Professor combats ignorance about Islam, women

Thursday, August 12, 1999

By JULIA LIEBLICH
The Associated Press

It was the 27th day of Ramadan in Alexandria, Egypt. Leila Ahmed was 6 or 7 when she followed her grandmother up the steps to the roof, the old woman's long black robe and veil blowing in the breeze.,br>
Her grandmother always wore black, mourning a son lost long ago. But this evening was for celebrating, she told her granddaughter. In Islam's holiest month, this was the Night of Glory when the gates between heaven and Earth opened, and God might send the angels.

The little girl sat for hours, scanning the sky for signs.

"The angels didn't exactly come," she says now, sipping tea in a Cambridge, Mass., hotel. "But it was so wondrous to sit there waiting at my grandmother's side."

Prayer in the mosque is central to the lives of most Muslim men. Women like Ahmed's mother and grandmother rarely went to the mosque, she says, but they were as true to the spirit of Islam as any imam.

Now, newly appointed as the first women's studies professor at Harvard Divinity School, 59-year-old Ahmed hopes to unveil a hidden Islam, a woman's Islam, as part of her work on women in world religions.

"For women, being in tune and aware of the wonder of life was part of what Islam was," Ahmed says. "It was not the ritualistic things one reads about, or the official Islam. It was about what sense you make of your life and how aware you were of other people and the stars and the rhythms of existence."

Those rhythms are central to her most recent book, "A Border Passage: From Cairo to America -- A Woman's Journey" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). In this memoir of identity across cultures, Ahmed looks back at a childhood immersed in a woman's Islam: the long hours in her grandmother's receiving room, where no men entered and children were privy to private conversations and pointed, if affectionate, imitations of pompous men.

Many women had a low opinion of clerics, Ahmed says, and men were not considered necessary intermediaries in the realm of the spirit.

"We grew up understanding that nothing came between you and God," she says.

Ahmed learned about religion by watching. "The messages were hidden messages: attitudes, posture, a glance of approval," she says. "It's the lived version of Islam that's passed down from generation [to generation] just as surely as the textual tradition."

Her mother saw herself as a religious woman, but without the formal trappings.

She always quoted one verse as summing up everything Islam meant: "The person who kills one being kills all of humanity, and the person who gives life to one being gives life to all humanity."

Her mother went so far as to prohibit her sons from serving as combatants in any of the wars that wracked the Middle East. She could not live, she said, with knowing that she had given birth to a man responsible for the death of another mother's son.

Later, Ahmed would learn of another Islam preached among men in the mosque, which she describes as more authoritarian and sometimes violent. "But for me Islam was a pacifist, gentle tradition," she says.

Only when she began teaching women's studies at the University of Massachusetts did Ahmed confront the prevailing images of Islam in the West. Her non-Muslim colleagues seemed to have only one subject on their minds: female circumcision. And Ahmed found herself continually explaining that it was a custom that predated Islam, a point she reiterated in her earlier book, "Women and Gender in Islam."

She was no apologist for violence committed in the name of Islam nor the repression of women in any tradition. But she was distressed to see her religion viewed through a single lens.

"I had to address the issue of prejudice about Islam as much as sexism within Islam," she says. "I was really stunned at how unaware American feminists were of what Islam was and any connection between Islam and Christianity and Judaism. It was as if it was a religion of some wild savages.

"If you want to see Islam as violent you can find a violent Islamic history legitimated," she says. "You can also find a completely pacifist tradition. The debate within Islam is a mirror of what is going on in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism. Whose tradition is valorized?"

Or: Whose Islam is it anyway?

It's a question Ahmed will address in her women's studies classes at Harvard tracing the development of feminist thought on religion, courses that will treat women's testimony with the same respect as religious texts.

"I want to find ways to bring what is ordinarily left out of academic discourse, and makes up most of our lives, into recognized space," she says. "It's knowledge my grandmother and mother passed on to me that is as key as any knowledge I acquired in the academy."

Orthodox interpreters of the Koran would likely dismiss such knowledge, says Judith Tucker, director of the Arab studies program at Georgetown University. "They think lived experience is irrelevant, and that a good Muslim is trying to find the meaning of the text," she says.

Still, Tucker says, more scholars are recognizing the importance of such experience in Islam, particularly anthropologists who study how oral tradition is passed down from generation to generation, grandmother to granddaughter.

Ahmed looks back fondly on her days in her grandmother's receiving room, a woman's space she has never been able to re-create in America. And she remembers evenings on the roof, particularly the night of the year when heaven and earth opened, and an old woman and young girl sat gazing at the stars.

Copyright © 1999 Bergen Record Corp.