writing assignment #9

Book Title: Price of Honor: Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World Author: Jan Goodwin Chapter 2: Muslims, the First Feminists Section 1 Quote: “Treat your women well, and be kind to them.” Prophet Mohammad

Despite its rapid spread, Islam is not a religion for those who are casual about such things; adhering to its five pillars takes effort and discipline. One must rise before dawn to observe the first of five ritual prayers required daily, none of which can take place without first ritually cleansing oneself. Sleep, work, and recreational activities take second place to prayer. Fasting for the month of Ramadan, undertaking the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime, paying Zakat tax for relief of the Muslim poor, in addition to accepting Islam's creed, which begins, "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammad is his messenger," require a serious and energetic commitment. And the vast majority of Muslims worldwide do observe those tenets.

Every condition and circumstance of life is believed contained within the Koran, the hadiths (the reported traditions recording the Prophet Mohammad's behavior and sayings), and the Shariah, the Islamic code of law. The most minute details of everyday existence are governed, such as the correct way to style one's hair, or by which foot one should enter a toilet. The Koran's teachings, in their entirety, are meant to be observed in their original purity. Unlike the Bible, for example, the Koran may not be given contemporary interpretation; it is considered incontrovertible, modern mores notwithstanding. It is for that reason that Muslims, no matter their mother tongue, are expected to read their holy book in the original Arabic, not in translation, which may change the meaning originally intended.

So it is ironic that the most outstanding contradiction regarding the inequities suffered by Muslim women is that Mohammad, the founder of Islam, was among the world's greatest reformers on behalf of women. He abolished such sex- discriminating practices as female infanticide, slavery, and levirate (marriage between a man and his brother's widow), while introducing concepts guaranteeing women the right to inherit and bequeath property, and the right to exercise full possession and control over their own wealth. Islam, in fact, may be the only religion that formally specified women's rights and sought ways to protect them. Today's Islamic spokesmen frequently extol the Prophet's revolutionary innovations, but usually fail to note that" they are rarely honored in reality.

They fail to observe, for example, that it is not the Koran that compels Islamic women to be enshrouded from head to toe or confined to their homes while men feel free to pester women who do venture out. Mohammad's directives on this issue were addressed to both sexes and could not be clearer:

Say to the believing men that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty. And say to believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty.

Said Islamic Scholar Dr. Zaki Badawi, "This section of the Koran also states that women should not show 'their adornment except what normally appears.' This means it is left to custom. There has never been an Islamic obligation for women to cover at any time. In fact, veiling the face is an innovation that has no foundation whatsoever in Islam. Even in Saudi Arabia the covering of women from head to toe is recent; it was not required before the discovery of oil." The hijab veil (which covers all of a Muslim woman's hair) is also not obligatory. And in Europe, for example, it should be prohibited because it creates a lot of problems for women. If women are attacked because they are wearing the hijab, as happened in France not so long ago, then they should not wear it. I have spoken out on this issue on a number of occasions, and since I began doing so, a lot of Muslim women in Europe have started leaving off the head covering."

The veil originated as a Persian elitist fashion to distinguish aristocracy from the common masses, and has moved in and out of fashion ever since. Early Islamic scholars, for example, tried to enforce veiling by declaring "all of woman is pudendal." Islamic studies specialist Nancy Dupree, of Duke University, explained its more recent use. "At the time of national movements against colonial powers, it became a symbol of resistance against alien policies that were generally viewed as a move to encourage female over permissiveness. After independence was won and governments embarked on their indigenous Western-oriented paths, the veil was discredited as an emblem of enforced orthodoxy and suffocating social control, an archaic social institution similar to slavery."

Like Pakistan's first female prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, many Muslim women who grew up in this less-restrictive era wore Western dress. Bhutto took to Islamizing her wardrobe only when she began her election campaign. Throughout her time in office she has had great difficulty keeping her head modestly covered simply because she is unused to wearing the chador intended for that purpose, and it keeps sliding off.

As Islamic radicalism rose at the beginning of the last decade, the pendulum for Muslim women swung the other way again. Once more they were to be hidden behind veils, a development that now seemed to legitimize and institutionalize

inequality for women. In fact, calls by Islamist organizations in recent years for Muslim women to veil themselves have been followed shortly thereafter by demands that women stop working, stay home, limit their educations, and resign positions of authority. Insists Dr. Badawi, however, "This is not required by Islam. According to our religion, women have a perfect right to take part in society."

