INTRODUCTORY

While gender and gender-related issues are without a doubt as old as creation since they have attended the conception of the earliest human society, the emergence of the gender debate and the interest of academia in `gender studies' is a distinctly modern prerogative. A parallel interest in learning about Muslim societies and about gender relations in particular, is also part and parcel of the modern encounter of the West with Islam. The shaping discourse on gender and Islam available to readers today in both the Muslim and contemporary Western worlds is occurring against a changing discourse on modernity in a rapidly changing global context which is becoming as open to technological challenges as it is vulnerable to the noticeable currents of social and cultural entropy.

To understand gender in Muslim society  we need to begin by shifting perceptions and  attitudes to learning about Islam and gender away from the dominant judgmental and manipulative modes of knowing to a mode of understanding in the spirit of  transcultural interaction and enlightenment. This paper will suggest a road map to such an understanding and address some of the needs and conditions for the study of gender relations in an Islamic context.

The aim of this essay is to question the adequacy of the prevailing approaches and to suggest a more relevant framework of inquiry for understanding gender in Muslim societies. Seen here, gender is part of a more general quest for understanding different aspects of Muslim society and so the present methodological and critical orientations draw on and are relevant to other areas of inquiry into Muslim society as well. The significance of this questioning and the proposed alternative go well beyond the specific topic of 'gender' and the particular core of gender studies and gender specialists to concern students of the Muslim world in general.

The essay is constructed around a series of orientations that identify a set of questions and hypotheses commenting on the existing approaches in the field and then indicating certain areas of disaffection with the prevailing paradigm/s of inquiry and suggesting a basic strategy of deconstructing the field to expose misunderstandings and to probe into their sources. Alternatively, the premises and grounds for an alternative paradigm and matrix which draw on Islamic sources of knowledge and coneptions of society is outlined. Reflected in the analysis are issue of specific concern to a Muslim scholar and what might be of a standing practical reformist concern within Muslim societies but they may be easily related to issues in a wider scholarship interested in similar issues of gender and societal reform elsewhere.

GENDER AND MODERNITY

All gender related issues are invariably emerging in the context of modernity and must be defined as modern problems, both in Muslim societies and elsewhere. As the range of response to such issues broadens, Islamic intellectual responses can also bring enriching insights and practical solutions to restructuring gender relations in a setting which while inspired by an Islamic epistemology is hardly confined to specifically 'Muslim' societies.

It is the Islamic perspective that gender, as it is constructed in contemporary scholarship cannot be separated from the project of modernity. Furthermore, the Islamic perspective sees the the growing prominence of the gender question and its various formulations in the academy as reflecting a real and serious crisis in social relations and social organization which finds its echoes in the political and social expressions of our age. To truly come to terms with gender in Muslim societies, one must be prepared to access information about Muslim cultures and traditions against Islamic standards rather than those standard assumptions and theoretical practices which have been established in other traditions, especially in the West.

The current debate in Muslim  countries on gender relations takes place along two planes: the encounter with the Self and the encounter with the Other. The one perspective takes the discourse on gender within a critical reappraisal of the Islamic tradition itself. It takes for its premises the decadence of a tradition and sees Muslim societies as confronted with the consequences of this decadence. Backwardness is conceived of as decline in terms of the integrity and standards of the Islamic tradition; to overcome this decline, reformists work to tap the original sources of Islamic knowledge as they may be found in the Qur'an and the traditions of the Prophet and the formative community as well as in the more general intellectual and juridical sources of the Islamic legacy in order to recapture a lost momentum and induce recovery and renewal. Within this vein of literature is a growing critique by popular leaders in the current Islamic movement and among representative sectors of opinion which addresses gender reform in a distinctly Islamic idiom and whose representativeness and appeal are far-reaching. As will be noted below in observations on the contextual premises of the alternative paradigm, the outcome of the gender debate in contemporary Muslim societies is substantially contingent on the resolution of this critical and constructive encounter with the Self.

