Varieties of Muslim Experience:
A Border Passage by Leila Ahmed

August 18, 2007

A Border Passage by Leila Ahmed is not a book I had meant to read over the summer. I picked up a library copy, thumbed through it a bit.. then decided to read just a chapter or two. Now I am just about to the end. A chapter entitled "Harem" was particularly insightful. Ahmed begins this chapter by relating stories about the community of women with whom she was raised in Egypt. It was hardly the harem of the western imagination, rather a closed and mutually supporting group of women. Writing about her experience at a women's college in England, Ahmed entitles a later chapter "The Harem Perfected?".. establishing with this parallel her positive view of the sheltered world in which she grew up.

About midway through the chapter on the harem, Ahmed turns her attention to the form of Islam that was cultivated among the group of women she knew:

Islam, as I got it from them, was gentle, generous, pacifist, inclusive, somewhat mystical—just as they themselves were. Mother's pacifism was entirely of a piece with their sense of the religion. Being Muslim was about believing in a world in which life was meaningful and in which all events and happenings were permeated.. with meaning. Religion was above all about inner things...

This the women passed on to us most of all through how they were and by their being and presence, by the way they were in the world, conveying their beliefs, ways, thoughts, and how we should be in the world by a touch, a glance, a word—prohibiting, for instance, or approving. [121]

Ahmed is not describing an ideal version of Islam; she is writing about what she experienced. The text is permeated with details and introspective.. and the reader can have no doubt that this is the Islam she actually knew as a child. Oddly there are plenty of people who would like to tell her that Islam means something else, and these people include fundamentalists and academics. I think we could now add plenty of TV talking heads. All these people have vested interests in defining Islam. According to them Islam is above all a textual religion.. a religion in which authorities by argumentation settle its nature. Ahmed's point is that lived and experienced religion ends up getting left behind. There is no rule book that says the "real" version of Islam is the one that has the most intellectually consistent or rigorously logical framework. No, Islam is what it is to the people who live it.

The second paragraph cited above points to an alternative world of authority. In normative Islam traditions are passed down among scholars.. and multi-volume collections gather and organize knowledge. Ahmed proposes a view of Islam in which knowledge is passed down not by words, but by subtle expressions and nods, approvals and disapprovals. Through this unspoken Islam, a social world is created. Religion becomes not a set of beliefs, but a way of interacting with the world. Over-reliance on the written word and officially constructed versions of a religion will miss lived religious experience.

To some extent this would be true of every religion, but Ahmed wants to say that Islam especially allows for the spread of this informal version of itself:

...beside the fact that women could not read... women in Muslim societies did not attend mosques. Mosque going was not part of the tradition for women at any class level... Women therefore did not hear the sermons that men heard. And they did not get the official (male, of course) orthodox interpretations of religion that men (or some men) got every Friday. They did not have a man trained in the orthodox (male) literary heritage of islam telling them week by week and month by month what it meant to be a Muslim... [124]

Such a situation (in Ahmed's view) gave rise to a parallel tradition of Islam, disconnected from the institutions and knowledge of official Islam. In the absence of authority, individuals could pick and choose from the oral recitations of the Qur'an central values and concepts. A verse from the Qur'an would not have to be run through the battery of past interpretations, but could be taken for itself.. and lodged in the mind as exemplary.

What we are living through now seems to be not merely the erasure of the living oral, ethical, and humane traditions of Islam but the literal destruction and annihilation of the Muslims who are the bearers of those traditions. In Algeria, Iran, Afghanistan, and, alas, in Egypt, this narrow, violent variant of Islam is ravaging its way through the land. [130]

Despite her interest in defining the informal Islam in which she grew up, Ahmed sees that it is a lost cause historically. Oddly enough, in encouraging women to play a more active role in the official religion (going to mosque, studying traditions) fundamentalism is breaking down the private Islam of the harem. For Ahmed, that is a tragedy. For a teacher of Islam, it is a challenge: this informal and oral-based Islam should be represented in classes on Islam.. and that means teaching outside official written texts and trying to capture the lived texts of everyday experience.