Deterritorializing oppression:
Lou Salome and the individuation of the Islamic female
Philip Simon
Local identity on a global stage
The west’s precarious conceptions of the place of women in contemporary
Islamic culture can be traced in large part to its non-consideration of Islam’s
socio-historical context, so that the possibility that Qur’anic Islam
could support believers’ transcendence of their biological gender is
also conveniently and often neglected. The distinction between Islam’s
theoretical Qur’anic notions concerning women and such nations’
as Iran, whose civil code actively sanctions numerous practices which clearly
penalize women juridically, must be made, however. The ebb and flow of the
deterritorializing global economy seemed to invite initial hostility and later
open arms when it began with the spread of the industrial revolution through
the Middle East, but today’s west will expect not only ever-increasing
economic transparency but western standards of equity in jurisprudence as
well. And conversely, with modern anti-globalization alarmism slowly gaining
credence amidst the global economy’s emerging implications, middle-class
alarmists’ hegemony (however puritanical) cannot help but to undermine
such a traditionalist religio-politico-social model as contemporary Islam.
The fluidity of Islam’s existing legacy, however, with respect to validity
in the changing global cultural climate via its internal objective value-codes,
is defended mainly by scholarly theorists and juridical purists. Consideration
of these apologetics is an attempt to clarify whether or not an Islamic purist’s
view of the woman, even and especially when understood within its proper socio-historical
context, can possibly be reconciled with today’s Americanizing global
economic trends, which promise to further destabilize ethnic social patterns.
This paper does not pretend, however, to propose a political activism, but
rather to explore (the trajectory of) a re-consideration of the Islamic female
experience informed by the thoughts of a recent female who, though not a Muslim,
developed in a relative ideological context.
Abdal Hakim Murad’s (2000) contention is poignant, that "Islam’s
theology of gender contends with a maze, a web of connections which demand
familiarity with a diverse legal code, regional heterogeneity, and with the
metaphysical no less than with the physical. This complexity should warn us
against offering facile generalizations about Islam’s attitude to women."
(http://www.cyberislam.com/literature/women/gender/html)
While Islam’s ‘attitudes’ may be too broadly divergent to generalize,
practices legally-sanctioned by the faith are a necessary concern in public
policy and commerce as the western(ized) conscience takes on a continuously
more important role in shaping both.
The Iranian Qisas (Law of Retribution) prescribes that
for the process of stoning men be buried up to their waist, while women are
buried up to their chest (Article 102), making obvious the possibility of escaping
the punishment by freeing oneself from the hole (Article 103) greater for a
man than for a woman. Haideh Moghissi (1999, 110) extends the meaning of the
blood money (dieh) payable to the family of the victim for the death
of a man being twice that for a woman (Article 258), to an official calculation
(at least in financial terms) of the value of awoman’s life as half that
of a man’s. In her examination of current Islamic periodical literature,
she finds Chief Justice Ayatollah Yazdi admitting that it has encouraged the
murder of women under the pretext of defending ‘family honor,’ so
that many women and girls live in constant fear for their lives simply because
some men murder their wives or daughter on slight suspicion and are then easily
set free by paying a very low sum of compensation (blood) money (dieh); in addition,
setting a higher price on a man’s life also means that rape and women’s
murder go unpunished (Said-Zadeh, 1998). Under the Iranian criminal code these
crimes are punishable by death, but under the new "Islamified" law,
the family of a murdered woman is required to pay a substantial sum of dieh
to the murderer before he can be punished (Article 209).
Needless to say, Article 209’s social and cultural consequences go beyond
its impact on individuals. It (Article 209) proves that in Iran, today, full
citizenship remains a male prerogative. In fact, laws like these constitute
an assault on the dignity of women; they negatively affect social perceptions
about women and women’s own sense of self-worth and confidence, forcing
them to live under constant fear (Moghissi, 111).
