gender inequality. This chapter, which highlights Mernissi’s simultaneous critique of both colonialism and ethnocentrism, presents Mernissi as a postcolonial feminist critic. The second chapter addresses the other aspect of her secular approach (worldly critique) through a discussion of her pioneering fieldwork devoted to foregrounding the agency and consciousness of the female subaltern in Morocco. It is also demystifying, anti-essentialist, and, therefore, secular, since this work places at the forefront multiple Moroccan female subjectivities, bringing to crisis the mythical, unified female identity or ‘Muslim woman,’ as normalized or “invented” (to borrow Lamia Ben Youssef Zayzafoon’s words) in the 1957 Moudawana, that of the dependent woman. The chapter indicates that Mernissi’s interviews with subaltern women target the postindependent state’s myths of modernization and development. In this chapter, ‘secular’ in the sense of ‘unorthodox’ also refers to Mernissi’s opposition to a local “dogmatic Marxist discourse,” which rejects the feminist orientation of her work, or rather her hybrid methodology combining a Marxist and feminist approach.5 To examine gendered subalternity in Morocco in which both gender and class disparities intersect, Mernissi, nevertheless, critically deploys Marxist tools of analysis by transcending the closure of this discourse to gender analysis. This chapter presents Mernissi as a subaltern critic devoted to foregrounding the female subaltern’s voice and countering the power, against the grain, of a subsuming official discourse. The chapter ends with a critical tone, though, by raising the question of whether the subaltern can be heard by Mernissi and via Mernissi by the audience, in an attempt to insist on the necessity to pay constant attention to the pitfalls of representation even in the work of a well-intentioned scholar like Mernissi.

5 Mernissi uses the phrase “dogmatic Marxist discourse” in “Etat planification nationale et discours scientifique sur la femme” [State national planning, and scientific discourse on women], in Portraits de Femmes: Changement et resistances [Portraits of women: Change and resistance], ed. Mernissi, Approches [Approaches] series (Casablanca: Le Fennec, 1987): 93.

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In the last chapter of this part, I further examine Mernissi’s profile as a secular intellectual. Chapter 3 highlights her conflict with those whom she identifies as “provincial Western feminists.” By presenting indigenous women’s agency and resistance, Mernissi’s work disturbs the prevailing myth which holds that the West is the original center of feminism, and, in the process, performs a certain ‘decentering’ of feminism.6 It is this decentering of feminism, or assertion of the idea that feminism has no essence or single origin, that gives further meaning to Mernissi’s secular critique. Part 1 ends with a chapter mainly devoted to Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass, Scheherazade Goes West, and The Forgotten Queens of Islam. Even though Mernissi wrote these books later than the 1970s and 1980s (the main timeframe of part 1), I include them here to emphasize Mernissi’s “double critique,” a concept used by the late Moroccan author Abdelkébir Khatibi, or multiple-front analysis, which is another aspect of her secular or unorthodox critique.7 The first section of the chapter sheds light on the way Mernissi targets Western and local myths of the harem and harem women in a gesture of doublefront critique. The last section examines the way Mernissi reads into the gaps of Muslim history, demystifying its monolithism and linearity by shedding light on women in power who were subsumed or subject to amnesia. The mere presence of these women in history, even if they can be seen as exceptional beings, demystifies the image of women as domestic beings. Mernissi’s work foregrounds, therefore, a narrative of subalternity and discontinuity.

6 On decentering, see Lazreg, Eloquence of Silence, 8 and Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation, pp. 19-21 and Feminism in Islam, pp. 242–47. 7 To put it in simple (perhaps simplistic) terms, Khatibi’s notion of “double critique” describes a simultaneous critical project of deconstructing Western ethonocentrism, built in the social sciences, and of critiquing knowledge and discourses elaborated by different societies of the Arab world. See especially his chapter “Double Critique.” Khatibi, Maghreb Pluriel [Plural Maghreb] (Paris: Denoel, 1983), 43–111.

CHAPTER ONE

MULTIPLE-FRONT POSTCOLONIAL FEMINIST CRITIQUE In this chapter, I present Mernissi as a postcolonial feminist critic whose critical position inhabits an enabling margin from which she could target, in radical terms, colonialism, nationalism, and the postindependent state with respect to their discourses on women. It is this critical liminality, or “double critique,” as shown by Abdelkébir Khatibi, targeting both a Eurocentric or Orientalist discourse and an ethnocentric local discourse, that gives sense to the term ‘postcolonial’ by which I describe Mernissi’s feminist critique. Mernissi picks holes at both colonial and indigenous mythical narratives about the ‘emancipation’ or ‘liberation’ of Moroccan women. Her entire work is, in fact, inscribed within this double critical space, allowing her to write the history of female subalternity in Morocco against the grain. The in-betweenness or critical liminality Mernissi’s critique inhabits defines, in part, what I mean by Mernissi’s secular critique in the sense of a heterodox critique. This chapter is divided into three sections. The first section examines Mernissi’s demystification of the idea that France is a ‘modernizing’ force especially with respect to women’s rights. The second section sheds light on her critique of nationalism and its bourgeois essentialist discourse on ‘women’s liberation.’ Finally, the third section discusses her critique of the postcolonial ‘neopatriarchal’ state and its accommodation with the traditional configuration of gender roles. Revisiting French Colonialism and the ‘Emancipation of Women’ In Beyond the Veil, originally Mernissi’s dissertation thesis written between 1970 and 1973 for the fulfillment of a PhD degree in sociology in the United States at Brandeis University, Mernissi is conscious that she is addressing Western readers, who obviously are interested in women’s rights in Muslim societies and who most likely come to her text with certain assumptions. The book significantly opens up with a foreword entitled “A Note to the Western Reader,” which can be read as an attempt to confront the Orientalist discourse constructing

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the ‘Muslim woman’ as the symbol of Muslim societies’ backwardness. She writes: Is there a nascent female liberation movement similar to those appearing in Western countries? This kind of question has for decades blocked and distorted analysis of the Muslim woman’s situation, keeping it at the level of senseless comparisons and unfounded conclusions. It is a wellestablished tradition to discuss the Muslim woman by comparing her, implicitly or explicitly, to the Western woman. This tradition reflects the general pattern prevailing in both East and West when the issue is “who is more civilized than whom.”

Thus, even when Mernissi appears to be very critical of her Muslim society and Islam in particular in Beyond the Veil and might be seen as nourishing the Orientalist discourse on Muslim societies, she is careful not to let her criticism be recuperated by this discourse and confronts its assumptions. She continues: In this book, I am not concerned with contrasting the way women are treated in the Muslim East with the way they are treated in the Christian West. I believe that sexual inequality is the basis of both systems. My aim is not to clarify which situation is better.1

Beyond the Veil is inscribed in a double critique that characterizes Mernissi’s writings in general. If the book is critical of patriarchal Islam, it is equally critical of the colonial West. The book questions a prevailing myth, that Western colonization (in this case, France) is the motor behind “Moroccan women’s emancipation,” that is, the access of a woman to education and employment. She contends that the idea that “France is a ‘modernizing’ force” is mere “colonial fantasy.” Her objective is to demystify the assumption that the emancipation of native women is the ‘natural’ outcome of the project of modernity, which the French Protectorate launched in the country. She makes it clear, for example, that the colonial administration did not promote the schooling of young native women, even those belonging to the urban upper class of Morocco like herself. Increasing educational opportunities for women born in the 1940s, for example, was a goal of the nationalist movement; building schools for girls in some urban areas was on its agenda long before independence. The colonial administration, Mernissi argues, was not interested in native women’s

1

Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 7, 8.

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education, as shown by its refusal to intervene in native customs that did not directly conflict with its interests.2 Mernissi seeks particularly to upset this Eurocentric myth, which is built right into certain feminist discourses, as found in the work of such scholars as Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Marnia Lazreg.3 In the opening section of Beyond the Veil, she stresses the detrimental effect of colonization on the ‘liberation of women,’ which representatives of the nationalist movement first supported then somehow abandoned as a defensive reaction to Western attacks on Islam as a backward religion. Because of colonial intervention, she contends, Muslims found themselves defending anachronistic institutions (by many Muslims’ own standards) such as polygamy, arguing for example that it is better to institutionalize man’s polygamous desires than to force him to have secret mistresses.4

In Mernissi’s analysis, colonial intervention had two major legacies, which would continue to influence women’s rights issues in the postindependence era. The first is the vision that any change in women’s condition was a concession to the colonizer’s hegemony. She explains: The psychological result of foreign power’s intervention in Muslim legislation was to transform the shari’a into a symbol of Muslim identity and the integrity of the umma. Modern changes were identified as the enemy’s subtle tools for carrying out the destruction of Islam.5

Although Mernissi uses the problematic phrase ‘Muslim legislation,’ which does not account for the differences of legislative trends followed by postindependent Muslim states, her analysis gives an interesting explanation to the conservative path taken by newly independent Morocco in matters of family legislation.6 Since, as Mernissi points

2

Ibid., 153–54. See, for instance, Spivak. “French Feminism in an International Frame,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 134–53; Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 51–80; and Lazreg, “Feminism and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (1988): 81–107. 4 Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 7. 5 Ibid., 23. 6 See, for example, Mounira Charrad’s comparative analysis of women’s rights in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia in States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California 3

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out, the postindependent Moroccan state retained the shari’a mainly in family law, the 1957 Moudawana and women’s inferior legal status that it encodes become important icons of the Muslim identity of the state.7 As a reaction to the colonial discourse on women, then, women’s rights are caught within identity politics. This legacy continues to operate after independence in Morocco and explains, to a great degree, conservative reactions to demands of reforming the 1957 Moudawana, especially the opposition from Islamists during the debate preceding the adoption of the 2004 Moudowana amendement. In this respect, Leila Ahmed argues that women’s issues in most Muslim societies are entrapped within a struggle over culture as a result of the colonial encounter. If in the colonialist discourse women’s status in some Muslim societies reflects the backwardness of Islamic culture, Islamists resist change in gender, identifying the family structure promoted by family laws as the symbol of Islam and any change as an attack by the West on Islam. The Islamist position vis-à-vis women’s rights, Ahmed argues, is a consequence of the colonial discourse on women, which invokes women’s inferior status in Islam in order to debase Islam and indigenous cultures. The Islamist position regarding women is also problematic in that, essentially reactive in nature, it traps the issue of women with the struggle over culture—just as the initiating colonial discourse had done. Typically women—and the reaffirmation of indigenous customs relating to women and the restoration of the customs and laws of past Islamic societies with respect to women—are the centerpiece of the agenda of political Islamists.8

For Ahmed, the call for a return to an “authentic” Islamic culture is a response to the aggressive colonial discourse.9 In this respect, one of the strongest ideas or predictions of Mernissi’s Islam and Democracy is that neocolonial aggression as represented by the Gulf War would contribute to the rise of extremist reactions in Arab Muslim countries

Press, 1992). Charrad explains the different paths taken in family legislation in Tunisia (modernist), Morocco (conservative), and Algeria (conservative) by the different role played by the ‘tribe’ in the formative state period. 7 Mernissi indicates that penal law, taxation, constitutional law, law of war, and law of contracts and obligations are not regulated by religious law, as opposed to purely religious duties, family law (marriage, divorce, and maintenance), law of inheritance, and law of endowments for religious institutions. Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 22. 8 Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 236. 9 Ibid., 237.

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and have negative repercussions for women’s rights. Aggressions on the Muslim territory, she points out, are translated into violence on women at the local level, in the sense of a desire to return to more “authentic Muslim values” and the erection of women as powerful symbols of those values.10 The second legacy that Mernissi identifies is that ‘women’s liberation’ is considered by the postcolonial state “almost exclusively as a religious problem” rather than an economic and social one. In the conclusion of Beyond the Veil, Mernissi explains that “the liberation of women” is more of an economic issue than a religious one. “Liberation,” she writes, “is a costly affair for any society, and women’s liberation is primarily a question of the allocation of resources.” She argues that a state that undertakes to “liberate” women is obligated not only to provide them with employment but also to provide childcare and food; i.e., a system of kindergartens and canteens, which “is an indispensable investment promoting the liberation of women from traditional domestic chains.”11 She further explores these two legacies in “Etat planification nationale et discours scientifique sur la femme.” In this essay, she argues that the Moroccan postindependent state entertains two discourses, which potentially conflict with each other: a “theological” language, the discourse of the 1957 Moudawana; and a “scientific” language, the discourse of statistics. If the Moudawana represents women as dependent and economically inactive, statistics produce data that, if analyzed, would foreground women’s active role in the Moroccan economy and thus would undermine the religious discourse. Mernissi points out that one of the functions of the religious discourse is to convert problems of economic, political, and social nature to religious and moral issues. Thus, instead of discussing the obstacles to girls’ schooling in rural areas, she continues, the theological discourse makes the debate slip into questions like “est-ce que tel hadith est « Sahih » (authentique) ou pas?” (is this or that hadith “Sahih” (authentic) or not?), or “est ce que telle loi ou mesure est vraiment conforme à la tradition du 10 Mernissi, Islam and Democracy, 2–3. The term ‘women’ in Mernissi’s usage here does not include women who militate inside Islamist movements, and more specifically, in the Moroccan context, women who marched in Casablanca against the Plan d’Intégration de la Femme au Développement (PANIFD, Plan of Action for the Integration of Women in Development) on March 12, 2000. On the topic of the plan and the debate it stirred, see Belghazi and Madani, L’Action collective, 44–56. 11 Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 7–8, 165.

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Mali[kisme] ou est- elle une innovation?” (is this policy in accordance with the Maliki tradition or is it an innovation?). The religious discourse encourages the perception of a problem like prostitution, for instance, which is mostly an economic problem linked to rural exodus and uneasy access to schooling and professional training, as the expression of deviant female behaviors.12 Another myth that Mernissi confronts in Beyond the Veil is that the French administration aimed at destroying patriarchy, which burdened Moroccan women. Mernissi contends instead that France actually exported its own misogyny by introducing further misogynistic measures to Moroccan legislation. In fact many of the laws introduced during the French protectorate compounded the burdens of local traditions with the misogynist dementia of the Napoleonic Code. The legal articles on obligations and contracts concerning women in financial transactions, as well as the articles in the penal code on ‘crimes of passion,’ are gifts of super-patriarchal French civilization and are in complete contradiction with the principles of the shari’a.13

One instance of this contradiction between the Napoleonic Code and the shari’a is that the French code, written in the nineteenth century (first elaborated in France in 1899 and introduced in Morocco in 1913), did not allow a woman to manage a business without her husband’s consent, a right granted by Muslim law.14 Thus, the 1957 Moudawana, on which Mernissi’s critique focuses here, not only is the result of a rigid interpretation of shari’a (mainly Maliki fiqh) but is also burdened by patriarchal colonial laws. For Mernissi, the protectorate marks a continuation and even an exacerbation of patriarchy rather than a “cataclysmic” break with this system. Problematizing the humanist discourse that justified French

12

Mernissi, “Etat planification nationale,” 92, 96. Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 154. 14 Mernissi is probably referring to Article 6 of the former Code de Commerce (Trade Code), which affirms that women have to seek their husband’s consent to start a business. This article has been abolished by the present trade code. However, Ahmed Khamlichi argues that this article does not exactly contradict Maliki fiqh, since, despite a woman’s right to manage her own business under Maliki law, which is the reference of the Moudawana, her husband still has the power to prevent her from stepping outside the home. See Khamlichi, “Massadir al-qanun al-munadhim li wad’iyati al-mar’a bi al-Maghrib” [The sources of the law regulating the status of women in Morocco], in Mernissi, Portraits de femmes, 15. 13

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colonization, Mernissi stresses the purely economic motivation of colonization. She states: French policy, inspired by General [Hubert] Lyautey, who liked to think of himself as a great humanist and philosopher, was to respect Moroccan traditions whenever they were not in open contradiction with French interests.

Thus, the traditional landowning system in Morocco, for example, was dismantled in order to install a modernization project that demanded the establishment of large production units in the agriculture sector, while the patriarchal structure of the family was the object of “exotic respect.”15 In addition to Beyond the Veil, Mernissi’s fieldwork represents an empirical demystification of the taken-for-granted idea that colonization and the modernization project it initiated were beneficial to Moroccan women, especially those belonging to underprivileged classes. Mernissi specifically emphasizes poor and illiterate women’s voices and assesses the effects of the colonial modernization project, carried out by the postindependent state, on the social perception about these women and their material life conditions. Her interviews with poor women in rural and urban areas bring to the forefront the other side of the colonial linear narrative of progress and development that the modernization project supposedly brought to Moroccan women. In her outstanding study “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development in Morocco,” Mernissi argues, for example, that rather than activating a break with the traditional perception of femaleness, which denies women an economic dimension, the colonial modernization project actually promoted it. With the introduction of a new economic system based on technology and machinery, modernization exacerbated the common perception of peasant women as economically inactive by further devaluing their manual labor. Modernization, Mernissi continues, gave the local representation of femininity a “technological legitimacy” that consolidated “sacred legitimacy.” Mernissi further states that, with the destruction of the subsistence economy, in which peasant women used to play a significant role, and with the introduction of another system based on technology and machinery,

15

Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 154.

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manual labor, in general, was associated with cultural backwardness, which also entailed the devaluation of rural women’s labor and their productive potential. By destroying the subsistence economy and with it the extended family that provided a certain form of protection for women, rural women’s condition underwent remarkable degradation. Adding to this is the detrimental consequences of rural exodus, which rapid modernization provoked, and the depreciation of female labor following the general devaluation of manual labor with the introduction of machinery.16 She sums up her argument in “Morocco: The Merchant’s Daughter and the Son of the Sultan,” an essay that she published during the years of her groundbreaking field studies mapping women’s work in Morocco. Colonization, to be sure, devalued women’s labour even further than the indigenous patriarchal systems had, and with a double effect: the downgrading of manual labour in contrast to technical expertise, and the specific downgrading of domestic labour within the capitalist concept that defines domestic labour as nonproductive and therefore doesn’t stoop to integrate it into national accounts.17

She further argues in “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development” that the colonial modernization project meant reinforcement, rather than dissolution, of patriarchal power relations, in the case of rural women. Mernissi adds that this situation, provoked by colonialism, has served to strengthen the authority of the male head of household, who has become impoverished by modernization. She explains: [The] Muslim patriarch stripped by the colonial power of his lands and privileges fell back, with even more rapaciousness, on the means of production that he could still control; women’s work was a means over which his authority was certified as sacred and unquestioned by the colonial administrators.18

Another consequence of this situation, which will have a negative impact on women’s rights, is the rise of religious ‘fundamentalism’;

16 Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development in Morocco,” pt. 1, Feminist Issues 2, no. 2 (1982): 69–104, esp. 85, 86; and Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development in Morocco,” pt. 2, Feminist Issues 3, no. 1 (1983): 61–112. This study was published in Feminist Issues in two parts in 1982 and 1983. 17 Mernissi, “Morocco: Merchant’s Daughter,” in Women’s Rebellion, 14. 18 Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” pt. 1, 86.

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Mernissi identifies ‘fundamentalism’ as a reaction to the aggressiveness and rapidity of the modernization process.19 This does not mean, however, that Mernissi holds ‘the West’ or France as solely responsible for the precarious status of women’s rights and condition in Morocco. As Lazreg writes, concerning French colonialism in Algeria: “it is by no means assumed to be the cause of gender inequality.” [It rather] created the condition of possibility of the ideologization of women by colonists and colonized alike and their structural silencing. It helped to unify native men’s attitudes towards women as well as pave the way for the intrusion of religion in the political arena in contemporary Algeria.20

Mernissi’s analysis cannot be described as ethnocentric or nativist. It is a multiple-front critique targeting not only colonialism but also the nationalist movement’s narrative of ‘women’s liberation,’ and the postcolonial state’s blindness to gender issues, its opportunistic use of Islam as a unifying discourse, and its adoption of a capitalist and androcentric vision of development. Mernissi also looks at historical elements that shape women’s inferior status, such as the development of slavery during the Muslim Abbasid Empire and its impact on the vision of femininity; the climatic conditions of the Mediterranean that created famines and epidemics; and, prior to these factors, the history of Islam as a political culture and memory that has developed into despotism and misogyny, and erased all movements that could have led to a powerful debate over democracy and gender equality. Deconstructing Nationalist Discourse of ‘Women’s Liberation’ Mernissi is one of the first Arab feminists to have presented a postcolonial feminist revision of the discourse of Arab and Moroccan nationalism. Her analysis of gender relations in postindependent Morocco introduces a more radical vision than the one inherent in the project

19 Mernissi, “Fatima Mernissi,” interview by Serge Ménager, Le Maghreb littéraire [The literary Maghreb] 2, no. 4 (1996): 107. She also points out that fundamentalism is the outcome of the quasi-absence of real modern means of protest, like strong trade unions, which modernization should have also brought. 20 Lazreg, Eloquence of Silence, 2.

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known as ‘women’s liberation’ as articulated by the Moroccan nationalist movement through its leader Allal al-Fassi (1910–74) in his book Al-Naqd al-dhati.21 Mernissi’s critical decoding of the ‘progressive’ discourse of al-Fassi and of the Arab League’s preliminary outline, “the Arab Charter,” which a committee composed of Arab male nationalists, among them al-Fassi, drafted in 1948 and which advocates the liberation of women, highlights their patriarchal and bourgeois limitations. This kind of decoding describes another aspect of Mernissi’s invigorating postcolonial feminist critique that I wish to stress here, though this critique occasionally loses rigor and falls prey to apology, as I indicate in this section. In her first book, Beyond the Veil, Mernissi declares that she is “not so much interested in the content of the feminist movement’s programme as in its genesis and causality, its instrumental aspect as part of the strategy for liberation.”22 By the “feminist movement,” she refers to Arab champions of women’s liberation, like Qasim Amin in Egypt, the author of Tahrir al-mar’a (The liberation of women) and al-Fassi in Morocco.23 As this statement suggests, Mernissi highlights that the idea of women’s liberation is contingent on and concomitant with national liberation. In other words, she demonstrates the instrumentality of the idea of liberating women to a movement of resistance that sought liberation from colonial domination. “Women’s liberation” as a discourse, Mernissi explains, did not spring from an authentic awareness of women’s inferior status and conditions, or from a genuine need for establishing gender equality, as much as from a strategic need to liberate women’s productive potential as indispensable economic agents. For this reason, Arab reformists, who advocated female libera-

21 Al-Fassi, Al-Naqd al-dhati [Self-critique] (Beirut, Baghdad, and Cairo: Dar alKassaf, 1946). In my discussion of al-Fassi’s book, especially his chapter on women, I will be using his chapter reproduced in the journal Prologues. Al-Fassi, “Al-Mar’a al-Maghribia bayna al-’urf al-jahili wa al-‘amal al-shar’i” [Moroccan women between ignorant customs and shari’a scholarship], in “La Réforme du droit de la famille cinquante années de débats” [Reform of the family law fifty years of debate], special issue, Prologues, no. 2 (2002): 29–45. 22 Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 13. 23 Amin wrote Tahrir al-mar’a in 1899, followed by Al-Mara’a al jadida (The new woman) in 1900. Amin, Tahrir al-mar’a (1899; repr., Cairo: Dar al-Ma’arif, 1970); and Amin, Al-Mara’a al jadida (1900; repr., Cairo: Dar al-Ma’arif, 1972). A translation and compilation of the two books is available under the title The Liberation of Women and the New Woman: Two Documents in the History of Egyptian Feminism, trans. Samiha Sidhom Peterson (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000).

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tion, were first of all nationalists who sought liberation from colonial powers, rather than genuine feminists. They had to prove their capacity as natives to carry out the modernization project in the postcolonial era, hence their need to liberate all powers of society, including women. For this reason, Mernissi argues, this movement did not opt for ‘modernity’ as a project based on the principle of gender equality nor did it assume its own option for economic liberalism and modernization. The result was an eclectic modernization where women’s education and employment were sought while the principle of patriarchy and male-female hierarchical relations was paradoxically maintained. At this stage of her early critique, Mernissi identifies modernity with gender equality and equates Islam with gender hierarchy and patriarchy. Thus, she argues that “the nationalists had advocated the liberation of women, in the name of Islam’s triumph, not in the name of any genuine modern global ideology,” hence the particular character of women’s liberation in postindependence Morocco.24 Mernissi asserts, then, a new standpoint that differs from the religious overtone of women’s liberation discourse produced by some Arab reformists. From the outset, as suggested before, Mernissi declares her secularist position by demarcating herself from a controversy that has raged throughout the century between traditionalists who claim that Islam prohibits any change in sex roles, and modernists who claim that Islam allows for the liberation of women, the desegregation of society, and equality between the sexes.25

By “modernists,” Mernissi refers to Arab reformists, like Muhammad Abduh and Amin, whose liberal ideas concerning women had influenced, for example, the Moroccan champion of women’s liberation, al-Fassi. But Mernissi uses the term ‘modernists’ only to demonstrate afterward that the reformists’ discourse was not inscribed in a purely modernist perspective, which, in her sense, describes a vision of society based on secularization and sexual equality. For her, there is no significant difference between “traditionalists” and “modernists.” They are “fractions” of the same ideology that maintains “one thing: Islam should remain the sacred basis of society.”26 Mernissi’s position is clearly secularist. She is convinced that Islam, which according to her

24 25 26

Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 7–8. Ibid., 19. Ibid.

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condones gender hierarchy, should not be the basic reference of family legislation in a state that expresses its need for sexual equality through the promotion of women’s education and employment. To illustrate her idea of the sterility of Arab women’s liberation discourse, which does not question the maintenance of Islam as the ultimate reference for social and gender relations, Mernissi brings out the example of Amin. She writes: Amin tried to show that women’s seclusion and their exclusion from social affairs was due not to Islam but to secular customs. . . . In Amin’s argument, Islam becomes the most liberating of religions towards women. . . . When the traditionalists set out to prove the opposite, they had a rather easy task.27

For Mernissi, in contrast, Islam provides ample examples, like polygamy and unilateral divorce, that go against the principle of sexual equality. The central argument in her book is directed toward demonstrating, first, how Islam contradicts the project of sexual equality and modernity, since its “ideology of the sexes” is precisely based on the principle of “sexual segregation”; and, second, how this segregation is empirically breaking down with the modernization process that the postindependent state itself encourages, while affirming its Muslim identity. In this respect, she points to the contradiction of encoding family legislation in postcolonial Morocco that maintained sexual inequality through such institutions as unilateral divorce and polygamy, on the one hand, and promoting women’s education and employment, on the other hand. This explains Mernissi’s idea that the female liberation project does not express the state’s option for a genuine modern conception of society, which is, in her opinion, based on the principle of the separation of state and religion. The nationalist movement’s inability to produce a modern project, she contends, led to an opportunistic option for Islam as the ultimate referent of Moroccan family legislation. The absence of a genuine modern ideology strengthened the hold of Islam as the only coherent ideology that masses and rulers could refer to. It is therefore not surprising that Morocco, like other independent Muslim states, recognized Islam as the ideology of the family in its otherwise Western-inspired code.28

27 28

Ibid., 14–15. Ibid., 107, 170, 23–24.

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For Mernissi, “the Moroccan nationalist movement is a failure since it has never made the transition from an independence movement to a nation-building movement”; that is, it did not succeed in converting its ideology of liberation, the ultimate goal of which was to ward off the colonial power, into an ideology and an instrument of social change, as its attitude vis-à-vis gender relations clearly demonstrates. This incapacity is most vivid in its eclectic acceptance of some “ideas from liberal capitalist Europe,” like principles of human rights, while rejecting some of these rights with regard to women. Mernissi also notes that postcolonial Morocco ratified some international treaties establishing these principles even when they were “clearly prejudicial to the central principle of the Muslim family: male supremacy and the systematic inhibition of feminine initiative, of female-self-determination.” This is the case for Article 16, concerning family regulations, of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which Morocco has signed. The article stipulates that “ ‘men and women . . . have equal rights with regard to marriage, in the marriage, and in the event of its dissolution.’”29 Thus, Mernissi’s critique in Beyond the Veil is more radical than the ‘liberationist’ discourse of Arab nationalism. If the nationalists’ aim was women’s schooling and employment as a way to allow women to contribute more effectively to the country’s development, Mernissi seeks the establishment of “democratic male-female relations,” which, for her, Islam does not allow.30 Marxist ideas might also have influenced her secularist position, especially since she mingled with the Union National des Etudiants Marocains (National Union of Moroccan Students, UNEM) in the 1960s, an organization that at that time was mostly led by leftists. Fatna Ait Sabbah, Mernissi’s pseudonym in Woman in the Muslim Unconscious (La Femme dans l’inconscient musulman) best articulates the demarcation of Mernissi’s radical feminist discourse from the reformist discourse of female liberation. I would like to make my contribution to going beyond the superficialities of the sexual and political discourses in which we have been submerged for almost a hundred years, ever since Kasim [also Qasim] Amin’s book,

29 30

Ibid., 83–84, 12. Ibid., 95.

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chapter one Woman’s Liberation [The Liberation of Women], appeared in the full flush of the Arab nationalist movement in the late nineteenth century.31

What is most interesting here is that both Mernissi and Ait Sabbah declare their affiliation to a more intransigent position than Amin’s reformist discourse. Both are convinced of the necessity to go beyond the nationalist providential discourse on women’s liberation. It is interesting in this respect that Leila Ahmed’s decoding of Amin’s ‘feminist’ discourse, especially his depiction of Egyptian women, underscores his misogynous attitude, which further supports Mernissi’s critique of the women’s liberation discourse.32 Mernissi also distances herself from the ‘liberationist’ discourse of al-Fassi. Nevertheless, if al-Fassi is mentioned in Beyond the Veil in rather positive terms (in relation to his advocacy for women’s education), it is not the case in Mernissi’s subsequent work. When Mernissi mentions al-Fassi in her first book, she addresses a Western audience and aims to underline the nationalist movement’s endeavor to educate women in an effort to demystify the Eurocentric idea that French colonization was behind such a project. Thus, when she states, for instance, in Beyond the Veil that “the nationalist leader Allal al-Fassi did not forget women when he participated in drafting an ‘Arab Charter,’ ” she is interested in critiquing neither al-Fassi’s ‘feminist’ discourse nor the way this charter constructed ‘Arab women.’33 In contrast, al-Fassi’s ‘feminist’ discourse is the subject of Mernissi’s deconstruction and critique in her article “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development.” Mernissi originally prepared this study for the Tripartite Seminar of the International Labor Office for Africa on “The Place of Women in Rural Development,” held in Dakar, Senegal, on June 15–19, 1981. The original title of her study was “Développement capitaliste et perceptions des femmes dans la société arabo-musulmane: une illustration des paysannes du Gharb du Maroc” (Capitalist development and perceptions of women in Arab Muslim society: The case of peasant women of the Gharb of Morocco). As the title suggests, the study is a critical assessment of the detrimental effects of both traditional perceptions about women and capitalist development on rural women’s situation. This article explains Mernissi’s critical stance

31 32 33

Ait Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, 4. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 155–64. Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 155.

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toward nationalism, which, she argues, has used the slogan of women’s liberation only to further its objective of national liberation and which has encoded in the aftermath of independence a conservative family law and an elitist development policy that ignores rural women. In this article, with a critical eye, Mernissi revises the Arab League’s preliminary charter. In Mernissi’s decoding, the charter reveals its conservative discourse on the topic of women. With regard to women and the family one finds in it traditional concepts like the concept of maternity and a new concept framed as follows: “Help woman to fulfill her duty in society.” This inoffensive phrase expressed a whole philosophy concerning women and their productive potential that the nationalists had debated at great length as far back as the second half of the nineteenth century with the appearance of the book by Kacem [Qasim] Amin, Liberation of Woman [The Liberation of Women].

She observes that this androcentric and essentialist conception of femininity that informs the discourse of women’s liberation also informs the family laws of a number of Muslim independent states.34 Decoding the philosophy of Arab nationalism, Mernissi unearths its bourgeois premises. She contends: The essential point in this philosophy is that the nationalists fought for the idea that woman should “come out of her seclusion” and begin to “turn her attention to the general welfare.”35

For Mernissi, this idea betrays the nationalists’ elitist vision since the woman they had in mind is the bourgeois woman who was subject to seclusion. Their reformist discourse of liberation does not include rural women, who have always worked in the fields. The patriarchal bourgeois ideology that Mernissi presents as the main characteristic of the nationalist discourse also features in alFassi’s vision of society. For Mernissi, al-Fassi’s underlying assumptions “clearly lay out the bourgeois limits of the world dreamed of by the nationalism of the beginning of the century.” The limitations of alFassi’s ‘feminist’ discourse lie in his essentialist conception of women and his bourgeois vision. In fact, the same essentialism that Mernissi discloses in her discussion of the Arab Charter is found in al-Fassi’s book. She argues that al-Fassi “had a relative idea of liberty: there was

34 35

Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” pt. 1, 82, 89. Ibid., 89.

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a natural dimension to the inequality between the sexes, which must not be questioned.” For Mernissi, at this stage of her scholarship, Arab reformists’ androcentric vision is in accordance with the Qur’an, since even when the latter is not clear about the superiority of men over women, it still considers the reversal of male-female relations of power as a transgression.36 With respect to my claim that Woman in the Muslim Unconscious is Mernissi’s, it is worth mentioning that Mernissi’s idea that any attempt at reversing male-female hierarchy is considered as an attempt to destabilize Divine Order is also Ait Sabbah’s thesis. Significantly, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development” was originally written in 1981, one year prior to the publication of Ait Sabbah’s work, which also indicates that Mernissi wrote the book. Ait Sabbah argues that the power relations in which male and female relations are inscribed are similar to the power relations between male believers and the Muslim God, that Islam is a pyramidal relationship in which God is on the top and women and children on the bottom, and that any attempt at reversing this order is regarded as heretical in Islam. In her article, Mernissi also argues that nationalists, who identified Islam’s precepts as the pillars of the postindependent society, did not challenge sexual inequality. “The principle of sexual inequality,” she writes, “had to be remodeled and not abolished,” hence the failure of the nationalist movement to imagine a new social vision based on the modern principle of sexual equality.37 In addition to the androcentric essentialism of al-Fassi’s discourse, Mernissi brings out the bourgeois limits of his vision, which ignores working-class and rural women’s work. She observes that when al-Fassi advocated for women’s right to work, the type of work he had in mind was nonmanual labor. He overlooked women’s manual work because his real concern was not to ‘liberate’ this category of women from the hardship of their daily labor, but to liberate women of his own class, bourgeois urban women, from seclusion. In a Marxist tone, Mernissi contends that the nationalists’ focus was also to create a new category of women, “a female petit-bourgeois class, the daughters and wives of the petit-bourgeois class, which was concentrated in the towns and

36 37

Ibid. Ibid.

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was to replace the colonizer in the running of the country.”38 Similarly, Ahmed observes the bourgeois limitation of Amin’s discourse when he states that Egyptian women do not work.39 The bourgeois upbringing of ‘champions’ of women’s liberation, like Amin and al-Fassi, contributed to the failure of the nationalist women’s liberation project, since they did not address lower-class women’s needs. For Mernissi, the project’s failure lies in the nationalist movement’s shortsightedness as it was mainly concerned with national liberation rather than the conception of a modern postcolonial project. The whole “conceptualization of the future Muslim society” by the nationalist movement, she argues, reveals the “limitations of its historical task.”40 The nationalist movement did not transcend its anticolonial phase in order to turn into a producer of a postcolonial project of society based on social and gender equality. The nationalist movement’s bourgeois ideology and nativist discourse dictated this “ideological bricolage,” to use Mohammed Arkoun’s phrase.41 She writes: One of its limitations was its eclectic view, which expressed and incarnated its petit bourgeois quality and its historical affinities with the phenomenon, which had given it its birth—colonization. The nationalist philosophy—that is, the nationalist view of the world—was an attempt to deal with twentieth-century reality by juxtaposing the precepts and concepts of ancestral Islam (salafite), and the precepts and concepts of the colonizer, that is, the philosophy of nineteenth-century capitalism.42

I further discuss in the next chapter the implications of this eclecticism on the perception and status of underprivileged working women in relation to Mernissi’s critique of capitalist modernization of the independent Moroccan state. What is of interest here is Mernissi’s invigorating feminist revision of the nationalist discourse of female liberation, which demystifies its ‘liberationist’ narrative concerning women and more specifically lower-class women, who are Mernissi’s focus in this article as well as other fieldwork studies that she conducted from the end of the 1970s

38

Ibid., 89–90. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 158. 40 Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” pt. 1, 88. 41 Arkoun, Pour une critique de la raison islamique [For a critique of Islamic reason] (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1984), 359. 42 Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” pt. 1, 88. 39

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to the beginning of the 1980s. She vigorously concludes her analysis with the following question: What did their “liberation of woman” consist of? It consisted of liberating the secluded women, who are precisely the women of the urban bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie, which was their own class.43

This vigor and intransigent critical stance vis-à-vis the nationalist reformist discourse is not consistent in Mernissi’s scholarship. It occasionally leaves the floor to apology. In contrast with the critical spirit displayed above with respect to al-Fassi’s discourse, the following statement from her book Chahrazad n’est pas marocaine: autrement elle serait salariée (Sheherazade is not a Moroccan: Otherwise she will be a salaried worker) betrays a lenient tone. Ce n’est pas un hasard si l’un des livres les plus importants de cette époque, écrit par Allal Al Fassi s’intitulait “Al-Nakd adDati” [Al-Naqd aldhati] (Auto-critique). L’auto-critique, voilà le départ d’une renaissance de société et d’individus. Avant, le Maroc était buté dans une attitude d’auto-défense. . . . Dans les années quarante, c’était autre chose, un vent moderne incarné par une attitude critique un regard froid et lucide sur la société et sur soi a balayé les rivages du pays. Le Maroc prenait l’initiative de se voir, de s’analyser: c’est là pour moi la grande signification de ce mouvement nationaliste qu’on a maintenant tendance à minimiser sous prétexte qu’il était « Salafiste » (référence au Salaf, l’ancêtre). Il était Salafiste, nostalgique du passé? Oui, mais il n’y avait pas que cela, il y’avait une remise en question profonde de la société marocaine par l’élite nationaliste elle-même. Les Marocains sont devenus à ce moment là les acteurs de l’histoire, et conscient de l’être. It is not by chance that one of the most important books at that time [the forties], written by Allal Al Fassi, was entitled “Al-Naqd al-dhati” (Self-critique). Self-critique, here is the beginning of a renaissance of society and individuals. Before, Morocco was stubbornly trapped into an attitude of self-defense. . . . In the forties, things became different, a modern wind, incarnated by a critical attitude, a lucid gaze on society and self, swept Moroccan shores. Morocco took the initiative to look at and analyze itself. Here is for me the greatest meaning of this nationalist movement which people nowadays tend to minimize using as an excuse that it was “Salafist” (reference to Salaf, ancestor) There was a profound rethinking of the Moroccan society by the nationalist elite themselves. Moroccans became at that moment actors of history and conscious of being so.44 43

Ibid. Mernissi, Chahrazad n’est pas marocaine: autrement elle serait salariée (Casablanca: Le Fennec, 1988), 46, emphasis mine. 44

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This long passage is but a short extract of an extended celebration of the nationalist movement and the national state. In 1997, Mernissi voices the same celebratory discourse in an article that she published in the Moroccan daily newspaper La Vie économique (Economic life), in a special issue on women on the occasion of Women’s Day, March 8. The article is suggestively entitled “En terre d’Islam, le feminism fut d’abbord une affaire d’hommes” (In the land of Islam, feminism was first of all men’s business). She mentions the Turkish leader Kamal Ataturk, the Tunisian president Ahmed Bourguiba, and the Moroccan king Mohammed V and their role in promoting women’s education and employment. She also argues that Amin’s book Tahrir al-mar’a “had the effect of a bomb.”45 Mernissi presents al-Fassi’s book, especially the six-page chapter that he devotes to the issue of women, as the most important feminist manifesto in modern Morocco’s history. She also writes that women’s emancipation represents the dream of the nationalists and the two kings Mohammed V and Hassan II. This flattering article seems to be addressing King Hassan II and the state in addition to the wider public, urging more measures to promote women’s political participation. In 1997, four women were appointed secretary of state. Previously, in 1995, a woman was appointed for the first time to the position of Haut Commissaire des Handicapés (High Commissioner for the Handicapped). One might logically interpret these shifting positions as demonstrating Mernissi’s highly ideological discourse. Opponents of Mernissi’s shift regarding feminism in the late 1980s might argue that the lenient tone of her newspaper article or her book Chahrazad n’est pas marocaine is in line with her shift from a ‘radical’ (Marxist/secularist) feminism to a ‘soft’ (Islamic) feminism. Yet one can also see it as a sort of intellectual development or political maturity, a move from criticizing the state and its apparatuses from an outside position to “talking to the [Ideological State Apparatuses] ISAs,” to borrow Tony Bennett’s phrase.46 To do justice to Mernissi, one also has to note the strategic nature of Chahrazad n’est pas marocaine, published locally and clearly addressing the Moroccan state of the late 1980s, as a means to urge more

45 Mernissi, “En terre d’Islam, le feminism fut d’abbord une affaire d’hommes,” La Vie économique, March 7, 1997. 46 Bennett, “Putting Policy into Cultural Studies,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrance Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 32.

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commitment to girls’ schooling, especially in rural areas. Mernissi argues that one of the main obstacles to rural women’s well-being and empowerment is illiteracy. Unlike Scheherazade who could save her life through her wide knowledge, illiterate women do not have access to valorized paid jobs, hence the title “Sheherazade is not a Moroccan: Otherwise she will be a salaried worker.” Her ultimate aim is to urge the state to promote women’s rights by addressing the state rather than merely condemning it from an outside position as in the Marxist tradition. To use Lamia Ben Youssef Zayzafoon’s words by which she comments on Mernissi’s The Veil and the Male Elite: Unlike [Judith] Butler, who locates political agency in subverting the dominant phallocentric discourse, “Third World” feminists like Mernissi are committed to effect social and economic change through the intermediary of the state; that is, they want to involve the government in enacting laws that guarantee women’s education and their equal access to economic and social privileges.47

It is, therefore, important to keep in mind the strategic aspect of Mernissi’s shifts. Mernissi’s critique of the nationalist discourse of ‘female liberation’ remains, nevertheless, one of the first invigorating postcolonial feminist revisions of this discourse, which participated in the construction of independent Morocco as a state that maintained patriarchy as the basis of its own project of state and society. Uncovering the Political and Economic Instrumentality of Traditional Gender Roles to a Neopatriarchal System In his book Neopatriarchy, Hicham Sharabi mentions Mernissi’s Beyond the Veil as one of the earliest radical feminist critiques of patriarchy in independent Muslim states.48 In this section, I develop Mernissi’s feminist critique of the Moroccan postcolonial state’s schizophrenic discourse on gender and its political instrumentalization of the traditional distribution of gender roles in the family as an invigorating postcolonial feminist critique of ‘neopatriarchy.’ Sharabi defines 47

Zayzafoon, Production of the Muslim Woman, 26. Sharabi, Neopatriarchy, 32–34. Sharabi also mentions Nawal El Saadawi’s The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World, trans. and ed. Sherif Hetata (London: Zed Books, 1980) as the other example of early feminist critiques of patriarchy in the Arab world. The lack of engagement with Saadawi’s scholarship in comparison with Mernissi’s is one of the numerous limitations of my book. 48

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‘neopatriarchy’ as the combination of modernization and patriarchy as characterizing a mode of government, society, and discourse as well as hindering change toward democracy in Arab societies. In fact, Mernissi’s critical diagnosis of the Moroccan postindependent state’s contradictory options for both modernization and tradition and the way it is accommodated with gender hierarchy, not only in Beyond the Veil but also in her other studies written between the late 1970s and early 1980s, is clearly in agreement with Sharabi’s theorization and critique of neopatriarchy. Sharabi’s term, indeed, serves to theorize the schizophrenic postindependent state discourse on gender as diagnosed by Mernissi. This section mainly relies on Mernissi’s Beyond the Veil and Ait Sabbah’s Woman in the Muslim Unconscious. Both books stress the political instrumentalization of the traditional conception of gender roles. Beyond the Veil, like “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” shares with Woman in the Muslim Unconscious the same conclusions. In the concluding lines of Beyond the Veil, Mernissi states: “It is my belief that, in spite of appearances, the Muslim system does not favor men, the self-fulfillment of men is just as impaired and limited as that of women.”49 In a similar vein, Ait Sabbah states in the last pages of her book that “Islam is not a construction of the universe whose objective is to permit the human being to actualize his potentialities.”50 Moreover, if Beyond the Veil argues that “Muslim sexual ideology” is concomitant with an authoritarian political system, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious seeks to demonstrate that Islam’s model of gender roles or “schema of pyramidal relationships” is in the service of political authoritarianism.51 In Sharabi’s theorization, neopatriarchy is the particular form of political and social configuration that combines modernity and patriarchy in Arab societies that has come into an abrupt encounter with European modernity in the age of imperialism. The forceful encounter with modernity, according to Sharabi, accounts for those states’ rejection of the intellectual modernization project and the adoption of a material modernity, or modernization. This eclectic modernity, which does not renounce patriarchy, has produced a “modernized patriarchy,” 49

Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 173. Ait Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, 117. 51 Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 24; and Ait Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, 74. 50

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or neopatriarchy. It is this “schizophrenic” political configuration and discourse, to use Sharabi’s word, that Mernissi’s critique unearths with respect to the Moroccan independent state and its discourse on women.52 Mernissi deconstructs the discourse of the national state, or its political choices, laying bare its inconsistencies or “ideological bricolage.” In her analysis, the main features of this state are contradiction, imitation, and political opportunism, which are the same characteristics of the neopatriarchy that Sharabi describes. She mainly focuses on two contradictory ‘policies’ of the postindependent state. On the one hand, there is the politics of modernization with its liberal ideology that promotes women’s education and employment, and, therefore, asserts women’s economic role. On the other hand, there is the patriarchal 1957 family legislation, mainly inspired by a rigid conception of the shari’a (Maliki fiqh in particular), normalizing a hierarchical distribution of gender roles that paradoxically denies women an economic role. Mernissi states that “Article 115 of that code [the 1957 Moudawana] affirms: ‘Every human being is responsible for providing for his needs (nafaqa) through his own means, with the exception of wives, whose husbands provide for their needs.’ ”53 In order to deconstruct the Moroccan state’s inconsistent representation of women, she divides Beyond the Veil into two major parts: a theoretical part, dealing with, as she entitles it, “The Traditional Muslim View of Women and Their Place in the Social Order”; and an empirical part, analyzing “The Anomic Effects of Modernization on Male-Female Dynamics” in early 1970s Moroccan society. From the onset of Beyond the Veil, Mernissi unearths the bricolage characterizing the postcolonial Moroccan state. Morocco claims to be modern, Arab and Muslim. Each one of these three adjectives refers to a complicated nexus of needs and aspirations, more often contradictory than complementary, which gives the modern Muslim way of life a powerful impetus and a specific character.54

52

Sharabi, Neopatriarchy, 21, 4, 23. Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 148. Mernissi refers to Code du Statut Personnel, Dahir no. 1–57-343, in Bulletin Officiel no. 2354, December 6, 1957. The amended 2004 text of the Moudawana radically changes this conception of gender roles and relations by stipulating in Article 4, for example, that the family is under the joint direction of both parents. 54 Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 12. 53

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This contradiction stems from the needs created by each of these adjectives. While the adjectives ‘Arab’ and ‘Muslim’ create the need for the shari’a, which is, for Mernissi, based on the principle of ‘sexual segregation,’ the adjective ‘modern’ creates the need for ‘sexual equality.’ She mentions in this respect that Morocco as a member of the United Nations signed the Declaration of Human Rights, which asserts sexual equality.55 As a sociologist with a secularist (Marxist) feminist perspective, Mernissi critiques the independent state ideology and rhetoric by confronting it with a disturbing social reality. She also highlights the extent to which the state’s ideological bricolage has created an ambiguity that is felt with most acuity at the social level, particularly in the realm of gender relations. In this respect, her study affirms that the contradictory state option for both modernization and shari’a is responsible for a “sexual anomie” (a term she coins from the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, who defines ‘anomie’ as a confusion of moral norms), that is, tension, “deep confusion and absence of norms” in male-female relations, created by the gap between ideology, belief, and practice. She points out that “the anomie stems from the gap between ideology and reality, for more and more women are using traditionally male spaces, going without the veil, and determining their own lives.”56 The affirmation of the existence of a sexual anomie, in other words, tensions and confusions, demystifies the state’s narrative of political and social harmony, or the happy marriage between asala (authenticity) and mu’assara (modernity) celebrated by Moroccan official discourse. The demystification of this kind of harmony is also the subject of Mernissi’s article “Etat planification nationale et discours scientifique sur la femme.” As mentioned earlier, in this article, Mernissi argues that there are two contradictory and parallel discourses of the Moroccan postindependent state: a religious discourse, which expresses official ideology; and a statistical discourse, which contents itself with producing data without analysis since any comment would undermine the official narrative. Thus, if the official discourse claims that women’s legal status does not need to change since it is coherent with the ideal of the Muslim family in which the woman is a provided for

55

Ibid. Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 97–98, 98. Mernissi refers to Durkheim, Selected Writings, ed. A. Giddens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 174. 56

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being, the statistical discourse expresses the opposite, affirming, for instance, that Moroccan women are far from being simple consumers but are indispensable economic agents. Mernissi argues that statistics underline women’s massive access to the labor market and education. Statistical figures also underscore changes in matrimonial and demographic structures.57 In this respect, Taieb Belghazi and Mohammed Madani write (prior to the 2004 family code) that “la famille Moudawanatiste” (the Mouduwana family) is problematized by “la famille vécue” (the empirical family). Their argument is based on a number of indicators, including a rise in the age at first marriage (which problematizes the principle of the prescribed family of the Moudawana based on early marriage), the frequency of divorce (which questions the principle of the durability of marriage promoted by the Moudawana), and the emergence of women heads of households (which contradicts the principle of the family headed by males). All these elements constitute this emerging empirical family, which enters into conflict with the prescribed family, that Mernissi’s critique tried to unveil as early as the beginning of the 1970s.58 As suggested earlier, in Beyond the Veil, Mernissi seeks to admit an empirical reality, which the neopatriarchal state chooses to ignore, that “the seventh-century concept of sexuality conflicts dramatically with the sexual equality and desegregation fostered by modernization.”59 By “sexual desegregation and equality,” Mernissi refers to Moroccan women’s access to employment and schooling. She highlights then the schizophrenic nature of Moroccan society, where Muslim spatial boundaries of public and private spheres are transgressed in everyday life, while being rigidly maintained at the theoretical or legal level, that is, at the level of the Moudawana. Mernissi observes the vast incongruity between ideology (family legislation) and the social reality that it comes to represent. She further explains: Moroccan society has not pushed its social reform in matters of malefemale relations as far as the changes in the traditional distribution of power and authority might have warranted; hence the anomic aspect of that relation.60

57 58 59 60

Mernissi, “Etat planification nationale,” 95. Belghazi and Madani, L’Action collective, 30–31. Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 24. Ibid., 150–51, 20, 151.

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In fact, the conservatism of the Moroccan family legislation does not push society toward change and also “fossilise les normes sociales” (fossilizes social norms), to use Rahma Bourqia’s phrase.61 Commenting on Article 155 of the 1957 Moudawana, Mernissi observes the absence of a clear position vis-à-vis women’s work, which is not affirmed as a woman’s indisputable right, hence the lack of realism and the fantasy of this law. The Moudawana is a “masterpiece of ambiguity and a mine of potential conjugal discord,” she writes. “The Moroccan husband,” she continues, “is faced with anxiety-provoking ambiguities,” since the law gives him the right to control his wife’s movements, whereas economic reality confiscates it. Women’s entry into public space, she further explains, is thus felt as a castrating phenomenon by males whose identity is constructed on an idea of virility confounded with financial power and the control of female relatives’ movements.62 The observed sexual anomie is, for Mernissi, a sign of the postcolonial state’s inability to perform its role of “producer of ideology,” which should accompany societal changes initiated by its own politics. To illustrate this idea, Mernissi presents the example of China, a state also based on a traditional society, to indicate how, in contrast to the Moroccan postindependent state, China succeeded in producing a family legislation harmonious with the modern project of society that it had outlined. The contradiction of Moroccan family legislation with reality reflects the shortsightedness of the national state’s policy, the main feature of which, Mernissi writes, “seems to be empiricism, ad hoc decision-making, rather than the subordination of decisions to a long term programme of action.” Legislators were mainly motivated by the immediate interests of the independent nation rather than by a long-term vision of society.63 But perhaps the challenging feature of Mernissi’s critique of the Moroccan postcolonial state is her unveiling of the strong correlation between power relations underlying gender dynamics and the authoritarian form of power exercised at the level of politics in the context of neopatriarchy.

61 Bourqia, “Les Femmes: un objet de recherche” [Women: Objects of research], in Etudes féminines: notes méthodologiques [Female studies: Methodological notes], Serie: Colloques et Seminaires [Series: Colloquia and seminars], no. 73 (Rabat: Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, 1997), 16. 62 Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 148, 152, 171–72. 63 Ibid., 151, 151–52, 23.

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chapter one The complementarity of an authoritarian political structure and the authoritarian power of the husband and father seem to be a feature of transitional societies unable to create an effective development programme to face change with effective planning.64

The traditional distribution of gender roles is, therefore, inextricably linked to the political configuration and the economic situation of a neopatriarchal state that Mernissi highlights in the concluding chapters of Beyond the Veil, as well as in her subsequent works as discussed in the next chapter. Quoting the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who highlights “the functions of the patriarchal family in economically depressed societies,” Mernissi also stresses the “psychological function of female oppression,” which provides for “an outlet for male frustration and aggression” in a context of political and economic oppression.65 Within the Marxist vision to which Mernissi refers, the oppression of women and their confinement in a patriarchal family would impede the proletariat rebellion, since it stifles the anger of this class that would stem from a consciousness of their exploitation. The male’s subjugation of the female in the private sphere provides for an outlet of anger that, instead, should be directed toward the economic and political system. She writes: The unexpected frustration that society imposes on the sexual desires of its young men is allowed no outward expression. Aggression against the managers of the Moroccan economy is violently discouraged and legally repressed. Anger against society turns in towards the family and women—objects of frustrated desire. The family offers the sexually and politically oppressed Moroccan male a natural outlet for his frustration.66

Mernissi aims to problematize the divide between the private and the public by showing how the private consolidates the political. Mernissi’s inclusion of Reich’s ideas is an instance of her use of Marxist tools of analysis in her critique of the postcolonial state, as further explored in the next chapter. The major example of her appropriation of the Marxist approach is clear in her fieldwork studies; this approach allows her to assess urban and rural lower-class working 64

Ibid., 172. Ibid., 160. She refers to Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Farrar, Straur and Giroux, 1970), 31. 66 Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 163. 65

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women’s exploitation by a capitalist vision of modernization and development. Her perspective, informed by Marxist and feminist analytical tools, enables her to revisit development policy and foreground its gender and class biases, which account for the poor conditions of many Moroccan women, especially in rural areas. At another level, the secularist position deployed in Beyond the Veil can be seen as influenced by the “Marxist critique that religion provides a superstructural legitimation for socio-political inequality,” to borrow Sa’diyya Shaikh’s words, though used in a different context.67 Mernissi’s materialist analysis in Beyond the Veil leads her to the observation that Islam’s sexual ideology is instrumental to the economic system of a dependent state incapable of ensuring employment and welfare, which normally represent a state’s raison d’être. Traditional distribution of gender roles shows women’s unemployment as unimportant compared to men’s because women’s ‘natural’ place is the home as it is presumed by the 1957 Moudawana. This allows the state to avoid the obligation of creating jobs for women. Employing women, Mernissi argues, becomes an act of benevolence and generosity. She concludes: To keep women in the home, under the control of men, satisfies needs both psychological and economical in a Third World country in which the economy is in deep crisis and is strongly dependent. If the Muslim family, with its territorial sexuality did not exist, it would have been created.68

Further borrowing Marxist tools of analysis, she argues that the “Muslim family” is “an Ideological State Apparatus” that fulfills several vital functions for the system, namely, masking the claim of employment by millions of women and children belonging to poor classes.69 Thus, if Mernissi relates the maintenance of patriarchal gender roles to the hastiness of the nation-state building process and the incapacity of the nationalist movement to come up with an alternative project of society at the eve of independence, her account of the permanence of the patriarchal hierarchical model of gender relations in postindependence Morocco stresses the political and economic usefulness of this

67

Shaikh, “Knowledge, Women and Gender in the Hadith: A Feminist Interpretation,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 15, no. 1 (2004): 104. 68 Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 159. 69 Ibid., 160, 346.

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hierarchical domestic configuration. This argument is also found in Ait Sabbah’s Woman in the Muslim Unconscious. In fact, both Mernissi and Ait Sabbah rely on the 1957 Moudawana and its distribution of gender roles, which obliterates women’s economic dimension. Woman in the Muslim Unconscious undertakes the examination of “the unconscious Muslim vision of femininity and masculinity” and the way these constructions serve the postcolonial state’s ideological interests. It is worth mentioning here that Ait Sabbah also quotes Reich to support a similar argument. Decoding “the orthodox theological” discourse on women, that is, the discourse of the Qur’an and some authoritative texts of Sunni theology, Ait Sabbah shows that it exaggerates the sexual dimension of a woman while obliterating her economic identity. This androcentric conception of femininity serves the exploitation of lower-class working women in a context of economic dependency, unemployment, and a high population rate.70 The process of obliterating the economic dimension of women and inflating the erotic dimension of the female body has served not only an eroticization of gender relations, but also, and more important, a ‘sexualization’ of problems that normally belong to other spheres. Consequently, some problems of economic order are viewed as sexual problems because of the exaggeration of the erotic dimension. For instance, the male’s economic bankruptcy, which should be perceived as a political and economic problem, is felt in sexual terms, as a castration in a Muslim patriarchal society where virility is defined in terms of financial power. Moreover, women’s access to work space, which is a result of the particular economic orientation that the postcolonial state has chosen, is often experienced as sexual aggression in a society in which women’s bodies, identified as ‘awra (meaning a shameful zone—genitalia—that must be covered at all times), has been controlled by the traditional division of space.71 Ait Sabbah also notes that prostitution is consequently perceived as a moral problem, i.e., as a manifestation of the great sexual appetite of women, rather than as an economic and social problem. This belief, she continues, emerges even at the level of some scientific studies.72 This perception allows the state to eschew discussing prostitution as

70 71 72

Ait Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, 15–17. Ibid., 16–17. Ibid., 37.

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a socioeconomic problem. Mernissi also expresses this idea in “Etat planification nationale et discours scientifique sur la femme,” in which she argues, as mentioned in the first section, that the state’s religious discourse encourages the perception of a problem like prostitution as the expression of deviant female behaviors, rather than a phenomenon directly linked to rural exodus and the difficult access to schooling and professional training for women.73 In this chapter, I have highlighted Mernissi’s profile as a postcolonial feminist critic, who is inscribed in a space of ‘double critique’ targeting Orientalist and local patriarchal discourses on women. It is this simultaneous critique that allows her to revisit the ways in which discourses of colonialism, nationalism, and the postindependent state have invented Moroccan women. The next chapter is mainly devoted to her fieldwork studies and examines the strategies and methodologies that she uses to map women’s work in Morocco.

