Review: Women, Islam, and the Abbasid Identity, by Nadia Maria El Cheikh

Abstract

I always become angered and confused when I witness incidents of women being belittled. Why must we be afraid and worried about women who assertively express themselves? What is the relationship between sexuality that is supposed to be a personal matter, social order, and politics? How is the image of women used to define both the identities of the family and society and how does it contribute to preserving them? In this book, historian Nadia Cheikh takes us on a journey through the Islamic world in search of answers to these questions (and several others). She does not analyze Islamic society as a homogenous whole; instead, she unveils various (and sometimes conflicting) ideologies. Her main focus is the groups that challenged the Islamicization of society and the new moral system that Islam advocated. These groups are the Jahilis (pre-Islamic peoples), the Qaramita heretics, and the Byzantines, all of whose identities were interlinked with each other. Through a bold and close analysis of these groups, she identifies the oppositions and dualities that constitute these identities. Cheikh states that Islam’s identity politics center around women’s image, sexuality, and social role, which gives women a pivotal part in drawing the boundaries between “us,” the Muslims, and “them” the pre-Islamic people, Shiites, or Byzantines.Black and white are two sides of an interlocked binary. In the same way, man would not exist without a woman (and the same goes for his authority and her subordination). Cheikh claims that classical Islam would not have existed without the Jahiliyya and that Orthodox Sunna would not have existed without the Qaramita Shiites. According to Cheikh, the history of Islam is full of antagonisms, dualities, and processes of “othering.” She states that Islam compared itself with both temporally and geographically near others (the Jahiliyya, the Qaramita Muslims, and women) and geographically distant others (the Christian Byzantines) to give itself meaning and validity.In relation to the Jahiliyya, Islam adopted a position of “enlightened superiority,” as it looked retrospectively and with a critical lens at pre-Islamic ways of life, claiming a purportedly unbridgeable ideological distance. At the center of this lens was Hind bint ‘Utba, a pre-Islamic woman who firmly clung to her fierce sentimentality and pre-Islamic customs—the most important of which were the rituals of death and lamentation. Hind was a woman whom the Muslims despised and wished dead before she converted to Islam. Cheikh dedicates an entire chapter (chapter two) to explain how Hind, for the Muslims, was the first and most successful prototype against whom they would assert the validity of the new social order and moral renewal project, in achieving an imperialist agenda. She bases her claims on inherited poetic literature, the Sira (the biography of the Prophet), the stories of the prophets, and the writings of al-Tabari, Sayyid Qutb, and contemporaneous academics. She explains that Muslims singled out Hind because she was a woman who expressed herself with strength and ferocity; a savage who ate the liver of Hamzah, the uncle of the Prophet; a woman who was accused of adultery and who was the wife of Abi Sufyan, the Prophet’s archrival from the ruling class of Quraysh. Cheikh considers that the pagan–Islamic discourse about Hind is an “intentional construction” (19) employed to eliminate the pre-Islamic order and give legitimacy to Islamic rule; the Islamic rule which accused the Jahiliyya of corruption, sexual immorality, and depravity (note that these same accusations were used to elevate the status of the Muslim over the Byzantine). These accusations were justified because they conflict with Islamic law, hence people were called upon to adhere to Islam as it could establish and enforce rules for moral and social conduct that protect the Muslim community from the dangers of backwardness and immorality.Hind bint ‘Utba was known for being outspoken and revengeful. She was a poet who specialized in delivering eulogies for the dead of her tribe. In the second chapter, Cheikh discusses death and lamentation rituals through an anthropological lens to unveil their implicit political and social meanings. She justifies the choice of these rituals because they are mostly related to women, stating that women, from an Islamic perspective, are seen as the weaker, more emotional, sex and are hence more prone to revert to pre-Islamic customs (of which Hind bint ‘Utba is a prototype). Cheikh gives examples of women who have been famous for practicing death and lamentation rituals, namely “Khansa,” Fatima Bint Hussein, and the Prophet’s daughter Zainab. Cheikh highlights that men and women deal with death in different ways; that the narrative around death rituals is gendered. Whereas women scream, tear at their skin, and in some instances shave their heads, men are pictured as being “rational” as they take such occasions as an opportunity for contemplation and becoming closer to Allah.Cheikh builds her argument on the academic claims of anthropologists Lila Abo Lughod and Clifford Geertz in relation to the centrality of death rituals in constructing a Muslim social identity where death is “the ultimate expression of society’s beliefs, and also the ultimate opportunity