Despite the limitations placed on them, Muslim women have achieved amazing gains. In Islamic cultures, where education for women often began only three or four decades ago, women whose mothers are totally illiterate frequently earn advanced degrees. One need only look to the percentage of women teaching in universities in Muslim countries to see how fast change is occurring for women. ''In 1981, in Egyptian universities, twenty-five percent of the faculty were women. In American universities at the same time, it was twenty-four percent and in Germany, twenty-five percent," says Fatima Mernissi, a leading Moroccan sociologist. "Even in conservative Saudi Arabia, women have invaded sexually segregated academic space. They are twenty-two percent of university faculty there." It was also in this era that Benazir Bhutto became the first woman to head a modern Muslim state, and many other women succeeded to public office. A number of Arab states, however, had female ministers as early as the fifties, long before most Western countries. These Muslim women are the ones who have been able to balance their culture 's traditional customs and demands at home -arranged marriages, obedience to their husbands - with the progressiveness their careers demand.

Women who do work in Gulf and Middle Eastern countries often enjoy job benefits their female counter parts in the West would envy. Equal pay with men has existed in a number of the countries since the 1970s, while women in the United States and Britain still earn only slightly more than half a man's salary for the same job. In Iraq, where human rights are scant, a woman's employment benefits are extensive and include free child care while she is working and the right to retire with a full pension after fifteen years of employment. And in virtually all Arab countries, maternity leave on full pay is substantially longer than it is in the United States.

Dichotomously, as we near the twenty-first century, the majority of Muslim women still find their lives controlled by their closest male relative. They are the daughters whose future marriage partners continue to be determined by their fathers. They are the brides who must be virgins on their wedding nights in a culture where if they are not, honor killings are common and often carried out by the girl's own brothers. To guard against this, a simple surgical procedure - hymen restoration - is equally common in the Muslim world. Fratricide can occur when a young woman refuses to marry a man of her family's choice. Even though Islam

states that a woman has the right to refuse a husband selected for her, in reality, familial pressures can be so strong, they may result in her death if she is not acquiescent.

Bride-price still exists in Muslim countries, a convention that only serves to confirm that a woman is a man's property. Once married, every aspect of a woman's life will be dictated by her husband: what she does, who her friends are, where she is permitted to go, how her children are raised, and even whether she may use birth control or be sterilized. She cannot obtain a passport or travel abroad without his written approval.

And if she is not obedient, her husband may take another wife. Polygyny is the specter that haunts every married Muslim woman: husbands are entitled to take four wives. According to Koranic dictates, should a man decide to marry again, he is supposed to obtain his first wife's permission. He is also required to treat each wife exactly the same, in affection, time spent together, material possessions, and status. In practice, if his first wife doesn't agree, he gets married anyway, and human nature being what it is, he invariably favors the newer and younger spouse.

I remember a discussion with a woman whose husband had taken a second wife when she was twenty-six and had borne six children. "He just moved her into our home. He didn't tell me. One day she wasn't there; the next day she was. After that time, I sit in the same room with them and he hardly speaks to me, he has never come into my bed again, and he ignores our children and favors hers. It is difficult to get him even to buy clothes for mine." Now ten years later, she is delighted that her husband is taking a third wife. "Good," she told me. "Now his second wife will know what it was like for me. She can watch, as I did, as he ignores her and spends all his time with the new wife."

Not so long ago, a young woman began a national outcry in Pakistan when she questioned in a letter to a newspaper why, if polygyny was really the Islamic right of men, Islamic law did not grant similar rights of polyandry to women. Outraged religious and political leaders publicly condemned the woman, terming her statement "illegal, immoral, and highly irresponsible." She was ordered to "repent, or she would be declared apostate."

The point the young woman was making that was completely overlooked in the furor is that polygyny was not intended to be an automatic right for Muslim men, a chance to trade in the old model for a sleeker, newer version. The Prophet Mohammad's original intention was to provide protection to widows and orphans. The Koranic verses on polygyny were recorded shortly after a major battle, when many Muslim males were killed, and women would have been left destitute unless the surviving males took additional wives.

