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 Zayn R. Kassam,
Editor

Women and Religion in the World

In Iran, Islamist women support the right of

women to work outside the home, while in
Malaysia, Sisters in Islam fights to bring gender
justice to Islamic law. Although the subject of
women in Islam can provoke horror, fascination,
pity, and at times, vitriolic reactions, Muslim
women around the globe are fighting for a place
in today’s world.

The expert essays in Women and Islam are

designed to stimulate discussion and help
readers achieve a more sober understanding of
the lives of Muslim women around the world.
They explore the issues Muslim women face
as they fight for gender justice and meet the
challenges of living in a globalized, post-9/11
world—whether in Iran, France, Ethiopia, or the
United States.

Each chapter examines a different part of the

globe, exploring issues arising from cultural and
religious codes, as well as from internal and
global politics, economics, education, and the
law. Readers will get a glimpse at the diverse
ways in which Muslim women are actively
involved in addressing the conditionltobedded
in their discrete environments as the
the opportunities afforded to them an
strategies ranging from the political t
from the theatrical to the religious.'
"Women and Islam
Recent Titles in
Women and Religion in the World

Women and Christianity

Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan and Karen Jo Torjesen, Editors

Women and Indigenous Religions

Sylvia Marcos

Women and Judaism

Rahhi Malka Drucker

Women and New and Africana Religions

Lilian Ashcraft-Eason, Darnise C. Martin, and Oyeronke Olademo, Editors
cWomen and Islam

ZAYN R. KASSAM, EDITOR

Women and Religion in the World

Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, Lillian Ashcraft-Eason,
and Karen Jo Torjesen, Series Editors

Q PRAEGER
AN IMPRINT OF ABC-CLIO, LLC
Santa Barbara, California • Denver, Colorado • Oxford, England
Copyright 2010 by ABC-CLIO, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Women and Islam / Zayn R. Kassam, editor.
p. cm. — (Women and religion in the world)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-275-99158-6 (hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-
08274-0 (ebook) 1. Women in Islam. 2. Feminism—Religious aspects—
Islam. 3. Muslim women—Islamic countries—Social
conditions. I. Kassam, Zayn R.
BP173.4.W694 2010
297.082—dc22 2010031249

ISBN: 978-0-275-99158-6
EISBN: 978-0-313-08274-0

14 13 12 11 10 12 3 4 5

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Visit www.abc-clio.com for details.

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This book is printed on acid-free paper (oo)

Manufactured in the United States of America

To all who work for gender justice
Now, among those whom We have created there are people who
guide [others] in the way of the truth and act justly in its light.
—Qur’an 7:181

And thus does their Sustainer answer their prayer: “I shall not lose
sight of the labor of any of you who labors, be it man or woman: each
of you is an issue of the other.”
—Qur’an 3:195

One who partakes of good deeds and is a believer shall enter para¬
dise, and shall not be wronged by as much as [would fill] the groove
of a date-stone.
—Qur’an 4:124

It is [the divine being] who has created you [all] out of a single soul,
and out of it brought into being its mate, so that one might find rest
in the other.
—Qur’an 7:189

Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot unedu¬

cate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the
person who feels pride. And you cannot oppress the people who are
not afraid anymore.
Cesar E. Chavez
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xi
Zayn R. Kassam

Part I. Women, Family, and Environment 1

1. Law and Iranian Women’s Activism 3

Louise A. Halper

2. Gendered Space and Shared Security: Women’s Activism in Peace

and Conflict Resolution in Indonesia 19
Etin Anwar

3. Failures of Solidarity, Failures of the Nation-State: Nongovernmental

Organizations and Moroccan Women’s Activism 43
Rachel Newcomb

Part II. Socioeconomics, Politics, and Authority 61

4. Beyond Personal Belief? The Role of Religious Identities among

Muslim Women Respect Activists 63
Narzanin Massoumi

5. In Search of Faithful Citizens in Postcolonial Malaysia: Islamic

Ethics, Muslim Activism, and Feminist Politics 93
Azza Basarudin

Part III. Body, Mind, and Spirit 129

6. Muslim Women’s Scholarship and the New Gender Jihad 131

Roxanne D. Marcotte

VII
viii Contents

7. New Expressions of Religiosity: Al-Huda International and the

Expansion of Islamic Education for Pakistani Muslim Women 163
Khanum Shaikh

8. “Women’s Spirit” and “Spiritual Matter(s)”: Gender, Activism,

and Scholarship in an Ethiopian Eco-Spiritual System 185
Patricia H. Karimi-Taleghani

Part IV. Sexuality, Power, and Vulnerability 229

9. Staging Politics: New Currents in North African Women’s Dramatic

Literature 231
Laura Chakravarty Box

10. Indonesian Women: Activist and Islamist Spiritual Callings 245

Nelly van Doorn-Harder

11. The Dialogics of a New Orientalist Discourse: Telling Tales of

Iranian Womanhood 263
Khani Begum

Part V. Women, Worldview, and Religious Practice 289

12. Religious Practice and Worldview of Muslim Women in Western

Europe 291
Kari Vogt

13. From Ritual to Redemption: Worldview of Shi'a Muslim Women

in Southern California 303
Bridget Blomfield

14. Religion as a Spring for Activism: Muslim Women Youth in

Canada 325
Katherine Bulloch

Abbreviations 347
Glossary 351
Bibliography 359
Web Resources 383
Index 387
About the Editor and Contributors 397
 Acknowledgments

This volume would not have been possible without the vision of Cheryl
Kirk-Duggan, Lillian Ashcraft-Eason, and Karen Jo Torjesen, who envis¬
aged a series of works that would bring together the way in which women
were addressing contemporary and local issues through a globalized, and of¬
ten religious, consciousness. I would like to thank each of the contributors
to this volume for generously responding to my request to share their think¬
ing and research with a broader readership. With great regret and sadness,
I note that Louise Halper, whose chapter on Iranian women is included in
this volume, passed away before its publication. Audrey Bilger’s thoughtful
suggestions were extremely helpful. Working with the editors at Greenwood
Press, Praeger Publishers, and ABC-CLIO, the publisher of Greenwood
Press titles, has been a pleasure and I thank each one for attending to the
myriad details involved in bringing a project such as this to light. My pro¬
found gratitude for Kathleen Mirante, who so kindly offered a place in
which to read, reflect, and write. Her generosity is boundless, and for that I
am deeply grateful. My thanks to my sister, Tazim R. Kassam, for her wise
counsel, support, and encouragement. And finally, as with all such work,
any blemishes are mine alone.
Claremont, California, 2010

tx
-
 Introduction

Zjzyn ‘3^. %assam

T he subject of Muslim women or women in Islam continues to pro¬

voke horror, fascination, pity, anger, sadness, and at times, vitriolic
reactions against both Muslim men and Islam. The chapters in this
volume, on the other hand, will, it is hoped, invoke a different kind of
response, perhaps of admiration for the work of many of these women. More
realistically, this volume hopes to stimulate further discussion over more so¬
ber understandings of challenges faced and strategies employed by Muslim
women around the world in attending to the realities of daily life. Each chap¬
ter takes us to a different part of the globe and affords us a glimpse into the
many diverse ways in which Muslim women are actively involved in address¬
ing the conditions imbedded in their discrete environments, taking up the
opportunities afforded to them, and, in some instances, creating spaces for
an energetic engagement with what it means to be a Muslim woman in a glo¬
balized world.
This volume was conceived as the volume on Islam in a series titled
Women and Religion in the World. Its intent is to focus on contemporary
selected experiences of women and how their lives interface with religion.
Each volume is organized according to five themes: (1) Women, Family,
and Environment; (2) Socioeconomics, Politics, and Authority; (3) Body,
Mind, and Spirit; (4) Sexuality, Power, and Vulnerability; and (5) Women,
Worldview, and Religious Practice. Although the boundaries between each
of the themes are permeable, the chapters under each theme illumine dif¬
ferent lenses through which the theme may be engaged.
As the chapters reveal, the challenges Muslim women face arise both
from within and outside, whether in relation to Islam or their national

XI
XU Introduction

contexts, and have as much to do with cultural and religious codes as they
do with politics, economics, education, and the law. Thus, the various chap¬
ters take on many important challenges. The overarching question might be,
How do women draw upon their faith to address their local issues? For
instance, under the first theme, Women, Family, and Environment, we may
ask, how do familial connections help women ameliorate their environment
in such war-torn areas as those in Indonesia in their attempts to facilitate
peacemaking and peace building? How do women in Iran enact democratic
change to family law under a seemingly authoritarian regime? How do
women better respond to the needs of their families in light of the social dis¬
locations brought about by structural adjustment policies enacted in Mo¬
rocco in ways that run counter to accepted social roles for women? Thus
each chapter under each theme brings out various facets of how the over¬
arching theme, when examined in specific locales, reveals some interesting
specificities but also points the way to some commonalities that might facili¬
tate transnational linkages.
For the second theme, Socioeconomics, Politics, and Authority, the
two chapters included here ask the following questions: How do British
Muslim women enter the political realm, given that such activities have
largely been consigned to Muslim men as spokespersons for their com¬
munities? How do Malaysian Muslim women reconfigure the place of
women in society, given the patriarchal slant in Islamic family law? Both
chapters point to ways in which women in two highly different contexts,
one non-Muslim and one majority Muslim, attempt to carve spaces of
authority, one political, and one legal and social.
The chapters for the third theme, Body, Mind, and Spirit, engage the
relationship between frameworks of reality and praxis by focusing on the
following questions: How do Muslim women academics living in non-
Muslim-majority countries engage with sacred and authoritative texts in
order to propose ways in which both the understanding and the praxis of
Islam could reflect the gender equity they see at the core of Islam? On the
other hand, how do those who subscribe to gender complementarity rather
than gender equity use the pathways of education to inculcate their under¬
standing and praxis of Islam? How do Western academics produce knowl¬
edge about African women, and how do Ethiopian women in particular
draw upon their faith tradition to address issues of marginalization and
poverty?
The chapters discussing the fourth theme, Sexuality, Power, and Vul¬
nerability, have as their unifying thread the issue of violence against
women and the vulnerability of women as they engage such questions as
the following: How do North African women playwrights grapple with vio¬
lence against women and violence against nations as cultures come into
 Introduction xiii

contact with each other? How do Muslim women in Indonesia invoke

politically charged religious justifications as they campaign in support of or
against the issue of plural wives, polygyny? How do expatriate Iranian
women’s memoirs relate to the war on terrorism?
Finally, chapters placed under the fifth theme, Women, Worldview,
and Religious Practice, examine the following questions: How do Euro¬
pean Muslim women create a Muslim life in an increasingly Islamophobic
context? How do Southern Californian Shiite Muslim women draw upon
female role models to construct their spiritual and social identities? How
do young Canadian Muslim women construct an identity that is empower¬
ing rather than oppressive?
Posing such questions enables an examination and understanding of
the real issues with which Muslim women grapple, in each of these highly
'disparate contexts, rather than dwelling on the privations that being Mus¬
lim is supposed to inflict on Muslim women. From the many studies that
are now available on gender in Islam and Muslim women, perhaps among
the most significant are those that problematize easy assumptions about
the role and place of women in Muslim societies and religion. For
instance, Leila Ahmed, in her magisterial work titled Women and Gender
in Islam, traces how the Qur’an, the sacred scripture for Muslims, while
clearly viewing women as ontologically equal in stature to men, assumes a
social role for them in keeping with the Arabian context of the day without
essentializing women as inferior. Moreover, she shows how the Qur’an
came increasingly to be interpreted in ever-narrower ways for Muslim
women as Muslims entered societies in which patriarchal norms were well
established. Barbara Stowasser reinforces this view in her study Women in
the Qur’an, Traditions, and Interpretation, in which she examines interpre¬
tations of the Qur'an and the hadith literature in the Muslim medieval pe¬
riod (circa 9th through 13th centuries). She additionally makes the case
that Muslims were bringing their interpretations in line with the Byzantine
and Persian contexts in which these discourses were generated. Asma Bar-
las in her work titled “Believing Women” in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal
Interpretations of the Qur’an examines such interpretative strategies further
through asking the theological question, What is the nature of God? Is the
divine being misogynist? She finds not only that the divine being is far
from being misogynist but also that there is no evidence for essentializing
men or women in the Qur’an; rather, differences between humans are pre¬
dicated on their degree of righteousness or piety. Valentine Moghadam, in
her study of women in Muslim societies titled Modernizing Women: Gen¬
der and Social Change in the Middle East, finds along with Leila Ahmed
that colonization has played its own. role in generating contemporary dis¬
courses on women both from within the Islamic discursive tradition as well
XIV Introduction

as from outside it, that is, from the Western discursive tradition. In this
respect, the Other was formulated—and women played a large role in
such a formulation—in such a way that the West could be seen as femi¬
nist and liberal and democratic, whereas the East—into which Muslim
societies were placed—was seen as a place for privation and oppression of
women, very much a place to be redeemed. In addition, Moghadam s work
points out the state’s interests in facilitating a state-sponsored feminism
that has had as much to do with opening up spaces for women to advance
socially as it does with holding back legal reforms to pacify political inter¬
ests, especially those such as Islamism, which pose a viable threat to the
secular state. Such observations notwithstanding, she finds in her study ti¬
tled Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks that the rate of
literacy and economic capacity growth among Muslim women has been ro¬
bust; however, the larger forces of globalization have, in their wake,
brought both opportunities as well as a downward spiral in women s eco¬
nomic opportunities and increased Islamist surveillance of women. The
contributions of others are noted in Roxanne Marcotte’s chapter included
in this volume, most notably those of Amina Wadud and Rifaat Hasan,
alongside those of such younger scholars as Etin Anwar and Kecia Ali.
Thus, to come to a fuller understanding of how Muslim women’s lives
interface with religion, the evidence provided in this volume is that while
the Islamic cultural and legal legacy may provide some impediments to the
full realization of women’s potential or to gender equity, Muslim women
themselves are in fact turning to their religious tradition to argue, on its
own terms, that gender inequity is by no means Islamic. Rather, the issues
they face are very much connected to larger socioeconomic processes such
as globalization and the war on terrorism, as well as to more regional proc¬
esses such as conflict over limited resources, and more specifically to legal
and political and social processes within their respective societies.
The remainder of this introduction details highlights of each of the
chapters included in this volume.

