Islam, the West and the Challenges of Modernity. Tariq Ramadan

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СКАЧАТЬ forth in a space which is eminently exigent, and we would be wrong to make the economy of the condition of education that it supposes. It offers human beings a choice; it is giving him, beforehand, sufficient education and knowledge in order to assert himself while possessing full knowledge of the cause. The responsibility of parents, educators, or trainers consists in giving to their children or pupils knowledge and the means to make their own choice of responsibility. Religious education does not go against this rule, even less the education of girls. They have the fundamental right to learn and it is here that is born personal responsibility before God and before society. This responsibility, lastly, has no sense unless women possess a real freedom to determine and choose for themselves.

      What we have just said regarding the veil is a good illustration of a disfunctioning still too frequent in Islamic societies. The example of the veil is very vivid, but we can find this same tendency towards formalism in a great number of domains. By making the economy of reforming things in depth, we stop at what is in reality an Islamic varnish, when it is not a question of a social do-it-yourself, whereby we merrily mix restriction, confinement and cultural habit. Such situations are legion in all Arab-Muslim countries, in some Asian regions and in neighbourhoods of Europe and the United States. There is an urgent need for education and training not only of girls and women, but also of fathers and of all men. The worst enemy of the rights of women is not Islam but ignorance and illiteracy, to which we may add the determining role of traditional prejudices.

b. The social dimension

      To be convinced, in light of the Qur’ān and the Sunna, that Islam recognises and defends the fundamental rights of women; to remind ourselves with conviction of our equality before God and of our prescribed social complementarity – for the man as for the woman – within familial priority; to call for a recognition of Muslim identity as the source of a social project which offers to the woman a space for life that returns to her all the rights that Islam bestowed upon her, but which present-day societies daily deny her – to do all this is to hold a very critical view on the contemporary ²⁶ situation and to be engaged in changing things in consequential fashion for the long-term. This patience in action, which is the exact definition of the Arabic word “ṣabr”, ²⁷ must be armed with the conviction that it is more appropriate to approach a model slowly than to hastily put make-up on the form.

      To make any reference to Islam today, on the plane of social identity, is clearly to call for the liberation of women within and by Islam. It will certainly not be the model of liberation which has taken course in the West (this in consequence of its specific history and in which we will be poorly inspired if we do not recognise a certain number of gains), but one which nonetheless takes Muslim societies out of their serious and difficult situations.

      It must first involve engaging in a vast enterprise of education and schooling. Great efforts are provided today by caring associations by NGOs and broadly speaking by movements that function on the model of South American based communities, but this cannot be sufficient. It is important that this reform is presented as a priority for states and that it is carried out and defended by a real political will. We know that this is not the case today and that nothing in what the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Bank (WB) do makes this work a priority. For example, the rate of schooling for women in the Maghreb today is the lowest in the world. This situation is inadmissible from the point of view of Islam. The Muslim woman, like the Muslim man, has a right to learning. It is an inalienable right that any social organisation must respect.

      The religious education of women should take the form of foundational instruction. For if Islam gives rights to women, it remains that they need to know these rights in order to defend them. The good, theoretical speeches of men have never remedied the daily sufferings of women. Consequently, the latter should have access to a different religious education, one which allows them to contribute in abstracting the essence of the message of Islam from the accidents of its rustic, traditional or Bedouin reading. This would be a means to facing up to the distortions of such readings. One that requires that we respect the orientations of the Revelation and not the strictly masculine pretensions of such and such a custom, or of any paternal “habit”. Women are nowadays more and more engaged in the sense of this education in all Muslim countries. Still we are far from what ought to be achieved. However, the progress, although not spectacular, is tangible. This work of depth is already an application of the Sharī’a. Its application is progressive, for the long-term and is fed by the memory of the path of its source. It is with human beings, for the respect of their rights, without ever forgetting God.

      At one time women used to trade, and participate in meetings; they were even in-charge of the market at Madina under Caliph ‘Umar. Furthermore, they engaged in social life in the seventh century. Is it possible to posit that a process of “Islamisation” at the end of the twentieth century will be rendered by a definitive return to home, house confinement and infantilisation? ²⁸ By what twist of the mind have we managed to disfigure the Islamic message while asserting a willingness to defend it? Undoubtedly, as we have suggested above, it is because nowadays we think Islam more in contrast to “Western derivatives” than in function of its proper essence (which indeed has rules to be respected but which has no reactive twist). It is, therefore, necessary to return, serenely we must say, to the original teachings of Islam and allow women, at all levels of social life, to take an active part in the achievement of the reforms that we would like to bring forth. This is the prolongation of the education which they have the right to and which will allow them to run their affairs, to work, to organise themselves, to elect and be elected without any contravention of Islamic ethics or the order of priorities. Women must be able to play a social role. And if Islam clearly stipulates the priority of the family, this has never meant that a woman cannot move out of this space. Priority conveys the idea of a hierarchy but not the expression of an exclusivity. ²⁹ Wearing the veil, in this sense, does not mean the confinement of woman. If it is freely worn, ³⁰ then it must express an exacting and moral presence on the plane of social activity. It marks a limit in the proximity of which man understands that the woman – a fortiori one who is socially active – is a being before God. It should instil respect of privacy, before any inclination towards seduction due to her appearance.

      The debate on the role of woman drags to its wake a broader reflection on modernity. Is it possible nowadays to defend the idea of a moral presence of men and women in the field of social activity together with a well-defined role for the family? Does wanting to differently apprehend the contemporary world, or the life described as modern, imply rejecting progress or the fact of modernity? One must acknowledge the impressive advancements of industrial societies as one should delight in the progress achieved today. Yet, one must not forget to take account of the dismantling of the social tissue, the profound crisis of values and the generalised doubt which lies at the heart of such. We cannot be so blind as not to notice the consequences of this “very modern” life, which makes out of speed a norm and out of meaning a secondary question. By essence, Islamic civilisation cannot recognise itself in such a strange inversion of priorities. By essence, it measures the evolution of societies by the level of their faithfulness to fundamentals, preferring quality of life (social, spiritual and moral) over quantity of productivity and consumption. There are women nowadays, whose number is constantly increasing, who wish to participate in the construction of a new society, but who at the same time do not want to deny any of their faithfulness to Islam. They defend both access to modernity and the principles of their religious and cultural practices at one and the same time. They are “modern” without being “Western”. Those in the West are often incredulous in the face of such a strange “mixture”, for it seems hardly possible. The Western media reinforce this dubitative reflex as long as they report with high publicity the words of women from Algeria, Egypt, or Bangladesh who, while opposed to “Islamic obscurantism”, think “like over here”.

      Thus, the trait of these intellectual women is first to have a discourse which is accessible only because it resembles the formulations used in Europe or the United States. They then represent the progressist forces because they claim the same progress and the СКАЧАТЬ