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Mernissi, “Etat planification nationale,” 96.

CHAPTER TWO

A SUBALTERN CRITIC UNVEILS THE INTERSECTION BETWEEN GENDER AND CLASS BIASES IN MODERNIZATION POLICIES This chapter presents Mernissi as a ‘subaltern historian’ writing the subaltern history of Morocco. As mentioned earlier, it is mainly based on the study of the often neglected aspect of Mernissi’s work: her fieldwork realized between the late 1970s and early 1980s, which can be seen as one of the first invigorating endeavors to foreground female subalternity in Morocco. A hybrid approach simultaneously using Marxist and feminist tools of analysis enables this narrative. Her methodological unorthodoxy is, however, subject to resistance from what she identifies as a “dogmatic Marxist discourse,” which apparently permeated Moroccan social studies during the period of her fieldwork.1 To the dogmatism of this discourse, which focuses only on class as a category of social analysis and class struggle, the response of Mernissi’s work seems to be ‘the personal is [also] political.’ ‘Secular,’ which also means demystificatory and anti-essentialist, can be used to define Mernissi’s work from this period. Her interviews with hitherto unrepresented women upset the essentialist category of ‘Moroccan woman’ built into the 1957 Moudawana (describing a consumer and inactive being), with the complicit silence of the state’s ‘scientific’ discourse (i.e., statistics). In Mernissi’s decoding, the state’s discourse on women is both misogynist and capitalist, and is, therefore, unable to account for poor urban and rural working women’s indispensable economic role, and is incapable of foreseeing and satisfying their needs. Against the grain of this discourse, Mernissi foregrounds the voices of female subalternity by conducting the first interviews in Morocco with rural women and by affirming the existence of a Moroccan ‘female proletariat.’ ‘Female proletariat’ especially designates poor 1 Mernissi, “Etat planification nationale,” 92–93. I am not referring to Marxism as a philosophy or theory, which contains multiple expressions. The mere existence of ‘Marxist feminism’ indicates the noncontradiction between feminism and Marxism. I am, therefore, referring to what Mernissi identifies as a “dogmatic Marxism,” proponents of which opposed her feminist discourse in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

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women working in key Moroccan industries, like textiles, whose life conditions are affected by both capitalist exploitation and gender discrimination. Mernissi can, of course, be criticized as inappropriately describing poor Moroccan women as a class, since they do not possess a ‘class consciousness’ in the Marxist line of thinking, that is, the process by which the proletariat becomes aware of conflict with the bourgeois class and decides to fight for liberation from capitalism through an organized structure.2 However, one should read Mernissi’s endeavor as a strategic provocation to compel dogmatic Marxists to pay attention to the specific conditions of pauperized working women, who are subject to double discrimination. If these women do not possess ‘class consciousness,’ they appear in Mernissi’s interviews to have what Zakiya Pathak and Rajeswari S. Rajan call “subaltern consciousness,” a subjectivity based on some sort of resistance, without this implying the notion of “free choice” or designating “a unified and freely choosing” subjectivity.3 This chapter maps the way Mernissi’s empirical work brings to the forefront female subalternity in Morocco, piecing together a ‘subaltern consciousness,’ a peripheral Moroccan narrative against the subsuming official history. The chapter ends with a critical tone, problematizing Mernissi’s authorial/authoritarian consciousness when representing the subaltern through raising the question of whether the subaltern can be heard by Mernissi and via Mernissi by the audience.

2

On the notion of class consciousness, see Andrew Milner, “Western Marxism,” Cultural Theory (London: University College London, 1994), 62–67. 3 Pathak and Rajan, “Shahbano,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 267–68. It is this definition of ‘subaltern consciousness,’ connoting an idea of resistance that Moroccan scholar Lahcen Haddad uses when, based on a gender study of a Moroccan village, he declares the emergence of “une conscience subalterne feminine” (a female subaltern consciousness), which transgresses patriarchal rules. Haddad, Le Résiduel et l’émérgent: le devenir des structures traditionelles: le cas de la tribu hors et dans la ville [The residual and the emergent: The becoming of traditional structures: The case of the tribe outside the city] (Rabat: Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, 2000), 45.

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Mernissi’s Subaltern Narrative and Conflicts with a Dogmatic Marxist Discourse With a PhD dissertation on gender relations in Morocco in 1973, the gestation of which coincided with second-wave feminism in the United States, the newly trained sociologist Mernissi is confronted with a ‘third world’ country that has known massive rural exodus and economic difficulties.4 Rural and poor women’s labor and status could not but catch the attention of the feminist sociologist. Marxist tools of analysis imposed their analytic usefulness. Mernissi’s methodology, which combines class and gender analysis in order to understand the particular intersection of class and gender in Morocco, calls into question the singular focus on gender that Chandra Talpade Mohanty describes as the major aspect of Western, middle-class liberal feminists’ writings. Mohanty writes: The major analytic difference in the writings on the emergence of white, Western, middle-class liberal feminism and the feminist politics of women of color in the U.S. is the contrast between a singular focus on gender as a basis for equal rights, and a focus on gender in relation to race and/or class as part of a broader liberation struggle. Often the singular focus of the former takes the form of definitions of femininity and sexuality in relation to men (specifically white privileged men).

For Mernissi, “male/female domestic relations cannot be a singular focus,” as Mohanty phrases it, hence Mernissi’s adoption of a perspective combining attention to both class and gender, and her espousal of a multiple-front critique.5 This section does not discuss Mernissi’s reformulation of feminism, which is the subject of the next chapter. What I am interested in here is the way her hybrid methodology, combining both Marxist and feminist analyses, grates against a “dogmatic Marxist discourse,” which, according to her own experience, has permeated social studies in 1970s Morocco (this is also a description of a broader, prevailing

4 Zakiya Daoud notes that Mernissi gets herself noticed especially at the 24th Congrés de Sociologie (Sociology Symposium), in Algier, April 1974. See Daoud, Féminisme et politique au Maghreb [Feminism and politics in the Maghreb] (Casablanca: Eddif, 1993), 366. 5 Mohanty, “Cartographies,” 11, 12, emphasis original.

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antagonism between Marxism and feminism).6 While dogmatic Marxism centers its attention exclusively on class disparities in its analysis of social injustice, Mernissi asserts a feminist perspective in addition to the class one. Her own analytical arsenal consists of an appropriation of the enabling analytical tools that Marxism provides, but is critical of its dogmatic expressions manifesting an obstinate focus on class as the only category of social analysis and its foreclosure to other categories, like gender. In this, her project resembles that of another renowned Arab feminist in the 1970s and 1980s, Egyptian Nawal El Saadawi, to whom Mernissi pays tribute in her Islam and Democracy.7 Mernissi finds it necessary and urgent to compel the dogmatic Marxist discourse in sociology to pay attention to the female proletariat, who have specific problems and are subject to multiple discriminatory factors.8 She seeks to sensitize this discourse to the pitfalls of focusing on class as the only category of analyzing social disparity. What Mernissi communicates is that social justice or democratic social relations cannot be achieved without striving to eliminate sexual hierarchy. She affirms that the determinants of class and the determinants of sex mutually reinforce each other and are solidified at various historical junctures; to try to confront one without questioning the other is chimerical.9

As suggested before, Mernissi’s Marxist sensibility is born with her involvement in the 1960s with the leftist UNEM. This participation has a great impact on her political consciousness.

6 This has to be taken with a grain of salt, since sociology in Morocco has not really been closed off to women’s issues. See, for instance, the work of Moroccan female sociologist Malika Belghiti who produced fieldwork studies on gender as early as the late 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, which Mernissi cites in Beyond the Veil. Belghiti, “Les relations féminines et le statut de la femme dans la famille rurale, dans trois villages de la Tassaout” [Female relations and the status of woman in rural family in three villages of the Tassaout region], Bulletin économique et social du Maroc [Economic and Social Bulletin in Morocco] 31, no. 114 (1969): 1–73; and Belghiti, Najat Chraibi, and Tamou Adib, “La ségrégation des garçons et des filles à la campagne” (Segregation of boys and girls in the countryside), Bulletin économique et social du Maroc 33, no. 120 (1971): 81 –144. Mernissi’s critique in 1987 might be specifically directed to the Moroccan sociologist Abdessamad Dialmy as I discuss later in this chapter. 7 Mernissi, Islam and Democracy, 161–62. A comparison of Mernissi and Saadawi, interesting as it is, does not fall within the scope of this book. For such a comparison, see, for instance, Majid, “Politics of Feminism.” 8 Mernissi, “Etat Planification nationale,” 93. 9 Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” pt. 1, 78.

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L’Union Nationale des Etudiants Marocains (UNEM), où j’ai longtemps milité et où j’ai pendant un temps été chargée des affaires culturelles, a joué un rôle immense dans ma formation politique et m’a aidé à m’épanouir. Ce fut vraiment un moment extraordinaire de la vie de notre génération: tout le monde était engagé, c’était naturel. The Union Nationale des Etudiants Marocains (UNEM), in which I was an active member for a long time and in which I was for some time in charge of cultural issues, played a great role in my political training and helped me blossom. It was an extraordinary moment in the life of people of our generation: everybody was committed; it was natural.10

Mernissi’s Marxist sensibility is combined with a feminist one and with the conviction that social change cannot be conducted without gender equality. In her “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” an article that is obviously critical of capitalism, she also criticizes Arab socialism. An Arab “socialism” in which the struggle against sexual inequality is not a sine qua non of the struggle against social inequality is a dubious enterprise, in which the stake, even if it is draped with the legitimacy of Islam, is definitely the maintenance of privilege and not the disappearance of privilege.11

Mernissi sees socialism as a social project that should seek to end discrimination related to both class and gender disparities. Addressing Arab socialists and Marxists, she points out in the conclusion of Beyond the Veil that Marx and Engels actually called for ‘sexual’ (or gender) equality. Marx and Engels had to attack repeatedly the confusion of bourgeois writers which distorted their thinking about any family in which the woman was not reduced to an acquiescent slave. They had to show again and again that a non-bourgeois sexuality based on equality of the sexes does not necessarily lead to promiscuity, and that the bourgeois family pattern was an unjustified dehumanisation of half of society.

In addition to the founding fathers of (international) Marxism, Mernissi also mentions an Arab Marxist, George Tarabishi, who has called for ‘sexual’ equality in the Arab world.12

10

Mernissi’s words are quoted in Sophie Bessis and Souhayr Belhassen, Femmes du Maghreb: l’enjeu [Women of the Maghreb: The issue] (Casablanca: Eddif, 1992), 64. 11 Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” pt. 1, 78. 12 Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 167, 176–77.

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In fact, the very purpose of Beyond the Veil is to argue that democratic social relations for which ‘progressive’ Arab intellectuals call cannot be achieved without seeking democratic gender relations. Explaining the aim of her book, she writes: The objective is to arouse discussion about our behaviour toward the other sex, and about the political implications of that behaviour. By ‘political’ I do not mean the democratic infrastructure (how parliaments, parties, and trade unions, for example, allow for the spread of democracy); I have in mind rather the relations we establish with the people closest to us, with whom we share the greatest interests and weave the most intense and most intimate human relation possible—in other words, the people with whom we share domestic space. It is quite inconceivable for a human being who does not cherish democratic relations in a domain considered non-political, like the household (in which life’s essential functions are enacted: eating, sleeping, love-making), to seek it in the high ground of democracy, the party cell or the parliamentary chamber.13

Beyond the Veil’s insistence that power infuses a more intimate sphere, the ‘domestic’ realm, is an assertion of the feminist slogan ‘The Personal is [also] Political.’ Strikingly resembling Mernissi’s above passage, Fatna Ait Sabbah, addressing a local audience, also stresses the way that the sexual is intimately linked to the political. I would like to say to the young men formed in our Muslim civilization that it is highly improbable that they can value liberty—by which I mean, relating to another person as an act of free will, whether it be in bed, in erotic play, or in political debates in party cells or parliament—if they are not conscious of the political import of the hatred and degradation of women in this culture.14

Thus, both Ait Sabbah and Mernissi bring gender to the forefront as an indicator of democracy. Mernissi’s original endeavor, at that time, was to conduct fieldwork studies in Morocco, the perspective of which is marked by attention to class and gender discriminations or the particular intersection of both in a neopatriarchal context. In the introduction to Doing Daily Battle, which presents extracts from lengthy interviews conducted with Moroccan women from different social classes, Mernissi addresses local

13 14

Ibid., 95–96. Ait Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, 5.

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progressives, urging them to integrate the category of sex (or gender) into their social analysis: “it is important for men who strongly support change to integrate ‘female’ values into their theories and practice,” she writes.15 This new perspective that Mernissi introduces to the Moroccan intellectual scene is, however, the target of a dogmatic Marxist discourse, as Mernissi expresses it in one of her articles. She contends that an indepth exploration of underprivileged women’s experiences is rejected as a betrayal of the working-class struggle. Mernissi’s response to this criticism is particularly interesting. She ironically contends that the dogmatic Marxist discourse also uses legitimacy concepts as sacred as the Prophet’s hadiths used by religious fundamentalists, namely ‘revolution,’ ‘class struggle,’ and ‘proletariat.’ She writes: Pour les tenants de ce discours il n’est pas essentiel que les chances des femmes d’être exclues du système scolaire et d’être chômeuses soient beaucoup plus grandes que celles des hommes. Ceux et celles qui s’attardent sur la question sont des « bourgeois totalement coupés du réel des masses ». Il va de soi dans la logique de ce discours-là, que seul le marxiste dogmatique jouit d’un rapport miraculeux au réel, possède une relation privilégiée au peuple qui l’habilite à parler en son nom. Et ce peuple bien entendu n’est pas sexué. Il n’est pas composé à 50% de femmes, avec des problèmes spécifiques. For the proponents of this discourse, it is not important that women have bigger chances to be excluded from schooling and be jobless. Those who dwell on this matter are “totally at odds with the masses’ reality.” It is evident that in the logic of this discourse, that only the dogmatic Marxist enjoys a miraculous relationship with reality, [and] has a privileged relationship with the people which authorizes him to speak on its behalf. And these people are obviously not gendered. They are not made up of 50% of women, with specific problems.16

Thus, if the theological discourse accuses Mernissi of atheism, the dogmatic Marxist discourse accuses her of being bourgeois, alienated from the interests of the masses. In fact, the very use of the word ‘dogmatic’ points to the way Mernissi equates this (local) reading of Marxism with the dogmatism of a rigid religious discourse.17 For both ‘orthodoxies,’

15

Mernissi, Doing Daily Battle, 15. Mernissi, “Etat planification nationale,” 93. 17 This is the case, for example, when she publishes her controversial The Veil and the Male Elite. The book was subject to censorship and a death fatwa was pronounced against her in Tangiers. 16

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her project of foregrounding poor women’s experiences is ‘heretical’ since it transgresses the ‘sacredness’ of their projects. Mernissi further expresses her experience with this recalcitrant discourse in the following statement, in which she describes how either in the name of class struggle or in the name of Islam her discourse is subject to assault. Chaque fois que j’ouvre la bouche, je me trouve confrontée à deux sortes de censeurs, ceux qui veulent me faire taire au nom de « at-thurat » (Patrimoine), et ceux qui veulent m’étouffer au nom de « At Thawra » (la révolution). Pour ces derniers, qui vous sautent dessus au nom de la défense du Prolétariat, comme si celui-ci n’était constitué que d’hommes, m’interdisant de parler de la condition féminine avançant comme argument que « tout discours sur les femmes est une « [sic] dilution du vrai problème, celui de la révolution », comme si pour que leur révolution ait lieu, il fallait cacher les femmes et leurs problèmes tel un tabou honteux. Every time I open my mouth, I find myself confronted by two types of censors, those who want to keep me quiet in the name of “al-turath” (Patrimony), and those who want to strangle me in the name of “althawra” (Revolution). For the latter, who jump on you in the name of the defense of the Proletariat, as if it is made up only of men, forbid me to speak about women’s condition, putting forward the argument that “every discourse on women is a weakening of the real issue, that of revolution,” as if for their revolution to take place, it is necessary to hide women and their issues like a shameful taboo.18

For dogmatic Marxists, the focus on gender is a dilution of ‘the real’ issue, class struggle. Mernissi voices this exasperation with dogmatic Marxism prior to 1987. In 1982, she published in the local avant-garde magazine Lamalif (subject to a ban in the late 1980s) an article with the revealing title “La conversation de salon comme pratique terroriste” (Living room conversation as terrorist practice), in which she precisely describes her frustration with this type of resistance.19 She had already published in Lamalif and other Moroccan publications a number of articles that were clearly feminist and therefore provocative for her detractors: “Virginité et patriarcat” (Virginity and patriarchy) in 1979; and in 1980, “Un future sans femmes” (A future without women), “Femmes: 18

Mernissi, Chahrazad n’est pas marocaine, 21–22. Mernissi, “La conversation de salon comme pratique terroriste,” Lamalif, no. 139 (1982). 19

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ascension ou décripitude” (Women: Rise or decadence), and “Le proletariat féminin au Maroc” (The female proletariat in Morocco).20 Though Mernissi does not name the Moroccan intellectuals whom she designates as “dogmatic Marxists,” her description of these Marxists matches the position of Moroccan sociologist Abdessamad Dialmy in his book Sexualité et discours au Maroc, in which he indulges in an often virulent critique of Mernissi on Marxist grounds (in spite of his refreshing point of view concerning fiqh and its possible use by feminists as discussed in part 2). In Dialmy’s analysis of the feminist’s discourse, Mernissi represents the “féministe révoltée” (rebellious feminist), whose discourse obliterates class struggle. In a statement, which curiously recalls Mernissi’s description of the resistance of dogmatic Marxists to her writings, he writes: Le problème sexuel, à l’intérieur du discours révolté, est un moyen pour refouler le problème des classes sociales, et cette opération refoulante, qui veut faire du discours révolté un discours « libre », nous pousse justement à la rattacher aux classes dans l’intérêt est de marginaliser, de minimiser la lutte des classes au Maroc. The sexual [gender] issue, at the heart of the rebellious discourse, is a means to push back the issue of social classes, and this act of containment, which aims at presenting the rebellious discourse as a “free” discourse, drives us precisely to link it with classes whose interest is to marginalize class struggle in Morocco.

Although it does not nominally address Mernissi, this statement is clearly directed to her and summarizes Dialmy’s criticism of her feminist position. In the chapter that he devotes to Mernissi, Dialmy argues that she has to question her feminism because it occludes class struggle.21 Dialmy is not the only intellectual who represents this kind of ‘Marxist’ criticism of Mernissi’s feminist discourse. Another Moroccan intellectual, Anouar Majid, likewise voices this criticism in his article “The Politics of Feminism in Islam,” in which he argues for an indigenous path to women’s emancipation based on what he calls “progressive Islam.” For Majid, the feminist project in Islam should contest both

20 Mernissi, “Virginité et patriarcat,” Lamalif, no. 107 (July 1979); Mernissi, “Un future sans femmes,” Lamalif, no. 115 (April 1980); Mernissi, “Femmes: ascension ou décripitude,” Al Asas, no. 32 (June 1980); and Mernissi, “Le proletariat féminin au Maroc,” Al Asas, no. 24 (October 1980). 21 Dialmy, Sexualité et discours, 69, 36, 79.

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global capitalism and clerical, male-dominated Islam. While he praises Mernissi’s critique of clerical Islam (though he is critical of her historicization of the Qur’an as I show in part 2), he suggests that Mernissi’s discourse voices a bourgeois ideology. This criticism is reminiscent of Mernissi’s words, stated above, concerning dogmatic Marxists’ accusation of her being a bourgeois alienated from the masses. He writes: The prominent feminist sociologist Fatima Mernissi, however, has accepted the capitalist model of human relations; she . . . argue[s] quite forcefully for a bourgeois notion of democracy and individual liberties as the foundations for any Arab nation that aspires to genuine sovereignty and development.22

Majid is particularly critical of Mernissi’s secular position in The Veil and the Male Elite, in which she advocates a certain separation of religion and state (even when putting forward a new position identified as ‘Islamic feminist’). However, his exclusive reliance on Mernissi’s work on Islam obviously obscures her fieldwork, which is particularly critical of capitalist development and the exploitation of female workers. Majid offers no reference to Mernissi’s “The Degrading Effect of Capitalism on Female Labour in a Third World Economy,” “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” or Doing Daily Battle, all of which are clear instances in which she problematizes the discourse of capitalist development by foregrounding female subalterns’ voices.23 These particular studies make criticism, like Majid’s or Dialmy’s, unfounded. The rest of the chapter is devoted, therefore, to a discussion of Mernissi’s field studies as an example of subaltern work, and underscores Mernissi’s groundbreaking contribution to the Moroccan intellectual scene, as it raised as early as the 1970s the necessity of adopting more inclusive approaches to the study of society that combine both class and gender perspectives. Problematizing Modernization through a Subaltern Narrative In this section, I highlight Mernissi’s profile as a subaltern critic. Mernissi is one of the first Moroccan sociologists to attempt to bring 22

Majid, “Politics of Feminism,” 328. Mernissi, “The Degrading Effect of Capitalism on Female Labour in a Third World Economy: The Particular Case of Craftswomen in Morocco,” Peuples Méditerranéens [Mediterranean peoples] 6 (1979): 41–57; Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development”; and Mernissi, Doing Daily Battle. 23

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poor rural and urban working women to the sphere of representation, against the grain of official economic and political discourses that ignore their existence. The narrative that emerges from Mernissi’s interviews problematizes the development policy or modernization project carried out in postindependence Morocco, underscoring its class and gender biases. Combining a Marxist and feminist approach, she is the first sociologist to draw attention to female labor in Morocco and to declare the existence of a Moroccan female proletariat.24 Mernissi’s pioneering interviews with subaltern women reveal women’s indispensable economic role as well as make their needs visible to national planners and, consequently, contribute to their empowerment. Her innovative combination of gender and class perspectives allows her not only to assess female exploitation and marginalization but also to subject to radical critique the capitalist vision of the international market and the bourgeois ideology of the national state’s modernization policy and development. Mernissi’s questioning of development as practiced by the Moroccan postindependent state appears as early as her first book, Beyond the Veil. Development plans devote hundreds of pages to the mechanization of agriculture, mining and banking, and only a few pages to the family and women’s condition. I want to emphasise on the one hand the deep and far-reaching processes of change at work in the Muslim family, and on the other hand, the decisive role of women and the family in any serious development plan in the Third World economy.25

Beyond her reductive approach, which generic phrases like ‘the Muslim family’ or ‘Third World economy’ suggest, when she specifically analyzes the Moroccan context, Mernissi sheds light on women’s invisibility in development plans in spite of their decisive role in the Moroccan economy. Following Beyond the Veil, Mernissi published groundbreaking fieldwork studies that challenge the prevalent vision of development and strive to give it a human face. Her 1979 article, “The Degrading Effect of Capitalism on Female Labour in a Third World Economy,” is one of the first attempts in Morocco (and in the world, at the time) to make visible female labor and its non-avowed importance for the economy. The study unveils

24 As early as 1979, she published her study “Degrading Effect of Capitalism”; and in 1980, she published “Le Prolétariat féminin au Maroc.” 25 Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 169.

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women’s work conditions and assesses the deteriorating effect of capitalist economy on their status and life conditions. It also underscores a consolidation of religious and scientific patriarchal discourses in obscuring women’s labor. Mernissi argues that the exploitation of women’s labor is facilitated, on the one hand, by what she calls “the Muslim vision of womanhood,” which in her analysis is a particularly erotic vision that obliterates women’s identity as an economic agent; and, on the other hand, by a scientific discourse, imported from certain Western capitalist economic theories, which is also based on a patriarchal ideology.26 This is an argument that Mernissi shares with Ait Sabbah, who, in decoding the construction of woman in both orthodox and erotic literatures, unearths her oversexualization, which denies her other dimensions of her humanity, like the economic dimension. It is worth recalling that Ait Sabbah also stresses the idea of the instrumentality of traditional conceptions of women for the development of a depressed economy. In “The Degrading Effect of Capitalism,” Mernissi unveils the way scientific concepts consolidate religious ones. For Mernissi, concepts like ‘unproductivity’ and ‘illiteracy’ have become legitimizing concepts for the exploitation of female labor. Unproductive and illiterate, women’s subordinate and unprivileged situation is therefore legitimate. Exactly like traditional religious authorities, modern western trained statisticians and economists, manage, through concepts and linguistic quasi-magical tricks, to blur the economic contribution of women to society.27

Mernissi shows how women’s statistical invisibility facilitates their exploitation and allows the state and its development programs to elude the responsibility of responding to their needs. This kind of analysis is also found in Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, in which the author stresses the “exploitation of the female body through the expedient of its statistical invisibility.”28 The continuity that Mernissi reveals in the above quotation between Western-trained statisticians/economists and traditional authorities is also found in Beyond the Veil, in which she denounces the classifica-

26 27 28

Mernissi, “Degrading Effect of Capitalism,” 41–42. Ibid., 42. Ait Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, 15.

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tion of rural women who work fourteen hours per day as inactive.29 In “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” Mernissi likewise observes a contradiction between statistics and the empirical reality that rural women experience. Although statistics divide the population of the village in which Mernissi conducts her interviews into five categories—‘active and employed,’ ‘unemployed,’ ‘students,’ ‘housewives,’ and ‘others inactive’—Mernissi argues that the village inhabitants only recognize two categories: active people and those who are unemployed.30 A category like ‘housewives,’ for instance, does not make sense for the villagers, since women’s activity and contribution is undeniable.31 “The Degrading Effect of Capitalism” also demystifies the narrative of scientific truth by highlighting the paradoxical continuity between the scientific discourse, a discourse of ‘modernity,’ and the religious discourse, often viewed by modernists as ‘pre-scientific,’ and therefore ‘mystifying’ and ‘untrue.’ Mernissi’s study shows that this ‘modern’ scientific discourse can indeed be mystifying. She argues that economic categories, such as the ones mentioned above, are not only incapable of studying “situations of labour production and labour relations in third world economics” but also “function against the interests” of people working in the traditional sector in general and women in particular.32 This type of double-front demystification targeting scientific and religious discourses is more clearly spelled out in Mernissi’s essay significantly entitled “Women’s Work: Religious and Scientific Concepts as Political Manipulation in Dependent Islam.” In this study, she declares in clear terms her objective: to “question medieval religious concepts and selective Western scientific, economic, and statistical categories retained by our technocrats (legislators, planners, etc.) when dealing with women’s work.” It is in this study that Mernissi urges planners to look for “better conceptual tools” to evaluate and integrate female labor in the household and informal sectors into national

29

Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 193. Mernissi refers to the Recensement agricole [Agricultural Census], vol. 1, Data for 1973–74 (Direction de la statistique, Secretariat d’Etat au Plan et au développement régional [Direction of statistics, secretariat of state of plan and regional development], 1980). 31 Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” pt. 1, 74. 32 Mernissi, “Degrading Effect of Capitalism,” 45. 30

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accounts.33 She also urges leading local planners to acknowledge that the androcentric concepts they describe as ‘objective’ (and, therefore, unassailable) could by no means be elevated to the rank of ultimate truth, but rather need to be problematized and reformulated. Mernissi also contends in “Etat planification nationale et discours scientifique sur la femme” that scientific discourse can express misogynist options and assert a precise political choice: that of patriarchy and male supremacy. Her analysis highlights the silent complicity of statistical discourse in obscuring reality, especially concerning women’s economic agency. This complicity, as suggested earlier, is expressed through producing numbers or data without any comments because every comment risks dragging the technician to the analysis of reality, which may contradict official rhetoric.34 Mernissi’s conclusions in “The Degrading Effect of Capitalism” particularly challenge the myth of modernization in the discourse of the postcolonial state and the national bourgeoisie. Modernization with its market and banking system is alien to illiterate women. The female proletariat lives in exclusion from the modern capitalist system. The discourse of modernization, she concludes, ignores poor women’s interests and reveals the interests of the dominant group, the native bourgeois minority that continues to carry on the colonial capitalist system. What is called “development” is precisely to belong to this national group which constitutes itself as different from the masses, consume western goods and languages and therefore feel the strong need to talk about authenticity, tradition, popular culture etc.35

Modernization, in general, and rural modernization, in particular, initiated by the colonizer and carried on by the independent state and its elite, express a bourgeois capitalist ideology, and employ a discourse of authenticity and tradition. In Doing Daily Battle, Mernissi criticizes the postindependence project known as la marocanization (Moroccanization), supposedly one of the important projects of decolonization in Morocco, identifying it, 33 Mernissi, “Women’s Work: Religious and Scientific Concepts as Political Manipulation in Dependent Islam,” in Contemporary North Africa: Issues of Development and Integration, ed. Halim Baraket (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1985), 214. 34 Mernissi, “Etat planification nationale,” 74, 94–95. 35 Mernissi, “Degrading Effect of Capitalism,” 55, 56.

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on the contrary, as one of the poles of the construction of ‘capitalist’ Morocco. She indicates that this project, which resulted in the transfer of lands confiscated from peasants during the French Protectorate (1912–56) by “foreign colonizers” to “Moroccan owners” after independence, is aggressively discriminatory. This transfer has benefited only bourgeois owners and has continued the colonial marginalization of peasants, and peasant women in particular, by allowing the urban bourgeoisie to put on the colonizers’ shoes through the purchase of their lands.36 She argues that to ignore female workers is to continue the colonization project. Mernissi criticizes the narrative of modernization as a postcolonial myth. In her analysis, the project is an expression of a “corrupted modernity,” differentiated from the process of constructing capitalism by the European bourgeoisie. For Mernissi, if the latter emptied the country to fill factories, the Arab bourgeoisie emptied rural areas without creating factories. The result is immigration to Europe; massive rural exodus; and insertion of rural people, both men and women, into an informal sector that escapes regulation and does not provide access to social security or the old traditional solidarity system and compassion (destroyed with modernization and the eradication of the extended family).37 This type of demystification is even clearer in “Le Prolétariat féminin au Maroc” (The female proletariat in Morocco), published one year after “The Degrading Effect of Capitalism.” In “Le Prolétariat féminin au Maroc,” she affirms the existence of a female proletarian class, the offspring of the massive rural exodus that modernization has provoked. In this study, Mernissi asks challenging questions that development planners do not consider. Quel est donc ce prolétariat féminin? Où est-il? Dans quels secteurs se trouve t-il? Ou mieux encore, de quel secteur est-il exclu? Que veulent dire pour la femme marocaine pauvre des mots aussi graves pour l’histoire du vingtième siècle, que: options industrielles? Investissement? Formation? Y a-t-il assez d’éléments pour tracer un profil de l’ouvrière? Est-elle en général jeune ou âgée ? Est-elle mariée ou célibataire? Est-elle illettrée ou instruite?

36 Mernissi presents this idea in her chapter “Khadija, fille de fellah” [Khadija, a laborer’s daughter], in Le Monde n’est pas un harem, 261–2n6. 37 Ibid.

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chapter two What is then this female proletariat? Where is it? In which sector is it to be found? Or rather, of which sectors is it excluded? What do words as serious for the history of twentieth century as industrial options? Investment? Training? Mean for the poor Moroccan woman? Are there enough elements to draw the profile of the female worker? Is she in general young or elderly? Is she married or single? Is she illiterate or educated?38

Besides problematizing state modernization policies, the questions also indicate Mernissi’s goal to create interest in the field of sociology in Morocco to produce research on women workers affirming their economic role and identifying their specific needs and legitimate aspirations. Mernissi observes women workers’ exclusion from some important industrial sectors, like the sugar industry, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, sectors that the state presented as priorities of the development plan since they allegedly were destined to have a substantial social impact. She points out that even when a female worker has a permanent job, rarely does she have access to technical knowledge. Furthermore, the majority of women are subject to the irregularity of the job market, hence their concentration in seasonal jobs. In this respect, Mernissi draws the attention of planners to the negative impact of seasonal employment on the lives of these women, not only with respect to wages and prospects of promotion but also with regard to their family life, stressing the drawbacks of the absence of mothers on their children. She concludes that women’s employment conditions as observed in Morocco necessitate a radical change, which must take into consideration a fundamental element: recognizing women who belong to poor classes as legitimate job applicants within the national job market. This also demands the creation of nurseries and generalized structures of education and professional training.39 In her powerful book Le Monde n’est pas un harem, Mernissi publishes a few interviews of female workers grouped under the sugges-

38 The text of “Le Prolétariat féminin au Maroc” is an extract of a study that Mernissi conducted one year earlier (in 1979) for the United Nations Funds, “Femme, population, développement, politique envers la femme” (Woman, population, development, politics toward woman). Mernissi, “Le Prolétariat féminin au Maroc,” in Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord [Yearbook of North Africa] (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique [CNRS], 1980), 347. 39 Ibid., 356.

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tive heading “Le Proletariat Voilé” (The veiled proletariat).40 She gives voice to women working in the informal sector and makes the silence surrounding their economic activity speak. She underscores that the postcolonial state uses the religious conception of women’s (domestic) role, which completely ignores lower-class working women, as the basis for the economy. She explains that these interviews problematize the category ‘husband-provider,’ which becomes a mere fiction that excuses the state from addressing such issues as social security, transportation, and kindergartens.41 Mernissi’s challenging work does not stop at asserting the existence of a female proletariat; one year after the publication of “Le Prolétariat féminin au Maroc,” she produced another outstanding study on the situation of rural women, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development.” The aim of this study was to assess the impact of capitalist development and rural modernization on illiterate peasant women’s material lives as well as on perceptions about women or gender roles. Interviews with rural women serve to demystify the state narrative of ‘rural modernization,’ by comparing agricultural state technicians’ statements and worldviews with those of female peasants. Again, Mernissi’s study brings the issue of female subalternity to the surface. Has the situation of rural women improved since the beginning of the century? Have these rural women realized their productive potential? Have they worked in better conditions than in the past? Has their contribution been more valued and thus better remunerated? As a result, does it mean that their basic needs in food, clothing, housing, health, and education have been met? What are their aspirations and their frustrations? What is their standard of living? Whom do they see as responsible for their frustrations: individuals or institutions?42

In sum, Mernissi assesses whether ‘rural modernization’ has any relevance to peasant women. In the following statement, she summarizes women’s perception of ‘rural modernization’ or development: “life is one long workday, which development has made still more arduous.”43

40 This heading is found only in the French edition. Mernissi, Le Monde n’est pas un harem, 128. 41 Ibid., 131–32. 42 Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” pt. 2, 62. 43 Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” pt. 1, 673.

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In addition to being critical, Mernissi’s work is also interventionist. The significance of her critique lies in its objective to intervene into development programs in order to contribute to its revision, as she states: The aim of the study is to identify for development program planners a perspective, directions, and plan of action around which a rural modernization program which promotes social and sexual equality can be articulated.44

The contribution of Mernissi’s work is to assert the importance of what is now known as ‘human development,’ which pays attention to both class and gender factors. The significance of Mernissi’s critique remains her problematization of development by strategically opposing the official state narrative about the success of rural modernization and the interviews of female peasants that undermine this narrative of success. The result of the study, Mernissi states, reveals a “fundamental contradiction between the statements of the peasant women on development, and those of the planners, directors and agents of this development, the vast majority of whom are men.” Her objective is to seek the reasons why peasant women and male decision makers experience development in “radically different ways.” She strongly states the conclusion of the study from the beginning: “the prevailing view of development—of its models, its practices, and its values—is essentially a male view,” hence her desire to juxtapose it with the female peasant’s worldview.45 The subversiveness of Mernissi’s endeavor lies not only in the content of her essay but also at the level of form. The very construction of her essay displays a conscious defiance to the scientific or sociological approach, as she explains: Normally, in the scientific approach, one first describes the phenomenon being studied (the documented description), and then one explains it (the theory). I have decided to adopt the opposite approach for a simple reason, which is linked to the aim of this study: to reverse the order of things, that is, to relativize the male view of development.46

44

Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” pt. 2, 61. Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” pt. 1, 69, 69–70, 70, emphasis original. 46 Ibid., 70. 45

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This reversal of the order is also found in Woman in the Muslim Unconcious.47 Indeed, the first part of “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development” examines the historical roots of the prevalent negative view of women in development policies, while the second part is devoted to her fieldwork. The reason for this displacement is to prepare the reader for the idea that rural women’s low status is not a given, but is rather a contextual cultural construct and is therefore capable of being transformed.48 The exploration of the historical conditions of the construction of female inferiority, which permeates the discourse of development policies, highlights the role of what she calls “the vision of woman and sex roles in Islam”; the development of slavery during the Abbasid Empire and its impact on the vision of femininity; and the climatic conditions of the Mediterranean, famines, and epidemics.49 Finally, her analysis touches on the unregulated introduction of the capitalist system during colonization and its negative impact on the value of female labor during colonization and after independence. All these elements inform the vision of rural development programs in Morocco and account for the blindness to women’s contribution and needs. The second part of “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development” analyzes the material conditions of peasant women’s lives in the Gharb region of Morocco and engages in a critical assessment of the state’s rural modernization policy. Mernissi’s interviews reveal the failure of this policy to ameliorate not only peasant women’s living conditions but also their status and the value of their labor. Her assessment suggests that what the state calls ‘rural modernization’ is actually a technical project designed to ameliorate the technological aspect of agriculture in large production units, which are either possessed by the state or wealthy owners, usually city-dwellers. This project ignores the needs of the workers, especially female ones. Mernissi strongly argues that for the majority of peasant women, ‘rural modernization’ meant more burdens and a further lowering of their social status, because of

47 As discussed in part 2 in the chapter devoted to Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, Ait Sabbah declares that she will analyze the religious discourse on women by reversing the order as set by the discourse of religious authorities and reassemble them according to her own “fantasized” order. Ait Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, 6. 48 Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” pt. 1, 70–71. 49 Ibid., 77.

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the destruction of the precapitalist economic system of subsistence, in which women used to have a rather important role. Mernissi’s choice of the Gharb region as the location for her case study is not fortuitous; it is intended to demystify the colonialist and nationalist narratives of modernization benefits, since the Gharb is officially designated as the model of rural modernization by both the colonial and the postcolonial administrations. Mernissi critically writes in her footnotes: The Gharb was chosen for studying the impact of capitalism and the advance of technology because it is a region where these two phenomena have been “tested” since the beginning of the century on “indigenous” populations in order to “bring them out of their lethargy” and their poverty, and to induce them, through the effects of French colonization, to taste the pleasures of progress and modernization.

The marginalization of rural women and their exclusion from state development projects, she points out, is made evident by their massive illiteracy, their exclusion from land possession (although women do have the right to possess land in Islam, as she admits), and their quasi-absence from the permanent jobs the state created especially in the sugar industry in the Gharb region.50 As stated earlier, in this part of her study, Mernissi explains how modernization has provoked the breakdown of the extended family and with it the mechanisms of protection for women, which used to compensate for fragile marriage ties, as unilateral divorce and polygamy exemplify. With the destruction of the extended family and the exclusion of women from land inheritance, women are delivered to the “jaws of a savage capitalism.” She argues that peasant women’s situation has dramatically worsened due to this unregulated passage from a traditional system (which was strongly misogynistic but which had set up systems of alliance guaranteeing minimal security in case of accidents, sickness, or old age) to a modern capitalist system, just as fundamentally misogynistic, but without the least mechanisms of protection.51

Mernissi also points out that the destruction of small family farms in favor of the implementation of public and private organized and mechanized large farms has not been accompanied by the creation 50 51

Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” pt. 2, 107, 71. Ibid., 67, 69.

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of wage labor for people in rural areas. Even in cases where they are created, she observes, the scarce jobs are mainly designed for men.52 Despite agrarian reforms and state modernization policies, the agriculture of ‘modern’ Morocco is, however, still based on unpaid manual family labor. This state of nonregulation, which characterizes modernization, Mernissi strongly suggests, serves capitalist interests. If the state congratulates itself for its rural modernization project that has brought to ‘the rural world’ significant facilities, such as electric energy or water distribution, Mernissi’s interviews show that these facilities benefit state farms and bourgeois landowners. The burdens of peasant people, especially women, like carrying water and collecting firewood, have not been alleviated. This accounts for rural girls’ huge school dropout rate and the large percentage of female illiteracy in rural areas in general.53 Mernissi’s studies reveal that when modernization has devalued female labor in the rural sector with the emergence of technical knowledge and has made that labor invisible, it has, by the same token, facilitated rural women’s exploitation, especially because of a lack of information and statistics that cover employment in the rural area.54 Even when statistics are carried out, Mernissi writes, “there is a huge gulf between the statistics and the peasant reality.” As mentioned earlier, Mernissi’s reading of statistical figures indicates, for example, that statistics use categories, which are not meaningful for village inhabitants. As for the women—of whom 92 percent were classified in two categories, “housewives” and “others inactive”—they do not recognize themselves in this conglomeration of indolence and blissful ease that the statisticians have striven hard to give birth to. A simple stroll around Beggara and the neighboring villages establishes one fact: apart from the wives of the very few petit bourgeois who still deign to live in the village (most of them move their families “to town” in Sidi Slimane, because absenteeism is the primary criterion of their standing) and who can be counted on the fingers of one hand, all the women are outside their houses and all work and are involved in tasks which appear to them to be indispensable.

In contrast, the technocrats consider these women as economically nonproductive and categorize them as inactive. This categorization,

52 53 54

Ibid., 72. Ibid., 76. Ibid., 70.

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Mernissi argues, conforms to the prevalent view in development policy that space is divided into two “subuniverses,” one economical and male, the other, domestic and female. Women’s domestic “nature,” she continues, is a common belief even in “modern” planners’ perception. This belief is, therefore, decisive in what pertains to women’s access or non-access to power and knowledge.55 For Mernissi, scientific categories used by state apparatuses need to be revised, because they are unable to account for women’s labor and are, therefore, unrepresentative. She also points out that the inability of statisticians and planners to recognize rural women’s labor and their indifferent attitude to women’s needs is explainable by their upper-class position. For these male planners, technocrats, economists, and statisticians, often living and having studied in the city (even if they were originally from rural areas), the only woman who contributes to the economy is the one who, like them, has diplomas. The economic contribution of illiterate women is perceived as nonexistent, as not producing value. This blindness of the planners of rural development is partly responsible for this specifically discriminatory effect of the rural “modernization” program on women—that is, the concentration of land-holding and the omnipresence of the state in the process of production.56

It is this combination of a feminist and Marxist analysis that makes Mernissi’s studies challenge the state discourse of development and modernization. Mernissi’s subversive language, especially after the publication in Morocco of her groundbreaking book Doing Daily Battle (Le Maroc raconté par ses femmes) in 1984, is, however, subject to assault from another type of detractor whom she identifies as “the general guardian of scientific truth.” The main contention is that the small number of interviews (twelve women interviewees), which form the basis of her book, cannot scientifically represent Moroccan women. For Mernissi, this critique is a form of “intellectual terrorism.” His [Mernissi’s detractor] terrorist tactics can be expressed in two sentences: firstly, “What you are talking about is an imported idea” (referring to access to the cultural heritage); and secondly, “What you are talking about is not representative” (referring to access to science). What is the meaning of these two sentences so often thrown at any Moroccan citizen, male or female, who puts forward any idea which appears to upset the established order?

55 56

Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” pt. 1, 74, 73. Ibid., 70.

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Mernissi’s decoding of the two statements is interesting. She explains that the first provisional speaker is erected as the legitimate and exclusive guardian as well as interpreter of “national patrimony,” who accuses Mernissi of “betrayal of the national cause,” of being “an agent of foreign enemies.” The second statement refers to science, but the mechanisms and assumptions are the same: the speaker is erected as the general guardian of scientific truth.57 The second accusation makes specific allusion to the quantitative method of sociology and questions the representativeness of Moroccan women (as the title of the first edition of the book Le Maroc raconté par ses femmes suggests). Mernissi responds to this last accusation with a demystification of scientific ‘truth’ by problematizing the approach and technique which the state recognizes as the effective tools that enable ‘representativeness.’ She argues that to reduce the scientific practice to a quantitative approach and technique of the questionnaire is to affirm a political option. It is to adhere to the American capitalist model that is designed to respond to the law of profit and consumption.58 This model, she continues, is inapplicable in the Moroccan context and does not give access to the life experience of the female rural worker or the illiterate population. A questionnaire reduces Tahra Bint Muhammed to a statistical unit, that is, to a robot who will merely reply yes or no to the questions chosen by the investigator. The questions that Tahra Bint Muhammed considers as pertinent or as having priority have no place in the process of the collection of data by questionnaire. In the final analysis, the investigator has very little concern for her priorities. Worse still, the way in which the questions are formulated leaves Tahra Bint Muhammed at the mercy of the investigator.59

Mernissi points out that national surveys based on a quantitative, statistical method, cannot pretend to reflect reality since their instruments and language are alien to women in a context of massive female illiteracy.60 She calls for the creation and adoption of other methodologies, which can be more appropriate to the local context, and builds a case for a qualitative approach. The revisionist thrust of Mernissi’s work extends also to the very methodology and techniques that she learned in the Western schools 57 58 59 60

Mernissi, Doing Daily Battle, 14. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 17–18.

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of sociology she attended in the late 1960s and early 1970s. If Mernissi dreamed of being an interview specialist because she wished to give voice to illiterate women, as she told the late French literary critic Serge Ménager, she became aware of the limitation of her own technique: “Je me suis aperçue qu’il ne s’agissait pas du tout de pratiquer l’interview tel qu’on me l’avait appris à Boston parce qu’avec cette technique-là, les gens se ferment comme des huîtres” (I realized that I could not conduct interviews as I was taught at Boston because with this technique people shut like oysters).61 The revision or adjustment of her methodology started as early as her PhD dissertation, Beyond the Veil, in which she privileges lengthy interviews conducted in the form of a “gossip exchange” to respect the narration rhythm of illiterate female women.62 To foreground these women’s voices, Mernissi declares in Doing Daily Battle that she had to disobey the methodological rules of sociology learned in Western universities. So I can be proud of my interviews in that they give me a feeling of fidelity to the reality of women’s experience that no statistical table has ever given me. How and according to what rules did I conduct these interviews? I began by violating Rule No. 1 at the Sorbonne and at the American university where I was trained in “research technique”: to maintain objectivity toward the person being interviewed.

The statement thus suggests her distrust of the myth of objectivity and representation. She continues: It is necessary to give up the cherished rule of control, of controlling the give and take (as I was taught by my French and American trainers), of knowing how to anticipate and codify, especially while in the process of interviewing . . . . As for me, I have learned that the best rule is to know how to give up control, to take the risk of wasting time and looking ridiculous. In this way I have learned that an illiterate woman has her own narrative pace, and that a Moroccan interviewer must learn to be sensitive to this pace and respect it.63

Mernissi is careful to assert that her interviews make claims neither to representation nor to capturing the faithful translation of her inter-

61 62 63

Mernissi, “Fatima Menissi,” interview by Ménager, 111. Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 90. Ibid., 18, 19.

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viewees’ empirical reality, though they are not totally devoid of scientific value. She describes her objective as follows: These interviews do not pretend to be an “exclusive” depiction of the reality of the Moroccan women. Such a claim would be contrary to the open-mindedness that must guide our research into Moroccan reality, our desire to be faithful to it. They are merely a very tentative effort to understand the complexities of that reality. I would wish that the greatest number of researchers—men and women—would find here encouragement for their own personal initiatives along the road of understanding of others and themselves.64

The stated objective behind her interviews is, therefore, to encourage research on women and to initiate the establishment of women’s studies programs in Morocco. This desire is realized through her participation in a research group on La Femme, la famille et l’enfant (Woman, family, and child) hosted first by the Faculty of Law, Université Mohammed V, Rabat, in 1981.65 Mernissi explains that “the idea was to meet, to spell out our vision of change together, to show how Morocco could be transformed, and to offer alternatives.”66 This project was developed a few years later with the initiation of a book series, edited by Mernissi, Approches (Approaches), which has produced several edited books on issues regarding women and the family. The collective’s first issue was published in 1987, under the title Portraits de femmes (Portraits of women). It is one of the first editions of a series of publications in women’s studies in Morocco (although then not institutionalized as an academic discipline). Reflecting on the role of this research group in her introduction to the journal’s first volume, Mernissi writes: Quel était le but de ce collectif ? Contribuer à l’accumulation de l’information scientifique sur la femme. Et quand je dis scientifique, je veux dire des données sur le réel, le vécu féminin. La science est tout simplement une tentative de connaître le réel, et c’est pour cela qu’elle dérange tout ce qui se superpose au réel, le cache ou le nie, comme les systèmes idéologiques par exemple qui défendent les intérêts du groupe

64

Ibid., 16, 20. Daoud also mentions another research group in which Mernissi was involved, Commission de recherche pour la formation et la promotion de la femme (Council for the training and the promotion of woman), which was created on April 24, 1978. See Daoud, Féminisme et politique, 369n56). 66 For an account of this experience, see Mernissi’s chapter “Writing is Better Than a Face-Lift,” in Women’s Rebellion, 6–7. 65

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chapter two qui dirige. Développer le discours scientifique sur la condition féminine est certainement une manière de contribuer à l’amélioration de cette condition. Et éclairer les phénomènes sociaux, les expliquer, les resituer dans les réseaux de pouvoirs et d’influences qui en déterminent la perception est un des rôles et privilèges de l’intellectuel dans sa société. What was the objective of this collective work? To contribute to the accumulation of scientific information on woman. By scientific, I mean data on real and lived experience of women. Science is very simply an attempt to be familiar with reality, and this is why it is disturbing everything that superimpose, hide or negate reality like ideological systems, for instance, which serve the interests of the ruling group. To develop scientific discourse on the condition of women is certainly a way to contribute to the improvement of this condition. And to clarify social phenomena, to explain them, to resituate them within networks of power and influences which determine their perception is one of the roles and privileges of the intellectual in his [her] society.67

But Mernissi is aware of the limits of scholarship in ameliorating Moroccan women’s lives. She declared in 1991 her suspicion of the importance of “the role of the intellectual” in the introduction to Le Monde n’est pas un harem. In retrospect, she observes that neither her book nor any other has ameliorated poor women’s fate since the 1970s; rather, there has been an increase in young illiterate rural women since that time.68 But Mernissi’s work has contributed to the awareness of women’s issues, and here lies her important role as an intellectual, as a scholar who pushes forth the feminist project in the Arab world. “The films and books produced by women in the Arab world may not have changed the negative image of women cultivated by society, but they have at least created an awareness of the problem.”69 Therefore, even if it has not reduced gender hierarchy, her work is a major contribution to foregrounding an important part of an unrepresented population. Foregrounding ‘Subaltern Consciousness’: Can the Subaltern Be Heard by Mernissi? Even though Mernisssi’s work denounces the economic exploitation of subaltern women in rural and poor urban areas, it does not aim

67 68 69

Mernissi, introduction to Portraits de femmes, 8. Mernissi, Le Monde n’est pas un harem, 7. Mernissi, Women’s Rebellion, 58.

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to produce women as essentially victims, but rather purports to draw the attention of national policymakers and development planners to the needs of economically dispossessed women. Mernissi’s interviews also attempt to give voice to the female subaltern and to document women’s agency and counterpower. In fact, Mernissi underscores, for instance, that Moroccan women after independence have become aware of their disadvantageous legal, economic, and political status, and that young women are rejecting some constraining traditional feminine values and therefore are challenging patriarchy. In this section, I read Mernissi’s attempt to underline the importance of women’s awareness of their oppression and their means of resistance as a pioneering endeavor that points to the formation in Morocco of a “subaltern consciousness,” a phrase by which Zakiya Pathak and Rajeswari S. Rajan describe the resistance of the subaltern that comes as a refusal of assigned subjectivities.70 In Mernissi’s analysis, resistance does not necessarily imply dissidence. As stated earlier, ‘subaltern consciousness’ is not equivalent to (the Marxist) ‘class consciousness,’ which implies a power of subversion and organized resistance. Even though the women Mernissi interviews are aware of their marginalization, they cannot overthrow the system altogether. The political system often appropriates their voices, as she indicates in her study “Women, Saints and Sanctuaries.”71 For Pathak and Rajan, following Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘subaltern consciousness’ is not an identity or subjectivity, but a palimpsest of identities; and, therefore, a ‘subalternist,’ according to them, can only produce the subaltern’s subject-effects.72 Similarly, I argue that Mernissi could only produce the subaltern’s subject-effects of illiterate and poor women rather than represent the subaltern. I end the section with a discussion of whether the subaltern can speak in Mernissi’s narrative, to paraphrase Spivak’s important question, or whether the subaltern could be heard by Mernissi and via Mernissi by the audience.73

70

Pathak and Rajan, “Shahbano,” 266–68. Mernissi, “Women, Saints and Sanctuaries,” in Women’s Rebellion, 21–33. This study first appeared in 1977 as “Women, Saints and Sanctuaries,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 3 (1977): 101–12. In my analysis, I will refer to the version published in Mernissi’s book. 72 Pathak and Rajan, “Shahbano,” 268–71. 73 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. 71

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Mernissi stresses the formation of a subaltern consciousness in the introduction of her revised edition of Beyond the Veil. Asked to name the major changes that have occurred in the Arab and Muslim world twelve years after the publication of the first edition, she answers: “the politicisation of Muslim women and the new perception they have gained of their problems.” By the generic ‘Muslim women,’ Mernissi precisely refers to the poor Moroccan women whom she has interviewed over one decade. According to Mernissi, women are starting to identify and articulate their problems as political and legal rather than emotional and domestic. This political awareness is, for Mernissi, the result of a change in self-perception, and is “the substance of the revolutionary process that is taking place in the Muslim world.”74 The result of her fieldwork conducted among craftswomen in 1979 already underscores a form of resistance to traditional subjectivity, or ‘female values.’ Even when the changes in their economic conditions are mostly negative, Mernissi argues, changes in their self-perception and worldviews are noteworthy. She writes: Young women do not accept any more unhappiness as a fate. They refuse values such as hard work for the sake of hard work, like their elders. They do not believe in work ethics. They believe in happiness, in securing a better life. This, in itself, is the most important change in a Muslim society based for centuries on hierarchical patriarchal ideology, which infused in women the sacred quality of ‘SBER,’ [sic] patience.

For Mernissi, these women are “dropping out from [the] traditional value system altogether.”75 However, even though such a statement betrays certain romanticism, Mernissi does not see this form of counterpower as fully capable of overthrowing the patriarchal system. Mernissi’s study also shows that these women are conscious of their oppression. Their rising consciousness comes from their assessment of their marginalization, and the prejudice and humiliation that they experience as a result. Women, she continues, have always voiced a sense of injustice and frustration, yet what is new is the political nature of these complaints. The big change is that now women’s complaints are more of economic nature. Women are complaining, besides traditional themes of procreation and men’s love, about purely economic issues: illiteracy, unem-

74 75

Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, xviii, xiii–xiv, xiv. Mernissi, “Degrading Effect of Capitalism,” 45.

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ployment, economic exploitation, inflation, uncertainty about jobs and pay. This is probably one of the most important changes in women’s self-perception and images of femininity in the Arab world.76

Mernissi’s objective is also to stress that within these complaints, women begin to show a propensity to identify solutions to their problems. Her interviews with peasant women in the Gharb demonstrate the ability of these women to spell out their own sense of development. One of the findings of this study—perhaps the most important—is that the peasant women, like their men, have developed, in the course of their experience as the “guinea pigs” of the policies of rural modernization imposed by the city, an authentic endogenous development plan.77

Poor rural and urban working women, according to Mernissi’s studies, identify education as an important solution to their marginalization.78 The women interviewed for Doing Daily Battle, Mernissi maintains, also lay claim to the egalitarian couple and control of their own reproductive capacity.79 Mernissi’s focus on the subaltern comes from her idea that these working women can potentially challenge patriarchy (even though they are unable to put an end to it). She argues that the emergence of a ‘female proletarian’ class is the most promising event of modernization as it signals the first empirical break with patriarchal gender representation.80 In contrast, the growth of a bourgeois female class that has earned diplomas in Morocco does not have the same effect; its emergence means a reinforcement of hierarchical patriarchal relations instead of their subversion. The rise of these educated women as a new social phenomenon, which is mostly restricted to the bourgeois class, is concomitant with the rise of illiterate rural women as ‘maidservants.’ Using a Marxist feminist analysis, Mernissi unveils a link between the visibility of these educated bourgeois women and the process of obscuring the exploitation of female labor. She argues that the increase of women who have earned diplomas, which obviously represents a break with the traditional configuration of gender roles, could have

76

Ibid., 56. Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” pt. 1, 77. 78 Mernissi, “Degrading Effect of Capitalism”; and Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” pt. 2. 79 Mernissi, Doing Daily Battle, 7–13. 80 Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” pt. 1, 97. 77

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radically transformed Moroccan society with respect to gender, if it had not been a class phenomenon. The emergence of female bourgeoisie with diplomas and paying jobs operates not as a break in the perception of traditional sexual inequality, but as an affirmation of class inequality and an incarnation of it. In plainer terms, it can be said that the success of the bourgeois woman who has access to a diploma and a paying job is due not to the fact that she is a woman, but that she is of the bourgeois class.81

With the rise of educated bourgeois women, Mernissi argues, the class disparity between the male master and the maidservant is obliterated and a female aspect of domination emerges. At the level of representation, the scarcity of bourgeois workingwomen in comparison with the widespread phenomenon of ‘maids’ has a negative impact on the perception of the latter. Through a contradictory effect, the educated women, because of their small number, constitute in relation to the female masses, where poverty and illiteracy are rife, an “exception” which proves the rule and reaffirms the attitude of domination, exploitation, and contempt toward the poor masses.

The hierarchical relationship mistress/maid, she further points out, reflects also the nonmanual/manual hierarchy and the city/country gap, which were exacerbated and widened during colonization and continued to exist more acutely in postindependence.82 For all these reasons, Mernissi argues in the conclusion to her previous essay, “The Degrading Effect of Capitalism on Female Labour,” that the “diploma holder female accommodating petite bourgeoisie” has no “revolutionary” potential and even represents an “important blockage in the process of democratisation and cultural revolution.”83 In the above mentioned study, Mernissi points out that the “Moroccan female world” has known a “dichotomisation,” which, since independence, has strongly influenced the perception of women’s productive power.84 However, Mernissi is probably aware that there has never been such a homogeneous and classless ‘female world,’ which was polarized in the postcolonial period, since women have always

81 82 83 84

Ibid. Ibid., 99. Mernissi, “Degrading Effect of Capitalism,” 56. Ibid., 96.

