BRINGING GENDER INTO SHIʿI HISTORY

Although the problem of gender has been central to the constitution of modern Middle Eastern cultures and subjectivities and has undergone something of a renaissance over the past two decades, the issue generally has received scant attention from historians of Shiʿism.⁹

As this broader scholarship demonstrated the utility of gender as a category of analysis, the place of women within the family and within the household, among other things, has become much better understood.¹⁰ Even though gender has somehow slipped through the cracks of Shiʿi historiography in Lebanon, it has been a constitutive element of Shiʿi political, legal, religious, and intellectual life.¹¹ To be sure, one needs to consider how men conceived of women and how male representations of women were reflective of male conceptions of and anxieties about gender. Moreover, we also must attend to the ways in which men were conceived and represented, both in relation to and independent of the women in their lives. An adequate historical discussion of gender norms, identities, and boundaries requires more than just consideration of how women were treated or portrayed.

For a number of reasons, the social and cultural history of the Lebanese Shiʿa in the 20th century more generally speaking has only recently begun to attract the attention of historians. Under the Ottoman Empire, Imami Shiʿi communities in Greater Syria negotiated ambiguous relationships with the Sublime Porte, on the one hand, and their neighbors of various communal affiliations, on the other hand.¹²

Depending on local circumstances, the political and religious lives of these communities tended to oscillate between the opposing poles of quietism and activism. The former was exemplified by the practice of taqiyya, or precautionary secrecy. As a result of a number of economic and political changes sweeping across the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire (and elsewhere) during the late 19th century, Shiʿi society in Jabal ʿAmil was transformed. New social classes of religious scholars (ʿulamaء) and political elites (wujahāء) emerged at this historical moment and spearheaded a number of important social and political trends, including a series of campaigns for the reformation of religious education in Jabal ʿAmil. In the most general intellectual terms, this reformist trend sought to bring about a kind of reconciliation between “modern” science and “traditional” religion. Islamic modernism represented a kind of epistemic shift in Islamic theological and cultural discourse.

The integration of Shiʿi communities in Jabal ʿAmil and the Bekaʿ Valley into the state of Greater Lebanon ushered in a new era. Starting in the late Ottoman period, new social groups began to emerge in Jabal ʿAmil as sweeping economic and political changes across the empire contributed to the transformation of relations between Shiʿi communities, not to mention other Ottoman subjects, and the state.¹³

Various communities that previously had been treated as subjects came to be categorized and to think of themselves as different kinds of citizens; as a result, new senses of political belonging and modes of identification took root. It was during this period that new ideologies, including Arab nationalism, Lebanese nationalism, and Pan-Islamism, first started to circulate in and around Jabal ʿAmil and elsewhere in Greater Syria. Political elites, religious leaders, and ordinary people began promoting demands on behalf of an increasingly politicized Shiʿi community in Lebanon. Islamic modernists often allied themselves with political activists to demand greater rights and representation for the Shiʿi community within the framework of the Lebanese colonial/national state.¹⁴ From 1920 onward, with the advent of the Mandatory state, these various religious communities were defined in altogether new ways. In the case of the Shiʿi communities in Jabal ʿAmil (and elsewhere, in what became Greater Lebanon), these groups eventually came to think of themselves and be defined as a coherent social group known as “the Lebanese Shiʿa.” This was accomplished through a number of historical practices, but the articulation of various cultural and political identities was one crucial component of this historical process of definition.¹⁵

Most extant historical accounts have dealt primarily with these political leaders, religious elites, and the apparently inexorable crystallization of communal solidarity, exploring how the modernization of religious education and tentative steps toward greater communal cohesion under the Mandate ultimately led to increased political participation.¹⁶

None has devoted any substantial attention to the role of gender in Lebanese Shiʿi society and culture.¹⁷ A paucity of primary historical sources may partially explain this. Whatever the case, if scholarship has tended to portray Shiʿi communities as naturally retrograde and traditional, issues of gender and family in Shiʿi culture have been dealt with downright skepticism or even disdain.¹⁸ Moreover, a disproportionate degree of attention has been placed on the more “exotic” aspects of Shiʿi culture, including the ʿAshuraء rituals (this article being no exception) and the practice of “temporary marriage” (mutʿa), both of which are held up as irrefutable evidence of the exceptional character of Shiʿi men (and women). This article will reexamine conventional narratives of Lebanese Shiʿi history—including, briefly, the ʿAshuraء mourning ritual—before moving into uncharted territory, specifically interrogating some elements of moral discourses about gender current in Shiʿi Lebanon under the French Mandate.

THE GENDERED DISCOURSE OF THE ʿASHURAء DEBATES

Shiʿi religious doctrine has been saturated with particular interpretations of “correct” gender roles and the role of gender in an adequately pious society. Because certain moral discourses were crucial for carving out and reinforcing the mores of Shiʿi society in Lebanon, religious discourses on gender were not only concerned with disciplining women and indexing their properly prescribed place. Public intellectuals and religious figures alike vehemently defended what they perceived to be the gender roles and practices perceived most appropriate for both men and women. Practices or ideas that were individually or collectively perceived as heteroprax or heterodox could be and were stridently attacked through a variety of tones and in an increasing range of media.

