Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

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