Harry Bastermajian 00:10
Welcome to the Harvard Islamica Podcast. I'm Harry Bastermajian,
Meryum Kazmi 00:14
and I'm Meryum Kazmi. In March 2022, we interviewed professors Leila Ahmed and Kecia Ali to discuss Professor Ahmed's distinguished career with a focus on her classic book, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate, which was first published in 1992, and republished in 2021, with a new foreword by Professor Ali. Professor Leila Ahmed came to Harvard Divinity School in 1999 as its first Professor of Women's Studies in Religion. She was then appointed Victor S. Thomas Professor of Divinity in 2003 and became Victor S. Thomas Research Professor of Divinity upon her retirement in 2020. Professor Kecia Ali is Professor of Religion at Boston University, where her research and teaching focus on Islamic law, women and gender, ethics, and biography.
We began by asking Professor Ahmed about her background and how she became a scholar of women and gender within Islamic studies.
Harry Bastermajian 01:14
To get us started, Professor Ahmed, can you share with us a little bit how you entered the field of Islamic studies and then turn your focus to the subfield of women's and gender studies, especially after the beginning of your career with a dissertation and book that focused on the Orientalist Edward Lane?
Leila Ahmed 01:36
Thank you, Harry. Well, I'll take this as a question about how I came to write Women and Gender in Islam. Initially, I hadn't intended to write on the subject; rather, I was just researching it for my own information in response to the events of the day, and specifically in search for answers to questions which were raised for me by the Iranian Revolution. This was the late 1970s and I was working at the time in the United Arab Emirates, just across the Arab Gulf from Iran. And I remember being very struck one evening, watching the news, by scenes of women running in the streets snatching up headscarves, which were provided on carts on street corners, and tying them on as they ran to join the revolution. This was, for me, an arresting sight. I grew up in Egypt where veiling was no longer a norm in cities, even people whom I knew to be deeply religious did not wear it. The sight now of women voluntarily putting them on led me to question my assumptions about veiling and about women's history in Islam and I set out just to inform myself as to what the facts were. I did most of my research during my summer vacations in Cambridge, England, where I had access to an excellent library, as well as to book shops, which carried the latest works in what was then the emerging new field of women's studies. Most of these were books coming out of the United States. One thing led to another and not long after, I obtained a post in the women's studies program in Amherst, Massachusetts. Founded in 1975, it was one of the first women's studies programs in America. Luckily, too, the program had strong connections with the African American studies program, which had also been recently founded. In answer to your question then, I don't see myself as having transitioned into a subfield of Islamic studies, but rather into then emergent, and today flourishing and well established, academic field of women and gender studies.
Meryum Kazmi 03:41
We then asked Professor Ali how she came to the study of women and gender in Islam, and how Professor Ahmed's work had been of benefit on her intellectual journey.
Kecia Ali 03:51
So my copy of Women and Gender in Islam was purchased the last term of my undergraduate education at Stanford. So it was in paperback, so that would have been sometime in the first half of 1993. And I was headed off that fall to start graduate studies at Duke University in history, but actually Latin American history. So I had these interests in the Middle East, in Islam, in women, but I was prepared to do something different. And what ended up happening is the same kind of thing that Professor Ahmed was talking about, which is: I had questions, and the things I was reading didn't necessarily have answers. So as someone who studied modern 19th, 20th century Brazil, and also was reading contemporary Muslim discussions about women's status in Islam, and also was reading Women and Gender in Islam-- also, amina wadud's Qur'an and Woman which was published also in 1992, it was a very good year-- trying to put together all of these different discourses, and make sense of why contemporary Muslims sounded so much like 19th and early 20th century Latin American elites when they started to talk about women and domesticity and the exalted position of the wife. And of course, Women and Gender in Islam helps us understand the answer is colonialism. The answer is a set of discussions about women, about family, about gender roles that are global in reach. And so when I ended up doing my dissertation, looking really at ninth and 10th century Islamic law, part of what I was trying to answer was the question of how we got from there to here. And this is why we write books, right? Nobody's written them already. I would much rather simply go and find a book where somebody else has answered the questions that I have than have to go find them for myself. That wasn't the case here.
