Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 192 - The Stronger Sex - Women Scholars and Islam.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Stronger Sex, Women, Scholars and Islam. Quiz time. Which of the following has not been mentioned in these podcasts on philosophy in the Islamic world? A giraffe, a silent film star, or a woman philosopher? Okay, it's a trick question. I've actually mentioned all three. The giraffe was Hayawatha, the silent film star Buster Keaton, and the woman philosopher was, of course, my non-existent sister. If you think a non-existent person can't be a philosopher, all I can say is, try telling that to my sister's face. And what, you might think, could be more appropriate? The only female thinker I've seen fit to mention this whole time doesn't exist. Surely the oppressive arrangements of Islamic societies, from medieval times down to today, have excluded women from pursuing intellectual pursuits. That would make this a very short episode. But it turns out that women have always been allowed to play a part in Islamic intellectual history, even if that part has undeniably been more limited than the one allowed to men. In fact, some of the men we have discussed were taught by women. For instance, the 12th century thinker Abdalatif al-Baghdadi, whom we discussed back in episode 171, studied with a female religious scholar named Bint al-Ibaari. And the greatest of the philosophical Sufis, Ibn Arabi, studied under a woman named Fatima of Cordoba. Speaking of which, it's actually not true that women have gone entirely unnoticed so far. I did discuss Rabia, a major early Sufi, who helped introduce the theme of passionate love for God into Islamic mysticism. That's not a bad place to start with our topic, since women feature prominently in the history of religious asceticism and mysticism from early on in the Islamic world. Here, we can detect a parallel to late antiquity, where we saw several desert mothers joining in the Christian ascetic movement. In the Latin Christian medieval world too, there were major female mystics who will before long be featuring in this podcast. In the Islamic tradition, Rabia was the most famous such figure, quoted by many male Sufis and imitated by many female ones. Rabia exemplified rigorous asceticism, unmarried and destitute. She came by her poverty the old-fashioned way by actually being poor. In fact, she was a freed slave. But like the late antique desert mothers, many other Muslim women who contributed to Sufism were well-to-do. Some literally contributed by sponsoring religious orders and retreats, while others gave up their lives of luxury for the rigors of asceticism. In another respect, Rabia was downright unusual. She remained steadfastly celibate. This corresponds to the expectations we might have from the Christian ascetic tradition, but in fact most women honored as Sufi sates were married. Even so, they were often seen as having an ambivalent relation towards their husbands and towards femininity itself. Within a hundred years of Rabia, who died at the end of the 8th century, we have an interesting example in the person of Umm Ali of Balkh. Unlike Rabia, Umm Ali was from a wealthy background and was well-educated in the Islamic sciences of her day. She not only married, but according to some stories, aggressively pursued her husband and teased him for being unmanly in eluding her advances. As his wife, she annoyed him by boldly unveiling herself while studying with a male Sufi teacher. She justified this on the grounds that the teacher was another spiritual partner alongside her husband. In these stories, Umm Ali departs from expectations about women in medieval Islamic society. In fact, her teacher paid her the dubious compliment that she was in effect a man wearing women's clothes. Similarly, Rabia was praised as being no longer a woman because of her intimate knowledge of God. Perhaps then, women mystics were exceptions who proved the rule. Their ascetic lifestyle and intense spirituality freed them from the constraints normally imposed on women in Islamic society to the point of transcending their gender in the eyes of that society. Yet, female Sufis were not the only women playing a role in the Islamic religious traditions. I choose the word traditions advisedly because of the significant number of female transmitters of hadith, the traditions, about the life of the Prophet Muhammad. The earliest transmitters included the wives of the Prophet, who are admired in Islam as exemplars for other women to emulate. Among them, the most important for the reporting of hadith was Muhammad's favorite wife, Aisha. As we saw when we looked at Islamic jurisprudence, reports about the Prophet are a fundamental basis for the law and as a guide for day-to-day life of all Muslims. To ensure the reliability of these reports, hadith scholars traced each of them back through a chain of transmitters who each needed to be trustworthy, indeed above reproach. And well over 1,000 of these reports have chains of transmission beginning with Aisha. These hadith and stories about Aisha herself provide key sources concerning attitudes towards women in Islam. Once it was claimed to her that the Prophet deemed prayer to be interrupted if a woman, donkey, or dog should come between the believer and the