Does Islam suffer from a malaise of female oppression—or a discomfort with individualism? Are its male elites resisting the intrusion of femininity—or democracy? They fear the threatening power of rebellious individualism, inescapably feminine AND democratic! writes Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi.[1] This rebellion she names nushūz, a Qur’anic term originating in one of its most controversial suras (4:34) frequently cited to support domestic violence against women. For Mernissi however, the essence of nushūz is empowering: a wife’s symbolic revolt against her husband in keeping with the fundamentally egalitarian message of Islam. An act of nushūz is thus a reorientation of one’s qibla, for while Muslim men orient their actions around the divine will, women are made subservient to those who serve the divine will![2] “All debates on democracy,” Mernissi exhorts, “get tied up in the woman question and that piece of cloth that opponents of human rights today claim to be the very essence of Muslim identity.”[3]

Mernissi is speaking, of course, of the hijab—the physical barrier frequently imposed between men and women in the Muslim world under the claim that women are fitna, that they who uphold obedience most strictly are paradoxically most disruptive of Islam’s eponymous expression of divine subservience.[4] Historicizing the occultation of the Qur’an’s core, Mernissi argues that domestic violence against women has consistently functioned as a repressive tactic against the participatory potential of the individual-qua-woman, the most burdensome challenge to patriarchal monopoly of divine authority. But we have yet to identify more precisely the relationship between Mernissi’s democratic and feminist advocacy. So too, her work is too often understood as a systemic whole rather than being broken into discreet periods themselves defined by eclectic methodologies.

Hence, Mernissi’s work ought to be firstly divided into secular and Islamic feminist classifications.[5] This mélange finds complete expression as an empowerment of femininity and individualism central to the spirit of Islam, developed through an understanding-centered Qur’anic reading and meticulous scrutiny of hadith literature. However, Mernissi relies on an essential foundational core of Islam that she believes has been occulted in both modern and classical historical moments. Her transcendent feminism is thus framed as neither secular nor Islamic—but democratic, which she understands as a basic religious truth for Muslims. As such, Mernissi comes to rely upon what I call the democratic problem of Islam: the positing of an infallible religious essentialism which humans can access as a provision for mediating across the equality of believers.

Has the specter of nushūz arisen today in response to the gross excesses of inequality in the Muslim world? No—rather, in her revisionist accounts of Islamic feminism beginning with The Veil and the Male Elite, Mernissi is firstly a historical thinker chronicling the unfolding of Islam’s central message—sexual equality—and its constant distortion from the beginning, best visualized in the beating. Physical violence threatens the submissive believer from both within and without of the ‘ummah: for Mernissi, Islam has always existed alongside national conflict for which, as a nation-building project, it was originally the solution.[6] But if gender violence for Mernissi is couched in a horizon of possibility where the future is never guaranteed, does such circumstance restricting the active pursuit of the ideal not exist today? This is what Mernissi considers the feminized reality of modern Islam that largely replicates the faith’s early uncertainty. It is the basis for her revisionist calls for reimplementing a sense of fundamental Islam. Such crisis is a historical question worthy of our moment, as the ‘ummah is caught between individualistic capitalist innovation from without and individualistic political opposition from within. It remains a perennial feature of Islam’s promising idealistic message, just as al-Tabari long ago considered the rise of Islam’s banner of promise as a unifying response to a national crisis. This egalitarian goal was unachievable in the Salaf’s earlier moment of crisis—seen through the lens of sexuality, women’s expression of self as an active sexual ego and equal community member cools to resemble Freud’s of a masochistic, inwards-moored feminine passivity.[7]

So historically speaking, the question of female equality in Islam has been answered. But has that moment also been eclipsed today? Mernissi’s answer changes over the course of her scholarship, first advocating rebellious pursuit of the ideal in in a secular framework rejecting any Islamic ability to fulfill its democratic promise. “Sexual equality,” she writes, “violates Islam's premises, actualized in its laws, that heterosexual love is dangerous to Allah's order. Muslim marriage is based on male dominance. The desegregation of the sexes violates Islam's ideology on women's position in the social order: that women should be under the authority of fathers, brothers or husband.”[8] Male violence against women adopts an inevitable character linked to the realities of relational power in the Islamic faith. But the historical affinity of Mernissi’s Islam—her shared crisis between contemporary and historical faiths testifying to a centrally egalitarian message—allows her to develop nushūz as the practical expression of an unshakable belief that Islam can exist without gender violence and in wholesale democratic authenticity: because it has.

