Because A Devil Would Not Come Close to a Woman
Comment on Gisella Webb and Mohja Kahf in Windows of Faith
Leonard C. Epafras (ICRS – 07/259877/SMU/326)

… Attention should be paid (in this connection) to what Muhammad told Khadijah about the revelation when he first experienced it, and she wanted to know what it was like. She asked him to embrace her, and when he did so, it left him. Khadijah, thereupon, said that it was an angel, and not a devil, meaning that (a devil) would not come close to a woman. She also asked him what garments he liked best (for the angel) to wear during the revelation, and he replied, "White and green ones." Whereupon Khadijah said that it was an angel, meaning that green and white are the colors of goodness and of the angels. Black, on the other hand, is the color of evil and of the devils. There are other such stories. (Ibn Khaldūn, al-Muqaddimah, my emphasis)
The fourteenth century prominent statesman, historian, philosopher, jurist, lawyer, and, what modern scholars like him the most, “sociologist” – some say, the first sociologist – Ibn Khaldūn, recorded a small episode about Khadījah bint al-Khuwaylid, the first wife of Prophet Muh{ammad, and her husband. The incident was about whether Muh{ammad truly encounter the God-sent angel or it simply a devil attempt to posses him. One of the chapters of his magnum opus, The Muqadimmah, Ibn Khaldūn wrote a long prefatory for his world history. The chapter was about inspiration and dream visions. Earlier part of it devoted for historical and scientific proof of the Prophet, and his exceptionality, and that of his trustworthiness of his divine messages. Interestingly, as the above story tells us, Khadījah confirmation of his revelatory reception was a decisive confirmation that Muh{ammad was a truly messenger of God and the first revelation he received from Gabriel was not a daydreaming. The account presented by Ibn Khaldūn was in fact, a very personal one, near-legendary style even, but it was listed along with other traditional, “scientific” and “sociological” argumentations. It is interesting to know that the earlier formation of Islam, a woman took great significant part. 
Khadījah was recorded in the Islamic tradition as the first person who believe Muh{ammad’s mission and even the first Muslim(ah). Nonetheless, even though Khadījah ranked among the exemplary women and prominent figure in the biography literatures of the Prophet, she rarely appears in the exegetical works. This situation somehow reflected the general pattern of the position of women in the Islamic history, that of mostly they belong to the “memory” rather than “history proper.” If it is true that the history is belong to the powerful, then the women are belong to memory; memory that interwoven into the standard topos of history. Women either reified as subject within the classical pre- and early Islamic literary works, such as the story of Bilqis, the queen of Sheba, and/or celebrated as professional poets. Sarah, a contemporary of the prophet Muh{ammad and a member of the Jewish tribe of Qurayz}a, wrote verses so beautiful that they appear in Kitab al-Aghani, a classic anthology of Arabic poetry. However, further development of Islam, after it became a full-fledged religious system, roughly in the second and third century of Islamic Year (ca. 8th/9th c. CE), which equipped with mature systematic legal system, theologies, philosophies, and all of the apparatuses, the position of women within the society and before the law more or less stable. From this point onward, their role in the larger conversation and public sphere slowly faded away. 
At this point, the work of Mohja Kahf extremely important, that is to reassess the presumably minor role of women in the early formation of Islam. Contrary to the wide-held view, she asserted that, in fact, “Women’s words are woven into the whole range of early Islamic texts,” (p. 147). The “wovens” she mentioned are cultural memory buried in the standard narrative of Islam. Kahf, a modern American Muslimah, attempted, not only to recover meticulously this layer of memory, but also revive and activate it for the present audience. She begins the revival process with ‘Um Said interlocution, “Aunt, tell me your account,” (p. 148), haddithini or akhbirini, “speak to me!” ‘Um Said was a prominent woman figure in the early Islam. Through her story, Kahf is once again wanted us to hear her voice desirous, and the voices of women stood in line on her back. 
