Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam (30 page)

In this flexible and adaptable model of family, the existence of female- headed households was less endangered due to complex networks of support and community relations. In addition, females without seemingly fixed male partners were not subjected to the negative stigma implied by some Islamic legal configurations of family still prevalent in most Muslim traditional cultures.

How is Islam, a more recent yet major addition in shaping the identity of African-American Muslim women, distinct from other configu- rations of African-American women? Islam is a major identity factor, with its history of meticulous ideas about community, family, and relationships. None of these ideas reflect the post-slavery survival mechanisms for African-American families despite many important corollaries between ideology and praxis. I have already discussed the sources of the Islamic ideology and related its development of
shari‘ah
, a detailed system of laws and codes. What I am considering here are areas of reform in the law based upon the multiple actual experiences of all mothers. The Qur’an is emphatic that Muslims are characterized by both belief and action. Certain actions are prescribed, both regarding ritual practice (
‘ibadah
) and social relations
(mu‘amalat
).As the Qur’an was revealed in seventh-century Arabia and then the law was developed, it established juridical principles to help constructwhat could be understood as morally acceptable behavior within the context of a just social order. It did so in a manner that reflected the time, place, and

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circumstances of the ones constructing the law. It is equally important to take into consideration the time, place, and circumstances of other Muslim communities, especially modern ones, in order to continually determine right praxis. In this regard, the special history of African-Americans, as a significant part of Islam in America, should impact upon ideas about attaining and sustaining social justice in the context of an African-American Islamic identity.

The experiences of African-American female heads of household must be looked at holistically, vis-à-vis reform notions of Islamic law. The argument for this stems not only from the basis of our particular experiences as African-American women who have chosen Islam, but also on the basis of the Hajar paradigm, which gives a historical precedent to an important parallel within the entire Abrahamic legacy, including the Islamic legacy: especially since the law was developed without considering her experience, while retaining it as liturgically indispensable to the fulfillment of one of the five pillars. With larger numbers of women facing a similar reality, there is an even greater imperative for the law to accommodate this reality instead of continuing to turn a blind eye to it. The legal accommodations I refer to

must include mechanisms to help ensure

the

safety and well-being of

families with single women as heads of households, to prevent the double burden of the negative stigma of fixed ideals of family, mother, and female as well as of the public sphere.

In this complexity, the American Muslim community has several competing paradigms of family and marriage: family from traditional Muslim cultures; as a reflection of the unique African-American historical experience; and families within the context of Western cultures and U.S. legal codes. African- American Muslim women have entered into marriages, only to exit them in percentages no one dares admit. In selecting this topic, I want to emphasize the tenacity and bravery of such women who not only engaged in single

parenting, especially including sole responsibility for material support, but also often offer innumerable public services to the Muslim community.
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We are in denial. We do not focus upon the realities of these women’s experi-

ences, because to do so would be to admit that their lives are far from the ideal perceived to be their right or due in
“
Islam.
”
Of course, when attention is focused on them and this discrepancy between right and reality, we implicate the woman herself, otherwise it reflects badly on Islam. Our failure to admit this will not make this reality go away. That’s rather like little kids who say,
“
Cover your eyes and the monster won’t see you.
”

Should any shortcoming befall such families, we do not address it as a

148 inside the gender jihad

matter of collective community responsibility, inadequacies of legal struc- tures, or their implementation, nor as a matter of systemic forces playing at even our most intimate developments as individuals and members of kinship groupings. We simply hide behind the rhetoric, “Islam gave women all their rights fourteen centuries ago.” The context in which those rights were given, the complexities of historical development, and the challenges of current circumstances with painful realities for women in families are totally ignored. Furthermore, if we can blame these shortcomings on the parent who spends the most time and resources toward providing for endangered children, then the community does not have to look at its role in failing such families. Instead, it projects a very impractical expectation – the best Islam has to offer will result, no matter what actual circumstances people live in. If individual families or women cannot live in the fulfilled promise of Islam, the implication has been that the fault lies with
their
own faith or personality. Women are left to face this burden alone and silent. “Over the years, female-headed families have been among the most maligned and misunderstood of all Black families, being forced to bear the responsibility, as it were, for all the ills of Black America.”
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My concern is that the formation of Islamic family law was based upon certain notions of family that have ceased to exist in most parts of the modern world, and that have
never
existed in the context of many parts of the world that have transitioned and continue to transition into Islam, like the African-American Muslim community. Yet the legal ideals of family are presumed to remain unencumbered by global or regional realities. If Islam is for all places, for all times, and for all people, then how do we deal with
this
reality from an Islamic perspective? In the case of Islam in America, especially in the case of transitioning Muslim women, we expect they will represent the best while they are offered the least. We offer no substantive consideration of the realities that so many women face when left to raise children single-handedly in a predominantly non-Muslim and un-Islamic environment with fixed and exclusionary definitions controlling success in the public space for acquiring a means of survival.

TOWARD EGALITARIAN CONCEPTS OF FAMILY FOR HOLISTIC LEGAL REFORMS

Although the story of Hajar is not detailed in the Qur’an, Muslims claim her and ritually re-enact her plight during the pilgrimage,
sa‘y
– running seven times between Safa and Marwah. Pilgrims have the opportunity to

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focus on her predicament and the reality of a single female head of house- hold. In every situation where Muslims are ravaged by war, faced with refugee status – with estimates that Muslims make up as much as a half of the world’s refugees – wherever poor Muslim countries supply male and female laborers for wealthy Muslim countries, including the brain drain, real families are split off from even their own ideal notions. When women assume greater responsibilities for protecting and financially managing the family, they achieve a larger social role. They are certainly more than mere vessels for safe delivery at childbirth.

