Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
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218 t CHAPTER NINE<br />
Women represent a special case. In some respects they are “defective”<br />
individuals in the face of the sharia. Their testimony in<br />
court does not carry the same weight, <strong>for</strong> example, as that of a<br />
man, despite the notorious fact that a great deal of the testimony<br />
regarding the custom of the Prophet on which the sharia is built<br />
was transmitted by a woman, Aisha, Muhammad’s wife. Lawyers<br />
also invoked the notion of the higher good to excuse women from<br />
per<strong>for</strong>ming of many of these ritual duties. The bearing <strong>and</strong> rearing<br />
of children, which in Muslim society was a woman’s responsibility<br />
until the child was about seven, when, at least in the case of male<br />
children, the father took over, was thought sufficient cause to keep<br />
a woman at home, <strong>and</strong> occupied.<br />
What actually barred a woman from full participation in the<br />
liturgical life of <strong>Islam</strong> was rather, it appears, her occasional but not<br />
always predictable states of ritual impurity: questions of (enabling<br />
or disabling) ritual purity (tahara) always precede discussion of the<br />
obligations in Muslim legal h<strong>and</strong>books. Like her Jewish counterpart,<br />
the Muslim woman was rendered ritually impure by childbirth<br />
<strong>and</strong> by menstruation <strong>and</strong> so unfit to per<strong>for</strong>m the ibadat or<br />
even to touch a Quran. In Judaism—<strong>and</strong> among the <strong>Christians</strong><br />
who emerged from it—such impurity prohibited a woman from<br />
becoming a priest or even approaching the sanctuary. <strong>Islam</strong> had no<br />
priesthood, but the prospect of ritual impurity was enough to bar a<br />
woman from participation in ritual acts, from prayer to fasting<br />
during Ramadan.<br />
But if women are seen only rarely in mosques—there are many<br />
Prophetic reports advising them to absent themselves—<strong>and</strong> then<br />
only in the same kind of sheltered enclaves as appear in traditional<br />
synagogues, the reason is not merely a male—or divine—fear of<br />
ritual contamination. It was also a matter of gender segregation.<br />
Women were not notably empowered in pre-<strong>Islam</strong>ic Mecca—the<br />
Quran dictated improvements in their st<strong>and</strong>ing in society—but<br />
there is no indication that they were segregated. A degree of female<br />
segregation was, however, practiced among the urbanized classes<br />
of both Byzantine <strong>and</strong> Sassanian society, where women lived in<br />
separate quarters in the great houses <strong>and</strong> were often veiled in public,<br />
which Bedouin women never were. As Muslims moved out of