Female Subjectivities

Biographies published early in this century celebrated early Muslim women (as well as contemporary Arab and/or Muslim and European women) for offering their readers what the biographers valorized as expanded lives offering greater choice. They suggested that neither gender nor religious identity had to define social roles. Biographies of the same subjects today celebrate them for the clarity and uniformity they offer as gendered role models for Muslim women. This distinction is important to the differing (if overlapping) concepts of the female subject discernible in most of the biographies from each period.

As we have seen, early in this century it was the sovereign individual subject who appeared as the ideal in these biographies, even when work on behalf of the community (local, national, religiously defined) was stressed and lauded, tempering the sought autonomy of the subject. Women's “public” work could be defined as female sacrifice on behalf of others—a traditional and cross-cultural trope of feminine acceptability grafted onto a new situation. Women's work was often cast in the supportive role, especially as supportive of disadvantaged females, nationalist husbands, and baby boy nationalists. Yet biographies of the early twentieth century tended to exhibit individual women's determination to define and achieve their own goals, even when the result could be articulated as communal betterment. This emphasis on women's work as “service to society” has been a theme in men's writing on the woman question in Egypt since the turn of the century. Leila Ahmed has called it one of the many common threads that link Muhammad ‘‘Abduh to the Muslim Brotherhood in the era of its founder, Hasan al-Bannā, and after.^[43]

In today's biographies the collectivity is paramount and is the sole justification for women's action outside of nuclear family boundaries (which assumes as the norm a quite new definition of “the family,” at least one that would not have governed the universe of early Muslim women). Moreover, the collectivity is unequivocally the umma of Islam. Eighty years ago it was more often watan (nation), or a prenational but territorially defined collectivity, stressing unity across confessional borders in the interests of the dominant secular nationalist ideology. Now it is umma—and that term carries no ambiguity, in contrast to early in the century, when it was shifting from the premodern sense of the community of Muslims into near synonymity with the term watan. Khadīī;ja is lauded as helpmeet to her husband in spreading the message of Islam, as well as in calming his fragile nerves. Other women are shown as active in the faith's propagation but not in the institution of a secular state. And nowhere is there an emphasis now on women working to benefit a collectivity specifically of women.^[44]

In today's biographies the ordinary limits of women's everyday experience are permeable only if the Islamic umma is threatened. Here the woman is Muslim first, female second. But the transgression is always shown to be temporary, consonant with the emphases of contemporary Islamist discourse and activism, and illustrative of the rhetoric of exceptionality, wherein certain personages are defined as outside the ordinary woman's reach as they are simultaneously defined as exemplary. Let us turn to a famous female example who, as we have seen, wrote other women's lives as exemplary. Zaynab al-Ghazālīī;'s independence with regard to her own marriages, and her clear prioritizing of duty to the faith before duty to the family, might provide a countermodel. In fact, though, it parallels contemporary presentations of early female Muslim activists.^[45] For as al-Ghazālīī; has always made clear, transgressing the boundaries of exemplary female comportment is a performance available to a small and select group of activists, those working to realize the Islamist society of the future. Once this is achieved, even these exceptional women are to return to their domestic duties. Al-Ghazālīī;'s biography of Khawla bt. al-Azwar shows this trajectory. It begins with a generalizing declaration that sets out a gendered political program for today's Islamist communities: “The Muslim woman bore her responsibility capably in life's arenas. She lived inside the home [practicing] successful leadership, and participated in the battles to build the state by raising her children, and in the tumult of battle she was an exemplar and model; and one of the unforgettable Muslim women was Khawla bt. al-Azwar.”^[46]

Here (and typically), women's role in war is mentioned last. But it is in this arena that the anecdotes of Khawla are sited, overwhelming the primary situating of “the Muslim woman . . . inside the home.” Yet, in the second part of al-Ghazālīī;'s sketch, we are reminded of the equation between motherhood and jihad, the struggle for personal and communal spiritual perfection. While al-Ghazālīī; begins with an explicit reference to both genders of parents, this slips at the end of the paragraph into an emphasis on mom.

