Zaynab al-Ghazali campaigned for women and the nation in Islamist terms, and Doria Shafik campaigned for women’s rights and human rights in the language of secularism and democracy. The divergence in their perspectives repeats the divergence incipient in feminism at the turn of the century and articulates a persistent and ever-widening bifurcation within Egyptian and Arab “feminist” discourse—feminist in that it affirms women and wornen’s subjectivity. A variety of social forces and personal circumstances always play a part in shaping particular paths taken. The following brief review of the politics and lives of these two women therefore constitutes merely a preliminary exploration of the factors shaping the differences between them and is perhaps suggestive also of the differences underlying the two primary and contrasting channels through which women have affirmed themselves and their subjectivity in the twentieth century in the Egyptian, and Arab, context. As this century draws to its close, the idiom developed by al-Ghazali, the Islamist founder of the Muslim Women’s Association, is unexpectedly proving to have the greater resonance for those now shaping mainstream Egyptian culture, and the feminism of Doria Shafik, like that of Shaʿrawi, Amina al-Saʿid, and others, secularist and westernising, the indisputably dominant voice of Arab feminism for most of this century, appears to be now becoming the marginal, alternative voice.
Al-Ghazali (b. 1918) started her political life working for Huda Shaʿrawi and what al-Ghazali (in an interview given in 1981) termed her “women’s movement, which calls for the liberation of women.”16 She quickly found herself in disagreement with its aims and resigned to found, at the age of eighteen, her own organization, the Muslim Women’s Association. The association helped women study Islam and carried out welfare activities, maintaining an orphanage, assisting poor families, and helping unemployed men and women to find useful employment. Within six months of its founding, Hasan al-Banna tried to persuade al-Ghazali to incorporate the association into his Muslim Brethren movement. He met with her after she delivered a lecture at the Brethren headquarters and exerted considerable pressure on her to make this move. In recounting how she and the association members refused, although they offered full cooperation in every other way, al-Ghazali refers to al-Banna’s persistence in the matter and to his “anger” at their refusal. By the time she wrote of these events in Ayam min hayati (Days of my life), the Muslim Brethren had been subjected to intense persecution, al-Banna had been murdered (in 1949), and she herself had been imprisoned and tortured for six years (1965–72) at the hands of the Nasser regime for her support of the Brethren cause.
Even after making an oath of allegiance to al-Banna when his brotherhood was undergoing its trials, al-Ghazali, and her association, remained independent. When the government ordered the Muslim Women’s Association to dissolve in the late 1940s, in conjunction with its measures against the Brethren, al-Ghazali contested the order in court and won. By this time she was a figure to be reckoned with. She acted as an intermediary between al- Banna and her friend Mustapha al-Nahhas, leader of the Wafd, and through the 1950s and early 1960s she consulted with the senior leaders in the society, joining with them in devising its future program. The Muslim Women’s Association continued to function until her imprisonment in 1965, when it was dissolved. It appears not to have been reconstituted, though al-Ghazali continues to lecture and work for the Islamic cause.
As al-Ghazali recalled it to her interviewer forty-five years later, she broke away from Shaʿrawi’s association to found her own because she believed Shaʿrawi’s approach to be a “mistake.” She thought it was “a grave error to speak of the liberation of women” in an Islamic society. She believed that Islam provided women with “everything—freedom, economic rights, political rights, social rights, public and private rights,” though these rights were unfortunately not manifest in Islamic societies. The goal of the association was “to acquaint the Muslim woman with her religion so she would be convinced by means of study that the women’s liberation movement is a deviant innovation that occurred because of the backwardness of Muslims. ... We consider Muslims to be backward; they must remove this backwardness from their shoulders and rise up as their religion commands.”
Besides helping women study Islam and carrying out benevolent activities, the association also took a political stand: “Egypt must be ruled by the Koran, not positivistic constitutions.” The way to bring about a society in which women had freedom and human rights was also the way to revive the Islamic nation, which “possesses one third of the world” and which geographically speaking is “richer than the rest of the world”: “Why are we backward? Because we are not following our religion, we are not living in accordance with our constitution and laws. If we return to our Koran and to the Sunna of our Prophet, we will live Islam in reality, and we will control the whole world.”
Al-Ghazali did not spell out how these comprehensive rights would be restored to women or whether a new Islamic law would be drafted to ensure them—for surely they are not provided for in shariʿa law as commonly applied. There is, moreover, an implicit or potential contradiction between her declaration on the provision of these rights and other statements she has made on the role of women in Islamic societies. Her definition of their role essentially coincides with that expressed by the reformist wing of Brethren thought: although a woman’s primary role is in the family, she is also entitled to a professional life and to full participation in political life. Al-Ghazali said: Women [are] ... a fundamental part of the Islamic call. ... They are the ones who build the kind of men that we need to fill the ranks of the Islamic call. So women must be well educated, cultured, knowing of the precepts of the Koran and Sunna, informed about world politics, why we are backward, why we don’t have technology. The Muslim woman must study all these things, and then raise her son in the conviction that he must possess the scientific tools of the age, and at the same time he must understand Islam, politics, geography, and current events. He must rebuild the Islamic nation. We Muslims only carry arms in order to spread peace. We want to purify the world of unbelief, atheism, oppression, and persecution.... Islam does not forbid women to actively participate in public life. It does not prevent her from working, entering into politics, and expressing her opinion, or from being anything, as long as that does not interfere with her first duty as a mother, the one who first trains her children in the Islamic call. So her first, holy, and most important mission is to be a mother and wife. She cannot ignore this priority. If she then finds she has free time, she may participate in public activities. Islam does not forbid her.
