In our selection from Leila Ahmed's book, she states:
“The egalitarian conception of gender inhering in the ethical vision of Islam existed in tension with the hierarchical relation between the sexes encoded into the marriage structure instituted by Islam.”
What does she mean by this statement? Give references to page numbers.
Leila Ahmed WOMEN AND GENDER IN ISLAM Historical Roots of a Modern Debate Yale University Press New Haven & London Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Calvin Chapin of the Class of 1788, Yale College. Copyright © 1992 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illus trations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by Jill Breitbarth. Set in Sabon type by Brevis Press, Bethany, Connecticut. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ahmed, Leila. ^om en and gender in Islam : historical roots of a modern debate / Leila Ahmed, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-300-04942-0 (cloth) 978-0-300-05583-2 (pbk.) 1. Women— Arab countries— Social conditions. 2. Sexism— Arab countries— History. 3. Women, Muslim'— Attitudes. 4. Feminism— Arab countries. I. Title. hq1784.a67 ,1992 3 0 5 .4 8 '6 9 7 1 — dc20 9 1 -2 6 9 0 1 • CIP The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and dura bility of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 20 19 18 17 CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 PART 1 The Pre-Islamic Middle East 9 Chapter 1 Mesopotamia 11 Chapter 2 The Mediterranean Middle East 25 PART 2 Founding Discourses 39 Chapter 3 Women and the Rise of Islam 41 Chapter 4 The Transitional Age 64 Chapter 5 Elaboration of the Founding Discourses 79 Chapter 6 Medieval Islam 102 PART 3 New Discourses 125 Chapter 7 Social and Intellectual Change 127 Chapter 8 The Discourse of the Veil \ 144 INTRODUCTION I BEGAN THIS BOOK WITH THE INTENTION OF BRING- ing together such information and insights as were cur rently available on the conditions and lives of women in Middle Eastern Arab history. The only general ac counts of women in Arab or Muslim history available when I started to research this book (some ten years ago) were such works as Wiebke Walther’s Woman in Islamy an attractively illustrated book, more anecdotal than analytical, which took little if any notice of the perspectives on women in history that contemporary feminist research on Western women, and to some ex tent on Arab women, had begun to elaborate.1 I soon realized that my task would not after all be as simple as 1 had first imagined and that a key focus of the book must be the discourses on women and gen der, rather than, more straightforwardly, the presen tation of a synopsis of recent findings on the material conditions of women in the different periods of Middle Eastern Arab history. Throughout Islamic history the constructs, institutions, and modes of thought devised by early Muslim societies that form the core discourses of Islam have played a central rple in defining women’s place in Muslim societies. The growing strength of Is- 1 2 W INTRODUCTION lamist movements today, which urge the reinstitution of the laws and prac tices set forth in the core Islamic discourses, made the investigation of that heritage on women and gender seem particularly urgent and relevant. Other factors contributed to my sense that a prime focus of this study of Middle Eastern Arab women in history must be the discourses and the changes in, and varieties of, the discourses on women. The debates going on in the contemporary Arab world between Islamists and secularists— between advocates of veiling and its opponents— and the ways in which the issues of the veil and women as they figured in these debates were ap parently encoded with political meanings and references that on the face of it at least seemed to have little to do with women, again brought the issue of discourse to the fore. Similarly, the way in which Arab women are discussed in the West, whether in the popular media or the academy, and the sense that such discussions often seem to be centrally even if implicitly engaging other matters through the discussion of women— such as the mer its or demerits of Islam or Arab culture— also highlighted the importance of taking the discourses themselves as a focus of investigation. Discourses shape and are shaped by specific moments in specific soci eties. The investigation of the discourses on women and gender in Islamic Middle Eastern societies entails studying the societies in which they are rooted, and in particular the way in which gender is articulated socially, institutionally, and verbally in these societies. Some charting of the terrain of women’s history and* the socioeconomic and historical conditions in which the discourses are grounded was thus in any case a necessary first step. This in itself was a considerable task. Knowledge about women’s his tory and the articulation of gender in Muslim societies is still rudimentary, although in the late 1980s there was a spurt of new research in that area. Nonetheless, existing studies of periods before the nineteenth century deal with random isolated issues or scattered groups and thus illuminate points or moments but give no sense of the broad patterns or codes. A recent authoritative tome on the history of the Islamic peoples by Ira Lapidus makes no reference to women or the construction of gender prior to the nineteenth century and devotes only a small number of pages to women after 1800. This treatment exemplifies the status of research on women and gender in Islam, reflecting the absence of work attempting to concep tualize women’s history and issues of gender in any Islamic society before the nineteenth century and also the progress that has been made in con ceptualizing a framework of women’s history with respect to more recent times.2 Unearthing and piecing together the history of women and the articu INTRODUCTION ? 