The Tao of Islam: A Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought

Rating:
Summary: A great book with some exaggerations
Review: I find this book very interesting and very enlightening. There is however passages which seem to be a bit far-fetched and unrealistic. The problem with the constant obsession with "mystical" interpretation is that at times one may overshoot the mark and miss the obvious. True that there are some sayings attributed to Muhammad with respect to women, but one has to understand that Muhammad lived at a tie when people in Arabia were burrying baby girls alive out of shame. In chapter 6 page 176, author mentions a verse in the Koran along with Ibne Arabi's understanding of the meaning of this verse which is really far fetched. The verse which is simply a warning to couple of his wives who seemed to have a lack of fundamental understanding of Prophet and his status with God and spiritual world. One of these two women, according to history, did repeatedly show this lack of understanding in one way or another. Apparently these two "exemplary Moslem wives" had conspired against Muhammad in hope of creating a character issue for Muhammad, and God tells them that going against Prophet is in reality going against the entire spiritual realm, something well beyond the two women's wildest imagination (or if they could understand the "divine will and presence" they certainly didn't think Muhammad had anything to do with it. Now the interpretation of this verse has been turned around and upside down stating that since "women" are so magnificently powerful that in order to counter balance their plot against Muhammad God himself has to declare war and step in or else the totality of universe will collapse. The matter is even worse than what we have pictured, since in counterbalancing these two "super women", according to this interpretation, even God himself would not be worthy enough, and he has to come to Mohammed's support with his mighty angels and all the believers, apparently God himself had the fear of getting defeated by these two and had to warn Aisha, and Hafsa that they are up not just against God (since they may still have a chance to overcome Him) but rather it is the entire sphere of existence that they will have to deal with. Who knew these two women had so much power up in their sleeves. Come on now lets be serious and have a more down to earth understanding of what took place and what this verse in the Koran is trying to tell us. This verse is not a testimony to super natural almost Godlike power of Aisha and Hafsa but rather a testimony of their lack of understanding of the status of the man whom they claimed to have believed to be "messenger of God"(yeah right). Koran is telling them that if you really were believers in this claim of Muhammad, you would have known, provided you are intelligent enough, that God and Gabriel are his supporters and even the thought of trying to overcome him is a sign of a sick and absurd mind. Is it possible for someone to have truly understood the Status of Muhammad, as this verse was trying to convey, and yet play a kind of sick game that they had up their sleeves? This verse is not about the "super natural" power of couple Bedouin women in Arabia, but rather a testimony of who Muhammad is. . I guess before we start searching heavens for meaning of things we should look around on earth, the explanation may be closer than we think. Ofcourse if one chooses to go this path of "out of this world" interpretation for this verse, then one has to be consistent and apply this same principle to other occasions where God has declared that he and angels are his protector which would imply that in these other cases, too, the power of his enemy must have been tremendous and Muhammad very weak in comparison, which necessitated the direct backing of God and his angels. I also think there is a political motivation behind this kind of approach to history and verses of Koran. One is to turn the meaning around and instead of being honest and blaming Aisha and Hafsa for their lack of faith and decency in trying to bring under question the character of Muhammad, who was not only their husband but supposedly a Prophet of God, would actually make the verse into a testimony of these two being "goddesses" with so much power as to warrant the direct attention of the entire divine realm (Wow). Secondly the inhumane way that women have been treated in the middle east, is being justified by telling them that the reason they can't have even the most basic right such as choosing their husband, is because they are just so very much powerful and if this power is left unchecked it will end up destroying the entire universe. So what do you do with untamed lions? Well, you just cage them and that is what Middle East traditionally has done to women. And yet the weird thing is though, that some women actually buy this argument. I call this "desperate feminism". Moslem scholars have long held the view that "Christianity and its theology" as we know it has more to do with Paul than Jesus himself, and this may very well be true. But what is best kept secret is that " Islam and Islamic theology" also has little to do with Muhammad and has much to do with certain other figures as is evident by the incidents of last few days of his life which the "pious" scholars of the Moslem world rarely mention in their works.

Rating:
Summary: Gender and spiritual cosmology: the BIG picture
Review: In "The Tao of Islam" Sachiko Murata uses the lens of gender ideas in Islam to explore in a comparative religious framework the idea of a spirtual cosmology based on feminine and masculine principles. Although she is aware of the contemporary issues of women's legal status in Islam, she feels that such issues are not as fundamental as understanding the true role of gender within the cosmos. Those seeking arguments about whether the legal provisions of the Sharia (Islamic law) are or are not culpably sexist and what should be done about if they are will not find much meat for their arguments in this book. Murata writes relatively clearly, and the writers she cites are often fascinating and insightful. They are, however, frequently prolix and I must say I found the book somewhat repetitive at times. (For this reason I would have liked to give the book 4.5 stars if that was allowed.)