This shared moment is key to Mernissi’s reading of the Qur’an, seeking a core foundational truth to Islam beyond societal misrepresentations. Mernissi makes clear that is a male elite controls any sort of knowledge about the Qur’an as the truth of Islam through exercises of memory embodied in hadith scholarship.[9] However, in her attentiveness to the Sunna Mernissi devotes surprisingly little attention to the depth of the Qur’anic message, preferring instead to develop various misreadings of contextual revelation that support anti-Islamic patriarchal structures.[10] To that end her scholarship develops a foundational understanding of Islam as fundamentally egalitarian—although its ideals were thwarted by the patriarchal strength of pre-Islamic traditions.[11] As such, the message of the Qur’an is never truly in doubt, leaving Mernissi unable to reconcile certain interpretive difficulties as expressed in fiqh. Instructively, this confusion is best expressed when Mernissi is not dealing with the Sunna, more specifically in Beyond the Veil's secular scholarship where Mernissi debates the legal justification for polygamy. By her reckoning “the Koran does not provide a justification for polygamy,” though one is elaborated post-facto by a male Moroccan commission tasked with authoring a personal legal code.[12] But a certain problem of practical acquiescence is evident here. On the one hand, legitimizing polygamy seems like a historical product of certain circumstance that is read onto the Qur’an, inconsistent with its true meaning. Polygamy was revealed as a permissible measure following the battle of Uhud and seems in some ways a lawful limitation of jahiliyya disharmony and libidinal aggressiveness. Yet on the other hand, legislators and judges have continued to interpret the sole reference to polygamy in the Qur’an (4:3) as permissible only when it does not lead to injustice. 
Thusly, polygamy is addressed ambiguously in the Qur’an—it is and isn’t legitimated—with enough problematic entwinement that as a secular feminist Mernissi must reject this possibility of Islam’s sex equality as impossible in its democratic demand.[13]

Any hope for a democratic, feminist, submissive Islam must then come through the recovery of the Qur’an as historical, as revealed text. In contrast to Amina Wadud’s work in The Qur’an and Women, Mernissi’s methodology implies a problematic disciplinary spirit that occults the truth of the Qur’an. To that end, her interpretive readings essentially follow the path of creating an inner-outer set of meanings and significance. We might this duality as grammatical and psychological that aims to offer a methodology of understanding, the seeking of the interior sensibility of the sign.[14] A notable example derives from Mernissi’s most substantial Islamic feminist text: The Veil and the Male Elite; in her eighth chapter, she notes that egalitarian Islam could develop from surah 33:35. But instead, she follows verses 33:34 and 4:34—establishing through the legitimation of male violence unequal rights to intimacy and segregated wealth access. Mernissi’s style of her later works offers a more realistic mediation not only between problematic verses, but also in confronting challenging conflicts between individuals, prophets, and God. Moreover, her insistence on the centrality of a religious truth to Islam reproduces the conservative issue of an authentic society in line with foundationalism, a challenge that also plagues her hadith scholarship. For Lamia Zayzafoon, as well as Svensson, Mernissi “paradoxically endorses the notion of truth from which the hadith derives its authority and hence forces the power of tradition to reinscribe and perpetuate itself.”[15]

