PART FOUR
ASRA Q. NOMADI'S "STANDING ALONE IN MECCA"
The last book in this series of three books is “Standing Alone in Mecca, An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam” by Asra Q. Nomani (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005).
Perhaps in her introduction Nomani gets carried away, or so I suspect anyway, and on page x declares that as a result of her pilgrimage:
On my journey, a remarkable transformation happened in my understanding of my religion. I uncovered the hidden secrets of the strength of Muslim women in the earliest years of Islamic history. I discovered the legacy of Muslim women who marched into battle with spears, challenged the prophet, and sculpted the society that was the first Musim society. They prayed, worked, and pioneered a new community with men, empowered by their leader, the prophet Muhammed, to contribute fully and express themselves completely. The prophet was indeed the Muslim world’s first feminist.
You have to read her story and what she learned along the way to see why she actually believes this way, and how believing this empowered her to work for change within her religion. Learning about the prophet’s first wife and their relationship inspired her, as did learning about the prophet’s youngest wife who became Islam’s “first theologian” (many hadith are based on her accounts of what the prophet did and said and taught).
She believes in a Golden Age and that what killed it was the rise to power of clerics who saw no good in allowing individuals to exercise critical thought where religion was concerned (or much else, for that matter). So her two areas of seeking reform are (1) bringing back womens’ rights to where they should be (taking on the Wahhabi version of Islam that now seems to dominate the religion), and (2) calling for respect for critical thinking and questioning, or ijtahad.
Her story is very personal and charming. She doesn’t like Abraham (of old) for what he did to Hagar (Hajar in her book) and her son, setting them loose in the desert to fend for themselves. She says that makes him a deadbeat dad (p. 66). Of course I think she lets him off way too easy, attempted murder is more in line with the facts as we know them, in my view. But she is inspired by Hagar’s self-reliance and faith, as well we all should be.
On the same page where she is critical of Abraham, she approvingly quotes Rumi. No wonder I liked this book.
Pages 82 to 87 give a very sympathetic account of the prophet and his wives. His first wife, and his only wife until she died, was Khadijah, fifteen years his senior, a widow, independent business owner, who had hired Muhammed and liked what she saw and how he worked, and proposed to him. Muhammed accepted! (Nomani makes a point of this mariage, contrasting it with the school of thought current in many places that non-virgin women have no value and no self-respecting young man will marry a non-virgin).
When Muhammed began to have his visions and revelations it was she who encouraged him to step up to the challenge to which he was being called. He was less certain, and afraid, and tried to hide from his calling, but she took him to see a Christian wise man who told them his calling was to be a prophet and that he would see great and violent opposition. That was the start of Islam, Nomani states on page 84.
She next tells several interesting stories about the prophet defending women against over-zealous men believers who are trying to place restrictions on them, and on pages 98-99 she tells how the prophet allowed women into the mosque and prayed with them, something allowed when she visited the Medina and Meccan mosques but not allowed today in her home town mosque in the US (hence her protest actions at her local mosque as recounted toward the end of her book).
Page 100 is where Nomani discusses Muhammed’s youngest wife, Aisha. She does not know what to think of the youthfulness of this girl, says there is confusion about her age but she may have been nine when she became part of his household. But, Nomani says, “she was a firecracker” and devoted herself to her husband’s mission. Nomani says she suffered with jealousy as new wives came into the household, but did not lose sight of her own mission (pp. 100-101):
. . . Aisha secured her place in history as the prophet’s favorite wife when he died with his head on her lap. After the prophet’s death , she related extensive anecdotes about his life to scribes in the mosque. . . . She relayed direct quotes, chronicled detailed narratives, and delivered rich political, social, and religious commentary. Today nearly half of the Islamic jurisprudence of the Hanafi school of thought, which is followed by 70 percent of Muslims, is based on the theology and jurisprudence communicate by Aisha to her students.
She became the transmitter of the fourth-largest number of hadith, or sayings of the prophet. . . . She also earned respect as a profound critical thinker and great expert in law, history, mathematics, and astronomy. She corrected many hadith, and her corrections became the subject of an eighth-century book on jurisprudence that is considered mandatory reading for any student of hadith.
I’m impressed.
