Islam

You’ve Got to Be Kidding!

by Zaineb Istrabadi

Did you ride a camel? Had you seen a car before coming to this country?" "Did you live "'Din a tent?" These were some of the questions I was asked in 1970 during my first week of attendance at an American high school in the Midwest. The questions seemed sincere rather than patronizing, so I responded politely with short, concise answers, marveling inwardly at how little my classmates knew about the outside world. But I too exhibited ignorance as my question produced disbelieving silence followed by expressions of astonishment in the classroom during the English period, when I raised my hand and asked, "What is the ERA?"

My parents, brother, and I had arrived in Washington, DC in mid-July 1970, after having left Baghdad in early June of that year. In late August my father announced that we were heading to the Midwest because my mother had been accepted into the Ph.D. program at Indiana University. When we arrived in Bloomington I had already missed the first week of classes. It took another couple of days to determine in which classes I would be placed, since I had already taken algebra, chemistry, and physics by my freshman year. It also took a couple of days to get used I , to actually understand, the southern Indiana Hoosier accent. During all, this time and unbeknownst to me, the ERA had been a hot topic of discussion at school. In my English class, the students had been assigned the task of giving persuasive speeches either for or against the ERA. It was in my third day of school that I committed my unforgettable blunder.

The Equal Rights Amendment was explained to me not only inside but also outside the classroom. My reaction flabbergasted my classmates as much as my original question, because I was unable to understand how people could be treated differently just because of their gender; the idea, the concept, was foreign to me. "Do you mean to tell us that you were never discriminated against as a woman? What about your mother? And aren't Muslim women treated terribly in the Muslim world?" they asked me. Here we come to the crux of the matter: the Muslim world, the Muslim woman.

Is there such a thing as the Muslim world, the Muslim woman? A simple "yes" or "no" does not provide an answer. Yes, there is a Muslim world; that world stretches from Morocco in the west to China in the east, including areas of Eastern Europe, parts of west and east Africa, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and central Asia. And it includes the Arab world of which Iraq is a part. Even though the inhabitants of these regions share in the same religion, they do not share the same traditions, culture, and obviously language. By this token the experience of the Moroccan Muslim differs considerably from that of the Chinese Muslim. And Islam as it is experienced in Turkey differs from Islam in Saudi Arabia.

This brings us back to Iraq, which is a predominantly Muslim country. Both of my parents, and all of my aunts and uncles, were born and raised there. My mother finished her primary and secondary schooling there, attended college, and then was sent to the United States for graduate studies. When she returned she became a professor of English literature at the University of Baghdad. One of her sisters was a principal of a high school; her two other sisters were physicians and both taught at the School of Medicine. How was it possible for these women to achieve their goals in a Muslim country where supposedly women are oppressed, veiled, kept locked at home?

In Iraq, education is free from primary school through college. All children are required to go to school . Placement into college depends on one's final grades regardless of one's sex.

On one occasion the government thought of placing a quota on the number of women entering the universities. There was such an outcry against the proposal, with people saying that neither civil nor religious law justified discrimination, that, as authoritarian as the government was, it backed down. Thus there is equal opportunity for women to enter into universities and the various professions, and as a consequence there are large numbers of women professors, doctors, pharmacists, not to mention teachers and secretaries (professions traditionally linked to women). Women have joined the army and the police force. In the late sixties, when I lived there, Iraq's Minister of Higher Education was a woman. These achievements were possible because of Islam, not despite it.

An issue that was important to the women's movement in the United States in the early 1970s was equal pay for equal work. It is still an issue to this day, nearly twentyfive years later. This is not the case in Iraq: women receive equal pay for equal work. Another issue important to feminists in the early seventies was the right of a woman to maintain her maiden name after marriage. Iraqi women, indeed Arab women (for it is an Arab tradition), retain their maiden name, never taking on their husband's last name. Although there are some exceptions nowadays, for example in Jordan, this has been a fairly recent development and is a result of Western influence.

The situation for women was and is by no means utopian. And indeed, one cannot speak of Iraqi women as if the experiences of s even or eight million people are uniform. The experience of the educated, urban woman differs considerably from that of the uneducated, marshland woman, for instance. The rich have a considerable advantage over the poor. Nevertheless, there are still certain advantages and opportunities that Iraqi, Muslim women have over their sisters in the United States, which I as a young teenage woman took for granted.

Zaineb Istrabadi, a LIS citizen, was born in London and raised in Iraq, and holds a Ph.D. in Arabic language and literature.