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belonged to different social classes even while inhabiting the same space. Indeed, in Doing Daily Battle, she interviews two women who live in a ‘harem,’ one as a mistress and one as a maidservant, stressing the disparity of their harem experiences according to their class positions, as discussed in the next chapter. Therefore, what I take Mernissi to mean is that education and diplomas, to which only bourgeois women have had easy access, have created a vast breach between educated (usually bourgeois) and illiterate (mostly poor) women. In fact, she argues in her subsequent study, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” that this dichotomization reflects the hierarchical division in the third world between the educated and the illiterate, or those who have access to expertise and technology and therefore power and decision making, and those who do not.85 Mernissi’s study recommends that the state promote lower-class women’s paid work, which would allow a social transformation at the levels of both gender and class relations in Morocco. Despite Mernissi’s optimism about the counterpower of women belonging to disadvantaged classes, she has no illusions regarding their power to overthrow altogether the patriarchal and capitalist systems that oppress them. This is clear in “Women, Saints and Sanctuaries,” which presents women’s saint worship as both an instance of female counterpower and an aspect of the dominant system’s control over subaltern women’s force of dissent. Her study discusses how illiterate women find a space where they may voice their frustrations vis-à-vis the oppressive system of “the new developing economies,” but also how this system nevertheless appropriates their dissident power.86 Mernissi constructs the sanctuary as a sort of ‘female public sphere,’ yet is conscious of its limited power to affect decision making. The sanctuary emerges in her reading as both a female space of resistance where illiterate women trespass into the public sphere as well as a space where the system neutralizes their trespassing. Mernissi starts by recognizing illiterate women’s consciousness of being oppressed: “They know they are wronged (madluma) by the system. Their desire to find an answer to their urgent needs is a desire to regain their rights.” Visiting sanctuaries is for these women an act of self-affirmation.

85 86

Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” pt. 1, 96. Mernissi, “Women, Saints and Sanctuaries,” 30.

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chapter two This insistence on going to the saints’ tombs exemplifies the North African woman’s traditional claim that she is active, can decide her needs for herself and do something about them, a claim that the Muslim patriarchal system denies her. Visits to and involvements with saints and sanctuaries are two of the rare options left to women to be, to shape their world and their lives. And this attempt at self-determination takes the form of an exclusively female collective endeavour.87

The sanctuary offers an illiterate woman a space where she escapes her subordinate position within a bureaucratic, patriarchal, and capitalist system that denies her any decision-making capacity. Within the sanctuary, her illiteracy is not an obstacle; it does not prevent her from expressing her claims. In contrast to hospitals where the use of French prevails, the illiterate woman can directly communicate her ills in sanctuaries. The saint’s tomb is directly accessible. It gives her a certain sense of control over her own sexuality and reproduction. A woman who builds a saint’s tomb undermines the division in space as well as in roles that exclude her from positions of power in both religion and politics. Mernissi explains: This resistance to hierarchical knowledge is a persistent characteristic of saints’ lives and their battles, which finds sympathy with the oppressed of the new developing economies: the illiterates, who are predominantly women. It is, therefore, no wonder that in the disintegrating agrarian economies of the Maghreb, sanctuaries, among all institutions, are almost the only ones visited spontaneously by women where they feel at home. The sanctuary offers a world where illiteracy is not a hindrance to being a wholesome, thinking, and reasonable person.88

The saint’s tomb is for Mernissi a female space of discontent and female solidarity against a marginalizing system. Mernissi notes that women shrine-goers form an “intrinsically female community,” and the sanctuary should be seen as an “informal women’s association,” a space of mutual support, therapy, and soothing, rather than a religious space.89 However, she is not suggesting that it is a substitute for women’s associations, or that it performs the political role of such organized structures. Thus, even as she constructs this space of female counterpower, Mernissi has no illusions as to its political potential and, therefore, does not romanticize this phenomenon.

87 88 89

Ibid., 25, 24, emphasis original. Ibid., 24, 27, 28, 30. Ibid., 25.

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The sanctuary cannot directly influence formal decision making. In the shrine, women look to a supernatural force as the means to affect the hierarchical social system, and thus they do not channel their solidarity against the system.90 This argument is again similar to that of the Marxist theorist Wilhelm Reich, who explores instances in which forces of dissidence are contained within the private sphere instead of being channeled against the political system, as discussed in the previous chapter in relation to Beyond the Veil. In Mernissi’s study, the sanctuary is a female space where simultaneously a consciousness of marginalization is cultivated, and female counterpower and subversive energy is absorbed and recuperated by the system. She writes that the saint in the sanctuary plays the role of the psychiatrist in the capitalist society, channeling discontent into the therapeutic processes and thus depriving it of its potential to combat the formal power structure.

Therefore, a sanctuary functions as a structure that facilitates the adaptation of these women to oppression, since within it their resentment dissipates.91 The theory of the sanctuary’s complicity with the economic system of developing countries is further supported by the state’s encouragement of saints’ rituals. Paradoxically, the arena where popular demonstrations against oppression, injustice, and inequality are most alive becomes, in developing economies, the best ally of unresponsive national bureaucracies. Encouragement of traditional saints’ rituals by administrative authorities who oppose any trade unionist or political movement is a well-known tactic in Third World politics.92

Traditional saints’ rituals are thus supported by a system that finds in those rituals an excellent means to recuperate a potentially subversive power. The saint becomes part of the power game of a state that uses and encourages traditional practices to reinforce its power. Mernissi’s statement concerning the political system’s supervision of saints’ rituals as a way to reinforce its power might be explained by the important role of the tribe and rural notables in Moroccan politics in the aftermath of independence as important allies of the monarchy. 90 91 92

Ibid., 31. Ibid. Ibid.

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As noted before, following Mounira Charrad’s analysis, to reinforce its power, the monarchy strived to encourage kin-based solidarities. Since it was in rural areas and particularly among tribes that the monarchy found its strongest support, it was to the monarchy’s advantage to refrain from policies that might bring about change. It was safer to leave in place social, economic, and political arrangements that contributed to the survival of tribal structures in Moroccan society.93

The encouragement of saints’ rituals might be part of this political strategy. If local authorities absorb the rebellious energies of discontented women by encouraging their containment in the space of saints’ tombs, some Western studies of the sanctuary, Mernissi argues, ignore the potential subversiveness of such a space as an “anti-establishment arena,” to use Mernissi’s phrase, and focus instead on the magical aspect of it. Western scholars who investigated the institution were fascinated by the “paralogical” component of the “Moroccan personality structure” and the importance of magical thinking patterns in the still heavily agrarian Moroccan economy and paid little attention to what I call the phenomenological aspect, namely, what the practitioners themselves derive from their involvement with the saint and the sanctuary.94

Mernissi is, therefore, critical of the Orientalist discourse behind these studies, which reduces women who visit saints’ tombs to fascinating, exotic figures of preindustrial (primitive) societies. This kind of double-front critique is an instance of Mernissi’s postcolonial feminist position understood here as a simultaneous critique of Western ethnocentrism and local bourgeois and patriarchal discourse. But if these women are so sorely misrepresented in both local sociological studies and Western ethnographic writings, can they be more accurately represented in Mernissi’s writings? As Marnia Lazreg writes: Individual women from the Middle East and North Africa appear on the feminist stage as representatives of the millions of women in their societies. To what extent they do violence to the women they claim authority to write and speak about is a question that is seldom raised.95

93 94 95

Charrad, States and Women’s Rights, 158. Mernissi, “Women, Saints and Sanctuaries,” 26–27. Lazreg, “Feminism and Difference,” 89.

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The rest of this section is an attempt to answer this question in relation to Mernissi. The examination of Mernissi’s article, “Zhor’s World: A Moroccan Domestic Worker Speaks Out,” in addition to Mernissi’s construction of the veil, and, by extension, ‘veiled women,’ allow me to attempt an answer to the question of whether the subaltern can be heard by Mernissi and via Mernissi by her readers.96 My assumption is that representation of the ‘subaltern’ is not possible, neither is subaltern consciousness retrievable by simply attempting to make the subaltern speak in order to capture her worldview. Published in 1982, “Zhor’s World” is another instance that epitomizes Mernissi’s project of foregrounding the voice of the female subaltern. It is an attempt to make the maidservant, obscured by the emergence of the bourgeois city-woman, more visible to decision makers. The title of the study strongly suggests Mernissi’s ambition to redefine the status of the Moroccan maidservant as a ‘domestic worker.’ Her interview with the maidservant Zhor indicates, according to Mernissi, the aspirations and the desire of this category of underprivileged women for economic independence. These women, she argues, no longer aspire only to have a husband to provide for them, but dream of a regular paid job. For Mernissi, these kinds of dreams constitute a total break from the ideal of the traditional patriarchal family where the man is defined as the only family provider. It is “a break with the fantasies on which politics and economics are shaped.” In that sense, Zhor’s desire demonstrates a woman’s awareness of her exclusion from power spheres. Mernissi also argues that the basic, and the seemingly harmless, fantasy on the part of a woman of being a wage-earner in a Muslim society is definitely the first step in a silent but deep and overwhelming subterranean revolution.97

Mernissi’s objective is to prove that the patriarchal model of the family promoted by the Moudawana is obsolete, that the paradigm of nafaqata’a (alimony [in exchange for] obedience) at the heart of the 1957 Moudawana is untenable, since the male is no longer the sole family provider as demonstrated by the situation of the maids whom she has interviewed. This agenda makes Mernissi fall prey to the pitfalls of authority and representation. Thus, Mernissi prompts Zhor to speak 96 Mernissi, “Zhor’s World: A Moroccan Domestic Worker Speaks Out,” Feminist Issues 2, no. 1 (1982): 3–31. 97 Ibid., 4, 14, 4.

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on different subjects seemingly designed to capture her spontaneous worldview, but which unwittingly controvert such spontaneity. First, one can argue that the mere organization of Zhor’s narrative under particular headings displays Mernissi’s hand at work in framing this narrative. The headings interrupt the free flow of Zhor’s voice, which becomes caught within the power relations between the (feminist) representer (Mernissi) and the (subaltern) represented (Zhor). The representer’s framing power is clearer in a section under the heading “God, Hope, and Education.” Zhor is never left room to express herself freely on the meaning of God, and the place of religion in her life as the first question addressed to her on this topic is overtly leading: “Do you think that God helps the poor?” to which Zhor, not surprisingly, answers with silence, stressed by Mernissi.98 Another revealing heading, “Status and Clothing: The Veil, Symbol of Poverty,” displays the authorial consciousness of a native feminist intellectual addressing a Western audience. Zhor’s transcribed narrative never includes mention of the veil per se; she only speaks about the marginalizing aspect of wearing a poor traditional dress (a poor Djellaba), as opposed to Western dress (or fancy Djellabas nowadays), in a highly class-conscious Moroccan society. The text of the narrator, Zhor, published in a feminist journal (Feminist Issues), is infiltrated by the discourse of a Western feminist’s sympathetic concern for “the plight of the Muslim woman,” which becomes evident in the use of the word ‘veil.’ Zhor’s narrative is thus complicated by the preoccupations of a native feminist author, with a certain agenda, and writing for a Western feminist audience. Mernissi thus falls prey to the perils of representation for a third world Muslim feminist when trying to give voice to the subaltern, to paraphrase Lazreg.99 In “Zhor’s World,” the feminist representer’s consciousness is exalted at the expense of Zhor’s own consciousness; Zhor cannot really speak. The treatment of the veil in “Zhor’s World” brings to mind another female voice that does not succeed in breaking through Mernissi’s feminist narrative, that of muhajaba (a woman who wears the hijab). In “Zhor’s World,” the veil is a particular signifier that serves a particular feminist agenda. Written during the secularist phase of Mernissi’s 98

The interview was published in 1982, i.e., during the secularist phase of her scholarship, which explains her leading question. 99 This expression is inspired from the title of Lazreg’s article “Feminism and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria.”

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feminism, the article suggests that a poor illiterate woman like Zhor also recognizes the veil as a symbol of subordination and oppression. In fact, throughout her writings, Mernissi conceives of the veil in negative terms, equating it with women’s oppression and male control over women’s bodies. The veil as an instance of free choice is not considered by Mernissi. For Lamia Ben Youssef Zayzafoon, “Mernissi’s feminist construction of the hijab as a negative signifier” is the result of her “double privilege of class and Western education,” which allows her “to speak on behalf of all Moroccan women and equate women’s emancipation with unveiling.” She continues, “as in Western colonial feminism, the veil in Mernissi’s writings is seen as a symbol of female oppression.” Zayzafoon links this pitfall to a major limitation in Mernissi’s work: her adherence to a binary opposition between tradition, which the veil symbolizes here, and modernity.100 This criticism is not unfounded since the veil in Mernissi’s writing symbolizes women’s oppression, though at times she considers the veil as a means of resistance. In her L’amour dans les pays musulmans, which belongs to her ‘Islamic feminist’ phase, Mernissi observes: “le voile devient aussi un instrument de lutte politique et son port peut devenir un symbol « positif »” (the veil becomes also an instrument of political struggle and wearing it can become a “positive” symbol). However, despite this statement in this book, Mernissi sees the veil as an obliteration of the female body: Le voile a avant tout pour but de cacher le corps féminin, de l’oblitérer, de le faire disparaitre—au minimum de le déformer. Évoquer le voile, c’est donc évoquer une sorte d’agression contre le corps féminin. The objective of the veil is above all to hide the female body, to obliterate it, to make it disappear—to deform it at the very least. To mention the veil, is to bring up a certain aggression against the female body.101

Thus the treatment of the veil in this book, which takes the element of choice into consideration, is not so different from the one implicit in Mernissi’s first book, with the suggestive title Beyond the Veil and which voices a secularist agenda.

100 101

Zayzafoon, Production of the Muslim Woman, 19, 21. Mernissi, L’Amour dans les pays musulmans, 74, 73.

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The veil as a signifier throughout Mernissi’s writings, ‘the secularist’ as much as ‘the Islamic feminist,’ is marked by a monolithic closed meaning. In fact, any discussion of the veil as a signifier in Mernissi’s work should perhaps begin by considering the presence of the word ‘veil’ in the title of her works. It is striking, for instance, the way the word/sign ‘veil’ in the titles of Mernissi’s books published in the English-speaking world, especially in the United States, becomes the twin of the word ‘harem,’ which appears in the title of the same books edited in France and Germany. Thus a French edited book like Le Harem politique, for instance, becomes The Veil and the Male elite in the American edition. This makes Mernissi easy prey to accusations of complicity with the Orientalist discourse, which is neither a totally unfounded argument nor a totally fair analysis of Mernissi’s work, as I argue in the next chapter. My objective here is rather to follow the traces of the signifier ‘veil’ in her work in order to see the extent to which Mernissi’s narratives allows the muhajaba a space of self-representation. As a signifier, the veil appears in two different moments in Mernissi’s scholarship, however, maintaining a constant meaning. In her earlier work, written in the beginning of the 1970s and early 1980s, which I identify as secularist, the veil signifies Islam’s ‘veiling’ of women’s self-determination. This is basically the main thesis of Beyond the Veil. The veil in this book is not the subject of her analysis, but only appears in the title, operating solely as a signifier, or a sign invested with a particular meaning. The word ‘beyond’ suggests the necessity of transcending the limitations of Islam, as activated by the postindependent state, or what she implicitly views as “Islamic gender norms,” which are detrimental to women. More important here, the phrase ‘beyond the veil’ also suggests an association made between veiling and backwardness, consequently ignoring or denying the agency of women who choose to veil. In The Veil and the Male Elite, which marks the second moment in Mernissi’s scholarship on Islam, the word ‘veil’ appears next to the phrase ‘the male elite,’ suggesting that it is this group who are to be blamed for ‘veiling’ women’s rights and for imposing the veil on women’s bodies. Islam is not recognized as guilty anymore. This time, at the end of the 1980s, Mernissi’s new interlocutor seems to be the Islamists, who have become more vocal publicly with their often conservative discourse on women and gender relations. Her earlier secularist tone yields the floor to a different standpoint, which has been identified as ‘Islamic feminist,’ that is, a position that does not

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see Islam as inimical to women’s rights, but rather as containing the means for promoting equality. The question that immediately comes to mind is: Is the treatment of ‘veiled women’ different in this book? In other words, does Mernissi’s shift from a secularist position to an ‘Islamic feminist’ standpoint and approach make a difference? I hasten to say that adopting an Islamic feminist position, as in Mernissi’s case, is not a guarantee. The Veil and the Male Elite, contrary to Beyond the Veil, makes hijab one of its central questions in its deployment of a more woman-friendly interpretation of Islam’s founding texts. The book displays an interesting contextual reading of the Qur’anic verses dealing with the veil, which ends up questioning its prescriptiveness and suggesting its historical contingency, as discussed in part 2. In a nutshell, Mernissi argues that the Prophet had no desire to make the hijab compulsory for women, and that it was imposed by the political opposition to his leadership at the end of his life, the sexual harassment of his wives, and the pressures of his companions known for their misogyny to impose the hijab as a solution. Thus, it is not the Prophet who imposed the veil on women, according to Mernissi, but rather his misogynous companions as well as those whom the Qur’an refers to as al-Munafiqun (hypocrites), who harassed women. The latter, according to Mernissi’s hermeneutics, were hypocrites who could not relinquish their Jahiliya (ignorant or pre-Islamic) customs that Islam came to eradicate, chief among these is misogyny. She then proceeds by addressing Islamists, arguing that to call for the hijab today is to go back to Jahiliya customs. Beyond the debate over whether using the master’s tools (here, the use of the Jahiliya discourse) is actually efficient in destroying the master’s house, or whether it serves to reinforce its foundation and pillars, I would like to draw specific attention to the association Mernissi makes again between veiling and backward practices.102 I also would like to ask the following question: Can we hear the voice of the muhajaba in this exchange between a feminist and Islamists? Women who choose to veil emerge as an absence, whose silence becomes eloquent, narrating the way this category of women are denied agency in some feminist writings. The criticism expressed here should not be seen as an attempt to bring down Mernissi’s valuable work, especially with respect to subaltern 102 For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see the section dealing with The Veil and the Male Elite in part 2.

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women, which has not yet received the recognition it deserves in the local context. Neither is my aim to simplistically make an unfair equation between the power relations and authority lying beneath the Orientalist discourse on ‘Muslim women’ and the muhajaba, on the one hand, and those underlying Mernissi’s, on the other hand. This would amount to crudely argue that “all power discourses produce equal oppression,” to borrow Trinh T. Minh-ha’s words.103 What I am chiefly interested in here is to draw attention to the shortcomings of representation and, most important, to emphasize the necessity of paying constant attention to the perils of speaking for others, even in most well-intentioned scholarship. With respect to the pitfalls of authority and representation in Mernissi’s writing, as in “Zhor’s World,” they might be explained by the accusations of cultural betrayal to which she is constantly the object as she reports in Le Monde n’est pas un harem (Doing Daily Battle), resulting in an overconcern with proving the social ground of her feminist discourse. This concern even leads her to state in the introduction to her book that she identifies with maids and underprivileged women.104 In another noteworthy statement, Mernissi equates her marginalization as a sociologist, in a third world country that does not appreciate her sociological studies, with that of her maidservant: “Tout le monde est . . . réduit au même stade. Tu es au même stade que ma bonne Khadija” (Everybody is . . . reduced to the same stage. You are in the same stage as my maid Khadija).105 But the equation constructed between the feminist and the subaltern that the two passages suggest has the effect of obscuring the subaltern’s consciousness in favor of foregrounding the feminist researcher’s own subjectivity, which inevitably also frames subaltern voices. This equation obliterates class differences between, on the one hand, the illiterate and pauperized maidservant, and, on the other hand, Mernissi as a middle-class Moroccan woman who had access not only to schooling as early as the 1940s but also to higher education (as early as the 1960s). Mernissi’s authorial consciousness in Doing Daily Battle is first felt at the level of form with her voice framing the transcribed interviews.

103 Trinh, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 10–11, emphasis mine. 104 Mernissi, Le Monde n’est pas un harem, 14. Mernissi does not relay this concern in the English version of this book. 105 Mernissi, “Fatima Mernissi,” interview by Ménager, 104–105.

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But could Mernissi avoid the power relations that infuse the relationship between the representer and the represented? In the footnotes to her essay, “Feminism and Difference,” Lazreg’s appreciative reading of Le Maroc raconté par ses femmes nevertheless reproaches Mernissi for exhibiting a certain narcissism: “Fatima Mernissi’s Le Maroc raconté par ses femmes purports to give a voice to illiterate women in Morocco. Yet the text reveals a narcissistic attempt to speak for women while rising above them.”106 For Lazreg, the book displays Mernissi’s desire to speak for her subjects rather than allowing them free space for selfrepresentation. This criticism is probably founded on Mernissi’s tendency to exalt her own subjectivity at the expense of her interviewees by stating, for example, that giving voice to illiterate women was also giving voice to her other self. I cannot be objective toward an illiterate woman because I have a very special relationship to her: I identify with her . . . . For me trying to give voice to the illiterate woman is to give voice to this self of mine which should have been doomed to the ancestral silence.107

But is this a real situation of recuperation in favor of the elevation of a privileged educated female (and feminist) subjectivity, or is it simply an instance of what Trinh calls “the Guilt” in the general case of third world committed writers and female ones in particular? Speaking about commitment as a reaction emanating from the sense of guilt in the case of third world writers, Trinh argues: Commitment is an ideal particularly dear to Third World writers. It helps alleviate the Guilt: that of being privileged (inequality), of “going over the hill” (Assimilation), and of indulging in a “useless” activity while most community members “stoop over the tomato fields, bending under the hot sun” (a perpetuation of the same privilege).108

This could explain Mernissi’s attitude. It seems, therefore, that the last supposition is more probable as the following statement may suggest. La parole confisquée des femmes exclues de la scolarisation m’a toujours hantée, surtout quand je préparais ma thèse dans une université américaine entre 1970 et 1973. J’ai toujours fait des interviews de femmes illettrées, comme pour exorciser le démon du silence.

106 107 108

Lazreg, “Feminism and Difference,” 106. Mernissi, Doing Daily Battle, 18. Trinh, Woman, Native, Other, 9–11, 10–11.

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chapter two The confiscated voice of women excluded from schooling has always haunted me, especially when I was preparing my thesis at an American university between 1970 and 1973. I have always conducted interviews of illiterate women, as if to exorcise the demon of silence.109

Trinh also explains that if committed writers are placed on the side of power, because “every discourse that breeds fault and guilt is a discourse of authority and arrogance,” this is “not to say that all power discourses produce equal oppression.”110 Lazreg recognizes that Mernissi’s works “have raised highly problematic questions concerning representations of poor and illiterate women for both national and international audiences.”111 And to do further justice to Mernissi, one also has to recognize that representation of the subaltern cannot possibly be achieved, neither can subaltern consciousness be simply retrieved by ‘making the subaltern speak’ on a few issues that can never sum her up or her worldview. As a subalternist, Mernissi could only produce the subaltern’s subject-effects. In the course of this chapter, which has dealt with most of Mernissi’s field studies, I have brought to the forefront another aspect of Mernissi’s secular critique by presenting her methodology as an enabling theoretical unorthodoxy. Mernissi’s borrowing of Marxist and feminist tools of analysis subverts a prevalent dogmatic Marxism in Morocco, and breaks the constraining boundaries of theories, resisting theoretical dogmatism, with the aim of foregrounding a female subaltern consciousness. The first section of the next chapter focuses on another instance of this secular critique, which is her revision of a ‘dogmatic feminism.’ This revision allows Mernissi, through a double-front critique, to demystify the category ‘Muslim woman,’ and to continue writing a narrative that counters an elite history.

109 110 111

Mernissi, Le Monde n’est pas un harem, 13. Trinh, Woman, Native, Other, 10–11. Lazreg, “Feminism and Difference,” 106.

CHAPTER THREE

DECENTERING FEMINISM, DEMYSTIFYING THE HAREM, AND REVISING ‘MUSLIM HISTORY’ This chapter further explores Mernissi’s postcolonial feminism, characterized by a double critique targeting Western ethnocentrism and local androcentrism. The first section examines Mernissi’s uneasy relationship with feminism; her critique of some American feminists’ colonialist discourse; and her grounding of ‘her feminism’ in indigenous terms, engaging in a kind of ‘decentering’ of feminism. Producing an indigenous narrative of women’s resistance, Mernissi also demystifies the construction of such categories as the ‘Moroccan woman’ or ‘Muslim woman’ not only by the local androcentric discourse but also by the Orientalist discourse that some Western feminists reproduce. In the second section, I examine her deconstruction of the term ‘harem,’ constructed by Orientalist narratives as a space of pleasure and its female dwellers as passive, sexually available beings. The harem is a metaphor by which Mernissi demystifies the category ‘harem woman’ and, by mental associations, ‘Muslim woman’ or ‘Moroccan woman.’ Mernissi’s demystification also targets official discourse (in the 1957 Moudawana) that constructs women as provided for beings, living in the secluded, protected, and fantasy world of the harem, while simultaneously ignoring women’s agency or women’s (manual or nonmanual) work and their contribution to Moroccan economy. The last section of the chapter deals with another aspect of Mernissi’s doublefront demystification: her feminist venture in the realm of history and history writing in Islam, unearthing forgotten queens and women who succeeded to seize power even from the secluded space of palaces and harems, in an attempt to counter both local and Western fantasies about ‘submissive Muslim women.’ Decentering Feminism Mernissi’s relationship with feminism has been a vexed one. She has never clearly self-identified as feminist. Her position vis-à-vis the label has evolved from refusal in the beginning of the 1980s to

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acknowledgment, or more exactly, a kind of acceptance, conditional on a redefinition of the meaning of ‘feminism,’ in the 1990s. The beginning of the 1980s is the period in which she quarreled with conservatives and dogmatic Marxists, as described earlier, which might explain her resentment to take up the label. This resentment somehow dissipates in the late 1980s and 1990s when her feminist writings take a different trajectory, which might be qualified as more indigenous, that is, the Islamic feminist trajectory. Mernissi begins to show less concern about being labeled ‘feminist.’ She starts to speak retrospectively about her story with feminism, or rather with some American feminists during her stay in the United States in the beginning of the 1970s, and her engagement in a revision of this feminism. Thus in her book Islam and Democracy, published in 1992, she pays tribute to Arab and Muslim feminist activism for the first time in her scholarship. This change of attitude toward the label, I think, results from Mernissi gaining more confidence after anchoring her feminist language in more indigenous form and therefore warding off accusations of cultural alienation or betrayal, and of importing a discourse that is fundamentally inimical to Islam. Mernissi’s position is clearly a feminist one even when she rejects the label. Her writings and activities are without doubt part of a project that she has for her society, which can be fairly described as feminist. One can even describe her position in her first book, Beyond the Veil, as ‘ultra-feminist,’ that is, one that adheres to a certain feminist essentialism, as the following statement indicates: “The woman is not a marginal tabooed individual; rather, she is the source, the generator of order and life.”1 The feminist label appears more clearly in her latest works. In the introduction to Women’s Rebellion and Islamic Memory, she confidently admits that her lifelong work has been to understand misogyny in the Arab world: “This book attempts to understand from different angles the puzzling question that is my obsession: why on earth is the Arab world so hostile to women?” The adjective ‘feminist’ appears clearly, perhaps for the first time, when she defines her work as part of a global feminist revision of the past in Muslim societies. The exploration of the Muslim heritage, by way of films, books and feminist readings of the past, remains one of the most rational and effective ways of standing up to fundamentalism and shifting the focus on to the

1

Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 175.

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issues which really count: the creation of equal opportunities in an environment which we have to recognize as limited in its resources.2

This self-confidence is the result of the different trajectory that her feminism has taken since the publication of her inaugural Islamic feminist book L’Amour dans les pays musulmans in 1986. The context was different in the beginning of the 1980s. Mernissi had not yet acquired this self-assurance, which accounts for a number of statements in which she demarcates herself from feminism. Thus in 1980, she declared, for instance, to the Moroccan magazine Lamalif: Je ne passe pas mon temps à pleurnicher sur les femmes ou à les défendre. Ce qui est faux, car je suis une personne qui adore rire et je n’ai jamais eu à me battre pour m’imposer. Donc mon thème de recherche n’a jamais été le malheur de ses dames. I don’t spend my time sniveling on women or defending them. It’s not true because I’m someone who loves laughing and I’ve never had to fight to impose myself. So my subject of research has never been the misfortune of those ladies.3

Mernissi is certainly reacting to a prevalent (male) portrayal of feminists as being ‘desperate men-hating women,’ an image circulating among some secular French-educated Moroccan men. In Morocco, some educated men (but sometimes also women) reiterate the French expression: “les feministes sont des mal-baisées” (feminists are sexually unsatisfied women). This expression is certainly inherited from French culture. One can rightly contend that by denying feminism Mernissi is reproducing and strengthening this stereotypical image instead of challenging it. Quoting the same statement from Lamalif by Mernissi above, Moroccan anthropologist Naima Chikhaoui critically responds: L’auteur ne cesse de se démarquer . . . de ce problème de la femme, tout en écrivant sur la condition de la femme marocaine. Elle ne cesse d’exprimer une sorte d’angoisse « folle » d’être taxée de féministe. Bien entendu, penser le problème de la femme marocaine n’est pas pleurnicher sur son sort et son destin, mais c’est plutôt les expliquer pour les dénoncer. Même une lutte féministe pénible n’empêche pas de rire, et

2

Mernissi, Women’s Rebellion, vii, 61, emphasis mine. Mernissi, “Un futur sans femmes,” 52, quoted in Chikhaoui, “La Question des femmes,” 17. 3

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chapter three la question objectivement traitée n’a rien à voir avec les émotions et les sentiments décrits. The author does not stop from demarcating herself . . . from the issue of women, while writing on the condition of Moroccan women. She ceaselessly expresses a sort of “insane” fear of being accused of feminism. Obviously, to ponder the problem of Moroccan women is not to snivel on her fate and destiny, but is rather to explain them in order to denounce them. Even a painful feminist struggle does not preclude laughter, and the issue of women objectively approached has nothing to do with the emotions and feelings described.4

Yet one also should keep in mind the weight of the label in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By 1980, the year in which Mernissi makes her above statement, she had written a number of texts, which were clearly identified as feminist and subversive: Beyond the Veil (in 1975), “The Degrading Effect of Capitalism on Female Labour” (in 1979), and “Le Prolétariat féminin au Maroc” (in 1980). None of these have had the power to identify Mernissi as a feminist in Morocco more than her 1979 article “Virginité et patriarcat,” published in Lamalif. The weight or trauma of constantly being identified with a label associated with ‘desperate men-hating women’ by male secularists, with individualism and capitalism by Marxists, and with Westernization and cultural betrayal by conservatives may explain her attitude. She clearly expresses this trauma in an article, published two years later in the same magazine, with the suggestive title “La Conversation de salon comme pratique terroriste” (Living room conversation as terrorist practice). In this article, Mernissi voices exasperation with being continually attacked, even when she expects it the least, during social conversations taking place in a cozy living room, for instance. Saturated with accusations of cultural alienation, Mernissi attempts to find ways to prove the endogeneity of her ‘new’ discourse and publishes in Morocco, one year later, Qui l’emporte la femme ou l’homme? (Who wins: Man or woman?).5 The text is mainly a French translation of a Moroccan folktale, which tells the story of a woman, Aisha, a merchant’s daughter, who defies her husband’s authority and succeeds in 4

Chikhaoui, “La Question des femmes,” 17. As noted in the book’s introduction, Qui l’emporte la femme ou l’homme? has been translated into English and published in a few edited collections. In my analysis here, I will be using the version that appeared in Mernissi’s book Women Rebellion and Islamic Memory, under the title of “Morocco: The Merchant’s Daughter and the Son of the Sultan.” 5

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defeating him on many occasions, using her cleverness and the power of ruse. Mernissi introduces the tale with a chapter suggestively entitled “La Contestation féminine ne vient pas de Paris” (Female contestation does not come from Paris). Mernissi’s avoidance of the term ‘feminist’ and use of the adjective ‘female’ shows that she is still not confident in her implicit assertion that feminism is indigenous to Moroccan culture. It is not until her L’Amour dans les pays musulmans published in 1986 that she makes her assertion explicit. Le féminisme est, dit-on, une idée importée d’Occident. Et Sukayna, la petite-fille du khalife Ali, d’où était-elle ? Elle était Hedjazienne jusqu’au bout des ongles. Elle avait fait stipuler dans son « contrat » de mariage avec l’Omeyyade Sayd Ibn Amr « qu’il n’eût pas d’autre épouse, qu’il ne l’empêchât jamais d’agir à sa volonté, qu’il la laissât résider auprès de son amie . . . qu’il ne l’a contrariât dans aucun de ses désirs », rapporte [Abu Faraj] Al-Asfahani, l’auteur des Aghani. Feminism, they say, is an idea imported from the West. How about Sukayna, the grand-daughter of Caliph Ali, where was she from? She was Hedjazi through and through. She stipulated in her marriage “contract” with the Omeyad Sayd Ibn Amr “not to have another wife, never to prevent her from acting as she wishes, to let her live near her girlfriend . . ., that he does not upset her in any of her desires,” reports Al-Asfahani, the author of Aghani.6

This self-confidence is the result of moving from anchoring feminism in popular culture in Qui l’emporte la femme ou l’homme? to locating it in Islam. She also expresses the desire to decenter feminism following the publication of her novel Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood. She states that the novel is “une biographie romancée, un roman autobiographique où j’explique que le féminisme ne me vient pas de l’Occident, mais des femmes de harem” (a fictional biography, an autobiographical novel, in which I explain that feminism does not come to me from the West, but from harem women).7 Dreams of Trespass demystifies the harem as a site of pleasure and women’s idleness and presents it instead as a space of female resistance. Foregrounding women’s agency, the novel is an attempt to decenter feminism from its Western location where it supposedly has originated, locating it in Moroccan culture and even within the confines of the harem. 6 7

Mernissi, L’Amour dans les pays musulmans, 70. Mernissi, “Fatima Mernissi,” interview by Ménager, 100.

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It is this kind of demystification of the harem and harem women that Margot Badran stresses when choosing the title Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, which Mernissi cites in a footnote.8 Translating Huda Shaarawi’s memoirs allowed Badran to underscore that Shaarawi’s feminism, and Egyptian first-wave feminism in general, is homegrown and that it even emerged from the closed space of the harem. It is significant that Mernissi’s tale Qui l’emporte la femme ou l’homme? was published under the title Who’s Cleverer? Man or Woman? in Badran and miriam cooke’s anthology, Opening the Gates, commemorating a century of Arab feminism. But before appearing in Badran and cooke’s anthology, the folktale was translated and published in the United States in 1984, one year after the publication of the Moroccan edition, as “Morocco: The Merchant’s Daughter and the Son of the Sultan” in Robin Morgan’s edited book Sisterhood is Global. In her contribution, Mernissi attempts to prove the endogeneity of feminism to Moroccan culture against new detractors, whom she identifies, with the rather monolithic designation, ‘Provincial Western feminists,’ without further qualifications. ‘Provincial Western feminists,’ according to Mernissi, see feminism as alien or foreign to Muslim societies. The opening statement of her chapter reads as follows: “Revolution is to understand the other’s unfamiliar and threatening languages.” By this statement she means that feminist revolution (understood as a global sisterly movement) cannot take place as long as some Western feminists cannot recognize difference or different modes of feminist expressions. She writes: “Feminism is not home-grown in Arab lands; it is an import from Western capitals.” This often-heard statement is shared by two groups of people one would never think of as having anything in common: Conservative Religious Arab Male Leaders, and the Provincial Western Feminists. The implication of this statement is that the Arab woman is a semi-idiotic submissive subhuman who bathes happily in patriarchally organized degradation and institutionalized deprivation.

She thus states that Western feminists [believe] that Arab women are subservient, obedient slaves, who discovered consciousness-raising and illuminating revolu-

8 Mernissi certainly draws some ideas from Harem Years, which Badran translated and introduced.

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tionary ideas only when fed such goodies by the most liberated of all women (New York, Paris and London feminists).9

Already in Beyond the Veil, she tries from the outset to ground her feminist discourse in Arab reformism of the beginning of the century (though she presents her point of view as a more radical critique). She argues that “the feminist movement” in the Arab world was initiated by male nationalists, like Qasim Amin and Salama Musa, though she ignores the activism of Arab women feminists, like Shaarawi and others.10 It is not until her Islam and Democracy that Mernissi mentions Shaarawi, along with Nawal El Saadawi, in a passage that celebrates Arab and Muslim feminists’ resistance. The appearance of Mernissi’s folktale in Morocco and in Morgan’s anthology is an instance of her double critique, targeting local androcentric discourse and Western Orientalism that seems to be reproduced in the patronizing discourse of some Western feminists, as Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Marnia Lazreg would later denounce. Mernissi continues: If you carefully ask yourself (as I often have) why an American or French feminist will think that I am less clever than she in grasping patriarchal degradation schemes, you realize that it gives her an immediate control of the situation; she is the leader and I the follower. She, in spite of her claimed desire to change the system and make it more egalitarian for women, retains (lurking deep down in her subliminal ideological genes) the racist and imperialist Western male distorting drives. Even when faced with an Arab woman who has similar diplomas, knowledge, and experience, she unconsciously reproduces the supremacist colonial pattern.

The background to her exasperation is not made clear. Yet Mernissi interestingly ends her introductory words to the tale by recommending more attention to illiterate women’s rebellious power. One of the steps necessary for intellectual women to share their privileged access to knowledge and higher consciousness is to try to decipher women’s refutation of patriarchy when voiced in languages other than their own. One such endeavour is to grasp and decode illiterate women’s rebellion, whether voiced in oral culture or in specifically dissenting practices considered marginal, criminal or erratic. One of my greatest

9 10

Mernissi, “Morocco: Merchant’s Daughter,” 11, 13, 15. Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 13.

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chapter three lessons in humility is the one I received from listening closely to folktales told by my illiterate Aunt Aziza.11

Within this perspective, Mernissi’s work has been devoted to decoding and documenting subaltern consciousness in Moroccan culture. Speaking retrospectively, and for the first time, about her encounter with feminism at the time she attended Brandeis University, she explains how she discovered the difference between her feminism and that of the American women with whom she mingled. Though she discusses feminism in general terms, she refers to a specific American feminist group, rather than the entire second-wave American feminism, which began during the early 1960s and lasted throughout the late 1970s, coinciding with her stay in the United States. She states: Quand je suis arrivée aux Etats Unis, c’est de là que date mon premier contact avec les féministes, c’était le début des années soixante-dix, le début du féminisme là-bas. J’avais déjà trente ans. Quand j’ai été dans leur groupe, Women Feminist Group, on y allait pour avoir des discussions. J’y allais portant des bijoux. On me disait, « il ne faut pas que tu te maquilles, tu es brain washed by publicity ». Je leur disais, « Mais de quoi parlez-vous ? Moi je viens d’un pays ou il y’a la tradition du voile et j’ai besoin de proclamer l’existence de mon corps que l’on m’a toujours niée. Je ne comprends pas ce que vous me racontez ». J’avais déjà deviné que nous ne menions pas le même genre de bataille elles et moi. When I first arrived in the United States, it is from there that dates my first contact with feminists, it was the beginning of the seventies, the beginning of feminism there. I was already thirty. When I went to their group, Women Feminist Group, it was to have discussions. I went there wearing jewelry. They used to tell me: “You cannot put on make up. You are brainwashed by advertisements.” I used to tell them: “But what are you talking about? I come from a country in which there is a tradition of veiling and I need to declare the existence of my body which has always been denied to me. I had already guessed that we were not waging the same battles.”12

Identifying the issue of the body as a point of divergence between her feminism and theirs is already expressed in Beyond the Veil. In this book, she argues, that if, for “western women,” disclaiming the body in pornographic mass media is a central concern in their feminist

11 12

Mernissi, “Morocco: Merchant’s Daughter,” 16. Mernissi, “Fatima Mernissi,” interview by Ménager,” 101.

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agenda, “Muslim women” would, on the contrary, retain the body as an essential claim in their movement for liberation.13 The second issue on which she disagreed with that group was the issue of men. She states: Leur idée c’était qu’il fallait se battre contre les hommes, or, moi je venais du harem ou il n’y avait que des femmes et je voulais être avec les hommes. Pour moi la libération c’était, travailler, réfléchir, être avec les hommes. Partager tout avec les hommes. Par ces deux aspects, je me suis rendu compte des limites exactes de ce que m’apportait ce mouvement. Mais au niveau des objectifs, je ne partageais rien et d’ailleurs elles le savaient très bien. Je n’ai jamais été invitée, ni impliquée; elles ne m’aimaient pas. J’ai donc pris tout ce que je pouvais d’elles. Their idea is that we had to struggle against men; however, I came from a harem in which there were only women and I wanted to be with men. For me liberation was to work, to think, to be with men and to share everything with men. Through these two aspects, I realized the exact limits of what that movement brought to me. But at the level of objectives, I did not share anything (with them) and they knew it very well. I had never been invited, nor involved; they did not like me. I therefore took everything I could from them.14

She also expresses this point of divergence in Beyond the Veil. In this book, she predicts that the project of “female liberation” in the Muslim context would be a “generational” rather than a “sexual” struggle, as illustrated, according to her, by the struggle between male nationalists and traditionalists over the issue of women’s liberation. She also argues that the struggle would be over “the mode of relatedness” between men and women and would, consequently, be led not only by women but also by men.15 It seems that this prediction was somehow realized in Morocco, especially with the founding of the interdisciplinary research group that gave birth to the book series Approches, in which Mernissi got involved with other male scholars, like Abderrazak Moulay Rachid and Ahmed Khamlichi, among others. She also directed with another male jurist, Omar Azziman, another feminist collective, called Femmes Marocaine Citoyennes de Demain (Moroccan Women Citizens of Tomorrow), initiated in 1992.16

13

Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 168. Mernissi, “Fatima Mernissi,” interview by Ménager, 101–102. 15 Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 19–20. 16 Another instance of men’s involvement in the advocacy of women’s rights is the former male Secrétaire d’État chargé de la Protection sociale, de la Famille et de 14

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In this respect, Rahma Bourqia explains that female scholars of the South of the Mediterranean hesitate to adhere to the radical feminism of some study groups in the countries of the North, which exclude men from reflection on women’s issues. Habitées par le syndrome de la ségrégation hérité des siècles d’histoire, ces femmes-chercheurs du sud optent pour une recherche sur les femmes menée à la fois par les hommes et les femmes. Il en résulte que dans les pays du sud de la Méditerranée, plusieurs chercheurs hommes ont investit le champ des études sur la condition féminine tout autant que leurs consœurs. Haunted by the syndrome of segregation inherited from past centuries, these women scholars of the South have opted for research on women led by both men and women. This results in a number of male scholars from countries of the south of the Mediterranean investing in the field of research on women like their female peers.17

However, it is not so much that women from the South were more willing to allow men to join in their struggle, as much as men were willing to join in, which was not the case in the West. In spite of criticizing the feminists she encountered in the United States at that time, Mernissi acknowledges her debt to them. She declares: “J’ai appris beaucoup d’eux, sur l’analyse, des tas de choses, le lobbying, comment s’organiser, comment influencer la société. C’était important, c’était l’empowerment” (I learned a lot from them about analysis, a lot of things, lobbying, how to organize, how to influence society. It was important; it was empowerment). It is these techniques that she adapts back in Morocco when she participates in two collectives, Approches and Femmes Marocaines Citoyennes de Demain, and organizes workshops where feminists from the West and the Maghreb meet to exchange ideas. At the moment Serge Ménager was conducting his interview with Mernissi, she was running, at the headquarters of the Moroccan feminist publishing house, Le Fennec, a workshop

l’Enfance (Secretary of State in Charge of Social Protection, of Family and Childhood) Saïd Saâdi, under whose mandate the progressive project called the Plan of Action for the Integration of Women in Development (PANIFD) was elaborated in 1999 and presented to parliament. Even when the project was aborted, it triggered the reform of the family law in 2004. Saâdi was amusingly elected “Woman of the Year” by the feminist magazine Femmes du Maroc [Women of Morocco], a title that he accepted with humor. There are, of course, other male examples. See Daoud, Féminisme et politique. 17 Bourqia, “Les Femmes,” 10.

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gathering Algerian women who came to develop a project for the creation of a publishing house in Algeria.18 This workshop is probably a follow-up to the research group that she initiated at the level of the Maghreb, called Femmes Maghreb Horizon 2000 (Women Maghreb Horizon 2000). She is also behind the creation of the Centre d’Ecoute (Listening Center), a shelter that provides legal counseling and psychological help to women victims of violence, established in 1993 in Casablanca. It is ironic that Abdessamad Dialmy accuses Mernissi of attempting to produce feminism as a struggle against men in his response to her essay Qui l’emporte la femme ou l’homme? Dialmy raises questions about how to decenter feminism, or how and where to ground feminism. He responds in the form of two articles published in Lamalif in 1986, followed by another piece titled “Un fqih marocain et les droits de la femme au XVIè siècle” (A Moroccan faqih and women’s rights in the sixteenth century).19 He later compiled the arguments of these articles in his Sexualité et discours au Maroc. In this book, Dialmy reproaches Mernissi for her attempt to ground feminist contestation in a folkloric tale, which, for him, clearly voices a patriarchal and misogynous ideology; he proposes instead to ground Moroccan feminism in (local) fiqh, as I will further discuss in the chapter focusing on Mernissi’s The Veil and the Male Elite in part 2. For Dialmy, the tale reenacts the notion of women’s kayd (ruse) and thus reproduces the stereotypical image of women as treacherous beings. He rightly argues that to celebrate such a tale is also to celebrate this essentialist vision, instead of questioning the patriarchal ideology behind such stereotypes. In his reading, the tale aims to socialize women to certain feminine values, like caprice, seduction, and fecundity. He also argues that, being feminine, Aisha’s contestation never reaches feminist consciousness. Dialmy points out that women’s superiority is a superiority of the kayd, artifice, and lies. It is precisely such characteristics that make male tyranny justifiable. He concludes: “Loin

18

Menager, “Fatima Mernissi,” interview by Mernissi, 102, 98–99. Zakiya Daoud mentions Lamalif issue numbers 162 and 164 in Féminisme et politique, 371n18. Daoud provides neither the titles of nor the exact publication dates for the articles, yet the issue numbers correspond to the year 1986. Dialmy, “Un fqih marocain et les droits de la femme au XVIè siècle,” Lamalif, no. 180 (1986). It was republished as “Un fqih marocain et les droits de la femme au XVIè siècle,” in “La réforme du droit de la famille cinquante années de débats,” special issue, Prologues, no. 2 (2002): 71–83. I will be using the more recent version. 19

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d’être féministe le conte d’Aicha [Aisha] est un contre-modèle exemplaire du féminisme. Il est une confirmation de la misogynie patriarcale: la femme est une figure du mal, une parente (méta) physique du diable” (Far from being feminist, Aisha’s tale is a counter model of feminism. It is a confirmation of patriarchal misogyny: woman is an evil character, a (meta)physical relative of the devil).20 Dialmy argues that Mernissi does not have to prove that female contestation does not come from Paris, because this is an obvious fact. Female contestation is no doubt endogenous to Moroccan culture, but what is at stake today is feminist contestation. He infers that Mernissi confuses the two, or rather deliberately tries to make the distinction between the two a hazy one, hence her manipulative reading of this tale. Ce serait plutôt en considérant le féminisme comme objet importé que l’on éprouve le besoin de le justifier en l’adoptant et ce, par le biais de la manipulation malsaine, malhonnête du patrimoine, au nom de la science, au nom de la spécificité. It is rather considering feminism as an imported object that makes one feel the need to justify its adoption, and this through unhealthy and dishonest manipulation of the patrimony, in the name of science and in the name of specificity.21

It is no doubt true that Mernissi does not have to prove the endogeneity of feminism, but his rather zealous reproach of an “unhealthy” manipulation of “the patrimony” makes him fall into the category of “the guardian and legitimate and exclusive interpreter of the cultural heritage and its content,” whom Mernissi decries in Doing Daily Battle.22 Dialmy falls prey to essentialism and binary opposition when he argues that feminism in Morocco cannot be legitimated on or grounded in tales, like the one Mernissi translates, because they originate in a “societé théocratique” (theocratic society) that he sets in opposition to a “societé humaniste” (humanist society) to which belongs feminism. He presents the dualism of his argument in a chart in which he includes a series of binary oppositions related to theocratic society and humanist society, such as religion and metaphysics versus science

20 21 22

Dialmy, Sexualité et discours, 104, 105. Ibid., 108–109, 110. Mernissi, Doing Daily Battle, 14.

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and history, inferiority of women to men versus equality of men and women, etc.23 In addition, Dialmy does not take into consideration the importance of retrieving illiterate women’s voices of resistance to patriarchy.24 The issue is indeed, as Dipesh Chakrabarty phrases it: “How do you write the histories of suppressed groups? How do you construct a narrative of a group or class that has not left its own sources?” Mernissi’s answer seems to be, to borrow Chakrabarty’s words again, “by fictionalising the past” and experimenting with how stories and folktales might intersect with history.25 It is this kind of adventure that Mernissi undertakes in her novel Dreams of Trespass, for instance. This book and other texts, in which Mernissi is involved in a double demystification of the constructs ‘Moroccan woman’ or ‘Muslim woman,’ are the subject of the next section. Demystifying the Harem Using a Double-Front Critique The word ‘harem’ traverses most of Mernissi’s work as the titles of a number of her books, especially the French editions, suggest: Le Monde n’est pas un harem (Doing Daily Battle); Le Harem politique (The Veil and the Male Elite); Rêves de femmes: une enfance au harem (Dreams of Trespass); or Le Harem et l’Occident (The harem and the West), which is the French translation of the English original Scheherazade Goes West. The existence of this fetish word in her titles as well as the image of a naked odalisque or a veiled woman on the covers makes Mernissi vulnerable to accusations of nourishing the Orientalist

23

Dialmy, Sexualité et discours, 111. Hasna Lebbady, who compiles and analyzes Moroccan women’s tales, contends that some of these tales raise issues that are at times similar to those raised by contemporary Western feminists. Whether one agrees with Lebbady or not, Lebbady is right to point out that oral culture and storytelling constitute a space for women’s selfrepresentation in which “women both questioned and effectively redefined their marginal position.” Lebbady, “Redefining the Margins: Embodied Knowledge in ‘Ali and a Spinner Too?” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, 12, no. 2 (2003): 131. See also her book Feminist Traditions in Andalusi-Moroccan Oral Narratives (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009); and her “Narrative Generations: From the Pre-colonial Folktale ‘Aicha Jarma’ to the Postcolonial Film ‘Douiba’ ” (Paper presented at the international conference “Urban Generations, Postcolonial Cities,” Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, Université Mohammed V, Rabat, Morocco, October 1–3, 2004). 25 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 98, 106. 24

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discourse.26 This is even more critical as the word ‘harem’ is unfamiliar in current Moroccan usage. If the space the word ‘harem’ designates existed historically, it has disappeared from Moroccan reality today. Indeed, the word ‘harem’ in Mernissi’s novel, Dreams of Trespass, for instance, describes in reality a traditional urban household, usually located in the Medina (the old city), which was the abode of an extended family and in which women’s seclusion was observed. This kind of household existed among (mainly) urban upper and middle classes that could afford to seclude their women or do without their labor outside the home. The disappearance of this type of household today and the absence of the word in Moroccan Arabic makes Mernissi appear to many young Moroccans (who most of the time, I must say, have never read her work) as someone who writes for the West, feeding its fantasies. However, I think that if Mernissi’s work is read, it would become clear that the content of her books precisely demystify these fantasies. I also have to admit, however, that this demystification is doubleedged. Demystification can only happen when the works are actually read; otherwise, they can have the opposite effect. A few years ago, I personally received an email from an American graduate student, who said she had read Mernissi’s novel, asking me for clues to start ethnographic research on “harem women” in Morocco! She had heard I was working on Mernissi’s writing and thought I could help her to start the interviews. This anecdote obviously supports the criticism leveled against Mernissi, as a native intellectual who participates in the cultivation of Western fantasies about the exotic. Marnia Lazreg and Anouar Majid voice this criticism. Lazreg suggests, with respect to the use of the veil in some of Mernissi’s books, that Mernissi makes herself complicit with the obsessive discourse on veiling. She writes: “Even angry responses to this abusive imagery could not escape its attraction as when a Moroccan feminist entitled her book: Beyond the Veil.”27 Referring to the use of the word ‘harem,’ Majid critically writes: “Even Mernissi has been convinced, despite her protestations, by French and German editors to put the word harem

26

For an image of a naked odalisque, see the cover of Le Harem et l’Occident (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001); and for an image of a veiled woman, see the cover of Le Monde n’est pas un harem. 27 Lazreg, “Feminism and Difference,” 85.

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in the title of her books to enhance their marketability.”28 He is referring to Mernissi’s endnote in Islam and Democracy, which reads as follows: The French and German publishers of my books always insist on having the word “harem” on the cover and a photo of a veiled woman. When I protest, they tell me that this makes it sell better, even if the contents of the book contradict this image. It is time to unveil women on the covers of books that sell in the West. Archaic attitudes don’t exist on just one side of the Mediterranean.29

Majid is right that even when she is pressured to include these words, she is not absolved from accepting this pressure. With respect to the title Beyond the Veil, it seems that it was Mernissi’s choice. Furthermore, Mernissi does not deny her interest in marketability. In a talk she gave at the Institut de Recherche Scientifique (Institute for Scientific Research), Rabat, Morocco, in May 2003, at an homage day organized in her honor after she received in the same month the prestigious Spanish literary Prince of the Asturias literary prize, she declared (in a humorous way) that there is no disgrace for an intellectual to market himself, or herself, and that being an intellectual does not mean that he or she is above advertisement and commercial business (she was showing a big sign advertising some of her works and those of the people involved in the project Synergie Civique). Despite these rather well-founded allegations, I still consider Mernissi’s scholarship as a major demystification of these very fantasies. The word ‘harem’ functions in Mernissi’s work as a metaphor for the divide, or the hudud (frontiers, limits), between the world of men and the world of women, or the public and private, which patriarchal discourse constructs. (Western) readers, whom the word ‘harem’ in Mernissi’s titles attracts, soon find their expectations and assumptions upset when reading the content of the work. If this is complicated with respect to her novel, as suggested by the anecdote with the American woman who contacted me, Mernissi openly targets these fantasies in her book Scheherazade Goes West, published in 2001, a book that Lazreg and Majid obviously could not consider in their criticism. Mernissi’s criticism of her French and German publishers who always insist on having the word “harem” on the cover and a photo of a veiled

28 29

Majid, “Politics of Feminism,” 334. Mernissi, Islam and Democracy, 187n10.

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woman can also be read as suggesting Mernissi’s confidence in the power of her books to subvert ‘archaism’ in both Muslim and Western societies. Tracing women’s subaltern consciousness is Mernissi’s strategy to demystify the harem as a construct in both the local patriarchal discourse and the Orientalist discourse. In fact, Mernissi’s work does not easily yield itself to categorization. To use miriam cooke’s words, though in a different context: No sooner has the reader pigeonholed Mernissi as betraying one group than she attacks its enemy, positioning herself as part of that very same group. She will not be caught in the contradictions that she consciously constructs.30

It is this homelessness at the origin of her double-front critique that I would like to further stress in this section. Here, I read some of her work as an attempt to demystify the stereotypical image of the submissive and passive ‘Muslim woman’ by foregrounding female agency in Moroccan history in particular and Muslim history in general. As a ‘native’ feminist, Mernissi is doomed to a sort of homelessness. Her work can inhabit only a critical border space from which she can target local and Western dogmatisms, both premised on a modality of Othering in their strategies of mutual disavowals, at the center of which ‘Muslim women’ are caught. As suggested earlier, on the one hand, women’s (subordinate) status in family laws is locally brandished as the symbol of Muslim identity in the postindependence era, a demarcation from the colonizer’s culture and a means of resisting Western domination. On the other hand, women’s condition becomes the symbol of Islam’s backwardness for Orientalist discourse. Fantasies about the harem are part and parcel of Orientalism that Edward W. Said describes as producing the Orient in terms of sensuality and sexual promise.31 Beyond these antithetical discourses, which represent the site of women’s ideologization, as Lazreg argues, women have little space for self-representation.32 This motivates Mernissi to document female subaltern consciousness. If a double critique traverses most of her work, albeit in a temperate way, nowhere is it as clear as in Scheherazade Goes West, in which she explicitly confronts the clichéd representation of the harem and

30 31 32

Cooke, Women Claim Islam, 75. Said, Orientalism (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 188. Lazreg, Eloquence of Silence, 2.

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‘harem woman,’ and, through mental associations, ‘Muslim woman.’ The avowed demystifying objective of Scheherazade Goes West, published after her novel Dreams of Trespass, complicates the categorization of Mernissi’s writings as complicit with Orientalist discourse. The construction of Scheherazade Goes West in the form of a travel narrative, rather than an academic book, is faithful to Mernissi’s original style, a style that uses humor and satire to escape a pretense of objectivity and truth claims. It teasingly puts into action a new consciousness in the realm of travel writing, that of a Moroccan female traveler on a journey in the West, visiting art bookshops and theaters to discover the myth of the harem and its female dwellers in Orientalist representations. This witty scenario amusingly subverts the classical Orientalist plot of the Western male traveler ‘out there’ to deliver ‘the truth’ about the ‘Oriental woman’ once back to his homeland.33 It also subverts the classical power/knowledge game involved in the construction of ‘the Orient’ and the ‘Oriental woman.’ Mernissi does not, however, seek to reverse the classical plot by replacing an Orientalist consciousness with an ‘Occidentalist’ representation of ‘the Western male psyche.’ Her engagement in male Orientalist representations of the harem is beyond such an essentialist impulse. In the Moroccan version of the book Etes-vous vaccinés contre le harem? (Are you vaccinated against the harem?), she is careful to specify that criticizing Western representations of harem women and Muslim societies should not lead to the kind of nativist position that denies the existence of female subjugation in most Muslim societies, for example, since this is undeniable.34 Like Said, therefore, she is not interested in how this Orientalist discourse misrepresents Muslim women, as much as how it denies them agency and resistance, and how it obliterates social change in Muslim societies, contributing, thus, to the Othering or ‘Orientalizing’ of ‘Muslim women.’35

33 There have been female Western travelers who have written about harem life as well. For an interesting and brief discussion of this topic, see Reina Lewis, “Women and Orientalist Artists: Diversity, Ethnography, Interpretation,” Women: A Cultural Review 6, no. 1 (1995): 91–106. 34 Mernissi, Etes-vous vaccinés contre le harem? 50–54. This book, published in Morocco, is the preliminary version of the English original Scheherazade Goes West, which was, in turn, translated and published in France as Le Harem et l’Occident. I will be mainly referring to the English edition, except when some ideas are missing in this version. 35 Said, Orientalism, 6.

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Like many of Mernissi’s books, Scheherazade Goes West suggests that the harem as the realm of “sensuality and voluptuousness,” to use Said’s words, is “a (Western) invention.”36 Mernissi states that the idea of writing Scheherazade Goes West came to her during the tour for her novel Dreams of Trespass. During that tour, I was interviewed by more than a hundred Western journalists and I soon noticed that most of the men grinned when pronouncing the word “harem.” I felt shocked by their grins. How can anyone smile when invoking a word synonymous with prison, I wondered. For my grandmother Yasmina, the harem was a cruel institution that sharply curtailed her rights.37

What Mernissi presents in Scheherazade Goes West and Dreams of Trespass is another narrative by which she strategically confronts the Orientalist narrative, rather than a representation of the truth of the harem. The first book is presented as some sort of a travel narrative rather than a scholarly, or researched, book. The second is not an autobiography, but a fiction with (semi)autobiographical elements. Mernissi uses the narrative of her grandmother’s experience of the harem to give specific meaning to the word ‘harem,’ which is closer to a feminist worldview than to empirical reality. Her interviews in Doing Daily Battle indicate that not all women who lived in this kind of household experienced it as a space of confinement; some interviewees speak about it as a sign of prestige, as further discussed below. The novel also shows that the harem had different meanings for its female dwellers, as it puts into action two different female camps: those, like the grandmother Lalla Mani, who accept harem life; and those, like the mother of the child narrator, who refuse it. Mernissi complicates the Orientalist narrative by foregrounding the element of female resistance, rather than representing the “truth” about the harem. As the title suggests, Scheherazade Goes West explores the way Scheherazade, which the author presents as the figure of female resistance par excellence, is (re)imagined or (re)invented in her journey into the Western imagination. Pondering the ‘Western harem,’ the book starts with an explanation of the different connotations that the word ‘harem’ acquires in the West. After etymologically linking the word ‘harem’ to haram (sin), Mernissi concludes that “when cross-

36 37

Ibid., 1. Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West, 2.