Leila Ahmed 06:37
I actually think it's really interesting the parallels in how we came to our work, because in a way, in both cases, it's kind of stepping away from the accepted academic framework. We're not going to stay within that. We're moving outside that. So in a way, we're very fortunate to have our own independent passions.
Kecia Ali 06:59
Yes, yes.
Meryum Kazmi 07:02
Professor Ahmed's Women and Gender in Islam covers the history of women in the Middle East, starting from ancient times before Islam to the present, which at the time was 1992. The book became a classic on the topic of women and to the Islamic tradition and laid the groundwork for subsequent scholarship on the topic. Professor Ahmed already talked about what led her to write the book, so I asked her what led her to republish it in 2021.
Leila Ahmed 07:27
Thanks, Meryum. That's an interesting question, because it assumes that we academics can simply decide when our work is published or republished. For most of us, this is not the case. What happened regarding the book's re-publication, was that Yale University Press contacted me to say that they'd like to republish it to mark the 30th anniversary of its publication, an honor, they said, they reserved for only a very few of their books. Naturally, I was very honored and happy to hear this.
Meryum Kazmi 07:57
In Women and Gender in Islam, Professor Ahmed critiques both patriarchy in Muslim societies and paternalistic Western attitudes towards Muslim women. In her foreword, Professor Ali mentions Professor Ahmed's discussion of so-called “colonial feminism” as one of the most original and influential contributions of her book. We were interested in hearing more about this concept and why Professor Ali thought that Professor Ahmed's discussion of colonial feminism was a valuable contribution to the field.
Kecia Ali 08:29
Specifically, the phrasing that she came up with that was so helpful, I think, for so many of us was “the discourse of the veil,” right, the idea that what Muslim women wore or didn't wear somehow could encapsulate and symbolize and even enact a whole set of changes to their status, power, what have you, that was really, really helpful. I think without understanding the way that at the turn of the 20th century, the veil came to be invested with so much meaning, we can't understand what she was talking about in the Iranian Revolution. If you don't have the discourse of the veil in the colonial period, then you don't have the Shah banning it, then you don't have the Iranian revolutionaries using it to symbolize opposition to a corrupt dictatorial Western leader. It's become this incredibly rich and also fraught language for so many things. But I also want to signal, I think, the kind of paradox that Professor Ahmed is talking about in terms of colonial feminism, the hypocrisy of Western leaders; we're not past that now. If you just look to last week, we have some American politicians and pundits lamenting the state of LGBT communities in Russia or in Ukraine, depending on who they are and where they're positioned, and at the same time, you have the Attorney General of Texas passing draconian anti-trans opinions that will be incredibly harmful and politicians in Florida with a "don't say gay" piece of legislation. So it's not that these folks actually care about minoritized and vulnerable groups based on sexual orientation or gender identity; it becomes a useful way to talk about those people over there and criticize them while having actually really regressive and harmful policies in your own context.
Leila Ahmed 11:26
Perfect parallel, yes.
Meryum Kazmi 11:28
We also discussed Professor Ahmed's other books. I was interested in knowing what led her to write A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence from the Middle East to America, on the topic of hijab, and specifically re-veiling. On the one hand hijab has become mainstreamed in America today-- I mentioned for example, going to Target and seeing ads with women in hijab there-- but there are also bans on hijab in other places, such as in a state in India and in Quebec. In her book, Professor Ahmed talked about Saudi Arabia as a force in promoting veiling, but that country has loosened many restrictions in recent years and no longer requires it. I asked Professor Ahmed if she could comment on the interesting ways in which attitudes and policies towards hijab have changed since she wrote A Quiet Revolution in 2011.
