ssxl
17-11-04, 03:15 PM
Islam, Irigaray, and
the retrieval of gender
©Abdal Hakim Murad (April 1999) The Prophet said that women totally dominate men of intellect and possessors of hearts. But ignorant men dominate women, for they are shackled by an animal ferocity. They have no kindness, gentleness or love, since animality dominates their nature. Love and kindness are human attributes; anger and sensuality belong to the animals. She is the radiance of God, she is not your beloved. She is a creator - you could say that she is not created.
- Jalal al-Din Rumi
The 1969 female eunuch was nothing but womb. The 1997 female eunuch has no womb.
- Germaine Greer
Can men any longer write about women? Will our discourse always fallaciously subjectivise the male, as the Lacanian digit to the feminine zero? Andrea Dworkin and many others are insistent here. And yet the theologian must oppose such a closure no less stridently. No-one should claim a monological right to instruct the other sex concerning moral thought and conduct. Moreover, and no less seriously, we must object to that anti-dialogical aspect of the prevailing academic feminism which, supported by biometric footnotes, proposes that men have nothing to say here because truly ‘female thought’ is on every level categorically different from the thought of males. On this view, sexual difference not only creates a predisposition to be interested in certain kinds of issues, but fundamentally affects every way in which we handle concepts. Knowledges are sexualised, we are told; ‘the very way in which we decide what is true and false is a function of sexual difference.'
One reaction against this view is voiced in detail by Jean Curthoys in her new book Feminist Amnesia. She applies a kind of Friedanite fundamentalism, lamenting the recent decline of 60s and 70s radical feminist theory which was grounded in assurances of identity between the sexes rather than mere equality. Conventional academic feminism today, she avers, draws on recent biology to posit a total epistemic discontinuity between male and female, so that all scholarship, and all conclusions about reality, are bifurcated accordingly, excluding all possibility of dialogue across the gender abyss. This aporetic cessation, she insists, is intolerable.
Clearly there is force to her complaint. But equally clearly, both she and her antagonists go too far. Biologists and philosophers now converge on a median position which suggests that men and women do indeed think differently, but not so differently that they can form no judgement on each other’s conclusions. It is not just the practical implications which make this inference inescapable (could we tolerate, for instance, separate encyclopedias for each sex?). More seriously, the claim to aporia is to be rejected as forming part of a recent feminist turn away from rationality itself as an oppressive product and tool of ‘male linearity’. On this view, women’s discourse, sceptical about attempts to deduce any intrinsically true facts about reality, is hence pre-eminently responsive to the project of postmodernism, while men languish amid the rationalising games of late modernity. This thesis of male backwardness is intriguing and has appealed to many; yet remains without persuasive proof. As the Maturidis insist, rationality and morality are observed by the mind, not merely constructed by it. Is this scruple a ‘linear male objectification’? Surely it is just objectification: to claim that women have a categorically more indirect, empathetic, spontaneous approach to reality may be tantamount to affirming that they are less capable of sustained argument based on fact. Such a conclusion is far from universal among feminists, converging as it does with a certain masculine stereotype. Of course, it is almost certainly true, as Professor Carol Gilligan has argued, that ethical responses differ markedly between the sexes. For her, women ‘make moral decisions in a framework of relationships more than in a framework of rights’. Women’s ‘moral processing is contextually oriented’. This is uncontroversial. But value judgements amid the hurly-burly of lived reality are one thing; large generalisations about the nature of the world are quite another. And in the latter field, neither revelation nor reason persuade us that the two styles of argument, the male and female, cannot overlap.
What follows, therefore, is not an androcentric apologia, although a deliberate or even unwilled male discourse is inescapable and is not inherently improper. It claims to be factual, not a self-authenticating view from within a particular ‘gendered’ language-game.
A second preliminary point raises the entire problem of gendered approaches to spirituality. The British religious philosopher John Hick, in a recent moment of feministic reflection, proposed that ‘because of the effects upon them of patriarchal cultures, many women have ‘weak’ egos, suffer from an ingrained inferiority complex, and are tempted to diffusion and triviality.’ He thus suggests that women experience greater difficulties in becoming saints because the spiritual struggle can only be undertaken by a coherent, confident personality. On this view, women must pass through two stages in achieving sainthood, while men require only one.
A little reflection will reveal that this position suffers from two sharp problems. For a start, it deploys an unexamined stereotype of traditional women as shallow and easily distracted; whereas any observation of women’s attendence at, say, salat, or a Turkish mevlud, suggests that women’s devotional behaviour tends to be not palpably less sober, or focussed or directed than that of men. Often it is women rather then men who retain a more serious faith under secularising conditions; although this may flower in the privacy of the home, rather than under public scrutiny in the mosque. Secondly, it implies that spiritual growth is a primarily mechanical, discursive procedure whereby the will overcomes passion, leading to the detachment from the world which is the precondition for sainthood. This begs some fundamental questions about the spiritual life; Hick’s image may hold good for some forms of Christianity and Hinduism, but cannot be applied to many other varieties of religious development, where the conscious, calculating will is deliberately pushed into the background. Specifically, what is characteristically male about love-based mysticism? The insistence that the mind is a prison, and that emotion and spontaneous love of God, triggered by relatively informal practices of the dhikr type, is a commonplace even of ‘male’ spirituality. Here, for instance, is a poem by Rumi: ‘In the screaming gale of Love, the intellect is a gnat.
How can intellects find space to wander there?’And again: ‘Do not remain a man of intellect among the lovers, especially if you love that sweet-faced Beloved.
