Women in Islam: Standard and Practice

Post 23--:

I continue the series that originally started in Post 19. Please check out the context of this material there.

The questions I was to answer were:
(a) How does the Qur’an say women should be treated?
(b) How does the above conform to or contradict what is practiced in many
Muslim countries or cultures?

Here is my response to those questions:

I interpret the questions as intended to evoke a discussion about Muslim suppression of women, since that is such a major Christian concern.

If you ask the same question about the Bible, you will get a wide variety of (contradictory) answers. There are OT texts about women from which pretty well all Christians distantiate themselves. For one thing, they are written from a male point of view—what the male should do for, with or to women. They were subject to men and valued mainly as wives and mothers. A father could sell his daughter into slavery. A father could annul his daughter’s vows or pledge, as could a husband his wife’s. Adultery could lead to stoning, but for both partners. The husband had various unilateral rights over his wife. A woman was worth half a man. Women could be taken as booty after victorious battles. They could become ceremonially unclean. Etc., etc. In the NT, women were restricted in their leadership roles. Christians have long rejected all or most of these ideas for sound Biblical and theological reasons, somewhat parallel to the Islamic doctrine of abrogation.

You find similar situations in the Qur’an and in the Muslim community. There is a wide range of interpretations from the literal to contextual-historical. Just as Christians have largely rejected the OT perspectives on women, especially those they see as oppressive, so do many educated Muslims argue their way out of similar Qur’anic texts. Most Muslim men tend to agree that women are honourable but fragile creatures that need to be protected from other men. Hence, the elaborate precautions to which some are subjected in terms of movement and dress code, while others dress and move about as they please. Most men regard women as too emotional and therefore insist that they, the men, should do the thinking and make decisions for them. They are seen as powerful when they play their legitimate role as mothers and wives who bring up and teach the next generation. They are allowed to conduct business and own property, but not at the expense of their primary role in the family. There is currently a dynamic at work in many Muslim communities that tends to restrict women more than was the case in the past, especially with respect to dress. One American female Muslim medical doctor practicing in Saudi was absolutely amazed at the restrictions placed on women in Saudi and condemned it outrightly as a retrograde form of Islam.

At the levels of militant fundamentalism and folk Islam, the literal interpretation tends to hold sway. Folk Islam is intimately mixed up with local pre-Islamic cultures. Its adherents often identify these foreign accretions as part of core Islam, with the result that anyone critiquing some cultural tradition may be accused of attacking Islam itself. In Saudi, public amputations constitute public entertainment after Friday prayers, but many educated Muslims are horrified.

The reality is that there is hardly any consistent pattern around the Muslim world. In many Muslim communities, women play a much larger role than the above would lead us to expect, while in most countries stoning and amputation form only a distant memory. And yet there have been several female Muslim heads of state in the largest Muslim countries! If Islam or the Qur’an were really as reprehensible and violent in its core as we witness today in some quarters, then the high civilization and culture they once reached would hardly have been possible.

A major difference between Christianity and Islam is that the former has experienced the philosophical developments from the Renaissance on—initially spurred on by Cordovan Islam—up to the current climate in the West. Before those developments, Christian individuals, religious leaders and nations were cruel and intolerant in ways hard to believe today, even though we already had the Bible. The change towards more civilized relationships is due as much to those philosophical developments as to our reading of the Bible. Most Muslims have not gone through this development.

How should women be treated according to the Qur’an? Your answer will be determined by the approach you prefer, literal or contextual-historical. Does the practice of some countries reflect the Qur’an correctly? To the extent that it is the result of a literal interpretation and mixed up with traditional cultural accretions, in agreement with more liberal Muslims, I would say “No.” But those who practice various forms of suppression of women, will, of course, answer “Yes!” They are the literalists. So, how and on what basis do I, a non-Muslim, answer these questions? Which is the true Islam or the right interpretation of the Qur’an?

I will interrupt my series and continue the subject of the treatment of women in the next post by reproducing an article on the subject by Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer, an Indian moderate Muslim scholar.

