The Argument

Despite critiques, much of the scholarship on IslamismFootnote ¹ and the ‘woman question’ continues to be driven by a modernization paradigm. A classic example is the assumption that not only Islamist movements but Islam itself stand against women's equality. Articulated variously under the flags of Islamic ‘religion’, ‘culture’ or ‘tradition’, it is held that Islam is the signature cause of women's plight. From an atheistic framework, Winter (Reference Winter2001a) argues that Islam and Islamist movements (she conflates them) have irredeemably chained women. She asks: is Islam not ‘a primary cultural means of ensuring men's political domination of women’? (2001: 33). Furthermore, she dismisses the idea that Islamist movements (she describes them as right-wing) have become moderate. Thus, she rejects any progressive reading of Islam claiming that the Qur'an (like other holy texts) is inherently ‘oppressive to women’ (Winter Reference Winter2001: 12; see also Sahgal and Yuval-Davis Reference Sahgal and Yuval-Davis1992). Critical of ‘Islamic feminists’ project of evolving non-patriarchal readings of sources of Islamic authority (see, e.g., Badran Reference Badran2002; Mirza Reference Mirza and Moghissi2005; Moghadam Reference Moghadam2002), Moghissi too contends that gender equality is ‘diametrically opposed to the basic principles of Islam’ and that ‘. . . no amount of twisting . . . can reconcile the Qur'anic injunctions . . . with . . . gender equality’ (Reference Moghissi1999: 140; also see Karmi Reference Karmi and Yamani1996: 79). Likewise, Mojab avers that Islamic feminism ‘is a compromise with patriarchy’ (Reference Mojab and Moghissi2005: 325).

Several assumptions animate such arguments. To begin with, these writers reify Islam. If, for Winter, Islam is a primary cultural means of women's domination, for Karmi masculine rule is fundamental to the Qur'anic view of society. For Moghissi, gender equality is alien to Islam because Islam has an essence, basic principles in her words, which clashes with feminism. These critics also gloss over many forms of mutations which Islamist movements have historically undergone. More importantly, their arguments are derived from studying the trajectories of Islamism in largely undemocratic Muslim-majority countries such as Algeria, Egypt and Iran.

Based on the study of the Indian Jamaat-e-Islami (hereafter Jamaat), I will make two interlocking arguments. Firstly, drawing on emergent works on Islamic feminism (e.g., Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod1998; Afary Reference Afary1997; Ahmed Reference Ahmed1992, Reference Ahmed1986; Hassan Reference Hassan2001, Reference Hassan and Grob1991, Reference Hassan and Cooey1991a; Mernissi Reference Mernissi1993, Reference Mernissi1985; Moghadam Reference Moghadam2002; Engineer Reference Engineer1998; Fernea Reference Fernea1998),Footnote ² I will argue that Islam has no essence; hence a non-patriarchal reading of Islam is plausible. It is my contention that it is not the Qur'an per se, which legitimates gender hierarchy, but the person making interpretation thereof and the context in which it is done. Thus, Ubaidullah Sindhi (d. 1944), a theologian of the Deoband, quoted the Qur'an, sura as-saf 9, to argue for Communist revolution. Abul Ala Maududi (1903–79), the Jamaat's founder, quoted the same sura to debunk Communism and call instead for Allah's Kingdom (Ahmad Reference Ahmad2005). Without multiplying examples, I stress that it is wrong to assume that the Qur'an is predisposed against women. As Zayd writes, ‘. . . (T)he Quran is at the mercy of the ideology of its interpreter. For a communist, the Quran would thus reveal communism, for a fundamentalist it would be a highly fundamentalist text, for a feminist it would be a feminist text, and so on’ (Reference Zayd2006: 91).Footnote ³

My second argument is that to impose, as Winter does, a blanket label of ‘right-wing’ on all Islamist movements is misleading.Footnote ⁴ Such a label simplifies the complexity of Islamism. In Prophet and the Proletariat, Harman argues that Islamism also has a progressive language—now shrill, now mild. During the first Gulf War, to the anxiety of Saudi Arabia, Islamists in many countries protested against the invasion of Iraq.Footnote ⁵ Harman concludes that Islamism is ‘a response to the ravages of imperialism’ (Reference Harman2002: 6). The label ‘right-wing’ is flawed on another count: Islamist movements lack a uniform character. The nature of Islamism in Iran is different from that of Egypt (Bayat Reference Bayat1998). Such differences become certainly substantial in the case of Islamists of India where Muslims, in 2001, numbered over 130 million. The distinctiveness of Indian Muslims, however, is not simply due to their demography. Indian Muslims have been makers of and participants in a polity, which is a secular democracy for over half a century. This distinctiveness eludes the Muslim-majority societies of the imagined ‘Islamic heartland’, the Middle East. For example, while the post-1979 Iranian state forces women to veil, the Turkish state forbids veiling in public institutions. By contrast, the Indian state leaves veiling to the volition of its citizens. In Saudi Arabia and Egypt, imams are required to have a licence from the state to deliver sermons. India has no such law. I take the Indian state's stance here as derived from its secular–democratic character. It is due, inter alia, to this factor that the Jamaat is probably the only Islamist party in the world to fight for secular democracy. To call it ‘right-wing’ is to miss this radical mutation.Footnote ⁶ A vital facet of the Jamaat's transformation is its changing discourse on gender.Footnote ⁷ Building on Trouillot's Silencing the Past, I will argue below that the factor catalyzing change was practice both within the Islamist arena and in the larger world Islamists inhabit. The vehicle of this changing discourse is Islamic feminism—a concept I will discuss in the section ‘Conclusion’.

