This reflects and responds to a very ancient, and very widely observed taboo. In some primitive societies, women are banished from their husband’s house during menstruation. The Galla tribes of Ethiopia allocate special huts for menstruating women. Even today, the significant disruption to women’s behavioral patterns is acknowledged in some legislation. Modern French law, for instance, even classifies extreme premenstrual tension as a form of temporary insanity.

Islam has preserved the memory of this ancient, and also Semitic hesitation, but in an interestingly attenuated and non-judgmental form. So we read

[They will question you concerning the monthly course: Say, it is a hurt. So go apart from women during the monthly course and do not approach them until they are clean.] (Al-Baqarah 2:220)

What this means is clarified in the Sunnah. A hadith reports that A’ishah was sleeping under one coverlet with God’s Messenger, when suddenly she jumped up and left his side. The Messenger said to her, “What is the matter? Are you losing blood?” She said, “Yes.” He said, “Wrap your waist-wrapper tightly about you, and come back to your sleeping-place.’’

There are echoes here of this primordial human unease, but they are very reduced. The naturalism of Islam constantly insists that holiness does not emerge from the suppression of human instincts, but from their affirmation through regulation, so that the natural rhythms of the body and the awe with which we regard them are not to be ignored, but need commemoration in religious ritual. Hence, a woman is granted a suspension of formal prayer and fasting for several days in every month. Some feminists see this as a diminution of female spirituality; Muslim female theologians regard it as a reverent acknowledgement; others, such as Ruqaiyyah Maqsood interpret it as a relief from religious duties at a difficult time. The dispensation is easily deconstructed by either suspicious or benign hermeneutics, and resists total interpretation.

What Muslims do stress is that Islam valorizes women by making the basic duties of the faith equally incumbent upon both sexes: The suspension for a few days each month is seen as a pragmatic and generous dispensation, which does not vitiate this basic principle. The Five Pillars are hence gender-neutral. Similarly, Islam does not establish sacred spaces inaccessible to women. Women can and do enter the Holy Ka`bah. The inner court of the Temple in Jerusalem, before its demolition by the Romans, was out of bounds to women, who faced the death penalty if they penetrated it. Under Muslim auspices it was thrown open to both sexes. Hence, the Dome of the Rock, the golden structure which still symbolizes the Celestial City, and which marks the terrestrial point of the Mi`raj, is allocated on Fridays exclusively to women, so that men pray in the nearby Al-Aqsa Mosque hall. Here, as elsewhere, the sexes are segregated during congregational prayers, and the reason given for this is again the pragmatic and unanswerable one that a comingling of men and women during a form of worship which entails a good deal of physical contact would readily lead to distraction.

Women may penetrate the sacratum, but what of the ambivalent privilege of leadership? Who is the broker of God’s saving word? If in Judaism, women could not approach the Torah, and in Christianity they found themselves excluded from administering the Eucharist, does the new dispensation of Islam restrain them analogously?

Here, Islam extends its feminizing of sacred spaces to its own epiphany of the Word, which resonates within them. For the Shari`ah, the Book is open to female touch and cantillation. Symbolically, the custodianship of the first Qur’anic text was entrusted to the Prophet’s wife Hafsah, not to a man.

Regarding collective celebration of the divine word, it is clear that there can be no Islamic equivalent to the debate over women’s ordination, for the straightforward reason that Islam does not ordain anyone, whether male or female. Our recollection of the primordial alast [covenant made prior to creation between God and the souls of mankind] and our affirmation of the Great Covenant have already conferred holy orders upon us all. They are valid to the extent of our recollection.

The imam does not mediate; but the spiritual director may do so by praying for the disciple and offering techniques of dhikr. It is a manifestation of the inescapably anti-feminine harshness of modern pseudosalafite activism that the Sufi sheikh is for such activists a figure not to be revered, but to be abolished. Sufism, and several other forms of Islamic initiatic spirituality, have frequently accommodated women in ways which purely exoteric forms of the religion have not. The Sufi sheikh, who exercises such influence on the formation and guidance of the disciple, and is often a more significant presence for the individual and for society than the person of the mosque imam, may be of either gender.

