CAPÍTULO I EL PROBLEMA.
6.6. Descripción de la Propuesta
Scholarship on middle period Muslim women is characterized by a tension between understanding the scarcity of sources on women’s lives, which indicates their relative unimportance to male scholars of their time, and making sense of normative texts about women’s behavior that indicate women were responsible for upholding the moral character of society. Much of the scholarship attempts to make sense of their public lives gleaned from court records, deeds, other official documents, and commentary on women’s lives by male scholars, in light of the prescribed gender segregation in norma- tive texts. The scholarship also reveals significant class-based differences in women’s
69Woods, 6. 70Woods, 89.
experiences in both public and private spheres.
In her essay on women in the Saljuq era, Carole Hillenbrand relates that urban, ru- ral, Persian, and nomadic Turkish women all primarily played roles of wife and mother and kept house, while rural women had additional responsibilities of working the land.72
Women’s pastimes were handicrafts. Those who held employment were craftswomen, servants, nurses, midwives, singers, dancers, or prostitutes.73 Yet, women from all so-
cial classes seemed to be present in public life, much to the chagrin of Ghazali, Tusi, and Davani, who advise men to seclude their wives as much as possible.74 From pre-
modern court records across Muslim lands, we know that women owned property, were litigants in business and family disputes and that divorce was not entirely uncommon.75
This is also evident from Tusi and Davani’s discussion of what qualities to look for in a wife; they find it permissible to marry a woman for her money, as long as she has other qualities.76
Most mentions of specific women in biographical indices from the middle periods exist only for women who were elite in some way, whether by wealth, social rank, as- sociation with powerful men in politics or government, or even by accomplishments in learning or piety, such as those in Sufi hagiographies. Even in that last category, women known for their spiritual accomplishments were often included in biographical catalogues as a result of association with notable Sufi saints or‘ulama’.77 Although the 72Carole Hillenbrand, “Women in the Saljuq Period” in Women in Iran from the Rise of Islam to
1800, eds. Guity Nashat and Lois Beck. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 107. 73Hillenbrand, 107.
74Tusi, 217. Davani, 190. Ghazali, 316-317.
75Judith Tucker. Women, Family, and Gender in Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
76Tusi, Davani 188-189.
77For example in the index of pre-modern Chishti saints, women’s entries are located at the very end of the text of hagiographies and almost all of them are mothers or sisters of the male saints, Nizamuddin, Shaykh Fariduddin Ganj Shakar, and Shaykh Nizamuddin Abul Muayyad. See ‘Abd
ethicists I study here came across men and women from all walks of life, they probably mainly operated within two social classes: the scholarly ‘ulama’ class to which they belonged themselves and the elites from court and government, in whose service they were employed.
With regard to women from ‘ulama’ families, Richard Bulliet writes that in pre- Mongol, 11th century Nishapur, Baghdad, and Gorgan, biographical dictionaries of
‘ulama’ show minimal presence of women in the context of praising their educational ac- complishments. Since education was hereditary, the women in the household of‘ulama’
families acquired the same education as their male siblings or relations.78 They had
the same Qur’an and Hadith lessons, excelled in writing and Arabic, and also gave instruction to their children.79 Bulliet concludes that among the Nishapur patricians,
women were equal to men in the realm of education.80
Asma Sayeed describes hadith scholarship as the main area in which female scholars excelled. The classical period, which she defines as the 10th-15th centuries, saw the first revival of women’s hadith scholarship since the period immediately after the Prophet’s death.81 She argues that there were two main reasons for revival. The first was that the
al-Haqq Muhaddith Dihlawi al-Bukhari,Akhbar al-Akhyar fi Asrar al-Abrar, ed. ‘Alim Ashraf Khan, (Tehran: Anjuman-i Athar o Mafakhar-i Farhangi, 2004). There are a few exceptional women who are known for their own spiritual accomplishments. Examples of these women can be found in the 11th century index of hagiographies, Abdur Rahman al-Sulami, Dhikr an-Niswa al-Muta’abbidat as-
Sufiyyat, trans. Rkia Cornell, (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 1999); and the 12th century collections of
reports on sufi women, Abu al-Faraj ibn al-Jawzi’s Sifat al-Safwa, which Laury Silvers is translating in her forthcoming book,Early Pious, Mystic, and Sufi Women: The Lives, Thought,and Practices of
Early Pious and Sufi Women.