3 lation of gender in Muslim societies, areas of history largely invisible in Middle Eastern scholarship, thus was a primary and major part of this enterprise. Both historically and geographically the field to be covered was potentially vast, precluding any comprehensive account. The broad frame work of this inquiry, with its principal objective of identifying and ex ploring the core Islamic discourses on women and gender and exploring the key premises of the modern discourses on women in the Middle East, served to set the geographic and historical limits. Within the broad limits of the Arab Muslim Middle East it was in certain societies most particularly, and at certain moments in history, that the dom inant, prescriptive terms of the core religious discourses were founded and institutionally and legally elaborated, so it is these societies and moments that must here be the focus of study. Crucial in this respect were Arabia at the time of the rise of Islam and Iraq in the immediately ensuing period. Some examination of concepts of gender in the societies that preceded and adjoined the early Islamic societies was also necessary to understand the foundations and influences bearing on the core Islamic discourses. A review of these was additionally desirable because the contemporary Islam ist argument, which maintains that the establishment of Islam improved the condition of women, refers comparatively to these earlier and neigh boring societies. The region comprises a kaleidoscopic wealth of the world’s most ancient societies, but the organization of gender has been systematically analyzed in few of them. Those surveyed in the following pages— at times extremely briefly and only to point to salient features or note parallels with Islamic forms— include Mesopotamia, Greece, Egypt, and Iran. They were picked for a variety of reasons, among them their importance or influence in the region, their relevance to the Islamic system, and the availability of infor mation. In more modern periods, crucial moments in the rearticulation and fur ther elaboration of issues of women and gender in Middle Eastern Muslim societies occurred under the impact of colonialism and in the sociopolitical turmoil that followed and, indeed, persists to our own day. Egypt in this instance was a prime crucible of the process of transformation and the struggles around the meanings of gender that have recurringly erupted in both Egypt and other Muslim Arab societies since the nineteenth century. In many ways developments in Egypt heralded and mirrored developments in the Arab world, and for the modern period this inquiry therefore focuses on Egypt. Which moments and societies in the course of Muslim history assumed a central or exemplary role in the development of the core or dom 4 ^ INTRODUCTION inant discourses fundamentally determined which societies are focused on here. The findings presented in the following pages are essentially provisional and preliminary and constitute in many ways a first attempt to gain a per spective on the discourses on women and gender at crucial, defining mo ments in Middle Eastern Muslim history. Part 1 outlines the practices and concepts relating to gender in some exemplary societies of the region an tecedent to the rise of Islam. The continuities of Islamic civilization with past civilizations in the region are well recognized. Statements to that effect routinely figure in histories of Islam. Lapidus’s History o f Islamic Societies notes that the family and the family-based community were among the many institutions inherited and continued by Islam, others being “agri cultural and urban societies, market economies, monotheistic religions/’3 The author might also have noted that the monotheistic religions inherited and reaffirmed by Islam enjoined the worship of a god referred to by a male pronoun, and endorsed the patriarchal family and female subordination as key components of their socioreligious vision. Judaism and Christianity, and Zoroastrianism, were the prevailing religions in the Byzantine and the Sasanian empires, which were the two major powers in the area at the time of the rise of Islam. In instituting a religion and a type of family conforming with those already established in such adjoining regions, Islam displaced in Arabia a polytheist religion with three paramount goddesses and a va riety of marriage customs, including but not confined to those enshrined in the patriarchal family. That is to say, Islam effected a transformation that brought the Arabian socioreligious vision and organization of gender into line with the rest of the Middle East and Mediterranean regions. Islam explicitly and discreetly affiliated itself with the traditions already in place in the region. According to Islam, Muhammad was a prophet in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the Quran incorporated,