direction of Mecca, Aisha rejected the report on the basis of personal experience. The Prophet prayed when she herself was lying in front of him. And I have to at least mention another anecdote in which she scoffed at the notion that, according to the Prophet, a believer could be damned to hell for mistreating a cat. Other reports transmitted by Aisha show her high degree of learning and especially her mastery of detailed legal issues. Given the example set by Aisha, and to a lesser extent the Prophet's other wives, it is no surprise that numerous women were important early transmitters of hadith. Yet there was a steep decline in the participation of women in hadith scholarship following the earliest generations. This is probably because of the increasing specialization of those who gathered and authenticated traditions, often by traveling long distances to interview witnesses. All this required freedom of movement and financial independence, something not available to women at this time in history. But in the late 10th century or so, once the corpus of hadith was better established, women came back into the game. When we hear of men being taught by women, it is often because the women are experts in the prophetic traditions and are passing them on to the next generation. All of this means that, even in the medieval period, and certainly later on, many women, usually wealthy ones, could boast of a high degree of education and expertise in the Islamic sciences. Still, women's education was kept within certain bounds. We've seen many times how central educational institutions were to intellectual developments in the Islamic world, something that is of course true in other cultures as well. So a major shift in opportunities for female intellectuals would come only in the later period we've been looking at in recent episodes. Last time, we saw how reform movements in the late Ottoman Empire, partly inspired by European philosophy, resulted in an overhaul of education and the emergence of new political ideas. After the 1908 revolution that gave rise to the modern nation of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal, probably better known to you as Atatürk, would stress the liberation of women as part of a new secularist society. The seeds for this change were already laid in the Ottoman era. We've seen how the Young Turk movement of the late 19th century pushed for secularism and scientism. Part of that political program was an insistence that women should be educated, if only because they represented an untapped economic resource. As one Young Turk intellectual, Namik Kemal, not to be confused with Mustafa Kemal, put it, The present idleness of women, who constitute more than half the human population, and their entire economic dependence, disturbed the balance of the general laws of cooperation and the welfare of mankind. The Young Turks often made the case for their ideology in newly launched magazines and journals, and a parallel development saw the emergence of periodicals written for, and often by, women. The authors of pieces in magazines like The Lady's Own Gazette were often the daughters of the bureaucrats who were running Ottoman society after the Tanzimat Reforms. They contributed literature, advice columns, and political essays which sometimes reflected explicitly on the question of whether to imitate the model of European female intellectuals. An article published in 1895 by the novelist Fatma Aliye is a good example. Speaking of the so-called Blue Stockings, women who pursued salon culture in Britain, she affirmed that their intellectual activities should be adopted by Muslim women, but that their immodest behavior should not. Like the men who set the agenda of the Young Turks, authors like Aliye knew that increased access to education would make all the difference. Against her stance, some argued that this would corrupt girls by making them inappropriately masculine. It's interesting to note that this debate echoes one that had taken place a century earlier in England, above all in the work of the philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft. Her pioneering work Vindication of the Rights of Woman is, among other things, a plea for better education for girls. In the past century, such educational reforms have indeed produced the sort of figure who had previously been as nonexistent as my sister—politicized Muslim women intellectuals. We might assume that these would all be passionate liberals railing against the patriarchal nature of Islamic culture, but—and I know you'll be surprised to hear me say this—it's dangerous to make such assumptions. Take for instance the Egyptian thinker Aisha Abdar-Rahman, who published under the pen name Bint Ash-Shati, meaning daughter of the shore. She was born in 1913 and died in 1998. She grew up in rural Egypt, the daughter of an illiterate but supportive mother and a father who was a conservative religious scholar. From inauspicious beginnings, she managed to attend Cairo University and to have an academic career beginning at the time of the Second World War. She's apparently the first woman ever to have produced extensive exegesis of the Qur'an, but she was not in the business of citing revelation to promote women's liberation. Rather, to quote a study of her by Ruth Roded, when