Ordinary Women as Makers of Islamic Doctrine

My position paper argues for the Islamic authority of ordinary Muslim women who are lost in the blur of a gendered everyday life in the home, dwelling at a remove from activities of the mosques and madrasas. I join feminist scholars of Islamic Studies in critiquing “ulama-ology” (cf. Dana Sajdi, 2013) i.e., the patriarchal politics of knowledge that privilege ‘ulama-led discourses written and uttered by men. The works of scholars such as Hadia Mubarak, Zahra Ayubi, and Roshan Iqbal have led our field into a promising direction in which the thematic emphasis on women-centric issues related to sexuality, the body, and marriage have been re-explored in critical feminist light. My own perspetive both adds to and challenges these conversations by underscoring the 'ordinary', i.e, the voices of those women who are outside of mainstream Islamic institutions or public life. I argue in my presentation for the role that diverse religious interpretations by ordinary Muslim women – i.e., women unlinked to Islamic institutions of mosques and madrasas, infantilized and silenced by men as ‘nāqiṣ al-‘aql’ (of deficient intellect) – play in shaping the meanings of texts and traditions in Islam. This demographic of Muslim women who live an ordinary life, perform gendered care and service work, and experience the classic peripheralizations of patriarchy (less education, early marriage, no outside employment), make up the majority of Muslim women in the larger MESA region. I synthesize findings from my ethnographic research in Pakistan where ordinary Muslim women agentially create and transmit Islamic knowledge, particularly related to taboo aspects of sexuality and hygiene, situating these findings in the larger interpretive quest of locating feminist voices in the field of Islamic Studies.

I do so by introducing three key directions in the presentation: (1) Situating the home as a critical site of religious knowledge production – an intellectual and fairly public space of knowledge creation which can upset the public-private binary, and the gendered, patriarchal, and colonial intonations of such a binary. In this part of the presentation, I will offer some posibilities of learning -- and also shifting away -- from Saba Mahmood's investigation of publically-engaged Muslim women (2) By raising the possibility that micro-practices such as the routinized acts by women of washing, bathing, cooking, caring for others, doing ‘mundane’ domestic chores can and should be a serious subject of Islamic Studies (Pérez 2016) (3) Shifting the emphasis of the field on the lived Islam of women, the vicissitudes and messiness of everyday life in which Islam is practiced and understood.

The relationship between ‘religion’ and the ‘everyday’ has been a fertile subject of debate in religious studies (Khan 2012; Deeb and Harb 2013; Schielke 2015). As my presentation will briefly highlight, the ‘everyday’ in these studies is largely marked as a world outside the home: in the streets, marketplaces, town-centers which are people largely by men. I question such a separation of ‘religion’ with the ‘everyday’ by suggesting that the often-contrasting discursive plentitude observed amongst women in Pakistani homes – for example, on a topic such as bodily hygiene rituals in Islam -- is fundamentally responsive to Islam’s doctrinal emphases on taharah. The private doctrine of the home is responsive to the public doctrine of Islamic institutions, and in many cases, the former makes critical contributions to ‘ulama/public discourse on Islam. While considered heretical or wayward by the ‘ulama, women’s role in quotidian life of understanding and creating doctrine points at the fundamental lacunae of legal and pedagogical nature in the Islamic tradition on matters which are explicitly feminine or female-centric.

My argument, however, does not indicate that ordinary women’s Islamic interpretations are a disruption from tradition. Nor does it situate ‘ordinary women’ or the ‘’ulama’ on parallel planes of competing authority. The assumption that everyday practice of ordinary Muslim women is not discursively or even majorly affected by the sweeping scope of religious texts or ‘ulama knowledge is one that bespeaks of an ossified and limited understanding of both ‘religion’ and ‘texts’. In a study of everyday Hinduism in South India, Leela Prasad demonstrates that the normative ethics of Hindu shastra (codified rules) is imbued – thoroughly and indistinguishably – in the ‘everyday’ of a South Indian town, in the sense that prescriptive texts animate the everyday world of Hindu people and are themselves animated by the lived reality of the people (Prasad 2007). Moreover, the lack of access to, or lack of specific and detailed information about Islamic tradition by ordinary Muslim women is thought to be tantamount to the their ambivalence toward that tradition, as has been argued in anthropological studies of Islam by Schiekle in his study of Muslim youth in an Egyptian fishing village, and by Magnus Marsden in his study of Chitrali mountain guides in Pakistan (Marsden 2005; Schielke 2015). This is far from the case in ethnographic sites of urban Pakistan, where I observed that even when women shared a ritual or belief that was clearly Hindu-leaning or folk-leaning, it was articulated as something that ‘Islam says we should do’. It is precisely the towering thematic emphasis of body hygiene in the Islamic tradition, substantiated by extreme attention paid to manner of washing and bathing, that contributes to an ‘everyday ethics’ of hygiene. Secondly, because the Islamic texts and ‘ulama discourses are not overtly present in a particular moment of women’s everyday lives, it is difficult to claim that they are not conceptually present, or that they do not exist in synergy with the ethics that are being realized in that time and space. Ordinary Muslim women, in their claim to be Muslims, are discursive partakers of an inter-temporal and cross-cultural expanse of Islam (Asad 2002).