Elizabeth Fernea’s travelogue (1998, 196) of her "Search for Islamic
Feminism" recalls the observation of Dr. Bedriya Awadhi, a Kuwaiti lawyer
who does not call herself a feminist: "They (Arab families) want daughters
always. But they need sons…According to our present laws, only a son
can protect his mother and her property. Only a son has that legal standing.
And I don’t think the laws are going to be revolutionized very soon."
It may be argued deterministically that the more egregious practices are bound
to fade into oblivion with the crystallization of American worldwide material
hegemony, but if a recognizable political form of Islam is to survive the
washing tide of economic advancement, its foundation will certainly have to
remain deeply rooted in the coherence of its philosophical system.
Islam’s feminist dialectic
For women believers in the fundamentals of the Islamic faith, who accept the
Qur’an as the word of God (as Muslims do), non-acceptance of the justice
of its sexual hierarchy within the family and in society is tantamount to
heresy. Such a person may call herself a feminist, but by conventional western
reckoning, she cannot believe in both the Islamic and feminist concepts of
equality—the two notions are incompatible (Moghissi, 1999; Fernea, 1998).
The perspective of the Islamic woman believer has been widely studied, but
the overwhelming majority of the studies conducted conform to types of an
Orient contra Occident paradigm, with western feminism (often western-educated,
middle eastern female academics) pitted against two branches of apologists:
Islamic clerics and western women who embrace religious Islam. Ziba Mir-Hosseini
(1999), in a contribution to the opposing scholarship (which argues for the
compatibility of Islamic beliefs and feminism) describes well the tension
faced by women who acquire a feminist consciousness in either a western or
an indigenous form: their Muslimness is perceived as backward and oppressed,
yet authentic and innate; while their feminism as progressive and emancipated,
yet corrupt and alien.
The seventh century found Arab women dispossessed of spiritual, material,
and domestic freedoms of almost any sort; primitive local codes intertwined
discursively with parvenu Christian politics and morality to confuse the nomadic
shepherd and merchant tribes who traced their lineage to Ishmael. The universe’s
order as revealed to Mohammed, however, proclaimed cosmic equanimity for women,
who became responsible for educating themselves and day-to-day domestic administration;
child rearing was aggrandized with Mohammed’s declaration that "Paradise
is under the feet of the mothers." " O ye who believe!" says
the Qur’an, "Ye are forbidden to inherit women against their will."
While civil administration and material maintenance belonged to men, these
rights were commonly accepted to be earthly ones, which significant mundane
responsibility was equated with women’s celestial.
"Islamic theology confronts us with the spectacular absence of a gendered Godhead. A theology which reveals the divine through incarnation in a body also locates it in a gender, and inescapably passes judgment on the other sex. A theology which locates it in a book makes no judgment, since books are unsexed. The divine remains divine, that is, genderless, even when expressed in a fully saving way on earth." (http://www.cyberislam.com/literature/women/gender/html)
And further,
though "the divine is referred to by the masculine pronoun, grammarians and exegetes concur that this is not even allegoric: Arabic has no neuter, and the use of the masculine is normal in Arabic for genderless nouns. No male preponderance is implied, any more than femininity is implied by the grammatically female gender of neuter plurals." (ibid.)
For Murad, a gender-neutral image of the divine suggests a God who is simply above gender. One logical conclusion that may be drawn connects the infinite and eternal transcendence of gender to its right fulfillment on earth by each individual believer.
Even the most sophisticated apologists of Islam and feminism’s reconcilability
concede soberly the ideological monopoly exercised, for instance, by Iranian
clerics and jurists in the Islamic Republic of Iran (many such apologists
are themselves clerics/jurists). Women’s subordinate legal position is
firmly upheld by these civil and religious leaders, who maintain their own
right vis-à-vis western criticism to cultivate oppressive regimes informed
by divine justice as pre-modern social models, and an antidote to the moral
and social crises currently experienced by western society, (which they identify
as) resulting directly from women’s insubordinate, de-regulated legal
status and public participation. Their defense of the right to choose to limit
others’ choice fits neatly under the umbrella of cultural relativism,
which is an ironic benchmark of intellectual ‘post-modernity,’ the
star to which feminism in modernity has had necessarily to hitch itself. A
re-evaluation of the Islamic female’s ideological currency must be undertaken
if she is to make a sound platform of the rights feminism has already helped
establish for women in the western world. The Islamic female experience can
be actuated by a perspective beyond post-modern cultural relativism, but also
beyond feminism’s heretofore necessary overreaction to modernist constructs.