The purpose of looking at the Hajar paradigm anew is to give precedent to the expectations of the “nurturing mother,” who is also housekeeper, cook, laundry woman, educator, valet, driver, and ad hoc medical assistant, and who must also contend competitively within the patriarchal public sector to provide protection and a means for living a life of dignity. Yet no elitist progressive discourse has focused strategically and pragmatically on the reforms needed in order to construct legal, political, and ethical systems that provide access to sources of financial, moral, and

psychological support – especially in

the U.S.A. where poverty has a

plethora of humiliating legal and moral consequences. What does this mean for a Muslim woman without a vast fortune? The Hajar paradigm is the reality for Muslim women heads of households whose legal category in
shari‘ah
deviates from the patriarchal, man-centered norm. Yet it is through the law that they expect their honor and dignity to be upheld.

In most traditional Islamic schools of law (except the Maliki school),

custody (
hadanah
) of the child goes to the

father and his people.

The

reasons for this again reflect cultural, historical, material, and tribal trends. In all schools, maintenance of the children is supposed to be the responsibility of the father or his extended family. In the context of modern U.S.A., custody of the child as well as maintenance most often goes with the mother, with the focus on underlying notions of nurturance and care, and also cultural and historical reflections of specific presumption of family not presumed to depend on maintenance. Muslim families in America have bought into both these ideals without increasing the means for support.

If a woman needs to divorce, earn an income, protect her family and community, she
simply
does so. It is within this realm of pragmatism that Islamic gender roles make sense. Many African-American trans- itioning Muslims want to be free from having to
“
do it all.
”
They want relief from having to bring in an income and manage all domestic

150 inside the gender jihad

affairs. Many women would like men to have a comparable desire for family stability, and if performing fixed gender roles is the method to achieve that goal, so be it.
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However, because there is no formal structure to sustain the paternal maintenance responsibility of traditional Islamic law, there is no guarantee of child support unless divorced women avail themselves of U.S. laws and policies surrounding child support. African-American women are often distrustful of these laws as un-Islamic, even when they are forced to provide financially for the children they presumed by an Islamic idealism would only require them to nurture and morally support. This leaves child main- tenance to the whim of fathers, who often receive sanction from male authorities of the transitioning Muslim community that excuses them from the traditional
shari‘ah
requirements to fulfill the child support respon- sibility while discouraging women from seeking support from the U.S. established legal means. All the while, the idealization of the full-time nurturing mother, according to one woman, is that “She is free from financial responsibility according to this religion.”
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The magical expec- tation that children are provided for and women are pampered and protected mothers, with paradise at their feet, is a negative fantasy afflicting the single mother’s realities of survival.

Therefore, this massive demand by Islamists for the full implementation of historical
shari‘ah
codes must include rethinking universal principles in the primary sources, rather than becoming a mere overlay of obsolete codes onto modern complexities. It behooves us to take into greater consideration the workings of the law and to become more responsible with regard to holistic and radical reforms. This is especially so in the U.S.A., where the Qur’an and Islam might be deemed our ethical guide, with no legal struc- tures organized to enforce the full implementation of its universal guidance. This circumstance has permitted neglect and abuse of Muslim women in families in ways particularly relevant to modern global changes. Meanwhile, because of a presumed ideal of
shari‘ah
, the realities of the single female head of household and her children experience additional yet undue damage.

CONCLUSION: MORE EGALITARIAN CONCEPTS OF FAMILY

Although Islam is a coherent and integrated system that includes the legacy of complex legal formulas known as
shari‘ah
, the underlying notion of

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family in
shari‘ah
has a patriarchal bias. As Muslim cultures move into modernity with the extended family giving way to the nuclear family, both notions have reconfigured and yet retained a patriarchal bias. This results from family retaining the primacy of marriage. According to the Prophet, “Marriage is half of faith.” When a “marriage” dissolves, however,
family
may still exist. Securing the survival of the family as a primary unit of society is not the same as securing the patriarchal bias of
shari‘ah
constructs. New configurations of family – with or without the heterosexual couple – must reconsider the ways that all members of the family may play various roles in care-taking, protection, and provision. As noted above, African families surviving slavery and the economic and political aftermath have been important sites for other configurations of the family, including different dynamics of the extended family. As African-Americans have adopted Islam, they have sometimes forfeited the integrity and survival benefits of their own heritage. Women have been valued primarily with regard to their relations to husbands, and sometime fathers. The realities of single, female heads of household do not include the sanction or support of this focus on male familial leadership and support. However, if an African-American articulation of Islamic identity is to be formed in a meaningful way, then our whole history must be taken into consideration. This history shows the virtue of women surviving and helping children to survive. In this task,

women still need the

benefit of networks of support. I recommend an

extended concept of community to offer that support, through public policy change, Islamic legal reform, and the moral imperative of family well-being. We should neither depend upon nor carelessly disregard the reality of Hajar’s abandonment. It was imperative that she survived, and that she helped her child experience a life of prosperity. The mechanisms available for her to create that prosperity are silenced in Islamic law. That silence needs to be broken for the many women who face a similar dilemma. This is one basis for extensive reform in Islamic law, such that community is structured as a network of support for children and families even if, or especially when, females stand alone as heads of household.