Beyond the Veil

Male-female Dynamics in Muslim Society

Fatema Mernissi, Fatima Mernissi

• Publisher: Saqi Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780863564123
• eBook ISBN: 9780863564796
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology
• Index: Social Sciences

Does Islam as a religion oppress women? Is Islam against democracy? In this classic study, internationally renowned sociologist Fatema Mernissi argues that women's oppression is not due to Islam because this religion celebrates women's power. Women's oppression, she maintains, is due to political manipulation of religion by power-seeking, archaic Muslim male elites. Mernissi explains that early Muslim scholars portrayed women as aggressive hunters who forced men, reduced to weak hunted victims, to control women by imposing institutions such as veiling, which confined women to the private space. In her new introduction, she argues that women's aggressive invasion of the 500-plus Arab satellite channels in the twenty-first century, including as commanding show anchors, film and video stars, supports her theory that Islam as a religion celebrates female power.

PART ONE

The Traditional Muslim View of Women and Their Place in the Social Order

1

The Muslim Concept of Active Female Sexuality

The Function of Instincts

The Christian concept of the individual as tragically torn between two poles – good and evil, flesh and spirit, instinct and reason – is very different from the Muslim concept. Islam has a more sophisticated theory of the instincts, more akin to the Freudian concept of the libido. It views the raw instincts as energy. The energy of instincts is pure in the sense that it has no connotation of good or bad. The question of good and bad arises only when the social destiny of men is considered. The individual cannot survive except within a social order. Any social order has a set of laws. The set of laws decides which uses of the instincts are good or bad. It is the use made of the instincts, not the instincts themselves, that is beneficial or harmful to the social order. Therefore, in the Muslim order it is not necessary for the individual to eradicate his instincts or to control them for the sake of control itself, but he must use them according to the demands of religious law.

When Muhammad forbids or censures certain human activities, or urges their omission, he does not want them to be neglected altogether, nor does he want them to be completely eradicated, or the powers from which they result to remain altogether unused. He wants those powers to be employed as much as possible for the right aims. Every intention should thus eventually become the right one and the direction of all human activities one and the same.¹

Aggression and sexual desire, for example, if harnessed in the right direction, serve the purposes of the Muslim order; if suppressed or used wrongly, they can destroy that very order:

Muhammad did not censure wrathfulness with the intention of eradicating it as a human quality. If the power of wrathfulness were no longer to exist in man, he would lose the ability to help the truth to become victorious. There would no longer be holy war or glorification of the word of God. Muhammad censured the wrathfulness that is in the service of Satan and reprehensible purposes, but the wrathfulness that is one in God and in the service of God deserves praise.²
. . . Likewise when he censures the desires, he does not want them to be abolished altogether, for a complete abolition of concupiscence in a person would make him defective and inferior. He wants the desire to be used for permissible purposes to serve the public interests, so that man becomes an active servant of God who willingly obeys the divine commands.³

Imam Ghazali (1050-1111) in his book The Revivification of Religious Sciences⁴ gives a detailed description of how Islam integrated the sexual instinct in the social order and placed it at the service of God. He starts by stressing the antagonism between sexual desire and the social order: ‘If the desire of the flesh dominates the individual and is not controlled by the fear of God, it leads men to commit destructive acts.’⁵ But used according to God’s will, the desire of the flesh serves God’s and the individual’s interests in both worlds, enhances life on earth and in heaven. Part of God’s design on earth is to ensure the perpetuity of the human race, and sexual desires serve this purpose:

Sexual desire was created solely as a means to entice men to deliver the seed and to put the woman in a situation where she can cultivate it, bringing the two together softly in order to obtain progeny, as the hunter obtains his game, and this through copulation.⁶

He created two sexes, each equipped with a specific anatomic configuration which allows them to complement each other in the realization of God’s design.

God the Almighty created the spouses, he created the man with his penis, his testicles and his seed in his kidneys [kidneys were believed to be the semen-producing gland]. He created for it veins and channels in the testicles. He gave the woman a uterus, the receptacle and depository of the seed. He burdened men and women with the weight of sexual desire. All these facts and organs manifest in an eloquent language the will of their creator, and address to every individual endowed with intelligence an unequivocal message about the intention of His design. Moreover, Almighty God did clearly manifest His will through his messenger (benediction and salvation upon him) who made the divine intention known when he said ‘Marry and multiply’. How then can man not understand that God showed explicitly His intention and revealed the secret of His creation? Therefore, the man who refuses to marry fails to plant the seed, destroys it and reduces to waste the instrument created by God for this purpose.⁷

Serving God’s design on earth, sexual desire also serves his design in heaven.