Sacred Refuge:
The Power of a
Muslim
Female Saint

by M. Elaine Combs-Schilling

Lala 'Aziza, "Our Lady of Goodness," was one of the Moroccan awliya', a Qur'anic term often translated as "saints" but more literally meaning "friends of God." Her tomb is a place of sanctity in the High Atlas Mountains in the South. We have a document written by a renowned religious scholar, Ibn Qunfudh, who saw her in 1362 and recorded the event in some detail. (The book of his journeys in Morocco is entitled Uns al-faqir wa 'izz al-haqir, "the Convivial Company of the Wandering Poor and the Honorable Strength of the Contemptible." It can be found in the Royal Archives in Rabat.)

While in Fez to participate in the internationally famous intellectual life of al-Qarawiyyan University , Ibn Qunfudh heard of 'Aziza of Seksawa, a remarkable figure of faith, and traveled to the mountains to meet her. He wrote:

I saw, in the farthest part of Morocco, on the edge of Seksawa, near the Deren mountains… 'Aziza the woman of Seksawa. She blessed me with her goodness. I studied with her awhile. I saw her reconcile a conflict between two great groups of people in the region… She was a teacher and had a number of followers, both men and women; they were involved in worship and in search for the divine… 'Aziza was eloquent in her speech, in her knowledge of the Qur'an and Arabic.... People were always crowded around her. I never saw her but that she was doing good. She is filled with God's generosity (Ibn Qunfudh 1375:57).

In the same document Ibn Qunfudh describes an encounter between 'Aziza and al-Hintati, the governor of Marrakesh and the most powerful general in southern Morocco at the time. Al-Hintati was engaged in a battle to bring the whole of southern Morocco under his control. He had conquered local regions one by one and forced them into supplying him with taxes and conscripts for his army.

Al-Hintati set out with 6,000 men to conquer Seksawa When his forces drew near the mountains, 'Aziza met them. As locals tell it, 'Aziza walked out of the safety of the foothills and onto the harsh Marrakesh plains and stood-alone- before the great general and his army, She confronted al-Hinlati with her words and his own faith. She spoke of God's demands for justice, the pull of the good, the wrong of harming God's creation.

The general was overwhelmed by her. He later described the event to Ibn Qunfudh:

O religious teacher! This one-she is a wonder. She answered me before I could ask anything of her. She knew what was going on inside of me ... my internal thinking, my ideas. I as not able to counter her argument, to reject her requests. I have never witnessed a more penetrating proof than that which she used against me (Ibn Qunfudh 1375:57).

'Aziza talked the general out of his conquest. She convinced him to leave the people of Seksawa unharmed. He marched his army back to Marrakesh, and she returned to the mountains.

'Aziza's confrontation with al-Hintati has been told and retold for generations. It is told still in the high mountains: the story of a woman who dared to stand up to a general and his army, armed only with her faith.

When 'Aziza died, the Seksawa built a tomb for her. For over six hundred years, it has, served as one of Morocco's many hurum places of sanctuary, beauty, and prayer. Down through the centuries people have sought refuge there, people fleeing the excesses of central power or local conflicts, people falsely accused of crimes, people who have done great harm (Muhammad himself established hurum in Mecca and Medina.) Hurum may not be violated even by the king. There all violence is forbidden: no blood can be shed, not even an insect can be killed, nor any leaf or branch broken. The people associated with these holy places feed those who have taken shelter there and attempt to resolve each conflict.

Even in the colonial era (the mid-1930s through the mid-1950s for Seksawa), 'Aziza's sanctuary was effective. Eight Seksawa men fled there when the colonial army conscripted them. They were protected. Finally the regional French official agreed to let the men go, so sobered was he by the popular rallying around the tomb.

The saint's space has also been a place for mediating relations between female and male. For centuries Seksawa women have held rights beyond those of women in adjoining territories outside the reach of the female saint. For instance, Seksawa women have held a work right equal to that of a man (that is, a right to equal pay for equal work, as in the gathering of almonds or olives); equal divorce rights; and rights to half of the goods acquired since marriage if a divorce should take place. On the eve of Prophet Muhammad's birthday, Seksawa women gather in the community's holiest place, 'Aziza's tomb, and sing poetry in praise of God and Muhammad. Men celebrate along with them, but they are located further away from the center of sanctity, a reversal of what happens in many places in Morocco on the Prophet's birthday, where men are spatially central to the celebrations and women are peripheral.

The tomb of Lala 'Aziza is a remarkable center of peace. Today as before, the Seksawa can turn to 'Aziza's remembrance and find there sustenance and breadth.

Prof. M. Elaine Combs-Schilling is chair of the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, and author of Sacred Performances: Islam, Sexuality, and Sacrifice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

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