GENDER STUDIES
Women and Islam
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`The book is a laudable effort to give the reader glimpses into a world tilted against women not only when it comes to political or social power, but also in the finer and creative things of life... '
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IF one could compress the learned, and often long-winded, theses and complex arguments and analysis contained in the collection of essays published by Orient Longman as Gender, Politics and Islam into a single, simple question, it would read: Does Islam oppress women?
The simple answer is "No" and this fact cannot be changed by using pictures of veiled Muslim women — something that has become a cliché in the majority of western writing — to symbolise the subjugation, marginalisation and oppression of women in Islam.
But this does not mean that Muslim women enjoy the best of freedom and are treated as equal to men. Far from it. Ideology, thought, culture and patriarchal interpretation of all things Islamic can make women second-class citizens in their own homes/ society. But more despicable, or dangerous, is the deft marketing of the image of American soldiers "liberating" Afghanistan from the Taliban and Afghan women throwing off their burkhas with great glee!
After recognising that the veil is not necessarily a symbol of oppression, that it can be worn voluntarily too, let's return to the collection, which thankfully acknowledges this. It is a laudable effort to give the reader glimpses into a world — West and South Asia — tilted against women not only when it comes to political or social power, but also in the finer and creative things of life like writing. In the essay "Elusive Bodies: The Politics of Aesthetics among Elite Yemen Women", Gabriele vom Bruck notes how in Yemenese families, "while male literacy is highly valued, in a woman's hand the pen is seen as a potential instrument for initiating illicit encounters". She narrates the story of a father, who after reading his daughter's fine writing "asked her teacher to stop instructing her. He was worried that she might not find a husband".
"Gender and the Politics of Fatwas in Bangladesh", by Elora Shehabuddin, explains how in rural Bangladesh the punishment for adultery is much harsher on women than men. Women are stoned, beaten, "tied to a stake, doused with kerosene and burned to death". But when a married man is discovered having an affair, he is simply advised to take the woman as his second wife!
But the essay also describes how these very women defy local religious decrees to become members of NGOs despite campaigns that the foreign, Christian-funded NGOs were "secretly turning Muslim women away from their faith". In some cases this defiance brought drastic consequences like divorce. Nojimon Begum, 37, who was appointed by an NGO to guard trees, attracted her husband's fury. His charge: "You go onto the road. You greet everyone. You have no honour. You take loans from them. You go and chat with them. You have no need of a husband."
Needless to say, such action has the blessing of local mullahs. So does the resentment at educating girls, giving them "Christian values and ideas, (making them) shameless, too knowledgeable about their own bodies, too informed of un-Islamic legal rights and irreverent towards religious authority".
The establishment of an Islamic regime in Iran that replaced the monarchy in 1979 and its trampling on gender rights is vividly captured by Valentine M. Moghadam, who details how measures were taken to greatly "diminish the legal status and social position of women. It banned women from serving as judges, discouraged women lawyers from practising and excluded women from many fields of study, occupation and professions". However, in the 1990s, after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini many of these policies were reversed.
But one of the most powerful essays details the trauma and dilemma of mothers in danger zones like Palestine. In "Icons and Militants: Mothering in the Danger Zone", Julie Peteet gives a graphic account of how the political status of mothers gains importance in relation to the number of sons she has sacrificed to the cause. She raises and tries to answer pertinent questions like how women handle maternal emotions in situations where conflict is endemic, and the kind of decisions and choices they must make in the midst of violence and death. The conflict between maternal protection and nurturing and a political situation that leaves them little option than to send their children to early and violent deaths is poignantly explored in this essay.
Heartbreaking is the passage that describes how during the Lebanese civil war and the Israeli invasion of 1982, during sustained shelling, air raids, sieges and massacres, mothers had to dart in and out of the overcrowded shelters to secure milk, water and food for their children. Says one such mother: "We couldn't get water or food, and children were dehydrated. Ten women would go out for water; only two or three would come back. They died — there was no solution: either their children died of thirst or the mothers died ...one woman was killed in front of me. She was balancing a bucket on her head when a bullet hit her."
Faced with such choices, how do women engage in learned discourses on equality or power play?
Was it ever different... in other times, other religions, sects, regions or classes?
To answer that let's wind back to Simone de Beauvoir and her introduction to her book The Second Sex written way back in 1949: "Woman has always been man's dependant, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shared the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change. Almost nowhere is her legal status the same as man, and frequently it is much to her disadvantage."
RASHEEDA BHAGAT
Gender, Politics, and Islam, edited by Therese Saliba, Carolyn Allen and Judith A. Howard, Orient Longman, 2005, p.354, Rs. 350.
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