As I mentioned at the end of the second review in this thematic review, I hunted and pecked through the book by Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf called "What's Right with Islam? A New Vision for Muslims and the West," (HarperSanfrancisco, 2004). I was surprised to read that he feels the same way about Muhammed, but without using the "f" word. He comes real close to describing Muhammed as a liberator of women, however, one who made great improvements by precept and example when compared with the extremely male chauvinistic tribal customs he and his followers were raised with and that surrounded them as accepted cultural wisdom. Like Hirsi Ali and Nomani, Rauf decries the effort to bring back those old tribal customs as wrongheadedly trying to restore what Muhammed had seen as unjust and had tried to improve! Rauf, like Nomani, also points to his relationship with his first wife especially, and then his other wives, as exemplary and not at all in keeping with what fundamentalists have been advocating in terms of women' place in Islam. I particularly liked this Qu'ranic quote in Rauf's book, with Allah addressing the prophet and saying: "God has indeed heard the words of her who pleads with thee concerning her husband and complains to God." (58:1) Nomani is right on target, saying very similar things in her book that this Islamic leader is saying (see his pages 216-220 especially).
I was also impressed with Nomani’s lesson in compassion on pages 134-135, it was good to see that she felt a believing Muslim lived with compassion for others. For those interested in the division of Islam into Sunnis and Shias, check out page 183 where the schism after the prophet’s death is described as some following Aisha’s father’s leadership when he was elected caliph (Sunnis) and some (the Shi-ah) following the husband of Muhammed’s only surviving child, Fatima (her husband’s name was Ali).
Pages 183 and 184 tell touching stories about the father’s respect for his daughter, whom he praises as “one of the four greatest women in the world.” Aisha and Fatima had their differences, says Nomani, but aisha praised her as being just below the prophet in stature. She married a poor man for love and established the tradition of a “dowry Fatima,” which Nomani likes because it indicates independence. Fatima got a small farm on her own over the protests of some of the men belivers. She raised two sons and a daughter to be important Islamic leaders.
Pages 199-203 are important for several reasons, they tell of Nomani’s readings supporting her contention that in Islam’s beginning there was no oppression of women as there now is, including three quotes from the Qu’ran supporting the idea that men and women are equal in the sight of God in terms of responsibility for their own actions and earning God’s rewards and praying in mosques. She also catalogs some of the ways the conservative Wahhabi influence is being inserted into local mosques around the world (illustrations coming from her own local mosque), and why it is important to stop this and save Islam from becoming more repressive in accord with their vision of what Islam is.
In the pages and chapters that follow Nomani recounts her experiences with trying to foment change, even including pulling in local law enforcement where she felt law was being violated. This has not made her popular with some Muslims, to put it very mildly, but it illustrates what Ayaan Hirsi Ali was talking about: local law should be enforced if it is being violated, even if the violation has a religious basis or excuse. This reminds me of polygamy prosecutions in Utah, which are not popular and it is hard to get a jury of peers to convict if the case is based solely on cohabitation being illegal. But the most recent case involved forcing a 14-year old into an unwilling marriage leading to a statutory rape charge since it involved a minor, and that was acted on by a jury resulting in conviction, even though the defense was that this was not rape but an arranged marriage in full accord with a small religious sect’s beliefs, beliefs which ought to be respected because of the Constitution's separation of church and state.
Nomani gives the impression there is little appetite in the legal community for taking on internal religious matters in her location. Understandable, but not right. She did manage to get “A Restraining Order in the House of God” (pp. 221-224) but suffered many disappointments in attempting to get her mosque to allow women into the forward part of the audience seating area as she had observed to be allowable in both Mecca and Medina (pp.224-228).
She analyzes some of the messages being given by her co-religionists to put and keep women in their places in the next few sections, and discovers where this influence is coming from and what it is based on: a large collection of hadith by Aby Hurayrah, who was even questioned about their content while he was alive (of course) by others who knew the prophet much longer than Aby had known him (pp. 234-237). Nomani received information from scholars saying that these hadith are of questionable authority, yet have become the favorite of those seeking to keep women subjugated.
Nomani was told by one zealous man tht if she did not believe one of these sayings of the Prophet she was not a Muslim, and her response was that this was not acceptable, he was not allowing for ijtihad or critical thinking (p. 235).
Nomadi’s book is rich with personal insights from her life experience. She delves into such intricate subjects as the separation of men and women being a form of repression of sexuality that then actually heightens awareness of sexuality and leads to bizarre behaviors on the part of younger people and less than pleasant experience, especially for women but it cuts both ways, in the bedrooms of married persons. Her discussion of these topics are quite insightful.
She has been criticized by her fellow believers, has received a death threat, but has also received much support from fellow Muslims, so all in all she is encouraged and says that if the women of Islam will rise up to claim their true heritage, they will be able to do so. The modern state of Islam is one produced through men overlying old cultural norms, norms that Muhammed through his actions was moving away from, on the religion created through the prophet and then wrongly calling it the true religion.
