The Veil And The Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation Of Women’s Rights In Islam, Translated

Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam, translated by Mary Jo Lakeland (New York: Basic, 1991)
The question of the role of women in Islamic public life has provoked debate both within and without the community since the earliest days of the Prophet. Even as modernity and democracy begin to emerge in Muslim nations, there remainsconsiderable resistance to women’s participation in that process. Citing the Qu'ran and the Hadith, opponents of change might appear to have an unassailable position. Yet Fatima Mernissi, in The Veil and the Male Elite, argues that calls to religious validation of misogyny are at odds with the original egalitarian intent of the Prophet.1 Analyzing these hadith and Qu'ranic sura, she notes that theyemerged out of a particularly critical point in the history of Islam, when internal and external pressures threatened Muhammad, his wives and the fledgling religion. Examining the context of the writing of these passages, especially the relationship between Muhammad and his wives, she argues that these forces brought about the diminution of the original Islamic principle and created a rift betweentruly Islamic attitudes to women and those descended instead from pre-Islamic tribal traditions. Much of the current internal friction regarding female participation in political debate arises, Mernissi claims, from the crisis of identity besetting a Muslim society that struggles to come to terms with modernity. As the West looks to the present and to the future, she avers that Muslims obsess insteadwith the past, turning to tradition and especially the apparent certainties of sacred texts for strength in a changing world. Born out of the earliest days of Islam in Medina, the hadith emerged as a “formidable political weapon” in times of crisis.2 Despite the “science” of hadith interpretation, she maintains that the elite continued to use false hadith to serve their
Fatima Mernissi, The Veiland the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam, translated by Mary Jo Lakeland (New York: Basic, 1991). 2 Ibid., 33.
1

political and economic ends. This included the disenfranchisement of women and the embedding of preIslamic tribal misogyny within the fabric of Islamic tradition. Mernissi identifies two hadith in particular as critical weapons in the male arsenal incontinuing debates against female equality. The first, transmitted initially by a Companion called Abu Bakra, states, “Those who entrust their affairs to women will never know prosperity.”3 The second, originated by Abu Hurayra, both places women in the same polluting category as animals as well as excluding them from sacred space.4 According to hadith science, the transmitters of hadith must beboth qualified and reliable for their hadith to be valid. For both these originators, Mernissi argues, this is not the case. Examining the history and the reputations of both Abu Bakra and Abu Huraya, she argues that both had personal reasons for the origination of anti-female hadith. Moreover, both men had reputations as liars. Nevertheless, these hadith became part of the tradition and mencontinue to rely upon them. This runs contrary to the duty of Muslims to question everything, even “authentic” hadith. Mernissi thus justifies her examination of these hadith and of the tradition in which they became entrenched not as counter to Muslim practice but as part of it. Mernissi thus continues by examining the emergence of the misogynist tradition that validated such hadith and allowed theircontinued currency. Such a tradition, she claims, was not the original intent of the Prophet Muhammad but rather the result of forces, internal and external, acting upon Islam in the very earliest days of the community in Medina. Muhammad, she argues, never intended the hijab – or veil – that “fell”
3 4

Ibid., 1. Ibid., 69.

upon women both literally and metaphorically, to separate them...