In any case. A few weeks ago, one of my best friends from college published this excellent piece at altmuslimah on rape and women’s clothing, dismantling the oft-parroted myth (we’ve all heard it, whether from upset imams or wise aunties/uncles) that rape and sexual assault have something to do with how women dress: a myth that is, alas, not restricted to our community alone, but is really a textbook example of blaming-the-victim. It’s great that people like Altaf (and others!) are addressing this loud and clear, and judging by the number of Facebook shares/likes in my networks alone, her piece at altmuslimah has been immensely influential among the online reading public.

On that note, when posting a link to the article, a friend of mine raised the following question:

So here’s a thought: The Muslim reason for a woman covering herself is so that she can be modest and avert male desire (according to the Quran). If a full-body/face covering does NOT save a woman from rape, much less averting male desire….then what is the point of wearing a hijab/head scarf from Islam’s perspective?

This may be in some sense the very essence of “the hijab problem” that continues to confuse all kinds of people, especially Westerners but also Muslims themselves. But it’s also a legitimate question, one that is however not so easy to answer. Let me just reiterate, with a few slight modifications, the couple of comments I wrote then in response:

While that, i.e. modesty, has indeed become the conventional rationale, it is also one that is arguably somewhat inaccurate (note though that rape and desire are NOT on a continuum–precisely the point of Altaf’s article). But this inaccuracy has more to do with the history of gender and the body (i.e. the shifting social configurations of male and female between the pre-modern to the modern), than with the Qur’an per se. One key to solve this problem is to examine why in classical Islamic law, certain “women” were forbidden to veil while others were required to do so. There’s a paper that pursues precisely this analysis and offers I think the best explanation so far in terms of social and legal history–I’m referring to this article.

Note however that especially from an anthropological point of view, it is sort of meaningless to ask what Islam says about this or that (which is like the perennial question these days), because “Islam” is not an actual entity that exists in reality. Rather it is the texts or people that speak.

I realize that I ignored above my own appeal to anthropology, because from that perspective, it shouldn’t really even matter what the text/law says but rather the voices of people themselves. Perhaps there are as many “reasons” to veil as there are women who do, even though I think a notion of piety is important and undercuts all of them. So the question is as complex as if we were to ask, why do we dress?

But to get back to the history (after all, my thing), basically it seems that in the classical Islamic legal conception, the point of veiling was not modesty in the sense of protection from male desire per se (even though jusrists did actually make this argument), but rather modesty in the sense of propriety and guarding social reputation, etc and to distinguish between respectable–what in Bengali we would call bhodro–women from “common” ones. Of course, this isn’t unique to Arab/Muslim history at all, as there’s evidence for veiling being practiced in most ancient Near Eastern traditions (including Judaism and Early Christianity) as well as as the Eastern Roman Empire i.e. the Byzantines. So for example, almost no traditional icon of the Virgin Mary shows her without a headscarf.

Now, the reason I was referring to gender history: the basic principle is that ideas about, or even who counts as, male or female are not the same in every time/place. Modernity erased a lot of social hierarchies that used to be there, such as noble/common, free/slave, etc. This has specific implications for the veil in Islamic law, but I don’t really need to get into that right now :)

That’s as far as I got then, but it’s probably important to clarify what specific legal implications I’m alluding to above: basically, what to do about the fact that pre-modern jurists considered the `awra (“shame zone,” or “private parts”) of legally un-free women to be different from and more limited than that of free women, and indeed the same as that of men, i.e. from the navel to the knee! This precisely is the point of departure for the academic paper I cite above; but also, this strongly suggests that what we mean when we say “women” is not necessarily the same as what Muslims back in the day would have meant, hence my reference above to a sort of constructionist principle of gender history. Of course, like it or not, what we’re really doing here is to open a can of worms that include such immensely complex problems as what us full-time nerds call “the history of the body,” as well as the very basic analytic categories of “sex,” “gender,” etc.