Originally, in the pre-Islamic or Jahilliah period of Arabian society, often referred to as an era of ignorance, polygyny and polyandry were recognized institutions. Men and women were allowed to have multiple spouses. Islam, however, condemned these practices for both sexes. The Koran permitted polygyny only in exceptional cases, principally for war widows, whom the Prophet feared would become impoverished or "unprotected" once their husbands were dead. Later, when the early Islamic caliphate was replaced by monarchy, wealthy males with the assistance of the then half-educated ulema (religious and legal leaders) again revised the pre-Islamic form of polygyny. Polyandry for women, however, stayed banned. At the same time, men began to ignore the Koranic preconditions for polygyny, and instead of marrying unprotected widows, it became, and remains, the practice for them to take young, unwed women as their subsequent wives.

There is a continuing debate in the Islamic world over whether polygyny is outdated and should be expunged from Islam. Modernists insist it is inappropriate today, anti-women, and some go as far as to argue that when one man impregnates multiple wives, it only exacerbates the high birthrates in Muslim countries. Traditionalists insist polygyny is a Muslim male's right and that the word of God as recorded in the Koran may not be changed. But despite insistences that Koranic intent not be modified at all, concubinage and slavery -which still stand in the Koran- have been subsequently abrogated. Tunisia prohibited polygamy in 1957. It cited the Koranic verse in which Mohammad acknowledges that men "have it not in your power to deal equally between wives, however much you may wish it." Tunisian religious authorities concluded that "unless and until adequate evidence was forthcoming that the wives would be treated impartially, which was virtually impossible, the essential conditions of polygamy could not be met."

In Turkey, Ataturk abolished the veil by decree when he came to power in the twenties, the first Muslim ruler to do so. But today, despite Turkey's now having a woman premier, in small towns and villages in the interior of the country women are rarely seen on the streets without being covered by a black chador, and polygamy is still practiced although it is legally forbidden. Feminists say that what Ataturk may have accomplished on paper still has to be accepted in practice by many Turks.

How is it then that Islam, the only religion to outline formally the protection of women's rights, is also the faith most perceived to oppress women? When Islam began fourteen hundred years ago, the women around the Prophet participated in public life, were vocal about social inequities, and often shared decision making with him. In fact, many women displayed traits that a modern-day feminist would recognize.

Section 2 Theirs was a relationship as contemporary as today. She was an international trader, forty years old and widowed twice, who headed

her own thriving business. A mature, aristocratic beauty of substantial wealth, she moved in the elite circles of her world. And as an intelligent and determined woman, and an excellent judge of character, she was, not surprisingly, influential in her community.

He was a twenty-five-year-old freelance importer-exporter, a slim young man of average height, whose beard, like his hair, was thick, black, and given to curl. The aquiline nose was typical of his ancestors, but it was his eyes that caught one's attention: large and set wide, with long, dark lashes, they had a luminous quality that everyone who met him commented on.

Orphaned as a child, he began work at twelve. Thirteen years later he was still too impecunious to marry. His first marriage proposal was rejected; the girl's father considered him insufficiently established financially. By his twenties, his strongest asset was still only his professional reputation.

Considered honest, reliable, and trustworthy by the traders for whom he had worked, he was well known in his field. She needed someone with those qualities to oversee a large shipment of her merchandise that would be traded in Syria, and so she hired him.

He was a skilled businessman, and the commodities he brought home sold for double the amount of the original investment.

Shortly after, she asked him to marry her, and he accepted. Fifteen years his senior and his employer, Khadija bint Khuwaylid became the

first wife of Mohammad, the man destined to be the Prophet and founder of Islam. It was a harmonious and monogamous marriage of twenty-five years that ended

only when she died, and even after he remarried, he spoke of her constantly and with great affection. She bore him six children, four girls and two boys; both sons died in childhood.

Was Khadija unusual in sixth-century Mecca, in what is now Saudi Arabia? She was, after all, a publicly visible woman who was economically independent due to inherited wealth, and who had initiated her own marriage to a man many years younger than her. Pre- Islamic Arabia is believed to have been a male-dominated society, where women were scarcely more than sales commodities, and girl babies were so little valued they were frequently buried alive. Although many women were treated as slaves, in major cities and trading centers, affluent women like.

Khadija occasionally had opportunities to enter commerce. And in Khadija's case, according to Professor Leila Ahmed, chair of the women's studies department at the University of Massachusetts, "the wealth she earned from caravan trains freed Mohammad from working and enabled him to become contemplative, the prelude to his prophethood."

Certainly his first wife appears to have contributed to Mohammad's respect and concern for women. During her lifetime, she was his confidante and counselor, his strongest supporter. She shared his ideology, became his first convert to Islam and a leading proselytizer of the new faith. And throughout their marriage, he turned to her for reassurance when he was threatened by his enemies or bewildered by his religious revelations. It was she who held him close and reassured him that he was not insane or sick after he received his first vision.

