The Muslim ummah today is living through a turning point in its history: Unless its scholars and intellectuals are committed to assuming their responsibility in providing the vision and the scholarship that can respond to its needs at this critical juncture, the chances are that we will be overwhelmed by the raucous tides that are remaking history. We are already experiencing the burden of the 'New World Order' and the events of the past decade do not bode well for our future. While the world panicked about the possibilities attending the advent of '2 YK ', the real catastrophes befalling the ummah went largely unnoticed, were downplayed and subdued, as Muslims were accomplices to their own disarray. It takes a sense of purpose and belonging among those of us who are lucky enough to be still alive and free, and who have the wit and mind to know something about the trends and events in our world today, to assume that responsibility.

The wages of survival in the 'new world order' : Muslim women have paid dearly for the untold suffering and afflictions wrought on their communities, from the breadth and depth of a once boundlessly fertile and golden global Crescent. From Europe to Central and city'. Those who have survived are scattered throughout refugee camps and living out their cold welcome in exile, as bereaved mothers, orphaned children, widows, and broken spirits. There is indeed little chance that these traumatized and brutalized remnants of historic communities will ever be in a position to rebuild, amid so thorough a devastation. The bitter irony of it all, is that the custodians of the new world mayhem have never ceased to pay lip service to the sanctity of human rights and the triumph of civility in a world where the only threat seems to come from Islam and its wretched communities. It is even more ironic to realize the various ways Muslims have been accomplices to their plight, from fundamentalists' to 'liberals' to modernists and secularists and traditionists of all strokes and stripes.

A call to action.

Muslim women in short, can no longer afford to sit back and watch as the world goes by, if such was ever the case, or even an option. A mother is bonded to life and has the welfare of generations instinctively at heart. Motherhood is a cast of soul and spirit, not a cultural artifact, and even less a biological contingency. And it is the drenching experience of horror pain and death all round that stirs the deepest gut instincts, fundamentally maternal instincts, for life, purpose, and worth. For those who experience and are aware, it is only in the darkest of gloom that the meaning and value of light and hope are born: and as some live through the experience and others are witness to the extinction of this light and to the very extermination of community, the meaning of it all dawns. It is out of this realization that a new awareness, a new consciousness is being born throughout the ummah, including its women. Part of this consciousness is a new resoluteness and resolve. Muslim women will not be used as weapons to backstab their already blighted communities, anymore than they will continue to defer to the infirmities and pathologies that may for long have afflicted their communities.

The birth of a new consciousness.

In these conditions, many women who have received a public education today and who have graduated from higher institutions of learning feel that they carry a duty in addition to that of everyday living, wherever their lives may take them. This duty is one of cultivating a certain kind of consciousness and contributing to its formation and its dissemination. Doubtless, a Muslim's sense of consciousness frequently (indeed, by definition) begins with a God-Consciousness, and from there on one begins to take one's bearings in the world. This of course presumes that one is aware of one's being a Muslim, in a world where an affliction of false consciousness, as much as lost consciousness is frequently the norm.

Today, many of us who may not have given much thought to their 'faith identities' in the past, or those who have simply taken it for granted, are increasingly becoming aware of what it means to be 'Muslim', for their Muslim identity is being flung in their faces, forced on their consciousness, by the very course of events. The only possible response in these circumstances is to face up to it: and choose between two alternatives, with little room for a third: One is to rise to the occasion and take up the challenge wholeheartedly, and drink up one's faith and beliefs and loyalties to the brim; the other is to be equally adamant, but in the reverse direction, to try and dissociate oneself, for all its proven futility, and to succumb to that broken reed within, despite a surface show of arrogance and indifference. In short, one is living an inevitable reality of polarization, and one that is not likely to dissipate in the immediate future.

Why Muslim Women's Studies?