The armies of Islam were victorious through noble fathers and mothers who . . . prevailed over this world for the sake of men raised in their laps . . . and they in turn conquered it for God and he subdued it for them. For if they were in possession of their souls, minds, and wills, it was due to the virtue they had drunk in with their mothers' milk, mothers who had lived for duty and for the truth before living for their own personal needs or psychological appetites.^[47]

The third installment ends in a pointedly contemporary lesson, after describing Khawla's successful strategy to free a group of women from imprisonment: “That was what the women did, Khawla at their head, working to stir up the army until the Muslims achieved victory. And where are the daughters of Islam today? Where are its women, its mothers? Why do we see the arena of work on behalf of Islam empty of them? We [females] reclaim the history of Khawla, ‘‘Afrā‘‘, and those women.”^[48]

It might seem tempting to recuperate this biography as a call for women to assume an eminently public role. Yet al-Ghazālīī; carefully places this role within the ambit of domestic duty, by equating “women” and “mothers,” as she recasts what appears in premodern sources as an independent action on the part of the women as a supportive, subordinate act that fit in to women's traditional role in battle, that of stirring up the men. (As was true early in the century, many women in these contemporary collections are portrayed as battlefield cheerleaders and nurses, roles given much respect as involving action under fire.)

In contemporary Islamist movements, women's allowable political work is construed as support. They may come out to demonstrate, particularly to show emotion; they are a useful rank and file, putting into effect the details of political programs defined by political men.^[49] Such a political role does not threaten the gendered status quo, for it has nothing to do, as al-Bizrī notes, with achieving power. Women interiorize this spelled-out political role, one defined, al-Bizrīī; comments, by emotion and a return to the home.^[50] In biography, women are shown to accept happily this pattern of temporary exit according to the needs of male politicians. What a contrast with biographies of Shajar al-Durr, Catherine II, Halide Edip, Sitt al-Mulk, Boudicca, Christabel Pankhurst, and others featured in Egyptian magazines at the turn of the century! Similarly, al-Ghazālī reveals Khadīja as a superbly domestic creature, not even mentioning her earlier life as a merchant (in stark contrast to the construction of Khadīja's life in 1901). Al-Ghazālī depicts Khadīja as a married woman at home; the narrative begins as her husband returns in fear from his first vision. We get no glimpse of Khadīja's life before her marriage to Muhammad, no view of her socioeconomic status in Meccan society; she is identified completely in her role as wife. Narrating her life as if it is a universal pattern, a story for unnamed “Woman,” al-Ghazālī articulates a lesson, adducing within the value of biography as a guide to future action: “Thus does the wise, mindful, good wife study thoroughly the life story [sīra] of her husband and his good traits. As a consequence she understands that he has been prepared for an event of great consequence. She reassures and steadies him, and stands by his side, and takes him to Waraqa b. Nawfal.”^[51] The scene shifts back to the individual life story, but what we are told is that Khadīja earns her home in paradise for having been Muhammad's best helper and greatest support. “Thus,” concludes al-Ghazālī, “was the fidelity and good companionship between the greatest of husbands and the greatest wife. I present [this] as guidance, as a model to be followed. God be pleased with you, O Mother of the Believers Khadīja.”^[52] Even as she leads a life defined by public political work, al-Ghazālī (like other female Islamist activists) stresses in her writings that in a perfect world, one beyond the necessity for jihad, women will not need to leave the home. This feature of contemporary Islamist discourse resounds in contemporary biography.

In sum, women's biography continues to offer a complex meditation on the interrelations of women's different and potential roles. But the message has shifted. Readers early in the century could draw a message of either ambivalence or multiple possibility from the “Famous Women” biographies. Now there is a clearer hierarchy of roles. The narrative subordinates ventures outside the home to a woman's domestic role far more sternly than in the past.

Biographies of premodern Muslim women published early in this century were often taken, perhaps indirectly, from premodern sources. As we have seen, they contrasted to some extent in construction, style, and tone with biographies in which the domestic and the public were clearly marked out. The latter were most often biographies of Western women, past or present, or contemporary Arab and/or Muslim women. The same cannot be said for the biographies available to reading women in Egypt now. While, as in the earlier period, biographers quote the early Muslim sources for these women's lives, and feature extensive passages verbatim from the Hadith, the biographies of the 1990s cannot be seen as anything but unequivocally modern. It is biographies of premodern Muslim women that become illustrations of a modern public-domestic divide. Authors interrupt their importations of source material from Hadith to map a modern public-domestic distinction onto the life histories of their subjects.

