Sufi Narratives of Intimacy (Ibn, Arabi, Gender, and Sexuality)

Book Specification

Book Description

About the Book

Thirteenth century Sufi Poet mystic, and legal scholar Muhyi al-Din ibn al-Arabi gave deep and sustained attention to gender as integral to questions of human existence and moral personhood. Reading his work through a critical feminist lens, Sadiyya Shaikh open fertile spaces in which new and creative encounters with gender justice in Islam can take place. Grounding her work in Islamic epistemology Shaikh attends to the ways in which in which Sufi metaphysics and theology might allow for fundamental shifts in Islamic gender ethics and legal formulation addressing wide ranging contemporary challenges including question of women right in marriage and divorce the politics of velling and women leadership of ritual prayers.

Sheikh deftly deconstructed traditional binaries between the spiritual and the political private conceptions of spiritual development and public notions of social justice, and the realms of inner refinement and those of communal virtue. Drawing on the treasured works of suffism, sheikh raises a number of critical question about the nature of selfhood subjectivity spirituality and society to contribte richly to the prospects of Islamic feminism as well as feminist ethics more broadly.

Sadiyya sheikh is senior lecturer of religious studies at the university of cape Town.

Introduction

Once upon a time a wise and generous story unfolded. This is how it might be imagined. It is cairo on a sweltering afternoon and the faithful are streaming into a beautiful simple mosque. The Friday (jumua) prayers are about to begin. In the courtyard people take their ablutions in the cool fountain water that provides welcome relief from the heat of the cairene afternoon. A group of women sitting close together is silently reciting the Quran. An old man his face kissed gently by time is sitting easily upright with eyes close meditating on the beautiful name of God. Two old friends, both returning to the city after years of travel, trade and learning are greeting each other with a tender embrace. A young man hand raised in supplication is softly murmuring his deepest yearnings into the hearing of the omniscient one. As the call to prayer is given a hush falls over the crowd with each person repairing to his her private supplications before the sermon begins.

The preacher ascends the stairs to the pulpit. She is the accomplished spiritual savant Umm Zaynab Fatima bint Abbas al-Bagdadiyya but renowned among the religious divines of cairo as jurist (faaiha) who provides practical legal responses to people questions (muftiyya). And yes it is the fourteenth century. And no there is no outrage or shock among the congregant that Shaykha Fatima is preaching to a mixed gathering of males and females in a mosque. In fact Shaykha reputation as a scholar has traveled with her to cairo. While living in Damascus she had trained as a jurisconsult among as elite group of Hanbali scholars known as the Maqadisa having studied with one of the great teachers of the city Shaykh Ibn Abi Umar. Among the women of Damascus and more recently Cairo she has come to be loved and revered as the wise one who provides refuge and guidance in their spiritual strivings.

She has studied with no less one of the leading male intellectuals of her time the protean Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyya. In public circles he has on occasion praised Shaykha Fatima not only for her intelligence and knowledge but also for her personal qualities of enthusiasm and excellence. Yet on this hot day in the Cairene mosque he sits among the congregants unable to quell his state of discomfort. To his great chagrin Shakhya Fatima easily even presumptuously ascends and defends from the pulpit as is unaware of the fact that she is after all only a women. This woman appears to be oblivious to any limitations of her sex. As he leaves the mosque after the service, Ibn Taymiyya realizes that his unease and acute irritation with Shaykha Fatima presence on the pulpit has so overwhelmed him that he had not even heard a word of her sermon. He goes home and falls into a restless afternoon sleep.

Ibn Taymiyya later recalled this incident: it unsettled me that she mounted the pulpit to deliver sermons and I wished to forbid her. In Ibn Taymiyya inner struggle to stop this self assured women from public preaching he saw the prophet of Islam in a dream. The prophet put and end to his anxieties and according to Ibn Taymiyya rebuked him saying. This is a pious woman. The prophetic instruction quelled Ibn Taymiyya agitation reconciling him with Shakha Fatima roles as public preacher.