May the men of intellect stay far from the lovers, may the smell of dung stay far from the east wind!
If a man of intellect should enter, tell him the way is blocked, but if a lover should come, extend him a hundred welcomes!
By the time intellect has deliberated and reflected, love has flown to the seventh heaven.
By the time intellect has found a camel for the hajj, love has circled the Ka‘ba.
Love has come and covered my mouth.
It says: ‘Throw away your poetry, and come to the stars!''
Perhaps a modern Protestant theologian will have problems with this; but most traditional religions assume that the way to God is through the heart, not the mind. So Hick’s idea that ‘patriarchy’ slams the door to God in the face of traditional women simply because they are (supposedly) less cerebral than men, seems distinctly unpersuasive. He is simply a victim of his own cultural and denominational limitations. With these preliminary points in mind, let us now move on to the core issue. Modern women writers on religion, such as Rosemary Ruether, insist that all talk of gender in religions has to start in the beginning, with the archetypes. What do images of God tell us about the place of men and women in the world?
In her book Sexism and God-Talk, Ruether objects to ways in which Christian metaphors about God’s maleness are taken literally. For her, the Decalogue’s prohibition of idolatry ‘must be extended to verbal pictures. When the word Father is taken literally to mean that God is male and not female, represented by males and not females, then this word becomes idolatrous.’ She acknowledges that Christian doctrine affirms that all language about God is analogous. Nonetheless the use of male terms for the Ultimate Reality, and the characteristically Christian emphasis on the personhood of God, has regularly resulted in this kind of idolatry. Her solution is to urge the use of inclusive language, so that God is referred to from time to time as the ‘Goddess’, or as ‘She’. Ruether even objects to the idea of God as parent, suggesting, no doubt absurdly, that this encourages what she calls a virtue of spiritual infantilism which makes ‘autonomy and assertion of free will a sin.’
Despite her promethean confidence in her ability to revise tradition, Ruether has been famously outstripped by Mary Daly, a former Catholic theologian who now, like several influential feminists, describes herself as a ‘witch’. Her book Beyond God the Father rejects even the metaphorical possibilities of traditional language. To call God Father, she insists, is to call fathers God. The Trinity is thus revealed as ‘an eternal male homosexual orgy’. As the engendering matrix of the world, God is, in fact, paradigmatically female. And the world itself, as mirror of heaven, ‘bears fruit’, and is hence female also. The male principle is the alien force, the nexus of disruption, aggression, and sin. Daly seems to approach the almost dualistic notion that God is female, while the ‘horned’ devil is male. This gendered Manicheanism may seem a bizarre inversion of Augustine’s androcentrism, but her books are hugely influential, selling in hundreds of thousands of copies.
Not every figuring of the divine is androcentric, of course. Luce Irigaray observes that it is in the West that ‘the gender of God, the guardian of every subject and discourse, is always paternal and masculine’. Even Orthodoxy is more aporetic in its metaphorical gendering of the sacred. The paintings of El Greco, as they reflect his trajectory from the timeless icon-painting of his native Crete, through his studies in Venice under Tintoretto, to the Toledo of the muscular Counter-Reformation, reveal a process of increasing concretisation, with growing attention to perspective, expression, and sharpness of form. His Christ, in his late, ‘Catholic’ paintings, is more human than divine; and hence more humanly and authentically male.
In this respect, perhaps more than in any other way, ours is not a Western tradition.
Islamic theology confronts us with the spectacular absence of a gendered Godhead. A theology which reveals the divine through incarnation in a body also locates it in a gender, and inescapably passes judgement on the other sex. A theology which locates it in a book makes no judgement about gender; since books are unsexed. The divine remains divine, that is, genderless, even when expressed in a fully saving way on earth.
The source of this teaching is unproblematic for believers. Secular historians might see it differently, as confirmation that early Islam was not covenantally-defined. Andromorphic views of the divine were necessary to Judaism, which was communally constituted in opposition to neighbouring goddess-worship, whence the imagery of Israel as ‘God’s bride’. This continued in the Christian church, the ‘New Israel’, the ‘bride of Christ’, as the Church Fathers waged war on the goddess cults of late antiquity, and also, increasingly, on ‘woman’ herself as the paradigm of responsibility for the Fall. But Islam’s community of believers never saw itself as a feminine entity, despite the interesting matronal resonances of the term umma. The Islamic understanding of salvation history did not require that Allah should be constructed as male.
From a theologian’s standpoint it might be said that Islam averts the difficulty identified by Ruether through its emphasis on the divine transcendence (tanzih). The same ‘desertlike’ abstract difference of the Muslim God which draws reproach from Christian commentators also allows a gender-neutral image of the divine. Allah is not neuter or androgynous, but is simply above gender. Even Judaism, which generally has fewer problems in this area than has Christianity, does not go this far. In the Eighteen Benedictions said by pious Jews every morning and evening, we find the words: ‘Cause us to return, O our Father, to thy Law,’ while in Deuteronomy 8.6, we read: ‘As a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you.’
Such references to God as Father are less common in the Old Testament than the New, but they are still abundant, and are thorns in the path of gender-sensitive liberal theologians.
When we turn to the Qur’an, we find an image of Godhead apophatically stripped of metaphor. God is simply Allah, the God; never Father. The divine is referred to by the masculine pronoun: Allah is He (huwa); but the grammarians and exegetes concur that this is not even allegoric: Arabic has no neuter, and the use of the masculine is normal in Arabic for genderless nouns. No male preponderance is implied, any more than feminity is implied by the grammatically female gender of neuter plurals.