In the final analysis, then, the prerogative of autobiography consists in this: that it shows us not the objective stages of a career–to discern these is the task of the historian–but that it reveals instead the effort of a creator to give the meaning to his own mythic tale. Every man is the first witness to himself; yet the testimony that he thus produces constitutes no ultimate, conclusive authority–not only because objective scrutiny will always discover inaccuracies but much more because there is never an end to this dialogue of a life with itself in search of its own absolute. Here every man is for himself the existential stakes in a gamble that cannot be entirely lost nor entirely won. Artistic creation is a struggle with the angel, in which the creator is the more certain of being vanquished since the opponent is still himself. He wrestles with his shadow, certain only of never laying hold of it. (p. 48, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical)

These are the closing words of Georges Gusdorf’s now-classic 1956 essay on autobiography (“Conditions et limites de l’autobiographie”)–which James Olney, a leading scholar in the field of autobiography studies, characterizes thus: “[I]t is only with Gusdorf’s essay…that all the questions and concerns–philosophical, psychological, literary, and more generally humanistic–that have preoccupied students of autobiography from 1956 to 1978 were first fully and clearly laid out and given comprehensive and brilliant, if necessarily brief, consideration” (p. 9, ibid.).

Gusdorf’s most potent idea, one that I think remains foremost in theories of autobiography, is about how a life-narrative constitutes a definitive moment in that life itself: “Any autobiography is a moment of the life that it recounts: it struggles to draw the meaning from that life, but is itself a meaning in the life. One part of the whole claims to reflect the whole, but it adds something to this whole of which it constitutes a moment” (p. 43).

It may have had to do with the fact that while reading the following passage, and before reaching K.’s hilarious punchline, I was thinking of the most recent of my own encounters with the Bureaucracy, with stories of which I have bored many a friend in the past. Earlier this summer, soon after I got home, I learned that I could no longer travel on my current passport, since it’s now only valid for less than six months. So I had to get a new one, better yet, a machine-readable one, now that the government has finally started issuing these after missing several international deadlines over the past decade or so (Yay! We’re finally catching up with the rest of the world–when I guess they’re actually moving on, with biometric passports and whatnot). Anyways, since due to lack of technical resources they’re apparently still having to outsource production overseas (Yes, they make our nationality documents in another nation!), the process takes some time, and there was some concern I might not have a new passport in hand before I had to get back…to my other home.

It turned out, however, that I was not even eligible to get one of these new passports, because in order for the system to accept a “print command” to issue one, it had to locate my identity on an electronic database that could verify my nationality. I am not sure why my already having a passport of said nationality does not do the same. Unfortunately, I do not exist on said database because I have neither a National (Voter) ID card, because I happened to be abroad last election season, nor a National Birth Certificate, because…well, because I happen to have not been born in this country. So there you go: I was required to get a new passport, but could not get one of the old kind because they’re now issuing the new kind, but I could not get one, because my current passport of the old kind was not enough to prove that I deserved a new one of whatever kind as a citizen of the nation. How I got out of this paradoxical situation is a matter of details that we can skip; suffice it to say that I thankfully managed both to get a new, temporary one of the old kind, as well as to apply for an ID card and thereby register my existence with the nation.

Bengalis love their motherland. They also love to complain. I hope Franz will posthumously accept my apologies for co-opting his story to tell my own very Bengali one. Now onwards to Joseph K.’s situation:

“Nothing here is done without taking thought,” said the Superintendent, actually forgetting the pain in his foot and sitting up. “Nothing!” said K., “and what about my being summoned here then?” “Even your being summoned was carefully considered,” said the Superintendent; “it was only certain auxiliary circumstances that entered and confused the matter, I’ll prove it to you from the official papers.” “The papers will not be found,” said K. “Not to be found?” said the Superintendent. “Mizzi, please hurry up a bit! Still I can tell you the story even without the papers. We replied with thanks to the order that I’ve mentioned already, saying that we didn’t need a Land Surveyor. But this reply doesn’t appear to have reached the original department – I’ll call it A – but by mistake went to another department, B. So department A remained without an answer, but unfortunately out full reply didn’t reach B either; whether it was that the order itself was not enclosed by us, or whether it got lost on the way – it was certainly not lost in my department, that I can vouch for – in any case all that arrived at Department B was the covering letter, in which was merely noted that the enclosed order, unfortunately an impracticable one, was concerned with the engagement of a Land Surveyor. Meanwhile Department A was waiting for our answer, they had, of course, made a memorandum of the case, but as excusably enough often happens and is bound to happen even under the most efficient handling, our correspondent trusted to the fact that we would answer him, after which he would either summon the Land Surveyor, or else if need be write us further about the matter. As a result he never thought of referring to his memorandum and the whole thing fell into oblivion. But in Department B the covering letter came into the hands of a correspondent, famed for his conscientiousness, Sordini by name, an Italian; it is incomprehensible even to me, though I am one of the initiated, why a man of his capacities is left in an almost subordinate position. This Sordini naturally sent back the unaccompanied coverring letter for completion. Now months, if not years, had passed by this time since the first communication with Department A , which is understandable enough, for when – which is the rule – a document goes the proper route, it reaches the department at the outside in a day and is settled that day, but when it once in a while loses its way then in an organization so efficient a ours its proper destination must be sought for literally with desperation, otherwise it mightn’t be found; and then, well then the search may last really for a long time. Accordingly, when we got Sordini’s note we had only a vague memory of the affair, there were only two of us to do the work at that time, Mizzi and myself, the teacher hadn’t yet been assigned to us, we only kept copies in the most important instances, so we could only reply in the most vague terms that we knew nothing of this engagement of a Land Surveyor and that as far as we knew there was no need of one.

“But,” here the Superintendent interrupted himself as if, carried on by his tale, he had gone too far, or as if at least it were possible that he had gone too far, “doesn’t the story bore you?”

“No,” said K., “it amuses me.”

Thereupon the Superintendent said: “I’m not telling it to amuse you.”

“It only amuses me,” said K., “because it gives me an insight into the ludicrous bungling which in certain circumstances may decide the life of a human being.”

From Franz Kafka, The Castle, Ch. 5. And in case we thought it was over:

“You haven’t been given any insight into that yet,” replied the Superintendent gravely, “and I can go on with my story. Naturally Sordini was not satisfied with out reply…

I’m sure we can spare ourselves the rest for now.

I think this quintessential Bengali concept may have begun to loose some significance for groups/generations of people born and raised in the big city, or even outside the nation. For me, however, the problem has usually been more in trying to accurately translate what desher bari could mean exactly. After all, we didn’t have a literal bari (house) in our desh, and it’s not so much where I’m from, but where I go to about once a year or so, to visit relatives on my dad’s side. What made things more confusing is that the bits of childhood I did spend in the country was in fact mostly at my nana bari, i.e. my mom’s desher bari, which is technically not mine–since you know, you are your dad’s son. When telling friends about where I’d be traveling to, I’ve often subconsciously resorted to using an alternate expression: dada bari, meaning paternal grandfather’s place. But I would then wonder if I was conveying something inaccurate, since my grandfather isn’t actually there. Yes, it was his bari, but the place has long since been divided up among his children, who then built their own homes. And so my desher bari has always been more about my uncles and aunts and cousins, some of whom feature quite prominently in fond memories from childhood.

Last summer when I visited my desher bari after several years–I can’t recall exactly how many–any unconscious Orientalist fantasy I might have had about a static, unchanging village were shattered by the historical reality I now witnessed. Of course, there was always an ongoing history, always something new, during my childhood visits: sometimes new plastered brick walls in place of a mud hut, or maybe a concrete ceiling in place of a tin roof. But if it is the people who define a place, many of the people I know are no longer there: some of my oldest uncles have passed away, and most of my cousins have moved away for their own independent lives with jobs and families. There is no more frolicking in the woods to look for unpicked guavas, no one to take me to the nearby train station to see the really tall and scary palm tree regularly haunted by jinns. It was yet another sudden, somewhat sad realization that we’ve all actually grown up.