Part 1: Women, Family, and Environment

Louise A. Halper (in memoriam) engages a discussion of Islamic law in the
context of Iranian women's activism in examining whether democratic change
is possible within Islamic law. Interrogating the widely held view that Muslim
women “benefit from a regime of secular law and suffer under religious law,’’
Halper points out that the situation of women under Islamic law in Iran is
quite comparable to that of Turkish women under secular Turkish law and
not at all like that of women under Taliban-inflected Islamic law in Afghani¬
stan. Rather, she argues, a more compelling determinant of women’s status
 Introduction xv

may, in fact, be "the salience of women to the political process and their
active involvement in it,” a hypothesis that is tested in conjunction with laws
on marriage and divorce in Iran. Noting the strides that have been made in
Iranian women’s literacy rates, school and university enrollments, and fertility
decreases and employment increases in the two decades between 1980 and
2000 since the inception of the Islamic regime, Halper asks how such data
are compatible with the reinstitution of Islamic law and how such improve¬
ments in women’s status have been effectuated and what role they them¬
selves have played.
Since the law of marriage and divorce exercises a huge impact on the
lives of women, Halper focuses on two legislative innovations occurring in
1993 and 1996 to the Divorce Reform Law of 1989, between Ayatollah
Khomeini’s death in 1989 and Mohammad Khatami’s inception as presi¬
dent of the Republic of Iran in 1997. A rich historical summary of the law
of marriage and divorce pre- and post-Revolution illustrates the strategies
women began to utilize once Khomeini reinstituted Islamic family law. Of¬
ten they used the mahr, a predetermined sum to be paid to the wife in the
eventuality of the husband’s death or divorce, to negotiate a more favorable
situation than they were entitled to under the law. The indigence into
which newly divorced women were placed in cases where the mahr was
practically worthless also motivated attempts by the women’s press and
women’s organizations to draw attention to the issue. Halper traces the
new interpretive moves made by clerics attempting to reconcile feminism
with Islam, whose work was published in such women’s magazines as
Zanan, and by women members of the Majles, the Iranian parliament,
who sought to find religiously legal ways to address inequities experienced
by women under the Iranian Islamic marital regime.
An examination of the political education and participation of women
before, during, and and after the Iranian Revolution reveals that Islamist
women, although they subscribed to the notion that “women’s primary
roles were in the family, also supported women who wanted or needed to
work outside the home” and “became advocates for interpretations of the
sharia more open to the concerns of modernist women.” The participation
of women in the war effort during the Iran-Iraq War as well as in the labor
force during and after the war led to the call for overt government support
for the promotion of women’s social participation and to the subsequent
formation of institutions establishing a direct connection between the gov¬
ernment and women’s issues. The successes achieved by women after the
Iranian Revolution demonstrate that democratic change is indeed possible
under Islamic law.
Etin Anwar’s chapter looks at the impact of conflict on human secu¬
rity, especially for women, and national security. She examines how social
XVI Introduction

and cultural gender constructs correlate with gender activism in the peace
and reconciliation process in such Indonesian conflict zones as Sambas,
Aceh, and Maluku. The religious education system, the pesantren, dissemi¬
nates the naturalized view of women as weak and men as strong, leading
to social convention in which males are seen as pillars providing suste¬
nance and authority for the household. The state further appropriated
women’s sexuality as “mothers of the nation within the national plan for
development in gendered ways, underscoring the role of women as sup¬
porters of men, considered the true champions of the state, and inscribing
the roles of women within the marital regime as responsible for the private
sphere while the public sphere was relegated to men. Despite the entrance
of some women into the highest corridors of power, the majority of women
find themselves in jobs associated with their sex.
Anwar interrogates the causes of conflict in Indonesia, examining first
the political conditions followed by a questioning of the assumed correla¬
tion between levels of testosterone and male-engendered violence. Noting
that violence is culturally constructed, Etin argues that the power of
destruction held by men gives them the power of domination over women
and generates gendered prestige and power systems embodied through the
performativities of masculinity and femininity. The social and cultural spe¬
cificities within which conflicts are located suggest that national security
outweighs human security, including the well-being of women and chil¬
dren. In investigating accounts of violence against women in conflict
zones, Anwar notes that women’s sexualities became the site regularly
transgressed and tortured for political deployment, while women also suf¬
fered mental and physical deprivation, all horrors into which children were
socialized as they observed what was done to adults. The ostensibly Chris-
tian-Muslim conflict in Maluku led to at least a half million displace¬
ments, increasing poverty for women and children especially.
Anwar examines three models to investigate the role of women in
peace and conflict resolution activism: the essentialist, constructivist, and
exclusivist. Grassroots organizations working on the essentialist model,
which views the rightful place of women as mothers, as wives, and in the
private sphere, reveals that solidarity is built in bringing women together,
say, for example, as mothers or as women who have lost their husbands to
war or religious or ethnic conflict, enabling the issues they face collectively
to be addressed. The constructivist model of activism draws upon such
female psychological traits as nurturing and caring to advance peacemak¬
ing and peace building. Bringing together women from parts of the com¬
munity that are in conflict with each other enables commonalities of
experience under war conditions to emerge, building solidarity and allow¬
ing the women to approach their menfolk to lobby for the end of hostilities
 Introduction xvi i

and to give up violence, its tactics, politics, and mediums. In this regard,
forgiveness plays a key role in generating a sense ol the common need for
human security and togetherness. The third model, exclusivist activism,
utilizes the restrictive gendered access to public space by enlarging the tra¬
ditional role of women as homemakers. By engaging in social activism and
humanitarian endeavors, they work to meet the needs of displaced per¬
sons, providing food, health facilities, microcredit loans, and education for
the children. In addition, they organize prayers and demonstrations and
meetings in order to bring about a “peace zone." Thus, despite the fact that
peacemaking and conflict resolution are often part of a gendered process
in traditional societies, women have utilized the avenues of agency open to
them to transform them into tools to achieve the goal of security shared by
both genders.
Rachel Newcomb turns to a discussion of nongovernmental organi¬
zations (NGOs) and Moroccan women’s activism. While such an NGO as
the Najia Belghazi Center founded by middle-upper-class women and
located in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Fes, Morocco, might
report a remarkable amount of success in helping women with legal advice
in cases of domestic conflict and divorce, as well as providing job training,
at the same time it faces several challenges that consume valuable resour¬
ces of time and effort. For instance, it encounters the social expectation
that it has unlimited resources; on the other, it is viewed with suspicion as
a tool of Western imperialism or an embezzler of grant funds, or both. In
addition, the widespread view that the family should be the source of as¬
sistance in most matters works against the NGO’s aim to build solidarity
among women across class lines. Newcomb questions whether such chal¬
lenges can be attributed to entrenched class differences or the oft-leveled
criticism of insufficient religiosity and argues, rather, “that religion, local
custom, and larger structural inequalities must be considered together in
instances where the activists’ efforts to foster social change failed."
For instance, such processes accompanying globalization as structural
adjustment policies (SAPs), deregulation, and privatization have reduced gov¬
ernment spending, seen declines in school enrollments for girls, and
increased unemployment. Consequently, the government has encouraged the
formation of NGOs to step into the social services breach while incurring
criticism for failing to deliver on its responsibilities as a nation-state. Nongo¬
vernmental organizations dealing with women’s issues touch a particularly
sensitive nerve, given the country’s attempt in 2000 to reform the mudawana,
the legal regime governing personal status law. The move sparked debates on
whether proposed reforms were anti-Islamic or not and revealed the state’s
uneasy alliance with conservative Islamists while also attempting to be pro¬
gressive. Reforming the mudawana would also undermine entrenched male
xviii Introduction

familial authority; however, no longer in place were the protections for

women that were built into the patriarchal system, protections such as the
community support that ensured an abused or divorced woman had some
recourse and financial support. As the country moved into line with global
neoliberal economic patterns, the traditional tribal structure was unseated by
a cash economy and capitalist structures that counted among its casualties
the disintegration of local networks and familial resources.
What purpose do NGOs serve? Newcomb points to two viewpoints:
first, that NGOs work in tandem with states to contribute more efficiently
to “development” than governments do within the framework of neoliberal
capitalism, providing for social needs where governments fail; and second,
that NGOs work outside the state in order to demand radical societal
change. The NGO examined by Newcomb fits into neither of these catego¬
ries; rather, she argues, they strategized to gain acceptance among conserva¬
tive elements while at the same time attempting to address the very real
issues their clients brought to them. Avoiding joining the fray of political
debate over the mudawana, they sought instead to make a focus on violence
against women their key mission, bringing programs and skill-building
approaches to bear on helping women build the capacity to address the sit¬
uations in which they found themselves.
However, despite some successful outcomes, for various reasons, such
strategies did not attain the solidarity among women and the capacity build¬
ing hoped for by the NGO. Newcomb deftly analyzes the various social,
economic, and cultural factors that impede their ability to address the
inequities women brought to their attention. The demands of the global
economy coupled with the state’s inability to work for gender justice within
the constraints placed on it by IMF-led programs of structural adjustment
give rise to social issues that are far greater than any NGO, even under the
best of circumstances, can be expected to handle. As Newcomb notes, the
problem is further compounded by class, religious, and cultural factors, but
to name these as the sole reasons for NGO failure without recognizing the
state’s role in signing on to structural adjustment programs or failing to
address the feminization of poverty must also be acknowledged.

Part 2: Socioeconomics, Politics, and Authority

Narzanin Massoumi’s chapter turns to the role of British Muslim women in

the formation of an alternative leftist political party, Respect, formed by peace
activists in the aftermath of protests against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
How do these women negotiate between their religious and political identities?
Do they draw upon religious precepts or secular values to justify their political
 Introduction xix

engagement? In order to address such questions, Massoumi invokes Peter

Mandavilles notions of translocalities, that is, spaces in global cities where
Muslims live as minorities and which afford “Muslim intellectuals the opportu¬
nity to express and encounter alternative readings of Islam” (Mandeville 2004,
135). In facilitating the development of a critical vision on Islam, including the
questioning of its own parameters, Islam has emerged as a mode of contesting
authority in that Muslim intellectuals are able to assert the capacity of each
Muslim to engage in ijtihad, or independent intellectual effort. An ethno¬
graphic study conducted in 2007 also revealed that such Muslims invoke the
notion of pluralism to open dialogue with others.
Engaging in ijtihad has enabled such Muslims both to reconsider their
relationship to non-Muslims and to open up spaces for political participa¬
tion for women. Events such as the Rushdie affair, the riots in the hanlieus
of Paris and in Britain, and the attacks on American soil on 9/11 have led
to a focus on Muslim men that has overlooked the political participation
and agency of Muslim women, seeing the latter rather as victims in a cli¬
mate of increasing Islamophobia. Suggesting that feminist rejections of re¬
ligion and multiculturalism as tools for reinforcing gender inequality
replicate essentialist binaries reminiscent of Orientalism, Massoumi argues
that it is not necessary to espouse ess'entialism in order to construct a
coherent social identity. Feminist Orientalism, most readily apparent in
Western feminist desires to “save brown women,” as Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak famously quips, represents Muslim women as the oppressed Other
in order to affirm its own identity as liberated and free. Further, such
Western feminists as Susan Moller Okin argue against multicultural poli¬
cies, suggesting that these serve to prevent minority Muslim women from
being rescued from their patriarchal cultures. Such ideas have grown
increasingly popular in Britain over the issue of the veil and complement
militant foreign policies in the Middle East as well as anti-Muslim racist
attitudes found in both Europe and North America. Massoumi carefully
critiques both essentialist and antiessentialist positions with respect to
multiculturalism, including at the more conciliatory end of the spectrum
Rogers Brubaker’s argument that even when social groups invoke such
essentialism in order to invoke ethnic, religious, and racial identities, social
scientists must not perpetuate such self-reification in their analysis.
Rather, Massoumi argues, following Tariq Modood’s prompt, that “groups
can be seen to have what he calls family resemblances without assuming
some kind of inherent essence.” Massoumi also finds useful Pnina Werb-
ner’s distinction between different types of essentialism, namely, reifica¬
tion and objectification, freighted negatively and positively, respectively.
It is within the context of these larger discussions of groupings, essen¬
tialism, and multiculturalism that Massoumi takes on her examination of
xx Introduction

politically involved Muslim women Respect activists, querying what they

see as the source of their identity and whence they draw the values that
drive their political participation. She found that participants identify two
triggers that spurred their activism and further clarified their sense of iden¬
tity. First, the events of September 11 translated into a wake-up call for
many of these women, who saw the importance of their religion and simul¬
taneously concluded that how they understood their religion was inher¬
ently a political act. In this connection, the concept of social justice in
Islam enabled them to develop "a coherent identity that made sense and
also allowed them to acknowledge that they were Muslims first. A few mi¬
nority voices, however, demur from this view, suggesting that adopting the
identity of being Muslim reflexively in response to post-9/11 Islamophobia
allows someone else to set the terms of one’s identity. Second, they sought
to change the predominant view that donning a headscarf signifies an
oppressive patriarchal relationship. By becoming involved in politics, all
but one respondent sought to act as ambassadors for their faith to show
that they, as Muslim women, were able to make their own decisions.
Espousing the views that Islam does specify rights for women and that
examples from the Prophet’s life and from those of his wives inculcate
playing an active role in society, some of the women suggest that it is im¬
portant to trace patriarchal understandings of the role of men and women
in Muslim society to culture, and not to religion. Drawing such distinc¬
tions between a pure Islam and a cultural Islam allows them to negotiate a
gendered public space within their own communities as well and to con¬
test the solely male ownership of the political sphere.
In concert with other studies that have reached similar conclusions,
Massoumi finds that “the gendered divisions between the Muslim commu¬
nity are distinct from that which is imagined in popular discourse."
Dubbed the “uncles’ club,” Muslim men who already hold positions of
power in the state or government-funded bureaucracy were seen as hold¬
ing women back from political participation, as well as being corrupt and
as not fairly representing the Muslim communities that had elected them.
Thus, these women find it necessary to articulate an alternative conception
of community, one that does not appeal to an abstract global community
but, rather, responds to concrete issues that need to be addressed. They
link their on-the-ground antiwar activism and service to their local popula¬
tions as a political act that is necessitated by their religious values. In so
doing, they also challenge the liberal and secular prejudices concerning
gender equity in such religious communities as their own.
Massoumi then engages secular liberal feminists who consider reli¬
gious feminism, or in this case, Islamic feminism, to be an oxymoron.
Rather, argues Massoumi, the secularist stance is itself exclusionary; and
 Introduction xxi

