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In the second issue of our flagpost, al mar'a wa al hadara 'Women & Civilization' we include abstracts in English of the main Arabic articles, together with the following "Foreword", introducing our periodic publication to the English reader:
Women
and Civilization
Forum for a New Scholarship?
Our forum is an open space of directed and purposeful inquiry that emerges at the crossroads of a critical historical moment in our life as nations, cultures, and communities worldwide. We reflect, interact, and communicate as Muslim women who have come of age at this late hour of day to a realization and a resolve. Beyond the realization that our communities, indeed our very identities are under siege, we are aware that we live a modern age with all its afflictions and paradoxes. We are also aware of a deep affinity that binds us to a legacy that transcends the bounds of time. Our resolve is to transform these challenges into an opportunity to rediscover and appropriate the better part of a valued heritage, that may then be used to affirm an identity and renew a community, and with it to reform an age and a world. This may sound like an overly ambitious resolve, but not if we tap into the sources that justify both the ambition and the resolve and make for the plausibility of a hope and its imminent realizability.
'Women and Civilization' comes to epitomize that hope and actuate its plausibility. Through a happy confluence it brings together the fundaments of both an epoch and a culture. If the turn of the millennium ushered in an unprecedented gender consciousness attended by a resurging awareness of a civilizational ethos, for Islam culture is intrinsically an inspired edification. Wherever it flowers, it brings with it the promise of a civilization, one that has reserved an unrivaled share of attention for Women. Constructing our forum at the interstices of Women and Civilization provides us a privileged vantage point on both an era and a culture: The challenge is to go beyond a fortuitous propinquity and establish the integral connectivity between the two as conceptual categories.
With the above in view, the question 'Why Women and Civilization' may thus be redundant. We believe in contextualizing our discourse; situating it both historically and conceptually: Our choice of civilization for a framework embedding women in culture and society through time is our response. We use civilization – hadara – with a cultural heritage and understanding in view that lends it specificity and a 'rigor' without foreclosing its universal implications, or denuding it of its soft and porous open-ended nuances. Take the following notions for illustration, notions that were touched on in our pilot issue of Women and Civilization that was published in the Spring 2000.
Umm and Ummah are two facets of a common mandate. Both concepts, mothering and community, were suffused and transfused with the coming of Islam. A natural – socio-biological role and a historically evolved entity came to be associated with a transcendent dimension (and mission), and were accordingly sublimated into valued culture practices and status markers through which the human condition could be elevated and ennobled. Woman was central to both concepts, without her, the one was inconceivable; in the absence of a distinctive presence and contribution on her part, the other was irrevocably undermined. Not only was she central to each role, rather, she was the vital link between both, stretching vertically, marking generations of descent (tabaqat), and spatially, or horizontally, imprinting an ecology of ascent. The moral order as defined by an ethos and its quality - intent, and extent - is contingent on this link. As women scholars embarked on an affirmative project of rediscovering root identities and reclaiming lost spaces / roles, we confront the task of retracing a collective, gendered sirah, and of piecing the fragments, interweaving them into coherent patterns that may serve to texture our lives in the modern world and give meaning and direction to our strivings. We might thereby also contribute to safeguarding our threatened communities against the wiles and guiles of the surreptitious anti-humanist globalizing currents that fill the air.
Our humanism is grounded in a theism that sets the tone and tenor for our research agenda and informs its theoretical and conceptual perspectives. It parts ways with the illusionary autonomy of a self-deluded age. Unlike the modernist homocentric view, we do not take the belief in God as cosmetic, or worse, as a matter of private conscience that is irrelevant to how we practice our science or constitute our society. We believe that ‘the difference of man and the difference it makes’ (Mortimer Adler) is contingent on this residual understanding as to what it is that constitutes our humanity and on how we relate to our ultimate end (s). A social science and a cultural history that take off from an understanding of the human being created in the divine breath, and of life as a mandated vocation inscribed in the norms of devotion and edification, ‘ibadah and ‘imarah, cannot be of the same elk as a science and profession that draw on the premise of the 'Cosmic Orphan' embarked on a venture spanning the void between Mount Olympus and a journey through Kathmandhoo.
The challenge facing the human venture in each cosmic register, and the standards called forth to calibrate and judge the outcome in each, must decidedly diverge, and radically so. It establishes the difference between one brand of feminist scholarship and another. A program of Muslim Women’s Studies and Research taking its bearings from a theistic humanism, and a particular theism at that (one informed by the tawhidi episteme), would be conducted in a register that secured it against the proven hazards of the craft. It is against such a register that our present work proceeds. As we distinguish registers, we are mindful of some other differences as well, that do not detract from commonalities and affinities.
As an open space of directed and
purposeful research and inquiry - our forum brings together three overlapping
generations. It beacons a coming of
age of conscience and consciousness in what may be ascribed to a dawning
civilizational sensibility that defines us as an ummah on the rise. The span
shortens between the generations, as the rate of maturity crystallizes. This
maturation spells a deeper sense of unity, not uniformity. We speak in multiple
or diverse voices, tuned to common themes and common concerns, as we draw on a
unity of intent and shared ends. It
is this sense of community and renewed affinities that is interwoven by the
inter-generational thread that brings us together as a purposeful forum, a forum
with a mission. This mission
informs our intellectual and scholarly pursuits as our chosen medium and means
of contributing to enlightenment and reform.