commenting on the Qur'an, she chose difficult, theological Qur'anic verses with no social implications whatsoever, which seems to be the strategy of an ambitious woman carefully invading a traditional male domain. Yet Bint Ash-Shati was certainly not an apolitical thinker. Befitting her background, she argued for improving conditions for peasants in the countryside, and she wrote fiction depicting the plight of women in rural society. Also, she did write a scholarly work devoted to the subject of women. As we've seen, Muhammad's wives have always played a central role in Islamic conceptions of femininity, and they provide both the theme and the title of her treatise The Wives of the Prophet. It is a work rooted in traditional scholarship, with information drawn from the many reports about the Prophet and his companions. But Bint Ash-Shati also imagines the inner mental life of her protagonists, in a sense reimagining the story of Muhammad's life from the point of view of his wives. Still, it's not exactly a statement of feminism. Bint Ash-Shati associates femininity with weakness and repeatedly describes the petty bickering and jealousy among Muhammad's wives. Roded goes so far as to say that in The Wives of the Prophet, Bint Ash-Shati is trading in almost misogynist stereotypes. But of course, there have been powerfully liberal voices too, among women intellectuals. In the past several decades, one outstanding example has been Fatima Mernissi. Born in Fez in 1940, Mernissi has held a professorship of sociology in Morocco and written several pioneering books considering the place of women in Islamic society. Her most famous work is Beyond the Veil, published in 1973. In this book, Mernissi draws a contrast between the Western oppression of women and the oppression distinctive of Islamic society. Whereas West Western thought has always insisted on the biological inferiority of females, Islamic society has instead feared women precisely because they are the stronger sex. Here, Mernissi contrasts Freudian ideas about women to sentiments she finds in a medieval author who is very familiar to us, Al-Ghazali. Whereas Sigmund Freud saw women as essentially passive, Al-Ghazali depicted them as active and sexually demanding, needing to be kept satisfied by their husbands to contain their potential for causing familial strife. Women are also possessed of a far greater degree of self-control than men. Hence the practice of veiling women. This is not done to protect them or hide them away. To the contrary, women are veiled in order to protect the weaker sex, namely men, who tend to lack control over their passions. Mernissi is onto something here. As we've seen many times, the Islamic intellectual tradition echoed Platonist ethics by describing virtue as the rule of reason over desire. Mernissi sees Al-Ghazali, and by extension the wider Islamic tradition, as associating the feminine with a provocation to untamed desire. Men must restrain and discipline their desires for women, and hence exert control and command over the women themselves, rather than showing them love and respect. But it is not just intellectuals like Al-Ghazali who are to blame. For Mernissi, the history of Muslim society is in large measure the history of an attempt to defuse women's power. She contrasts the status of women after the advent of Islam to this situation in the so-called jahiliyyah, or time of ignorance, before Muhammad received his prophetic message. In the pre-Islamic society, social structures were tribal, and women had a relatively high degree of self-determination. This was abolished early on in the history of Islam, through such legal means as rules on divorce, through veiling, and through the restriction of women to certain spaces. Only in recent times as the forces of modernity have broken down traditional Islamic social structures has it become possible for women to wield power again by invading the previously male enclaves of the workplace, politics, and the public sphere. But for Mernissi, the long-standing oppression of women in fact stemmed from a distortion of the Islamic revelation. She sees the prophet's message as a fundamentally democratic and egalitarian one. Mernissi argues for this reading of history and religion in another book called Women and Islam. She makes her case using the techniques of the Islamic religious sciences, especially a science we have already considered in this episode, hadith scholarship. Supposedly, the prophet once remarked that, Those who entrust their affairs to a woman will never know prosperity. This report has been used down the ages to justify the exclusion of women from political and economic leadership. As Mernissi recounts at the beginning of the book, it was even once quoted to her in her local grocery store. The report is deemed sound in the classical collections of hadith, but Mernissi decides to explore the provenance of the saying more thoroughly. She discovers that this quotation of the prophet was originally reported, many years after it was supposedly uttered, by one Abu Bakr. She further argues that this man's reliability is rather questionable and produces evidence that he was in fact convicted of bearing false testimony. For Mernissi, the conclusion is clear. This is obviously an unsound hadith, and only the sexist motives of