as the women in the study have shown, it is possible to invoke Islamic

feminism to refuse particular boundaries that are drawn out for women
as new political communities develop in non-majority-Muslim contexts.
Azza Basarudin examines Malaysian Sunni Muslim women’s praxis
to determine how women balance their religion with the demands of a rap¬
idly changing world. Taking as her case study the Malaysian Muslim pro¬
fessional women's organization named Sisters in Islam (SIS), Basarudin
argues that their intellectual activism is a contested site of alternative
knowledge production in (re)claiming their faith to (re)imagine a transfor¬
mative Muslim umma (community) inclusive of women’s concerns, experi¬
ences and realities. Suggesting that the strategy employed by Sisters in
Islam constitutes a faith-centered intellectual activism, which draws upon
the sources of the Islamic tradition as well as the larger human rights dis¬
course to effect a reform from within,” the author invokes and builds
upon Abdullahi Ahmed An-Nai’m’s concept of cultural mediation to show
how Sisters in Islam brings the local into conversation with the transna¬
tional in order to campaign for women’s rights within a specifically postco¬
lonial Malaysian Muslim public sphere.
The politicization of Islam in the public sphere in response to the British
colonial legacy of “economic divide, ethnic distrust, and political discontent”
led to an Islamic revivalism that brought in its wake the Arabization of Malay¬
sian Islam, including gender relations. Women have steadily been incorpo¬
rated into the economy commencing with Prime Minister Mahathir bin
Mohamad’s development agenda that brought educational and economic
opportunities to women. However, increasing Islamization in the form of "the
rising trend of the totalizing discourse of conventional Islam” has increased
surveillance of women’s comportment and dress, as well as calling for a return
to family values that promote veiling, gender segregation, the erosion of wom¬
en’s rights under Islamic family law, and subsuming women’s rights under
family and national development. Caught in the larger political struggle for
hegemonic rule, Malay Muslim women have become emblematic of the pu¬
rity of Malay culture and Malaysian Islam and are thus subject to intense
scrutiny, policing, and legislation with a larger context of “racial, ethnic, and
religious tension, factionalist politics, and state repression.”
It is in this context that Sisters in Islam was formed to address biases
toward women in Islamic family law. Under the guidance of Amina
Wadud, a group of professional women went back to the text of the Qur’an
to understand how this foundational Islamic scripture understood gender
and, moreover, what tools were available from within the Islamic tradition
for the realization of gender justice. Basarudin traces the process whereby
Sisters in Islam developed various strategies to address gender inequality
in the specifically Malaysian context, albeit with a transnational
XXI1 Introduction

consciousness of gender. A key strategy has been to develop and draw

upon hermeneutical recovery projects aimed at reexamining patriarchal
monopolies on religious knowledge and gender constructions. The revival
and reform of Islamic knowledge is brought to the public sphere through
conferences, workshops, legal clinics, and the like, in order to facilitate
discussions of religious beliefs and practices. Doing so creates a more
informed and hence responsible and responsive citizenry able to bring faith
to bear on the challenges of globalization, especially insofar as these relate
to and impact gender and gendered practices. Such efforts are further
undergirded by publications ranging from press releases to letters to news¬
paper editors, legal memoranda, working papers, and scholarly books. In
addition, Sisters in Islam has developed an international profile, thereby
encouraging a sharing and enriching of resources and strategies beyond
the local to the global.
The connection of praxis to theory is nowhere more readily seen than in
the legal and sociocultural regimes that govern the lives of women, which in
Malaysia, as in most Muslim majority countries, are informed and legiti¬
mated by religious interpretations. Thus, Basarudin pays special attention to
polygamy-monogamy campaigns and moral policing initiatives and to the
role that Sisters in Islam has played and continues to play in bringing gen¬
der justice to bear on these issues within the context of Islamic family law.
Challenges to Sisters in Islam’s legitimacy and authority are to be expected;
however, its work must be seen, Basarudin argues, as ‘fracturing" conven¬
tional Islamic hegemony; that is, “SIS’s intellectual activism is seeping
through the cracks to rupture the delicate relations of power." Indeed, Sis¬
ters in Islam’s intellectual activism may be squarely placed within the
stream of recovery projects that are grounded in a belief in Islam’s inherent
gender egalitarianism, given its moral and ethical vision.

Part 3: Body, Mind, and Spirit

Roxanne D. Marcotte turns her attention to scholarly activism on the
part of diasporic Muslim women academics, some of whom have sought to
propose what we would call feminist, and which are yet nonetheless
Islamic, ways to understand the religious tradition insofar as it pertains to
women. Turning to Mandaville’s idea of translocality, in which one ana¬
lyzes not how “people and cultures exist in places but rather how they
move through them,” Marcotte suggests that such Muslim scholar activists
“criticize both cultural and traditional understandings of Islam that reiter¬
ate the hegemonic discourses of patriarchal and even misogynist interpre¬
tations of Islam.” Their scholarly activities have opened up “new discursive
spaces for thinking new possibilities for change." Focusing on the nexus of
 Introduction xxiii

spirituality, scholarship, and activism, Marcotte argues that examining the

context in which scholar activism takes place is essential in shedding light
on the new discursive spaces that are opened up as a result. June O’Con¬
nors identification of Muslim feminist activity as comprising "rereading,
reconceiving, and reconstructing and Anne Roald’s alternate model of
reselection (of source material) and reinterpretation of such source mate¬
rial provide frames through which to consider the works of such Muslim
scholar-activists as Fatima Mernissi, Amina Wadud, Asma Barlas, Etin
Anwar, Kecia Ali, and Riffat Hassan, who choose to remain Muslim while
at the same time engaging the Islamic tradition to critique gender injusti¬
ces and to propose a more gender equitable understanding of Islam and its
institutions and practices. While the Moroccan scholar Fatima Mernissi
was successful in mounting an incisive feminist critique of the semisacred
'status accorded to the hadith literature (narratives recording the doings
and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad as conveyed by a chain of trans¬
mitters ending with his close companions), other indigenous scholars have
suffered an ignoble fate, even death as in the case of Mahmoud Mohamad
Taha, the Sudanese thinker, for attempting to address gender inequities.
Thus, Marcotte argues, new diasporic discursive spaces allow Muslims in
non-Muslim contexts “to explore, through their scholarship and their activ¬
ism, new understandings of gender equality in Islam.”
Noting that religion often remains undervalued in maintaining com¬
munity and individual cohesiveness for immigrant minorities in host coun¬
tries, Marcotte advances the view that Martin Baumann’s tripolar model
linking the historically and culturally religious community, the country of
origin, and the country of residence can provide an additional lens through
which to identify the discursive space occupied by a Muslim gender
scholar-activist through the imposition of a fourth element, Islam, with
such interrelationships represented in a Venn diagram (see Figure 6.1).
Thus, a Muslim academic who has studied Islam in the academy is able to
inhabit and also critique her historically and culturally specific Islamic tra¬
dition while negotiating her host country’s culture. The writings of Leila
Ahmed, Riffat Hassan, and Asma Barlas, all of whom find in their studies
of Islam a more equitable treatment of women than is often practiced or
inscribed in social institutions, are given as examples to illustrate the point
that the struggle for gender justice undertaken by these scholar-activists
was rooted as much in their scholarly work as it was in the positive evalua¬
tion of their faith with regard to the gender justice affirmed therein. For
Leila Ahmed, the experience of a “women’s Islam” serves to point to the
increasingly misogynist interpretations overlaid onto the fundamentally on¬
tological and moral equity with which women are treated in the Qur’an.
For Hassan, the biblical view of Eve (which entered Islamic discourse very
XXIV Introduction

early on) informs the manner in which women are treated in the discursive
and interpretive literature produced by Muslims in the early centuries,
thereby laying the foundations for an unequal treatment codified in social
and legal institutions. Barlas takes both these viewpoints further, arguing
that neither the central principle of tawhid or singularity of God espoused
by the Qur’an nor the principle of God’s justice allow for father-right, the
basis of patriarchy, to be supportable within a Muslim context; nor do they
allow for misogyny, since that would go against God s fairness in deploying
justice.
While the work of each of the foregoing three scholar-activists points
to a “rereading” of the Qur’an, the next two scholar-activists brought into
view, Etin Anwar and Kecia Ali, argue in their work for a reconsideration
of the sharia, the Islamic legal corpus, often faulted for its perceived
inequitable treatment of women. Anwar suggests that when from within
their cultural location women together “voice concerns of social, cultural,
psychological, and political realities that oppress them," they are more able
to find appropriate ways of addressing long-standing patriarchal inscrip¬
tions and practices. Ali addresses such inscription in the legal corpus,
arguing that rather than discarding it in favor of placing reliance for au¬
thoritative injunctions only on the Qur’an, sharia injunctions must be
engaged seriously, especially in Western contexts where these have moral
or ethical force rather than legislative power, as they do in Muslim-major-
ity contexts, in order to “address new issues that are particular to diasporic
environments.” Thus, with respect to developing a more just sexual ethics,
for which classical Muslim formulations are structurally inadequate in the
contemporary climate, she suggests that Muslim women’s contemporary
experiences form the starting point for mining classical texts using a gyno-
centric ijtihad—in this case, understood as a gender-sensitive hermeneuti¬
cal struggle or effort—to determine their relevance in addressing
contemporary sexual justice issues. The challenge remains how to "think
about sexual intimacy within the constraints of God's revelation to human¬
ity without becoming limited by patriarchal notions that deny women’s
lived experience and potential as fully human, fully moral, and fully sexual
beings.” She envisions a future in which women will serve as legal resour¬
ces and practitioners in the manner that male imams do currently within
their religious communities.
Marcotte then turns to examining the scholarly activism of such converts
as Amina Wadud to Islam. It may be falsely assumed that converts are those
least likely to interrogate “canonical” interpretations of their new faiths. Amina
Wadud, however, takes on precisely such a challenge, that is, “the arrogance
of those men who require a level of human dignity and respect for themselves
while denying that level to another human being," as she takes seriously
 Introduction xxv

the notion that one “cannot stand on the sidelines in the face of injus¬
tice and be recognized as fully Muslim." She, too, calls for a new herme¬
neutic in understanding the Qur’an’s injunctions dealing with gender,
and for making women’s experience part of the ongoing discourse on
gender justice.
Khanum Shaikh examines the spaces that have opened up in recent
decades for womens religious education. In particular, she investigates the
workings of an organization called Al-Huda International, which has suc¬
ceeded in reaching out to urban upper-class women, in an attempt to
understand how and why this organization has attained such a high degree
of success in delivering Islamic education. What kinds of subjectivities are
found to emerge through participation in their activities, and how are the
politics of gender played out? A study published in 1994 notes a move to-
'ward madrassa, or religious seminary, training for girls aged 11-15 in order
to combat what was perceived as a threat emerging from Westernization,
which was ostensibly projecting liberation but was seen as in reality pro¬
moting “obscenity and immorality.” In the same year, Al-Huda Interna¬
tional appeared on the scene as a space for women to study the Qur’an
and its exegesis (tafsir) in a self-proclaimed attempt to promote Islamic val¬
ues free of sectarianism and to strive for the upliftment of deprived
classes. Dr. Farhat Hashmi, a graduate of Glasgow University in Scotland,
began her efforts in Islamic education through private classes held at her
home in an upper-class neighborhood in Islamabad, Pakistan, which soon
led to the establishment of Al-Huda Academy, which offered one- to two-
year-long diploma courses of instruction for women and girls in many
urban cities in and beyond Pakistan. Over time, Al-Huda has extended its
reach to Europe, the United States, and Canada and as part of its out¬
reach goes into rural areas, slums, and prisons.
Shaikh points out that particularly for the Pakistani context, it is salient
to note that a woman has broken into the male preserve of the dissemina¬
tion of religious education. In doing so, Hashmi has mobilized the upper
and middle classes of women, earning her credentials not from a traditional
madrassa-based institution but, rather, from a European institution. The rea¬
sons for her success, observes Shaikh, include “technological sophistication,
pedagogical philosophy, accessibility, dawah as a strategy for outreach, and
a funding base,” each of which is explored in further detail.
What kind of subjectivity has arisen as a result of increasing women’s
access to religious education pertaining to the Qur’an and its exegesis?
Shaikh argues that she notes a conscious distancing from feminism; there
is, rather, a “gendered form of moral agency” whose goal is “not to challenge
normative prescriptions of gender and sexuality but, in fact, to inhabit these
roles.” Unlike the women featured in Marcotte’s essay who struggle for
XXVI Introduction

gender equality, these women argue for a gender complementarity that fur¬
ther reinforces hetero-normative social roles. Accompanying such normative
roles as wife, mother, and homemaker is a renewed emphasis on religious
observance as well as Arabized religious dress, a move that often generates
resistance from both family members and people from similar class back¬
grounds. Perhaps the strongest critique among several that have been
advanced of Hashmi’s approach and tutelage has come from Riffat Hassan,
also an academic and theologian, who suggests in no uncertain terms that
Hashmi is simply further reinforcing centuries-old male patriarchal interpre¬
tive norms without paying attention to Islam’s overarching principles of
social justice, including gender justice. Shaikh herself finds it problematic
that her interviewees acknowledge neither the historically long-standing plu¬
rality of approaches to the Qur’an nor their role in the politics of the pro¬
duction of (Islamist) Islamic discourses.
Patricia H. Karimi-Taleghani offers a scholarly platform for dia¬
logue on epistemological questions on how knowledge about African
women and societies is produced, with specific reference to Ethiopia. She
observes that apart from the continued imperialist gaze, both Western and
African, which colors much writing on Africa and gender issues, current
epistemologies often neglect “the role of African women’s spirituality in
their activism, particularly because that activism pertains to daily existence
within urban African contexts.” The chapter examines the features that
influence women’s economic situation and considers the indigenous values
and organizations employed by Ethiopian women social activists.
In examining gender ideology in Africa, Karimi-Taleghani poses the
question, “Just how much does ecological deprivation affect ideological con¬
trol of scarce resources, especially in times of war, food crises, fuel short¬
ages, and urban overpopulation?” She suggests that the ecological
environment determines women’s access to land, labor, and the products of
that labor and is sanctioned through ritual. Historically, “prestige" crops that
employed plow culture and more specialized skills, as well as cash crops
produced under colonial rule, in dominated by men, whereas women were
relegated less fertile lands and produced crops essential for feeding the fam¬
ily and employed hoe culture. The development of gender ideologies and rit¬
ual practices as well as legal systems to undergird male control of and
access to more fertile lands also played a role, under colonial rule, in domi¬
nating and controlling women’s productive work, restricting the access of
women to land and technology, and often pushing women into greater pov¬
erty as they worked with fewer resources to feed their families.
In being self-reflexive about her own epistemologies in producing knowl¬
edge about gender in such African societies as Ethiopia, Karimi-Taleghani
notes her own historically African roots and the oral knowledge that was
 Introduction XXVll

