SOURCE: Booth, Marilyn. “Back to Basics?” Women's Review of Books 9, no. 3 (December 1991): 21-2.

[In the following review, Booth notes that Mernissi's historical interpretations are occasionally narrow-sighted and anachronistic in The Veil and the Male Elite, but still offers a generally positive evaluation of the book.]

Over a century ago, there emerged a tradition of scholarship in the Arab Muslim capitals which came to be labeled “Islamic modernism.” In a context of nationalist and anti-colonialist struggle, scholar-activists sought to revive what they saw as their societies' historical strengths, grounded in the events of earliest Islam and the written sources to which they gave rise. The Islamic modernists founded their programs for the future on a return to “the basics” of the faith and its earthly community. Defining those “basics”—a process that continues heatedly today—has never been easy or uncontroversial, especially in the crucial matters of gender and women's status in Islam.

Fatima Mernissi's Le harem politique, published in Paris in 1987 and now appearing in English as The Veil and the Male Elite, can be set within the Islamic modernist tradition. But Mernissi goes further than previous scholars and polemicists in constructing her own revisionist interpretations of Muslim history. She writes deliberately and self-consciously as a Muslim—which she defines first and foremost as “belonging to a theocratic state.” But drawing on Islam as a belief and a code of conduct, she repeatedly invokes the believer's duty to seek knowledge through looking critically at the codified sources of Muslim practice. This is crucial, she argues, to counter efforts to bolster today's misogyny with manipulative readings of the sacred texts.

Like many scholars of gender in Muslim societies today, Mernissi rejects essentialist, ahistorical visions of “Islam.” The Veil and the Male Elite can be seen as a sequel to this prominent Moroccan sociologist/feminist activist's groundbreaking work, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (Indiana University Press, 1975). In both works Mernissi's scholarship is framed by her political, feminist involvement with the present. The first book focuses on contemporary Morocco. The present one spotlights the earliest Muslim community—Mecca and Medina in the seventh century CE, the time of the Prophet Muhammad.

Looking at key events and utterances that occurred—or are said to have occurred—as the Prophet was consolidating his community, Mernissi finds there was a battle over women's sexual and political agency, a battle that became central in the power struggles of Muhammad's last years. The Prophet, she argues, tried to realize a spiritual-political community based on equality, autonomy and self-regulation; he urged women's full, free and public participation in the new community: “Islam as a coherent system of values that governs all the behaviors of a person and a society, and Muhammad's egalitarian project, are in fact based on … the emergence of woman's free will as something that the organization of society had to take into account.” The Prophet, according to Mernissi, “could only conceive of the sexual and the political as being intimately linked,” and “insiste[d] on putting his private life and his public life on the same footing.” He consulted women on strategic concerns, listened and tried to legislate on their behalf, and resisted men's opposition to his “egalitarian project.”

Pitted against the women of the community and the Prophet in Mernissi's scenario are some real villains. Chief among them is 'Umar, one of Muhammad's closest advisers and fiercest adherents, later his second successor as head of the Muslim community (or caliph). 'Umar, traditionally one of the heroes of Islamic history, is presented here as the leader of the opposition to many of Muhammad's ideas:

For ['Umar,] as for the many Companions that he represented, the changes that Islam was introducing should be limited to public life and spiritual life. Private life should remain under the rule of pre-Islamic customs … The men were prepared to accept Islam as a revolution in relations in public life, an overturning of political and economic hierarchies, but they did not want Islam to change anything concerning relations between the sexes.

(p. 142)

Looking closely at the chronological ordering of the revelations Muhammad received from God (which differs from their ordering in the Qur'an), Mernissi suggests that the women of the first Muslim community—certain wives of the Prophet chief among them—engaged in debates and made demands touching on equality and autonomy not only in religion but also in economics and sexuality. Had they been granted, those demands would have gone a long way toward abolishing practices that had governed women's lives earlier. And at first, women's queries received encouraging responses: certain revelations came to Muhammad that made clear women's spiritual equality and commensurate responsibilities. Others stipulated new legal rights and protections. When women complained to the Prophet that the men were ignoring the new society's regulations and continuing to follow pre-Islamic practices—such as refusing to let women inherit property, and continuing to treat women as property that could be inherited—Muhammad supported the women with further revelations that underscored their new status.

But, says Mernissi, as the women pressed for increased economic power (such as the right to take booty after raids), limits on men's authority in sexual relations (such as the right to command their choice of positions for sexual intercourse), and a stop to men's violence against women (such as the right to beat one's wife), these issues posed a fundamental threat to the young community's unity. Says Mernissi, “[T]he very survival of monotheism was threatened.” She sees in this the impetus for a new series of revelations to Muhammad, revelations that

temporized on the principle of equality of the sexes and reaffirmed male supremacy, without, however, nullifying the dispositions in favor of women. This created an ambiguity in the Koran that would be exploited by governing elites right up until the present day.

(p. 129)

For example, in certain verses of the Qur'an women are described as full and equal members of the religious community, who cannot be treated as possessions, yet elsewhere in the Qur'an women are said to be under men's control. Women are clearly given the right to inherit property, yet limits are placed on the shares they can claim; some scholars have argued on the basis of the text that these limits apply only to certain situations. Such pronouncements, if not contradictory, allow for multiple legislative possibilities.

