Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam (12 page)

44 inside the gender jihad

his career.”
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In most families the cost of maintaining care and the contri- butions of care-givers and care-workers are not realistically calculated in terms of the developments of public policies and economic theory. The ones who fulfill those contributions perform while invisible. Tronto challenges the inequity of defining the citizen in terms of production, wage-earning, and consumption when she politicizes an ethics of care as essential to comprehensive social justice.
58

Sharon Welch agrees with this ethics of care in her work.
59
She thinks

outside the box of each human being as a discrete entity responsible only for obtaining their piece of an ever-shrinking pie of global resources. Welch describes the patriarchal ethic as outdated with its “equation of responsible action and control – the assumption that it is possible to guarantee the efficacy of one’s actions.” She analyzes “the political correlates of this assumption addressing particularly the monopoly of power that one must have if one defines action as the ability to attain, without substantial

modification, desired results.”
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Instead of apathy and despair leading to

non-action “when faced with a problem too big to be solved alone or within the foreseeable future,”
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she suggests a feminist ethic of risk in response to such grand global predicaments. The best we can hope for is collective participation as a continual process contributing toward more

holistic engagement in ethical practices that

end the “uneven rhythm of

social change,” which is so disheartening that it can lead to “cynicism and despair”since“in some situations we cannot prevail.”
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She found inspiration to challenge the “presumptions of Western moral theories” while working with African-American women and men toward “alternative constructions of the aim of moral reasoning, the morality of rights or the morality of care and responsibility.”
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This ethics of risk is correlated to “a theology of divine immanence, that reinforces” it “and the passion for justice,”
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challenging us “to relinquish ‘power over’ others” and inviting us “to participate in ‘power with’.” Like Welch suggests here, I have experienced the joy of working with women’s collectives in a process-oriented challenge to gender oppression among Muslims. Nevertheless, I do not expect to see gender oppression eradicated in my lifetime. My work is part of the process; the results are truly in the hands of Allah in concert with human agents of free moral choice.

Muslims accept Allah’s sovereignty over all things. Although we must struggle to establish the good, we never have control over the results of our struggle in the process. They belong solely to Allah even as they reflect the whole of human collective agency. Furthermore, the results are not

What’s in a Name?
45

restricted to a select few. Therefore, all people have the choice of agency as responsible care-takers or care-workers, learning and relearning what it means to achieve peaceful coexistence with each other on the planet. “Do not be concerned with the fruit of your action – just give attention to the action itself. Fruit will come of it own accord. This is a powerful spiritual practice.”
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Diana Eck
66
describes her amazement, during a week-long interreligious

dialogue between women from different parts of the world, when Japanese women confessed the absence of a Japanese word for “justice.” She and others had “presupposed the importance of justice [w]as a basic criteria of value.” Further discussion would disclose “[t]hat the word in Japanese would be something like what you mean by harmony.” For the complex and yet simple implications of such distinctions in language, Eck confessed, “A sense of ethics must be won through the difficult process of dialogue, built from ongoing relationships.” In describing the
tawhidic
paradigm above, I also used the words “harmony” and “equilibrium” as critical to the underlying objective toward justice.

In Islamic cosmological thinking, the universe is perceived as equilibrium built on harmonious polar relationships between the pairs that make up all things. All outward phenomena are reflections of inward noumena and ultimately of God. All multiplicity is reducible, in some way to the one. All creatures of the universe are nothing but God’s signs.
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Furthermore, in our current time, justice for women is simply not like justice a thousand or two thousand years ago. It is more evident that despite women’s continued child-bearing capacity, central to the biological function of human survival, the role of nurturance and care-taking could be

integrated into dynamic

economic and political

public policies that

contribute integrally to restructuring the care-work in family and society. Ideally, care is important enough to guarantee structural support in the public sector. It would also operate on more egalitarian terms of mutually shared rights and responsibilities.
68
Women and men are not merely their

biology. The greatest teachers available to provide men with opportunities to learn about care-taking and its resulting egalitarianism are those who have most often been confined to this experience: women. Once men have learned more about this, women would still have exclusive privilege in the experience of childbirth but childcare and the construction of domestic tranquility must be incorporated as central to the larger framework of

46 inside the gender jihad

public duties. This requires policy reforms sensitive to women’s domestic experiences, now enshrouded by taboo and misplaced discourse on honor.

Today we witness worldwide chaos and community-building simul- taneously. It is crucial for continued self-reflection in Islamic discourse on harmony and justice to include both the inside and the outside as essential for building the moral agent (
khalifah
) in the context of the family. Muslim men and women speak a different language or fail in the process of an equitable “ongoing relationship” to bridge the language disparities with the result of different conceptualizations of justice and harmony and, not insig- nificantly, the disequilibria of male historical, political, and familial

privileges. Thomas Sowell suggests, “What social justice seeks to do is to eliminate undeserved disadvantages for selected groups.”
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He also agrees with the notion of social justice as a process, and as an important part of

the larger category of cosmic justice, which is up against conditions, circumstances, and consequences that can in no way be completely controlled by humans in order to be achieved at no cost. At least social justice can be measured relative to the advantages and disadvantages of its projected results. Cosmic justice cannot be so easily measured on the basis of results since the consequences can be endless. That is why my Islamic framework points out that results belong to Allah, as the collective effort of human agency to achieve those results belongs to all humankind. My concern here is that consciousness of cosmic justice must continually come into deliberation when working on other issues of social justice. I especially conceive of gender justice as a harmonious process in which women and men work together to remove barriers to women’s full mainstreaming in all aspects of society, while simultaneously acknowledging and compensating them for the indispensable contributions they have played throughout history by way of reproduction, nurturance, and care-taking of family and community, by increasingly mainstreaming women in the process of public

policy.