Specifically, during the late 1920s and early 1930s, a series of controversial debates broke out in print over the reformation of Muharram mourning practices, or the ʿAshuraء ritual. Under the Ottomans, the ability to openly engage in such Shiʿi ritual practice was circumscribed. It was only during the early 20th century that Shiʿa in Jabal ʿAmil began to participate in such acts without regard for potential state reprisals. The place of men and women in these ceremonies and the proper representation of women in such rituals were of supreme importance to those disputes, among other things. In a recently edited volume, Kamran Scot Aghaie and others demonstrate the importance of “gender-coded” symbols and narratives associated with the martyrdom of Husayn and his companions at Karbala.¹⁹

Such gender-coded symbols and narratives were also mobilized in the debate over the reformation of ʿAshuraء mourning practices among Lebanese and Iraqi Shiʿa. However, it is incredible that no study of this “fitna” has investigated the extent to which this debate was bound up with broader themes of gender identity and appropriately gendered cultural practices.

These debates were set off by a series of works entitled al-Majalis al-saniyya (The Prescribed Sessions), written by the venerable Muhsin al-Amin (d. 1952).²⁰

Through these treatises, Amin sought to reform and standardize both the texts and the rituals associated with communal mourning ceremonies during ʿAshuraء.²¹ Although the primary aim was to eliminate certain practices deemed religiously or ethically unacceptable—most notably that of “head-cutting” (al-hajjama) and other forms of self-flagellation (tatbir, laṭm) associated with expressing one's solidarity with the suffering of Husayn and his family (ahl al-bayt) through physical pain—Amin also paid substantial attention to renovating the gendered landscape of ʿAshuraء, especially in his subsequent work.²²

The most notable response to Amin came in the form of ʿAbd al-Husayn Sadiq's Simaء al-sulahaء (Attributes of the Pious).²³

Sadiq (d. 1948), a highly respected and relatively conservative religious scholar from the southern town of Nabatiyya, advocated for practices such as crying, public processionals, laṭm, and other forms of self-flagellation in order to most effectively mourn and honor Husayn. Weeping on behalf of Husayn, he believed, was capable of uniting people from different classes, social backgrounds, and educational levels.²⁴ As for the intermingling of the sexes on such occasions, Sadiq argued that Shiʿi religious gatherings were not comparable to other, more decadent events that took place in the streets and that often included people playing musical instruments or engaging in other hedonistic pastimes. In these religious circumstances, gender roles could be loosened up, but only slightly.²⁵

Muhsin al-Amin's riposte to his critics—Sadiq and others—was a slim tract entitled Risalat al-tanzih li-aʿmal al-shabih (The Treatise of Purification for the Works of the ʿAshuraء Mourning Play, hereafter al-Tanzih).²⁶

The main argument of the treatise was that certain practices considered “authentically” Shiʿi had actually been recently incorporated into ʿAshuraء commemorations and therefore constituted unacceptable and unlawful innovations (bidaء) in Shiʿi ritual life.²⁷ Moreover, Amin expressed grave concern over the harm done to the bodies of Shiʿi Muslims who had engaged in such practices, promoting an individualist ethic that chimed, “The most important thing is the protection of the self.”²⁸

Those individual bodies Amin sought to protect, however, were not all created equal. Amin was deeply unsettled by the understanding and representation of gender roles as conveyed through the ʿAshuraء rites. In fact, for Amin, the enactment of those gender roles in ritual mattered most in terms of how they might be perceived by others and somewhat less with respect to their perceived fealty to Shiʿi “tradition.” For one thing, Amin criticized men dressing up as women in mourning plays (tashabbuh al-rijāl bi-l-nisāء), citing what was ostensibly a fragment from a fatwa delivered by al-Qommi.²⁹

Al-Qommi was addressing how to portray female members of ahl al-bayt in the representation of the Karbala tragedy, arguing that a man did not need to fully dress up as a woman in order to indicate to the audience that he was meant to be a woman in the performance; the moral exemplarity of Fatima al-Zahraء or Sayyida Zaynab might also have been illustrated by a man with the help of a simple stage prop, such as a nightgown (chador shap), for example.³⁰ The issue seemed not so much to be that men were (cross-)dressing to portray female characters or that women portrayed male ones per se (although that, too, was frowned upon by some) but that such activities would, over time, lead to the “feminization of men.”

As for female roles in the ceremonies, Amin argued that women participating in mourning ceremonies should not “scream” within earshot of “foreign men.” Women's screaming was criticized as “ugly,” although screaming women in front of a foreign audience was particularly problematic for Amin, as a woman's voice was “shameful.”³¹

Any “shameful” female participation in public spectacles could have deleterious political repercussions for the aspirations of Imami Shiʿi communities in Lebanon, not to mention Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere. In other words, if the turn of the century debate over the veil in the modern Middle East located communal honor on the face and upon the bodies of Muslim women, then Amin (re)located that honor around her subdued, reserved behavior in dignified religious ritual. The potentially undesirable outcome he perceived was that women screaming or men cross-dressing or both women and men playing music in public could all be interpreted as dishonorable and lead to the shaming of the community. In this, Amin relied on a binary logic of shame–honor that was inscribed on the bodies of women (and their male approximations); it counterposed the personal experience of guilt over (or in solidarity with) Husayn's suffering to the public or social element of its observation.³²

In his critical response to those who sought to restrict the array of practices that Shiʿi Muslims engaged in during ʿAshuraء, Hasan al-Muzaffar stressed that his mujtahid predecessors, including the ʿallāmas al-Qommi and Murtada al-Ansari, did not interdict the representation of women by men (tashbīh al-rajul bi-l-marءa), but the feminization of men (taءannuth al-rajul), which fell “outside the akhbār.”³³

In response to Amin's indexing of al-Qommi, then, Muzaffar made a qualitative distinction between “resemblance” and gender bending. With respect to the problem of tashabbuh al-rijāl bi-l-nisāء, another critic of Amin, ʿAli Naqi al-Lakhnawi, made the point that the Prophet Muhammad was definitively opposed to the practice but not, however, in instances when men dressed up as women for a specific purpose and for a limited amount of time.³⁴ Here is one clear example of the flexibility of ijtihād in modern Shiʿi Islam, where an identical fatwa and a similar intellectual lineage could be mobilized to support diametrically opposed political or moral claims.³⁵ The ʿAshuraء debates were effectively a public debate over the proper practice of Imami Shiʿi ritual as a model for appropriately gendered behavior.

