Transcript 26 Ahmed (3/12)

The Fall and Rise of the Veil:
Leila Ahmed
“Those of us leading this transformation
are confident in claiming Islam for
ourselves.”
(Sociology 156)
4:34
• Traditional translation:
– Men are in charge of women by [right of] what Allah
has given one over the other and what they spend [for
maintenance] from their wealth. So righteous women
are devoutly obedient, guarding in [the husband's]
absence what Allah would have them guard. But those
[wives] from whom you fear arrogance - [first] advise
them; [then if they persist], forsake them in bed; and
[finally], strike them. But if they obey you [once
more], seek no means against them. Indeed, Allah is
ever Exalted and Grand. (Shahih International)
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4:34
• Key word: daraba
– Usually translated to mean “to beat” or “to hit”
• But Laleh Bakhtiar, in her English translation, interprets the word as “to go
away from”
– Root verb has many possible meanings, including hers
• Mohammed never reported to have struck his wives, said bet husband the one who
treated his wife best, women to be granted divorces at will
– Bakhtiar concludes that translating as “to beat” not internally consistent with
Quran, decides to interpret as “to go away from”, i.e. to divorce
– The return of scholarship and interpretation, but animated by Islamist political
impulse
• Male ISNA secretary general in Canada condemns Bakhtiar’s translation,
considers banning it in ISNA bookstores
• ISNA president Ingrid Mattson rebukes him, affirms the diversity of North
American Islam, the value of debate
– The supremacy of men and right to enforce it through bans may once have
gone unquestioned, but not today (266-268)
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Changing face of Islam in America
• Not a matter of questioning the validity Quran, but of
understanding it correctly
– Does justice necessarily include gender equality?
• Post-9/11 era in America a moment of “unprecedented
opportunity for Muslim, feminists, liberals, and
progressives—and even of liberal progressives.”
– Critiques of radical & even strongly conservative Islam, such as
Wahhabism
– Women’s place in Islam a subject of public concern
• Nomani (2004): “I’ve seen that if we don’t assert ourselves,
we’re relinquishing our religion to be defined by those who
speak the loudest and act the toughest.” (272-74)
– Even so, activists typically reject the label “feminist” (291)
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Changing face of Islam in America
• “It seems that anyone aspiring to leadership today in
the religious-cum-academic community among
Western Muslims, American or European, must give
some generally liberally inclined attention at least to
issues of women and gender.”
– To these, gender equality appears self-evidently a part of
Islamic justice
– Many such scholars get their BA in the US, attend Islamic
university in the Muslim world, return to US for grad
school, combining the two scholarly traditions
• American Islam confronting same changes in gender
politics faced by American Christianity & Judaism in the
1960s & ‘70s (275-78)
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Changing face of Islam in America
• Abdul Ghafur: Global Islam in the midst of a
transformation led “largely by Muslims in the West:
because we have certain academic freedoms and
freedom of speech and freedom to worship. These
civil liberties are largely unknown in Muslim-majority
countries. Those of us leading this transformation are
confident in claiming Islam for ourselves.”
– True? Or is it better to speak of emerging Islams, as we
might Christianities?
• Saed: “Patriarchy and sexism are not necessarily
Islamic traits but are actually cultural traits.”
– Islamic, even Islamist, and American values intertwine
(280-82)
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Identity & Activism
• For the young generation of American Muslim activists, “their
identity as Muslim Americans clearly trumps and supersedes their
sense of identity and community as grounded in either ethnicity or
national origins.”
– Ideological legacy of Islamism; non-activists may place much more
emphasis on nationality
– Also a distinction between Islamist understanding of Islam as
necessitating political and social engagement, and the more private,
apolitical understanding of the American Muslim majority
• As Islamism spreads in the Middle East, identities change and bonds
between, for example, Egyptian Muslims and Egyptian Christians
may be loosened as bonds between Egyptian and Saudi Arabian
Muslims grow more salient (285-287)
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Women’s Rights
• Concerns w/women’s rights and equality can be found in
liberal, radical feminist, & conservative American Muslim
women
– Liberals & radical feminist may or many not wear hijab,
conservatives (ISNA, MSA) women are consistently do, in
addition to other concealing Islamic attaire
• Widespread concern w/minority & women’s equality not
found in Islamist movements in home countries, which
typically “emphatically reaffirm” patriarchal institutions &
practices
– Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb “excluded women from
among those who were to be considered autonomous human
subjects subservient to no one and entitled to equal justice in
the ideal Islamic state that was to be ruled by sharia.” (292)
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Women’s Rights
• Female leaders, like Ingrid Mattson, not found in Islamist
leadership outside the US
– Even in the UK, they imported American Muslim women for for
a female-led prayer event
• “The emergence of this wave of Islamic activism in relation
to issues of women and gender is... the product of the
convergence of key elements in the teachings of Islamism
with the ideals and understanding of justice in America in
these very specific decades.
– Had this merging occurred in 1950, for example, the concern
with women’s equality would not have been an issue
• In their home countries, Islamist organizations do not
advocate equality before the law for minorities, in America
they do (293-295)
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Identity & Activism
• “It is Islamists and the children of Islamists and not secular
or privately religious Muslims who are most fully and
actively integrating into [a] core and definingly American
tradition of social and political activism and protest in
pursuit of justice.
– It is they, after all—they and not us, the secular or privately
religious Muslims—who are now at the forefront of the struggle
in relation to gender issues in Islam, as well as with respect to
other human rights issues of importance to Muslims in America
today—and implicitly of importance in the long term to other
Americans too.” (297)
• But recall that Ahmed focuses on the most progressive minority of the
Islamist and Islamist-influenced activist minority (301)
• Fifty years ago, it looked as if the veil was headed for extinction. 50
years from now, who knows? (305)
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What does it mean to be a ‘secular
Muslim’?
• The word changes meaning across time and space
• Dr. Tariq Amahd: “We do not pray five times a day, do not read the
Koran and have not spent much time inside a mosque.”
– Describes practices of the pre-Islamist majority, at least in Egypt
– Focuses on the outward signs of belief
• ‘Secular’ a term “applied pejoratively early on in the rise of
Islamism to Muslims who were not Islamists and who did not
practice Islam as Islamists did, for example, who did not wear hijab
even though many women were, in their own eyes, believing
Muslims.” (298-299)
– Islamists capture & define conceptual labels
– Some Muslims “finding themselves alienated by and feeling no
sympathy with” the now dominant Islamist strain of Islam, “perhaps
begin to wonder if they in fact are Muslims after all: if this is Islam.”
– Putnam & Campbell’s “nones” & Christian conservative politics
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