Dishonoring the Quran
How does context change biblical theology? Just ask Prof. Fontaine, whose membership on the Board of the Interreligious Center for Public Life has led her into work with women’s issues among Muslim communities. “Once the ICPL of Hebrew College and ANTS became an active force on our hill, I found that the opportunity to work on theological issues with Jewish and Muslim feminists and interfaith partners continually reshaped my theology and presentation of biblical teachings and issues. I can’t even imagine doing ‘isolationist’ biblical studies any more, pretending that the very texts we love are not being used in cynical and critical political discourse. We have a duty to be part of these conversations.”
Fontaine, who specialized in Islam, especially Quranic exegesis and the position of women in Islam, during her Ph.D. work at Duke University has become a popular speaker on the human rights circuit, and offers strategic advice on progressive readings of scriptural traditions which can combat exclusivist, literal readings from within the traditions in question. Below is a speech she gave at a Conference on Women, Islam and Equality: The Unrelenting Struggle in Iran, in Auvers-sur-Oise, France this past August.
“Madam Maryam Rajavi, the President-Elect of the National Council of Resistance in Iran, is a ‘popular’ Islamic feminist theologian who challenges the portrait of Islam that is being used to oppress women worldwide”, says Fontaine. “It’s like being in the presence of an early Church Father--Rajavi draws her theology fresh from the Quran and long traditions of interpretation and places it in meaningful dialogue with the current abuses in her beloved country and beyond. She has a message that everyone who has been thought to think of Islam as backward, extremist, exclusivist, and woman-hating needs to hear. It’s easy to see why she has been named as one of the 100 most powerful women in the world. I was honored to be asked to speak in such a context. So far, my career has produced few moments as powerful as those wherein I am invited to share the liberating traditions of the Gospel and the Hebrew Bible with the ‘enemy’ we are supposed to hate and call ‘evil’.”
Speech
At the Women, Islam and Fundamentalism ConferencePaper Read at the ‘Women, Islam and Fundamentalism’ Conference at Auvers-sur-Oise, August 27, 2005. (Portions of the paper omitted for reasons of time have been placed into footnotes.)
May all our ways be the Straight Path of peace and justice!
I am honored to be with you today to speak of the religious heresy and deep dishonor that clings to the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran like a dirty cloak. I am a scholar of the ancient past of the Middle East, and of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. I am also a trained student of Islam and once, in my younger days, a painfully slow translator of the poetry of the Quran.
But I must tell you, that from the time of ancient religions until the Christian Catholic Inquisition in the late Middle Ages in Europe, I have not witnessed anything like what is happening to women and girls in Iran: the institutionalization of gender apartheid. Even the Christian Inquisition on its wildest hunt for heretics, homosexuals and witches never managed to totally wipe out the notion of human dignity, nor did they succeed in making their views of women’s corrupted natures into the sole doctrine of the Christian body of believers.
But the Islamic Republic of Iran has shown us something new: this is what happens when Fundamentalists gain control of the structures of the nation-state, and use religion to cynically impose laws and practices which betray the very history and content of that religion. Christians in the United States, and secularists in the state of Israel should learn this history and beware.
Only listen to what the Quran has to say on such matters:
The Sura is ‘The Cow’, Sura 2, Ayat 256:
“Let there be no compulsion in religion. Truth stands out clear from Error: whoever rejects evil and believes in God has grasped the most trust worthy hand-hold that never breaks. And God hears and knows all things.”
Before I continue, let me say that I do not agree with the presupposition that the Islamic world is to be viewed as the repository of all Human Rights violations, while the ‘West’ is always superior in its attention to Human Rights and international law. Quite the contrary, as a look at world news will show us. [1] So, shame is to be found in equal measures wherever and whenever one religious group decides to violate the basic social rights and the common good of others. But the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran over the last 25 years should provide a cautionary tale to all societies committed to the freedom, rights and dignity of all of its members—including women and girls!
I want to say that violence against women has a great and long history. Islam did not make this up; it did not arrive with the Prophet Mohammed. It did not begin with the Hebrew Bible (the Torah). It was rather, from its earliest times, a strategy for state formation and male dominance. You see, in order to acquire land and hold it, a man must be able to trust and count on support from those men to whom the land is given. If a man can control marriages and give his womenfolk to the right men, he will suddenly have brothers he can trust. So women’s bodies must be controlled, in order for this strategy to function properly. Little girls were ‘trafficked’ to other countries to seal political bargains and treaties; slave women were kept for personal exploitation or freely passed around as ‘rewards’ to the men who did their masters’ bidding.
Now, even in religious thinking, it is not so easy to turn the despised ‘Other’ into an object suitable for exploitation—it requires an ideology to support such behaviors which so clearly violate the human code of mutual support and respect, and house violence and tyranny right in the home of the family. Such support has been seen in the various Scriptures which are interpreted—by male experts, of course!—as authorizing the denigration of women and men’s complete control over them. And who could be bold enough to transgress the commands of God?
