Open Discussions in association with Gulf Cultural Club
Divinity and Women empowerment
*Dr Rebecca Masterton (academic, author)
**Sakina Datoo (Journalist, Television Producer and Broadcaster)
***Tara O’Grady(human rights defender)
15th August 2023
Women, their status, and their role in society is a much-debated topic past and present. It often leads to ideological and conceptual controversies. This makes the exploitation of this issue a deeply-entrenched phenomenon. Yet the religious discourse does not seek to exploit it; the divine revelations have sought to grant women respectable status as the equals of men in creation, duties, and aspirations. The experience of women within the context of the Karbala events (in October 680 AD) continues to provide glimpses into how women can lead their communities in difficult times. It is worth noting that the first martyr in Islam was a woman who was tortured to death by the men of the Quraish tribe. The question is: Can the discourse on women ever become objective, non-partisan, and rational, examining cultural, religious, and societal factors that influence the discourse on women’s place in modern societies?
Dr Rebecca Masterton: My thoughts about the question of women’s leadership in Islam. It is difficult to know where to begin. One primary thought that I have is that as scholars have shown in the last 100 years because of colonialism and secularism Western powers have put pressure on Muslim countries to answer the issue of whether or not there is women’s leadership.
Often there is a covert objective behind this because when you study colonial history you can see that French and British networks did quite a lot to dismantle traditional women’s education while they were purporting to support the removal of the hijab the symbol of women’s liberation and at the same time they were setting up schools that only the sons of local noble families could attend.
In this way, they also limited women’s access to education and marginalised women. We see the same pattern of behaviour occurring with the invasion of Iraq. It is known that the United States government when they were in talks with the so-called leaders of Iraq and they were discussing the process of how to manage society what the next step was they invited local men to meetings in order to be involved in the decision-making process. This was because of their preconception that there is no inherent Muslim leadership in Muslim societies.
I feel that when we talk about the women of the Ahl Al Bayt a lot of the time the topic of the talk is about women’s leadership and especially among young women in their late teens and early 20s who are almost desperate to get some kind of sustenance from the narrations in the text so that they can follow the model of the women of the Ahl Al Bayt.
But with regards to even Lady Khadija, Lady Fatima, and Lady Zainab there is very little actual detail on their lives. You can only really hypothesize about the issues that they were dealing with by reflecting upon the context that they were living in.
So sometimes I think that owing to the pressure from the last 100 years for Muslims to prove that they have some kind of secular political model of leadership then very often we are trying to look for a model within the texts that may not necessarily be there because of the lack of detail about the women of Ahl Al Bayt it means that their role can be interpreted in many different ways. This gives rise to conflict among Muslims about what the role of women should be. However, when we study different Muslim cultures all the way from West Africa over to Indonesia we see that prior to the last 100 years pressure on Muslim cultures coming from colonial powers, prior to that there was or were forms of female leadership that have probably been overlooked in social and political studies.
If we are to really consider how women take inspiration from Ahl Al Bayt then maybe we need to take a step back from being on the defensive and trying to prove that we can match the challenge that is put to Muslim-majority countries by secular governments. Instead of doing that, we can actually do research into Islamic history without being in the position of constantly having to prove ourselves.
When we start to look at forms of Muslim leadership in different regions of the Muslim world then we will find a more nuanced picture and it is this more nuanced picture that we can probably turn to to get some kind of inspiration.
For example, under the Sokoto Caliphate run by Usman Fodio which is in West Africa which is again a point of contention among many Nigerians but we see that the women of that caliphate did actually set up women’s educational networks.
Obviously, in somewhere like Nigeria you have people living miles and miles apart in different villages so there would be women from Fodio’s family who would be trained up as teachers and then they would travel together to these distant villages, and in this way they would educate the women.
We can also see that in Somalia prior to the incoming of the Wahabi influence Somali women used to gather for gatherings that were called sitat and these were gatherings where they in effect praised Mada and they called for her intersection. Nowadays this kind of practice may be seen as superstition, or it is not relevant or the only kind of politics is the politics of political parties and the secular model of leadership.