Mohammad was forty years old in A.O. 610, when Angel Gabriel first appeared to him and commanded him to read, a seemingly odd instruction to a man who, like most of his contemporaries, was illiterate. At that time, he was meditating alone, as he did frequently, in a mountainside cave above Mecca, when he heard a voice tell him, "O Mohammad, thou art the apostle of God, I am Gabriel."

Over the next twenty-two years, Mohammad received many revelations, the contents of which became the Koran, the divine guide for all Muslims, who are required to accept every word as the literal word of God.

"Some eighty percent of Koranic rulings are devoted to regulating marital relations and the conduct of women," says Professor Ahmed, an authority on women and Islam. "The area in which Islam introduced the greatest reform was marriage and sexual relations." This is not surprising given the Prophet's statement that "marriage is half the religion."

Many of those rulings, most being of a practical nature and intended to improve and regulate the everyday life of Muslims, often occurred in circumstances when the Prophet had been undergoing some profound experience in his own life. The various domestic dramas that the Prophet experienced with his wives frequently were used as the sources of his own enlightenment.

When Khadija died in A.D. 620, Mohammad, then aged fifty, was bereft, and friends recommended that he marry again. They suggested two potential spouses, Sawdah bint Zam'ah, who was in her thirties and who had been recently widowed, or A'isha, the daughter of his closest friend, Abu Bakr. It depended, the Prophet was told, on whether he wanted to marry a virgin or non-virgin. The Prophet chose both, marrying Sawdah first. At his marriage to six-year-old A'isha a few months later, the child-bride was not present, and the union was contracted between Mohammad and the girl's father. Because of A'isha's youth, she continued to live at

her parents' home, unaware of her new marital state. Three months later, the Prophet married again, this time to Hafsa, whose

husband had just died in a recent battle, and who was the daughter of another of Mohammad's most powerful supporters. It was after the Prophet's fourth marriage that the Koranic verses regarding polygyny were revealed to him: "Marry of the women who seem good to you, two or three or four. And if ye fear that ye cannot do justice to so many, then marry only one."

In the twelve years following Khadija's death until his own demise at age sixty- two, Mohammad married between nine and twelve women (the exact figure has been lost in history). He was apparently not subject to the four-wife restriction because of his position. He did, however, endeavor to treat all his wives fairly. After every marriage, a room of identical proportions was added to the Prophet 's home to accommodate the new wife. Mohammad did not have quarters built for himself; instead, he shared those of each of his wives in turn.

Of all the world's religions, Islam is closest to Christianity, yet the Christian world has reviled it and its founder from the Crusades until today. A frequent point of attack was the Prophet’s multiple marriages, which caused Christian critics to denounce him as "lust-ful"; Voltaire went so far as to accuse him of being sexually insatiable. Such arguments drew apparent support from the writings of the early Islamic chroniclers of the hadiths, who described Mohammad's sexual vigor as being "equal to that of forty men."

There were, however, sound political and social motivations for the Prophet’s numerous marriages. At a time when Islam had gained many converts and Mohammad was well established as its Prophet, the new religion continued to meet with enormous resistance. By selecting the wives he chose to marry, the Prophet forged alliances with tribes that had been bitter enemies of Islam and in the fore front of battles against it. His marriage to Safiya bint Huyay, the daughter of an important Jewish chief, for example, diminished Jewish opposition to the Prophet's mission. Important clans suppressed long- standing feuds with Muslims and accepted the new faith.

Even the consummation of his marriage to A'isha when she was ten, an age later critics considered scandalously young, took place at the request of her father, who wanted to strengthen the bonds between the two families. It was A'isha's father, Abu Bakr, an important supporter of Islam, who succeeded Mohammad after his death.

With the exception of A'isha, all of Mohammad's wives were widows, many of whom lost their husbands during wars. By marrying widows in an age when few were permitted to remarry after their husbands died, the Prophet tried to ensure that

women who would otherwise have been unprotected were cared for. Mohammad is described as being tolerant, flexible, affectionate, and good-

humored with his wives. But he was unable to live up to his own ideal of treating them equally. That he tried to, they recognized, as he drew lots among them to select a companion to accompany him when traveling, and systematically spent each night with a different wife. And it was he who stated in a hadith, "A man who marries more than one woman and then does not deal justly between them will be resurrected with half his faculties paralyzed."

