I recently finished Khaled Abou El Fadl’s book “Speaking in God’s Name”. I’m comfortable admitting that, too often, the complex juristic explanations went right over my head, making me re-read a page several times. I still gained a lot from reading it. I’ll share a gem from it and a big point in this book:

The most pronounced feature of the legal determinations that exclude women from public life is the obsessive reliance on the idea of fitnah. In these determinations, women are persistently seen as a walking, breathing bundle of fitnah….

It does not seem to occur to the jurists who make these determinations that this presumed fitnah that accompanies women in whatever they do or wherever they go is not an inherent quality of womanhood, but is a projection of male promiscuities. By artificially constructing womanhood into the embodiment of seductions, these jurists do not promote a norm of modesty, but in reality promote a norm of immodesty. Instead of turning the gaze away from the physical attributes of women, they obsessively turn the gaze of attention to women as a mere physicality. In essence, these jurists objectify women into items for male consumption, and in that, is the height of immodesty.