Nowadays in history and in politics there is talk of the fact that in some sense politics based on political parties and models of democracy are becoming outdated. We know that behind the political parties, the real power lies with multinational corporations, and big pharma and so in effect if we are still some decades behind pressurising Muslim-majority countries to follow the secular democratic model it means that we are effectively pressurising people to follow a model that has been found to no longer be useful.
So rather than it being a top-down discussion as we often have in our majalis on how can the women of Ahl Bayt offer examples of leadership we can perhaps go to women themselves in different communities and ask how and where they obtain their social and political power.
I was recently at a conference in Mashad and a woman came up to me, she was a participant in the conference, and she said that we as women here don’t have many rights. I said to her it is well known that women in Iran have found alternative routes to obtaining power so while overtly they may not appear to have a lot of political power covertly, they do have political and social power. And when I said this to her, she blushed because it was as if I had caught her out on her trying to put across a kind of myth to me. Here is this person coming from the West and they are going to give some sympathy and go up to them and give them the narrative that we don’t have rights while it is known again that the picture is far more nuanced and complex than that.
So another thing is that within our meetings when we are constantly trying to look at the women of Ahl Al Bayt and models of leadership and how we can look to them as leaders something else is being overlooked. One of the main reasons why I came into Islam is the spiritual dimensions of Islam. I am not talking about the kind of fluffy vague come feel-good spirituality life but rather that the basis of Islam is metaphysical. Its basis is esoteric and this is a very big and important thing that Islam has to offer society.
So if we are just constantly having meetings and majalis about women’s leadership one thing that we are overlooking is how to meet the needs of modern society through the spiritual dimensions of Islam. Again, when you look at the secular world the spiritual industry is a multimillion-dollar industry but we find that within the industry spirituality, we find very little representation from the teaching of Ahl Al Bayt.
So we have people like Deepak Chopra and other well-known names from other traditions mainly the Buddhist and Hindu traditions and then we have a kind of satanized version of Rumi that has become popular in the United States but if we are thinking in terms of what we can offer the world, in terms of what the world needs right now a big thing that we can offer is the teachings of aestheticism, connection to the diving, the study of the self and this is something that can be offered to women as an alternative model, especially to the women who are caught up in this very ruthless secular, capitalistic, economic model.
So I think that rather than us being on the defensive and trying to prove that we have the same kind of model as the secular model we need to take a step back and say we have our own model or models that we can draw upon by hearing women out from different cultures. Actually, we don’t hear their voices much about how they are addressing the challenges of their day and age outside of the secular political model.
We also need to provide a spiritual and psychological response to the neurosis and illnesses that are arising from the secular society in which we are living.
Sakina Datoo: Salam aleikum. I appreciate this opportunity to be able to share some of my thoughts. Much of what has been discussed today is about women and divinity. I want to look at the concept of how women have generally been exploited through the generations and if there is any framework within religion that offers an alternative path. And also, to look at the leadership of women in wartime.
We have to look at the cases of women in Karbala and Seida Zainab, in particular, to see how this can offer women in modern times guidelines in terms of how to go about leadership in terms of war but not only limited to times of war.
So very briefly to start with I will look at the exploitation of women. Women have been exploited from time immemorial looking at the era before the prophet and how women were treated. There was always subjugation of women and even today if you look at the Eastern countries or Africa where I am from or South Asian countries and Arab women there has definitely been exploitation and subjugation of women in terms of education and political pull but also the social view of what the role of women is. This is usually limited to serving men and looking after the whole household so you are a leader within your household in your kitchen and this limits you. There have been changes but to a large extent, this continues.
If I remember myself and my background. I was very lucky that I had a father who really propelled me and was very open to having political thoughts. And ever since I remember we sat and discussed politics in our household.
However, I had a lot of friends and I remember particularly in the African set up when they got married they used to feel very frustrated. They were well-educated women and they said when we have family gatherings there was a very interesting discussion happening on the men’s side. They were talking about politics and women were discussing recipes. They would want to go and sit with the men and would be told this is not deserving of women. You can’t have these discussions for women.
