Must be one of those Freudian slips. For three days now I’ve been avoiding the confrontation with surat-al-Nur. Well, I mean I read it three days ago and actually felt like I should share some thought but then came up with other things— reasonable, yes, but still, I see now, part of the avoidance tactic. Then this morning I offered to drive my daughter and my grandson to their mommy class at 9:30 with the reasoning I would start my blog after that, and still have it done before noon. Only for that I have an appointment with myself at 10. It’s avoidance, for sure. But why?
Whenever I think of surat-al-Nur, I want to say I think about the passages about divine light nur an ‘ala nur. But alas, it’s the gender and society stuff that always gets stuck in my head, so let’s bare it naked, so to speak and see what we shall see.
When I was in Indonesia I got asked more than once, why the verse that talks about zinah, adultery and fornication, starts with the female al-zaani’a, when male starters is the norm for both Arabic language in general and the Qur’anic language in particular. I can only wager a guess, not even worth mentioning I’m afraid. There are other problems about the word zinah, as recent times have shown.
Verse 2 says to punish the female and the male guilty of zinah with one hundred lashes. (!!) Okay, that would be bad enough, but why then are some women (and so far it’s only been women) stoned to death? And why are women who have been victims of rape being lashed 100 times? I mean, rape is not some kind of adultery or fornication, right? It doesn’t help that in verse 31 women are warned not to “draw attention to their (hidden) zinah? What?!
Then verse 4 says, anyone who accuses women of zinah, without bringing four eyewitnesses, should themselves be punished with 80 lashes. There’s a lot of public-private conflict in here and it seems the Qur’an takes both very seriously. So apparently there are limits in sexual relationships. Some kind of contract makes these licit. That is unless of course you are talking about men’s sexual relations with slave women or concubines (also in this surah), because there is no contract there and the Qur’an considers it licit. So did the Prophet, who actually himself had sexual relationships with concubines to whom he was not married.
Then there’s the word nikah. While we may understand this as marriage, i.e. that contractual thing before sex itself, actually nikah is that sexual thing itself. Why else would there be a verse (in this surah as well) that says, women beyond child bearing “who have no hope of nikah”? Does it mean menopausal women have no sexual desire? That would not be accurate then would it? Certainly 14 centuries ago when romantic love was not the primary motivation of marriage and partnership, women past a certain age would not be considered eligible for marriage. At that time, marriage was only about sex, and hetero-sex at that. Thus the one word collapses many different concepts—and some of these aspects need to be taken apart.
That’s the gist of the problem; it’s with the word zinah. In this surah the Qur’an also uses it for some kind of adornment of women; it’s either their jewelry, their person, or their makeup. One verse says “avoid tabarruj: wanton display.” In particular it uses the word zinah, translated as “hidden adornments,” and asks women asks women not draw attention to them.
One of my favorite pieces of jewelry is a silver anklet with a single bell. As I walk you can hear this tiny little ringing. My friends used to say that “Amina is tabarruj,” because there I was with this little bell drawing attention to itself. Whether I was wantonly displaying is, well, up for interpretation. We could joke about it because there was no risk of corporal punishment. I mean, let’s face it; it is pretty hard in today’s complex world to ascribe the word “wanton” to any one action.
But what is happening in the cry for a return to shari’ah (also mistakenly taken as Islamic law, when what people really mean is fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence — since shari’ah is more abstract than law). In Pakistan or Nigeria an overinflated interest in penal codes, or the hudud ordinances, has left women to face the brunt of this Islamization project — and usually in a bad way. So if a woman says she has been raped that is taken as confession to a sexual relationship outside of marriage, and she is punished (again, since, rape, a crime of violence is punishing already).
In Nigeria, there were two famous cases, those of Amina Lawal and Safiya Husseini, unmarried pregnant women who were sentenced to be stoned to death. I met some of the women who defended one of these. She was set eventually freed and one of the arguments of defense was the “sleeping fetus.” A husband returns to his wife after a long absence and resumes sexual relations. The wife produces a child and even if it was in, say, four months’ time, that’s okay, the jurist says — because the fetus went to sleep and was awakened with the father’s return, so it is his child!
In the other case, the man accused of being the father actually swore he was not, and swore that he had not had sex with the woman. He was let free; but within six weeks he was dead. The Qur’an says that if there are not four witnesses, then the ones accused can swear four times that they are innocent and the fifth time invokes the wrath of God. I guess he got his…
Among many interesting developments in modernity is this strange personal notion called consent. Consent is individual, no doubt, but it is also about agency. When women had no agency, according to patriarchal culture, then her sexual organs were not hers to control. She could not exert any discretion or determine any direction. So the nature of the contract of marriage in Islamic law is a contract of sale. Guess what is being sold? Fortunately, at least the bride price or mahr, which is also mandatory in the contract according to the Qur’an, goes to her and not her father. Wow, we would really be in trouble.
The other thing is why Muslims think using forensic evidence and DNA might somehow make their judgments un-Islamic, but something as stupid as a sleeping fetus makes sense? Oh, never mind.
Now that I’m trying to write on this, I guess the avoidance techniques were safe defenses against the quagmire of sex and sexuality in Islam and amongst Muslims and Muslim cultures. So, I’m not going to try to salvage this. I’m not going to try to finish my thoughts, to answer my own questions, or even say something witty.
As it stands, if this was not difficult enough, tonight I intend to break fast with an LGBT Muslim group. If you think this conversation about hetero-sex was hard, and it was; you don’t know what happens around Muslims when we try to have a conversation about homosexuality.
For one thing, I expect I will have something to comment tomorrow about my iftar experience. But suppose—just suppose—that there is no difference with regard to one’s sexuality and fasting at all? I already said there is uniformity of fasting in Islam. Remember? When homosexual Muslims fast, they fast just like heterosexual Muslims. And since I failed miserably to talk about sexuality coherently from a heterosexual perspective, then maybe it won’t be so far fetched if I don’t have anything to say about sexuality just because I am breaking fast with non-heterosexuals.
Maybe it will just be about eating food and sharing the stories of our fast and not our sexuality.
Hmm, I never did get to the verses about women’s dress in surat al-Nur…
