Rites
And Rights
By Margot Badran
18 October, 2006
Al-Ahram
Women are flocking to mosques
around the world. Now, during Ramadan, they are packing mosques nightly
in many countries for tarawwih or the recitation of the Qur'an. It has
not always been easy, or indeed possible, for women to participate in
communal worship.
Exactly 95 years ago when
the Egyptian National Congress met in Heliopolis, in the midst of the
anti-colonial struggle, writer, educator, nationalist, and feminist
Malak Hifni Nasif (known under the penname Bahithat Al-Bad'iya) seized
the change to forward the demand that women regain the right to participate
in congregational prayer in the mosque that, as she pointed out, they
had enjoyed in Mecca and Medina in the early days of Islam. If male
nationalists, as fervently as women nationalists, wanted the colonialists
out of Egypt, Malak Hifni Nasif and others wanted women in the mosque.
In recent decades, women
have won increased entry to mosques. Yet, with new gains come new concerns.
These include women's use of mosque space. While often curtailed in
their access to the mosque or relegated to inferior space in mosques
around the world, Muslim women have traditionally looked -- both figuratively
and literally, every time they pray -- to the holy city of Mecca where
male and female believers pray in common space in the Grand Mosque and
circumambulate the Kaabah together. This is in stark contrast to the
extreme gender segregation and female face shrouding that prevails in
the rest of the country, advertising the extremes and durability of
the very patriarchal practice the Qur'an had come to eliminate. The
ritual at the holy shrines of Mecca and Medina has traditionally reflected
the Qur'anic ethos and the practice of the early egalitarian Muslim
community. This, however, is now threatened.
It was with outrage last
August that women received the news from the Presidency of the Two Holy
Mosques Affairs that they were to be removed from the circumambulation
area around the Kaabah called the mataf and to be shunted to the northern
wall of the Grand Mosque. Women in Saudi Arabia swiftly objected. Soon
women around the world joined in. Hatoon Al-Fassi, a Riyadh-based writer
and historian, objected in the press that the proposed plan "not
only goes against the message of Islam but also wounds the feelings
of Muslim women." She continued: "The main problem of the
proposal is that it denies Muslim women the right to pray at the holiest
place on earth, near the Holy Kaabah, where prayers are answered and
where the faithful can achieve better devotion and closeness to God."
Islam was revealed for humankind
( insan ), women and men alike. She reminded people: "The Prophet
(peace be upon him) has instructed that women must not be banned from
mosques," stressing that "throughout history, from the earliest
days of Islam, women have never been banned from praying inside the
mataf or any other parts of the two holy mosques [at Mecca and Medina]."
Women are referencing the Qur'an to back their rights. Many call this
discourse Islamic feminism; others prefer simply to call this ijtihad
or rational investigation of religious sources. Suhaila Hammad of the
National Society for Human Rights quoted the Qur'an: "As to those
who have rejected [God] and would keep people from the Way of God and
from the Sacred Mosque [ al-masjid al-haram ] which we have opened to
all people [ al-nass ] -- equally the dweller there and the visitor
from [another] country -- and any whose purpose therein is profanity
or wrongdoing -- We will cause them to taste of the most grievous penalty"
(22: 25).
There have been increasing
restrictions lately placed upon women with respect to worship and devotions,
Al-Fassi notes. The proposed restriction at the holy shrine in Mecca
was just the latest example. It was certainly the most distressing example.
Alerted by Saudi women, news of the proposed restrictions sent out shock-waves
among Muslim women world-wide. Aisha Schwartz, founder-director of the
Muslimah Women's Alliance in Washington, immediately set up the Grand
Mosque Equal Access for Women Project that circulated a petition protesting
the restrictions. Very quickly a thousand signatures were collected.
Women inside Saudi Arabia and around the world, meanwhile, carried on
protesting in the media. It was the most striking example to date of
concerted Islamic feminist global protest and one that authorities could
not ignore.
Suddenly in mid-September,
less than a month after the plan was first announced, and two weeks
before the start of Ramadan, the Presidency of the Two Holy Mosques
issued a second statement saying the proposal had been dropped. In making
this announcement, Deputy-Director Nasir Al-Khuzayyam was careful to
re-affirm that "Women and men stand on an equal footing in Islam."
Women have been flooding mosques in recent years in many of the old
Muslim communities in Africa and Asia, and in the newer communities
in the West. If the mosque serves more purely as a place of worship
in Muslim-majority societies in Africa and Asia, in the West the mosque
constitutes community space and an important gathering place for families.
Many mosques in the United States in recent years have had to increase
their prayer space, extend their education centres and childcare facilities,
and expand parking facilities to accommodate the growing needs.