The other perspective which has evolved in Muslim intellectual circles is an understanding of gender issues in Muslim societies stemming from the encounter between the Self and the Other, ie. with the West. Here, the discourse on gender in contemporary Islamic societies takes its point of departure from the way in which the West has impinged on the Muslim world. In the course of a globalizing process, the encounter with the West has been subsumed into the context of a "modernity" which has been mediated in Muslim societies through the generalized impulse to adapt to modernity by effectively developing their economic, political, and socio-cultural infrastructures. Representative of these works are such articulate and vocal feminist writers like Fatima Mernissi and Nawal Saadawi whose primary constituency remains ironically confined to a western audience. Both are widely disseminated in their English translations or originals, thanks to their westernized idiom and enthusiasts. Clearly, it is against this setting that gender issues impress their urgency as modernization creates the ground situation which challenges both a stirring counter-consciousness and an uncertain order of social/societal relationships, and as a triumphant and over-bearing West continues to impinge on both as much through its cultural norms and example as through its interest power politics.

On another plane then, the discourse on gender in Muslim societies may be gauged against the standards and consequences of this encounter with the Other. It should be noted that non-Muslims wishing to discover the nature of gender issues in Muslim society should be aware that these two planes of discourse on gender in Muslim societies are associated with to levels of groups: the concern with Islamic sources as a guide to shaping gender relations in the future is found at the popular/majority and grass roots level and is currently filtering upward; the second approach which tends to incorporate Western notions of gender is cultivated at the elite/minority level and at best is echoed in official forums of public opinion and policy-making circles in a setting where there is a historical apathy between power and society given the authoritarian and unrepresentative nature of the regimes in power in most Muslim countries.

Often there is more visibility/ audibility for the elitist debate, especially when seen from the outside owing to the very nature of the post-colonial state in the Muslim setting. The confusion for the observer of the scene arises when the two planes of discourse are conflated, or when one plane becomes the exclusive focus and the other is reductively dismissed. One plane is usually lost sight of and the other is disproportionately extended.

This is what frequently happens in the attempts to understand gender in Muslim societies by Western scholars. This confusion is hardly confined to the latter, as many an indigenous professional operates out of the same orbit of scholarship of which he is frequently less inclined to be critical and more disposed to accept its orthodoxies than his western colleague. As we indicate below however, the fault lies more frequently with the paradigm of inquiry and not with the individual scholar for all his subjectivities.

CONSTRAINTS IN THE CURRENT SOCIAL SCIENCE PARADIGM:

There are other factors which constrain the current paradigm of inquiry into gender in Muslim societies and which make it objectionable from an Islamic point of view. It is a paradigm which assumes a positivistic conception of society. From an Islamic perspective, this is not only a reductionist conception, but it is a distorted view which makes it impossible to grapple with the effective dimensions of the community, any community, and particularly the community as it is ideally perceived and as it is developed historically in Muslim societies. In these societies, despite a rampantly materialistic and agnostic age which affects every one, a major part of individual and social life still continues to respond to the transcendental. In the absence of a paradigm of inquiry which can accommodate transcendence( IE. THE PARADIGM OF MODERNITY?) within its matrix of social inquiry, many of the social and cultural realities of such a society are missed.

For example, the return to the veil as a sociological phenomenon can only be fully understood against this dimension of transcendence, and against the awareness that in addition to political, economic, or practical considerations of whatever sort, there remains the catalyst of taqwa (an individual sense of piety and righteousness), which conduces to a raised God-consciousness and to a personal self-understanding occurring in the context of transcendence. This is not simply a personal, or an inner development, but it is a group phenomenon that radiates outwardly to be eventually projected in the moral and sociological domains as much as in their political and cultural counter spheres and in practical projects of socialization and institution building. This will in turn inevitably have its ramifications for public policy and politics.

