A Quiet Revolution Read Free Page A

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    “The absence of a woman’s point of view for over 1440 years since
    the revelation” was clearly, Bakhtiar observes, a situation that needed to be changed. Convinced that “the intention of the Quran is to see man and woman as complements of one another, not as superior-inferior,” and acutely aware of the widespread criticisms that were made of Islam “with regard to the inferiority of women,” Bakhtiar now paid particular attention to the one key verse on which the notion of the inferiority of women might be said to hinge. This, she says, is verse 4 : 34 , which is typ- ically interpreted to mean that a husband may beat his wife “after two stages of trying to discipline her.” 4
    Her research, Bakhtiar explains, led her to challenge conventional readings of a key word in this verse—the word daraba. Conventional readings understand the word as being derived from the root verb “to
    beat” or “to hit.” Consequently, the verse is commonly understood and translated as specifically permitting men (in the words of various other prior translators) to “beat,” “hit,” or “spank” their wives, if the first two recommended stages—of first “admonishing” the wife and then leaving her “alone in bed”—failed to tame the woman’s resistance. 5
    Bakhtiar found that the root verb “daraba” had a number of pos- sible root meanings besides “to beat,” including “to go away.” In addi- tion, Bakhtiar points out, the Prophet Muhammad was never known to have beaten any of his wives and thus had never himself put into prac- tice a method of controlling wives that the Quran purportedly recom- mended. Furthermore, taking account of the fact that the interpretation of the word “daraba” as “to beat” is internally inconsistent with the broad, general tenor of Quranic statements and recommendations re- garding relations between men and women, Bakhtiar concluded that the correct interpretation of this word could not possibly be “to beat”: rather, she concluded that in this context it must mean “go away from.” The verse thus basically instructs men, as Bakhtiar interprets it, to leave— divorce—women who persist in challenging or resisting them. Given that the Quran also explicitly instructs men to grant divorce to women who do not wish to remain in a marriage, this reading and translation of the verse, Bakhtiar maintains, was in every way internally consistent with the Quran’s other specific teachings, as well as its broad, general teach- ings.
    Raised in the United States by her American Christian mother, a single parent, Bakhtiar describes herself as “schooled in Sufism” and as someone who is on the Sufi path. Now in her sixties, Bakhtiar has been a longtime student of Islam and is deeply familiar, she explains, with the dominant Muslim schools of thought, both Shi’i and Sunni. On her own initiative, as a child of eight, Bakhtiar had converted to Catholicism— not her mother’s faith. When she traveled to Iran with her Iranian hus- band at the age of twenty-four she found herself drawn to Islam. At this time Bakhtiar got to know her father, an Iranian who was “not religious, but spiritual, devoting his life as a physician to help to heal the suffering of people.”
    When Bakhtiar’s translation was first published, Mohammad Ashraf, ISNA’s secretary general in Canada, declared that “this woman-
    friendly translation will be out of line and will not fly too far.” Main- taining that “women have been given a very good place in Islam,” Ashraf also said that he would not permit the translation to be sold in ISNA’s bookstore. “Our bookstore would not allow this kind of translation,” he said. “I will consider banning it.” 6
    His remarks drew a stern response from Ingrid Mattson, the pres- ident of ISNA. Calling on the secretary general to retract his comments about banning the translation from their bookstore, Mattson (herself a noted scholar of the Quran)