78Richard Bulliet, “Women and the Urban Religious Elite in the Pre-Mongol Period” inWomen in
Iran from the Rise of Islam to 1800, eds. Guity Nashat and Lois Beck, (Champaign: University of
Illinois Press, 2003), 78.
79Bulliet, “Women and the Urban Religious Elite,” 71.
80Richard Bulliet,The Patricians of Nishapur: a Study in Medieval Islamic Social History, (Cam- bridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 47-60.
81Asma Sayeed,Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam. (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2013), 3-5.
canonization and written form of transmission of hadith literature from the preceding male dominated centuries opened the field back to non-specialists, including women. The second reason she argues is that kinship networks of ‘ulama’ families benefited from women’s participation in knowledge transmission, became part of their cultural and social capital and even led the ‘ulama’ to relax the “legal and normative aversion to contact between non-mahram men and women.”82 Often, these were women of the
scholars’ own households. In the sections on the ethics of relations with one’s mother, all three thinkers credit mothers for being their children’s first teacher, which may have been true in their own experiences, but their biographies only mention their fathers or other male tutors as their first teachers.
With regards to concubines or female slaves, Kecia Ali’s work on marriage and slavery in early Islamic jurisprudence demonstrates that slavery posed important legal, social, and ethical dimensions for consideration for scholars creating an Islamic code of conduct. While royals certainly owned slaves, it was common for the middle class and families of the ‘ulama’ to have slaves for both sexual purposes and household work.83
However, this historically common presence of female slaves does not translate to sub- stantive mentions in ethics as it does in legal works. All three ethicists mention good conduct with household servants and slaves as a general principle, without distinguish- ing between male and female slaves.84 Although they do not mention sexual activity
outside of marriage, one can assume that they would advise against having concubines because all three ethicists advocate for the curtailment of excessive sexual activity and explicitly discourage men from taking multiple wives; only sultans may have more than
82Sayeed, 114.
83Kecia Ali, Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 22.
one wife in order to ensure birth of heirs.85
Pre-modern Muslim women associated with royalty in the harems in various dy- nasties from the middle periods in Persia (and elsewhere) were famed to live largely secluded lives but were also notorious for their involvement and influence on court politics.86 Elite women were patrons of mosques, schools, and other institutions; they
attended women’s sections of mosques and the court and left the city to broker peace or welcome brides from other cities.87 Powerful mothers, wives, sisters, or even influential
concubines were concerned with succession and who held power in the courts. Mothers of heirs advocated for their sons’ claims to power or conspired to re-direct succession. Based on Bayhaqi’s history of the Ghaznavid court, Julie Meisami writes that in the 11th century, the elite women:
play[ed] a variety of roles–major and minor [...] they (like men) act[ed] as advisors whose counsel [was], often as not, disregarded; they (like men) may [have been] pawns in larger political games whose outcome may be positive or negative; they (like men) may [have] fall[en] victim to court intrigues; they (like men) may [have] function[ed] as exemplars whose words and deeds provide[ed] moral comment on the events in which they figure[d].88
Even women’s court activities mirrored that of men’s.
In the Saljuq context, Nizam al-Mulk famously lamented in his Siyasatnamah or
Book of Government women’s meddling in court affairs: “when the wives of the king begin to play the role of rulers, they base their orders on what interested parties tell
85Ghazali, 302-303. Tusi, 120. Davani, 189-190.
86I mention Saljuq, Ghaznavid, and Timurid examples below since they are contemporary to the ethicists. Leslie Peirce’sThe Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York, 1993) discusses the intricacies of women’s involvement in court politics in great detail but focusing on the Ottomans analyzes a later period.
87Hillenbrand, 110. D. Ruggles, ed.,Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Soci-
eties, (Albany: New York State University Press, 2000).