The Muslim in You (1)

Post 17

Most people in the West think that there is little or no connection between Western cum Christian culture and that of Islam. They look down upon Islam as a religion cum civilization that is chaotic, destructive and that has never offered anything constructive to the cultures of the world in general or, more specifically, to Western culture as well as Western Christianity. Well, Westerners have heard plenty about the negative aspects of Islam, often in slanted and distorted form. Since we are now neighbours who daily rub shoulders with each other, it is useful to be aware of the positive contributions of Islam to the Western world so that we can also respect them.

Actually, the Muslim world has for centuries led in terms of cultural development and was far advanced in civilization compared to the primitive medieval West.
Syria’s Baghdad was the place to be. Especially medical students from the comparatively primitive West would study in Baghdad. Noah Gordon’s The Physician is a delightful novel that is relevant here. Published in 1986, a New York Times reviewer judged the book “surprisingly relevant in an age when fanatical fundamentalism and intolerance are…on the rise….” Its relevance is precisely its depiction of a high culture that could not possibly have arisen out of the negative and chaotic picture Westerners have of today’s Islam. A book I am currently reading is Stephen Glain’s Mullahs, Merchants, and Militants, in which he has a chapter on Syria that, chaotic as it is today and far behind in modern development, was at one time a major centre of international culture and economics.

In Spanish Andalusia, the underdeveloped West had a high Muslim culture right at its doorstep for some 700 years, during which time it developed a flourishing culture. Superior Muslim cultural spillover into the Christianizing West was inevitable. Andalusian culture itself was the product of centuries of multi-cultural interaction and fermentation in Asia between Muslims, Christians and Jews, going back many centuries. It was Christian Syriacs who translated Greek philosophy, especially Aristotelian works, into Arabic before Islam saw the light of day even. From those translations, Muslim scholars became familiar with that philosophical tradition, interacted with it and was influenced by it.

As Islam moved westward, Muslim scholars translated these works into the language of the West, Latin. It was from there that the West learned about Greek philosophy and developed its own interaction with it. Christian theologians and philosophers also interacted with their Muslim counterparts, some in agreement, while some developed their own in opposition to Islamic philosophy, but they were all influenced by it one way or another. Then the various Christian philosophers, influenced as they were by their Muslim counterparts, interacted and discussed among themselves, but again in ways that can not be fully understood or appreciated without recognizing that Muslim background. Much of pre-Reformation theology and philosophy was heavily indebted to that culture and religion. (For a scholarly summary of this development I refer you to Frederick Copleston’s A History of Philosophy, volume 2, part iv.) Though today the residue of that background has become increasingly difficult to trace, it is only a lack of historical awareness and prejudice against Islam that have combined to produce gross ignorance of the Islamic foundational roots of our current culture.

You may agree with the above summary of philosophical developments, but dismiss it as irrelevant. So what if these abstract philosophers were influenced by Islam? What does that have to do with you, the reader of this blog or with the man/woman on the streets of Vancouver or Toronto? In short: the common sense of today in the West is the product of centuries of philosophizing that trickled down into the consciousness of the common person. “Trickle down” may not always work in economics, but it surely does in philosophy. Even if you know nothing about these ancient philosophers, they are woven into the fabric of your common sense.

I will continue with more of “The Muslim in You” in my next blog. Stay tuned. If things get too philosophical or abstract for you, let me know by writing a comment. I am trying to shift back and forth between abstract and more “practical” realities.

That is a distinction I make only halfheartedly, for in fact there is nothing more practical than philosophy, for the philosophy of yesterday becomes the “common sense” on tomorrow’s streets via the university. Today, you are thinking and doing as you are because of what abstract philosophers wrote over the past few centuries. Ideas, as they say, have legs. You may not know their names or have read their books, but they are part of you. They are in your veins, not to say DNA. Muslims are among your cultural ancestors. Welcome them back into your psyche and into your world, though, being a Christian, I step back from encouraging you to become a Muslim. I am, after all, Christian missionary.