3. What is the role of women in Islamic history?
Shortly after the Prophets death, the community expands and it ultimately becomes very vulnerable to local conditions and local attitudes. And one of the things that happens very rapidly and very noticeably in Islamic history is the marginalizing of women in Islamic society. When these early Muslims travel from Arabia to places like Spain or North Africa, to parts of the former Byzantine Empire or Persia, to places like India, what they encounter are misogynistic societies which have much more punishing attitudes about what the acceptable role of women is. Women, after the first few generations, disappear from not only religious literature but as actors on any other level. They are increasingly required to remain at home. They lose their knowledge of things that might make them authorities or sources of information.
Theres this kind of tragic marginalization of women in the first centuries after Islam. Definitely the sort of public role that Aisha led and had, her involvement in politics, her involvement in war, her involvement in religion as a religious authority, her having led prayer. These are things that subsequent generations of Muslim women increasingly could not do. But there were other arenas where women became active, and as a result, have left us sources of information about what their lives were like.
While women lost their role in the political arena and in religious authority, they did gain a presence in the world of literature. So you do have poetry, to some extent other kinds of literature, that are known to be authored by or presumed to be authored by women. They then become the window that we can use to get some sense of what womens lives were like. A very different window, because such kinds of writing tends to be much more personal and reflective. And as a result, the kind of information you get is going to be different than the kind of information you get from Hadith, which speaks more to the public arena.
The role of women in Islamic history is debated from two different perspectives. From the Western perspective, theres a reliance on an accumulation of impressions and perceptions about Islams relationship to women. There is a premise that goes all the way back to the time of the Crusades in the 11th century that Islam is different from Christianity precisely because of the way women are treated.
The debate from the Muslim perspective tends to be very defensive. Muslims will argue that the relative oppression of women in Islamic societies has less to do with the religion itself than it has to do with bad interpretations of its scriptures. And they will point out that the scriptures of Islam themselves are quite radical and revolutionary in lifting up the status of women. Thats how we end up with this debate that doesnt seem to resolve itself.
Neither side is taking into account the role of historical context. From the Western perspective, what the Koran says is not only understood the same way by all Muslims in all Muslim societies, but also applied the same way over time. Theres a tendency to essentialize Islam and turn it into a monolithic thing whereby one text determines the exact same behavior over time and across space.
From the Muslim perspective, going back to the Koran and some of the early religious literature is an attempt to defend those texts against the Western critique. In doing so, they also engage in this essentializing discourse. As a result, we have two freezeframe approaches.