The current paradigm of inquiry offers us a conflictual model of socializing and social change and development. It is a polarized model that exacerbates differences and contradictions, and this reflects on an agenda of research and inquiry as much as on essays in interpretation and analysis. From an Islamic perspective, it is not only distracting and delusory, but it is positively destructing and subversive. Muslim societies like all societies contain elements of cooperation and conflict, of division and divergence and of integration and convergence. The existing paradigm focuses on the negative elements in a universal equation to the complete negation and neglect of the constructive elements. Hence, Mernissi, working in the dominant tradition can write eloquently on polarization between the fundamentalists and the feminists in Moroccan or other North African societies where she has done her empirical research. Yet, one should not overlook the fact that the moment she locates, or assumes this polarization for a reality, she is not necessarily drawing on her factual findings in the field as a sociologist, but she is interpreting the scene as an involved observer. She is then writing from an ideological perspective that places that research as well as whatever generalizations she might make into this area. At best she might tell us something about some sector of the field, but her research focus and strategy can rarely tell us much more, nor can it pretend to assimilate the whole: At worst, it is irrelevant, if all it has to tell us is something about a shared obsession with power on the part of both the fundamentalists and the feminists. This is not the same thing as telling us about the reality and aspirations, or the ideal interests and perceived stakes (even in power) that might motivate and shape behaviour in society in the area of gender relations and gender conceptions.

Another aspect about the dominant paradigm which makes it inadequate for discussing gender in Muslim societies is its inherent cynicism. This might accord with the temper of modernity in the West: but it hardly accords with the temper of change and struggle in Muslim societies. To the extent that modernity has affected attitudes in the latter, there might be room for elements from the dominant paradigm to describe if not to account for or remedy an existing chart of gender perceptions and gender relations. But, again by definition, what may be noteworthy about particular Muslim societies is an element of residual resilience and a pervasive optimism that defies such cynicism. We therefore need another paradigm that would be realistic without being cynical and that could thereby capture dimensions of Muslim reality more effectively and convincingly when it comes to assessing the forces of change and continuity.

APPROACHES TO GENDER STUDIES IN Muslim SETTINGS:

In modern sociological thought there are two main approaches to explaining influences on social development including gender relations and related issues. One school stresses cultural factors and the other stresses material factors. The cultural school gives primacy to tradition, values, belief-systems and habits, as they might have been transmitted down the generations, while the other underlines the primacy of economic and technological factors in inducing corresponding changes at the level of social organization and cultural attitudes. In studying gender in Muslim societies, the approaches deployed by scholars from different disciplines have reflected the varying emphases in the field depending on their sources, their training, and the research traditions to which they subscribe, or, more often their individual biases and ideological orientations.

One major influence on most studies pertaining to Muslim societies has come from Orientalism. Orientalism has generally favored a particular form/mode of cultural interpretation to the exclusion of everything else: In its interpretation of culture it has often opted for a rigid definition of culture - that sees it more archaic than arcane, as well as approaching culture in an abstract and reified manner. Its choice methods have been linguistic, literal, and textual. Drawing widely on stereotypes which it has played a key role in instigating and perpetuating, it has generally tended to be ahistorical.

The second major influence on the study of gender in Muslim societies comes from the social sciences belonging to a relatively younger tradition, and their application in the context of Muslim societies has not escaped the influence of an existing and a more established tradition in the field. Like most professionals, Western social scientists have brought with them their particular professional orientations and biases, and they have accordingly brought with them fresh approaches and emphases tending to look for causality in empirical field factors: in doing so some have emphasized environomental, functional, or systemic variables, while others have emphasized changing historical contexts as invariable catalysts. Their focus is on change, rather than on continuity, and priority is given to studying observable phenomena as they exist at any given moment with little interest or attention given to the normative or to longer term perspectives. Within the social sciences, anthropologists have generally (though not exclusively ) drawn on dimensions of Orientalism in projecting or reinforcing their premises of research in addition to observing the sanctioned codes and practices associated with the practice of their discipline.

