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And this leads us towards a further question. Feminists point out that early Christian celibacy was driven by a horror of the flesh, so that women were, in Tertullian's words, “the devil's gateway.” This could have no deep purchase in Islamic culture, with the hadith insisting that “marriage is my sunnah, and whoever departs from my sunnah is not of me;” a valorization of marriage which implicitly valorized functional womanhood in a way that the Church Fathers, with their preference for virginal perfection, had found problematic. It is true that a celibate advocacy developed among some second and third generation Muslim ascetics also, with Abu Sulayman Al-Darani declaring, “Whoever marries has inclined towards the world.” However, this kind of sentiment tended to be expressed in the very early ascetical milieu, where the drive for celibacy, as Tor Andrae has shown, was the result of Christian monastic influence, and was later swept away by the tide of normative Sufism. In high medieval Islam, the conjunction of holiness and celibacy was unimaginable, and few who aspired to God were unmarried: Ibn Taymiyah was the rarest of exceptions.
This evolution of values again parallels the situation in early Christianity. A bitterly fought scholarly argument debates whether the appearance of the first Christians improved or degraded the status of women, with Peter Brown and many feminists arguing the latter view. Ben Witherington observes that it is the later New Testament material (Luke, Acts) that advocates an improved role for women and a departure from the rabbinical (and hence post-prophetic) norms which shaped the attitudes of the first Christians. However, as Jesus was a Jewish prophet, loyal to revelation, and in particular to its interpretation within a compassionate template, it is reasonable to assume that there existed genuinely pro-female possibilities in the early Jesus community that capsized under the weight of pre-existent Hellenic misogyny which some authors of the Pauline epistles imported from the mystery religions, in the way that Foucault has shown in the second volume of his History of Sexuality.
It may be said that an analogous corrosion befell Islamic social history. Critically, however, this happened to a much lesser extent, for a set of reasons that demand careful attention.
First, the above-noted refusal of the scriptures to attribute male gender to the Godhead deprived the tradition of an unarguable gynophobic foundation. The doctrine of the names as archetypes for all bipolarities in creation ruled out any possibly consequent idea that humanity's retrieval of theomorphism must entail a shedding of gender in favor of androgyny. On the contrary, the retrieval of theomorphism is the retrieval of gender, fully understood.
Second, the very word woman had been for many Church Fathers a metonym for concupiscence; and patristic Christianity's consistent preference for celibacy as a calling higher than marriage had entailed a particular attitude towards women. The model was, of course, Christ himself, as later figured and interpreted by the Church's imagination. Islam, by stark contrast, maintained a version of the primordial, and also Solomonic, polygamous, heroic model of Semitic prophethood. As Geoffrey Parrinder has shown, sex-positive religions tend also to accord a higher status to the female principle; and Islam from its inception stressed that the presence of women's bodies and spirits was in no way injurious to the spiritual life. The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) worshiped in his tiny room for much of the night, and when he was descending into prostration he would nudge aside the legs of his young wife `A'ishah to make room. A far cry from the devotions of the Syrian monk, alone in his desert cell.
Also built into the archetypal patterns of Islam is a characteristic amended to existing purity laws. Feminists have often identified these as a major sign and strengthener of misogyny. They exist in branches of Christianity, as is shown by Russian Orthodox hesitations about the reception of the Eucharist by menstruating women. In Judaism, they are very elaborate, so that the menstruating woman is only sexually available for half of every month. Special bathhouses are required for her purification.
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