Gender in Judaism and Islam

Common Lives, Uncommon Heritage

Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Beth S. Wenger

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781479880331
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Jewish andIslamic histories have long been interrelated. Both traditions emerged fromancient cultures born in the Middle East and both are rooted in texts andtraditions that have often excluded women. At the same time, both groups haverecently seen a resurgence in religious orthodoxy among women, as well asgrowing feminist movements that challenge traditional religious structures. In theUnited States, Jews and Muslims operate as minority cultures, carving out aplace for religious and ethnic distinctiveness. The time is ripe for a volumethat explores the relationship between these two religions through the prism ofgender. Gender in Judaism and Islam brings togetherscholars working in the fields of Judaism and Islam to address a diverse rangeof topics, including gendered readings of texts, legal issues in marriage anddivorce, ritual practices, and women's literary expressionsand historical experiences, along with feminist influences within the Muslimand Jewish communities and issues affecting Jewish and Muslim women incontemporary society. Carefully crafted, including section introductions by theeditors to highlight big picture insights offered by the contributors, thevolume focuses attention on the theoretical innovations that gender scholarshiphas brought to the study of Muslim and Jewish experiences.At a timewhen Judaism and Islam are often discussed as though they were inherently atodds, this book offers a much-needed reconsideration of the connections andcommonalties between these two traditions. It offers new insights into each ofthese cultures and invites comparative perspectives that deepen ourunderstanding of both Islam and Judaism.

PART I

Comparative Perspectives

1

Jewish and Muslim Feminist Theologies in Dialogue

Discourses of Difference

SUSANNAH HESCHEL

Islamic and Judaic Feminist Theologies: The Context

Although Christians have developed the most important and influential feminist theologies, it is Jewish and Muslim feminists who have the most in common with each other as they struggle to achieve equality within their respective religions, both of which are rooted in legal systems.¹ Jews and Muslims work within religious systems of civil and ritual legal jurisdiction that center around revealed scripture and oral traditions that for centuries have been the nearly exclusive domain of male scholars and judges. Jews and Muslims also share some customs; for instance, both indicate religious membership through hair and head coverings.² While head coverings for women are not an explicit requirement of Islamic or Jewish scriptures, but based instead on custom and tradition, they have become increasingly important in recent decades, usually in conjunction with secularization efforts and political movements.³ Yet here the two religions diverge in gendered fashion: Jewish identity is signified through Jewish men and their head coverings, whereas Islamic identity is signified through Muslim women and their head coverings. Political liberation movements—whether overturning colonial rule or establishing an independent Jewish State of Israel—have led both Jewish and Muslim women to intensify their “modest” attire of long sleeves and skirts, hats, scarves, wigs, or veils, even as their presence in the public sphere has finally been legitimated.

What, then, constitutes women’s “liberation” for feminists in Islam and Judaism? Is it the freedom to intensify their religious devotion, or the freedom to achieve equality with men as figures of religious authority, or the freedom from religion altogether? Muslim and Jewish feminists have directed their attention to different issues. Muslim feminists have focused on family law—marriage, divorce, inheritance, and protection from physical abuse—whereas Jewish feminists have centered primarily on public worship—study and interpretation of Jewish legal texts and scripture, and laws regulating Jewish divorce. Not all these concerns are new, or developed in isolation. Having lived under Muslim rule for many centuries, Jewish religious customs and even Jewish religious laws were at times influenced by Islamic practices. Recent scholarship by Gideon Libson has revealed that as early as the Geonic period, sixth to eleventh centuries, Jewish legal authorities living in Muslim lands were pressured to liberalize aspects of Jewish law affecting women.⁴ For instance, Jewish divorce laws were liberalized because Islamic divorce laws were considerably more sympathetic to women, which attracted Jewish women converts seeking expeditious divorces.

While Islam may have been more liberal in certain respects, this is not always recognized in contemporary comparisons of the two religions. Modern-day Americans at times regard Islamic law as dangerous (and outdated?), and some states have pending legislation preventing any influence of sharia, Islamic law. In 2011, nearly half the state legislatures in the United States were considering, or had passed, legislation that prohibited judges from considering sharia, Islamic law, when issuing judgments. Unfortunately, Judaism and Islam’s mutual appreciation for each other has deteriorated in recent decades. Contemporary feminism has not seen a strong coalition of Jewish and Muslim feminists, and more often there is antagonism as some Jewish groups have funded Islamophobic organizations and at times portrayed Islam as a religion intrinsically hostile to Jews and Judaism and oppressive to Muslim women.⁵ Calling attention to the parallel feminist efforts, and revitalizing collaboration, should become our joint goal. Most importantly, feminist critique of any religion should not be manipulated into a denunciation of that religion, given the reality of misogyny and patriarchal domination in all religions.

