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Woman in the Muslim unconscious
Book Reviews the ‘cumulation of the work [she had] been doing on AfroAmerican women writers since 1980.’ Her conclusions are insightful, and the developmental process both interesting and instructive. Black Feminist Criticism is a work that cannot be ignored, and Barbara Christian is to be commended for her continuing leadership in and contributions to the on-going scholarship on black women writers. While this is not a book without limitations, especially for scholars, nevertheless, it is one that many people will find extremely useful, and to which they will turn for viewpoints on black women’s literature that they can easily comprehend. Within the academy, many of its shortcomings can best be understood as the desire of the author to take her message beyond the limiting walls within which we carry out our tasks of reading, interpreting, and writing for ourselves and those with whom we share a common language that otten excludes others. This is strongly suggested in Christian’s faithftdness to a philosophy that links text to context in a historical approach to literary materials. As feminist criticism on black women’s literature increases, so will the opportunities for us to write for different kinds of audiences. Christian may well be on a wave that already signals another new direction along these lines. NELLIEY. MCKAY WOMANIN THEMUSLIMUNCONSCIOUS by Fatna A. Sabbah, 131 pages. Pergamon Press, Oxford. 1984. Price cloth $27.00; paperback $11.00. Throughout history men have written about woman, describing what her true nature is, what she likes, what she requires, how she should behave. Man creates a fantasy model of what, for him, would be the ideal helpmate-and he names her: wife. And the woman who does not meet this Protocol, who desires, acts, confronts or rebels, he names as well: spinster, witch, the devil. Feminism-the work of women to empower all women-is, for man, disorder incarnated. It upsets what he terms rational, logical, as the correct order; it elucidates the processes men use to control women. From continent to continent, from culture to culture this ‘correct order’ varies, affecting women in different, yet similar, ways. In the Middle East. feminists are strueeline aeainst a patriarchal religious-legal system where &w &d-custom reinforce and substantiate one another. The decoding of this order, of the way this culture has come to define women as ‘beautiful’-meaning submissive, silent and obedient-has been undertaken by a Middle Eastern feminist, publishing under the pseudonym of Fatna A. Sabbah. (This anonymity is precisely due to the restrictions on women in her homeland.) The analysis and conclusion of ‘Sabbah’s’ work, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, brings us to question not only the core of male/female relationships but the Islamic religion itself. Sabbah’s work is a critique of two opposing treatises on women, by men, in Islam: the religious erotic discourse and the orthodox discourse. The first section of the book analyses images of women in the Muslim religious erotic literature that, written in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, is still readily available and widely read by men today. In the second section Sabbah describes and decodes the images of women in the original, legal sources that provide the foundation for Orthodox Islam, the Koran and
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the Sunna. Her literary criticism allows us to understand Muslim thought by presenting the proscriptions and contradictions for women, men and their relationship to each other, and to the higher power of Allah. Although these writing and modes of thought represent opposing forces within the culture they do have one common denominator: the maintenance of, and support for, male domination. In the erotic literature woman is linked with ‘all that has been forgotten, rejected, repressed, forbidden,’ with the Pre-Islamic ‘era of the godesses, when the identity of a child was determined by its maternal origin, the vagina from which it emerged, and not by a fiction of law-that is, Paternity.’ (p. 26). The individual stories that make up the erotic literature describe a woman with an overt, unquenchable sexual desire that only a man fortified by nutritious substances and magical potions can satisfy. Although women are described as the gender with the insatiable sexual drive the Islamic erotic literature does not focus on what women desire but rather on what men project onto her as her desires. The objective of these writings is to instruct men how to sexually conquer women. Women are the subject matter, but the objective is the maintenance of male power. And this hierarchy of power between the sexes is not linked with the mind and perceived as a mental or emotional construct but is based on biology-in and of the genitals. Sabbah compares this creation of women in the religious erotica to the sexual politics and women’s role in orthodox Islam. In the writings of the Koran we enter a world where the power of Allah is seen as capable of inverting biological realities. Woman is born from man, conception occurs due to the will of Allah. Reproduction is separated from the reality of fertility and individual procreation. And these ‘facts’ deemed truths by Allah are not to be questioned, but accepted because he controls all. The relationship between man and Allah is one manifestation of the overriding element of Orthodox Islam: domination-the domination of one aspect of life, Sabbah labels this or one human, over another. relationship of domination between women and men, men and Allah, desire and reason, ‘inversion-linkage.’ ‘Inversion-linkage ties two elements in a relationship of dependence structured in such a way that any attempt by the dominated element to reestablish equilibrium is perceived as opposition, subversion, and questioning of the existing hierarchy. The inversion-linkage that structures the rapport between God and the believer reflects and is reflected in the relationship between the sexes.’ (P. 68). Thus man is dependent on Allah, woman is dependent on man, reason is dependent on the overriding of desire. And as man is made in the image of Allah, the opposite of man-woman-is the opposite of God-the devil. Because she is perceived as the visual manifestation of disorder by Allah, woman is by definition problematic. She equals desire, she engenders danger. Woman represents the antithesis of the Islamic world. She must be controlled for the havoc that she would wreak; her movements must be curtailed. Custom declares that men must devalue women as love for a woman distracts a man from his true purpose: maintaining his pure love and devotion to Allah. Inversion-linkage-the domination-submission pattern that composes all relationships within the religious structure of Islam-creates a male identity centered on