The modern Jordanian theologian Hasan al-Saqqaf emphasises the point that Muslim theology has consistently made down the ages: God is not gendered, really or metaphorically. The Quran continues Biblical assumptions on many levels, but here there is a striking discontinuity. The imaging of God has been shifted into a new and bipolar register, that of the Ninety-Nine Names.
Muslim women who have reflected on the gender issue have seized, I think with good reason, on this striking point. For instance, one Muslim woman writer, Sartaz Aziz, writes: I am deeply grateful that my first ideas of God were formed by Islam because I was able to think of the Highest Power as one completely without sex or race, and thus completely unpatriarchal . . .
We begin with the idea of a deity who is completely above sexual identity, and thus completely outside the value system created by patriarchy.
This passage is cited by the modern Catholic writer Maura O’Neill, who writes on women’s issues in dialogue, and who rightly concludes: ‘Muslims do not use a masculine God as either a conscious or unconscious tool in the construction of gender roles.’ This does not mean that gender is absent from Muslim metaphysics. The kalam scholars, as good transcendentalists, banished it from the non-physical world. But the mystics, as immanentists, read it into almost everything. We might say that while in Christianity, relationality is in the triune Godhead, and is explicitly male, in Islam, relationality is absent from the Godhead but exuberantly exists in the Names. To use Kant’s terms, the noumenal God is neutral, whereas the phenomenal God is manifested in not one but two genders. The two leading modern scholars of this tradition in Islamic thought are Izutsu and Murata, who have both noted the parallels between Sufism’s dynamic cosmology and the Taoist world view: each sees existence as a dynamic interplay of opposites, which ultimately resolve to the One.
The Sufi metaphysicians were drawing on a longstanding distinction between the Divine Names that were called Names of Majesty (jalal), and the Names of Beauty (jamal). The Names of Majesty included Allah as Powerful (al-Qawi), Overwhelming (al-Jabbar), Judge (al-Hakam); and these were seen as pre-eminently masculine. Names of Beauty included the All-Compassionate (al-Rahman), the Mild (al-Halim), the Loving-kind (al-Wadud), and so on: seen as archetypally feminine. The crux is that neither set could be seen as pre-eminent, for all were equally Names of God. In fact, by far the most conspicuous of the Divine Names in the Qur'an is al-Rahman, the All-Compassionate. And the explictly feminine resonances of this name were remarked upon by the Prophet (s.w.s.) himself, who taught that rahma, loving compassion, is an attribute derived from the word rahim, meaning a womb. (Bukhari, Adab, 13) The cosmic matrix from which differentiated being is fashioned is thus, as in all primordial systems, explicitly feminine; although Allah ‘an sich’ remains outside qualification by gender or by any other property.
Further confirmation for this is supplied in a famous hadith, preserved for us by al-Bukhari, which describes how during the Muslim conquest of Mecca a woman was running about in the hot sun, searching for her child. She found him, and clutched him to her breast, saying, ‘My son, my son!’ The Prophet’s Companions saw this, and wept. The Prophet was delighted to see their rahma, and said, ‘Do you wonder at this woman’s rahma for her child? By Him in Whose hand is my soul, on the Day of Judgement, God shall show more rahma towards His believing servant than this woman has shown to her son.’ (Bukhari, Adab, 18)
And again: ‘On the day that He created the heavens and the earth, God created a hundred rahmas, each of which is as great as the space which lies between heaven and earth. And He sent one rahma down to earth, by which a mother has rahma for her child.’ (Muslim, Tawba, 21)
Drawing on this explicit identification of rahma with the ‘maternal’ aspect of the phenomenal divine, the developed tradition of Sufism habitually identifies God’s entire creative aspect as ‘feminine’, and as merciful. Creation itself is the nafas al-Rahman, the Breath of the All-Compassionate. Here the Ash‘arite occasionalism which insists on preserving the divine omnipotence by denying secondary causation is shifted into a mystical, matronal register, where the world of emanation is gendered by the sheer fact of its engendering. ‘We have created everything in pairs,’ says the Qur’an.
This ‘female’ aspect of God allowed most of the great mystical poets to refer to God as Layla - the celestial beloved - the Arabic name Layla actually means ‘night’. Layla is the veiled, darkly-unknown God who brings forth life, and whose beauty once revealed dazzles the lover. In one branch of this tradition, the poets use frankly erotic language to convey the rapture of the spiritual wayfarer as he lifts the veil - a metaphor for distraction and sin - to be annihilated in his Beloved.
One thinks here of Christian bridal mysticism, but in reverse. St Teresa of Avila appears to use sensual images to convey her union with Christ. But again, Christ, as God the Son, is male. In Islamic mysticism, the divine beloved is ‘female’.
The kalam hence abolishes gender; spirituality deploys it exuberantly as metaphor, thereby displaying an aspect of the distinction between ‘iman’ and ‘ihsan’. The third component of the ternary laid down by the Hadith of Gabriel, ‘islam’, comprising the outward forms of religion, also recognises and affirms gender as a fundamental quality of existence, and this finds expression in many provisions of Islamic law and the norms of Muslim life.