Care-taking contributions have become invisible, but must now

enter into full-scale public discourse in terms that reflect the immense voluntary donation of women as moral agents. No parallel contribution so

essential to all human well-being has ever been just by virtue of being male and human.

voluntarily made by men

The development of Islamic moral theory insufficiently incorporated explicit reflections on the dynamics of family as they bear upon gender. Women themselves were not considered full agents with a perspective of total choice in their contributions. Their identity has been relative to their role in the family as care-takers. Since domestic harmony is so important, it

What’s in a Name?
47

must be fulfilled. But to restrict the identity of women to this role, even as they increasingly fulfill other community, political, and economic roles, unfairly violates the importance of care and restricts or doubly burdens women in the fulfillment of other aspects of their divine purpose as
khilafah
.
Despite these historical developments about the moral agent, the
ahadith
and
sunnah
reinforce the thesis that
taqwa
is more than an outward attitude or performance. The statement by the Prophet, “God will not look at your bodies or forms, but at your hearts,” moves the focus away from external gender disparity. Likewise, the famous
hadith
,
“All actions are judged in accordance with their intentions,”
7
0
seems to emphasize situating the locus of judgment on the heart and mind in the actions, not on the accident of biology. Actions that qualify as either good or evil are then truly viewed generically, not in gender-stratified terms.
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Although the
hadith
“does not give us a definition of what the good and the evil referred to really are, we can clearly infer from it the express identi- fication of goodness with conformity to the dictates of Islam or the [Qur’an].”
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In the Qur’an, “whoever does good, whether male or female and is a believer” shall be rewarded (40:40). Such explicit emphasis prevents gender, class, or ethnic disparity as features of expanding and maintaining the development of a truly progressive Islamic ethical theory of care and compassion as a communal responsibility.

ETHICS AND ISLAMIC LAW:
SHARI‘AH
AND
FIQH

Law is used in society and government to establish the necessary terms of basic rights and wrongs in collective living as well as to assemble the checks and balances for maintaining those rights. Before I look at definitions of law or
shari‘ah
in the context of Muslim history and societies, it is important to devote some consideration to Islamic ethics in its own right as well as in terms of its extension to the legal tradition. The existing gender bias requires appropriate deliberation with regard to the needs and complexities of living Islam today. Little if any work has been done explicitly on the relationship between gender and Islamic ethical theory, especially empha- sizing the particular place where women experience oppression most: as daughters, wives, and mothers in the private domain. Too much of Islamic reform and the works of Muslim reformists extensively occupied with

women’s

human

rights

address

the issue of family through the law

without considering the direct and detailed relation between Islamic ethics and the law. Discussions of the historical juridical formula of law and

48 inside the gender jihad

women’s rights get all the attention while the ethical foundation of that law and the underlying ethical theories remain underexamined. However, from the perspective of this book, gender disparity was an underlying character- istic of
shari‘ah
in its historical development
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and as such remains one of the most hotly debated topics in reform movements today.

The ethical foundation of the gender
jihad
,
so far, has been subsumed under the extensive debates over
shari‘ah
and
fiqh
. Despite the absence of direct or explicit corollaries between ethics, whether explained explicitly on the basis of ethical theory or operating as an underlying ethical presumption, the meanings of
shari‘ah
have often been inferred by reducing it to one word: justice. As discussed above, it is clear that justice means different things to different people. It is also clear that patriarchal thinking assigns full justice to men, who then limit it to women.

The fourteenth-century jurist Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah said,

The foundation of the
shari‘ah
is wisdom and the safeguarding of people’s interest, in this world and the next. In its entirety it is justice, mercy and wisdom. Every rule, which transcends justice to tyranny, mercy to its opposite, the good to evil and wisdom to triviality does not belong to the
shari‘ah
although it
might have been introduced in it by implication
.
The
shari‘ah
is God’s just and mercy amongst His people.
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(emphasis mine)

This quote helps us to begin an examination of that foundation. The words
“
shari‘ah
” and “
fiqh
” were not used as they became central to the Islamic intellectual movement after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Ziba Mir- Hosseini reminds us how crucial it is to “distinguish between
shari‘ah
and the science of
fiqh
.” She first points out that
fiqh
“is
not revelation
; it is that part of religious science whose aim is to discern and extract
shari‘ah
legal rules from the Qur’an and Sunnah. Strictly speaking,
fiqh
is a legal science with its own distinct body of legal theories and methodology as developed.”
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Likewise, Feisal Abdul Rauf reminds us to take care in

making the “distinction between
shari‘ah

as the idea of an immutable

divine order, and
fiqh
, the human interaction between that belief and the sources of divine
shari‘ah
from actual applications and implementations
that require human endeavors
”
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(emphasis mine). These are but two examples of how most modern scholars emphasize this distinction.