Woman, Man, and God in Modern Islam by Friend Theodore

Author:Friend, Theodore [Friend, Theodore]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Published: 2011-11-15T16:00:00+00:00

The God-tempest that I found in Iran moved me still further to seek to understand gender as conceived there. One eminent interviewee, an exile returned to Tehran, said flatly and smilingly that “the Iranian women are better than the men.” I searched to see that, for it was not demonstrated at the conference. Most female presenters seemed awed by male dominance and by turbaned presences. They failed to engage their audience with eye and voice, and their papers, read in faltering tones at an incantatory pitch, seemed like prayers to an angelic presence hovering near ceiling height.

An invitation to visit the Muslim Women’s Research Organization seemed to promise real discourse. Its founder, Dr. Sorayya Maknoon, had twelve years previous launched an intensive reexamination of rules and roles for women, with the ambition of defining an Islamic psychology which is “universal.” I found her colleagues, a small cell of women in black chadors, bent with the gravity of their endeavor, unstinting in hope, and surrounded with paper. The walls were tacked and plastered with successive position papers on their “Model of Women’s Dignity”; and their oral arguments were accompanied by gestures at the walls, as if to say, “There it is, manifest, and to any right-minded person, irrefutable.” What does one say to a cadre of women whose courageous aim one approves, while feeling that they are without traction, like geese on a frozen pond? They believe they have worked out a comprehensive syllabus of life, “beyond gender and religion.” In developing it they have ascribed value weights of 4 to feeling, 2 to action, 1 to thinking, as correctives against male underappreciation of emotion and overemphasis on reasoning. I heard unfolded at some length this model, which stresses enjoyment and mercy, without neglecting power, in realizing the Divine Will. Male thinking can certainly take female correction, I thought; but what follows from these calligraphic posters?

Tentative conclusions, they emphasized. Tentative against what contingency? I asked. Toward what tests? I felt urgently that their work across a dozen years not be lost, but become grounded in social reality. My sallies of questioning, however, only revealed that publications thus far had been minimal. There were no survey instruments, nor was there any social-science strategy for empirically testing their hypotheses. There was no evidence at all of public discussion. It felt stale.

Billy entered the room very late from another meeting and hit the same wall at once, but kept his American game face on, unaffectedly congenial in his desire to be a Quaker-for-all-seasons. Faézé, who had been there silently from the start, later described this cell of research endeavor as “insane.” No, quite sane, I thought; but futile in its sequestration. It took me a long time to feel the faith and hope in their work, and to trust that it was attended and blessed by nameless angels.

Dr. Nosrat promised to provide new insights by inviting us three Americans to a private seminar in his psychiatric hospital. What he chose to show us was accompanied by his comments as a practical man, a presentist, a results-oriented administrator.

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