In the first part of this paper, I discuss the Janus-faced character of the Jamaat's gender ideology as laid down by its founder, Maududi. Arguably, he was the first thinker in India to open the door of his organization to women qua individuals. At the same time, he stipulated the harshest rules for women. For instance, he argued that if women stepped out of the home they must be veiled from head to toe. In the second part, I show how Maududi's position came to be critiqued by his followers. I discuss criticism on issues such as veiling, women's participation in the public domain (including work and cinema) and questions of eligibility to become head of state and study in co-educational institutions. In the final part, I account for the factors behind change. In the section ‘Conclusion’, I discuss what such criticism of Maududi's neopatriarchate entails. Does it inaugurate an Islamic feminist discourse? If so, what is its meaning and form?Footnote ⁸

Maududi's Neopatriarchate

To appreciate the Jamaat's changing discourse on women, it is crucial to historicize the movement's formation. Why did Maududi found the Jamaat? How did women figure in the Jamaat's weltanschauung?

After his turn to Islamism in the 1930s, Maududi critiqued both the Indian National Congress (hereafter Congress) and the Muslim League (hereafter League). He considered Congress to be a Hindu, not a secular, party (Reference Maududi1938). As for the League, he found it a replica of the Congress for both parties believed in a secular state. Since the League had no agenda for a shari'a state, Maududi declared that the future Pakistan would be an ‘infidelic state of Muslims’ (Reference Maududi1942: 109). In 1941, he founded Jamaat-e-Islami and called for an ‘Islamic State’. Maududi's call arose out of the loss of Muslim power to the British. To undo that loss, he stressed rehabilitation of a pure, uncontaminated Islam. To Maududi, a reigning sign of Islam's contamination was the ‘moral degradation’ of women. His treatise Purdah, The Veil, argued that women's freedom had led to the decline of many a nation.Footnote ⁹ Praising the Greek nation, he lamented its latter degeneration caused when women began to participate in the public domain and hedonism grew pervasive. The ultimate sign of Greece's immorality was its worship of Aphrodite, goddess of love (Reference Maududi1959: 12). The modern West was on the same path of immorality, he observed, as the Greeks in the past.Footnote ¹⁰

Maududi saw a similar scenario unfolding in colonial India, especially among westernized Muslims.Footnote ¹¹ He attacked the League for flouting shari'a's limits on women. In his view, there was no difference between the Congress and the League in their respective stances towards gender issues. Both held anti-shari'a approach to women. He noted that unveiled women were the ‘candles of the party’ in the meetings of the League in the same way Hindu women were in the meetings of the Congress (in Ahmad Reference Ahmad2005: 70). Maududi called Muslim men like those in the League ‘true believers in the religion of the West’ (Reference Maududi1959: 91). He cited an Urdu story, Repentance, written by a man.Footnote ¹² In it, a young unmarried girl falls in love with a man. They end up making love and she gets pregnant. Once pregnant, the fear of sin haunts her. She asks herself:

With such quotations, Maududi showed how Muslim men mimicked ‘western culture (firangi tahzeeb)’. He described western culture as an ‘epidemic’ (Reference Maududi1959: 201). Like Westerners, such men promoted values antithetical to shari'a. They encouraged women to step outside of their ‘natural’ space—home. Maududi singled out women's visibility in public arenas—council, bazaar, college, theatre, restaurant, etc.—as the greatest threat to morality. Art, literature, music, film, dance, use of makeup by women: all were shrieking signs of immorality (Reference Maududi1953, Reference Maududi1959). Though men embraced the ‘epidemic’ before women did, the embrace of the latter was lethal for Maududi who regarded harem (women) as the last shelter wherein Islam preserved its culture. In his usage, harem means both women and space; segregated, and guarded. Stressing its spatial import, he wrote: ‘Harem is indeed the mightiest fortress of Islamic culture, built so that Islam could seek shelter there if it was ever defeated’ (Reference Maududi1959: 201). He lamented that even this fortress was no longer safe from the epidemic.

Maududi's almost paranoid endeavours to protect the fortress resonate with those of wider Islamic reform movements (see Devji Reference Devji and Hasan1994; Metcalf Reference Metcalf1992). Indeed, as Chatterjee (Reference Chatterjee1993) notes, Hindu reform movements too paraded the logic of protecting the inner domain (women) from the external intrusion of ‘the West’. Given the invasion of harem by westernization, Maududi devoted two-thirds of The Veil to outlining mechanisms for safeguarding the fortress of Islamic culture. Before I come to the specifics of his mechanisms, let me outline the general principles. The origin of the universe and its purpose are the axioms of Maududi's ideology. As the creator of the universe, Allah made humans, like other creations, in a pair. He endowed each pair with ‘natural sexual attraction’. But unlike other creations, which possess limited attraction (solely to perpetuate themselves), humans have an unlimited capacity of attraction. Humans' goal is neither simple self-perpetuation nor pursuit of pleasure. Maududi viewed pleasure-oriented sex as subversion of the divine, condemning contraceptives and birth control and likening the latter with suicide (Reference Maududi1977: 93). Allah or what Maududi called ‘nature (fitrat)’Footnote ¹⁴ wanted humans to fashion a ‘pious civilization’ (Reference Maududi1953: 109). The foundation of that civilization is the heterosexual family. To sustain the family beyond sheer functionality, nature had instilled in women the merits of beauty, sacrifice and shame, to attract men. As Maududi saw it, the plan of nature was to fashion a moral order free from chaos (fitna/fasad). He presented this as a balanced path between the sexual anarchy of modern West and the women-degrading stances of medieval Christianity and Hinduism (see note 10).

