Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam (50 page)

Town more than a decade before.
Surah Inshirah
, the 94th chapter, is my reminder that difficulty in life comes with ease in life. A few members from the congregation offered the requisite reminder of the portions over which I lost my flow of thoughts and memory. It reminded me of the difficulty before me: I was not facing the media, they were inappropriately located in the direction of prayer, as the organizers later told me, because they could not be controlled.

I was facing the reality that Allah is present in all ways, at all times, and in all places, and all I needed to do was to look with the eyes of my heart and turn my prayer back on track: an act of worship toward Allah. When those who claim a tradition of authority to prevent women from standing in front of men because the men might get distracted, it is the responsibility of the men, prior to the prayer, to consent and then to respond through consciousness of the act of worship and not the incidents of form. So, despite my lack of consent, I took self-responsibility at that moment to remember
what the prayer represents
: an act of devotion to That which is beyond our eyes’ vision, as could be disturbed by the weakness of our hearts. If we settle our hearts back to Allah, then and only then can we hope to complete the worship as intended. That is what I did. The cameras and the media disappeared before my heart and no longer presented a distraction to my eyes.

Finally, I must acknowledge with gratitude those about whom I had the most knowledge of in organizing this event: Ahmad Naseef, Asra Nomani, and Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur. Many others were involved but I never spoke with them directly. May Allah bless us all in this one moment in the timelessness of the cosmic order and important events in the gender
jihad
for justice and reform in Islam.

Stories from the Trenches
253

I don’t care who’s wrong or right

I don’t really wanna fight no more.

– Tina Turner
1

INTRODUCTION

There have been multiple reasons for fighting the gender
jihad
, many of them so intimately connected to the question of my own well-being that I scarcely know where to start. However, there is enough evidence in this book that such a
jihad
was absolutely necessary for survival. The few thoughts I include here by way of conclusion are not a summary of the book. There are a few reiterations, but in the final analysis, this is really the place where I hope the preceding pages can come to some concluding words and purposeful closure.

ON BEING FEMALE

God created women fully human. Anything, anyone, or any system that treats them privately or in public as anything less than that is destroying the potential harmony of the entire universe. “No person is your friend [or kin] who demands your silence or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended. Or who belittles in any fashion the gifts you labor so to bring into the world.”
2
That such treatment of women and women’s gifts has been justified by religious and secular discourse,

254 inside the gender jihad

interpretation, and action is an overt historical reality. It is my deepest desire to correct this flaw for all human beings, but especially to encourage women to affirm the reality of our full humanity by any means necessary. An Islamic studies professor recently told me that, by focusing so much of my time, research, and energy on gender, I run the risk of being a “gender fundamentalist.” I accept that label, since working to dismantle the historical paradox of the utility of women without equal affirmations of their intrinsic worth, being, and agency, he claimed, “reduces [me] to being a female . . . and
nothing else
.” This makes me and my work the axis of female “dehumanization” as he called it. This blatant erasure of my whole integrity as a person because of my personal and professional focus on gender is fundamental to that intrinsic significance and worth of the very work that I have been doing.
To be female is to be human
. Those who act as if I must be something else in order to merit full human status implicate themselves by implying that “man” is actually the same as human, such that being female is
de
humanizing. Women have consistently shown the moral fortitude to live
as Muslims
despite the absence of recognition of our full humanity in Islamic thought and practice. I have fought in the gender
jihad
to affirm both for myself and for other females, that being who we are is exactly what we were created to be. I could not be more or less than female. That
is
my humanity.

Patriarchal control over what it means to be human robs females of their God-given agency and full humanity. In this book, I have contributed some stories, some personal examples, and some intellectual considerations, in an effort to tell
a part of the grand story
including the dehumanization of female identity throughout Islamic thought, practice, and the basic con- structions of meanings of Allah and Islam, which have reduced femaleness to deviant in whatever ways women are like or unlike men, as subjects or utilities of or for male intellectual, social, political, sexual, spiritual, and historical analysis and experience. I have exposed my own location in the many ways that female dehumanization occurs and is often rewarded through the male near monopoly of determining the meaning of the divine, not only for their own self-aggrandizement as male – hence masculine-God identified – and for determining applications, uses, and abuses of “Islam,” but also for denying women’s “gifts” except as benefits of male public and private utility. When women sanctioned their own dehumanization, in part by attempting to be care-givers for themselves and others – even their patri- archal fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, colleagues, and friends – it is easy to see how constructs of gender relations are both problematic and essential

Conclusion
255

to being human. Men have so much more to learn about the truth of women’s full humanity – especially about the female potential to maintain wholeness despite entrenched practices contributing to this dehuman- ization, often from the very ones whom they have loved and cared for. Provided male chauvinism can be recognized as obsolete, even the most macho of men can learn by the historical and current examples of the female human as care-workers in a manner befitting and benefiting the divine status of both males and females.