The Prophet's downfall was Maryam, a Coptic Christians slave renowned for her beauty, who had been sent to him as a gift by the ruler of Egypt. Mohammad was so enamored of her he began to spend days and nights in her company, ignoring his wives, who became increasingly jealous. Eventually, the Prophet's wives became so resentful that Mohammad retreated from his household to meditate. While he was gone, rumors spread rapidly that he was about to divorce all of his wives. His followers were appalled, recognizing that divorce would destroy the earlier tribal alliances brought about by the Prophet's marriages.

During his long meditation, he received a vision in which he was shown how to bring harmony back to his home and restore peace among the women he loved. A month later, Mohammad returned to his family and told his wives God had given them a choice: either they could accept an ordinary life and be honorably divorced, or, if they "desired Allah and his Messenger and the abode hereafter, then Allah [would] prepare [them] a great reward " If they chose the latter, however, Allah required that they "stay at home and not display themselves as in the days of ignorance." Influenced by A'isha, his wives all chose to stay with the Prophet.

The Prophet's other wives were equally jealous of the time he spent with A'isha. It was clear he was fondest of her, and those who wanted to please Mohammad would donate their turn with him to her. But when they voiced any feelings of discontent, the Prophet chastised them. It was in A'isha's company, he told them, that he received the most revelations.

Zeinab bint Jahsh was another wife around whom many revelations occurred. She was the high-ranking and beautiful cousin of the Prophet, and Mohammad had given her in marriage some years before to his adopted son, Zaid, a former slave. The Prophet's intent had been to show that social class was irrelevant. Zeinab, an extremely proud woman, had not been happy in the marriage to a man she considered infinitely her inferior, and, because of her discontent, neither had Zaid.

Mohammad was visiting his adopted son's home one morning when he caught a glimpse of Zeinab as she was dressing, and embarrassed by his feelings, he hurriedly left the house. When Zeinab later told her husband of the incident, she

hinted that the Prophet was impassioned with her. In an apparently loveless marriage, and not wishing to stand in his father's way, Zaid offered to divorce Zeinab if the Prophet wanted to marry her. Mohammad refused. In Arabia at that time, an adopted son was viewed as a blood relative, and marriage with Zaid's ex- wife would have been considered incestuous. But the incident triggered a breakdown in Zaid's marriage, and the couple divorced anyway. Shortly after, in another revelation, God commanded Mohammad to marry Zeinab.

The potential scandal in the community was avoided by the fact that same revelation also told the Prophet that adoption was now no longer legally permitted, and so, did not confer the status of parenthood. Zaid, who had been known for thirty-five years by the name Ibn Mohammad, meaning "son of Mohammad," now reverted to the name of his biological father.

And since divorce was frowned upon by Islam, this divine revelation also decreed that all future marriages must be between consenting partners; the woman must also be consulted and must agree. A radical change in its day, this had not been the case when Zeinab's first marriage was arranged for her.

At the Prophet's marriage to Zeinab, another far-reaching divine decree was revealed. Mohammad became angry when wedding guests stayed too long in Zeinab's room talking to her, and that same day he observed male guests touching the hands of his wives, possibly as they offered food to their guests. Since his home was at the center of the burgeoning religion, and the Prophet did not have private quarters of his own, there was a constant flow of visitors to the house. A revelation shortly after led to the seclusion of the Prophet's wives. "Enter not the dwellings of the Prophet for a meal without waiting for the proper time, and unless permission be granted you. When your meal is ended, then disperse. Linger not for conversation. And when ye ask the wives of the Prophet for anything, ask it of them from behind a curtain."

The same decree forbade Mohammad's wives to marry again after the Prophet died. By this and other divine verses it was made clear that the wives of the Prophet were to be treated, and comport themselves, differently from ordinary women. The rulings for them to stay home and be secluded behind a curtain, the literal meaning of purdah, were formalized into the religion. However, it was clear that such rulings were intended for Mohammad's wives and not for women in general.

But it was an incident with A'isha that not only led to the Koranic punishment for slander but also is believed to have instigated the initial rupture in Islam, which created the religion's Sunni and Shi'a sects.

In the eighth year of A'isha's marriage to the Prophet, she accompanied him on

one of his frequent expeditions, and was traveling in an enclosed howdah on a camel. On one of their regular halts to pray, A'isha slipped away from the men to seek privacy to perform the ritual washing required beforehand. Adjusting her veil as she rejoined the party, she realized she had lost her necklace and turned back to find it. The beads had great sentimental value for her, having been a wedding gift from her mother. By the time she located the necklace, the expedition had left, assuming she was inside the howdah. A'isha had no choice but to wait for someone to realize the error and return for her.