Professor Murata presents in this book a philosophy well-known to Platonism and which was also once familiar in the Christian West, but which is in danger of vanishing. In this philosophy, God, the cosmos (or the macrocosm), and the human self (microcosm) are the three great realities with the latter two stemming from and returning to God. The cosmos around us, and especially the human being in a superlative way, manifest as a kind of shadow the attributes of God. The highest purpose of studying the cosmos and the human self is thus to learn to recognize these manifestations of God's nature. Islamic writers in the Sufi Islamic tradition correlated these attributes into two fundamental families, that of majesty, awe, punishment, masculine, etc., and that of beauty, intimacy, mercy, feminine, etc. God is beautiful as well as majestic, intimate as well as awe-inspiring, merciful as well as punishing. Jalal (majesty) and jamal (beauty) are analogous to yang and yin of Chinese writings, while God matches the eternal Tao ("Way").

To manifest both His yang/jamal and His yin/jalal attributes visibly, God creates within the cosmos and human nature paired relations of yang-yin, jalal-jamal: heaven and earth, intellect and soul (both universal and in each person), spirit and nature, men and women. The productivity and fertility of these pairs is the sign of God's own abundance overflowing from His majesty and beauty. Things in the cosmos manifest these relations naturally, but human beings, having freedom, frequently damage these relation, with the yin elements rebelling against the yang and the yang elements forgetting their yin relation to God and tyrannizing over the yin.

As the creator and governor of all, God is primarily experienced by His creation naturally as powerful, active, and bright, i.e. jalal or yang. As a result God cannot normally be experienced by His creation but as a He, that is to say as manifesting yang/jalal attributes. Yet Sufi writers also recognize that God's Essence, apart from its relation with the cosmos, is like the true Tao mysterious, dark, and hidden from the sight and is thus in an absolute sense feminine. Yet such an understanding of God's yin/jamal nature must always be an esoteric understanding, compared to the exoteric understanding of God as yang/jalal.

Murata points out that the real enemy of this view of gender is not so much feminism (although feminism is certainly hostile to it), but the purely materialist vision of natural science. Materialism inquire only into mechanism, sees the cosmos and humanity as purposeless, and rejects the correlative thinking that sees the world around and inside us as keys to knowing God. Science has given us so much new knowledge about creation, yet we have not yet made sense of it as God's creation, demonstrating His attributes.

As Murata acknowledges, Islam's gendered cosmology is only one, albeit strikingly clear and articulate, contribution in the long tradition of spiritual cosmology. Murata compares Islamic cosmology to the Tao but her treatment of "Taoism" is the weakest part of the book. Her main source for "Taoism" is a superficial reading of the Yijing (I ching), but the Yijing is quite as much Confucian as it is Taoist, if not more (see the twelfth-century Neo-Confucian anthology "Reflections on Things at Hand" translated by Hok-lam Chan). Murata adheres closely to the ABC rule for modern spiritual writers ("anything but Christianity"), but the Christian readers will find in this book thought-provoking parallels to the several pairs of creation (light-dark, dry-wet, man-woman etc.) in Genesis 1, the feminine Wisdom as God's instrument in creation in Proverbs 8, the divine-human marriage language in Psalm 45 and Ephesians 5, and the structuring duality of works (jalal/yang) and grace (jamal/yin), Law and Gospel, Moses and Christ in St. Paul's epistles and St. John's gospel. Those involved in the debates over gender and sexuality now wracking parts of the Christian church will find Murata's book a powerful reminder that gender is not something under human control that we can remake as we wish--instead human gender is only one reflection of the fundamentally gendered fabric of the cosmos, itself made by God.

Rating:
Summary: A Deeper Analysis of Gender in Islam
Review: Murata has accomplished a formidable feat by pooling together sources from both the sunni and shiah perspectives in order to present an overview of the Islamic perception of gender. By doing so she has done more justice to the multi-faceted Islamic tradition than most scholarly works that deal with the subject at hand. Her sunni sources are largely drawn from the sufic or mystical sunni-Islamic dimension, which in many respects stands parallel to shiaism, not because of a "borrowing" of one from the other as a historicist approach is forced to presume by its very premises, but rather because both sufism and shiahism tap into the same Prophetic Reality. Considering that sufism is the interior spiritual sap that gives life to the exterior bark of sunni-Islam, and that shiasm is an exteriorized Islamic spiritualism, the link between these two worldviews -- the sufic and shiite -- becomes clear. Hence Murata's employment of both sources.

As Murata shows, Islamic cosmology perceives sexual differentiation of the genders as a cosmic polarity compirising of a yin/yang interplay of opppostes. The Divine "faces" are both feminine and masculine.

Murata's work is already begining to exert its weight in Islamic studies departement's across Europe and North America. The book is sure to go a long way in reshaping the dominant views of Islam as an inherently mysogynistic religion.