In the case of the social sciences, perceptions have also been marked by a `modernizing', or a developmentalist bias, which has generally been taken to favor Western conceptions and models of social change and organization. In the Orientalist tradition, the cultural bias might have sometimes been more subtle, but it was just as insidious; it took for granted the superiority of the Western tradition - taken in its truncated form to mean the Graeco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian tradition. Moreover, it discounted the viability, let alone the vitality, of any alternative traditions, particularly, the Islamic tradition.

These influences are deeply rooted in a protracted and uneven tradition of encounter with Islam on the one hand, and in the modern ambivalent political dimensions of the post-colonial situation between the Muslim world and the West. The area of gender in particular has provided a fertile ground for a complex political and ideological confrontation and, at least from a Muslim retrospective on the situation, it would seem that both Orientalism and social science tend to converge on gender as a strategic ground for waging battle on Islam. In the encounter between Islam and the West, gender lies at the crux of a two-pronged critique aimed at discrediting Islam and questioning its adequacy in the modern context.

In examining approaches to the study of Islam, whatever the level, it is important to draw the lines between our knowledge interests and our power interests and not to allow our value judgements in the one arena to be clouded by misperceived or misconstrued interests emanating from the other arena. The problem of the cooptation of westernized Muslim scholars into the dominant paradigm is a case in point. On the face of it the successful transplant of the vision and the categories of a culture to a potentially influential coterie (0F ANOTHER CULTURE) amounts to the truimph of the power interests implicated in the dominant culture. In fact such a development signals something more than the the effacement of the Other: it amounts to a negation of a potential culture interest for the vanquisher, not just the vanquished. It must be seen as a double loss to mainstream scholarship, as much as to the prospects of  a better understanding of  the Muslim tradition.  The cooptation of Muslim scholars into mainstream schools is no guarantee of adding a representative dimension carrying Islamic perspectives.  What is at issue is the paradigms that are deployed in approaching Muslim societies, and the interpretative framework that commands the production of knowledge.  In the absence of an adequate paradigm, the production of  relevant knowledge in its field will remain negligible.  

Conversely, it is only in a power-obsessed setting that culture values tend to be diminuitively valorized in such power-interest terms and distortingly transfused with an idiom nurtured in a field that is under-powered by zero-sum games.

If the cooptation of Muslim scholars is something to be applauded in the short term, it certainly needs to be addressed beyond that, if only to draw attention to the double loss it entails: to existing/ mainstream scholarship and to the understanding of the Muslim tradition alike. Not only does the absence of an alternative paradigm of inquiry deprive the dominant culture and paradigm of potential and potentially potent sources of correction, renewal and consolidation, but it also detracts from its very reason and grounds: where some measure of understanding the Other constitutes the preliminary grounds for its justification. Consequently, in the view coming from an alternative paradigm of knowledge where the moral categories of culture-interests are more central than those of power, the operational criteria for evaluating scholarship in the field of gender in Muslim society would need to be periodically questioned, if only to ensure scholarship against its own biases and inertia. Failing that, and notwithstanding appearances to the contrary, the existing scholarship is threatened with various forms of an infantile senility. Those include varying degrees of redundancy and marginalization verging on its practical irrelevance amidst the signs of visible affluence : in effect, marking the state of a theoretical/ academic "stagflation".

In order to avoid frameworks of inquiry which are motivated by political and power interests, it is important to remain vigilant about the ultimate purpose and objective in learning about gender in Muslim societies. This is one of the many ambivalent areas of contemporary scholarship in general because of its tendency to be conflated and tainted with power-related considerations. Modern knowledge is rarely conceived of in terms of curiosity, wisdom or pure enlightenment: rather than an object of understanding being a legitimate end in itself, it is implicitly assumed that knowledge is an instrument of manipulation and control. Hence, studying gender in Muslim societies is frequently undertaken with the idea of changing the structures and cultures of these societies. Underlying this orientation is the implicit assumption that "ours" is the standard for viability and validity and the norm for civilized patterns of conduct and social organization. We therefore study Muslim societies to identify their pathologies and, whether out of self-interest or philanthropy, we seek to identify the most effective strategies to lead them out of their ways to ours.