We, as the advocates of Muslim women's studies in an academic setting where 'women's studies' have become the main growth 'culture industry' of our times, come to the field with these various concerns in our minds and hearts. We feel that this is an excellent opportunity to occupy a 'site' and engage a role, where we would contribute to this historic need of consciousness raising and lucidity, both within our 'thought communities' as well as within our core communities as part and parcel of a larger historic entity we identify with the ummah. At its simplest, this entity is a global community that takes its bearings from its God-Consciousness, its sense of indebtedness to its Creator, and unto whom is the Return. Our task as Muslim women scholars, is to sharpen this perception and to inquire into its implications for our life in this world in the here-and-now, with an eye on the world beyond and the reality of a hereafter. We believe that this is a unique task that is as much needed within our professional community as well as among our core social historical communities, because of the crass materialism and positivism that is a rampant hallmark of the times and threatens to so brutalize and trivialize our life on earth. There is a need to rehumanize our world and our sensibilities: and while this is a common task to which everyone qualified for the task can contribute, we feel that as women our stakes are more than doubled in this venture. As 'Muslimat', and as women of faith and loyalty, with access to the pristine sources of a religion of guidance that has openly addressed us as fully responsible and mature members of a privileged community, our sense of duty is compounded.

From profession to vocation:

We come to that task with a sense of mission and vocation: we use our profession as a means and not an end. Our professional training, may afford us the tools and the opportunity to approach our task, but that is only the beginning, and a premise for other conditions that are needed before we may qualify as 'vocationists.' Our priority goes to advancing our pursuit with the higher ends in view, beyond the individual gains and perks that attend the advancement of our worldly careers. We hope to instill something of that spirit in Muslim Women's Studies as a newly emerging field of scholarship - and vocation - in the New Academy. One of the foremost features of the latter is its openness: it is an academy without walls in every sense of the term. We may have a chance later, in the course of the Perspectives that we share in this cyber academy, to develop this idea further - 'au fur et a mesure,' as the French might say. For now, however, we bring up this trait, because it is the inspiration behind this forum of ours that we have called the 'Riwaq'

Cairo pioneers.

It is no secret that much of the drive for making our venture a success comes from the dedication and spirited commitment of our circle of Friends of the Chair in Cairo. Particularly our young and upcoming friends: the hallmark of the future, the Spring of a generation, that has missed so many Springs. And Cairo is home to a rich and unbroken tradition of culture, from antiquity to the present. Central to that tradition is its historical role at the heart of a living community and a cultural heritage associated with one of the oldest universities in the world, al Azhar.

The rebirth of the riwaqs.

True, the Azhar is but a dim shadow of its golden prime, of a nearly thousand years odd. Still, it remains the symbol of a unique tradition of learning that embodies much that is treasured in the openness and inclusiveness that we cherish and invite into our own forum. The 'niches' that stand in the Azhar today, those welcoming alcoves that embrace its courtyard and soften its stately columns, were once the refuge and resort of generations of knowledge seekers who came from near and far, in a community that owed its very roots to learning and to the traditions of its transmission. These niches were called 'riwaqs', or 'colleges' ... Such riwaqs may have been unique to a culture or tradition, but they were certainly not confined to a privileged center in the Muslim world: they were simply embryonic of a cluster of institutions, a hive of learning that ran the length and breadth of the Muslim City wherever it may have flourished, from Samarkand to Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Morocco and Andalusia. Women were patrons and contributors to the munificence that made this lifeline possible everywhere and down the centuries.. For until well into the 18th century, we will encounter women whose faith and will kept them actively involved in the vital ongoing trade that welded generations and provided the ethos upon which the ummah thrived. I mean to say that women were vital links in the chains of transmission of that learning that constructed and confirmed community in Islam.

From modest beginnings, in very different circumstances, in a world radically changed and a community deeply traumatized, we ourselves today, come as members of different generations and backgrounds, to make our contribution. Through the 'Riwaq Zahra,' named after the woman whose example inspires our Chair, and through its constellation of sister riwaqs as these steadily and graciously come into their own, we hope to give voice to the birth of the new consciousness and to channel energies thus infused to their appointed ends. In so doing we hope that we, too, will be able to make a difference, and leave a small imprint, on our world. To follow in the footsteps of those who have gone before.

The Azhar Riwaqs

RATIONALE

The last two decades have seen a tremendous growth in the field of Women Studies in the Western academy, a growth that is paralleled and reinforced in practice by the tidal global interest in the renewal of civilization/s and in socio-cultural politics. This has been attended by a resurgence in topical issue-areas entailing a redefinition of public space and by new forms of transcultural encounter and communication. In the process, the changing moral economy of vulnerable societies has profiled an unprecedented visibility of women - together with a new dynamics of gender and gendered consciousness. The upsurge of interest in Islam and in Muslim women has opportunely come to the fore in these circumstances.

