Boys will be Boys

Gender identity issues

Abdal-Hakim Murad

I have been asked to offer some comments on gender identity issues as these impact on Muslims
living in post-traditional contexts in the West, and particularly as they affect people who have traded
up to the Great Covenant of Islam after an upbringing in Judaism or Christianity. The usual way of
doing this is by examining issues in the classical fiqh, and explaining how Islams discourse of equality
functions globally, not on the micro-level of each fiqh ruling. That method is legitimate enough
(although as we shall see the concept of equality may raise considerable problems), but in general
my experience of Muslim talk on gender is that there is too much apologetic abroad, apologetic, that
is, in the sense not only of polemical defence, but also of pleas entered in mitigation. What I want to
do today is to bypass this recurrent and often tiresome approach, which reveals so much about the
low serotonin levels of its advocates, and suggest how as Western Muslims we can construct a
language of gender which offers not a defence or mitigation of current Muslim attitudes and
establishments, but a credible strategy for resolving dilemmas which the Western thinkers and
commentators around us are now meticulously examining.

Let me begin, then, by trying to capture in a few words the current crisis in Western gender
discourse. As good a place as any to do this is Germaine Greers book The Whole Woman, released in
1999 to an interesting mix of befuddled anger and encomia from the press.

This is an important book, not least because it casts itself as a dialogue with the authors earlier,
more notorious volume The Female Eunuch, published thirty years previously. Throughout, Greer,
who is one of the most conscientious and compassionate of feminist writers, reflects on the ways in
which the social and also scientific context of Western gender discourse has shifted over this period.
In 1969, liberation seemed imminent, or at least cogently achievable. In 1999, with states and
national institutions largely converted to the cause which once seemed so radical, it seems to have
receded somewhere over the horizon. Hence Greers anger descends upon not one, but two
lightning-rods: the old enemy of male gynophobia is still excoriated, but there is also a more diffuse
frustration with what Greer now acknowledges is the hard-wiring of the human species itself. Most
feminism in the 1960s and 1970s was equality feminism, committed to the breakdown of gender
disparities as social constructs amenable to changes in education and media generalisation;
feminism in the 1990s, however, was increasingly a difference feminism, rooted in the growing
conviction that nature is at least as important as nurture in shaping the behavioural traits of men
and women. Most politicians, educators and media barons and baronesses are still committed to the
old feminist idea; however, as Greers book shows, the new feminism is growing and promises to
take the world through another social shakedown, whose consequences for Muslim communities
will be considerable.

Several factors have been at work in securing this sea-change. Perhaps the most obvious has been
the sheer stubbornness of traditional patterns, which most men and women continue to find
strangely satisfying. Radical feminist revolution of the old Greer school has not found a
demographically significant constituency. Most women have not properly signed up to the
sisterhood.

Moreover, the world which has been increasingly shaped by secular egalitarian gender discourse has
not proved to be the promised land than the younger Greer had prophesied. As she now writes:

When the Female Eunuch was written our daughters were not cutting or starving themselves. On
every side speechless women endure endless hardship, grief and pain, in a world system that creates
billions of losers for every handful of winners. (p.3)

She goes on to suggest that the sexual liberation that accompanied the gender revolution has in
most cases harmed women more than men. The sexuality that has been freed, she writes, is male
sexuality. Promiscuity harms women more than men: women continue to experience the
momentous consequences of pregnancy, while the male body is unaffected. When the
USS Acadia returned from the Gulf War, a tenth of her female crewmembers had already been
returned to America because of pregnancy aboard what became known as the Love Boat. The
number of men returned was zero.

Another consequence of the sexual revolution has been an increase in infidelity, and a consequent
rise in divorce and single parenthood. Again, it is women who have shouldered most of the burden.
In 1971, one in twelve British families was headed by a single parent, in 1986 one in seven, and by
1992 one in five (p.202). Another consequence has been the pain of solitude. By the year 2020 a
third of all British households will be occupied by a single individual, and the majority of those
individuals will be female (p.250). One of the most persistent legends of the sexual revolution, that
testing the waters before marriage helps to determine compatibility, seems to have been
definitively refuted. Some of the briefest marriages are those that follow a long period of
cohabitation (p.255).

