Beyond the Veil

by Fatema Mernissi

  The fourth type is where many men frequent a woman, and she does not keep herself from any who comes to her. These women are the baghaya [prostitutes]. They used to set up at their doors banners forming a sign. Whoever wanted them went in to them. If one of them conceived and bore a child, they gathered together to her and summoned the physiognomists to designate as father the man whom the child resembled most. Then the child remained attached to him and was called his son, no objection to this course being possible. When Muhammad (God bless and preserve him) came preaching the truth, he destroyed all the types of marriage of the jahiliyah except that which people practise today [numbers added].35

  The general picture that emerges from Bukhari’s description is a system characterized by the coexistence of a variety of marriages, or rather sexual unions. In three of the four kinds of marriages, biological paternity seems unimportant and the concept of female chastity is therefore absent (2, 3, and 4). Two of the marriages were polyandrous, the woman having as many ‘husbands’ as she desired (3 and 4).

  Another kind of marriage mentioned elsewhere by Bukhari is mut’a (‘marriage of pleasure, or temporary marriage’).

  If a man and a woman agree to live together, their partnership lasts three nights and if they want to extend it, they extend it, and if they decide to part, they part.36

  Tarmidi gives a description of the practicality of such a union.

  In early Islam, when a man would arrive in a new town where he did not know anybody, he would marry a woman in exchange for a sum of money according to the length of the period of his stay, and she would keep his belongings and take care of him. This was practised until the verse forbidding it was revealed.37

  Its sexual goal is affirmed in another traditionist’s description. Imam Muslim writes.

  Mut’a . . . was a temporary marriage. The man would say to the woman, ‘I will enjoy you for a certain period of time in exchange for a certain sum of money.’ It was named mut’a [pleasure] because its main purpose was exclusively sexual pleasure, i.e., without procreation and other purposes usually expected from marriage. Mut’a was out-lawed by the Book and the Sunna.38

  It was practised in early Islam and is still practised by Muslims who follow the Shia trend.39

  Compared to orthodox Muslim marriage, mut’a violates two fundamental principles of Islam’s ideal of sexual union. First, its temporary and personal character gives the woman as much freedom as the man, in both the initiation and the termination of the marriage. Muslim marriage reserves these rights to the man only, subordinates the woman’s consent to that of her guardian, and alienates her freedom to divorce by subordinating it to a judge’s decision. Second, such a union implies different paternity rules than the ones on which Muslim marriage is based, the rule according to which the social father must be the biological genitor. For Robertson Smith

  Mut’a in short is simply the last remains of that type of marriage which corresponds to a law of mother-kinship, and Islam condemns it and makes it ‘the sister of harlotry’ because it does not give the husband a legitimate offspring, i.e. an offspring that is reckoned to his own tribe and has right of inheritance within it.40

  The panorama of female sexual rights in pre-Islamic culture reveals that women’s sexuality was not bound by the concept of legitimacy. Children belonged to their mother’s tribe. Women had sexual freedom to enter into and break off unions with more than one man, either simultaneously or successively. A woman could either reserve herself to one man at a time, on a more or less temporary basis, as in mut’a marriage, or she could be visited by many husbands at different times whenever their nomadic tribe or trade caravan came through the woman’s town or camping ground.41 The husband would come and go; the main unit was the mother and child within an entourage of kinfolk.42

  The linguistic legacy of the matrilineal past has survived in Arabic. The word rahim, meaning ‘womb’, is ‘the most general word for kinship’.43 Batn (‘belly’) is the technical term for a clan or sub-tribe.44 The word umm (‘mother’) is the origin of umma (‘community’ in general and, after Islam, the Muslim community). According to Salama Musa, the fact that the word haya, ‘life’, is also a name for the female reproductive apparatus expresses the old Arab belief that women had the gift of giving life while the male’s role was ‘pure sexual pleasure’.45

  Robertson Smith copiously documents the shift from patrilineal to matrilineal marriage with examples from both Muslim and pre-Islamic sources.46

  The Effects of Muslim Marriage on Pre-Muslim Society

  If we consider marriage as a ‘rearrangement of social structure’ and social structure as ‘any arrangement of persons in institutionalized relationships’,47 then a change in the marriage system would imply far-reaching socio-economic changes. A change in kinship implies a dislocation of old socio-economic structures, and the appearance of new networks based on new units. In Muhammad at Mecca and Muhammad at Medina,48 Montgomery Watt analyses Arabia’s socio-economic foundations in the transitional period during the sixth and early seventh centuries. He attributes Islam’s sweeping. success among the tribes (Muhammad started preaching in 613, and when he died in 632 most of Arabia’s tribes were already converted) to a preexisting malaise caused by the disintegration of the tribal system. Insecurity and discontent were spreading because of the rise of a thriving mercantile economy which was corroding traditional tribal communalism. Individuals engaged in trading were motivated by new mercantile allegiances which often clashed with traditional tribal ones.49 In thriving urban settlements like Mecca, the contradictions between new and old allegiances were particularly acute. The violation of traditional allegiances brought about isolation and economic insecurity among the weakest members of the tribe. Responsible members who were supposed to administer property for the communal good were now lured by individualistic pursuits and neglected their traditional role as protectors of the weak.50 Women and children were among those most directly affected by the disruption of the old networks of solidarity since they had no institutionalized access to property through inheritance.51 Inheritance was the privilege of those who took part in battles and acquired booty: able-bodied adult males.

