Download essay2

1
According to Fatima Mernissi in The Veil and the Male Elite, during the Medina period
of early Islamic society women enjoyed substantial equality with men. Basing her claim
primarily on the lives of Muhammad’s wives, Mernissi argues that prior to God’s proclamations
regarding the hijab, Islam, under Muhammad’s auspices, permitted women to be politically and
religiously outspoken. This paper will explore and evaluate Mernissi’s evidence for this claim.
First I define Mernissi’s position and introduce the evidence she marshals in support of it, most
of which centers around the wives of the Prophet, specifically Umm Salama and ‘A’isha. Then I
assess the plausibility of extracting from those examples a model of how Muslim women in
general fared during the Medina period. I contend, contrary to Mernissi, that such an extraction
is impossible. Although the wives of the Prophet may indeed have been empowered, their
empowerment owed more to their class status than to any revolutionary implications of Islam.
Mernissi claims that the role Muhammad originally staked out for women in Medina was
one of self-empowerment and active participation in all aspects of society. The majority of her
evidence for this view lies in events surrounding Muhammad’s wives. The Prophet took his
wives to battle sites with him, thereby including them in military matters (104). Muhammad’s
wives also demonstrated their involvement in politics when they responded to Muhammad’s
inquiries about their political opinions (104). Spatially, Mernissi asserts, women also had direct
contact with political forums. ‘A’isha, Muhammad’s favorite wife, lived in an apartment that
directly opened into the mosque (107), which was the community’s locus of political and
religious discussion (113). The apartments of the rest of Muhammad’s wives likewise adjoined
the mosque (107). The space was so permeable that Umm Salama was in her apartment combing
her hair when she heard Muhammad in the mosque reciting his revelation regarding the equality
of the sexes as believers in Islam (118). Furthermore, a point central to Mernissi’s argument is
2
that Muhammad also did not intellectually separate his public from his private life, but rather
regarded both as equally important and pertinent to his religious mission (105). Thus the
Qur’an’s “Women” sura is rife with verses ordaining and minutely outlining women’s right to
inherit money (125-126). This new inheritance law constituted a major and controversial break
with pre-Islamic practice, in which male heirs’ inherited widows and fatherless daughters,
together with the women’s money (120-121, 124). On this evidence, Mernissi judges that early
Islam aimed to be inclusive of women politically and socially.
Mernissi sees Muhammad’s wives as particularly demonstrative of the gender equality
Muhammad promoted in Medina. For example, she posits Umm Salama as the leader of the
“protest movement” that developed as women sought application of the equality that some of
Muhammad’s revelations had declared (119). As was alluded to above, Umm Salama was
responsible for questioning Muhammad on the Qur’an’s lack of reference to women (118). After
God’s validation of gender equality in this area, Umm Salama approached the political issue of
booty acquisition through war and raids, a primary source of wealth from which women were
traditionally excluded (132). She was less successful in this area, but her willingness to broach
the subject in itself reveals a substantial degree of political involvement (134). Umm Salama
also had the distinction of having a political prisoner released according to her wishes and of
standing up to ‘Umar when he lectured her and the Prophet’s other wives on the virtues of
domestic docility (163, 144). Umm Salama was thus influential politically and domestically.
Mernissi also praises ‘A’isha, another of Muhammad’s wives, as exemplary of women’s
equality and independence in Medina. Most of Mernissi’s citations of ‘A’isha’s participation in
power are drawn from incidents that occurred after the Prophet’s death. Mernissi sees ‘A’isha as
a brave woman who fearlessly challenged male authority. Most prominently, ‘A’isha made the
3
bold and intensely political decision to lead an army against the caliphate of ‘Ali in 656 CE (5).
‘A’isha was defeated, but her military failure is immaterial to the political confidence Mernissi
sees in ‘A’isha’s act of challenge. Mernissi also admires ‘A’isha for her public, confrontational
denouncement of many of the (according to Mernissi) misogynist Hadith reported by Abu
Hurayra after Muhammad’s death (70, 72, 76). For example, ‘A’isha declared of Abu Hurayra
“to whoever wanted to hear it: ‘He is not a good listener [to the Prophet], and when he is asked a
question, he gives wrong answers’” (78). For Mernissi, ‘A’isha’s close involvement with the
politics of war and contestation of Hadith is evidence of space for female empowerment under
Islam during the Medina period.