88Julie Scott Meisami, “Eleventh-Century Women: Evidence from Bayhaqi’s History” inWomen in
Iran from the Rise of Islam to 1800, eds. Guity Nashat and Lois Beck, (Champaign: University of
them because they are not able to see things with their own eyes[...] in all ages noth- ing but disgrace, infamy, discord and corruption have resulted when kings have been dominated by their wives.”89Here Nizam al-Mulk is writing against the political partic-
ipation of Tarkan Khatun and other elite turkic women because of the actual power they yielded.90 This indicates that not only did women attempt to participate in politics,
but that in order to affect a particular outcome at court, interest groups approached wives of the king, who were known to hold audience with such parties. Hillenbrand argues that in addition to the Saljuq Turkish women who were not veiled, according to their nomadic traditions, medieval paintings from the time suggests that women at court were not always veiled either.91 Yet, Nizam al-Mulk’s satiate men that women
are “not able to see things with their own eyes” also suggests that they may have had partial access to court, or that they attempted to influence affairs from the sidelines instead of in the open.
According to Beatrice Manz, Timurid women were even more involved in politics:
women were not a class apart but active members of a ruling group [...] Marriage neither overrode a woman’s ties to her own family nor limited her circle to the household of her husband [...] Dynastic women had ties among [the dynasty’s followers and top military commanders] and could apparently deal directly with them.92
However, regardless of their active participation in politics, the ‘ulema’ frowned upon
89Nizam al-Mulk, Book of Government or Rules for Kings, trans. H. Darke (London: Routledge and Kegal Paul, 1978), 179-180.
90Tarkan Khatun, which literally means ”Queen of the Turks” was the title for all Saljuq queens. Nizam al-Mulk was famously at odds with Sultan Malikshah’s Tarkan Khatun over the line of succes- sion. Hamid Dabashi, Truth and Narrative: The Untimely Thoughts of ‘Ayn al-Qudat al-Hamadani
(London: Curzon, 1999). 78-79. 91Hillenbrand, 108.
92Beatrice Manz, “Women in Timurid Dynastic Politics” inWomen in Iran from the Rise of Islam
independent action by elite women without sanction from men.93 In citing legal texts
by fuqaha, or jurists, which supported women’s confinement from men, Hillenbrand characterizes elite women’s participation in public life as their strategies to “loosen constraints of their male-dominated society.”94 Real women from all social classes were
much more integrated in society than what texts on Islamic behavior prescribed. Like- wise, the ethical treatises I study in this dissertation create an imagined world which upheld gender segregation as the ethical social order and assumed public realm was male, and accordingly ethics of society, siyasat-i mudun or the ordering of cities, was entirely about ethics of male homosocial relations.95
Roxanne Euben highlights some extant attitudes held generally towards women in Premodern Muslim contexts that traverse the public and private conceptions of women’s roles. In her close reading of commentary about women in Ibn Battuta’s
Rihla, a narrative of his thirty year journey, she explains that, at first, he “conforms to [the] convention” that women belong in the private sphere, and thus are not notewor- thy.96 This common attitude from the middle periods is responsible for the scarcity of
rich narrative sources about women’s lives.97
93Ali Asani describes a notable exception to this pattern in pre-modern Muslim lands was Saljuq descendent, Razia Sultana (d. 1240), the only woman sovereign, not regent queen, of a Muslim region in pre-modern times. She was selected as heir to the Mamluk Sultanate of Delhi by her dying father, Shams-ud-din Iltutmish, for her military and administrative experience, and the lack of qualified sons at the time of his death. There were no legal objections to a woman’s rule from the ‘ulema’ until centuries after her rule. She reigned for four years before a governor of Bhatinda, Altuniyya, revolted against her rule. Altuniyya captured her and surrendered her to her younger half brother who usurped the throne. Altuniyya later married her to and campaigned for her return to the throne but Razia’s half brother had them both killed. See Ali Asani, “Razia Sultana” in Medieval Islamic Civilization:
An Encyclopedia ed. Joseph Meri, (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2006), 674-675.
94Hillenbrand, 104 and 116.
95The ethicists use the termsiyasat throughout their works to signify the related concepts of order- ing, management, governance, and politics.
96Roxanne Euben,Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowl-
edge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 81. 97Euben, 80-81.