On the other side, what has been the case in Western society? I think the same was the case in Western society until the industrial revolution and then things changed somehow for the better. But is it really better? This is the question. Are women not exploited anymore? I think they are, and it is arguable women now are exploited more in Western society than ever before.
So with the industrial revolution and issues of women now being financially independent and having careers but in reality we are still the ones who do the maximum in the house and parenting is the burden of women and they continue to be exploited even more so today in Western society.
And that is not all. I think that with the rise of feminism, there are issues that we are being exploited in terms of the image of women if you look at the concepts that are coming up with feminism. But before I continue with that let me make it clear that feminism is a very broad subject and there are many dimensions to it.
There is a certain type of feminism that I am in favour of. I think Islam sort of gave us this feminism a very long time back. I don’t think that everything coming from the West has been negative. Living in an eastern country myself there were some values that we got from the West that really helped us women to speak up, to have the right, to say we are not just going to be put into this small group. We want liberation but within which context?
So the context is that there is still the exploitation of women. There is the snow-white movie next year where the woman is not looking for love from a man. She does not want to get married. Is that freedom? No for me it is exploitation. It is within women to want to be mothers and wives and to have that aspect.
So, for our young girls who live here, I think they are being exploited when they are told that it is anti-feminist to want to be married. So, women are being exploited left right and centre historically and today.
So where is the answer? In my view, Islam had the answer years ago and continues to have it. But there is a big protest in different shadings in Islam and the culture that comes from Islam. I am only talking about the context of Islam here because of the limited time. All religions allow this. But within the framework of Islam, it is very possible.
Western women are now criticising films like snow white and are saying that this is not feminist. And not every woman is a leader. Not every woman wants to be a leader. Not every woman wants power. So, when we were talking of the context of leadership what are we saying is that every woman is not necessarily successful if she is in the forefront. We are looking back in history at Sayeda Khadija. She was a leader. After she was overshadowed by the prophet, she was a leader before she got married. She ran the huge caravans of men, and she was the leader.
But when she got married to the prophet first of all if Islam did not condone women’s leadership, he would not have married someone like her. But through history and then later through wartime and the difficult period the prophet went through when he was in exile, her leadership may not have been in the limelight. She may not have been making news as we call it today through social media and platforms, but she was still providing leadership. That is the reason that when she passed away the Prophet was grieving. Her leadership was strong.
Looking at the example of Sayeda Fatima unfortunately we have the view of Sayeda Fatima as the woman who was always crying, a weak woman. She was always indoors. This is not the reality. It is unfortunate that we do not have a lot of information about the life of these women. But when she needed to stand up and had to fight the war for Iman Ali that is when you saw her leadership. You saw her leadership when she went out there and she was fighting for her rights.
Not only that for a woman whose children actually made the institution of Kerbala, Imam Hussein, and Sayeda Zainab she was a leader who was prepared. What I am trying to say is that women’s leadership is not a competition between men and women. It is not about having a position in certain places.
To understand the leadership of a woman is to be able to understand that Islam is given equally to men and to women. There are so many Ayas in the Holy Quran, the believing man, and the believing woman. Men and women have been created equally and it is only society that separates them. At the end of the day, each of you will be judged by your level of piety.
So these issues when they are talked about Islam have a modern concept of feminism. We want to follow a certain path or a certain framework, but women’s leadership has always been there. If you look at the African context there have been so many leaders.
If we look at the example of the Palestinian cause. Shireen who lost her life. What was she doing? She was providing leadership. Today the war is not on the battlefield. It is in the media more than anything. And how many women are there at the forefront of the media fighting this war? They are all providing women’s leadership.
So finally, when we talk about Sayeda Zainab and all the other ladies of Kerbala you feel leadership at every stage of the way. The way they supported their men, the way they prepared their children. Imam Husein used to consult Sayeda Zainab and ask her advice. So she was equally assisting. But women were providing leadership. After the tragedy in Kerbala, it was not that suddenly this meek woman was able to speak to Yazid. She was a woman who was already prepared, already a leader from her childhood. We know that Imam Ali used to prepare her.
