booke

220chapter five1.forthcoming generations of scientists were able to study phenomenain nature and link them to the limits that Allah has set forhuman societies. However, current Muslim scholarship cannotresort to this excuse. After centuries of progress in the natural andsocial sciences, we are now able to apply the legal impositions ofwhat is ‘straight’ and what is ‘curved’ in line with what is inherentin nature and the disposition of human beings, thus allowing us toembark on a truly contemporary and enlightened assessment ofthe situation of women, based on our rereading of the Book.Feminists have failed to envisage a struggle for the liberation andemancipation of women that goes beyond the time of MuÈammad’slife. In their attempt to prove that Islam is not misogynous,Islamic feminists have too often focused solely on how MuÈammad’smission has liberated women in ancient Arabia, while moreor less ignoring the plight of Muslim women ever since. By doingso they have unintentionally suggested that the liberation of womenachieved under MuÈammad was the optimum of emancipationpossible. And since during MuÈammad’s time women were notworking as judges and preachers and since they did not occupyhigh political positions, this was seen as the maximum amount ofwomen’s liberation that we, today, are not allowed to furtherextend. This ignores, of course, the fact that the position of womenin Arabian society was, just like slavery which initially had to beendorsed, something that did not allow radical changes or, to putit in evolutionary terms, something that did not allow a sudden‘combustion of entire time periods’. Just as a sudden abolition ofslavery would have destroyed the social fabric and the prevalentmeans of production in ancient Arabian society, a radical repositioningof women’s roles would have undermined the social stabilitythat MuÈammad (ß) so desperately wanted to achieve with hisnew state. 2 The society which MuÈammad (ß) created was Islam’sfirst but not only model—Islam’s first fruit, so to speak.function, a kind of a fluxion that is based on a theory of limits. See P. Kitcher, “Fluxions,Limits, and Infinite Littleness: A Study of Newton’s Presentation of the Calculus,”Isis 64, no. 221 (1973), 33–49, and N. Kollerstrom, “Newton’s Method ofApproximation: An Enduring Myth,” British Journal for History of Science 25 (1992),347–54.2The slave trade in Islam was banned for the first time in 1847 for the region ofthe Persian Gulf, and in 1887 the authorities of the Ottoman Empire signed withGreat Britain a convention against it. The last Muslim countries to outlaw slaverywere Qatar (1952), Saudi Arabia (1962), and Mauritania (1980). Even though slavery