“One is not born, but rather becomes a woman…her wings are cut and blamed for not knowing how to fly,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her celebrated work The Second Sex. The history of the world is, alas, a miserable story of women's subjugation. The suppression of women starts with the very dawn of human history and legends. Lilith, a feminine figure in Mesopotamian and Jewish mythology, is theorized to be the first woman and the wife of Adam. She was "banished" from the Garden of Eden for not complying with and obeying the first man, Adam.
Misogyny is ubiquitous, prevalent in all cultures and societies to varying degrees. Islamic society has haplessly been suffering from this malady from its inception. Fatima Al-Zahra, daughter of Muhammed, the Prophet of Islam and the founder of Medina, the first Islamic state, was a dolorous victim of the political leadership of Medina who succeeded the Prophet’s political authority. Likewise, Fatima Jinnah, sister and close political and personal companion of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Qaid-i-Azam and the founder of ‘New Medina’, as historian Venkat Dhulipala called Pakistan in his Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India (2015), suffered the same woeful fate at the hands of Jinnah’s successors in Pakistan. Both of them are still extolled and glorified in the pulpits; but they were brutally betrayed by the Prophet’s and the Qaid’s successors. Their wings were cut; mainly because they were women. Patriarchal societies seldom tolerate political roles for the second sex.
The Queen of Heavenly Ladies
Given the title of Al-Zahra, the Lady of the Light, Fatima, daughter of Muhammed, was renowned for her intellect, faith, and modesty. Loved greatly by her father, Prophet Muhammad, it is reported that he stated: “Whoever injures Fatima, he injures me; and whoever injures me injures Allah; and whoever injures Allah practices unbelief. O Fatima! If your wrath is incurred, it incurs the wrath of Allah; and if you are pleased, it makes Allah pleased, too.” The marriage between the daughter of the Prophet and his most cherished companion, Ali bin Abi Talib, signaled a powerful beginning for the legacy of the Prophet’s household.
Despite her exalted position in Islam, Fatima met a tragic death at the hands of the political authorities of Medina, soon after the demise of the Prophet, mainly due to her political stand regarding the election of the Caliph. Fatima’s house was attacked at the instigation of Abu Bakr and Umar, who succeeded to power in Medina immediately after the demise of Muhammed in 632 CE. This episode is called ‘the story of the door’. The purpose of the attack was to arrest Fatima's husband Ali who had withheld his pledge of allegiance to Abu Bakr as the Caliph. Fatima firmly stood by her husband in the political crisis. Her injuries during the raid caused the young Fatima's miscarriage and death within a few months of Muhammad’s passing away. Even though scholars of Sunni Islam deny this untoward episode, Shia sources like Kitab Sulaym bin Qays corroborate this tragic death of Fatima Al-Zahra.
In Kitab Sulaym, the story of the door can be recounted as follows: “Lady Fatimah said: “O Umar, what do you have to do with us?” He replied: “Open the door, otherwise we will burn your house.” Lady Fatimah said: “O Umar, are you not afraid of Allah and are you entering our house?” Umar refused to return. He asked fire to be brought and he set the door on fire, then he pushed it and entered. Lady Fatimah came in front and screamed loudly: “O Father, O Prophet of Allah.” Umar raised his sword with the shield and hit her on the side. She screamed: “O Father. He then lifted a whip and hit her on the hand and she cried: “O Prophet of Allah, Abu Bakr and Umar behaved very badly after you.” Fatima’s tragedy has many shades; one among them may be her political assertion in a male-dominated polity.
