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Ziba Mir-Hosseini, a social anthropologist, works as a freelance researcher and consultant.

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In 2015, Musawah, a global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family, published Men In Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition (Oneworld 2015). The book is a product of a five-year Musawah Knowledge Building initiative that sought to critically engage with and re-think the two central juristic concepts of qiwamah and wilayah. The book tackles the question of how these legal postulates came to be and how the construction of male authority within Islamic legal tradition by classical jurists has stubbornly persisted till today. There are also suggested approaches to seeking egalitarian interpretations of these concepts, accounts of how women around the world experience them in their daily lives, how muftis engage with the changing reality of contemporary spousal relations, as well as the challenges faced by NGOs when attempting to suggest new ways of understanding these postulates in contemporary family law. The essays are thus interdisciplinary and provide a wide range of approaches to understanding qiwamah and wilayah, whether it’s from a legal, theological, historical or sociological lens.

In the Muslim legal tradition, qiwamah and wilayah generally provide legal and religious legitimacy to the supposed authority of men over women, effectively institutionalising gender inequality and upholding the patriarchal family as not only the ideal, but the only acceptable model of the family. To summarize briefly, qiwamah, a term that does not appear in the Qur’an but is derived from the word qawwamun (translated as ‘protectors and maintainers’) has been generally taken to denote the husband’s authority over his wife and financial responsibility towards the family. This postulate has been called the “DNA of patriarchy” by Musawah Advocates Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Zainah Anwar as it affects all areas of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) relating to gender rights, especially when it comes to laws regulating marriage. The second term, wilayah, does appear in the Qur’an and though it is not once used to sanction the authority of men over women, it has been taken to refer to the guardianship male family members possess over female family members.

Even for those unfamiliar with these concepts and their effects on fiqh, the book does a thorough job of introducing these terms, how they were derived, subsequently codified into law and why patriarchal interpretations have prevailed over more egalitarian ones.

The introductory essay “Muslim Legal Tradition and the Challenge of Gender Equality” by co-editor Ziba Mir-Hosseini provides an excellent primer of the historical context that surrounded these juristic concepts. Hosseini details the problems in the Muslim legal tradition and the tensions that arose when the understanding, validity or interpretations of these concepts were contested in a climate of modern demands for more equal gender relations. These two postulates and their codification then are not simply understood through the theological lens but with the added awareness that they were susceptible to and shaped by socio-historical pressures. It is clear from the introductory chapter that a holistic approach is needed if we wish to intelligently problematise these two juristic concepts. In a particularly incisive prognosis, Hosseini suggests that 


“The problem is not with the text but with context and the ways in which the text is used to sustain patriarchal and authoritarian structures. The strategy must be not just logical argument and informed reinterpretations from within the tradition; there must also be challenges on the political front.”


The two subsequent chapters, “The Interpretive Legacy of Qiwamah as an Exegetical Construct” by Omaina Abou-Bakr and “An Egalitarian Reading of the Concepts of Kilafah, Wilayah and Qiwamah” by Asma Lamrabet, further provides a thorough understanding of these concepts for the reader. In the former essay, Omaina Abou-Bakr traces how a mere descriptive word, qawammun, had evolved to become the patriarchal construct of qiwamah and how this term came to be conceptualized and re-conceptualized by medieval theologians and then modern Islamic thinkers who each coloured it with their conceptions of gender difference, essentialism and hierarchy. Lamrabet would then follow up to detail how current interpretations of khilafah, wilayah and qiwamah that uphold patriachal notions of gender relations are in fact un-Qur’anic. By referring to injunctions in the Qur’an and directly analysing the semantics of these terms in relation to the Qur’an, that is, to interpret and understand these terms as they were to be understood, Lambaret uncovers how a reformation of these terms is not only possible, but Qur’anically valid:

“To reduce wilayah to male guardianship over dependent wards or qiwamah to an assumed authority of the husband amounts of violating the spiritual principles of the Qur’anic message regarding the ethics of marriage and family life. We must not forget that the meaning of Qur’anic concepts will evolve over time, especially since the Qur’an never set out to determine specific social roles for men and women.”


By now, these central juristic concepts have been adequately demystified. They are not immutable divine laws were subject to the whims of socio-historical contexts and human prejudice.

Further suggestions on approaches to reforming these juristic concepts include considering prophetic reports as a source that can help point one to a more egalitarian framework (Ayesha S. Chaudry) as well as utilising Sufi discourses and perspectives since Sufisms’s stress on the complete equality of all humans, regardless of gender, before God and its distaste for egotism and the exercise of personal and social superiority provides provides ample opportunity to critique gender discrimination from within the tradition (Sa’diyya Shaikh).

Subsequent chapters then provides real-life accounts and observations of how these concepts work in reality, whether through activists who have studied how the concepts of qiwamah and wilayah and the challenges NGO face when attempting to enact proposed reforms or the challenges faced by muftis who have to grapple with outdated interpretations of these concepts in a world of shifting gender relations. These accounts takes the reader away from understanding these juristic concepts theoretically and semantically, to actually understanding how they function as legal postulates that govern personal lives in our time and how they interact with international human rights law or human rights norms. The suggestions made then at this point are not about re-interpretations of the terms but about how NGOs can refine their approaches in proposing legal reforms.

Towards the last two chapters we then come to read of personal accounts of women. Lena Larsen details presents in her chapter the personal accounts of women from all over the world through the Global Life Stories project which documented and analysed personal accounts of fifty-eight Muslim women from 10 different countries and how they experienced qiwamah and wilayah in their daily lives. It is through the study of these personal accounts that one could truly see that the patriarchal understanding of these concepts do not stand in contemporary reality. For example, males are no longer necessarily the main providers of the family, females often take on economic roles in the family and polygomous marriages are evidently likely to put women

“at risk of economic marginalization, spousal abandonment, lack of support for their children and lack of emotional fulfilment.”


Perhaps a chapter that best provides a microcosm of what the journey to seeking a more egalitarian formulation of laws is the concluding chapter by Amina Wadud. She begins by sharing her personal and intellectual journey in grappling with the issue of male authority as articulated in dominant interpretations of the Qur’anic verse 4:34. She then continues to talk about the polarized perspectives she noticed women themselves had with regards to Islam and patriarchy. These personal experiences then would go on to shape her development of a new principle based on Tawhid (monotheism or the unicity of Allah). Often it is the personal that would go on to drive the way people would proceed to function in society, or the way they would choose to approach things like the reformation of laws. Paying attention to the personal and the real is what can bring about the most effective ways of diagnosing problems and coming up with precise solutions. That the book concludes with personal accounts is probably no small matter. After all, the personal is political.

Men In Charge? is a valuable contribution to the production of knowledge centred around family law and preciously includes the lived experiences of women. It demystifies the concepts of qiwamah and wilayah and aids in the push for reforming laws to reflect a more equal relationship between married partners and de-institutionalising gender inequality. Though critical feminist and other social-scientific methodologies were used, the approach that Musawah chose was still markedly rooted in the Islamic tradition. While these two approaches are not necessarily at odds, there has been a tension between the two discourses that activists continue to grapple with. Understanding that merely a human-rights based approach will not suffice without also integrating those who wish to work within the tradition is what makes Musawah’s method of knowledge production particularly effective. The book itself is a testament to the holistic approach they have chosen to take, starting with a more theoretical understanding of the two concepts, how these concepts function legally and socially in reality and ending with understanding them through personal accounts and lived realities.

(First published in Karyawan, a publication by the Centre for Research on Islamic and Malay Affairs (RIMA), Volume 11, Issue 2, June 2016.)
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verkur | Jan 8, 2021 |

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