Gender in Islamic Culture Barbara

Gender in Islamic Culture

Barbara Stowasser divides the groups debating over Islamic values into three categories: modernists, conservatives or traditionalists and fundamentalists. Women's status and role are an important to all these groups in supporting their position for or against modernism. Traditionalists emphasize the importance of preserving women's roles according to the classic Islamic law that stipulates their inferiority in terms of decision making at community level. Women must thus be excluded form any form of political life since their main quality is coming from their enhanced emotional capacities compared to the rationality of men Each of the three groups involved in the debate regarding Islamic values have their own methods of interpreting the religious texts their arguments rely on (Stowasser).

In the Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran, Ziba Mir-Hosseini evaluates the debate over women' status in today Islamic world, focusing on the present situation in Iran. After the Islamic Revolution, pessimists thought that women were condemned to lead most of their lives within the walls of their homes again. If in the case of the modernists involved in the debate over Islamic values, like the Egyptian theologian Muhammad Abduh "identified women's liberation from male oppression... As an essential precondition for the building of a virtuous society" (Stowasser, 1994), the Iranian traditionalists that fought for the returning of the public space to the rules destined to insure moral virtue have actually paved the way for women that abode the rules to play an important role into the public sphere (Mir-Hosseini).

The Qur'an as the Word of God given to Mohammed through his messenger, Gabriel, has several female figures called according to Stowasser "The Mothers of the Believers in the Qur'an." The prophet's wives are, of course, the models used by theologians and exegetes to argue their position in the debate over gender roles and women status in the Islamic culture. but, the prophet's women were considered to be like no other and therefore their image was extraordinary. They were excluded from the public life only precisely because of their extraordinary position in the community. "Muslim interpreters past and present stipulate that the Prophet's wives participated fully in the communal affairs of Medina until the revelation of hijab verse. They ascribe their exclusion from public life at that time to several factors" (Stowasser, 1994). The revelation of the hijab brought the custom of covering Muslim women, according to the model of Muhammad's wives when they were in a public space. Their freedom of movement was by no means restrained by the new law and it only aimed at providing protection for them when outside their homes (idem).

Once Islam expanded into new territories, it met new cultures and borrowed some of the customs in the newly conquered regions. Two of them were the veiling of women and their confinement within the walls of their homes they took from the Byzantines and the Sasanians.

The consequence of the so called "Affair of the Lie" that involved Muhammad's favorite wife, Aisha and her and the accusations of being unfaithful that rose against her was the revelation that gave God's word in favor of her innocence, followed by some other piece of legislation in Sura 24:4 that punishes those who accuse women of not being chaste and are not able to provide four witnesses (Stowasser, 1994).

There are a few specific verses in the Qur'an that address the Prophet's wives after his seclusion from them which were extensively used in the debates of theologians and Islamic law makers. Verse 33:33 is according to Stowasser the precise source of forbidding Muslim women to display any parts of her body or wear embellishments in public.

The first generations after the Prophet started to consider him and his entire life sinless and his women became flawless models for any Muslim woman. There different views over the image projected by the Prophet's wives that ranged from the all too common women who were subject to all human weaknesses to the models of virtue that will lead all Muslim women toward a life according to the word of God.