So the women who are in leadership let us not judge them only when we can see them. Only when they are in the limelight. Women are very effective at every stage of life. We are very capable and when the opportunity arises, but it is not the case that women’s leadership is there when there are no men around. They have always been leaders. They shine when men are not there. But that does not mean that when men are there that women are any less effective. Women’s leadership has always been there.
At the moment women are at the forefront of fighting for their rights. The Iranian revolution is an example of women in the forefront. What is different from the time of Sayeda Zainab until today? It is divinity. Sayeda Zainab had a very clear goal as to what it was that she was fighting for. She was connected to Imam Ali in a very peaceful manner. She said I only see beauty. How could she only see beauty? This is because she was so focused, and she had beauty within her. This was her guiding compass.
For us today this is a challenge because when we are in the forefront in the media it is very difficult to remove yourself from your work. When I am on tv it is about me, that I get recognised and people see me rather than my cause. And I think that is where the problem is. The issue of women in public life. This may be controversial but, in my view, when women are not strong it is because the cause is not very clear. Everybody wants to do things for the right reason. Everybody is fighting for haq but where is the haq? You cannot recognise it. You cannot find the truth if God is not within you.
I see the revolution of Kerbala being the platform which will help women’s leadership change the course of history today as long as God and divinity is within ourselves.
Tara O’Grady: When I was asked to speak my first concern was about my ability to say anything that would be inspirational or balanced considering the impact the Catholic Church has had in Ireland in recent times following on from decades.
In Islam you believe that a child is born in the state of grace and in Catholicism we believe that children are born with inherited sin. And we have this guilt complex throughout our lives that we are making up for Eve convincing Adam to bite the forbidden fruit.
And so there is this ideology – and please bear with me that this is my own opinion after my own experiences, and they will probably not be popular opinions but I am being as sincere as I can. The Catholic church particularly was standing against the role of a positive image of women created the ambiguous position where women would either be considered a madona like figure or that of a prostitute like Mary Magledene. We have no medium line in that to be just women.
I was recently in Amazon where I was in the jungle in the rainforest with the various tribes. It was ten-hour drive from the town through a dirt track into the jungle and it was for the call of Chief Ranie to talk about the climate and the catastrophe that is happening in the Amazon with mining, logging, and unlawful land grabbing. Villages are being burnt out. Many tribes who have never been contacted by the white man before are affected. There were 17 different tribes whose leaders were brought together and some of those leaders were women because they believe in the value of mother earth and their supermarket is the rainforest. Everything they need from their medicinal herbs to their food and their water comes from the rainforest.
So when we go and poison their rivers through hydroelectricity and mining the fish die so they can’t feed themselves they see this problem as one where mother earth is being attacked.
I noticed that many women in positions of leadership were just as confident in speaking and at the forefront of this political debate. It is no less than a political debate and for them, it is a war because they are being killed and disappeared and there are people who are being internally displaced and for them, it is a war that costs life. Her death is coming through huge trucks filled with gmo grain and gmo fertilizer. So, the divine family is being attacked for them.
We have seen enough blood in our lives already. We do not hunger for war, so we do not feed into the war machine which creates a mechanism for that. Very sadly many of us are fathers, brothers, sons, uncles, and siblings involved with war. Women are the ones who mop up afterward and grieve and continue to keep the home going and to keep the faith alive as is the prime example of Zainab.
In Ireland, we have unfortunately been disturbed in the very bedrock of our faith with this issue of clerical abuse initially when the free state was born from 1916 to 1922 the government in partnership with the Catholic church went into the cities. The British soldiers would come to red-light districts and an underworld was created where prostitution was the thing. Women in a co-operative would raise children and they would be educated and then they would move on and send money back to their families.