Muhsin al-Amin vociferously argued that self-harm (al-ḍarar wa-l-dirar) was absolutely prohibited in Islam, evincing both scriptural and medical proof for the right(eous)ness of such a position as a means of promoting healthy bodies and sound minds. In the ʿAshuraء debates, as in other cultural contexts that I will turn to below, this discourse of gendered ideals and ideal gender roles was buttressed by a set of hygienic concerns characteristic of Shiʿi modernist discourse and its scientific epistemology more generally. Amin's claims, and those of others, were informed by a bounty of medical and scientific knowledge that also seeped into the moral discourse of al-ʿIrfan during the first two decades of its publication.

AL-ʿIRFAN AND THE “WOMAN QUESTION”

Conventional narratives of Lebanese history under the Mandate have pointed out the central role played by Shiʿi (political) reformism and (religious) modernism. The monthly journal al-ʿIrfan is a rich source for the political, cultural, and intellectual history of the Shiʿi communities in Lebanon and beyond.³⁶

It was founded in Sidon in 1909, during an era of loosened press freedoms that prevailed throughout the Arab provinces on the heels of the Young Turk revolution by Shaykh Ahmad ʿArif al-Zayn, a notable intellectual from a commercial bourgeois family in Sidon, who was able to “break through” the national Lebanese political and cultural scene through his highly successful and altogether unique cultural product. In the somewhat exaggerated opinion of Fouad Ajami, “[t]o the extent that there is some kind of written record of Shia life in Lebanon, it is in the pages of Al Irfan.”³⁷ Silvia Naef confirms the national and regional importance of the journal, writing that “it is a source of primary importance not only for historians of Lebanon, but equally for all those who are interested in the intellectual evolution of the Middle East in the 20th century.”³⁸ The journal deals with such broad topics as politics, Islamic history, poetry, scientific discovery, and invention, as well as with local, regional, and international news.

In addition, al-ʿIrfan had a prime role in the construction and propagation of an ʿAmilī Shiʿi sense of self during this period by opening up a capacious forum for the negotiation of Arab, Lebanese, and Shiʿi politics. This struggle to discursively define the Shiʿa was fueled by and, in turn, inflected a number of important material struggles and institutional transformations in Lebanese Shiʿi economic, legal, and political life under the Mandate. In addition to the political contribution of the journal, a range of other materials published and discussed in al-ʿIrfan illustrated certain gendered anxieties and gender identities that circulated throughout early 20th-century Shiʿi society. On the one hand, these sources constituted a prescriptive discourse on gender articulated by men and geared toward an imagined reading public.³⁹

On the other hand, the content of these texts also expressed the “correct” roles men and women were to play in Shiʿi society as those authors and their contemporaries saw it. In other words, the journal was both a “model of” and a “model for” an ideal(ized) Shiʿi community. As such, the journal ought to be situated within a broader discussion (to the limited extent that such a historiographical discussion currently exists) about the historical role of mass-mediated morality in the burgeoning Lebanese public sphere.

This reformist approach characteristic of al-ʿIrfan included an attempt to redefine gender relations. In his wide-ranging study of ʿAmilī literature, Hasan Muhammad Salih commented on the status of women in Jabal ʿAmil during the 20th century. He argued that the “woman question” took on a “great significance” in the writing of ʿAmilī reformers during the nahḍa period.⁴⁰

Moreover, he wrote that “[t]hese writings that ʿAmili writers began to publish in the pages of ʿAmili journals were in solidarity with the call for a re-appraisal of the social position of women, even as some pushed for demanding the formation of a new imagination of her role” and even as they “started trying to formulate new laws to liberate her.” This entailed a growing clamor for greater recognition of rights she possessed in potentia that could “bring her closer to the modern woman than to the Ottoman woman.”⁴¹ The limitations of such a reductionist and diametrically opposed reading of the “modern” and the “Ottoman” woman notwithstanding, a critical reading of the journal from this period does indicate the extent to which the “woman question” was rapidly becoming a concern in the Shiʿi world to an extent similar to that among Sunni modernists. The various expressions of gender ideology in al-ʿIrfan and elsewhere were comparable to other discursive and political demands for women's emancipation, rights, and gender equality throughout the Middle East at the turn of the century. Still, women's claims to rights and citizenship throughout the Arab Middle East were often circumscribed by a number of forces and factors.

The formation of a Lebanese national sense of belonging during the late 19th and early 20th centuries was not cut and dried. As the predominant strains in Lebanese and Arab nationalist discourse often glossed over the specificity of local communities, the Shiʿa were inadvertently transformed from an invisible (and illegitimate) community into a kind of “internal other” but also a legitimate minority group. As Shiʿi intellectuals and religious scholars grappled with the reality of being defined as part of a visible yet minority culture, some thought that they should irrefutably establish the modernness of their community. This entailed, among other things, an exaggerated level of attention directed toward “civilizing,” educating, and morally uplifting undereducated Shiʿa all around the country.