  But if women did not have the right to inherit, that does not mean that they had no access to goods, as some Muslim writers believe.52 Their protection and economic well-being were the core of a tribe’s prestige and the embodiment of its honour.53 It has been argued that many of Islam’s institutions were a response to the new needs that emerged with the disintegration of tribal communalism, a means of absorbing the insecurity generated by such disintegration. Polygamy, for example, has been described as such an institution.54 The Prophet, concerned about the fate of women who were divorced, widowed or unmarried orphans, decided to create a kind of responsibility system whereby unattached women were resituated in a family unit in which a man could protect them, not just as kinsman but as husband. The fact that polygamy was instituted by the Koran after the disaster of Uhud, a battle in which many Muslim males were slain, substantiates this theory.55

  Moreover, the Prophet had a vested interest in reintegrating women, made helpless by the breakdown of tribal solidarity, into new solidarity units, because otherwise they were likely to seek protection in transitory sexual unions considered as zina by Islam. It is here that one sees the genius of Islam. That its institutions were appreciated is shown by its success in connecting both communal and self-serving tendencies and channelling these otherwise contradictory trends into the most cohesive social order Arabia has ever known. The communal tendencies were channelled into warfare for Pax Islamica, and the self-serving tendencies were mainly vented in the institution of the family, which allowed new allegiances and new ways to transfer private possession of goods while simultaneously providing tight controls over women’s sexual freedom.

  Watt suggests that the umma resembled the tribe in many of its premisses. The responsibility system within the umma was very similar to the tribal principles of blood-feud and l
ex talionis: ‘For the military prestige of the umma, it was essential in Arabian conditions that a Muslim should never go un- avenged.’56

  But the umma steered the tribes’ bellicosity, usually invested in tribal feuding, in a new direction – the holy war.57 The old allegiance to the tribe was replaced by an allegiance entirely different in both form and content. The new form is the umma and the basic unit is not the tribe, but the individual. The bond between individuals is not kinship but a more abstract concept, communion in the same religious belief.

  In less than a few decades, the razzia-inclined nomadic tribes, which were a great obstacle to Arabia’s thriving trade routes and centres, were persuaded to give in to the umma, which required unconditional surrender to the will of Allah. Consequently, their quest for booty was deflected from internal attacks and channelled into holy war against the common enemy. The wealthy Byzantine and Persian empires fell to the Arabs before they were even fully aware of the existence of Islam. (Persia was conquered in 642, twenty years after the hijra; the first siege of Constantinople took place in 670.)

  Parallel to the harnessing of tribal bellicosity in the service of the Muslim community, there was a similar absorption of self-serving tendencies into the family structure. One of these channelling mechanisms was the concept of fatherhood and legitimacy, which allowed full expression to the believers’ self-interest.

  It would be natural for him [any man in an increasingly patrilineal society] at the same time to become specially interested in his own children and to want them to succeed to the wealth he had appropriated. In a matrilineal family, the control of the family property would normally pass from a man to his sister’s son.58

  For a man to transfer his goods to his sons implies that he has sons, which had not generally been clear. Biological paternity had been considered unimportant in the pre-existing systems, and the patterns of female sexuality made it difficult to establish who had begotten whom. Islam dealt with this obstacle in two ways. As we have seen, it outlawed most previous sexual practices as zina and institutionalized strict control over paternity in the form of the idda, or waiting period. The idda can be seen as the best proof both of the previous disregard for biological paternity and of Islamic curtailment of female sexual rights, since no equivalent period was instituted for men.

  As the institution of the idda shows, obsession with depriving a woman of her power to determine paternity is difficult to satisfy without her cooperation. The idda implies that the Muslim God does not expect a woman’s cooperation, although He explicitly requires it as a condition of her oath of allegiance. Verse 228 of the second sura declares

  It is not lawful for them [women] that they should conceal that which Allah hath created in their wombs, if they are believers in Allah . . .

  The fact that despite His unequivocal orders to women, Allah decided to check on them by institutionalizing- the waiting period shows that He did not expect them to obey the divine order. The expectation that women will not cooperate, that they will need to be coerced, explains man’s religious duty to control the women under his roof. The man is responsible not only for satisfying the woman sexually and providing for her economically, but, as a policeman of the Muslim order, also for disciplining and guarding his female relatives.