An attempt to enhance the position of the Muslim female believer must begin
with the woman herself; the specifically Islamic feminist/antifeminist discourse
is in many ways a shared experience with women in recent periods of western
history. As I will explore in the next section, the changing cultural climate
in which a contemporary Muslim female finds herself, overlaps in many ways
with the experience of an inspirational woman at a corresponding point in
European modernity’s cultural paradigm shift.
Historical transitions: evolution of the ego
The nineteenth century’s latter half saw the industrial revolution catalyze
the release of imperial Europe’s increasingly tenuous codified and ideological
solipsism. Its thriving intellectual communities, however, represented this
phenomenon paradoxically: the experience of the self was the subject of deeper
rational scientific study than ever before. Education as a cultural imperative
sailed on the winds of class de-stratification to an enriched and enhanced
view of the individual per se, and women no less than men profited
from the benign side of the empowerment of the individual. Modernity’s
stabilization from ‘revolution’ into historical moment balanced
on this very fulcrum—the status, position, prominence of the individual
in meta-narrative—just as the place of the personal narrative in post-modernity
vacillates toward an enriched perception of the individual in current re-evaluations
of the meta-narrative. It is suggested that a specifically empirical approach
to the rational model of Islamic fundamentalism can inform believing woman
in daily as well as socially implied dimensions: the multidimensional empowerment
exemplified by western feminism can share a trajectory with the empowerment
of Islamic women, starting at the level of individual experience.
Lou Salome, the intellectually beguiling, emotional and spiritual muse to
Freud, Rilke, and Nietzsche, concludes in Jesus the Jew "that it is always
only the individual, the great individual who attains the peaks of religion,
its genuine blissfulness and its full tragedy." What he experiences up
there, the crowd below does not learn. Likewise the Islamic female, as on
a trajectory of individuation via a speculative individualized experience
of her faith can evolve in moment to transcendence of her current functional
context. Indeed to Salome isolation in vacuo of a trait resultant from votive
spirituality is impossible, for "the actual religious phenomenon really
only emerges in the back-effect of a god on the human beings who believe in
it, no matter how that god originated (ibid., 342-3). Salome viewed being—that
is, being in the world—as a cause for rejoicing, and passion after
the wholeness of existence as characteristically female: "She celebrated
the feminine desire and capacity for self-dissolution over masculine oedipal
renunciations only if the ‘feminine’ tendency to remain locked in
a childhood misperception of the other as the locus of the self and the consequent
lack of ego boundaries were countered by an equally strong passion for knowledge
and or being in the world (Martin, 36)."
The idea of the ‘back-effect’ of religion becomes particularly relevant
when it is observed that the force driving the Islamic consciousness in its
conception of unity is its social facet, self-perceived as a cosmic meta-narrative.
Institutional constraints at a given historical moment may be expressed oppressively,
but if the sunnah purports to be a constructive moral scheme it is
bound to reckon with contextual evolution which by western measures of constructiveness
may be progressing at an indistinguishably varying pace from, but not necessarily
after a pattern incongruous with, constructive social goals. Martin (78) describes
the religious experience according to Salome, as ‘an involuntary blending
and exchanging of the most intimate with the most lofty—this conception
of the intimate as the lofty…the characteristic basic element of the
religious.’ In a socio-cultural moment which appears to conspire to divest
the individual (woman) of her right to subjective individuation, what sounder
recourse could she have than to the development of personal intimacy with
her faith? However limited her external locus may prove itself, the means
of self-becoming under an oppressive political regime will always be at her
fingertips if it be a Muslim one, for what are the revealed religions if not
the organized infusion of purpose into suffering’s chaos?