The position of woman is central to this pious civilization. Quoting the Qur'anic verse sura an-nisa 6, Maududi argued that Allah made men rulers (qauaam) over women. A man has thus authority to rule over his children and wife. He invoked a hadith, Prophet's saying, to state that anyone who disturbed such ordering of the family would not be dear to the Prophet (Reference Maududi1953: 176–178). To maintain the ordering of the family, Allah also divided spheres of work for men and women. Provision of livelihood for a woman was the job of her husband and the ‘natural domain’ for a woman was the home. She was, therefore, not allowed to travel unless accompanied by a mahram, a man forbidden in marriage, e.g., brother or father (antonym: ghair mahram). In the case of dire needs she might go out; however, this was an exceptional concession.

Behind Maududi's insistence on woman's confinement to the home lay the belief that her entry into the public domain caused immorality such as that which, he believed, had led to the fall of a once-mighty power like Greece. He saw woman's body as a source of fitna and destructive of nature's wish for a pious civilization. Outside of her home and in the presence of ghair-mahram, the sight of an unveiled woman is a visual sin inevitably inciting sexual storm in men, which in turn prefaces the ultimate sin—copulation.Footnote ¹⁵ To one refusing such Newtonian causality, Maududi asked if he will also deny that ‘the lava beneath the smoke of the volcano on the mountain is not restless to come out’ (Reference Maududi1953: 234). Since there was a sinister volcanic power in the female body that body was a threat to the pious civilization. Precisely for this reason Allah, Maududi argued, contained the volcano by limiting women to the home. According to him, Islam at most allowed a woman to unveil only her face and palms. Even in the presence of mahram in the home, she was obliged to observe this norm. A pious woman in the era of the Prophet, Maududi noted, covered herself from head to toe by wearing neqab. She also wore gloves to hide her palms. Further, a woman's voice, gait, smell, not to speak of gaze, was all fitna. He also described photographs and drawn images of living beings as haram. ‘All pictures . . .’, he wrote, ‘will remain haram’ (Reference Maududi1999: 125). He made no difference between a woman and her photograph for the consequence of both was chaos (1999a: 52). Music (1999: 135) and films were likewise illegitimate (Reference Maududi and Ahmad1963: 438). Obviously, there was no question of a woman acting in a film.

Legitimizing separation, Maududi called co-education ‘poison’ ‘Howsoever acceptable gender-mixed education may be to non-Muslims, from the Islamic viewpoint it is destructive . . ..’ (in Islahi Reference Islahi1997: 108). Like the reformists Nazir Ahmad and Ashraf Ali Thanawi before him, Maududi noted the need for women's education. But he considered only that education legitimate which made her a perfect mother and housewife. Only exceptionally bright women could study other non-domestic sciences, provided they didn't transgress shari'a. Maududi regarded women inferior to men. He thought it, ‘impossible that even a single person of the stature of Aristotle, Avicenna, Kant, Hegel . . . would be born in the fair sex’ (1953: 148). The reason was biological: nature had made woman suitable for nurturing and domesticity, not for intellectual pursuits. Like patriarchs in other religions, he offered, inter alia, menstruation and pregnancy as reasons for the domesticity of woman (1953: 138–150).Footnote ¹⁶

Maududi didn't allow any political role to women. Like theologians before him, he believed that it would spell disaster if woman became a ruler. He quoted a hadith in which the Prophet said: ‘A nation which handed over its affairs [of state] to a woman would never prosper’. The issue of ‘head of state’ aside, Maududi didn't allow a woman even to vote in elections. When asked why Islam forbade a woman to vote, he justified it as follows: ‘The present-day assemblies . . . control the whole of national politics. As such their status is . . . that of a qauaam [ruler] over the whole republic. . . . In sura an-nisa . . . Allah clearly assigns the status of qauaam to men’. Pre-empting the objection that the said verse dealt with the domestic domain, he went on to argue that if Allah did not make a woman ruler inside the home how could He allow her to rule a republic, ‘a collection of millions of homes’? (in Azmi Reference Azmi1999: 206) To strengthen his point, he quoted the Qur'anic verse ihzaab 4, to say that Allah commanded women to remain in the home. Rejecting the view that Allah's command was specific to Muhammad's family and did not apply to common women, he asked, ‘Does Allah want to see each Muslim home other than the Prophet's steeped in indecency?’ (in Nomani Reference Nomani1998: 113).

