Topics
A Modern History of Muslim Gender
Faisal Devji—
In the middle of the nineteenth century, Islam began to lose its meaning as a set of beliefs or practices. Instead of describing something that Muslims did, Islam came to be seen as an actor in its own right. Initially understood as a civilization, and later, in the twentieth century, as an ideology, Islam became a protagonist in history. It was now capable of willing, wanting, and acting on a global stage. This happened at a time when much of the Muslim world had been absorbed into European empires, with Islam attaining its new role as a global subject by taking the place of traditional Muslim authorities, from kings to clerics and mystics to military men.
As an actor in global history, Islam could possess ideals and goals. But it could also be deprived of them and sink into defeat and irrelevance. Its global agency was therefore fragile and called for the loyalty and sacrifice of Muslims. And this meant that however religious Muslims may have been, Islam itself was deprived of any metaphysical quality, with even its decline seen in profane rather than apocalyptic terms. Islam was therefore capable of casting the agency of traditional Muslim authorities into question without providing much of an alternative to them. But this did allow for the emergence of ordinary Muslims as Islam’s protectors.
Its existence as a protagonist in history also meant that Islam suppressed or at least displaced the agency of such theological figures as God and Muhammad. Running counter to conventional wisdom about Islam bringing religion and politics together, in other words, these categories were minoritized within it. But today we face a situation in which Islam seems to have run its course as a protagonist of history, a role it had played for Muslim liberals or modernists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for Islamists during the Cold War’s ideological struggles, and for the militants of the twenty-first century. However devout their participants, popular Muslim movements today rarely invoke Islam.
While I explore many aspects of the history of Islam’s rise and fall as a global actor in my book, I want here to focus on the place of gender in this story. The rise of Islam led to downgrading the Prophet’s authority by making him vulnerable to insult as a human being with whom Muslims could identify and so had to protect. It resulted in identifying sovereignty as a theological principle to be expelled into God’s keeping, removed from the world of men. The emergence of Islam similarly led to men being replaced by women as ideal Muslim subjects precisely because they lacked even the potential of sovereign authority and represented the virtue of obedience.
Women in the past have existed not as subjects in their own right but rather as members of a group that included children, unbelievers, and the enslaved, all of whom were seen as possessing incomplete or lesser legal agency than Muslim men. This didn’t mean they lacked power. On the contrary, these figures were routinely brought together in literary works as agents of seduction who were capable of depriving Muslim men of their moral integrity and independence. With colonialism, however, these men were themselves deprived of sovereign authority and thrown back into a domestic realm dominated by their erstwhile inferiors.
These representatives of pagan seduction now had to be Islamized while also being separated from one another to be better controlled. Women became the objects of reformist movements led by men who sought to make them more Muslim by imparting to them a hitherto masculine education. Women, then, were made to become more like men, which made the marking of gender difference into a problem. The Muslim modernists who pioneered these reforms and the Islamists who followed them could not rely on biological difference, at least in part because they had rejected it when arguing against the racial discriminations of European empires.
How, then, was gender hierarchy to be marked, since the Muslim reformers tended also to play up the equality of the sexes, at least regarding moral virtue? One way to mark difference was by focussing not on biology but on dress and comportment. Just as men of different classes had to occupy parallel and notionally equal social roles so as not to come into competition and conflict, men and women were envisioned as possessing corresponding but separate duties. Because they were otherwise so similar, their relations had to be rigorously policed by differences of dress and behaviour. Many of these Islamic distinctions, however, were interestingly reserved for public life alone and did not define a woman’s domestic life.
While women in public represented Islam by their dress and comportment, in other words, their domestic lives could be quite different and “Westernized,” even in the view of the reformers. Their public modesty as representatives of Islam was often lauded as resistance to the sexual objectification and exploitation of women by men, whether in their interpersonal relations or by way of advertising and capitalist mass culture. However disingenuous, this argument served as a criticism of biopolitical governance rather than simply drawing on premodern understandings of sex. The deliberate undoing of biological difference also led to the acceptance of sex change and gender reassignment surgery–even, and especially, in Islamist countries like Iran.
Unlike homosexuality—considered, like adultery or fornication, a “normal” sin to be controlled by correct moral choices—gender dysmorphia came to be understood as a medical condition that required surgical correction. This is because gender was not vested in biology as sex but was a matter of self-identification. It had to be distinguished by dress and comportment even as it involved differential legal statuses. Yet by differentiating gender on the basis of self-identification and the sartorial and behavioural character this entailed, the Muslim woman was turned into an opaque subject as Islam’s ideal representative. For it was Islam that possessed true agency in her public life.
In our own day, Muslim women, veiled and unveiled, believers and agnostics, have suddenly emerged as subjects in a new way. With the decline of Islam as a protagonist in history, women have come to the fore in popular movements without having to represent it. The massive mobilization of Iran’s Woman, Life, Freedom movement in 2022, the largest since the revolution that founded the Islamic Republic, was led by women but invoked the language of the minority rather than either religion or nationality in its Kurdish slogan. In India, similarly, the even larger female-led protests of 2021 against a new citizenship law discriminating against Muslims invoked neither Islam nor even gender. Those protests represented a politics in which women had escaped both kinds of identity.
Faisal Devji is Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History and Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He is the author of The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence and Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea.
The post A Modern History of Muslim Gender appeared first on Yale University Press.
Faisal Devji,gender,history,Islamic history,Muslim women
Source link yalebooks.yale.edu