220
Book Reviews
why there is so little written record under Anna’s own name.’ For although women were among the most tireless and diligent of Victorian plant-hunters, records of their activity, particularly in the first half of the period, survive almost solely in references made by their male contemporaries, who published prodigiously. Amelia Griffiths, for instance, was said to have earned ‘the lasting gratitude’ of her fellow naturalists for her achievements in marine botany, and even had a genus named after her. But she produced no work by her own hand. Atkins’s iirst important works were in fact illustrations to accompany a book by Griffiths’s cousin, William Harvey. What distinguished them was her adaptation of a new blueprint process called cyanotyping. Atkins placed her specimens directly on chemically treated paper and exposed them to the sun, then washed the prints in water. The results were detailed impressions on bright blue backgrounds, the caption letters hand-formed from seaweed strands. Atkins collected about 400 of these photograms between 1843 and 1853 to create British Algae: Cyunotype Impressions. She explained her intent in the book’s introduction: ‘the difficulty of making accurate drawings of objects as minute as many of the Algae and SUSANR~CHMAN Conferva has induced me . . . to obtain impressions of the plants themselves, which I have much pleasure in offering to my botanical friends.’ For this ‘important and brilliant undertaking,’ Schaaf declares, ‘Atkins had used the most practical technology available to her at the time.’ In 1854 SUN GARDENS: VICTORIAN Prroroo~~~s by Anna Atkins. she applied the same process to varied compositions of Text by Larry J. Schaaf. Aperture, New York. 1985. Price ferns, leaves, feathers and lace. The result was Cyanofypes $30.00; Phaidon Press, Oxford. 1986. Price f25. of British and Foreign Plants and Ferns, from which Schaaf draws most of his remarkable examples of Atkins’s work. Anna Atkin’s career bridges two of the principal Through her father Atkins was closely acquainted with activities through which Victorian women contributed to William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of photography on British intellectual life. Many women with leisure time to paper, and she came to cyanotyping through its inventor, spare were amateur naturalists, cataloguing and often Sir John Herschel, another family friend. A few years copying botanical specimens, and Atkin’s cyanotypes of earlier, Herschel had introduced photography to Julia algae and ferns are among the most striking examples of Margaret Cameron, via samples mailed to her residence in their work. Hers were also the first photographs taken by a Calcutta. But Cameron didn’t take her first picture until woman, and the first by man or woman created to illustrate 1864, twenty years after Atkins’s While the works of a book. Larry Schaafs study shows how Atkins turned a Atkins and Cameron represent striking examples of the conventional ‘fondness for Botany’ into ‘an accomplishnew medium’s experimental range, Cameron would have ment far ahead of anyone else’s in successfully applying to wage a fierce professional defense for her ‘out of focus’ pictures: ‘and who has a right to say what focus is the photography to a practical and valuable publication.’ legitimate focus?’ she complained in a letter to Herschel. Collecting plants, shells and algae was an ideal occupation for nineteenth-century ladies of the leisure By contrast, some of the relatively few copies of Atkins’s class like Atkins. It provided moderate exercise and decidedly in-focus pictures may have been lost because recreation, instruction in the rudiments of science and a collectors failed to recognise their importance as welcome distraction from the ennui of the drawing room. photographs. And since the study of nature was presumed to provide, at Larry Schaaf is more aware than anyone of the least in pre-Darwinian days, countless exempla of the frustrating paucity of documentation surrounding the wonders in God’s creation, it qualified as a ‘safe’ pursuit career of a woman with Atkins’s talents. But he has for the pure-minded. But Atkins seems to have come to assembled a full record of all that survives, including natural history not merely for recreation or religion, but interesting evidence of her long-standing relationship with through the encouragement of her father, the distinguished Anne Dixon, ‘an even more shadowy figure,’ whom Atkins scientist John Children. At age 24 she hand-drew over 250 called her ‘friend/almost sister.’ And most importantly, images of shells as illustrations for Children’s translations Schaaf provides Atkins’s photographs, almost 70 of them, of Lamar&s Genera ofShells (1823). Children’s letters to with full technical and archival background. They are not eminent botanist Sir William Hooker chronicle Atkins’s only an important contribution to the histories of Victorian developing interest in botany. Her father’s function as the women and photography, but also astonishingly beautiful. ‘channel of communication’ between Atkins and the scientific world, Schaaf notes, ‘provides some explanation MARYJEAN CORSE~Tand VKTORLUF~G
obedience and worship; man’s allegiance is not to himself but to God. And following from this, a woman’s duty to ‘her husband parallels her husband’s obedience to God. Both men and women exist to serve another. The Islamic structure does not allow any individual, male or female, to work towards actuahing his or her own potential. Sabbah’s critique of Muslim culture and of the Islamic religious-legal system that denies self-determination shows us how the roots of inequality are maintained by the social structure. In her analysis the contradiction between equality and Islam is exposed; for Islam is basically, at its roots, a hierarchical structure. Thus to attain equality for women and to eradicate the patriarchy will require dismantling the entire Islamic religious-legal structure that disempowers women, Sabbah’s book deserves to be read. In speaking out on women’s oppression and labeling Islam, her own culture, non-humanistic, she is daring. Her conclusion indicates that it will require defiant women, such as herself, as well as a complete cultural revolution to bring equality to the Middle East. For men in the Muslim world women’s silence means order. But, within this silence, women are speaking and their voices will be heard.