  Watt noted that the idea of a police force distinct from the community was unknown among the Arabs.59 A rigid code of honour compelled every individual to tailor his actions, which were entirely involved in communal pursuit, to the community’s standards. In Islam the same mechanism operated, but the man’s burden was heavier because the umma conceded him an individual territory of which he would be the master and for which he would be held responsible: ‘The man is the guardian of his family and he is responsible . . .’60

  Conclusion

  The social order created by the Prophet, a patrilineal monotheistic state, could exist only if the tribe and its allegiances gave way to the umma. The Prophet found the institution of the family a much more suitable unit of socialization than the tribe. He saw the tightly controlled patriarchal family as necessary to the creation of the umma.

  The Prophet’s religious vision, his personal experiences, and the structure of the society he was reacting against all contributed to the form Islamic society took. The assumptions behind the Muslim social structure – male dominance, the fear of fitna, the need for sexual satisfaction, the need for men to love Allah above all else –were embodied in specific laws which have regulated male-female relations in Muslim countries for fourteen centuries.

  Today, however, with modernization, basic changes are occurring not only in economic structures but in social relations as well, and these challenge the underlying principles of Islam as a social order. If we define modernization as involving, among other things, the integration of the economies of the Arab-Muslim countries into the world market, with all that this process entails in disintegration, upheaval, conflict, and contradiction, then we may say that one of the areas in which this integration is having decisive effects is home life, the structure of family relations, and especially the dynamic of relations between the sexes.

  The Arab-Muslim economies have already gone far along the road to integration into the world market. In his book The Arab Economy Today Samir Amin shows that ‘the Arab world occupies a very special place in the Third World as a whole and is the part of it most closely integrated into the contemporary world system’.61 This economic integration has been accompanied by an ideological integration that is far less widely accepted. An Arab man buys an automobile produced by French, Swedish, or American factories and he considers it his property for which he has paid a certain price. The same man has a far more ambiguous attitude towards the import of what might be called symbolic capital. The great struggles in the Arab world today concern this attitude towards Western symbolic capital, in particular the fight for authenticity (al-asala), which now figures prominently in all current debates, whether these be political, social, or economic.

  One of the areas in which the import of Western symbolic capital (ideas) has been evident is social relations, especially liberal concepts like human rights, civil law, and the structure of relational models. Concepts like political party, trade union, parliament are among the ideological exports of former colonial countries of Europe to the formerly colonized Arab societies. In fact, the Arab nationalist movement itself may be regarded as a strange Trojan Horse within which the transfer of ideas took place in a context of violently anti-Western, xenophobic struggle.

  The fact is that economic dependence (the transfer of machinery, for instance) seems not to have elicited among contemporary Arab leaders the same virtually neurotic reactions as have been aroused by the transfer of symbolic capital, by the ideological dependence that seems directly and openly to challenge the key notion of identity.

  If the debate is wide-ranging, the stakes are high. What is of most interest to us here is the transfer, during the twentieth century, of ideas from liberal capitalist Europe to the Muslim societies, especially the elements of Western democracy generally grouped under the label ‘human rights’, which have been the subject of international treaties some of which directly concern relations between the sexes. The fact that the Arab countries have manifested their resistance to this transfer of liberal ideas about relations between the sexes by refusing to sign certain international treaties and conventions has not prevented them from ratifying many others that are clearly prejudicial to the central principle of the Muslim family: male supremacy and the systematic inhibition of feminine initiative, of female self-determination. This is the pertinent point in understanding the new trends in relations between the sexes.

  For instance, to understand the virtually hysterical attitude of Arab-Muslim leaders to the emergence of female self-determination which is inherent in the economic and political changes these countries are now experiencing, we must place this attitude in its historic and cultural context, which is to say in the ‘Muslim time-frame’ accordin
g to which the year 622 marks the birth of civilization and the year 621 is still a time of the chaos of ignorance, of jahiliya. Female self-determination, feminine initiative, whether in the home or the outside world, is the very embodiment of the absence of order, the absence of Muslim laws. Hence the importance of looking back at the roots, at the pre-Islamic period, if we are to comprehend some of the behaviour patterns and cultural attitudes of the Arab world today.

  In analysing the condition of women in the Muslim countries, it must never be forgotten that ideologically the year 622 still lives in the formulation of future strategies. The time scales of contemporary Muslim societies are very special: fourteen centuries seem to have elapsed without major upheavals or fatal discontinuity, and the future promises to be a continuation of the past. The emergence of feminine initiative consequent to such unremarkable features of present-day economies as the individual wage is reminiscent in the collective memory of the conflicts of jahiliya, re-issued and projected forward as the shape of the future.

  In modern Muslim societies women who seek university degrees and jobs and who invest a large part of their energies in strictly individualist aspirations conjure up, in a whole inventory of symbolic images, the ghosts of women of the pre-Islamic Arab aristocracy, ghosts that have never been definitively buried. Islam’s trenchant opposition to jahiliya has paradoxically made jahiliya a fundamental matrix of the Muslim psyche. And that psyche, through a strange regressive reflex, sees the advent of the industrial era, the era of individual wages and individual votes, as heralding a new jahiliya. Women – with their demands for initiative and self-determination – are a symbolically potent component of both the old jahiliya and the new, the one that opens with the modern era.