Metin Teke:
Hi. Welcome to Perspectives on Faith.
I’m your host Metin Teke.
This week we are coming from Hartford Seminary in Connecticut.
We have with us today Dr. Ingrid Mattson. She is a professor of Islamic studies at Hartford University, and she is also the President of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).
Dr. Mattson, thank you for coming on our show.
Dr. Ingrid Mattson:
You are welcome.
Metin Teke:
Would you describe the general characteristics of the society that Prophet Muhammad grew up in?
Dr. Ingrid Mattson:
What you have to understand about pre-Islamic Arabian society first of all is that it was a society in which there is no rule of law. There was no political structure that was governing the Arabian Peninsula. The only ruling powers were tribes that were in mutual rivalry. These tribes operated in a way similar to a gang structure. This means that the only way to have power or promote your interests is by using brute force.
The tribes are highly territorial and are in constant conflict with each other. A society like this values strength and force and is highly militarized. This means that for women, their position is secondary to that of men who through their strength and through their violence exercise their will. So the basic structure of the society is one in which women, as mostly non-combatants, are in a secondary position to men.
Metin Teke:
So why would women respond positively to the message of Muhammad?
Dr. Ingrid Mattson:
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) both through his attitude and as the messenger of God with the Quran that he received from God, brought a message that women are equal to men in their value. And not only that, also how you value a human being is not through their brute strength, not through their ability to dominate, but in fact their ability to submit themselves to God.
So there is a whole different paradigm shift of what makes a human being valuable. In pre-Islamic Arabia, what made a human being valuable was to be a dominant warrior, someone who by whatever means necessary subjected other people to his will.
What the Quran says is that the person who is valuable, the one who is most noble in the eyes of God, is the one who has most awareness of God. That awareness is something that could be gained by either a man or a woman, that your gender has nothing to do with whether you have the ability to submit yourself to God. So this is a completely different assessment of the value of the human being according to the Quranic paradigm.
Metin Teke:
Could you provide examples of these women’s initial responses to Muhammad’s messages?
Dr. Ingrid Mattson:
Well, as it’s well known, the first person who responded to Prophet Muhammad’s message was his wife Khadijah. Khadijah who was really in all ways a full partner to Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). She was a mature woman who was financially independent and had her professional career, and she and her husband really were in all ways full partners, raising their family and having their business.
She knew him as a woman knows her husband better than anyone. And when he received the call by God to come and bring this message, she was the first to respond to him and supported him and believed in him. But it didn’t stop there. In fact, women were among the early supporters of Prophet Muhammad. You had not only women like Khadijah, who was a free woman of high status, but a woman like Sumayah who was a slave woman, who was in a highly degraded position and for whom this message of Islam was one of her dignity, even if it appeared by all objective measures that she was the most degraded person in Makkan society.
Metin Teke:
How were these women participating in the public ground of Makkah?
Dr. Ingrid Mattson:
Muslim women in Makkah experienced hardships to the same degree that men did. We find that for example the first martyr in Islam was Sumayah, who was murdered in a brutal fashion by Abu-Jahl for being a Muslim. Because there was no recognition in the political order of Makkah of individual human rights, it was possible for someone, so called a free man, to kill a slave in impunity.
Among the other women were Khadijah and the other women of Banu Hashim (the clan of Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him) who were boycotted by the rest of Quraish for three years. They had to live in the outskirts of Makkah and were deprived of meaningful sustenance. In fact we know that Khadijah died because she was weakened by the boycott. She and other women suffered along with the male believers in that situation.
Women also were among the delegation that left Makkah at the command of Prophet Muhammad to seek refuge with the ruler of Abyssinia, a good Christian king who gave refuge and comfort to the Muslims who were persecuted in Makkah. Women were there with the men. So Muslim women were beside the men at all stages in the Makkan period.
Metin Teke:
Was there anything in the initial revelations of God that improved the status or role of the women in Arabia?
Dr. Ingrid Mattson:
What we have to understand is that the first thing that improved the status of women was simply a redefinition of the value of human beings. Being women as human beings were re-assessed according to their value, now their value was not primarily as shadow or as property of men, but as individual human beings who had their own spiritual relationship with God. That’s vitally important. It means that if a woman, whether married or not married, whether she is a mother or can’t have children, whether she lives a life that’s in the public eye as famous or someone who gets greater claim because of her career or her accomplishments that are all of these things are irrelevant because at the end her primary value in relationship is the dignity that she can get through her relationship with God. It’s very important to understand that.
Of course there were specific rulings about females in that society that did help their situation within the limits that were possible within 7th. century Arabia. One of the first things that were done of course in the early revelations was to link the mistreatment of women with morality. So the burial of female children, female infanticide, that was practiced among the pre-Islamic Arabs was condemned. And not only was condemned as something that was wrong, but it was linked to an ultimate value which was that God would judge this action...
