Privately Empowered: Expressing Feminism in Islam in Northern Nigerian Fiction
248
Privately Empowered: Expressing Feminism in Islam in Northern Nigerian Fiction
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810133679 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2016 |
| Pages: | 248 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
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Privately Empowered
Expressing Feminism in Islam in Northern Nigerian Fiction
By Shirin Edwin
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2016 Northwestern University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3368-6
CHAPTER 1
Connecting Vocabularies
A Grammar of Histories, Politics, and Priorities in African and Islamic Feminisms
A major flaw of feminist attempts to tame and name the feminist spirit in Africa is their failure to define African feminism on its own terms rather than in the context of Western feminism.
— Obioma Nnaemeka (emphasis added)
Because gender is preeminently a cultural construct, it cannot be theorized in a cultural vacuum, as many scholars tend to do.
— Oyèrónké Oyewùmí
By simply living their lives, Muslim women are causing the Muslimwoman to crumble.
— Margot Badran
In a country like Iran, Islam is not a matter of personal spiritual choice but rather a legal and political system.
— Valentine Moghadem
One of the problems with current discussions of Islam and feminism is ahistorical generalizations.
— Afsaneh Najmabadi
This chapter presents a conspectus of African and Islamic feminist theories to historicize the evolutionary trends in their methods and agendas. It surveys the historical and ideological circumstances — European colonialism, ethnocentrism, and an improper appraisal of African and Muslim women's situations — that motivated African and Islamic feminists to articulate such key discursive concepts as African womanism, Umoja, nego-feminism, stiwanism, and motherism, for African women and women's legal rights, public roles, and political participation as promulgated in the Qur'an, for Muslim women in the Middle East. In so doing, this chapter unravels the systematic de-emphasis of African Muslim women and of goals expressed through methods other than public and political activity by discursive practices in both African and Islamic feminist discourses. In their treatment of the "Muslim world," Islamic feminists elliptically reference Africa. Privately Empowered attributes this negligence to the fetishization of political and public engagements in Islam as is the case in most societies in the Middle East that are Islamic nation-states. As for African feminism, African theorists uphold Africa's plurality but excoriate Islam's influence on the African Muslim woman and call Islam "religious colonialism." The African feminist injunction of "building on the indigenous," as Obioma Nnaemeka confidently recommends, where "African worldviews are capable of providing the theoretical rack on which to hang African literature," woefully falls short when African feminists read African-Islamic feminist literature, since Islam, as made plain in 'Zulu Sofola's words, "de-womanized" the African woman. To a fortiori claim that Islam is a form of religious colonialism for African women has calamitous consequences for African literary theory. For one, it inaccurately arms the African Muslim heroine with an aggression and intense hatred associated with colonialism, inscribed, in this case, in Islamic systems, in its putative patriarchy and sexual subjugation that she must overcome for emancipation. Just as African feminists denounce European theorists for not factoring in their realities, "fantasizing a measure of superiority over African and other Third World women," as Ifi Amadiume rightly points out, and disrespectfully trivializing African realities, oddly enough African feminists themselves shrink from the idea of including African Muslim women in key feminist formulations despite promoting an inclusionary expression of African feminism.
A biliterate African-Islamic reading of Alkali's, Ali's, and Gimba's fiction reveals that the African Muslim woman embodies key qualities of each of the foundational concepts of African feminist thought — Umoja, African womanism, nego-feminism, stiwanism, and motherism — with an eye to abiding by her Islamic faith, for her African and Islamic identities are not mutually exclusive. Specifically, then, the African Muslim woman is an African Muslim womanist, an African Muslim nego-feminist, an African Muslim stiwanist, an African Muslim motherist, and so on. Paraphrasing Nnaemeka, the African-Islamic worldview, I contend, is precisely the rack on which to hang the African Muslim woman's feminism that draws from her African and Islamic environments. This biliterate presence and function of African-Islamic feminism in Alkali's, Ali's, and Gimba's fiction emerges through a closer look at three examples of feminism in Islam in northern Nigeria — the pivotal roles and goals of Nana Asma'u and Amina of Zaria's leadership, the practice of seclusion (kulle), and Hausa oral storytelling — not only because they question conventional wisdom about the goals of leadership, the acquisition and use of linguistic skills, and economic autonomy in unusual ways, but more importantly because they mirror the personal, private, and individual engagement with Islam illustrated in Alkali's, Ali's and Gimba's fiction to instantiate African-Islamic feminism in apolitical means and ends. The African-Islamic feminist lens allows us, moreover, to ask where in patriarchal societies — northern Nigeria — do African Muslim women turn for personal, private, and individual fulfillment? If indeed, as African feminists — 'Zulu Sofola, Chikwenye Ogunyemi, and Ama Ata Aidoo — insist that African Muslim women feel abused particularly by "patriarchal" and "sexist" Islam, then in the privacy of their homes, with no one watching or listening, African Muslim women would have no problem in abstaining from Islamic habits and rituals. More to the point, what does African Muslim women's voluntary and willing practice of Islamic rituals and spiritual habits reveal about their own feelings and thoughts about Islam? A reading of Alkali's, Ali's, and Gimba's depictions of African Muslim women's voluntary and willing deployment of Islamic rituals and spiritual habits — prayer, veiling, virtuous behavior, and Islamic monotheism — therefore, produces surprising conclusions for African feminist theorists and Islamic feminists alike.