Leila Ahmed 12:16
A vast and wonderful question. This actually is exactly the kind of simple or seemingly simple question which led me to research and write A Quiet Revolution. Why, I wanted to know, were women in Cairo in Egypt in the 1950s, not wearing the veil and why was it that here and now in America in the late 1990s, they were wearing it? And I obviously thought this was an important question, since I spent the next 10 years or so researching and writing. In this case, it was just two countries I was researching. You mentioned now four countries, America, India, Saudi Arabia, and Canada. I think this is a very important question that you ask. Why is it happening? What does it mean? It's a very good topic. Somebody should definitely research this. I don't know if you have any research plans in your future, Meryum, but if you do, maybe you should consider researching this yourself. It isn't usually easy to come up with good questions, and this was a good question. Kecia, you have something to add?
Kecia Ali 13:21
You know, actually, I don't know if this makes the approved topics list, but I really want to hear you talk a little bit more about A Border Passage, which came in between, because Women and Gender in Islam, for obvious reasons, is the book of yours that has been most influential for me and for my work and most relevant in my teaching, but I think A Border Passage is my favorite.
Leila Ahmed 13:54
I’m happy to hear that. I’m a bit taken aback, but what why is it your favorite?
Kecia Ali 13:59
Well, it does something that memoirs don't always do, which is skillfully connect personal history to important, broader stories of what's going on in the world, in Egypt, specifically. I think there is something dramatic about your own story, obviously, which crosses many borders, but it's also really a story about Egypt entering modernity, in a very complicated kind of way and it's also just beautifully written and rendered. It's very serious in terms of how it engages Egypt in the first half of the 20th century, the history is there, but the learning is worn very lightly, and it's accessible. I could give the book-- and in fact have given the book-- to people who don't have degrees in history and they can understand and appreciate what you're doing.
Leila Ahmed 15:23
I'm really happy to hear this, Kecia. Thank you very much for those words, because in fact, the project I'm currently working on is, in a way, very similar in the sense that I follow out in it, not my own life this time, but the lives of half a dozen people who lived in Egypt from the 1900s to the 1950s, and for whom a decent amount of information on their lives is available. Egypt through this period was under British rule, and in addition, this was also the era when many Europeans and Levantines lived in Egypt, a time often referred to today as Egypt's cosmopolitan period. It was also, as it happens, a very important era in relation to women's history, so it's a period I've worked on earlier books. But this time, though, my focus is on issues of race, and on tracking and following up in particular, the nature of relations across race, between the British and Egyptians, colonizer and colonized, white and brown, over the course of the period. I grew up in the last years of that era and it was a childhood memory from the 1950s of an encounter with our British neighbors, and the questions that memory immediately posed me as to the nature of relations across race, which led me to begin the research, which eventually became this project.
[musical interlude]
Harry Bastermajian 16:50
Professor Ali, how has Women and Gender in Islam influenced-- how has this book influenced subsequent scholarship in Islamic studies generally, but specifically also your own scholarship?
Kecia Ali 17:07
So there are three answers to that question. One answer, when it comes to my own scholarship, is to say, in some ways Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam, which is the book that grew out of my dissertation, is really a kind of elaboration on the chapter on the formation of the core discourses of Islam. I went back, I didn't realize this until many years later, but I went back and really did the primary source digging to look at and really substantiate Professor Ahmed's observation that there is overlap and confusion between the categories of woman, wife, and enslaved person and that that plays out in the way the jurists think about marriage. So that's one way that it's influenced my scholarship.
More broadly, it's influenced the whole field of women, gender, and Islam. It wasn't the only book of its time; it really emerged, as I say in the foreword to the new edition, in a context where women's history and women's studies were really gaining force, were really gaining momentum. And so if you look at the classics of the study of women and Islam, gender and Islam, many of them come in the first half of the 1990s. So there's a very important anthology edited by Nikki Keddie and Beth Baron, and a whole series of things get published during those years, which begin to lay some groundwork for what we have now, which is just an incredible profusion of materials on nearly all times and places. Some are better covered than others, but there are lots of empirical studies that address texts, that draw on archives, that look ethnographically at groups and communities that got only the lightest sort of study in this big, incredibly ambitious survey.
