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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781842772751 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2006 |
| Series: | Global Masculinities |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.59(d) |
About the Author
Lahoucine Ouzgane is associate professor of English at the University of Alberta, where his teaching and research interests focus on postcolonial theory and literature, composition and rhetoric, and masculinity studies.
Read an Excerpt
Islamic Masculinities
By Lahoucine Ouzgane
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2006 Lahoucine OuzganeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-151-4
CHAPTER 1
Gender and Islamic spirituality: a psycho logical view of 'low' fundamentalism
DURRE S. AHMED
This chapter is part of a continuing exploration of the psychology of two broadly conceived types of Islamic fundamentalism, namely 'high' and 'low'. 'High' Islamism pertains to those who are well educated by modern standards, including in the sciences, but who nevertheless subscribe to a narrow, literalist and violent vision of Islam. As such, they contradict the popular, widely held belief, particularly in the secular Muslim world, that fundamentalism is a lack of rationality which can be inculcated only through systems of modern education reflecting a strong scientific bias (Hoodbhoy 1991). Clearly, this is not the case: witness 11 September 2001. Whether it be Osama bin Laden, or the alleged leader of the aeroplane attacks in the USA, Mohammad Atta, increasingly there are many Islamists highly trained in scientific disciplines ranging from engineering to medicine, to architecture and nuclear physics.
I have examined this type of 'high' fundamentalism in a separate and detailed analysis, including its roots in certain key psycho-philosophical aspects of modernity (Ahmed 2002a; see also Ahmed 2001a). To the extent that increasingly it is the 'high' fundamentalist who provides either the inspiration or, frequently, financial and technical support to his not so well educated brothers who comprise 'low' fundamentalism, modernity and its problems and prospects remain central to understanding the phenomenon as a whole. Given that, high and low, almost all Islamists tend to have repressive and brutal attitudes towards women; broadly speaking, they are similar in terms of socio-political attitudes and impact. At the same time, given the relative lack of exposure to science and other key consciousness-changing technologies such as literacy, 'low' fundamentalism exhibits certain differences in psychology regarding gender.
Of course, the psychologies of both types of Islamists are deeply interlinked and these are not starkly separate categories/individuals. Given their similarities in terms of outcome (violence, misogyny), these are ultimately differences in style. In the case of 'low' Islamists, the differences are more evident at the local/national level, in this instance in Pakistan. Contextualizing them at different levels offers deeper insights, from different angles, into ultimately the same phenomenon. To this end, whereas the analysis of 'high' fundamentalism was primarily located within a critique of modernity, the present one also incorporates an Islamic idiom related to doctrine and gender. Put another way, while both remain connected to modernity, taken together they may represent certain global and local dimensions of Islamic fundamentalism. The first part of this chapter delineates the theoretical underpinnings of the analysis. The second discusses some of the key factors in the rise of 'low' Islamism in Pakistan and the attendant psychological implications for Islamist masculinity.
The psychological/theoretical framework
The connections with modernity of the present analysis are at a dual level. The first has to do with the feminist critique of viewing it as an implicitly 'phallogocentric' ('masculinist') project which is saturated in the 'Cartesian masculinization of thought' (see Bordo 1985). At the same time, I locate myself in the work of Carl Jung and particularly of James Hillman, in what is referred to as Archetypal psychology/theory. Its relevance lies, first, in the significance given by Jung to the role of religion in psychology. Second, apart from being a post-Jungian amplification, there are close connections between Hillman's ideas and an important intellectual tradition within Islam. For Hillman, after Jung, 'the second immediate father of archetypal psychology is Henry Corbin (1903–78), the French scholar, philosopher ... principally known for his interpretation of Islamic thought' (Hillman 1983). This paper also utilizes Murata's work on gender and Islam. Additionally, it is implicitly contextualized in writings on the significance of the 'symbolic imagination' in, among others, the work of Gilbert Durand, Henry Corbin, Mircea Eliade and Paul Ricoeur. As a whole, this body of work signals that
We should not be surprised ... to find that, in the last half century, developments ... resulting from Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian depth psychology have converged with a new orientation of the old history of religion discipline. Thus, with Mircea Eliade, Henry Corbin and Georges Dumezil ... to cite only a few authors ... reflections on the phenomenon of religion have broken away from etiological reductions within purely historical, social contexts to enter the territory of a more anthropological field – one centered on the properly religious function of the creative imagination. (Durnad 1987; see also Joy 1987)
In the present context, words such as 'creative imagination' or the 'Imaginal' do not refer to flights of fancy but to a complex epistemological framework. Whether in Ricoeur's notion of a 'poetics of experience' and the dynamic centrality of metaphor, or in Eliade's view that the soul-stifling aspects of modernity can be countered only through awakening the imagination which is innately predisposed to perceive the sacred/symbolic, imagination is conceptualized in a manner that can enable an articulation and understanding of religion and religious experience.