Anti-Jewish and Anti-Muslim Attitudes

Both religions have long faced political critiques regarding their legal systems. During the nineteenth century, as Europeans debated the political emancipation of the Jews, Judaism itself came under scrutiny for its suitability to the modern age. They questioned whether Jewish law permitted Jews to join the military and whether Judaism was an “Oriental” religion, given the role it prescribed for women. When Muslims migrated to European countries after World War II, there were similar debates regarding Islam’s alleged “Orientalism,” as well as its compatibility with European society, and whether European culture was intrinsically “Christian” or multicultural. Within the United States, Islam came under sharp scrutiny after September 11, 2001; questions were raised about whether Islamic jihad (struggle on behalf of religion) ordered Muslims to wage war against non-Muslims, whether Muslim women were oppressed by their religion, and whether Islam was suited to democratic culture. Such questions epitomized the veil as a symbol of American suspicion regarding Islam: Were Muslims seeking to dominate the West, just as they dominated their women? Were Muslims placing the West under surveillance, gazing at non-Muslims from an unseen, hidden place, just as veiled Muslim women could see but remain unseen? For instance, in their study of the semiotics of the veil, Christina von Braun and Bettina Mathes argue that the anxiety of the West over Muslim women’s veiling is actually about unveiling and revealing, not only the unveiling of women’s bodies, but the revelation of God’s commands.⁶ While the veil was originally common in Christianity and was subsequently appropriated by Muslims, the West came to equate the liberation of women with unveiling and unmasking. Von Braun and Mathes link those cultural attitudes to theological convictions: in Christianity, God is not concealed but is revealed in the body of a man, whereas Islam forbids any bodily image of God or of the Prophet Muhammad.

Was Muslim treatment of women a sign of the retrograde nature of Islam, a backward religion that has failed to modernize? What Went Wrong? asked the title of a 2002 book by Bernard Lewis, a prominent scholar of the Islamicate world. Other scholars and political policy organizations have sought to explain Islam’s alleged failure to enter the modern world.⁷ In a 2003 report for the Rand Corporation, “Civil, Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies,” political scientist Cheryl Benard urged the promotion among Muslims of Western-style historical-critical approaches to scripture in order to encourage a less “fundamentalist” reading of the Qur’an. A critical response by anthropologist Saba Mahmood argued that Muslims should not be expected to follow Western models of religious modernization, and that the failure of Muslims to assimilate into Western countries lies with the West’s skewed understanding of secularism, one that is so deeply rooted in Christian assumptions that it is inapplicable to the Muslim world.⁸

While Mahmood has been notably sympathetic to religious Muslim women, identifying agency in their piety, books critical of Islam’s sexism written by Muslim women, based on their own experiences, have achieved considerable popularity in the West. Irshad Manji and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are two of the best-known authors of diatribes against Islam’s treatment of women.⁹ Neither distinguishes between Islam as a religion and the customs promoted in the countries in which they were raised—Manji in Kenya, Ali in Somalia. Nor do their books explore comparative dimensions with the sexism of other religions, nor historical explanations for the sexism that is certainly present in all religions. As a result, it is not always clear to all readers if the books are intended as a critique of Islam’s sexism or of Islam.

Islamic feminism arrived in the United States in recent decades during the flourishing of feminist efforts to reconsider the role of gender in Judaism and Christianity, but came to widespread public attention only after the September 11 attacks and the rising concern over terrorist attacks committed in the name of Islam. As a result, Muslim feminists were frequently separated from the already well-established Christian and Jewish feminist debates and instead viewed in isolation, often to corroborate entrenched negative stereotypes of Islam. Thus, Muslim feminists experienced the conundrum of presenting a critique of Islam’s sexism and a simultaneous defense of its religious legitimacy in a Western, democratic context.

This conundrum is similar to the one faced by earlier generations of Jewish feminists who sought change in women’s status within Judaism during an era (nineteenth-century Europe) in which the political rights and social equality of Jews were not yet fully established. Criticizing Judaism in that era—or Islam in this era—they fear would reinforce already negative images of their respective religions in popular culture, giving fodder to anti-Semites or Islamophobes. As early as the Middle Ages, some Christians had criticized Judaism for not including women in central religious rituals (prayer quorums or rites of covenant), and some Christian theologians pointed to women’s inferior status within Judaism as an area of difference in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹⁰ Using its treatment of women as evidence, Judaism was denigrated as “oriental” and “primitive,” placing Jewish feminists in a difficult position, similar to the one Muslim feminists in the United States and Europe face today. Both felt trapped in a political maze in which feminist criticism of Islam and Judaism gave fodder to Islamophobes and anti-Semites.