The pattern of life decreed by Islam, which is the retrieval of the Great Covenant (mithaq), is primordial, and hence biophiliac and affirmative of the hormonal and genetic dimensions of humanity. Body, mind and spirit are aspects of the same created phenomenon, and are all gendered through their interrelation. To the extent that the human creature lives in wholeness, that creature’s spiritual essence is possessed of gender, whence the magnificent celebration of the genius of each sex which is so characteristic of Islam. The Prophet (s.w.s.) himself can only be fully understood in this light: his virility indicates his wholeness and hence his holiness. His archetypal celebration of womanhood, his multiple wives, recalls the virility of Solomon or other Hebrew patriarchs, or even of Krishna. Living life to the full, he embraced and utterly sacralised the divinely-appointed rite of procreation. His khasa’is, the rules which the Lawgiver fashioned for him alone, and which are listed by Suyuti in his al-Khasa’is al-Kubra, generally imposed upon him rigours from which his followers were exempt. The tahajjud prayer was obligatory for him, but only optional for other Muslims. He was entitled to fast for twenty-four hours, or for much longer periods (the so-called Continuous Fast - sawm al-wisal); although ordinary believers were required to fast from dawn to dusk only. His khasa’is are for the most part austerities; and yet among them we find the inclusion of an expansive polygamy. Several of his wives were elderly, it is true (Sawda, Umm Habiba, Maymuna), and their marriages may have been straightforward matters of compassion and political wisdom; but other wives were young. By his triumphant polygamy, the Blessed Prophet was indicating the end of the Christian war against the body, and rhetorically re-affirmed the sacramental value of sexuality that the Hebrew prophets had proclaimed.
Inseparable from this was his valour on the field of battle. His style of spiritual self-naughting linked to heroism has no European equivalent: it was not that of the celibate Templars, or the Knights of Calatrava, but resonates instead with the warrior holiness of Krishna, or the bushido of medieval Japan. The samurai ethic combines meditative stillness, military excellence, and love for women in equal measure; it is a spectacular expression of maleness which is illuminative of this, to many Europeans, most remote and ungraspable dimension of the Sunna.
And this leads us towards a further question. Feminists point out that early Christian celibacy was driven by a horror of the flesh, so that women were, in Tertullian’s words, ‘the devil’s gateway’. This could have no deep purchase in Islamic culture, with the hadith insisting that ‘Marriage is my sunna, and whoever departs from my sunna is not of me;’ a valorization of marriage which implicitly valorized functional womanhood in a way that the Church Fathers, with their preference for virginal perfection, had found problematic. It is true that a celibate advocacy developed among some second and third generation Muslim ascetics also, with Abu Sulayman al-Darani declaring, ‘Whoever marries has inclined towards the world’. However, this kind of sentiment tended to be expressed in the very early ascetical milieu, where the drive for celibacy, as Tor Andrae has shown, was the result of Christian monastic influence, and was later swept away by the tide of normative Sufism. In high medieval Islam the conjunction of holiness and celibacy was unimaginable, and few who aspired to God were unmarried: Ibn Taymiya was the rarest of exceptions.
This evolution of values again parallels the situation in early Christianity. A bitterly-fought scholarly argument debates whether the appearance of the first Christians improved or degraded the status of women, with Peter Brown and many feminists arguing the latter view. Ben Witherington observes that it is the later New Testament material (Luke, Acts) that advocates an improved role for women and a departure from the rabbinical (and hence post-prophetic) norms which shaped the attitudes of the first Christians. However, as Jesus was a Jewish prophet, loyal to revelation, and in particular to its interpretation within a compassionate template, it is reasonable to assume that there existed genuinely pro-female possibilities in the early Jesus community that capsized under the weight of pre-existent Hellenic misogyny which some authors of the Pauline epistles imported from the mystery religions, in the way that Foucault has shown in the second volume of his History of Sexuality.
It may be said that an analogous corrosion befell Islamic social history. Critically, however, this happened to a much lesser extent, for a set of reasons which demand careful attention.
Firstly, the above-noted refusal of the scriptures to attribute male gender to the Godhead deprived the tradition of an unarguable gynophobic foundation. The doctrine of the Names as archetypes for all bipolarities in creation ruled out any possibly consequent idea that humanity’s retrieval of theomorphism must entail a shedding of gender in favour of androgyny. On the contrary, the retrieval of theomorphism is the retrieval of gender, fully understood.
Secondly, the very word ‘woman’ had been for many Church Fathers a metonym for concupiscence; and patristic Christianity’s consistent preference for celibacy as a calling higher than marriage had entailed a particular attitude towards women. The model was, of course, Christ himself, as later figured and interpreted by the Church’s imagination. Islam, by stark contrast, maintained a version of the primordial, and also Solomonic, polygamous, heroic model of Semitic prophethood. As Geoffrey Parrinder has shown, sex-positive religions tend also to accord a higher status to the female principle; and Islam from its inception stressed that the presence of women’s bodies and spirits was in no way injurious to the spiritual life. The Prophet (s.w.s.) worshipped in his tiny room for much of the night, and when he was descending into prostration he would nudge aside the legs of his young wife Aisha, to make room. A far cry from the devotions of the Syrian monk, alone in his desert cell.
Also built into the archetypal patterns of Islam is a characteristic amendation to existing purity laws. Feminists have often identified these as a major sign and strengthener of misogyny. They exist in branches of Christianity, as is shown by Russian Orthodox hesitations about the reception of the Eucharist by menstruating women. In Judaism they are very elaborate, so that the menstruating woman is only sexually available for half of every month. Special bathhouses are required for her purification.
This reflects and responds to a very ancient, and very widely-observed taboo. In some primitive societies, women are banished from their husband’s house during this time; the Galla tribes of Ethiopia allocate special huts for menstruating women. Even today, the significant disruption to women’s behavioural patterns is acknowledged in some legislation: modern French law, for instance, even classifies extreme premenstrual tension as a form of temporary insanity.