As the objectified memory, history differs from memory. Memory is a cognitive device that catalyzes emotions, senses, participation, pain, joy, togetherness, and ultimately, community. Meanwhile, the specificity of cultural memory is characterized by its distance from the everyday. It concentrates on fixed events of the past whose memory is maintained through cultural formation (texts, rituals, monuments, etc). It is also contribute significantly to the formation of identity. Therefore, the importance of the link Kahf attempted to forge is more than a better understanding of the past events but programmatically is to find an Islamic answer to the modern Muslimah problems; while at the same time “escaping” from the charm of “Western feminism discourse.” For the above concern, she is more than a visitor of literary text. She opens an ijtihad from different venue, i.e. by historical investigation of the taciturn memory insinuated in the male-centered text of early Islam. Her work is meant to knock down the cultural imagination induced by American media that Muslim women are “an oppressed or mute victim,” as Gisela Webb put it, and to “initiate a critique of androcentric attitudes toward religion” (p. 171). At this point, her achievement is more than the whole volume of Windows of Faith demand, which is to give Muslim women voices of their own. If it comes to its maturity, this study is a significant step to refine the standard version of Islamic history, or else an alternative of it.
Kahf demonstrated that since the very beginning of Islam, even earlier there were complex strategies of women to keep their visibility and audacity in the general conversation, i.e. within the discourse of manhood. She started this by an analysis of rhetorical art in the classical Arabic culture called balagha (“eloquence”). Surprisingly, according to her finding, since the pre-Islamic era, women involvement in this art was significant. The eloquence through beautiful and effective wording, especially through poetry and performance was imprinted until nowadays in the Qur’anic chanting by Muslims throughout the world. The balagha activities allow both sexes to involve in. Kahf indicated that through balaghat al-nisa’ (women’s eloquence) women marginality could be compensated. However, the prominence of balaghat al-nisa’ assumingly also proves the scarcity of women appearance in the male-centered society – there was no such a “men’s eloquence” because of its apparent ubiquity. In large part, this was a popular cultural activities carried out by professional poets and even commoners. Khalf also introduced another concept of mujadila (fem. “interlocutor,” lit. “she who argues/dispute”). It was a woman who initiated public eloquence for furthering her social matters. This eloquence, as the name implied was meant to interpellate or proposing interlocution, or even interrupt of the ongoing male discussion. The importance of these two concepts for women was that in this arena (balagha) and role (mujadila) there the space available for them to maneuver. Khalf pointed also even more significant role of mujadila in the story of Qaila bint Makhram, a Bedouin women who pledge her situation to the Prophet Muh{ammad. Bedouins were nomadic group who in the construction of Ibn Khaldūn history is a symbol of the pristine simplicity and “primitivism” (al-'umrān al-badawī) as against the sedentary (al-'umrān al-had}arī). Bedouin women in certain circumstance, as the case of Qaila is even more vulnerable than other women in the non-Bedouin society, thus her pledge (eloquence) before the Prophet was noted. 
Kahf concluded that, “Women produce discourse in the mujadila mode in part because of marginalization from other routes of access of power” (p. 168). The social arrangement of a mujadila interpellated the male circle in one way is a mark of women submission to the male domination, as there were thick mannerism (way of asking and respond, and so forth) in the discourse, as to confirm Althusser observation that interpellation enforces social class and role of the subject. However, Kahf study is not about domination/dominated discourse, but about the women strategy to foreground their interest through the possible means. Even as in some cases presented, she pushed further by saying that it is, “a discourse of manhood in woman-centered terms” (p. 171).
This may recall Judith Butler, a prominent feminism theorist that against the long tradition of feminist scholarship, that treated the women condition were entirely constrained by external and social imposition, she argued that the social norms are “the necessary ground through which the subject is realized and comes to enact her agency.” A subject is produced, as Foucauldian construction tells us, “simultaneously through a necessary repudiation of identities, forms of subjectivities, and discursive logics, what Butler calls ‘a constitutive outside to the subject.’” Modern/secular feminism tends to see the woman personhood in terms of relative autonomy of the individual from the social. While recent studies, for example by Saba Mahmood, showed different understanding in the case of Muslimah. Similar observation also stated by Webb that, “The approach [of the Windows of Faith] is a frontal challenge to a perceived chauvinism, a new patriarchy, that ‘the Western’ feminists – perhaps unwittingly – did not see developing in their own ranks toward Muslim women (and other non-European women and their cultures), whose assumptions were crystallized in the ‘universalist’ assumptions underlying the United Nations platform on women’s rights” (p. xiii). Kahf’s finding, in my opinion is definitely in accordance with this trend. 
In order to grasp the whole spirit of Window’s of Faith, it is important to allow other modern mujadillas – mujadillas, the interlocutors “are not poets, orators, or storytellers,” and in modern sense, are not scholar-activists – to voice out their plead and beautiful proverbs. However, Webb correctly remarked that to hear the off-stage, hidden, and tacit memory of Muslim women, need a posture of khabarini, that is “be willing to listen to the self-generated discourse.”