Evolving Definitions: On the concept of Disobedience and Women's Rights in Islam
ٍI had jury duty yesterday, which turned out to be more or less sitting around in a room, getting called to another room, and then getting interviewed by attorneys and having a peremptory challenge issued to my being on the jury, at which point I went back to my original room to repeat the process. Eventually they let me go. But this potential ordeal turned out to be kind of a good thing, as it required me then to focus on actually reading a few articles I had left on a pile. I picked up one randomly, something I had printed some time back, and it started like this:
That sentence threw me for a complete loop, as it would I think any Arabic speaker. Because in modern parlance, the adjective nashiz means something entirely different than what the author is suggesting. I went straight to my handy copy of the Iraqi Personal Status Code (when I got home, I don't bring Arabic books anywhere anymore, which relates to another fine article I read while doing my duty to Allegheny County, concerning the practice of covering identity written by John Tehranian to be discussed another time and available here) and confirmed my understanding was correct, and indeed it was, under Iraqi statute.
Nashiz means "rebellious" (as close as I can get to a good definition) and it refers to a wife who fails to obey her husband, and who, because of her failure to adhere to this marital duty of obedience, sacrifices her right to demand her husband's marital obligation of maintenance. Classical Islamic law requires that a wife must obey her husband, husband must support his wife, and it's written straight into most modern Muslim legal codes. This requirement, and the term nashiz that currently accompanies it as used in the modern world, has been the bane of feminists in the Muslim world, so many I know despise this term and have sought invariably to remove it, with varying degrees of success. One Kurdish women's group was quite proud of having successfully led a push to alter the Kurdish version of the Iraqi Personal Status Code respecting this matter. Did they remove the obligation of the wife to be obedient, or to forfeit a right to maintenance? No, absolutely not, that was hopeless to even try. But they did take out the word nashiz, and replaced it with "disobedient".
Thus, so ugly is the word nashiz in some parts it's a victory just to replace it, even if you might be called "disobedient" instead. To many women, it suggests a place they are supposed to be kept, a hierarchy at which they are on the bottom, akin to the disgusting term "uppity" directed at African Americans--know your place is the general idea. I've never liked the word at all, I've always felt that as believing Muslims we should be looking forward by abandoning this awful terminology and finding new ways to approach our texts rather than employing them to continue the same old misogyny, but we all have our ideological disagreements I guess.
The Arabic grammar in the Iraqi law, and when described in the modern world by respectable muftis (typical example here) is also instructive. The adjective doesn't take the feminine ending, it's always nashiz and not nashiza. This generally happens in Arabic when the adjective cannot really apply to a man. So, for example, a pregnant woman is hamil, or carrying. Were she carrying a sparrow and not a baby in her womb, it would be hamila (asfoura), in other words, the feminine ending gets attached. This is because anyone can carry a sparrow, so the adjective is called in to specify, but only women can get pregnant so you don't bother with a feminine ending. (I know about the Oprah show, let's leave that aside).
So what does this grammatical digression mean? That the term appears designed towards women. otherwise we'd call the woman nashiza (nashizat pl.) and the men nashiz. In the law, then, it's women. Among scholars, women. Among people fighting the term, women. Everyone thinks it's about women, you can't call a guy nashiz, I think to myself as I read the first sentence, what the hell is this author talking about?
But of course, the author is well schooled and drops us a footnote, informing us that in fact, it is possible to use the term nushuz to refer to men, citing, in favor of the proposition, a number of dead men, the last of whom appears by my quick estimation to be Ibn Abidin, who died sometime in the 19th century. And indeed according even to Hans Wehr, the authoritative Arabic English dictionary, that is correct.
Now we all know that isn't the modern understanding, the author calls the current understanding "conventional wisdom", I would call it "modern Islamic law" which I'm not happy to call it that as a Muslim, but it is what is in the codes, it is what the modern authorities hook onto when they use the term, incliuding senior mufti (see immediately preceding link), it's far more than a generalized conventional understanding, it's ubiquitous. But centrally, the point is, some dead guys said this, and nearly everyone in the modern world thinks that, what actually counts? You know my view, cold comfort to the woman about to lose her right to support that in fact some dude who died two hundred years ago is on her side, and Hans Wehr says her definition is supportable.