Contributors to al-ʿIrfan, much like other periodicals of its ilk from that era, spilled a lot of ink on the “woman question.”⁴²

It was broadly conceived enough to include a wide range of issues, including women's rights, women's work, veiling/unveiling (hijab/sufūr), and temperance. These themes were then refracted through conversations of domesticity and “scientific motherhood.” By the 1920s, contributors to and consumers of al-ʿIrfan had started to note that women were beginning to attend school in record numbers.⁴³ A number of pieces published in al-ʿIrfan vociferously condemned the enrollment of Muslim girls in “foreign” schools, such as Christian missionary institutions, on the grounds that untold negative consequences for family and social life would result. A correspondent from Tyre, Jaʿfar Khalil Safi al-Din, reported that it was a shame to enroll in foreign schools when there were already perfectly good locally run schools in the city. He argued that a student in those schools “loses her language and learns a foreign language”; he asked, “Do the fathers of those girls want to marry their daughters to a foreigner?” Such behavior would inevitably lead to nothing but girls losing their “dignity” and “honor,” exactly as was happening to young women in Beirut and elsewhere. The author called on al-ʿIrfan to take up this issue directly because “girls are the mothers of tomorrow and Paradise is [found] beneath the feet of mothers.”⁴⁴

However, during the 1920s, the “woman question” was predominantly an issue of veiling/unveiling. From Nabatiyya, the venerated Shiʿi poet Muhammad ʿAli Houmani weighed in on the issue of veiling, arguing that the hijab ought not be understood as merely a piece of cloth that prevents foreigners from seeing or touching a woman's body but rather as a kind of moral force field, one that could protect the blessings and grace of a woman, not to mention ensuring her physical segregation.⁴⁵

The morals that Houmani perceived under threat at that moment included honor, chastity, self-respect, and love for the homeland.

He identified the disciplinary function of the veil as well. As one of the primary elements for the “advancement” of a people, the veil also played an “educational” role. Associating the decadence of unveiling with Beirut, he wrote about the capital as a place where “hordes” of lewd women made their way to “amusement parks” (masāriḥ al-lahw), trampling on the morals and “tradition” (ḥimya) that he so desperately sought to protect. The primary culprit, according to Houmani, was “women's dress,” which, in violating the sanctity of the hijab, strayed beyond the bounds of “humanity” and “civilization.” What others would call “the liberation of women” Houmani viewed as the simple satisfaction of “animalistic desires.” He closed by affirming that certain women's rights could not be denied and exhorted women to move beyond the state of “savagery” expanding all around them and to “adhere” to their traditional “household education.”

Several months later, two sisters from Sidon, Adiba and Suʿadat Qaddureh, published their own perspective on the issue.⁴⁶

They opened their piece by pointing out how some believed that the hijab was a “requirement” for women, whereas others argued that the path to “civilization” was traversed through the act of unveiling. For these authors, the hijab was the “good name of honor” and the guarantor of both chastity and honor. In the end, they argued, the veil lasted for centuries in “Eastern” “Arab” culture, and nothing should change that tradition.

Despite the proveiling position taken in this article, Suʿadat Qaddureh demonstrated the difficulty for an individual to take one everlasting position on the “woman question,” which should give us pause before we attempt to make broader cultural generalizations as well. In a subsequent article, she advocated for greater freedom of mobility and the freedom to work for women.⁴⁷

In her words, “[t]here is no doubt that this weak hand [i.e. women] can work together with men in many jobs, except household chores that are requested of her, because there is no people that has developed and awakened without the woman in the forefront of those working to develop and raise it up.” Part of this enterprise required the assistance of men. If men would not do something to help, then “we”—the entire society—will remain distant from “true civilization.”⁴⁸ She was also quick to point out that she was not in favor of letting a woman do any job she felt like, but did want to “allow her to go out into the light” somewhat.

The editorial staff of al-ʿIrfan took their own explicit position on the “woman question.” In an editorial from February 1927, they affirmed that “[w]omen are half of existence.”⁴⁹

Yet, a woman was qualitatively different from a man because, like her “role,” her “mind was not the same as his.” Those who crossed gender boundaries—women who had “big” brains or who had done “great” works, men who were “women in their works and their minds”—were considered “deviant.” The burning question was this: “If women took over the roles of men, who would take on the roles of women, including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and home management?” The editorial railed against women and those men who had become “womanlike” (mutaءannathīn) who sought to change this system, which in the end would lead to the “destabilization of the social system generally and the family system in particular.” In conclusion, he pointed out that “[t]his is contrary to the nature that God arranged.” ⁵⁰ This “womanlike” character appeared earlier in the debates over the reformation of ʿAshuraء mourning practices. Such definitional views of men and women were both responses to and defense against—real or perceived—transgressions of normative gender boundaries.⁵¹

Women were beginning to break out of traditional roles and responsibilities, achieving even a certain level of publicity during this period.⁵²

In 1930, Fatat al-Furat (Girl of the Euphrates) wrote that the issue of women's veiling was a “social issue” and not simply a “religious issue.”⁵³ Esteemed writer Widad Sakakini weighed in on the “woman question” by writing articles and letters to the editor, which appeared in al-ʿIrfan's pages; many others wrote as well, confirming that there were women who read and critically engaged with the journal during the 1920s and 1930s. In a letter to the editor published in 1928, Sakakini, then a teacher at the Beirut Islamic school for girls, praised the journal for its work and commented that she especially enjoyed the sections on education as well as health and home management.⁵⁴

PRESCRIBING GENDER IN PUBLIC AND IN PRIVATE

The “woman question” was often mirrored by an often implicit or latent “man question” that might tell us something about the historical delineation of gender roles and representations.⁵⁵

In the early 1920s, one of the recurring columns worthy of closer scrutiny was “Ten Commandments for the Housewife” (ʿashar waṣāyā li-rabbat al-bayt). Not only does the “Ten Commandments” prescribe gender-specific behavior by explicitly admonishing women to behave in a particular way around the house, it also tries to intervene in “public behavior” considered unbecoming of a good housewife. Indeed, the boundaries of a “housewife” were not altogether clear; they extended to wherever she roamed and were not restricted to the space of her physical home. Furthermore, such mobilization of religious injunctions (“Ten Commandments”) was not restricted to women; it was also geared toward teaching men how to be proper moral Shiʿa amidst changing social and political circumstances. Through a critical reading of this column, we may find a representation of the “Shiʿi woman” as such but also the impression of a counterposed “Shiʿi man”—mirrored back through his own projected anxieties, desires, fears, and expectations with respect to himself and the women and children in his life. The role of the woman at home was not only informed by a certain perceived fealty to religious traditions governing gender roles but was also certainly one that reflected contemporary cultures of patriarchy.

