By Arshad Alam, New
Age Islam
23 January
2021
A commonly
held perception about Muslim women is that they are at the mercy of their men
and are oppressed inside their homes. Part of the stated rationale behind the
introduction of the ‘triple Talaq’ law was that it will ‘liberate’ Muslim women
from their dependency of men. This is not to suggest that the law did in fact
liberate Muslim women. Rather, the way in which the law was introduced made it
amply clear that it was designed more to punish Muslim men and appease the
majoritarian sentiment about Muslims. This is also not to suggest that
everything was good about the then existing Muslim divorce law; that it
required fundamental changes was beyond question.
Muslim
women’s groups had been advocating the abrogation of such regressive laws for
long and only if the government would have accepted their draft, a much better
law could have been made. This is also not to suggest that women are not
disempowered within Muslim societies; certainly they are. The point of this
article is that Muslim women themselves have been struggling to improve their
lot and if their voices would have been heard by Muslims themselves, today
Muslim society would have been at a much better place.
Rashid
Jahan
----
One such
voice was that of Rashid Jahan (1905-1952), who through her writings,
challenged the sacred hierarchy between men and women in Muslim society. She
was born at Aligarh in 1905 in a household which was keen to educate their
daughters. She was fortunate enough to be born in family which valued women’s
education over everything else. Her father, Sheikh Abdullah, was the founder of
Muslim Girls’ School (which later became the Aligarh Women’s College), despite
heavy opposition from the clerics and other conservative section within
Muslims.
Educated at
Aligarh, Lucknow and Delhi, Rashid Jahan eventually graduated to be a doctor,
which was again a rare achievement for a Muslim woman at that time. As a state
doctor, she travelled in different parts of UP (then United Provinces) which
gave her newer insights into the condition of women within the household, how
they were treated and how their health needs were very often neglected by men.
She developed an acute understanding of how Muslim patriarchy worked, advocated
for women’s education and organised literacy classes for them. Despite being
involved in the national movement, her special focus always remained on the
pitiable condition of Muslim women because she came from the same religious
background and few were speaking up for uplifting Muslim women at that time. In
fact, Rashid Jahan was one of the first feminists of modern India.
Rashid
Jahan 4th from left to right|Pinterest...
------
It was
through her stories that she ripped apart the hallowed domestic space of Muslim
society and bared it for what it was: a space in which women had very little
agency. In 1932, she, along with some others writers like Sajjad Zaheer,
published a collection of short stories called Angarey (Embers). One of her contributions in this collection was Parde ke Peeche (Behind the Curtain).
This story was about the exploitation of women in Muslim households and how their
husbands almost treated them as an absolute possession. The obsession of the
Muslim husband to beget a male heir and his sexual fantasies almost decimates
the health of his wife. And yet, this Muslim man did not feel that he was doing
anything improper or that his actions were being detrimental to the health of
his wife. What Jahan was telling us was that male entitlement was so
deep-rooted that men were not even conscious of it and seemingly soft spoken
sharif men had no understanding of what violence they were enacting on their
women.
Her style
of writing was bold and direct which impacted both the genders very
differently. While many Muslim women of the time would read her stories in
secret, Muslim men would rally on the streets demanding a ban on her writings.
Published in 1932, Angarey created such a furore within the Muslim religious
establishment that mosques were used to denounce the book. The conservatives
thought that the book was questioning their religious and cultural values.
Partly, this was correct, but then according to Rashid Jahan, that was the main
purpose of the book. Ultimately, the colonial government had to succumb Muslim
orthodoxy and banned the book in 1933. The book was banished with such fury
that only five of the original copies survive in different libraries. Muslims
who are perturbed today about the diminishing freedom of expression in our
country will do well to remember that they too are to blame for the rise of
such intolerance.
Certainly,
Rashid Jahan wrote about the Ashraf/upper
caste household because, coming from the same milieu, she was most familiar
with this space. Traditionally, Shudra
Muslim women never had the ‘luxury’ of being in the Zenana. Their very material existence forced them to work alongside
their men. Not being allowed to work outside their homes was therefore never a
Shudra Muslim women’s issue; they were already doing so due to the force of
their adverse circumstances. However, the Muslim ideal has always remained that
women should not venture outside the ‘threshold’ which was the patriarchal
household. One of the first tasks of an upwardly mobile low caste Muslim family
has been to put their women inside the four walls of their homes. So although
Rashid Jahan’s stories emanate from a particularistic caste and class location,
they have become universal in their concern about the position of women in
Muslim society.
Rashid
Jahan|Creative common...
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The home
and its imaginations are fundamentally political. Even today, the
identification of the household with women functions to domesticate them in
different ways. It is not surprising therefore that Islamic regimes have
identified and paid sufficient attention to the household because they
perfectly understand that any change within this sphere will fundamentally
impact gender relations elsewhere. That is precisely the kind of politics which
we see in the writings of Deobandi scholar Ashraf Ali Thanwi. Ostensibly, his Bahishti Zewar advises women on how to
lead a pious Islamic life. But Thanwi makes it very clear such a life is not
possible without following the commands and wishes of husbands. Thanwi’s regime
of domestication went to the extent of advising wives not to wear anklets lest
its’ sound might attract other men’s attention. Women were always supposed to
talk in a low voice and were directly prohibited to read anything else apart
from rudimentary religious literature. It is a sad commentary on Muslim society
when we still gift a misogynist text like Beheshti Zewar to our girls when they
get married.
Through her
stories, Jahan was not just showing a mirror to Muslim society, but also
telling us the function of such religious writings which was to fundamentally
transform women into an ornament, thus denying her any possible agency. She was
telling us that people like Thanwi, and religious scriptures more generally,
have conspired to keep women enslaved within Muslim society and that it was
time to question such religious and cultural mores. And any such questioning
must necessarily critique the existing theological justification on which such
a system rests.
Today, when
many Muslim women are flaunting their veils as a question of ‘choice’, they
completely forget that the same cannot be said for millions of other Muslim
women for whom it is not a choice but an imposition. Had Rashid Jahan been
alive today, this new kind of ‘Islamic feminism’ would have definitely saddened
her. Needless to say, had Thanwi been alive today, he would have been very
receptive of this new ‘feminism’. It is time that Muslims, especially Muslim
women, paid sufficient attention to the writings of Rashid Jahan in order to
bring lasting changes in their society.
-----
Arshad Alam is a
columnist with NewAgeIslam.com
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/rashid-jahan-(un)veiling-muslim-women/d/124135
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