What did make desher bari my dada bari were the stories my cousins would tell about our dada. My grandfather died when my dad, the youngest of his siblings, was still a teenager. And so none of us in my immediate family, nor most of my cousins, have ever seen him; in the absence of any known suriving photographs, I have no idea of what he even looked like. But the many myths and legends made him more real to us than perhaps any real trace of him possibly could. I still sometimes try to visualize the Royal Bengal tiger that was hanging out by the pond one early morning when my dada went to wash for the dawn prayers. It has been said that he always used to bathe before fajr, no matter how cold the water. Dada told the tiger to not disturb him, took his bath and returned home unharmed: no doubt a testimony of his spiritual blessings. The budding historian in me would sometimes try to inject some facts into the fiction. Before tigers began to become extinct from the area, reportedly even my dad could hear them in the distance whenever he would be visiting home from school. Surely then it is not entirely implausible that one of them would show up during dada‘s morning rituals.

Last week on the train to desher bari, these vague memories drifted back into my mind as I dozed off during the long, lazy ride. But I was not expecting the minor discovery that transpired the next day. We were visiting one of my aunts, recently widowed, and while my mom and she were catching up, I indulged in my usual habit of multitasking by fishing through every readable material at hand. On the coffee table were two or three books, including the last volume of a Bengali translation of Ibn Kathir‘s tafsir, and the recent issue of a small, obscure Islamic periodical. As I aimlessly leafed through the cheap newsprint pages of the magazine, the name of which I can’t even recall now, I chanced upon a one-page biography of a renowned early 20th century Deobandi member of the Bengali ‘ulama, who I happen to know about partly because he once had a contentious debate with nana, my maternal grandfather. I decided to read the piece, and as I was skimming through the conventional overview of the man’s scholarly lineage, I was struck by a name in the list of his students, appended by the name of a madrasah. I waited until an appropriate moment to interrupt the conversation, and asked, “Mom, at which madrasah was dada the principal?” Neither my mother nor my aunt could remember right away, but when I read it aloud from the magazine, they both recognized it as the one.

This was almost certainly the first time I saw grandpa’s name in print–I guess aside from a brief mention in nana‘s memoir. As I was falling asleep later that night, I thought about this small but strange coincidence. I don’t know where in the country that random magazine is published from, but it’s funny that I should happen to come across it while actually visiting dada bari. I don’t know if it was a kind of answer to perhaps an unconscious quest on my part for connections to my grandfather. But in any case, at least I learned something new and now know who one of his teachers were.

On the train back to the capital, I was taking a break from reading an unusually small print edition of Kafka’s Amerika by closing my tired eyes and reflecting on this odd, obligatory and otherwise uneventful trip to my desher bari. Despite express instruction from my dad, I somehow did not manage to visit dada‘s grave–arguably the most tangible trace of him in the place that honors his faint memory by still being referred to as “Maulvi Bari.” I don’t know why the tomb was never quite a big part of the itinerary when visiting our village home; or maybe it was and I just don’t remember. I can only vaguely picture it, but can’t even recall where exactly in the gardens it’s located. I began to regret not having made the effort this time, but consoled myself that it’s perhaps the thought that counts. It is, after all, the memories, the most intangible of things, that really connect us to where we are from. It is the stories we tell that make us who we are.

Now, the Islamic rules of ritual purity (ṭahāra) are some of the most important as well as the most complicated in all of fiqh (ṭahāra makes for the first chapter/volume in most classical Islamic law books). Not surprisingly, there’s a huge body of secondary literature on this, including in English, and often with various complex and competing theories about the underlying logic or conceptual basis for these rules. It’s impossible to present here even a cursory overview, but I want to highlight the one basic conclusion that these scholars often cite as a kind of well-known fact: that in Islamic law, no human being is ever considered impure (najas). Rather, they can only be in transient states of ritual impurity, either a minor kind (ḥadath, such as due to urination) or a major kind (janāba, usually understood as a state of being sexually defiled), and which can be overcome with wudu or ghusl respectively before the person can resume prayers. As Ze’ev Maghen argues: 

[T]he shari’a accords all human beings a clean ritual slate from birth, and, what is more surprising, flatly denies the possibility of persons becoming ceremonially contaminated or contributing to the ritual defilement of others under any circumstances. These characteristics make the Islamic ṭahāra system an intriguing anomaly in the world of religious purity codes. (348)

Similarly, Janina Safran writes:

In contrast to other purity systems, classical Sunni Islam does not define individuals and groups as inherently impure and polluting and does not in this way articulate internal social hierarchy (as the Hindu system does) or rigid, impermeable barriers between insiders and outsiders, as Zoroastrianism does, for example, by prohibiting food prepared by outsiders, shared bathhouses, and sexual intercourse with outsiders. (198)

The apparent uniquess of the Islamic purity code lies especially in the absence of any notion of ritually contaminating persons. In the words of Kevin Reinhart, “in the ṭahāra system no human being is ever contagiously dangerous” (15), and this also applies to menstruating women. According to some jurists and/or schools, the assumption of purity actually extends beyond humans and includes animals as well (except for pigs and dogs–a whole other topic!). Let me quote directly from Shafi‘i‘s Kitab al-Umm: “There is no impurity in any living thing (ولا نجاسة في شيء من الأحياء), if it touches the water a little by drinking from it or if a part of it enters the water.” (This is in the context of a discussion on the purity of stagnant waters, for the purposes of ablution, etc). In some manuscripts of al-Umm, there’s additional text in which Shafi‘i says that all of the Children of Adam are pure–that is, not just Muslims! One reason why this is all the more intriguing is because there is actually a Qur’anic verse (9:28) proclaiming that the mushrikun (“polytheists”) are najas (“impure”): it’s fascinating to see how the classical fiqh scholars explain this away, so to speak. Of course, the relationship between scripture and law is a complex issue and has been the subject of never ending debates. But now you can see why even the idea of Pakistan as “land of the pure” is Islamically quite problematic.

In any case, with that established (and with the caveat that this basic principle may not quite reflect the intricacies of the many detailed purity rituals in various madhhabs), we can now move on to the specitic issue of menstruation. What strikes me is that even though, as mentioned, there is no general notion of a polluting person in Islam, the matter is emphasized specifically for menstruation in some hadith traditions which the jurists often cite in the law books. Reportedly, the Prophet would drink water from the same vessel as ‘A’isha while she was on her period (See hadith No. 0590 here in Siddiqui’s translation of Sahih Muslim). There’s another tradition (See No. 0587 thru No. 0589 here), in which the Prophet reportedly asked ‘A’isha to fetch him a prayer mat, and when she objected that she was menstruating, he replied: “Your menstruation is not in your hand.”

I wonder if we could potentially use these sources for some social-historical speculation. Perhaps these hadith reports were significant for medieval Muslims precisely because they were already aware of some notion of defiled/defiling being associated with menstruation, at least in neighboring cultures if not in their own. This becomes particularly clear if we trace the relevant Qur’anic interpretations. In her book on the early history of Muslim purity rites, Marion Katz shows how Muslims understood the context for the verse on menstruation (2:222). The supposed contexts for specific Qur’anic verses are traditionally described in hadith (or hadith-like) narratives called asbāb al-nuzūl, “occasions of revelation.” In discussing 2:222, Suyuti writes that it was “revealed about menstruating women at a time when the Muslims were expelling them from their houses as the Iranians do. They asked the Prophet for a ruling on this, and God revealed [this verse]. The believers thought that ‘keeping aloof’ meant their leaving their houses, as they were doing, until he recited the end of the verse, and the believers understood what ‘keeping aloof’ was, because God said, ‘Do not touch them until they are clean again’.” (Katz, 11) Now, the interesting thing that Katz notes is that although Suyuti correctly associates Zoroastrians with the practice of isolating menstruants (Suroor mentioned ‘menstrual huts’ in her post), other asbāb al-nuzūl accounts attribute it to Jews instead! (See, for example, hadith No. 0592 here) As Katz points out, although many Jewish laws on menstruation are indeed more severe than those in Islam, these reports portray the former as even more excessive and, as mentioned, incorrectly ascribes a Zoroastrian practice to the Jews. The explanation for this apparent shift, in light of Islam’s historical-theological relationship to other religions, is a far more complex problem that Katz addresses in her book. 

However, what concerns me here is the spirit of these discussions on the interpretation of the verse. It seems that these Muslims (of the “classical” and “post-classical” period) regarded the Qur’anic provision on menstruation as more “liberal,” so to speak, than the social practices with which they were familiar. It doesn’t really matter whether they themselves (or the early Muslims, as claimed by the hadith) actually engaged in such practices like shunning menstruants: there’s no way for us to know for sure. But what the sources suggest at the least is that they recognized or knew about ideas that regarded menstruating women as polluted/polluting. And they therefore recognized that if the Qur’anic verse is interpreted as a prohibiton only on sex during menstruation, then it is much more specific and limited than the socially prevalent ideas would have.