The commandments for women from October 1920 include the aphorism that “cleanliness is close to godliness,” as well as much advice: make sure that everything in your home is organized; do not rely on servants, but take care of household matters yourself; be “economical” and teach your children a “love for thriftiness”; be good-natured toward your husband, children, relatives, and friends; look and smell good when you are around your husband, and don't gross him out; spend your free time exercising, paying visits to people, and reading good books; make your home “like a night school” for your children and teach them “ambition [himma], blessings, and self-reliance”; do not promise your children what you know you cannot give them. The tenth commandment from this installment is simply that “[t]he woman is a woman,” which apparently means a slew of contradictory things: a woman can be “pure” and “clean” and thus a “benevolent angel,” or she can be “filthy” and “ugly” and therefore a “deplorable devil.”⁵⁶

Moreover, although certain “beneficial visits” or social calls are condoned, going to “parties” and “meetings” is frowned upon.⁵⁷ Some key words—“pure,” “clean,” “chaste,” “thrift,” “pretty”—were stock phrases in household management and family planning columns throughout the Middle East and elsewhere during this period, and Shiʿi societies were no exception.

In subsequent issues, the journal commanded peacefulness, amicability, and thriftiness as important traits for women. Moreover, women were admonished not to “let your husband frequent coffeehouses and recreational places when he sees the house in poor condition. Rather, try as best you can to cheer him up and satisfy him.”⁵⁸

It often seemed as if these columns were, in fact, intended to do just that, to “cheer him up and satisfy him.” In July 1922, women were instructed to dress with “modesty” and not to “be concerned with the sayings of fortunetellers and soothsayers regarding your future. Know that your future is your seriousness, your effort [ijtihād], your being good-natured, your interactions, and your not being wasteful.”⁵⁹ Contributors to this column of the journal unabashedly tooted their own horns, arguing that part of a woman's proper lifestyle included subscribing to “women's magazines” and spending free time reading or doing something similarly useful.⁶⁰ Moreover, part of any healthy and hygienic lifestyle was to have “clean air,” to believe that “cleanliness is close to godliness,” to sleep eight hours a night, to get exercise by doing a variety of sports, to “work regularly,” and always to be happy.⁶¹

In the ʿAshuraء debates, we saw how Shiʿi modernist discourse relied on certain conceptions of the body and techniques to ensure its protection. Gendered discourses of family management and maintenance also overlapped with such medicalized discourses of health and hygiene. In a piece by an ʿAmilī doctor who regularly contributed a health-related column, Dr. Adib Rahhal wrote, “If it is known that a healthy mind is in a healthy body, it has [also] been shown that the requirements for the advancement and development of the nation [are in] the well-being of bodies and individuals who are free of disease.” The idea was that there had to be healthy mothers and fathers in order to produce healthy children. To that end, this piece extended to other realms, including how to make cities cleaner, more hygienic, and, ultimately, more livable. Bodily practices of hygiene were discursively linked up with social reformist issues across the Shiʿi community and the Lebanese body social more generally.⁶²

In the following year another doctor, Sharif ʿUsayran, prescribed behavior modification for specifically social maladies. In a piece entitled “How to Prevent Divorce,” ‘Usayran sets out “Commandments for the Husband” and “Commandments for the Wife.” Although there are certainly some points of commonality between these two, there are also differences. Husbands are expected to be as “generous as possible” and not to interfere in “household affairs… because, in general, women are more knowledgeable than men about managing the household in such a way that furnishes happiness and hominess.” Men are expected to be wise and just toward their children in the realm of childrearing, as well as to dress “sharp” (murattab) and keep their bodies clean. Beyond this limited number of roles, men are also entreated to respect women and treat them well, because they are, like him, made of flesh and blood, but unlike him, they are a “bundle of nerves” and “delicate of feelings.” Men are called upon to love their women to the utmost extent without being vulgar, and in the meantime to remain aware of and be attentive to “gendered differences” (al-fawāriq al-jinsiyya).⁶³

In contrast, wives are expected to keep the house clean, because there is “nothing more loved in the eyes of men” than to come home and find an “elegant” and “organized” household. Furthermore, a woman should make herself “attractive” to her man without looking at anyone but her husband. She should not protest when her man metes out a “just punishment” to her children and should always find ways to allow for the most powerful expression of her “signs of womanhood,” because women were created with “the morals of femininity,” and they should be used to most efficiently “incline towards” their husbands.⁶⁴

These columns helped to shape normative discourses of morality in which the stability and persistence of family—assured through the practices of marriage and fidelity as well as properly gendered behavior—was of paramount importance.⁶⁵

In another piece, “Beware, Husband, and, Beware, Wife,” the ideal husband is expected, for example, not to leave cigarettes on the carpet, have the smell of cigarettes on his breath, or tell jokes to his wife, instead keeping them to himself or saving them to be shared with his friends at another time. Moreover, in a hortatory tone articulated toward both one's gendered subject position and right gender conduct, men are expected to “gaze upon [women] as a man [would] and not as a woman, [for] the gaze of women is not the same as the gaze of men.”⁶⁶