Most oustanding in Lou Salome was her devotion exclusively to the culture
of her time, complete immersion in that culture, by which her life could be
characterized by Rudolph Binion (491) as "outwardly and inwardly both…among
the richest on record." An "interest in religious experience,"
though, "was at the center of her particular model of reading and interpretation,
and religious effect served as the foundation for her conception of modernity
as renewal, growth, and transformation" (Martin, 27). The only obstacle
to these variants on the theme of religious devotion as a few bars to the
ear of an Islamic female—and stimulus toward a life-enriching, gender-affirming
pattern—would be her material access: clearly at the center of the need
to adapt to shifting global perceptions, though, is democratized access to
knowledge tools, and this point quickly grows moot where it is not already.
Binion’s expansion upon Lou Salome’s legacy helps us to identify
precisely where the potential for a gender-transcendent Islamic experience
can be informed by this woman whose own consciousness was raised by the cultivation
of intimacy with an individual religious back-effect: "A microchemistry
of history could lead into a new macrophysics of history in ways unforeseeable—not
excluding some simple transpositions, as from how we singly to how we collectively
reformulate our past."
Conclusion
According to Moghissi (38), literature by Islamic women (e.g., Nawal el-Saadawi)
emphasizes women’s irrepressible strength and struggles rather than their
victimization, de-mystifying their experiences under patriarchal traditions
and institutions. This is in fact a shared tradition in western and "Oriental"
literature by women, a demonstration of mutuality of purpose and grounds for
re-consideration of the compatibility of the Islamic religious experience
with multidimensional feminine empowerment and enrichment.
Despite regional development further outside of normatively
rational loci and the ostensible consensus among Islamic females (and males
alike) that the western paradigm is unable to process the elementary symbols
of their faith’s coherence (Kahf, 179; Fernea, 29, 87-88, 246-47), the
oppressed juridical position of the contemporary Islamic female deposits itself
immediately in a culturally repressive social experience. Criticism of the
Western narrative of the Muslim woman has not attended to the historical genealogy
of this narrative (Kahf, 177), though, and fundamentally Qur’anic conceptions
of ‘woman’ in Islam are not incompatible with an empowering itinerary
in a similar vein to that traveled by constructs of the western woman, albeit
requiring sensitivity to ethnic developmental paces and moral context. An
analysis of the character of this necessary sensitivity shows it to be sustained
effectively externally and internally in the united moral context and cultural
moment of which Lou Salome’s thought was a product.
Attempts to disentangle cultural conceptualizations of ‘self’ from their social or ideological context are infinitely less realistic than simple cognizance of self, which is the springboard to enacting meaningful changes in one’s environment. Tradition quotes a Russian ascetic of the middle 19th century (Seraphim of Sarov) as having said that "one who saves his own soul saves a thousand with him." The cultivation and defense of legal equanimity (and all its social implications) may be outpaced by one’s spiritual development, but civil advancement can only be stabilized, indeed catalyzed, by the noetic experience of emancipation. Social justice figures centrally in Qur’anic Islam, and Salome’s idea of religious back-effect engages in a unique and essential discourse with Islam’s basically holistic premise.
Uniformity is no more possible among Islamic political boundaries than globally
for at least the foreseeable future (if it were even desirable). But just
as the humanist search for a unity of knowledge fueled the political syncretism
which has been the linchpin of progress for the west, coherence in one’s
self-narrative is essential to the preservation of one’s place in a necessarily
united global scene. The western experience is itself immeasurably enriched,
en route to the recognition of universal commonalities—and the avoidance
of self-destructive militarism—from reminders (such as Islam nurtures)
of the transcendent potential in the nature of one’s place cosmically,
of human identity. It would be hopelessly myopic to imagine that either Judaeo-Christian
modernity or today’s Islamic world can serve one another as only economic
stimuli.
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