TheDaak review

Diane D’Souza, Partners of Zaynab: A Gendered Perspective on Shia Muslim Faith, The University of South Carolina Press, 2014

By Saddam Hussain Shah

This book examines the gendered expressions of Shia Islam. How women from the dominant Ithna Ashari, or Twelver, Shia group organize and experience their religious lives is the main area of focus for the author. In order to achieve this, Diane uses female narratives and understandings as a starting point, primarily relying on the experiences of women who reside in Hyderabad, a city in southern India, home to one of the country’s largest Shia communities. The book is an example of putting primacy on the lived experiences of people located in religious tradition over the canonically imagined religious tradition. Thus, the book offers an anthropological account of Muslim rituals and also examines how gender influences the knowledge of Shia faith and practise through the use of literary sources like poetry, sermons, hagiography, and historical texts. This ‘gendered’ lens is crucial because the majority of Shia research and writing, whether by Muslim religious scholars or academics in the domains of religion or social science, predominantly reflects the male expressions and beliefs.

The book raises and attempts to answer three questions.

First and most important, how do pious Shia women nurture and sustain their devotional lives within a patriarchal culture? The author finds the answer in the study of female piety in relation to religious stories, holy setting, ritual performance, female leadership, and iconic symbols. The study goes beyond the typical depiction of Muslim women as merely a background in the male- centered events and offers glimpses of female leadership in a variety of contexts, including the stories of Fatima, Zaynab, and Hind, present-day memorial services and supplication rituals, and also the establishment and management of an unique women’s public shrine. Shia women employ ritual to support, nurture, and draw strength from others, whether the relationships are localized in social or familial networks or extend beyond, thanks to ties to the Prophet’s family. These and other studies of the rich religious lives of women have shown how women actively create spaces and rituals that vividly reflect Shia devotion. The author employs five main entry points into female religiosity—religious narrative, sacred space, ritual performance, female leadership, and iconic symbol as well as elements for each that influence women’s piety in order to explore this subject.

The second question the book answers is what new insights into Shia faith are gained through an understanding of the gendering of religious practice? This question yields some fascinating findings. The author explores and analyses the female narratives and stories about crucial historical events. Stories which help one understand the significance of those events for believers.  The story of succession over who will succeed the Prophet is transformed into a tale of loyalty and faithfulness rather than of gaining or losing control; the Karbala events shed light on what bravery and willingness to stand up for truth means in the face of tragedy and betrayal moving beyond a focus on martyrdom as the only way to demonstrate one’s commitment to one’s faith. The focus placed on bearing witness to the truth, which defines not only the historical deeds of Fatima and Zaynab but also a critical female ritual role in forming masculine religious identities, is particularly illuminating. Shia traditions that are quite popular have female roots, which provide fascinating insights into power and gender dynamics within the community. The exploration of male and female cooperation in rituals with separate gender-based zones of authority or at religious places run by men or by women is also fascinating. It is obvious that there are gendered streams of ritual and belief that have a significant impact on how believers perceive, comprehend, and shape the fundamentals of Shia faith in addition to a large shared world of meaning and activity.

The third question it answers is how unexamined gender assumptions complicate the scholarly dichotomy between normative and popular religion and ask what alternatives might be considered for conceptualizing the diversity of religious behavior?

In answering this question, the book presents the argument that the prevalent normative religious tradition has marginalized and devalued women’s religious expressions, therefore undermining our understanding of religion in general. Islam that is normative (or alternative) is best described as the result of a dominant social group, while Islam that is popular is linked to individuals who have a limited capacity to define standards authoritatively. Therefore, the dichotomy best captures the power and privilege in a particular society. It demonstrates how women frequently express their visions, sources of knowledge, and authority outside of officially sanctioned religious institutions. It would be more accurate to state that this scenario currently limits our ability to see and accept them rather than that it diminishes the power of female visions.

The book tests the presumption that normative Islam is beneficial in helping us understand the beliefs and practices of Muslims. It asks what form normative religion might take if the religious practices of underrepresented believers, including Shia women, were to be prioritized?

The author examines this dichotomy in terms of gender, and argues that women’s religious behaviors are most often associated with the ‘popular’ or ‘folk’ categories, whereas normative or orthodox religion most predictably encompasses men’s perspectives and activities. This is due to the fact that religious authorities and textual sources have historically been dominated by men. In other words, elite men have generally held the power to define what is and is not religion, and they tended to downplay, ignore, or even dismiss as illegitimate many aspects of female spiritual expression. This position is supported by a gendered explanation of human nature, with religious scholars claiming that God created females with a weaker, more emotional nature than the stronger more rational males. For them men are thus inherently superior to women, including in religious knowledge and practice. Associating women with marginal or incomplete religious activity demonstrates how the emphasis on men as the only normative actors in a male-defined religious world made it difficult to even acknowledge that women had religious lives, let alone independent ones worthy of study.

Through the anthropological studies the book demonstrates that women’s ritual activities express central theological ideas of their own. The books discusses the works of Jacques D. J. Waardenburg (1979) and Abdul Hamid el-Zein (1981). Leonard Norman Primiano (1995) in trying to forward a method to bring out a nuanced understanding of the religion that goes beyond the normative religious paradigm dominated by the religious elite to a more inclusive and grounded understanding of religion and religious experience.

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