All this goes to show that religious belief, common sense, religious law, and social/cultural values do not have straightforward or simple relations to each other. This is the lesson that comes up for students of Islamic law again and again, especially those who take an interest in gender issues. It turns out that in some cases the law is far more “progressive” than social reality (if only beacuse of the abstract, formal nature of legal reasoning), whereas in other cases it is the law that remains “conservative” and outmoded. I don’t know what kinds of cultural prejudices about menstruation there are across Muslim societies today (and I bet they vary considerably between Africa, the Middle East and South/East Asia), but the point is that it isn’t always easy to draw the line between these values and people’s perceptions of the rituals they practice, or to figure out how the one influences the other, if at all. I think the above discussion shows that this was as true for medieval Muslims as it is for us today.

This difficulty becomes particularly relevant if we look at some of the specific fiqh rules on menstruation. Why did the jurists conceptualize a woman on her period as junūb, and why did they deem it both impermissible and unnecessary for her to perform salah during that time? Moreover, why did some of them have issues with her going to the mosque? It will be very helpful to keep in mind some of the points raised above when addressing these tough questions, which I hope to try in another post soon.

In any case, I’m not here to try and find silly patterns and meaning where there is none. And yet I cannot but mention, since it did cross my mind, that I now happen to be sitting in the very room where I first began to blog just over eight years ago. Lest that imply a false sense of continuity, I need only reflect on where all I’ve been, what all I’ve done and who all I’ve become in these long years. But yes, I am home, although honestly I don’t know if I still think of it as “home” any more.

A few days ago, a friend of a friend who is visiting the country for the summer asked me how I deal with coming back here, whether I feel like I really belong. Of course, neither of us knew where we really belong and we reflected on our shared experience of diaspora in America. It was intriguing to hear her talk about the first time she went back to Beijing after many years: a moment she had mentally enacted again and again, but when it finally came she was unprepared for the shock of realizing that both she and her hometown had become so different.

My trips back to Bangladesh have been accompanied by a similar recognition, or perhaps I should say misrecognition. It really is a bit of a paradoxical situation when I remember and therefore reconnect with the place where I grew up, but thereby also realize how distant I have become from it: a distance both literal and temporal. The paradox lies also in the double bind of continuity and discontinuity: the place that is, both is and isn’t the the place that it was; the I that am, both is and isn’t the I that was. And so if every act of remembering is an attempt to reattach our dismembered selves back to where it used to belong, isn’t it always already a failure, merely a longing to be?

Last week, I met up with two of my best friends from high school, and for much of the time I was quietly overwhelmed by a familiar but oddly intense sense of nostalgia that I didn’t quite know how to react to. At some point, as they argued over what to order at the cafe, I remarked: “you guys haven’t changed!” This made them both laugh, but then I began to wonder why I said that. After all, so much has changed, even though they are still young and beautiful and so much like how I remembered us and our friendship. Maybe it’s still taking some getting used-to, that we’ve come a long way, with our respective lives, careers, and for some even spouses. I suppose we’re perpetually still getting used to growing up, and perhaps nostalgia is no more than a mere coping mechanism? Oh well, c’est la vie.

Anyways, you get the idea. But whatever on earth was the context for this, you wonder? Well, the topic for the day was, apparently, the relationship between the physical and spiritual aspects of the human being. As an elaboration of the fact that Islam cares about the physical body, we were invited to ponder in good detail a well-known hadith on personal hygiene that enumerates ten things that people should do. Things like cleaning your teeth and clipping your nails. That’s right, nothing could be more religiously, socially or politically urgent for the faithful community to reflect on at their weekly congregation, than what they do in the bathroom! And I’m not even gonna say anything about the issue of circumcision, and “the debate between faqihs about the desirability of circumcision for females.” Yeah, I wonder what the sisters at the back were thinking.

Ugghhhh.