Khatun-i-Pakistan and Madar-i-Millat
Fatima Jinnah was Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s ‘Man Friday’ in his isolated island of personal life in the evening of his life. “She was English educated, a professional dentist and an unveiled social worker even before the word Pakistan was coined in the 1930s. And once the cause of Muslim nationalism became the official plank of the Muslim League, she was at the center of women’s activism in its favor – a public personality even before the state’s independence in 1947. Nor did Pakistan’s creation dull the people’s enthusiasm for this woman. In fact, it propelled her further into their consciousness, not as a political office holder, but as an advocate of citizens’ rights to education, welfare and political participation. Her voice of conscience, in fact, was largely resented by the political elite whose own agendas more often than not conflicted with the interests of those they ruled. Her last public act, therefore, was to actually enter the political fray as the leader of a disparate coalition of opposition parties seeking to establish representative government in an environment choked by military-bureaucratic rule. She ran for president in 1964–5 – a time when men from east to west balked at the idea of women heads of state. She lost, as she herself predicted, but this final gesture of a woman then in her seventies only reaffirmed her standing in the eyes of Pakistanis,” writes M. Reza Pirbhai in his Fatima Jinnah: Mother of the Nation (2017). Fatima Jinnah was the ‘Fatima Al-Zahra of New Medina’ and was hailed as Khatun-i-Pakistan (the First Lady of Pakistan) and Madar-i-Millat (Mother of the Nation). But she met the same oppression and injustice like her holy namesake during her twilight years at the hands of Pakistan’s ruling elite.
Fatima Jinnah was fearless and outspoken while criticizing the corrupt and repressing ruling elite. She was persuaded by the opposition alliance to turn on Gen. Ayub Khan in the presidential election of 1964-65. Even Jamaat-i-Islami, which held the view that women had no right to head an Islamic government, extended support to Fatima with a caveat that this support should in no way create a precedent that a woman can become head of state. Leaders of the Jamaat-i-Ulama-i-Pakistan led by clerics of the Barelvi school convened an All-Pakistan Sunni Conference where 650 clerics of various schools jointly issued a fatwa against Fatima Jinnah, declaring it haram (forbidden) for a woman to head an Islamic state. The electoral college under the Basic Democratic System devised by Ayub Khan was skewed against Fatima’s prospects. The Jama‘at al-Mashaykh, an umbrella organization of Sufi Pirs whose membership included 25% of the electoral college, not only argued that it was haram (forbidden) for a woman to head an Islamic state under any circumstances, but further warned that members of the electoral college would invoke the wrath of God if they voted for Fatima.
Fatima’s only goal was stated to be the establishment of the people’s right to vote freely, without the limitations on their franchise imposed by the Ayub regime. This, she added, was not only the people’s right, but was what their Quaid-i Azam envisioned, and was necessary for the “moral and material uplift of the nation.” The most basic question before the people, she said, was whether they would be ruled by “representative or authoritarian government.” She decided on the former because, as a Muslim, “every action, every word, every breath, every heart beat and every step has but one resolve and that is to assert the right to choose our own government” by adult franchise – a system inclusive of a “sovereign Parliament, a free press and independent judiciary.” But thanks to the skewed ‘Basic Democracy Scheme’ and widespread vote rigging, Fatima Jinnah lost the election. The vote of the electoral college, announced on January 2, 1965, was a resounding endorsement of the incumbent president: 63% for Ayub versus 37% for Fatima.
Fatima Jinnah’s death is also, like Fatima Al-Zahra’s, shrouded in mystery. She was found dead in her bedroom on 9 July 1967. The doctors declared the official cause of death to be heart failure and the police inspector concurred that there seemed to be no sign of foul play. An autopsy was therefore not deemed necessary. The official account of heart failure was immediately challenged and rumours of murder persist to the present, with everyone from Ayub to a disgruntled or thieving cook suspected. Hearing such reports, Fatima’s nephew, a prominent lawyer from Bombay, Akbar Pirbhai, came to Karachi and demanded an inquiry during a meeting with Ayub, but the body having since been buried, an exhumation was deemed out of the question by authorities.
The tragedy of the two Fatimas underscores the misogyny of the machismo leadership of the Muslim community that has lingered across the centuries. The tragic but brave tales of Fatima Al-Zahra and Fatima Jinnah are potent enough to break the glass ceiling that still prevents women, especially Muslim women, from claiming their due.
(Faisal C.K. is Deputy Law Secretary to the Government of Kerala. Views are personal. Email: faisal.chelengara10@gmail.com ).