The intrinsic nature of being human is not exemplified by patriarchal manipulation of the gifts females have been acculturated to practice in order to better the quality of life for all humanity. It is time for what it means to be female to become more than a utility of men’s searching for self-affirmation and identity. It is time for men to be
empowered with
and not to exert power over female identity and contributions. It is time for women and men to accept the full humanity of women by removing the veils put over women being female. It will prove to be the only way to save the planet from more public and private violence, to end war and the prep- aration for war, and to become citizens of care and compassion. Those “manly” traits, which perhaps once helped the whole human race to move out of subjectivity to the vicissitudes of nature’s unpredictability, have long outstripped their merits. The Qur’an says, “We have made [what is in] the earth subservient to you [human beings]” (22:65). Now that we have reached the zenith of our expressions and practices of
dominion over
, we must all take care to become servants of the earth’s salvation. To continue on this macho trajectory only builds further destruction. The female humans who have participated in the continuity of human well-being are the ones with the longest and strongest history of performing the role of care-givers. Their newly forming leadership, without the assumption of the master tools or the limitations of male human standards of power over, will

help

avoid this

dangerous

course

by teaching

all

who

dare to listen

how to assume the responsibility and facility of preserving that which is not only sacred, but also ordinary – peaceful co-existence with differences. Audre Lorde says:

Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependence become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.
3

256 inside the gender jihad

FULLY CLAIMING MY PAST AND HERITAGE AS A TRANSITIONING AFRICAN-AMERICAN MUSLIM

I am my father’s daughter. He was a devoted man of God. He felt called to God at the age of fifteen, while walking in the red Georgia dirt and hot lush fields. He gave his life, the next thirty years, to that call. He never achieved worldly success, either in his ministry or in terms of wage earning. He never wavered from his role as believer while becoming a husband, father, and man of the world. Although raised in and a practitioner of corporal punishment, he never hit his female children or his wife, and only disci- plined his sons after due explanation of his expectations, and the ways he considered they had failed to meet them. I have five brothers, most married and/or fathers. None of my brothers has ever beaten a woman.

I am my mother’s daughter. She was a full-figured African-American woman, extremely comfortable in her embodiment, highly sexual, and a living example of the best of southern hospitality. When I brought friends home, I told them her first or second question would always be,
“
Are you hungry?
”
or
“
Did you-all have something to eat?
”
It was always so. She suffered from undiag- nosed depression. She hit only in anger
–
me, my sister, my brothers, and my father. She was pampered to imprisonment by my father’s goal of being the protector and provider. She rebelled until he died. Then she transformed and became a competent human agent in the form of an independent woman. Despite my childhood inability to understand her, my adulthood confirmed over and over again that she was the glue that kept our family together.

My childhood was full of paradox, sometimes conflictual, sometimes transformative, but always within a confirmation that humanity was a mani- festation of the divine potential. Each of us could either rise to the highest level or indulge to the lowest level (95:5). I was raised on the idea that the Sacred is a constant
–
the only constant. I was raised on the idea that God is love. Of course my transition into Islam was influenced by my upbringing. I chose the name Wadud in its
indefinite
form to affirm the pervasiveness of God’s love and not simply to admit my servitude by attaching
‘abd
to the definite form, al-Wadud (
“
the Loving
”
, one of the ninety-nine names of Allah). The divide between the sacred and the mundane was no paradox: it was an illusion.

I have fought the gender
jihad
to remove the blinders that see only the illusion of fragmentation and then build structures and formulate systems to sustain the perception that it is real; and then give divine sanction to the illusion of human independence from transcendent peace and unity, and to pretend the practices, codifications, and systems constructed to sustain

Conclusion
257

the illusion are divinely ordained. In doing this, no one can perform as
‘abd/ khalifah
, servant/agent of Allah. Instead, one must consider oneself Allah, granting rights to all others as if their status is inferior to self or deviant from the norm. Yet “the rain does not fall on only one man’s house.” There is no such divine arbitrariness toward humankind.

Early in my studies of Islamic thought I fell in awe of Sufi “saints and mystics,” particularly Rabi‘ah al-‘Adawiyyah. I have relished the legacy and writings of Sufism in the hope of one day reaching such a devoted status. When I eventually committed myself to the practices of my teacher, Shaykh Ahmed Abdur-Rashid, head of several Sufi
tariqahs
(orders), I was still embroiled in the conflict between being a divinely ordained human being while being a female, and an African-American in transition. After spending thirty years, more than the number of years that Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allah had spent in his divine commission as Prophet and Messenger of Allah, I considered myself equal to anyone on the earth and certainly equal to any who struggles in Islam, however understood or practiced. I was also transformed to realize the essential component of faithful actions,
al-amal al salihah
, in completing my identity as servant. I wrote the following short essay as a personal journal entry. It was originally written over a decade ago and is only slightly edited here. This is a third and more significant reason for fighting the gender
jihad
.

THE ACTIVE PRINCIPLE OF ISLAM, OR, ACTIVATING ISLAMIC PRINCIPLES

There are no two ways about it, to understand the significance of this title requires some self-disclosure. Since the Islamic intellectual discourse has such a poor historical record of women’s self-disclosure
in the name of Islam
, it is even more appropriate to admit to the personal as political.

On my return to the U.S.A. after three years in Malaysia, where I was given the opportunity to link my theories about Islamic theology with active social involvement
in the name of Islam
, I encountered the bleakest circumstances. The pervasive, systematic oppression and resulting spiritual strain in the lives of ordinary people – causing most to live in utter disregard for their fellow humans – I found unbearable. I sought answers and resolu- tions to this dilemma by reading every kind of source material I could. There was little consolation. At each juncture, I continued to find more literature focusing on the extent of the problems, psychological, physical, social, economic, or political.