I want to suggest here that during the years that interest us - from year 3 (the defeat at Uhud) to the beginning of year 8 (the conquest of Mecca) - the Prophet's project for equality of the sexes foundered because he refused to minimize the sexual aspect of life, to hide it, to consider it marginal or secondary. The Prophet was in a vulnerable position. His aims came to nothing because he always refused to separate his private life and public life. He could only conceive of the sexual and the political as being intimately linked. He would go to prayer directly upon leaving ~A'isha's bed, using the small door that linked her room to the mosque. Despite 'Umar's advice, he continued to go on expeditions accompanied by one or two of his wives, who, accustomed to being directly involved in public affairs, moved around freely and inquired about what was going on. One scene in al-Tabari depicts 'Umar as being beside himself at seeing 'A'isha strolling around the battlefront beside the trenches: "But what brings you here?" he cried out. "By my life, your boldness borders on insolence! What if a disaster befalls us? What if there is a defeat and people are taken captive?"--Fatima Mernissi (1987 [1991]) The Veil and The Male Elite: a Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam. Translated by Mary Jo Lakeland, p. 162.
Mernissi's Beyond the Veil is, of course, better known than The Veil and the Male Elite. In fact, while scholar.google tells me that the latter book is cited plenty, I have never seen it discussed in high theory in political philosophy. This is a shame because in addition to the themes announced in its title and subtitle, it is a wonderful study in the challenges and trade-offs of revolutionary, political leadership. And while the narrative is not as gripping as, say, the masterpiece of the genre, Black Jacobins (recall here; here), it certainly held my attention through out while discussing key years of the Prophet Muhammad's early struggles and their significance to Islamic jurisprudence, historiography, ethics, and political life.
As the quoted paragraph indicates, Mernissi treats Muhammad's original program for Muslim political life as fundamentally egalitarian. (The language of 'rights' in the sub-title is a bit misleading rights don't figure much in the book.) Throughout the book, she recounts his progressive views on women's inheritance, property ownership, and agency more generally. And she offers a plausible account how the history narrated in Qu'ran supports her argument.
In fact, in her hands Muhammad recognizes over thirteen hundred years before the second wave feminists that the political and the personal are intrinsically intertwined. And she shows this, in part, through a fascinating discussion of the spatial structure of the first mosque built in Medina with 'A'isha's apartment having its own entry into the mosque.
Now, for Mernissi later Islamic jurisprudence (Fiqh), which governs Islamic communal life in practice, was corrupted, in part, by some dubious Hadith (sayings) attributed to the Prophet (these were promoted by interested politicians); and, in part -- and this is more interesting -- by a flawed empirical method that treats all the data on par without regard to the systematic and ethical principles that might unify the Prophet's vision. And without some such principles, the evidence that is shaped by pre-Islamic patriarchy (and aristocracy) and by the late years' tactical regressions has no counterbalance (despite clear evidence in the sources that these regressions were challenged by important political agents in the moment).
In her book, Mernissi never mentions the Islamic philosophers (Falsafa) or Ibn Khaldun. But with them she shares a treatment of Muhammad as a political leader who, unlike failed prophets, recognizes that without arms the ethical message may not have successful uptake. And with them, there is an implied criticism that The Prophet did not handle the problem of succession very well (although with them she recognizes that the way succession was initially handled for the rightious caliphs at least has democratic potential). Because his companions are left without the right sort of guidance, within half a century the Umayyad have re-established the contingencies of (monarchic) birth as source of succession (familiar from trival life) and shortly thereafter the battle of Karbala shatters the very possibility of a unified community committed to justice (forever, it seems).
Okay, with that in place, we can now make more specific the significance of 'Umar to her narrative/analysis. 'Umar was Muhammad's father in law, one of the leading companions of Muhammad, and later the second caliph after his death. And in Mernissi's analysis 'Umar becomes the archetype of a key element in Muhammad's political coalition: strongly attracted to Muhammad's vision on intrinsic moral and political grounds, which provides a chance to overcome political and social crises, but unable to let go of what we would call male entitlement or patriarchy rooted in (tribal) martial virtues.