There's also-- I said there were three answers to the question-- the third answer is that, really shamefully, some of the people in the field who aren't doing women and gender are still not reading or engaging its broad claims. So one of the things that Professor Ahmed points out in the preface is Ira Lapidus's History of the Islamic Peoples, which was a relatively new publication when she wrote, basically had almost nothing to say about women and gender. Hmm, it's a shame. Well, Shahab Ahmed's book, What is Islam?, which was published in, I believe, 2015, devotes eight pages to Ira Lapidus's book and doesn't even include Women and Gender in Islam in the bibliography. And so, you know, there are reasons and there are perspectives but I think it's really telling when someone thinks that they can do a big ambitious synthesis of what gets to count as Islamic studies, and not really address women or gender at all, and it's especially ironic given that this book argues that we need to move beyond a narrow textual basis for thinking about what counts as Islam, which is an argument that Women and Gender in Islam makes, and that Professor Ahmed has elaborated on in other places as well. So it's had a really important impact on many areas of the field and yet because of the very deliberate marginalization of the study of women and gender, it hasn't been always been taken into account.
Harry Bastermajian 21:56
Can I follow up on that? What problems for the historian, for the student, for just your readership, the people who would pick up the book, whether they're academics or just sort of a non-academic, the more casual reader, what are the implications here? This is important, right? We leave half the population out of the historical narrative here. And this is question is for either of you. What does this do to our understanding of history?
Kecia Ali 22:31
I think if you have Islam, and then you have women and Islam, you're pretending that men don't have gender, that you can simply take them, as amina wadud talks about them, as the "normative human being," right, and you assume that the normative human being is male. This isn't a Muslim problem; this is a patriarchy problem. But the way it particularly manifests within the study of Islam and Muslims shows up everywhere. I mean, it shows up in specialized scholarly tomes but it also shows up when, on the popular documentary about Muslim ritual practices, people say, "And when Muslims go on Hajj they wear an unseamed, white garment." Well, it's like, which Muslims actually? Because that's not what women wear. And so that question about who gets to be representative, it's an important question.
Leila Ahmed 23:37
Kecia, is this this true also of histories of America? Are they doing any better? Or are all the big names in history, in American history, also ignoring women's history? Or is it only people who work on Islam?
Kecia Ali 23:52
Oh, no, everybody. It's a patriarchy problem. It's a patriarchy problem. Yeah, it's not-- and it's not just about deciding to ignore women. It's saying, well, we're going to tell American history as political history. Right? Well, we're going to talk about presidents. Okay, what are you doing? It's not that we decided we didn't want to talk about women. It's just that women haven't been president, right? This is really the debate that women's historians were having as early as the '70s. You can't keep all of your categories and archives and questions intact and just say, we'll just add women to the way we've always been doing this. Once you decide that you want a more inclusive account, then you have to also think about, well, how are we going to get that account? Right? Well, we can't write about women and Islamic law, because there weren't jurists who were women. Well, then maybe the way you approach Islamic law has to differ.
Harry Bastermajian 25:15
Professor Ali, you gave a seminar not too long ago at our program on the topic of gender in the Islamic studies classroom in which you talk about incorporating both the topics of women and gender and scholarship by women, including Muslim women, into syllabi. Which subfields of Islamic studies do you believe have done this more successfully and which have a longer way to go in terms of including scholarship by women in course syllabi?