On the other hand, discussion about women in normative texts seems to indicate that women’s behavior and men’s control of their behavior, were essential in iden- tity formation and establishing moral character of people. We see this tendency in the Rihla too as, Euben explains, Ibn Battuta makes more frequent remarks about women as he travels further away from his point of origin; his comments “function has a kind of legend, as on a map, by which his male audience can decode the Rihla’s tax- onomy of peoples and cultures.”98 He describes women through binaries, “veiled and
naked, visible and secluded, aristocrats and slaves, learned and illiterate, rich and poor, autonomous and obedient—that overlap and intertwine.”99 Unsurprisingly, he praises
pious women, properly veiled women, and certain aristocratic women who show him generosity and favors, a sign of their piety. Euben explains, “Ibn Battuta’s focus on what he regards as proper religious observance also fuels a consistent preoccupation with women’s sexual behavior and appearance, and a concomitant tendency to trans- form women into an index of the virus or value of an entire people, as when he deems the citizens of Shiraz particularly pious because of the modesty and purity of their women.”100 Yet he also, “frequently represents women as objects of sexual pleasure,
indices of piety, or both at once” as indicated by his praise of Meccan women, who are “‘strikingly beautiful, pious, and chaste’” and the women of Marhata (Bangladesh) “as having ‘in sexual intercourse a deliciousness and a knowledge of erotic movements that other women do not have.”101 Although the ethicists deemphasize the erotic rela-
98Euben, 80. 99Euben, 81. 100Euben, 81.
101Euben, 81. Carl Ernst and I, along with my colleagues Mathew Hotham and Mathew Lynch, have counted Ibn Battuta as having contracted 10 marriages throughout his journeys as published in Ross Dunn’s volume. Euben states that he married 4 women from Maldives at the same time and “swears that he lived only on coconuts known as aphrodisiacs for his entire year and a half stay there.” Euben, 81.
tionship a man can have a with a woman, they recognize women’s sexuality (as part of their fertility), as well as their piety as important qualities in a wife.
In her essay on Cairene women from 14th century Mamluk Egypt, Huda Lutfi also discusses images of women that were bound up in normative narratives about women’s roles. She examines the ethico-legal treatise, al-Madkhal by scholar Ibn al-Hajj (d. 1336) to glean data about daily life of married women and argues that a significant “discrepancy between the theoretical and actual restrictions on women” particularly because the texts attempted to “correct” women’s behaviors.102 Lutfi explains that
Mamluk women actively participated in public life with frequent visits to Sufi shrines, mosques, bazars, public baths and more. Ibn al-Hajj responds directly to what he viewed as “unislamic practices and extravagances” that were a result of women women’s presence in public, which he saw as a male domain.103 Further, Ibn al-Hajj laments
improper breakdown gender segregation in the home when women received visits from male neighbors and relatives.104 He held men responsible: “Throughout al-Madkhal,
Ibn al-Hajj stresses repeatedly that the Muslim man should be responsible for the proper shar’i behavior of his females, and he complains that in actuality women were left unguided and unrestricted, inviting and following their own ways.”105
Male responsibility over wives is a key theme in the ethics treatises of Ghazali, Tusi, and Davani, who likewise advocate that men ensure proper seclusion of their wives.106
However, for the ethicists, control over wives ran much deeper than spatial protection.
102Huda Lutfi, “Manners and Customs of Fourteenth-Century Cairene Women: Female Anarchy versus Male Shar‘i Order in Muslim Prescriptive Treatises” in Women in Middle Eastern History:
Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender. eds. Nikki Keddie and Beth Baron Eds. (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1991). 103Lutfi, 101.
104Lutfi, 104. 105Lutfi, 106.
The desire to confine women was for their own protection but also to control theirnaf- ses. With their focus on ordering the individualnafs, the main assumption the ethicists make with regard to women is their lack of superior rationality that comes with their sex. The ethicists all recognize women’s full humanity because they hold that women are in possession of nafses; however, because women are deficient in rationality, they are not able to discipline their nafses and need their husbands to do that for them.107
I discuss this gendered metaphysical tension of full humanity and partial rationality of women in greater detail in Chapter Three.
1.4
Defining Islamic Ethics
The definition of Islamic ethics is contested. In current scholarship, there is a signif- icant debate on the epistemology of Islamic ethics as a discursive tradition. Scholars of the Islamic intellectual tradition mainly describe the history of Islamic ethics through three genres: fiqh (jurisprudence),kalam (theology), and akhlaq (philosophical ethics), which I will discuss in greater detail below.108 The texts I study in this dissertation fall