Week 3 Response

The justification of past versus present with Mernissi’s story of her unfortunate trip to the grocery, and that of A’isha, much longer ago, was something I found to be a very interesting aspect of the first chapter of Mernissi’s book. I greatly enjoyed that Mernissi compiled her thoughts into a much easier read, as she is far easier for me to relate to than other authors we have read.
In this reading, Mernissi takes offense at the Hadith that gets thrown at her at the store scene in the beginning of the chapter, which states “ those who entrust their affairs to a woman will never know prosperity.” Now that is an extremely blunt and biased statement. This Hadith was also used to criticize A’isha, a character whom it seems Mernissi can relate well to. I found it ironic that while A’isha was taking on a battlefield at the head of an army and challenging a powerful caliph, her huband, Muhammad ‘Arafa, who was supposedly quite supportive of her, was the one who wrote books expressing that women virtually have no rights, no do they have political history. I view this as a sad irony that is unfortunately a continuation of the double-talk that Wa’dud wrote extensively on in our past readings. Traditionally, in Muslim households, men are brought up to develop ideas of manhood as unlimited and exclusive empowerment, yet supposedly men and women are said to sit at equal levels. This is an example of the strange gender disparity that is even more magnified within the family, where things are really not transparent.
It also angered me to read that A’isha was also slandered by writer al-Afghani, who published two books essentially blaming A’isha for any and all bloodshed involved in the civil war, and for the split between Sunni and Shi’a. Al-Afghani uses A’isha as an example of why women should never meddle in politics, and this is just so unfair, because there are various other reasons, but because a man was the one who took the authority to write the book, he basically holds authority of what happened.