From memory I think the word hysteria comes from either a Greek or Latin word meaning womb (Please correct me if I'm wrong). Therefore hysteria is seen as being specifically female, our biology supposedly making us prone to emotional excesses. In nineteenth century England, Hysteria was a considered a common mental disorder but contemporary evaluations of women affected in such a way would suggest that they were just victims of a patriarchal culture. Bored and maligned and given no voice or means of personal expression, they went "crazy". So we have two arguments, the traditional being that it was their biology that made them act that way, the second being that it was their unfortunate circumstances. Which is correct?
In the past I dismissed the biology argument as @#$%. When I came across Islamic sources interpreted using this logic, I was not surprised as I was already aware of such thinking in Western thought, why wouldn't it be a cross-cultural phenomenon? What better way for men to put women down than by saying that we are innately stupid and crazy? Once such a premise has been established everything we say can be dismissed as being irrational and not having a basis in logical thought.
How then do we approach certain base sources that appear to adhere to this line of reasoning? It is one thing to say that it is a matter of interpretation and that the source has been taken out of context. But what if even when considered in context, the source still suggests something that we find unpalatable? One response is to deny it, another is to put it aside and say to yourself that you'll deal with it later.
Suroor's recent post at http://achelois.wordpress.com/2007/01/08/women-the-fitnah-are-dwellers-of-hell/
discusses the following hadith
Abu Said al-Khudri narrated: Once Allah’s Apostle went out to the Musalla (to offer the prayer) on ‘Id-al-Adha or al-Fitr prayer. Then he passed by the women and said, “O women! Give alms, as I have seen that the majority of the dwellers of Hell-fire were you (women).” They asked, “Why is it so, O Allah’s Apostle?” He replied, “You curse frequently and are ungrateful to your husbands. I have not seen anyone more deficient in intelligence and religion than you. A cautious sensible man could be led astray by some of you.” The women asked, “O Allah’s Apostle! What is deficient in our intelligence and religion?” He said, “Is not the evidence of two women equal to the witness of one man?” They replied in the affirmative. He said, “This is the deficiency in her intelligence. Isn’t it true that a woman can neither pray nor fast during her menses?” The women replied in the affirmative. He said, “This is the deficiency in her religion.” (Bukhari 1.301).
When I first converted to Islam, this hadith bothered me greatly, I could not reconcile it's seemingly misogynist sentiment with the character of the Prophet. He was such a great champion of women's rights, why would he say something like this? So I put it aside and focused on what was more immediately important such as fostering my understanding of tawhid.
Things cannot remain buried forever, however, this hadith kept popping its head up every now and then in different forms forcing me to try and understand what it really means. Over time I have found that I actually find value in it, how can this be? Could it be that I am actually starting to subscribe to the "biology" argument? Or perhaps I have internalized Islamic patriarchy to such an extent that I am now its' willing victim? What has happened?
My conversion to Islam was followed six months later by my marriage. One year after this, I had my first child. In four and a half years of marriage, I have spent twenty seven months pregnant and thirty one months lactating and feeding. I am not advertising my credentials for being a good breeder but rather acknowledging that since my marriage, I have learned first hand, the impact that our bodies can have on us. Yes, as modern women, we can control our reproductive systems to a certain extent, that is we can "plan" our pregnancies (knowing that it ultimately rests with Allah), but we cannot control the effects of pregnancy once it has occurred. And for most women living in traditional societies, even "planning" is impossible. The Prophet was addressing women from such a society.
It is usually understood that what is meant by saying that women are "deficient in intelligence" means not that we are less smart than men but that our intelligence is sometimes clouded by our emotions. Now this is of course true of men also but men are not subject to the same biological factors as women in traditional societies are, year after year. Oh dear, back to that again!WHY? Because it was with shock that I discovered what is is like to be at the mercy of ones body. During my last pregnancy I realised that my behaviour at times bordered on that undesired hysteria. This horrified me. Always known as the calm and peaceful one (my mother calls me 'her serene highness'!) why did I becoming a neurotic harpee? I felt like a blackboard that someone was continually scratching their fingers down! My husband felt that he was in a war zone!