From the above outline, one might say that Maududi's gender ideology was a plain replay of patriarchy. Such a view is simplistic. Following Shirabi, I will instead call it ‘neopatriarchy’, a reworked version of traditional patriarchate in a modern context (in Kazemi Reference Kazemi2000: 455). And precisely because of the radically new context of its articulation, what appears as a re-assertion of patriarchy and tradition is indeed a subversion of tradition. Below, I show how Maududi used Islam to at once subvert and invent tradition.

It was in the early twentieth century that Muslim women began participating in modern politics (Jalal Reference Jalal and Kandiyoti1991; McDonough Reference McDonough and Sharma2002). They held their first conference in 1915. Bi Ammi, mother of the Ali brothers, was one of the first women to address a public meeting in 1917. Women's participation intensified with the League's demand for PakistanFootnote ¹⁷ (Jalal Reference Jalal and Kandiyoti1991; Willmer Reference Willmer1996). The rationale for their participation, however, stemmed more from secular than theological sources. Organizations like the Jamiatul Ulema-e-Hind (see Dastoor-e-asaasi undated) and the Tablighi Jamaat, which based their agenda on Islam, had no provision for recruiting women. The Jamaat was the first to grant membership to women qua individuals and on the basis of the Quran and hadith. Stipulating membership criteria, the Jamaat stated that any person, ‘whether a man or woman’, could become its member if s/he agreed to work for its goal (Dastoor Reference Maududi1942: 177). The membership of women was clearly an invention of tradition since the very idea of a party like the Jamaat was foreign to pre-modern polity (Tilly Reference Tilly and Bright1984), as was the notion of a constitution. Social movements are themselves ‘an invention of the modern age’ (Tarrow Reference Tarrow1998: 2). It is in this sense that the politics of Razia Sultana, a female ruler in the Sultanate period, belongs to a different catalogue. It was not only membership which set the Jamaat apart from the rest. The role it assigned to women was a departure of sort from tradition. The Jamaat's Constitution obligated women members to preach its ideology to their families. It urged them to ‘disobey the commands of their husbands and guardians if such commands were sins against Allah . . .’ (Dastoor Reference Maududi1942: 183).Footnote ¹⁸ Clearly, this call to disobey husbands went against tradition obliging women to obey.

Islamic Critique of Maududi's Islam

The innovation of allowing membership to women notwithstanding, the Jamaat's Constitution obligated them to observe shari'a and it was this aspect of its ideology which became dominant. After Partition, Maududi himself left for Pakistan. The Indian Jamaat, however, faithfully followed its founder, including his neopatriarchal prescriptions. Like Communists, the Jamaat initially believed that Islamic revolution was imminent in India. In 1951, its organ, Zindegi, wrote what would happen if ‘God-worshippers [the Jamaat]’ came to rule. Depicting the horrors India would face if Communists captured the state, Zindegi listed several benefits if the Jamaat did. One basic merit, Zindegi wrote, would be that the gender mixing would become a ‘serious crime’ and ‘women will remain women and men will men’ (in Ahmad 2005: 278). Zindegi urged women to accept that there was a ‘clear difference in the physical, mental makeup of men and women which can't be eliminated’ (1961 May: 54). In 1964, Zindegi reproduced each of Maududi's neopatriarchal arguments (August: 20–32). Further, the Jamaat resolved to fight dance, music, obscenity and birth control (Jamaat-e-Islami 1964: 10). As late as 1980, it forbade wearing lipstick outside the home (Zindegi 1980 September: 48). Officially, the Jamaat continued to stick to Maududi. But from the 1980s onwards, dissenting voices began to emerge from within. In the 1990s, they grew stronger to form a new critical language we can label Islamic feminism (see the section ‘Conclusion’). Below I will discuss its forms of reasoning as it appears both within the Jamaat and its student wing, Student Islamic Organization (SIO). I will also discuss one heated debate on veiling in Zindegi-e-nau.Footnote ¹⁹

Halfway through my fieldwork, a critic of the Jamaat advised me to meet Akram Zurti. Aged 80 or so, Zurti had retired as a reader from Aligarh Muslim University (henceforth AMU). He had heard Maududi deliver, in 1940, a speech at AMU. This speech transformed Zurti into a Jamaat member. Around the mid-1960s, however, he resigned. As a student of Chemistry, he could not endorse Maududi's rejection of Darwin. He instead believed that the Qur'an supported evolutionism. More importantly, in Zurti's view, the Qur'an was a book of ethics (ikhlaq) and justice (adl) for the entire humanity, regardless of religious divides. The Jamaat had, by contrast, turned it into a book for ‘Muslims’ as an ethnic group. Thus, Zurti lamented, in the early 1960s when communal riots broke out in India, the Jamaat sided with Muslim victims even if they were rapists, liars, hypocrites and cruel. To Zurti, this stance of the Jamaat was un-Islamic: rather than speaking for humanity it defended Muslims as an ethnic group. By backing the Urdu-speaking West Pakistan against the Bengali-speaking East Pakistan in the 1971 War, in Zurti's narrative, the Pakistani Jamaat further degenerated, coming to equate Islam with one language.

