Death of a feminist
9
It is not a particularly fortuitous time to be a Muslim woman. If she makes her home in a Muslim-majority country, the oppressive weight of patriarchal interpretations of Islam constricts and confines her. If she lives as a minority in India, France, the United Kingdom or America, she is crushed under the weight of Islamophobia and the expectations of a disenfranchised cultural identity that seeks to control her every move. In the midst of this, the heroic is hard to find; even the insightful is increasingly rare.
When the world lost Moroccan Muslim feminist Fatima Mernissi on Nov 30, it was another tragedy in addition to the several tragedies that afflict Muslim women; but in this case what has been lost has left a legacy for those of us she left behind. Mernissi’s writings, on how the feminist and revolutionary facets of Islam’s teachings were covered up and sidelined by patriarchal scholars and jurists, can easily be classified as amongst the most crucial pieces of writing on women and Islam.
Mernissi set herself the ambitious task of revealing how an early Muslim male elite created institutions of seclusion and veiling that would undermine women’s power.
In Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society, Mernissi dissected how the strong female leaders of early Islam have been systematically and pointedly written out of Islamic history (as a consequence, the ‘official’ Islam that was constructed exists in tension with ideas of equality between the sexes) by outlining how patriarchal descriptions of women’s sexuality have hence become cornerstones of an order that presents women as the source of all trouble.
Mernissi’s project is one of ideological reclamation; discussions regarding female sexuality must be taken away from male scholars and jurists to extricate existing Muslim theology from the clutches of inequality and oppression.
Equally compelling is Mernissi’s analysis of the issue of veiling, presented in her book The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam. Here, Mernissi sets herself the ambitious task of revealing how an early Muslim male elite, seeing the ascent and popularity of women like the wives and daughters of the Holy Prophet (PBUH), decided to create institutions of seclusion and veiling that would undermine women’s power.
Mernissi considers the Muslim community in Madina, contrasting its simplicity with the ostentation of caliphs and Muslim kingdoms. She also pays due attention to the early Islamic emphasis on women’s rights, its inclusion of women in all prayer and ritual, in inheritance and business — facets of the faith that were with accruing years since the death of the Prophet duly excised from Islamic history.
Mernissi’s is a brave discussion, not least because the very act of a Muslim woman considering religious texts is fraught with peril. While Muslim men, a majority of them unschooled in interpreting religion, consider themselves self-styled and singular authorities on all matters of faith, the perspectives of women who likely spend far more time in spiritual pursuits are seen as invalid per se. It is an interesting point to note, since it is replicated so often and so frequently in the lived experiences of so many Muslim women.
Mernissi’s work connects this reluctance of Muslim women, even those duly schooled in religious matters and doctrinal interpretation, to present their interpretation as worthy of attention to a legacy that is centuries old. It is not coincidence, this sidelining and marginalising; it is the intentional product of a plot whose first moves took place not long after the death of the Prophet.
Having put out these controversial views, Mernissi faced the brunt of criticism, unsurprisingly from conservatives whose unspoken gripe was probably with the very idea of a woman taking on the task of religious interpretation. She persevered, however; a persistence likely born of as much her own experience of growing up in Morocco as of her scholarly command over her subject. Growing up partly in the seclusion of her family’s harem (an experience she also recounted in a moving and lyrical memoir) Mernissi was aware of what a life of segregation and of deliberate exclusion from the public sphere felt like.
Hers, then, was not the perspective born solely of study; her experience and closeness to the many women, aunts, mothers and grandmothers, who were all sentenced to a life that could not extend beyond the private, formed the basis of her work. It is this truth of shared suffering that shines through in her work.
Its sincerity is enhanced by an endearing honesty; for even while she speaks of the oppression of a harem, she recollects also the intimate bonds of friendship and love that brought women together in a way that is elusive in the public sphere. Segregation was a burden, its arrangement to prevent interaction with men an inherent subordination and an institutionalisation of inferiority. At the same time, it was some small respite against entitled men, smug in their domination and unthinking in their entitlement.
Where women stand, what they should wear, how they should conduct themselves is central to every aspect of social and political life in Pakistan. In many ways, it is the inability to create a tolerant discourse around these issues that has left the matter of feminism and faith in the doldrums.
In the meantime, a new generation of Pakistani women waits on the sidelines, considering the perils and profits of participating in a public sphere that seems hostile if not downright deadly. Texts like Mernissi’s can provide some worthy insight into these problems of the present, connect the experiences of Pakistani women with Moroccan women, the tribulations of the feminists of now with the conclusions of feminists past.
Mernissi did not, could not, solve all of these complex conundrums; but she used her pen, her courage and her scholarly training to leave us the vocabulary to begin the discussion.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, December 9th, 2015