Of all the traditional world religions Islam provides the most daunting challenge to globalization. In its own model of universality it assures a credible alternative to the current dominant thrust of globalization. This alternative that is more humane and more viable speaks directly to the issue areas at stake in the changing moral economy, including notably gender-related issues.

The precarious position of the Muslim world on the protracted eve of a century's renaissance leaves it hamstrung. The initiative for critical cultural encounters and self representation in controversial domains can only be taken up by women themselves.

It is for Muslim women scholars in particular to carry the burden of critical enlightenment in their communities as they seek to explore and to re-examine , to articulate and to embody, the ideals of Islam.

Muslim women need to renegotiate the substance and boundaries of the public square in their diverse localities and, beyond that, in the all-pervasive global sphere that impinges on every issue and setting.

As they do so, they will inevitably be contributing to the emerging transcultural discourse. In imparting their vision and will on the gender dynamics shaping the global moral economy, they will also be reinscribing the very nature and direction of cultural modernity.

The Zahira Abdin Chair for Women and Gender Studies is a timely response and a practical initiative in this direction.

OBJECTIVES

To institute an Islamic civilizational perspective grounded in tawhid, community, and a commitment to family values.
To lay the foundations for a systematic and cumulative inquiry into women and gender drawing on the civilizational perspective.
To re-examine the historical legacy on Women in Islam from within its civilizational parameters.
To critically address women and gender-related concerns in the Contemporary Muslim world
To encourage comparative studies on women and gender-related issues in a Changing World
To provide a forum for networking and interaction on women and gender to sustain a new academy
To contribute to reformulating the current discourses on women, family, and community
To give momentum and direction to a fast growing field of scholarship on women and gender, with a focus on the Muslim world.
To provide a bridge/ link between different initiatives in the field: especially between indigenous scholarship and discourses and their counterpart in the Western academies.
To provide a reliable, authentic and authoritative pool of resources and perspectives for informed, responsible and ethical policy initiatives.
To form new cadres of competent and responsible scholars in the field.

Cairo, Seminar 2000 1

BACKGROUND

A SYNOPSIS

In the conviction that enlightened knowledge, as much as sound belief, is the premise for responsible and moral action, and that its absence or confusion diminishes the human status and subverts the socio-moral order, the Zahira Abdin Chair sets out to fulfill a conspicuous need and to remedy a precarious social condition. In a global world, this condition knows no boundaries. Accordingly, the scope of its address extends to multiple constituencies. For obvious reasons, those immediately targeted for engaging a discourse, are expected to come from within the Muslim community, the ummah. The nature and parameters of this discourse are a function of its context. Globalization has simply exacerbated conditions in the post-colonial world, and the historical encounter with the West has added to the general disorientation, particularly in the Muslim world. The mounting interest in Women and gender questions, as it spreads from the West to the Rest, aptly epitomizes this double disarray, while the prominence of Islam in global politics is further amplified in the paradoxical visibility attending Muslim women worldwide. The meaning of the Zahira Abdin Chair and the uniqueness of its mission, need to be seen against this background.

To note, this is the first initiative of its kind, a Chair in the West without being of the West, housed in a nascent academy equally compelling in its mission and vision as it strives to bridge the historical rift between (an outgrown and mythical) ‘East and West’ at the same time as it sets out to reform and renew Muslim thought. In taking Women and Gender for its focus, the Chair is dedicated to one of the more controversial and intractable fields of the age. In its pursuit, it questions and contests many of the prevailing assumptions in the field, and seeks to transcend the dominant paradigm (s) and pave the way for an alternative model in the academy and in society.

Against this background, The Chair sees its academic and intellectual agenda in terms of a two pronged strategy of deconstruction and reconstruction, to critique and to edify. It assumes the initiative to critique a tradition ‘from within,’ while at the same time, seeking to reform and reconstruct on the basis of an authentically grounded paradigm drawn on the original and originating sources of Islam. (Qur’an and the sunnah as an explanatory source and adjunct to the Qur’an). In affirming the enduring value, validity, and viability of these Sources, it also hopes to articulate a model of thought and action in its field that can contribute positively to the ongoing debates and policies gender related issues, in a global forum. In a more general vein, the goals and objectives of the Chair are conceived within a broader tradition of scholarship that strives to retrieve and appropriate the best in a universal and perennial tradition identified with the divinely revealed sources of human enlightenment and guidance. In doing so, it seeks to align itself with the forces that make for a global cultural renewal.