These feelings raised really important questions for me. Firstly, I had to reassess my assumptions that the biology argument was #@!! as I was experiencing first hand the power that hormones have to disrupt your usual life. I realised that I had to acknowledge that I am not just a mind suspended in space but rather my mind is biological. I am a creature and Allah swt has made me in a particular way. Was I at fault then, for my excesses of behaviour, my over-reations? Allahu Alim, if my responses were purely physiological then probably not, we are not blamed for that which we cannot control. We know that the mentally ill person who loses their focus on Allah swt will not go to Jahannum. Allah is the most Just. But I was not suffering from fully fledged crazyness just a little hormonal imbalance, so where were the boundaries of personal responsibilty?How can one know the intricate workings of ones molecules?! How do we know when it is just our blindly straying nafs charging forth into unchartered territories?
Quite simply, we cannot know, for such knowledge is only with Allah. What we can and must do however, is maintain an awareness of our physiology. I am not in any way advocating reducing everything to biology. Allah subhana wa ta'ala gave humans personal choice and determination of actions. This is what distinguishes us from the rest of creation. It is both a great blessing and an enormous burden. It is something we cannot ignore. If we know that we have a tendency towards a certain type of behaviour that is harmful to us, then we must try and reign it in,we must always keep sight of this personal responsiblity for actions and part of this responsibility is having an awareness of one's own nature.
Emotions are particularly confusing. What begins by hormonal prompting often ends up as a wildly raging ego, we are not to blame for the prompt, we are most certainly to blame for the ugliness of an ego in action. So now when I think about the above hadith, I think perhaps this is what the Prophet pbuh was alluding to. He was after all addressing a group of women, it was a message meant for them. It is unfortunate that men have used his words to claim the inherent inferiority of women, how they can do this and see it as fitting the rest of the Islamic message and the Sunnah, I don't know. There is so much to support the opposite of this view.
The words of the hadith are very direct however and I have not addressed them directly. I am just speaking about a feeling that I get from the hadith, there is nothing scholarly about my musings and they may make no sense to anyone other than me! To accept that biology plays a role in our lives may not be PC but my own experience has taught me that I cannot ignore it. Accepting this though is very different from biological reductionism. We have a tendency to oversimplify things, if I accept that part of my 'femaleness' is dictated by my biology, I lead myself to being accused of such reductionism. But instead, I think that we need to find a middle ground, that we accept the role that biology plays on our lives but that we see it in balance with the sociological and spiritual factors that are also present.
The hadith in discussion is often used by those who want to attribute EVERYTHING to biology, those who see only the negative possibilities of 'femaleness'. I have no background in Women's Studies, this is not an area that I can discuss with any authority but it is an area that fascinates me. I disagree wholeheartedly with the way the hadith has been used against women, but I feel that it may have a positive message that has been ignored. That is, it doesn't have to come across as putting women down. We may have the words that were spoken, but we don't have the tone of voice in which they were cloaked, we cannot see the Prophets facial expressions as he uttered them. I have a feeling that this hadith was not meant for men at all but was simply a teasing warning for women to be on their guard, to keep on top of the negative (i specify negative because we know that there are also many positive!) possibilities of their biology.
In all of this talk however, we cannot forget that men are biological creatures also. Do they not also have a reponsibility to be aware of their natures? I have been thinking about this a lot lately. Regardless of whether it is nature or socially constructed it is a fact that many men are not adept at communicating when the discussion revolves around emotion. Frequently in my pregnancy I would dissolve into tears and my husband would say 'what do you want me to do?' I didn't want him to do anything, I wanted him to understand.He couldn't, but at least he could empathize, but this required prompting. Without the prompts I was likely to start beating the walls with my fists (almost:)) and such feelings made me feel strongly for those hysterical women of the Victorian era, a great deal of their illnesses were a result of the complete lack of interest and understanding by the men in their lives. So there is a necessity to communicate and when communication fails just accept and love each other and steer each other in the right direction with kindness and empathy. Too often a man's pride and stubbornness can push a woman over the edge. The accountability lies with both.