Continued:
http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/ahm/gender.htm
the retrieval of gender
©Abdal Hakim Murad (April 1999) The Prophet said that women totally dominate men of intellect and possessors of hearts. But ignorant men dominate women, for they are shackled by an animal ferocity. They have no kindness, gentleness or love, since animality dominates their nature. Love and kindness are human attributes; anger and sensuality belong to the animals. She is the radiance of God, she is not your beloved. She is a creator - you could say that she is not created.
- Jalal al-Din Rumi
The 1969 female eunuch was nothing but womb. The 1997 female eunuch has no womb.
- Germaine Greer
Can men any longer write about women? Will our discourse always fallaciously subjectivise the male, as the Lacanian digit to the feminine zero? Andrea Dworkin and many others are insistent here. And yet the theologian must oppose such a closure no less stridently. No-one should claim a monological right to instruct the other sex concerning moral thought and conduct. Moreover, and no less seriously, we must object to that anti-dialogical aspect of the prevailing academic feminism which, supported by biometric footnotes, proposes that men have nothing to say here because truly ‘female thought’ is on every level categorically different from the thought of males. On this view, sexual difference not only creates a predisposition to be interested in certain kinds of issues, but fundamentally affects every way in which we handle concepts. Knowledges are sexualised, we are told; ‘the very way in which we decide what is true and false is a function of sexual difference.'
One reaction against this view is voiced in detail by Jean Curthoys in her new book Feminist Amnesia. She applies a kind of Friedanite fundamentalism, lamenting the recent decline of 60s and 70s radical feminist theory which was grounded in assurances of identity between the sexes rather than mere equality. Conventional academic feminism today, she avers, draws on recent biology to posit a total epistemic discontinuity between male and female, so that all scholarship, and all conclusions about reality, are bifurcated accordingly, excluding all possibility of dialogue across the gender abyss. This aporetic cessation, she insists, is intolerable.
Clearly there is force to her complaint. But equally clearly, both she and her antagonists go too far. Biologists and philosophers now converge on a median position which suggests that men and women do indeed think differently, but not so differently that they can form no judgement on each other’s conclusions. It is not just the practical implications which make this inference inescapable (could we tolerate, for instance, separate encyclopedias for each sex?). More seriously, the claim to aporia is to be rejected as forming part of a recent feminist turn away from rationality itself as an oppressive product and tool of ‘male linearity’. On this view, women’s discourse, sceptical about attempts to deduce any intrinsically true facts about reality, is hence pre-eminently responsive to the project of postmodernism, while men languish amid the rationalising games of late modernity. This thesis of male backwardness is intriguing and has appealed to many; yet remains without persuasive proof. As the Maturidis insist, rationality and morality are observed by the mind, not merely constructed by it. Is this scruple a ‘linear male objectification’? Surely it is just objectification: to claim that women have a categorically more indirect, empathetic, spontaneous approach to reality may be tantamount to affirming that they are less capable of sustained argument based on fact. Such a conclusion is far from universal among feminists, converging as it does with a certain masculine stereotype. Of course, it is almost certainly true, as Professor Carol Gilligan has argued, that ethical responses differ markedly between the sexes. For her, women ‘make moral decisions in a framework of relationships more than in a framework of rights’. Women’s ‘moral processing is contextually oriented’. This is uncontroversial. But value judgements amid the hurly-burly of lived reality are one thing; large generalisations about the nature of the world are quite another. And in the latter field, neither revelation nor reason persuade us that the two styles of argument, the male and female, cannot overlap.
What follows, therefore, is not an androcentric apologia, although a deliberate or even unwilled male discourse is inescapable and is not inherently improper. It claims to be factual, not a self-authenticating view from within a particular ‘gendered’ language-game.
A second preliminary point raises the entire problem of gendered approaches to spirituality. The British religious philosopher John Hick, in a recent moment of feministic reflection, proposed that ‘because of the effects upon them of patriarchal cultures, many women have ‘weak’ egos, suffer from an ingrained inferiority complex, and are tempted to diffusion and triviality.’ He thus suggests that women experience greater difficulties in becoming saints because the spiritual struggle can only be undertaken by a coherent, confident personality. On this view, women must pass through two stages in achieving sainthood, while men require only one.
A little reflection will reveal that this position suffers from two sharp problems. For a start, it deploys an unexamined stereotype of traditional women as shallow and easily distracted; whereas any observation of women’s attendence at, say, salat, or a Turkish mevlud, suggests that women’s devotional behaviour tends to be not palpably less sober, or focussed or directed than that of men. Often it is women rather then men who retain a more serious faith under secularising conditions; although this may flower in the privacy of the home, rather than under public scrutiny in the mosque. Secondly, it implies that spiritual growth is a primarily mechanical, discursive procedure whereby the will overcomes passion, leading to the detachment from the world which is the precondition for sainthood. This begs some fundamental questions about the spiritual life; Hick’s image may hold good for some forms of Christianity and Hinduism, but cannot be applied to many other varieties of religious development, where the conscious, calculating will is deliberately pushed into the background. Specifically, what is characteristically male about love-based mysticism? The insistence that the mind is a prison, and that emotion and spontaneous love of God, triggered by relatively informal practices of the dhikr type, is a commonplace even of ‘male’ spirituality. Here, for instance, is a poem by Rumi: ‘In the screaming gale of Love, the intellect is a gnat.
How can intellects find space to wander there?’And again: ‘Do not remain a man of intellect among the lovers, especially if you love that sweet-faced Beloved.
May the men of intellect stay far from the lovers, may the smell of dung stay far from the east wind!