Who would have thought that one of the most renowned mujtahids of the premodern Muslim world Taqi al-Din ibn Taymiyya an individual whom may present day chauvinists claims as their religious luminary would have been subdued into accepting a woman authority by a dream? Indeed it was no less than the prophetic command that had castigated the Hanbali juriconsult. This dream not only challenged his fourteenth century gender lenses but continues to do so for other today, providing a stark contrast with the vision of women that are promoted by the contemporary votaries of ibn taymiyya. Very few of ibn Taymiyya followers will energetically recover this view of their intellectual exemplar either in terms of its gender implications or of the sufilike recognition of a prophetic dream. But many Muslim have not had the good fortune of an emancipator prophetic dream foretelling that women spiritual equality does in fact have social and ritual implications.

In the contemporary period a worldwide Muslim debate was sparked in 2005 when professor Amina Wadud led Friday ritual prayers in full view of the international media in New York City. Muslim prayer leaders (the imamte) around the globe issued fatwas (legal decree) regarding women leadership taking a variety of positions on the subject. Sahib BenCheikh the former grand mufti of Marseilles belonging to an older generation of male graduates of Egypts Al-Azhar University publicly participated in a congregational prayer led by another women in solidarity with the event in New York. Conversely, Dr. Ssoad Salehm a female Islamic law professor at Al-Azhar, declared that women ld prayers with mixed congregations constitute apostasy in Islam, an offense punishable by death under classical interpretations of Islamic law. Among her reasons for rejecting female imams, Saleh declared that the women body even if veiled stris desire. Ironically a few years earlier Saleh has applied to become Egypts first female mufti an application that was still officially pending at the time of the New York incident but might well be considered de facto unsuccessful. salehs positioning in the debates on women leadership in the mosque and in public rituals demonstrates current contestations over embodiment and gender, spirituality and leadership sexuality and power within the Muslim world.

Our perspectives on this fraught contemporary debate might be enriched by turning to the counsel provided by an eminent thirteenth century Muslim scholar Muhyi al-Din ibn al-Arabi in a striking contrast to the present day focus on women bodies as the inappropriate provocateur of male desire the premodern ibn Arabhi has a very different entry point for the understanding of gendered ritual leadership. He unperturbedly claims understanding of gendered ritual leadership. He unperturbedly claims ungendered and equal access to the position of imam on the basis that men and women have identical spiritual potential in the Islamic tradition. Without much fanfare ibn Arabi informs us that spiritual equality between men and women has very clear social and ritual consequences. It is not simply centuries that divide saleh from this premodern personality; it is also radically different assumptions on the nature of gendered human beings in light of an ontological spiritual and religious telos. Ibn Arabi thus categorically assert that women may lead mixed congregations of men and women in ritual prayers.

The story of women contemporary ritual leadership began in south Africa my birthplace in event that shaped me and planted the seeds for deeper study and clarity on issues of gender and spiritual in islam. The year 1994 was particularly memorable for Muslim South Africa because of two significant event. First the first nonracial democratic election book place singaling the official death of apartheid. Second professor Amina Wadud, a visiting scholar and author of a pioneering Islamic feminist work, Quran and woman delivered the Friday sermon (khutba) at Claremont main road mosque which I attended. The mosque had invited wadud to share her insight on Islam with its members who also decided to use the occasion to transform the gendered nature of their prayer space. Not only was a women going to give the all important Friday sermon but the female congregants would move from the balcony into the central space of the masjid on par with albeit separate from the men. For me a young committed Muslim women entering the newly open a receptive Masjid felt like stepping into the warmth of the sunshine after a lifetime of being concealed in the shadows a feeling somewhat akin to voting in my country of birth for the first time. In my experiential framework this minority congregation was boldly embodying a fundamental social justice imperative that was intrinsic to Islam. However even as this act of liberation unfolded many broader community contestation of this even were pervaded by assumption that women are somehow peculiarly and inferiorly defined by their bodies and that these female bodies in the proximity of men somehow diminish and threaten the sacredness of the mosque. Integrating justice and harmony into both personal and communal religious spaces constitutes a serious religious challenges for a number of contemporary Muslim which is why women free access to central spaces of worship and women ritual leadership remain controversial topics.