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ing the frontier to the West, the Arabic word ‘harem’ lost its dangerous edge.” Mernissi then relates her discovery of the existence of two kinds of harems: one historical, experienced as a space of confinement by women; and the other fantasized, represented as a space of sexual pleasure. Images of the fantasized harem, she argues, are nourished by numerous representations of Hollywood filmmakers, playwrights, and artists, like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. The fancy representation of the harem as a sexual paradise and the portrayal of its female dwellers as nude and sensual odalisques, she argues, establish an invisible link between voluptuousness and female subjugation in this Western imaginary.38 The stereotypical representation of harem women not only ignores social and cultural change in Muslim societies, but also, and more important here, erases female agency. Mernissi’s book then asserts that “dissidence” is part of women’s history.39 She provides the first illustration of this resistance at the very beginning of Scheherazade Goes West when she recalls one of her grandmother’s tales, originally a tale from The Thousand and One Nights [also known in English as The Arabian Nights], which her grandmother Yasmina recounts in a way that foregrounds female self-assertion.40 The suggestion is that, despite their illiteracy, Moroccan women, living in what Mernissi calls “domestic harems” (or rather traditional houses of the medina), still manage to resist their marginal status through oral narratives that escape male censorship, or surveillance, and subvert male narrativization by introducing unorthodox distortions.41 Being of a volatile oral tradition, Mernissi suggests, these narratives manage to

38

Ibid., 13, 14. Mernissi, Le Harem et L’Occident, 34. 40 There are many translations of The Thousand and One Nights, which is a collection of folk tales that date back to the ninth century. Mernissi refers to Richard Francis Burton, The Book of the 1000 Nights and a Night (London: Burton Club for Private Subscribers, 1886). The Arabic original that she uses is Hikayat alf lila wa lila [The stories of the thousand and one nights] (Beirut: al-Maktaba ach-chaiabiya, n.d.). See Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West, 10n1. 41 Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West, 5. For an interesting analysis of how some Moroccan women’s tales transgress male narrative surveillance, see Lebbady, “Redefining the Margins.” Lebbady also argues that such transgressions were possible in part because these tales not only were told by women but were also destined to a predominantly female audience, unlike their European counterparts, like Cinderella. European tales were gathered and transcribed by men and destined to a larger audience as a result of literacy and printing, which made them part of the cultural production that “prescribe a certain behavior for women—passivity for instance.” Lebbady, “Narrative Generations,” 3. 39

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escape the policing of an androcentric discourse that erases difference and heterogeneity as alien to Muslim culture. This calls to mind her translation of the folktale “Morocco: The Merchant’s Daughter and the Son of the Sultan” and further reveals the feminist rationale behind such a cultural revision. Dreams of Trespass, a narrative about women’s dreams of trespass and transgressions, both upsets Orientalist assumptions and decenters feminism, locating it at the very heart of the harem, invented as a space of idleness. Blurring the boundaries of fiction, autobiography, and history by being punctuated with footnotes referring to Morocco’s history of liberation and women’s contribution to it, the novel retrieves the subaltern experiences of women living in what is referred to as a ‘harem’ by fictionalizing the past. The “tales of a harem girlhood” narrate their story, erased from official Moroccan history. Mernissi resorts to storytelling as another way of writing history by appropriating her (grand)mother’s tongue. The book problematizes the divide between story and history, or truth and fiction, and presents storytelling and fiction as an alternative to building historical consciousness as Trinh T. Minh-ha suggests. Story-telling as literature (narrative poetry) must then be truer than history. If we rely on history to tell us what happened at a specific time and space, we can rely on the story to tell us not only what might have happened, but also what is happening at an unspecified time and place. No wonder that in old tales storytellers are very often women, witches and prophets. The African griot and griotte are well known for being poet, storyteller, historian, musician, and magician—all at once. But why truth at all? Why this battle for truth and on behalf of truth? I do not remember having asked my grandmother once whether the story she was telling me was true or not.42

Like Trinh, Mernissi considers historical truth as a partial and relative construction involving power relations. History is thus a narrative to which one can legitimately juxtapose another narrative. This is clear in her assertion in The Forgotten Queens of Islam, discussed in greater detail in the next section, that there are several historical truths, depending on the representer and the interests at stake.43 She voices this kind of subversion as early as 1983 in Qui l’emporte la

42 43

Trinh, Woman, Native, Other, 120. Mernissi, Forgotten Queens, 85.

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femme ou l’homme? Blurring the boundaries between fiction/fantasy and history/rationalism, she writes: Ce conte est un « conte pour grands enfants » aussi, dans la mesure où ceux-ci se croient majeurs et vaccinés contre tous les récits qui se posent d’emblée comme des récits non réels. Les grands enfants de trente ans, surtout ceux qui ont eu accès à l’éducation moderne, se pensent rationnels . . . et je crois que là est le plus grand des mythes de notre siècle. This tale is also a “tale for big children,” in the sense that the latter think of themselves as vaccinated against all narratives that self-identify from the outset as unreal. Thirty-year-old big children, especially those who have had access to modern education, think of themselves as rational . . . and I think here lie the greatest myths of our century.44

This lack of ‘seriousness’ is concomitant with Mernissi’s use of fictitious and (semi)autobiographical stylistic devices even in her more scholarly texts dealing with religious issues. The use of fiction, Mernissi declares, has always haunted her books as an element of her indigenous culture that she had tried to repress. She confides to Serge Ménager: Il a donc fallu autrefois que je tue cette fiction pour prouver que j’étais scientifique. Et c’est comme cela que j’ai fait tous ces livres mais même dans ces livres, tu trouves des envolées qui tendent à la fiction, il n’y a rien à faire. En quatre-vingt-sept j’ai décidé que ça y était. Je leur avais montré que j’étais intelligente selon leurs critères que je trouve assez cons d’ailleurs. Ça me rappelle une anecdote qui ouvre Le Harem politique, je suis chez mon épicier qui me dit, « je voyage à travers le monde et ce livre a été traduit dans huit langues et c’est tout ce que les gens en retiennent ». Cet épicier était très fort. Bien sûr, je l’ai fabriqué, il n’est pas réel. J’ai eu des discussions comme ça, mais pas avec des épiciers. C’est ça le pouvoir de la fiction. Chaque fois que j’intègre un personnage fictif dans mon travail, c’est lui que les gens retiennent. In the past I had to kill this fiction to prove that I was scientific. And this is how I wrote all those books. But even in those books, you can find attempts to fiction, no way. In [nineteen] eighty-seven I decided that it was enough. I had shown them that I was intelligent according to their own criteria that I find rather silly in fact. It reminds me of an anecdote which opens up The Veil and the Male Elite, I am at my grocer who tells me, “I travel around the world and this book has been translated into eight languages and that is all what people remember.” This grocer was very smart. Of course, I made him up. He is not real. I had discussions like this but not with grocers. That’s the power of fiction. Every time

44

Mernissi, Qui l’emporte la femme ou l’homme? 3.

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chapter three I include a fictional character in my work, it is him (her) that people remember.45

In her interview with Ménager, Mernissi does not finish her sentence concerning the anecdote with the grocer that opens The Veil and the Male Elite, which goes as follows: Mernissi asks her grocer whether a woman can rule a Muslim state; the grocer’s answer is negative and comes in the form of a hadith that clearly outlaws women from the political realm. This statement, which highlights the device of integrating fictional characters even in a book like The Veil and the Male Elite, dealing with the Qur’an and the hadith, is in line with Mernissi’s refusal of orthodoxies and dogmas. In this book, she subverts the boundaries of both religious studies and secularist feminism. Mernissi’s style, which incorporates (semi)autobiographical elements, strives to break down the “artificial separation between the socalled ‘objective’ and the ‘subjective,’ the personal and the political,” to borrow bell hooks’s words. Mernissi shares this feminist strategy with hooks when the latter declares: “I think that a lot of what’s going on in my work is a kind of theorizing through autobiography or through storytelling.”46 At the empirical level, Mernissi’s interviews in 1984 with two women who lived in a domestic harem in the colonial period, representing two different categories, the mistress and the slave, introduce the element of difference in harem packaging. They show how the harem was experienced differently by women depending on their class status. According to the testimony of two women, Batul and Mariam, who lived in one of the most prosperous harems in Fez during the 1930s, a harem has nothing to do with eroticism and pleasure. A harem, is above all, a power structure, a system in which oppression and violence work together in the lives of women to turn their daily life into a prison universe.47

Dreams of Trespass also portrays two different female camps: those, like the grandmother, Lalla Mani, who accept harem life; and those,

45 Mernissi, “Fatima Mernissi,” interview by Ménager, 114. The pronouns ‘them’ and ‘their’ refer to provincial Western feminists, as discussed before. In this interview with Ménager, Mernissi emphasizes her indigenous discourse and insists that her work decenters feminism. 46 Hooks, Outlaw Culture, Resisting Representations (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 209. 47 Mernissi, Doing Daily Batlle, 21.

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like the mother of the child narrator, who refuse it. Indeed, the novel is narrated through a seven-year-old child (supposedly the young Mernissi) who sews her narrative with a thread of questions about the meaning that the adults make of the harem. This narrative strategy is also reminiscent of the inquiry-like plot of Scheherazade Goes West, or the detective-like scheme of The Veil and the Male Elite, as discussed in part 2. The novel traces the subject-effects of this other category of subaltern women, ‘imagining’ their counterpower, because, to borrow cooke’s words, “it is not a matter of giving voice to an absence, but rather of tracking what the effect of such an absent presence must have been.”48 The Western reception of the novel Dreams of Trespass as another fancy tale about harem life conflicts with the female experience that Mernissi narrates. The Western response, she contends, reveals that things have not changed in a significant way since the depictions of Picasso or Matisse.49 The novel, in contrast, foregrounds in addition to female consent, women’s resistance to gendered power relations and creation of their own space that escapes male surveillance. The terrace of the house, for example, appears in Mernissi’s novel as a space for women’s transgressions. It is the space where borders of patriarchal surveillance are trespassed by women and children, who gather to listen to an aunt narrating Scheherazade’s stories. In Schererazade Goes West Mernissi emphasizes the contrast between the women’s reading of the story of Scheherazade, conceived as a narrative about female cleverness and self-affirmation, on the one hand, and some Western versions of the narrative that reduce Scheherazade to a mere erotic figure, on the other hand. For Mernissi, these Western readings obliterate the narrative’s message, which is eminently a political one. She even suggests that Scheherazade’s tales have a feminist message. She presents The Thousand and One Nights as a sort of manifesto of “female self-determination.”50 The passage of Scheherazade going to the West—to France in 1704—Mernissi suggests, deprives her of the feminist message that she seeks to deliver. The French translation of the story is thus not value free, but imbued with the fantasies and assumptions of its new cultural location.

48 49 50

Cooke, Women Claim Islam, 65. Mernissi, Etes-vous vaccciné, 49–50. Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West, 68, 51, 68.

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Scheherazade’s feminism disturbs not only the Western narrative of Oriental women but also the fundamentalist narrative about Muslim women. Fundamentalists, Mernissi suggests, at least were able to recognize the political nature of Scheherazade’s story, as when they burned some editions of The Thousand and One Nights in Egypt in the 1980s and 1990s. By doing so, they were making a statement of opposition to the work’s political dimension. But both fundamenatlist and Western versions of the story rub out female self-determination from Muslim culture.51 Mernissi confronts both reactions as similar dogmatisms. Within the framework of these two orthodoxies, women appear to be subject to a double discursive violence. The image of nude odalisques fixes meaning not only about harem women but also about Arab women as a whole. According to cooke, the odalisques signified “something other than themselves.”52 Cooke also explains how the image of the half-naked odalisque, which came to represent the Arab woman in Orientalist fantasies, is today substituted with the veiled woman as American contact has grown with the Arab world. The image of the veiled woman, she argues, “gives access” to a Muslim identity. “Images of covered women epitomize Islam. These women’s bodies serve as icons of Muslim Otherness.” Images are like photographs, cooke continues, “they frame and freeze a fragment of the real and then project it as the whole. What was dynamic and changing becomes static.”53 Mernissi also shows how Orientalist images freeze Muslim time into inertia. She points out that, at the moment that French artist Matisse was painting his Odalisque à la culotte rouge (Odalisque in red culottes) in the 1920s, important social changes regarding women’s condition were taking place in Turkey, which do not find echo in those art representations.54 In Etes-vous vacciné contre le harem? she even argues that what Matisse was painting was not exactly the Oriental woman but his female fellow citizens in an act of nostalgic reminiscence of a lost fragile femininity. The representation of the harem, she continues, reflects the difficulty of the male Orientalist to cope with modern gender norms. This difficulty, she further contends, is not yet transcended,

51 52 53 54

Ibid., 68–69. Cooke, Women Claim Islam, 131. Ibid., 126–27, 130, 131, 125. Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West, 109–110, 162–64.

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since this kind of male discourse can still be seen at work, constructing a canon of femininity in cosmetic and fashion industries.55 However, fancy representations about the harem and women are not exclusive to a Western Orientalist discourse; they also are shared by postindependent Moroccan technocrats, or planners, as suggested by Mernissi’s fieldwork studies. Mernissi points out that the myth of the harem and the jariya (woman slave), the Arab equivalent for the Turkish word ‘odalik’ (odalisque), is at the bottom of the obliteration of female economic agency in development programs and seems to nourish the essentialist image of women in the Moudawana.56 The perception about women as essentially sexual and domestic beings is also inherited from the colonial era. In fact, Mernissi’s critique engages the colonial and postindependent administrations on equal grounds, stressing the implication of both in the promotion of such a vision. Examining the historical conditions that served to construct women as economically inactive in Morocco, Mernissi stresses the role of French colonizers in the promotion of the phenomenon of female slavery, even when, paradoxically, France officially ended it through a forceful measure.57 Mernissi indicates, for example, that by promoting the phenomenon of the caids (local warlords), French colonizers also promoted slaveholders.58 Rich caids, backed by the French administration, “reproduced at the local level the pomp of the Muslim Golden Age of Baghdad under the Abbasids. The harem and the Jawari [plural of jariya] were brought with the surplus confiscated from the people that they governed.”59 The postindependent administration, in contrast, did not seek to break with this practice and the mentality behind it. On the contrary, its policy of tourism created a new phenomenon, further participating in the enslavement of poor women: the peasant woman as sheikha (woman dancer). The state’s option for rural tourism not only has 55

Mernissi, Etes-vous vacccinés, 46, 149–50. The translation of jariya is not totally accurate. Lebbady states: “As in al-Andalus, to be slave girls or jawari [plural of jariya] was not necessarily to be looked down upon. In some respects, it is difficult to tell whether it was better to be a free woman or a slave.” Lebbady, “Narrative Generations,” 2–3. She notes that these women had belonged to the sophisticated milieus. 57 Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” pt. 1, 84–85. 58 ‘Caid,’ today, designates an official attached to the Ministry of Interior. Caids were generally notables (from rich families) who had administrative, judicial, and financial positions and sometimes served as chiefs of tribes. 59 Ibid., 84. 56

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served to degrade folklore as a commercial commodity, Mernissi contends, but is also behind the degradation of the perception of the peasant woman and her emergence as “woman-entertainment.” The massive rural exodus that an unregulated rural modernization project provoked led to the influx in Moroccan cities of women who lacked appropriate skills to work in the city; they were illiterate and lacked professional training. The sheikha emerges as the modern version of the historical jariya. The importation into the city of troupes of sheikhas, peasant women who dance at the evening parties of the city bourgeoisie, is one of the characteristics of independent Morocco. The sheikhas are sort of a more democratic version of the Jawari of times past. While the women-asentertainment used to be reserved for some few holders of power, today for 800 dirhams (about 200 dollars) the sheikha can travel from Ain Louh to Rabat and offer a small-time official of the capital the impression for a few hours for being Haroun El Rachid—a very vivid male (and female) fantasy.60

This is one of Mernissi’s powerful passages that display an intransigent critique of postindependence Moroccan society. The end of the statement makes obvious that Mernissi does not believe that the harem is exclusively a male fantasy; it can also be cherished by women as demonstrated by her interviews with the two harem women, Batul and Mariam, or by her novel through the character of Lalla Mani, for instance. For Mernissi, at this radical stage of her feminist critique, the image of a jariya is consolidated by the representation of women in the Qur’an, which does not recognize women’s economic dimension.61 It is interesting to note here the similarity with Fatna Ait Sabbah’s argument. Ait Sabbah also shows that the religious discourse oversexualizes women.62 It is this economic dimension that Mernissi’s work as a whole strives to highlight. Yet Mernissi does not exactly believe that the Qur’an is the source of or “the only explanatory factor,” as Lazreg writes, behind this objectification.63 She argues that the Qur’anic conceptions “would not have been so vivid in twentieth-century mentalities if it had not been for the expansion of a legendary Muslim empire

60 61 62 63

Ibid., 94. Ibid., 79. Ait Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, 16–17. Lazreg, Eloquence of Silence, 15.

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which allowed sexual inequality to assert itself and to spread through the phenomenon of the Jariya.”64 Through a historical reading of The Arabian Nights, Mernissi argues that it is during the Abbasid era, considered as the Golden Age of Islam, that the association of women with entertainment was ingrained in “the Muslim psyche.”65 Her reading at this stage does not yet focus on female resistance in Islam nor does it posit Scheherazade as a figure of female resistance, as it is the case in Scheherazade Goes West. It rather focuses on the image of the jariya that the text stages, which is reinforced by the sacred model of the houri (the paradisal woman promised to the good (male) believer in heaven). Mernissi’s decoding reveals that “one of the characteristics of the structuring of the ‘Muslim psyche’ is this confusion between the imaginary and the historical Muslim Golden Age. And the two coincide perfectly in the very strategic feminine role of the Jariya or female pleasure slave.”66 Demystifying the myth of the Golden Age and unveiling the organic link existing between literature and politics, she unveils how the low status of women (as slaves) is associated with wealth and glory, especially with the publication of The Arabian Nights in the nineteenth century.67 Setting to demystify this ‘local harem,’ Mernissi also takes up the task of a historian, as in Le Maroc raconté par ses femmes, the first book she published in Morocco, foregrounding a narrative that sheds light on the gendered silence in Moroccan postindependence history. The interviews with some women who speak about their experiences represent an empirical demystification of the myth of the harem built into official patriarchal discourse. Such a book underscores female resistance and builds a reconstitution of female speech, as Abdelkébir Khatibi points out in his preface to the second Moroccan edition of the book. For Khatibi, the ‘woman’ in Mernissi’s book appears to be resisting her situation of marginalization by using energy of counterpower, a parallel power.68 In fact, by foregrounding women as narrators of history, Mernissi’s book constitutes a double demystification

64

Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” pt. 1, 79. Ibid., 80. 66 Ibid., emphasis original. 67 Ibid., 81. 68 Khatibi, preface to Le Maroc raconté par ses femmes, by Fatima Mernissi, 2nd ed. (Rabat: SMER, 1986), 7–10, esp. 7. 65

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that upsets both local and Orientalist fantasies. She writes in “Morocco: The Merchant’s Daughter and the Son of the Sultan”: The reality of the Arab woman’s life is not, after all, out of the Arabian Nights, much as many Arab men and most Western tourists would like to believe. The reality of Moroccan women’s lives, for instance, consists of enormous and vital (but often unacknowledged) labour; carpetweaving, bead-setting, leather embroidery, sewing, fieldwork in agriculture, jobs in the massive bureaucratic administration, in light industry, and—of course—in the service sector and in housework, cooking, and childcare.69

Mernissi’s double critique is made evident in the different titles given to the book. While the title Le Maroc raconté par ses femmes clearly addresses a local androcentric discourse and ambitions to write a counter history of Morocco, the title of the French edition, Le Monde n’est pas un harem, suggests Mernissi’s aim to demystify a Western fantasy that Moroccan women live in a harem world of idleness, pleasure, and eroticism. This double demystification introduces a new positioning that enters into conflict with Lazreg’s either/or standpoint when she argues that Third World female intellectuals find themselves either defending their culture against feminist misrepresentations or revelling in the description of practices deemed disreputable, but always sensational, in an attempt to reaffirm the primacy, validity and superiority of Western feminism.70

Mernissi’s critique does not fall within these two tendencies as I have so far argued. Her work inhabits an enabling in-between space, which allows this double motion that she privileges when she declares: “Il faut un va et vient et c’est dans ce va-et-vient que tu peux comprendre mieux et agir mieux” (You need a come and go movement and it is in this come and go that you can understand better and act better).71 This free movement, or interstitial position, is enabling, since it ensures at the same time a theoretical distance and an empirical anchoring. Mernissi seems to believe in intellectual exile, which is dictated by the type of multiple-front critique that she practices. This critique of the margin confronts both local and Orientalist assumptions by bringing their Other to the forefront. The next section further explores Mernissi’s

69 70 71

Mernissi, “Morocco: Merchant’s Daughter,” 14. Lazreg, Eloquence of Silence, 11. Mernissi, “Fatima Mernissi,” interview by Ménager, 102.

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simultaneous critique and the subversion of the linear narrative of the harem, which ignores elements of discontinuity, such as the seizure of power in Muslim history by some women living in harems. In the Silent Margins of Muslim History The Forgotten Queens of Islam is another instance of Mernissi transcending the limits of her initial training, sociology, by revisiting history in Muslim societies from a refreshing perspective. The avowed objective of the book, in which she digs up the women heads of states in Islam, who are subject to amnesia, is to ‘demystify history’; that is, to show that it has been a male narrative. This further foregrounds her profile as a subaltern historian, who writes from the margin of an androcentric ‘Muslim history,’ reading into its gaps, making its moments of silence eloquent, and shaking its patriarchal foundations.72 Although she uses the rather monolithic phrase ‘Muslim history,’ she is aware that this history is plural. Her assessment indicates that differences in the treatment of women in power exist, for example, between Yemenite historians and other Arab historians. Muslim history in this case refers to a certain official history dispensed in schools, for instance, which obliterates and ignores women in the sphere of power and leadership. Mernissi’s book tries then to subvert this homogenous and homogenizing history by “constructing a counter memory,” which brings to the forefront women’s agency and resistance to marginalization from the sphere of power.73 Mernissi states that she revisits Muslim history using a “modern outlook,” taking gender into consideration and having in mind the partiality of history writing in general.74 I read this methodology as another example of her secular critique, in the sense of a demystifying, critical reading of history that aims to remove the discussion on women and political power from the realm of the sacred and to show that the conflict of women and power in Islam is constructed rather than natural or divine. She is aware that her endeavor is subversive, since, as the book firmly suggests, history writing in Islam is strongly linked to religious knowledge and religious truth. She indicates that

72 73 74

Mernissi, Forgotten Queens, 191n9, 40. Cooke, Women Claim Islam, 65. Mernissi, Forgotten Queens, 40.

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there are several historical truths depending on the representer’s position and the ideological framework from which he operates. The secular nature of her approach is also exemplified in the distance that she takes from authoritative male Muslim historians who could not envisage women in power, and in the new questions, considered heretical, that she asks. Arguing that Mernissi uses a secular approach, I do not mean that she adopts a secularist position. On the contrary, The Forgotten Queens of Islam, published after The Veil and the Male Elite, falls within the Islamic feminist stage of her intellectual trajectory. Like in The Veil and the Male Elite, the main argument in The Forgotten Queens of Islam is that gender equality is normative in Islam’s foundational message, but it has been subject to a number of distortions. In this book, she opposes what she refers to as “Islam-rissala” (Islam-message), that is, Islam as a divine revelation, to “political Islam,” which is the outcome of a history of ideological and political manipulations. Islam has become hierarchical, elitist, and despotic because of the “political opportunism” of male elite groups and their vested interests.75 There is no incompatibility between Islam-rissala and democracy; the latter is intrinsic to the message of Islam. The incompatibility that exists is between political Islam and democracy. Equally, the conflict between the female and the political, which is the issue the book raises, exists in political Islam, based on the maintenance of privileges and exclusions. Muslim history writing serves this political configuration by erasing traces of difference, resistance, and discontinuity, which are created, for instance, by women who have succeeded in seizing power. Unlike in Beyond the Veil, which views the pre-Islamic period as more favorable to female self-determination, in the Forgotten Queens of Islam, Mernissi pays more attention to female figures of resistance inside Islam. The Forgotten Queens of Islam, like its precedent, The Veil and the Male Elite, puts forward the opposite argument of Beyond the Veil with respect to the pre-Islamic era. Unlike in Beyond the Veil, in which Mernissi argues against the orthodox narrative which claims that women in pre-Islamic Arabia had more freedom than under Islam, in The Forgotten Queens of Islam, she espouses the orthodox discourse on the Jahiliya, used also by Islamists, that disparages this period and constructs it as the counter memory of Islamic civilization.

75

Ibid., 5, 210n51.

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Making a rather similar argument as Islamists (to a different end, of course), she suggests that if Muslim history has turned up misogynist, elitist, and despotic, it is because the Prophet’s teachings and the egalitarian society, regardless of sex or race, of which he dreamt have been forgotten, and because people’s customs have regressed to resemble those of the Jahiliya.76 Using the Jahiliya discourse is a major limitation in Mernissi’s methodology as it subverts the very approach she comes to assert, which counters mystifying and ahistorical approaches to the past and religious texts, as further discussed in the next part of this book. This criticism does not, however, completely remove the subversive character of her methodology in The Forgotten Queens of Islam. Mernissi does not go as far as espousing the Islamist ‘myth’ of the return to an ideal Islamic past in which political problems did not exist. On the contrary, she even goes as far as subtly demystifying the ideal period of the four caliphs, considered orthodox by Sunni Islam, by showing that it was marked by elitism and exclusion. In fact, she challengingly argues that the bay’a (choice of a leader), which some Islamists brandish as the Muslim equivalent of ‘Western democracy,’ has never been identical to universal suffrage because it has been elitist.77 Mernissi is an intellectual who advocates the adoption of universal human rights in Muslim majority societies, and her return to the past through historical revisions is only to prove the compatibility of these principles with Islamic values.78 She lays out the benefits of the secularization of power in guaranteeing human rights. Addressing her coreligionists and Islamists, she insists that the debate over democracy is “not a betrayal of our ancestors nor a mechanical imitation of the West.”79 She makes it clearer in her subsequent book Islam and Democracy that democracy is intrinsic to Islam but represents its repressed

76

Ibid., 82–83. It is interesting to note that Mernissi’s irreverence vis-à-vis the ‘orthodox period’ of Sunni Islam is closer to the Shi’i attitude. I will discuss how the doctrinal divergence between Shi’a and Sunni could be beneficial for the project of islamic feminism in the section dealing with The Veil and the Male Elite in part 2. 78 Mernissi, Forgotten Queens, 34. On this point, see also Svensson, Women’s Human Rights and Islam, 214. 79 Mernissi, Forgotten Queens, 184–85, 140. 77

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memory.80 The forgotten queens are part of this Muslim memory that she revisits. As is the case for most of her writings, Mernissi constructs a brief scenario to open the discussion on women and political leadership. This entertains the reader and incites him/her to follow the book much more like a detective story than a ‘serious’ or scholarly historical book. Mernissi writes that her historical investigation in search of forgotten queens of Islam is a response to the opposition of Pakistani fundamentalists to the appointment of Benazir Bhutto as the prime minister of Pakistan in 1988. For the fundamentalists, she argues, Bhutto’s appointment is religiously illegitimate; it is an anomaly in Muslim history since no Muslim woman has ever exercised such a position. This idea, she continuous, is echoed in the media and even in the discourse of some Western scholars and specialists of Islam.81 Mernissi embarks on a historical investigation to check whether Bhutto was really the first. The originality and importance of Mernissi’s rereading of history lies in her defiance of the taken-for-granted patriarchal nature of power by daring to ask new questions. From the outset of the book, she asks, for instance: “Has there ever been a woman caliph?” She explains that her question is considered heretical and blasphemous since the title ‘caliph’ has a religious and even messianic dimension, unlike the title ‘malik’ (king), which has a negative connotation in Islam; it is associated with archaic despotism. According to Muslim male theology, the title ‘caliph’ refers to a divine mission that is exclusive to men. She confesses that having been socialized in a Muslim society, she feels that the mere act of voicing this question is sacrilegious. I feel that asking the question in itself constitutes a blasphemy. The simple idea of daring, as a woman, to question history is experienced by me, programmed as I am by a traditional Muslim education, as a troubling blasphemy.82

80 Mernissi, Islam and Democracy, 16. Despite the fact that the English version of The Forgotten Queens was published after the English version of Islam and Democracy, Mernissi published the French version of the The Forgotten Queens first. Sultanes oubliées: femmes chefs d’état en Islam, the French original of The Forgotten Queens of Islam was originally published in 1990, that is, two years before La Peur-modernité, the French original of Islam and Democracy. 81 Mernissi, Forgotten Queens, 1. 82 Ibid., 9, 10, 9.

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Her use of the notion of ‘programming’ suggests the idea of how religious taboos are internalized and how the unthinkable of Islamic thought, to use Mohammed Arkoun’s terminology, (like the idea or concept of gender equality) is ingrained through education.83 Mernissi’s feminist inquiry defies the unthinkable, introducing gender as a category of analysis to the study of Islam. Her investigations into the realm of history writing in Muslim societies are, in my view, inscribed within the Arkounian applied Islamology, which rethinks Islamic thought by interrogating what has been silenced using new tools of analysis. Her aim in The Forgotten Queens of Islam is to confiscate the issue of women and power from the realm of the unthinkable and to put it on the table of examination and decoding, which is the only way to displace the issue from the sphere of the sacred, or what has been sacralized. Mernissi’s historical inquiry yields the discovery of many women who succeeded in seizing power. Even when they did not bear the title ‘caliph,’ these women bore other titles like ‘sultana,’ or queen. The forgotten queens of Muslim memory are, among others, Yemenites (‘Arwa and Asma) and also Moroccans (Zainab al-Nafzawiyya and Hakima Tatwan, who reigned in the sixteenth century). With respect to Hakima Tatwan, for instance, Mernissi reports that there is no information available on her in Muslim historical sources. Muslim historians, she comments, treated her with “disdainful silence.” Mernissi also turns to Aisha, the Prophet’s wife, whose engagement in the Battle of the Camel (36 Hegira, 658 AD) signals the first political act of female leadership in Islam.84 She shows that even if this event is known in Muslim history, its importance has been minimized because it is associated with fitna (anarchy or disorder).85 Mernissi stresses that the battle Aisha conducted against Ali Ibn Abi Talib does not even retain her name, which suggests that a historical will led to the erasure of traces of women from the sphere of power and political leadership.86 Despite the fact that Mernissi asserts that these women “have been rubbed out of official history” and subject to “liquidations,” her analysis 83

Arkoun, Al-Fikr al-usuli, 10. The Hegira, literally meaning in Arabic ‘migration,’ refers to the year the Prophet left his native city Mecca to migrate to the city of Medina, fleeing persecution after he preached the new religion. The first year of the Hegira, which corresponds to AD 622, is the first year of the Muslim calendar. 85 Ibid., 18, 66. 86 Mernissi makes a similar argument in Mernissi, Veil and Male Elite, 5. 84

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acknowledges the plurality of Muslim history, which depends on the subcultures in the Muslim world.87 Thus, in their treatment of women in power, Yemenite historians, she argues, seem to be less misogynous than most of their Arab colleagues. This is because the history of Yemen has known the reign of a number of queens, most important, the Queen of Sheba. Mernissi particularly considers the Qur’anic story of the Queen of Sheba (Balqis) and its treatment by historians and exegetes, unveiling the organic link between history writing and exegesis, and the complicity of both in constructing a homogenous male Muslim memory. The Qur’an cites the Queen of Sheba and her meeting with King Solomon as one of the most significant stories. The Queen of Sheba is one of the few women that the Qur’an recognizes as playing an eminently political role. However, Mernissi’s examination of the Islamic historical and exegetical interpretation of the story underscores that some male authors inseminate the text with their own ideological (profane) concerns. Mernissi comments: What is most fascinating about the story of Balqis, however, is that it prompted the commentators to get involved in a long, tangled, oversubtle exegesis of the problems which seemed to torture them personally and which the Koran superbly ignored. One of the principal problems the writers stumbled over was the nature and importance of the queen’s throne. It absolutely had to be reduced in importance.88

Thus the authoritative religious exegete and historian Abu Jafar Muhammad Ibn Jarir al-Tabari, for example, interprets the Qur’anic adjective ‘adhim’ (mighty), which describes the queen’s throne, in terms that reduce its importance.89 For him, the adjective ‘adhim’ does not describe the throne, but the danger this throne represents. Other historians have been concerned about whether the queen was a virgin when she married Solomon, a question that the Qur’an ignores. For Mernissi, these are clear examples showing that exegesis is not a limpid interpretation of Qur’anic texts but is informed by patriarchal assumptions of male scholars. The Qur’anic story, she argues, defies

87

Mernissi, Forgotten Queens, 2. Ibid., 142. 89 al-Tabari, Tarikh al-umam wa al-muluk [History of peoples and kings], vol. 19 (Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 1979), 48. 88

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such reduction; it is inscribed as an eternal myth in the founding text, and she even extends it to traverse Muslim poetry and culture.90 Mernissi makes it clear that her aim is not to produce a celebratory chronicle of superwomen who succeeded to take and hold power. In this book, she demarcates herself from the feminist trend that presents matriarchal rule as more democratic. She writes: “Nowadays we hear all over the place those feminist theories that sound like advertising slogans, asserting that if we were governed by women all violence would disappear from the political scene.” This rather essentialist portrayal of feminism (though she is careful to say by “some feminists”) demonstrates that the position she adopts in this book is neither inimical to men nor to Islam. She continues: At the risk of disappointing some feminists who want to lull us with dreams of democratic matriarchies at the dawn of civilizations and superpowerful women in past realms, I examine the sultanas with humour and a bit of irreverence.91

Beyond the limitations of this simplistic and monolithic vision of feminism, claiming humor can be read as a technique through which Mernissi tries to subvert “the politics of rage” at the heart of political engagements, especially among radical feminists. Humor possesses its own subversive power. Toril Moi writes that “anger is not the only revolutionary attitude available to us. The power of laughter can be just as subversive, as when carnival turns the old hierarchies upsidedown, erasing old differences, producing new and unstable ones.”92 Humor, which suffuses most of Mernissi’s work, not only is a way for her to subvert the pretense to objective and scientific truth, about which she is skeptical, as suggested previously, but is also a way to subject recalcitrant discourses of violence to parody, or demystification. It is interesting to note that in 1993 Mernissi acted in a Moroccan comedy, which parodies polygamy, in which she played the role of a fortuneteller. Her performance was in the first part of the locally famous movie, directed by Moroccan film director Mohammed Abderrahman Tazi, Al-Bahth ‘an zawj imraati (Looking for my wife’s husband), translated in French as À la Recherche du mari de

90

Mernissi, Forgotten Queens, 142, 143–44. Ibid., 88, 86. 92 Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: A Literary Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1985), 40. 91

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ma femme.93 The film recounts the story of a rich polygamous jeweler, Haj Benmoussa, and his three spouses. He seems to happily manage the ‘harmony’ between his wives until the day he repudiates the young and beautiful Houda, his third wife, for the third time. In love with her and unwilling to let her go, he is compelled to find her a “short-time husband” in order for him to remarry her (in Muslim tradition, a man who has repudiated his wife three times cannot remarry her a fourth time, unless she first gets married to another man). The film is thus the saga of a man looking for a “husband for his wife.” Mernissi’s role, though minor, not only accentuates her profile of a borderless intellectual, but also signals her belief in the usefulness of mobilizing the film industry and media to question patriarchal culture and to subject its gender configuration to critique by parodying a patriarchal myth, like the harem, and an institution, like polygamy. With respect to the forgotten queens, Mernissi proposes to look at their stories with a lot of interest as well as with humor and irony. She advocates “a vigilant, critical if possible ironic attitude, never pontificating, nor eulogizing, and still less indulging in sentimental dreams of glory.” The aim behind this ironic approach is to write the history of discontinuity and resistance, one that disturbs the narrative of stability and myth of homogeneity, which Muslim history has constructed. What gives strength, she continues, is not “the uncommon ancestors,” but the “very human ancestors who in difficult situations succeeded in thwarting the rules of the masters and introducing a little responsibility and freedom.” She stresses the proximity of these women to the power arena: “In the realms of the women who took power in Islam, only the women close to the prince, whether he was father, brother, husband, or son, succeeded in infiltrating the political scene.”94 In this respect, Naima Chikhaoui’s contention that Mernissi ignores the fact that these women were able to seize power only thanks to their proximity to males already in power is rather unfounded.95 Rather than stressing women’s superpower, Mernissi points out the blind spots of history and opens discussions about women and power in Islam. The main idea that The Forgotten Queens of Islam strongly suggests is that history is not an innocent transcription of events, or a value93

Mohammed Abderrahman Tazi, À la Recherche du mari de ma femme (Morocco: Arts et Techniques Audiovisuels, 1993). 94 Mernissi, Forgotten Queens, 86, 177. 95 Chikhaoui, “La Question des femmes,” 21.

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free repository of truth. It subverts the truth claims of androcentric Muslim historians and shows their participation in the construction of a selective male memory. Muslim history appears in this book as a narrative, rather than a pure chronicle of facts, written by male elites and, in this sense, cannot but be partial and biased. Perhaps the major challenge to orthodox Muslim history is her daring question: “Is there really a fundamental incompatibility between the caliphate as the ideal model of authority and a woman ruler?” This question is particularly important as it allows Mernissi to decode the eligibility criteria for the caliphate. The mere examination of these criteria makes the history of the caliphate less abstract and natural. Mernissi points out that not all eligibility criteria were taken for granted in the beginning of Islam. Some criteria have been subject to debate, namely, the racial origin of the caliph. She mentions the Kharijites, a Muslim sect that emerged in the beginning of Islam, as the first group to have raised the issue of social equality in the selection of the caliph. For her, this proves that the debate on democracy is not a Western importation, but is genuinely Islamic. The struggle for democracy in the sense of equality did not begin with the importation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is Western, as everyone knows; it began in the first centuries of Islam with the Kharijite sect. At the very beginning this sect, one of the many which challenged Islam as a political practice, questioned the requirement that the caliph must be from the Quraysh tribe, asserting that anyone, regardless of ethnic origin, had the right to be caliph, to lead Muslims.

Mernissi does not believe that this early debate is an example of the existence of democracy, as understood today, in the first centuries of Islam. As suggested earlier, she argues that traditional practice by which caliphs have been elected, the bay’a, did not mean that everybody, regardless of gender, race, or class, could become the caliph.96 The shura (consultation), the early principle by which the first orthodox caliphs of Sunni Islam were chosen, was rather elitist and cannot be considered as the equivalent of a democratic election process, since it only involved the notables, as Mernissi suggests in The Veil and the Male Elite.97

96 97

Mernissi, Forgotten Queens, 45, 23, 34. Mernissi, Veil and Male Elite, 38–42.

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What Mernissi stresses is that the eligibility criteria are not sacred and unquestionable since there have been moments when one criterion was contested. Two of the criteria of the eligibility for the caliphate are being a male and being an Arab. While the latter criterion has been violently challenged and thousands of Muslims have died to defend the idea that any Muslim can become caliph, no one has ever questioned the criterion of maleness. In any case, no one has ever endangered life and limb to contend that the criterion of maleness for occupying the position of caliph violates the principle of equality which is the base of Islam.98

This historical precedence allows Mernissi to question not only the sacredness of the title ‘caliph’ but also the conflict between women and power. If the criterion of Arabness was questioned in the beginning of Islam, the criterion of maleness can also be questioned today. Mernissi further argues that if the main criterion for being eligible to the title ‘caliph’ is to have the Friday khutba (sermon) proclaimed in ‘his’ name, or to have ‘his’ name inscribed on coins, then there is no incompatibility between women and the caliphate, since historically there were a few women heads of states who had their names inscribed on coins and, more important, had the Friday khutba said in their names.99 The Forgotten Queens of Islam strongly suggests that women’s exclusion from politics is not ordained; it is the result of the androcentric configuration and conception of power. She continues: How could Islam reconcile these two points: the principle of equality among all believers and the very restrictive criteria of eligibility for the caliphate? Here is one of the enigmas of political history that it is incumbent on the people of today to clarify. The aim of my voyage into the past in search of the sultanas and their titles is one small step in that direction.100

This kind of question represents the substance of an Islamic feminist agenda, that is, an investigation into the process that has turned egalitarian Islam into a misogynous religion. Mernissi also indicates that some male exegetes have excluded women from the mosque, which is the political and spiritual space

98 99 100

Mernissi, Forgotten Queens, 23 Ibid., esp. chapter entitled “Fifteen Queens,” 88–111. Ibid., 23.

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par excellence, when they recommended that women pray at home. By declaring women’s presence in the mosque unnecessary, she argues, Muslim scholar Ibn al-Jawzi (who died in 597 after Hegira), for example, participated in the marginalization of women from the sphere of politics. For her, this signals the gradual regression of the position of the Muslim woman from that of sahabiyyat (companions of the Prophet) to the former object status she used to occupy in the preIslamic period, in which femaleness was considered threatening and even polluting. She argues that “nothing better expresses the betrayal of the Prophet in this matter than the attitude toward the access of women to mosques.” She also adds: “We are certainly a long way from the Prophet’s mosque, open to all, welcoming all those interested in Islam, including women.”101 Mernissi’s study “Women, Saints and Sanctuaries” might be seen as underscoring one of the contemporary consequences of this exclusion. Illiterate Moroccan women, marginalized in an orthodox, learned Islam that does not speak their tongue, invade sanctuaries and shrines where a colloquial Islam is invented. Her study foregrounds the subaltern side of Muslim orthodox theology. The sanctuary emerges as an “anti-orthodox” and “anti-establishment arena.”102 Sanctuaries are the other side of an exclusionary learned Islam, as she writes in Doing Daily Battle, a book in which she includes interviews of a professional psychic. Mernissi writes: Women, veiled and marginalized in the mosques of the masters, slipped away among the outcasts and went to the courtyards of the shrines, where the supernatural is more approachable, where the spirits speak the dialects of the people and accept the most humble of offering.103

The brilliance of Mernissi’s approach in The Forgotten Queens of Islam lies also in the link that she establishes between women’s exclusion from this early ‘Muslim public sphere,’ the mosque, and the general authoritarian configuration of political power. Women’s marginalization,

101 Ibid., 81–83, 82–83, 80, 82. The emergence of the Murshidates, women preachers, in Moroccan mosques in contemporary Morocco could be seen as a consecration of Mernissi’s implied wish. This has to be balanced, however, by the fact that the formation of the Murshidates is a state initiative rather than the result of an Islamic feminist struggle. It is a response to the terrorist attacks of May 16, 2003, in Casablanca, Morocco, and a part of a whole program of reforming the religious sphere. 102 Mernissi, “Women, Saints and Sanctuaries,” in Women’s Rebellion, 25. 103 Mernissi, Doing Daily Battle, 126.

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she argues, is concomitant with that of the ‘amma, a negative elitist word that identifies the mass of the people. Historically, she points out, the exclusion of the ‘amma from the mosque is the outcome of the caliph’s desertion of the mosque as a political space. It is the moment in which a new institution emerges: hijab al-khalifa (the caliph’s hijab). Mernissi astutely coins this appellation from the title ‘hajib,’ which designates the caliph’s secretary. The hajib occupation appeared (not without contestation) after the orthodox Sunni period. The name of the official responsible for controlling access to the sovereign was coined from the same linguistic root as hijab; he was called al-hajib, literally, the one who veils the caliph. The hajib was the one who acts as a buffer; he received the applicants for an audience in the place of the caliph and decided who should be received and who should be sent away.

This institution is a key moment in Muslim history as it signals the birth of despotism, according to Mernissi.104 Mernissi’s aim is also and above all to establish the link between hijab al-khalifa and the hijab (as cloth), which she considers essentially as a male imposition on women’s bodies, as discussed earlier. For her, both are signs of arbitrariness. Mernissi argues that without the institution of the hajib, Islam might have given birth to a democratic political culture. One can imagine the transformation of the masjid, the mosque, into a popular assembly with the expansion of the umma and the growth in the number of Muslims. We might have seen the birth in the heart of Islam of a democratic practice founded on a neighborhood mosque/local assembly, since mosques are found everywhere where there is a community of Muslims and someone to lead them. The Prophet left everything in place for moving in that direction. A parliament could have been created without arguing about it as a satanic Western importation.105

This is concomitant with the main argument of her subsequent Islam and Democracy that there is no conflict between Islam as a divine message and democracy. It is from this Islamic feminist position that Mernissi calls for the writing of “another history.”106 104

Mernissi, Forgotten Queens, 295, 79. Ibid., 80. 106 Ibid., 85. Mernissi borrows the phrase (originally “une histoire autre”) from Jacques Le Goff, “Les mentalités: une histoire ambiguë” [Mentalities: An ambiguous 105

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We have to free Islam from clichés, go beyond the idealized pretty pictures of the groups in power, scrutinize the counter resistance, study the marginal cases and exceptions. This is especially necessary for understanding the “history” of women in Islam, a history doomed, like that of peasants and the poor, never to be reflected in the official discourse. It is time to begin to re-write the history of the Muslims, to go beyond the Islam of the imam-caliph-president, of the palace and its ulama [religious scholars]; to move beyond the Islam of the masters, and doing that means going into the swampy, dark areas of the marginal and the exceptional—that is, the history of dynamic tensions, the history of order thwarted, the history of rejection, of resistance.107

This kind of secular reading, which focuses on moments of refusal, tension, and complexity, is for Mernissi the only way to counter the homogenous and homogenizing narrative of obedience into which Muslims have been inscribed. The Forgotten Queens of Islam underscores the plurality of historical readings, depending on the historian’s ideological position. To say today that “Islam forbids women’s access to the field of politics” is certainly to speak the truth. But we understand our history a little bit better if we admit that that is one truth among many others. One could, depending on the approach, choose another historical truth by studying the cases of some women who pushed their way into political power. Admitting that there are several historical truths, depending on the point of view of the person speaking, is already a big step forward. This is an admission that Islam and its so-called history are only political weapon.108

Writing this other version of the story and unveiling the political manipulation of Islam constitutes the gist of Mernissi’s Islamic feminist project. Like Mernissi’s other writings, The Forgotten Queens of Islam is also characterized by a double-front critique, which targets not only Muslim historians for their androcentrism but also some Western historians of Islam for serving this monolithic historical narrative that has subsumed difference as exemplified by women heads of states. She writes:

story], in Faire de l’histoire: les nouveaux objets [To make history: The New objects], ed. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 3:125. See also Mernissi, Forgotten Queens, 202n45. 107 Mernissi, Forgotten Queens, 84–85. 108 Ibid., 85.

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chapter three Still more surprising is that this amnesia affects even Western historians, who seemingly should not be at all threatened by the Arab woman/ power connection. With an assurance that recalls to mind the ayatollahs, Bernard Lewis affirms that “there are no queens in Islamic history and the word ‘Queen,’ where it occurs, is used only of foreign rulers in Byzantium or in Europe. There are a few instances where Muslim dynastic thrones were briefly occupied by women, but this was perceived as an aberration and condemned as an offence.”109

This passage makes a clear equation between Muslim fundamentalists and Orientalist Western scholars of Islam in their constructions of a monolithic patriarchal Muslim history in which women have no agency. Observing this double denigration leads Mernissi to affirm that the task of writing the gendered subaltern history of Islam is incumbent on Muslim women themselves. This type of categorical statement by brilliant Islamic scholars of the stature of Bernard Lewis confirms just one thing: Muslim women in general, and Arab women in particular, cannot count on anyone, scholar or not, “involved” or “neutral” to read their history for them. Reading it for themselves is entirely their responsibility and their duty. Our demand for the full and complete enjoyment of our universal human rights, here and now, requires us to take over our history, to re-read it, and to reconstruct a wide-open Muslim past.110

This is another statement that describes the contours of the Islamic feminist project, which the next part discusses in conjunction with Mernissi’s secularist approach to Islam.

109

Ibid., 116. Ibid., 206n5. Mernissi cites Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 66. 110

PART TWO

BETWEEN SECULARIST AND ISLAMIC FEMINISM

The first part of this book hinted at the existence of two critical moments in Mernissi’s intellectual trajectory, corresponding to two different positions that she has adopted vis-à-vis Islam. This part is an assessment of these two moments. Chapter 1 investigates the enabling and disabling strategies of Mernissi’s secularist critique in Beyond the Veil and Woman in the Muslim Unconscious. Chapter 2 deals with Mernissi’s L’Amour dans les pays musulmans, The Veil and the Male Elite, and Islam and Democracy. In the third chapter, which concludes this book, I further engage in problematizing ‘Islamic feminism’ through a comparative analysis of the feminist hermeneutics of Amina Wadud, Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid, Kecia Ali, and Mernissi. This allows me to propose an ‘alternative’ path, which transcends the limitations of the prevailing theoretical framework of Islamic feminism toward what I call ‘a post-foundationalist islamic feminism’ in the book’s concluding chapter.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE SECULARIST MOMENT Beyond the Veil As suggested earlier, Mernissi’s Beyond the Veil, originally written a little more than one decade after Morocco gained its independence, is a critique of the postcolonial state that simultaneously enacted conservative family legislation (the 1957 Moudawana) while carrying out a modernization project that breaks with the gender roles promoted by this very legislation. Her study’s focus is to juxtapose what she calls the “Muslim ideology of the sexes” and the new gender dynamics created by modernization, in order to argue that Islamic gender roles are clear obstacles to modernity.1 The target of her critique is the postcolonial state’s ambivalence, or “the monarchy [that] tried to walk a fine line between modernisation and respect for Islamic traditions,” to use Rebecca Barlow and Shahram Akbarzadeh’s words. For Mernissi, promoting women’s rights entails “a dramatic reconstruction of Muslim societies” through the adoption of international treaties on human rights and the abandonment of certain tenets of shari’a law.2 Mernissi’s standpoint in this book is clearly secularist as suggested by the following passage, in which she places herself outside the religious framework of the debate on ‘women’s liberation.’ Controversy has raged throughout the century between traditionalists who claim that Islam prohibits any change in sex roles, and modernists who claim that Islam allows for the liberation of women, the desegregation of society, and equality between the sexes. But both fractions agree on one thing: Islam should remain the sacred basis of society. In this book, I want to demonstrate that there is a fundamental contradiction between Islam as interpreted in official policy and equality between the sexes.3

1 2 3

Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 24. Barlow and Akbarzadeh, “Women’s Rights in the Muslim World,” 1484, 1485. Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 19 (emphasis original).

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Even when she might be viewed as only targeting “Islam as interpreted in official policy” (in this case, the Moudawana), Mernissi makes statements about Islam as a divine message. She continues: “Sexual equality violates Islam’s premises, actualized in its laws, that heterosexual love is dangerous to Allah’s order.”4 At this stage of her scholarship, she unambiguously considers that Islam is based on a fundamental principle of sexual hierarchy and segregation. Significantly, in this respect, she ends her preface by the following statement: “One wonders if a desegregated society, where formerly secluded women have equal rights not only economically but sexually, would be an authentic Muslim society.”5 Mernissi’s critique of the androcentric representation of femininity and sexuality in orthodox religious discourse is intransigent. For her, Muslim marriage is based on male dominance. The desegregation of the sexes violates Islam’s ideology on women’s position in the social order: that women should be under the authority of fathers, brothers, or husbands. Since women are considered by Allah to be destructive elements, they are to be spatially confined and excluded from matters other than those of the family.6

Although this statement is problematic for its confusion of ninth- and tenth-century fiqh and Islam as a divine message, it nonetheless represents a radical critique of the androcentric representation of women and gender in Islamic jurisprudence. Her analysis is an interesting theorization of gender in Muslim societies in terms that transcend the dogmatism of conservatives or the timidity of Islamic reformists with respect to the promotion of women’s rights, as in the case of the Egyptian Qasim Amin, as discussed before, or the Moroccan Allal al-Fassi. Thus, even when “al-Fassi’s views were audacious in the context of Morocco at the time,” as stated by Mounira Charrad, they remained prisoner to a patriarchal vision that prevented him from going beyond vague claims for women’s liberation toward considering gender equality.7 In fact, in the chapter that al-Fassi devotes to women in his AlNaqd al-dhati, the target of his criticism is not the androcentrism of

4 5 6 7

Ibid. Ibid., 9 (emphasis mine). Ibid., 19. Charrad, States and Women’s Rights, 159.

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Maliki legislation and its refusal to change, but what he calls ‘al-‘urf al-jahili’ (ignorant customs), more explicitly Amazigh (or ‘Berber’) customs. He considers these customs pagan or uncivilized, hence the adjective ‘jahili,’ which refers to the Jahiliya, the time of ignorance. The conservatism of his discourse is clear. Even when advocating equality between men and women, he could not conceive it without limits and conditions. Thus, he writes: “Inna min haqi al-mar’a an tatassawa ma’a al-rajul al-mussawat allati la tatanafa ma’a tabai’i al-ashia’i” (A woman has the right to be the equal of man, an equality that does not go against the nature of things).8 This reference to “nature” clearly demonstrates the essentialism of his reformist discourse and the limitations that he sets for equality. Al-Fassi could not conceive of gender equality per se, which presupposes the belief in gender as a social and cultural construct. In addition to being conservative, al-Fassi’s reformism was rather dogmatic, that is, closed off to the adoption of progressive laws elaborated by other schools of jurisprudence than the Maliki school adopted in Morocco, though he claims that he is, in principle, favorable to such openness. In practice, he is not. This is clear in his opposition to the abolition of the institution of the wali (male tutor), or the establishment of a woman’s right to sign her own marriage contract without a male tutor, allowed by the Hanafi school, for instance. He states: “Al-usra Al-maghribia lam tatatawar ba’d ila al-haddi alladi takbalu fihi al-‘amala bi madhabi abi Hanifa fi al-mas’ala” (Moroccan family has not matured yet to the extent of accepting the Hanafi school on the matter). He abandons his call for the abolition of polygamy, which he championed in his book, after independence when he was entrusted to preside over the commission in charge of elaborating the 1957 Moudawana which made polygamy legal. In his report, alFassi does not reiterate his critical position vis-à-vis this institution that the text normalized; he is content to comment en passant that polygamy is maintained, though his opinion on the matter is different.9 This shortcoming not only informs us that the progressive project

8

Al-Fassi, “Al-Mar’a al-Maghribia,” 31, 42, emphasis mine. Al-Fassi, “Taqrir al-muqarrir al-‘am li lajnati mashru’ Wizarat al-‘Adl li kitabai al-zawaj wa al-talaq” [Report of the general executive (presiding over) the commission for the Ministry of Law project (for the elaboration) of the two chapters on marriage and divorce], in “La Réforme du droit de la famille cinquante années de débats,” special issue, Prologues, no. 2 (2002): 54, 56. 9

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of some nationalists was abandoned when its champions flirted with power after independence, but also suggests that al-Fassi’s ‘revolutionary’ ideas with respect to women might not have emanated from a true conviction or a global social project for postcolonial Morocco. His ideas were a mere rehearsal of others’ ideas, namely, Muhammad Abduh’s and Amin’s, for instance. This supports Mernissi’s view that the discourse of these male reformists does not differ from conservatives’ discourse when it pertains to women. Since Mernissi wants to prove the incongruity of activating a family law based on the shari’a in postcolonial times, she has to confront the apologetic rhetoric that claims that Islam granted women rights which they have never had before. She thus juxtaposes the Muslim configuration of gender roles in the early Islamic period with those of the pre-Islamic era in order to argue contrary to the apologetic narrative of the Jahiliya that women were granted a much more advantageous status than under Islam. Mernissi’s study of pre-Islamic marriage practices emphasizes the existence of a degree of female self-determination that disappeared under the establishment of Islam’s patriarchal and patrilineal social system with its family structure based on male leadership. She argues that the Prophet Muhammad was confronted with female self-determination. Revealing disturbing facts of the Jahiliya narrative as constructed by Muslim theology, she explains that the Prophet was asked for marriage by women, starting from his first wife Khadija, through hiba (gift), a prevalent custom by which a woman offered herself for marriage to a man. She also recalls that the Prophet was rejected by some of his wives, who used a particular formula of repudiation. Remnants of this tradition in present-day Muslim matrimonial practices, she continues, are tamlik (possession or ownership) and khul’ (removal), two techniques by which women can divorce their husbands.10 The existence of such practices and formulas, Mernissi maintains, represents undeniable evidence of female self-determination prior to the rise of Islam.11 To further illustrate her argument that Islam came to curtail female power when establishing its patriarchal system, Mernissi evokes the 10

Khul’ is a woman’s right to divorce by paying compensation to her husband in return for the dissolution of marriage. Tamlik is a woman’s right to divorce with her husband’s consent. 11 Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 53.

