A Quiet Revolution (44 page)

Her research, Bakhtiar explains, led her to challenge conventional readings of a key word in this verse—the word
daraba.
Conventional readings understand the word as being derived from the root verb “to

beat” or “to hit.” Consequently, the verse is commonly understood and translated as specifically permitting men (in the words of various other prior translators) to “beat,” “hit,” or “spank” their wives, if the first two recommended stages—of first “admonishing” the wife and then leaving her “alone in bed”—failed to tame the woman’s resistance.
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Bakhtiar found that the root verb “daraba” had a number of pos- sible root meanings besides “to beat,” including “to go away.” In addi- tion, Bakhtiar points out, the Prophet Muhammad was never known to have beaten any of his wives and thus had never himself put into prac- tice a method of controlling wives that the Quran purportedly recom- mended. Furthermore, taking account of the fact that the interpretation of the word “daraba” as “to beat” is internally inconsistent with the broad, general tenor of Quranic statements and recommendations re- garding relations between men and women, Bakhtiar concluded that the correct interpretation of this word could not possibly be “to beat”: rather, she concluded that in this context it must mean “go away from.” The verse thus basically instructs men, as Bakhtiar interprets it, to leave— divorce—women who persist in challenging or resisting them. Given that the Quran also explicitly instructs men to grant divorce to women who do not wish to remain in a marriage, this reading and translation of the verse, Bakhtiar maintains, was in every way internally consistent with the Quran’s other specific teachings, as well as its broad, general teach- ings.

Raised in the United States by her American Christian mother, a single parent, Bakhtiar describes herself as “schooled in Sufism” and as someone who is on the Sufi path. Now in her sixties, Bakhtiar has been a longtime student of Islam and is deeply familiar, she explains, with the dominant Muslim schools of thought, both Shi’i and Sunni. On her own initiative, as a child of eight, Bakhtiar had converted to Catholicism— not her mother’s faith. When she traveled to Iran with her Iranian hus- band at the age of twenty-four she found herself drawn to Islam. At this time Bakhtiar got to know her father, an Iranian who was “not religious, but spiritual, devoting his life as a physician to help to heal the suffering of people.”

When Bakhtiar’s translation was first published, Mohammad Ashraf, ISNA’s secretary general in Canada, declared that “this woman-

friendly translation will be out of line and will not fly too far.” Main- taining that “women have been given a very good place in Islam,” Ashraf also said that he would not permit the translation to be sold in ISNA’s bookstore. “Our bookstore would not allow this kind of translation,” he said. “I will consider banning it.”
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His remarks drew a stern response from Ingrid Mattson, the pres- ident of ISNA. Calling on the secretary general to retract his comments about banning the translation from their bookstore, Mattson (herself a noted scholar of the Quran) went on to declare in a statement that ISNA was an organization that strove to represent the “diversity of North American Islam.” Affirming the “validity of different schools of Islamic thought,” ISNA also did not recognize, Mattson’s statement continued, that “any particular scholar, school of thought or institution,” was “nec- essarily authoritative for all Muslims.” Pointing out that an Islamic

scholar had in fact advanced a similar thesis to Bakhtiar’s regarding verse
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in the pages of ISNA’s own magazine,
Islamic Horizons,
in
2003
, Mattson’s statement also declared ISNA’s support for all “schol- arly enquiry and intellectual discussion on issues related to Islam,” and its support and encouragement of “honest debate and scholarship on issues affecting the Muslim community. In particular, we have long been concerned with the misuse of Islam to justify injustice towards women.” ISNA “expects its administrators,” her statement concludes,

“to promote ISNA’s values and mission.” Although she takes a clear po- sition on freedom of thought and speech, Mattson notably does not take a position as to the accuracy or religious acceptability of Bakhtiar’s translation.
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ISNA, like other American Muslim organizations, has been under- going palpable changes in the post-
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era, as I described in Chapter
10
, regarding dress and speech, and the group has exhibited signs of gener-

ational change. The Ashraf-Mattson exchange symbolically captures key and telling elements of the processes of transition as a new, American- born generation begins to take the reins.