for shaping and controlling a society’s behavior” (39). She claims that death rituals are ideologically opposed to the new faith which focuses on salvation in the afterlife. She mentions that Muslims challenged these rituals and that the Prophet forbade them and even ordered the killing of some female mourners. Cheikh tells us that the Islamic community was not homogeneous and she refers to a struggle of meanings within it. She explains that wherein wailing and self-harm are natural uncontrollable human needs, Islam ordered an erasure of these forms of self-expression to reorient the cultural norms of society. Islam aimed to tailor death rituals to make them fit into its civilized system. Since raving sentimentality is characteristic of the “primitive” Jahiliyya and weeping a way to repine at God’s will, Islam established boundaries for grief. It allowed “mute crying” and forbade self-harm and head-shaving labeling them as “primitive” customs. It is important to note that Cheikh does not study Jahiliyya as a period of time that has ended but as a mental state, an existential state, and a dynamic force that continuously threatens Muslim identity and the Islamic social order.Cheikh believes that Islam puts itself on a pedestal through anecdotes that center around women’s sexuality, social roles, morality, and social status. She claims that Islam criticized both the savage Jahili woman for being “primitive” and exaggerated the immoral display of Byzantine women arousing fitna (sexual temptation among men). In the fourth chapter she examines anecdotes and poems in Islamic literature quoting famous writers such as Jahez, Al-Asfahani, and others to reveal the political purposes behind these texts. One of the most important ideas that she emphasizes is Islamic–Byzantine relations (a relation of a different kind from the Jahiliyya–Islamic one). She notes that Byzantium was prestigious, culturally rich, and politically and socially advanced and comparable with the Islamic empire. Actually, the Islamic and Byzantium empires had trade relations. But what does that mean? It means, according to Cheikh, that Islam had to find an essential difference to draw clear boundaries between “us” and “them” and this importance of clear boundaries stems from a fear of disrupting the new order and of a reversion to the system of Jahiliyya (a fear illustrated in the apostasy wars). Islam constructed a type of Byzantine otherness that is illustrated in the constructions of sex and sexuality which, of course, center on women; women became a tool for national self-identification. Cheikh cites anecdotes from the Sira (the Prophet’s biography) and Al-Tabari’s and Ibn Nadim’s writings that describe a kind of beauty that holds the power of distraction, the beauty characteristic of Byzantine women whom the writers criticize for their freedom of dress (not wearing hijab) and movement (relations with men). Using these anecdotes, Islam categorizes or labels the customs of Byzantine women as immoral and non-Islamic.We should note that the “being” of women influences men’s image, identity, and relationship with themselves. And here, I would like to point to Cheikh’s in-depth analysis and description of the relationships of obedience and authority between identities and groups. Cheikh tells us that Muslim men get annoyed by Byzantine men’s behavior with their women. It seems that these men do not control their women and allow them to converse with unrelated men. Through this comparison, Cheikh delineates two conceptions of masculinity and highlights Muslim men’s fear of women (again). Cheikh employs a perfect example of the construction of these conceptions. She cites Abu Tammam’s ode to Al-Mu’tasim’s victory (capturing Amorium, a city in Byzantium). In this poem, Abu Tammam uses masculine adjectives to describe victory and feminine adjectives to describe Byzantine submissiveness. The boundaries between the masculine and feminine appear clearer for Muslims than Byzantines.The most dangerous “others,” “those whom Muslim scholars described as more harmful than Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians […and] the Dajjal [the anti-Christ]” (66) are the Qaramita Shiites. During the Abbasid rule, the majority of Muslims were Sunni. As for the minority, they constituted new Muslim groups that challenged the Shari’a law and the new social order. Again, Cheikh points out the creation of a new concept: heretics (just as Muslims created the concept of sexual temptation to define its boundaries with the Byzantines). In this way she claims that the Sunni group guarded itself and gave itself validity and superiority through the concept of orthodoxy. Being orthodox meant that Sunnis had the power to command what they thought was right, forbid wrong, and accuse the Qaramita, as Al-Shafi’i, of pushing their political agenda to destroy the Islamic state. Cheikh studies the narratives pertaining to Qaramita women and their sexuality claiming that they aimed to belittle the Qaramita and keep them away from the political sphere. Sunni scholars accused them of immorality, incest, denial of the legal laws of sex, wife exchange, and other ways that Muslims—including judge “Abd al-Jabbar and Thabit b. Sinan and Al Ghazali—sought to make characteristic of the Qaramita culture. Moreover, the Muslims, she states, took advantage of the rituals related to Hussein’s death (performed exclusively by the Shiites) given that these rituals are inferior and similar to the Jahiliyya’s death rituals. Cheikh claims that Muslims employ these narratives to promote Sunni Shari’a law and protect the Islamic empire and its moral code (especially discipline, purity, and faithfulness). Moreover, Cheikh studies the semantics of the term “Qaramita” and its transition from being a description of a group in Bahrain to a description of “rebellious” groups.However, it seems that Cheikh makes women into victims. She views women as victims of the Islamic empire’s agenda as if individuals do not have a choice in their social roles and conduct. A change in gender roles may take place in a society even though its political system does not change. We are witnessing an improvement in the social and economic status of women in the Gulf despite its rigid political system, for example.Throughout her study Cheikh exposes an issue of referentiality. She believes that Muslims have used, exaggerated, and stereotyped the Jahili, Shiite, and Byzantine women’s depravity and participation in adultery. She revisits stories about “immoral” and “non-Muslim” practices that took place among the Muslim elites. Cheikh stresses the problem of referentiality across all the chapters. That is why her study is critical. In the beginning, she informs us that “the standard sources for historical study were authored by male elite members […whose literature] form[ed] the metanarrative and imagine[d] the ‘true[ly] Islamic’ identity […and] prescribed…the normative gender system that existed” (13). She concludes that texts about women were written through the male gaze. She tracks this issue in the historicization of the Umayyad era which was written by Abbasid historians. Also, by taking into account that the Qaramita Muslims were a threat to the caliphate in Baghdad, Cheikh exposes the Sunni biases stating that the texts are “malicious.” The same applies to the writings about Byzantium which were motivated by political and military purposes. Despite the sharpness and clarity of her analysis and examples, Cheikh does not provide the voice of the people she talks about, namely, the Qaramita and Byzantines. Instead, she denies the existence of an objective and scientific study of these groups, thereby leaving the readers to their own imagination or prior information.In the final chapter, Cheikh presents the change in the sociopolitical status of women brought about by Islam by showcasing the lifestyles of the Prophet’s wives—as sacred Muslim women exemplars. She explains that Islam encourages women to be patient, merciful, modest, beautiful, and repentant, values that serve to mitigate and “Islamicize” femininity—the femininity that has been stained/dirtied by Hind bint ‘Utba’s savage character. On this note, Cheikh highlights the change in Muslim people’s attitude towards Hind bint ‘Utba after she converted to Islam. Islam, Cheikh states, “tamed” Hind’s morals who then became the center of both Umayyad and anti-Umayyad narratives.Cheikh started her book by putting forth three main perspectives related to the strong (or weak) positive/negative role of Islam in improving/diminishing women’s social status. In the conclusion, she criticizes some Islamic values because they obliterate her character. Considering the political aspect of women’s lives, Cheikh talks about the activism of Aisha, the Prophet’s wife, and her role in the political struggle. Her social status, however, is tied up with her being the Prophet’s wife. Cheikh indicates that Muslim men were enchanted with Byzantine woman’s beauty and sexual temptation while demanding of their wives to stay at home for the sake of protecting family values. She concludes that these values—purity, chastity, and virginity, which were represented through Mary’s character—and the demand to preserve them changed women’s social relations, altered their ability to be politically and socially active, and promoted their subordination. Mary’s model is a justification to curb women’s characters (as in Aisha and Hind’s examples, both of whom were accused of adultery) because fitna (sexual temptation) is of “worldly” importance as it is related to the Afterlife.Moreover, Cheikh exposes some contradictions in Muslim men’s lifestyles. Wherein Muslims encourage women to be chaste and faithful and sometimes ask them to perform genital mutilation, some Muslim men went with prostitutes to receive sexual pleasure. She contends that wherein Muslims claim to honor women, they ask of them to stay at home and away from the political sphere as well as to be silent and give up their sexual desires.In Women, Islam and the Abbasid Identity, Cheikh provides a deep and critical analysis of the centrality and function of gender-related and sexual imaginings in constructing Islamic identity, fears, and political agendas. Cheikh does not present a homogenous Islamic community. Instead, she searches for differences and contradictions that Muslims tried to contain or eliminate. She views the dual nature of reality: every concept derives its legitimacy from its opposite which depends on it and threatens it constantly. She draws out the images of a “primitive” Jahili, heretic Shiite, and overtly sexual Byzantine. Lastly, the question remains: as for the woman, the center of this book, when will she possess the power to define herself?