Wadud Khutba at the Claremont Main Road mosque was inspirational. Her words were like a glorious warm summer rain drenching us in mercy and radiating all kinds of existential possibilities. This was a spirituality ripe sermon inspired and inspiring beautiful and beautifying luminous and illuminting. She went to the very heart of the matter to the understanding of Islam as a state of engaged surrender in all of our most intimate and immediate relationship as human beings marriage pregnancy, childbirth and sites of intimate relationship to the divine one. For the first time in my adult life in a public religious space, I felt myself sincerely validated as a Muslim woman. While some sectors of the south Africa Muslim community enthusiastically hailed the event other segment of that community became incensed. The resulting conflict reflected fierce struggles regarding Muslim understandings of sexuality sociality and human embodiment.

Contemporary gender politics relating to Islam is not restricted to the issue of women imams or internal differences within the Muslim world. Wide ranging geopolitical dynamics and ideological contestations are played out on the bodies of muslim women. Representations of Muslim women vacillate between dominant western image of Muslim women as the only truly liberated women. The debated on both sides are often simplistic, rigidly formulated, authoritarian, ideologically loaded, and contingent on the political forces of the day. Examples abound. French public schools prohibit Muslim women from wearing head scarves (hijab) ostensibly as a marked as a symbol of authentic Islamic identity. U.S. politicians strategically invoked the plight of Afghani women as a way to build public support for the American-led invasion of Afgani women as a way to build public support for the American-led invasion of Aganistan in 2001 yet are notably silent about the Saudi Regime appalling women right record as a result of the two countries intimate political economic relationship. In many part of the Muslim world notion of gender equality are often interwoven with larger postcolonial identity struggles about indigenous values cultural allegiances, and loyalties and disloyalties. The global context for discussions of gender justice and Islam is therefore ideologically fraught with contestation of the nature of religion, law and secularism; citizenship, identity, and empire; freedom, equality and self-expression.

Many antagonists in these debates share the assumption that Islam is a monolithic religion with a singular all embracing gender paradigm. Such generalizations not only belie the complex varying realities of contemporary Muslim women but also ignore the rich diversity of the Islamic tradition that is informed by the mlange of Arab, Turkic, pesian, Andalusian, African and south Asian histories and cultures. Gender dynamic among Muslim are as complex and polymorphous as the realities of women (and even men, for that matter) in other religious social and political contexts while there are undoubtedly universal aspects within islam that all fall within a cohesive religious category this unity is mostly accompanied by myriad diversities.

Among contemporary Muslims, gender contestation occur within a tradition characterized by diverse gender episteme. Contenders in gender debates often cull the primary Islamic sources of the Quran and hadith had their traditional legacy of interpretation especially jurisprudence to find positions that for example either support or reject women ritual leadership. Many of the arguments are of an epistemological nature that is contestation over which among these various legal position count as authoritative Islamic knowledge. Such argument often are limited in scope primarily addressing the outer symptoms of gender injustice such as women imamate or the politics of hijjab. These types of debate fail to address the way in which the underlying theological category of the human being is gendered.

While such gender contestation are necessary and important a richer understanding of gender debates in Islam requires more than simple epistemological disputation about which traditional sources to prioritize and authorize in relation to specific issue. Debates on women roles as imam or the religious necessary of hijab for example demand exploration and interrogator of the foundational premises and constructs of gender. Contesting position on gender are after all underpinned by specific assumptions regarding human nature and existence in fact by specific anthropological cosmological and ontological constructs. A through investigation of gender thus demand an analysis of these related philosophical constructs in Islam.

