Zahira Abdin Chair 

What it Means and Why the World needs it

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The excerpt below has been adapted from A Message to the Friends of the Chair convening in Cairo on July 15 1998 to deliberate on 'Implementing Strategies.' Its theme dealt with the need to launch a new field in Women's Studies from an Islamic civilizational perspective. The original address, together with a summary of the proceedings,  will be published to the Arabic Al Riwaq. [See Photo.]

Speaking as a woman scholar 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 processes (=actions!) that assure not only the conception of community, but its persistence and continuity in human history and its being an enduring benchmark in assessing the quality of life and the caliber of human civilization. These community engendering 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 term 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 community in a particular historical context is hardly the function of the physical or biological component of the species, but 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 of a community. It means giving value to such ends as its betterment or refinement and 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 civilizational 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 impart to it its ethos and its ends. Launching activities in the ‘civil society’ that come to shape the public sphere and impart it with its ethos and its ends. The health of the community is gauged by the health of 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 disequilibrium between needs and resources becomes the trigger for inventiveness. Women’s Studies Programs have been noted for their resourcefulness as much as for their dynamism and diversity. They have provided the occasion and conditions for reconstructing the academy and directing it to new ends and new openings. This may be more true of the earlier phases in the seventies and eighties as opposed to the to the later nineties, a situation that is a reflection of the constraints that inhere in a paradigm, more than in the particular field in question. 

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 by transcending them. ‘Transcend’ is used to suggest an intellectual and moral posture of ‘standing up to’ and ‘reaching beyond’- as opposed to wasting energies in confrontational or defensive strategies. 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 about 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.

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; this is what Thomas Kuhn had 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 clearly grounded, 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, a world of normal practice that is open to question, and another world of possibilities that is yet to be born, that the awareness (and birth pangs) of the paradigm shift are experienced as a ‘crisis’ in the scientific community. The scholarly and educated constituencies to which we address our concerns and initiatives are likely to have affinities with such a community. 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. One way of visualizing the project 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. These courses can be part of an ‘Open University’ or a versatile academy, one best expressed in the idea of a university without walls, or a learning community without frontiers. The familiar figure of the visiting professor could easily become the pivot in the New Academy, a roving ambassador and herald, or a mission bearer.