By ethics, Zurti meant what was morally good: love, kindness and care for the poor. So pivotal is ethics to the Qur'an that it calls prayer ‘fraud’ if a prayer-doer disregards compassion. Zurti cited sura al-maoon where Allah chides worshippers who are unkind to their fellows. For Zurti, the Qur'an is also a call for action, at the heart of which lies the obligation to command maruf and forbid munkar. The words maruf and munkar are taken to mean ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.Footnote ²⁰ In Zurti's reading, these terms had different meanings. For a thing to qualify as maruf, it should (a) be popular (maruf), acceptable (maqbool); (b) it should accord with Allah's feature (sifat): justice and compassion and (c) it should stand to reason. Further, Zurti stressed that since Islam was dynamic, with societal change the notion of maruf would also change. He defined munkar as the ‘other’ of maruf. As he considered Islam a religion for humanity, maruf was beyond religious borders. He held that in the modern West several ideas of maruf had developed: human rights, democracy, freedom and women's equality. So had ideas of munkar: slavery and colonial loot, for instance. According to Zurti, it was Muslims' duty to embrace maruf and shun munkar. He argued that not only did women have the right to vote in elections but that they could also become Prime Ministers. Against Maududi, he didn't consider women to be intellectually inferior. Arundhati Roy, he said, is brighter than many men. He lamented that Muslims had not produced a Roy (whose lecture at AMU in early 2004 was a big event). In Zurti's view, women were also entitled to equal shares in property. Today, he continued, women's education, including in co-educational institutions, and their participation in the public domain were maruf. In India, they could also uncover their head and wear a half-sleeve blouse, as both were maruf. Rejecting popular practices of the age, he warned, would run against the Qur'anic call to command maruf.

Clearly, Zurti departed radically from Maududi. In Zurti's account, Maududi confined women to the home because he took an ethnic, not a universalist, approach to Islam. Had Maududi's approach been universal, he would have welcomed western maruf about women. According to Zurti, Maududi also ignored justice—a feature (sifat) of Allah. As Allah desires justice, he contended, how could He deny the right to vote or run a state to women? Maududi, despite his questioning of many theological positions, remained a muqallid (an imitator). In Zurti's view, Maududi had the potential to be a mjaddid (renewer) but ended up defending patriarchy. He called Maududi's commentary on the Qur'an, Tafhimul Qur'an, as a piece of ‘sheer ignorance (niri jahiliat)’. He lamented that none—from Ibn-e-Tamiya (d. 1328) to Maududi—understood the Qur'an because commentators had thus far interpreted it through the hazy lenses of mostly distorted hadith and medieval jurisprudence. The sole authentic book was the Qur'an the writing of whose commentary, in its own terms, was his mission.

When I asked him if he had published his thoughts, Zurti sadly told me that owing to his advanced age he could not write any more. Whenever ideas came to him, he recorded them in cassettes. He had employed a Ph.D. student to transcribe and read them out for further reflections. He was hopeful that one day his views would appear in print. In one of the several sessions I had with him, he urged me also to meet Sultan Ahmad Islahi to whom he often referred.

In the Islamist arena, Islahi was a contested figure. Some admired him for his novelty; others attacked him for diluting the Jamaat's ideology. To his detractors, he was moody, provocative. He critiqued Maududi, they alleged, to equal himself to Maududi's stature. He was also considered ‘obscene’, for in one book (see below) he freely discussed the subject of sex. Born in 1951, Islahi was educated at Madrasatul Islah (in Azamgarh), a seminary initially receptive to Maududi. In 1974, he joined Aligarh's Idara Tahqiq-wo-tasneef, a Jamaat research institute. He has remained with it since then. Islahi also held key leadership roles in the Jamaat. He was, however, foremost a writer. He has authored 20 books. Among other issues, it was his unusual view on women that was a point of debate, especially among the young Islamists.

Bemoaning deviation from Maududi's ideology, one Jamaat hardliner told me how people like Islahi were responsible. In this critic's opinion, Islahi justified unveiling, dancing and singing. This critic asked me, rather angrily, what people would think of the Jamaat when Islahi's own daughter went to study at Abdullah Girl's College of AMU in a half-sleeve qamiz and with her head uncovered—nangi (naked) he called her. Such was the hostility towards Islahi. In such allegations, however, Islahi saw the play of manly power rather than concern about Islam. Men's obsession with women's veiling, he argued, ignored the fact that Islam also had codes about men. The Prophet forbade a handsome man to roam unnecessarily in the streets. None of the ulema (theologians), however, ever cited this hadith to issue a fatwa against men. The wearing of tight jeans, which show the crest and trough of a man's body and hamper the ritual of prayer, is likewise un-Islamic. But ulema do not prohibit it as they fear the wrath of men. They, however, always focus on female dressing because women are easy targets. In Islahi's opinion, his critics misconstrued the nature of Islam. It is ‘a soft (narm), flexible (lachakdar) religion’. Excluding the categorically forbidden, he held that shari'a was flexible enough to swim with the age and women's issues were no exception. Islahi told me that his critics also didn't understand the principles of shari'a. The early jurists (foqha) did not reject maruf—by which he meant local culture. If a maruf didn't directly clash with Islam, most jurists accepted it. Thus, in Africa, they not only sanctioned dance and music but some of them also took part.