passed down to her from other women in her family. She reflects on the spir¬
itual retentions that are exhibited in the principles of a respect for nature, the
symbiotic relationship between the physical and the metaphysical environ¬
ments, the tangible nature of the spirit world, and the enduring connection to
Africa, as well as her own academic training and fieldwork in Ethiopia. All of
this, she notes, “enable me to enter Africa in different ways, to hear differ¬
ently and report differently because I have experienced differently.”
Having outlined her position with respect to her study of gender activ¬
ism in Ethiopia, Karimi-Taleghani notes that the parallel and symbiotic
gender systems of old are now viewed in fragments because of the intru¬
sion into Africa of colonialism, intellectual chauvinism, and capitalism and
as a result of the concomitant patriarchal ideologies that accompanied
these. Consequently, African women’s lives are now subjected to a “double
patriarchy in which African women are subordinated twice—by indige¬
nous patriarchies and by Western white and male-focused lenses and theo¬
ries. The oversimplification of African women as a monolith ignores the
specific and localized identities within the many nations in Africa. Further,
both state and international policies and economic regimes exercise an
impact on preexisting indigenous gender relations. Parallels in indigenous
gender systems were evident in metaphysical and political spheres and in
gendered role expectations, while allowing for female subordination to be
redressed through female institutions and metaphysical tools. Such sys¬
tems have been undermined with the advent of Christianity, Islam, and
colonization, as well as state-sponsored institutions. Nonetheless, spiritual¬
ity is central to the traditional female world, and studies have shown that
the sacred and the secular are of a piece in addressing colonial and con¬
temporary challenges.
Karimi-Taleghani then asks, “To what degree have Ethiopian women
been included or excluded from leadership roles and political participation
within state and local structures?” Further, she asks, how do female institu¬
tions and organizations serve as avenues for change, and to what extent does
women’s spirituality aid in transforming their environments in order to meet
family needs? She finds that much (but not all) “of the spiritual world of
most women in Ethiopia revolves specifically around the feminine body and
its reproductive functions.” In addition, women’s organizations in Ethiopia
draw upon the teachings of their respective faiths, as well as indigenous spi¬
rituality and education, in order to organize women and provide training and
other services that address the poverty in which many communities live.
The efforts of state and international agencies are also noted with regard to
gender development, environment, and biodiversity, all of which affect the
lives of women. Data gleaned from both the organizers and the recipients of
a transnational aid organization named Tesfa Ba Los Angeles, founded in
xxviii Introduction

the United States by expatriate Ethiopians, reveal that spirituality informs

the desire of American Ethiopians to help the communities and women of
Ethiopia, while eco-spiritual considerations inform the programming under¬
taken to ameliorate living conditions and poverty in Ethiopia itself.

Part 4: Sexuality, Power, and Vulnerability

Taking us to dramatic literature produced by North African Muslim

women, Laura Chakravarty Box suggests that such literature provides ‘a
bridge between the sphere of the personal or domestic and that of the
national or international.” Observing a shift since the inception of the war
on terrorism from the sociological toward the political, Box traces the
rewriting, by the Algerian French author Fatima Gallaire herself, of the
play Princesses, first written in 1988 and revised in 2004 with a new end¬
ing. Rarely performed with its original ending, in which the protagonist is
beaten to death by older village women, the play was revised by the
author, who expressed her wish to change the ending, which she did in
2004, indelibly changing the character of the protagonist from one of vic¬
tim to one who exercises a chilling agency not unlike that of her oppres¬
sors. Box sees in this shift a new note of pessimism regarding the ability of
generations to work together for social change.
The chapter’s attention then turns to the Tunisian playwright Jalila
Baccar, whose play Khamsoun, initially banned in Tunisia, was performed
in Tunis in 2008. Another play, Araberlin, takes up the subject of hybri¬
dized Arabs in Berlin in a post-9/11 era while reflecting perhaps meta¬
phorically on politics at home, where it has not yet been performed.
Engaging the question of for whom such women playwrights produce their
works, the author observes that their recent work shows a greater preoccu¬
pation with world politics, subsuming the individual to the context in
which the individual operates. The theme of resistance against occupation
and oppression is increasingly brought into greater prominence even as the
theme of violence against women ostensibly occupies center stage.
Nelly van Doorn-Harder turns to how spirituality factors into Indo¬
nesian women’s struggles with respect to gender roles. Observing that the
quest for developing a spirituality is on the rise and finds expression in a
myriad number of activities, including Qur’an readings, meditation, and
chanting, van Doorn-Harder considers various understandings of spirituality
to draw out the power of spirituality to transform society. Accordingly, her
chapter considers women “whose faith moves them to become advocates for
women and transform society according to their specific vision of Islam,”
women who are both liberal and Islamist. What binds these divergent
visions of Islam is their common appeal to the Qur’an as providing the
 Introduction xxix

blueprint for gender roles in society. Specifically, van Doorn-Harder takes

up the struggles of women around the issue of polygamy, or more accu¬
rately, polygyny, in order to examine the role of spirituality in activism both
for and against the practice. Complicating the issue further is that those
who wish to see the implementation of shari a law in Indonesia support poly¬
gyny on that basis, as a religious right.
The decade of upheaval since the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998
has resulted in heightened religiosity, whether in Islamist radicalism or
what has been termed “overmoralization,” as Indonesians sought to restore
what they felt was the loss of morality that accompanied the political and
natural upheavals of the decade, or in liberal activism that found itself
increasingly preoccupied with campaigning for women’s rights as the calls
from Islamists for legalizing sharia grew louder. The decade also saw a
"Shift toward the much-needed relief work in such locales as war-torn Aceh
as an expression of spiritual life. The issues encountered in such relief
work include addressing the Islamist call to restrict the role of women in
public life, limiting their choice of occupation, and restricting their mobil¬
ity without male supervision. Islamist women have sought to socialize such
ideas, including such practices as wearing the veil and promoting polyga¬
mous marriages, whereas others have fought to retain and promote wom¬
en’s religious and civil rights in the face of an increasing drive to Arabize
Indonesian Islam and make its legal systems more consistent with sharia
law. While the latter did not succeed at the national level, it has made
some headway in the form of by-laws or state laws, as in the state of Aceh,
which declared sharia law to be the law of the state in 2002. Such consid¬
erations have led to debates about polygamous marriages, the role of the
woman as spouse, her call to ikhlas (sincerity of faith), and the parameters
of violence in all its forms. Regardless of where they are on the ideological
spectrum, what unites activist women is the practice of their faith, how¬
ever conducted, and a struggle between literalist and liberal understand¬
ings of the Qur’an, mirroring the larger societal move from a communal
sensibility to a more individualistic orientation.
Turning to the issue of polygamy, van Doorn-Harder explores the notion
of ikhlas and how it has been reconceptualized by both Islamists and liberal
Muslims alike in order to support or argue against the practice, respectively.
The case of Ninih, the wife of a well-known preacher, is taken up to show how
Ninih invoked the notion of ikhlas upon hearing news of the secret second
marriage of her husband. This notion of ikhlas is one that involves an active
sense of acceptance and resignation in the hopes that by being a virtuous wife
and accepting polygamy—thought to be prescribed in the Qur’an—she would
go to heaven. Islamists here promote polygamy because they view it as insur¬
ance against such Western vices as single parenthood and broken families.
XXX Introduction

Such views are also directed at girls, for whom literature is produced to show,
on the one hand, the “friendly” face of Islam while, on the other, simultane¬
ously undermining individualism and encouraging conformance to sharia,
including polygamy. Girls are implicitly taught that a high sense of ikhlas
should result in accepting one’s fate as something God has sent one’s way.
Despite such a reductionist view of the virtue of ikhlas, antipolygamy
activists come from a position that it is important to draw upon the lived expe¬
riences of women. In their view, polygamy is a form of psychological abuse.
The notion of ikhlas is reinterpreted to show that it may in fact be understood
in a positive manner to argue for monogamy, with marriage understood as a
partnership between equals rather than as an institution promoting a master-
slave relationship between the husband and wife. In such a view, marriage
may be construed as an act of devotion entailing ikhlas "practiced from the
principles of voluntary choice, equality, justice, well-being, pluralism and de¬
mocracy.” Another antipolygamy activist appeals to the Qur anic notion of
tawhid, ascribing unity to God, to suggest that there can be no subordination
between humans, since God alone is above humans, regardless of their sex.
This view further argues that in spirit, the Qur’an was moving toward monog¬
amy as the preferred form of marriage.
The stakes of how Indonesian women confront polygamy are high, for
this issue is emblematic of a larger move toward a sharia mindset that
would also yield immense political power to Islamists.
Khani Begum explores the recent proliferation in literary memoirs by
Iranian women. She suggests that rather "than expressing a genuine desire
to understand the experiences of Islamic women and their culture on their
own terms,” there are “underlying sociopolitical and psychological reasons
for this particular trend at this particular time in the West." She believes
that “they implicate U.S. political and economic interests ... by drawing
attention to the relevance of these personal memoirs for U.S. and Western
policies regarding the West’s relations with Islamic societies in general and
Iran in particular." Drawing upon Edward Said’s observations regarding
the relationship between the construction of knowledge about Islam and
“the political, economic, and intellectual situation in which it arises,”
Begum notes that a new kind of Orientalist discourse is being generated in
the writings of “insiders,” who “occupy varying positions of power, espe¬
cially during critical global political crises." Thus, her chapter examines
recent Iranian women’s literary memoirs in order to examine their own
vested interests in power and authority. Such a discourse gives women a
voice and informs Western readers while simultaneously reifying Western
stereotypes of Islamic culture and Muslim women.
For instance, in adopting the form of the literary memoir, a form that
is new to the preferred Iranian literary forms of poetry and drama, Iranian
 Introduction xxxi

women are engaging in a transgressive act that goes counter to traditional

prescriptions of self-effacement. Similarly, the parameters and regulations
instituted under the fundamentalist regime in Iran around filmic depic¬
tions of male-female relationships has sparked innovative film-making
styles and techniques in Iran and the Iranian diaspora, making Iranian cin¬
ema one of the most dynamic film mediums globally. At the same time,
Begum suggests, there is a continuum in the Western fixation on the veil
and the harem, whether exercised in the past through travelers’ accounts
or in the present through interest in the “unveiling ’ Muslim women offer
in biographical narratives and films in that both are a way to know the
Other, interpreted through categories familiar to the viewer’s experience,
with the Other being determined as exotic and mysterious when failing to
accord with such experience. Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and others
'have noted the reflexivity of the scopic eye in defining its own sense of self
when examining the Other.
The process of selection with respect to which works and filmic pro¬
ductions are brought to critical and scholarly attention and acclaim like¬
wise reveals an interesting feature, with films exhibiting humanistic values
shared with the West receiving more attention than films that challenge
preconceptions of the Other. The shift from viewing the Orient as object
to be desired, as during the time of colonization, to object to be feared,
during the present era of globalization, has also sparked an even greater in¬
terest in the Other woman. Thus, the heightened interest in women’s liter¬
ary memoirs serves both to affirm Western humanistic values in battling
patriarchal structures around the globe and to investigate possible answers
to the perplexing question of “why do they hate us?” invoked in Iranian
rejection of Western culture.
In this respect, Iranian women, as with other subaltern women,
become the “native informant” brought into public view by publishers in
response to current events “that have generated the fear and paranoia evi¬
denced in the rhetoric of the war on terrorism.” Their narratives, in the
form of films and literary memoirs, are thus made to do the work of the
earlier Orientalist writings, which emphasize Western humanistic values
while simultaneously identifying its enemies. Turning to Hamid Dabashi’s
observations on Azar Nafisi’s much-acclaimed memoir, Reading Lolita in
Tehran, Begum reinforces her claim that such works work in tandem with
current geopolitical agendas in justifying belligerence toward the Other.
Works that might run counter to popular presuppositions of Iranian wom¬
en’s plight, such as the filmmaker Tahmineh Milani’s The Hidden Half, for
which she was arrested and then released (although charges are still pend¬
ing), rarely get the kind of coverage accorded such a film as Marjane Satra-
pi’s Persepolis. While the first examines a hijah-wearing woman’s portrayal
XXXI1 Introduction

of her participation in the Iranian Revolution (1978), the latter portrays an

Iranian woman’s experience of the Revolution that finds much more reso¬
nance with Western conceptions of the same, despite the fact that both
narratives are individual and highly specific tellings of the same story,
pointing to the plurality of ways in which the Iranian Revolution was expe¬
rienced. An exception must be made in the case of Shirin Neshat, whose
art installations are much more widely known and acclaimed. Although
her works fall more in line with the complex portrayals found in Milani’s
films, rather than being relegated to the margins since it does not work as
well as works like Nafisy’s and Satrapi’s do in service of imperial designs,
Neshat’s art has taken on a life of its own and has crossed several bounda¬
ries to encompass photography, performance, literature, and art.