What is unclear here is who is to see to it that women fulfill their first, holy, and most important mission. There is at least a potential contradiction between this view and her statements to the effect that Islam provides women with freedom and comprehensive rights. Al-Ghazali does not indicate whether she envisages that women themselves will have the autonomy and authority to decide whether or not they intend to fulfill their “first, holy, and most important mission” or whether she accepts the common notion of male- defined Islam that men are in authority over women and have the right of decision in such matters. Given the high regard in which she is held by the Brethren and by many eminent patriarchal leaders of the Arab world, including Prince Abdullah Feisal of Saudi Arabia, who visited her in Egypt, it is doubtful that she challenges the idea of male authority and control. These statements, with their grand and idealistic vagueness, imply contradictory perspectives, and nowhere is that contradiction addressed.
The contradiction in al-Ghazali’s position on women is not confined to words. Al-Ghazali’s own life seems, on the one hand, to flagrantly undercut her statements on the role of women in Islamic society and, on the other hand, to demonstrate that all rights are available to the woman who knows her Islam even within the area legally of greatest peril for women, the laws governing marriage. Thus al-Ghazali entered into two marriages, she informed her interviewer, on terms that she set and that gave her control over the continuance of the marriage. She divorced her first husband because her marriage “took up all my time and kept me from my mission” (as Islamic activist, not as wife and mother) and because her husband “did not agree with my work.” She had stipulated before marrying him that her mission came first and that they would separate if there was any major disagreement between them. Besides illustrating that al-Ghazali is correct in that women do have the right (in some schools of Muslim law) to stipulate conditions that are legally binding in their marriage contracts, these remarks about her marriage also indicate that apparently it is permissible for women, or, in any case, it was for her, to place their work before their obligations to raise a family and to devote themselves to their husband. The terms of her second marriage were similar to those of her first; indeed, her second husband not only agreed in writing that he would not come between her and her mission but also, in a complete reversal of conventional roles, agreed too that “he would help me and be my assistant.”
Al-Ghazali’s autobiographical account spells out no less unambiguously than her statements to her interviewer how her calling took precedence over marriage. She writes that she made clear to her husband that
if your personal or economic interests should conflict with my Islamic work and I find that my married life has become an obstacle to my fulfilling my mission and the establishment of an Islamic state, we would part. ...
I had decided to cancel the matter of marriage from my life, in order to devote myself completely to the mission.... I do not have the right to ask you today to join me in this effort, but it is my right to stipulate that you do not prevent me from continuing in my struggle in the path of God ... the struggle to which [I] have devoted [myself] from the age of eighteen.
Apparently al-Ghazali was raised with the expectation that she would be an Islamic leader. Her father in particular nurtured this ambition in her. A graduate of al-Azhar, he was a large-scale cotton merchant, who devoted his time, outside the cotton season, to touring the country and preaching in mosques on Fridays. He schooled her in the Islamic cultural heritage and told her that with God’s help she would be a leader—not in the style of Huda Shaʿrawi, she reports him saying, but in the tradition of the women leaders of Muhammad’s time.
Al-Ghazali’s account of herself shows her collaborating more and more closely with the leaders of the Brethren, Abdel Fattah Ismael, Hudaybi, and Sayyed Qutb. She met frequently with Ismael to study how “to restore this nation to its glory and its creed.” She describes how they decided to promote their cause with pamphlets, study groups, and lectures for thirteen years (“the duration of the call in Mecca”), and then, after these years of “Islamic education for young men and old, and for women and girls,” they would conduct a survey. If they found that “the harvest” of those believing in Islam as both “religion and state” was 75 percent, then they would call for the establishment of an Islamic state. If the harvest was less, they would renew their teaching for another thirteen years. It was unimportant if generations came and went; what was important was to continue working to the last and to pass on the banner of Islam to the next generation.
As the testament of a religious revolutionary, al-Ghazali’s account is striking in a number of ways. First, it is remarkable that a spiritual commitment to Islam seems to be absent. Islam figures as a path to empowerment, to glory, to a properly regulated society—but not as a spiritual path. Similarly, the qualities of a reflective consciousness, of an acuity of moral perception, which might be expected in someone with a religious mission, again seem to be absent. In justice to her, she does write of “good nights and unforgettable days, holy moments with God.” These words occur in the context of group readings, when people met together to read verses of the Quran and review their meanings and implications. Those were days, al- Ghazali writes, “which were sweet and good, a blessing from God surrounding us as we studied and studied, educating ourselves and preparing men and youth ... for the cause.” But again the cause and the exhilaration of working together in a common cause seem to be what the words are celebrating.
Al-Ghazali’s account is striking in the second place for the openness with which it links the need to restore Islam with the need to restore a nation suffering from the humiliations of imperialism and for the openness with which it preaches that Islam is the path to power and glory. The call to Islam is not made to call souls to God or proclaim a fundamental truth but to restore to power and give “control [of] the whole world” to the nation of Islam.
Finally, her account is remarkable for the apparent naïveté and bland innocence with which she announces an agenda of intolerance, exemplified in her statement “We Muslims only carry arms in order to spread peace. We want to purify the world of unbelief, atheism, oppression, and persecution.” Surely even Muslims, let alone people of other faiths or none, have reason to fear such a statement, for perhaps their Islam will not precisely fit the desired mold. Al-Ghazali seems either unaware or unconcerned that some of the worst brutalities in history have been committed in the name of purifying society.
Source: Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam - Historical Roots of Modern Debate, 1992, Conclusion (ebook version)
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