Note: This is definitely special interest book for most of my GR friends but when I was reading it a friend asked me to remember to write something about it. I have been "away" for a while and pressed for time as punishment for being away (work accumulation!), so I am not able to give as much time as needed to properly review a book of this nature, but I have jotted down a few lines to fulfill the promise.
This is arguably the best biography of Fatima (d. 632 CE), the daughter of Prophet Muhammad, that I have read. She died young - reports say at the age of 18, some put it at 28 - having been married early as was the custom in those days, and having borne four children who grew up to become revered figures in early Islam (Hassan, Hussain, Zainab and Umm-e-Kulthum), her children from her second cousin Ali bin Abi Talib, who was Prophet Muhammad's first cousin, the first Imam of the Shias (considered divinely appointed vicegerent), and the fourth caliph of the Sunnis (thought to be elected by the elders of the community).
Ali Shariati casts a fresh look at the life of Fatima, her social position as the Prophet's daughter, her moral-philosophical outlook of life, and her brief political activism aimed at recovering from the reigning caliph her inheritance, which was a new concept in 7th century Arabia, since women were hitherto excluded from all sorts of inheritance. The book is written to give a historical account of her life beyond the ideological taint injected by Sunni and Shia narrations about her. The most important feature is how the author interprets (reinterprets) some important events in Fatima's life to relate them to the difficulties Muslim women face in the 20th century in defining their role as religious and modern. In that sense it might be taken as a revisionist account, which is not surprising given Shariati's credentials as a modernist reformer who anchored his thought in traditional Islamic religio-cultural matrix: those who neither reject the modernity descending from the West nor embrace it as the be all and end all of civilisational progress. The type of Muslim intellectual I personally like, favour, enjoy reading.
Shariati focuses disproportionately on the common heritage that Fatima passed down to the women of her times and which also inspired subsequent generations who saw in her life a model to follow. The influence of Fatima's political activism on her daughter Zainab can be gauged from the role she played in the wake of the battle of Karbala (680 CE), in which her two sons, many brothers and cousins, and most of Hussain's family, were brutally murdered in a single day. She took charge of the survivors, most of them women and children, en route to Damascus as captives to be presented in the court of the ruler who held the caliphal throne and the rival of the Prophet's family, Yazid bin Muawiyah, a scion of the Umayyad tribe.
For a woman, much less a captive, broken woman, to challenge the ruler in his own court on moral and scriptural grounds for the imposed war, to denounce him for inflicting atrocities on innocent people living pacifically, for having killed with impunity, elders as old as 80 years and infants as young as 6 months, which according to Islamic laws of war is verboten, and for treating women and children with indignity and disrespect, was unheard of in Arabia. Her impromptu speeches and devastating elegiacs in verse caused a disquiet in the Damascene ranks so that she had to be taken away and silenced for fear of fomenting rebellion among the commoners assembled at the court.
I digress, but this is to give a glimpse of the fighting spirit Islam had injected into the common consciousness of women through its leading female religious figures. Although Islam did not challenge or dismiss the tribal patriarchal culture of the time, given the impossibility of instituting any other type of system in that time and place, it nonetheless laid down a barrier encoded in law that ensured the rights of women and gave them the impetus to fight if their God-given rights were suppressed or taken away: rights such as of inheritance, equality and allowance in law where hitherto none existed, the right to bear witness in law courts, the right to choose their spouses, to own and manage their own wealth and property - all the rights having to do with the maximum social position women could aspire to in tribal medieval Arabia, minus the right to become community leaders, which to this day causes controversy among the conservative and progressive camps.
I read the book way back in Urdu translation and read it recently in English (the original is in Farsi or Persian). It was nice to find out that I had retained a lot of it, probably because I'd read it during my early formative years and remember this having a lasting impact on my future readings.
September '15.