To fully comprehend Islahi's argument, let me turn to his 43-page article (Reference Islahi1997) in a journal from AMU. Given Islahi's unorthodox position, the editor put a disclaimer that the he didn't agree with all of the arguments. Titled ‘Modern Media and Islam’ and laced with over 90 references (mostly Arabic), the article was written with the realization that despite attempts at reform media could not be purified of songs, women's voice and images and that these were indispensable to life. Islahi's objective, then, was to find a rationale for women to participate in these arenas, notably films. The maxim of Islahi's analysis was: Islam is a soft, flexible and natural religion, fitri deen. He used fitrat differently from Maududi. While the former used it to limit women to the home, Islahi used it to pave the way for their participation outside home. Again against Maududi, he did not consider veiling (neqab) Islamic. Citing works by Imam Hanifa and others, Islahi argued that Islam permits woman to unveil her face, hands, arms and feet. She could also work outside the home: indeed, such was the case in Islam's early era. The daughter of Caliph Abu Bakar, Asma, worked in the field nine miles away from Medina. She collected fodder for animals and carried them on her head. If Asma worked outside of the home, Islahi argued, today women can certainly work in fields, offices and schools. The veil, for him, was more a status symbol of elite Muslims, shorfa, than a tenet of shari'a. Islahi's specific aim, as stated, was to explore whether a woman may also act, dance and sing in films (Reference Islahi1997: 67–68).

According to Islahi, a woman can certainly act in films. To argue this, he invoked canonical texts not discussed here for lack of space. I will focus on his conclusions and argumenation. To argue for woman's acting, Islahi first proposed that her co-actors be mahram; preferably, her husband. However, since shooting never happened in seclusion, in the presence of mahram she could also act with ghair mahram. The setting of shooting was such that chances of romance were non-existent. The next question, to Islahi, was the extent to which she could show her body. She could show her face, palms, hands, arms and feet as shari'a allowed it. The question was whether she could reveal her other parts. In Islahi's view, she could on the following ground: Islam makes a distinction between ‘slaves’ and ‘free women’ and had different provisions of satr for both. Satr means the part of body which must not be revealed. Though a man's satr is generally from navel to knee, Imam Hanifa didn't include the navel. In the eyes of shari'a, the satr for all men and for female slaves was the same, except that for the latter it also included the back and the belly. Stating that while he had no wish to revive slavery, if a free woman wanted to use the provision of a slave and thus show other parts of her body, Islahi argued that it wouldn't be un-Islamic. She could even touch a believing man. In a country like India, if such a provision was denied to her, Islahi feared, she might leave Islam itself. Allowing her to show parts of body a slave was entitled to show, he mused, was a lesser evil than apostasy. Islahi argued that women could also sing, as the Qur'an did not forbid music and singing. He did not regard, as Maududi did, woman's voice as fitna. If necessary, women could also dance in films. Pre-empting his critics, Islahi went on to argue that if a hadith on music and singing was taken literally, then a Muslim should become a renouncer because the Prophet once described the world as a curse, laanat (Reference Islahi1997: 68–73, 80).

Like this paper, Islahi's book Sex in Islam also departed radically from Maududi's ideology. The book covers a variety of issues. I will deal with just some themes. As you will recall, for Maududi, sex for pleasure was illegitimate. Sex's only intent was to procreate, in order to fashion a pious civilization. Islahi, by contrast, argued that pleasure in itself was equally Islamic (2000: 240–247). Unlike Maududi, he also saw no problem in using contraceptive. For Islahi, the issue was not legitimacy but the terms of usage. If a woman didn't want pregnancy, her husband could not force her. If he did, Islahi argued, she could take him to court (Reference Islahi2000: 309–310). The book in fact teaches how to use contraceptives so as to maximize pleasure and minimize risk. It also critiqued masculinity. As an example, Islahi cites the attitude of husbands during the first night when, to prove their ‘manliness’ and subdue their wives, they indulge in repeated intercourse. Such an attitude, Islahi argues, is un-Islamic (Reference Islahi2000: 204–205). He also approvingly discusses the practice of honeymoon. But what was especially taken as obscene was the graphic detail with which he spelt out Islamically legitimate modes of intercourse, called by him ‘Islamic positions (aasan)’ (Reference Islahi2000: 221). The Sanskrit text on sex (kok shastra) mentions 84 aasan of intercourse. Based on experiences with his clients, Keval Dhar, a sexologist, argues that only 6 were practical. Islam, Islahi notes, approves 11 aasan.

The young activists of SIO also questioned Maududi's neopatriarchate. Of 28 SIO members at AMU in 2002, Jamal was quite distinctive. His father was a member of the Jamaat, to which he had converted after a long association with the Communist party. Jamal had his early education in a government school that was gender-mixed. On conversion to the Jamaat, Jamal's father sent the boy to Jamiatul Falah, the Jamaat madrasa in Azamgarh, for further study. Jamal did not feel at home at Falah. He critiqued his teachers and friends for their ‘orthodox’, ‘theocratic’ views. Let me give one illustration. In class, a teacher argued that the Qur'an said that women should be subordinated to men. Jamal asked what the rationale was. The teacher responded that it was ‘woman's nature’ and that was why they had always worked within the home. Jamal argued back, saying that there was nothing such as ‘woman's nature’ and that if educated, they too could excel. He asked, what about women such as Razia Sultana, Rani Laksmi Bai (who fought against the British) and Sarojni Naidu (a leader of the anti-colonial movement)? Jamal told me that he did not get ‘rational’ answers to his questions. He was not convinced either about Maududi's argument that Islam prohibited a woman to be head of state. Like his brother, also an SIO activist, he believed that a woman could surely become a head of state. As a student at Falah, Jamal's brother had written his final year essay arguing for why Islam allowed a woman to become Prime Minister.