Our minds and bodies are the same and not the same, what we cannot deny is that our mind is connected to our body and therefore influenced by it. Modern life has allowed many of us to escape it's influence to a certain extent. The hadith in discussion has nowhere near as much relevance to a woman living in one of the big cities of the Western world as it did to the women to whom it was directed. Nevertheless, wherever and whenever we live we will remain human and we can only be the way we were made. Our societies and lifestyles may affect the extent to which we notice our biological make-up, but we must always accept that we are biological beings.
The way we label ourselves however, is of our own making. To designate hysteria to women is wrong and therefore I dislike the word. One of it's definitions is 'exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion or excitement'[Oxford English Dictionary]. Men are just as likely to engage in such behaviour, it's just more likely to be accepted. For example violence may be frowned upon, but a man's sanity will not be questioned, whereas if a woman starts screaming excessively (another means of expressing nervous energy) she will be deemed to have temporarily lost her mind).
Both types of behaviour usually stem from a sense of powerlessness and an inability to overcome an immediate obstacle. The fact that this behaviour was seen to be compounded in women was more to do with their lack of agency than their having wombs. If power was taken away from men, perhaps they would become a bit more agitated and we'd have to coin the term testosteria!
Before it seems like I've totally lost the plot, I'll summarize what I'm trying to say. Emotional "disturbances"are not specific to women. The ways in which we express emotion are often culturally defined, that is, the "type"of emotions we have may be impacted upon by our socialization and considered acceptable forms of expression.Nevertheless there is also a biological factor, our bodies DO influence our mental states. They are not all we are, but they are an undeniable part of us. As women, we can find that our emotions are affected by the functioning of our bodies (whether this makes us more emotional than men is another discussion entirely). As Muslims we accepted the role of khalifa, to effectively uphold this role we need to rise above our biological natures, but the only way in which we can do this is by accepting them and knowing what they are. Perhaps this hadith was just a means of reminding the women to not be deceived by their nafs, to be aware of one thing in their lives that could influence them negatively.
Allahu Alam. What I have realised is that although I will never really know if the hadith is truly authentic (as Suroor pointed out our early scholars were not infallible), I do know that being a woman is not a complete cultural construction. Motherhood and childbearing and simply remaining fertile affect the way that I feel and act. This impacts me positively and negatively. What I want to try and ensure is that it impacts those around me ONLY positively, or at least most of the time anyway. I don't want to fall prey to my ego even if it is set off by my hormones, because I know that to fall for it is to fall from Allahs swt grace, to feel the coldness of seperation and ultimately to risk Jahannum, whatever Jahannum may be. Ya Rabb, please keep me alert and still my mind.
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12 comments:
I've been meaning to post up some comments on this hadeeth for Suroor from a class I took that discussed it but haven't gotten around to it yet but one thing to keep in mind is that the Prophet sal Allahu alayhi wa sallam never said these exact words, he didn't speak English so this is the interpretation of the translator and a very poor rendering of it at that.
Haven't we all read something translated into English from Arabic that had very poor word choice all the while thinking we could have done a better job refining it? One of our teachers, a shaykh provided a translation which he believes is closer to the Arabic meaning and spirit of the hadeeth and that reading has none of the misogynic or mocking connotations that the more frequently quoted one does. The same arabic but better English.
Salams, this is a problem we always face as non-Arabic speakers but it's even more complicated and has to do with understanding the connotations of the words used in exactly the same way as they would have been understood at the time of the Prophet.
I recently read two translations of the same paragraph from a work by Ibn Arabi, one by William Chittick and the other by Nuh Ha Mim Keller, the meaning was different in both, totally different, one suggesting the author promoted the idea of religious plurality, the other saying he didn't, maybe i'll post about it.