If a man of intellect should enter, tell him the way is blocked, but if a lover should come, extend him a hundred welcomes!
By the time intellect has deliberated and reflected, love has flown to the seventh heaven.
By the time intellect has found a camel for the hajj, love has circled the Ka‘ba.
Love has come and covered my mouth.
It says: ‘Throw away your poetry, and come to the stars!''
Perhaps a modern Protestant theologian will have problems with this; but most traditional religions assume that the way to God is through the heart, not the mind. So Hick’s idea that ‘patriarchy’ slams the door to God in the face of traditional women simply because they are (supposedly) less cerebral than men, seems distinctly unpersuasive. He is simply a victim of his own cultural and denominational limitations. With these preliminary points in mind, let us now move on to the core issue. Modern women writers on religion, such as Rosemary Ruether, insist that all talk of gender in religions has to start in the beginning, with the archetypes. What do images of God tell us about the place of men and women in the world?
In her book Sexism and God-Talk, Ruether objects to ways in which Christian metaphors about God’s maleness are taken literally. For her, the Decalogue’s prohibition of idolatry ‘must be extended to verbal pictures. When the word Father is taken literally to mean that God is male and not female, represented by males and not females, then this word becomes idolatrous.’ She acknowledges that Christian doctrine affirms that all language about God is analogous. Nonetheless the use of male terms for the Ultimate Reality, and the characteristically Christian emphasis on the personhood of God, has regularly resulted in this kind of idolatry. Her solution is to urge the use of inclusive language, so that God is referred to from time to time as the ‘Goddess’, or as ‘She’. Ruether even objects to the idea of God as parent, suggesting, no doubt absurdly, that this encourages what she calls a virtue of spiritual infantilism which makes ‘autonomy and assertion of free will a sin.’
Despite her promethean confidence in her ability to revise tradition, Ruether has been famously outstripped by Mary Daly, a former Catholic theologian who now, like several influential feminists, describes herself as a ‘witch’. Her book Beyond God the Father rejects even the metaphorical possibilities of traditional language. To call God Father, she insists, is to call fathers God. The Trinity is thus revealed as ‘an eternal male homosexual orgy’. As the engendering matrix of the world, God is, in fact, paradigmatically female. And the world itself, as mirror of heaven, ‘bears fruit’, and is hence female also. The male principle is the alien force, the nexus of disruption, aggression, and sin. Daly seems to approach the almost dualistic notion that God is female, while the ‘horned’ devil is male. This gendered Manicheanism may seem a bizarre inversion of Augustine’s androcentrism, but her books are hugely influential, selling in hundreds of thousands of copies.
Not every figuring of the divine is androcentric, of course. Luce Irigaray observes that it is in the West that ‘the gender of God, the guardian of every subject and discourse, is always paternal and masculine’. Even Orthodoxy is more aporetic in its metaphorical gendering of the sacred. The paintings of El Greco, as they reflect his trajectory from the timeless icon-painting of his native Crete, through his studies in Venice under Tintoretto, to the Toledo of the muscular Counter-Reformation, reveal a process of increasing concretisation, with growing attention to perspective, expression, and sharpness of form. His Christ, in his late, ‘Catholic’ paintings, is more human than divine; and hence more humanly and authentically male.
In this respect, perhaps more than in any other way, ours is not a Western tradition.
Islamic theology confronts us with the spectacular absence of a gendered Godhead. A theology which reveals the divine through incarnation in a body also locates it in a gender, and inescapably passes judgement on the other sex. A theology which locates it in a book makes no judgement about gender; since books are unsexed. The divine remains divine, that is, genderless, even when expressed in a fully saving way on earth.
The source of this teaching is unproblematic for believers. Secular historians might see it differently, as confirmation that early Islam was not covenantally-defined. Andromorphic views of the divine were necessary to Judaism, which was communally constituted in opposition to neighbouring goddess-worship, whence the imagery of Israel as ‘God’s bride’. This continued in the Christian church, the ‘New Israel’, the ‘bride of Christ’, as the Church Fathers waged war on the goddess cults of late antiquity, and also, increasingly, on ‘woman’ herself as the paradigm of responsibility for the Fall. But Islam’s community of believers never saw itself as a feminine entity, despite the interesting matronal resonances of the term umma. The Islamic understanding of salvation history did not require that Allah should be constructed as male.
From a theologian’s standpoint it might be said that Islam averts the difficulty identified by Ruether through its emphasis on the divine transcendence (tanzih). The same ‘desertlike’ abstract difference of the Muslim God which draws reproach from Christian commentators also allows a gender-neutral image of the divine. Allah is not neuter or androgynous, but is simply above gender. Even Judaism, which generally has fewer problems in this area than has Christianity, does not go this far. In the Eighteen Benedictions said by pious Jews every morning and evening, we find the words: ‘Cause us to return, O our Father, to thy Law,’ while in Deuteronomy 8.6, we read: ‘As a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you.’
Such references to God as Father are less common in the Old Testament than the New, but they are still abundant, and are thorns in the path of gender-sensitive liberal theologians.
When we turn to the Qur’an, we find an image of Godhead apophatically stripped of metaphor. God is simply Allah, the God; never Father. The divine is referred to by the masculine pronoun: Allah is He (huwa); but the grammarians and exegetes concur that this is not even allegoric: Arabic has no neuter, and the use of the masculine is normal in Arabic for genderless nouns. No male preponderance is implied, any more than feminity is implied by the grammatically female gender of neuter plurals.