But this information and its use is actually quite striking, as it leads to cross currents in how to force the evolution of Islamic law. We've got this unfortunate situation where our law, and I say this again as a believing Muslim, our law, our statutes, our legal systems to the extent they call on Islam are almost without doubt the most retrograde towards women in the entire world. There are relative differences between different nations, but it's hard to find countries that are much worse than ours as a general matter. The term nashiz is one manifestation of that, and to me a much worse one than the veil. A woman can wear a headscarf and be a government minister, can you really achieve much in society if you think it's your husband's right to deny you the ability to leave the home, travel, have friends, without his permission?
So what can Muslim liberals do? One thing is to jettison old concepts, as with slavery, a reform that nearly all Muslims no matter how conservative accept. The word means nothing, the classical rules mean nothing, the foundational texts are read to say something entirely plausible but something at odds with most of Islam's history, and onward we go.
But another is to look again at the words. Redefine jihad to focus on its peaceful aspect, again contrary to Islamic history but entirely consistent with Muslim foundational text. The reason for the different approaches probably has to do with any number of factors, among them the more flexible uses to which the term jihad is put in foundational text (meaning Qur'an and Sunna), the relative infrequency of references to slavery in the Qur'an relative to jihad, the fact that foundational text embraces jihad where it does not slavery, etc. (The latter redefinitional approach hasn't worked out as well in the context of jihad, but I've discussed that in earlier posts. See here and here.)
Nashiz, it seems to me, lies at the crossroads. It's not as central a Qur'anic term as jihad, I think it only appears once, but the disapprovals associated with slavery don't come as near and quite clearly it seems to have had a less sexist definition in its history. And so you could I guess just jettison all of the obedience stuff that is all over the classical texts precisely as we do with slavery, which is what the Kurdish women's group wanted. Or you could take a step back and say, actually, the term is okay, it just means something different than you think. The latter course is the one this author takes. She boldly forces a definition to which my ears are unfamiliar, battering them with a term I've always understood as sexist and applying it again and again to husbands and men. It's two different approaches towards remaking Islamic law in our times.
Either way, though, it should be clear that the actual words of any texts aren't really the constraint. After all, if we can't really decide what the words even mean, it cannot really be said that they are any impediment to change.
HAH
Islamic law grants a wife who desires to break her marriage contract several options. In the case where the husband is nashiz, (i.e. if he violates his marital duties) or mistreats her, the wife can turn to [a judge] . . . . .
The piece is by a PhD candidate at McGill whose name is Mida Zantout, you can read it in full here. It is actually quite a fine article that really pays serious attention to the relationship of theory to practice in a type of marital separation known as khul'. I'm hooking myself onto the first sentence though for this post.That sentence threw me for a complete loop, as it would I think any Arabic speaker. Because in modern parlance, the adjective nashiz means something entirely different than what the author is suggesting. I went straight to my handy copy of the Iraqi Personal Status Code (when I got home, I don't bring Arabic books anywhere anymore, which relates to another fine article I read while doing my duty to Allegheny County, concerning the practice of covering identity written by John Tehranian to be discussed another time and available here) and confirmed my understanding was correct, and indeed it was, under Iraqi statute.
Nashiz means "rebellious" (as close as I can get to a good definition) and it refers to a wife who fails to obey her husband, and who, because of her failure to adhere to this marital duty of obedience, sacrifices her right to demand her husband's marital obligation of maintenance. Classical Islamic law requires that a wife must obey her husband, husband must support his wife, and it's written straight into most modern Muslim legal codes. This requirement, and the term nashiz that currently accompanies it as used in the modern world, has been the bane of feminists in the Muslim world, so many I know despise this term and have sought invariably to remove it, with varying degrees of success. One Kurdish women's group was quite proud of having successfully led a push to alter the Kurdish version of the Iraqi Personal Status Code respecting this matter. Did they remove the obligation of the wife to be obedient, or to forfeit a right to maintenance? No, absolutely not, that was hopeless to even try. But they did take out the word nashiz, and replaced it with "disobedient".
Thus, so ugly is the word nashiz in some parts it's a victory just to replace it, even if you might be called "disobedient" instead. To many women, it suggests a place they are supposed to be kept, a hierarchy at which they are on the bottom, akin to the disgusting term "uppity" directed at African Americans--know your place is the general idea. I've never liked the word at all, I've always felt that as believing Muslims we should be looking forward by abandoning this awful terminology and finding new ways to approach our texts rather than employing them to continue the same old misogyny, but we all have our ideological disagreements I guess.