Friends of the Chair -Cairo, 1998

One of the first Outreach Circles was established in Egypt - within months of the announcement of the Chair at the Graduate School in Leesburg, Virginia. The adjoining excerpt has been adapted for the readers of 4'M 2U from the Message to the Friends of the Chair convening in Cairo on July 15 1998 to deliberate on strategies to implement a vision and a program. Its theme dealt with the need to launch a new field in Women's Studies from an Islamic civilizational perspective. The original Arabic address will be published, together with a summary of the proceedings, to our web page in its Riwaq.

Speaking as an educator coming from an Islamic civilizational perspective, I take ‘engendering community’ to be a vital perspective in rethinking women in culture and society.

To speak about women is to envisage community, and no amount of thinking about community can be taken seriously without re-centering women as the cornerstones and active agents for generation, preservation, cultivation, and regeneration. In short, women are rightly identified with key roles and processes (=actions!) that assure not only the conception of community, but its persistence and continuity in human history. Community is the enduring benchmark for assessing the quality of life and the caliber of human civilization.

These community engendering roles and processes are frequently subsumed by social scientists under the rubric of ‘socialization.’ To speak of community in terms of preservation and continuity however, by no means restricts the processes of socialization to a monotonous or a one-dimensional exercise in a ‘system-maintenance’ activity, to use another jargon from one of the older schools of thought in social theory.

Engendering community is as much about change in the double sense of the term. ‘Change’ can be taken as adaptation to meet the challenge of survival and well-being in a perpetually changing world. ‘Change’ can also be understood as reformation and transformation in a specifically human setting where culture is an artifice defined by the interplay of agency, morality, and responsibility. The survival of a historical community in a particular place and time is hardly the function of the physical or biological components of the species; but it depends on a ‘wellness’, or on the viability of its normative and moral profile.

Taking women as an access to engendering community, therefore, takes us beyond survival to the quality of life. It means giving value to such ends as its betterment and refinement, or its moral excellence. Like mothering and caring, the epitome of womanhood, engendering community ultimately refers to a certain quality that verges on wholeness and wholesomeness.

Rethinking women and gender against Islamic civilization perspectives reinforces this approach. A discourse drawing on this identification between women and community opens out new horizons for understanding society, culture, and change, and points to new directions for reconstructing the curriculum. The ground is thus effectively paved for instituting policies that are bound to reflect on the public sphere and to impart to it its ethos and its ends. The health of the community may be primarily gauged by the health of its women, and the health of a society is contingent on that of its community.

This prognosis is nothing less than a prescription for a way of understanding self, world, and other. It points to a way of seeing through the patterns of relationships and interdependence, constituting the woof and the warp of a primal cosmic weave, to the complementarity, measure, and proportion they encompass. This is one aspect of what we mean by a ‘holistic approach.’

One of the principal objectives of the Chair for Women’s Studies is to provide an institutional focus for the efforts towards a comprehensive and integrated curriculum. This kind of curriculum is a necessity in view of the challenges brought about by the pace and nature of change in the modern world. The uniqueness of that change is a function of modernity. Not only have material and technological acumen outstripped moral development, but the scale and reach of the resulting turbulence has swept through the very real global village, turning globalization into something more than a virtual reality.

The kind of curriculum that we are piloting should be capable of meeting a general need, as well as responding to the more culturally specific needs. Only a curriculum developed with a view to the universal and the particular in the human condition can aspire to deal effectively, ethically, and responsibly with its charge.

The Need to innovate in Form and Content

Why innovate? To meet the challenges in a field marked by the perennial economy of imbalance. Far from being a source of weakness, we believe that given the right context and attitudes, or frame of mind, the discrepancy between needs and resources becomes the trigger for inventiveness. Women’s Studies Programs in the modern academy in the West have often been noted for their resourcefulness as much as for their dynamism and diversity. They have provided the occasion and the conditions for reconstructing the academy and directing it to nobler ends and new openings. This may admittedly be more true of the earlier phases, in the seventies and eighties, as opposed to the latter nineties, a situation that is a reflection of the constraints that inhere in a paradigm, more than in the particular field in question.