Islam, Gender Politics, and the Deeper Question
I use the term religious anthropology to indicate a focus on the fundamental concern of what it means to be human within the Muslim tradition. This focus addresses question of the nature and vision of human being as depicted within an Islamic worldview. For the believer, it addresses the age old ontological question Who am I? and What is the nature of existence? within the context of Islam.

The question of what is means to be a human being immediately beckons the inquirer to the next level of inquiry: what does it mean to be a gendered human being? Does Islam provide notions of a universal essence that transcends gender? Does Islam teach that men and women have essentially different nature? And if so do all women and all men share some universal female or male essence respectively? Or rather is there a combination of sameness and differences between men and women that is do men and women share certain attributes while differing in terms of other attributes? Definitions of beings human invariably provide meanings of beings gendered.

A final related question in addressing religious anthropology focuses on the relationship between gender and moral capacity. Does the religion set out different moral and existential goals for men and women? Or does Islam posit a single ungendered map for human moral agency? Are the ultimate goals human morality within an Islamic framework the same for men and for women? In sum how do gender differences relate to a person moral capacity?

Definition and understanding of religious anthropology are closely linked either implicitly or explicitly to an ontological framework. Ontology refers to a theory about the nature of reality or the nature of being. Its most basic questions and concerns are the following: What actually exists? What is the nature of being? What is? An ontological level of inquiry in term of human nature asks the question Who an I? in relation to the entire universe of existence to all that is. Ontology focuses on the most fundamental categories of beings and the relations among them. Ontological question thus place our understanding of gendered human beings and a religious anthropology within a broader framework of understanding the nature of reality.

While ontology deals with existence in general its intimate companion cosmology, provides a map for understanding the universe in its totality it. Cosmology concerns an understanding of the order and relationship between the various part of the created universe. Questions that arise in relation to cosmology might include the following; what is the nature of the universe? How was it created? For what purpose and toward what destiny was it created? What are a human beings origin place and purpose in this universe? Thus a cosmological level of inquiry in Islam enables the inquirer to situate notions of human nature and existence within a broader framework of understanding the nature of all creation. In a study of Islamic cosmology one also finds macrocosmic mappings of gender that resonate in varying ways with understandings of human genderedness.

A strong relationship exists between these seemingly abstract constructs of religious anthropology ontology and cosmology on the one hand and the realpolitik of gender on the other. Underlying many of the gender inequalities in traditional Islamic legal and ethical formulations are problematic assumptions about the nature of men and women. Many opponents of women imamate for example argue that a woman in a central sacred space stirs sexual desire in male congregants distracting them from their religious devotion. How might these individuals respond to the challenge of men being stirred sexually by the presence of other men in the mosque? Their stated argument against women imamate is premised on a rather convoluted gendered view of humanity in which carefully constructed and highly problematic religious universe is created or the moral benefit of men at the expense of women.

On the one hand men are assumed to be the natural leaders and spiritual authorities in sacred spaces. The prevailing status quo naturalizes male control of the public religious space so that women mere presence in a mosque often needs to be explicated explained justified or vilified. The dominant order of things is such that women are inherently positioned as impostors in the public sacred space. Women otherness is defined in this view as primarily in relation to a powerful sexualized body that ultimately desacrealizes the mosque for male worshippers particularly if the women occupies center stage as the leader of the ritual congregational prayers.

These constructs reflect a patriarchal religious anthropology that is at once binary and hierarchical. Women and femaleness are constructed as sexual carnal and often by extension emotional and irrational engendering chaos. This sexualized feminine realms is seen as oppositional to spirituality intellect and rationality which are associated with maleness and men. Thus men are superior and are inevitably leaders and authorities over the lesser human beings who is the female this gendered split between the principles of body and the mind presents us with Cartesian dualism in Muslim garb.