Al-ʿIrfan regularly touted the salubrious effects of marriage in addition to its moral advantages. Such “correct” behavior and family planning was articulated with the burgeoning discourse of “modern” science and medicine, which, as mentioned, was mobilized to support the notion that “traditional” institutions like marriage and the family had far-reaching and salutary consequences. According to an article from 1928, “[i]t has been medically proven that marriage is more beneficial than bachelorhood, whether it is for a man or woman.” Still, once safely within the confines of the institution of marriage, moral agents must continue to use all the necessary methods to prevent disease and social disorder, because “[a] penny of prevention is worth more than a fortune of treatment.”⁶⁷

Furthermore, in one humorous anecdote published in the journal, it was related that a young woman who was engaged had contracted an ocular sty. When her father fetched a doctor and asked him to do something on behalf of his daughter, the doctor replied, “The best medicine is to hurry along her marriage, for nothing opens the eyes like marriage.”⁶⁸

However, faith was not always put into the healing powers of medical science. For example, in one humorous anecdote, a doctor asked a nurse at a hospital how many sick patients had passed away the day before. The nurse told him that six people had died. The doctor asked how that could be because he gave seven of them medicine. The nurse replied that one of them hadn't taken the medicine! Here the curative power of medical science was placed squarely in question through satirical lampooning.⁶⁹

As these articles and others illustrate, discourses of gender in al-ʿIrfan were not limited to the “experience” or representation of women alone. From articles on health and hygiene to question and answer columns and the various published interventions of leading shaykhs, sayyids, and judges, gender-related problems and gender relations problems literally suffused the pages of the journal during the Mandate period. In the context of such a print-culture mediated world, al-ʿIrfan began fielding questions that dealt with issues that typically would have been dealt with by religious fatwas. One could conceive of these pieces as a sort of popularized fatwa. Readers were anxious about gendered boundaries being breached through new social practices. Moreover, the journal devoted space each month to the “Course of Science,” tracing the emergence of such wild things as rocket ships, new medical cures, and other “exotic” inventions, and fascinated by the prospects held out by innovations in technology and medical science all over the world.

Moral quandaries were also framed in terms of their social ramifications. One reader posed the question, “What do you think about a Shiʿi woman shaking hands with a stranger [who is] visiting her husband's home?” The response from the journal's editors was that a woman shaking hands with a strange man who is not from her “immediate family” would not be “legally permitted” whether he happened to be a distant relative or “unrelated.” Even if the man and woman were consenting, such social practice had to be rejected for fear of such habits spreading throughout contemporary Shiʿi societies and the potential subsequent intermixing of the sexes in unexpected ways.⁷⁰

These didactic approaches were paralleled by similarly exemplary literature that used the technique of humor to convey the same sense of correct gender conduct and normative morality.

HUMOROUS ANECDOTES (NAWADIR) AND/AS GENDERED CULTURAL PRODUCTION

As the first two sections of this article demonstrate, Lebanese Shiʿi gender ideologies were in a state of flux during the 1920s and 1930s. A special section (bāb) in the journal entitled “Nawadir wa hawadir” (Strange Happenings) began in October 1922, and it often addressed questions of gender through the seemingly innocuous language of humor. I argue that this section provides a unique perspective on cultures of gender circulating in Mandate-era Shiʿi Lebanon in its humorous yet critical portrayal of women and gender relations. This iteration of Shiʿi cultural politics has not been previously appreciated in terms of the “cultural anxiety” it produced. As historians have perceptively applied methodologies from other disciplines—specifically anthropology and literature—to their work, this section explores certain elements within Shiʿi cultural discourse, returning to al-ʿIrfan from a vantage point that might orient the historian's gaze away from reductionist reconstruction and toward cultural critique. As opposed to the prevalent stereotype of the solemn, stern, and ultraserious Muslim scholar, one of the most surprising conclusions one reaches after a close reading of al-ʿIrfan is the frequency with which humor was deployed as a means of articulating politics and shaping culture. If we accept that a substantial proportion of both educated and ordinary people were exposed to this literature, we can reasonably assert that they would have somehow related to, or at least comprehended, these instances of humor as well as the cultural symbols underpinning them.⁷¹

The perils of historical ethnography notwithstanding, I emphasize that the life of the Lebanese Shiʿa more generally was not entirely limited to one of pious commitment, self-deprivation, or religious fanaticism. Many of the anecdotes or jokes in this section of the journal would not seem entirely out of place in other contemporary periodicals from elsewhere in the region and even farther away. On the one hand, the universality of this humor exposes the inadequacy of pigeonholing the Lebanese Shiʿa as having ever been of only one cultural stripe. On the other hand, the cultural specificity of these jokes sheds light on the specific construction of Shiʿi cultural identities and cultural politics at a particular moment in history.⁷²

These anecdotes often effectively skewered major issues of the day in a way that clearly illustrated a common cultural understanding of material (political, infrastructural, or institutional) problems confronting the journal's audience. For example, one anecdote intersected with broader campaigns for Shiʿi rights in Lebanon, what Tamara Chalabi calls a specifically Shiʿi “politics of demand” (maṭlabiyya)—for water, roads, and, as this example illustrates, electricity.⁷³ A visitor to an unnamed village asks a local man, “Does this village have electricity?” Yes, the villager responds, we have electricity every winter when lightning strikes.⁷⁴