Kecia Ali 25:52
Well, the obvious answer is that books around women and gender in Islam are more likely to have non-male authors and that field shows a great deal of balance. American Islam is a pretty balanced subfield, and in fact, broadly, ethnography including ethnographies for the Middle East, for Africa, for South and Southeast Asia, those fields are all fairly balanced. Much less balanced are studies of early Islam, studies of Islamic law and studies of Qur'an, if you define out the scholarship on gender and Qur'an or women's engagements with the scriptural texts that are normative engagements with the text, so if you define those out of Qur’anic studies, then Qur’anic studies is a fairly male field, or male-dominated field. Some of this also comes down to, in the case of the classroom, who's writing intro books. And so intro books for-- whether that's intro to Islam or survey books on Islamic law, or Islamic history-- those kinds of texts are more likely to be male authored than more focused studies. And the question of why is one that I've been giving a fair amount of thought to. I think part of the answer, but probably only part of the answer, has to do with the professional rewards that are received or not received from writing those kinds of books. I think sometimes men are encouraged to take the chance of writing something like that in a way that women maybe aren't. It's not perceived necessarily as sufficiently scholarly, and they won't be rewarded in terms of career advancement for doing so.
Harry Bastermajian 28:15
So then fewer introductory books to Islamic studies, to Islamic history, what have you, just by the fact that they're not being produced by female scholars or published by-- they're being produced, but they're not necessarily always leading to publication, perhaps, is part of the problem. To what degree is it even, not even, you know, let's step away for publishing, but even just graduate students, and what they're sort of guided towards. We all know that we all come into graduate school with a plan and what we're going to work on, and often we're shaped by our advisors. To what degree and again to both of you, what can universities do, what can graduate programs do? What should they do? Not only what can they do, but what should they be doing to encourage more diversity, gender diversity, in their research and their students?
Kecia Ali 29:19
That's a very big question.
Harry Bastermajian 29:22
Sorry. [LAUGHS]
Kecia Ali 29:27
I'm not sure I can answer that at all. I don't actually think-- well, let me rephrase this, actually-- I think part of the reason that we see so many studies that aren't explicitly about women and gender, especially if they're by men, fail to cite women's work, whether or not it's about women and gender, I think a lot of that really owes to the conservative nature of syllabi and comprehensive exam lists. We're still reading Watt, we're still reading Hodgson. We're still reading what our advisors read when they were in graduate school, and not necessarily making room for newer things on these lists. And so if what you're assigned is always the classics, if it's always J. N. D. Anderson and never Ziba Mir-Hosseini when you're going to talk about family law, then that's what you're going to reproduce in your own publications. But if we're talking about graduate school, we're also talking about the really terrible job market and many, many other things. I think comprehensive exams and reading lists don't make my top three list of what's wrong with doctoral education in Islamic studies today.
[musical interlude]
Meryum Kazmi 31:32
I asked Professor Ahmed about her experience coming to Harvard Divinity School in 1999 as its first Professor of Women's Studies in Religion. I also asked her about the challenges and opportunities she encountered at the Divinity School in that time, shortly before 9/11.
Leila Ahmed 31:48
It was very exciting of course to come to Harvard, and the Divinity School’s students are wonderful. But, as you mentioned, I’d barely had a chance to find my feet when we were struck by the tragedy of 9/11, and the backlash against Muslims which followed. There weren’t many students in hijab back then, but I happened to have had one in my class that semester, and maybe just a week or two after 9/11 she arrived in class totally disheveled, having been pushed off the pavement in front of cars and spat on and had her scarf torn off…That was very shocking, not just to me but to the entire class. I think this may have been among the reasons-- seeing her in this state-- that prompted me to begin doing the research on A Quiet Revolution.
Meryum Kazmi 32:33
In the conclusion of Women and Gender in Islam, Professor Ahmed writes, "the study of Muslim women in the West is heir to colonialism" and that, "research on Middle Eastern women thus occurs in a field already marked with the designs and biases written into it by colonialism." I asked Professor Ahmed to what extent she thinks changes in the field, such as demographic changes that she mentioned, including more Muslims entering the field, have changed that sense that the Western Academy is a means of imposing particular values onto Muslims.