A further area in which women seem to have found themselves degraded rather than liberated by
the new cultural climate is that of pornography. This institution, opposed by most feminists as a
dehumanisation and objectification of women (Otto Preminger once called Marilyn Monroe a
vacuum with nipples), has not been chastened into decline by the feminist revolution; it has
swollen into a thirty billion pound a year industry, populated by armies of faceless Internet whores
and robo-bimbos. As Greer remarks, after thirty years of feminism there is vastly more
pornography, disseminated more widely than ever before. Pornography blends into the fashion
industry, which claims to exist for the gratification of women, but is in fact, as she records, largely
controlled by men who seek to persuade women to denude or adorn themselves to add to a public
spectacle created largely for men. (Many fashion designers, moreover, are homosexual, Versace only
the most conspicuous example, and these men create a boylike fashion norm which forces women
into patterns of diet and exercise which constitute a new form of oppression.) Cellulite, once
admired in the West and in almost all traditional societies, has now become a sin. To be saved, one
works out. Demi Moore pumps iron for four hours a day; but even this ordeal was not enough to
save her marriage.

Greer and other feminists identify the fashion industry as a major contributor to the contemporary
enslavement of women. Its leading co-conspirator is the pharmaceuticals business, which, as she
says, deliberately creates a culture of obsession with physical flaws: the so called Body Dysmorphic
Disorder which is currently plumping out the business accounts of doctors, psychiatrists, and, of
course, the cosmetic surgeons. As Dolly Parton says, It costs a lot of money to look as cheap as I do.
The worlds resources are gobbled up to service this artificially-induced obsession with looks, fed by
the culture of denudation. And perhaps the most repellent dimension is the new phenomenon of
hormone replacement therapy, billed as an anti-aging panacea. The hormone involved, estrogen, is
obtained from mares: in America alone 80,000 pregnant female horses are held in battery farms,
confined in crates, and tied to hoses to enable their urine to be collected. The foals that are
delivered are routinely slaughtered.

The consequences of the new pressures on women are already generally known, although no
solutions are seriously proposed. Women, we are told by the old school of feminists, today lead
richer lives. However, it is also acknowledged that these lives often seem to be sadder. Since 1955
there has been a five-fold increase in depressive illness in the US. For reasons that are anything but
clear women are more likely to suffer than men, (p.171) while 17 percent of British women will try
to kill themselves before their twenty-fifth birthday. This wave of sadness that afflicts modern
women, which is entirely out of keeping with the expectations of the early feminists, again has
brought joy to the pharmaceuticals barons. Prozac is overwhelmingly prescribed to women. (This is
the same anti-depressant drug that is routinely given to zoo animals to help them overcome their
sense of futility and entrapment.)

Greer concludes her angry book with few notes of hopefulness. The strategies she demanded in the
1960s have been extensively tried and applied; but the results have been ambiguous, and
sometimes catastrophic. What is clear is that there has not been a liberation of women, so much as
a throwing-off of one pattern of dependence in exchange for another. The husband has become
dispensable; the pharmaceutical industry, and the ever-growing army of psychiatrists and
counsellors, have taken his place. Happiness seems as remote as ever.

Later in this talk I will attempt an Islamic critique of all this. But before doing so I think it would be
useful to take a brief look at the science which is now providing Western social analysts with a
context in which to frame an interpretation of what has gone wrong.

The most obvious area in which science has reverberations among feminists is in the differentials of
physical strength which divide the sexes. In areas of life demanding physical power and agility, men
continue to possess an advantage. Attempts have, of course, been made to overcome this proof of
Mother Natures sexism through legislation. The most notorious attempt in the United Kingdom was
the 1997 Ministry of Defence directive that female recruits would not be subject to the same
physical tests as men. This excursion into political correctness foundered when it was discovered
that the women being admitted to the army were not strong enough to perform some of the tasks
required of them on completion of their training. As a result, the 1998 rules applied what were
called gender-free selection procedures to ensure that women and men faced identical tasks. The
result was a massive rise in female injuries when compared with the men. Medical discharges due to
overuse injuries, such as stress fractures, were calculated at 1.5% for male recruits, and at anything
between 4.6% and 11.1% for females. Lt Col Ian Gemmell, an army occupational physician who
compiled a report on the situation, noted that differences in womens bone size and muscle mass
lead to 33%-39% more stress on the female skeleton when compared to that of the male. The result
is that although social changes have eroded the traditional moral reasons for barring women from
active combat roles, the medical evidence alone compels the British army to bar women from the
infantry and the Royal Armoured Corps.