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event of the Harlots of Hadramout. According to Muslim historians, this was a rebellion of some prostitutes in Hadramout, who celebrated the Prophet’s death.12 In Mernissi’s reading, the incident reveals the existence of “a clash of interests” between the Prophet and women, and is an instance of women’s rebellion against “Islam’s opposition to prevailing sexual practices.”13 Of course, in this book, Mernissi is not yet interested in tracing Muslim women’s agency and resistance inside the Islamic faith. By demystifying the Jahiliya narrative, Mernissi can be seen as the first Muslim feminist to problematize the concept of the Jahiliya as an ideological construct, invented to perform the role of the antithesis of Islamic civilization. Leila Ahmed provides another demystification, when she writes: Islamic civilization developed a construct of history that labeled the pre-Islamic period the Age of Ignorance and projected Islam as the sole source of all that was civilized—and used that construct so effectively in its rewriting of history that the peoples of the Middle East lost all knowledge of the past civilizations of the region. Obviously, that construct was ideologically serviceable, successfully concealing, among other things, the fact that in some cultures of the Middle East women had been considerably better off before the rise of Islam than afterward.14

This argument is also confirmed by the findings of the Saudi scholar Hatoon Ajwad al-Fassi in her study Women in Pre-Islamic Arabia: Nabataea. She argues that women in the pre-Islamic period enjoyed considerable rights in the Nabataean state (an urban Arabian kingdom centered in modern Jordan, southern Syria, and northwestern Saudi Arabia during the Roman Empire), more than in Saudi Arabia today. The objective of this problematization of the Jahiliya construct serves a purpose other than Mernissi’s; al-Fassi’s aim is to show that most practices related to women’s status in Saudi Arabia are based on some local traditional practices that are not necessarily Islamic.15 The Jahiliya construct is central to conservatives’ rhetoric when it focuses on reforming women’s legal status. Conservatives, as suggested before, often argue that women in the Jahiliya were mere objects, that

12

Hadramout is a historical region of the South Arabian Peninsula. Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 72–73. 14 Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 36–37. 15 Al-Fassi, Women in Pre-Islamic Arabia: Nabataea (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports International Series, 2007). 13

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when they were not victims of infanticide, they were inherited like cattle, and that it is not until the advent of Islam that they were liberated and granted revolutionary rights like the right to inherit. Mernissi contends that this vigorous rhetoric, which condemns the Jahiliya and especially its sexual patterns, makes this pre-Islamic period a key to understand Islam’s attitude toward women. She explains that “it is by retracing Islam’s selective attitude toward jahiliya sexual practices that we may grasp the new religion’s stance toward relations between the sexes.” She argues that the pre-Islamic period cannot be simplistically discarded and reduced to the Age of Ignorance, and contrasted to Islamic civilization; it is one component of Muslim memory and is, therefore, necessary to understand “the Muslim psyche.” Her interest in this period breaks with apologetic Muslim historians, who are, in her own words, often so deeply imbued with centuries of monotheistic patriarchy that they find it impossible even to imagine that the situation on the eve of Islam was far more complex than the system later consolidated by Islam.16

Apologizing for women’s inferior legal status is not only a leitmotiv in conservatives’ rhetoric but also a representation of a ritual introduction to any discussion of the issue even by a reformist like Allal al-Fassi. In fact, the chapter on women’s rights in his book opens with a reminder of women’s inferior status during the Jahiliya, when they used to be sold, bought, and inherited, rather than ones who inherit.17 Al-Fassi’s appeal to the Jahiliya narrative functions as a strategy to situate his discourse in the language of reform rather than radical change. This should be contrasted to Mernissi’s intransigent discourse. Clearly, in Beyond the Veil, Islam is unambiguously against gender equality. Mernissi points out that “Muslim marriage gave absolute male authority a stamp of holy approval” through institutions like polygamy and repudiation. As a social project, she continues, Islam is inherently opposed to female power, which it associates with fitna: “The fear of female self-determination is basic to the Muslim order and is closely linked to fear of fitna.” She sums up her findings with the following:

16 17

Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 65, 85. Al-Fassi, “Al-Mar’a al-Maghribia,” 30.

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The new social structure of Islam, which constituted a revolution in the mores of pre-Islamic Arabia, was based on male dominance. Polygamy, repudiation, the prohibition of zina [illicit sexual intercourse], and the guarantees of paternity were all designed to foster the transition from a family based on some degree of female self-determination to a family based on male control. The Prophet saw the establishment of the maledominated Muslim family as crucial to the establishment of Islam.18

Mernissi’s idea that the patriarchal structure established by Islam constituted a “revolution” in the mores of pre-Islamic Arabia is, however, inaccurate and ahistorical. According to Ahmed’s study, if a matrilineal system prevailed in Arabia prior to the advent of Islam, it does not mean that patriarchy was unknown to Arabian society, or that matrilineality was the only system adopted at the time. Ahmed argues that patriarchy was already practiced in urban centers of Arabia in the pre-Islamic period. Prior to the rise of Islam, she maintains, patriarchy and misogyny were salient features of Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean Middle East and are, therefore, not specific to Islam.19 Mernissi’s affirmation that “the right to polygamy and repudiation granted exclusively to males seems to have been an innovation in seventh-century Arabia” not only ignores that such practices were already in use in Jewish communities prior to the rise of Islam, for example, but also has the effect of detaching Islam and its gender norms from their broad cultural or historical background.20 This does not mean, however, that these practices are specific to Judaism, as Ahmed rightly argues. Most important, Ahmed adds, “to identify Judaism as the sole or even principal source of misogyny among Christians not only risks being simplistic and inaccurate but also evades the fundamental question of why such negative definitions of women found ready acceptance in this region at this time.”21 Ahmed explains that during the fifth and sixth centuries (the period immediately before the advent of Islam), Arabian life had started to be more sedentary due to growth of trade. This trade led to a decline of 18

Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 67, 53, 64. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, chap. 3, pt. 1. 20 Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 50. 21 Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 35, emphasis mine. In this respect, feminist biblical scholar Tikva Frymer-Kensky points out that “history shows that patriarchy was well entrenched fifteen hundred years before Israel first came into being” and that “Biblical Israel did not invent patriarchy.” See Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Reading the Women of the Bible: A New Interpretation of Their Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), xiv, xvi. 19

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tribal values and gradual disappearance of communal property, especially with the growing independence of individual traders, their accumulation of wealth, and their desire to transmit their property to their offspring. This shift consequently gave new importance to paternity, and explains the need for, or ready acceptance of, the establishment of patrilineality and patriarchy as more appropriate models of social and family structures.22 From this observation, one can conclude that Islam came to consolidate, rather than invent, the patriarchal social order, as Mernissi assumes in Beyond the Veil. Mernissi’s secularist standpoint accounts for her adoption of an ahistorical, essentialist, or mystifying approach, unwilling to take into consideration the global social and cultural background in which Islam first appeared. As Ahmed writes, though in a different context, to omit consideration of that larger pattern altogether, would constitute a serious distortion of the evidence, for it would falsely isolate Islamic practices and by implication at least suggest that Islamic handling of these matters was special and even unique.

This critical statement, by which she addresses some Western scholars who write about Islam, clearly applies to Mernissi as well. Mernissi’s reductionist approach has the effect of stressing the separateness of “Islamic mores” and “obscuring or erasing interconnections and continuities,” to use Ahmed’s words.23 Like the Orientalist research that Ahmed criticizes, Mernissi’s study does not pay attention to the element of ‘cultural exchange’ and therefore separates Islam from the societies prior to its rise and the ones that were adjacent to it, which probably had contributed to the formation of its mores. In fact, Ahmed is critical not only of the androcentric discourse of Muslim historians but also of the Orientalist discourse of some Western scholarship about Islam. Certain elements . . . such as the tendency to attribute Byzantine seclusion to “Oriental influences” and to distance the oppression of women from European societies and represent it as originating among non-Europeans, suggest yet other barriers to understanding. In particular, they suggest that ideology and nationalism continue to play a role in the writing of history, and they indicate the need to develop an integrated approach,

22 23

Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 43. Ibid., 5, 36.

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free of racial and nationalist bias, in the exploration of this crucial period of human history.24

Mernissi’s reductionist thesis reproduces the Orientalist discourse on Islam, even when she sets out to demystify some of its assumptions in the beginning of her book. Indeed, she point outs that, in contrast to some Western assumptions, Islam, unlike Christianity, has no ideology of female inferiority. Women’s subordination in Muslim societies is the outcome of laws and customs establishing women’s social subordination rather than originating in a belief in women’s inherent or biological inferiority. “Traditional Islam,” she observes, “recognizes equality of potential,” and “the democratic glorification of the human individual, regardless of sex, race, or status, is the kernel of the Muslim message.”25 Criticizing Mernissi’s “unstable” position in Beyond the Veil, Marnia Lazreg argues: “Disclaiming traditional/europocentric conceptions of Islam has been part of a ritual among feminist writers who nonetheless use the very language denounced.”26 But Mernissi’s demystification of Orientalist assumptions about Islam and women serves also to consolidate her own thesis in her book. The book’s argument is that women occupy an inferior rank in Islam not because of a belief in their biological inferiority (to the contrary, Islam recognizes an equality of potential), but precisely because of the strong (even when latent) Muslim belief in women’s power as threatening to the stability of the umma. Women are perceived as potential sources of fitna, hence the need to control them through spatial segregation and such institutions as patriarchy and repudiation. An inherent assumption of this feminist thesis is that the umma is gender-specific, which Mernissi clearly expresses in the following statement: “Women’s position in the umma universe is ambiguous. Allah does not talk to them directly. We can therefore assume that the umma is primarily male believers.”27 Mernissi interprets the existence of the Qur’an’s two voices as the egalitarian and the hierarchical. The

24 Ibid., 18, 36. Ahmed especially focuses on Sasanian society, which prevailed in the Iraq-Iran region, conquered by Islam. Sasanian mores fused with Muslim ones and therefore “played a key role in defining Muslim law and institutions, including many which still are in place today.” Ibid., 19. 25 Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 19, 11, 19. 26 Lazreg, “Feminism and Difference,” 103. 27 Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 138.

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egalitarian trend, she argues, only hides the hierarchical one. In her writings deploying an Islamic feminist standpoint, she reverses this order and maintains that gender equality is the kernel of the Qur’anic message. In Beyond the Veil, she identifies the androcentrism of orthodox Muslim theology and what is known today as the shari’a (or the shari’a as interpreted by the historically determined fiqh) as being the essence or the divine message of Islam. If the reductionist limitation of Mernissi’s approach can be viewed as a direct consequence of her influence by, or reliance on, (Western) Orientalist scholarship about Islam, it is also, in my view, the consequence of the influence of the very conservative Muslim scholarship she opposes. Like orthodox readings of religious texts, her approach is equally literalist and ahistorical, ignoring that what has been identified as ‘Islam’s gender norms’ might be contextual and contingent, rather than given and transcendental. She also takes for granted and espouses the orthodox view that patriarchal institutions, like polygamy and unilateral divorce, are fundamental to Islam as a divine message. Thus, even when she claims being outside the logic of the orthodox theological discourse, her account of Islam is inside its framework. The adherence of Mernissi, who paradoxically presents herself as a “secular” critic, to the orthodox thesis is clear when she identifies twelfth-century Sunni scholar (1058–1111) Abu Hamid al-Ghazali’s conception of femininity and female sexuality in his book Ihya ulum al-din (The revivification [or revival] of religious sciences) as being Islam’s.28 Thus, if al-Ghazali conceived a woman as “a dangerous distraction that must be used for the specific purpose of providing the Muslim nation with offspring and quenching the tensions of the sexual instinct,” Mernissi sees his ideas as representing the divine conception of gender and gender relations. She writes:

28 Ihya ulum al-din, for centuries, has been the most read work after the Qur’an in the Muslim world, and has been published and translated frequently. Although the exact date that al-Ghazali wrote this corpus is unknown, he probably wrote it in 1096– 97. It is divided into four volumes, each containing ten chapters. For her analysis, Mernissi most likely used the second volume, which focuses on man and society—eating manners, marriage traditions, wage earning, friendship, and so on. Mernissi cites al-Ghazali, Ihya ulum al-din (Cairo: n.p., 1964). An English translation of some essays (volume 2) from Ihya ulum al-din is available under the title Marriage and Sexuality in Islam: A Translation of Al-Ghazali’s Book on the Etiquette of Marriage from the Ihya, trans. Madelain Farah (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1984).

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Ghazali’s conception of the individual’s task on earth is illuminating in that it reveals that the Muslim message, in spite of its beauty, considers humanity to be constituted by males only.29

The use of the phrase “the Muslim message” shows again that the discourse of the ‘secular’ (or rather secularist) critic is not totally situated outside the religious discourse as it claims to be. Mernissi ignores that the dehumanization of women is not intrinsic to Islam, but was a common feature of the Mesopotamian, Persian, Hellenic, and Christian cultures, and is, therefore, the result of cultural exchange. As Ahmed writes: Cultural exchange seems to have led above all to the pooling and reinforcement of such ideas and to the triumphant endorsement throughout the region of a notion of woman in which her humanity was submerged and all but obliterated by a view of her as essentially and even exclusively biological—as quintessentially a sexual and reproductive being.30

Dehumanizing women is also a salient social feature in the region, in which al-Ghazali, a fervent defender of the Abbasids, originates. It is during the Abbasid era, one of unprecedented misogyny in Muslim history, that most institutions and laws considered today ‘Islamic,’ or constituting what is now known as the shari’a, had been elaborated. With the Abbasid age, Ahmed argues, an epoch of prosperity and wealth, the words ‘woman,’ ‘slave,’ and ‘object of sexual use’ had become indistinguishable.31 For Lamia Ben Youssef Zayzafoon, Mernissi’s claim that al-Ghazali’s teachings determine male-female dynamics in contemporary Muslim society, that is, Moroccan society, is problematic in two ways. First, she asks: “how solid is any claim that bases social practice on an authoritative text, especially a text from the eleventh century?” She rightly argues that “to claim that al-Ghazali’s teachings have determined women’s condition and rights in Morocco presumes that Moroccan society is culturally reified and frozen.”32 Second, Mernissi ignores those teachings in al-Ghazali’s Ihya’ Ulum al Din or The Revivication of Islam [sic] [The Revivification of Religious Science] that are not detrimental to women. Despite his obvious and undeniable

29 30 31 32

Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, chap. 1, 45, emphasis mine. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 18. Ibid., 67. Zayzafoon, Production of the Muslim Woman, 24.

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chapter four misogyny, al-Ghazali’s recommendation for the Muslim man to engage in foreplay and be preoccupied with his wife’s sexual pleasure is very advanced for his century.33

Mernissi’s monolithic apprehension of an entire Muslim order antagonistic to heterosexual love erases the element of plurality in Islamic thought. Zayzafoon writes: Ibn Hasm’s (994–1064) The Ring of the Dove: A Treatise on the Art and Practice of Arab Love, for instance, undermines Mernissi’s claim that Islamic tradition condemns love between a man and a woman. Just as [Michel de] Montaigne’s and [Pierre] de Courtois’s defense of the arranged marriage serves to protect the aristocratic blood line, the “Muslim order’s” attack on love needs to be historicized as a defense of the practice of endogamy that existed not just in Morocco, but in southern Europe, especially in Italy, Greece, and France.34

She also notes that many French writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries warned people against the perils of marrying for love, and that “it would be very naive, indeed, to conclude” based on the authority of these writers, that “French society condemns love between a man and a woman, and a husband and his wife.”35 Mernissi’s monolithic approach erases elements of contradiction and plurality when confronted with them. This is clearest in her exploration of what she calls “the Muslim ideology of the sexes.” It is worth underlining from the outset the singular form of this ideology that she aims to unveil, even when her own findings reveal a plurality of “ideologies,” or rather the existence of different theories of sexuality. Indeed, she comes across this plurality when she distinguishes between two existing “theories of female sexuality” in Islam, one implicit and the other explicit. The first theory, represented by al-Ghazali, recognizes female power and women’s active role; while the second, represented by Egyptian Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad (1889–1964), presupposes women’s inherent passivity.36

33

Ibid., 23. Ibid., 24. 35 Ibid., 29n56. But, as discussed in this book’s introduction, Zayzafoon’s criticism applies only to Beyond the Veil, rather than Mernissi’s entire scholarship, which Zayzafoon’s study maps. As I will discuss in the next chapter on L’Amour dans les pays musulmans, Mernissi precisely mentions this other aspect of al-Ghazali’s thinking. Zayzafoon confuses the two moments of Mernissi’s feminist development. 36 Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad is the author of a book on women in the Qur’an entitled Al-Mar’a fi al-Qur’an [Women in the Qur’an] (Beirut: Dar a-kitab al-Arabi, 1967). 34

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Mernissi also identifies al-Aqqad’s androcentric interpretation of the Qur’an’s verse 2:228 (“And they [women] have rights similar to those [of men] over them in kindness, and men are a degree above them”) as representing Islam’s true message concerning women. Her reading of the same verse embraces al-Aqqad’s. And, even when noticing that the verse “is striking by its inconsistency,” she, nevertheless, declares that she is “tempted to interpret the first part of the sentence as a simple stylistic device to bring out the hierarchical content of the second part.”37 When confronted by the existence of two voices in the Qur’an regarding gender, she chooses to emphasize one at the expense of the other as being ‘the truth’ of Islam. This is an instance of the reductionism and authoritarianism of her secularist position, for which ambiguity and plurality of meanings in the Qur’an are inconceivable. Mervat Hatem also underlines this limitation in her discussion of Mernissi’s “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” which likewise belongs to the secularist stage of Mernissi’s thinking. Hatem writes: Mernissi approaches Muslim texts and their discourses without an adequate appreciation of their ambiguous character. She views Muslim discourses as having “an almost mathematical logic” in which ambiguities are foreign.38

Neglecting the element of ambiguity highlights the foundationalist discourse of Mernissi’s secularist critique, which adheres to the belief in the existence of one single truth. This limitation aligns the secularist critic’s approach to the very dogmatic theological discourse it eschews, and justifies Lazreg’s following criticism: In an uncanny way, feminist discourse on women from the Middle East and North Africa mirrors that of the theologians’ own interpretation of women in Islam. Academic feminists have compounded this situation by adding their own problematic specifications. They reduce Islam to one or two sura [Qur’anic chapter], or injunctions, such as those related to gender hierarchy.39

Mernissi’s approach is, therefore, not quite foreign to the orthodox theological discourse. The limitations of her secularist feminist approach are present with more acuity in Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, which the next section examines.

37 38 39

Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 182. Hatem, “Class and Patriarchy,” 816. Lazreg, “Feminism and Difference,” 86.

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chapter four Woman in the Muslim Unconscious

I have already indicated that Fatna Ait Sabbah’s Woman in the Muslim Unconscious is most likely Mernissi’s second book and have noted a number of similarities between its arguments and those of her other writings published before it, like Beyond the Veil, “The Degrading Effect of Capitalism,” and “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development.” Mernissi’s interest in what she calls in Beyond the Veil “the Muslim psyche” with respect to the representation of women in Islam is obviously pursued in Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, as the title strongly suggests. This kind of psychoanalysis is a constant in her work as indicated by the following statement, quoted from Islam and Democracy: What I am trying to do is to explore what I call our mental territory, the stock of images and symbols that generate our emotions and thoughts, our cultural schema, the landmarks of our civilization—all of which allow us not only to understand the world but to situate ourselves in it and act in it.

Of course, the objective of revisiting this mental territory in Woman in the Muslim Unconscious is not the same as in Islam and Democracy. While the latter aims to “restore a more nuanced image of Islam”—that is, to indicate that Islam is not opposed to democracy and modernity—the first aims to show the incompatibility of Islam with gender equality.40 To justify its analysis here, in this section, I will continue demonstrating that this book is Mernissi’s. Woman in the Muslim Unconscious is central to my deployment of her secularist feminism, since its critical position is more radical and reveals its assumptions even more clearly than Beyond the Veil. As suggested before, my goal is not to construct a binary opposition between Mernissi’s secularist writings and Islamic feminist scholarship. Her secularist scholarship cannot be discarded as it presents enabling strategies in addition to disabling ones that are equally instructive in theorizing Islamic feminism, which is the reason behind examining it here. The value of Woman in the Muslim Unconscious and Beyond the Veil lies in their enabling critique of the androcentrism of Islamic jurisprudence and early Islamic thought. They also present a revision of religious texts that defies the 40

Mernissi, Islam and Democracy, 176n4, 26.

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limitations of some Islamic feminist scholarship, which avoids dealing with some verses that do not fit the claim that gender equality is normative in the Qur’an. In contrast, both books fall prey to arbitrary and essentialist readings, as they reduce Islam to a mere ideology, ignoring the plurality of its significations and isolating it from its cultural and historical context of production. Proving that Mernissi is the author of Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, however, raises the issue of ethics. The choice of using a pseudonym is usually dictated by a fear of reprisals. Unlike Beyond the Veil, which was written in English, La Femme dans l’inconscient musulman (Woman in the Muslim Unconscious) was originally written in French, a more accessible language to Moroccan readers. Today, the ‘fact’ (or idea) that Mernissi is the book’s author has become an open secret in intellectual circles in Morocco and beyond. For example, Jonas Svensson confirms it in his PhD thesis: “While Mernissi is silent on the topic, it has been suggested that Ait Sabbah is Mernissi,” referring to the works of Haleh Afshar and Reza Afshari.41 He further observes that even Mernissi refers to Woman in the Muslim Unconscious in some of her subsequent writings and that the book contains references to Beyond the Veil. It is also no coincidence that both Mernissi and Ait Sabbah have the same English translator, Mary Jo Lakeland, who translated Le Harem politique (The Veil and the Male Elite). Another indication is the choice of an Amazigh (‘Berber’) last name, Ait Sabbah, for the pseudonym, as opposed to the more aristocratic (Fassi) name Mernissi.42 The use of the name Ait Sabbah probably refers to the Amazigh origin of her grandmother, whom Mernissi mentions in some of her writings. Most important, in the second part of her study “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” Mernissi points to one of her unpublished papers entitled “Le Discours érotique religieux: Réflexion sur les productions idéologiques dans l’Islam dépendant” (The religious and erotic discourse: Reflection on ideological productions in dependant Islam).43 This is one of the most significant indications that she is the author since Woman in the Muslim 41 Svensson, Women’s Human Rights and Islam, 112. He cites Haleh Afshar, Islam and Feminisms: An Iranian Case-Study (London: Macmillan, 1998), 218; and Reza Afshari, “Egalitarian Islam and Misogynist Islamic Tradition: A Critique of the Feminist Reinterpretation of Islamic History and Heritage,” Critique, no. 4 (1994): 17. 42 “Fassi” comes from the city of Fez, which is known to be the capital of (religious) knowledge in Morocco and the hometown of the majority of bourgeois Moroccans. 43 Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” p. 1, 104n54.

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Unconscious presents a decoding of the erotic and legal discourses on women and gender. The similarities of the two works are striking. The starting point of their feminist critique is the 1957 Moudawana. Both engage in decoding the gender representation deployed in the Moudawana and fiqh from which it is derived. Both end up confusing the androcentrism of fiqh and the inherent misogynous message of Islam. The conclusion of the two books are also acutely similar, though more extremist in Woman in the Muslim Unconscious. Mernissi argues in Beyond the Veil that Islam’s divine message is against sexual equality since it opposes female self-determination, while Ait Sabbah contends that Islam is against human self-fulfillment altogether because it is primarily a system based on an economy of obedience and hierarchy. For both Mernissi and Ait Sabbah, Islam’s hierarchical gender representation serves a particular political and economic configuration. Both authors argue that the obliteration of the economic dimension of a woman, or her objectification, in the religious discourse serves the interests of the economically dependent postcolonial Muslim states, and that the patriarchal religious system at the level of the private sphere consolidates the global authoritarian political system in place. Like Mernissi, Ait Sabbah declares, from the very outset of her book, her distance from Qasim Amin’s reformist discourse, as quoted in chapter 1. Ait Sabbah’s approach is more radical, since she enters the issue from a more obvious secularist perspective. She makes it clear that her approach also falls outside the apologetic religious discourse on women in Islam. The official statement on political and sexual matters in the Muslim societies are distressing, not simply because they are meager and lack substance, but above all because they are mechanically repeated. As an adult woman, I have heard them so much, have run into them so often in my daily search for freedom, dignity and happiness that I feel nauseated when I hear the tedious introductory phrase: “Since the seventh century, Islam has given a privileged place to woman. . . .” It is a phrase that is usually followed by an avalanche of Koranic surahs and hadiths that a child of eight learns in a few hours and that we adults repeat in an off-hand manner throughout our whole lives without ever thinking seriously about them.44

44

Ait Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, 5.

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Ait Sabbah’s unorthodox perspective is expressed in decisive terms, which are reminiscent of Mernissi’s irreverent style. Ait Sabbah writes: As a woman who belongs to Muslim society and has access to writing (a male privilege and the incarnation of power), I am indulging in the indescribable pleasure of rewriting the cultural heritage—a subversive and blasphemous act par excellence. What I mean by “rewriting” is an active reading—that is, a process of decoding the heritage and at the same time of coding it in a different way. I am going to indulge myself and take the elements that have been assembled by the religious authorities and philosophers into a specific order and cut them up and reassemble them according to an order fantasized by me.45

Ait Sabbah presents her methodology as overtly subversive. As a Muslim woman, she seeks to subvert the order of things as dictated by the religious discourse and to undermine a tradition of reading that usually expresses a male worldview. Ait Sabbah claims heterodoxy as a reading strategy. She makes it clear that she deliberately puts together authoritative and prescriptive texts, alongside a literature considered trivial, if not heretical, by orthodox theology since it deals with eroticism and sexuality. Thus, she indulges in examining books on eroticism, courtesy literature, and manuals that prepare young grooms for their wedding night, in addition to the Qur’an and ‘orthodox’ religious texts that constitute the main sources of Islamic jurisprudence. By this particular selection, the author consciously seeks an avowed absurdity. However, it is this absurdity according to the canons of Muslim orthodoxy that I claim to be the essence and the basis of my reading of that Muslim heritage. It is the distinctive feature of power to establish an order of the component elements of the world and how they should be perceived according to a given hierarchy of values in order to set up a given cultural system. I am asserting a claim to my part of that power (monopolized by men up until now in my society) by making a personal selection of works to be analyzed, which escapes the selection imposed by the religious authorities, and by giving it my personal interpretation.46

For her, the two types of literature constitute two different discourses on gender and sexuality, what she calls the “erotic discourse” and the “orthodox discourse.” Each discourse, she explains, has its own corpus

45 46

Ibid., 6. Ibid.

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of messages that it inscribes on male and female bodies, but both are involved in the same process of objectification and dehumanization. It is striking that al-Ghazali’s corpus Ihya ulum al-din, which Mernissi uses in Beyond the Veil to capture “Islam’s ideology of the sexes,” is also present in Woman in the Muslim Unconscious. Al-Ghazali’s text significantly appears, besides the Qur’an, as the authoritative text on which lies Ait Sabbah’s analysis of the orthodox discourse and its conception of femininity and female sexuality. The book’s point of departure is al-Ghazali’s description of the ideal female beauty, the main criteria of which are silence and obedience, which, she argues, represent an unvarying conception of femininity in Muslim societies. Her driving questions are: What is the relationship between beauty and the right to expression? And are these qualities required for women only or do they concern men as well? The book’s answer to these questions is that inertia and passivity are not characteristics reserved for women only, but are also attributes required for male believers. They are, she concludes, central to Islam as a philosophy based on the principle of submission. The book’s first part is devoted to decoding the erotic discourse that is, Ait Sabbah explains, widely consumed by youth. This discourse presents itself as a “scientific” discourse on sex, though it has no religious weight. On the contrary, it is considered heretical because it gives primacy to sex and human desire rather than religious contemplation. This discourse mainly focuses on women and their sexual drives. In the omnisexual sphere it is man who is inert, and woman who is active. To use the terminology of hunt, so dear to Al-Akkad [al-Aqqad], one of the most eloquent theoreticians of modern Muslim patriarchy, she is the pursuer, he is the prey.

It is significant that al-Aqqad is present in Ait Sabbah’s project. Even if the erotic discourse, with its reversal of roles, overturns al-Aqqad’s theory of sexuality and femininity (developed in Beyond the Veil), according to Ait Sabbah, it still conceives of male-female dynamics in terms of power relations.47 Digging into the erotic discourse, in light of the Foucauldian theory of power/knowledge, she argues that a discourse of power dehumanizes man and woman by reducing them to their genitals. Woman appears

47

Ibid., 45.

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to be “omnisexual”; she is a woman-body, or what Ait Sabbah calls a “voracious-vagina-crack woman,” whose sexual appetite cannot be satisfied by an ordinary man. Man is also reduced to his sexual capacities; he is a “tent-pole man.” The emotional and intellectual dimensions of the sexual act are missing from this representation. Reality as an economic and political confrontation, she explains, is equally absent from this literature on the man-woman relationship.48 The erotic discourse, which presents itself as an objective (scientific) discourse on sexuality, Ait Sabbah concludes, is a male biased representation of femininity and female sexuality. It is a male invasion of the female body. It projects male desire onto this body, producing a representation that substitutes the will of the person being investigated with the will of the investigator/conqueror. Thus, even though it is centered primarily on the female subject, erotic literature is exclusively based on male accounts. She also adds that this authoritative representation necessarily results in the mutilation not only of the represented female but also of the male representer, who experiences a feeling of castration when faced with the insatiable nature of a woman.49 The fact that the erotic discourse reduces the intellectual dimension of male-female relations does not mean, Ait Sabbah stresses, that the woman is denied her intellectual capacity; on the contrary, there is a strong belief in women’s cunning intelligence and malice, or what is known in the Qur’an as kayd. This argument is in line with Beyond the Veil’s idea that, in Islam, women are not thought of as inferior but as powerful and dreadful beings, hence the numerous laws to restrict their power. For Ait Sabbah, the belief in women’s kayd is a common denominator between the erotic and orthodox discourses.50 It is also a shared belief between the “explicit” and “implicit” theories of female sexuality that Mernissi examines in Beyond the Veil.51 In the second part of her book, Ait Sabbah examines the orthodox discourse. Her objective is to observe whether the female body, fetishized in the erotic discourse, is constructed in different terms in the orthodox discourse, supposedly a discourse of spirituality. From the outset, her decoding announces the existence of the same fetishization,

48 49 50 51

Ibid., 44, 58. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 32–33. Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 33.

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which is clear evidence of the misogynist essence of Islam as a divine message. If the female body, the cultural product of a sacred vision of the world, emerges as an exception to the spiritualization of the material and physical, one can then ask why this is true. Why does Islam, whose purpose is to give a spiritual dimension to the material, refuses this dimension to women? This fact in itself will be the bearer of a very significant message.52

Obviously, for her, as well as for Mernissi, Islam is undoubtedly misogynous. Ait Sabbah points out that the very relationship between the divine and the human varies according to sex. The divine being in his programming of the universe set up two distinct relationships, each of which conforms to a very specific code. The relationship of the Muslim God to man is not only different from the one he maintains with woman, but her relationship to man is only understandable through an analysis of the triangular relationship between God, the male believer, and the female believer.

Her analysis of the mode of relatedness regulating the relationship between these three protagonists in the orthodox discourse unearths an inherent modality, what she calls the “articulation-linkage.” Within this configuration, the three poles of the triangle are organically linked in their respective roles, and any change in these roles is a complete subversion of the whole equation. Strengthening one part automatically means weakening the other, hence the term ‘articulation-linkage.’ For her, the insistence on observing the balance of this schema explains “the phobic attitude of Islam toward change, bid’a (innovation), condemned as one of the most serious heresies.”53 Hierarchy is the pillar of the Muslim order, according to Ait Sabbah; to perturb it is a menace to the survival of Islam. She argues: Not only is inequality among men a consequence of the divine will, but precisely because of this, it is blasphemous to upset it. Questioning the relationship of inequality is upsetting the divine design. A master who tries to become close to his slave, to divide his wealth with him in such

52 53

Ait Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, 63–64. Ibid., 66, 67.

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a way as to give him more equality, is a being who violates divine will and upsets the divine plan.54

For Mernissi, too, the essence of the Muslim social order is hierarchical. As quoted before, she wonders in the opening pages of Beyond the Veil whether a society that gives equal rights to women can be an authentic Muslim society. In addition, in “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” she states, in terms that echo Ait Sabbah’s above words, that “the Koran also regards any reversal of the sacred hierarchies as a particularly serious act of impiety.”55 Going further than Mernissi in her examination of this relationship of domination, Ait Sabbah argues that the notion of adoration, which is the very foundation of Islam, is organically linked to a special economic philosophy. In the orthodox Islamic discourse, the believer is obliged to worship God, and God in reward guarantees him access to material riches. The affective and economic realms are thus interconnected in a binding relationship.56

Despite the limitation of this analysis, which confuses orthodox theology’s interpretations of Islam with the essence of Islam as a divine message, it is still significant in decoding the ideological assumptions of fiqh which served as the foundation of the 1957 Moudawana. In fact, the relational scenario, described in the above statement, is the same as the nafaqa (alimony) in exchange of ta’a (obedience) scheme designed for the husband-wife relationship in the Moudawana.57 Ait Sabbah identifies the roots of the nafaqa-ta’a modality as being central to Islam. Analyzing the literature describing paradise—which represents, according to her, the model of Muslim society—she indicates that the nafaqa-ta’a equation not only is restricted to the (earthly) domestic sphere but is also found in the “sacred economy of production.” The literature, Ait Sabbah points out, foregrounds the existence of “an economy of gatherers rather than one where production of usable products entails an effort, specifically, work.” In paradise, the believer does not have to work; he can gather everything he needs.

54 55 56 57

Ibid., 67, 87. Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” pt. 1, 89. Ait Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, 67. Ibid., 79.

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This principle mirrors the idea that access to goods is guaranteed by submission to God rather than the indispensability of human work.58 Islam, according to Ait Sabbah, is in essence a pyramidal relationship with God at the top, the woman at the bottom, and the male believer situated between the two.59 Women’s submission is central to upholding the edifice; hence the necessity for the orthodox discourse to symbolically mutilate women, since “a human being cannot possess another human being; the idea is absurd.” Because the orthodox discourse acts as a legitimizing discourse, the justification of women’s subjugation is one of its raison d’être.60 Ait Sabbah’s decoding of the symbolism of the houri is central to her thesis, which is that Islam does not allow the fulfillment of human potentialities. She asks: “does the houri, passivity in the extreme, signify only herself, or is she in fact the mirror image of male passivity?” Examining the orthodox narrative about the houri, she writes that the houri does not think; she is an object of male pleasure.61 Ait Sabbah’s discussion of the houri recalls Mernissi’s ideas in “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development.” One of Mernissi’s arguments is that the image of the houri as the archetypal female and its earthly equivalent, the jariya, still affects decision making and has a dramatic impact on human development, particularly with respect to underprivileged women. She explains that this image of women as essentially sexual beings, derived from the houri and jariya models, not only infuses the distribution of gender roles in the 1957 Moudawana but also explains the statistical invisibility of female labor and consequently the invisibility of the needs of an important portion of workingwomen. She writes in the same tone as Ait Sabbah: For it must not be forgotten that the sacred writings also share this definition of women as source of pleasure through the model of the houri. This model, described in the Koran, strongly calls to mind the characteristics of the Jariya. The houri, the female creature in paradise, is supposed to be offered as a reward to believers who have merited access to heaven by their good works on earth. The houri, as described in the Koran, is beautiful, eternally virgin, and eternally loving.62

58 59 60 61 62

Ibid., 86, 79–80. Ait Sabbah also writes about the status of the child as subaltern. Ait Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, 45. Ibid., 90, 96. Mernissi, “Women and the Impact of Capitalist Development,” pt. 1, 81–82.

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Ait Sabbah concludes that the passivity of the houri not only represents the model of femininity in Islam but also stands for male passivity since the male believer in paradise is only a consumer. If the houri is unable to procreate, being eternally virgin, the male believer is also castrated. The male believer’s castration is not restricted to paradise, but is one of the characteristics of earthly sexuality as well. Sexuality is emptied of two of its components: desire and procreation. According to Ait Sabbah, Qur’anic stories stress the idea that procreation is a divine competence. The earthly biological system of procreation as a human process is disturbed by a “sacred biology.” Sacred biology depends on other laws and other principles. It is an inverted biology, where old women give birth as well as virgins and barren women. Abraham’s wife is an example of a woman giving birth in old age. . . . In the example of Mary, it is a virgin woman who gives birth. Sexual union as the creator of life is eliminated.63

Ait Sabbah’s reading of al-Ghazali’s and Muhammad Ibn Ismail alBukhari’s recommendations (in his Al-Sahih [The authentic]) concerning sexual intercourse between husband and wife aims to show that desire and pleasure are equally confiscated from both men and women.64 The sexual act is metamorphosed from a male-female orgasmic experience to an “opération à trois” (triadic sexual relationship), in which God’s presence is required through the invocation of his name in the beginning of the sexual act and the moment of orgasm as recommended by the two religious scholars. God’s presence during sexual intercourse signifies God’s appropriation of this orgasm. Like reproduction, it seems that the sexual act constituted a crisis situation for the Muslim God, a situation that he had to take over. He had to divert the believer’s attention from the female body. He had to liquidate the body at hand which offered pleasure and a child to man, and make present the absent—the God who could offer in concrete reality neither the one nor the other.

It is clear that Ait Sabbah, like Mernissi, holds al-Bukhari’s and alGhazali’s particular readings of the Qur’an, which are informed by their own worldviews, as representing God’s message. She also identifies al-Ghazali’s androcentric recommendations with those of God. 63

Ait Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, 96, 98, 100. Ibid., 119n3. Ait Sabbah cites Imam al-Bukhari, Al-Sahih (Beirut: Dar al-Ma’rifa, n.d.). An English translation is available, al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari: The Translation of the Meanings, trans. Muhammad M. Khan (Houston: Darussalam, 1997). 64

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chapter four Paradoxically it is because woman is recognized as too important to man that the Muslim God obliges man (so that he can worship God without the shadow of a rival) to fetishize her, to reduce her to a mere heap of organs that can be brought to orgasm by conscious and deliberate manipulation.65

By equating Islam’s divine message with orthodox theology, Ait Sabbah’s vision of women’s place in Islam, like Mernissi’s, paradoxically rehearses the vision of orthodox male theologians. Ait Sabbah stresses the idea that although Islam, unlike Christianity, does not have a negative attitude toward sexuality, this does not mean that Islam has a positive attitude toward it, since the sexual act has to be emptied of its emotional charge. Sexuality, she continues, is tolerated as long as it is excised of two important human dimensions: desire and procreation. In the orthodox discourse, male believers have to control their desire because Islam is defined as the religion of reason, while women come to incarnate desire. Women are fetishized in order to realize the binary scheme that opposes reason to desire, order to disorder, God to the devil, and control to the uncontrollable.66 For Ait Sabbah, like Mernissi, the Qur’an clearly considers women as objects rather than subjects. If Mernissi argues that the Qur’anic discourse does not directly address women, Ait Sabbah also argues that “they are not spoken to, they are spoken of.”67 Women are sometimes categorized among male believers’ material possessions (verse 3:14). The Qur’an reduces them to objects of sexual desire, as in verse 2:223: “Your women are a tilth for you (to cultivate) as ye will.” Ait Sabbah comments as follows: In this surah, the human being is man. Woman is a category whose human dimension is ambiguous. Woman is defined in terms of her function, her relationship to man. As an entity, she is land, she is real estate, she is inert. The essence of maleness and the essence of femaleness unfold in relation to each other in a three-dimensional space, each having a position, its own dynamics (or lack of it), and a precise mode of conduct that defines it and opposes it to the other in an immutable and determining hierarchical relationship.68

65

Ait Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, 106, 107, 114. Ibid., 110, 114. 67 Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 138; and Ait Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, 71. 68 Ait Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, 44. 66

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The importance of Ait Sabbah’s secularist perspective lies precisely in engaging a verse like the one above, which Mernissi avoids in her Islamic feminist work probably because it does not fit the egalitarian paradigm that she seeks to emphasize. As discussed in the concluding chapter to this book, Amina Wadud calls for seriously engaging this verse and others dealing with sexuality in order to produce a theology that would make a difference for women victims of AIDS.69 Ait Sabbah’s reading is interesting in this sense, though its critique is intransigent, only aiming at proving the inimical nature of Islam toward women. She does not balance her view with the egalitarian voice of the Qur’anic discourse, which addresses men and women on equal terms. Furthermore, Ait Sabbah’s reading also removes the above verse, or utterance, from its particular linguistic, cultural, and historical context of production. The limitations of the approach adopted by Ait Sabbah are also clear in her reading of the symbolism of the wali. The male tutor, she argues, represents the interests of the Muslim social order; the woman, if given the opportunity to choose her husband, would be motivated only by her libidinal desire. The woman and the male tutor represent respectively the confrontation between the forces of nature and those of culture. The orthodox discourse casts the woman as the representative of anarchy, the symbol of unreason and disorder, while the wali is constructed as “the representative of the Muslim order.”70 While this critique is relevant to the Maliki school with which the Moudawana is affiliated, it cannot be addressed to all fiqh, let alone represent the essence of Islam as a divine message. The institution of the wali is not a requirement for the Hanafi school, for example.71 To ignore this difference and plurality is clear evidence of the pitfalls of this secularist feminist approach. The essentialism of Ait Sabbah’s apprehension of Islam comes from the starting principle of her analysis, which defines the orthodox discourse as representing God’s voice. While “the erotic discourse is a reflection by a human being,” on the one hand, she argues, “the orthodox discourse, on the other hand, is the discourse of a god on power and its dispensation.” She adds:

69 70 71

Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 235. Ait Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, 36, 35. The new Moroccan Moudawana (2004) also makes the marital tutor optional.

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chapter four The orthodox discourse, source of truth and laws that guide the actions and thoughts of the believer, is not the work of humans; it is the work of a supernatural force who is God the creator, guardian, and master of the group.

This kind of confusion is behind the radicalism of one of the conclusions her book reaches, when she writes: And it is the necessity to subjugate woman as the incarnation of desire, the necessity for the believer to dominate and master her that explains the fundamentally misogynistic attitude of Islam, which is very plain in legal Islam and especially in the Sahihs. Misogyny—contempt for women and discrimination against them—is a structural characteristic and pivotal axis of the Muslim order; the reason/desire conflict overlays and polarizes a whole series of conflicts, each one as determining as the other.72

This quotation also suggests the origin of the idea behind revisiting al-Bukhari’s al-Sahih in The Veil and the Male Elite, as discussed in the next chapter. But if Woman in the Muslim Unconscious confuses Islam as a divine message with fiqh and its androcentric discourse, The Veil and the Male Elite engages in a feminist revision of al-Sahih with the assumption that it contradicts God and Muhammad’s message of justice and gender equality, as discussed in the next chapter. Ait Sabbah falls prey to another more obvious essentialism when she declares the Muslim God to be male and his message as relating a homosexual experience, hence the conflict between Islam and the heterosexual emotional involvement. One can only understand the fundamentally misogynistic attitude of the sacred by placing it within the power struggle that God, the abstract body, and woman, the concrete body, wage every day. The sacred can be interpreted ultimately as a homosexual experience. It is the attempt of the male principle at self-fertilization, if one regards the monotheistic God as a projection of earthly man. The sacred is, among other things, the fertilization of earthly man by the male principle erected into a divine (that is, abstract) body. It is this that produces the fundamental conflict between heterosexual union and the sacred, which in Islam is focalized around the conflict between reason and desire.73

72 73

Ait Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, 18, 64, 113–14. Ibid., 109.

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The idea of the opposition of Islam or God to heterosexual love is also the thesis of Beyond the Veil, providing further evidence that the same author wrote the two books. Mernissi states from the beginning: It appears to me that the Muslim system is not so much opposed to women as to the heterosexual unit. What is feared is the growth of the involvement between a man and a woman into an all-encompassing love satisfying the sexual, emotional and intellectual needs of both partners. Such an involvement constitutes a direct threat to man’s allegiance to Allah, which requires the unconditional investment of all his energies, thoughts and feelings in his God.74

Ait Sabbah and Mernissi believe that Islam is not exactly sexist since it subsumes both men and women to the same mutilation. Mernissi argues that “it is my belief that, in spite of appearances, the Muslim system does not favour men; the self-fulfillment of men is just as impaired and limited as that of women.”75 Ait Sabbah also believes that Islam is against the realization of human potentials as a whole. Islam is not a construction of the universe whose objective is to permit the human being to actualize his potentialities. Its objective is to take some of a person’s potentialities and from them fashion a believer, who is to be a being totally committed to obedience to and worship of a superior, abstract force: God. He is only fulfilled within that unequal relationship. Like woman, man’s end is not in himself. He is only defined by relation to the need of another. Woman is defined by relation to the orgasmic need of the male believer. The believer is defined by relation to God’s need to be worshipped.76

Inequality is thus the finality of the message of Islam since it is related to God’s desire to be adored. “The Koran,” Ait Sabbah continues, “is a treatise on the question of submission to the almighty and how to achieve it.” It is a monologue. The Koran is the point of view of the divine being on the relationship that must exist between him and the human being. The Koran is the universe according to the desires and will of the divine being. Nowhere in the holy book are the desires and needs of the human being expressed directly.

74 75 76

Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 8. Ibid., 173. Ait Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, 117.

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Thus the relationship that the Qur’an puts forward, according to her, is exclusively one of power, of master and slave.77 Reading Woman in the Muslim Unconscious with the resources provided by The Veil and the Male Elite, Ait Sabbah’s writing becomes clearly reductive as it ignores the interactive nature of the Qur’anic discourse, especially in its Medina stage. During this stage, it appears as a response to the questions of early believers and is even a response to the questions of some female disciples who were claiming equality with men, as discussed in the next chapter. These two different readings of Islam by the same author provide evidence to the importance of the interpreter’s perspective and the ability of the message of Islam to yield a plurality of meanings. Ait Sabbah’s secularist perspective reveals its own dogmatism when it fails to recognize plurality and erases ambiguity. For her, like Mernissi, the message of Islam contains no ambiguity: “the Koran, as a construction of the universe, has a crystalline limpidity,” she writes.78 It is about obedience and submission. This ignores other dimensions of the Qur’an, like the dimension of love and rahma (mercy), which Mernissi treats in her subsequent projects (especially L’Amour dans les pays musulmans and Islam and Democracy). In addition to its inability to account for the reasons for Islam still making sense to millions of women (and men), this secularist position reinforces the transcendentalism of fiqh and the idea of the fixity of regulations supposedly advocated by the Qur’an by not questioning the idea that orthodox interpretations are the true representation of Islam’s divine message. By reading the Qur’an literally and dehistoricizing it, the secularist feminist approach produces the Qur’an, in the same way as the fundamentalist discourse, as a legislative text, and its recommendations are seen as permanent prescriptions bounding all Muslims in all times. For this reason, this approach is, therefore, not exactly independent of the foundationalist religious discourse, but rather serves to reinforce its logic and power. The secularist feminist critic, then, embraces the same essentialist logic as her opponents, because, like them, she precisely considers the orthodox discourse (as represented by a scholar like al-Ghazali) as the ultimate truth of Islam. The essentialism (both)

77 78

Ibid., 80, 81. Ibid., 126n4.

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Mernissi (and Ait Sabbah) fall(s) into makes her (their) secularist approach to be the flip side of the androcentric religious coin. However, as I argued earlier, Mernissi’s (and Ait Sabbah’s) secularist critique should not be totally rejected. It has dared to radically ponder women’s status and gender construction in Islamic theology, domains of research that are part of what Mohammed Arkoun calls the unthought and the unthinkable in Islamic thought. The androcentrism and misogyny that Mernissi reveals hold true for the orthodox patriarchal theology believed to possess the unique and final meaning of Islam’s message.

CHAPTER FIVE

REVISITING ISLAM FROM ‘WITHIN’ L’Amour dans les pays musulmans L’Amour dans les pays musulmans (Love in Muslim countries), published in 1986, marks the turning point in Mernissi’s feminist trajectory. It is her first Islamic feminist text. The book’s thesis is in complete opposition to her previous studies Beyond the Veil and Woman in the Muslim Unconscious. In it, she asserts that Islam is not against love. In contrast to her two earlier works, which rely on the misogynous discourse of some orthodox theologians, the present book sheds light on liberal Muslim scholars, who preach faithfulness in heterosexual relationships, like Andalusian scholar Ibn Hazm (born in 384 Hegira [994 AD]) and (surprisingly, one might say) Abu Hamid al-Ghazali. She treats al-Ghazali differently here than in her earlier works, showing the importance of the reader’s, or interpreter’s, perspective when dealing with (religious) texts. She also bases her claim on the Islamic tradition of Sufism, which has a more liberal attitude toward women than ‘orthodox’ Islam. Although L’Amour dans les pays musulmans does not have the analytical rigor of her earlier books, since it is a collection of articles originally published in the magazine Jeune Afrique (Young Africa) in 1984, it does share their subversive style. In an irreverent tone that is reminiscent of Fatna Ait Sabbah’s derisive style, when describing her unorthodox methodology, Mernissi writes: L’un des privilèges de l’écriture, pour moi en tous cas, est d’écrire ce qui me passe par la tête, comme je le fais maintenant. Mais, quand je dis « ce qui me passe par la tête », je ne veux pas dire que c’est désordonné. Le processus d’écrire est très mystérieux. Mais ce qui est sûr, c’est qu’il n’est pas désordonné. Il obéit à un ordre qui n’est pas celui du lecteur, c’est tout. Souvent, dans certains genres d’écritures, les plus intéressantes selon moi, cet ordre échappe à l’auteur aussi. One of the privileges of writing, at least for me, is to write what comes to my mind, as I am doing now. But when I say “what comes to my mind,” I do not mean that it is disordered. The writing process is very mysterious. But what is certain is that it is not disordered. It obeys an

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chapter five order that is not the reader’s; that is all. Often, in some genres of writing, the most interesting [genres] according to me, this order escapes the author as well.1

To overthrow the male order/power, like Ait Sabbah, Mernissi claims a special order or disorder of writing and analysis. She is aware that she is involved in fabricating another narrative, one that does not claim ‘objectivity’ and ‘order.’ She aims to juxtapose her narrative to the male narrative, avoiding the latter’s pretension to truth. Though Mernissi’s title announces a sociological study of love in Muslim countries, the book is a study of ancient religious texts. This focus raises the question of the problematic reliance on religious texts to explain and discuss emotion and affection in present-day Muslim societies. This shortcoming is overcome in the book’s new edition, published in Morocco in 2007, through the use of a subtitle, A travers le miroir des textes anciens (Mernissi’s Web site provides a translation for the full title as “Love in [the] Moslem world through the mirror of ancient literature”), that narrows the original title’s scope.2 The feminist publishing house Le Fennec, led by Leila Chaouni, published the new edition.3 According to Mernissi, Chaouni wished to republish the more than twenty-year-old book in paperback to encourage young Moroccans to learn that Islam promotes love.4 What is the reason behind her shift with respect to Islam in L’Amour dans les pays musulmans? By 1984, the year in which she published articles in Jeune Afrique, Mernissi started mingling with a number of Moroccan male intellectuals, like Ahmed Khamlichi and Abderrazak Moulay Rachid, within the multidisciplinary research group Woman, Family and Child created in 1981. These male scholars, well versed in religious matters, advocated reform of the Moudawana using an Islamic framework. Their progressive Islamic thought might have started to shake Mernissi’s secularist take on Islam. By that time, Mernissi also became aware of the difficulty of using a secularist feminist discourse to advocate women’s rights in the Moroc1

Mernissi, L’Amour dans les pays musulmans, 9. Mernissi, L’Amour dans les pays musulmans: A travers le miroir des textes anciens (1986; repr., Casablanca: Le Fennec, 2007). 3 Chaouni founded Le Fennec in 1987. A number of its publications deal with women or gender, some of them initiated and edited by Mernissi, like the book series Approches. 4 See Mernissi’s Web site, http://www.mernissi.net/books/books/lamourdanslespays musulmans.html. 2

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can context and of the necessity to adjust her feminist language into more indigenous forms. The articles that form the book were published one year after her Qui l’emporte la femme ou l’homme? with its claim that “La Contestation féminine ne vient pas de Paris” (female contestation does not come from Paris), which is the title of its introduction. After digging into Moroccan folktales to prove that women’s contestation and her feminist discourse, by extension, is indigenous to Moroccan popular culture, she turns to Islam to make evident that her feminist discourse has roots in Islamic thought. Mernissi highlights female Muslim figures of resistance, like Sakina (or Sukayna), the Prophet’s granddaughter, who was assertive enough to have dictated her own conditions on her marriage contract, such as demanding that her husband could not take a second wife. For Mernissi, the mere existence in Islam’s history of a figure like Sakina demonstrates that present-day feminist claims are not Western importations but are authentically Islamic. Quand les femmes s’expriment et disent comment elles désirent être aimées, on s’aperçoit que le discours féministe n’est pas une importation diabolique de l’Occident. C’est un discours bien de chez nous. Sakina, petite fille de Ali, et Aicha Bint Talha violaient toutes les règles du mariage musulman lorsqu’elles dictaient leurs conditions au cadi chargé de dresser leur acte de mariage au premier siècle de l’hégire, le VIIe siècle chrétien. When women express themselves and say how they wish to be loved, we realize that the feminist discourse is not a diabolical import from the West. It is a discourse that comes from home. Sakina, the granddaughter of Ali, and Aicha Bint Talha violated all the rules of Muslim marriage when they dictated their conditions to the cadi [judge] in charge of writing their act of marriage in the first century of Hejira [Hegira], seventh century BC.5

This statement is part of her conversation with conservatives, who accuse her of cultural betrayal, as discussed before. It is interesting that here she confidently evokes the word ‘feminist,’ unlike in Qui l’emporte la femme ou l’homme? for instance, in which she only writes about “female contestation.” Another obvious cause behind Mernissi’s shift is the spread of political Islam in the late 1970s and 1980s. In their efforts to contextualize

5

Mernissi, L’Amour dans les pays musulmans, 19.

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her transition in The Veil and the Male Elite, Rebecca Barlow and Shahram Akbarzadeh mention that this period, marked by an economic crisis provoked by the failure of the modernization policy, gave birth to a general distrust of secular modernity, and secularism, and the emergence of claims of Islamization. In Morocco the economic crisis brought on by foreign debt precipitated street riots. Tensions were exacerbated by widespread dissatisfaction with the government’s incompetence in providing comprehensive health and education services. Modernisation appeared to be faltering; the ruling regime was clearly suffering from a legitimacy deficit. The Islamist response to the failure of the modernisation paradigm in Morroco, as elsewhere in the Middle East, was to reject the secular model and call for a return to Islam. “Islam is the solution” became the catch cry in response to all social ills. Western secularism was identified with the entire range of problems that were being experienced in Muslim societies.

It is in this context that Muslim feminists “were compelled, or chose, to recognise the centrality of Islam to Muslim identity, as well as its power as a source of legitimacy and popular mobilization.” Consequently, Barlow and Akbarzadeh state that it appeared necessary for Fatima Mernissi to redefine her feminist project in a manner that Muslim women perceived as a more authentic accommodation of modernity to their religion and culture.6

One element in L’Amour dans les pays musulmans that corroborates the above analysis and shows the beginning of an awareness of the necessity of shifting her perspective is when Mernissi discusses the veil as a symbol of resistance. At this point, she interestingly mentions an article, published in 1979, by Tunisian feminist scholar Souhayr Belhassen, “Femmes Tunisiennes islamistes” (Tunisian Islamist women). Mernissi reports that, according to this article, Islamist women choose to veil to express a series of refusals, claims, and aspirations.7 She cites an interviewee from Belhassen’s study, who argues that after the failure of Western capitalist and Marxist ideologies, there is room for new values, those of Islam. To this, Mernissi comments that “porter

6

Barlow and Akbarzadeh, “Women’s Rights in the Muslim World,” 1486. Mernissi, L’Amour dans les pays musulmans, 74. Souhayr Belhassen, “Femmes Tunisiennes islamistes,” in Le Maghreb Musulman en 1979 [The Muslim Maghreb in 1979], ed. Christine Souriau (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1979), 77–94. 7

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le voile, dans ces conditions, c’est prendre position contre des agressions culturelles. Le voile [est] à l’envers” (to wear the hijab, in these conditions, is to take a stand against cultural aggressions. The veil [is] upside down).8 Interestingly, like Mernissi’s two previous books, the point of departure of L’Amour dans les pays musulmans in analyzing the attitude regarding love in Islam is al-Ghazali. Here, Mernissi brings up alGhazali as a religious scholar who champions love in Islam through his account of the Prophet’s love for his wife Aisha. Mernissi lays out the main questions of her study as follows: Pourquoi cet aspect de l’Islam est devenu si étranger à nous? Pourquoi aimer est devenu un acte ridicule de nos jours, une spécialité d’adolescents? Qu’avons nous fait du souvenir du prophète amant? Pourquoi est-il si absent de nos échanges banals, quotidiens, routiniers? C’est un peu pour partager ces réflexions, les lectures et leurs délices que j’ai écrit ce texte sur« L’Amour ». Why did this aspect of Islam become so foreign to us? Why has love become a ridiculous act nowadays, a specialty of teenagers? What have we made of the memory of the Prophet-lover? Why is he so absent from our banal, daily, and routine interactions? It is somehow to share these thoughts and their delights that I wrote this text on “Love.”9

The above questions clearly indicate the beginning of Mernissi’s articulation of her new feminist position elaborated in The Veil and the Male Elite, which portrays the Prophet as a lover and an early advocate of women’s rights. In L’Amour dans les pays musulmans, al-Ghazali’s views of ideal female beauty, characterized by passivity and obedience, do not represent the Islamic canon of female beauty, as Ait Sabbah argues. For the ‘new’ Mernissi, there is no single Islamic model of beauty, since beauty has depended on historical moments; in the Abbasid period, for example, the canon of female beauty was a mixture of knowledge and beauty.10 Thus, her approach is more nuanced here than in her earlier accounts, because it is less ahistorical and essentialist. After shedding light on the progressive thinking of some individual male scholars with respect to love in Islam, Mernissi foregrounds Sufism as another important experience of Islam that emphasizes love 8 9 10

Mernissi, L’Amour dans les pays musulmans, 75. Ibid., 11, 11–12. Ibid., 63.

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and equality as the basic relationship between God and the believer, male or female. Mernissi provides the example of Mansur al-Hallaj (born in Iran in 244 Hegira [857 BC]) and his ideas about mystic love as the basis of Islam, which contradict orthodox Islam’s emphasis on obedience. For the Sufi mystic al-Hallaj, God as love inhabits the believer’s innermost soul. This led al-Hallaj to utter the famous statement that justified his accusation of heresy and his execution: “Ana al-haq, wa al-haqu ana” (I am al-haq [al-haq is one of the attributes of God] and al-haq is me). For Mernissi, his persecution and execution is evidence of the violent political and ideological manipulation of Islam and its construction as a single rigid ideology, which condemns heterogeneity and reason. Mernissi’s analysis also brings to the forefront the female mystic Rabia al-Adawiya, a saint and poet of the eighth century, considered one of the most important figures of Sufi Islam. Al-Adawiya had a number of male disciples, whom she initiated to the quest of transcendentalism. She is, according to Mernissi, the incarnation of the egalitarian aspect of Sufism and, by extension, Islam. She states, “avec les Sufis, en effet, on entre dans un monde où les frontières, sont très mobiles, et la séparation homme-femme, ou homme-Dieu, très flou” (with the Sufis, as a matter of fact, one enters a world where the frontiers are very mobile and the separation man-woman, or man-God, very hazy.”11 Mernissi’s major question is: “Pourquoi n’enseigne-t-on pas dans les écoles primaires où l’on modèle la personnalité des enfants, cet islam de l’amour?” (Why don’t we teach in primary schools, where we mold the personality of children, this Islam of love?).12 In her subsequent book The Veil and the Male Elite, she relates her personal uneasiness with the Islam taught in school. She already suggests the answer to the question in Beyond the Veil and Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, both of which stress the instrumentality of hierarchical Islam and hierarchical gender relations, in particular, to the authoritarian configuration of political power in postcolonial societies. Mernissi advocates, then, the reactivation of this liberal aspect of Islam represented by Sufism instead of the rigid orthodox version dispensed in schools. Therefore, if Beyond the Veil underscores the existence of a ‘sexual

11 12

Ibid., 110. Ibid., 106.