Part 5: Women, Worldview, and Religious Practice

Kari Vogt turns to an examination of Muslim women’s religious practices

in Western Europe. Noting that the presence of Islam in Europe dates
largely from immigration flows in the 1950s, Vogt observes that the
“broader political and social context of decolonization and specific eco¬
nomic and political choices made by European countries during times of
economic growth or decline” must be taken into account in any discussion
of European Muslim women’s practices and worldviews. Numbering
between 15 million and 20 million, many second- or third-generation Eu¬
ropean Muslims have taken full citizenship in their countries and are to be
distinguished from more recent arrivals fleeing their countries of origin
because of political unrest or from the migrants that came under family
reunification programs as a result of changes in immigration laws. Such
differences account, in part, for the diversity of attitudes to religion, social,
and moral questions found in European Muslim communities. In addition,
the already diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds of the women in such
communities contribute to the diversity of viewpoints and practices. Mus¬
lim familial practices pertaining to marriage and divorce have led to public
debates resulting in the formation of Muslim women’s associations aimed
at representing and supporting their communities. The public debate over
the headscarf and its subsequent banning in France in 2003 and then
parts of Germany continues to be an issue of concern in Europe, both
within and outside Muslim communities.
While the home has traditionally been the locus for Muslim women’s re¬
ligious practice, increasingly the mosque is becoming “an important arena for
women’s activities.” Thus, rituals that previously used to be performed only at
home—the aqiqa ceremony (head-shaving) performed after the birth of a
child, for example, or the Qur’an-khwani (the recitation of the entire Qur’an),
 Introduction xxxiii

at the time of a person’s death—are now often also being performed at the
mosque as well. Increasingly, women are organizing such communal events
as the provision of iftar (fast-breaking snack or meal) during the fasting month
of Ramadan. Shi ite women meet in homes or in the women’s section of the
hosainiyeh to conduct mourning ceremonies during the month of Muharram.
Some younger-generation Muslim women seek ways of learning about
and understanding "authentic” Islam and may search out another mosque
community, mentor, or Sufi shaykh (one sufficiently advanced in the spirit¬
ual life so as to be able to instruct others), as many of the latter take
female disciples. A mosque in Oslo, Norway, for example, organizes spe¬
cial programs, including lectures and social events. Women also form such
non-mosque-related organizations as the An-Nisa Society in London that
provide a range of services and programs.
Women associated with more traditional Islamic movements gather at
homes or reserve sections of the mosque for their devotional practices.
Vogt examines a number of such movements among Moroccan, Pakistani,
and Turkish Muslims in order to provide a better understanding of how
women create spaces within which to sustain their faith despite and in
response to the gender segregation encouraged by such movements. In
addition, women have organized autonomous associations that cross ethnic
and cultural boundaries, communicating with each other in European lan¬
guages and addressing women’s concerns while also bridging their com¬
munities with non-Muslim European authorities without giving up their
commitment to their faith. Although traditional communities do not allow
women to preach to mixed audiences, women nonetheless are legitimately
permitted to preach to women-only audiences, leading to the development
of female religious specialists. Since Al-Azhar University in Cairo began
admitting women in the 1970s, several women have trained as Islamic
scholars and have begun nonritual preaching. Although many such preach¬
ing activities take place in the languages of the country of origin, as wom¬
en’s networks arise, the language of such instruction has increasingly
begun to be a European language.
Studies indicate that many European Muslims prefer the “Islam of the
heart” rather than a strict legalistic Islam and view as the crux of Islam the
five pillars rather than the interpretations of Islam that led to the creation
of the shari’a. While attempting to educate themselves on Islam, religious
Muslim women do not appear to be antagonistic toward European culture,
which they also appreciate and engage both personally and professionally.
It is important for them to claim their right to live as Muslims in European
societies. Although they fight prejudice from both within and outside their
Muslim communities, Muslim women in Europe are consciously creating
networks and organizations and pursuing knowledge of Islam in order to
XXXIV Introduction

sustain their religious lives within a diasporic context to create spaces of

authority and engagement both within and outside their communities.
Bridget Blomfield looks at the female role models drawn upon by
Shi’a Muslim women to construct their spiritual and social identity, also
considering the intercessory and redemptive roles served by such models.
These models are invoked during the days of ritual commemoration of the
slaughter of the Prophet’s grandson Husayn and his loyal band of family
members and followers during the ill-fated battle near Karbala (present-
day Iraq) between Husayn’s forces and those of the Ummayad caliph Yazid
led by Shimr. Among these role models are such women as Fatima, the
daughter of the Prophet who was also the wife of Ali, whom the Shi’a con¬
sider the legitimate successor to the Prophet. Fatima’s daughter Zaynab is
also revered, as is Fatima, for her struggle on behalf of justice and her re¬
sistance to oppression. Blomfield traces the many ways in which Fatima is
a role model as a person who is pure, the ideal wife and mother, one who
stands up for justice and against oppression, and also examines her spirit¬
ual role as the progenitor of the Imams, the mother of compassion, and
the bearer of divine wisdom. Zaynab is sent as an outraged sister and
mother who defends her family after the massacre of her brother and fam¬
ily members and friends at the court of the Ummayad caliph Yazid. She
Jhas thus become a symbol of courage for Shi’a women.
Believing that emulation of Fatima’s and Zaynab's laudable character¬
istics is necessary, Shi’a women retell stories of the two women at various
occasions throughout the year, especially during the 10 days of mourning
in the month of Muharram. Blomfield illustrates how these two women
associated with the events at Karbala serve to model, as suggested by Kam-
ran Scott-Agahie, the “new woman" who stands up to Western oppression,
even as she may have been co-opted by the Islamists. In other words, Fat¬
ima and Zaynab together “make a modern, pious woman who is politically
and religiously involved,” that is, a woman who deals with her grief and
loss by becoming a public activist. Such activism calls for freeing them¬
selves from patriarchal constraints in order to practice a moral, pious life¬
style of their choosing. For example, as Lara Deeb’s work suggests, Shi’a
women in Lebanon view their faith as activism through which they can
address injustice by offering education and support in their centers.
Blomfield notes that participation in the Muharram rituals commemo¬
rating the death of Husayn and members of his entourage serve to config¬
ure Shi’a women’s worldviews and their hope for redemption. Further,
these rituals structure time and place in a manner that enables the enter¬
ing into sacred space while establishing continuity with formative events
of the past, thereby allowing the past both to inform and to address the
sufferings of the present. Blomfield adds her observations of Muharram
 Introduction xxxv

rituals performed by women in Shi a communities in Southern California.

Here, she observes how women’s bodies, too, as with their homes and cen¬
ters, become sites of ritual enactment, allowing the “women a different
perspective of human suffering by putting their personal sufferings in the
context of the larger issues that the Prophet’s family faced.” In addition,
the Muharram rituals are grounded in a theology that merits reverence
and mourning for the Prophet and the Imams and their family with justice
and redemption in the afterlife and with the courage to withstand suffering
in the present.
Katherine Bullocks examination of the autobiographical narratives
of three young Muslim women in Canada reflects on the relationship
between religion and women’s activism. Nadira, Mona, and Samana are
three hijab-wearing young Muslim women who self-consciously publicly
identify themselves as Muslims ‘‘by wearing a headscarf and long wrist-
and ankle-length clothes out of a conviction that this is a religiously man¬
dated dress." Although such points of view are part of the diversity of Mus¬
lim perspectives and are not always considered liberatory from a feminist
point of view, the author argues that the reformist and anticolonial activ¬
ist-inflected interpretation of Islam espoused by these women “can con¬
tribute to women’s empowerment, rather than necessarily being a source
of oppression.”
Two of the women were raised in activist environments; the third was
propelled into activism in response to the hostile stares she encountered
one day during the first Gulf War. All three were active in Muslim organi¬
zations first either as children or as students at school or university. All
three are activists. Bullock examines the role of religion in their activism
and finds that religious teachings play a central role in the women’s desire
to be activists working toward social upliftment in a multilayered con¬
sciousness that extends from the individual to the family to society.
In terms of how religious upbringing and the decision to don hijab
relate to growing up Muslim and female in Canada, one young woman,
Nadira, reports her surprise at learning that men and women are treated
differentially in some Muslim communities (including within Canada), for
that was not her experience. Moreover, her decision to wear hijab is
inflected by her growing spirituality and attention to religious praxis influ¬
enced by the writings and teachings of the medieval theologian and mystic
al-Ghazali (d. 1111). For her, the hijab is a symbol of “educational
advancement and moral liberation.” Gender inequities among Muslims, in
her view, must be addressed through sharia because these are, in her view,
the result of the wanton desires of some Muslims and not illustrative of
the faith’s teachings. Another woman, Mona, reflects on the moral
accountability of both men and women to suggest that both genders are
XXXVI Introduction

equally responsible for activism. In this respect, the role models of

such older Muslim women as Sheema Khan, director of the Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), provided for such women as Samana,
the third woman whose narrative is included in this analysis, have also
been critical in their own formation as Muslims and activists.
Bullock’s research shows how these young women understand concepts
of gender equity in ways that allow them to continue practices that seem,
from a feminist point of view, to be reinforcing gender hierarchies and inequi¬
ties. Drawing upon Yasmeen Abu-Laban’s suggestion that Muslim women’s
political behavior—in this case, activism—be understood based on their own
understandings, Bullock finds that young Muslim women such as the ones
whose narratives have been examined here have opened up spaces through
which they can balance their commitments to their faith with their commit¬
ments to, and indeed expectations for, women's equality.
 Part I

cWomen> family,
and Environment
 CHAPTER 1

Law and Iranian Women s

Activism*

jLouise A. J-falper

A widely accepted view, both in scholarly and more general writing,

is that Muslim women benefit from a regime of secular law and
suffer under religious law. Thus, we are accustomed to conflating
the situation of women in countries as diverse as Iran and Afghanistan
and thinking both dreadful. But in fact, indicators of women’s advance¬
ment in Iran1 are quite comparable to those of women in Turkey, which
has a secular tradition that is now 85 years old. On the other hand, in Af¬
ghanistan, the situation of women continues to be abysmal. At a glance,
then, it appears that the presence or absence of sharia as the law of the
state is at the least nondeterminative, whatever influence it may have. It is
in fact my hypothesis that the situation of women is impacted less by the
nature of the legal regime than by their political status, that is to say, by
the salience of women to the political process and their active involvement
in it. Iran is my key example, and modifications in the law of marriage and
divorce there constitute my data, so to speak.
Let me first set out some actual data. With respect to literacy, illiter¬
ates as a percentage of Iranian women 1 5 to 24 declined from over a third
in 1980 to less than 10 percent in 2000.2 Over the same period, the illiter¬
acy rate for the entire population of adult women was cut in half, from
about 60 percent to about 30 percent.3 As for education, the number of

This chapter adapted from Louise Halper, “Law and Women’s Agency in Post-Revolutionary
Iran,” Harvard Journal of Law and Gender 28 (2005): 85, 113. Used by permission.

3
4 Women and Islam

women in secondary school as a percentage of the eligible age group more

than doubled from about 30 percent to almost 80 percent.4 As of 1999, for
every 100 boys in primary school, 96 girls were enrolled, indicating
that boys and girls were almost equally likely to be learning basic literacy
and numeracy skills.5 In 2000, half of all Iranian university students
were women,6 as were 60 percent of entering students/ who were selected
on the basis of a difficult nationwide exam. Twenty-seven percent of work¬
ing-age women were in the labor force as of 2000, up from 20 percent in
1980.8 In terms of health, life expectancy went up by 11 years between
1980 and 2000 for both Iranian men and women/ With respect to family
planning, "levels of childbearing have declined faster than in any other
country,” going from 5.6 births per woman in 1985 to 2.0 in 2000,10 a drop
accomplished by a voluntary, but government-sponsored, birth-control
li
program.
As these figures reveal, since the Islamic Revolution, women in Iran
are more literate and have more years of education than women under the
monarchy. They are also longer lived and more likely to be in the work¬
force after schooling. They are likely to marry later and have greater con¬
trol of their reproductive lives than women under the monarchy.
Some of these changes, for example, longevity and education, are cer¬
tainly at least in part reflective of the redistributive character of the Islamic
Republic, which, while it has not had a great deal of success in growing
the economy, has readjusted the share of national wealth going to lower-
income quintiles. Both men and women in this group have benefited from
expanded availability of schools and health care within the popular classes.
But beyond redistribution of wealth, these data bespeak a residue of atten¬
tion to and focus on the situation of women hardly predictable if we turn
our focus to the Islamic Republic’s initial commitment to shari a law inter¬
preted in the patriarchal terms familiar to Islamic jurisprudence in Iran
under the monarchy.
How are these data compatible with the reinstantiation of sharia as
the law of the state under the Islamic Republic? To what extent does that
law continue to govern? By what mechanisms have the improvements
reflected in these data been effectuated? What role have women them¬
selves played in this improvement? These are important questions, particu¬
larly today, for they strongly implicate the issues of religion, law, gender,
and activism.
I would like to examine these questions through the lens of the law of
marriage and divorce. It is probably the case that the law of marriage and
divorce is the central locus of gendered contact with the law in the courts
and on the books. Most women will not have to testify in a criminal or
commercial case, will not be victims of criminal acts, will not commit acts
 Law and Iranian Women’s Activism 5

denominated sexual crimes; but most will be married, and many will be
divorced. They will be a party to a marriage contract whose terms will
shape their lives, and many will find that contract governing the terms
under which the marriage is dissolved and their futures arranged. Thus,
the law of marriage and divorce is of importance to women and is, in fact,
the site at which their active intervention to shape the law is most likely to
be seen. This is indeed the case in Iran, where the law of marriage and
divorce has, since the Islamic Revolution, been a topic of interest to many
women and an issue for women’s organizations, as well as the women’s
press.1- Women’s involvement in this issue has had consequences for the
law of marriage and divorce, demonstrating both the extent to which women’s
activism impacts the concerns of the state and the extent to which the state
must respond to women as a constituency.
This discussion focuses particularly on two legislative innovations in
the law of marriage and divorce from the mid-1990s, in the period after
the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 and the election of Mohammad
Khatami as president of the Islamic Republic in 1997.
The starting point should be the status of the law of marriage and
divorce before the Islamic Republic constitutionally denominated sharia as
the law of the state. Prior to that, the law of marriage and divorce was sup¬
posed to be compatible with sharia, as interpreted by leading clerics.
Under Shah Mohammad Reza, a new law, the Family Protection Law
(FPL), was adopted in 1967 and amended in 1975. That law, which com¬
pliant clerics had held as being sharia compatible, constrained the unilat¬
eral power over divorce that was the husband’s prerogative under classical
Islamic law. Instead, the FPL said no divorce was final until ratified by
the judge, who had to be satisfied with arrangements for custody and for
the family’s post-divorce maintenance. Moreover, the new law added mal¬
treatment to the very limited circumstances (long desertion, insanity, im¬
potence) under which the wife could initiate an action for divorce.
Further, the husband could not register a second marriage without the first
wife’s consent, thus limiting his rights to polygamous marriage. These
changes were procedural, but they had an impact on the substantive law.
After the overthrow of the Shah at the end of 1978 and almost imme¬
diately after Ayatollah Khomeini’s return to Iran in February 1979 from 13
years of exile, Khomeini declared the FPL “un-Islamic” and declared that
any person who remarried after being divorced under the FPL was an
adulterer. But although Khomeini abrogated the FPL and replaced its lay
judges with clerics who would administer sharia, no particular legislation
was put in its place. Instead, judges were left to decide for themselves
how the broad outlines of shari’a were to be applied to particular cases.
Nor were procedural rules amended, leading judges to try to fit the new
6 Women and Islam