The modern Lebanese saint Fatima Al-Yashrutiyya is a conspicuous and deeply moving example, but there are many others. Frequently, in those Muslim societies where the mosque has become a primarily male space, the tomb of a prophet or a saint supplies a sacred place for women, responding to their affective spirituality, which flourishes, as Irigaray would have it, in the embrace of closed circles rather than in straight lines. The importance of some of the tombs of the prophets for Palestinian women has often been noted in this regard. Pseudosalafism, with its nervousness about any public visibility for women, seeks to suppress such contexts, with the exception only of the tomb at Madinah, which it construes not as paradigm but as exception.

Nonetheless, the issue of a possible female imamate has been raised in several communities in recent years, although the evidence suggests that very few women aspire to this ambivalent position. The imam of a mosque can claim none of the mediating authority of a priest as he does not stand in loco divinis, but is mainly present to mark time, to ensure that the worshipers’ movements are coordinated, and to represent the unity of the community. While in some cultures he may have the added function of a pastoral counselor, this is not a canonical requirement.

All four madhhabs (schools) of Sunni Islam affirm that the imam must be male if there are males in the congregation. If there are only females, then many classical scholars permit the imamship of females, and this is generally accepted nowadays. But women cannot lead men in prayer. There are in fact no Qur’anic or Hadith texts that explicitly lay this down; it is a product of the medieval consensus. Although those who reject the four schools, and attempt to derive the Shari`ah directly from the Revelation, sometimes repudiate this consensus. Only a few, such as Farid Esack, have proposed it seriously. In practice, women activists in the Muslim world appear to have little concern for this, again, because of the absence of inherent prestige and authority in the imamate. One can be a religious leader without being imam of a mosque, the example of prominent theologians such as Bint al-Shati’ in modern Egypt, and a host of medieval predecessors such as Umm Hani, A’ishah Al-Ba’uniyya, and Karima Al-Marwaziyya, affording sufficient proof of this.

The discussion so far has moved downwards through districts of metaphysics to touch on issues of Shari`ah. Theologically, as we have seen, Islam tends to assert the equality of the male and female principles, while in its practical social structures it establishes a distinction. To understand this paradox is to understand the essence of the Islamic philosophy of gender, which constructs roles from below, not from above.

Women’s functions vary widely in the Muslim world and in Muslim history. In peasant communities, women work out of doors; in the desert, and among urban elites, womanhood is more frequently celebrated in the home. Recurrently, however, the public space is rigorously desexualized, and this is represented by the quasi-monastic garb of men and women, where frequently the color white is the color of the male, while black, significantly the sign of interiority, of the Ka`bah, and hence the celestial Layla, denotes femininity. In the private space of the home, these signs are cast aside, and the home becomes as colorful as the public space is austere and polarized. Modernity, refusing to recognize gender as a sacred sign, and delighting in random erotic signaling, renders the public space “domestic” by coloring it, and makes war on all remnants of gender separation, crudely construed as judgmental.

For Muslims, a significant development in the new feminism is the renewed desire for apartness. Contemplating the crisis of egalitarian social contracts, where the burden of divorce invariably bears most heavily upon women, Daly and many others advocate an almost insurrectionist refusal of contact with the male, and the creation of “women’s spaces” as citadels for the cultivation of a true sisterhood. This cannot be immediately useful to Muslims. Hermeneutics of suspicion directed against either sex are irreligious from the Qur’anic perspective. God, as a sign,

[has created spouses for you, from your own kind, that you may find peace in them; and He has set between you love and mercy.] (Ar-Rum 30:21)

Nonetheless, the feminist demand for apartness should not be cast aside, it may even converge significantly with Islam’s provision of it.

In her Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray denounces the technological workplace created by men, which “brings about a sexuate leveling at a certain level, [and] neutralizes sexual differences.” To compete, women must assume the “tunnel vision” of the achievement-oriented male, and hence relinquish aspects of their hormonally coded essence for the sake of a public mercantile space, which is biocidal, profiteering, anti-feminine, and now anti-gender. She also observes that “the sexual liberations of recent times have not established a new ethics of sexuality,” and that women have been the prime sufferers. But an insurrectionist feminist response “often destroys the possibility of constituting a shelter or a territory of one’s own. How are we to construct this female shelter, this territory in difference?” The question is shared with Islam, but her response is disappointing, and surely futile. Like Levinas, she demands a revolution in love, a “fertility in social and cultural difference” rooted in reconciliation, a new language of gesture, and valorization of the separate nature of femaleness by males.