Rarely these days do we hear discussions of Islam and its existence in Western society without hearing negative comments about its treatment of women. Feminist theology may be dormant in modern Christian and Jewish circles, but it is a heated and passionate topic in relation to Islam. Yet the denigrations of Judaism and Islam in the Christian culture of the West are different: Judaism has long been coded as a legalistic and oppressive religion, characterized by narrow-mindedness, hypocrisy, and superciliousness, whereas Islam, which has long been viewed as a throwback to Judaism’s legalism,¹¹ is often presented today as a religion seeking the violent overthrow of Christianity, the West, and democratic freedoms.

This political maze is fueled by a historical cultural anxiety in Christian Europe that viewed Judaism and Islam as inferior but nonetheless powerful forces that threatened to disfigure and degenerate European power. Calls to liberate Europe from Jewish influence became particularly shrill with the rise of racial theory in the second half of the nineteenth century, and reached a peak in Nazi Germany’s effort to exterminate the Jews. Military opposition, particularly from the Ottoman Empire, was translated as an Islamic threat to Christian Europe. As Albert Hourani once put it, Judaism was the theological challenge to Christianity, while Islam was the military challenge.¹²

Historical Origins of the Struggle for Women’s Religious Rights

Historians debate the origins of both Muslim and Jewish feminist movements. Calls for the liberation of women within the two religions were heard during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as both Jews and Muslims were facing problems of political liberation—Muslims seeking the overthrow of European colonial domination and Jews seeking political emancipation as a colonized body within Europe. In both cases, wider political contexts influenced the nascent women’s rights movements. The Egyptian Muslim leader Qasim Amin (1863–1908), an advocate of modernization and Western culture, is often heralded as the first Arab feminist. He insisted on women’s rights, particularly in education, and also demanded an end to women’s veiling and seclusion. Egypt had declined and fallen under Western domination, Amin argued, in part as a result of its suppression of women.¹³ Yet by linking women’s rights with his advocacy of modernization, and making the removal of the veil an affirmation of Western culture, Amin inadvertently transformed the veil into a decisive marker of Islamic identity in opposition to the West and to modernity. This in turn led to Islamist movements that revered the veil as central to Islam and a symbol of Muslim resistance to Western culture. Moreover, as feminist scholar Leila Ahmed pointed out, Amin’s agenda was ultimately not feminist—empowering women and overturning patriarchy—but rather the substitution of Western androcentrism for Egyptian androcentrism.¹⁴

Jewish Enlightenment and, later, socialist critics of Jewish communal and religious structures often fought for women’s rights, but like Amin, not always for the sake of empowering women. Within the Jewish context, support for women’s rights was similarly intertwined with the position of Jews in relation to European (Christian) culture. Jewish socialists and Zionists, for example, had other political goals, and positions of political leadership were firmly in men’s hands. Moreover, the emancipation of “Jews” was sometimes limited to men: While Jews were permitted entry into German universities in the early nineteenth century, for example, women (Jewish and Gentile) were excluded until the 1890s. Some European feminist organizations did not admit Jewish women as members, and some Jewish communities did not permit women to vote in communal elections until the 1920s. Early Jewish efforts to redress gender imbalance attempted to enhance women’s educational opportunities and position within the Jewish community, creating social service and charitable organizations run by women, rather than overturn male domination. The Jüdischer Frauenbund (Jewish Women’s Organization) was founded in Germany in 1904 by a social worker, Bertha Pappenheim, and strove to win voting rights for women within Jewish communal affairs, but offices of communal leadership remained in the hands of men.¹⁵ Within the United States, Rebecca Gratz founded the nineteenth-century Sunday School movement that created new roles for women in Jewish education, even as the rabbinate remained a male institution until the 1970s and 1980s.

While women’s rights within the larger Jewish and Muslim societies were the focus of early feminist activity, equality within the religious sphere has become central to Jewish and Muslim feminists in recent decades. Religious questions began by challenging aspects of religious law, particularly women’s rights within marriage and divorce. Soon, however, the issue of authority came to the fore: Who had the right to determine matters of religious law, which had traditionally been firmly in the hands of men, both in Islam and Judaism? Those questions, in turn, led to theological challenges: Can there be equality for women within a religion whose texts, institutions, and even its God have been consistently male since its inception? Is a feminist Islam or a feminist Judaism a contradiction in terms? Are changes in religious law and the addition of women’s scriptural commentaries going to create fundamental alterations in the religion or merely ma...