legal structure into the old procedure and vice versa. This state of affairs
continued, with bits of mending and amending for more than a decade.
Not until the Divorce Reform Law of 1989 were the sources of law apply¬
ing to marriage and divorce in the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) agreed
upon and legislation passed to rationalize them with existing rules and
opinions. In 1992, that law was further amended, resulting in the creation
of a new family code that while similar to the FPL went further in protect¬
ing women in respect to divorce and custody.1 That law was further
amended in 1993 and 1996, on both occasions to the wife's advantage.
By the time Mohammad Khatami was elected president of Iran, with a
stunning 80 percent of the women’s vote, the law of marriage and divorce
was not only the equivalent of the FPL in terms of its provision for
women, but in some cases the law exceeded its protections.14 I want to
focus in particular on the amendments of 1993 and 1996, as they indicate
a new approach to the ways in which the Islamic law of marriage and
divorce can be applied in a state context through new or reclaimed inter¬
pretive strategies. To do so requires some brief examination of classical
marriage law.15
As indicated, in shari’a, marriage is considered a contract entered into
by the two parties, each having different rights and responsibilities, which
are themselves gendered. Thus, the husband is required to maintain the
wife for both their lifetimes and for hers, if she survives him or if he divor¬
ces her by talaq (a mode of divorce in which a male verbally divorces his
wife in front of witnesses by pronouncing the word talaq three times). In
order to provide for her support, he is required, upon marriage, to endow
her with a capital sum, known as the mahr, capable of maintaining her
should he die or divorce her. Fie then has a right to her obedience and sex¬
ual and reproductive services. Fie also has the coterminous right to enter
into up to three other similar contracts and the right to unilateral divorce.
She has the right to be maintained and the duty to obey and provide sex¬
ual and reproductive services. She does not have a unilateral right to
divorce and may seek it only in very limited circumstances. She cannot
enter into another such contract coterminously, nor does she have any
duty in regard to his support. Upon divorce, he has no further duty of sup¬
port to her, though he must still maintain his children, to whose custody
he is entitled. The contract bespeaks an implicit view of society as heavily
gendered, with economic activity constituting the province of men.
With this as the outline of the sharia-based law applied in the post¬
revolutionary religious divorce courts, many women were shocked to find
themselves at risk late in their lives when their husbands unilaterally
divorced them. Because of inflation or a marriage contract that had replaced
the economic value of the mahr with some romantic conceit like a rose or a
 Law and Iranian Women’s Activism 7

sigh, they could be left indigent with no resources at all, dependent on aged
parents or grown children, and with little possibility of remarriage. Younger
women who wished to divorce found it very difficult to leave a bad marriage
without the consent of a spouse from whom they were alienated and were
subject to being deprived of support if they separated.
Ziba Mir-Hosseini has richly described in her books and the film titled
Divorce Iranian Style how these dilemmas made Quranic exegetes of
women who were challenged by this religious law to attain their goals in the
context of unwanted divorce or marriage. Among the strategies they
employed was an insistence on extracting the cash value of the mahr from a
divorcing husband. Generally, payment of the mahr was deferred at the
inception of the marriage, making the wife the first creditor on the hus¬
bands estate before its disbursal to successors after his death; in case of his
unilateral exercise of talaq, she was then entitled to it, though many women
did not understand their rights in this respect until they were educated by
the women’s press. Another use of the mahr was to waive its payment if the
divorcing husband would give her custody of the children. Or she could buy
her way out of the marriage by agreeing not to press her claim to the mahr.
But all these strategies relied upon the mahr retaining its value. In
fact, however, inflation raged in Iran after the Revolution and during the
Iran-Iraq War, making many mahrs, in the words of a woman member of
the Iranian Majles, or parliament, “'barely enough to pay a wife's taxi fare
to the divorce court.” Her only source of support after divorce, her poten¬
tial means of obtaining a divorce or of keeping her children, might be com¬
pletely valueless within a few years after the marriage.
The women’s press took up this question and sought reform that
would keep women from destitution after divorce or the destruction
caused by a bad marriage. One solution, suggested by Khomeini, was
the creation of a right for the wife, upon the husband’s exercise of talaq,
to half the property acquired by him during the course of the marriage.16
Such a provision would be included in the boilerplate marriage con¬
tract1' and could provide for the woman whose mahr had, at the time
of divorce, declined dramatically in value because of inflation. But this
solution only served women married after the new provision was added
to the contract. It did nothing for the older women whose marriage con¬
tracts were made earlier than 1982 when Khomeini had the provision
added.18
During the decade of the 1980s, women had been crucial to maintain¬
ing popular support for the Islamic Republic during the terrible Iran-Iraq
War of 1980-1988. They lent both active and passive support to the 1RI,
on the one hand, filling roles as ambulance drivers, ammunition packers,
health workers, and workplace substitutes for men at the front and, on the
8 Women and Islam

other, allowing their husbands and sons to go off to the devastating

“human-wave” attacks that allowed Iran to use its population advantage to
counter Iraq’s weaponry advantage. By the end of the 1980s, issues of con¬
cern to women, including the laws applying to their marriages, divorces,
and families, had become a focus of both administration and legislation.
There had been a decade of attention to the “crisis of marriage” by wom¬
en’s organizations and in the women’s press that had led to this outcome,19
as both women and judges (who were, in the revolutionary aftermath, all
men) sought ways to ameliorate the impact on women of the harsh stric¬
tures of classical marriage law.
But when the Majles took up this question, it did not at first provide a
solution to this fundamental problem facing women, in part because it did
not know how to do so. In finding a solution, it was aided by the demonstra¬
tion in the women’s press of the possibilities of new interpretive strategies
when applied to religious law. The new “dynamic jurisprudence,” or feqh-e
;puya, experimented with women-friendly interpretations of Quranic text
and hadith and was a product of the thinking devout and believing women
and their allies had done about the situation of women in a religious state.
This position was advanced by the cleric Mohsen Sa’idzadeh, in the
1990s the author of a series of pseudonymous articles in the feminist mag¬
azine Zanan (Women), challenging traditional interpretations of feqh con¬
cerning women. Sa’idzadeh was apparently the first modern cleric to make
“an overt attempt to reconcile feminism with Islam,” believing that religion
and gender equality are reconcilable. His starting point was the strong
equality claims of Islam, which allowed him to conclude that gender is a
social construction, “a relative matter [that] . . . has no place in the divine
realm.’’ Hence, those traditions that seem to mandate inequality are either
misinterpreted or otherwise incorrect.20 Zanan published these articles as
explicit challenges to retrograde interpretations of the situation of women
and in order to provide women with ammunition in legal actions regarding
their own marriages.
At the same time, there were a number of women among members of
the Majles who were interested in improving the legal situation of women
and who were apparently attending to the discussion of feqh-e puya. They
and their male allies took up the problem of the lack of support for
divorced women and were able to suggest a religiously acceptable means
of providing that support. The novel solution they proposed was drawn
from accepted notions of religious jurisprudence reconceptualized in a
post-revolutionary context.
Their solution was to turn to mu'amalat, the religious account of the
duties people owed one another. Among them is the responsibility to com¬
pensate fairly those who labor in one’s behalf, so long as that labor is
 Law and Iranian Women’s Activism 9

volunteered, and not commanded. In that situation, the laborer is worthy

of his or her hire, as another monotheistic tradition has it. The correspond¬
ing concept in Islam is ujrat al-mithal, meaning that a fair price should be
paid for any commodity, including the labor of a free person.
Now, although the marriage contract commits the wife to compensate
her husband with her obedience and sexual and reproductive services in
return for his maintenance of her, it does not require her to keep house or
nurse children. Yet most women do so. Thus, they are entitled to be com¬
pensated for this work, should they demand it, as they might do upon
divorce. Such a provision was added to the 1991 divorce law at the end of
1992, as another judicially cognizable claim a divorced woman would have
upon her husband.-1 This time, the Majles not only required that the form
contract include the provision that the wife was due her wages in case of
divorce but also made it possible for a woman married under the old form
of contract to get wages for housework, implied into the old contract judi¬
cially, if a court found she had not agreed to contribute her work without
pay.2- Thus, even a woman married before the right to wages was made
explicit in the form contract might be entitled to receive them, though
there were limitations on this right that were a product of compromise.
The most complete answer to the problem of support for divorced
women was in a sense both the simplest and the most faithful to the reli¬
gious tradition. Recall that the marriage gift was intended to provide
women with the assurance of support regardless of what happened to their
husbands or their marriages. The mahr ceased to accomplish that function
only because of inflation, which diminished the value of the marriage gift
when stated in terms of currency. The obvious solution, and the one
adopted by the Majles, encouraged by female parliamentarians within and
women’s organizations and the women’s press externally, was to inflation-
index the marriage gift.23 Thus, whatever amount of gold the currency-
denominated gift would have bought at the time of the marriage was
understood to be the ongoing value of the gift at whatever time it might be
demanded by the female spouse. In one simple amendment, then, the issue
of support for divorced women was resolved. That amount which she and
her family had believed would serve as a capital sum capable of supporting
her for life would be available to her whenever the marriage ended, whether
it ended by death or divorce.
All of this, occurring as it does even before the reformers take over in
the elections of 1997, is surprising, given the standard narrative of women s
situation in Iran, and begs, but does not defy, explanation. That explana¬
tion, in my view, lies in the events surrounding the Islamic Revolution,
both its precursors and sequelae, and the activism of Iranian women in that
context.
10 Women and Islam

Here it is necessary to review a bit of history. Although Iranian women

were supporters of national independence as far back as the Qajar dynasty
at the end of the 19th century, they were not traditionally expected or
encouraged to he politically active. The notion of female suffrage was first
raised in the context of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 but was
soundly rejected by both clerics and laypersons. The founder of the Pahlavi
dynasty, Reza Shah, ordered that women had to unveil in public and estab¬
lished girls’ schools in major cities, but he did not otherwise seek their polit¬
ical support. After his forced abdication, in the 1940s, a popular front
government introduced suffrage legislation, but once again it was defeated.
With the overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953, Reza Shah’s
son, Mohammad Reza, undertook personal governance of the state. On the
advice of his U.S. supporters, he sought to broaden his internal base of sup¬
port by giving women the vote. It was, in fact, on this issue that Ruhollah
Khomeini, then a relatively low-ranked cleric, first made known his public
opposition to the Shah in 1963, denouncing women’s suffrage as un-Islamic.
And certainly at least in part because of his opposition, relatively few
women voted in the Majles elections, which were, in any case, a sham, for
the Shah brooked no opposition electorally or otherwise.
Rut the opposition to the Shah and his government had never declined
since Mossadegh’s overthrow, despite savage repression, and Khomeini,
though sent into exile, continued as one of the public faces of that opposi¬
tion, which contained secular, religious, and liberal figures of many political
stripes. Khomeini’s forces had an edge—as clerics, they were less repressi-
ble than were other groups, whose organization was perforce underground,
whereas the clergy's was visible in every mosque and husayniya (a place of
gathering where ceremonies commemorating the life and martyrdom of
Imam Husayn are held). It was within the power of Khomeini and his orga¬
nization to rally truly mass support for the anti-Shah movement. Nor did
Khomeini scruple to include women within these forces.
Mary Hooglund (the well-known social anthropologist Mary Ellen
Hegland) was conducting her thesis research in a small village near Shiraz
in the summer of 1978, when the protests against the Shah entered their
final and most populous stage. She describes how women became active
in them. She notes first that the mosque was the “most important center
of revolutionary activity" in the village and that women who regularly
attended were “more likely to be influenced by the revolutionary ideas."
Moreover, the seven young girls in the village who went to high school
were taught by a mullah whose classes “became forums for learning revolu¬
tionary ideology.’’ Both men and women experienced “horror, rage, and
frustration . . . when witnessing or hearing of acts of violence against their
fellow citizens. ”24
Exploring the Variety of Random
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PIONG PAN HO:

OORSPRONKELIJKE INDISCHE ROMAN ***
[Inhoud]

[Inhoud]
 PIONG PAN HO.
OORSPRONKELIJKE INDISCHE
ROMAN

DOOR
J. DERMOUT.

AMERSFOORT,
G. J. SLOTHOUWER.
[VII]

[Inhoud]
[Inhoud]

INHOUD VAN HET EERSTE DEEL.

Bladz.

I.

TWEEËRLEI LUIDRUCHTIGE AANKOMST 1

II.

HOE EEN CHINEES ZIJN CARRIÈRE BEGINT 23

III.

HIJ EN ZIJ 57

IV.

DE KUNST OM FORTUIN TE MAKEN 80

V.

RELATIES AFGEBROKEN EN AANGEKNOOPT 99

VI.

WAAROM JUIST DEZE? 125

 VII.

HANDEL EN ROUW 150 [VIII]

VIII.

ZOU DIE OOIT TERECHT KOMEN? 174

IX.

TROUWEN … GOED; MAAR GEËNGAGEERD …! 210

X.

EEN CHINEESCHE LES IN STAATHUISHOUDKUNDE 231

XI.

NOG EEN PAAR AANBIDDERS 249

XII.

DE VOORAVOND VAN EEN FAILLISSEMENT 263 [VII]

[Inhoud]

INHOUD VAN HET TWEEDE DEEL.

I.

UN HOMME AVERTI… VAUT DEUX CHINOIS 1

II.
TWEE DOZIJN MET DE ROTTAN 22

III.

GOED INTRIGEEREN IS NIET IEDERS WERK 51

IV.

MEN POUSSEERT ZICH 82

V.

SINTERKLAAS-SURPRISES 98

VI.

OOK EEN COMPAGNON 119

VII.

