Shifting Allegiances: Networks of Kinship and of Faith

The Women's Program in a Syrian Mosque

Dale

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781498237192
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What happens when Muslim women gather together at the mosque to read the Qur'an, learn, and pray? How does family loyalty interact with mosque attendance for women? This book explores the growing Muslim women's piety movement through looking at one women's program in a Syrian suburban mosque. Community models shape individual behavior. The place and power of blessing help define the boundaries between orthodox and popular Islam. Modesty and shame, feasts and fasting, purity and prayer, interact to shape daily life possibilities for women involved in the mosque program. At the same time, the growing accessibility of religious teaching for women allows them to take up new places of authority in the Muslim ummah. Women read the Qur'an not just for blessing, but for what it has to say to issues of daily female and family life. And the words of communal dhikr devotion offer a window into the worshippers' consciousness of God and of Muhammad, Prophet of Islam.

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Introduction

For the casual inhabitant of the Middle East, the Islamic revival developing in the last few decades of the twentieth century found visible form in the increasing numbers of women wearing hijab, along with growth in Islamic groups. The 1990s witnessed the developing movement of women into mosque space. Crowds of women gathering around or emerging from mosques became a common sight, along with women taking up the role of religious exhortation in public female space, such as the women’s metro carriage on bustling Cairo subways.

As a teacher in the Arab world seeing these trends, talking with colleagues and students, neighbors and friends, I was curious about the shift that was happening. There was the growth in Islamic practice, and also a move in women’s perception of themselves and their faith, that was leading to a women’s movement into mosques and textual teaching—spaces that had previously been occupied largely by men. Most of the women I had known personally were based primarily in their homes and sometimes work places, and the gatherings they attended were family ones. While they performed salah (formal prayer) at appropriate times and fasted during Ramadan with public devotion and more or less private diligence, domestic responsibilities and fashions engaged them more than faith issues. Heath and Street urge the ethnographer “to know yourself as a constant learner,” remembering that “we study something because we already know something.”1 As I met more devout Muslim women, my own commitment to faith and practice of the life and teaching of the Messiah found both correspondence and contrast with their devotion in faith practice and perspective. We shared allegiance to God (according to our perceptions of Deity), and adherence to the significance of our respective sacred texts and their implications for all of life. Friendship required a deeper appreciation of their position. Commonality called for a greater understanding of differences. Within a communal conservative reading of texts, Christian women can find that gender restricts access to some spaces or roles, as much as ability. And so I was curious about how these Muslim women were negotiating the boundaries of pious practice in more public space.

Then some years ago I was invited with my daughter to a party in a Syrian suburb for women who had memorized the Qur’an. Chapters 3 and 4 tell of how I moved from that invitation to a growing involvement in the women’s program in a mosque, meeting and talking with the other women who attended, and learning from the teachers in the program and particularly Anisah Huda, its founder and leader.

For these women in Damascus who were part of the growing mosque piety movement, I wanted to ask how they viewed their community (of family and of faith) and themselves within it. What practices shaped their participation? How did they read the Qur’an and other texts as women, and read themselves in the texts? How did they relate to God in and through their community? What did these faith practices look like in the lives of the women, and what place did they occupy in the wider context of discussions and movements within Islam? In this book I discuss the women’s program in that mosque.

Women in Mosques

The presence of women in mosques is not new in Islam. Ahadith (traditions) attributed to Muhammad, Prophet of Islam, which refuse to ban women from mosques2 support accounts of their attendance during the time of Muhammad, including the Friday sermon and feasts. However, in subsequent centuries, as Islam expanded, the practice of women attending mosques became more unusual.

Today the presence of women in large numbers, who are attending mosques in order to learn, marks a new development within Islam. The women’s mosque movement emerges within the worldwide growth in women’s education, together with women’s wider access to religious materials through pamphlets, audiovisual materials, radio, TV, satellite programs, and internet, both feeding and fed by the increasing influence of radical Islam with its emphasis on religious education.

Shifting Communities of Allegiance

Women’s actions and behavior, and how they position themselves in relationship to other people and to religious texts, are guided by their choice of investment in community membership. The movement of women into mosques signals not just increasing personal piety, but also a change for the women in their community of primary allegiance. The majority of women in the Middle East have built their lives around extended family networks. Family, rather than friends, are the principal arbitrators of behavior and values. Women who work outside the home include social interaction with colleagues in their professional lives, but their primary allegiance is to family. Kinship networks tend to be the basis of loyalties, in political or daily life decision-making. The understanding and practice of religion for women is similarly based around extended family expectations and practices.