The army is an unusual case, and the great majority of professions to which women seek access
require no great physical ability. But the differences between the sexes are at their most profound
where they are least visible. The gender revolutionaries of the 1960s, popularising and also
radicalising the earlier, gentler calls for equality led by the likes of Virginia Woolf, were working with
a science which was still largely unequipped to assess the subtler aspects of gender difference.
Modern techniques of genetic examination, the reconstruction of genome maps, and the larger
implications of the DNA discoveries made by Crick and Watson, were unimaginable when Greer first
wrote. Since Marx and Weber, and also Freud, it had been assumed that gender roles were
principally, perhaps even entirely, the product of social conditioning. Re-engineer that conditioning,
it was thought, and in due season fifty percent of those doing all jobs, composing symphonies, and
winning Nobel Prizes, would turn out to be women.

In retrospect this seems an odd assurance. The intellectual climate was, after all, thoroughly secular.
There was no metaphysical or moral imperative that obliged the Western mind to conclude that the
sexes were different only trivially, or, as one trendy bishop put it, simply the same thing but with
different fittings. And yet so overwhelming were the egalitarian assumptions that had shaped
Europe and America since at least Thomas Paine and David Hume, that everyone assumed that the
sexesmust be equal, in the way that the classes must be equal, or the races, or the nations.

One of the first large-scale social experiments based on the new theory of gender equality was the
kibbutz scheme in Jewish-settled Palestine. This was founded in 1910 on the assumption, still
eccentric in that time, that the emancipation of women can only be achieved when socialised gender
roles are eliminated from the earliest stage of childhood.

The kibbutzim were collective farms in which maternal care was entirely eliminated. Instead of living
with parents, children lived in special dormitories. To spare women the usual rounds of domestic
drudgery, communal laundries and kitchens were provided. Both men and women were hence freed
up to choose any activity or work they wished, and it was expected that both would participate
equally in positions of power. To ensure the neutral socialisation of children, toys were kept in large
baskets, so that boys and girls could choose their own toys, rather than have gender-stereotyped
toys and games pressed upon them.

The results, after ninety years of consistent and conscientious social engineering, have been
disconcerting. The children, to the anger of their supervisors, unerringly choose gender-specific toys.
Three year-old boys pull guns and cars out of the baskets; the girls prefer dolls and tea-sets. Games
organised by the children are competitive - among boys - and cooperative among the girls.

In the kibbutz administration, quotas imposed to enforce female participation in leadership positions
are rarely met. Dress codes which attempt to create uniformity are consistently flouted. In Israel
today, the kibbutzim harbour sex-distinctions which are famous for being sharper than those
observable in Israeli society at large. The experiment has not only failed, it seems to have backfired.

Most scientists and anthropologists who have documented the failure of such projects of social
engineering today locate the gravitation of males and females to differing patterns of behaviour in
the context of evolutionary biology. Darwinism and neo-Darwinism are of course under attack now,
particularly by philosophers and physicists, rather more seriously than at any other time over the
past hundred years. And as Shaykh Nuh Keller has shown, a thoroughgoing commitment to the
theory of evolution is incompatible with the Qur'anic account of the origins of humanity. We believe
in a common ancestry for our kind; the neo-Darwinists insist in multiple and interactive
development of hominids from simian ancestors.

This does not mean, however, that all the insights of modern biology are unacceptable. Keller notes
that micro-evolution, that is to say, the perpetuation and reinforcement over time of genetically
successful strategies for survival, is undeniable, and is affirmed also in the hadith. The breeding of
horses, for instance, presupposes principles of natural selection in which human beings can
intervene. Heredity is true, as a hadith affirms. Categories such as the Israelites, or the ahl al-bayt,
have real significance.

What do the biologists say? The view is that biological success amounts to one factor alone: the
maximal propagation of an organisms genetic material. A powerful predator which dominates its
habitat is, however outwardly imposing, a biological failure if it fails to reproduce itself at least in
sufficient numbers to ensure its own perpetuation.

