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ARTICLES

• Springtide:Women's Baya'a - Turning Point?

• The Fall - Women Rebels( kharejyat) versus Omawee Kings  

• Social and Political Role of the Faqihaat in Muslim History  

• Sufi Women’s Biographies

• Women’s Biography in Folklore and Arab Myth

• Men in Women’s Classical Poetry-

• Portrait of Women in Arab Tales about Egypt  

•  Between Baraka & Siyasa- Zaynab Bint al-Zahra 

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Roundtable: 

Women's Sirah & Muslim History- Approaches & Issues

Commentary

Thematic Issue:  Women's Sirah and Muslim History***

Springtide:Women's Baya'a -

A Turning Point in Women’s Political History? 

 Manal Yahia

 In the early years of Islam, a formal pledge between the Prophet (saas) and his followers, sealed the loyalty of a fledgling community, the ummah, and set the terms of   political obligation that would henceforth define the moral ethos of a new order. This act, consecrated in the Qur'an and recorded in the prophetic sirah as the 'Baya'a,' came to be ritualized in the course of its re-enactment at nodal junctures in the founding of the community. Women were constituent members of this pact, in every phase, and left a permanent imprint on the Act in what came to be known as baya'at al nisaa.

The article focuses on women's baya'a as a core event at the dawn of Islam that would have far-reaching implications for redefining women’s role and status in general and in the political community in particular. 

A textual analysis of women's baya'a discloses it as a concrete concept with a determinate religious and political content, as much as a groundbreaking event in institutionalizing the premises of the political order and integrating it to a socio-moral order that implicated all its members in terms of agency, morality and responsibility. 

The analysis is set in a socio-historical context that briefly previews and interrogates the nature and role of Arab women in the pre-Islamic political and public arena, against the subsequent changes that followed in the train of the baya'a. Why is the baya'a, rather than women's individual acceptance of the faith, taken as a watershed in demarcating women's history?  In what way does this open and public compact constitute an unprecedented act? What is the significance of 'promulgating' the New Woman as a dignity, status, and vocation, to which 'everywoman' could qualify? 

By briefly spotlighting individual women's political fortunes, against a transformed spirituality and conscience, the article implicitly poses the question of the intimate connection between the inner and the outer, the immanent and the transcendent, the moral and the political, the body and the polity. It points to, without engaging, the methodological challenges of reading gender into the politics of the early Muslim community.

The Fall ... Or, the Wages of Dissent?

Women Rebels( kharejyat) versus Omawee Kings

 Dr. Amani Saleh

  Less than three decades after the Prophet’s death, the new set of concepts and ideals introduced by Islam were severely tested thanks to the counter-offensive of tribal and authoritarian forces. Forefront in the casualties was the emergent concept of  the ‘new woman,’ fully responsible, actively engaged and committed, firmly vested in a  wide range of rights and prerogatives within the family and the ummah at large, that gave way to its obverse in an older, deep-rooted counterpart of women as inferior subjected beings. The reversion was complete as the royal theory of  the Caliphate was institutionalized under the Omawees’ reign – emphasizing coercion and submission, interpreting rulers as expressions of God’s Will, confusing just protest with chaos-inducing insurrection, and glorifying in fate over freedom.

   Under this theory women effectively lost all the public roles they had gained under the Prophet and his successors (Al Rashedeen).. Women had no political role left but to contest the legitimacy of those in power in the name of a betrayed ideal of a pure and radical Islam with which they readily identified. It was in zealously defending an identity forged in this ideology that women came to play a prominent role in the anti-Omawee movements (Al khorouj) , but this role was hardly documented..

    This essay sets out to explore the sira of the rank and file of a long forgotten and outstanding generation of dissenting women through tapping  indirect sources of history, such as the speeches and poems of the kharejiat who were admitted to the audience of  Omawee courts.  Those texts were recorded and preserved as literary fragments, but they could just as well be probed for the wealth of historical information and insights they provide into a real and long-obscured vital political role played by women during a crucial phase in the history of the Ummah.

The Social and Political Role of the Faqihaat in Muslim History

Appendix: On Mufti Women

Zeinab Ali

      Drawing on the entries on learned Muslim women in the genre of biographical dictionaries and lexicons, this article explores the position of Faqihaat (the jurist women) in the schools of Islamic jurisprudence and the ways in which they were involved in social and political roles throughout Muslim history.

     The article chronologically arranges the Faqihaat into three generations, the pioneers (3-7 c), the middle generation (7-10 c), and the Ottoman generation (11-13 c). The history of faqihaat starts with the pioneers’ taking part in establishing the four Sunni schools of jurisprudence. The middle generation includes the most active faqihaat who were involved in creating the cultural and the sociopolitical history, through educating, preaching, Iftaa (giving Fetawa, semi-legal notes on an inquested matter), heading socio-religious institutions, in addition to advising the Muslim kings and princesses. However, the Ottoman generation shows the decline of all the former roles of Faqihaat.

      Embedded in the article, is a short appendix on the Muftiaat (women who give Fetawa). It reveals that the contemporary controversy in Egypt about admitting women as Muftiaat can plausibly be settled in the light of  precedents which prove that, in the past, Muslim women had never been denied  their religious right to practice their profession, wherever they were qualified for such, including their prerogative to the  pre-eminent practice of ifta’.