Ashraf ’s comments reflect a worldview that is confidently grounded in a sense of the absolute rightness of male dominance and of readings of the Quran that embody that view. Clearly they are grounded too in the assumption that banning dissenting views from circulation, at least in

ISNA-sponsored bookshops, is a perfectly acceptable way of dealing with divergent opinions. Such notions, entirely normative in most Muslim- majority societies, are obviously not notions that would necessarily have much purchase in America or Europe.
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As Mohammed Ayoob has pointed out in his study
The Many Faces of Political Islam,
Islamist organizations in different countries, even when they are branches of the same mother organization, commonly evolve in profoundly different ways in response to the local situation.
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ISNA, with its Islamist Middle Eastern and South Asian heritage, is evidently developing along lines shaped by its American context, lines that dis- tinctly bear the imprint of that context: it is becoming, that is, an
Amer- ican
-Muslim organization. The Mattson-Ashraf exchange, taking place some twenty-five years after the founding of ISNA, can be seen as one clear sign of this evolution. As I mentioned earlier, even the fact that ISNA has a female president may not have been something that ISNA’s founders had ever envisioned. At any rate, no Islamist organization in the home countries is headed by a woman.
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Andrea Useem, the young Anglo-American convert to Islam we en- countered earlier as the spokesperson and interpreter at the open house meeting at a Boston mosque in the weeks after
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, now a working jour- nalist, interviewed Bakhtiar about her translation of the Quran and in particular her rendering of verse
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. Useem also interviewed Bonita McGee, the community activist also mentioned earlier who worked with ISNA on domestic violence, as well as Hadia Mubarak, the former pres- ident of the MSA, regarding this verse, inviting them to reflect on the significance of Bakhtiar’s translation from their own professional and personal perspectives.

What impact, Useem asked McGee, might this new translation have on the community that she served, and did she think that this verse as conventionally translated had “actually result[ed] in abuse.” McGee said she did not believe that the verse caused domestic violence. “Abusers abuse because it works for them,” she said. “If you had a perfect transla- tion of the Quran, guess what? Abusers would still abuse and find justi- fication for it. It’s a behavior choice.” McGee did, however, go on to say that in its conventional rendering the “verse can create a serious crisis of

faith for women who are hurting and don’t know how to accept it in their hearts.”
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Mubarak, whose statements as president and then as former pres- ident of the MSA had been notable for how they interwove elements from both her American and her Islamist ethical heritages, again dis- plays these same attitudes and assumptions in her responses to Useem. Thus, noting in her reply that other scholars of Arabic besides Bakhtiar had also interpreted the verses as not endorsing the beating of women, Mubarak goes on to express her gratitude to Bakhtiar “for putting this in- terpretation into an English translation.” The verse had posed a “per- sonal dilemma” for her, she said, when she was growing up. It had been difficult to “reconcile this verse, ‘to beat them,’ with my own notions of Islam’s egalitarianism.” She explained further, “You read the Quran and see the basic gender paradigm that ordains mercy and justice between men and women. Then you come to this one verse that seems to con- tradict everything you believe Islam stands for, and it just doesn’t fit. I never accepted that this verse actually instructed men to beat their wives. That to me is an absolute contradiction to the way God describes Him- self, as absolutely just.”
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Even prior to the publication of Bakhtiar’s translation, Mubarak’s personal uneasiness with this verse had spurred her to write an article about it in which she had drawn attention to the multiple meanings of the word “daraba,” including its meaning “to leave,” and she had also speculated as to the misogynist societies whose assumptions may have in- formed earlier interpretations. Mubarak carefully remains within the ac- cepted bounds of orthodox belief—as indeed Bakhtiar does in her translation: that is, they challenge interpretations of the Quran but never so much as gesture toward questioning the divine origins of the word or words themselves. This is the one inviolable stricture, the one inviolable line that cannot be crossed by anyone who wishes to be viewed as a Mus- lim by orthodox Muslims.
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It is clear from Mubarak’s responses to Useem that she understands Islamic justice as unambiguously including gender justice: if Islamic jus- tice does not include gender justice, her reply implies, then it would not be justice. The same assumptions are reflected in her article. “As God’s justness is unarguably a basic principle in Islamic theology, then God