Beyond such explicit political satire, jokes and humorous anecdotes in al-ʿIrfan drew liberally from vast reservoirs of gendered imagery and cultural assumptions about gender. Feared, despised, and admired at the same time, women (or “woman”) were among the most important and consistently used tropes in this regard. This ambivalent relationship toward women—wives, mothers, and sisters—speaks volumes about the nature of Lebanese Shiʿi society during this period, as well as offers more specific explanations for what have otherwise been somewhat generalized assumptions regarding the nature of Shiʿi patriarchy. These sources show how women could be objectified as nothing more than prospective wives and mothers in the male imagination. In one example, a judge asks an accused man if he is married. The accused responds, “No, but if you know of a decent girl [bint ḥalāl], I'd be very pleased if you would marry me to her.”⁷⁵

Here, we find the expression of male anxiety to be about engaging in an appropriately monogamous relationship but more generally about male anxiety over finding a suitable mate. Another anecdote is about a man who goes out to buy his wife a new dress; it indicates the extent to which consumerist ideology was not limited to Beirut or other urban environments and would have made sense to al-ʿIrfan's readership. Rushing home, this man is stopped on his way by a friend who asks him why he is in such a hurry. He responds by saying that he fears the dress he just bought for his wife will go out of style by the time he returns home.⁷⁶ Male desire for reproduction is projected on to this imagined female desire for conspicuous consumption. Obsessed with looking good, women were also portrayed as congenitally envious. One reader inquired why this was so. The editor responded with an interesting tautology: women are jealous because they want their man to be theirs and theirs alone. This, the editor continued, was a “human instinct.”⁷⁷ The more interesting question to ask in light of such issues is, Why were men so worried about (“their”) women being jealous?

Women in al-ʿIrfan were also represented as intellectually challenged. At one level, one could argue that such a depiction of women or male commentaries on such stereotypes were intended to be light and harmless riffs for male consumption and amusement. Take, for example, the following humorous anecdote, entitled “The Wife's Idiocy”:

This story can be seen as operating on at least two levels. On the one hand, the explicit meaning of the story, given in the text, is that the woman was silly to wait all that time just for her husband to return. On the other hand, the subtext is that she could have done something else during that time and then gotten back into position when her husband returned! In other words, not only is the wife represented literally as her husband's “beast of burden,” used to access his books, she is also metaphorically converted into a home furnishing and a tool for the education and successful productivity of her husband. Furthermore, she is ridiculed for not doing her own job in the most effective or appropriate manner after she is finished being her husband's footstool.

These gendered jokes occasionally deployed language that bespoke a kind of repressed loathing of women. For example, in one brief piece, the authors refer to an adage attributed to Socrates in which he was apparently uncomfortable with just three things in the world: grammar books, poverty, and women. He was said to be able to get over the first through a great deal of study and the second through his learning of patience, but as for the third, he never got over it.⁷⁹

All three of these things—fluency in language, worldly means, and wives and mothers—were perceived as both necessary and virtuous elements of a balanced life by contemporary Shiʿi religious scholars as well as others who would have read or come into contact with al-ʿIrfan. Yet, despite the importance of women in a purely biological or evolutionary sense, not to mention the moral arguments consistently made for the importance of marriage as a social institution discussed above, writers for al-ʿIrfan often moaned and griped about the burden of the women in their lives. One person asks a friend, “How old were you when you got married?” The second responds, “I don't remember exactly, but it was, no doubt, before I was old enough to make a rational decision.”⁸⁰

There are also darker jokes. In one example, a boy comes across his father, who is in tears. When the boy asks his father why he is crying, the father replies that it is because the father's mother had died. “Would you cry like that remembering my mother if she died?” “No,” the father replies, “I would be joyous if she died.”⁸¹

This loathing of women made humorous is somewhat disturbing. It stands in contradiction to the prescriptive discourse analyzed above, in which the male editorial staff beseeches women to appease male desire and to behave in ways that will soothe the ideal male ego. This loathing of women, on the other hand, suggests that women can do nothing to appease their men that would be as great as simply to disappear.

These morbid satires are paralleled, or perhaps even buttressed, by a related fear of women. One memorable anecdote describes a group of men praying together in a mosque during the lifetime of the venerated “wine poet” Abu Nuwas. In the middle of his khuṭba (sermon), the mosque's imam expresses his sympathy for all those men feeling estranged from or fearful of their wives. He goes on to ask those who feel that way to stand up so that they might find solidarity with one another, a kind of strength in numbers, and so that the imam can gain a sense of how many people are actually experiencing such a thing. Everyone but Abu Nuwas rises to their feet. The imam asks Abu Nuwas, “Can it be so that you are not afraid of your wife at all?” Abu Nuwas responds that he would have stood had his wife not beaten him so badly that he is no longer able to stand.⁸²

There is further evidence of this latent fear that some Shiʿi men may have felt toward their wives in the broader prescriptive discourse that fills the pages of al-ʿIrfan during the 1920s and 1930s (and beyond). However, there often was respect tempered by subtle criticism of the so-called wiles of women. In one such story, a woman is described as someone who makes fun of everyone she meets. People complain to the village cleric about her and ask him to try to compel her to stop. One evening he goes to her home, on the top floor of a building. When she hears footsteps downstairs, she asks nicely for the “blessed visitor,” whoever it is, to bring up a container of food for her. She pleads, “I am a weak woman [and] I don't have the power to carry it… I really need it.” When he reaches the top floor, she cries out, “Oh, is that you, our Father?!… Shame on you! Had I known it was you, I never would have asked. I cannot eat from the container that you have carried up… I should die before eating from a container that I made you carry.” In response, he takes it back downstairs with him on his way out. She carries on melodramatically, wailing, “I beg you in the name of the holy sacrifice! In the name of the divine secrets! In the name of the honor of the priesthood!” When he returns to the people of the village who had requested his help in the first place, they ask him what has just happened. He replies that they should know that she got him to work for her both “coming and going!”⁸³