This is what makes me frustrated about people thinking that everything in religion is so fixed. How can it be when our understanding is centred around language and language is not fixed?
This post doesn't make very much sense, i'm trying to wrap my head around some things and i haven't quite got there! Sorry it's so incoherent, if Muslim Apple hadn't already commented i'd delete it!
Feel free to delete.
ok so i deleted this and then kept it as a draft and now I've put it back for you Al-Maraya! I just felt that it sounded very confused and didn't make much sense, because that's the way i feel about this issue i guess. i have moments of clarity and then it is gone!
Thank you, sister! There was so much in this post that I wanted to discuss with you and when I returned to find it gone, I wanted to kick myself in the fanny for not having responded immediately when I saw it. My bum and I are both grateful. :)
For starters, your memory of the etymology of hysteria; its roots are in the Greek word for womb, later in the Latin (remember that those pesky Romans stole just about everything they could from the Greeks). The ancients established a connection between women and the moon, albeit in an entirely negative fashion. Menstrual cycles are lunar, and with menstrual cycles come temporary hormonal changes, and with surges in hormones come temporary personality changes in some women. It didn't take long before the ancients began to use the moon, in all its waxing and waning glory, as the symbol for all things feminine / female while the sun, ever fixed and constant, became the masculine / male symbol.
I think there is a great deal of significance in the symbols to the biology vs. patriarchy argument that you make in your post. Although one might argue that the moon's phases and changes are a sign of inherent weakness because of the implication of inconstancy, this argument overlooks one key point: the phases are of the moon are constant and predictable. While there are changes, they are temporary; the moon always returns to her original state before the cycle repeats itself. What does this mean for women? I would argue that it means that a woman can adapt to change fairly easily, can negotiate her way through thick and thin (pardon the pun) yet remain true to herself in the end, for regardless of the changes she experiences, she retains her center. Unfortunately in a cultural context and in terms of the patriarchy, too much attention has been paid to the changes of the moon's phases and its tie to a woman's menstrual cycle.
The sun, or the masculine, on the other hand, remains steady and fixed -- unyielding, unchanging, unbending. While steadfastness might seem entirely positive on the surface, it also offers an explanation for so much of the trouble in the world. An unwillingness to yield, change, bend, see things from a different perspective, or, dare I say, stop and ask for directions when lost, has been at the root of nearly all conflicts since time began.
I say, give me some good old hysteria any day. In the end, just as the moon cleanses herself in a cyclical fashion so, too, does the female body and like the moon, the hysteria will pass and the center will return.
Insh'allah, I've made some semblance of sense.
Subhan Allah, what a wonderful response and i agree with you 100% i'll be back later, i have to wake up my kids or they wont sleep tonight!
Assalamu Alaikoum Sisters,
Al-Maraya, i love this symbolism, despite it's pagan roots! Before my childbearing days my cycle was in tune with the moons! i was like a wolf, howling when it was full (well not quite, but anyway!)
you know, the problem is that not enough attention is paid to the center returning, it is too easy to say that women are inconsistent and erratic without paying attention to the full circle (excuse the pun!).
Might I add however, that while the sun may appear to be steadfast, there are days when it's glare is brighter, sometimes it looms large on the horizon, other times it is just a spark in the distance! The issue is that IT sees itself as fixed and therefore there's no need to bend.
Something that I brought up in my post is that when we say that women 's emotions are influenced by biology, does this mean that we are more emotional than men? I'm not convinced by this. I know it says in Qu'ran that Allah created men and women differently, but this doesn't have to mean that we are so different that our experiences bear no connection. I would argue that we express our emotions differently (Allahu alim whether this is part of our biological makeup or if it is socially constructed behaviour) but that they are no less intense.
Suroor, you inspired this post obviously so thanks for commenting!
you said
Most Arab men are hysterical, not because there is some biological defect but because they are raised to show their emotions emphatically.
so true! in fact my own hysterical behaviour has only reared it's ugly head since living with my Arab husband, so pregnancy aside, it's his fault! I'm interested though, are Arab women raised to do the same? If so he should be able to deal with my outbursts!