The Arabic grammar in the Iraqi law, and when described in the modern world by respectable muftis (typical example here) is also instructive. The adjective doesn't take the feminine ending, it's always nashiz and not nashiza. This generally happens in Arabic when the adjective cannot really apply to a man. So, for example, a pregnant woman is hamil, or carrying. Were she carrying a sparrow and not a baby in her womb, it would be hamila (asfoura), in other words, the feminine ending gets attached. This is because anyone can carry a sparrow, so the adjective is called in to specify, but only women can get pregnant so you don't bother with a feminine ending. (I know about the Oprah show, let's leave that aside).
So what does this grammatical digression mean? That the term appears designed towards women. otherwise we'd call the woman nashiza (nashizat pl.) and the men nashiz. In the law, then, it's women. Among scholars, women. Among people fighting the term, women. Everyone thinks it's about women, you can't call a guy nashiz, I think to myself as I read the first sentence, what the hell is this author talking about?
But of course, the author is well schooled and drops us a footnote, informing us that in fact, it is possible to use the term nushuz to refer to men, citing, in favor of the proposition, a number of dead men, the last of whom appears by my quick estimation to be Ibn Abidin, who died sometime in the 19th century. And indeed according even to Hans Wehr, the authoritative Arabic English dictionary, that is correct.
Now we all know that isn't the modern understanding, the author calls the current understanding "conventional wisdom", I would call it "modern Islamic law" which I'm not happy to call it that as a Muslim, but it is what is in the codes, it is what the modern authorities hook onto when they use the term, incliuding senior mufti (see immediately preceding link), it's far more than a generalized conventional understanding, it's ubiquitous. But centrally, the point is, some dead guys said this, and nearly everyone in the modern world thinks that, what actually counts? You know my view, cold comfort to the woman about to lose her right to support that in fact some dude who died two hundred years ago is on her side, and Hans Wehr says her definition is supportable.
But this information and its use is actually quite striking, as it leads to cross currents in how to force the evolution of Islamic law. We've got this unfortunate situation where our law, and I say this again as a believing Muslim, our law, our statutes, our legal systems to the extent they call on Islam are almost without doubt the most retrograde towards women in the entire world. There are relative differences between different nations, but it's hard to find countries that are much worse than ours as a general matter. The term nashiz is one manifestation of that, and to me a much worse one than the veil. A woman can wear a headscarf and be a government minister, can you really achieve much in society if you think it's your husband's right to deny you the ability to leave the home, travel, have friends, without his permission?
So what can Muslim liberals do? One thing is to jettison old concepts, as with slavery, a reform that nearly all Muslims no matter how conservative accept. The word means nothing, the classical rules mean nothing, the foundational texts are read to say something entirely plausible but something at odds with most of Islam's history, and onward we go.
But another is to look again at the words. Redefine jihad to focus on its peaceful aspect, again contrary to Islamic history but entirely consistent with Muslim foundational text. The reason for the different approaches probably has to do with any number of factors, among them the more flexible uses to which the term jihad is put in foundational text (meaning Qur'an and Sunna), the relative infrequency of references to slavery in the Qur'an relative to jihad, the fact that foundational text embraces jihad where it does not slavery, etc. (The latter redefinitional approach hasn't worked out as well in the context of jihad, but I've discussed that in earlier posts. See here and here.)
Nashiz, it seems to me, lies at the crossroads. It's not as central a Qur'anic term as jihad, I think it only appears once, but the disapprovals associated with slavery don't come as near and quite clearly it seems to have had a less sexist definition in its history. And so you could I guess just jettison all of the obedience stuff that is all over the classical texts precisely as we do with slavery, which is what the Kurdish women's group wanted. Or you could take a step back and say, actually, the term is okay, it just means something different than you think. The latter course is the one this author takes. She boldly forces a definition to which my ears are unfamiliar, battering them with a term I've always understood as sexist and applying it again and again to husbands and men. It's two different approaches towards remaking Islamic law in our times.
Either way, though, it should be clear that the actual words of any texts aren't really the constraint. After all, if we can't really decide what the words even mean, it cannot really be said that they are any impediment to change.
HAH
Comments