At the very least, Mernissi herself cannot be faulted for not acknowledging the scope of the democratic problem bound up in her own thought. What does it mean to claim rights in the birth of a historical movement that inscribes within itself its own end? The first challenge is one Mernissi locates in fundamentalist Muslim women: the radical interpretation of foundational Islamic texts which, to however questionable ends, employs legitimate methodology.[16] In general, such attempts cut through impure, ambivalent cultural elements of Islamic tradition to access a ‘true’ spirit of Islam which, in its foundational text, still remains ambiguous. Difference produces, it seems, that which it forbids. While perhaps a conservative tact, it is one that Mernissi herself engages in by elaborating a sense of perfect Islam that borders on essentialist.[17] Second, Islam’s democratic problem is Janus-faced, concerned not simply with an understanding of its heritage but with active engagement in its future. Muslim intellectuals, in the words of Ebrahim Moosa, must confront the impossible difficulty of honoring their intellectual influences while remaining innovative.[18] This is the everyday praxis of any democratic conception of Islam, which itself brings to life many Islams—different ways of conceiving time and space, expressing faith, and representing Muslim identity. While Mahmoud critiques Mernissi’s nushūz as limited to men when it is really part and parcel of Islam’s empowerment of the individual, he notes that it nonetheless remains a wholly creative process that seeks liberation of the woman and of the individual together in accordance with God’s will.[19]

This is the submissive essence of Islam that Mernissi so artfully elaborates in the ideal female character. Yet it depends here on proper access on the part of a Muslim to the supreme authority—in our state of prophetus ex machina, there exists no proper arbitrary system to mediate between an active sexuality and a submissive one. If both men and women are to be active and passive in situationally dependent manners, we have the opportunity again to test the experimental equality Mernissi believes to have briefly existed in the Prophet’s lifetime and the early years of the Rashidun Caliphate. But when first tested, intractable problems arose, of which two short examples will suffice: the first is related by Abbasid historian al-Baladhuri, in describing Khalid ibn-al-Walid al-Makhzumi’s capture of Damascus in 636 CE.[20] While commanding the force of Muslims and enjoying in large part the loyalty of his subordinate generals, Khalid unilaterally negotiates terms of surrender on behalf of the Muslims with the city’s Greek defenders. Does a military commander enjoy the power of peace-making (and thus loot-provisioning) for an egalitarian community of believers, particularly if—like Khalid—he is a recent convert? Second, al-Tabari, writing some years later about the fitna following Caliph Uthman’s death, describes a Basran assembly in 656 CE, twenty years after Khalid’s capture of Damascus.[21] In a debate between ‘A’isha and ‘Ali, both of whom claiming the right to lead the ‘ummah, a young man who did not belong to the elite stood up and noted the increasingly non-democratic bend of decision-making in Islam.[22] The message of the prophet, he argued, was accessible to all despite the problem of hierarchy (who had become a Muslim first). Why are you negotiating communal leadership on our behalf?

The real question is: in an egalitarian community of believers, why should anyone obey anyone else, anyone other than God? Mernissi briefly alludes to the significance of this question—“all monotheistic religions,” she writes, “are shot through by the conflict between the divine and the feminine”—but considers not that the democratic state of Islam is both the solution to states of fitna and their prospective source.[23] After all, following Mahmoud’s critique we might note that nushūz, as an individual endowment, is accessible to men just as much as to every member of the ‘ummah. al-Baladhuri’s prosaic response—in the voice of Khalid’s general abu-‘Ubaidah—clarifies that even a new convert, the ‘lowest’ of Muslims, can negotiate binding terms. But there is no challenge here to adjudicate competing claims as in al-Tabari. In the Basran assembly, we observe that the question of compulsion, the possibility of negotiation, is most easily resolved by the sword, particularly when no right choice is available. The young man’s death signals to the ‘ummah that they must accept a modicum of submission to powers beyond God to preserve any democratic autonomy at all. This notable problem of compulsion, beheld briefly in flashes of a more egalitarian Islam becomes a democratic cul-de-sac for Islamic expression which, Mernissi paradoxically assures us, is the best hope for women’s liberation and justice in Islam today.

28 April 2022

  [1] Fatima Mernissi, Women’s Rebellion and Islamic Memory (London, Zed Books: 1996), p. 119-120

[2] Ibid, p. 109

[3] Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite (New York and London, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company: 1991), p. 188.