EEN OORSPRONKELIJKE DECLARATIE EN EEN BLAUWTJE 160

[VIII]

VIII.

ONVERBREEKBARE BANDEN 195

IX.

OORLOG IN HUIS 223

X.

VOOR AAN UED. GELEVERD: EEN MEISJE 252

XI.
DE ZEELUCHT WERKT WONDEREN 277 [1]
[Inhoud]
I.
 TWEEËRLEI LUIDRUCHTIGE AANKOMST.
Het was al laat in den morgen van een warmen Oost-moeson-dag.
Ratelend sjokte een toko-wagen over den gladden macadam-weg,
die de schoone Bodjong-wijk met Semarang’s benedenstad verbindt;
de kleine Javaansche paarden zonder oogkleppen en een minimum
tuig, in vollen galop. Want een toko-wagen ratelt altijd, behalve als
hij stilstaat en men er niet tegen stoot; en als de paarden niet
galoppeeren zou men de uitdrukking „sjokken” door „kruipen”
moeten vervangen.

In den wagen, van het soort dat door een [2]grappenmaker eens
beschreven is als een langwerpig gat, met aan weerszijden een
bank, zat een Europeaan, diep in ’t wit. Hoewel hij den weg reeds
eenige honderden malen had afgelegd, ’s morgens naar het kantoor,
’s middags naar huis, gedurende minstens tien jaar, scheen het alsof
heden alles nieuw voor hem was. Met belangstelling keek hij uit naar
de huizen, de voorbijgangers, tot zelfs naar de honden, als zocht hij
onder dat alles naar iets bekends, om het datgene te kunnen
toeroepen, dat zijn geheele hart op dien morgen vervulde …

Een vertraging in den gang van den wagen, de brug, toen een
versnelling bij het afrijden, een draai, en de paarden stonden vanzelf
stil voor het kantoor van een der groote firma’s. De Europeaan
sprong eruit en liep naar binnen. Eerst een magazijn, waar
mandoers en koelies bezig waren groote kisten en balen te ordenen,
dan de trap met uitgeloopen treden, die hem op de monsterkamer
bracht. [3]

Van een grooten zolder, omgeven door een muur met vensters en
met twee rijen houten pilaren, die het dak schraagden, was de helft
monsterkamer. Lange houten tafels droegen de monsters van alles
waarin het „huis” handelde: katoentjes, garens, klokken, patjols…
neen, daar is niet aan te beginnen! Althans niet wat betreft de
artikelen van import. Want een hoekje, ingenomen door een groot
aantal stopfleschjes met suiker en koffie, toonde aan dat men ook
aan export deed. De andere helft van den zolder had den
vreemdeling licht op het denkbeeld kunnen brengen, dat de firma op
uitgebreide schaal handel dreef in kraamschutten. Bij een nadere
beschouwing bleek evenwel, dat men met die dingen een indeeling
beoogd had van de groote ruimte, in hokjes en vakjes, voor de
verschillende afdeelingen van administratie en beheer. Het was het
kantoor.

Op de monsterkamer was een jongmensch [4]bezig een Arabier rond

te leiden, en hem eenige artikelen aan te toonen, die hij meende dat
de Arabier wel zou kunnen gebruiken.

„’Morgen, meneer Wije,” riep hij den binnenkomende toe. „Hartelijk

gefeliciteerd.”

„Dankje Terborg,” antwoordde Wije hem de hand drukkende. En nu

kwamen zij allen te voorschijn van achter de kraamschutten, met
groot vertoon van belangstelling en vriendschap; de een vóór, de
ander na, hem gelukwenschende, naar gelang van hun positie „Wije”
zeggende of „meneer”. Zelfs de beide chefs waren uit hun vak
gekomen, hem opwachtende, toen hij zich door de profusie van
wenschende collega’s op de monsterkamer had heengewerkt, in het
nauwe gangetje.

Wije was zichtbaar geroerd door het feit, dat de chefs voor hem van
hun stoel waren opgestaan; want hij was wel de „verkooper” en een
heele knappe verkooper bovendien, maar een chef staat toch
oneindig veel hooger. [5]
„Geluk!” zeide de oudste chef. „’n Jongen hè?”

„Ja meneer, dank u,” antwoordde Wije, zich verwonderende dat men
dit hier al wist. Nu, de chef wist het niet, maar raadde gelukkig. Zij
stonden allen om hem heen, de jongeren met groot respect, de
getrouwden een knipoogje wisselend, tot de chef zeide: „Kom!” en
ieder zich weer aan zijn werk begaf.

Wije was een sympathiek persoon. Van middelmatige grootte, met

iets dat naar corpulentie streefde, bruine, open oogen, blond haar
en baard, beiden kort geknipt en een blanke huidskleur, waarop zelfs
de Indische zon geen vat scheen te hebben, mocht hij onder de door
de natuur begunstigden gerekend worden. Doch meer dan dat,
wonnen zijn geest en hart dezulken die met hem omgingen. En in
zijn werk had hij zijns gelijke niet. Niemand kon zoo met Chineezen
en Arabieren overweg als hij; steeds met behoud van [6]zijn prestige
als Europeaan. Geen der gekleurde klanten van de firma
veroorloofde zich ongepaste familiariteiten, en Wije had niet noodig
zich met hen te encanailleeren om de waren van zijn huis geplaatst
te krijgen.

Tien jaar lang was hij verkooper geweest van deze firma. In rang
was hij dus niet vooruitgegaan, doch wel in tractement, dat nu zelfs
hooger was dan dat van den procuratiehouder. In den loop van het
tweede jaar, na de eerste verhooging van salaris, trouwde hij met de
dochter van den toenmaligen militairen Commandant, een der vele
„rozen van Semarang.” Deze stad toch is sedert onheuglijke tijden,
en met recht, beroemd om haar groot getal mooie meisjes, groot in
verhouding tot andere plaatsen in Indië, en de mooiste draagt als
eeretitel den naam van de koningin der bloemen. O zeker, men
noemt ook elders het mooiste meisje zoo, men spreekt van de roos
van Makassar, Padang … maar [7]dat is namaak, usurpatie, diefstal;
de echte roos is alleen die van Semarang. En mevrouw Wije was in
haar tijd de roos. Nu was zij eenvoudig het mooiste vrouwtje van de
stad. Het diminutief was ten volle op haar toepasselijk; klein was zij,
maar heerlijk geëvenredigd, tenzij men misschien een uitzondering
mocht willen maken voor het blauwzwarte haar, te veel om anders
dan in een vlecht te worden gedragen. Al spoedig na hun huwelijk
was er een dochtertje gekomen, de „kleinste” Anna, zooals Wije
zeide; want de „kleine” Anna was zijn vrouw, en die kon hij met den
besten wil, zelfs in tegenstelling van haar dochtertje, niet de
„groote” Anna noemen.

Maar toen gingen de jaren voorbij zonder dat zij meer van dien
„zegen” deelachtig werden, die zoo raadselachtig het eene huis
voorbijgaat en het andere in overdaad vult. Wije en zijn vrouwtje
berustten er in, hoe gaarne zij ook een stamhouder gehad zouden
hebben; [8]hij voor zich, zij voor hem. Eindelijk—de „kleinste” Anna
ging reeds naar de lagere school en de „kleine” Anna begon zich zoo
alleenig te gevoelen, den ganschen dag, als haar beide lievelingen
uit huis waren—daar kon zij op zekeren dag haar man toejuichen:
„Willem, het is zoo!” En Wije vroeg niet wat er „zoo” was, maar
begreep het onmiddellijk en antwoordde: „Ik hoop, Anna, dat „het”
een „hij” is.” Welk zonderling Hollandsch alweer geen vraag uitlokte;
alleen een langen kus.

Hun hoop werd vervuld. Het was een jongen.

Wat wonder dat Wije dien morgen zoo opgewekt naar het kantoor
reed, hoewel hij het grootste gedeelte van den nacht wakende had
doorgebracht! Hij had zich kunnen verontschuldigen, doch hij kende
den chef en wist dat deze uiterst gevoelig was voor vertoon van
ijver. De belooning bleef niet uit. Nauwelijks was hij gereed met den
Arabier, dien hij van Terborg had overgenomen, of hij werd
binnengeroepen. [9]

„Nog iets te doen in het Chineesche kamp vandaag?” vroeg de chef.

„Neen meneer,” zeide Wije. „Kan Liong Tjoe zal morgen zelf hier
komen om bericht te brengen of hij die factuur Cambrics neemt.
Alleen moet ik vanmiddag nog even naar de ijsfabriek; ik hoor dat zij
gebrek aan brandhout hebben en wil eens probeeren hen de
steenkolen aan te praten, waar de suikerfabriek ons mee heeft laten
zitten van ’t jaar.”

„Dat is goed. Rijd dan een eindje verder, naar den kleinen Boom, en
kijk meteen of de prauwen met ijzerwerk voor de suikerfabriek er al
zijn. Geef den koetsier het bericht maar mee; want je zult wel
verlangen om thuis te komen, hè?”

„Alsublieft meneer,” zeide Wije, aangenaam verrast.

„Dan ging ik nu maar,” opperde de chef.

Wije stapte in den toko-wagen met een gevoel alsof de geheele

wereld zich om zijnentwille [10]verheugde. Daar was nu de oudste
chef, die anders waarachtig niet scheutig was met verlof en het hem
ditmaal uit eigen beweging gaf! En dat de ijsfabrikant dadelijk beet
in zijn steenkolen, was enkel om hem plezier te doen; niet omdat hij
anders dure kolen bij de Spoorwegmaatschappij moest koopen …
„enkel om mij plezier te doen.” Hij had het hardop gezegd, en lachte
er toen zelf om.

De prauwen waren er nog niet, toen hij aan de landingsplaats kwam

bij den kleinen Boom, maar in het douane-lokaal was een opstootje.
Ten minste er werd verschrikkelijk geschreeuwd. Wije liep er in en
zag een Chinees, die groot misbaar maakte, te midden van een
troepje inlanders, boom-beambten en koelies, die hem schenen te
willen verwijderen. Het was een jonge Singkeh, dat is een in China
geboren Chinees, gekleed in wijde broek en buis van grove blauwe
stof; onder den eenen arm hield hij een koffertje van geperst papier,
[11]in
den vorm van een boomstam, met den anderen gesticuleerde
en verdedigde hij zich onder heftig gepraat in zijn eigen taal.

„Wat heeft die man?” vroeg Wije aan den wachthebbenden

verificateur.

„Ik weet het niet,” zeide deze. „Hij is van de „Angelic,” uit Singapore,
gekomen en staat iedereen te vervelen. Misschien is hij in een
verkeerde haven geland, maar niemand kan hem verstaan. Ik heb er
hem al tweemaal uit laten zetten, maar hij komt telkens weer terug.”

„Een prettige manier om iemand terecht te helpen,” merkte Wije op.

„Is hier geen andere Chinees in de buurt?” En hij zag den weg af,
doch bespeurde niets.

Of hij onder andere omstandigheden zich met den armen Singkeh

zou bemoeid hebben, was een vraag die hij zich had kunnen stellen;
maar voorzeker, wat hij verder deed, was meer dan hij bijvoorbeeld
een maand geleden [12]zou gedaan hebben. Hij ging op het
twistende troepje af, duwde de inlanders op zij en trok den Singkeh
aan een zijner wijde mouwen mee, den toko-wagen in. De man
begreep blijkbaar dat Wije hem wilde helpen, en nam gewillig plaats
op het voorbankje. Daar gezeten, begon hij een verhaal te doen van
zijn wederwaardigheden, altijd op denzelfden schellen toon, een
woordenvloed dien Wije onmachtig was te stuiten, zelfs niet met het
veelzeggend gebaar van zijn ooren eenige oogenblikken dicht te
stoppen. Eindelijk amuseerde het hem, vooral om de verbazing te
zien op de gezichten der voorbijkomende inlanders, die zich schenen
te verbeelden dat er in dien toko-wagen minstens moord en
doodslag voorviel.

In de straat genaamd „het Zeestrand,” ofschoon heinde en ver geen

strand te bekennen is, liep een Chinees. Wije liet ophouden en riep
hem aan. De Singkeh gaf ondubbelzinnige bewijzen van vreugde
toen hij een landgenoot [13]zag, maar weldra bleek dat ook deze
twee elkaar niet verstonden. Want een op Java geboren Chinees,
een Babah, kent niet meer Chineesche woorden dan voldoende zijn
om, in het Maleisch gemengd, dit te veranderen in een argot dat
noch de echte Chinees, noch de Europeaan begrijpt. Wije begon
ongeduldig te worden, toen ten slotte de Singkeh een papiertje voor
den dag haalde en het den Babah toonde.

„Kan Liong Tjoe,” spelde deze. „Daar moet hij zijn, meneer.”

„Kampong-Tjina!” beval Wije den koetsier, en voort ging het, tot zij
stilhielden voor een der grootste Chineesche toko’s.

„Dag sobat,” zeide Wije, de toko binnengaand met den Singkeh

achter zich, en knikte het hoofd der zaak toe. Aan handjes geven
deed hij weinig. „Hier heb ik een zwerveling, ingeklaard aan den
kleinen Boom.”

Kan Liong Tjoe vroeg den Singkeh iets, [14]waarop deze hem een
brief overhandigde en onmiddellijk weer op zijn gewone luide manier
aan het praten ging. Hoewel Kan Liong Tjoe wat meer van zijn
landstaal kende dan de Chinees van het Zeestrand, was dit hem toch
te machtig.

„Geen leven maken!” beval hij. De uitdrukking: wees stil, zwijg,

bestaat niet in ’t Chineesch. En hij wenkte een der bedienden om
den nieuweling naar achter te brengen. „Hoe heet je?” riep hij hem
nog achterna.

„Piong Pan Ho,” was het antwoord, en eer hij er veel had kunnen
bijvoegen, had de bediende hem de achterdeur van de toko
ingeduwd.
„Singkeh’s praten altijd zoo hard, omdat zij bang zijn dat men hen
niet verstaat,” verklaarde de toko-houder. „De man was voor mij
bestemd, maar ik verwachtte hem eerst later; anders zou ik wel
iemand gezonden hebben om hem af te halen. Ik ben meneer
intusschen zeer dankbaar voor de moeite.”