The modern Jordanian theologian Hasan al-Saqqaf emphasises the point that Muslim theology has consistently made down the ages: God is not gendered, really or metaphorically. The Quran continues Biblical assumptions on many levels, but here there is a striking discontinuity. The imaging of God has been shifted into a new and bipolar register, that of the Ninety-Nine Names.
Muslim women who have reflected on the gender issue have seized, I think with good reason, on this striking point. For instance, one Muslim woman writer, Sartaz Aziz, writes: I am deeply grateful that my first ideas of God were formed by Islam because I was able to think of the Highest Power as one completely without sex or race, and thus completely unpatriarchal . . .
We begin with the idea of a deity who is completely above sexual identity, and thus completely outside the value system created by patriarchy.
This passage is cited by the modern Catholic writer Maura O’Neill, who writes on women’s issues in dialogue, and who rightly concludes: ‘Muslims do not use a masculine God as either a conscious or unconscious tool in the construction of gender roles.’ This does not mean that gender is absent from Muslim metaphysics. The kalam scholars, as good transcendentalists, banished it from the non-physical world. But the mystics, as immanentists, read it into almost everything. We might say that while in Christianity, relationality is in the triune Godhead, and is explicitly male, in Islam, relationality is absent from the Godhead but exuberantly exists in the Names. To use Kant’s terms, the noumenal God is neutral, whereas the phenomenal God is manifested in not one but two genders. The two leading modern scholars of this tradition in Islamic thought are Izutsu and Murata, who have both noted the parallels between Sufism’s dynamic cosmology and the Taoist world view: each sees existence as a dynamic interplay of opposites, which ultimately resolve to the One.
The Sufi metaphysicians were drawing on a longstanding distinction between the Divine Names that were called Names of Majesty (jalal), and the Names of Beauty (jamal). The Names of Majesty included Allah as Powerful (al-Qawi), Overwhelming (al-Jabbar), Judge (al-Hakam); and these were seen as pre-eminently masculine. Names of Beauty included the All-Compassionate (al-Rahman), the Mild (al-Halim), the Loving-kind (al-Wadud), and so on: seen as archetypally feminine. The crux is that neither set could be seen as pre-eminent, for all were equally Names of God. In fact, by far the most conspicuous of the Divine Names in the Qur'an is al-Rahman, the All-Compassionate. And the explictly feminine resonances of this name were remarked upon by the Prophet (s.w.s.) himself, who taught that rahma, loving compassion, is an attribute derived from the word rahim, meaning a womb. (Bukhari, Adab, 13) The cosmic matrix from which differentiated being is fashioned is thus, as in all primordial systems, explicitly feminine; although Allah ‘an sich’ remains outside qualification by gender or by any other property.
Further confirmation for this is supplied in a famous hadith, preserved for us by al-Bukhari, which describes how during the Muslim conquest of Mecca a woman was running about in the hot sun, searching for her child. She found him, and clutched him to her breast, saying, ‘My son, my son!’ The Prophet’s Companions saw this, and wept. The Prophet was delighted to see their rahma, and said, ‘Do you wonder at this woman’s rahma for her child? By Him in Whose hand is my soul, on the Day of Judgement, God shall show more rahma towards His believing servant than this woman has shown to her son.’ (Bukhari, Adab, 18)
And again: ‘On the day that He created the heavens and the earth, God created a hundred rahmas, each of which is as great as the space which lies between heaven and earth. And He sent one rahma down to earth, by which a mother has rahma for her child.’ (Muslim, Tawba, 21)
Drawing on this explicit identification of rahma with the ‘maternal’ aspect of the phenomenal divine, the developed tradition of Sufism habitually identifies God’s entire creative aspect as ‘feminine’, and as merciful. Creation itself is the nafas al-Rahman, the Breath of the All-Compassionate. Here the Ash‘arite occasionalism which insists on preserving the divine omnipotence by denying secondary causation is shifted into a mystical, matronal register, where the world of emanation is gendered by the sheer fact of its engendering. ‘We have created everything in pairs,’ says the Qur’an.
This ‘female’ aspect of God allowed most of the great mystical poets to refer to God as Layla - the celestial beloved - the Arabic name Layla actually means ‘night’. Layla is the veiled, darkly-unknown God who brings forth life, and whose beauty once revealed dazzles the lover. In one branch of this tradition, the poets use frankly erotic language to convey the rapture of the spiritual wayfarer as he lifts the veil - a metaphor for distraction and sin - to be annihilated in his Beloved.
One thinks here of Christian bridal mysticism, but in reverse. St Teresa of Avila appears to use sensual images to convey her union with Christ. But again, Christ, as God the Son, is male. In Islamic mysticism, the divine beloved is ‘female’.
The kalam hence abolishes gender; spirituality deploys it exuberantly as metaphor, thereby displaying an aspect of the distinction between ‘iman’ and ‘ihsan’. The third component of the ternary laid down by the Hadith of Gabriel, ‘islam’, comprising the outward forms of religion, also recognises and affirms gender as a fundamental quality of existence, and this finds expression in many provisions of Islamic law and the norms of Muslim life.