Early in the century, biographies tended to stress that a woman's aspirations to a world outside the domestic did not keep her from fulfilling what were defined as her primary duties in the home. Now the domestic is both equated with the nuclear family and unequivocally presented as woman's permanent domain. Her hard work therein is emphasized and lauded. Al-Kahhāla's biography of Fātima bt. Muhammad, which reproduces premodern biographical sources scrupulously and does not add contemporary editorializing, features among other anecdotes ‘‘Alīī;'s description of how his spouse wore out her grinding stone. The famous passage characterizes their life as one of poverty and hardship. ‘‘Isā, on the other hand, prefaces ‘‘Alīī;'s words with a paragraph that recuperates those words as evidence of what a dedicated homemaker Fātima was:

When Sayyida Fātima, God be pleased with her, married, she served in the home of her husband and did all in her ability to make her husband happy, to keep her home clean and lovely, a place of repose and joy.

Her husband Sayyidunā ‘‘Alīī;, God be pleased with him, told this story of her, out of pride and contentment in her: “The daughter of the Messenger of God—God's prayers and peace be upon him—and the most honored of folk in his eyes, who was also my wife, wore down the grinding stone so much that it imprinted her hand, and drew water with the water-skin so often it left a mark on her breast, and swept the house until she filled her robes with dirt, and lit the flame below the pot so frequently she soiled her clothes and suffered harm.”^[53]

In many of these biographies we follow the male players in the biography from home to public sphere and back. The women stay at home but invariably have knowledge that the men need, and this role is praised as crucial and demanding.^[54] The wives of the Companions, as portrayed by al-Shinnāwīī;, know exactly who has converted, and their husbands ask them for this information. They are forthright and fearless in expressing their opinion, particularly when they must assure dubious male family members of the power, authority, and appeal of Islam.

Yet most often these conversations take place explicitly within the home. In al-Shinnāwīī;'s Mothers of the Companions, women's narrative role is to answer questions about the folk of the community and to ask questions that allow the men to speak of Muhammad and to explicate the new faith. The motif of the male (husband or son) as teacher runs throughout the book. Rayta bt. Munabbah is the pivot in a generational conflict between her husband, commander of the Muslim forces during the expansion out of Arabia ‘‘Amr b. al-‘‘As, and her son. She appears in order to inquire about Muhammad; her son responds. Rayta asks her son to show her how to pray and inquires about the new policy on alcohol and infidelity, eliciting a detailed explanation. Like other female subjects in these collections, she stands in for the female interlocutor/reader who is to be instructed on the fundamentals of her faith. This reiterates women's domestic positioning while reminding female readers of their duty to be active and knowledgeable believers. Moreover, it echoes a specifically Islamist polemic, which “was not simply a recitation and regurgitation of Islamic feminine virtues but a call to action and rededication that flattered female followers with a message that assigned them the most crucial role in the struggle for a just Islamist society.”^[55]

Yet it is Rayta who knows what is happening in the community. If her channels of information are domestic ones, this attests to the centrality of the home and of female activities to the vitality, indeed the maintenance, of the community in a time of vulnerability. It suggests the permeability of boundaries—although not their dissolution. It complicates notions of female seclusion by dislocating knowledge as the privilege of a male/public identity, by questioning, indeed, the binarisms of public-private, visibility-seclusion, power-powerlessness.

Duties to the domestic and obligations to the faith suggest not conflictual domains in today's “Famous Women” biographies but arenas that may require negotiations, resonating nicely in a late-twentieth-century context:

“Were I not pregnant in my ninth month,” said Umm Kujja, “I would go out [to battle] with you [pl.], a mujāhida [fighter] preparing food and water for you, and putting salve on wounds.”^[56]

Her husband drew close to her and whispered in her ear: “My love, I am coming back to you with a victory, God willing.” He returned from the Battle of Badr on the day she gave birth to a second daughter, “and how he had hoped that the newborn would be a boy. But it was God's will, which the Muslim accepts with all assurance and security.” [At the Battle of Uhud], she said to him “You intend to obtain the garb of jihad on your own? My dear husband, I have not known you to be so egotistical. When I stayed behind on the day of Badr, it was only because of my pregnancy. But now I am going with you to my Lord.”