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anomy’ in gender relations, which generates suffering and anxiety, as a consequence of the important gap between the realities of the evolving male-female dynamics and the conservative ideology of family legislation, L’Amour dans les pays musulmans proposes the reactivation of ‘liberal Islam’ as an ethical system. However, the major limitation of Mernissi’s approach in this book is the adoption of an apologetic discourse, a limitation that unfortunately characterizes her second-stage feminism. Contrary to the criticism in Beyond the Veil and Woman in the Muslim Unconscious of the conception of sexuality in Islam and female sexuality, in particular, she writes in L’Amour dans les pays musulmans, “tandis que le christianisme se méfie des femmes et du désir qu’elles suscitent, l’Islam les glorifie dans de nombreux livres sacrés sur l’amour” (whereas Christianity is suspicious of women and the desire that they arouse, Islam glorifies them in a number of sacred books on love).13 Clearly, this statement, which dramatically contrasts her previous books’ findings and arguments, romanticizes the issue and falls prey to apology. In addition, Mernissi carefully avoids rereading Qur’anic verses dealing with women in L’Amour dans les pays musulmans, which suggests the difficulty of moving from a secularist to an Islamic feminist position. Since the book is her first attempt to bring together feminism and Islam, she has not yet found the appropriate approach to the Qur’an, especially its androcentric discourse, which she cannot yet explain. It is not until her subsequent work, The Veil and the Male Elite, that she overcomes this difficulty by adopting a historical or contextual reading of Qur’anic verses. The Veil and the Male Elite In The Veil and the Male Elite, originally published in 1987, one year after the publication of L’Amour dans les pays musulmans, Mernissi’s shift toward Islam is clearer. I have already hinted that the resurgence of Islamism as an oppositional discourse in the late postcolonial era largely dictated this change. Mernissi’s interlocutor is no longer a postcolonial neopatriarchal state with its ambiguous discourse on women and gender equality, but an Islamist discourse in which the

13

Ibid., 99.

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family in general and the woman in particular are placed at the center of its concerns.14 With this new social and political background, she decides to trespass the secularist boundaries of her earlier feminist agenda in order to engage in religious issues from a position of an insider, as a Muslim woman. But, as suggested before, one cannot affirm that the shift in Mernissi’s feminist perspective is essentially political or strategic, since this change was not abrupt but gradual, starting from L’Amour dans les pays musulmans. The change is also the outcome of her gradual recognition of the plurality of Islam. She has become aware that Islam not only promotes the version activated in the 1957 Moudawana but also has allowed less misogynistic interpretations, as in the case of Sufism, and has made women flourish, as in the examples of al-Adawiya and the Prophet’s youngest wife, Aisha. In fact, the central female figure in The Veil and the Male Elite is Aisha, who epitomizes, for the new Mernissi, the early Islamic encouragement of female self-assertion. This is obviously the antithesis of Beyond the Veil, which stages the figure of Khadija, the Prophet’s first wife and a businesswoman, whom Mernissi uses as evidence of preIslamic women’s self-determination, curtailed by Islam. The new attention to Aisha announces the switch in Mernissi’s feminist perspective as indicated by her following statement, discussing how she ‘discovers’ this Muslim female figure: Elle [Aisha] était merveilleuse. Elle avait cette chance inouïe, elle avait ce mari incroyable qui aimait cette intelligence et cette force des femmes et qui lui donnait l’espace nécessaire pour qu’elle se réalise. Plus tard, j’ai découvert cette bataille qu’elle a menée, la bataille du chameau. She [Aisha] was wonderful. She was extremely lucky. She had a great husband, who loved this intelligence and this strength, and who gave her the necessary space for self-fulfillment. Later, I discovered that battle that she had led, the Battle of the Camel.15

The obvious suggestion here, which The Veil and the Male Elite emphasizes, is that Islam actually allowed the flourishing of women’s selfdetermination and autonomy. This statement, addressed to the French Serge Ménager and designed for a Western audience, can be viewed as

14

Taieb Belghazi and Mohammed Madani argue that, starting from the 1990s, Islamism in Morocco has shifted its central concern from the political regime to the protection of the patriarchal family (encoded by the former Moudawana), which is in crisis and is felt to be “endangered.” Belghazi and Madani, L’Action collective, 139. 15 Mernissi, “Fatima Mernissi,” interview by Ménager, 113.

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an affirmative strategy by which Mernissi decenters feminism, placing it at the center of Islamic history. The Veil and the Male Elite foregrounds the ‘feminist’ claims of the Prophet’s wives and even presents the Prophet as a feminist. This decentering is one of the strengths of her new take. However, the above statement also shows that Mernissi’s new take is prey to a certain mystifying discourse that resembles apologetic religious rhetoric. Mernissi completely ignores, in line with the thesis of Beyond the Veil, that Aisha’s free attitude may be one of the vestiges of (aristocratic) women’s power in pre-Islamic Arabia. As Leila Ahmed points out, in contrast to Khadija, Aisha, however, lived at a moment of transition, and in some respects her life reflects Jahiliya as well as Islamic practice. Her brief assumption of political leadership after Muhammed’s death doubtless had its roots in the customs of her forebears, as did the esteem and authority the community granted her. The acceptance of women as participants in and authorities on the central affairs of the community steadily declined in the ensuing Islamic period.16

Mernissi’s lack of objectively considering this possibility is a prelude to the apologetic discourse of her new take in this book, which is, in my view, one of the weaknesses of her new approach. The position of The Veil and the Male Elite is influenced by the Islamic modernist discourse of Khamlichi and Moulay Rachid, whom Mernissi encounters at the beginning of the 1980s. This was the time when some women’s associations and scholars in Morocco started to advocate the amendment of the Moudawana (without much success).17 It is significant that Khamlichi is an alim (singular form of ‘ulama,’ religious scholar), a member of Le Conseil Superieur des Oulama (the High Council of Ulama), one of the roles of which is to guide and support the king’s decision in a would-be modification of the family law. The Moudawana falls within the prerogatives of the king, who has the religious title of ‘Amir al-Mu’minin’ (Commander of the Faithful). First promulgated after independence in 1957, the Moudawana was modified only twice, once in 1993, with very minor changes, and a second time in 2004, with a reform considered by many associations as revolutionary. Interestingly, Khamlichi is one of the ulama who took

16

Ahmed, Women and Gender, 43. See Zakiya Daoud’s book, Féminisme et politique, on the history of the feminist movement in Morocco and the Maghreb. 17

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part in the committee that was in charge of elaborating the new law. Today, he serves as the director of Dar al-Hadith al-Hassania, one of the most important schools for the training of ulama in Morocco. Moulay Rachid is a jurist. In 1981, he defended the first thesis in a Moroccan university dealing with women’s status and condition in Morocco, entitled “La Condition de la femme au Maroc” (Woman’s condition in Morocco) and published it in 1991 as La Femme et la loi au Maroc (Woman and law in Morocco).18 He advocated the amendment of the Moudawana by focusing on Islam’s egalitarian scope rather than its letter. Khamlichi and Moulay Rachid jointly published in 1981 a critical study of the Moudawana, entitled “Moudawanat al-ahwal al-shakhssia ba’da khamsata ‘ashara sanatin min suduriha” (The Moudawana: Fifteen years after its issue).19 Their assessment criticizes the law’s exclusive reference to the Maliki school and its closure to other schools whose jurisprudence may be more progressive. This is the case, for instance, of the Hanafi school, which abolishes the institution of marital tutorship. The two scholars also denounce the refusal of the Moudawana creators to incorporate progressive readings dealing directly with the two sources of legislation, the Qur’an and the Sunna (the Prophet’s tradition mainly based on the Hadith), without automatically going through fiqh teachings. They call for taking social context into consideration and criticize the orthodoxy’s refusal to accept the intervention of the social sciences, which explains the Moudawana’s clear alienation from the changing social reality. Their take supports Mernissi’s later endeavor, to reread the Qur’an and Sunna from outside the enclave of religious science in The Veil and the Male Elite. Khamlichi’s progressive ideas in his contribution to the 1987 publication, Portraits de femmes, to which Moulay Rachid and Mernissi also contribute, is particularly suggestive as far as explaining the influences behind Mernissi’s new position. His chapter, “Massadir al-qanun almunadhim li wad’iyati al-mar’a bi al-Maghrib” (The sources of law regulating the status of women in Morocco), shows that the family code, which conservatives refuse to change because of a presumable

18

Moulay Rachid, La Femme et la loi au Maroc (Casablanca: Le Fennec, 1991). Khamlichi and Moulay Rachid, “Moudawanat al-ahwal al-shakhssia ba’da khamsata ‘ashara sanatin min suduriha,” in Al-Majalla al-maghribia li al-qanun wa alsiyassa wa al-iqtissad [The Moroccan magazine of law, politics, and economics], no. 10 (1981): 128–53. 19

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fidelity to the shari’a, cannot actually pretend to be a faithful translation of divine law; it is very much ideologically biased.20 He starts by distinguishing between the shari’a, as a divine law consigned in the Qur’an, and the Sunna, on the one hand, and its interpretation by fiqh, on the other hand. For him, when the Moroccan legislation refers to the shari’a, it refers in reality to a particular interpretation of the shari’a, or to the ijtihad of ulama who belong to the third and fourth centuries of Hegira (ninth and tenth centuries AD). By historicizing what is commonly known as the shari’a, through stressing that fiqh is a human ijtihad, Khamlichi aims at desacralizing the Moudawana in order to argue for the legitimacy of change. His critique starts by removing the cloak of sacredness over fiqh itself, suggesting its historical contingency, hence its inability to respond to a new social condition. He also shows that the Moroccan ulama, who were behind the elaboration of the family code, ignore this nuance; refuse to consider other schools (because they are trained in the Maliki school); and are against the collaboration of economists, jurists, psychologists, and sociologists. Khamlichi states that these ulama rely on a historically contingent ijtihad; refuse to engage in a revision project, or a true ijtihad, which, he argues, has been closed starting from the tenth century, and opt instead for taqlid (imitation) while rejecting progressive readings that directly engage the sources of the shari’a taking into consideration the changing reality. Yet Khamlichi’s modernist standpoint (like Mohammed Arkoun’s) does not consider the existence of a ‘progressive’ fiqh as represented by the sixteenth-century Moroccan faqih Ahmed Ibn Ardun, who issued a subversive fatwa allowing women the right to receive compensation after divorce. Being from the rural (northern) region of Chafchaoun, this faqih was more sensitive to the value of women’s work in rural areas than his (usually) aristocratic and urban peers from the city of Fez, the Moroccan center of religious knowledge. Ibn Ardun also issued a fatwa asserting women’s right to sexual pleasure relying on al-Ghazali’s ideas. Interestingly, it is a secular sociologist, Abdessamad Dialmy, who cleaned the dust off the faqih in 1986 in his article “Un Fqih marocain et les droits de la femme au XVIè siècle.”21 20

Khamlichi, “Massadir al-qanun.” Dialmy, “Un fqih marocain.” Dialmy is known for his secularist ideas and for his specialty on sexuality in Morocco. In 1981, he defended his thesis on sexuality “Sexualité et societé: étude théorique et pratique” [Sexuality and society: A theoretical and 21

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In fact, Dialmy offers an important contribution to the debate on feminism, or ‘Islamic feminism,’ in Morocco as early as 1986. At the heart of his contention is the question of the endogeneity of feminism and the ground on which to seat feminist claims in Morocco, as discussed before. This began with his two articles in response to Mernissi’s Qui l’emporte la femme ou l’homme? followed by the article on Ibn Ardun. His book, Sexualité et discours au Maroc, which compiles the arguments of his three articles, initiates a very interesting conversation with both Mernissi and Moulay Rachid over their ‘feminisms.’ As mentioned earlier, he discredits Mernissi’s attempt to ground feminist contestation on a folkloric tale, which, for him, clearly voices a patriarchal and misogynous ideology. With respect to Moulay Rachid, Dialmy criticizes his progressive reading of the Qur’an and his argument that feminism is compatible with the spirit of Islam. For Dialmy, this point of view is “insincère” (insincere), “une mystification” (a mystification), and “une ruse feministe” (a feminist ruse). His criticism is particularly based on Moulay Rachid’s rereading of the Qur’anic verses qiwama (responsiblity) (2:228) and the daraja (degree) (4:34), which Moulay Rachid, according to Dialmy, interprets as not sanctioning the superiority of men over women, but as a verse that should be considered as restricted to the particular context of marriage and the husband’s responsibility to provide for his wife. For Dialmy, in contrast, the notion of superiority is more faithful to the Qur’anic text.22 Dialmy’s position is, therefore, clearly secular, yet it cannot be easily dismissed as secularist or as voicing an antireligious worldview. On the contrary, his book puts forward the argument that the feminist advocacy of women’s rights in Morocco should (strategically) seat itself in fiqh. He also calls for transcending the polarized attitudes in Morocco toward fiqh. Le fiqh peut être soit l’objet d’un refus en raison de sa légitimation de la hiérarchie sexuelle, soit l’objet d’une vénération en tant que sacré. Peuton dépasser des positions aussi tranchées, aussi extrémistes? Fiqh can be either the object of refusal because of its legitimization of sexual hierarchy, or the object of a veneration as sacred. Aren’t we able to transcend positions so clear-cut, so extremist?

applied study] (PhD diss., Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, Université Mohammed V, Rabat, Morocco, 1981). 22 Dialmy, Sexualite et discours, 86, 82–83, 83n50.

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He points out that the problem does not so much lie in (Moroccan) fiqh as much as in the selective rationale, or eclecticism, of those who elaborated the Moudawana when drawing their laws from this tradition. Dialmy contends that the feminist dismissal of fiqh is not a solution. He argues that digging into the scholarship of fuqaha, especially marginal fiqh (like Ibn Ardun’s), offers the possibility of constructing “un fiqh rationnaliste” (a rationalist fiqh). He also points out that defending female orgasm and making the wife’s work capable of earning wages are two model directions provided by this ignored and repressed rational fiqh. From this premise, he continues, all feminist values today are “islamisables” (Islamizable). He concludes by arguing that there is a necessity to give more attention to minor or peripheral opinions, like Ibn Ardun’s; to open up to schools other than Malikism; and to engage in ijtihad.23 It is unfortunate that the conversation initiated by Dialmy with Mernissi and Moulay Rachid is not followed up by them. The next year, Mernissi published The Veil and the Male Elite, which locates feminism at the kernel of the Qur’anic discourse, following the line of thinking of Moulay Rachid and especially Khamlichi, whose name clearly appears at the top of her acknowledgments as one of her most helpful sources.24 Khamlichi’s modernist Islamic discourse has no doubt opened new avenues for Mernissi. This connection is also suggested by the following statement, in her introduction to Portraits de femmes: Des Ouléma, comme le professeur Khamlichi, soutiennent de nos jours qu’on peut trouver dans le Coran des arguments pour justifier une législation plus égalitaire, où la femme jouit de tous ses droits et de sa dignité. Le fondement même de la misogynie dans les pays arabes, qui se disent « sacrés », est loin de faire l’unanimité parmi les fuqaha et les Ouléma, que ce soit au début du siècle ou de nos jours. Ulama, such as Professor Khamlichi, maintain today that we can find in the Qur’an arguments to justify a more egalitarian legislation, in which woman enjoys all her rights and her dignity. The very foundation of

23

Ibid., 116, 123, 122, 123, 123–24. Mernissi, Veil and Male Elite, x. Khamlichi’s name is also associated with another Islamic feminist scholar in Moroccco, Farida Bennani. He supervised her doctoral thesis, which she published in 1993. Bennani, Taqsim al-‘Amal. The thesis of Bennani’s book builds on Khamlichi’s views of fiqh, but also uses analytical tools from the works of other scholars of Islamic thought, such as Arkoun, as well as feminist conceptual tools. 24

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chapter five misogyny in Arab countries, which present themselves as “sacred,” is far from having unanimous support among the fuqaha and ulama, either in the beginning of the [twentieth] century or nowadays.25

Beyond influencing her research, the encounter and collaboration with the two progressive male scholars of Islam also reconcile Mernissi with the Islam of her childhood. This is not devoid of value for a Muslim woman who had been angry with one of the most important components of her identity and psychological making. The weight of this internal conflict is clear in the following statement: Throughout my childhood I had a very ambivalent relationship with the Koran. It was taught to us in a Koranic school in a particularly ferocious manner. But to my childish mind only the highly fanciful Islam of my illiterate grandmother, Lalla Yasmina, opened the door for me to a poetic religion.

The rest of the passage emphasizes a central element of this reconciliation, her recognition of the importance of interpretation and the interpreter’s worldview in the construction of Islam, overlooked in her secularist writings. She adds: Depending on how it is used, the sacred text can be a threshold for escape or an insurmountable barrier. It can be that rare music that leads to dreaming or simply a dispiriting routine. It all depends on the person who invokes it. However, for me, the older I grew, the fainter the music became. In secondary school the history of religion course was studded with traditions. Many of them from appropriate pages of [Muhammad Ibn Ismail] al-Bukhari, which the teacher recited to us, made me feel extremely ill at ease.26

This statement, by which she introduces her revision of al-Bukhari’s al-Sahih, further expresses the feeling of uneasiness toward Islam’s androcentric side, which is common to many Muslim feminists. The following reflection by South African scholar Sa’diyya Shaikh is instructive in articulating the position of a number of scholars later producing Islamic feminist scholarship (even those who have difficulties accepting the label) and in explaining their commitment to alleviate gender injustice in Islamic law through revisiting Islamic tradition from a gender perspective.

25 26

Mernissi, introduction to Portraits de femmes, 88. Mernissi, Veil and Male Elite, 62, 64.

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I am a Muslim South African feminist. There are two significant personal motivations that propel me in my academic work. Firstly, I have a fundamental commitment to justice as a spiritual core of Islam. The second related point is my experience of spiritual and psychological and social dissonance when I read much of the authoritative textual material in Islam which makes it almost impossible to consider myself, a female Muslim, as the normal addressee of the text. I am very often left with the uneasy and unpalatable notion that as a female, I am the ‘Other’ within the house of Islam. It is not a position I am willing to accept. My rejection is not only based on the very real pain that I experience as a human being through this exclusion but, more importantly, it is my very deep commitment to the fundamental Islamic view of the full khilafa [caliphate] of all human beings, male and female. This commitment makes it impossible for me to surrender my religion to what I consider to be the shirk [the sin of polytheism] of patriarchy.27

With The Veil and the Male Elite, Mernissi was one of the first scholars to take up the challenge of delving into religious studies, usually closed to people of her training, and of going beyond the boundaries of her own formative discipline, sociology. In this book, she investigates the authenticity of some misogynous hadiths, casting doubt on their genuineness. She also produces a rereading of some Qur’anic verses dealing with women, especially the verses related to the hijab, putting them into their historical context and suggesting their prescriptive impermanence. These two aspects constitute the two major parts of her book. Mernissi is aware of the double defiance of her endeavor, religiously and politically. Venturing into the theological domain and defying male clerical surveillance is a risky act, as she explains in the beginning of her book: Delving into memory, slipping into the past, is an activity that these days is closely supervised, especially for Muslim women. A passport of such a journey is not always a right. The acts of recollecting, like acts of black magic, really only has an effect on the present. And this works through a strict manipulation of its opposite—the time of the dead, of those who are absent, the silent time that could tell us everything. The sleeping past can animate the present. That is the virtue of memory. Magicians know it, and the imams know it too.28

27 28

Shaikh, “Knowledge, Women and Gender,” 99. Mernissi, Veil and Male Elite, 9–10.

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As mentioned before, her defiance led to a death fatwa pronounced against her and the censorship of her book in Morocco. One of the central ideas of The Veil and the Male Elite, and also of Mernissi’s previous writings, stresses the political and ideological manipulation of the religious. Not only have the sacred texts always been manipulated, but manipulation of them is a structural characteristic of the practice of power in Muslim societies. Since all power, from the seventh century on, was only legitimated by religion, political forces and economic interests pushed for the fabrication of false hadiths.

She also uses this statement to introduce the legitimacy of her revision of the Hadith ‘as a Muslim woman’ who has the right and perhaps the duty to defy these political maneuvers by investigating the past against the grain of male surveillance. Introducing her book, Mernissi addresses the question of the religious legitimacy of her rereading. She asks: To go poking around in the vast areas of the Muslim heritage that is mine—is this a sin for me? Doesn’t the Koran according to the Lissan al-‘Arab (The Language of the Arabs, a prestigious dictionary), command us simply to “read”? But can one ever “simply” read a text in which politics and the sacred are joined and mingled to the point of becoming indistinguishable from each other?29

By this statement, she both emphasizes the idea that the Qur’an, by its very etymology, invites interpretation and suggests the idea that interpretations have never been neutral, hence the legitimacy of her revision. Legitimization in Mernissi’s case is a double challenge; she is not only a woman but also a sociologist. She needed to impose the legitimacy of a woman engaging in fiqh and exegesis and the legitimacy of the social sciences to deal with religious issues. She devotes a few pages to assert the scientific nature of religious knowledge in the Islamic tradition. Thus, she starts by emphasizing her right as a Muslim woman to reread Islamic texts according to the teachings of the Prophet, who considered religion a science, and according to a long Islamic tradition that has considered religion a scientific domain.30

29 30

Ibid., 8–9, 49, 9, 10. Ibid., 3.

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Mernissi also astutely makes a parallel between religious science and modern social sciences, and even suggests that traditional religious sciences are one of the precursors of modern sciences. We will see in the case of al-Bukhari, one of the ninth-century founders of the science of the isnad (the chains of transmission from the time of the Prophet), how the Muslims developed a science for the authentication of the Hadith that resembles interview and fieldwork technique (and that would turn late-nineteenth-anthropologists green with envy).31

As argued throughout this book, Mernissi always has in mind two kinds of audiences, or two types of potential detractors: religious conservatives and Western ethnocentrists to whom the above statement seems to be addressed. Mernissi further asserts the scientific vocation of fiqh by referring to such authoritative figures as al-Bukhari and Imam Malik Ibn Anas.32 She strategically underlines the extreme care with which al-Bukhari consigned the hadiths that he included in his al-Sahih, separating unsound from sound traditions. Insistence on the scientific vocation of the hadith consignation through the isnad (methodology of authenticating a hadith) as a theological methodology and the prudence of these early Muslim scholars allows her to affirm the human aspect of their scholarship, and therefore to desacralize it. It also enables her to introduce her revision of a few hadiths considered authentic by alBukhari, who is significantly one of the most important collectors of hadiths in Sunni Islam, hence her carefulness in claiming her right to revision.33 She states: “The great lesson to be drawn from al-Bukhari’s experience in coming to grips with the flight of time and failing memory is that one must be true to one’s method and honor it, by continuing to mistrust all those who regulate their affairs with the help of Hadith.” She thus inscribes her revisionist endeavor in continuity with al-Bukhari’s tradition of verification and counter-verification rather than defying or disrespecting it. Al-Bukhari becomes a legitimizing element of Mernissi’s investigation. With respect to the main hadith with which she deals in this book, she writes:

31

Ibid., 9. Ibid., 43–44, 59. 33 For the Shi’a, the authoritative text in the matter is al-Kafi (That which is sufficient) compiled by Muhammad Yacoub Kulayni. Al-Kafi is a collection of hadiths attributed to the prophet Muhammad and the Infallible Imams, according to the Shi’a. 32

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chapter five According to al-Bukhari, it is supposed to have been Abu Bakra who heard the Prophet say: “Those who entrust their affairs to a woman will never know prosperity.” Since this [h]adith is included in the Sahih— those thousands of authentic [h]adiths accepted by the meticulous alBukhari—it is a priori considered true and therefore unassailable without proof to the contrary, since we are here in scientific terrain. So nothing bans me, as a Muslim woman, from making a double investigation— historical and methodological—of this hadith and its author, and especially of the conditions in which it was first put to use. Who uttered this hadith, where, when, why, and to whom?34

She declares openly her insider position as a Muslim woman and the affiliation of her approach to the methodologies of a religious scholar like al-Bukhari, though she ends up challenging his methodology by asking new questions and using new analytical tools. Mernissi justifies investigating the hadith “Those who entrust their affairs to a woman will never know prosperity” by its relevance to today’s politics and especially Moroccan women’s political representation. She opens her book with a simple question: “Can a woman rule a Muslim state?” which she asks her (fictitious) grocer, because he, as all grocers, is a “barometer” of public opinion in Morocco. The grocer answers in negative terms using the above hadith. Mernissi uses the fictitious grocer character to justify her otherwise controversial underlying idea that religious discourse explains the underrepresentation of Moroccan women in today’s politics. Women’s low political representation, she argues, is not a sign of Arab Muslim societies’ backwardness as much as a manifestation of the androcentrism of the male elite and their vested interests, hence the significance of going back to Islam’s founding period and to the founding texts to highlight the dark zones of resistance to women’s access to power. She writes: The journey back in time then is essential, not because the pilgrimage to Mecca is a duty, but because analysis of the past, no longer as myth or sanctuary, becomes necessary and vital.35

Thus, Mernissi defines her revision as a demystifying analysis of Muslim memory, though her discourse falls, at times, prey to mystification, as I shall demonstrate.

34 35

Mernissi, Veil and Male Elite, 44, 49. Ibid., 1, 2, 24.

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Through her historical investigation of Islam’s founding period, Mernissi sheds light on a fundamental conflict between the Prophet Muhammad’s social vision and male elite’s interests. In Mernissi’s narrative, Muhammad appears as a “Prophet/lover,” who preached nonviolence and equality, and who dreamt of a democratic society. In his time, women had their place in the community as equal partners. The Prophet and his God, she also argues, could be consulted by believers, both men and women. It is the period during which “the Muslim community lived out the Muslim ideal.”36 This ideal time, she continues, disappeared with the Prophet’s death and the birth of struggles over power, which constitutes the political background of the formative Hadith period. Mernissi’s historical account demystifies the idyllic idea of Islam’s early history, especially the period after the Prophet’s death. This began when the Prophet was abandoned without burial three days in Aisha’s apartments; his companions and disciples were busy preparing his succession, as Aisha complained. For Mernissi, Muhammad’s death signals the end of democracy and the beginning of elitism and political violence. After his death, only the elite were involved in the election process. Soon, this elitism turned into a dynastic affair, which the Prophet had tried to avoid. Far from being idyllic, this early period, she points out, is one of dissension, political rivalries, violence and assassinations, elitism and marginalization, and manipulations of the Prophet’s tradition for political reasons. She argues that after his death and the development of the succession problem, numerous hadiths arose to legitimize emerging political claims.37 This narrative is a major difference between Mernissi’s and an Islamist’s return to the past. The suggestion is, to use Jonas Svensson’s words when describing Mernissi’s argument: While there are moral ideals and exemplary models for individual emulation to be found in early Islamic history, the Medina society as a whole definitely does not provide a blueprint for a social ideal today.

As discussed later in this chapter, in all her work, irrespective of her position vis-à-vis Islam, there is an assumption that religion should be restricted to the private sphere. Svensson observes that this is a major

36 37

Ibid., 10, 48, 102, 31 Ibid., 39, 42, 43–65.

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difference between Mernissi and other Muslim scholars, like Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na’im and Riffat Hassan.38 Verifying the truthfulness of the hadith “Those who entrust their affairs to a woman will never know prosperity” transmitted by a disciple, Abu Bakra, Mernissi asks new questions. She, for example, questions the circumstances under which this disciple remembered this statement, which al-Bukhari did not (and probably could not) ask. Abu Bakra, she observes, remembered this saying twenty-five years after hearing it from the Prophet, which from the outset is suspicious to her. She first examines available biographical elements concerning this disciple. She finds out, for example, that Abu Bakra was an ex-slave, whom Islam had liberated and elevated to the rank of a notable, a position that he probably did not want to renounce. His position might explain the reason for his remembering such a hadith in the particular historical juncture that Mernissi unveils. According to Mernissi’s inquiry, Abu Bakra remembered this statement after Aisha’s defeat in the Battle of the Camel against Ali Ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet’s cousin. Ali tried to gain the sympathy of Aisha’s supporters, or gain potential allies among Bassora dignitaries, including Abu Bakra, when the latter cited the hadith.39 Abu Bakra explained that he had refused to take part in Aisha’s offensive because he had heard the Prophet uttering this statement. Mernissi also reveals that Abu Bakra had already been accused of perjury and was flagellated during Umar Ibn al-Khattab’s rule. For Mernissi, these elements make Abu Bakra’s reliability doubtful, according to the rules of isnad. Mernissi’s inquiry into Abu Bakra’s biography leads her to recommend “good Malikite Muslims” to reject him as a reliable transmitter. She states: “if one follows the principles of Malik for fiqh, Abu Bakra must be rejected as a source of Hadith by every good, well-informed Malikite Muslim.”40 This conclusion is, in my view, one of the instances of the disabling strategies of her methodology. The strategy of verifying the authenticity of a few misogynous hadiths could have been enabling if it were not an end itself and if its central objective were the problematization of authenticity. Instead, Mernissi makes the untruthfulness of those particular hadiths an end, rather than a means, to stress

38 39 40

Svensson, Women’s Human Rights, 214. Mernissi, Veil and Male Elite, 51, 53. Ibid., 53.

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the problematic nature of the authentication methodology as practiced by al-Bukhari and others; to suggest the untenable aspect of literalist and legalist readings of the Prophet’s statements; and, more important, to build a case for the contextual approach, or the necessity of contextualizing religious texts, like the hadiths. By going as far as concluding that this or that transmitter is unreliable, or this or that hadith is untrue and therefore should be discarded, she exceeds the limits of problematizing authenticity and even reinforces the authenticity discourse by espousing its very logic. One can logically ask: What if the revision of isnad did not provide for the desired objective, which here is the transmitter’s unreliability? In other words, what if the hadiths are found to be authentic? And, to borrow Kecia Ali’s questions, what are the implications of the Prophet’s action for the contemporary world? Is his precedent binding or is it to be understood as limited to the particular circumstances of his time and place?41

One can also wonder whether Mernissi’s methodology, which may have succeeded with the particular hadiths that she investigated, is likely to succeed with all hadiths voicing a patriarchal worldview. I am especially thinking of the argument made by Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid and others regarding the Qur’anic discourse, but which is also applicable to the Hadith. This argument basically states: because the Qur’anic discourse first addressed a particular people, for whom gender differentiation was an important part of their culture and social system, it was only normal that it would reflect this differentiation in its dialogical conversations, or polemics, with them, since its ultimate objective was, above all, communication, or communicating a certain message. To say this, Abu Zaid adds, does not mean that the Qur’an espoused this differentiation. It is also a mistake, according to him, to consider dialogical or polemical expressions as legislation per se that Islam brought about or invented, adding that the so-called legislative verses do not exceed one-sixth of the whole Qur’an.42 In my view, Mernissi’s conclusion that the hadiths articulating an androcentric vision should be discarded by fiqh because they are untrue leaves uncriticized the logic of considering prophetic statements

41 42

Ali, Sexual Ethics and Islam, 51. Abu Zaid, “Qadiyyat al-mar’ah,” 43.

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in general as fixed statements of law, and even reinforces such a foundationalist discourse. While the strategy is certainly enabling for an Islamic feminism seeking the subversion of androcentrism in Islamic jurisprudence, it should not be the central focus, since the ultimate aim, it seems to me, is the dismantling of foundationalism and fixity altogether. Therefore, making authentication the inquiry’s objective central rather than a method by which to problematize authenticity and emphasize contingency and historicity, Mernissi settles within the confines of the methodology of authentication, isnad. This methodology verifies the transmitters’ reliability and the hadiths’ authenticity with the aim of adding them as sources of law, without considering the context of their production and the changing present-day environment. Mernissi, thus, strengthens the foundationalist logic, based on the consideration of the Prophet’s statements and Qur’anic texts as statements of law binding all Muslims in all times. Her conversation with the tradition is not productive, since she ends up agreeing on the principle of authenticity or authentication rather than leading the discussion toward the necessity of rethinking traditional methodologies and the necessity of introducing new reading methodologies, like the contextual approach. I believe that one way of transcending the limitations of the search for authenticity is to ask new questions. At times, Mernissi’s methodology emphasizes, but also deviates from, asking new questions. What are the cultural, social, and ideological elements that inform religious texts, and what do they tell us about the society of the time? What is the original tone in which a statement attributed to the Prophet was uttered? And, most important, were these texts or statements meant to be prescriptive, or rather descriptive, as Abu Zaid would ask? Authentication should not be the ultimate objective of revisions. The responsibility of the Islamic feminists who today initiate such conversations with the tradition, equipped as they are with new (in addition to traditional) tools, is to take tradition to other spheres. This is not simply a negative, critical project, but a productive one, that is, one that aims to revitalize this tradition through raising new issues. What is at stake, in my view, is not to prove the inauthenticity of all hadiths voicing an androcentric worldview, but to emphasize that these texts may not be meant to be (permanent texts) of laws regulating gender relations for eternity, but are descriptive of past practices and worldviews. This kind of thinking is not totally new or ‘unislamic.’ In his work, Sudanese scholar An-Na’im, following his compatriot, the late Mah-

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moud Mohamed Taha (1909–85), stresses, for example, that the orthodox caliph Umar took the liberty not to follow the Prophet’s tradition and some Qur’anic texts, justifying his “deviations” from the primary texts “by his perception of what constitutes the best interest of the Muslim community.” This is the case, for instance, of verse 9:60, which specifies, in clear terms, according to An-Na’im, the items of expenditure or the beneficiaries of state funds, to include al-mu’alafati qulubuhum, those whose hearts and allegiance to the Muslims need to be won over or retained through the provision of material incentives.43

Umar chose to ignore this text, though the Prophet abided by it in his lifetime, and refused to pay it, arguing that it was paid at a time when Muslims were in a weak state, and since the context had changed, the payment would be stopped. Another case of Umar’s ijtihad, even in the presence of clear Qur’anic texts, is when he refused to distribute lands captured during the conquests of Iraq and Syria as part of ghana’im (spoils of war) granted to combatants under Qur’anic verses 59:6–10. An-Na’im points out that Umar justified his decision “by arguing that to do so would deprive the state of essential resources necessary for maintaining its armies to defend its territories.” An-Na’im concludes: “contemporary Muslims have the competence to reformulate usul alfiqh and exercise ijtihad even in matters governed by clear and definite texts of the Qur’an and Sunna.”44 This supports the idea that foundationalism, or the system of classifying the foundations of the shari’a law, is arbitrary and problematic. The particular classification of usul al-fiqh as being, first, the Qur’an; second, the Sunna; third, the ijma’; fourth, the qiyas; and, last, the ijtihad is itself a mere interpretation, or human ijtihad, according to An-Na’im. For An-Na’im, this classification is not binding for all Muslims in all times. Umar’s ijtihad suggests that Muslims today may choose ijtihad as a first-step methodology, transcending the early fiqh’s normative classification that makes ijtihad the last step, and engaging in a new ijtihad or the construction of a new shari’a, which takes the changing social reality into consideration. It is this kind of confidence in the ability of not conforming to foundational texts, or

43 An-Na’im, Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights, and International Law (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 28. 44 Ibid., 28–29.

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foundationalism, that should be emphasized by scholars of Islamic feminism. Mernissi’s methodology, however, does not succeed in going beyond foundationalism. In contrast, Shaikh’s approach avoids, in my view, some of the pitfalls of Mernissi’s methodology. Shaikh presents a new reading of some hadiths to counter androcentric theological interpretations without falling prey to the pitfalls of the authenticity discourse. One of Shaikh’s assumptions is that the Prophet came to reform and “ameliorate aspects of patriarchy without bringing the entire paradigm into question.” Shaikh also argues that these hadiths embody the patriarchal assumptions of their formative context, but opposes “contemporary Muslim proponents of patriarchy [who] often look to those hadiths . . . as the justification for supporting sexism in Islam.”45 Thus, her position of faith does not lead her to affirm that misogynous hadiths are not authentic because they go against the Prophet’s intention to establish an egalitarian society, as Mernissi suggests in The Veil and the Male Elite. Shaikh considers these hadiths in their historicity; in other words, she considers these statements, or utterances, as products of a given historical, social, linguistic, and cultural background. Shaikh does not present her reading as the truest to the Prophet’s intention, but keeps different readings of these hadiths in tension with each other. She affirms the plurality of meaning that the hadiths offer rather than verify their authenticity. Most important, she uses these hadiths to inform her of the society and prevailing gender ideology at the beginning of Islam and at the time of Hadith consignation. She writes: My paper is not concerned with isnad criticism and historical authenticity. In short, I am concerned with approaching the Hadith as a religiocultural text which provides a mirror into the dominant conceptions of gender and the category of woman within a formative period of the Muslim legacy, as well as the ways in which these become ideologically functional subsequently in defining religious ideals of gender.46

Her methodology does not relinquish analytical rigor to fall into mystification. This assessment is not to debase Mernissi’s work in The Veil and the Male Elite. On the contrary, Mernissi succeeds in questioning the authenticity of al-Bukhari’s al-Sahih and deploys an outstanding

45 46

Shaikh, “Knowledge, Women and Gender,” 104, 100. Ibid., 100.

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contextual reading of the Qur’an. Furthermore, one must take into consideration that she published her book in 1987. It is not surprising that as one of the pioneering texts of Islamic feminism, her book has some difficulties assuming this novel position and determining the contours of this new critical methodology. The critical comparisons I am making here should be understood as a way to identify enabling approaches and to think about alternative methodological roads for this promising project called ‘Islamic feminism.’ Mernissi’s approach in The Veil and the Male Elite has opened new avenues for feminism in Islam, hence my deployment of her methodology here. Another target of Mernissi’s critique is Abu Huraira, one of the Prophet’s companions and one of the most respected transmitters of hadith in Sunni Islam. He is the narrator of a number of misogynous hadiths, among them, “the Prophet said that the dog, the ass, and woman interrupt prayer if they pass in front of the believer, interposing themselves between him and the qibla [the direction of Muslim prayer],” consigned in al-Bukhari’s Al-Sahih.47 Mernissi argues that, when consigning this misogynous hadith, al-Bukhari neglected a number of elements that make the hadith’s veracity doubtful. For instance, al-Bukhari ignored Aisha’s refutations, which stated that Abu Huraira only heard part of the sentence. According to Aisha, the Prophet was talking critically about a specific Jewish tribe who had this vision of women. Mernissi maintains that to overlook this version of the story underlines the androcentric bias of al-Bukhari, who easily accepted the veracity of a hadith with such a misogynous load, ignoring his own rules of counter-verification. He also neglected to look into the disciple’s biography, which might have suggested his biases and unreliability. This is another indication of al-Bukhari’s own male-biased methodology. Mernissi’s inquiry into Abu Huraira’s biography reveals interesting facts. His occupation particularly caught her attention. Abu Huraira used to help the Prophet’s wives with domestic chores, an activity that was certainly not considered masculine or of any value at that time. Mernissi logically concludes that this unvalued task and his inferior status with respect to the Prophet’s wives could explain his misogynous attitude and narration of the above hadith. She especially underlines his conflicted relationship with Aisha. Another important fact that she

47

Mernissi, Veil and Male Elite, 64.

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brings up, and that al-Bukhari disregards, is that Umar was suspicious of Abu Huraira’s “infallible” memory and refused to consider him a trustworthy source of hadiths; for him, Abu Huraira remembered too many hadiths. In fact, Mernissi notes, during the three years that he spent in the Prophet’s company, Abu Huraira succeeded to remember the incredible number of 5,300 hadiths!48 Abu Huraira’s hadith, which clearly voices a dehumanization of women, Mernissi contends, finds roots in the Jahiliya mentality and the belief in women’s polluting nature, which Islam came to discard. She adds: Islam stresses the fact that sex and menstruation are really extraordinary (in the literal meaning of the word) events, but they do not make the woman a negative pole that “annihilates” in some way the presence of the divine and upsets its order.

As suggested earlier, for the new Mernissi, Islam’s “totally revolutionary” relationship to the female was betrayed and regressed to its pre-Islamic configuration. Misogyny, she adds, quickly gains the fuqaha’s discourse, where the superstitious vision of the polluting female reemerges.49 Mernissi’s task is enormous; she asserts the importance of a critical approach to the texts collecting the Hadith, one that doubts their claims to truth and authenticity. She stresses the necessity to revisit the tradition that has, in Arkoun’s words, “transfiguré les acteurs historiques de la Mecque et de Médine en Témoins irrécusables, en Transmetteurs scrupuleux de tous les évènements fondateurs de l’islam” (transfigured the historical actors of Mecca and Medina into uncontestable Witnesses, scrupulous Transmitters of all founding events in Islam).50 However, she avoids such an overt statement and prefers to engage in subtle demystification. She would like to lead her readers to gradually accept that the laws organizing women’s rights in Islam are not sacred and immutable, avoiding to state clearly the assumptions of her position and approach. She is content with the suggestion that

48

Ibid., 71–79, 79, 80. Ibid., 69–70, 74, 75. 50 Arkoun, “Islam et développement dans le Maghreb indépendant” [Islam and development in independent Maghreb], in Pour une critique de la raison islamique, 364. 49

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al-Bukhari’s al-Sahih is not that sahih (authentic) and that it should be subject to revision. What conclusion must one draw from this? That even the authentic Hadith must be vigilantly examined with a magnifying glass? That is our right, Malik Ibn Anas tells us. Al-Bukhari, like all the fuqaha, began his work of collecting by asking for Allah’s help and acknowledging that only He is infallible.51

This statement, which evokes Imam Malik, underlies another strategy that Mernissi uses: turning the tradition’s tools against it. It also represents how the isnad’s tools actually enabled her isnad criticism. Doubting these hadiths, she suggests, does not come from a secularist methodology but from the methodology of the fuqaha. By affirming that only Allah is infallible, she also desacralizes al-Bukhari’s work and gives further authority to her own revision. Mernissi’s criticism of Abu Huraira is one of the elements that made her book subject to contention and ‘censorship’ in Morocco.52 In 1999, Abdelkébir Alaoui Mdaghri, the head of the Ministère des Habous et des Affaires Islamiques (Ministry of Habous [land property legislation] and Religious Affairs, 1984–2002) at the time, published a book in response to Mernissi’s work. The publication date coincided with the issuance of the controversial Plan of Action for the Integration of Women in Development (PANIFD), which Mdaghri clearly opposed. Among the reforms that the PANIFD advocated was modification of women’s legal status. The debate that the PANIFD triggered in Morocco gave birth to the 2004 Moudawana reform. Mdaghri’s text, Al-Mar’a bayna ahkam al-fiqh wa al-da’wa ila al-taghyir (Woman between the fiqh’s laws and the call for change), from the outset announces the argument’s conservative flavor, suggesting a clear and fixed idea about ‘woman’ or ‘Moroccan woman.’ He states: “Nu’akkidu . . . annana ma’a al-islah wa ma’a al-taghyir . . . ’ala sharti an yatimma dhalika intilaqan min shari’atina . . . la an yakuna mujarrada taqlidin li al-gharb” (I assert that I am with reform . . . as long as it does not contradict our shari’a . . . and is not a mere imitation of the West). He also argues that

51

Mernissi, Veil and Male Elite, 76. In a brief word that I exchanged with her in 2004, Mernissi objected to my use of the term ‘censorship’ with respect to the fate of her book when it first appeared. She maintained that it was “kidnapped” from Moroccan bookstores and has never been subjected to an official ban. Later, the book was translated into Arabic and the French edition circulates today as well. 52

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women’s legal status is regulated by the Qur’an and Sunna, which nobody can change. Feminists and feminist organizations who call for change of the Moudawana do not represent Moroccan women, since, according to him, “al-mar’a . . . mutamassikatun bi al-din, radiyatun bihukmih” (woman sticks to religion and accepts its law). Of course, Mdaghri ignores that he does precisely what he accuses the feminists of doing, namely, speaking in the name of women. Not surprisingly, he also voices the prevalent conservative argument regarding gender equality, which states that men and women are ‘equal,’ but that they have ‘different’ roles, which are in harmony with their ‘nature.’53 Mdaghri devotes a whole chapter to Mernissi’s The Veil and the Male Elite. He argues that Mernissi has no knowledge about religious sciences and that her analysis is superficial. He mockingly calls her a “faqiha biduni fiqh” (a female faqih without fiqh). The mere use of the female adjective ‘faqiha’ already stirs mockery because of the prevalent belief that fiqh is a male domain. His comment is indicative of the difficulty of accepting other readings coming from disciplines outside of religion. Mdaghri starts his chapter on Mernissi by mentioning a talk that he gave in 1990 in front of King Hassan II in the Ramadan religious lectures, which usually are seminars that gather ulama from all over the Muslim world. According to him, in his lecture, he mentioned that women are not entitled to the “al-wilaya al-‘amma” (universal guardianship), which he explains as caliphate, or presidency of state today. He bases his argument precisely on the hadith that Mernissi invalidates: “Those who entrust their affairs to women will never know prosperity.” He also mentions that some secular opponents have criticized his point of view and explains that his chapter on Mernissi responds to these secular opponents. Mdaghri presents his argument unambiguously as a defense of this hadith.54 His reaction to Mernissi’s book and his defense of the hadith shows that Mernissi’s refutation was not convincing and that focusing on proving the inauthenticity of a few hadiths is counterproductive, only leading to a sterile debate over truth. Mdaghri observes that Mernissi starts her book as a good Muslim, but soon “dhalaliha al-qadim” (her former perdition), alluding to her secularist position, takes the upper hand. Concerning the hadith that 53

Mdaghri, Al-Mar’a bayna ahkam al-fiqh wa al-da’wa ila al-taghyir (Mohammedia: Fedala, 1999), 4, 215, 26, 32. 54 Ibid., 23, 220, 233, 211, 212.

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Mernissi investigates, he asserts that it is a “sharif ” (authentic) not “da’if ” (weak) hadith. He bases his argument on the fact that no woman has ever held the head of state position. He mentions Bhenazir Bhutto some pages later to prove that even when a woman is elected as head of state, it is a failure. He also supports his argument by stating that Islam banned women from the imamate of prayer. He adds, “Wa ‘ala kulli hal fa hadha ikhtiyarun ikhtarahu al-islam, wa ja’alahu qa’idatan ‘amma fi binai al-mujtama’i al’islami” (anyway, this is a choice that Islam made, and considered a general basis for the construction of the Muslim society). His use of ‘Islam’ refers to the ijma’ of the fuqaha and ulama. He continues: al-ulama ya’atabiruna hadha al-hukm maqtu’an bih, hatta annahum rubbama la yadhkuruna sharta al-dhukurah . . . wa ka’annahum ya’tabiruna annahum la yatakallamuna ‘ani al-imam illa wa huwa dhakar The ulama consider this rule unquestionable. They perhaps even do not mention the criterion of maleness . . . as if they consider that they do not talk about the imam except when he is a male.55

Mdaghri fails to see that early ulama did not discuss the criterion of maleness simply because their (patriarchal and andocentric) worldview did not allow them to do so; gender equality as a concept was unknown to them. Against the logic of his argumentation, one can also contend that since the fuqaha did not mention the criterion of maleness, nothing bans women from occupying, or aspiring to, this position. Mdaghri concludes by going beyond fiqh argumentation to invoke ‘scientific’ arguments, as if he felt his point was not sufficiently convincing. He alludes to some medical views in general terms, which, according to him, confirm the existence of an opposition between women’s nature and political leadership. He mentions, for example, pregnancy, menstruation, breastfeeding, and emotions and sensitivity of women. It is here that he evokes Bhutto’s example, or “failure” according to him, to strengthen this point of view. He argues in vague words: wa hunaka ‘adadun mina al-bahithin fi al-‘ulumi wa al-tib yu‘ariduna bishiddah tafwida al-mar’a a’la mansibin tanfidiyin fi al-dawla, wa dhalika bi mandhurin ‘ilmiyyin baht

55

Ibid., 216, 232, 233.

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This is an instance of how ‘science’ comes to the rescue of the alim, Mdaghri. It is interesting to note that Shi’ites do not consider Abu Huraira, whom Mdaghri defends, trustworthy with respect to hadith transmission. An Iranian friend once told me that Mernissi’s critique of Abu Huraira is closer to the Shi’a orthodox treatment of him. This struck me as signifying that what is considered unorthodox and heretic on one pole of Islam is legitimate and orthodox on the other. It also shows that this doctrinal difference between Shi’a and Sunni could be enabling and productive for Islamic feminists, especially since they belong to the two sects and are most of the time irreverent of orthodox boundaries in their networking projects. These scholars of gender can perhaps exploit these theological differences in their struggles against androcentrism in Islam. It indicates that islamic feminism is an interesting space of liminality within Islam, and that islamic feminists, from both faiths, can be parasitic to the knowledge produced in the two camps, benefiting from their different arguments and turning them against their constructed androcentric narratives. Mernissi’s book is an example of this ‘parasitic’ attitude, which is threatening to both orthodoxies. The Veil and the Male Elite was banned in Iran when the book was translated into Persian, which suggests that Iranian authorities most likely considered the book’s second part, dealing with the Qur’an and more precisely with the verse of the hijab, as subversive. In 2003, a letter by the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) regarding the persecution of publishers and translators in Iran sent to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, mentions that the translator Maliheh Maghazei, the publisher Jafar Homaei, and the literary critic Majid Sayadi were sentenced to prison terms ranging from one year to eighteen months by the Criminal Court of Tehran. The authors of the letter state that the court found them guilty of “deliberately distorting the history and undermining the basic tenets of Islam” by translating a work “most of which content is a misrepresentation of Quranic verses . . . a work imbued with femi56

Ibid., 234, 234–35, 235.

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nist opinions and infatuation with the West . . . a work which shamelessly assigns certain positions to the Prophet and to Islam which will undermine the very bases of Islamic beliefs.”57 After examining the realm of the Sunna through hadith criticism, Mernissi moves to the Qur’an, revisiting the methodology of tafsir, Islamic exegesis. Her focus is mainly on the Qur’anic verses dealing with women, in particular the verses invoking the hijab. Her interest in these verses is in line with the issue that her work explores, which is the hudud, or the frontiers that the patriarchal discourse constructs between the worlds of men and women. Exploring verses on the hijab is important, because, as she explains, they “introduced a breach in space that can be understood to be a separation of the public from the private,” which is contrary to the democratic society dreamt of by the Prophet.58 Her rereading of these verses is interesting as it proposes to understand them in their social and historical contingency with the strong suggestion that they should be considered descriptive and contingent rather than permanently prescriptive. As Rebecca Barlow and Shahram Akbarzadeh state, Mernissi attempts to explain away the highly restrictive verses of the Qur’an by attributing them to sociomilitary conditions specific to the time in which they were revealed.59

The strength of this new approach is that it transcends the determinism and essentialism of her first secularist approach toward another type of reading strategy: historicizing Qur’anic verses. Mernissi’s strategy to pave the way for her historicization of the Qur’anic text is attention grabbing. In the original French edition, Le Harem politique, she begins by evoking the “Satanic verses,” which refer to verses 53:19–22 delivered by the Prophet as part of the Qur’an and later retracted.60 These verses are said to have acknowledged the power of the female goddesses of the Quraysh tribe—Allat, Manat, and al-Uzza—during the persecution of Muhammad and his disciples by

57 See Committee on Academic Freedom of MESA to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, December 23, 2003, http://www.mesa.arizona.edu/caf/letters_iran.html. 58 Mernissi, Veil and Male Elite, 101. 59 Barlow and Akbarzadeh, “Women’s Rights in the Muslim World,” 1491. 60 Mernissi, Le Harem politique, 41–42. Discussion of the “Satanic Verses” is absent from the English translation of The Veil and the Male Elite, because, as Svensson explains, “the ‘Rushdie Affair’ took off in 1989, and the topic has yet not ceased to be sensitive.” Svensson, Women’s Human Rights, 155.

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the Meccans in the beginning of Islam. Later, the Prophet disavowed the verses as whispered to him by Satan. The verses are controversial since they suggest that the Prophet admitted the existence of the goddesses, which constitutes a blow to Islam’s monotheism. By invoking the Satanic verses, Mernissi does not seek to desacralize the Qur’an, but to stress from the outset the Prophet’s humanity and vulnerability, which allows her to argue that forces of circumstances dictated the hijab verses. Mentioning the Satanic verses also allows her to underscore the importance of the historical context in reading and understanding the Qur’an and suggests, in a subtle way, the Qur’an’s human dimension (which is not the same as denying its divine origin). Like the Mu’tazila, to whom she pays tribute in Islam and Democracy as discussed in the next section, Mernissi asserts, though very cautiously, that the Qur’an is not just transcendental but also has a human dimension. As Svensson states concerning her approach: “The Qur’an is still the word of God, but relativised in relation to a historical context of dissension and pragmatism.”61 Having subtly introduced her new reading strategy, Mernissi asks readers to “remember that the Koran is a book rooted in the daily life of the Prophet and his community; it is often a response to a given situation.”62 This statement is an important instance of how she introduces the idea that the Qur’an, even when being the Word of God, is most often “situational” rather than “transcendental,” to borrow the words of Ali Asghar Engineer, quoted by one of Mernissi’s critics, Anouar Majid.63 In his article, Majid criticizes Mernissi’s methodology in The Veil and the Male Elite on the grounds that it “desacralizes the Qur’an by reducing it to a mere historical document.”64 Yet he clearly falls into contradiction in this article when he reproaches Mernissi for her historicization of the Qur’an while quoting approvingly such scholars as Engineer and An-Na’im who precisely call for the abandonment of

61

Svensson, Women’s Human Rights, 159. Mernissi, Veil and Male Elite, 87. 63 Engineer, The Rights of Women in Islam (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), quoted in Majid, “Politics of Feminism,” 352. 64 Majid, “Politics of Feminism,” 329–30. Majid has changed his position regarding this particular point since the publication of his article. Majid, interview by author, Rabat, Morocco, April 28, 2004. In a lecture, he also declared that the Qur’an, like other scriptures, is a text that is open to multiple interpretations. Majid, “PostHumanities English” (lecture, Department of English, Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, Université Mohammed V, Rabat, Morocco, April 28, 2004). 62

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the Medina verses altogether, since, according to Majid, they had had their particular historical circumstances and are obsolete today. After all, Mernissi is also dealing with Medina revelation, to which belong the verses on the hijab. Majid writes: Taha and his disciple Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, however, go further than any mainstream reformer to call for the total elimination of the Shari’a (since it is inherently inegalitarian and patriarchal and cannot be altered beyond certain limits) and the creation of a new law based on Meccan Revelation (i.e., before the Prophet’s flight [hijra] to Yathrib, later Medina, an event that inaugurated the Islamic calendar and that, in Mernissi’s view, set back the freedoms of women and reinstated them at the point zero of history). Although extremely controversial, such an arrangement would not necessarily be un-Islamic, for the Shari’a is “a situational, not a transcendental law.”65

To subscribe to An-Na’im’s project and Engineer’s idea is to accept the Qur’an’s historicity and its historicization. In addition to showing the vacillation of Majid’s position, the above statement indicates that he authorizes himself to decide which approach is ‘Islamic’ and which is not; this is an instance of the abuse of authority, or authoritarianism, denounced by Khaled Abou El Fadl’s book Speaking in God’s Name. Another example of Majid’s authoritarian discourse is when he argues that “with the exception of a few rules in the Qur’an, one can negotiate any ideology within the wide and amorphous parameters of the faith.”66 This perspective, of course, leaves unanswered such questions as: “Who decides and How one decides What these exceptional rules are?” as Suad Joseph rightly contends in her critical response to Majid’s article. She also writes: The solution he [Majid] offers, through the indigenous and progressive path charted by Mahmoud Mohamed Taha and his disciple Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im “based on Meccan Revelation” . . . is, nevertheless, a recuperative of an earlier true version of Islam. His critique of “false Islamic orthodoxy,” refreshing as it is, raises the question of who and how one knows the “true Islam.”67

65 Majid, “Politics of Feminism,” 351–52. In this statement, Majid quotes Engineer, Rights of Women, 9. 66 Majid, “Politics of Feminism,” 332. 67 Joseph, “Comment on Majid’s ‘The Politics of Feminism in Islam’: Critique of Politics and the Politics of Critique,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 23, no. 2 (1998): 367, 366.

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The tenants of a discourse like Majid’s, which supposes the existence of permanent rules that cannot possibly be changed, assume a position of authority and an implicit claim of orthodoxy that discard other readings as unorthodox and even heretical. Mernissi’s contextual reading raises issues that are, in my view, refreshing for Islamic thought and its development. Her methodology is an important contribution not only to the revision of isnad but also to the methodology of tafsir. She starts her rereading of the hijab verse (33:59) by asking new questions and proposing a new approach that transcends or challengingly expands the methodology of exegesis.68 She asks: “What does the hijab really represent in the early Muslim context? What does the word signify? What are its logic and justification? When was it inaugurated, for whom, and why?”69 Mernissi proposes to read the verse of the hijab taking into consideration the historical, social, and psychological context of the whole period between year five and year eight after Hegira. Her contextual approach builds on, or departs from, what is known in exegesis as asbab al-nuzul, which is itself a historical approach and may be seen as the precursor of the contextual approach, yet one that is limited to the immediate circumstances of the verse. She starts by relating the verse dealing with women’s veiling with another one preceding it, verse 33:53, which recommends that the Prophet’s companions should respect his privacy when he is in his apartments by talking to him behind a hijab.70 According to exegesis, and to Abu Jafar Muhammad Ibn Jarir al-Tabari, in particular, the verse came to protect the intimacy of the Prophet, bothered by the lack of tact of one of his disciples, Anas Ibn Malik, on his wedding day to his cousin Zaynab Bint

68

69 70

Verse 33:59 is: O prophet, tell your wives, your daughters, and the wives of the believers that they shall lengthen their garments. Thus, they will be recognized (as righteous women) and avoid being insulted. God is Forgiver, Most Merciful. Mernissi, Veil and Male Elite, 81. Verse 33:53 is: O you who believe, do not enter the prophet’s homes unless you are given permission to eat, nor shall you force such an invitation in any manner. If you are invited, you may enter. When you finish eating, you shall leave; do not engage him in lengthy conversations. This used to hurt the prophet, and he was too shy to tell you. But God does not shy away from the truth. If you have to ask his wives for something, ask them from behind a barrier [hijab]. This is purer for your hearts and their hearts. You are not to hurt the messenger of God. You shall not marry his wives after him, for this would be a gross offense in the sight of God.

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Jahsh. Mernissi observes that the hijab first appeared to put a barrier between two men rather than between a man and a woman, and that it has its own social and historical circumstances. But, for her, the immediate circumstances that al-Tabari evokes according to the narration of Anas Ibn Malik is not sufficient. In describing the “descent of the hijab,” al-Tabari does not try to give us the reasons for the irritation of the Prophet, who was known for his composure and infinite patience. This irritation was to precipitate the revelation of such a grave decision as the establishment of the hijab.71

For Mernissi, “the incident that took place during the night of the Prophet’s wedding to Zaynab must be resituated in its context—an epoch of doubts and military defeats that determine the morale of the inhabitants of Medina.” She starts by observing that the verse appears in Medina in year five, a year marked by military and social crisis. She evokes the defeat of Muslim troops in the Battle of Uhud in year three and its important human loss, which resulted in psychological and social crisis in the community. The Qur’an, in this particular verse, alludes to this social crisis. The last part of the verse, she points out, warns Muslims against marrying the Prophet’s wives after his death, suggesting the verse’s social and psychological background. Mernissi concludes that the Prophet was subject to harassment during these troubling years. At the end of his life, she explains, a growing opposition to his leadership by some people from his own community, whom the Qur’an calls ‘al-Munafiqun’ (hypocrites), saw light. The opposition was so tense that the Prophet’s wives were subject to sexual harassment and some of these hypocrites threatened to marry his wives after his death, as suggested by the verse. It is here that Umar urged the Prophet to impose veiling on his women, which the Prophet opposed in the beginning. With growing dissension and opposition, faced with the difficult choice between the survival of Islam and its unity, or the survival of the egalitarian project, she continues, Muhammad was forced to yield to Umar’s pressures.72 The verse recommending the veiling of his wives and those of his disciples settled the issue. Mernissi’s methodology goes beyond the exegetic technique of asbab al-nuzul toward studying the broad historical and social circumstances of the verse and using the Qur’an to inform readers about this historical 71 72

Mernissi, Veil and Male Elite, 85, 87–88. Ibid., 92, 138–39.