COMMON OCCURRENCES IN SCHOLARSHIP

ON GENDER IN Muslim SOCIETIES:

It is commonly assumed that Muslim societies have a cultural specificity, which is generally attributed to the primacy, or the pre-eminence of Islam and its (homogeneizing) impact upon the structures and developments in different societies. Without indulging into a cultural essentialism, we can generally support this specificity in view of the fact that Islam as a religion has a lot to say about a community besides its faith, and that historically and institutionally the family has been at the center of both Islam as faith and community and of the sociological reality of Muslim societies. In this way, the convergence between Islam and social organization in Muslim communities is more than a theoretical abstraction. The other factor to consider that lends a primacy to the cultural specificity of Muslim settings which is by no means exclusive though, comes from the fact that the family there remains the primal social unit which is grounded and differentiated against the background of gender relations and sex role differentiation. ie. The family is a bio-cultural and social unit where gender is the principal determinant in its conception and development. The definition of gender as a social construct lies at the intersection of biology and culture.

Some of the topically specific issues already implicit in our above introductory perspectives about gender and modernity in the contemporary Muslim setting might be formulated at the outset of our discussion against a critical reflection that constitutes its primary focus and objective. What are the pitfalls to avoid when addressing the question of gender particularly in Muslim societies? Or, at a more preliminary level, how viable are the current approaches to understanding gender in Muslim societies?

(1) The Confusion of Islam with Tradition:

While Islam is inevitably understood and practiced against a social context and while in any given context or on any given issue its understanding is mediated through a tradition, it is important to distinguish between influences arising from change, pervasive customs and folk traditions and those influences that can be attributed to Islam as an autonomous and enduring source for shaping attitudes and convictions through time and against ingrained habits and customs. Few anthropological studies care to make the distinction, and more often than not such oversights are as much methodological as temperamental. [Some of the better ethnographies will admittedly draw attention between the discrepancies in practice and the norm.

The relevance of Islam in specific Muslim societies and in concrete situations needs to be realistically addressed and elucidated against variable conditions and a plurality of contexts. This is not an aspect that can easily be fitted into the present conceptions and practices of social inquiry where the boundaries between categories are either drawn too tightly as to be exclusive or where they merge and fuse to the point of confounding their utility. Normative Islam, to take an example, is thus either completely ignored as a relevant sociological category, or else it is simply fused with tradition and culture in an anthropological inquiry and treated diffusely as such.

This point might perhaps be put somewhat differently to suggest that neither the sociology of religion nor the understanding of religion in general as they are current in dominant practice (Western scholarship) is conducive to an understanding of Islam as religion or community. Such constraints provide the initial stumbling block in any attempt to grapple with social phenomena in Muslim societies insofar as they might be related to Islam. As by definition at least, there is much in such societies that is justly or otherwise attributed to Islam, the area of vulnerability is indeed large.

(2) Confusing Contending Forms of Expression with Islam as Core

The above observation further leads to a need to comprehend Islam as an element in the tradition - the tradition of any Muslim community - and Islam as an element of protesting and reforming that tradition: ie. Islam as a catalyst to change. This again goes against the grain of the prevailing wisdom which sees Islam, much as it sees any other religion, as an element in a tradition: a changing tradition. Therefore the only way of apprehending Islam according to the dominant paradigm is to see it as a system in mutation: This fails to distinguish between the immutable core that is at the ground of the Islamic tradition (faith and community) and its changing forms and the variety of permissible structures that continue to be sanctioned within the tradition. It further overlooks the range and limits of the dialectics of change within that tradition, where the core affects and does not simply reflect the changes in society. This insensitivity and oversight under-estimates or devalues the relevance /resilience of the Islamic essence in Muslim societies and it misses its essential implications for the gender question.