These confrontations took place in a period of instability and insecurity, years three to eight of the Islamic calendar (624/25 to 629/30 CE). During this brief period, Muhammad failed to triumph over the powerful clans of Mecca who had refused to accept his project. At the same time his own community, based in Medina, was riven by doubt and dissension. When certain Medinans tried to undermine the Prophet by spreading rumors about his personal life and harassing his wives, the result was revelation from God that became the basis for women's seclusion. This practice, Mernissi argues, did not exist among the earliest Muslims, although it seems to have been prevalent to a greater or lesser degree in the pre-Islamic Arabian peninsula.

Interwoven with Mernissi's analysis of the Qur'an's pronouncements on women in the political context of Islam's birth is another, related investigation: that of the hadith literature, the sayings and actions of the Prophet, as reported by his close associates, which form a source of Muslim law and practice second only to the Qur'an. As Mernissi emphasizes, hadith literature has been a much-contested ground. A great deal of spurious hadith were generated as conflicting interest groups and multiple claims to political power emerged in the young community. Hadith scholarship, which began in earnest soon after Muhammad's death, sought not only to compile hadith but to verify every report of a hadith and the route of its oral transmission.

Mernissi cites some leading examples of hadith that have been used to put women in their place, nicely showing how these pronouncements are part and parcel of contemporary discourse. “Those who entrust their affairs to a woman will never know prosperity” is used to reject women's access to political leadership. Other hadith, which assert that women are essentially impure or ascribe to them animal-like features, have been used to limit or degrade their activities as religious beings: “The Prophet said that the dog, the ass, and woman interrupt prayer if they pass in front of the believer, interposing themselves between him and the gibla [orientation toward Mecca; necessary for prayer].”

Mernissi examines the political interests of the first transmitters of these and other hadith, and questions their veracity. She's not the first to do so, but her rejection of the large body of hadith attributed to Abu Bakra and Abu Hurayra, the two transmitters she targets, goes far beyond the cautious attitude taken by previous scholars. (Abu Hurayra was one of the most prolific transmitters of the Prophet's deeds and sayings; to reject his contribution is to reject an awful lot of extant hadith.)

It is clear that the Prophet regarded women as active, responsible members of his new community who had important, often public, roles to play. Other twentieth-century scholars have pointed out that Khadija, his first wife (until her death, his only one), was central in defining and sustaining Muhammad's sense of mission. Later wives—notably 'A'isha and Umm Salama—were outspoken advisers and public figures. The new faith also seems to have sought to give some women legal protections they had not enjoyed earlier. Yet, while Mernissi's own readings of her sources are generally careful, she does not always allow for alternative possibilities that the same sources would also support, or at least do not preclude. She also ascribes motives and beliefs to the early Muslim protagonists of this drama that are beyond our ability to know, and some of her observations are anachronistic.

If Muhammad did see in some women important potential supporters, this did not necessarily mean he sought to give them the same status as men. Neither is it at all clear that in Medina, as Mernissi contends, “the debate on equality of the sexes raged,” nor that the Prophet believed in principle in sexual equality. Nabia Abbott's early and still important study, “Women and the State in Early Islam,”¹ sees in the absence from leadership positions of women not married to the Prophet a gauge of Muhammad's ambitions about gender: from this perspective, one Mernissi does not examine, the “egalitarian project” looks far less egalitarian.

I think Mernissi strains the reader's belief when she leaps from women's active roles in the early Muslim community, and from their interest in ascertaining their rights and roles, to claiming that they were “press[ing] the Prophet to ask the Muslim God to make a declaration on [sic] the place of the free will of a woman as believer in the new community.” It also seems farfetched to suggest that “'A'isha and Umm Salama … demand[ed] the liberation of women.” The relative lack of evidence about pre-Islamic Arabia makes it still harder to evaluate early Muslim women's actions and demands, not to mention their expectations and assumptions.

As Mernissi says, some kind of shift, boding ill for women, did occur late in the Prophet's life. But we do not and cannot know the motives behind the revelations he received in this period—revelations that would later ratify men's sexual, spatial and economic domination of women. Perhaps, as Mernissi claims, the climate of instability and the increasing challenge to the Prophet were key. But it may also have been Muhammad's own relations with his wives, said to have been troubled at this time, that generated these verses, and he may not have been quite the reluctant legislator that Mernissi portrays.

I'm not as optimistic as Mernissi. I don't think that placing the Qur'an's pronouncements on women in historical context can alter either the gender-based power relationships it dictates or its theological and legislative power as God's immutable Word. Still, this eloquent, forthright and carefully documented argument should get a hearing. Mernissi makes clear that critical re-readings of the central sources for Islamic belief and practice are not only possible but imperative. (She compares her own reinterpretations to the “muzzled, censored, obedient and grateful” responses of other Muslims.) The care she takes to provide basic historical, doctrinal and exegetical information suggests her interest in reaching non-Muslims as well as English and French speaking Muslim communities in Europe and the US. She also engages contemporary Muslim polemics on gender and sexuality published in Arabic. The book is especially important, I think, when placed in the context of an increasingly heated struggle in the Muslim world—a struggle in which “Islamic legitimacy” is invoked to support a vast range of conflicting visions of women in the volatile world politics of the nineties.

Note

1. Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. I (1942).