On the other hand this argument attributes enormous power to female sexuality and paradoxically reduces men to hapless victims of their own libidos. While women possess and overwhelming sexual allure heterosexual men have little capacity for resistance. Because of men inability to focus on God in the presence of the female body women need to be outside men field of vision. Male subjectivity in this guise is defined by and caught in conflict between the realm of the transcendent divine that men are seeking and the presence of the immanent female body that they simultaneously desire.

Ironically even perhaps humorously such an argument significantly diminishes male humanity. From this perspective a man is effectively a perpetual moral adolescent subject to uncontainable heterosexual instincts and his locus of self control has escaped into the shadows just outside of his personal command. His ineffectiveness in monitoring his own body and behavior necessitates vigilant policing of the outer environment. Women whose essence is characterized by a chaos-creating sexuality needs to be remove rendered invisible dispatched into luminal spaces and derived of voice. Thus with such effort toward and effect on women the spiritual sanctity of the mosque (for men) is retained a dubious notion of moral agency indeed.

These types of arguments are based on a religious anthropology that defines men and women as essentially different and more especially gives gender differences distinct hierachal values. Ontologically women are lesser then men and are hence accountable to divergent moral and ethical standards. Men and women are anointed with varying types and levels of moral capacity in the world. This asymmetrical moral compass generates a normative framework when men dominate and lead in the public world and women are ideally relegated to the invisible spheres of the private and the domestic. As such the contemporary Muslim politics of the imamate is essentially underpinned by questions about human nature that are based on specific understanding of genderdness. These understanding must be rendered fully and on an individual basis if gender contestations are to move forward in terms of changing social mind sets rather than merely tackling issues or symptoms.

These debates on the imamate also illustrate that anthropological and ontological assumption prefigure ethical and legal norms. Thus genuinely challenging the widest possible forms of sexism in society requires delving challenging the widest possible form of sexism in society requires delving into question about the constituent nature of humanity male and female from a religious perspective. How is the primary God human relationship from a religious perspective understood to mediate relationship between the sexes? Framing questions in this way might intimately link ontology to understanding of religious anthropology while simultaneously addressing gender as an intrinsic part of a broader Islamic cosmology.

The Islamic tradition in fact possesses some rich multi multitextured and deeply grounded approaches to gender with regard to politico-legal issues. The thirteenth century muslim polymath Muhyi al-Din ibn al-Arabi offers precisely such an approach when addressing the issue of women imamate. Within an Islamic cosmology Ibn Arabi the contemplative mystic asserts men and women have equal capacity to attain the divinely ordained vision of spiritual completeness. Indeed for ibn Arabi the equal ontological capacity for spiritual completeness shared by men and women defines an Islamic view of human nature. On the basis of his assumptions regarding a universal and ungendered human capacity promoted in Islam the incisive jurist asserts that a women leadership in ritual prayer is licit before men and women, adding somewhat dismissively that one should not pay heed to anyone who opposes it without proof. In his arguments on the subject ibn Arbi Skillfully unmasks the pervasive problematic or limited web of ontology and religious anthropology underlying gendered political issues in Muslim thought.

Understanding Sufism, Understanding Gender
Ibn Arabi deep rooted reponse to the issue of women imamate is also suggestive of his primary discursive tradition Sufism. In addressing the nature of human beings, society and God, sufi scholars often reveal a specific preoccupation with ontology or the nature of reality. Drawing both on contemplative interpretations of the primary Islamic sources the Quran and hadith and mystical experiences Sufi thinkers address most questions including understanding of gender in relation to the ultimate nature of reality.