Sexual desire as a manifestation of God’s wisdom has, independently of its manifest function, another function: when the individual yields to it and satisfies it, he experiences a delight which would be without match if it were lasting. It is a foretaste of the delights secured for men in Paradise, because to make a promise to men of delights they have not tasted before would be ineffective.... This earthly delight, imperfect because limited in time, is a powerful motivation to incite men to try and attain the perfect delight, the eternal delight and therefore urges men to adore God so as to reach heaven. Therefore the desire to reach the heavenly delight is so powerful that it helps men to persevere in pious activities in order to be admitted to heaven.⁸

Because of the dual nature of sexual desire (earthly and heavenly) and because of its tactical importance in God’s strategy, its regulation had to be divine as well. In accordance with God’s interests, the regulation of the sexual instinct was one of the key devices in Muhammad’s implementation on earth of a new social order in then-pagan Arabia.

Female Sexuality: Active or Passive?

According to George Murdock, societies fall into two groups with respect to the manner in which they regulate the sexual instinct. One group enforces respect of sexual rules by a ‘strong internalization of sexual prohibitions during the socialization process’, the other enforces that respect by ‘external precautionary safeguards such as avoidance rules’, because these societies fail to internalize sexual prohibitions in their members.⁹ According to Murdock, Western society belongs to the first group while societies where veiling exists belong to the second.

Our own society clearly belongs to the former category, so thoroughly do we instil our sex mores in the consciences of individuals that we feel quite safe in trusting our internalized sanctions. . . . We accord women a maximum of personal freedom, knowing that the internalized ethics of premarital chastity and post-marital fidelity will ordinarily suffice to prevent abuse of their liberty through fornication or adultery whenever a favourable opportunity presents itself. Societies of the other type . . . attempt to preserve premarital chastity by secluding their unmarried girls or providing them with duennas or other such external devices as veiling, seclusion in harems or constant surveillance.¹⁰

However, I think that the difference between these two kinds of societies resides not so much in their mechanisms of internalization as in their concept of female sexuality. In societies in which seclusion and surveillance of women prevail, the implicit concept of female sexuality is active; in societies in which there are no such methods of surveillance and coercion of women’s behaviour, the concept of female sexuality is passive.

In his attempt to grasp the logic of the seclusion and veiling of women and the basis of sexual segregation, the Muslim feminist Qasim Amin came to the conclusion that women are better able to control their sexual impulses than men and that consequently sexual segregation is a device to protect men, not women.¹¹

He started by asking who fears what in such societies. Observing that women do not appreciate seclusion very much and conform to it only because they are compelled to, he concluded that what is feared is fitna: disorder or chaos. (Fitna also means a beautiful woman – the connotation of a femme fatale who makes men lose their self-control. In the way Qasim Amin used it fitna could be translated as chaos provoked by sexual disorder and initiated by women.) He then asked who is protected by seclusion.

If what men fear is that women might succumb to their masculine attraction, why did they not institute veils for themselves? Did men think that their ability to fight temptation was weaker than women’s? Are men considered less able than women to control themselves and resist their sexual impulse? . . . Preventing women from showing themselves unveiled expresses men’s fear of losing control over their minds, falling prey to fitna whenever they are confronted with a non-veiled woman. The implications of such an institution lead us to think that women are believed to be better equipped in this respect than men.¹²

Amin stopped his inquiry here and, probably thinking that his findings were absurd, concluded jokingly that if men are the weaker sex, they are the ones who need protection and therefore the ones who should veil themselves.

Why does Islam fear fitna? Why does Islam fear the power of female sexual attraction over men? Does Islam assume that the male cannot cope sexually with an uncontrolled female? Does Islam assume that women’s sexual capacity is greater than men’s?

Muslim society is characterized by a contradiction between what can be called ‘an explicit theory’ and ‘an implicit theory’ of female sexuality, and therefore a double theory of sexual dynamics. The explicit theory is the prevailing contemporary belief that men are aggressive in their interaction with women, and women are -passive. The implicit theory, driven far further into the Muslim unconscious, is epitomized in Imam Ghazali’s classical work.¹³ He sees civilization as struggling to contain women’s destructive, all-absorbing power. Women must be controlled to prevent men from being distracted from their social and religious duties. Society can survive only by creating institutions that foster male dominance through sexual segregation and polygamy for believers.

The explicit theory, with its antagonistic, machismo vision of relations between the sexes is epitomized by Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad.¹⁴ In Women in the Koran Aqqad attempted to describe male-female dynamics as they appear through the Holy Book. Aqqad opened his book with t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• New Introduction: Why Does the Veil Scare Europe?
• Introduction: Roots of the Modern Situation
• Part One: The Traditional Muslim View of Women and Their Place in the Social Order
• Part Two: Anomic Effects of Modernization on Male–Female Dynamics
• Conclusion: Women’s Liberation in Muslim Countries
• Notes
• Index