Sufi Women’s Biographies through Muslim History -

Azza Galal

       Sufism suffered from a conspicuous underdevelopment in Islamic approaches qualified to deal with it as a social religious phenomenon. Nor was this lack compensated for by a biased Orientalist scholarship in the field.

    In taking the initiative to re-open the history of Sufi women, we broach the relevant biographical dictionaries and source-material with three main questions in view:

    The first question is about the evolution of Sufi women through the different phases of history in search of the shape, pace and direction of this evolution.

    The second question queries the apparent absence of autonomous Sufi schools established by women comparable to those founded by Sufi men. It asks why, despite the significant prominence of women adepts of the sufi way, their influence stopped short of institutionalizing their orders.

     The last question was about the peculiarity of the private and social life of Sufi women that distinguishes women’s Sufism and that was generally ignored by  historians.

Women’s Biography in Folklore and Arab Myth

  Asmaa Abdel-Raziq Soliman

    Folklore and myth are significant resources reflecting both women’s real or conventional position and women’s assumed or desired image in a certain society at a specific period of history.

    It would seem that in the course of Arab history, myth has played a balancing role between the real position of women and their prevalent image. Whenever women hold strong positions in society, folklore tends to depreciate the value of women and vice versa, except in cases of conformity between the conscious and the unconscious mind of the nation, at which point folklore and myth become as a transparent mirror.

    In addition, Arab myth  interweaves two types, as it displays and concentrates on either the heroic political role of strong-willed women or on their hidden and nuanced social roles, with the same inherited image about women’s cunning and deceit attaching to both kinds. These images  appear to partake of and contribute to a conventional stereotyping that stigmatizes an ‘eternal feminine’ and that transcends Arab lore and myth, linking it to other cultures and traditions.

      This article draws attention to the need for a more thorough investigation of the field. Through women’s biography it may be possible to explore the mutual resonances between the image and the reality, and to trace the impact of time on the development of myth. 

Men in Women’s Classical Poetry- 

 Amina Mahmoud

      This article raises some interesting questions about the legacy of Arab female poets, and how to use their poetry as a guide to exploring both the psychological and social characteristics of those women.

    Through a condensed reading into a selection of texts, the article tries to examine the self-consciousness of the female writers, the kind of relations they had with men, and their attitudes towards the social traditions of their times.

   As a topical and recurrent theme in women’s poetry,  “men’s portraits” are taken  for a focus and a tool to unmask and recover some of the more intimate and hidden aspects of the lives of those women, lives and experiences that possibly extended beyond those of the self-professed female voices articulating the texts in view.

The Portrait of Women in Arab Tales about Egypt

  Hind Mustafa

 A metaphor, Al Rahem,  and its etymology are used to shed light on a significant aspect in the Islamic experience concerning women's role and status. Al Rahem, in Arabic means both womb and kin,  and from the same root the term Rahma, compassion, is derived.  It is a rich concept that textures Islamic discourse in general and is central to Islamic legislation, thanks to its connotations in the Qur’an and the Sunnah.

This metaphor has been particularly pursued in women’s tales, whether true or imaginary, included in Arab historians' writings on Egypt. Such writings always start by an emphasis on the Selat al Rahem (meaning literally “womb linking”, but actually intended to convey the virtues of maintaining good relations with relatives, which entails the necessity of committing oneself to giving them all kinds of support) that connects Egypt with the Arabs through a number of Egyptian women, most important among whom are Hagar and Maria.

Hagar is the Egyptian wife of Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham) and the mother of Prophet Ismail, the great grandfather of the Arabs, and Maria is the wife of Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him).

    The intimate affinity between women and Al Rahem is inevitable when dealing with women’s status in the Islamic view of human life in general. Women not only carry within them “the house of creation”,  Al Rahem,  but they  also represent numerous live links that connect people as individuals or groups or even nations.

A Place for a Woman: Zaynab Bint al-Zahra in Islamic Historical Texts

Between Baraka & Siyasa (Piety & Politics)

Tayba Sharif

The primary aim of this article is to discover what lies beneath the discreet layers  that veil the perception and position of Muslim women within the history of the Umma.

 In order to understand the representation of Muslim women in historical Islamic texts, this article will use the Sirah of Zaynab Bint al Zahra as an example of how early Islamic historians documented Siyar of Muslim women.  The choice of Zaynab as an example is due to the many features on and portraits of Zaynab that appear in numerous historical sources.

 This article will also look at the effect of biographers’ ideologies on women’s Siyar by examining the authenticity and objectivity of Zaynab Bint al-Zahra’s many Siyar in the light of her biographers particular ideology (i.e. Sunni, a Shi’ite or a Sufi ) and of course always bearing in mind that the majority of said biographers were and still are Muslim men.

 The article will also try to give an answer to the following questions:

 (a)    Does a biography die with its subject or does it live on for others to derive lessons from throughout history? What are the elements that keep a biography alive in the memory of the people who read it?

(b)   Why has Zaynab’s Sirah attracted the attention of all the different Islamic schools of thought?  And how was she portrayed in historical texts firstly as a woman and then as a religious and political symbol ?

(c)    What does Zaynab Bint al-Zahra symbolize in the identity and the collective memory of Muslim biographers?

 *** Thanks to the ASWIC team for their creative role in making Women & Civilization a worthy forum for Muslim Women Studies....