Conceiving Identities: Maternity in Medieval Muslim Discourse and Practice

Notes

253 Notes Introduction 1. The works of al‑Jāḥiẓ are significant for this study because of his obsessive interest in developing an overarching system to explain both natural and social phenomena. For Jāḥiẓ, instructions from and insight into God and human behavior come from critical contemplation of the natural world. As a Muʿtazilite, Jāḥiẓ believed that wisdom is present in all of God’s creation through moral reason. Explanations for human action and, more generally, why the world is as it is become apparent through his many writings. For an extended analysis on the life of Jāḥiẓ and the significance of his work, see Tarif Khalidi’s Arab Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 104–107. 2. Abū ʿUthmān ʿAmr ibn Baḥr al‑Jāḥiẓ (d. 869 CE), “Chance or Creation”? God’s Design in the Universe, trans. M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (Reading, Berks.: Garnet Publishing, 1995), 76. Not all scholars view this work as a legitimate work of Jāḥiẓ; however, whoever the actual author, the text represents a particular position or opinion that characterizes the thinking about these very human issues during the medieval period. 3. Ibid., 72. 4. Ibid., 80. 5. Ibid., 81. 6. The name “Jāḥiẓ” itself means “pop-eyed,” which suggests he suffered from a severe form of eye disease. Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al‑Damīrī (d. 1405 CE) notes that Jāḥiẓ was attacked with hemiplegia towards the end of his life, which left one half of his body numb (Ḥayāt al‑ḥayawān al‑kubrá, vol. 2 [Qum: Manshūrāt al‑raḍī, 1985], 248). 7. In Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (New York: Routledge, 2009), Lisa Baraitser describes the maternal body as both “singular and multiple”; it disturbs notions of both unity and the bounded self (22). 8. See, for example, Nancy Chodorow, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 6. 9. Carol Delaney, The Seed and the Soil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 27. 10. According to a national survey conducted in 2003, male academics outrank females 62 percent to 38 percent (“Faculty Diversity in Higher 254 Notes to Introduction Education,” Rutgers: Institute for Women’s Leadership). In 2001, 33.9 percent of MESA full members were women (A. H. Betteridge, “A Case Study in Higher Education International and Foreign Area Needs: Middle Eastern Studies Association Membership from 1990–2002,” Global Challenges and US Higher Education Conference, Duke University, January 2003). 11. Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic revival,” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2: 205. 12. For a discussion about “instabilities” in the Book of Genesis, and the potential readings they produce, see Ken Stone, “The Garden of Eden and the Heterosexual Contract,” in Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler, ed. Ellen T. Armour and Susan M. St. Ville (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 50. 13. Or, as Nancy Chodorow articulates it, this study seeks to analyze “an open web of social, psychological relations, dynamics, practices, identities, beliefs” to comprehend “relations of gender and sexuality not immediately comprehended in terms of hierarchy, domination, or inequality or by concepts like patriarchy, male dominance, or the law of the father” (5). 14. See, for example, Delaney, The Seed and the Soil, 16, and Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 4. 15. Lynda Birke, “Bodies and Biology,” in Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, ed. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 44–45. 16. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 25. 17. Stone describes this phenomenon in the biblical context (54). See also Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 237. 18. Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 135ff. 19. Muslim ibn al‑Ḥajjāj al‑Qushayrī (d. 875 CE), Jāmiʿ al‑ṣaḥīḥ, vol. 6 (Beirut: Dār al‑iḥyāʾ al-turāth, 1956–1972), 176. See also Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ḥanbal (d. 855 CE), Musnad, vol. 3 (Cairo: Al‑Maṭbaʿa al‑maymanīya, 1895), 106. 20. This innate relationship has been referred to as the “heterosexual presumption,” a term coined by Teresa de Lauretis, “The Female Body and Heterosexual Presumption,” Semiotica 67, no...