However, the dimensions of this space are rather singular. The actions of the Prophet’s
wives cannot rightly be taken as Mernissi takes them, as examples of women’s role in general in
Medina. Instead, superior class and status strongly contributed to Umm Salama and ‘A’isha’s
forwardness and privileged them above the rest of their sex. According to all of Mernissi’s
accounts, even in the time of the Prophet Medina was stratified by clearly defined class
distinctions. Slavery was permitted, although Muhammad discouraged it, until irresistible
colonial pressure abolished the practice in the 20th century (153). Moreover, female slaves
sometimes were forced into sexual relationships with their masters (132), or even made to
become prostitutes, though this practice too ran contrary to Islam (181). Slavery was a product
of war and raids because the captured women of the losing side became part of the victors’
booty. In case of loss, the only women exempt from servitude were aristocrats who belonged to
tribes wealthy enough to ransom them (182). Class insulated and empowered rich aristocratic
women because it freed them from the specter of slavery and its related sexual degradation, but
common women’s social status was very precarious, and hardly liberated.
4
The practice of slavery existed previous to the revelation ordaining the hijab, which for
Mernissi is the moment signaling female subordination in Medina. Still, Mernissi does strongly
criticize slavery as an affront to the equality promised by Islam (150). But in her condemnation
of slavery as a masculinist social construction, Mernissi is inconsistent in her standards of
judgment. According to her, women slaves are degraded because a constructed practice made
them so, but Umm Salama and ‘A’isha are bold and influential because of their natural
endowments and the sexual equality of Islam. She allows class to govern the lowered existences
of women slaves, but maintains that religion is responsible for the exalted lives of the Prophet’s
wives. This causal inconsistency in Mernissi’s logic is fatal to her argument that Muhammad’s
wives’ influence was the product of new openings that Islam created for women in society.
When this inconsistency is considered in light of Mernissi’s account of Hind Bint ‘Utba, a
courageous, outspoken woman who was not a Muslim but was an aristocrat whose husband was
the pagan chief of Mecca, the conclusion that class and not religion determined women’s roles
during the Medina period becomes even more plausible (117). Just as slavery existed as a social
practice against Islamic doctrine, it is also possible that Muhammad’s wives gained their power
extra-religiously, according the status afforded them by their marriage to the Prophet.
Muhammad’s wives were, after all, much more than mere free women: they were married
to the Messenger of God. The later Shi’a tradition of venerating the family of the Prophet,
together with ‘A’isha’s title of “The Mother of the Believers”, suggests the extremeness of the
wives’ singularity (72). Muhammad’s wives are exceptions to the rules of Islamic society in
many ways. The wives of the Prophet were uniquely forbidden to remarry after his death (171),
they were subject to different marital rules governing sex (174), and are mentioned specifically
and by name in the Qur’an (in the verses proclaiming ‘A’isha’s innocence of adultery, for
5
example) (178). The wives’ paramount status among women is readily discernable when one
compares the pattern of outcomes that followed their voicing of concerns regarding sex and
religion to the outcomes met by common women. In the two controversies that were resolved in
the women’s favor, the right of women to inherit and the equality of all believers under Islam,
the women’s concerns were raised by one of Muhammad’s wives. In contrast, in the two
controversies that were decided against the women, control over sexual position selection and the
permissibility of violence against women, ordinary women raised the issues. One cannot say that
Muhammad was biased and responded more favorably to his wives than to common women,
since it was not Muhammad but God through Muhammad who supplied the ultimate decisions.
But perhaps one may say that the wives of the Prophet were, in virtue of their position as
Muhammad’s wife, blessed with judgment superior to that of average women. Either way, the
pattern of God’s accord with the Prophet’s wives’ suits and disagreement with the suits of
common women, popular reverence for the Prophet’s family, and the general trend of the wives’
singularity in Islam all point toward a decisive distinction between Muhammad’s wives and
women in general.
For all of these reasons, it is problematic to argue for a certain role for Medinese women
in general from the particular roles of the Prophet’s wives. Mernissi’s attempt to do so is a
manifestation of her strong desire to draw principles from individual instances in Islamic texts
and history. Indeed, her perennial criticism of Islamic scholars is that they examine each
individual Hadith and each verse of the Qur’an in isolation from other parts of the texts (129).
But Mernissi could benefit from incorporating just such a piecemeal approach into her own
work. The complexity of early Muslim society requires that women be viewed not only
according to their sex, but also according to their class. Thus, although the Prophet’s wives do
6
exemplify a liberation that was perhaps newly enhanced under Islam, their confidence was
unique among their fellow women. Mernissi’s argument for equality of the sexes in Medina
prior to the instatement of the hijab does not hold.
7
Works Cited
Mernissi, Fatima. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights
In Islam. New York: Perseus Books Publishing, 1991.