The pattern of life decreed by Islam, which is the retrieval of the Great Covenant (mithaq), is primordial, and hence biophiliac and affirmative of the hormonal and genetic dimensions of humanity. Body, mind and spirit are aspects of the same created phenomenon, and are all gendered through their interrelation. To the extent that the human creature lives in wholeness, that creature’s spiritual essence is possessed of gender, whence the magnificent celebration of the genius of each sex which is so characteristic of Islam. The Prophet (s.w.s.) himself can only be fully understood in this light: his virility indicates his wholeness and hence his holiness. His archetypal celebration of womanhood, his multiple wives, recalls the virility of Solomon or other Hebrew patriarchs, or even of Krishna. Living life to the full, he embraced and utterly sacralised the divinely-appointed rite of procreation. His khasa’is, the rules which the Lawgiver fashioned for him alone, and which are listed by Suyuti in his al-Khasa’is al-Kubra, generally imposed upon him rigours from which his followers were exempt. The tahajjud prayer was obligatory for him, but only optional for other Muslims. He was entitled to fast for twenty-four hours, or for much longer periods (the so-called Continuous Fast - sawm al-wisal); although ordinary believers were required to fast from dawn to dusk only. His khasa’is are for the most part austerities; and yet among them we find the inclusion of an expansive polygamy. Several of his wives were elderly, it is true (Sawda, Umm Habiba, Maymuna), and their marriages may have been straightforward matters of compassion and political wisdom; but other wives were young. By his triumphant polygamy, the Blessed Prophet was indicating the end of the Christian war against the body, and rhetorically re-affirmed the sacramental value of sexuality that the Hebrew prophets had proclaimed.
Inseparable from this was his valour on the field of battle. His style of spiritual self-naughting linked to heroism has no European equivalent: it was not that of the celibate Templars, or the Knights of Calatrava, but resonates instead with the warrior holiness of Krishna, or the bushido of medieval Japan. The samurai ethic combines meditative stillness, military excellence, and love for women in equal measure; it is a spectacular expression of maleness which is illuminative of this, to many Europeans, most remote and ungraspable dimension of the Sunna.
And this leads us towards a further question. Feminists point out that early Christian celibacy was driven by a horror of the flesh, so that women were, in Tertullian’s words, ‘the devil’s gateway’. This could have no deep purchase in Islamic culture, with the hadith insisting that ‘Marriage is my sunna, and whoever departs from my sunna is not of me;’ a valorization of marriage which implicitly valorized functional womanhood in a way that the Church Fathers, with their preference for virginal perfection, had found problematic. It is true that a celibate advocacy developed among some second and third generation Muslim ascetics also, with Abu Sulayman al-Darani declaring, ‘Whoever marries has inclined towards the world’. However, this kind of sentiment tended to be expressed in the very early ascetical milieu, where the drive for celibacy, as Tor Andrae has shown, was the result of Christian monastic influence, and was later swept away by the tide of normative Sufism. In high medieval Islam the conjunction of holiness and celibacy was unimaginable, and few who aspired to God were unmarried: Ibn Taymiya was the rarest of exceptions.
This evolution of values again parallels the situation in early Christianity. A bitterly-fought scholarly argument debates whether the appearance of the first Christians improved or degraded the status of women, with Peter Brown and many feminists arguing the latter view. Ben Witherington observes that it is the later New Testament material (Luke, Acts) that advocates an improved role for women and a departure from the rabbinical (and hence post-prophetic) norms which shaped the attitudes of the first Christians. However, as Jesus was a Jewish prophet, loyal to revelation, and in particular to its interpretation within a compassionate template, it is reasonable to assume that there existed genuinely pro-female possibilities in the early Jesus community that capsized under the weight of pre-existent Hellenic misogyny which some authors of the Pauline epistles imported from the mystery religions, in the way that Foucault has shown in the second volume of his History of Sexuality.
It may be said that an analogous corrosion befell Islamic social history. Critically, however, this happened to a much lesser extent, for a set of reasons which demand careful attention.
Firstly, the above-noted refusal of the scriptures to attribute male gender to the Godhead deprived the tradition of an unarguable gynophobic foundation. The doctrine of the Names as archetypes for all bipolarities in creation ruled out any possibly consequent idea that humanity’s retrieval of theomorphism must entail a shedding of gender in favour of androgyny. On the contrary, the retrieval of theomorphism is the retrieval of gender, fully understood.
Secondly, the very word ‘woman’ had been for many Church Fathers a metonym for concupiscence; and patristic Christianity’s consistent preference for celibacy as a calling higher than marriage had entailed a particular attitude towards women. The model was, of course, Christ himself, as later figured and interpreted by the Church’s imagination. Islam, by stark contrast, maintained a version of the primordial, and also Solomonic, polygamous, heroic model of Semitic prophethood. As Geoffrey Parrinder has shown, sex-positive religions tend also to accord a higher status to the female principle; and Islam from its inception stressed that the presence of women’s bodies and spirits was in no way injurious to the spiritual life. The Prophet (s.w.s.) worshipped in his tiny room for much of the night, and when he was descending into prostration he would nudge aside the legs of his young wife Aisha, to make room. A far cry from the devotions of the Syrian monk, alone in his desert cell.
Also built into the archetypal patterns of Islam is a characteristic amendation to existing purity laws. Feminists have often identified these as a major sign and strengthener of misogyny. They exist in branches of Christianity, as is shown by Russian Orthodox hesitations about the reception of the Eucharist by menstruating women. In Judaism they are very elaborate, so that the menstruating woman is only sexually available for half of every month. Special bathhouses are required for her purification.
This reflects and responds to a very ancient, and very widely-observed taboo. In some primitive societies, women are banished from their husband’s house during this time; the Galla tribes of Ethiopia allocate special huts for menstruating women. Even today, the significant disruption to women’s behavioural patterns is acknowledged in some legislation: modern French law, for instance, even classifies extreme premenstrual tension as a form of temporary insanity.
Continued:
http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/ahm/gender.htm