Islamic HIStory: A Book Review

Mehri Zand

The image of women among Iranians, whether in the US or back

home, has been primarily shaped by the influence of the historical
development of Islam within our culture. I remember the wide variety of
behavioral prescriptions that were filled everyday, publicly and privately, so
that women’s actions would be kept in line with that which was suited for
her according to Islam. (Dokhtare Shayesteh) These behavioral codes,
pertaining to women, are regulations which have been taking shape for many
years through different interpretations of sacred texts. The source of these
interpretations has been the turbulent history of Seventh Century Arabia, the
dawn of the establishment of Islam, particularly in Mecca and Medina.

There are two extreme forms of responses to these re-readings of the

HIStory of Islam; one is an unquestionable faith in the official version, and
the other a superficial rejection of the same. Both seem profoundly
unfounded. Fatima Mernissi’s The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist
Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam is a brilliant work of scholarship
that questions the official HIStory and will undoubtedly place the question
of the equality between men and women on top of the agenda of any
meaningful change in Muslim countries.

Mernissi is a sociologist who teaches at University Mohammed V in

Rabat, Morocco. Her other books include Beyond the Veil, Doing Daily
Battle, and Islam and Democracy. There is also a book titled Women in the
Muslim Unconscious that many believe was written by her under the
pseudonym of Fatna Sabbah.

The current book under review is organized in two parts, ‘ Sacred

Text as Political Weapon’ and ‘ Medina in Revolution: The three fateful
Years’. In the preface to the English edition Mernissi informs us that after
completing the book she came to the understanding that “if women’s rights
are a problem for some modern Muslim men, it is neither because of the
Koran nor the Prophet, nor the Islamic tradition, but simply because those
rights conflict with the interests of a male elite.” The attempt by these men
to convince us of their claim based on the sacred text is questioned by
Mernissi in the first part of the book.
 Mernissi’s journey towards the past by is a well-informed one. We
are reminded about the crucial role of Time in our everyday life, which has
taken shape in its present contour through the dominating aspect of our
modern/postmodern technological civilization. For Mernissi, this return to
the past is not of the same quality practiced by many Middle Eastern
intellectuals who following the brutal and suppressive colonization period
tried, having been “veiled” themselves in the process, to redefine citizenship
through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Mernissi’s return is not
for the purpose of putting things “back in order”, but the questioning of the
order in which women are only considered in a relationship of submission to
authority.

The journey into the past starts with an ordinary encounter in the
present. Mernissi asks a Moroccan grocer if a woman can be a leader of
Muslims. The grocer is shocked and a customer recounts the Hadith: ”
Those who entrust their affairs to a women will never know prosperity! “ It
is this powerful influence of the sacred text in the form of Hadith collections
(the record in minute detail of what the Prophet said and did) over the
consciousness of citizens that motivates Mernissi through her excavation of
Muslim sacred texts.

After the recounting of some of the major events of Mohammed’s life,

Mernissi sets the context in which the importance of the gathering of Hadith
comes into the picture. The absence of a male heir following Mohammad’s
death in AD 632, brought the issue of succession to the forefront of a
political battleground. Politicians manipulated the sacred text for a gain of
power and, through the elaboration of figh ( a veritable science of religion),
scholars opposed them, utilizing the figh’s concepts and methods of
verification and counterverification.

Tracing “a tradition of misogyny”, Mernissi elegantly deconstructs the

above quoted Hadith as well as others by a meticulous examination of the
circumstances under which these Hadith were recorded and transmitted. We
learn the technical aspect of this examination through the reporting of
Mernissi under the direction of well-established scholars. Through this
examination we also learn of ‘A’isha, one of Mohammed’s wives and the
daughter of Abu Bakr, whose knowledge about religion, poetry and
medicine was unrivaled according to ‘ Asqalani1. ‘A’isha’s denomination in
Islamic HIStory, especially by Al-Afghani a contemporary historian, is
turned into an appreciation of the prominent place that she took in the
political turmoil following Mohammed’s death. ‘A’isha challenged the rule
of Ali as the fourth caliph as unjust. It was Abu-Bakr who recounted the
above-mentioned quotation to question her challenge to Ali. The Muslim
community was clearly divided in this conflict; many including the
inhabitants of Basra chose neutrality. But Abu-Bakr’s opposition to ‘A’isha
based solely on her gender is the only one which has been given the stamp of
approval by the male Muslim elite in this conflict, although at the time
‘A’isha enjoyed the respect of a major portion of the Muslim community.
This was a great opportunity to seclude women in political decision-making
once and for all. Al-Afghani thinks that ‘A’isha proves that “woman was
not created for poking her nose into politics.” How the actions of one
woman, even if proven wrong can be generalized to affect half of a
community based solely on the common trait of gender, is telling of the
remaining influence of the inherent misogynist attitude of the pre-Islamic
jahaliyya (the era of ignorance) period through the present day.

The veiling of women in Islam has also an important place in this

tradition of misogyny narrated by Mernissi. She convincingly shows that
the primary reason, as it has been recounted to us, for the physical seclusion
of the women’s body in public by hijab is not casual observing by men, but
it is an instrument chosen by a man (Mohammed) to discourage untimely
intrusion by outsiders in a couple’s private moment. This was on the
wedding night of Mohammed and Zaynab Bint Jahsh, when following the
celebration and the serving of supper, three men stayed chatting after all
other guests had left. Growing impatient with the desire to be alone with his
new wife, Mohammed drew a sitr (curtain) between him and others and
recited what has come to be the main source of legitimization of the veiling
of women by Muslims.

We are told that many Muslim women resisted the hijab. Of these the
most prominent was Sukayna2. “The most powerful men debated with her,

1
A ninth century scholar, whose seventeen-volume commentary on al-Bukhari’s Hadith collection, Al-
Sahih (The Authentic), is the primary source of Hadith for Mernissi. Al-Bukhari interviewed 1,080 persons
and collected 600,000 Hadith, and after careful examination retained only 7,257 of them as authentic. One
wonders if at that time there were 596,725 false Hadith in circulation how many are today.
2
She was one of the great-granddaughters of the Prophet through his daughter Fatima, the wife of Ali, the
fourth orthodox caliph who abandoned power to Mu’awiya and was assassinated by the first Muslim
political terrorist.
caliphs and princes proposed marriage to her, which she disdained for
political reasons. Nevertheless, she ended up marrying five, some say six
husbands. She quarreled with some of them, made passionate declarations
of love to others, brought one to court for infidelity, and never pledge ta’a
(obedience, the key principle of Muslim marriage) to any of them. In her
marriage contracts she stipulated that she would not obey her husband, but
would do so as she pleased, and that she did not acknowledge that her
husband had the right to practice polygamy. All this was the result of her
interest in political affairs and poetry.” After presenting Sukayna as a
typical traditional Muslim women in a conference in Malaysia in 1984,
Mernissi is accused openly by a Pakistani, editor of an Islamic journal in
London, of lying. The man shouted to the audience: ”Sukayna died at the
age of six!” Mernissi showed her Arabic source of these accounts to the
man, and he responded that the sources were scanty. Only later Mernissi
finds out that this journalist did not read or speak Arabic. May be this is not
a good excuse for the show of ignorance (Sukayna died at Medina at the age
of 68), but is the show of a typical blind faith in official versions of HIStory.

The Male and the Male Elite does not go far enough to a radical
critique of Mohammad’s practice in private life, which is understanble given
Mernissi’s position in the Islamic world. However, Mernissi’s book is
illuminating and quite entertaining. It uncovers the accounts of the
participation of women in the early history of Islam, which either remains
hidden or is given a negative exposure by the official Histories.