As she waited, a young man she had known in the days before she married rode by and recognized her. He offered to help her catch up with Mohammad 's party, and, seating her on his camel, he led A'isha back to the city. Gossip traveled faster than they did: people who saw the attractive couple together concluded that Mohammad 's favorite wife, then only fourteen, preferred the company of a younger man to that of the now aging Prophet. It was the beginning of a scandal that shook the community. The uproar came at a disturbing time for Mohammad; the Muslim community was showing signs of disunity, and his divine revelations had apparently ceased. He became cold toward A'isha, and began to question many people about her character and fidelity. All but one of the men with whom he discussed the issue spoke well of her. Only his cousin and son-in-law Ali, who was married to Mohammad 's daughter Fatima, did not. "Women are plentiful, you can always change one for another," said Ali, encouraging the Prophet to divorce A'isha. A'isha never forgave him for it. This antipathy between the two would later cause Islam to splinter into two main sects.

The drama was finally brought to a close with another revelation in which the Prophet was told that his wife was not guilty of the accusations against her. The Koranic verse still used today in adultery cases dates from this time: "And those who accuse honorable women but bring not four witnesses, flog them with eighty stripes, and never again accept their evidence. For such men are evil-doers."

Throughout his life, the Prophet's affection and concern for women, and for mothers in particular, was evident. On one occasion when asked by a follower to whom one should show the most respect and kindness, the Prophet responded, "Your mother." "And then who?" insisted the questioner. "Your Mother," Mohammad replied again. "And then who?" "Your Mother," responded the Prophet for the third time. The questioner persisted: "And after that who?" "Your father," Mohammad replied, positioning men in fourth place. Similarly, on another occasion, when the Prophet was asked whether there was a shortcut to Paradise, he responded, "Paradise lies under the feet of the mother."

And in what turned out to be his final public address to Muslims from Mount

Arafat near Mecca, the Prophet exhorted them, "Treat your women well and be kind to them."

Shortly after, Mohammad, now in his sixty-second year, began to complain of debilitating headaches. The pain intensified, and he finally collapsed. He was carried to A'isha's room and was nursed by all his wives. A few days later, on June 11, in the year 632, the man known to Muslims as the final Prophet died in the arms of A'isha, his favorite wife, who was then only eighteen. Section 3

The unexpected death of a Prophet who left no male heirs created a major crisis in the Islamic world. Rebellions broke out all over Arabia, and for a while it looked as if the new Islam unity might revert to the former tribal factions. Immediately, those who wanted to appoint a successor to Mohammad split into rival camps. A'isha's father, Abu Bakr, eventually succeeded as first Caliph or representative of Mohammad, with only Ali initially refusing to acknowledge his authority.

The appointment of her father as Caliph helped to confirm A'isha's position in the Islamic world. Even as a teenager, because of her closeness to the Prophet, she was frequently asked to interpret verses of the Koran and religious traditions, or to rule on Islamic law. She became the most prominent of all of Mohammad 's wives, and was considered a major authority on Islam and an adviser to Muslims. One description of her at the time was as follows: "There is no greater scholar than A'isha in the learning of the Koran, obligatory duties, lawful and unlawful matters, poetry and literature, Arab history and genealogy." Her juristic opinions were widely sought, and one-quarter of the Islamic Shariah law, which is based on the collection of hadiths, is believed to have been narrated by her.

Later, after her father's death and that of his successor, A'isha led the opposition against the appointment of Ali, her former antagonist, to third Caliph. Says Professor Leila Ahmad, when the two opposing factions rode out to the attack in what is now known as the Battle of the Camel -the first time Muslim slaughtered Muslim - A'isha was leading her troops. Ali, who recognized her as a rallying point for her men, ordered her camel cut down from under her, which caused confusion among the ranks and brought about a ceasefire.

The followers of A'isha eventually came to be known as Sunni Muslims, and those of Ali, the Shi'a. Today's Sunni Muslims, who make up approximately 85 percent of the Islamic world, believe the first four Caliphs were the rightful successors of Mohammad. While they respect the Prophet's family, they do not believe that the temporal and spiritual leader of Islam must be a member of it.