Well, the mullahs of Iran are just that bold in their debasement of the values of the Quran. How painful this is to anyone who knows the history of Islam! Those who know the history of the Prophet, and the profound support, respect and dignity accorded him by the women in his life cringe at what we now see in so-called ‘Islamic Fundamentalism’. [2] Among the three ‘Book’ scriptures—the Hebrew Bible or Torah, the Christian New Testament, and the Quran—it is the Quran which insists on the dignity of slaves and the necessity of setting them free It is the Quran which forbids female infanticide. It is the Quran which provides that women be consulted for their agreement on any marriage arranged by their families (that is, they cannot be ‘inherited’ against their will, and this is amplified through various hadith). It is the Quran which provides women with some guarantee of inheritance rights, and the right to freedom of religion, and so on. The Quran’s teachings on social justice, and especially women and slaves, were revolutionary for their time, and could be ‘revolutionary’ even now. Yet, the mullahs, with their institutionalization of the link between male power and violence against women at every level, show only disrespect and contempt for the humanistic goals of the Quran. One wonders what a God called ‘ar-Rahman’ can possibly think of the fundamentalist construction of the Quran offered to the world by the merciless mullahs!
Again, listen to the voice of the Quran. Sura al Hujurat (49), ayat 3 tells us:
“We created you from a single pair of male and female and made you into nations and tribes that you may know each other. The noblest of you in the sight of Allah is the best in conduct…”
There is not even a hint here that women are inferior to men, nor that one tribe or nation is to exterminate another! Rather these differences in sex and nationality or ethnicity are Good Things created by God as a means to instruct the human race in the glory of the fullness of God’s creation! We find in Sura 27, The Ant, ayat 24, that the legendary Queen of Sheba rules on a ‘splendid’ or ‘glorious’ throne, with no tirade that finds her forbidden to hold such office by nature of her sex! Indeed, two verses later, in ayat 26, we discover that Allah sits on exactly the same kind of throne (’splendid, mighty, glorious’): the Arabic words there are precisely the same, with the slight change made to the possessive endings to reflect Sheba as female as ‘Allah as ‘male’, as custom has it in reference to a Being of whom it is not really appropriate to attribute gender. If Sheba, a woman ruling alone, can occupy an office or throne called by the same words as ‘Allah’s throne, what conclusions might one draw from that, were one open to being a humble student learning from the Quran, rather than imposing one’s own perverted desires onto it? Much, I would imagine.
The Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women Yakin Ertürk, who reports to the UN High Commission on Human Rights, has noted that the two most serious challenges worldwide to the rights of women are 1) globalization, and 2) the rise of religious extremism (UN doc E/CN 4/ 2004/66). Both of these trends are allied with an assault on the rights of many groups, and the environment as well. [3] The Islamic Republic of Iran has given us a new twist on the twin threats of globalization, which victimizes workers and environment around the world, and religious extremism. Iran has united the two into a single vicious impulse. The mullahs have successfully exported extremist terrorism to help make it a global phenomenon; their ideologies of female inferiority and genocidal goals toward the West are part and parcel of this export.
To quote the Christian New Testament:
1 John 4:20-20: “If any one says, “I love God,” and hates his brother [or sister], he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother [or sister], [4] whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him (God), that he who loves God should love his brother [or sister], also.”
Whoever would claim to love God will be judged on how well they are treating their human brothers and sisters! The Quran is no stranger to these sentiments, and even makes explicit that female newborn babies and slaves are included as valuable members of the ‘Ummah whose protection is a duty for the believer.
Yet, the courageous women of Iran are NOT silent under this assault by the mullahs, and the West cannot be silent, either, trading its integrity for cheap oil. In a recent response of protest to the lessening of women’s rights and minority rights in the Iranian Constitution, a full 31 different women’s organizations and 62 brave individuals signed the document in question, now circulating on the Internet.
I want to applaud women’s entry into the arena of the theological world, to offer alternative solutions from within an Islamic framework. We believe that this is absolutely necessary and one of the most powerful tools to dismantle the mullahs’ extremely bigoted and narrow version of Islam. And the West must offer its support as we recognize with what difficult tasks women are faced in trying to use the Quran and knowledge of the history of Shari’a to challenge the mullahs’ biased interpretations. The language of the Quran is of the highest poetic quality, extremely difficult, and it takes years of study—study often forbidden to women—to learn to translate and understand it. Likewise, Shari’a is an extremely intricate and difficult body of texts to master.