Leila Ahmed 33:06
Okay, so how has the field changed? Well, there were maybe a dozen or at most two dozen books on women in Islam, which engaged with contemporary Western academic thought when I wrote my book on gender, women and gender. Now there are 1000s, probably many 1000s of themes relating to women in Islam, written by a vast variety of people from many different perspectives. I'm sure that the fact that Muslim women, or women of Muslim backgrounds, have been among those contributing to the field has been and continues to be a valuable enrichment. But you know, today there are also many excellent books on the subject by non-Muslims. At this stage in the history of gender and women's studies, we have well developed theoretical frameworks as to the issues and questions that need to be considered by any scholar in the field. And basically, I think it's these considerations, rather than people's identity, ethnicity, religion, race, and gender, which make for good scholarship.
Meryum Kazmi 34:10
We asked Professor Ahmed and Professor Ali what they hope to see in the future of the study of women and gender within Islamic studies.
Leila Ahmed 34:18
You know, societies change. America today is not what it was in 1990. Nor is scholarship today where it was in 1990. The times themselves constantly put new problems before us, and scholarship changes in response to the new situation. In the 1990s, for instance, we didn't have ISIS and now we do, and already there is significant scholarship on women in relation to ISIS. We haven't had the Syrian refugee crisis either. But now in the wake of it, we have many ongoing studies on Muslim women refugees. I'm sure, too, that there will soon be many more studies on what is already an academically-growing field, women in Afghanistan. Obviously, I have no crystal ball and have no idea what the future will bring. But my hope is that the extraordinary advances that feminist and minority studies have made over the last 50 years will continue to respond to whatever arises. But you know, too, I don't think on the whole in terms of disciplines, or this discipline or that. I think women and gender studies scholarship is about changing the academy and society across the disciplines. And I'm hoping that the revolution, this revolution which is already underway, and has been underway for several decades now, continues to thrive and flourish. This last century, half century, has brought tremendous changes both in the academic world and in our society in relation to women's rights in America across religion, race, and ethnicity. My hope is that this revolution will continue, the revolution in scholarship, as well as in law and rights with respect to women, and in relation to issues of gender, race, and so on. Over the decades that I've been teaching, the advances in scholarship and in society in these areas have been truly tremendous. In recent years, as we know, these gains have come to seem more precarious. But I've noticed too, that in those 10 years, students have become all the more passionate and focused in their commitment to gender justice and to a society of justice for all. That's where my hope lies.
Kecia Ali 36:31
There's so, so much terrific scholarship out there. I think I want to see that flourishing continue. And I'd really like to see more people who don't think of themselves as studying women or gender really read and engage that scholarship. If there's a book about gender and Sufism, people who think of themselves as scholars of Sufism should read it. If there's a book about gender and tafsir, people who think of themselves as scholars of tafsir should read it. Because the tendency to simply think of women and gender as being the totality of what those of us in the field study is really, really wrong. And so that marginalization I'd like to see ended.
Meryum Kazmi 37:42
We ended our conversation by asking both professors about their current research.
Leila Ahmed 37:46
As I said, I'm working on a book on the first half of the 20th century in Egypt looking at relations across racial difference, particularly between British and Egyptians, but also to some extent, a relationship across difference more generally, what was in this era, a multi-religious and multi-ethnic society.
Kecia Ali 38:06
Do you have a title for the book?
Leila Ahmed 38:08
Well, my provisional title is, The British in Egypt: Life stories from Egypt's Cosmopolitan Era, 1900 to 1950.
Kecia Ali 38:18
And I'm working on a book about the gender politics of academic Islamic studies.
Leila Ahmed 38:21
Oh, how interesting.
Meryum Kazmi 38:26
Thank you both so much. Thank you.
Kecia Ali 38:28
Thank you. This was lots of fun.
Meryum Kazmi 38:32
Yeah. Thank you for coming. And it just so happened to be that today's the first day of Women's History Month, which was not planed. Timing worked out well.
That concludes our episode with professors Leila Ahmed and Kecia Ali on Professor Ahmed's classic book and the study of women and gender within Islamic studies. We hope you'll subscribe and join us for future episodes of the Harvard Islamica Podcast and follow us on Twitter @HarvardIslamic. I'm Meryum Kazmi, thanks for listening.