Fihriya Circle- Morocco 1999 1

In Muslim Women’s Studies, as we rethink an emerging field of learning, training, reflection and action from a renewed and renewing civilizational perspective inspired by Islamic sources and precedents, it is imperative that we strive to overcome situational impediments. We may indeed, transcend them. ‘Transcend’ is used here to suggest an intellectual and moral posture of ‘standing up to’ and ‘reaching beyond’- as opposed to wasting energies in confrontational or defensive tropes. Among the ‘impediments’ that come to mind is the double-barreled resistance that comes from both vested professional interests and sheer ignorance, to say nothing of the inertia that encounters all initiatives to take up untrodden paths. In planning our curriculum we need to be imaginative and creative, scaling our achievements to the range of the possible, not the ‘given’ or existing faculties and facilities. Possible can go a long way if it is hedged with perspicacity and resolve.

In the conventional curriculum, the focus is usually on the subject and its particulars. Rarely is attention given to the underlying assumptions that frame the subject, or to the conceptual and contextual framework that foregrounds the particulars. The forest is often overlooked in the search for the trees. This may be justified in terms of a prevailing consensus on the rules of the game among a community of practitioners. It is what Thomas Kuhn in his classic work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, referred to as the conventions of ‘normal science’.

In cases where there is doubt about the validity of the rules of the game, or where a different quest is sought, such normal or predefined practices are open to question. It is then that any attempt to suggest an alternative must be grounded, with its presuppositions and parameters subject to question and conscious articulation. A curriculum developed in this alternative mode would necessarily follow suit.

It is in this struggle between two worlds, one of normal practice that is open to question, and another possibilities that is yet to be born, that the awareness of the paradigm shift come to be experienced as a ‘crisis’ in the scientific community. The scholarly and educated constituencies to which we address our concerns and initiatives in this forum, are likely to have affinities with such a community. And to experience its birth pangs.

The Abdin Forum is conceived as a space that can contribute to the advancement of the new paradigm. In the meantime, concrete initiatives will need to be taken, one by one, on a number of fronts: whether in research, teaching, or advocacy. We may take an immediate task at hand by way of example.

In drawing up a new curriculum, we are aware of the need to balance the parts with the whole and, above all, to keep the grounds that anchor the whole well within the reach and confines of the parts. This is a precept garnered from using the civilizational perspective in exploring other areas. It can be used to inform structure and process as much as content.

One way of visualizing the project at the formal, or procedural plane, is to consider setting up our Women’s Studies Program along the following lines. Modules for a series of ‘crash courses’ could be developed with the objective of orienting, training, informing, educating, and communicating. The backbone for this series would be a core matrix consisting of a set of lectures that provided the perspective and foundations. Around this matrix the emphasis would shift to adjoining ‘electives’ that could be adapted to the needs and circumstances of different learning constituencies.

It is an instructional package that is open and versatile. Over time and with experience, it can be adjusted and consolidated. These courses can be part of an ‘Open University’ and a dynamic growing academy, one best expressed in the idea of a university without walls, or, a learning community without frontiers.

With the meteoric rise of the internet and the opportunities it avails for distance learning, it takes only imagination and resolve to turn dreams into reality. When we recall the classical tradition of the ambulant scholar,or ulema, which continued until late into the nineteenth century in remote enclaves of Muslim learning, the distance learning of the twenty first century means a new dimension to an old tradition. The familiar figure of the visiting professor could then easily become the pivot in the New Academy, a roving ambassador and herald, or a mission bearer.

One may add a point on this finishing note. The learned women in the ummah today, have an advantage that their forebears, the sheikha and 'alima of earlier centuries, may not have had. Their responsibility to contribute to the heritage and the well-being of the community is thus proportionately multiplied.

It is in this spirit that the Chair for Women's Studies from a civilizational perspective is being launched. It comes to respond to a felt need in the ummah and the world community. But at the same time, it is inspired by a rich legacy that it seeks to rediscover and activate. In gracing it with the name of a modern accomplished professional, scholar, and lifelong community healer and builder, we pay tribute to this heritage, and uphold a model and example to our younger generations to instill them with faith in the realizability and practicality of the ideals and precepts of their tradition.

Professor Zahira Abdin. Edinburgh 1980

w'al hamdulillah

MuslimWomenStudies.com

RATIONALE

OBJECTIVES

BACKGROUND

A SYNOPSIS

The Need to innovate in Form and Content

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