(3) The Oversimplification of Socialization in Muslim Societies:

The forces, agents and processes of socialization in Muslim society, modern and traditional, are dynamic, complex and subtle. They need to be taken as such into consideration. The modern include: the public media, the state, modern education, modern art and literature. Forces of modernization, like changes in the modes of production, technology, economic organization and, even more significant in Muslim societies are those changes brought about by the creation/ imposition of the modern centralized state, first, the colonial administration, and even more, the post-colonial set up and by the policies of ruling elites. There are other factors which impact on a situation either directly or indirectly, through mediating general influences and affecting public attitudes. Eg. the demonstration effect, the force of exposure, economic duress, emigration, demographic patterns of mobility. etc. The traditional forces of socialization would include formal and substantial elements.

The family itself is central to those forces of socialization that cannot be too starkly categorized. Where the formal structures of the traditional community are threatened, innovative responses activated by the communal instinct of survival emerge, and usually it is the family that is at the heart of a network of reinforcing patterns and relations that serve the purpose of preservation and continuity in the face of countervailing policies or forces. Throughout, it is not at all certain that the dominant paradigm can distinguish, isolate, integrate, or synthesize the various elements and forces in a complex socializing situation that falls outside conventional categories of identification and classification and might call on a different set of idioms of inquiry.

‘DECONSTRUCTING GENDER?’

• (6) Wherever the tide of Islam is on the rise, women's gains are inevitably threatened.

• (7) Where women's rights are concerned [feminists] and ['fundamentalists']] are irreconcilable adversaries. Little attempt is made to define the meaning and scope of either.
  
  The above generalizations are in turn contingent upon a few even more basic assumptions which structure Western academia. They include the following propositions:

• (1) Tradition, all tradition, is oppressive of women because tradition is assumed to be predominantly patriarchal. This is particularly the case with the Western tradition which is grantedly taken as the norm for judging all human history and culture.

• (2) There is an ambivalence, if not an outright duplicity, about Modernity: When the non-West, particularly Muslim societies are the subject of appraisal, modernity is seen as the unequivocal antithesis of tradition and is the highway to women's emancipation. When the liberal West is the subject of appraisal, then modernity is assumed to have miscarried because of its "misgendered" biases. This ambivalence has its practical implications for scholarship on women in Muslim society. Whereas in current feminist scholarship in general and in the writings on women and gender related issues in general there is room for questioning the gains of modernity and the norms and consequences of such objectives as emancipation and gender equality, there is no room for such uncertainty when writing about Muslim women - despite the evidence to the contrary. The result is that there is almost a double code for writing about the subject: one where consensus rules and one where women write in different voices.

• (3) If there is any doubt about either tradition or modernity, there is no such equivocation about Religion. There is rather a firm belief that all religion, particularly Islam, is oppressive of women. It is a stronghold of tradition, of patriarchy, of authority, of woman's subordination and repression, all of which are antithetical to the ideals of women's liberation.

• (4) Common biases about all three areas: tradition, modernity and religion are aggravated by an ideological premium attending the historical encounter with Islam. Of all the negative feelings in the modern liberal West about tradition, the most negative are reserved for religion. And the more negative of these feelings about religion are reserved for Islam. When it comes to the understanding/ misunderstanding of gender in Muslim societies, the convergence between the worst of both, tradition and religion, is complete.  
  
  
  The above gives  an idea of some of the myths and stereotypes that perpetrate and institutionalize the misunderstandings on women in Muslim society. Exposing some of the relevant underlying suppositions which inform modern scholarship in the West explains the almost logical sequel which sees in Muslim society the elements of an archaic social order which is gender-based and gender-biased to the disadvantage of women. Given these foundational assumptions, it is equally logical to assume that all three dimensions of social evolution in Muslim society, the religious, the traditional, and the modern conspire against the liberation of women which is conditional upon the restructuring of gender relations. This also constitutes the basic matrix of inquiry against which all specific research projects are mounted and these are the implicit perceptions which set the bounds for any inquiry be it sociological, anthropological, or political, or historical, or hermeneutical.