Biologists point out that males and females have different reproductive strategies. The burden of
what biologist Robert Trivers calls parental investment is massively higher in the case of females
than of males. This has nothing to do with social conditioning: it is a genetic and biological given. The
human female, for instance, makes a vast investment in a child: beginning with nine months of
metabolic commitment, followed by a further period before weaning. The males parental
investment is enormously less.

Trivers shows that the sex providing the greater parental investment will become the limiting
resource. The sex which contributes less will then necessarily be in a social position involving
competition, because they can improve their reproductive success through having numerous
partners in a way that members of the other sex cannot. Hence, for modern biologists, the genetic
and hormonal basis of male competition and aggression. Competition and aggression are traits
which may be found in females, but typically to a greatly reduced degree, simply because they are
not traits vital to those females reproductive success. The aggression which is vital to male
biological survival is directed primarily against other males (the vast, physiologically-demanding
racks of antlers on stags, for instance); but aggression also serves to make the male more equipped
for hunting. Male parental investment is hence physiological only indirectly, insofar as it is directed
to providing food or defence for the young.

Biology also helps us understand why the female hormonal pattern, dominated by estrogen and
oxytocin, generates strong nurturing instincts which are far less evident in the male androgens and
in adrenaline, which is useful for huntsmen and warriors, but of considerably less value in the rearing
of children. Simply put, mothers have a far greater investment to lose if they neglect their children. A
child that dies, through lack of care resulting from insufficient hormonal guidance, represents a
greater potential failure for the mother than for the father. During gestation and lactation, the
mother is infertile or nearly so; whereas during the same period the father may become a father
again many times over. Hence, again, the genetic programming which generates nurturing and
convivial instincts in women far more than it does in men. Men have less of the nurturing
neurotransmitter oxytocin than do women. Androgens ensure that men choose mates for their
youth and their apparent childbearing abilities, estrogens impel women to choose mates who are
assertive and powerful, as more likely to provide the food and protection that their offspring will
need.

Hence also the prevalence of polygyny in traditional societies, and the extreme rarity of polyandry.
To have many wives is a genetically sensible strategy, to have many husbands is not.

The aggressive instincts fostered by the male physiology, flushed even before birth with androgens,
served our ancestors tens of thousands of years ago, and a few generations of very different
lifestyles have not been sufficient to bring about any substantial alteration to the male hormonal
balance. This is why ninety percent of prison inmates are men, in almost every society. Psychologists
have shown that around the world, murderers and the murdered are usually young, unmarried men.
A further factor is that males are far more attracted to competitive forms of behaviour. As Kingsley
Browne notes, While competition significantly increases the motivation of men, it does not do so for
women. The more competitive an academic programme is perceived by women, for example, the
poorer their performance, while the correlation is reversed for men. Studies also show that men are
more likely than women to opt for difficult tasks.

The origin of this gender differential is again to be sought in primordial patterns of survival.
Aggressive, competitive males became alpha males, and maximised their chances of reproductive
success. (Males have ten times more testosterone than women; and it produces aggression as well
as the sex drive.) Weaker, more co-operative males were pushed to one side, and rarely if ever
found a mate. Successful hunting brought status, and status brought greater opportunities for
genetic transmission.

Biologists like Camilla Benbow have recently assessed the implications for modern social
differentiation of our genetic inheritance. Her study shows that boys are much more likely to
choose careers in maths and science even though girls are fully aware of their own abilities in these
areas. Again, the conclusion is not that women are less intelligent than men - the new biology
clearly rules that out - but that they prefer to exercise it in specific fields. At Harvard, for instance,
there is a seven to one male preponderance in the science faculties, and a female preponderance, or
equivalence, in arts subjects. Subjects like languages and art history are consistently oversubscribed
by female students. And while there is no evidence that women are less intelligent than men - and in
general they show themselves much more articulate - more than seventy percent of first-class
degrees at Oxford are obtained by male students.

