3
Reviewing Beginnings
Arab writers are disentangling language, blood, ethnicity,
religion, and gender, and they are demonstrating that the
apparently natural connections between them are in fact
constructed and contingent. There is no fixed, essential
center that would mark the core of a single, foundational
identity. Throughout the twentieth century there has
been much talk of identity: losing identity to imposed
cultures and their values; uncovering lost identity;
regaining
authentic
identity;
asserting identity
as
member of a disadvantaged group; identity politics. In
each case, identity is tied to birth, to place, to language,
to community, to religion, and to gender. Identity
confers rights. Identity takes rights away. But what is this
singular, unified identity? If identity is the recognition of
sameness with some and difference from others, then we
have many identities. To retain a sense of wholeness, we
usually assert only one of many possible identities, the
one that gives authority at the moment of its assertion.
This speaking position is not an identity, but rather an
ascribed or chosen identification.
Most recently, religious identification has taken on
political significance in postcolonial Arab countries.
Social, economic, military, and political failures have
galvanized reactionary, religious responses to Western
domination, globalization, and the corrupt values they
are thought to be spreading. Islamist groups from
Morocco to Bahrain are calling for an Islamic state,
within which they will reestablish what they consider to
be Islamically sanctioned gender relations. What they are
calling for is a jihad, understood as the individual-
collective struggle within the Muslim society, which,
even if it does not connote military war, does suggest the
conditions pertaining to war. In other words, to be in a
state of jihad is to be in a war-like state of emergency that
demands a suspension of norms and the improvisation
of new rules of conduct. As in times of war, these
emergency conditions open up the possibility for
changing expectations connected with women’s roles and
rights.
As we shall see in the next chapter, Zaynab al-Ghazali
declared her right to participate in jihad. The Saudi
preacher Fatima Naseef goes further to claim this right
on behalf of all Muslim women. She dedicates a section
in her chapter on women’s political rights to the “Right
to Participate in Jihad.” Quoting from the Qur’an, 2:216,
she writes: “Fighting is decreed for you, much as you
dislike it.” Naseef ranks jihad as next in importance to
the five pillars of Islam (Naseef 1999:152). She quotes a
tradition taken from the Prophet’s wife Aisha stating that
although jihad for women may be “without fighting,” it
remains jihad. Indeed, in a case where infidels invade a
Muslim country, “all the inhabitants of this country
should go out and fight the enemy. In this situation, it is
unlawful for anyone to refrain from fighting” (153).
Further, during these exceptional times women can act
without their husbands’ permission, as may “the child