Post-Jungian psychology The (post)Jungian view of the human psyche is based on the paradigmatic significance of myth in both religion and human behaviour. The earliest expression of religion, mythology, is today considered a 'primitive' precursor to psychology. To this extent, like the ancient pantheons (and every civilization had one), our psyche is inherently 'polytheistic'. As experienced by us, in our outer and inner thoughts/emotions/behaviours, ranging from lust to compassion, to love, despondency, ambition and infinitely more, we inhabit a dense and diverse inner reality, not too different from the gods and their complex, multi-level exploits and expressions. In the same way as even today, different festivals honour different gods or aspects of a single deity, different 'gods' enter and exit in continuous flow within us, expressing the varied nature of, for example, love, vengeance, sexuality. As such, our changing moods, obsessions and concerns reflect an inherently polyvalent, polycentric, 'polytheistic' psyche. Forming a sort of web of inner meaning, this ancient notion of archetypes, as reintroduced in modern depth psychology by Jung, refers to the foundations of our basic assumptions about life/relationships and the controlling images that determine the course of our lives.
From within this framework, the issues of gender and socialization, at one level, take on marginal importance. As is evident, the gods, whether Greek or Indian, present a range of masculinities, from Zeus to the bisexual Dionysus. Each archetype represents an attitude, a style or structure of consciousness, uniquely embodied but expressed primarily as symbol(s). Thus, to study human behaviour is to study its relationship with the symbolic, not only as it appears in mythology and religion, but also in art, drama, epic, music, dance, architecture and other cultural manifestations.
The literal and symbolic When we discuss fundamentalism today, a common refrain is that the symbolic is taken as literal. While this is indeed the fact, the proposed counter-method is actually more allegorical and is not the same as an understanding of the symbolic. The symbolic, in this context, differs from its counterpart in, for example, modern anthropology or semiotics. In archetypal theory, symbols have a certain 'affective' power, can never be fully explained in terms of what they evoke and will always have an element of ambiguity, that is, an individually unknowable, transpersonal element. The attendant aspect of mystery is what we call(ed) a 'sense of the sacred', and which is connected to that ultimate mystery: death. As something that we all will experience but know nothing about, death, by definition can be 'known' only in terms of the symbolic imagination. In so far as it forms the bedrock of the enterprise of religion, our understanding of what life 'means' (or doesn't) is closely linked to how we understand death. Thus, as Corbin put it, symbols say that which cannot be said in any other way (Corbin 1987: 14–15, 38–77). In short, phenomenologically, the symbolic is both a psychological, physical (literal), as well as transcendental/metaphysical reality. It was these notions of the symbolic and its virtual absence in modern sensibility that Norman O. Brown was referring to when he said that 'the thing to abolish is literalism ... truth is always poetic in form, not literal but symbolic' (1986: 244). Brown's concern has been similarly echoed by others such as Jung and Eliade who see the primary malaise of modernity as its loss of the symbolic/imagination.
For something to be symbolically true, at some level, it has to be literally true. Death, for example, is a literal fact, but from the perspective of many religions it is largely a symbolic affair, a transformation, a re-birth. To talk of the loss of the 'sense' of the symbolic, then, is not to say symbols have ceased to exist. Given their (trans)personality, they remain as such, but interpreted, and manifest, at increasingly literal levels – which basically means a narrowing of the spectrum of their meaning till eventually all multiple possibilities of interpretations are excluded in favour of just one. But the 'power' of the symbol remains.
For example, the (post)Jungian critique of psychology sees modern psychology as repressive and abusive towards the 'feminine' side of the psyche. As a logical concomitant of the Cartesian split between 'mind' and body, the body is regarded as inferior, 'feminine' in contrast to the rational 'mind' which can be considered 'masculine' in its overvaluation of logos and notions of will-power, detachment, instrumentalist rationality, control. Given this dominance, other attitudes which are more intermediate, ambiguous, imaginal, metaphoric, having to do with eros and relatedness, can be considered 'feminine'. From the point of the modern Freudian/Cartesian 'ego', this feminine domain and the psyche's diversity as a whole are useless, threatening to its 'consciousness'. When they surface, as they must being a part of life, and erupt from the 'unconscious', they are considered abnormalities, 'pathology', and treated accordingly. Thus, in the West, the first two 'diseases' to be 'discovered' were hysteria and schizophrenia. The first is primarily associated with women, and the second with diversity and multiplicity of personality.
The point is that, first, culture itself can be 'read' symbolically. Second, that whether at the individual or the cultural/collective level, in spite of an absence of the sense of the symbolic, the archetypal power of the symbolic itself lives on, and powerfully at that. Thus, as used in this psycho-symbolic-sacred sense, culture becomes a crucial concept, not only as archetypal canvas but also as a diagnostic one.
Religion and sexuality From the Jungian perspective, gender does not have to do with just literal, outer manifestations of genital sexuality, but also, more importantly, it is a psychological-symbolic construct. For example, in contrast to Freudian literalist reductionism and its tendency to view dream images such as a dagger or a pointed object as symbols of 'nothing but' the male genitals, the Jungian may regard them also as certain attitudes of consciousness which could be normatively termed 'masculine'. As evident in the hero archetype, they could refer to the idea of rational intellect, a 'penetrative' insight, an attempt to 'see through' a situation, mastery, detachment, abstraction, clarity of thought. (It was this literalist reduction of Freudian thought which led Jung to remark, only half in jest, that the penis is 'nothing but a phallic symbol'.)