Shi'a Islam rejects the first three Caliphs and regards Ali, the Prophet's cousin

and son-in-law, as the original Caliph. They insist that the Imam, Muslim leader, must be a descendant of Ali and his wife, the Prophet's daughter. They also reject the Sunni sect, and the Sunna hadith laws from which they take their name. Shi'as are found mostly in Iran, Iraq, Yemen, and Azerbaijan, and have sizable populations in Kuwait, the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Since the murder of Ali in A. D. 661 to the present day, Shi'as have waged an on- again, off-again war to overthrow the Sunnis and make Shi'ism, which is older than Sunni'ism, the dominant faith.

After A'isha's defeat by Ali, he charged that by going into battle she had violated the seclusion imposed on Mohammad 's wives by the Prophet. Her place, he told her, like that of the other wives, was at home. It was then that A'isha retired from public life. "Women scholars and authorities were still to be met with in the following two generations, though in far fewer number," says Professor Leila Ahmed. "Gradually it became extremely rare for any teachers of the hadiths to have learned from a woman. This is the period typically blamed for the restriction on women 's lives." Added an early biographer of A'isha, "Muslim women's position was now one of passivity and submissiveness. By the second and third centuries of Islam, the seclusion and degradation of women had progressed beyond anything known in the first decades of Islam.'' Section 4

It begins at birth. The delivery of a baby boy is greeted with felicitations, parties, and, in some Muslim countries, even celebratory bursts of gunfire. The birth of a girl, on the other hand, is invariably a time for mourning. Even in everyday speech in much of the Arab world, when a silence falls at a gathering, the phrase uttered is Yat Bint, "a girl is born." And when one is, midwives have been known to abandon a delivery the moment they realize the child they have just helped into the world is of the "wrong" sex. Even before the umbilical cord is cut, more than one mother has had her face slapped for daring to give birth to a girl.

Husbands frequently feel shame, women feel guilt, and their family and friends offer whispered condolences instead of the customary sweets. "It is God's will," they say sadly, using the same expression employed when someone dies. "Next time," the new mother is told, "next time, you'll give him a son.''

Modern Muslim physicians recognize the problem. A woman obstetrician at a high-tech Arab hospital in the Gulf told me, "We never inform women of the sex of their baby-to-be after they've had a sonogram. We find they can cope much better and longer with labor pains if they don't know they are giving birth to a girl."

If a Muslim woman doesn't present her husband with a son, chances are high that he will eventually take a second wife. He may even divorce her, which, in

much of the Islamic world, can render her a social pariah. In a culture where men, on being asked how many children they have, will reply, for example, "Four children" meaning four sons, and when pushed will reluctantly add, "and three daughters," women are blamed for the birth of girls. Few Muslim males, even educated ones, accept that it is he, not his wife, who determines the gender of their child. "My wife is worth less, she has only given me girls," is a common refrain. And indeed, a woman's place in many Muslim societies can be determined by her sons; without them she is frequently viewed as having lower status than other women. Similarly, the woman is held responsible if the couple is unable to have children.

The low value placed on the average female Muslim child may have its genesis in the title used to describe a girl before marriage: translated, it means "another's wealth." The epithet refers to the fact that any investment made in a girl in her early years will be enjoyed only by her husband's family when she moves in with them permanently upon marriage. Because she is seen as having only "temporary guest membership" in her own family, money, time, and effort spent on her childhood development may be minimal.

In l985, the president of Pakistan established a commission to investigate the status of women. The report concluded, "The average woman is born into near slavery, leads a life of drudgery, and dies invariably in oblivion. This grim condition is the stark reality of half our population simply because they happen to be female." Not surprisingly, the government suppressed the report.

Few statistics are available in most Muslim countries for the simple reason that all information is tightly controlled by the governing regimes; concerning women, however, they scarcely exist, and when they do, they can be grim. In Pakistan women have a lower life expectancy than men. In fact, the country is listed in The Guinness Book of World Records for an unusual reason - the world's lowest female- male ratio: 936 women to every 1,000 men. The world average is the reverse: 1,110 women to 1,000 men. The main reason for this is poor health in women caused by the discrimination they face from the time of birth. A boy infant, for example, is breast-fed for two years as prescribed by the Koran. A female baby is frequently weaned much earlier. In the majority of families, girls and their mothers usually eat only after the male in the family; not surprisingly, therefore, girls have a much higher malnutrition rate than boys. And even in privileged homes, sons are more likely than daughters to be given milk, eggs, meat, and fruit.