And what happened was that the state and the Catholic Church went into these areas, shut them down and arrested the women, and put them into institutions to work for the state. They worked for decades, they never received any payment themselves, and almost like the Nazi war machine they were contained. The children were put into homes and by the time they were six or seven years old, they were farmed out to work in farm labour in the countryside. They continued in institutions throughout their lives until they became criminals and went back into the justice system and into prisons.
We say that men have sex and women have babies and that is a fact of life. In Islam, there are provisions for women if there is a short marriage it is done through a grace that is given by the clergy. If there is an issue from that marriage and the couple hasn’t stayed together the man has to allow for the woman and the child to be taken care of. We don’t have that in Christianity.
There is this demonism of women where up until the 1800s women were burnt at the stake. Wise women were considered a lean on the resources. They used medicinal herbs to help people rather than going to the clergy and they were considered a threat to the framework of society that had been built by the Catholic church. These are frameworks that are built to contain people and to keep them within a framework of discipline which I understand.
I visited Kerbala. In Ireland, we pick up this issue with the Catholic Church. People have been dispossessed of their faith because we were not encouraged to read the bible as we have been encouraged to read the Quran. We did not have that to comfort ourselves with. Everything went through the Catholic clergy.
So, we did not have the ability to nurture ourselves with God on our side the way that you did. So, in our disappointment and our hurt, this feeling of dispossession people have abandoned going to mass. They have abandoned having anything to do with weekly devotion to God through Sunday mass. They may go to have their children baptised because that is what is considered just, they may go to mass at Christmas or at Easter but apart from that they really don’t have anything to do with the Catholic church.
So, if you go into a Catholic church you see elderly people who have the capacity to understand that faith is greater than owning the church and they are devoted and continue going for the solace it gives them. Ireland is bereft of the sanctuary. People feel so bereft of the church that they don’t feel welcome in the place of traditional worship.
Islam is a lively living faith. It is not dying. There is a rejuvenation that we can see. One of the unfortunate things that we see is the rise of the far right with people who are fuelling sectarianism. They are fuelling division in local neighbourhoods and smaller villages where the people are not necessarily well educated or have not travelled so they do not see the wider world. That is causing big problems in our society.
However, going to Kerbala reinspired me in continuing to have my faith in humanity. I heard Imam Hussein’s call after 1400 years and I was blessed to attend the pilgrimage for A s
Arbeen in 2018 and again in 2019. I am so honoured that I have been there already twice this year. It is such great food for the soul to witness humanity being kind and being generous with each other and taking away all the hierarchy when someone dresses in their white collar and tie and somebody else wears their workman’s clothes with their sleeves rolled up for their work. All of that is taken away in Kerbala and raw humanity is to be seen there.
As women we see the women of Kerbala and what happened directly afterward and the heinous experiences of the women and children who were driven all the way to Syria in a caravan and the experiences they had at Yazid’s court going through the villages and being spat on. They were chained to each other with chains around their necks so if you stumbled the person behind you would also stumble and perhaps be choked. This gave me incredible inspiration, so I wrote a poem for Zainab after my experience in Kerbala.
Another lament for Zainab:
I see you, Zainab
I see you weeping and clutching your hands.
I see how you carry yourself with honour.
I see you pray in silence and I see you praying aloud
Your lips form the words as they pour out of your heart.
I see your face turned upwards towards Allah in the heat
I see your brothers’ blood like rivers on their skin and under their nails dust on their beards and their savagely severed heads.
My stomach turns at the horror.
I wish you could recall happier times when you were all young together playing and splashing each other as you swam under the same sun in the same Euphrates that inaccessible river.
Did Abbas have long hair then when you were children?
I see your brother the most noble of men a shining exemplar to others.
Through their discipline and code of conduct taught dignity and integrity by their actions.
Oh Zainab you did not learn of violence from your kinsmen, no.
Your grandfather was not a brutal man, how could he have been?
He was obviously respectful and compassionate towards women.
He had Khadija really the mother of Islam as his partner for life.
She was all he knew of women without a mother of his own an orphan all he learned of comfort and love and affection he learned from her tenderness.
