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Chapter Five THE FEMININE The question of the status of women in Islam has been at the forefront of most discussions of that religion in the last decades. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that it has become a kind of cultural symbol of the deep civilizational chasm that is deemed by many to have widened between Islam and the West. The pervasive Western perception that Islam condones a social subordination of women, and further legitimizes their overall oppression, is no doubt the primary factor, together with the question of the religious use of violence, in the deep-seated unease of most non-Muslims vis-à-vis the religion brought by the Prophet Muhammad. It is on this point that the Western and modern consciousness appears to be the most focused, and it is upon these grounds that the Western understanding of Islam as a religion incompatible with modern values and as an obsolete witness of archaic stages of development thrives. Our intention is not to assess the validity or the limits of such perceptions against the background of the complex and often disconcerting stage of contemporary Islam. There is no doubt that such visions cannot but be founded on certain painful or uncomfortable realities; the real question is that of their overall representativeness and normativity and, above all, their consonance or lack thereof, with the tenets and injunctions of Islam as founded in the Qur’ān, the Sunnah, and the consensus of believers. The other no less important question is that of the normativity of Western discourses in such matters, and the philosophical, not to say metaphysical, premises upon which these discourses are predicated. These questions, as against more immediate ones having to do with the social, economic, juridical , and political dimensions of women’s status and conditions in Islam, are not the purview of this study. One may well wonder, therefore, what can be the relevance of “inner Islam” to such acute and sensitive matters. The following pages will in fact be an indirect response to this question, at least in so far as they will help reframe within a much wider and deeper philosophical context the specific problems of women’s identity and function in the spiritual and human economy of Islam. 104 PATHWAYS TO AN INNER ISLAM The fundamental affinity of inner Islam with the domain of feminine reality is already apparent in Louis Massignon’s work. Let us say that it first emerges from a meditation on the relationship between self-awareness and destiny. Massignon’s spiritual crisis of 1908 had no doubt played an important role in the unfolding of this crucial consciousness of the intimate nexus between what is received and conceived inwardly and what is given or expressed outwardly. This concept is made manifest in a spiritual duality that contrasts the domain of external duties with that of inner vocation. These two poles are epitomized by the complementary notions of vow and oath. Here is the most concise and substantial summary of this polarity to be found in Massignon ’s work: The ultimate personality of each witness, coming from within, is his vocation, from outside, his destiny; it is expressed from within by the vow, it is imprinted outside by the oath. The vow is feminine sacralization, the oath is masculine ordination. The vow remains open to the unexpected, the oath closes itself on a legal (sacrificial) sanction.1 As for destiny, it is the “gradual emergence of the secret vow through one’s public life.” The introduction of two terms defining the “witnessing” personality runs parallel to the consideration of two worlds, which remain distinct in their very mingling, that of the law, which is the purview of masculine outward engagement and definition, and that of the inner conception , which is the realm of feminine inward consecration and inspiration . The relationship between vow and conception has an essential bearing upon Massignon’s understanding of the feminine. Conception, the exemplar of which is the fiat of Mary, consists in the acceptance of an other within oneself, another that determines one’s being in a purely private, secret, but essential way. This is a feminine prerogative the manifestation of which Massignon has illustrated through the examples of female figures such as the Virgin Mary, Fātima, and perhaps surprisingly to many, Marie-Antoinette. Woman is the priestess of hospitality, not only in the outward sense of a homemaker, but also and above all on the...

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