Her husband smiled and asked her: “Where will we leave our daughters?” “With my mother,” she answered. And the two spouses went . . . and what happened happened. . . . Umm Kujja returned from the battle alone, weeping. I wonder, was she crying out of joy that her husband, her beloved, had gone with the living to their Lord? Or . . . because she had not accompanied her husband in the journey to eternity? Or because she had become a widow, and how would she face life without her partner who had been her whole life? But faith was her companion, and loyalty to the memory of her husband was an impetus to face life for the sake of her two daughters.^[57]

The female returns to the hearth. And where women voice their opinions, by and large they defer to men, who are constructed as indisputable heads of household and as the leaders of society, in line with Islamist polemics from reformist to revolutionary, and from the turn of the century to today.^[58] In contemporary biography, women defy their husbands only to convert to Islam. (They are also shown as taking up jihad without mention of permission from husbands, contrary to a view Ghada Talhami suggests may be dominant: “Present-day advocates of the Islamist view claimed that women needed their husbands' permission to participate in the Jihad except in cases of naked aggression against the Muslim community.”^[59] The biographies tend to support, therefore, what Talhami labels as an approach specific to the more revolutionary groups, which see women's jihad as duty rather than as something merely urged upon them.^[60]}

Still, if these women leave home only when the faith calls, they cannot be totally domesticized. If the visibility of the Prophet's wives was historically a sociopolitical issue, a modern division of public-private (which Islamists do not gloss as “Western”) sits uneasily on these lives. Moreover, the imperative of emphasizing women's primary loyalty as being to the faith, even if this can be squared with the domestic by emphasizing women's contribution as that of wife and producer of future Muslims, means that women are not shown as necessarily obedient to the dictates of the domestic sphere. If certain contemporary male Islamist commentators on female space have ruled that having dinner ready for the menfolk takes precedence over going to the mosque to pray, this message would sit uneasily in many of today's biographies.^[61]

Thus boundaries of the domestic are permeable, but only in certain carefully defined circumstances. Protecting the faith and preserving the community provide unchallengeable reasons to disobey fathers and husbands, a theme emphasized in contemporary biographies of wives and mothers of the Companions—hardly any of whom appear in my texts from the earlier period. Thus, Ramla (Umm Habīī;ba), stood up to her father and her first husband in the name of her faith, notes al-Sa‘‘dāwīī;. Yet—ever the good daughter—Ramla is quick to forgive. Rewarded by marriage to the Prophet, she (perfect caretaker and pupil) is the perfect wife: “Ramla, wife of the Prophet, Mother of the Believers, lived in the home of God's Messenger, honored and respected, watching over the comfort of the Messenger of God and learning from him.”^[62]

But wanting to get an advanced education or choose a public career—goals that served to articulate and justify girls' resistance to uncooperative fathers in biographies eighty years ago—are not proposed now as appropriate challenges to paternal authority. Indeed, the point becomes moot in a genre that presents only early Arab Muslim women of the Arabian peninsula as subjects and ignores the need and/or desire of today's women for permanent, income-generating employment outside the home. As the life of Umm Kujja just quoted illustrates, today's exemplary life story unfolds within a set of domestically focused expectations and issues that address a contemporary, young female audience: pregnancy, child care, marriage versus the umma. The use of detail spells out ideal, and expected, comportment. After the death of her second husband, Khadīja refused many suitors: “Perhaps she abstained from marriage because she was occupied with her small, orphaned children. And she recognized that she should not just let her assets go, without forethought to their use, for then the household money might run out. So she put it into commercial transactions which she carried out while secluded in her house.”^[63]

The caveat that Khadīī;ja was secluded as she carried out her business is a contemporary addition, one I have never found in the early-twentieth-century biographies, where seclusion and the veil are loudly silent. This illustrates the way modern and very specific distinctions of public and private have become firmly entrenched as part of a modern ethos—but must still be spelled out.