Catechizing conventional wisdom about economic activity in seclusion, education, and the goals of political leadership is vital to a reading of Alkali's, Ali's, and Gimba's novels as it teases out, counterintuitively, the African Muslim woman's recruitment of spiritual practices and rituals to give expression to her feminism. Repatriating Nana Asma'u and Amina of Zaria to the list of those Aidoo calls "some of the bravest, most independent, and most innovative women this world has ever known," from which Nana Asma'u and Amina are conspicuously missing, may not qualitatively modify African feminist thought. Rather, a closer look at the goals of Nana's and Amina's leadership defamiliarizes the aims of political leadership as limited to public and social participation for women. Similarly, it is not to emphasize economic autonomy in the fact that secluded Muslim women control the local market from even behind closed doors or are linguistically talented without ever stepping into a school, but to wonder, following biliteracy in exploring multiple sites of sources, themes, and aims, that if these modes of engagement can impact leadership, the economy, and even education, then personal, private, and individual engagements with the religion must yield expressions of feminism that have not been sufficiently evaluated.
Invoking these notable examples, I hypothesize the following: if women can be autonomous even without stepping out of the confines of their homes both economically and linguistically, as is manifestly the case in parts of northern Nigeria because of kulle, then they can also express their feminism without subscribing to political activism and public roles through personal, private, and individual engagements with Islam. Leadership, likewise, need not mobilize women for greater public participation and political activity. It can, using Nana Asma'u's and Amina of Zaria's examples, promote faith and right living in Islam within the familial fold. The private need not be political, as the Egyptian feminist Hiba Rauf suggests. It can remain just that — private and personal. Therefore, in Alkali's, Ali's, and Gimba's fiction, women may engage Islam not for public expression, legal reform, or political leadership but to organize personal and private affairs through a repertoire of spiritual habits — salat, du'a, dhikr, akhlaq, shahadah, and hijab. Or quite simply, they may not approach Islamic practice for these ends at all but simply perform their religious duties for spiritual and personal fulfillment. This repertoire of spiritual expressions, performance of prayer, rituals, and Islamic habits serves as the most accurate index for discerning what Muslim women think and feel about Islam. Such a means of Islamic feminist expression that Privately Empowered locates within the contours of African-Islamic feminism pointedly emerges in Alkali's, Ali's, and Gimba's novels in their protagonists' practice of Islamic rituals and spiritual habits.
African Feminist Thought: A Corrective to Eurocentrism
African feminist thought passed through a twofold process in its development: identifying the weaknesses of European and American feminisms to refute the application of ill-matched concepts to African societies and developing a feminist discourse that is accountable to African women's realities. African feminists aver that African feminism must be defined on its own terms, in frameworks cohering with the realities of African women and their environment rather than importing concepts from elsewhere. The most daunting task, as will become evident in the following pages, was to identify and conceptually parry the misrepresentations of African women's realities, for the single most prominent idea expressed in the work of African feminists unequivocally describes Euro-American scholarship on African women as little more than an extension, a continuation, of colonial racism. Undoing the colonial grasp on feminist discourse on African women became the first salient feature of African feminist thought. As Oyewùmí competently puts it, colonialism "spurred, commissioned and sanctioned scholarship on Africa" that was produced during a period of "unprecedented European domination of non-European peoples." It then exported "gender imperialism" to other cultures, a discourse that contained the same racism and ethnocentrism of the European colonial enterprise, turning feminism into a natural heir of the production of an unmistakably imperialistic discourse on Africa.
To deter researchers from making overly generalized pronouncements and without an explication of sociocultural histories and contexts of African realities, Oyewùmí adduces gender — the very concept that she claims lies at the heart of Western feminist scholarship and whose episteme is radically different from its African conceptualization — to substantiate the urgent need for an informed approach to African women's issues. She argues that whereas gender has been "a fundamental organizing principle in all societies" and in Western culture gender is primarily "bio-logic," "woman" as a biological category did not exist in Yoruba communities in Nigeria "prior to their sustained contact with the West." Furthermore, in Western societies, claims Oyewùmí, "biology provides the rationale for the organization of the social world" as a result of which social categories of gender in Western feminist scholarship on African women derive also from the Western assumption that "physical bodies are social bodies" because gender and sex in Western societies are understood as inseparable and synonymous. In contrast to this notion, in Yoruba societies, avers Oyewùmí, gender is premised not on biology but on social facts: "Biological facts do not determine who can become the monarch or who can trade in the market ... hence the nature of one's anatomy did not define one's social position." Nevertheless, because of poorly informed scholarship, ethnocentrism and even racism, varied meanings in social arrangements, and the implications of gender and social relationships, many other African institutions — such as polygamy, arranged marriages, levirate, and child betrothal — continues Oyewùmí, are misrepresented as misogynistic and barbaric by Westerners.