As they become part of the contemporary piety movement, Muslim women negotiate the tensions between family expectations and mosque attendance. In conforming to new norms of dress and religious practice, they are choosing networks of faith beyond family as alternate communities of allegiance and identity.

These different communities of allegiance can be seen in terms of the community itself, of the mimetic ideal that embodies community values, and of how allegiance is lived out in actual practices and ways of being, in word (ways of engaging with authoritative texts) and in communal worship.

Mapping the Story

Chapter 2 offers a brief examination of the place of Muslim women in relation to (sacred) text. This is not a study of what the Qur’an and hadith say about women, but rather the place of women as transmitters, students, and teachers of text, within the Middle East. An overview of the history of women and women scholars within Islam since its inception, through colonial movements of resistance and emancipation, takes us up to recent movements of secular and Islamist feminism, the context in which the women’s mosque movement finds its place.

Chapter 3 discusses the context and process of the research. How did my quest for understanding lead to an ethnographic case study? Rigor in research demands that the researcher’s presuppositions be made explicit. And I look at how the process developed, how I started attending the mosque program, and the negotiated accountability for the notes I took in my time as guest of the women there.

Chapter 4 takes us to the mosque, to the place, the program, and the women who attend it. In this chapter I consider how faith finds embodied form in time and space, and survey the wider political and cultural context of the women’s program.

Chapter 5 explores the mosque as a place of alternate community to kinship networks for the women. The mosque female congregation is the local realization of the wider imaginary sorority of pious Muslim women and the ummah of Islam is realized in the local mosque community. The women negotiate the tensions between the primary kin community and the new community of allegiance around the place and priority of their domestic roles.

Chapter 6 asks about leadership in terms of the mimetic ideal. Communities find embodied definition in their mimetic ideal or model leader. Within Islam, Muhammad has always been the ideal model upon whom daily practices of faith and life are based in minute detail. In the context of the local mosque community, there is a shift from women within the immediate and extended family as primary models. Leaders within the mosque group provide an alternative model of behavior and devotion, enlarging the possibilities for women within the community of faith.

In chapter 7 I ask, if community allegiance is embodied in the ideal model, what does that look like in particular practices, in ways of being and doing in space and time? This chapter addresses how allegiance takes gendered form in performative practices of dress, patterning of time around daily and annual salah, feasts and fasts, issues of purity and piety, and questions of leadership.

Chapter 8 is concerned with sacred word: texts, and how they are read and interpreted. Allegiance to a community of faith is demonstrated in particular ways of relating to the sacred texts that define it. In the mosque community, the women go beyond a focus on the physical form of the Qur’an and its function in healing and protection, to take up the Qur’an through memorizing and reciting it. The chapter reviews how the community shapes patterns of interpretation and application, including how they address gendered texts in Qur’an and hadith.

Chapter 9 looks at community worship through the use of dhikr in the women’s mosque program. Analysis of the dhikr words and elements is used to explore how God is defined within this community, and how its members perceive themselves and their faith practices in relation to God.

Chapter 10 draws the book to a close, looking both at its conclusions and at the troubled times which have overtaken Damascus and the women of that suburb. In the last few years issues of communal allegiance have come to take on life and death import. How does that communal allegiance find form? And what might be the implications for the future?

1. Heath and Street, Ethnography, 30.

2. Narrated Ibn ‘Umar: The Prophet said, “If your women ask permission to go to the mosque at night, allow them.” (Book #12, Hadith #824) Narrated Ibn ‘Umar: The Prophet (PBUH) said, “Allow women to go to the mosques at night.” (Book #13, Hadith #22) Narrated Ibn ‘Umar: One of the wives of ‘Umar (bin Al-Khattab) used to offer the Fajr and the “Isha” prayer in congregation in the Mosque. She was asked why she had come out for the prayer as she knew that ‘Umar disliked it, and he has great ghaira [self-respect]. She replied, “What prevents him from stopping me from this act?” The other replied, “The statement of Allah’s Apostle (PBUH): ‘Do not stop Allah’s women-slave from going to Allah’s Mosques’ prevents him.” (Sahih Al-Bukhari Book #12, Hadith #824, Book #13, Hadith #22 and #23)

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Table of contents

• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Conventions
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Women and Text in Islam
• Chapter 3: Research in Context
• Chapter 4: Setting the Scene: Women’s Mosque Program
• Chapter 5: Alternate Community
• Chapter 6: Ideal Leader
• Chapter 7: Performative Practices
• Chapter 8: Texts, Practices, and Meanings
• Chapter 9: Dhikr
• Chapter 10: Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Grid and Group
• Appendix 2: Tajwid—Instruction and Practice Observed
• Bibliography