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.
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Set in Sabon type by Brevis Press, Bethany, Connecticut.
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Li
ary 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 XXXXXXXXXXcloth)
XXXXXXXXXXpbk.)
1. Women— Arab countries— Social conditions. 2. Sexism— Arab
countries— History. 3. Women, Muslim'— Attitudes. 4. Feminism—
Arab countries. I. Title.
hq1784.a67 ,1992
XXXXXXXXXX '6 9 7 1 — dc XXXXXXXXXX
• CIP
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and dura
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
PART 1
The Pre-Islamic Middle East 9
Chapter 1 Mesopotamia 11
Chapter 2 The Medite
anean 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
ently 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
y 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—
etween 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
ought 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
ooted, and in particular the way in which gender is articulated socially,
institutionally, and ve
ally in these societies. Some charting of the te
ain
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
oad 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
oad 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
oad 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
eview 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
oring 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
iefly 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
egion, 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 occu
ed 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 recu
ingly erupted in
oth Egypt and other Muslim Arab societies since the nineteenth century.
In many ways developments in Egypt heralded and mi
ored 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
outinely 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 u
an 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 refe
ed 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
iety of ma
iage customs, including but not confined to those enshrined
in the patriarchal family. That is to say, Islam effected a transformation
that
ought the Arabian socioreligious vision and organization of gender
into line with the rest of the Middle East and Medite
anean 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,