Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in Religious Studies – Anthology
232Only wit hin t he polit ic ally powerful version of Islam (and in it s reflec t ion in West ern
Orient alist lit erat ure) – a version with no greater claim to being regarded as the
only possible int erpret at ion of Islam t han Papal Christianity has to being regarded
as t he only possible int erpret at ion of Christ ianit y – is women's posit ion immut ab ly
fixed as subordinate. Just as with other monotheistic (and indeed
non- monot heist ic ) religions, what t he import of Islam was and what it s signific anc e
for human societies might be are subjects that yielded varieties of interpretations in
past soc ieties and that again today are open to a range of interpretations, inc luding
feminist int erpret at ions.
Thus, the Islamist position with respect to the dist ant past is flawed in
assuming t hat t he meaning of gender informing t he first Islamic soc iet y is reduc ible
t o a single, simple, unc onflic t ed meaning t hat is asc ert ainable in some prec ise and
absolute sense, as well as in assuming that the legacy was open to only one
interpretation on matters of gender and that the correct interpretation was the one
c aptured and preserved in the c orpus of Muslim thought and writing and
constituting the heritage of establishment Islam, created decades and indeed
c enturies after Muhamma d, in the soc ieties of the Middle East. In making these
assumptions Islamists overlook the complexity of a gender system diversely and
c omprehensively art ic ulat ed in soc ial mores, verbal presc ript ions, and t he int erplay
between these, on the one hand, and the c ritic al role of interpretation, on the
other. Underlying the above assumptions – and in part ic ular t he belief t hat t he laws
developed in Abbasid and other societies of early Islam merely preserved and
precisely elaborated the pristine originary meaning of Islam – is the notion that
ideas, systems of meaning, and conceptions of gender traveled to and were
transmitted by other societies without being blurred or colored by the mores,
c ulture, and gender systems of the soc ieties through which they passed. In a
similarly lit eralist approac h, lslamist s assume t hat ident ifying t he rulings regarding
gender c urrent in the first Muslim soc iety – rulings presumed t o be asc ert ainable in
some c at egoric al fashion – and transposing and applying them to mo d e rn M u s lim
soc ieties would result in the rec onstitution of the meaning of gender inhering and
artic ulated in that first soc iety. Suc h an assumption fails to rec ognize that a
soc iety's rulings in matters of gender form part of a c omprehensive and integral
system, part of a soc iet y's variously art ic ulat ed (soc ially, legally, psyc hic ally)
disc ourse on gender, and thus that the transposition of a segment of the Arabian
Muslim soc iet y's disc ourse (even if t his were absolut ely asc ert ainable) t o t he
fundamentally different Muslim soc iet ies of t he modern world is likely t o result not
in the rec onstitution of the first Arabian Muslim understanding of gender but rather
in its travesty.
The meaning of gender as elaborated by establishment Islam remained the
controlling disc ourse in the Muslim Middle East until about the beginning of the
nineteenth c entury. Unambiguous ly and on all levels – c ult ural, legal, soc ial, and
inst it ut ional – t he soc ial syst em it devised and informed was one t hat c ont rolled
and subordinated women, marginalized t hem ec onomic ally, and, arguably,
c onc eptualized them as human beings inferior to men. So negatively were women
viewed within this system that even women of the spiritual stature of Rabi'a al-
'Adawiyya st ill c ould be deemed inferior t o the least spirit ually developed man in
the eyes of an establishment spokesman like the theologian al-Ghazali. Evident ly,
dissent from this dominant view existed and found formal expression in the thought
of suc h groups as the Sufis and the Qarmatians and in the thought of a rare
philosopher, like Ibn al-'Arabi. Evident ly, t oo, informal resist anc e t o t he dominant