For Mernissi 'Umar represents resistance to "Islam as a coherent system of values that governs all the behaviors of a person and a society, and Muhammad's egalitarian project, are in fact based on a detail that many of his Companions, led by 'Umar, considered to be secondary: the emergence of woman's free will as something the organization of society had to take into account." (184)* And she describes the political circumstances in which Muhammad has to tack toward 'Umar's commitments in order to ensure the survival of the Ummah.
Now, it is important to recognize that for Mernissi 'Umar is not merely a traditionalist who lacks understanding of a part of Muhammad's vision. For she grants that the crisis years at Medina were fundamentally unstable. And she recognizes that he is not all wrong that part of the cause of the crisis or disorder were the Prophet's women (and women generally), who "were objects of envy." (185) And she implies that this crisis is not just due to the revolutionary internal regulation of Muslim communal life, but also to Muhammad's attempts to change the laws of warfare for his followers. In particular the abolition of using war as a means of enrichment and (sexual enslavement) if that meant turning fellow Muslims into booty (and slavery). (I was reminded of the issues surrounding Republic 470-1). Here's how Mernissi discusses the circumstances of the key decision at the height of the crisis:
In the circumstances of the military crisis in Medina in years 5, 6, and 7, the Prophet did not have many choices for coping with the insecurity in the city. He could either accept and live with this insecurity while waiting for the new source of power, God and His religion, to become rooted in the people's mentality, or he could reactivate the tribe as the police force of the city. The first option meant living with insecurity while waiting for God to show His power through military successes. With the second option, the tribe would assure security in the city immediately, but Allah and his community would disappear forever - at least in their original perspective. Muhammad's message - his dream of a community in which individuals are respected and have rights, not because they belong to a tribe, but simply because they are able to believe they have a link with a God - was dependent on the role that the tribe was called on to play during this transitory phase. Tribal power was the danger. Tolerating it, under any form whatever, as a means of control was a very grave compromise with the Muslim idea of a reasoning human being who exercises self-control. (187-188)**
But because tribal power is needed to make a successful transition from the crisis to Arab unification, 'Umar's more limited vision wins out. I don't mean to suggest that this is all of Mernissi's analysis--she roots the ultimate decision also in the fragility of age (and declining sexual prowess) of The Prophet. So, on Mernissi's view what Islam became after the crisis years is an unsteady mixture between Muhammad's original vision and the demands of realpolitik.
Structurally, these circumstances are analogous to the way the initial outcome of the French revolution was a victory for men, while simultaneously a step back for women's political participation (and an unexpected disaster for slaves). The underlying problem here is a more general feature of transition problems. Recall that (here, here, here, and here), I understand the transition problem, as how to move from an unjust status quo to an ideal (or vastly improved) state and, in particular, with a population raised under bad institutions (or, if one conceives this [as I would not] in eugenic terms, bad breeding). This is intrinsically challenging. But the problem is made all the more difficult when there are foreign enemies or when the war-economy is a central feature of the pre-revolutionary society.
Mernissi's feminist reading of the history of early Islam is an invitation to her fellow religionists to reject a millennium worth of jurisprudence and for a renewal from within (in this respect she is not unlike the fundamentalists who would have little time for her). But it is also a reflection on the challenges or constraints that pre-existing practices and beliefs generate to or impose on even the most successful projects of revolutionary renewal. To put this poetically, no prophet of political society can truly emulate God's creation from nothing, but s/he has to work with materials that cannot be fully cleansed from the effects of history, at least not at once.
*I hope somebody can check the French because I think Mernissi's argument only requires the claim that women have agency and moral/political standing not the claim about free will.
**Yes, here Mernissi does does discuss political entitlements in terms of 'rights.'
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