He loved her as the tide loves the beach.
Zainab, you are directly from that love
Your family must have been your world
How did you not collapse from that catastrophe
And to witness this catastrophe how did you not collapse?
How did you manage to comfort your children when all your heroes were lost?
How did you muster the strength to walk in those chains shackled to the children and the remaining women, knowing that if you stooped or stumbled in your struggle you risked the child being teetered to you being strangled by their own noose?
Your captors devised how best to hurt.
My mind is shocked by those things
How the golden earrings were ripped out of Sakina’s little ears
Tearing her skin and making her bleed.
He beat her.
I know that she ran out onto the battlefield through the dust as she fled from the terror of the tents
Being torched behind her. She screamed for her baba.
Alas Zainab you found her crouched over the decapitated corpse of her father, her head against his battered and bloodied chest, gouges of foot prints dug into him from where he was trampled and his ruined body punctured by a hail of arrows.
How can I write anything that could comfort you?
Your pain Zainab it echoes down the annuals of time through generations.
Your mighty pain. I see the grief almost 1500 years ahead of you. I am looking back at you through the mists of time and I see your suffering.
My heart aches for little Rukayya, poor child. Woe to those who tricked her with a gift box containing her father’s bloody severed head. Contemptable persecutors, shame on them.
Did you catch her as she fell dead from shock and grief finally her tidy body was exhausted, surrendering to God and escaping to be with her beloved father?
Was the mocking relentless as they paraded you through the villages on that march to Yazid’s liar in Damascus?
Were you spat at and jostled?
How did you find the strength to comfort the other captives?
Rumour has it that one of the women miscarried her child in the dust and you helped her to gather her wits to keep moving while she bled.
Were you relieved when the Christian monk in Aleppo paid a ransom for your brother’s head to wash his hair and clean the blood from his face?
Was it a comfort that the head of your Hussein was in careful hands.
You were truly the victor.
It was you who turned the tide of history against Yazid.
It as you and your legitimacy.
I know what you said to him when you raised your chin and struck him the force of your words.
Your sermon is legendary.
Surely Zainab you stood with composure and dignity
White-lipped with rage all thirst forgotten as you condemned him to the wrath of God.
Zainab of sorrows, how wrong that the holy family were so badly treated, the insults, the humiliation that Yazid and his henchmen sought to inflict has turned on their own heads and certain justice will be meted to them without mercy when the welcome day of judgment comes.
Dear Zainab, God made perfect work in you.
No woman in history is more deserving of your sacrifice and commemoration.
It is my privilege to set my feet on the path you trod on your return from captivity in Damascus.
Precious Zainab perhaps you will not recognise me when we meet at jenah but I will watch for you with the heavy expectation to greet you on the other side.
No more can they further humiliate you, no more can they hurl insults and mock your pain.
You are the one who is victorious Zainab, you are the one who is best remembered as beloved.
Your heroism conveys the divine message of your grandfather, your father and your brothers despite the stain of tears bright on your lips.
I see you Zainab, you hero of Kerbala. I wear a green ribbon for you.
*Dr. Rebecca Masterton: is a lecturer in Islamic Studies and is currently director of Online Shi‘a Studies, having taught at Birkbeck College and the Islamic College. She converted to Islam in 1999 and obtained her doctorate in the francophone and Islamic literature of West Africa from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in 2006. Her articles are available on Academia.edu and she has published two books Shi’i spirituality for the 21st century and: Passing Through the Dream. She has been an anchor presenter for various media including Sahar TV, Hadi TV, Press TV and Ahlulbayt TV.
**Sakina Datoo is an experienced journalist in both print and broadcast media. She has led small and large teams of media personnel and managed various different media outlets in Tanzania and the UK. Sakina is an award-winning writer, celebrated newspaper editor with many years of TV production experience and expertise. She holds BA Journalism from Edinburgh Napier University. She took further studies at the University of Westminster and University of Missouri-Columbia. Sakin speaks five languages and is described as “an excellent interviewer”.