 

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The Matrix of Inquiry and its Dysfunctions

A matrix of inquiry sets the agenda of research. It also suggests the answers in advance, or at least, it directs us to where to look for answers. It determines the kind of questions which are researchable. The old system is assumed to be oppressive, and resentment is the order of the day. The case studies that count and the voices that articulate this condition are deemed to be the only representative ones that are worthy of recording and translating. Gender conflict and the social discrepancies attendant on traditional gender relations are researchable areas, especially where the thrust of social and psychological theory in Western academia is predicated on probing conflictual situations. The result is that there is no authentic or genuinely representative single reading, or alternative readings, of gender in Muslim societies. What we have is a variety of Freudian, Marxian and pseudo-Marxian, Orientalist, feminist, and individualistic readings of gender in Muslim societies. Regardless of their intrinsic academic or intellectual merit, these are all readings which are hardly designed to enlighten us on the meaning of gender in Muslim societies - at least insofar as it might be perceived at the plane of moral agency within these societies.

 

The validity of this matrix is further impaired by a confounded and confounding rationality. Hence, we find a scholar on North Africa for example who points to the elements of social disintegration attendant on the breakdown in tradition and identifies a heightened incidence of psycho-pathologies among women in a context marked by their increased participation in the labor force and their growing visible autonomy. Yet, without much ado she concludes that this was the inevitable price that had to be paid for emancipation, and that this must anyway be accepted, if only as a transitory phase. The rationale for another study in a similar context of empirical surveys might be more subtly expressed, but it nonetheless confirms such side-effects as the imperatives of emancipation, and even as the measure of its effectiveness. As the Western model of emancipation and development captures the imagination and as social patterns and prevailing norms of social organization are contested, and the gender hierarchy begins to make way for relatively more egalitarian trends, it is not sufficient to establish those elements of change as they might be observable in particular women's attitudes to authority. 

What is deemed to be of consequence is to assess the extent to which such attitudes impact on the total structural organization and cultural orientations in society in a general sense. The issue then is no longer about individual women demonstrating strong personalities and participating in public life, or it is not longer the case of demonstrating that individual Muslim women are capable of initiative and leadership in a given Muslim setting. As long as this conduct has not affected the system at a structural level, then the process of change is impaired and the objectives of emancipation and equality are disconcertingly curtailed. Clearly then, the matrix of inquiry here does not only set the agenda of research by determining the questions worthy of asking, but it is also designed to orient scholars and target audiences towards the course of action, or change, by suggesting which answers are credible and acceptable, and which answers are deemed of value.

The trouble with the matrix of inquiry is not simply in the kind of rationale and rationality it imposes on the study of gender in Muslim societies. It is frequently at a loss to explain the phenomena that accost the student, or infringe on his/her observations. Hence, within the dominant matrix of inquiry into women in Muslim societies, there is no room to account for a woman's movement which operates within the framework of Islam and which demands change and is critical of the status quo but does so in strictly Islamic terms. If women's liberation is contingent on reclaiming her "equity rights" and if the standard for these rights is frequently sought in a religious tradition that has either been neglected or distorted, then how can we avoid a reconciliation?

 

The irony is heightened when this critique of the status quo in defence of `women's liberation' is frequently voiced by males in Muslim society as happened with the controversial call of Qasim Amin in Egypt at the turn of the century and as this apparently anomalous initiative continues to be assumed to this day by leaders of unquestionable integrity in the contemporary Islamic movement -like Sheikh Muhammad al Ghazali. The whole structure of a movement is at stake when its gendered premise and rationale seem to be threatened. Yet, when this observation is made, little attempt is made to understand the phenomena it entails systematically; it is either explained away by the politics of the day or it is attributed to a fortuitous contingency. In more specific issues and contexts, like the `return to the veil', where rationalizations for a seemingly irrational behavior falter, it is not unusual to impute an element of the quaint and the obdurate to the population and the culture in question. This could only feed into a residual socio-biology of cultural retardation that raises questions about the capacity of a people for refinement.

The logical question at this point would be to ask how we can go beyond the matrix of inquiry that we dispute?  Where do we turn for the alternative?  To validate a legitimate quest, we review the  grounds.