Such intense debates as Jamal had at Falah are also articulated in the Jamaat's organ, Zindegi-e-nau (hereafter ZN). ZN discussed veil, the ultimate symbol of Islam's ‘bigotry’. In February 2002, it published an article ‘Muslim Society and the Issue of Veiling’ by Abdurrahman Alkaf, a Jamaat intellectual, which unleashed a fierce debate. Educated at Sanvi Darsgah (Sanvi), a higher studies institute founded by the Jamaat in 1949, Alkaf was based in Sana. The Jamaat had established Sanvi for those of its activists who boycotted modern universities (like AMU) because Maududi had described them as ‘slaughterhouse[s]’ (Reference Maududi1991: 45). Alkaf's article delegitimized veiling as Islamic. Quoting sura ihzaab, he argued that Allah's command to women to remain in the home was specific to the Prophet's wives, and not meant for women in general. Given such a clear Qur'anic order, he wondered why all interpreters, including Maududi, were ‘adamant on’ turning the specific into the general (ZN 2002 February: 19). In Alkaf's view, there was neither command for women to be in the home nor veiled (2002: 27–29). Women were required to cover only their ‘head, neck, chest and nothing else’. He called veiling an ‘invention of man’ having ‘no place in the divine laws’ (2002: 32). Calling for ‘justice’ to women, he stated that it was the ‘anti-shari'a manliness of men’, and not the Qur'an, which prevented women from participating in economic activities.

Alkaf's article invited strong reactions. From March through June 2002, ZN carried a dozen responses, mostly negative. The fiercest came from a Bombay woman, Farzana Tabassum. Describing his argument as a result of an ‘apologetic mind’ under the influence of ‘mesmerizing and glittering Western civilization’, she refuted him point by point (ZN 2002 March: 71).Footnote ²¹ In so doing, she repeatedly invoked Maududi. In Tabassum's opinion, Alkaf's attempt was ‘contemptible’ because it went against the ‘categorical commands of the Qur'an and hadith’ (2002: 64). Indeed in Alkaf's argument, she detected a conspiracy.

The angry responses to Alkaf went beyond the pages of ZN. One aged Jamaat hardliner told me that Alkaf was not alone in propagating anti-Islamic ideas. In his view, a top section of the Jamaat leadership, most of which had either lived or were still living in the West and the Gulf countries, had sold itself out to the West and the lure of money. Alkaf, he said, belonged to that section. So did the Aligarh-based ZN editor, who had lived for 11 years in Saudi Arabia. When I asked this critic how he would explain the views of Zurti and Islahi who had never lived away from India, he remarked: ‘To be un-Islamic, one need not live in the West or the Gulf’.

So far, I have discussed some shades of critique levelled against Maududi's ideology by Jamaat activists themselves and the ways in which they offer a new discourse. I showed how Zurti, a former Jamaat member, critiqued Maududi and offered a new reading of the Koran on women's issues. I then shifted focus to lay out the theological reasoning of Islahi, an active Jamaat member. Then, I discussed the critical views of Jamal, a SIO activist, and concluded by discussing the debate on veiling in Zindegi-e-nau. In the remainder of this paper, I will discuss the context and factors that went into questioning Maududi's neopatriarchate and what such critique means analytically.

Context of Transformation

Writing about the Haitian revolution, Trouillot argues that it ‘thought itself out politically and philosophically as it was taking place’, in a context where ‘discourse always lagged behind practice’ (Reference Trouillot1995: 89). A similar process is at work in the case of the Jamaat's changing discourse. The dissenting voices I discussed above came to find a place in discourse because they were already being played out in practice. The levels at which these practices got staged were multiple. To start with, in the Islamist arena itself, Maududi's ideas began not to be strictly adhered to. In the mid-1970s, Nazar was an Islamist student activist at AMU. Then newly married, he did not let even his friends see his wife. Under Maududi's influence, he believed in the complete veiling of women. In 1975, when Indira Gandhi banned the Jamaat, several of its leaders in Aligarh were put in prison. One key leader of the Jamaat, a professor at AMU, was jailed. When Nazar went to visit the professor in jail, he also saw the latter's wife. She was without neqab. Even her scarf (dupatta) was not properly placed. To Nazar's shock, she even wore lipstick. Later, Nazar learnt that she did not consider neqab Islamic. If not wearing neqab is against Islam, she asked, were the unveiled women studying in AMU not Muslim? In Nazar's account, the professor himself didn't consider the veil Islamic. Let me offer another example of practice preceding discourse. To Maududi, co-education was ‘destructive’. However, most postgraduate SIO activists at AMU have studied alongside women. In Jamal's class of Communicative English, comprising 21 students, 9 were women and only 2 of them wore the veil. Jamal didn't consider studying with women un-Islamic: indeed he even talked to and spent time with them. Let me here mention the shift in Jamaat's stance on AMU itself. Earlier, I noted that in the 1940s the Jamaat forbade its members to study at AMU because it was a ‘slaughterhouse’. On the doctrine of necessity, in the 1950s it allowed some students to study. Soon, their numbers began to increase. Much to Jamaat's chagrin, these students didn't find AMU to be a slaughterhouse. Due, inter alia, to pressure from AMU-educated sympathizers and members, in the 1960s the Jamaat stopped calling AMU a ‘slaughterhouse’.