Within the Islamic tradition Sufism is often described as the inner path (tariqa) that allows a person to attain the goals of ethical and spiritual cultivation. When relating Sufism to other dimension of the Islamic tradition a popular hadith tradition suggests a tripartite structure of moral obligation that is islam (outward conformity) imam (inward faith) and ihsan (virtuous excellence). Some Muslim thinkers suggest using the metaphor of the embodied human being to understand these different element of moral obligation for the seeker. Jurists they suggest focus on assessing outward conformity with religious precepts that might be associated with the limbs of the body. Theologians and philosophers are concerned with notions of faith and belief which in turn correspond opt the mind. Sufism focus on the inner processes of spiritual cultivation and experiential knowledge both of which culminate in virtue and may be seen to be located in the heart. As such Sufism seeks deeper and more complete knowledge of the inner dimension of reality (or realities) that will facilitate a more intimate relationship with God and greater submission to the divine will. Islam, Imam, and Ihasan are all considered integral to the optimal moral functioning of each human being. To make full sense within this schema, inner understanding take as given the outer forms of religion, historically Sufism has for the most part operated within the norms of Islamic tradition while concurrently pointing to realities beyond them.

My focus on gender in Ibn Arabis work is largely framed by the potential of sufi discourse to address gender questions at a deeply rooted level of religious meaning. I examine the dynamic interplay among sacred texts, mystical cosmologies and social reality engaging at the nexus of these three critical junctures the religious construction of gender. Assisted by a feminist lens I explore in particular how love sexuality marriage and related gender dynamics are conceived imagined and created in the works of a major sufi thinker in a formative period of the Islamic legacy. I probe questions about the elements that constitute humanity male and female from a religious perspective the processes by which the primary god human relationship is gender and the understanding of these perspectives to mediate intimate relationship between the sexes. I hence unpack various narratives of masculinity and feminity within these texts.

My investigations into the relationship between gender and ontology are vested in the possible implication for core ethical values in Islam. Focusing on intimate relationship and the realm of sexuality as well as public gender dynamics the framework of ibn Arabi mystical cosmology is rich ground for an examination of seemingly abstract philosophical concepts such as ontology and religious anthropology on the one hand and the concrete daily relationship between men and women on the other.

Islamic narratives about personal intimate relationship and public gender imaginaries often share central gendered assumption. In particular patriarchal epistemologies have often configured the intimate realms of love, marriage, and sexuality as domestic, private and outside of the political sphere thereby rendering them invisible and inviolable. Feminists have rendered transparent the insidious reach of ideology and patriarchal politics into the sphere of the private. Deconstructing the binary between the private and the political has revealed the systemic nature of gendered power dynamics that pervade intimate and family relationship. Whether sexual, marital, emotional, or familial, all intimate relationship are entwined in dominant narratives of gender that are imminently political in nature.

Drawing on these feminist insights, I examine the interconnections between the personal and the political in my sources focusing specifically on the way in which marriage, sexuality, and intimate relationships are configured, I keep these personal/political narratives of gender in conversation with sufi ontology and anthropology to contribute to the contemporary search for a relevant Islamic ethics of gender justice.

I claim neither that Sufis hold a monolithic position on gender nor that Sufism is an ahistorical panacea of all things good and wonderful for women. To be sure, Ghazali, a central Sufi thinker who exposed the limitations of a law not based on ethical praxis concurrently conceptualized an ethics of justice that is comfortable and even often complicit with male domination. Thus Sufism does not automatically cure people of sexism. In its historical development and its multiple contexts, Sufism like all other areas of Islamic thought has been characterized by tension between patriarchal inclination and gender egalitarian impulses.

While negative understanding of women have been evident in some strands of sufi thought and practices from its inception particularly during its earlier ascetic variety, Sufism in other instances has also provided gender egalitarian spaces. As discussed in more detail in chapter significant evidence indicates the multitudinous approaches to piety adopted by early Sufi women. While varying levels of asceticism and spiritual discipline formed an integral part of the religious life of these women their pline formed an integral part of the religious life of these women their lifestyles varied from traditional gender roles as mothers and wives to nontraditional roles as independent individuals travelers, teachers, disciples, and solitary mystics. The departures of early Sufi women from traditional gender norms may have been rendered acceptable to other Sufis male and female largely by the greater priority most sufis accord to the individual inner state and by the concomitantly diminished significance of gender identity on the spiritual path. In some cases sufi practices have subverted traditional patriarchal religi