I agree with your questions as I share them with you, I guess this is what makes me feel that the Prophet wasn't being 100% serious. As you know, the event occurred right before the men were going to fight jihad. I think that the exhortation to give alms was in reaction to this, not in reaction to women being 'deficient in religion and intelligence'. To me it seems like a teasing prompt to get them to give up their gold!
i mentioned on your blog that i sometimes struggle with my iman during my period and you responded saying that this was not an issue for you. Alhamdulillah I'm happy for you that you always maintain that closeness with Allah. God forgive me but I have a tendency to be forgetful, I get absorbed by my daily affairs, Salat is a blessing that wakes me up. It's not that I'm a robot on spiritual auto-pilot, i don't forget Allah forever when i'm not praying but the level of my iman does decrease if i don't try and stay on the ball by doing dhikr and just simply communicating with God in my own way. Isn't this why Allah prescribed the prayer for us? He knows our lazyness and tendency to forget.
i guess that i don't interpret this hadith as meaning that women really are deficient in religion, rather i see it as a gentle and joking warning to watch ourselves.
i think also that Allah gives us attributes that are useful and needed for some things but that may have a negative side also. There is obviously some kind of higher purpose in the negative side as well, because it is all part of Allahs plan. EG. As much as we say that a lot of emotions and behaviours are socially constructed, we also know that many are not. Studies have shown that women do think more with the side of the brain that controls emotion (forget which side it is!). And from watching my son run around smashing things when he was only twelve months old, i really think that men are more innately aggressive. And this makes sense, we need these qualities for our lives. Men are Protectors and women are Nurturers to an extent (but we shouldn't be limited to these roles).
I need to try and find hadith that are targeted towards men specifically and see if there's anything directing men to be careful about an aspect of their natures.
something i have wondered for a while though is that it is said that Aisha narrated thousands more hadith than were actually recorded. Does this mean that they weren't Sahih or is it that they paid attention to what they thought was important at the time? Perhaps if this is a teasing hadith and Allah knows not me, then maybe he teased the men in similiar ways and it just wasn't recorded.
To leave Islam I guess you'd have to lose faith that the Prophet was really a Prophet. For me, the odd hadith like this isn't enough to do that alhamdulillah. I'm about to post some things about hadiths that i think are important.
many Salams to you, i really enjoy reading your blog, thanks for providing material to think about!
i think i just want to believe that men are capable of being as emotionally intelligent as us! when i was at uni i had male friends who were pretty good, having been trained by their mothers from birth i think! possibly why i don't deal with the frantic arab male hand gestures and agro talk too well! If Arab women don't express their displeasure to men then it explains a lot to me. i am extremely up front and i express my displeasure all the time, alhamdulillah my frantic gesturer is learning that it's not such a big deal!
We were made to worship. Being too religious is only scary when it is fervour without intelligence and depth and you don't seem to fit that category!
I agree that the Prophet pbuh was a big supporter of women. Those who came after him may have been exceptionally pious but their thinking was constrained by their times, whereas the Prophet's thinking was not.
You mentioned something about enjoying your emotions through your blog. i think i need to do that a bit but for me i think it would be about control, about owning my feelings rather than letting them own me, or at least turning things around and viewing the intensity of emotions as positive. i think we are taught to suppress a lot.
Jamila, I think your last comment is quite important. And if you are married to an Arab, there's also the whole stigma of speaking (or in this case, writing) freely about your feelings and/or your life. Just another of those cultural gaps, I suppose. Interestingly enough, though, it is tied to the concept of male honor. . .
I've been thinking about the idea of male honour in white, middle class Western society and wondering how it expresses itself. i really can't think of examples, is this because i'm so much a part of the culture that i'm unable to observe it or is it that it's no longer such a big deal? So much is expressed through this concept in Arab culture, so much seems tied up with "controlling" women and women "controlling" themselves. But does looking at it from the outside mean that I cannot understand these structures properly?
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