Along similar lines, Ifi Amadiume's benchmark study Female Husbands, Male Daughters, an anthropological disquisition on the Nnobe peoples of the Igbo society of Western Africa, powerfully reproves the ill-informed episteme of Western feminist theories on Africa and its methods of generalizing African cultures by terming it "disrespectful trivialization":
When in the 1960s and 1970s female academics and Western feminists began to attack social anthropology, riding on the crest of the new wave of women's studies, the issues they took on were androcentricism and sexism. ... The methods they adopted indicated to Black women that White feminists were no less racist than the patriarchs of social anthropology whom they were busy condemning for male bias. They fantasized a measure of superiority over African and other Third World women. ... It baffles African women that Western academics and feminists feel no apprehension or disrespectful trivialization in taking on all of Africa or, indeed, all the Third World in one book.
Terming the ethnocentric Euro-American scholarship on Africa as "new imperialism," Amadiume persuasively argues that Western scholars were guilty of assuming the catholicity of Western episteme.
Therefore, to counter this discursive evacuation of the particularities of the African environment, African feminists paid meticulous attention to the fact that although women across the world share common concerns and causes, African women faced a different order of priorities. As a result, the second salient feature proposed by African feminists was to judiciously focalize the plurality of African women's situations. Obioma Nnaemeka eloquently underlines plurality as an indispensable factor in the study of African feminism, writing that it "speaks literally thousands of different languages across the African continent." She insists, with Oyewùmí, that African women must be studied within the context of an "African environment," where African feminism is rooted culturally and philosophically. These two key injunctions — countering overly generalized, thinly pertinent, and racist pronouncements and defining African feminism within the pluralistic African environment, inhering to the realities of African women — fittingly provided the ideological impetus to reconfigure Western-derived discourse on African women. The first step in countering Euro-American scholarship, therefore, as Nnaemeka suggestively states, is to proactively describe African feminism:
To meaningfully explain the phenomenon called African feminism, it is not to Western feminism but rather to the African environment that one must refer ... It has a life of its own that is rooted in the African environment. Its uniqueness emanates from the cultural and philosophical specificity of its provenance. (emphases added)
To this end, African theorists look with favor on key terms such as African womanism, Umoja, nego-feminism, stiwanism, and motherism, among others, to explain African feminism. Although these terms focus on a particular viewpoint by a specific African feminist theorist, they are mutually allusive in that they overlap, interconnect, and intersect as each of the African theorists who forwards these terms — Chikwenye Ogunyemi, Mary Kolawole, Obioma Nnaemeka, Catherine Acholonu, and Molara Ogundipe-Leslie — acknowledges the meaningful contributions of these descriptions in the discourse on African feminism.
African Womanism: Locating African Peculiarities
Even as African theorists extrapolate African-American feminist ideas to the environment of the African woman — as does Chikwenye Ogunyemi's extension of the African-American feminist bell hooks's concept of "womanism," a form of feminism for the Black woman who is doubly marginalized by her own society's sexist attitudes and the White world outside it — Ogunyemi feels that "feminism and African-American womanism overlook African peculiarities." She therefore asserts "a need to define African womanism," for the African woman knows that "she is deprived of her rights by sexist attitudes in the black domestic domain and by Euro-American patriarchy in the public sphere." As a "counterdiscourse," then, African womanism revises "black men's and white women's discourses." So while womanism is particular to the Black woman everywhere, concedes Ogunyemi, it is only when the African woman, in particular, names herself meaningfully as she has always done in her cultures that she is able to historicize and focalize her politics. In other words, an African womanist anchors her feminism in the initiative to name herself instead of leaving it to others (especially to Euro-American feminists or to legacies of colonial ideologies), and she situates herself in African history (her local environment), that which Ogunyemi terms as "African peculiarities." A number of vocal strategies, symbolic of women's figurative actions to militate against patriarchy — kwenu, a vernacular theory; palaver-palava; and a spate of textual excursions into women's spaces or the "discursive universe," as Ogunyemi calls it — abet the African womanist initiative. Ogunyemi thus prescriptively concludes that African feminism's "feisty spirit" is aimed at "confrontationality" and at making the African woman a "spokeswoman" who must establish a "counterdiscourse" to break centuries of silence imposed by colonialism and African patriarchy. Not unlike Irene Assiba D'Almeida's conceptualization of African women's writing as a "prise d'écriture," on the one hand, African women wrest writing in the sense of a militant appropriation or seizing, "the deliberate action of those who take up arms to seize power." Through a panoply of terms on militancy, aggression, and battle, these assertions frame the ideological agenda of African feminist discourse as an act of political and literary confrontation.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction: Conjugating Feminisms: African, Islamic as African-Islamic Discourse- ConnectingVocabularies: The Grammar of Histories, Politics and Priorities of African and Islamic Feminisms
- Noetic Education and Islamic Faith: Personal Transformation in The Stillborn
- Historical Templates and Islamic Disposition: Personal Journeys in The Virtuous Woman
- Spiritual Legacies and Worship: Personal Spaces in The Descendants
- Frequent Functions and References: Personal Solutions in Sacred Apples and Destiny
- Epilogue