Dankbaar is alweer een woord dat in de [15]Oostersche talen slechts

door omschrijving kan worden uitgedrukt, maar de deugd zelve
bestaat toch, daar over de zee, hoewel … nu ja, juist als in Europa.
Kan Liong Tjoe was van plan geweest den volgenden morgen nog
een gulden af te dingen op de Cambrics; nu gaf hij de order zonder
meer.

Toen Wije eindelijk in zijn huis op Bodjong was gearriveerd, en den

koetsier met een briefje aan Terborg had teruggezonden, spoedde
hij zich naar de kraamkamer.

Er is ter wereld niets dat de drie begrippen: ruimte, kalmte en

behagelijkheid zoo in zich vereenigt als een kraamkamer in een mooi
Indisch huis. Het weinige rumoer dat men op den grooten weg
hoort, dringt in geen geval door tot het huis, dat midden op een
groot erf staat. In de kamer zelf zijn de ramen open, doch de
jaloezieën gesloten, warmte en fel zonlicht uitsluitende, dit
temperende tot een aangenaam halfduister. De witte muren,
gestoffeerd [16]met een schilderij hier, Japansche kunst daar, het
stroogeel van de rottan-mat en de iets donkerder tint der meubelen,
doen door hun harmonische zachte kleuren het oog weldadig aan.
Geen stuk dat te dicht bij een ander staat of gedrongen.

Het kinderbedje, gekroond door een smetteloos witte klamboe, met

blauwe strikjes opgenomen, en daarin vaders zaligheid en moeders
nieuwe liefde, stond schuin tegenover het groote ijzeren ledikant,
even breed als lang. En hierin, het hoofd en de ronde blanke
schouders—nachtjaponnen, die het geloof aan spoken deden
ontstaan, kent men in Indië niet—in het zachte kussen, lag „kleine”
Anna, een slapende fee gelijk.

Doch slapen deed zij niet meer; zij had alleen gewacht met de
oogen op te slaan tot Wije, die op zijn teenen was binnengekomen,
vlak voor het bed stond.

„Ondeugd,” fluisterde hij, haar kussende. [17]„Gaat het goed? Neen

… niet te veel praten; ik kom bij je zitten.” Hij haalde een stoel uit ’t
andere eind van de kamer, om in het voorbijgaan een blik te kunnen
werpen op zijn zoon, die onder de vliegenwerende zorg der baboe
lag te slapen met de vuist voor den mond.

Wije was niet altijd zoo attent voor zijn vrouw geweest en zoo
geduldig om langen tijd met haar te kunnen zitten praten. Toen de
eerste weken van hun getrouwd-zijn voorbij waren, had hij het
voorbeeld gevolgd van de meeste gehuwde mannen in Indië.
Thuisgekomen van het kantoor, baadde hij zich, kleedde zich dan op
zijn gemak aan en was tegen zeven uur gereed om in de
voorgaanderij de courant te gaan zitten spellen. Zijn vrouw had
gedurende dit gewichtige werk verlof zooveel mogelijk te zwijgen,
een handwerkje te doen en hem een nieuw bittertje in te schenken
als zijn glaasje leeg [18]was. Na den eten wandelde of toerde hij wel
eens met haar, maar ook heel dikwerf ging hij naar sociëteit.

De eens zoo gevierde „roos van Semarang” was bitter teleurgesteld,

doch zij gaf het zoo spoedig niet op. Zij begreep dat ze hem moest
heroveren, en vatte de zaak flink aan. Zonder dat hij er erg in had,
begon hij van zijn couranten-lectuur tijd over te houden en ging later
naar de sociëteit, ja langzamerhand bleef hij heele avonden thuis.
Hoe zij dat wonder bewerkt had? Door een aaneenschakeling van
kleinigheden. Vooreerst deed zij, terwijl hij baadde, de knoopjes in
zijn overhemd en legde alles klaar, zoodat hij het zoo maar aan te
schieten had en niet kon treuzelen; voorts … maar waartoe die
opsomming? Anna bewees eenvoudig de oude waarheid, dat de
vrouw het huis maakt; zij die dat wil, kan het, en die het niet wil,
neemt een wenk toch niet aan.

Het einde was aldus. Op een Zaterdag was [19]er Vauxhall in de

sociëteit; zij wilde er graag heen, hij niet, en zij hadden er een
beetje over gekibbeld. ’s Avonds kleedde zij zich in haar beste japon,
en hij die meende dat zij hem dwingen wilde, was knorrig. Het eten
was bijzonder lekker; dat deed zijn humeur weer in evenwicht
komen. Na tafel verveelde hij zich, omdat zij weinig sprak; hij had
wel trek toch maar te gaan, en eindigde met het voor te stellen.

„Lieve man,” zeide zij met een betooverend lachje. „Vindt je het
heusch niet naar?”

„Volstrekt niet. Ik had van middag wat hoofdpijn, weet je,” jokte hij.

„Laat dan inspannen! Ik ben in een wip klaar.”

Wije had gelegenheid om uit te maken dat de opgegeven

tijdsbepaling overeenkwam met wat men in het dagelijksch leven
een kwartier pleegt te noemen; doch toen het rijtuig vóórreed, was
zij er ook. Eerst bij het instappen [20]bemerkte hij dat zij haar japon
verwisseld had.

„Ik dacht dat we thuis bleven,” antwoordde zij op zijn vraag. „Voor
het Vauxhall is deze goed genoeg.”

Hij was stupéfait. Den geheelen avond hield hij zijn opmerkzaamheid
op haar gevestigd en vond bij het naar huis rijden, dat zijn vrouwtje
alle andere dames ver overtrof. De menschen met wie zij aan een
tafeltje hadden gezeten, vonden dat het wel leek of Wije nog altijd
verliefd was op zijn vrouw. Hij was het weer, en ditmaal voor goed.

„Je moest meer uitgaan,” zeide hij, toen ze thuis waren.

„Och Wim, ik houd er zooveel niet van, en .… binnenkort kan het
niet meer.” Het gebeurde namelijk vóór hare eerste bevalling.

„Dan,” zeide hij, „moet ik maar thuisblijven.” En dit deed hij sedert.

Naast het bed gezeten, verhaalde hij haar [21]van de vriendelijkheid

der chefs en zijn avontuur met den Singkeh, een beetje verlegen nu,
dat hij zich zooveel moeite gegeven had voor een individu van
minder ras. Toen hij dit ten einde gebracht had, hoorden zij kleine
dribbelpasjes in de binnengalerij, ophoudende voor de deur der
slaapkamer, en een kinderstemmetje vroeg: „Mag ik nu moesje zien
en broertje?”

Wije deed de deur open en een nieuwsgierig gezichtje, met groote

zwarte oogen, keek naar binnen; voorzichtig in ’t eerst, als
vertrouwde zij den toestand niet; maar toen zij haar moeder zag, die
het hoofd naar haar toe wendde, sprong zij met uitgestrekte
armpjes vooruit, zóó vlug dat Wije nauwelijks den tijd had haar vaart
te stuiten.

„Kalm wat, Anneke,” zeide hij, haar van den grond tillende om haar
de moeder toe te reiken.

„Is moesje ziek?” vroeg zij. [22]

„Ja, maar niet erg; moesje wordt gauw weer beter,” onderrichtte hij.
„En nu hierheen.” Hij zette haar neder voor het kinderbedje, dat met
een hekje was voorzien tegen ontijdige verplaatsing van
zwaartepunt. De kleine meid stond vol belangstelling toe te zien naar
het vreemde wezentje vóór haar. „Niet aanraken!” had papa
gewaarschuwd, toen zij een armpje door de tralies stak, en zij bracht
haar handjes onmiddellijk achterwaarts.

„Kan dat kind praten?” informeerde zij.

„Beloem,” zei de baboe.

Doch op hetzelfde oogenblik maakte de jonge wereldburger een

onrustige beweging en … toonde dat, zoo hij zich nog niet in
woorden kon uitdrukken, hij dan toch een geduchte stem in het
kapittel had.

„Broertje is stout!” besliste Anneke, een stap terugwijkende.

„Hij heeft honger,” zeide Wije; „en wij ook. Kom, laat ons gaan eten.”
[23]

[Inhoud]
II.
 HOE EEN CHINEES ZIJN CARRIÈRE BEGINT.
Piong Pan Ho had dus eindelijk zijn bestemming, de toko van Kan
Liong Tjoe, bereikt. Door de gangetjes en vertrekken van het
achterhuis geleid, schoot hem het hart vol. Een Europeaan zou
waarschijnlijk gevloekt hebben tegen het Labyrinth, wanhopende er
ooit den weg in te zullen vinden; niet zoo de Singkeh, die er zich
onmiddellijk thuis gevoelde. Hij gaf zijn vreugde lucht door nog
luider te praten dan anders. De bediende die hem den weg wees,
maande hem aan tot stilte, doch tevergeefs. Zij bereikten ten laatste
een magazijn, [24]waar te midden der grootst mogelijke wanorde van
kisten en waren, een zoon van den toko-houder met twee koelies
aan het werk was. Hij gelastte den nieuweling mee te helpen. Aan
uitrusten van de vermoeienis der reis scheen niemand te denken;
trouwens die kon moeielijk bestaan, daar Piong Pan Ho de dagen,
die hij aan boord had doorgebracht, liggende op zijn rug met
opgetrokken broekspijpen voor de koelte, zich geen andere
inspanning veroorloofd had, dan driemaal daags op te staan om zijn
bakje met rijst te halen in de kombuis.

Hij ging dadelijk aan den gang, doende wat hij de koelies zag
uitvoeren, doch zonder zijn mond een oogenblik stil te laten staan.
De beide andere Chineezen, die te samen iets bespraken, konden
door het lawaai dat hij maakte, elkaar nauwelijks verstaan.

„Geen leven maken!” riep de zoon des huizes ten derden male, en
toen dit niet hielp, [25]gaf hij Piong Pan Ho een flinken ribbestoot.
Maar deze wendde zich plotseling om, met voor uitgestoken wijs- en
middelvinger, en deed een uitval in de richting van de maagstreek
van hem die den klap had uitgedeeld. Hij werd gepareerd met een
spijkertrekker, harder dan een Chineesche hand; in ’t volgende
oogenblik voelde hij zich door de twee jongelui tegen een kist
aangedrukt en ontving een geregeld pak slaag, waarbij de een zijn
handen gebruikte, de ander het ijzeren instrument, om meer indruk
te maken.

En het hielp; na eenige seconden zweeg de Singkeh; de argumenten

der anderen waren hem op den duur te machtig.

Dit was zijn eerste les; de tweede kreeg hij dien avond in de
Maleische benamingen der getallen en muntstukken, en tevens om
op alles wat men hem vroeg en hij niet verstond, met het enkele
woord: ada! te antwoorden en daarbij een artikel van zijn koopwaar
[26]uit den meegedragen voorraad te nemen, onverschillig welk.
Want Piong Pan Ho zou zijn carrière beginnen als klontong.

De toko had er meer, die elken morgen uitgingen om de waren langs

de huizen te venten en het Maleisch volkomen machtig waren; doch
Kan Liong Tjoe wist best wat hij deed met den Singkeh te
engageeren. Hij had opgemerkt dat dezulken meer sleten dan
Babah’s; het publiek en vooral de Europeesche dames, koopen liever
van een Singkeh, die onder meer de reputatie heeft, dat hij minder
overvraagt dan zijn op Java geboren rasgenoot, hoewel zij hem niet
verstaan en dikwijls de moeite moeten nemen datgene wat zij
wenschen te koopen, zelf uit te zoeken. Of Kan Liong Tjoe deze
eigenaardigheid der dames kende daargelaten, maar wel wist hij dat
een Singkeh voordeelig was voor de negotie.

Overdag bleef Piong Pan Ho voorloopig in toko of bergplaatsen

werken, want in een [27]Chineesch huis werkt iedereen, en men kon
hem toch niet voor niets den kost geven! Maar ’s avonds kreeg hij
onderricht voor de betrekking die hij zou gaan vervullen, en in
beleefdheid. Dit laatste vooral had hij noodig, daar het hem geheel
onbekend was dat de Europeanen op Java, de Hollanders, zich als
van een hooger ras beschouwen dan al wat een getinte huid heeft,
en niet als de Engelschen den Chinees die rijk is of groote zaken
doet „Mr” noemen en zich door hem van het trottoir laten dringen.
Opstootjes te maken, zooals in Singapore, zou hun hier slecht
bekomen. Eens, het was nu ongeveer honderd jaar geleden, had een
streng Gouverneur-Generaal last gegeven dat alle Chineezen
moesten gedood worden, omdat zij te brutaal werden, en het was
vreeselijk geweest, zóó veel als er waren omgekomen! Piong Pan Ho
rilde van angst; want hoewel een Singkeh zich zonder lang
nadenken van kant maakt als het hem [28]tegenloopt, wanneer hij
het goed heeft, is hij zeer aan het leven gehecht.

Hij nam zich dus voor heel onderdanig te zijn jegens de Hollanders,
die voorzoover hij reeds had opgemerkt, hun zaakjes best in orde
hielden. Moord, doodslag en diefstallen schenen hier geen dagelijks
voorkomende zaken te zijn; ook zag hij niets van executies, en toen
hij er naar vroeg, lachten hem de anderen uit. Waarlijk, hij gevoelde
zich ongekend veilig. Maar toen men hem meedeelde dat een
Chinees in dit wonderland zelfs failliet mocht gaan zonder gestraft te
worden, ja mits hij slechts zorg droeg dat niemand uit zijn boeken
wijs werd, daarenboven mocht knoeien zooveel hij wilde, sloeg hij
een gat in de lucht en kreeg een aanval van zijn spreekmanie. Zijn
respect voor de Hollanders daalde een weinig, en hij vatte niet hoe
die menschen zoo verstandig en zoo dom te gelijk konden zijn. [29]

Een paar maal mocht hij met een der bedienden mee uit, om in de
toko bestelde artikelen aan de huizen te bezorgen en zoodoende den
weg in Semarang eenigszins te leeren kennen. Nu, dat was niet
moeielijk, ofschoon de betrekkelijke regelmaat waarin die stad
gebouwd is, hem den eersten keer dat hij alleen uitging, in de war
bracht.

Dat geschiedde ongeveer twee weken na zijn aankomst. In de

frissche morgenkoelte stak hij van wal. Aan de eene zijde van zijn