would not permit or promote acts that inflict
zulm
(injustice) upon any human being. No one can disagree that misogyny is a form of
zulm
by justifying women’s degradation as well as violating her rights.”
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Given that Mubarak was president of the MSA it seems reasonable to assume that her views fall within the range of the views considered ac- ceptable for a member and representative of the MSA (and they do re- main fully within the bounds of orthodoxy and of acceptable dissent) and even that they probably reflect those of many other MSA members and college students. Indeed, Mubarak goes on to say in her response to Useem that “a lot of educated young women” she knew felt just as she did with regard to this verse, feeling that it “seemed to contradict everything you believe Islam stands for.”
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Doubtless, too, though, there are prob- ably a range of differing opinions around such issues among young Muslims. Dalia Mogahed, for example, another prominent young Amer- ican-Muslim hijabi, coauthor of
Who Speaks for Islam
and a recent Obama appointee to the White House Advisory Council (on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships), seems to speak a language of comple- mentarity rather than of equality with regard to men’s and women’s roles. Often such language also implies accepting legal inequalities as re- flecting the complementarity of gender roles. Such a position would seem to be essentially different from that implied by Mubarak’s notion of “Islam’s egalitarianism.”
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Published in
2007
, Bakhtiar’s translation of the Quran, with its impor- tant recasting of orthodox patriarchal readings, was part of a post-
9
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trend of outspoken criticism and challenge by Muslim women of estab- lished Islamic teachings and practices as regards women.

Already, as we saw, the young scholar Mubarak had published an article on the issue in
2004
; in
2005
, a couple of years before Bakhtiar’s translation appeared, a group of young academics (Ayesha Siddiqua Chaudhry, Kecia Ali, Laury Silvers, and Karen Bauer) presented a joint

panel at the American Academy of Religion in which they focused en- tirely on verse
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, analyzing its inherent problematics and exploring the different readings of it offered by different interpreters over the course of history. Like Mubarak and Bakhtiar herself—and like many of the activists and critics of conservative Islam of this post-
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era—these

critics spoke for the most part as committed Muslims, albeit Muslims who were troubled by and found themselves questioning the dominant, conservative interpretations of Islam.
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Similarly, Amina Wadud, who had in her earlier work,
Quran and Woman
(
1992
), addressed herself to the subject of verse
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, now re- turned to the subject. And in this post-
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era she arrived at a far more categorically critical conclusion than she had previously. Quoting the verse she wrote: “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.” Consequently, Wadud continued—explaining now (as Bakhtiar had done) the scholarly and intellectual grounds for her po- sition—“I have finally come to say ‘no’ outright to the literal imple- mentation of this passage.” Saying an “outright no” to a verse from the Quran represented a quite dramatic shift from Wadud’s earlier position. The book in which Wadud put forth these views,
Gender Jihad,
was pub-

lished in
2006
.

Like Bakhtiar, Wadud was already a well-known scholar in the field of women and Islam prior to
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. And, like Bakhtiar, Wadud is a con- vert to Islam. She writes that she began to cover her head and wear long clothes even before formally converting to Islam. “As a descendant of African slave women,” she explained, “I have carried the awareness that my ancestors were not given any choice to determine how much of their bodies would be exposed on the auction block or in their living condi- tions. So I chose intentionally to cover my body as a means of reflecting my historical identity, personal dignity, and sexual integrity.” The mosque at which Wadud made her
shahadah
(her declaration of faith— the declaration that “there is no God but God and Muhammad is his Prophet,” which seals the conversion) at the age of twenty, a mosque conveniently located near where she lived, was “heavily influenced” by Maulana Mawdudi (founder of the Jamaat-i Islami). All the women as- sociated with the mosque, Wadud wrote, were “dressed in face veil as well.”
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