Practices within the Islamist arena have also been intimately linked into a much broader context. This context includes notable changes in Muslim society and Indian socio-political formations at large. The process of change began in the 1970s, an important decade for the women's movement in India. Considered as the decade of ‘reawakening’, the 1970s saw massive mobilizations by women throughout India. The ‘reawakening’ was clearly influenced by international developments, the women's movements of the 1960s in the West being crucial. The relative lull of the 1950s–1960s gave way to a heightened feminist consciousness in the 1970s (Calman Reference Calman1989; Mazumdar and Agnihotri Reference Mazumdar, Agnihotri, Ray and Basu1999; Patel Reference Patel and Ghadially1988). How could Muslim society remain untouched by such a monumental wind of change? Change certainly registered itself on the landscape of AMU. Prior to 1947, veiled women came in palanquins to attend classes. During the 1950s, classrooms at postgraduate levels were partitioned with a curtain to separate boys from girls (undergraduate classes were held separately, as they are still today). The 1970s saw the withering away of postgraduate gender segregation. Delhi's Jamia Millia Islamia, another important university for north Indian Muslims, did not lag behind, and the number of Muslim women attending AMU and Jamia Millia continued to increase. Women's visibility was not limited to universities. Many women achieved success in politics and even became cabinet ministers. As a prime time national TV newsreader, Selma Sultana became a household name in the 1980s (Shaheen Reference Shaheen and Ruhela1990).

The visibility of women in the public domain, especially in the new professions, was closely connected to urban class formation. Owing to a maze of factors, with the post-colonial developmental state as an important agent, the size of the middle class had expanded from the 1970s. In the 1930s, there had been no more than a dozen Muslim women with matriculation degrees in Bihar (Daudi Reference Daudi2001). By the 1970s, their number had dramatically risen and there were a considerable number of women going to universities. Writing about the position of the Tunisian Islamist party, Mouvement de la Tendance Islamiste (Movement of the Islamic Trend, MTI), Mahmoud (Reference Mahmoud, Sidahmad and Ehteshami1996) links the loosening of its rigidity in gender to the aspirations of this nascent middle class, MTI's main constituency. A similar link can be observed in the Jamaat. In The Veil, Maududi ruthlessly critiqued the middle class and its revolt against Islam as manifest in women's freedom. From the 1970s on, the Jamaat began to address itself to a segment of this very middle class, or those aspiring towards the middle class status. In Sex in Islam, Islahi discussed the practice of ‘honeymoon’ and concluded that Islam allowed it: in fact, he called it ‘desirable’. I noted that he also discussed the relative benefits of different contraceptives: condoms, pills and copper T, and while discussing this, he also informed readers about their prices. Clearly, such desires and needs are hardly those of the Indian working classes. One telling index of Islahi's (as well as Alkaf's) assumed middle class audience was the assumption of a desire for privacy. As Islahi told me, he considered the joint family harmful for it denied privacy to its members.

The transnational ties of one segment of the Jamaat's leadership were another significant factor. Elsewhere, I have dealt with the ways in which this segment influenced Jamaat's shift in favour of secular democracy (Ahmad Reference Ahmad2005a). Here I will dwell on the views of such leaders on ‘the woman question’. During the 1970s, some influential Jamaat leaders from Aligarh went to work in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf countries and the United States. They also visited Britain, France and many Muslim-majority countries. The views of these leaders carried weight, as most of them were university teachers and members of the Jamaat's shoora, an executive committee similar to the politburo of the Communist parties. One such member, Nejatullah Siddiqui lamented that the Jamaat kept an eerie silence about women's role in public life. Calling for women's involvement in political processes, he pleaded for a rethinking of the Jamaat's position on women (Reference Siddiqi and Ali2003: 99, Reference Siddiqi2000: 416–418, also see Reference Siddiqi1995). In this rethinking, he urged the participation of women who were equally well versed in modern and Islamic education. If there were no such women, he proposed, steps should be taken to produce them. Siddiqui was not alone in his call for a rethinking. The editor of ZN also believed that the Jamaat needed to recast itself in accordance with new challenges, particularly those relating to women. Without naming Maududi, he told me that ulema were wrong in equating the Indian custom of purdah with Islam. Views such as those of Siddiqui and ZN editor were to an extent also a part of the wider change in the discourses of Islamist movements worldwide. In the course of my telephonic interviews with him, Siddiqui often favourably mentioned Tunisia's Rashid Ghannoushi and urged me to read his works. As Esposito and Voll (Reference Esposito and Voll2001: 91–117) observe, Ghannoushi was one of the first Islamists to argue for women's participation in political processes.

To a certain extent, Maududi's death in 1979 paved the way for a thorough critique of his ideology. Though the Indian Jamaat had stopped heeding him already when still alive,Footnote ²² his death left no room for Jamaat hardliners to consult their ultimate authority, Maududi.