My thanks to Asra Nomani for writing her courageous, insightful and entertaining book. It gave me hope, hope that was seriously in doubt when I was plodding through Trifkovic’s book, and although Hirsi Ali’s book is not hope-less, I felt rather hopeless while reading it.
I like Nomani’s upbeat approach. It is as upbeat as Iman Feisel Abdul Rauf's book and on the same bases. But I especially like a point she makes several times in the book that ijtihad or critical thinking is part and parcel of her religion and yet it seems to be not allowed by the conservative interpretations now in vogue, especially not for women. Ayaad Hirsi Ali also mentioned the reclaiming of ijtihad as being a key to making Islam more tolerant and free within itself (especially where women are concerned).
On the internet there is a page for the Ijtihad Project, something that has been presented around the world on CNN apparently, and it has this to say about ijtihad (a few selected statements from a website by Irshad Manji at http://www.irshadmanji.com/get-involved ):
. . .
Ijtihad (pronounced “ij-tee-had”) is Islam’s own tradition of independent thinking. In the early centuries of Islam, thanks to the spirit of ijtihad, 135 schools of thought thrived. Inspired by ijtihad, Muslims gave the world inventions from the astrolabe to the university. So much of what we consider "western" pop culture came from Muslims: the guitar, mocha coffee, even the ultra-Spanish expression "Ole!" (which has its root in the Arabic word for God, "Allah").
. . .
What happened to ijtihad?
Toward the end of the 11th century, the "gates of ijtihad" were closed for entirely political reasons. During this time, the Muslim empire from Iraq in the east to Spain in the west was going through a series of internal upheavals. Dissident denominations were popping up and declaring their own runaway governments, which posed a threat to the main Muslim leader -- the caliph. Based in Baghdad, the caliph cracked down and closed ranks. Remember those 135 schools of thought mentioned above? They were deliberately reduced to five pretty conservative schools of thought. This led to a rigid reading of the Quran as well as to a series of legal opinions -- fatwas -- that scholars could no longer overturn or even question, but could now only imitate. To this very day, imitation of medieval norms has trumped innovation in Islam. It’s time to revive ijtihad to update Islam for the 21st century. That’s why I and other reform-minded Muslims have created Project Ijtihad.
. . .
Let us be clear: ours is not a call for the legal practise of ijtihad to be popularized. It's a call for the spirit of ijtihad to be broadened. We believe that anything less is a form of elitism that cements a pattern of submissiveness among contemporary Muslims - a submissiveness not to God (which is wonderful) but to God's self-appointed ambassadors. This stops peace-loving Muslims from speaking up even as extremists take over.
. . .
There’s no doubt that some young Muslims detest me and my message of ijtihad. They tend to be the vocal and vitriolic ones. But everywhere I go, I’m quietly approached by Muslims, especially young women, who are desperate to know that it’s possible to dissent with mainstream orthodoxy while remaining faithful. The challenge now is to help transform that underground hunger for change into an above-the-ground phenomenon.
Muslims need to know that Islam gives us the permission to be thoughtful and faithful at the same time. Project Ijtihad will show reform-minded Muslims that we can have such faith without fear precisely because we are not alone!
Salaam and thank you,
Irshad Manji, founder, Project Ijtihad
What can I possibly say to that other than to wish them well and give them my moral support. Ijtihad is needed in other religious settings too, not just in Islam. Faith and reason ought not be divorced in any religion, but ought to be two sides of a coin, the coin being the believer.
Manji, like Hirsi Ali, gives us some insight into the unique status and opportunity of North American Muslims (in great contrast to many European Muslim refugees as described by Hirsi Ali) to influence their culture through ijtihad when she cites the Muslim scholar Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, Ph.D. as writing (as quoted on another web site at http://pressthat.wordpress.com/2007/10/30/critical-thinking-a-right-and-duty-of-all-muslims/ ):
“Like our counterparts in Canada, considerable sectors of the American Muslim community, in contrast to many of our co-religionists in the European Union, are highly educated and constitute, per capita, one of the most talented and prosperous Muslim communities in the world. Moreover, American Muslims, at least for the time being, enjoy a relatively favorable socio-political context with extensive freedoms and political enfranchisement. Few Muslims in the world today are in a more advantageous position to comprehend the essence of modernity and post-modernity and to formulate new directions for ijtihad in keeping with the best traditions of Islamic thought and the imperatives of an interconnected pluralistic world.”
What a great way to end this three-part reflection on the state of the world and Islam’s role in it.
Revisit the other two BOOK REVIEWS under this Theme if you like, or simply "Go Home"
Ayaan Hirshi Ali's "The Caged Virgin"
Serge Trifkovic's "The Sword of the Prophet"
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