There are various spatial
arrangements in American mosques. In many mosques women pray in a section
behind men. There are also a good number of mosques where the physical
barriers dividing male and female congregants include high walls and
other partitions that prevent women worshippers from being able to see
and hear the imam leading the prayer. In one mosque in southern Illinois
a portable dividing wall mysteriously disappeared overnight (it was
said young women had a hand in this) and in a mosque I visited in Chicago
word was out that a wall that had been torn down was about to be re-erected
following the installation of a conservative mosque board. As one wag
put it: "Muslim women are up against the wall." In some mosques
"wall wars" are unnecessary, however, as women are relegated
to separate places altogether such as balconies or side rooms.
In many mosques women are
required to enter through a side door. Some Muslim women in America
have been rebelling against being shunted aside in a country where it
has not been forgotten that some people, because of race, were forced
to sit in the back of the bus. Activist Asrar Nomani tells in her book
Standing Alone at Makka how one day she and a group of women walked
through the front door of the mosque in Morgantown, West Virginia.
The contemporary mosque movement
can be traced back over a decade to early post-apartheid South Africa
when the Claremont Main Road Mosque in Cape Town invited African-American
theologian Amina Wadud, author of Qur'an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred
Text from a Woman's Perspective, to give a pre-sermon talk at the Friday
congregational prayer -- the first such invitation issued to a woman.
On that occasion, also for the first time, women descended from the
balcony to occupy the main prayer hall with men, and have remained there
every since praying parallel to men. Farid Esack his book Qur'an, Liberation,
and Pluralism and Fahmi Gamieldien in The History of the Claremont Main
Road Mosque: Its People and their Contribution to Islam in South Africa
(a 150-year-commemoration volume) have written about this spiritually
moving experience. The landmark event, however, also led to angry protest
and threats by militant diehards against the imam and others as Gamieldien
also details in his book. It is no surprise that those who had struggled
against racial apartheid had no patience for gender apartheid.
The spread of the mosque movement coincides with intensified democracy
and human rights campaigns. Muslim activists insist that equal rights
do not stop at the mosque door. It is as absurd as it is illogical for
Muslims to enjoy equality, or to fight for equality, in the secular
space of the nation (as Egyptian feminist nationalists understood early
last century) and to accept inequality in religious space -- and all
the more so as the Qur'an celebrates human equality. Many around the
world who clamour most loudly for social justice and decent treatment
are often the very same people who are willing cavalierly to deprive
women of their rights. Along with outrage against the assault on their
rights, women are getting fed up with the travesty this makes of Islam
and the stereotypes such behaviour fosters in a world all too ready
to denigrate Islam and Muslims.
Ritual is as important to
religion as to the nation. Ritual is a symbolic and practical adhesive
of the community. Prayer is enjoined upon believers and especially meritorious
is the weekly congregational prayer. So significant is this collective
prayer on Friday that the day itself is called in Arabic "the day
of gathering" or yawm al-jum'a. Is only half the community to be
gathered? It has not escaped notice that women, who have been exhorted
to be upright believers, and whose behaviour has been monitored and
evaluated in the name of religion, have been denied equal rights in
communal worship, the most praiseworthy form of prayer. This transmits
the message to women: you may enter the secular space of the nation
as equals but not the religious space of the umma (the Muslim community)
and while you must be pious you needn't fret about the blessings of
communal prayer. It is supremely ironic that the first bastion of gender
equality for Muslims was religious space and now religious space is
the last bastion of patriarchy.
It has not been easy to know about women's activism inside Saudi Arabia.
The exception was the drivers' protest by a group of women at the time
of the first Gulf War that made headlines -- at a time when large numbers
of foreign journalists were hovering about -- and which came to naught.
Saudi women's protest against women's expulsion from the mataf and the
Grand Mosque was a campaign of words or "information activism"
they took to the Saudi media -- and it was a resounding success story.
Hatoon Al-Fassi told me:
"Issues like these are part of my beliefs and my motivation not
to remain silent." Taking her cue from the Qur'an, she insists:
"I believe we as women can do a lot for women from within Islam."
There is no more concise and eloquent definition of Islamic feminism
than this.
Al-Fassi and other women,
while happy with the victory, are not sitting still. They are taking
nothing for granted. She has recently called upon Saudi women writers
to join in creating a cyber network to keep on top of issues. More than
50 writers have signed on. Nothing will hold back women determined to
practice their religiously-granted rights, especially retaining or re-claiming
their rightful place in the mosque, and they know The Book is with them.
During Ramadan it is not enough that women or men gathering for the
nightly tarawwih simply to recite the Qur'an. Muslims must heed its
message of human equality, insist growing numbers of Muslim women from
Mecca to Main Street.
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