Concomitantly, today's biographies emphasize emotional fulfillment as women's reward from marriage and family. Unlike early-twentieth-century sketches (and premodern Arabic biographical notices), today's lives of early Muslim women travel inward, into the subject's emotions. Khadīja may have been secluded for business, but as the same biography tells us:

When Sayyidunā Muhammad drew near to the house, with his comely demeanor and noble features, she hurried to welcome him at the door, giving him greetings of return, in a voice overflowing with sweetness, gentleness, and compassion. He raised his face to her in thanks, for he had been averting his eyes, then he told her of his trip, the profits from his commerce, and the perfumes he had brought her from Syria. She listened to him, half-bewitched. When he said good-bye and departed, she remained standing there, following him with her eyes until he disappeared at the curve in the road. And Sayyidunā Muhammad went on his way, feeling a sort of contentment and repose. . . .^[64] [Talking to her confidante Nafīī;sa, Khadīī;ja] did not hide her admiration for Sayyidunā Muhammad. . . . [Nafīī;sa told her to marry him.] Khadīī;ja felt confused about what to say, for she liked the idea, but the Trustworthy One might not, and she must hide her desire until his might appear. . . . The married couple was happy, with the affection and compassion that was established between them and that remained firm. And our Great Mother found out that her trustworthy one was the consummate husband, the most flawless husband there could ever be. . . . [She died] in the arms of the husband by whose love she had been consumed since the day she had met him.^[65]

This Harlequin romance version of Khadīja's life contrasts with the biography of the same subject published in Woman in Islam in 1901, intent on her public life. The nineties Khadīja is emphatically a domestic creature. This 1993 biography, the 1992 sketch of Khadīja quoted at the start of this chapter, and al-Ghazālī's Khadīja all emphasize the sentiment of domestic life, the emotional construct of monogamous heterosexual love as underlying the ideal Muslim couple and, by extension, the ideal community. Of course Khadīja, as Muhammad's sole spouse during her lifetime, is especially useful here. But the first polygynous household in Islam is glossed as a series of monogamous relationships. Marriage, as portrayed here and in most other contemporary biographies of women of Muhammad's time, is companionate, harmonious, emotionally fulfilling for both partners, a partnership that unites religious duty in the larger community with the duty of maintaining the family as the basic unit of society. The harmony can be threatened only (and temporarily) by the greater loyalty that the individual—male or female—owes to God and the furtherance of the faith. At the same time, this portrayal undergirds a basic assumption of Islamist discourse on gender, that which underlies the belief in women's and men's roles as complementary. “Women's emotionalism” has long been one of the pillars on which Islamist gender ideology, in all its manifestations, bases its gendered division of duties in the ideal society.^[66] Unlike in traditional biographies, emotional relationships between spouses are dramatized through dialogue:

“Was our separation easy for you, Abū al-‘‘As?” asked Zaynab.

“It was the torture of love, Zaynab. By God, after you, life was not sweet for me.”^[67]

But marriage, as saturated in emotional satisfaction as it is shown to be, is dictated by the requirements of the community of faith, as signaled in the subtitle to ‘‘Isā's portrait of Umm Sālim bt. Malham, mother of one of Muhammad's companions: “Islam before Affection.” The subject “found in Abū Talha all the qualities she hoped for in a man, but he was an unbeliever. May God's mercy be upon her, her principles and her faith had an impact on her desire for Abū Talha.”^[68]

This is given further emphasis by the relatively greater focus now on adult social roles, whereas early in the century there was more attention to childhood training. This distinction alerts us to one divergence between early- and late-twentieth-century modernities. As we saw, it was important in the 1920s to assert over and over the value of girls' education; focusing on the supportive father as decision maker furthered the message. In the 1990s, girls' schooling is taken for granted: after all, it has been compulsory in Egypt since 1952 (al-Bizrīī;, like others, notes that education is one of the gains from feminism that can never be “unsaid”).^[69] This is not because it would be anachronistic to mention “schooling” in biographies of early Muslim women, for eighty years ago parallels were drawn between the intellectual training of, for example, Sayyida Nafīī;sa and the need to educate girls of the nascent Egyptian nation. Perhaps this is hardly necessary now. But it also serves to emphasize women's domestic rather than public roles.