Beyond the Veil

by Fatema Mernissi

  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 the quotation from the Koran establishing the fact of male supremacy (‘the men are superior to them by a degree’) and hastily concludes that ‘the message of the Koran, which makes men superior to women is the manifest message of human history, the history of Adam’s descendants before and after civilization.’15

  What Aqqad finds in the Koran and in human civilization is a complementarity between the sexes based on their antagonistic natures. The characteristic of the male is the will to power, the will to conquer. The characteristic of the female is a
negative will to power. All her energies are vested in seeking to be conquered, in wanting to be overpowered and subjugated. Therefore, ‘She can only expose herself and wait while the man wants and seeks.’16

  Although Aqqad has neither the depth nor the brilliant systematic deductive approach of Freud, his ideas on the male-female dynamic are very similar to Freud’s emphasis on the ‘law of the jungle’ aspect of sexuality. The complementarity of the sexes, according to Aqqad, resides in their antagonistic wills and desires and aspirations.

  Males in all kinds of animals are given the power – embodied in their biological structure – to compel females to yield to the demands of the instinct (that is, sex). . . . There is no situation where that power to compel is given to women over men.17

  Like Freud, Aqqad endows women with a hearty appetite for suffering. Women enjoy surrender.18 More than that, for Aqqad women experience pleasure and happiness only in their subjugation, their defeat by males. The ability to experience pleasure in suffering and subjugation is the kernel of femininity, which is masochistic by its very nature. ‘The woman’s submission to the man’s conquest is one of the strongest sources of women’s pleasure.’19 The machismo theory casts the man as the hunter and the woman as his prey. This vision is widely shared and deeply ingrained in both men’s and women’s vision of themselves.

  The implicit theory of female sexuality, as seen in Imam Ghazali’s interpretation of the Koran, casts the woman as the hunter and the man as the passive victim. The two theories have one component in common, the woman’s qaid power (‘the power to deceive and defeat men, not by force, but by cunning and intrigue’). But while Aqqad tries to link the female’s qaid power to her weak constitution, the symbol of her divinely decreed inferiority, Imam Ghazali sees her power as the most destructive element in the Muslim social order, in which the feminine is regarded as synonymous with the satanic.

  The whole Muslim organization of social interaction and spacial configuration can be understood in terms of women’s qaid power. The social order then appears as an attempt to subjugate her power and neutralize its disruptive effects. The opposition between the implicit and the explicit theories in Muslim society would appear clearly if I could contrast Aqqad and Imam Ghazali. But whereas the implicit theory is brilliantly articulated in Imam Ghazali’s systematic work on the institution of marriage in Islam, the explicit theory has an unfortunate advocate in Aqqad, whose work is an amateurish mixture of history, religion and his own brand of biology and anthropology. I shall therefore contrast Imam Ghazali’s conception of sexual dynamics not with Aqqad’s but with that of another theoretician, one who is not a Muslim but who has the advantage of possessing a machismo theory that is systematic in the elaboration of its premisses – Sigmund Freud.

  Imam Ghazali vs. Freud: Active vs. Passive

  In contrasting Freud and Imam Ghazali we are faced with a methodological obstacle, or rather what seems to be one. When Imam Ghazali was writing the chapter on marriage in his book The Revivification of Religious Sciences, in the eleventh century, he was endeavouring to reveal the true Muslim belief on the subject. But Freud was endeavouring to build a scientific theory, with all that the word ‘scientific’ implies of objectivity and universality. Freud did not think that he was elaborating a European theory of female sexuality; he thought he was elaborating a universal explanation of the human female. But this methodological obstacle is easily overcome if we are ‘conscious of the historicity of culture’.20 We can view Freud’s theory as a ‘historically defined’ product of his culture. Linton noted that anthropological data has shown that it is culture that determines the perception of biological differences and not the other way around.