219
the Sunna. Her literary criticism allows us to understand Muslim thought by presenting the proscriptions and contradictions for women, men and their relationship to each other, and to the higher power of Allah. Although these writing and modes of thought represent opposing forces within the culture they do have one common denominator: the maintenance of, and support for, male domination. In the erotic literature woman is linked with ‘all that has been forgotten, rejected, repressed, forbidden,’ with the Pre-Islamic ‘era of the godesses, when the identity of a child was determined by its maternal origin, the vagina from which it emerged, and not by a fiction of law-that is, Paternity.’ (p. 26). The individual stories that make up the erotic literature describe a woman with an overt, unquenchable sexual desire that only a man fortified by nutritious substances and magical potions can satisfy. Although women are described as the gender with the insatiable sexual drive the Islamic erotic literature does not focus on what women desire but rather on what men project onto her as her desires. The objective of these writings is to instruct men how to sexually conquer women. Women are the subject matter, but the objective is the maintenance of male power. And this hierarchy of power between the sexes is not linked with the mind and perceived as a mental or emotional construct but is based on biology-in and of the genitals. Sabbah compares this creation of women in the religious erotica to the sexual politics and women’s role in orthodox Islam. In the writings of the Koran we enter a world where the power of Allah is seen as capable of inverting biological realities. Woman is born from man, conception occurs due to the will of Allah. Reproduction is separated from the reality of fertility and individual procreation. And these ‘facts’ deemed truths by Allah are not to be questioned, but accepted because he controls all. The relationship between man and Allah is one manifestation of the overriding element of Orthodox Islam: domination-the domination of one aspect of life, Sabbah labels this or one human, over another. relationship of domination between women and men, men and Allah, desire and reason, ‘inversion-linkage.’ ‘Inversion-linkage ties two elements in a relationship of dependence structured in such a way that any attempt by the dominated element to reestablish equilibrium is perceived as opposition, subversion, and questioning of the existing hierarchy. The inversion-linkage that structures the rapport between God and the believer reflects and is reflected in the relationship between the sexes.’ (P. 68). Thus man is dependent on Allah, woman is dependent on man, reason is dependent on the overriding of desire. And as man is made in the image of Allah, the opposite of man-woman-is the opposite of God-the devil. Because she is perceived as the visual manifestation of disorder by Allah, woman is by definition problematic. She equals desire, she engenders danger. Woman represents the antithesis of the Islamic world. She must be controlled for the havoc that she would wreak; her movements must be curtailed. Custom declares that men must devalue women as love for a woman distracts a man from his true purpose: maintaining his pure love and devotion to Allah. Inversion-linkage-the domination-submission pattern that composes all relationships within the religious structure of Islam-creates a male identity centered on
220
Book Reviews
why there is so little written record under Anna’s own name.’ For although women were among the most tireless and diligent of Victorian plant-hunters, records of their activity, particularly in the first half of the period, survive almost solely in references made by their male contemporaries, who published prodigiously. Amelia Griffiths, for instance, was said to have earned ‘the lasting gratitude’ of her fellow naturalists for her achievements in marine botany, and even had a genus named after her. But she produced no work by her own hand. Atkins’s iirst important works were in fact illustrations to accompany a book by Griffiths’s cousin, William Harvey. What distinguished them was her adaptation of a new blueprint process called cyanotyping. Atkins placed her specimens directly on chemically treated paper and exposed them to the sun, then washed the prints in water. The results were detailed impressions on bright blue backgrounds, the caption letters hand-formed from seaweed strands. Atkins collected about 400 of these photograms between 1843 and 1853 to create British Algae: Cyunotype Impressions. She explained her intent in the book’s introduction: ‘the difficulty of making accurate drawings of objects as minute as many of the Algae and SUSANR~CHMAN Conferva has induced me . . . to obtain impressions of the plants themselves, which I have much pleasure in offering to my botanical friends.’ For this ‘important and brilliant undertaking,’ Schaaf declares, ‘Atkins had used the most practical technology available to her at the time.’ In 1854 SUN GARDENS: VICTORIAN Prroroo~~~s by Anna Atkins. she applied the same process to varied compositions of Text by Larry J. Schaaf. Aperture, New York. 1985. Price ferns, leaves, feathers and lace. The result was Cyanofypes $30.00; Phaidon Press, Oxford. 1986. Price f25. of British and Foreign Plants and Ferns, from which Schaaf draws most of his remarkable examples of Atkins’s work. Anna Atkin’s career bridges two of the principal Through her father Atkins was closely acquainted with activities through which Victorian women contributed to William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of photography on British intellectual life. Many women with leisure time to paper, and she came to cyanotyping through its inventor, spare were amateur naturalists, cataloguing and often Sir John Herschel, another family friend. A few years copying botanical specimens, and Atkin’s cyanotypes of earlier, Herschel had introduced photography to Julia algae and ferns are among the most striking examples of Margaret Cameron, via samples mailed to her residence in their work. Hers were also the first photographs taken by a Calcutta. But Cameron didn’t take her first picture until woman, and the first by man or woman created to illustrate 1864, twenty years after Atkins’s While the works of a book. Larry Schaafs study shows how Atkins turned a Atkins and Cameron represent striking examples of the conventional ‘fondness for Botany’ into ‘an accomplishnew medium’s experimental range, Cameron would have ment far ahead of anyone else’s in successfully applying to wage a fierce professional defense for her ‘out of focus’ pictures: ‘and who has a right to say what focus is the photography to a practical and valuable publication.’ legitimate focus?’ she complained in a letter to Herschel. Collecting plants, shells and algae was an ideal occupation for nineteenth-century ladies of the leisure By contrast, some of the relatively few copies of Atkins’s class like Atkins. It provided moderate exercise and decidedly in-focus pictures may have been lost because recreation, instruction in the rudiments of science and a collectors failed to recognise their importance as welcome distraction from the ennui of the drawing room. photographs. And since the study of nature was presumed to provide, at Larry Schaaf is more aware than anyone of the least in pre-Darwinian days, countless exempla of the frustrating paucity of documentation surrounding the wonders in God’s creation, it qualified as a ‘safe’ pursuit career of a woman with Atkins’s talents. But he has for the pure-minded. But Atkins seems to have come to assembled a full record of all that survives, including natural history not merely for recreation or religion, but interesting evidence of her long-standing relationship with through the encouragement of her father, the distinguished Anne Dixon, ‘an even more shadowy figure,’ whom Atkins scientist John Children. At age 24 she hand-drew over 250 called her ‘friend/almost sister.’ And most importantly, images of shells as illustrations for Children’s translations Schaaf provides Atkins’s photographs, almost 70 of them, of Lamar&s Genera ofShells (1823). Children’s letters to with full technical and archival background. They are not eminent botanist Sir William Hooker chronicle Atkins’s only an important contribution to the histories of Victorian developing interest in botany. Her father’s function as the women and photography, but also astonishingly beautiful. ‘channel of communication’ between Atkins and the scientific world, Schaaf notes, ‘provides some explanation MARYJEAN CORSE~Tand VKTORLUF~G
obedience and worship; man’s allegiance is not to himself but to God. And following from this, a woman’s duty to ‘her husband parallels her husband’s obedience to God. Both men and women exist to serve another. The Islamic structure does not allow any individual, male or female, to work towards actuahing his or her own potential. Sabbah’s critique of Muslim culture and of the Islamic religious-legal system that denies self-determination shows us how the roots of inequality are maintained by the social structure. In her analysis the contradiction between equality and Islam is exposed; for Islam is basically, at its roots, a hierarchical structure. Thus to attain equality for women and to eradicate the patriarchy will require dismantling the entire Islamic religious-legal structure that disempowers women, Sabbah’s book deserves to be read. In speaking out on women’s oppression and labeling Islam, her own culture, non-humanistic, she is daring. Her conclusion indicates that it will require defiant women, such as herself, as well as a complete cultural revolution to bring equality to the Middle East. For men in the Muslim world women’s silence means order. But, within this silence, women are speaking and their voices will be heard.