Though she eats less than her brothers, a girl in an ordinary household does twice the work. Her fragile nutritional status leads to anemia and other nutritional deficiencies, and exposes her to infection. She is ill more often than her brother.

But even when she is ill, studies show that she is more likely to be treated at home, whereas boys are taken to doctors or hospitals. Women and girls have died when the men in their families have refused permission for them to be examined by male physicians because of Islamic modesty dictates, and female physicians are still rare.

Studies show that in Pakistan, for example, female deaths between the ages of fifteen and forty are fully 75 percent more frequent than male deaths. A significant cause of this is the extremely high rate of maternal mortality -Pakistan has one of the highest in the world- which is caused by one of the highest nutritional anemia rates. A shocking 97.4 percent of all pregnant women in Pakistan are anemic.

Such cause and effect is not confined to Pakistan. Many Muslim countries share depressingly similar practices, except among the minority, the educated elite. And even then, while women's physical needs may be well attended to, frequently their emotional needs are ignored.

From the time a girl is five or six, preparation for the only acceptable role for her -wife and mother- begins. She is groomed to be a good wife: docile, obedient, and self-sacrificing. She will learn that her brothers come first in everything, and that even her younger ones hold sway in her life. I found it unnerving to watch a nine-year-old boy walk into a room and with barely a glance cause his seventeen- year-old sister to give up her chair to him and sit at his feet. I was told by a young woman graduate student whose class was about to go on a perfectly ordinary half- day field trip, "My father gave me permission to go. But my younger brother became very angry and said it was not appropriate for his sister to go out on such a trip. He was so angry, he said he would leave our house if my father permitted it. And so I couldn't go." A more depressing example of male dominance is a seven- year-old who told his mother he would not give her his permission to go out when she wanted to attend a course in mother-and-child health care, and she complied.

As a Muslim girl approaches adolescence, the injunctions to walk, talk, and dress unobtrusively- to be invisible - become more stringent. She is constantly imbued with such values as the following: "A girl should be like water, unresisting. It takes on the shape of the container into which it is poured but has no shape of its own." Even her movements and associations are strictly curtailed. Her place is at home, she is not allowed to play outside, and her friends are limited. If she is fortunate enough to have attended school, which is usually segregated by gender except for the very young, she is often withdrawn as a teenager.

And once she reaches puberty, her world will be severely circumscribed. How much her world is limited depends on where she lives, and to which class she belongs. Only after menopause does she attain any real authority. No longer able to

bear children, she is often considered an honorary male. And if she has been totally veiled, it is at this age she may uncover her face, but by then she may no longer want to.

Feminism in the Islamic world, however, has a long history. The first Islamic feminist movement began in Egypt at the end of the last century and quickly spread to Turkey, Syria, and Iran. Women lobbied heavily for changes in polygyny, divorce, inheritance, and child custody laws, but won only minor successes. T hen in the twenties in Egypt, women began to shed their veils. In Iran, the veil was formerly abolished in 1936 by Reza Shah, and the king did the same for Afghanistan in 1921. The law there was soon reversed in a conservative whiplash. But in 1959, Afghanistan's President Daoud reversed it again, and most women unveiled.

Between the 1950s and 1970s, women in a number of Muslim countries made great strides. Today, however, the situation is reversing, as Islamic conservative movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and Wahabi-backed groups and Rabitat-Islami, both originating in Saudi Arabia, grow and spread.

" For a period of time, Muslim women were. able to obtain education, to work, and, in some cases, even join their country's armed forces. A middle class was born in some of these states, and women were an active part in it," says Iranian scholar and professor of Middle Eastern studies Shaul Bakhash. "Things began to reverse for these women at the end of the seventies. If you look at Muslim countries today, across the board the direction is toward Islamist movements. The current situation for women is not at all encouraging; the reverse, in fact: it is regressive.

"In countries like Iran where harsh restrictions have been placed on women, there is a tremendous amount of resistance against them from the new educated female elite. And because of this, Muslim movements back to traditionalism may have to yield on some issues. Conversely, in a number of Muslim countries, women are again being viewed as a potential source of corruption in the society (by their very existence), one that has to be watched most carefully so that such influence can be guarded against."

For Akbar S. Ahmed, an Islamic scholar of international repute, formerly of both Princeton and Harvard, the current change in the Islamic world regarding the situation vis-a-vis women comes down to a simple equation: "The position of women in Muslim society mirrors the destiny of Islam: when Islam is secure and confident so are its women; when Islam is threatened and under pressure so, too, are they."