the medieval hadith scholars could have blinded them to this fact. Mernissi takes the same text-critical approach when she considers the practice of veiling women. The institution of the veil can be traced back to a verse of the Qur'an, which instructs Muslims to request things of the prophet's wives from behind a curtain in Arabic hijab. As Mernissi emphasizes, many verses of the Qur'an were revealed in response to specific events, and this is one of them. The occasion was the prophet's marriage to his beautiful cousin Zainab. The verses were revealed when some guests overstayed their welcome, preventing the couple from enjoying their wedding night. For Mernissi, this context indicates that the so-called verse of the hijab was revealed to teach believers a lesson in tactfulness. It has, however, been abused to divide space itself into two realms, the private domestic sphere allowed to women and the public sphere of political and economic action reserved for men. The word hijab can also mean a veil, and as we've already seen, Mernissi sees the practice of veiling as an attempt by men to defend themselves from the attractions of women. But on her reading, there is no basis for this practice in the Qur'an. Mernissi could draw in some support here from an unlikely source, the 11th century Andalusian jurist Ibn Hazm, whom we discussed in episode 147. As we saw then, Ibn Hazm was a supporter of the Zahari school of Islamic law, which accepted a very restricted range of sources in reaching legal decisions. We saw, for instance, that he rejected the death penalty for homosexuality, since there is no support for this in the explicit statements found in the Qur'an and hadith. Similarly, he dismisses the religious requirement for veiling as having no basis in the authoritative texts of Islam. It is sometimes claimed that Andalusian society was unusual in the medieval period for allowing a greater degree of liberty and self-expression to women than was possible elsewhere in the Islamic world. This is a matter of debate, and even more debatable is the possibility that Ibn Hazm had anything remotely approximating feminist leanings. He does tell us himself that much of his early education was given to him by women, for instance in reading the Qur'an. This confirms again that in medieval Islam, women played an important role in scholarly transmission and in teaching. Still, in this and other cases, Ibn Hazm's woman-friendly rulings were not inspired by his experiences learning at the feet of women. Rather, they were a consequence of his restrictive legal method which often yielded liberal results simply because he could find no basis for more restrictive practices in the Qur'an or the hadith. Ironically though, Fatima Mernissi does have something in common with Ibn Hazm, and even more ironically with the Salafist jurist Ibn Taymiyya. Like them, she urges a return to the original teachings of Islam, and wants her fellow Muslims to divest themselves of distortions introduced in later Islamic history. For Mernissi, the distortions began almost immediately, in part thanks to the first caliph Umar. Though she admits that he had many admirable features, she also produces evidence that Umar was very hostile towards women. And he was, of course, only one of a long series of rulers and scholars whose misogyny led them to twist the revelation towards oppressive ends. Islam's true teaching concerning women, for Mernissi, is represented not by unsound anti-feminist hadith or the wearing of veils, but by a verse revealed to Muhammad after his wife Umm Salama asked why the Qur'an only ever spoke about men. In response, Muhammad received a revelation that seems to set women and men on a par. God shows forgiveness and gives reward to women and men who have surrendered to God, women and men who believe, women and men who show charity, and so on. Mernissi suggests that this verse was sent down in answer not just to an idle question by Umm Salama, but a wider demand from the women of the community for protection within the laws of the new religion. This demand was providentially answered, not only by that verse, but by the institution of laws protecting the women's right of inheritance. As these examples show, the status of women in Islam is inextricably bound up with interpretation of the core Islamic texts, the Qur'an itself, and reports concerning the sayings and deeds of the Prophet and his companions, including his wives. Mernissi puts her faith in what she calls memory, a recalling of the original intention of the Islamic revelation. She is convinced that the correct interpretation will give women their rightful place as equal partners, within the family and in religion. It's not my place to say what is and is not the true interpretation of these texts, but I do plan to continue giving women their rightful place in the history of philosophy. Soon we'll be turning to philosophy in medieval Christendom and meeting great women figures like Hildegard of Bingen. First though we need to finish our look at the Islamic world, with three final episodes that will continue to bring our story into the 20th century. So man up, or woman up, and join me next time as I continue to discuss recent philosophical developments in the Islamic world here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.