Given her pessimism about the mutability of the male temper, apparently reinforced by new molecular genetic studies on gender difference, this looks like wishful thinking, and cannot provide more than part of the agenda for an authentic and affirming mutuality. However, in her diagnosis we may locate the clue to the more moral and more spiritual solution for which she clearly yearns. “Our societies,” she notes, “are built upon men-among-themselves (l’entre-hommes). According to this order, women remain dispersed and exiled atoms.” But there is a rival cultural economy which cries out to be considered.

Traditionally, the Islamic public space is constructed and subjectivized, primarily by “l’entre-hommes,” the men in white. The women in black signal a kind of absence even when they are present, by assuming a respected guest status. But Islamic society, rooted in primordial and specifically Shari`atic kinship patterns, emphatically refuses to reduce them to the status of “dispersed and exiled atoms.” There is a parallel space of the entre-femmes, a realm of alternative meaning and fulfillment where men are the guests and which intersects in formal ways with the entre-hommes, but which creates a sociality between women, a space for the appreciation of nos semblables, which is largely lacking amid the conditions of modernity or post modernity, and which is more profoundly human and feminine than the academicized utopia of which Irigaray dreams.

Irigaray commends the new institution of affidamento, current among some Italian feminists, which seeks a withdrawal from the irreducibly male and abrasive public space into nuclei of relaxed female sorority. For her, this is “the token of another culture which preserves for us a possible and inhabitable future, a culture whose historical face is as yet unknown to us.” She acknowledges that the power-struggles and generally negative experience of women’s groups suggests that affidamento cells may not be able to merge to create a larger and stable women’s solidarity apart from men. But the random intrusion of women into the public space, and the consequent patterns of conflict, marginalization, the neglect of children, and spiraling divorce, suggest that some form of localized, informal sorority may provide women with the matrix of identity which a fragmenting modernity denies them.

The Islamic entre-femmes have been explored by several anthropologists. Chantal Lobato, in her studies of Afghan refugee women, angrily rejects Western stereotypes, praising the warmth and sisterly richness of these women’s lives. As she records, such women’s spaces, with systems of meaning, tradition, and narrative constructed largely by women themselves, intersect with the male narrative through institutions such as marriage. We would add that intersection, critically, is not determined by either sex. Irigaray holds that all discourses are gendered, but Islam would say that this is not true. There are, in fact, three discourses: male, female, and divine. Tawheed [oneness of God], as we have seen, refuses to gender God or God’s word, and the Qur’anic text is hence a neutral document. It is read by men and by women, and hence imported and internalized in gender-specific ways. As such, it supplies a barzakh [barrier or partition] between the two worlds of meaning equally possessed by each. It is the missing link in Irigaray’s theoretical model that enables an authentic and stable inter-sexual sociality.

What this theology, and the anthropology that is emerging to support it, proposes, is that normative Islamic society is concurrently patriarchal and matriarchal. The public space is primarily that of men, who may valorize it over the private, but the latter space is valorized by women, who may regard the public space as morally and spiritually questionable. Hence, a feature of Muslim folkways is a kind of reflexive amusement. Men frequently construct a trivializing discourse on women, but women, as any eavesdropper on a Muslim female conversation will know, dismiss men and their concerns with an even more amused disregard. They are right to say, “Men, what do they know?” And the male patriarchal dismissal is, from the male viewpoint, no less correct. Aspects of the hadith discourse that appear to diminish women can be affirmed, and also relativized, by adopting this perspective.

A final aspect of the concurrent patriarchy and matriarchy of Muslim cultures concerns the status of the mother. A weakness of Irigaray’s work is her worrying indifference to the aged. Like many feminists, she appears to be concerned only with her semblables. While she accepts the reproductive and nurturing telos of the female body, she signally fails to consider its other natural trajectory, which is towards senescence.

The veneration of aged mothers is a recurrent feature of the Prophetic vision, in which kindness and loyalty to the mother, a rahmah to reciprocate the rahmah they themselves dispensed, is seen as an almost sacramental act. Ibn `Umar narrates that

A man came to God’s Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him) and said, “I have committed a great sin. Is there anything I can do to repent?” He asked, “Do you have a mother?” The man said that he did not, and he asked again, “Then do you have a maternal aunt?” The man replied that he did, and the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) told him, “Then be kind and devoted to her.” (At-Tirmidhi)

Other hadiths are legion: “Whoever kisses his mother between the eyes receives a protection from the fire,” (Bayhaqi) and “Verily God has forbidden disobedience to your mother” (Al-Bukhari and Muslim).