We call upon Muslim women around the world, along with their like-minded sisters, to consider their qualifications and abilities for this sort of study, and we encourage them to enter into the theological discussion, armed with the tools of linguistics, translations studies, cultural studies and feminist theology. Those who have no gift for this sort of work must support the work of those who do. In the meantime, it is good to know that Muslim women have their own highly-trained scholars who address the teachings of the Quran out of their own consummate expertise, women like Riffat Hassan, Asma Barlas, Leila Ahmed, and Maryam Rajavi, just to name a few. But we must make sure that the young women students coming up behind them are there to receive the mantle of their scholarship and hand it on to the next generation, AND we must direct our attention to making sure that their work on Islam reaches women throughout all levels of society, so women may know their God-given rights.
Yakin Ertürk calls upon all of us here—community leaders, academicians, including religious scholars and leaders, media, government entities, national and international NGOs to engage in ‘cultural negotiation’ of group interests versus the rights of women (UN doc E/CN 4/ 2004/66; para. 55 (b). Analysis finds that when states or groups seek to repress women it is often in the service of group interests: they routinely sacrifice the women to bolster group identity—only witness the problem women’s rights is causing in the attempt to draft an Iraqi constitution. Yet, the States of the world need to understand that they are accountable to women for the guarantee of their rights, full access to legal protections and bodily integrity. The Republic of Iran is in violation of all three of these basic rights guaranteed by international treaties. We call upon the governments of the world to ensure that the Republic of Iran practice due diligence with respect to the rights of Iranian women and minorities. We cannot make treaties with a state that stones its grannies, flogs its women, and publicly hangs minor children. We will not say yes to this.
We call upon the men in Iran and outside its borders to stand in full solidarity with women to end the egregious legal, moral and theological oppression they are experiencing, and, for Muslims, to do so based on Islamic values. Men everywhere, of all religions or none, must learn to measure their masculinity and worth in other terms than the life and death power over the lives of women. Men need to discover an honor that brings life and not death, which builds up the entire family, community and nation. Women and men must learn how to support each other as partners, not as a master and his slaves.
To end with a Quranic passage, I quote Sura 98, ayat 5:
“And they have been commanded no more than this: To worship God, offering God sincere devotion, being true (in faith), to establish regular prayer, and to practice regular charity; and that is the Religion Right and Straight.”
Footnotes:
[1] We have only to look at the United States’ government and military’s continued cover-ups of the practices used in Guantanamo Bay against uncharged ‘detainees’ or the shameful record of the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (one may look in vain in the US media for documentation of the women prisoners raped and abused in Abu Ghraib, by the way: only the men ‘count’ in this scandal, as in all else in sexist societies!). Here, too, the claims that religion permits such treatment play a key role in our criminal administration’s assault on human dignity in its current debate over how the United States should deal with the rest of the world. Finally, the religious underpinnings that create abuses like these go well beyond these extreme examples into everyday life and social policy, at least in the United States. We are seeing clear fundamentalist attempts to take over a democratic, secular state in order to impose their literalistic bigoted views of religion on all the rest of us.
Even now, a married woman—a mother, with a prescription from her doctor—may not be certain that she will be able to obtain reproductive health services at her local pharmacy: a fundamentalist chemist may decide NOT to fill her medical prescription if he or she disagrees with women’s right to plan their families! Yet, at the same time, Viagra, the new drug with enhances male potency, is fully covered by our health insurance companies in Massachusetts (often thought to be one of THE most progressive state in the United States), even to the point of providing it to criminal sex offenders in prison, while birth control is NOT covered by health insurance. For this, we must thank the fundamentalist, misogynistic wing of the Catholic Church in Massachusetts—the same regional group that resolutely hid years of criminal sexual activity by priests against small children, choosing instead to protect themselves rather than those families in their care who trusted them.
[2] I believe we must question the appropriateness of naming a movement in Islam after a faction of Christianity descended from the warped religion of the slave-owning South in the United States.
[3] Since studies have demonstrated that a culture’s view of ‘Nature’ or environment is often built from its view of Woman: wild entities which must be made subject to male control, we should also not overlook the realm of environmental policies. Too many literalists of all three of the Holy Books are all too willing to bring about the end of the World and Last Judgment, something which affects the whole planet. In my own country, a famous so-called ‘Christian’ leader in the USA has recently called for the assassination of President Chavez in Venezuela for his temerity in thinking his nation can sell oil to whomever it wants, not just the SUV-driving and energy-wasting United States. Such leaders also advocate using nuclear weapons against Mecca to simply ‘take out’ the Islamic ‘menace’ at its roots, just as the leaders in Iran and North Korea would hold the world hostage with their nuclear threats. Sometimes it seems that we live in a time when ‘the Beast’ of the Christian Book of Revelation is in full control of the centers of political power, while people everywhere languish in poverty. With ‘moral’ leaders like these, the peoples of this world and the planet itself do not need enemies!
[4] Feminist studies of the Greek language used here have amply demonstrated that the male language—brother, and so on—is in fact used inclusively to refer to all members of the human community. So the message is clear for Christians at least, and since this text is a rephrasing of a Torah text (Leviticus 19), the message is clear for Jews as well.