As I see it, there are at least two levels of social critique embedded in this story. On the one hand, the demands of the stereotypically needy woman who is incapable of taking care of herself—“the nag” and “the helpless victim”—are lampooned, but at the same time the story shows how all of the men in town and even the local religious leader cannot resist the charismatic power of even the most pathetic of women. At the same time, this cunning woman scoffs at religious authority in a way that was becoming more acceptable during that time, in a way that readers were meant to relate to.⁸⁴

In other words, no matter how manipulative, crafty, and, at a certain level, irrational a woman may be, even she is capable of outsmarting and pestering the well-meaning and, ultimately, naive religious authority figure, who continues to serve the community even if he is made to play the fool. In this way, a contemporary critique of traditional religious authority also included women's participation, but with a difference.

However, the imagined or real effects of women on men are not the whole story. Another humorous anecdote illustrating how certain aspects of male anxiety could have both psychic and concrete effects on women follows.

What is useful about this story? Is it funny? How could readers at the time interpret this dream, and how might that differ from our reading today? In this telling, the ostensible male anxiety is fully legitimated by the author. The cause of this man's “extreme fear” of separation could be real or imagined. Here, patriarchal and legal authority converge. The woman in this scenario is expected to put up with even the most disgusting male practices, as the judge sympathizes with the man's fantastical dream rather than the specific reality she is facing. We are left without resolution of the issue at hand. In the final analysis, the story reinforces the notion that men often mistreat women and that women must get themselves out of such situations. At the end of the day, though, women must learn to live with this all too crude reality. However, judges—and, in fact, all arbiters of justice in a given society—are often quite personally compelled by the stories they are told, to the point that the very idea of the dream causes the same response in the body of the judge as it did for the husband. We might read this as somehow indicative of male loathing for women's autonomy as much as indifference toward the various plights of women that come with simply attending to men's needs. This woman is urinated on by her husband even as the judge sympathizes with the man's fear regarding the possibility of separation from his woman; the physical effects such behavior are actually having on her has no impact on the judge. In fact, it almost seems as though once a woman begins to ask for separation from her husband or exercises agency in her relationship with him in such a way that is deeply threatening to his authority, he is morally and legally justified in retreating into childish and immature behavior.

From these introductory snapshots of Lebanese Shiʿi cultural politics, we can sense the overwhelming inadequacy of stereotypes for understanding this community and also more deeply appreciate the value of historicized cultural critique. The uses of humor point up a number of improbable ways in which Shiʿa have assumed and debated cultural identities that have not been entirely directed by religious teachings or informed by doctrinal convention. The levity and wittiness that shine through here are invaluable, not only for their social, historical, and anthropological insights but also for their own intrinsic cultural value, as stories or parables that retain a certain meaning within their cultural universe right down to the present.

CONSTRUCTING GENDER IN SHIʿI LEBANON

In his study of the constitution of the self in ancient times, Foucault wrote that the texts he analyzed constituted

Such a conception of an ideal Shiʿi masculinity—or a Lebanese Shiʿi “male ethics”—is legible in al-ʿIrfan and the texts I explored from the ʿAshuraء debates. Hasan Muhammad Salih comments, “The problem of the liberation of women in Jabal ʿAmil or in the East remains the problem of man before it is the problem of woman.”⁸⁷ Without erasing women from the historical landscape by dissolving them in the male imagination or in representations produced by men, the sorts of cultural critique embedded in the Shiʿi public sphere during the 1920s and 1930s points out how gender became a legible category structuring social relations, even as religious discourse and politics were becoming increasingly susceptible to challenge and reformation.

Gender was and still is an important if underappreciated element in the constitution of Lebanese Shiʿi society and the production of Shiʿi culture in 20th-century Lebanon. The culture of gender and gendered cultures examined in this article demonstrate that gender relations among Shiʿa under the French Mandate were more complicated and culturally diffuse than previously recognized by historians. If gender norms and boundaries in Shiʿi Lebanon were fluid and shifting in some ways, they were unyieldingly restrictive in others. As historians, we ought to attend to how gender has been historically constructed and reinforced through moral discourse as well as social practice.

Discourses of gender change over time and are rooted in specific historical practices. Even though there was no one “correct” Shiʿi position from which men or women were exhorted to abide by certain behavioral norms, there were a variety of vantage points from which intellectuals, writers, and religious scholars did advocate for some actions over others. The prevailing sensibility in all of these cases was one of male anxiety about the place of women in their lives and the effect that women did or could have on them. A critical reading of al-ʿIrfan and other contemporary sources reveals a manifold anxiety over the potential transgression of gender boundaries even as the latter were in flux and vehemently debated in highly charged moral terms.⁸⁸

The constellation of discourses produced by and about Shiʿi men and women—of which this article has admittedly only scratched the surface—contributed to the delineation of certain gender norms and boundaries that were hammered out through practice over time. The definition and subsequent policing of those boundaries were contested processes. A persistent presentist focus that is rooted in modes of writing Middle East history from a standpoint that is “reactive” to the exigencies of current events tends to occlude the humor and ribaldry examined in this article from being included in the historical narrative of Shiʿi society under the Mandate. As the particular expressions of public piety now hegemonic in Lebanese Shiʿi culture are of relatively recent historical provenance and impinge on the character of sectarian self-understanding and gender relations in unique ways, they are also subject to challenge and reformulation. The cultural politics of Shiʿi Islam are historically contingent and likely to change over time.