We hope to reflect this in the original work we do, as we bring our
background training in the social sciences and the humanities to the field of
Muslim Women Studies. We do so in the conviction that a sustained effort is the
only way to bridging the gap between our modest resources and our elevated
ambitions. Our research
agenda bears out our expectations[MAF1].
'Sirah' is a rich and multivalent concept, especially when it is used in conjunction with other equally rich concepts. This is part of what the workshop and roundtable in this issue of Women and Civilization demonstrates. As a concept, Sirah mediates between the biographical entry, the narrative, the history and the memory. It is our gateway to rediscovery and appropriation of our heritage and history as Muslim women as we head into the future. We seek to recover and develop this concept as an analytical tool and approach that may be used as part of an integrated matrix of inquiry and reconstruction in implementing one of our major projects: reclaiming our history as Muslim women. We believe that this objective is a vital constituent in establishing Muslim Women’s Studies as a viable academic field, as well as its being the premise for an effective reform in contemporary Muslim society.
The present issue of Women and Civilization launches the
quest for the conceptual and methodological field, a quest originating in an
interest in contemporary Muslim women's biographies.
At an ASWIC sponsored seminar held in Cairo in the Spring of 2000, the
theme 'Cultural Genealogies and Contemporary Arabic Discourse' was examined
against the sirah and output of the late Arabist and Islamist scholar Aicha bint
al Shati'. At a time when
mainstream interest in cultural and intellectual circles in Egypt was geared to
discovering the roots of the 'modern age' in an Arab woman's movement and
feminist consciousness, Bint al Shati's less contentious life and career
straddling the bifurcated trajectory between tradition and modernity qualified
her for less radical claims. At
about the same time, a number of pilot projects were under preliminary
investigation to identify projected research tracks for the newly established
circle of 'friends of Muslim Women Studies,' projects that included women and
waqf, and a bibliography on women in the turath / legacy.
This work increasingly pointed us to the significance and potential of
tapping more systematically into the heritage, and tackling the problematics of
the modern Arab Muslim world in a mixed and complex legacy that lay in the past.
Increasingly too, it pointed us to the methodological challenges that lay
before us in such a task. It was
this that equally highlighted the value of both a strategy and its stratagems:
namely, referring us to the priority of grounding our present concerns with the
field into a solid interrogation of the past, and turning to the siyar al
nisa', or women's collective history, for an access to this task. Our
priorities shifted from those of contemporary biographies and their genealogies,
to their roots and sources, in a history and a legacy.
The collection of papers that follow in our thematic issue, 'Women, Sirah,
and Muslim History' would seem to more than justify this shift. Not only has it
made us aware of the wealth of untapped sources in our legacy and their
potential uses for promoting a vital field of scholarship, but it has stimulated
us to critically engage these sources in hitherto unthought ways, and has
pointed us to the gaps and silences that punctuate more than women's stories in
Muslim history. It has above all challenged us to reconsider the paradigm of
reading this history, as we ask new questions that seek to integrate women's
roles and voices and bring with them fresh perspectives. The objective is to
work our way to a center (beyond the closure in the current literature) from
which to understand and sift through the wheat from the chaff, as we reinterpret
and reconstruct. We do not come to this task with ready answers, but with an
awareness of grounds and ends, from which to steer our course. As a glance
through the discussions that took place among the researchers illustrates (See
the Workshop), this interest in addressing the sources is no sterile academic
discussion. It goes to the heart of a learning process of understanding and
self-discovery sustained in the exchanges and commentaries that recur.
As founder and co-pilot of the Forum and its projects, I humbly confess
to a privileged sense of responsibility at playing midwife to the cultural
currents sweeping our umma at what may, in retrospect, prove a tidal wave in its
history. Notwithstanding the many
uncertainties, one's innate disposition is inclined, with the grace of faith, to
see the silver lining in every cloud. On this note, I would like to commend the
effort of each and every member aboard the c/raft, who continues to contribute
selflessly to the Forum, no doubt as she daily comes face to face with a
deepening sense of her own identity and vocation.
The joy of inquiry as adepts or newcomers in a widening circle of
rejuvenationists, claiming the manzhoor al
tajaddud al hadari
for their own, is enhanced only by the joy of self-discovery, even as
the anguished moments of a subverted history are assuaged by the pride taken in
its unique elevations. The examples and accomplishments of expansive and
pervasive role models provide the sirah that serves to integrate and
renew the bonds of community across the generations, and to compass and rudder
identities at bay. There is no illusion though about resting on lost laurels.
The journey uphill cannot be ignored or relegated to another day, which is why Women
and Civilization is here to stay.
Nor can I bring this note to a close without warmly welcoming our guest
editor. Tayba Sharif brought to this issue a talented enthusiasm, dedication,
noblesse d'esprit, and knowledgeable participation that further contribute to
the realization of a project in its early cycles of gestation. I am sure that
she, too, has equally found in it a sweet homecoming that pays its own reward.
The present issue of Women and Civilization is a token to this combined individual and collective effort.
M.A.F