Abstract
M.A.
One of the broad areas of agreement amongst contemporary scholars of Islam - both traditional (Badawi 1995, Mattison 2005, Winters 1997, Jawad 1998) and feminist (Wadud 1999, Barlas 2002, Mir-Hooseini 1999) - regarding gender and women’s status in the Islamic tradition, is the notion of the absolute equality of men and women before God, in the realm of `ibadat, (worship). Men and women are deemed to be equally responsible and correspondingly rewarded for their acts of worship, performed through rituals or otherwise. There are a number of instances, however, where women’s participation in the core rituals of Islam - salah (daily prayers), sawm (fasting) and the hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) are markedly different from their male counterparts, both in form and function. This is in addition to gendered laws regulating ritual purity, which are required to enact the ritual in the first instance. These differences have been synthesized in the Fiqh (Islamic jurisprudential) literature.
The analysis of gender in Fiqh text is an emerging area of research in the study of Islam. This is why this dissertation is important for gender-research. For the vast majority of believers, both Sunni and Shi’a, Islam is a religious tradition of orthopraxis and depends pointedly on Fiqh in connecting believers to the faith. As a “technology of the self” (Bashir 2010: 75), positive law assists adherents to bridge the gap between their social and historical strata and the need to feel part of a universal, eternal and transcendent religious tradition. In practice, Muslims interact on a day-to-day basis with specific aspects of the Fiqh – albeit through its interlocutors – the fuqaha (jurists) or `ulama (religious leaders) and not through the foundational texts of the Qur’an and Hadith. Particular practical teachings emerging from the Fiqh discourse looms much larger in the imagination of Muslims who are required to conduct their lives in accordance with its laws and regulations.
Although the subject of women’s bodies in Islamic discourse has undergone much scrutiny with regards to sexuality, the way in which the female body is regulated in the performance of ritual as determined by the fuqaha necessitates probing. Examples of these are the different postures women assume during prayer as compared to men, the limitations on the space wherein they are expected to perform their prayers, the restriction of certain physical actions such as fast paced walking for women during circumambulation (tawaf) of the ka`bah om pilgrimage, dependence...