  All societies prescribe different attitudes and activities to men and to women. Most of them try to rationalize these prescriptions in terms of the physiological differences between the sexes or their different roles in reproduction. However, a comparative study of the statuses ascribed to women and men in different cultures seems to show that while such factors may have served as a starting point for the development of a division, the actual prescriptions are almost entirely determined by culture. Even the psychological characteristics ascribed to men and to women in different societies vary so much that they can have little physiological basis.21

  A social scientist works in a biographically determined situation in which he finds himself ‘in a physical and socio-cultural environment as defined by him, within which he has his position, not merely his position in terms of physical space and outer time or of his status and role within the social system but also his moral and ideological position.’22 We can therefore consider Freud’s theory of sexuality in general, and of female sexuality in particular, as a reflection of his society’s beliefs and not as a scientific (objective and ahistorical) theory. In comparing Freud and Imam Ghazali’s theories we will be comparing the two different cultures’ different conceptions of sexuality, one based on a model in which the female is passive, the other on one in which the female is active. The purpose of the comparison is to highlight the particular character of the Muslim theory of male-female dynamics, and not to compare the condition of women in the Judeo-Christian West and the Muslim East.

  The novelty of Freud’s contribution to Western contemporary culture was his acknowledgement of sex (sublimated, of course) as the source of civilization itself. The rehabilitation of sex as the foundation of civilized creativity led him to the reexamination of sex differences. This reassessment of the differences and of the consequent contributions of the sexes to the social order yielded the concept of female sexuality in Freudian theory.

  In analysing the differences between the. sexes, Freud was struck by a peculiar phenomenon – bisexuality – which is rather confusing to anyone trying to assess sex differences rather than similarities:

  Science next tells you something that runs counter to your expectations and is probably calculated to confuse your feelings. It draws your attention to the fact that portions of the male sexual apparatus also appear in women’s bodies, though in an atrophied state, and vice-versa in the alternative case. It regards their occurrence as indications of bisexuality as though an individual is not a man or a woman but always both – merely a certain amount more one than the other.23

  The deduction one expects from bisexuality is that anatomy cannot be accepted as the basis for sex differences. Freud made this deduction:

  You will then be asked to make yourself familiar with the idea that the proportion in which masculine and feminine are mixed in an individual is subject to quite considerable fluctuations. Since, however, apart from the very rarest cases, only one kind of sexual product, ova or semen, is nevertheless present in one person, you are bound then to have doubts as to the decisive significance of those elements and must conclude that what constitutes masculinity or femininity is an unknown characteristic which anatomy cannot lay hold of.24

  Where then did Freud get the basis for his polarization of human sexuality into a masculine and a feminine sexuality, if he affirms that anatomy cannot be the basis of such a difference? He explains this in a footnote, apparently considering it a secondary point:

  It is necessary to make clear that the conceptions ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, whose content seems so unequivocal to the ordinary meaning, belong to the most confused terms in science and can be cut up into at least three paths. One uses masculinity and femininity at times in the sense of activity and passivity, again in the biological sense and then also in the sociological sense. The first of these three meanings is the essential one and the only one utilizable in psychoanalysis.25

  The polarization of human sexuality into two kinds, feminine and masculine, and their equation with passivity and activity in Freudian theory helps us to understand Imam Ghazali’s theory, which is characterized precisely by the absence of such a polarization. It conceives of both male and female sexuality partaking of and belonging to the same kind of sexuality.

  For Freud, the sex
cells’ functioning is symbolic of the male-female relation during intercourse. He views it as an antagonistic encounter between aggression and submission.

  The male sex cell is actively mobile and searches out the female and the latter, the ovum, is immobile and waits passively. . . . This behaviour of the elementary sexual organism is indeed a model for the conduct of sexual individuals during intercourse. The male pursues the female for the purpose of sex union, seizes hold of her and penetrates into her.26

  For Imam Ghazali, both the male and female have an identical cell. The word sperm (ma’, ‘water drop’) is used for the female as well as for the male cell. Imam Ghazali referred to the anatomic differences between the sexes when clarifying Islam’s position on coitus interruptus (‘azl), a traditional method of birth control practised in pre-Islamic times. In trying to establish the Prophet’s position on ‘azl, Imam Ghazali presented the Muslim theory of procreation and the sexes’ contribution to it and respective roles in it.

  The child is not created from the man’s sperm alone, but from the union of a sperm from the male with a sperm from the female . . . and in any case the sperm of the female is a determinant factor in the process of coagulation.27

  The puzzling question is not why Imam Ghazali failed to see the difference between the male and female cells, but why Freud, who was more than knowledgeable about biological facts, saw the ovum as a passive cell whose contribution to procreation was minor compared to the sperm’s. In spite of their technical advancement, European theories clung for centuries to the idea that the sperm was the only determining factor in the procreation process; babies were prefabricated in the sperm28 and the uterus was just a cozy place where they developed.