The Women’s Economic Forum held in Jeddah on March 20 took as its emblem the name of Khadija bint Khuwailid, the first wife of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Khadija was a wealthy widow, who saw in Muhammad a man worthy of trust, so she employed him to look after her trading caravans between Makkah and Syria. In the collective memory of Muslims, Khadija stands as a powerful and influential character; she was a forthright and independent person, and it was she who proposed to the Prophet at the age of forty when he was only twenty five. Khadija was in her fifties when the Prophet received his first revelation. From this moment until her death, she supported and encouraged him in his preaching of Islam.
It is ironic perhaps that Khadija’s strong personality and attitude were shaped during pre-Islamic times — the Jahiliyya — rather than under the influence of Islamic teachings. Yet she stands as one of the Ummahat Al-Mu’minin and as someone who enriched Islamic culture with anecdotes and by her own example of how Muslim women should behave and act.
The legacy of Khadija compels Muslim women to step out of the shadows because the wife of the Prophet and a businesswoman was neither a meek nor a timid person. She would surely, therefore, be disappointed to see her descendants in the Arabian Peninsula and elsewhere still struggling to have their voices heard.
To be fair, the struggle of Muslim women is not an easy one. This is sadly for the simple reason that their struggle is with some of the Shariah laws — laws that are based on exclusively male interpretations of the Hadith and are reductionist and bigoted in nature. These male-biased interpretations have succeeded only in constructing barriers between the sexes, thus perpetuating women’s marginality and relegation to the domestic sphere.
The nexus of religion and law dissuades most Muslim women from openly challenging the Shariah laws for fear of ostracism. This is a crucial point, because it militates against any change in the situation of women and perpetuates the status quo.
Women, being the “sole bearers” of the Muslim identity, can however question the selectivity of the Shariah law accountable for maintaining severe control over women’s personal freedoms while endorsing other Western inherited issues such as banking, military and public services.
Many hope that the laws will be updated and rectified in the near future in response to the problems women face, particularly the less privileged majority who cannot afford to be chauffeured around and do not have the resources to hire a male agent to carry out governmental errands on their behalf. Liberating women from old restrictions and burdensome bureaucracy is not exclusively a feminist issue; it is a dire economic necessity. Women are in desperate need of more job opportunities, and they crave the return of their freedom to comfortably move around their own country.
However, Saudi women are pursuing their rights from an Islamic perspective rather than purely in relation to ready-made Western paradigms and definitions of feminism and modernity. Their commitment to an indigenous model and unwillingness to surrender their strong Arab/Muslim identity calls into question the usefulness of some Western “initiatives”. The need for indigenous examples and solutions is painfully evident every time the debates over face veiling, ban on driving and segregation provoke the now tired rhetoric about culture and nationalism. Such rhetoric became more accentuated with the increase in Western hegemony. As the writer of “Faith and Freedom” observes, “for many, the boldness of (the women’s) demand to drive had become the emblem of submission to Western values, and the hijab and homemaking the symbol of cultural resistance to the overwhelming Western influences in the country.”
Mindful of how empowering the “religious factor” is in most of the Islamic countries, women in Muslim countries tend to seek to add to their credibility by adhering to a rigid religious discourse when demanding their rights, and to the use of strict Islamic “power dressing” in formal meetings. Islam offers, in this environment, a stable framework which limits the uncertainties as to the rights and wrongs of a woman’s role in the workplace, her relations with the opposite sex and mode of dress. As Maha Azzam in “Gender and Politics of Religion in the Middle East” observes, “the Islamic legal framework can ‘liberate’ or ‘constrain’ both men and women; Islam remains the alternative for the masses and a route to empowerment within an environment of increasing Islamization.”
It is pertinent at this point to scrutinize some of the personal freedoms of women under the Shariah law. It states clearly that an unmarried woman is the ward of her father, a married woman is the ward of her husband and a widowed woman is the ward of her sons. Thus a woman is not only doomed to be answerable to and dependent on her next male kin, she is treated like a commodity.
A woman cannot obtain a passport or an exit visa without the permission of her guardian. She cannot conduct business without an authorized male agent who can easily take advantage of her because of this commandment. There is a large amount of useless bureaucracy that seems to have been designed solely to obstruct women’s advancement and progress as well as to be intimidating and insulting.
Hopefully intelligent “design” thinking will soon prevail and these obstructions will be removed for the benefit of both the sexes.
As we have seen at the Women’s Economic Forum in Jeddah, women’s networking at this level definitely generates a collective mood of confidence that helps create the conditions for a new reality for all women. At the same time, the recent debate over women’s employment and transportation, and the importance of reaching official institutions and the benefit from the legal system and the law marks the emergence of a new discourse.
This new discourse is much needed because each time an outspoken woman broaches the issue of women’s equal access to services and employment, and expresses her exasperation at the nonsensical restrictions on her freedom of movement, she is greeted by a pitiful outpouring of cultural wailing about the threat to the preservation of Arab/Muslim religious and cultural mores.
It is time that the self-appointed guardians of Islamic culture did their homework; Khadija would not be the respected and dynamic wife of the Prophet if she has been locked up in her house on the false premise of “protecting her virtue”. The time is more than ripe for change.
— Basma Al-Mutlaq has a Ph.D. in Comparative and Feminist Literature in the Middle East from SOAS, London University.