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background. It compels exegesis to go beyond its methodological limits. Stressing the limitations of al-Tabari’s methodology, Mernissi interestingly poses the question of methodology in the Qur’an’s interpretation. The hijab was to be the solution to a whole web of conflicts and tensions. However, a rapid reading of the Koranic text, like Anas’s testimony reproduced by al-Tabari, gives the opposite impression. This leaves us with the following methodological impression: Are we obliged to limit our investigation of that verse to the wedding night of Zaynab or, on the contrary, are we entitled to seek the causes elsewhere—in the historical context, for example?73

Arkoun provides an affirmative answer to Mernissi’s last suggestion concerning methodology. He maintains: Les versets ne reçoivent pas leur sens des « circonstances de la Révélation » (asbab al-nuzul), mais ils peuvent fournir à l’historien des indications sur l’état de la culture et de la société en Arabie au début du VIIe siècle. Verses do not receive their meaning from the “occasions of revelation” (asbab al-nuzul), but they can provide the historian for indications on the state of culture and society in Arabia in the beginning of the seventh century.74

Mernissi’s new approach joins Arkoun’s call for revisiting medieval theology by expanding the historicizing technique of asbab al-nuzul and using Qur’anic verses as historical texts that inform readers about the Arabian society and culture of the time. She argues for the necessity to look at the historical context, or the socio-spatial context, which informs the reader of an important element: the weight of social control on the Prophet, favored by the spatial proximity with his disciples.75 This is not a pure historical inquiry, but a methodology that allows the removal of women’s legal status from the sacred domain. As a matter of fact, Mernissi devotes a whole chapter to describe the weight of social control on the Prophet through an examination of his relationship to space. Her assessment conveys an understanding of the impact of rumor on the Prophet, which is important in explaining

73

Ibid., 93. Arkoun, “Comment lire le Coran?” [How to read the Qur’an?], preface to Le Coran [The Qur’an], trans. Albert de Biberstein Kasimirski (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), 36. 75 Mernissi, Veil and Male Elite, 89, 108, 110. 74

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why he succumbed to the imposition of the hijab. She suggests that this scission of space that the hijab stands for is not what the Prophet desired but what the force of circumstances dictated. Muhammad, she argues, did not separate his private life from his public life. Aisha’s apartment, for example, gave direct access to the mosque. Mernissi also stresses that the Prophet’s wives, in general, participated in his decisions. The Prophet’s close relationship to his wives and to the rest of the community, she continues, expresses the Prophet’s democratic inclination. Khadija, his first disciple, played a central role in supporting him in his mission. Umm (mother of ) Salama, his other wife, dared to ask the Prophet challenging questions concerning women’s status in the Qur’an, pleading for equality, to which God responded through a verse that affirmed that he equally addresses both men and women. Mernissi also underscores the fact that a sura bears the name of ‘women,’ al-nissa.76 Evoking these elements reinforces the idea that the Qur’anic message is a situational and an interactive discourse, and that its scope is egalitarian. However, Mernissi’s analysis conveys a certain overzeal and mystification. She mentions that Umm Salama’s questions transcend an isolated individual act and are symptomatic of “a veritable protest movement by the women.”77 Naima Chikhaoui rightly contends that this should be relativized since Mernissi is only dealing with a minority of women, the Prophet’s wives.78 This is one instance of Mernissi’s Islamic feminist standpoint unfortunately losing the analytical rigor of Beyond the Veil. Another example of Mernissi’s mystifying narrative is when she discusses a verse that affirms women’s right to inheritance. She writes: This little verse had the effect of a bombshell among the male population of Medina, who found themselves for the first time in direct, personal conflict with the Muslim God. Before this verse, only men were assured the right of inheritance in Arabia, and women were usually part of the inherited goods. . . . A wife, at the time of inheritance, seemed to be nothing but an object. . . . The new laws threw all this into question. Islam affirmed the idea of the individual as subject, a free will always present in the world, a sovereign consciousness.79

76 77 78 79

Ibid., 108, 107, 104, 111, 103, 249, 120. Ibid., 119. Chikhaoui, “La Question des femmes,” 21. Mernissi, Veil and Male Elite, 120–21, emphasis mine.

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This passage is an instance of how Mernissi falls prey to the mystifying narrativization specific to the apologetic orthodox discourse. She ignores that Muhammad’s first wife Khadija, described as an autonomous widowed businesswoman, had probably inherited her husband’s property. This mystification weakens the historicization of Islam that The Veil and the Male Elite asserts. It serves to reinforce the sacredness and permanence of inheritance law that grants a son a share equivalent to that of two daughters, which might be contested as unsatisfactory today. It also risks diverting attention from the idea that Islam came to reform rather than establish women’s status, as Arkoun argues.80 Clearly, Mernissi retracts her argument in Beyond the Veil that pre-Islamic women used to have an active role and enjoyed a certain degree of self-determination, which is in line with Hatoon Ajwad al-Fassi’s book Women in Pre-Islamic Arabia. Contrary to Mernissi’s apologetic discourse portraying women’s status in pre-Islamic Arabia as mere objects, Leila Ahmed argues that Jahiliya women were priests, soothsayers, prophets, participants in warfare, and nurses on the battlefield. They were fearlessly outspoken, defiant critics of men; authors of satirical verse aimed at formidable male opponents; keepers, in some unclear capacity, of the keys of the holiest shrine in Mecca; rebels and leaders of rebellions that included men; individuals who initiated and terminated marriages at will, protested the limits Islam imposed on that freedom, and mingled freely with the men of their society until Islam banned interaction.81

This is not to argue that Beyond the Veil’s account of the pre-Islamic period was the right one, but to warn against the perils of adopting a mystifying apologetic discourse and, by the same token, reinforcing its logic. In contrast to Mernissi’s mystifying narrative, Ahmed’s study relates Islam’s reform in inheritance matters to the particular economic system of Mecca, in which the Prophet originated. Women’s rights to inherit property—generally speaking, a woman is entitled to about half a man’s share—was another Islamic decree that Medinians found novel and apparently uncongenial. Medina’s being an agricultural community presumably made the new inheritance law, involving the division of land, more complex in its consequences than

80 Arkoun, “La Vie” [The life], in L’Islam: hier-demain [Islam: Yesterday-tomorrow], ed. George Richard-Molard (Paris: Buchet/Castel, 1978), 224. 81 Ahmed, Women and Gender, 62.

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for commercial Mecca, where property was in herd and material goods and where even before Islam it was apparently the custom for women to inherit.82

Another weakness of the book is Mernissi’s designation of Umar as responsible for women’s veiling. She concludes: “the hijab, which is presented to us as emanating from the Prophet’s will, was insisted upon by Umar Ibn al-Kattab, the spokesman of male resistance to women’s demands.” She again deviates from historicization, which seeks to explain how a given law was instituted or how it found ready acceptance, to designating the guilty person. She even portrays Umar as representing the Jahiliya mentality, which brings us to another weakness of the book, the use of rhetoric disparaging the pre-Islamic period, which makes her fall prey to a discourse of apology and authenticity.83 Mernissi concludes her book by affirming that the hijab is the vestige of the Jahiliya and that today’s claims that present the veil as constitutive of Muslim identity not only betray the Prophet’s will but also represent the recalcitrant remnants of the Jahiliya spirit that he strove to eradicate. She writes: Is it possible that Islam’s message had only a limited and superficial effect on deeply superstitious seventeenth-century Arabs who failed to integrate its novel approaches to the world and to women? Is it possible that the hijab, the attempt to veil women, that is claimed today to be basic to Muslim identity, is nothing but the expression of persistence of the pre-Islamic-mentality, the jahiliya mentality that Islam was supposed to annihilate?84

Contrary to miriam cooke, who sees Mernissi’s use of the Jahiliya rhetoric as enabling, I argue that this strategy is inconclusive. According to cooke, Mernissi’s approach is part of the strategy of “destroying the master’s house with his tools.”85 However, I argue, with Audre Lorde’s original words, though in a different context, that, in this case, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”; on the contrary, they strengthen its foundations.86 In other words, using the same

82

Ibid., 53. Mernissi, Veil and Male Elite, 114, 118. 84 Ibid., 81. 85 Cooke, e-mail message to author, January 27, 2003. 86 Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984), 110–13. 83

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language as fundamentalists gives further credence to their discourse. One might also argue that the death fatwa against Mernissi and the censorship to which her book was subject prove that gaining religious legitimacy through espousing the apologetic discourse did not win the day. According to Abdellah Labdaoui, Mernissi establishes continuity between the hypocrites of the early period and today’s fundamentalists, who advocate a return to veiling, and, by the same token, asserts her own reading as more faithful to the Prophet’s spirit and her own understanding as more orthodox than the fundamentalists’. Her statements of truth, he continues, are instances of the way she redefines the good and the bad Muslim, presenting a new orthodoxy, hers, which she asserts as more authentic than the Islamists’.87 Lamia Ben Youssef Zayzafoon also criticizes Mernissi’s authenticity strategy. She maintains that “Mernissi ascribes to herself the authority of the Muslim male elite who has the power to distinguish between the false and the true hadith” and thus reinforces, rather than deconstructs, male religious authority. She continues: Throughout her writings, Mernissi presents her reinvention of early Muslim society and the ideal of gender equality in Muhammad’s time as the truth that has been hidden or “veiled” by the Muslim male elite. Mernissi’s reauthentication of the hadith—a strategy within the very system she opposes—paradoxically endorses the notion of truth from which the hadith derives its authority and hence reinforces the power of tradition to reinscribe and perpetuate itself.

Zayzafoon also draws attention to the risk of cooptation of the discourse of truth that Mernissi adopts, regardless of its strategic use in providing for “a common basis for feminist mobilization in Moroccan society.” She writes: Mernissi’s reliance on the Shari’a law and defensive claims that there is no discrepancy between Islam and democracy, and that Islam elevated women’s status far more than any other religion, could be co-opted by conservative Islamic groups to preclude further demands for women’s rights.88

In my view, Mernissi’s truth claims and mystification are the results of an overconcern with legitimacy and represent evidence to the pitfalls 87 88

Labdaoui, “Mernissi et le féminisme islamique,” 205. Zayzafoon, Production of the Muslim Woman, 21, 22, 26.

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of having Islamists as central interlocutors. An-Na’im also criticizes this tendency. The opponents of the Islamists tend to be defensive about their “secular” views and apologetic for appearing to oppose the application of Shari’a principles which Islamists are advocating. In fact, some of them become more royal than the king by trying to be more “Islamic” than the Islamists.89

Another limitation to Mernissi’s argument that the hijab is among the vestiges of the Jahiliya is that it overlooks the element of choice, or the fact that some women choose to veil and sometimes transform the hijab into an instrument of contestation, which Mernissi herself notes in L’Amour dans les pays musulmans. As Mai Yamani observes, though in another context, “the question is not whether it is Islamic or not—but whether it is a woman’s right to choose whether to veil or not.”90 Thus, the voice of the muhajaba as discussed before, is inaudible in Mernissi’s work, even in her Islamic feminist scholarship. By suggesting that the hijab belongs to the Jahiliya mentality, Mernissi distracts attention from the enabling idea of historicization and restricts the debate to the closed terrain of truth and authenticity, instead of discussing the necessity to examine the historical and cultural dimension of this practice. In addition, her approach does not explain the reasons women’s veiling was readily accepted. According to Ahmed, at the time the veil was imposed, the Prophet was already a successful military leader, and his status dictated the pressing pragmatic necessity to protect his intimacy and his wives. At that time, he also possessed the appropriate means to release his wives from the tasks that women of his family used to perform, like fetching water or grinding corn, which helps to explain the acceptance of this custom. Moreover, seclusion and veiling already existed among some urban classes of Arabia and more particularly in Syria and Palestine, areas with which Arabians had contact. Ahmed argues: By instituting seclusion Muhammad was creating a distance between his wives and his thronging community on their doorstep—the distance appropriate for the wives of the now powerful leader of a new, unambiguously patriarchal society. He was, in effect, summarily creating in

89

An-Na’im, “Dichotomy between Religious and Secular Discourse,” 55. Yamani, introduction to Feminism and Islam: Legal and Literary Perspectives, ed. Yamani (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 20. 90

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chapter five nonarchitectural terms the forms of segregation—the gynaeceum, the harem quarters—already firmly established in such neighboring patriarchal societies as Byzantium and Iran, and perhaps he was even borrowing from those architectural and social practices.91

It is this kind of historical reading, as opposed to a mystifying one, which Mernissi, at times, lacks or from which she deviates in The Veil and the Male Elite. These limitations are also present in her subsequent work, Islam and Democracy, which I turn to next. Islam and Democracy Islam and Democracy is the last book in Mernissi’s Islamic feminist trajectory. Published in 1992, it is a reaction to the first Gulf War (August 2, 1990 to February 28, 1991). In it, Mernissi deploys a double critique of the West’s neocolonial aggression and the postcolonial Arab states that deny their citizens access to democracy. Mernissi is by now considered a prominent figure of ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ Islam for her role in promoting women’s rights in Muslim societies.92 In this book, she seems to be aware of this privileged position and uses it strategically by taking to task both the West and Arab states. Like her other works, this book simultaneously addresses a Western and a Muslim audience, informing the first of what it ignores and reminding the second of what it has forgotten. Her main argument is that democracy as a political thought is not alien to Islam, but constitutes its repressed memory, in which prevail a number of fears: the fear of the West, which in Arabic is al-Gharb (etymologically related to the adjective ‘gharib’ [foreign]), in addition to the fear of freedom of thought and individualism as well as the fear of women’s power. Governing elites have been manipulating these fears “by pasting ancient anxieties onto modern ones.” If democracy has not caught on in the Arab world, she argues, it is because postcolonial states did not envisage secular humanism, but opted instead for a shari’a based on ta’a, ignoring Islam’s rationalist and humanist tradition. She also argues

91

Ahmed, Women and Gender, 55. See Svensson, Women’s Human Rights, 12. Svensson observes that a part of The Veil and the Male Elite is included in the anthology Liberal Islam. Mernissi, “A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam,” in Liberal Islam: A Source Book, ed. Charles Kurzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 112–26. 92

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that the war brought those fears to the surface and compelled Arabs to confront and overcome these fears, which is the reason, she optimistically declares, that “the Arab world is about to take off.”93 Of course, Mernissi is overenthusiastic here; she obviously could not foresee that two other wars sanctioned by the United Nations (in Afghanistan and Iraq) would follow the first Gulf War. Her disappointment with these new aggressions is what has led her to refuse to go to the United States in protest of the American armed presence in Iraq today. The other main reason for her optimism in Islam and Democracy is the emergence of women as active participants in the public sphere of Arab states. By this, she means that the process of claiming democracy is already launched. The battle of the 1990s will be a battle over the civil codes, which women challenge as contrary to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and which the authoritarian states defend as sacred.

They are the “force of radical challenge.” Women, according to her, “constitute one of the most dynamic components of the developing civil society.”94 This is one of the reasons why she turns her attention in the second half of the 1990s to Morocco’s civil society. Mernissi begins and ends her book by celebrating Arab women’s activism. She starts by observing what, according to her, was an event that Western media did not notice during the war: women’s demonstrations in the streets against the war, in which she participated. She notes that women have felt the aggravating effect of this neocolonial aggression on their cause. How completely horrifying, then are the prospects for a woman in an Arab society put to fire and sword in the name of international law and with the authorization of the Security Council of the United Nations! And what can be said when this is done by the very Western states that claim moral leadership of the world by forcing other nations to accept as universal the democratic model, which strips violence of all claim to legitimacy?

Their demonstrations are thus a defensive reaction against eventual violence and victimization. Women emerge in this book as the heroines of the Arab world, who desire to make changes as they “publicly

93 94

Mernissi, Islam and Democracy, 13, 15, 42, 60, 37–38, 149. Ibid., 157.

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assert their right to self-affirmation as individuals.” Having had access to employment and education, women are transgressing boundaries: “they are demanding the renunciation of the ideal of the homogeneous city, carefully divided in two hierarchical spaces, where only one sex manages politics and monopolizes decision making.” For that, they are considered as ‘aswat al-gharb’ (the voices of the West).95 They represent the stranger within. Mernissi’s entire work is devoted to rethinking the hudud, the borders that participate in Othering women in the patriarchal discourse and Muslims in the Western Orientalist discourse, borders that justify misogynous violence and colonialist wars, hence her commitment to double critique. In the same way as she criticizes conservatives for their depiction of women as strangers in the city, she is critical of the West’s fear of foreigners. She explains: “When a Frenchman says ‘les Maghrebins’ he is simply saying ‘foreigners.’ ” She also writes in the first pages of her book: I have never felt my colleagues in the North so frozen in their Europeanness and I so frozen in my Arabism, each so frozen in their irreducible difference, as during my trip to Germany and France during the war to participate in discussions that were supposed to establish a dialogue, but that in fact established nothing but our pitiful inability to breach the boundary between us, to see the other in all his or her difference without letting that difference threaten and frighten. For as long as difference is frightening, boundaries will be the law.

Her book is an invitation to trespass boundaries based not only on gender but also on nationality and territory. Toward the end of her book, she states: “we can dream with Julia Kristeva about a future in which the gharib, ‘the strange’ and the ‘stranger,’ will no longer be frightening.”96 She pursues this dream in her novel Dreams of Trespass, published two years after Islam and Democracy. Dreams of Trespass is precisely about frontiers and the way women, even from within harems, used to defy them. It opens with the following suggestive paragraph:

95

Ibid., 157, 3, 157, 156, 163. Ibid., 14, 6, 170. Mernissi refers to the French original of Julia Kristeva’s book, Etrangers à nous-mêmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). The book is also available in English. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 96

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I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, a ninth-century Moroccan city some five thousand kilometers west of Mecca, and one thousand kilometers south of Madrid, one of the dangerous capitals of the Christians. The problems with the Christians start, said Father, as with women, when the hudud, or sacred frontier, is not respected. I was born in the midst of chaos, since neither Christians nor women accepted the frontiers. Right on our threshold, you could see women of the harem contesting and fighting with Ahmed the door keeper as the foreign armies from the North kept arriving all over the city. In fact, foreigners were standing right at the end of our street, which lay just between the old city and the Ville Nouvelle, a new city that they were building for themselves. When Allah created the earth, said Father, he separated men from women, and put a sea between Muslims and Christians for a reason. Harmony exists when each group respects the prescribed limits of the other, trespassing leads only to sorrow and unhappiness. But women dreamed of trespassing all the time. The world beyond the gate was their obsession.97

This passage, referring to a specific history of colonialism and nationalist resistance in Morocco, is also an instance of her simultaneous critique of borders constructed by both the French when they created the ‘Ville Nouvelle’ (new city) and by nationals to prevent women from stepping outside the home. Boundaries do not ward off Mernissi’s intrusions as when she trespasses the world of literature and fiction with Dreams of Trespass. But this is not the first time she crosses the threshold of fiction. As suggested earlier, even in a scholarly text like The Veil and the Male Elite, she incorporates a flight of fancy toward fiction when she stages a grocer who utters the misogynous hadith that she investigates in the beginning of her book. Islam and Democracy likewise transgresses the border. In the introduction, Mernissi foregrounds two fictitious characters, a fishmonger and a merchant in Rabat’s shoe market, whom Mernissi uses, like the grocer of The Veil and the Male Elite, as “barometers” of public opinion in Moroccan society. She invents the two characters to show that Arab people, especially youth, had their eyes riveted on the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall (November 1989), to the extent that the fishmonger refused to serve her, risking to lose some dirhams (Moroccan money). He preferred to rush to “the neighboring shop which had a television set, to hear the announcer report the capture of Nicolae and Elena Ceaucescu.” Ali, the merchant in the shoe market, bought a black-and-white television set for his shop 97

Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 1–2.

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three days after the fall of the wall “just in order to see the world,” he tells her, only to sell it two weeks after the beginning of the bombings to give the money to the Moroccan Red Crescent (Moroccan equivalent of the Red Cross) to buy medical supplies for Iraq. These stories suggest that no sooner had Arab people and youth become enchanted by the West, as the promoter of freedom and humanism after the fall of the wall, than they became disappointed a few months later by the intrusion in Iraq, which reminded them of brutal colonial aggressions. The Gulf War highlighted the limits of ‘the West’ to export democracy and humanism, and shed light on its ambiguous position vis-à-vis violence. Mernissi also argues that the war unveiled the West’s sanctification of the petrodollar that finances Wahabism, and unearthed its role in the militarization of the Arab world, which signifies a halt to democratization and social and economic well-being in the region.98 Islam and Democracy ends with the mythological story of the Simorgh as imagined by the Sufi Farid al-Din Attar, a thirteen-century mystic poet, “who dreamed nine centuries ago of a marvelous planet inhabited by fabulous birds that were much like us—who wanted to find themselves, who wanted to travel, but were afraid.” The story recounts the journey of a group of birds that longed to see and know the mythical bird, the Simorgh. In the course of their journey only thirty remained. When they reached the land of the Simorgh, all they saw was their reflection in a lake. They became aware that they actually were the Simorgh; “in Persian,” Mernissi explains, “si means thirty and morgh means birds.” She continues: The Simorgh explained to them what is still not understood eight centuries later by our leaders: that the community, indeed the whole world, can be a mirror of individualities, and that its strength will then be greater.

Mernissi uses the story to argue that the success of Arab societies depends on the resourcefulness of Arab people. Women and their claims are the motor of this change. She writes: “since that time, the simorgh, banned in the orient of the palaces, has haunted women’s tales and children’s dreams.”99 Education and employment provided Arab women with wings; they are the Simorgh, since they represent the voices of difference, pluralism, and democracy. 98 99

Mernissi, Islam and Democracy, 3–4, 4–5, 5, 167–69. Ibid., 171, 173, 174.

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The reasons for Mernissi’s shift to fiction is never made clear but can only be imagined. Her interview with Serge Ménager suggests that this shift is the result of her growing awareness of the power of fiction to reach people’s mentalities and to deliver her message, and that it is also the expression of a certain lassitude with producing serious academic works, as discussed in chapter 3. This is not to say that she has lost faith in the power of scholarly revision of Islamic heritage, since it is in this book that she affirms that the future of gender equality and democracy must go through women’s reappropriation of Islamic history and rereading of religious texts, a project that she already launched with her own work. She concludes her book by paying tribute to Arab feminism and to women’s struggles all over the Muslim world, as if to announce her retreat from research on gender and Islam.100 Later, she declares in clearer terms her departure from the scholarly religious front; she continues to pursue her struggle for women’s rights and democratization of gender relations through accompanying civil action in Morocco. In fact, starting in 1997, especially with her publication Les Ait débrouille, a study of an NGO in the High Atlas, Mernissi’s trajectory marks another twist.101 She is now absorbed by following the development of civil society, hence her initiation of the project Synergie Civique. This, in itself, provides part of the answer to her retreat. Mernissi is more convinced that change in the Arab world will come from the bottom, or the grassroots. On her Web site, she explains that she discovered the expansion of civil society in the second half of the 1990s, when she observed a boom of NGOs, which has been helped by growing access and democratization of information technologies and the disappearance of legal restrictions on civil organization in Morocco.102 Islam and Democracy foregrounds a humanist Mernissi who celebrates the tradition of Sufism and extols the virtues of political secularism, which sheds further light on the reasons behind her shift. In the last pages, she celebrates Sufi humanism and its potential to enhance freedom and draw better prospects for the Arab world. She writes:

100

Ibid., 160, 161–62. She also published in 2004 another book on civil action in rural Morocco, Les Sinbads marocains: voyage dans le Maroc civique [Moroccan Sinbads: A trip in civic Morocco] (Rabat: Marsam, 2004). 102 See http://www.mernissi.net/civil_society/synergie_civique/syn_civ.html. 101

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chapter five Attar sang of that Sufi Islam that is today unknown to Western media. It will probably be the only successful challenge to the electronic agenda, for it offers something the latter can never threaten nor replace: the spirituality that gives wings, opening you up like a flower.103

The book’s last lines are in the form of a few questions concerning the future of Arab states, ending with the following sentence: “It is surely the poets who will be our guides among these new galaxies.”104 She suggests that only Sufi poetry, or Sufi humanism, can be inspiring in imagining a new world without boundaries, which may explain one of the reasons why she moved away from scholarly research on orthodox Islam and gender toward fiction and literature. Mernissi builds a case for political secularism, though this does not mean that her position shifted from an Islamic feminist to a secularist standpoint that rejects religion altogether. Secularism in the sense of the belief in the benefits of the separation of religion from politics is a constant in Mernissi’s work. However, if in Beyond the Veil (and Woman in the Muslim Unconscious) Islam is seen as the barrier to democracy, in Mernissi’s Islamic feminist writings, the source of the problem is the political manipulation of Islam, hence the need for the separation of the religious from the political sphere. In Islam and Democracy, the purpose of proving the compatibility of Islam and democracy is not to argue that Islam can be an alternative to democracy. Her aim, instead, is to prove that there is nothing that prevents Muslims from adopting a democratic and egalitarian project of society. Her Islamic feminist masterpiece, The Veil and the Male Elite, praises secularism from the very onset. This focus is suggested in the following statement, which establishes a difference between Islam as a personal choice and Islam as a religion of state. It is time to define what I mean when I say “we Muslims.” The expression does not refer to Islam in terms of an individual choice, or personal option. I define being Muslim as belonging to a theocratic state. What the individual thinks is secondary for the definition. Being Marxist or Maoist or atheist does not keep one from obeying the national laws, those of the theocratic state, which define the crimes and set the punishment. Being Muslim is a civil matter, a national identity, a passport, a family code of laws, a code of public rights.105

103 104 105

Mernissi, Islam and Democracy, 171. Ibid., 174. Mernissi, Veil and Male Elite, 20–21.

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The idea is that Islam has been politically manipulated and made to transcend the limits of personal faith in order to be a compulsory national identity. Naima Chikhaoui rightly argues that making religion a private matter is not a solution, since religion would still infuse gender relations in the private sphere. She wonders about the rationale behind claiming that religion should be a matter of personal choice and behind devoting an entire book to argue that a democratic and egalitarian religion had existed.106 Interestingly, Chikhaoui’s own position is unambiguously secularist. Her discussion of Mernissi’s work clearly favors Mernissi’s earliest position on Islam. Mernissi does not make clear her rationale in The Veil and the Male Elite, mainly because she does not want to dwell on the benefits of political secularism in a book that, for the first time, rereads Islamic texts from a new feminist position that she needed to consolidate. In Islam and Democracy, however, Mernissi puts forward, in a clearer way, the idea that secularism protects religion from political maneuvers, allowing it to flourish. The fundamentalists’ argument is that if Islam is separated from the state, no one will any longer believe in Allah and the memory of the Prophet. . . . Such reasoning is in fact an insult to Islam, with its suggestion that Islam can succeed only if it is imposed on people in a totalitarian manner. . . . Islam has much to offer. As both Christianity and Judaism have done, Islam cannot only survive but thrive in a secular state. Once dissociated from coercive power, it will witness a renewal of spirituality. Christianity and Judaism strongly rooted in people’s hearts are what I have seen in the United States, France, and Germany. In those countries the secular state has not killed religion; rather, it has put a brake on the state’s manipulation of religion.107

In Mernissi’s view, Islam is spirituality; it is not a political system. In an essay published in 1995, Mernissi reiterates the view that Islam is not a political system, when she confronts what she identifies as ‘racist’ representation of Islam. Few words in contemporary political and ideological lexicons have been misused, and abused, as “Islam” by both Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The term, meaning peace and submission, now invokes images of violence, totalitarianism, and irrationality. Speculations on the chances

106 107

Chikhaoui, “La Question des femmes,” 19–20. Mernissi, Islam and Democracy, 65.

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chapter five for peace in the Middle East usually centre on an embarrassingly racist question: are Islam and Democracy compatible? The question is racist not only because it reduces a set of complex, multifaceted, and global contradictions between Muslim and Western states to an opposition between a medieval religion and a modern political system, but also because when a Westerner asks such a question, he automatically assigns rationality to democracy and irrationality to Islam.108

Beyond the pertinence of the above critique of the Orientalist discourse, the passage shows that Mernissi gives liberal meaning to Islam, yet considers it a medieval religion that should not be compared to a modern political concept like democracy. Anouar Majid criticizes Mernissi’s position as reproducing the Orientalist discourse on Islam. He writes: In the final analysis, however, Mernissi is clearly in favour of a United Nations definition of human rights and democracy. In La peur-modernité (1992), she repeats the familiar orientalist thesis that only a secular modernity would be able to lift Arabs from their long and deadly paralysis, although she avoids blaming Islam itself. . . . Yet Mernissi dismisses this Islamic legacy as dated in the contemporary era and suggests, instead, that it must give way to a secular civil society, democratically organized, that protects individual freedoms.109

Unlike Majid, who favors Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im’s idea of enacting a new shari’a based on the Meccan revelation, Mernissi does not argue for a new shari’a, though her revisions of Islam adhere to AnNa’im’s and Mahmoud Mohamed Taha’s idea that the Medinian verses have had their specific context that no longer exist today. If, according to Jonas Svensson, scholars like Riffat Hassan and Amina Wadud are “safeguarding the relevance of religion in society,” Mernissi does not share this ambition.110 Her position is, above all, a reformist one. She is aware that reforming family laws in a Muslim majority country necessitates engaging religion, and she is conscious of the usefulness of religious language in claiming gender equality. Moroccan scholar Souad Eddouada reports that in 2006, Mernissi was invited to comment on a survey conducted by the Ministry of Planning, which revealed that

108 Mernissi, “Arab Women’s Rights and the Muslim State in the Twenty-First Century: Reflections on Islam as Religion and State,” in Faith and Freedom: Women’s Human Rights in the Muslim World, ed. Mahnaz Afkhami (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 33. 109 Majid, “Politics of Feminism,” 329. 110 Svenson, Women’s Human Rights in Islam, 83.

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a majority of people in Morocco are unfavorable to women’s rights and freedom of attire. Mernissi’s response was that this opposition to women’s rights is the outcome of Moroccans’ ignorance of their own religion. Mernissi proposed another survey analysing the reactions of Moroccans to the hadiths favouring women, such as “only an honourable man will honour them; and only a despicable man will degrade them.” One should observe that these same words, spoken by the Prophet, were used in 2004, by King Mohamed [Mohammed] VI to justify the introduction of the idea of gender equality in reforming Family Law. The reform undertaken by King Mohamed VI is part of broader changes in general policies concerning women, based on “Islam’s egalitarian spirit and universal human principles.” Adopting the same attitude used for the reform of Family Law, the King has been innovative in proposing the election of a quota of thirty-three women to the Moroccan Parliament (usually there are three).111

Therefore, Mernissi’s pro-secularist position does not totally reject the use of religion in the public sphere. Her distrust of the presence of religion in politics comes from the fact that postcolonial Muslim states have historically manipulated religion for ideological purposes and have activated an Islam that particularly suited their vested interests. In Islam and Democracy, Mernissi argues that postcolonial states activated an Islam-ta’a, which guarantees obedience to the ruler in the public sphere, itself resting on a domestic ta’a. She thus reiterates her idea, in Beyond the Veil and Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, that the prevalent conception of family codes serves the authoritarian configuration of power, hence the political unwillingness to envisage gender equality. Obeying the husband means obeying God. The word ta’a, which appears in contemporary civil codes, reproduces in the harem blind obedience to the caliph. The imams are irate because if domestic ta’a is challenged by weak women, how can men be expected to lower their eyes in deference to the leader?112

Poscolonial states, Mernissi argues, have never considered secularism as an option. They did not mobilize their educational apparatuses for

111

Eddouada, “Morocco’s ‘Mourchidates’ and Contradictions,” trans. Francesca Simmons, Reset Dialogues on Civilizations, April 17, 2009, http://www/resetdoc.org/ EN/Morocco-Islam-imam.php. 112 Mernissi, Islam and Democracy, 152–53.

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the propagation of Western secular humanism. “The break with the medieval state, which used the sacred to legitimize and mask arbitrary rule, never took place in the Arab world.” She also argues that these states chose to ignore the rationalist tradition of Islam as represented by the Mu’tazila’s thinking, because an Islam based on rationalism was threatening. Therefore, “it is that Islam of the palaces, bereft of its rationalist dimension that has been forced on our conscious as the Muslim heritage today.”113 Mernissi argues that contrary to Western assumptions about political inertia characterizing the Muslim world, the history of Islam has been the theater of contestations and dissension, which postcolonial Muslim states mostly fear, hence their promotion of an Islam ta’a. She argues that political opposition has always been within the framework of two traditions: a rationalist tradition, represented by the Mu’tazila; and a rebel one, represented by the Kharijites. The Mu’tazila are the philosophers who posed the primacy of the rational individual against political arbitrariness. The Kharijites resorted to assassination and terrorism as the only form of political resistance, starting with Ali Ibn Abi Talib’s assassination. She writes: The two conflicting trends within Islam, Kharijite rebels and Mu’tazila philosophers, appeared on the scene very early and continued, under various names, to be active throughout Muslim history.

According to her, the contemporary names of the Mu’tazila and Kharijite are progressive Muslim scholars, on the one hand, and Islamists, on the other hand. Militant Islam . . . the heir of the rebel fringe, the Kharejite reaction, is the inevitable offspring of official despotism disguising itself as obedience to the divine will. In the face of this convergence, Arab intellectuals, mostly philosophers, are defending the opening to all humanistic thought, whether ancient or modern.114

In the same way as she identifies Islamists as some sort of neo-Kharijites, Mernissi presents Muslim women who are revisiting Islamic heritage to claim modernity as some sort of neo-Mu’tazilites. The equality they [women] demand, say the supporters of caliphal, despotic Islam, is a foreign, imported idea. These women are traitors, allies

113 114

Ibid., 40, 46, 37. Ibid., 32, 28, 33, 37–38.

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of the West and its philosophies, like the Mu’tazila and rationalists of yesteryear who tried to import Greek ideas.115

Mernissi’s binarism, especially her demonizing portrayal of the Kharijites, is in complete contradiction with her depiction in her previous book The Forgotten Queens of Islam. As discussed in chapter 3, in this book, she presents the Kharijites as the first group that introduced the issue of democracy and questioned the requirement that the caliph must be from the Quraysh. Mernissi used the Kharijites to strengthen her problematization of the exclusionary criteria of eligibility to caliphate with respect to women. The contradictory treatment of the Kharijites in her two books is a clear instance of her manipulative strategies, which unfortunately limit the rigor of her analysis. It is also regrettable that the reason behind evoking the Mu’tazila does not go beyond this reductive binary narrative of Islamic political history and Islamic thought, toward taking up the issue raised by these philosophers, though relevant to Islamic feminism. When Mernissi argues in broad terms that the Mu’tazila’s insistence on the primacy of reason was politically deranging, hence their persecution, she avoids naming the real issue, which is at the heart of the unthinkable that she seeks to transgress. The main question that the Mu’tazila raised is known as ‘khalq al Qur’an’ (the creation of the Qur’an). They entered into conversation and conflict with their opponents, the Asharites, because of this issue. This is the idea that the Qur’an is not transcendental like God, but is God’s creation since it is expressed in a human language, Arabic. The Mu’tazila relied on reason and rational deduction as tools in the interpretation of the Qur’an and theological inquiry. For them, as noted by John L. Esposito, both reason and revelation are complementary sources of guidance from a just and reasonable God. The Mutazila took issue with the majority of ulama over the doctrines of the divine attributes or names of God and the eternal, uncreated nature of the Quran. Both beliefs were seen as contradictory and as compromising God’s unity [Islam’s absolute monotheism]. How could the one, transcendent God have many divine attributes [sight, hearing, power, knowledge, will]? The Mutazila maintained that the Quranic passages that affirmed God’s attributes were meant to be understood metaphorically or allegorically, not literally. Not to do so was to fall into anthropomorphism, or worse, shirk, associationism or polytheism.

115

Ibid., 157.

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Similarly, they believed that the Qur’an’s doctrine, as being the Word of God, should not be understood literally, “for how could both God and His word be eternal and uncreated? The result would be two divinities.” For the Mu’tazila, the Qur’anic texts that speak of the Qur’an as preexisting in heaven are metaphorical, hence their idea that “the Quran is the created word of God, who is its uncreated source.”116 The Qur’an, in their thinking, is created by God in a certain context and its meaning is to be understood in light of that context.117 Since then, orthodox theology has considered taboo the issue of the Qur’an’s creation raised by the Mu’tazila, because it stirs the heated issue over the Qur’an’s metaphorical language versus the text’s literal meaning. The Mu’tazila’s use of the metaphor, as a tool to interpret verses considered ambiguous, inspire many ‘new thinkers’ of Islam today, who engage in critiquing Islamic thought and in offering new readings of the foundational text, using the literary approach, for example.118 The Mu’tazila’s idea of reason and revelation as two important sources of guidance from a just God, their opposition to literalism, and their insistence on the metaphorical level of Qur’anic discourse are thus of great relevance to Islamic feminists, who argue that Qur’anic language does not represent an unambiguous legal discourse, the prescriptions of which are fixed and eternally binding. The Mu’tazila’s ideas find echo in Mernissi’s historicization of Qur’anic discourse. It is, therefore, unfortunate that she chooses not to delve into the issue and prefers to speak in a superficial way about the Mu’tazila, mainly in relation to politics rather than theology and religious ijtihad. Deconstructing Mernissi’s Islamic feminist position, by unveiling her mystifying discourse and her search for authenticity and truth claims, which, as I have argued, weaken her historical, contextual approach, is instructive in theorizing islamic feminism. These pitfalls are also shared by other scholars of Islam and gender, who often are so concerned about proving the normativity of gender equality in Qur’anic discourse that they fall prey to manipulative interpretation, truth claims, and foundationalism. Her earlier secularist position with the analytical rigor of its approach, regardless of its stigmatization of Islam, is also relevant in rethinking Islamic feminism, hence my exam116

Esposito, Islam, 70, 71. Benzine, Les Nouveaux penseurs, 200–201. 118 Benzine identifies Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid as one of the new thinkers who take up the conversation between the Asharites and the Mu’tazilites. Ibid., 199. 117

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ination of the two positions and approaches that she adopts vis-à-vis Islam in the last two chapters. The next chapter, which concludes this book, examines the limitations and prospects of Islamic feminist theory by a comparative discussion of the approaches used by Mernissi, Wadud, Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid, Kecia Ali, and others.

CONCLUSION

TOWARD A POST-FOUNDATIONALIST ISLAMIC FEMINISM The limitations to which Mernissi falls prey, which are, in my view, the search for authenticity, mystification, and foundationalism, are also symptomatic of the difficulties that Islamic feminism generally faces. In this concluding chapter, I further clarify my point through additional comparisons between the scholarship of Mernissi and other scholars of Islamic feminism. I especially focus on Amina Wadud’s Qur’anic hermeneutics, which I contrast with Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid’s. I choose to focus on these two figures because, like Mernissi, they espouse contextual reading. Wadud’s different positions, adopted in her two books Qur’an and Woman and Inside the Gender Jihad, are especially instrumental in pointing out that Islamic feminist theory based on the postulate of the normativity of gender equality in the Qur’an has reached a theoretical dead end. The project of Islamic feminism is usually carried out through revisiting the age-old male production of religious meaning, emphasizing verses in line with gender equality, and reinterpreting the ‘less clear’ texts in what pertains to gender equality through a woman-friendly perspective. As Anne Sophie Roald argues, it is true that feminist scholars of Islam are more limited in comparison with Christian feminist theologians, who are empowered by a tradition of historical-critical method within Christian theology that allows them to see the Bible as written by human beings, men in particular.1 In Islam, this is a theological impossibility, since, even when Muslims, Sunni and Shi’a, may not agree on the Hadith, they all agree on the Qur’an’s authenticity as the Word of God. This is why scholars of gender in Islam, Roald explains, have mostly adopted a methodology that focuses on textual analysis and that seeks to emphasize evidence to establish gender equality.

1

Roald, “Feminist Reinterpretation of Islamic Sources: Muslim Feminist Theology in the Light of the Christian Tradition of Feminist Thought,” in Women and Islamization: Contemporary Dimensions of Discourse on Gender Relations, ed. Karin Ask and Marit Tjomsland (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1998), 17–44.

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However, rarely have these scholars engaged in rethinking the concept of the ‘Word of God’ itself, which, in my view, can help transcend the theological limitations in Islam and can allow scholars to deal with the Qur’an’s androcentric discourse without apologies, or without mystification. By revisiting the concept of the ‘Word of God’ or ‘revelation,’ scholars can consider this androcentrism as historical and contextual rather than eternal and divine. This is central to the project of Islamic feminists who compromise neither their faith nor the ideal of gender equality. Such a rethinking is not ‘un-Islamic’; it goes back to the early centuries of Islamic thought with the debate that the Asharites and the Mu’tazila initiated and that continues today in the thinking of such scholars as Mohammed Arkoun, Abu Zaid, or Abdolkarim Soroush, to name only a few. Instead, Islamic feminism is built on the postulate that gender equality is normative in the Qur’an, which often leads scholars to mystification and foundationalism. Qudsia Mirza also identifies the concept of ‘gender equality’ as one of the theoretical limitations of scholars who rethink gender in Islam. For Mirza, “the idea of equality is one that is assumed, with little or no theoretical discussion of the implications of basing it on the concept of sexual difference or sameness.”2 She argues that there is no real discussion of the Qur’anic concept of ‘sexual difference,’ which sometimes gives more rights to mothers, for instance, when compared with men. I am not using this criticism to argue that Qur’anic sexual difference is enabling, since it can exclude other female subjectivities that do not fall within traditional paradigms of women in the scriptures, as Mirza observes, but to show that emphasizing the specific equality (spiritual equality) advocated by the Qur’an and claiming that it is evidence for the normativity of gender equality in Qur’anic discourse is mystifying.3 It obscures the Qur’an’s androcentric aspect that needs to be acknowledged and dealt with without apologies. Similarly, Kecia Ali argues that “the necessity of equality as a component of justice must be defended, not merely asserted.” According to Ali, feminist Qur’anic scholars have never raised serious questions about the universality or “the timelessness of specific points in the Qur’an and hadith.” She rightly argues that they do not discuss the concepts of ‘justice’ and ‘gender equality’ and do not address the

2 3

Mirza, “Islamic Feminism,” 118. Mirza, “Islamic Feminism and Gender Equality,” ISIM Review 21 (2008): 31.

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Qur’an’s androcentric discourse. Ali also points out that “there is general silence” on the implications of the Prophet’s actions for today’s world and on the extent to which his precedent is binding. These limitations are present in Mernissi’s The Veil and the Male Elite, as I noted in the previous chapter. Rethinking the concept of ‘revelation’ and the status of the Sunna will help, I think, to emphasize what Ali calls “the freedom to treat the Qur’an and hadith not as repositories of regulations to be applied literally in all times and places but as sources of guidance” in the quest for gender equality.4 Of course, this description of Islamic feminism does not account for the complexity and sophistication of the different approaches used, especially with regard to the Qur’an. Mernissi’s methodology in The Veil and the Male Elite is a case in point, as her Qur’anic hermeneutics is based on recovering the historicity of the Qur’anic text. Thus, unlike Wadud in The Qur’an and Woman, Mernissi (implicitly) acknowledges that there are discriminatory moments in the Qur’an, which have to be relativized by taking into consideration their constraining historical context. Yet the existence of another aspect in Mernissi’s approach (especially when she deals with the Hadith) that seeks to retrieve an original more egalitarian truth confirms the entrenchment of this general tendency that I have been describing as foundationalist. I have indicated in this book’s introduction that this idea of retrieval (of gender equality) is also found in some theorization of Islamic feminism. It is based on the assumption, shared by a number of scholars of Islamic feminism, that Muslims have “easy access to pure origins” that would somehow facilitate the matter.5 However, the issue is clearly more complicated: the Qur’an does not provide all answers, as Wadud realizes in her second book, Inside the Gender Jihad. She also criticizes the apologetic tendency in rereading religious texts from a womanfriendly perspective, including her own. This self-critique is even more significant, since apology, or what Ali calls “simplistic apologia” is a major weakness in this scholarship.6 Therefore, it is not so much the confessional position of Islamic feminism, or its scholars’ faith position (the belief in Islam’s message

4

Ali, Sexual Ethics and Islam, 154, 156, 51, 156. Cooke, Women Claim Islam, xxii. 6 Ali, Sexual Ethics and Islam, 123. Jonas Svensson, for instance, notices how Riffat Hassan “accepts certain aspects of gender discrimination with a basis in the Qur’an, and apologetically defends them.” Svensson, Women’s Human Rights and Islam, 215. 5

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of justice and gender equality in particular), against which I argue here. Writing from a (pro-)faith position is an important (though not crucial or essential) incentive. It is also an enabling position of departure since it speaks to believers. What I am critical of is when this position turns into an approach that seeks, by all means, to retrieve gender equality as a norm established by the Qur’an, to the point of becoming a blinding dogma that weakens analytical rigor and produces mystifying narratives. The deconstruction of Wadud’s methodology enables me to illustrate more clearly the limitations of this dogma in Islamic feminism. In Qur’an and Woman, Wadud chooses to focus on the Qur’an using an approach that allows her to see gender justice as one of the cores of the Qur’anic message. Egalitarianism, according to Wadud, is distorted by centuries of male interpretations, to which she juxtaposes a female-inclusive exegesis. This approach, she states, restores the Qur’an’s original meaning. However, Wadud’s methodology presents, in my view, two major problems: an insufficient contextual analysis and an overfocus on linguistic interpretations, on the one hand; and eclecticism, or a lack of addressing verses voicing an androcentric worldview, on the other hand. The first problem is best illustrated by comparing Wadud’s reading and Abu Zaid’s reading of verses 2:228 and 4:34.7 The two verses 7 The translation of verse 4:32 is rather controversial. I will rely on Wadud’s reading, since I am exposing her discussion of this verse here. Her translation is as follows: Men are [qawwamuna ‘ala] women, [on the basis] of what Allah has [preferred] ( faddala) some of them over others, and [on the basis] of what they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are [qanitat], guarding in secret that which Allah has guarded. As for those from whom you fear [nushuz], admonish them, banish them to beds apart, and scourge them. Then, if they obey you, seek not a way against them. Wadud interprets the phrase “men are qawwamuna ‘ala women” as meaning “men are supporters of wives” (thus restricting it to the marital tie). She also interprets “women are qanitat” as women “who are inclined towards being co-operative with one another and subservient before Allah.” As to “nushuz,” she interprets it as “resistance.” Wadud’s translation of verse 2:228 is: Women who are divorced shall wait, keeping themselves apart, three (monthly) courses. And it is not lawful for them that they conceal that which Allah has created in their wombs if they believe in Allah and the Last Day. And their husbands would do better to take them back in that case if they desire a reconciliation. And [(the rights) due to the women are similar to (the rights) against them, (or responsibilities they owe) with regard to] the ma’ruf, and men have a degree [darajah] above them (feminine plural). Allah is Mighty, Wise. She interprets ‘ma’ruf ” as indicating “something ‘obvious,’ ‘well known,’ or ‘conventionally accepted.’ However, with regard to treatment, it also has dimensions of

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are usually invoked together (one consolidating the other) to provide evidence of divine preference for men over women. On verse 2:228, Wadud writes: This verse has been taken to mean that a darajah [degree] exists between all men and all women, in every context. However, the context of the discussion is clearly with regard to divorce: men have an advantage over women. In the Qur’an the advantage men have is that of being individually able to pronounce divorce against their wives without arbitration or assistance.

Wadud concludes, unsatisfactorily one might concede, that daraja in this verse must be restricted to the context of divorce since “to attribute an unrestricted value to one gender over another contradicts the equity established throughout the Qur’an with regard to the individual.”8 With respect to verse 4:34, which contains the idea of qiwama (responsibility), usually understood as men are responsible for women, Wadud argues: In this verse, it means that men are qawwamuna ‘ala [responsible for] women only if the following two conditions exist. The first condition is “preference,” and the other is that they support the women from their means.

Wadud writes that this reading, centered on conditionality rather than universality, is based on Azizah al-Hibri’s pioneering work and is related to a whole reading tradition used by Muslim reformists, especially in reference to reforming women’s legal status. For Wadud, there is only one instance in which “Allah has determined for men a portion greater than for women: inheritance.”9 Wadud considers the Qur’an as essentially prescriptive, overlooking its descriptive level that would have helped her to understand the ‘law’ of inheritance as restricting the inheritance share of males rather than ‘determining,’ or prescribing, a new binding law, in which women are obviously discriminated against. Wadud states that her primary concern is the verb faddala (to prefer). In her hermeneutics, “faddala cannot be unconditional.” Like

equitable, courteous and beneficial.” Wadud, Qur’an and Woman, 70, 74, 68, 69. In the above quotations, all notations in brackets and parentheses are Wadud’s. 8 Ibid., 68. 9 Ibid., 70, 92n17, 92n19, 70, emphasis mine.

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daraja, qiwama (related to faddala) is also granted as a way to test the worthiness of the one to whom it is given, in this case, men. Wadud explains this ‘preference’ as a man’s obligation to take care of his wife since she has the burden of childbearing. For simple balance and justice in creation, and to avoid oppression, his responsibility must be equally significant to the continuation of the human race. The Qur’an establishes his responsibility as qiwamah: seeing to it that the woman is not burdened with additional responsibilities which jeopardize that primary demanding responsibility that only she can fulfill.10

This example shows how Wadud’s lack of considering the Qur’an’s descriptive level leads to an unconvincing interpretation. The lack of persuasiveness of Wadud’s woman-friendly tafsir is clearest in her reading of the part in verse 4:34 that evokes the beating of the nashiz (rebellious) wife. She starts by arguing that the verb ‘daraba’ (to strike) does not necessarily indicate force or violence but can mean “to set an example.” Yet, as if unconvinced of this explanation, she turns to the social context in which the verse was pronounced, a context in which conjugal violence was a prevalent practice. This enables her to conclude that the verse is meant to restrict an already existing practice.11 However, if this is a clear example of the contextual approach, which recognizes the Qur’an’s descriptive level, Wadud’s insistence on giving other meanings to the words of the verse weakens this contextual reading. Contextualization emerges, then, as a mere strategy invoked to rescue an insufficient and unconvincing interpretive method, which is here tafsir, rather than as a systematic and pondered approach that recognizes and asserts the Qur’an’s historicity. I examine Wadud’s reading in Qur’an and Woman only to illustrate the limitations of the prevalent Islamic feminist approach to the Qur’an. Wadud’s second book, Inside the Gender Jihad, deploys a new position and methodology that breaks with her woman-friendly exegesis. She honestly identifies her first book’s methodology as an instance of “interpretative manipulations.”12 This characterization should not be taken as meaning that Wadud was dishonest in her first book, or that her methodology was the result of a deceitful strategy. One must

10 11 12

Ibid., 71, 73. Ibid., 76. Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 200.

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take into consideration the difficulty and complexity of upholding and sustaining a position that does not make any concessions about either faith or gender equality. The limitation that Wadud recognizes is the result of the initial postulate of the normativity of gender equality in Qur’anic discourse. Before addressing Wadud’s outstanding second book, I will further illustrate my point about the necessity for a coherent and confident contextual approach and the inadequacy of the woman-friendly tafsir methodology through the example of Abu Zaid’s reading of the two above-mentioned verses. Abu Zaid’s discussion of these verses puts forward the necessity for adopting a contextual reading of the Qur’an. This approach would allow Islamic thought to transcend what he refers to as “the crisis of interpretation and counter-interpretation.” He points to the way both opponents and proponents of gender equality often use the same interpretative strategy: shedding light on particular Qur’anic texts that serve their interests and positions by identifying them as the asl, and resorting to a particular interpretation of the texts that contradicts their interests and serves the interests of their opponents in a way that seeks to eliminate the undesired meaning. This criticism of ‘asl reading’ informs my own critique of foundationalism and truth claims inherent in Mernissi’s and Wadud’s Islamic feminist discourse. The suggestion Abu Zaid makes here is that this type of eclectic reading is caused by the inability to challenge a prevailing paradigm of reading religious texts, especially the Qur’an, which does not consider its historical context, its communicative or dialogical aspect, and its descriptive dimension. To consider these dimensions of Qur’anic discourse, he insists, does not mean a denial of its divine origin.13 Abu Zaid’s contextual reading of the qiwama verse is illuminating. A fundamental difference between Abu Zaid and Wadud is that, while recognizing the Qur’an’s egalitarian dimension, he does not blindly claim or consider Qur’anic discourse as fundamentally egalitarian. He starts by acknowledging the existence of two types of verses regarding gender relations. The first type is represented by verses recognizing a spiritual equality, in religious responsibilities and in the origin of creation. Indeed, the Qur’an acknowledges men and women to be from nafsin wahida (the same soul), in contrast to the Torah in which Eve

13

Abu Zaid, “Qadiyyat al-mar’ah,” 60, 37.

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is a woman who is created from Adam’s rib.14 The second type is less egalitarian, like the verses discussed by Wadud, for which he proposes a contextual approach. For him, the asl approach, or the ‘foundationalist’ reading, is insufficient, since it deals with the text outside its cultural background, failing to take into consideration the customs and commonsense of the first receivers of the Qur’an. Abu Zaid’s methodology allows him to deal with verses unaddressed by Islamic feminists, like Mernissi and Wadud. In fact, he starts by invoking the following verses, which, unless read in their context, might be easily (mis)understood as Allah’s preference for male offspring and, by extension, as divine sanctioning of male superiority. Verses 53:19–22 read as follows: “Have you then considered the Lat and the Uzza, And Manat, the third, the last? What! For you the males and for Him the females! This indeed is an unjust division!” He argues that these verses should be understood in light of the patriarchal cultural context of Arabia in the seventh century. The verses are a response to the insistence of Arabs to consider the pre-Islamic goddesses—Allat, al-Uzza, and Manat—as Allah’s daughters. He explains that Arabian society at that time had already shifted from a matriarchy to a patriarchal society, in which women’s status was already inferior as indicated by the practice of female infanticide. The above Qur’anic verses should then be considered as a response to what the Qur’an understood as denigrating allegations according to the prevalent gender discourse of the time; association with female lineage was considered degrading. This does not mean that the Qur’an espoused this differentiation, as is clearly evidenced by its abolition of female infanticide. The Qur’an was taking into consideration the worldview, mentality, and commonsense of its first receivers. The Qur’anic response should thus be seen as descriptive. To explain the qiwama verse, Abu Zaid brings up verse 17:21, which also includes the notion of faddala: “undhur kayfa faddalna ba’adahum ‘ala ba’din wa li al-akhirati akbaru darajatin wa akbaru tafdila” (See how We prefer one above another [in this world] and verily, the Hereafter will be greater in degrees and greater in preference).15 For Abu Zaid, it is illogical to consider this verse as an arbitrary divine prescription of poverty on some and prosperity on others. The Qur’an itself insists

14 15

Ibid., 42–43. Translated by Muhsin Khan, http://www.quran.com/.

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on the equal redistribution of wealth, as in verse 59:7: “so that it may not be a thing taken by turns among the rich of you.” He concludes that the differentiation should not be seen as prescriptive as much as a descriptive account of a reality that is in need of change with the goal of establishing equity. The contextual reading of this verse enables him to argue that the qiwama verse should be equally understood in its context of production. Qiwama should not be seen as normative, but as a description of the state of things that necessitates reform.16 Abu Zaid’s approach is an instance of what I describe as a ‘postfoundationalist islamic feminist’ approach, even though he does not extensively research the gender issue in Islam (although he does so to a greater degree than many male ‘progressive’ scholars, like Arkoun and Ebrahim Moosa). These male scholars, even when they advocate gender equality in Islam, hardly ever produce extensive scholarship on the issue. It seems that, for them, this task falls exclusively to women, a ‘female business,’ so to speak. Arkoun, for instance, writes: Les musulmanes doivent, pour la première fois dans l’histoire de l’Islam, se dégager de la problématique stérile qui transcendantalise un système d’inégalités totalement contingent. Muslim women should, for the first time in the history of Islam, to free themselves from the sterile issue, which transcendentalizes a totally contingent system of inequality.17

Thus, with few exceptions, male ‘progressive’ scholars of Islam are either content with recommending (in a paternalistic way) that Muslim women reread the Qur’an, or are very critical of Islamic feminists’ scholarship in an unconstructive way, as Wadud argues. Their criticism, according to Wadud, serves to enhance “masculine selfaggrandizement at the same time as they construct a public persona of being liberated.”18 In fact, in her second book, Wadud expresses her “disappointment” with male Muslim progressives whom she reproaches for their lack of collaboration and unwillingness to “assist [her] towards greater possible alternatives in [her] own work.” She continues:

16 17 18

Abu Zaid, “Qadiyyat al-mar’ah,” 46–48. Arkoun, “La Vie,” 224–25, emphasis mine. Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 190.

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conclusion In Progressive Muslims, Ebrahim Moosa specifies “feminists” for his critique of making “too much of a few verses of the Qur’an that suggest reciprocal rights and duties between unequal spouses and then hastens to suggest that the Qur’an advocates egalitarianism as a norm.”19

She rightly states that an argument like Moosa’s “draws no attention to the significance of gender as a category of thought by reducing the overall agenda of Islamic feminist research and theories to a ‘few verses.’ ”20 She is also right when she suggests that Moosa’s criticism is too monolithic and simplistically dismissive. However, even though I agree with Wadud’s condemnation of these male scholars for criticizing Islamic feminism from their ivory tower and refusing to take part in the project, Moosa’s criticism is closer to the one articulated in this book. His point touches on an important limitation in the foundationalist approach of Islamic feminism, with respect to the approach used in rereading the Qur’an, a criticism that Abu Zaid also voices in the following terms: Like the reformist approach to the Qur’an, feminist hermeneutics faces the problem that as long as the Qur’an is dealt with only as a text— implying a concept of author (i.e., God as divine author)—one is forced to find a focal point of gravity to which all variations should be linked. This automatically implies that the Qur’an is at the mercy of the ideology of its interpreter. For a communist, the Qur’an would thus reveal communism, for a fundamentalist it would be a highly fundamentalist text, for a feminist it would be a feminist text, and so on.21

Abu Zaid’s criticism is also in line with my argument regarding the limitations of the foundationalist approach of Islamic feminism. Abu Zaid contends that there is a necessity to consider the Qur’an as originally an oral discourse involving divine and human communication rather than a divinely authored text that has been revealed to all humanity regardless of its context of production, or historicity. Considering the dialogic and descriptive levels of Qur’anic discourse, rather than only focusing on its prescriptive dimension, allows scholars to address issues that remain unthought by Islamic feminism.

19 Ibid, 189. Wadud cites Moosa, “The Debt and Burden of Critical Islam,” in Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism, ed. Omid Safi (Oxford: Oneworld, 2003), 125. 20 Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 190, 189. 21 Abu Zaid, Reformation of Islamic Thought (Amesterdam: Amesterdam University Press, 2006), 91.

