And why are women feared? Although sex itself might not be inherently sinful, uncontrolled sexuality is regarded as destabilizing to the community — and female sexuality is regarded as the most dangerous. The Arabic word fitna means disorder or chaos, but it can also refer to a beautiful woman, thus demonstrating a link between women and instability.
What of the claim that women were better off under Islam than under the pagan systems before? According to Muslims, that stage was characterized by jahiliyya, which means “ignorance” or “barbarism.” At this time, there was only promiscuous and uncontrolled sex, and women were not treated with respect.
Mernissi argues that this isn’t true at all, and offers quite a lot of evidence which suggests that women had quite a lot of sexual self-determination in their hands, often tied to social status. She even cites an example of women who knew what they had prior to Islam and didn’t like the changes.
After Muhammad’s death, apostasy swept across Arabia because people felt that without him, there was no point in following his ideas. One apostate group was led by women who were described by the faithful as “harlots.” But this group was very diverse and included elderly grandmothers, little girls, and women from noble households.
Whatever it was that they had before Islam, it is clear that they liked it much better than what they had to endure under Islam. And it is also clear that their problems with Islam were likely sexual in nature, otherwise their critics would not have used the specific label of “harlot” to condemn them with:
- The panorama of female sexual rights in pre-Islamic culture reveals that women’s sexuality was not bound by the concepts of legitimacy. Children belonged to the 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. The husband would come and go, the main unit was the mother and child within an entourage of kinfolk.
Today, all of the traditional Muslim attitudes towards women are being challenged. Modernization has brought women into the schools, into the universities, and into the offices to work. Islam is witnessing an increase in women’s abilities to make decisions about their own lives and on their own terms, which conjures up ghosts of the pre-Islamic past.
This is something that the traditionalists are desperately fighting. On the one hand, they are doing it because they regard such changes as an imposition of the West on Islam; but they are also doing it because they fear the disorder that strong, self-aware women will create.
It is clear that the status of women in Islam is not as clear-cut as many would have us believe — it is not clearly bad, as claimed by critics, and it is not clearly good, as claimed by apologists. There is instead a complicated interaction of culture, politics and religion which results in a status that should be good in theory, but ends up being bad in practice. Mernissi’s book is an excellent resource for developing an understanding of these conflicts.
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