Similarly, a hollow object may be a symbol of a different set of psychological qualities: relatedness, receptivity, inwardness, more contemplative, reflective and less action-oriented. To the extent that men and women literally embody these genitally based metaphors, they may exhibit individual predispositions. But to consider this, as Freud did ('anatomy is destiny'), exclusively as literal is to fall into gender reductionism. In short, masculine and feminine are also attitudes, potentially available to both sexes and, as such, do not have to do just literally with man and woman.
To the extent that the concept of 'masculine' is meaningless without its feminine counterpart, any statements about the latter can substantively imply a view of the former. As one proceeds, this seeming shift in focus will at times be evident. It is remarkable that whenever there is an attempt to 'Islamize' what is in any case a pre-existing and predominantly Muslim society, much of it has to do with the behaviour and bodies of women. Given that such socio-political movements are rarely inspired, led or followed on a large scale by women, to that extent they indicate certain deep-rooted psychological issues within the Muslim male psyche regarding women, gender, sexuality and the relationship of these with religion.
Considering that Jung's extensive forays into comparative religion and spiritual alchemy form major conceptual underpinnings to his work, his ideas about the symbolic dimensions of gender have parallels not only in Gnostic Christianity but in almost all traditions which view the body in both physical and symbolic terms. All mythologies abound with sexual metaphors, simultaneously expressing religious concepts. In these and almost every spiritual tradition, the human being is a microcosm, 'the little world', representing the macrocosm or the 'great world', the universe (O'Flaherty 1980). The micro/macrocosm theme is similarly present in the monotheisms, of humans being made in the likeness of God.
Sexuality and spiritual experience have traditionally been linked in the literature of mysticism, the great spiritual current running beneath all religions. Terms such as 'rapture', 'passion', 'union', 'ecstasy', 'ravish', occur frequently in mystical texts. Many so-called 'esoteric' (to the westerner) psychologies in the East, including the perspective of certain types of yoga, Tantra and Sufism, would say that sexuality is really unexpressed and unfulfilled religious experience (Bataille 1998). These connections between religion and gender are all present within Islamic doctrine and practice.
Elements of doctrine and practice in Islamic mysticism
Perhaps more than most religions, the division between the exoteric and esoteric is vividly present in Islam. That is, there is the shariah as codified, textual law and the more informal, also textual but overwhelmingly orally transmitted idiom of the 'path' or 'way' of mysticism (tariqah). Both can be considered as engendering certain attitudes of the soul/psyche, in this case masculine and feminine respectively, but always as interrelated aspects of a unity, human or divine.
At a basic level, one's sense of self is inseparable from the body, which is a crucial element of understanding this gender/self/spirit connection, literally and symbolically. As in other mystical traditions such as Tantra, which does not perceive sexuality in primarily negative terms, male and female in Islam, and their sexual union, represent the highest level of a symbolic union with the divine. The positive role given to sexuality in Islam finds its fullest expression not only in the life of the Prophet but also in the Sufi poetry and the theme of love as 'realized gnosis', which, as Nasr says, 'dominates its [Islamic] spirituality', and in which 'God appears as the beloved and the female as a precious being symbolizing inwardness and the inner paradise' (Nasr 1980).
It is within such a psycho-spiritual framework, for example, that Henry Corbin has discussed the complex metaphysics of writers such as Ibn al Arabi and Rumi and an important dimension of their vision of the divine: 'a mystic obtains the highest theophanic vision in contemplating the image of feminine being, because it is in the Image of feminine being that contemplation can apprehend the highest manifestation of God ... The spirituality of our Islamic mystics is led esoterically to the apparition of the Eternal Womanly as an Image of the Godhead' (Corbin 1987: 159–60).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Islamic Masculinities by Lahoucine Ouzgane. Copyright © 2006 Lahoucine Ouzgane. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
PART ONE: Masculinities and Religion 1. Gender and Islamic Spirituality: A Psychological View of 'Low' Fundamentalism - Durre S. Ahmed 2. The Smile of Death and the Solemncholy of Masculinity - Banu Helvacioglu 3. Alternate Images of the Prophet Muhammad's Virility - Ruth Roded 4. The Trial of Heritage and the Legacy of Abraham - Najat RahmanPART TWO: Masculinities and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict 5. My wife is from the jinn: Palestinian men, diaspora, and love - Celia Rothenberg 6. Chasing Horses, Eating Arabs - Rob K. Baum 7. Stranger Masculinities: Gender and Politics in a Palestinian-Israeli 'Third-Space' - Daniel MonterescuPART THREE: Masculinities and Social Practice 8. Gender, Power and Social Change in Morocco - Don Conway-Long 9. Masculinity and gender violence in Yemen - Mohammed Baobaid 10. Opportunities for Masculinity and Love: Cultural Production in Ba'thist Iraq during the 1980s - Achim Rohde 11. On being homosexual and Muslim: Conflicts and Challenges - Asifa Siraj 12. 'The worms are weak': Male Infertility and Patriarchal Paradoxes in Egypt - Marcia C. Inhorn Index