By Arshad Alam, New Age Islam
01 August 2018
As Muslims, we have always been told that life in
pre-Islamic Arabia was barbaric, nasty, brutish and short. We are told that
before the advent of Islam in that part of the world, girls were buried alive,
men could have as many wives as possible and that generally the status of women
was very low. Rules were seldom maintained and it was Islam which brought order
within such a chaotic society. This characterization of pre-Islamic Arabian
society has been so much drilled into the consciousness of an average Muslim
psyche that questioning it has become difficult even when there are manifest
clues to the contrary.
The age of Jahiliyyah (ignorance), as it came to be
called was very nearly a period of darkness. And just as Enlightenment
delivered Europe into modernity through the dark ages, Islam delivered
geography and its people through darkness into a new dawn. In its modern
reading according to Syed Qutb and Maududi, large parts of the world are still
in the age of Jahiliyyah and are waiting for Islam to deliver them from their
self-imposed darkness. Just as the Europeans convinced us that colonialism was
good for us, Islamists are out to prove that Islam will be good for the entire
world. The claim rests on the assertion that Islam brought humanity to the
Arabs and one measure of that humanity was its treatment of women.
But how accurate is this narrative? It seems that in
our zeal to associate everything praiseworthy with Islam, we have falsified
history and the Arabs in particular have belittled their own historical past.
There is certainly a sense in which some of the laws and practices of the pre-Islamic
period continued into Islamic times. For example, hajj was made possible every
year because of the tribal mores that forbade killing within that month. Before
the pilgrimage was Islamised as the ‘hajj’, the society therein had evolved
some laws which they put into practice. If the society was so anarchic, as
claimed by Muslims, then certainly the annual pilgrimage which later became the
hajj would not have been possible. After the Prophet proclaimed Islam and made
the hajj, he was protected by the same tribal values of people who were not
only not Muslims but also hostile to the new religion.
It is true that pre-Islamic Arabian society resolved
their conflicts through blood feud. It is also true that Islam tried to control
some of this conflict. But then, throughout the world, blood feud was a common
method of conflict resolution in tribal societies. Moreover, even Islam could
not put a moratorium on such perpetual inter-generational conflicts. The
descent into violence immediately after the death of the Prophet can only be
understood as falling back on the tribal ways of conflict resolution.
Another important contention has been that Islam
improved the status of women in Arabian society. Now it might be the case that
female infanticide was practiced in Arabia at that time. But then it was by no
means unique to the region. Various tribal and non-tribal societies have had
this practice and most of them did not need Islam to overcome this horrible
practice. It just died its own death.
The special privilege that Islam claims as the reason
why this practice stopped is therefore unfounded. Also, the contention that men
in pre Islamic society could take as many wives as they desired seems untrue.
What seems to be the case is that there were many types of union which were
possible earlier. The specific contribution of Islam seems to be the introduction
of a new normativity in marriages which was called Nikah. In making Nikah as the standard form of marriage, Islam
considerably lowered the diversity which was practiced earlier in terms of
recognised sexual unions.
The claim that Islam gave an exalted status to women
is also an exaggeration. Muslim scholars are quick to point out that the
first wife of the Prophet, Khadija, was a highly successful businesswoman and
this is cited as a proof that the adoption of Islam led to women’s empowerment.
What we forget however, is that the marriage between Khadija and the Prophet
took place during pre-Islamic times. So, Khadija was a successful businesswoman
not because of Islam but despite it. The very fact that she inherited wealth
also belies the claim of those Islamists who argue that Islam gave property
rights to women. The case of Khadija demonstrates that property rights for
women existed in pre-Islamic Arabia; Islam merely re-affirmed this practice. It
must also be pointed out that the proposal for marriage was initiated by
Khadija and not from the Prophet’s side. This again tells us that women in
pre-Islamic Arabia were considerably independent and did not depend on men to
take important decisions.
It should also be borne in mind that till the time
Khadija was alive; the Prophet did not take another wife. While this is
regarded as Prophet’s devotion to his wife, it can also be read in another way. Marriage contracts were not the specific contribution of Islam; it
existed even before Islam. Women were free to put conditions in that contract,
a practice which Islam continued when it became the dominant power. It is not
entirely unfeasible to think that the Prophet was bound by a contract which
forbade him from taking another wife till the time Khadija was alive. We know
that the Prophet married many times after the death of his first wife, and not
all of them were for reasons of making political alliances as many Muslim
apologists tell us.
Thus what we call Jahiliyyah may not after all be a
period of darkness. Like any other society, women belonging to different
classes had different rights and statuses. What seems to have happened might
just be the opposite. That in trying to make one standard rule for all, Islam
in the process diminished some of the rights which women enjoyed earlier.
Arshad Alam is a columnist with NewAgeIslam.com
URL: http://www.newageislam.com/islamic-society/arshad-alam,-new-age-islam/the-myth-of-jahiliyyah/d/116003
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