[4] I follow Qasim Amin’s use of fitna as a chaos provoked by sexual disorder and specifically initiated by women. He employs it in an explicit sense of losing control that afflicts men, who are those specifically portrayed as needing to fight temptation: see Qasim Amin, The Liberation of Women and The New Woman, p. 64-65. Furthermore, I name Amin as source here because his reformist position, which critiqued fiqh ruling in favor of concrete reforms for women through education, societal participation, financial empowerment, and unveiling, is a firm standpoint of Mernissi’s as well (see Ziba Mir-Hosseini in ch. one of Gender and Equality in Muslim Family Law).

[5] Raja Rhouni, who primarily develops this distinction, separates an Islamic feminist trilogy (The Veil and the Male Elite, The Forgotten Queens of Islam, and Islam and Democracy) from the highly secular Beyond the Veil. I would add to the latter category Women’s Rebellion and Islamic Memory, which nevertheless offers a limited mediation between both themes. Here, Mernissi’s advocacy of rebellion, rather than internal fiqh-based reform, and her careful contesting of Islamic memory blend into a mature core of her feminist thought.

[6] This notion of nation-building is firstly expressed by al-Tabari, amongst other classical scholars, but Mernissi brings it more fully into her own on p. 68-69 of The Veil and the Male Elite.

[7] Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, p. 41

[8] Ibid,  p. 18-19

[9] Mernissi, Women’s Rebellion and Islamic Memory, p. 113

[10] For Mernissi, truly sufficient engagement with the Qur’an as revealed word is to be found only in the eighth chapter of The Veil and the Male Elite and the tenth chapter of Women’s Rebellion.

[11] Mohamed Mahmoud, “To Beat or Not to Beat: On the Exegetical Dilemmas over Qur’an, 4:34,” in Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 126, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 2006), p. 549

[12] Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, p. 47

[13] I am speaking of Mernissi’s respective articulations that “the Koran does not provide a justification for polygamy” (Beyond the Veil, p. 47) and her discussion of “the verse of the Koran justifying polygamy…” (Beyond the Veil, p. 48). This discrepancy of meaning is never clarified or resolved.

[14] Inga Römer, ‘Method,’ in Keane and Lawn ed. The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics (Oxford, Blackwell: 2016), p. 87

[15] Lamia ben Youssef Zayzafoon, The Production of the Muslim Woman: Negotiating Text, History, and Ideology (Oxford: Lexington Books: 2005), p. 22

Jonas Svensson, Women’s Human Rights and Islam: A Study of Three Attempts at Accommodation (Unpublished Thesis, Lund Studies in History of Religions Vol. 12: 2000), ch. 3

[16] Fatima Mernissi, Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (New York: Basic Books: 1992/2002), p. 165; “There are women who are active within the fundamentalist movements and those who work on a reinterpretation of the Muslim heritage as a necessary ingredient of our modernity.”

This also remains a critical issue elaborated by Adis Duderija in his 2015 paper “The ‘Islamic State’ (IS) as Proponent of Neo-Ahlḥadīth Manhāj on Gender Related Issues.”

[17] For the best elaborations of this critique, see the works of Lamia Zayzafoon in The Production of the Muslim Woman and Abdessamad Dialmy in Sexualité et discours au Maroc.

[18] Omid Safi ed. Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism (Oxford, Oneworld Publications: 2003), p. 113

[19] Mahmoud, “To Beat or Not to Beat,” p. 549

[20] al-Baladhuri, Futuh al-buldan (Lugduni Batavorum, E.J. Brill: 1968), p. 122

[21] al-Tabari, Tarikh al-umam wa al-muluk (Beirut, Dar al-Fikr, 1979), vol. 5, p. 179

[22] Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite, p. 55-56

[23] Ibid,  p. 81

I take ‘feminine’ here to mean the individual, strictly defined as herself firstly, who excels at submissive passivity but remains forever tortured by an active, confident sexuality—the necessary mediation of this conflict in herself is a microcosm between democratic-feminist nushūz and the One God.