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Wadud realizes the limitations of the female-inclusive tafsir in Inside the Gender Jihad, though not necessarily as a result of male Muslim progressives’ willingness to “assist (her) towards greater possible alternatives in (her) own work.”22 Her new position, though strongly influenced by the scholarship of progressive (male) intellectuals, like Khaled Abou El Fadl and the late Pakistani Islamic scholar Fazlur Rahman (1919–88), is rather a direct consequence of her own activism and the new direction of her work from theory to praxis. Her new approach also corresponds to Abu Zaid’s, for example, when she becomes aware that her Qur’anic hermeneutics is unsatisfactory and that there is a need to go beyond it toward a contextual approach which takes into consideration the scriptures’ historicity. Unlike in Qur’an and Woman, in which Wadud mainly strives to excavate the Qur’an’s egalitarian voice and to apologize for its less equal discourse, in Inside the Gender Jihad, she admits that the Qur’an contains sexist language in verses that “promote” male sexual dominance. She writes: While on the one hand the Qur’an seems to operate within a structure of linguistic taboo about sexuality and matters of intercourse altogether, on the other hand, it promotes male sexuality in particular with the following three citations: (1) polygyny, housed in the language of desire, “Marry those who please you, maa taba lakum, of the women: two, three or four” (4:3). However polygyny is permitted in the text, it is also conditioned upon almost unachievable terms of justice. (2) Women are designated as harth, tilth, or something to be cultivated or tilled: “Your women are a tilth for you to cultivate . . . as you will, nisa’ukum harthun lakum fa’tuw harthaku, innaa’ shi’tum” (2:223). Whether this is a discussion of sexual position or permissible times of male sexual satisfaction, according to different jurists, it is still directed toward men and men’s sexual desires, while women and women’s sexuality remains passive. (3) The notorious virginal huris [houri] for men—even after they are dead, men’s pleasure should not be forsaken! (52:20, 55:72, 56:22).23

Addressing the verse dealing with sexual positions, in which the wife appears as a sexual object, indicates that the new approach allows movement beyond the constraints set by Islamic feminism and its a priori postulate/doctrine that the Qur’an establishes gender equality as a norm, which prevents discussions of the androcentrism in Qur’anic

22 23

Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 189. Ibid., 205, 192–93.

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discourse. It transcends the apologetic discourse, as in the case of Mernissi, who romantically claims in The Veil and the Male Elite that the Qur’an came to assert the woman as “subject,” as discussed in the previous chapter. Wadud’s new reading shows that the contextual approach enables us to retain the enabling moments of the methodology of Fatna Ait Sabbah (Mernissi), for instance, who addresses the verse without inhibitions, while moving beyond the stigmatizing and essentializing pitfalls of her secularist perspective. In fact, Wadud makes an explicit reference to Ait Sabbah’s work and cites her analysis of sexual positions and the houri figure approvingly. In contrast, her former book merely mentions Ait Sabbah in a note as an example of Muslim feminists who have confused the divine message of Islam with the patriarchal and misogynous discourse of its male interpreters, without an in-depth discussion of the arguments presented in Woman in the Muslim Unconscious.24 Wadud’s new position could also be understood as demonstrating the adoption of a ‘secular’ (in the Saidian sense of antidogmatic rather than ‘secularist’) position that breaks with the dogma of the normativity of gender equality in the Qur’an. It allows a kind of reconciliation, or represents an instance of the beginning of a conversation between secularist and Islamic feminists. The adjective ‘secular’ in this sense can be viewed as an enabling liminal adjective/space between the qualifier ‘secularist’ and the adjective/concept ‘Islamic’ (with a capital I) as theorized and practiced by scholars of Islamic feminism. An instance of this reconciliation is Ali’s position in Sexual Ethics and Islam; she precisely engages the ‘embarrassing’ verses discussing sex, which Islamic feminists advocating the normativity of gender equality avoid grappling with. Reading verses dealing with sexuality, she confidently engages the tension in the Qur’an between egalitarianism and hierarchy, admitting that “there is a basic asymmetry in God’s speech” in verse 2:223. Like Ait Sabbah, she observes that “God is speaking to men about women.” She also courageously points out that “the Qur’an is a thoroughly androcentric—though not misogynist—text.” However, unlike Ait Sabbah, she adds that “this androcentrism is not equivalent to misogyny, but neither is it unproblematic for interpreters concerned with matters of gender and justice.” To make such a statement is not to voice another rejectionist point of view with 24

Ibid., 13n4.

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respect to the Qur’an, or Islam. Ali makes it clear that she still considers the Qur’an and Sunna as sources of guidance. Examining difficult passages in these sources is for her a way to “(re)open dormant questions” and claim “the freedom to treat the Qur’an and hadith not as repositories of regulations to be applied literally in all times and places.”25 In Wadud’s case, the fact that she addresses the verse dealing with sexuality and the way she (re)reads Ait Sabbah through a new lens seems to be largely due to her involvement with the Malaysian women’s group Sisters in Islam, known for its action against violence directed toward women.26 It is also the result of her participation in forums discussing AIDS. In this respect, she states that her interest was especially directed toward the most vulnerable victims: women and children. She writes: The other group, of even greater concern to my work, is monogamous wives, especially in the context of Islam, where a Muslim wife is not only expected to be, but defined in terms of her being unconditionally sexually available to her husband. Properly fulfilling this role of wife is fatal to some women, with estimates as high as 80%. That is, 80% of heterosexual women with A.I.D.S. are monogamous and have only ever had sex with their husbands. . . . What does a theological premise, laa taqrabuna al-zinaa [do not commit adultery or have premarital sex], avail to these women?27

25 Ali, Sexual Ethics and Islam, 116, 112, 132, 112, 156. Another instance of this reconciliation between secularist and Islamic feminist critiques is Hatoon Ajwad alFassi’s book Women in Pre-Islamic Arabia, in which she argues that women in the pre-Islamic period enjoyed considerable rights in the Nabataean state. Her discussion might be seen as resuming the discussion that Mernissi initiated in Beyond the Veil with respect to the Jahiliya as a construct that serves patriarchal interests. With the radical critique of an earlier Mernissi, al-Fassi points out that Nabataean women enjoyed more freedom than in today’s Saudi Arabia, because clerics have misunderstood the origins of Islamic law, suggesting that some Saudi restrictions on women may have their origins in Greco-Roman traditions. Clearly, this problematization of the Jahiliya serves an objective other than Mernissi’s secularist and dismissive aim. AlFassi’s goal is to show that most practices related to women’s status are based on some local traditional practices that are not necessarily Islamic. Al-Fassi’s particular Islamic feminist position overcomes the limitation of Mernissi’s apologetic discourse in The Veil and the Male Elite on this subject, precisely by taking up Mernissi’s earlier radical critique while breaking with its secularism. It also demonstrates that Islamic feminists would benefit from the positive intransigent critique of secularist Muslim feminism. 26 Svensson mentions two pamphlets published by this group in 1991, entitled Are Muslim Men Allowed To Beat Their Wives? and Are Women and Men Equal Before Allah? Svensson, Women’s Human Rights and Islam, 13. 27 Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 235.

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Thus, the recognition of the Qur’an’s promotion of male sexuality is the first step toward realizing the need for a new theology, one that is more respectful of women’s will. It is an illustration of how the theoretical framework of Islamic feminism, based on the egalitarian postulate and a foundationalist approach, reveals its limits at the level of praxis, which highlights the importance of moving away from its confines. Realizing this limitation allows Wadud to argue for a liberating theology that transcends “religious platitudes,” or the “ostrich strategy” of the traditional moralist discourse, which simplistically promotes sexual abstinence, toward rethinking women’s sexual status and striving to sexually empower them.28 Equipped with her revised position, which considers the Qur’an as a source of inspiration for her gender jihad rather than a final text or a repository of answers to modern problems, Wadud reviews her own reading of verse 4:34. She significantly confesses: There is no getting around this one, even though I have tried through different methods for two decades, I simply do not and cannot condone permission for a man to “scourge” or apply any kind of strike to a woman. Because of the extensive time I have examined this verse, it is the best place for me to demonstrate the diverse interpretative and implementive possibilities as they have been applied through some historical examples and conditions, including my own attempts at interpretative manipulations. This leads me to clarify how I have finally come to say “no” outright to the literal implementation of this passage.29

Speaking critically of her earlier hermeneutical methodology, she argues that her approach “utilizes the linguistic space for manipulating meaning and promotes a ‘perhaps not’ possibility. Perhaps the Qur’an did not intend.”30 This joins Ali’s criticism of the “methodology of picking-and-choosing,” which scholars who rethink gender in Islam generally use. For her, such an approach is both fundamentally dishonest and ultimately futile; arguments about male/female equality built on the systematic avoidance of inconvenient verses will flounder at the first confrontation with something that endorses the hierarchical and gender-differentiated regulations for males and females that so many reformers would like to wish away.31

28 29 30 31

Ibid., 231–44. Ibid., 200. Ibid., 203. Ali, Sexual Ethics and Islam, 151, 153–54.

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Thus, the confrontation with issues of violence and HIV compels Wadud to revisit her own methodology, mainly by recognizing the existence of sexist language in the Qur’an, which needs to be seriously addressed. But to recognize the Qur’an’s sexist dimension and to explain it away, Wadud, who still speaks from a pro-faith position while not compromising the principle of gender equality, needed to engage in a discussion on the Qur’an’s status and the appropriate way to approach it. She thus argues that “whatever sexism might be found in the words of the immutable Qur’an is a reflection of the historical context of Qur’an revelation.” For Wadud, “unless these verses are rigorously examined vis-à-vis their context, the universal meanings could be lost by their modes of articulation.”32 In other words, contextualization, rather than woman-friendly tafsir, is necessary. Wadud’s new thinking is in line with those of progressive Muslim scholars, like Rahman, Abou El-Fadl, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, and Abu Zaid. Like them, she highlights Islam’s ability to reform, as in the example of slavery, which, while not abolished by the Qur’an, has been terminated in all Muslim states. She argues that Muslims’ abolition of slavery, even though the Qur’an did not really prohibit it, can be applicable to patriarchy and male dominance. She writes: Clearly, we were able to stop practising the institution of slavery and never charged ourselves with violating the text. Even the most conservative of Muslim fundamentalists do not argue to return to the Qur’anic position of accepting slavery under the seventh-century practice.

In the intellectual tradition of a number of progressive Muslim scholars who believe Islam to be an unfinished project, or one in becoming, Wadud considers the Qur’an as “an utterance or a text in process,” a means through which to conduct gender jihad rather than a readymade manual of gender equality. This allows Wadud to move beyond claiming that egalitarianism is normative in the Qur’an to equality as a “trajectory” drawn by the Qur’an. Gender equality becomes, then, an unfinished project inviting “human agency” or “intervention,” to use her words.33 It is also a means through which to achieve gender justice or conduct gender jihad rather than a manifesto of gender equality. The contextual approach promoted by Wadud is based on a rethinking of the Qur’an as the Word of God. She starts by rehearsing one

32 33

Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 205, 194. Ibid., 205, 191, 204.

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of the questions Abou El Fadl explores in Speaking in God’s Name: “Is all right and wrong only derived from the divine text and nothing but the text? The text is not the only representative of the Divine.”34 She concludes: “Whatever ‘the word of God’ means, the Qur’an is not God. Words are fallible.”35 This statement follows Abou El Fadl’s argument that “language is an imperfect human medium, and although God uses this medium perfectly, the medium itself is not perfect.” He also states: A text contains an attempt at an authorial intent or a partial view of the authorial intent. In other words, the text only tells us what the author thought necessary to reveal about himself in response to the specific historical dynamic that confronted him. The authorial intent, as expressed in the text, is bounded by its audience, historical context, and language.36

The concept of ‘revelation’ as discussed by Wadud and Abou El Fadl is strongly linked to the concept of ‘justice,’ or ‘gender equality,’ which, as Mirza critically argues, is most of the time assumed but never discussed in the literature of Islamic feminism.37 In the same line of criticism, Ali points out: Those Muslims who strive for gender equality, considering it an essential component of justice, must address the central issue: what is justice and on what basis does one know it? Is something good because God says so? Or does God say it is good because it is, inherently, so? If what God says—and indeed, what the Prophet, “a beautiful example” (Q.33:21), does—is automatically good, then what happens when this clashes with one’s own view of what is just or good?38

Abou El Fadl’s answer is that “when the reader’s sense of morality or conscientious conviction is in opposition to a text or textual determination,” it requires “a conscious pause,” which “might result in a faith-based objection to the textual evidence.”39 Ali, who, like Wadud, draws on Abou El Fadl’s idea of the “conscious pause,” expresses the issue with more clarity when she points out that “arriving at a working resolution of this dilemma requires a

34 Abou El Fadl, Speaking in God’s Name, 93, quoted in Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 201. 35 Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 208. 36 Abou El Fadl, Speaking in God’s Name, 128, 127. 37 Mirza, “Islamic Feminism,” 118. 38 Ali, Sexual Ethics and Islam, 149. 39 Abou El Fadl, Speaking in God’s Name, 93.

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consciousness of history and an acceptance of the role of the individual conscience.”40 These two aspects, I would like to add here, are not alien to Islamic theology, though they constitute its suspended or dormant issues as illustrated by the conversation between the Mu’tazila and the Asharites. This theological conversation is, I think, central to any discussion on justice or gender justice in Islam. Thus, engaging the concept of ‘justice,’ Ziba Mir-Hosseini also mentions the two schools of theology and suggests the centrality of human conscience and history. In brief, there are two schools of theology and thought. The dominant Ash‘ari school holds that our notion of justice is contingent on religious texts; whatever they say is just and not open to question. The Mu‘tazili school, on the other hand, argues that the value of justice exists independent of religious texts; our sense and definition of justice is shaped by sources outside religion, is innate, and has a rational basis. I adhere to the second position, as developed by Abdolkarim Soroush, the Iranian reformist philosopher. According to Soroush, we accept religion because it is just, and any religious texts or laws that defy our contemporary sense of justice or its definition should be reinterpreted in the light of an ethical critique of their religious roots. In other words religion and the interpretation of religious texts are not above justice and ethics.41

Mir-Hosseini’s statement shows that reviving latent Islamic theological debates, especially the one raised by the Mu’tazila and the Asharites with respect to the concepts of ‘revelation’ and ‘justice,’ is crucial to Islamic feminists advocating gender equality today. It is through the invocation of this debate that Wadud could revisit her earlier position and argue for the necessity of seeing the Qur’an not as a final and fixed text, but as a text inviting human agency and intervention. She further explains: If revelation through text must be in human language, in order for humans to even begin to understand it, then revelation cannot be divine or Ultimate. This is distinguished from the idea that revelation is from a divine source.42

Wadud, like other progressive scholars of Islam, such as Abu Zaid and Arkoun, is, of course, careful to distinguish between considering

40 41 42

Ali, Sexual Ethics and Islam, 149. Mir-Hosseini, “Muslim Women’s Quest for Equality,” 633. Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 214.

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Qur’anic ‘regulations’ as not sacred and binding for all human beings in all times, and negating the divine origin of the Qur’an. Like Mernissi, Wadud invokes the example of the Mu’tazila to prove the ‘islamicness,’ so to speak, of her new position. But unlike Mernissi (who is not a theologian), Wadud is more confident and assertive in discussing the issues raised by the Mu’tazila. As discussed in the section dealing with Islam and Democracy, Mernissi, who is generally more subtle (and more strategic) in these (sensitive) matters, mentions the Mu’tazila as an example of the existence of a rationalist tradition in Islam, without discussing the theological perspective that this school of theology has contributed to Islamic thought. Indeed, unlike Mernissi, Wadud openly claims her affiliation to the Mu’tazila, when she adheres to the idea of the ‘createdness of revelation.’ She writes: This has already been addressed between the Mu’tazilites and the Ash’arites by trying to decide definitely whether the Qur’an is eternal with God or created? There are other questions to ponder. Is Allah multilingual, so that She can reveal in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, or is Allah meta-lingual, not restricted by any language.

She even argues against the Asharites’ literalism noting that such thinking, which concretizes Allah to the limitation and literalism of the Qur’an’s revelatory context, parallels the Christian discourse that literally takes the notion of God’s incarnation as the body of the Christ.43

This is an example of not only how Wadud, like Mernissi (albeit to a lesser degree), is affiliated to the Mu’tazili theology, but also how she resumes, or picks up, the theological conversation between the Asharites and Mu’tazilites where it was left off. Wadud and Mernissi are thus building on the Mu’tazili thought by posing new questions equipped as they are by new tools, like gender and comparative religious studies.44 This may support the description of islamic feminism as neo-Mu’tazilism and the scholars as neo-Mu’tazilites. It also clearly indicates that islamic feminism is an active contributor to the redynamization of Islamic theology, namely, through asserting the significance of gender as an important category of thought.

43

Ibid., 212, 207–208, 214. Wadud, for example, writes: “I continue to believe in the Qur’an’s universal intent while armed with comparative religious studies in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries.” Ibid., 195. 44

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However, in spite of her new very enabling position, Wadud’s methodology presents, to my mind, an important flaw when she declares the necessity of saying “no” to the Qur’an, undermining her challenging position. I hasten to say that of course this does not mean that she rejects the Qur’an wholesale but simply argues for rejecting what she identifies as particular texts. I have always felt positively inspired by the Qur’anic worldview and this inspiration incites me in addressing these challenges and in researching the works of other scholars. This scholarly transfertilisation is instrumental in helping unveil possible paths through the Qur’an as a consolidated utterance—or fixed text—as well as an utterance or text in process. One important aspect of this challenge confronts the possibility of refuting the text, to talk back, to even say “no.”45

Wadud’s position, in my view, is problematic: how can we consider the Qur’an as an “utterance . . . in process,” and recognize its uncreatedness and historical contingency and still say “no” (or “yes”) to a discourse, situated in time and place? This suggests that, in spite of her important rethinking of the concept of ‘revelation,’ she does not relinquish the disabling assumption of considering the Qur’an as a normative text. One can, of course, protest an unfair text of law, reproaching it for its unjust and non-egalitarian assumptions, but one does not say “no” to a discourse involving divine and human interaction and taking place in a particular historical context. Her conclusion, unfortunately, weakens her contextual approach to the Qur’an and makes her fall prey to foundationalism, that is, the discourse that considers the Qur’an as the primary text on which law is founded. “To stand up against textual particulars,” is in my view on shaky ground; there is a need to consider the Qur’an as a discourse, situated in a particular historical, geographical, linguistic, and cultural context, containing descriptive and dialogical levels, as Abu Zaid argues, in addition to a metaphorical level, as Arkoun points out, rather than an exclusively prescriptive text.46

45

Ibid., 191. Arkoun explains that this is relevant for the new intellectual current, which seeks to subsume Islamic thought to a new critique, and for new approaches that engage in the historicization of the Qur’an. He argues that the Qur’an contains a mythical structure (not to be confused with a mythological structure); that is, it contains the dimension of myth, or story (qissa). It also contains a metaphorical dimension that invites multiple interpretations. Arkoun, “Comment étudier la pensée islamique?” 46

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Thus, in the cases of Wadud and Mernissi, it is sometimes the conclusions they reach more than their initial approach that presents limitations leading to the weakening of their arguments. As discussed before, even though Mernissi’s The Veil and the Male Elite was pioneering in presenting a new approach to religious texts (namely, through contextualization and historicization), her conclusions often betray a disabling search for authenticity, especially when dealing with the Hadith. In fact, in Mernissi’s case, contextualization is a last resort solution rather than a conscious and carefully thought-out methodology. The methodology of authentication, which primarily seeks to argue that whatever hadith containing a misogynous ideology is untrue, was obviously not applicable to Qur’anic verses, hence turning to a contextual reading. Contextualization as a mere strategy rather than a confident or convinced, and therefore convincing, approach may indeed explain the existence of an interesting contextual reading next to an apologetic mystifying narrative in The Veil and the Male Elite. Even when The Veil and the Male Elite presents a rereading of the Qur’an that suggests its consideration as a discourse rather than a fixed text, the foundationalist approach takes the upper hand, which accounts for the book’s essentialist and apologetic overtones. Another limitation directly linked to this approach is the absence of discussions of verses dealing with sexuality, for instance, as opposed to Woman in the Muslim Unconscious in which she deals with the issue without inhibitions. In general, the secular (antidogmatic) approach adopted in her previous scholarship is missing, hence the necessity of an islamic gender critique that, while careful not to stigmatize Islam and isolate religious texts from their historical and cultural contexts of production, does not relinquish rigorous critique in favor of apology and interpretative manipulation. This is the reason behind my assessment of her scholarship’s two critical stages on gender and Islam, identifying their enabling and disabling moments. This assessment has been instrumental in formulating a ‘new’ critical position that benefits from the points of strength, while avoiding the pitfalls, of the two positions and approaches that Mernissi has adopted. Mernissi’s secular critique, discussed in the first part of this work, was also instrumental in drawing, or highlighting, the contours of this ‘new’ theoretical path for islamic feminism that I have described as ‘secular’ (in the Saidian sense of antidogmatic) and post-foundationalist. As argued before, it has allowed her to foreground subaltern voices and

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adopt a multiple-front critique, which is irreverent to orthodoxy and dogmatism, religious or secular (in the sense of ‘worldly’). This suspicion of dogmatic affiliations even to a progressive theory like Marxism, or ‘Western feminism,’ is an instance of a secular critique that this book advocates for islamic feminism. By this, I mean a critique that relinquishes the postulate/dogma of the normativity of gender equality in the Qur’an, at the heart of the concept of Islamic feminism. This is because it is difficult to sustain, as Wadud’s new position suggests, and because it leads its practitioners to mystification, apology, and ideologization of religious texts, resulting in the need for a confident and fully assumed post-foundationalist islamic feminism. I have already explained in this book’s introductory chapter the reasons why I retain the word ‘feminism,’ which, following the insights of such scholars as Mir-Hosseini, miriam cooke, and Margot Badran, is instrumental in emphasizing how this growing scholarship contributes to feminist theory, in influencing the feminist agenda at the global level, and in breaking down barriers between ‘East’ and ‘West’ through collaboration and networking. I have also explained my own conception of the adjective ‘islamic,’ transcribed (following Arkoun’s transcription of ‘islam’) with a small i, in order to avoid the connotation of authenticity and foundationalism, which are inherent in most Islamic feminist scholarship. The adjective ‘islamic,’ as explained in the introduction, does not necessarily describe a position of faith, or a defense of a faith position. It is not exclusive of the intervention of secular and non-Muslim scholars. I will end this chapter by addressing another question that challenges the thesis presented here: Why retain such a qualifier? What is Islamic about it? Or, to use cooke’s question, why call Islamic feminism Islamic if it is not a matter of defending a faith position? You might as well call such a critique a feminist critique of Islam that could apply to any kind of religion?47

Basically, the adjective ‘islamic’ serves to describe an intellectual commitment (as opposed to an intellectual distance, or detachment) to reinvigorate Islamic thought through rethinking gender in Islam and posing new questions, which are enabled by new analytical tools as well as more traditional ones. In that sense, it is not restricted to

47

Cooke, e-mail message to author, July 30, 2003, emphasis mine.

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scholars writing from a faith position. Furthermore, I hold on to the adjective while keeping in mind the basic assumption that there is no such thing as ‘Islam,’ in the sense of a uniform, fixed, and singular thought. If it has to be defined, ‘Islam’ should be viewed, using Talal Assad’s phrase, as “an on-going discursive tradition” and, in this dynamic sense, should not be seen as essentially inimical to gender revisions, or fundamentally hermetic to the analytical tools provided by feminism, for instance.48 I also maintain the qualifier ‘islamic’ to stress the idea that this gender critique is not alien to Islamic thought, but actually represents a new engagement with it, and to foreground its affiliation to Islamic thought especially in its critical trend, ancient and modern. Related to the qualifier ‘islamic’ is the adjective ‘post-foundationalist’ by which I describe this ‘new’ path for islamic feminism that I am putting forward here. By ‘post-foundationalism,’ I refer to a critique which goes beyond the dogma of Islamic feminism that gender equality is foundational to the Qur’an. It likewise refers to an approach that transcends the asl reading; that is, it transcends the egalitarian approach that seeks to claim its reading as the most original and truest. It allows getting out of the vicious circle of ‘truth talk,’ or what Abu Zaid calls the “tradition of interpretation and counterinterpretation.”49 The term ‘post-foundationalism’ suggests a way out of essentialism, or using religious texts as repositories of truths, from which we can ‘retrieve’ an egalitarian Islam. It describes a ‘new’ reading methodology that rethinks the status of these texts. Post-foundationalism describes a methodology that goes beyond the foundationalism of usul al-fiqh, without negating the tradition altogether. As argued before, the gender critics discussed here often use tools of analysis belonging to modern human and social sciences in addition to tools provided by tradition. These tools allow revisiting the tradition critically, as in the case of Mernissi’s revision of isnad and tafsir. Indeed, the ijtihad used by such scholars as Mernissi, Wadud, Ali, Sa’diyya Shaikh, Ahmed, An-Na’im, or Abu Zaid is enabled by tools and methodologies that transcend the limitations, or extend the scope of the prescribed, or the traditional, ijtihad. 48

Talal Asad, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies Occasional Papers Series (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1986), 14. 49 Abu Zaid, “Qadiyyat al-mar’ah,” 60.

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As Abu Zaid argues, contextual reading is not totally new. It is rather an expansion of the methodology of usul al-fiqh, on the one hand, and a development of efforts of Islamic reformism, on the other hand. The fuqaha, he continues, found their methodology on the theory of ‘ulum al Qur’an (literally, Qur’anic sciences), especially asbab al-nuzul and al-nasikh wa al-mansoukh (the theory of abrogation) and the theory of ‘ulum al-lugha (literally, sciences of language, or philology). These are, Abu Zaid continues, among the most important tools of the contextual approach. If the usuliyun (scholars of usul al-fiqh), look, for instance, at asbab al-nuzul to understand the meaning, contextual reading looks at the broad social and historical context of the revelation.50 Indeed, it is this kind of affiliation to usul al-fiqh’s methodology that explains the choice of the prefix ‘post’ rather than ‘anti.’ Post-foundationalism also refers to the way some islamic feminists are transcending the limitations of jurisprudence and orthodox theology and are reactivating dormant theological issues, like the one discussed by the Mu’tazila, which seem to be increasingly recognized as central to the discussion of gender equality in Islam. By suggesting this alternative path that I have identified as ‘a postfoundationalist islamic feminism,’ I hope that I have contributed to the theorization of the important and promising field of research named ‘Islamic feminism’ by building on the important work of such scholars as cooke, Badran, Mir-Hosseini, Ali, and many others. Revisiting the work of Mernissi, Wadud, and other brave scholars of gender in Islam, my ambition was to present a constructive critique that seeks to take the courageous works of these outstanding scholars to an ‘alternative’ path (very often inspired by their own work), rather than debase or diminish their efforts. Indeed, one of the objectives of this book was to underscore their important contributions not only to the project of gender equality but also to the revitalization of Islamic thought as a whole.

50

Ibid., 40.

GLOSSARY Listed below are non-English words that I use more than once in the book. alim asab al-nuzul asl bay’a caids daraja/darajah faddala faqih fatwa fiqh fitna fuqaha hadith Hadith houri hudud ighlaq bab al ijtihad ijma’ iman ijtihad isnad Jahiliya Jahili jariya jawari kayd khutba muhajaba nafaqa qiwama/qiwamah qiyas ta’a shirk sura/surah tafsir taqlid ta’sil ulama umma usul al-fiqh wali

singular of ulama, religious scholar occasions of revelation origin, foundation choice of a leader local warlords degree prefer expert in fiqh, or jurist religious opinion or ruling Islamic jurisprudence disorder or anarchy plural of faqih, experts in fiqh narrative record of the sayings and customs of the Prophet. the whole corpus of hadiths or Prophet’s sayings the paradisal woman promised to the good (male) believer in heaven frontiers, limits the closure of the gate of independent reasoning scholarly consensus faith independent reasoning methodology of authentication pre-Islamic period, time of ignorance ignorant woman slave plural of jariya, women slaves ruse sermon a woman who wears a hijab alimony responsibility reasoning by analogy obedience the sin of polytheism Qur’anic chapter exegesis imitation foundationalism religious scholars, plural of alim Muslim community foundations of fiqh male tutor

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INDEX Abou El Fadl, Khaled, 11–13, 16, 227, 261, 265, 266 Abduh, Muhammad, 7, 26, 57, 168 Abu Bakra, 212, 214 Abu Huraira, 219–221, 224 Au Zaid, Nasr Hamid, 7, 11–14, 16, 34, 40, 163, 215, 216, 248n118, 249, 251, 252, 254, 257–261, 265, 267, 269, 272, 273 Al-Adawiya, Rabia, 200, 202 ahistorical, 37, 149, 171, 172, 174, 199 Afshar, Haleh, 179 Afshari, Reza, 179 Ahmed, Leila, 11, 28, 35, 40, 50, 60, 63, 65, 169, 171–173, 175, 203, 232, 235, 236n91, 272 AIDS, 189, 263 Aisha Merchant’s daughter, 122, 129, 130 wife of the Prophet, 28n80, 151, 119, 202, 203, 213, 214, 219 see also Battle of the Camel Ait Sabbah, Fatna, 39, 40n107, 59, 60, 62, 67, 74, 82, 88, 95n47, 144, 178–193, 195, 196, 199, 262, 263 see also pseudonym Akbarzadeh, Shahram, 5, 12, 165, 198, 225 Ali, Kecia, 11, 14, 15, 40, 163, 215, 249, 252, 253, 262–264, 266, 272, 273 alim, 203, 224 see also, Khamlichi, ulama Amazigh, 167, 179 Amin, Qasim also spelled Kasim or Kacem, 56–61, 63, 65, 125, 166, 168, 180 see also nationalism Amir al-Mu’minin, 203 ‘amma, 158 anomie, sexual, 67, 69, 71 An-Na’im, Abdullahi Ahmed, 1n1, 7, 25, 214, 216, 217, 226, 227, 235, 244, 265, 272 années de plomb, 10

apologetic discourse, 180, 201, 203, 232, 234, 235, 262, 263n25 Muslim historians, 170 narrative, 168, 70 overtones, 270 rethoric, 168, 203 tendency, 253 apology in Islamic feminism, 253, 271 in Mernissi’s discourse, 56, 64, 201, 233, 270 apology, 56, 64, 201, 233, 253, 270, 271 applied islamology, 19, 151 see also Arkoun Approches, 45n5, 101, 127, 128, 196n3 see also Le Fennec al-Aqqad, Abbas Mahmud, 176, 177, 182 Arab Charter, 56, 60, 61 Arabia, 148, 169, 171, 203, 230–232, 235, 258 Arabian, 35, 169, 230, 258 The Arabian Nights, 137, 145, 146 Arkoun, Mohammed, xiii, xvi, 7, 12, 13, 14, 16–20, 28, 35, 36, 63, 151, 193, 205, 207, 230, 232, 252, 259, 267, 269, 271 Asad, Talal, 272n48 Asharites, 247, 248, 252, 267, 268 see also Mu’tazila asbab al-nuzul, 16, 228, 229, 230, 273 see also Al-Tabari asl, 17, 257, 258, 272 see also Arkoun, authenticity, foundationalism, ta’sil, Zaid Attar, Farid al-Din, 240, 242 see also sufi authentic, 2, 51, 56, 105, 223, 234 hadith, 211, 212, 215, 218, 221 Islamic culture, 50 Islamic tradition, 3 Muslim values, 51 Muslim society, 166, 185 authenticity, 19, 69, 110, 291 in Islamic feminist theory, 22, 32

288

index

in Mernissi’s discourse, 6, 216, 218, 233–235, 248, 251 of hadith(s), 209, 214, 216, 218, 220 of the Qur’an, 13, 251, 270 problematization of, 215, 216 religious, 5 see also asala, and foundationalism authentication, 211, 215, 216, 270 see also ta’sil authorial, 2, 16, 78, 112, 116, 266 authoritarianism, 30, 67, 177, 227 see also Abu El Fadl authority, 116, 155, 176 abuse of, 227, 228 and secular critic, 37 male, 54, 122, 166, 170, 234 Mernissi’s, 221, 234 of hadith, 2 of religious texts, 15 pitfalls of, 110, 111, 116, 118 ‘awra, 74 Azziman, Omar, 127 Badran, Margot, xiin2, 2n4, 4n11, 11, 20, 21–27, 29–33, 39, 46, 124, 271, 273 Barlas, Asma, 1n3, 2n4, 3, 4, 11, 30, 31 Barlow, Rebecca see Akbarzadeh Battle of the Camel, 151, 202, 214 see also Aisha (wife of the Prophet) Battle of Uhud, 229 bay’a, 147, 155 see also shura Belghazi, Taieb, xiin2, xiv, 8n21, 10, 51n10, 70, 202n14 Belghiti, Malika, 80n6 Belhassen, Souhayr, 81n10, 198 Bennani, Farida, 22, 207n24 Bennett, Tony, 65 Benzine, Rachid, 6–8, 248n118 Berlin Wall, 239 Bessis, Sophie, 81n10 Bhutto, Benhazir, 150, 223 bid’a, 184 boundaries, 5, 238, 242 between fiction and history, 139 between religious and secular feminism, 140 Islamic feminists defying of, 224 of disciplines, 11, 138 of Mernissi’s secularist agenda, 202 of sociology, 39, 209

of theories, 43, 118 special, 70, 238 bourgeois, 78, 83, 91, 97, 179n42 discourse of Allal al-Fassi, 56, 61, 62, 63 discourse of Arab nationalism, 61, 63 discourse of Qassim Amin, 63 discourse on female liberation, 44, 47, 56 ideology/discourse, 86, 87, 90 male elitism, 43 minority, 90 woman/women, xi, 61, 62, 105–107, 111 see also nationalism bourgeoisie, 64, 90, 91, 106, 144 Bourguiba, Ahmed, 65 Bourqia, Rahma, 71, 128 bricolage, 63, 68, 69 al-Bukhari, Muhammad Ibn Ismail, 187, 190, 208, 211, 212, 214, 215, 218, 219, 220, 221 Burton, Richard Francis, 137n40 caids, 143 capitalism impact of (on women) 1, 44, 63, 78, 81, 86–91, 96, 122 capitalist development, 60, 86, 93 system, 90, 95, 96, 107, 108 see also development Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 32, 131 Chaouni, Leila, 196 Charrad, Mounira, 49n6, 110, 166 Cherrak, Ahmed, xvin11 Chikhaoui, Naima, 5, 121, 154, 231, 243 China, 71 Christian cultures, 175 feminist theologians, 251 religious texts, 16 West, 48 Christians, 171, 239 Christianity, 173, 188, 201, 243 civil society, 9, 237, 241, 244 class, 155 approach/analysis/perspective, 43, 79, 86, 87 as a category of analysis, 77, 80 biases, 73, 87 consciousness, 78, 103, 112 discrimination(s), 38, 43, 82

index disparities, inequality, 1, 45, 80, 81, 106, 116 factors, 94 lower, 63, 74, 93, 107 marginalization of women, xi middle, 79, 116 position(s)/status, 107, 140 privilege, 113 relations in Morocco, 107 second, xii struggle, 77, 83–85 upper, 48, 98 working, 43, 62 see also bourgeois, capitalism, Allal al-Fassi, proletariat conscious pause, 266 see also Abu El Fadl Conseil Superieur des Oulama, 203 see also ulama contextual, 16, 95, 174, 252 approach/reading/analysis, 12, 14–16, 20, 40, 115, 201, 215, 216, 219, 228, 248, 251, 254, 256–259, 261, 262, 265, 269, 270, 273 contextualization, 5, 256, 265, 270 of Mernissi’s shift, 5 contextualize, 23, 197 contextualizing, methodology, 12 contingency, 12, 14, 23, 115, 205, 216, 225, 269 contingent, 56, 174, 205, 225, 259 Cooke, Miriam, 2n4, 4n11, 11, 21, 24, 27–35, 39, 124, 134, 141, 142, 233, 253n5, 271, 273 crosspollination, 33, 36, 37 Daoud, Zakiya, 79n4, 101n65, 128n16, 129n19, 203n17 daraba, 256 daraja (darajah), 206, 254n7, 255, 256, 258 Dar al-Hadith al-Hassania, 204 darija, xv democratic, 153 discourses, 22 gender relations, 82 glorification of the human individual, 173 election, 155 Prophet’s, inclination, 231 male-female relations, 59 matriarchies, 153 political culture, 158

289

religion, 243 social relations, 80, 82 society, 213, 225, 242 West, 36 democracy, 25, 55, 82, 148, 158, 178, 236, 237, 240, 241, 242 and Islam, 235, 242, 244 debate on/over, 149, 155 concept of, 244 in Arab societies, 67 in Islam, 149, 155, 213 issue of, 247 notion of, 86 Western, 149 demystify, 45, 46, 48, 60, 93, 96, 118, 131, 132, 134, 135, 145, 146, 147, 149, 169, 173, 212 development, 59, 86, 94, 105 androcentric vision of, 55 human, 94, 206 Mernissi’s (intellectual), 87 myth of, 45 narrative of, 53 of civil society, 26 planners, 91, 92, 103 plans, 87 policy(ies), 10, 38, 61, 73, 87, 95, 98 prevalent vision of, 87, 88, 90 problematization of, 94 program(s), 72, 94, 143 project, 96 rethinking, 10 rural, 93, 98 state discourse of, 98 Western model of, 5 see also capitalist, modernity divorce, 50n7, 168, 205, 255 frequency of, 70 judicial, 28n80 unilateral, xiin2, 58, 96, 174 see also khul’ and tamlik Dialmy, Abdessamad, 1n2, 4, 32, 80n6, 85, 86, 129–131, 205–207 dogma, 37, 38, 140, 254, 262, 271, 272 dogmatic, 19, 27n77, 43, 44, 167, 177, 271 Marxist, 45, 78, 79, 80, 83–86, 118, 120 see also secular dogmatic closure/enclosure, 18, 19 see also Arkoun

290

index

dogmatism, 38, 43, 77, 134, 142, 166, 192, 271 double critique, 46–48, 75, 119, 125, 134, 146, 236, 238 see also Khatibi, and postcolonialism Durkheim, Emile, 69 Eddouada, Souad, xiin2, 244 empowerment, 11, 24, 66, 87, 128 Engineer, Asghar Ali, 226, 227 Esposito, John L., 7n9, 18n43, 247 exegesis, 152, 210, 225, 228, 230, 254, 256 see also tafsir exegetes, 152, 156 faddala, 254n7, 255, 256, 258 faith, 16, 28, 34, 169, 227, 241, 243, 252, 257, 266 community, 13 based position, 8, 10 position, 14, 23, 26, 29, 33, 218, 253, 265, 271, 272 Family Code, xin2, 8, 38, 70, 204, 205, 242, 245 see also Moudawana faqih, 18, 129, 205, 222 see also fiqh al-Fassi, Allal, 56, 57, 60–65, 166–168, 170 al-Fassi, Hatoon Ajwad, 169, 232, 263n25 fatwa, 32, 34, 83n17, 205, 210, 234 see also Ibn Ardun feminism American, xi, 119, 120, 126 Arab, xiv French, xi, 125 postcolonial, 119 Western, 146, 271 see also decentering fiqh, 206 see also faqih, jurisprudence foundationalism, xiii, 16, 17, 33, 35, 40, 216, 217, 218, 248, 251, 252, 257, 269, 271, 272 see also Arkoun, asl foundationalist, 17, 117, 192, 216, 251, 253, 258, 260, 264, 270 see also foundationalism France, 30, 47, 48, 52, 55, 114, 141, 143, 176, 238, 243 French, administration, 52, 143

colonialism/colonization, 47, 52, 53, 55, 60, 96 Protectorate, 48, 52 Frymer-Kensky, Tikva, 171n21 al-Gharb, 221, 236, 238 gharib, 236, 238 al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid, 174–176, 182, 187, 192, 195, 199, 205 globalization, 10 Gramsci, Antonio, 10, 23 see also organic intellectual Greifenagen, Franz Volker, 37 Gulf War, 50, 236, 237, 240 Haddad, Lahcen, xivn8, 78n3 Hadith, 2, 15, 204, 210, 211, 213–215, 220, 221, 251, 253, 270 hadith, 2n6, 51, 83, 140, 180, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214–225, 234, 239, 245, 252, 253, 263, 270 Hakima Tatwan, 151 al-Hallaj, Mansur, 200 see also Sufi Hallaq, Wael B., 20 see also ighlaq bab al-ijtihad hajib, 158 see also hijab harem, 9, 46, 107, 114, 119, 123, 124, 127, 131–138, 140–147, 154, 236, 238, 239, 245 Harlots of Hadramout, 169 Hassan II, 65, 222 Hassan, Riffat, 1n1, 13, 214, 244, 253n6 Hatem, Mervat, 1n3, 117 Hellenic, 175 hermeneutical, 30, 36n102, 264 hermeneutics, 21, 37, 115, 163, 251, 253, 255, 260, 261 heterodox, 38, 39, 43, 47, 181 see also secular High Atlas, 9, 10, 241 hijab, 112, 113, 115, 158, 199, 209, 224, 225–233, 235 see also veil al-khalifa, 158 see also hajib Hildebrandt, Thomas, 7n20 historians, Arab, 147 Muslim, 148, 151, 155, 159, 169, 170, 172 Western, 159, 160 Yemenite, 147, 152

index history, 15 as a narrative, 138 comparative, xiii, 16, 19 consciousness of, 15, 267 elite, 118 hegemonic, 38 homogenizing, 147 Moroccan, 10, 38, 43, 65, 77, 134, 138, 145, 146 Muslim/Islamic, 21, 46, 55, 118, 134, 147–160, 175, 197, 203, 213, 241, 246, 247 of discontinuity, 154 of Egyptian feminisms, 23 of female subalternity, 47 of gendered subalternity, 43, 44 official, 43, 78, 147, 151 of laywomen, 44 postindependence, subaltern, 160 women’s, 137, 159 Homaei, Jafar, 224 Hooks, bell, 140 houri (or huri), 145, 186, 187, 261, 262 hudud, 133, 225, 238, 239 human rights, 1n1, 9, 10, 13, 14, 24, 33, 59, 149, 16 Declaration of, 59, 69, 155, 160, 237, 244 universal, 149 women’s, 6 humor, xv, 39, 135, 153, 154 Ibn Abi Talib, Ali, 123, 151, 197, 214, 246 Ibn al-Khattab, Umar, 214, 217, 220, 229, 233 Ibn al-Jawzi, 157 Ibn Anas, Malik, 211, 221, 214 Ibn Ardun, Ahmed, 205, 206, 207 Ibn Hazm, 195 Ibn Malik, Anas, 228, 229 Ideological State Apparatus, 65, 73 see also Bennett ideology and feminism, 28 and religion, 28 ijma’, 217, 223 ijtihad, 17, 20, 23, 35, 205, 207, 217, 248, 272 see also Arkoun, ighlaq bab al-ijtihad, al-Hallaq, and taqlid illiterate, 10, 43, 53, 66, 88, 90, 92, 93, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 107, 108,

291

113, 116, 117, 117, 125, 126, 131, 144, 157, 208 see also rural, and subaltern iman, 34 see also faith Iraq, 25, 173, 217, 237, 240 Islamism, 2, 25, 26, 201, 202 Islamist discourse, 26, 201 group Adl wa al-Ihssan, 23 originary narrative, 3 militant Nadia Yassine, 22, 27 movement(s), 25, 51n10 myth, 149 the adjective, 29 position vis-à-vis women, 50 underground, 32n94 women, 198 isnad, 211, 214, 215, 216, 218, 221, 228, 272 see also al-Bukhari jahili, 167, 170 Jahiliya, 115, 148, 149, 167, 168–170, 203, 220, 232, 233, 235, 263 jariya, 143, 144, 145, 186 see also jawari (plural form) Jeune Afrique, 195, 196 Joseph, Suad, 227 jurisprudence, Islamic, 16, 18, 20, 22, 23, 28, 34, 166, 167, 178, 181, 204, 216, 273 see also fiqh kayd, 129, 183 Khadija wife of the Prophet, 168, 202, 203, 231, 232 khalq al Qur’an, 267 see also Mu’tazila Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali, 224 Khamlichi, Ahmed, 52n14, 127, 196, 203, 204, 205, 207 Khariji, 28n80 Kharijites, 155, 246, 247 Khatibi, Abdelkébir, xvii, 46, 47, 145 khul’, 168 see also divorce khutba, 156 Kristeva, Julia, 238 Labdaoui, Abdellah, 4, 5n13, 6, 21, 29, 39, 234 Lakeland, Mary Jo, 179

292

index

Lamalif, 84, 121, 129 laughter, 122, 173 Lazreg, Marnia, 26, 49, 55, 110, 112, 117, 118, 125, 132–134, 144, 146, 173, 177 Lebbady, Hasna, xivn8, xvii, 131n24, 137n41, 143n56 Le Fennec, 128, 196 see also Chaouni legitimacy, 43, 32, 53, 81, 83, 198, 205, 210, 214, 234, 137 Le Goff, Jacques, 158n106 Lewis, Bernard, 160 Lewis, Reina, 135n33 liberation, 22, 30, 44, 45, 47–49, 51, 55–79, 127, 138, 165, 166 Lorde, Geraldine Audre, 233 love, in Islam, 3, 23, 82, 104, 121, 154, 166, 176, 191, 192, 195, 196, 197, 199, 200, 201 Madani, Mohammed see Belghazi Maghazei, Maliheh, 224 maid, 43, 105, 106, 107, 111, 116 see also worker, and Zhor Majid, Anouar, 1n2, 18n44, 80n7, 85, 86, 132, 133, 226–228, 244 Maliki, 28, 52, 68, 167, 189, 204, 205, 214 Malikism, 207 manual, work, 53, 54, 62, 97, 106, 119, 181 Marxism, 39, 43, 44, 57n1, 80, 81, 83, 84, 118, 271 Marxist approach(es)/analysis(es), 43, 45, 72, 73, 77, 87, 88 critique/criticism, 73, 85 discourse, 79 discourse in sociology, 80 dogmatic, 45, 77, 83 feminism, 65, 77n1 feminist, 105 grounds, 85 ideas, 59 ideologies, 198 sensibility, 80, 81 thought, 28 tools of analysis(es), 45, 72, 73, 77, 118 tone, 62 tradition/vision/line of thinking, 66, 69, 72, 78

see also class, Reich, Tarabishi, UNEM Mdaghri, Abdelkébir Alaoui, 221–224 see also Abu Huraira Mecca, 151, 212, 220, 232, 233, 239 Meccan, 226, 227, 244 see also An-Na’im, and revelation Ménager, Serge, 55n19, 100, 116n105, 123n7, 126n12, 127n14, 128, 129n18, 139, 140, 146n71, 202, 241 Mesopotamia, 171, 175 see also Ahmed metaphor, 28, 119, 123, 248 see also Mu’tazila metaphorical, 18, 248, 269 metaphorically, 247 Ministry of Planning, 244 Mir-Hosseini, Ziba, xiii, xviii, 11, 13–15, 23–25, 26n68, 27, 29, 31, 32n90, 267, 271, 273 Mirza, Qudsia, 7n18, 26, 252, 266 mystifying, 14, 16, 89, 149, 172, 203, 231, 232, 236, 248, 252, 254, 270 see also secular modernist discourse of, 203, 207 elite, 6 (Islamic) thought, 7 Perspective, 57 scholars of Islam, 36 standpoint, 205 modernity, 22, 25, 57, 58, 67, 113, 165, 168 compatibility of Islam to, 11 corrupted, 91 discourse of, 89 eclectic, 67 European, 67 material, 67 Muslim women claim, 246 project of, 48, 57 secular, 198, 244 the eve of, 19 see also mu’assara modernization, 54, 57, 67, 69, 70, 96, 97, 105, 165 capitalist, 63, 73 discourse of, 90, 98 eclectic, 57 myth of, 45, 90 narrative of, 91, 96–98, 105, 144, 165, 98 policy(ies)/project(s), 38, 53–55, 57, 67, 87, 91, 92, 97, 165, 198

index politics of, 68 process, 55, 58 rural, 90, 93–95, 97, 98, 105, 144 see also, development mu’assara, 69 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 43, 44, 49, 79, 125 Moghadam, Valentine, 11, 27n75, 28 Moi, Toril, 153 Moosa, Ebrahim, 259, 260 Morgan, Robin, 4n11, 124, 125 mosque, 156–158, 231 Moudawana 1957, xin2, 38, 43, 45, 50, 52, 68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 77, 111, 119, 143, 165–167, 180, 185, 186, 189, 196, 202–204, 205, 207 2004, xin2, 8, 68n53, 189n71, 221 see also Family Code Moulay Rachid, Abderrazak, 127, 196, 203, 204, 206, 207 muhajaba, 112, 114–116, 235 see also hijab al-Munafiqun, 115, 229, 234 murshidates, 157n101 Mu’tazila, 7, 27, 28, 226, 246–248, 252, 267, 268, 273 see also Asharites Mu’tazili, 19, 288 Mu’tazilites, 7n20, 268 see also neo-Mu’tazilism nafaqa, 68, 131, 205 see also ta’a Najmabadi, Afshaneh, 11 Napoleonic Code, 52 nashiz, 256 al-nasikh wa al-mansoukh, 273 nationalism, Arab, 59, 60, 61 Moroccan, 55 see also al-Fassi, Amin nationalist, 24, 34, 44, 48, 49, 55–65, 73, 96, 125, 127, 168, 173, 239 neo-mu’tazilism, 7n20, 268 neo-mu’tazites, 7, 246, 266 neopatriarchal, 44, 47, 66, 70, 72, 82, 201 neopatriarchy, 66–68, 71 see also Sharabi normative, 13, 40, 148, 179, 217, 252, 259, 265, 269 normativity, 248, 251, 252, 257, 262, 271

293

organic intellectual, 10, 23 see also Gramsci Orientalist assumptions, 138, 146, 173 consciousness, 135 constructions, 2 discourse(s), 24, 26, 47, 48, 75, 110, 114, 116, 119, 131, 132, 134, 135, 142, 172, 173, 238, 244 fantasies, 142, 146 images, 142 Islamology, 29, 36 male, 142 narrative(s), 119, 136 representation(s), 135 research, 172 scholars, 160 scholarship about Islam, 174 orthodox boundaries, 224 caliph(s), 149, 155, 217 discourse, 148, 166, 177, 181–186, 188–190, 192, 232 interpretations, 192 Islam, 157, 195, 200, 242 literatures, 88 Muslim history, 155 Muslim theologians, 36 narrative, 148, 186 reading, 174 Shi’a, 224 Sunni period, 158 texts, 181 theologians, 188, 195 theological discourse, 74, 174 theology, 157, 174, 181, 185, 188, 193, 248, 273 theoretical affiliations, 43, 44 thesis, 174 version of Islam, 200 orthodoxy, 271 claim of, 228 Mernissi’s, 234 Muslim/Islamic, 81, 227 refusal of, 37, 38 oxymoron, Islamic feminism as, 27, 28, 29 Pakistan, 150 Palestine, 235 parody, use of in Mernissi’s writings, 153, 154 Pathak, Zakiya, 78, 103

294

index

PANIFD, 51n10, 128n16, 221 see also Moudawana, and Saadi, Said Persian, 175, 224, 240 polygamy, 2n2, 28n80, 49, 58, 78, 116, 153, 154, 157, 170, 171, 174 postcolonial, era/period/times, 25, 57, 107, 168, 201 feminist critique, 47, 55, 56, 66 feminism, 139 fires, 27n77 Mernissi as, 45, 47, 75, 110 modern project, 63 Morocco, 58, 59 myth, 91 societies, 200 state, 11, 44, 47, 51, 55, 66, 68, 71, 72, 74, 90, 93, 96, 165, 168, 180, 201, 236, 245, 246 the term, 47 see also double critique, and Khatibi post-foundationalist, 12, 17, 38, 40, 163, 270 post-foundationalism, xiv proletariat, 78 female, 77, 80, 87, 80, 91, 92, 93 rebellion, 72 provincial, Western feminists, 46, 124, 140n45 provincialize, 32 see also Chakrabarty pseudonym, Mernissi’s, 40, 59, 179 see also Ait Sabbah qiwama (or qiwamah), 206, 255–259 qiyas, 18, 217 qualitative approach, 99 quantitative approach, 99 Queen of Sheba (Balqis), 152 Rajan, Rajeswari S. see Pathak Rahman, Fazlur, 36n102, 261, 265 Red Crescent, 240 Reich, Wilhelm, 72, 74, 109 retrieval, of truth, 22, 34, 35, 253 revelation, 15, 229, 230, 247, 248, 265 concept of, 6, 13, 148, 252, 253, 266, 267, 269 createdness of, 268 historical context of, 273 Meccan, 227, 244 Medina, 227 see also asbab al-nuzul, and khalq al Qur’an

Roald, Anne Sophie, 251 Robbins, Bruce, 37 rumor, impact of on the Prophet, 230 rural, areas in Morocco, 63, 5, 66, 73, 91, 97, 110, 225, 241n101 community, 9 development, 95, 98 exodus, 52, 75, 79, 91, 144 modernization, 90, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 102, 144 notables, 109 tourism, 143 women, xi, 10, 38, 53, 54, 60, 61, 66, 72, 75, 77, 85, 93, 96–99, 102, 105 women’s labor, 54, 62, 79, 87, 89 Saadi, Said, 128n16 see also PANIFD Saadawi, Nawal El, xiv, 66n48, 80, 125 Said, Edward W., 37, 63, 138, 134–136, 262, 270 sanctuary, 107–110, 157, 212 see also shrine Satanic verses, 225, 226 Saudi Arabia, 169, 263n25 Sayadi, Majid, 224 Scheherazade, 9, 66, 136, 141, 142, 145 schizophrenic, state discourse, 66–68, 70 Secular approach, 45, 148 critic, 37, 58, 174 critique, 38, 43, 44, 46, 47, 118, 147, 270, 271 feminism, 45 feminist, 56 humanism, 236, 246 modernity, 198, 244 position, 37, 57, 86 scholars, 53 sociologist, 205 secularist approach, 160, 193, 245 critic, 155, 157 critique, 163, 177, 193 feminism, 65, 140, 178 feminist, 28, 177, 189, 192, 196 methodology, 221 position, xii, 37, 58, 39, 57, 59, 73, 115, 148, 172, 177, 180, 189, 192, 216, 222, 242, 245, 248, 262 scholars, 178 stage in Mernissi’s writings, 4, 5, 39, 165, 177 writings, 178, 208 secularization, 57, 149

index sexuality, 77, 108, 181, 183 female, 174, 176, 182, 183, 187, 201 in orthodox religious discourse, 166 in Islam, 70, 188, 189, 201 in Morocco, 205n21 non-bourgeois, 81 territorial, 73, 201 women’s sexuality, in the Qur’an, 261–264, 270 Shaarawi, Huda, 24n60, 124, 125 al-Shafi’i, Muhammad b. Idriss, 18 see also Arkoun, and ijtihad Shaikh, Sa’diyya, xviii, 11, 26, 36, 40, 73, 208, 209n27, 218, 272 Sharabi, Hicham, 44n4, 66–68 see also neopatriarchy shari’a, 34, 49, 50, 52, 68, 69, 165, 168, 174, 175, 205, 217, 221, 227, 234–236, 244 sheikha, 143, 144 Shi’a, 7n19, 28n80, 149n77, 211n33, 224, 25 see also Sunni shirk, 209, 247 shrine, 108, 109, 157 see also sanctuary shura, 155 Simorgh, 240 Soroush, Abdolkarim, 15, 252, 267 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 49, 103 statistical, categories, 99 discourse, 51, 69, 90 figures, 70, 97 invisibility of women, 88, 186 method, 99 table, 100 unit, 97 statistics, 51, 70, 77, 89, 97 story-telling, 138 see also Trinh, Minh-ha T. Structural Adjustment Policies, 10 Synergie Civique, 9, 133, 241 Syria, 169, 217, 253 subaltern, 45, 78, 86, 103, 105, 111, 112, 116, 118, 138, 157, 186n59 consciousness, 78, 102–104, 111, 116, 118, 126, 134, 135 critic, 45, 77, 86 historian, 77, 147 history, 38, 77, 160 narrative, 38, 43, 79, 86 subject-effects, 103, 118 voices, 116, 270

295

women, 1, 26, 38, 43, 44, 45, 87, 102, 107, 115–116, 141 work, 86 subalternity, 46 gendered, 43, 44, 45 female, 45, 47, 77, 78, 93 subalternist, 103, 118 Sufi, 240 Islam, 200, 242 humanism, 241, 242 mystic, 200 poetry, 242 Sufism, 95, 99, 200, 202, 241 Sukayna (or Sakina), 123, 197 Sunna, 17, 18, 204, 205, 217, 222, 225, 253, 263 Sunni, 174 Islam, 7n19, 18 law, 28n80, 74, 146, 149, 155, 158, 211, 219, 224, 251 see also Shi’a Svensson, Jonas, xvin11, 1n1, 10, 14n35, 149n78, 179, 213, 214n38, 225n60, 226, 236n92, 244, 253n6, 263n26 ta’a, 111, 185, 236, 245, 246 see also nafaqa al-Tabari, Abu Jafar Muhammad Ibn Jarir, 152, 228, 229, 230 Taha, Mahmoud Mohamed, 217, 227, 244 tafsir, 225, 228, 256, 257, 261, 265, 272 see also exegesis tamlik, 168 see also divorce taqlid, 18, 20, 205 see also ijtihad ta’sil, 17–20 see also asl, authentication and usul al-fiqh thinkable, 18 see also unthinkable, and unthought Tohidi, Nayereh, 27n75 Trinh, Minh-ha T., 116–118, 138 ulama, 20, 159, 203, 204, 205, 207, 208, 222, 223, 247 see also alim Umm Salama wife of the Prophet, 231 umma, 29, 34, 49, 158, 173 ‘ulum al-lugha, 273 UNEM, 59, 80, 81

296

index

United States and Mernissi, 47, 79, 114, 120, 126, 237, 247 Unthinkable in Islam, 18, 19, 151, 193, 247 see also unthought, and Arkoun unthought, 18, 19, 193, 260 usul al-fiqh, 18, 217, 272, 273 see also foundationalism

word of God see revelation worker, domestic, 111

veil, 28n80, 69, 111–115, 132, 198, 199, 233, 235 see also hijab and muhajaba

Zainab al-Nafzawiyya, 151 Zaman, Muhammad Qasim, 20 Zanan, 29, 31 Zaynab Bint Jahsh, 228–230 Zayzafoon, Lamia Ben Youssef, 2, 3, 11, 48, 66, 113, 175, 176, 234 Zine, Mohammed Chaouki, 20n46 Zhor, 111–113, 116 see also maid

Wadud, Amina, xviii, 6, 7n20, 8, 11, 14, 26, 33n95, 36, 44, 163, 189, 244, 249, 251, 253–258, 260–273 wali, xiin2, 167, 189 al-wilaya al-‘amma, 222

Yamani, Mai, 235 Yassine, Abdessalam, 23 Yassine, Nadiya, 22, 23, 27, 32, 34 Yemen, 152 Yemenite, 147, 151, 152