A variety of university committees have been set up to investigate this, initially with a view to
eliminating it. However the differential is very stubborn. The reason may be partly to do with
socialisation, but an awareness is growing that heredity is also a factor that refuses to be ignored.
The male endocrine system carries the memory of thousands of years of hunting, an activity which
requires a kind of focussed attention on a single quarry to the exclusion of all else, coupled with an
adrenaline rush at the finish. Such a metabolism, it is now being argued, is better equipped to cope
with university-style examinations (as distinct from secondary-school styles of assessment), than the
female metabolism, which has historically flourished, that is, been reproductively successful, in
nurturing and co-operative tasks.
The response at universities like Harvard and Oxford has been to question the primacy of the
examination system. If the competitiveness and focus of males are unfairly served by examination
assessment, then alternative modes of assessment must be sought. And so we see alternative
assessment procedures: continual assessment of termwork, and other schemes which enable
women to work consultatively on projects and hence develop their full potential. Already the results
are encouraging, and it may be that the male bias which seems to be inherent in the examination
system will one day be eliminated.

This, however, raises a larger and more troubling question. The new science has established that
men and women have comparable intelligence quotients, but that the nature of male and female
intelligence, and the context in which it flourishes, can be quite different. Hence Capucine La Motte,
another researcher, has documented how from the age of about three most children prefer to play
with children of their own gender. They can accomplish their goals in their play activities more
reliably in this way. Boys games are competitive and often aggressive; girls games are collaborative
and involve more sophisticated forms of discourse and conceptualisation. Another child
psychologist, Janet Lever, notes that 65% of boys games are formal games, while only 35% of games
played by girls have rules. Boys, it seems, are more rule-oriented than girls. (This is why the
contemporary Muslim interpretation of sharia in ways which diminish haqiqa is so often
accompanied by a diminished respect for women. The sexes are only regarded with equivalent
esteem when batin and zahir are spoken of with equal frequency by believers.)

A further aspect of inherited gender difference is presented in the issue of risk-taking. Primordial
humanity allocated willingness to take risks differently among the sexes, not for constructed social
reasons, but for reasons of biological survival. To achieve the power and status requisite for
transmitting his genetic material, the male had to take risks. In the historically very few years that
have elapsed since such times, this norm does not appear to have changed. Consistently the figures
show that risky activities and sports attract more men than women. Gambling, motor racing and
bungee-jumping continue to be overwhelmingly male activities. Men are statistically more likely to
ignore seat-belt laws. Despite the popular stereotypes of women as dangerous drivers, the great
majority of lethal road accidents are the fault of men, because they indulge in hazardous and
aggressive styles of driving. More than twice as many boys as girls die through playing dangerous
games, and this statistic is remarkably consistent throughout the world.

The precise mechanisms in the brain which generate this behaviour are only now being understood.
The mechanisms are called neurotransmitters, hundreds of different varieties of which activate
emotions and bodily movements. One of the most important is serotonin, which has as one of its
functions the task of informing the body to stop certain activities. When the body is tired, it
generates the desire to sleep; when we have eaten enough it tells the body to stop eating; and so
on. It does this by linking the limbic system (which is the kingdom of the nafs, and which generates
primal impulses to attack, be sad, or make sexual advances), with the frontal cortex at the front of
the brain, where our ability to assess and plan our actions is thought to be located. Studies indicate
that men typically have lower serotonin levels than women, and conclude that the higher risk-taking
behaviour characterising successful Formula One drivers, for instance, is likely to make that choice of
career an almost entirely male preserve, whatever the amount of social engineering that feminist
societies may attempt.
Universities can reduce gender disparities by adopting alternative modes of assessment, but after
graduation, the real world is often less amenable. Risk-taking is a necessary ingredient of success in
many, perhaps most, high-flying professions. Psychologist Elizabeth Arch has recently shown that the
glass ceiling in many professions, which supposedly excludes women from further promotion
because of prejudice, may in fact have a biological foundation. Conspicuous success in business, for
instance, demands the taking of risks that do not always come instinctively to women. As she says,
from an early age, females are more averse to social, as well as physical, risk, and tend to behave in
a manner that ensures continued social inclusion; and this is largely innate, rather than socially
constructed.

One expert who has devoted his research to the implications of neurotransmitters for gender
behaviour is Marvin Zuckerman. He divides the serotonin-related human quest for sensation into
four types. Firstly, there is the quest for adventure and the love of danger, which is associated with
the typically low serotonin levels of the male. Secondly, the quest for experiences, whether these be
musical, aesthetic or religious. Zuckerman detected no significant difference between male and
female enthusiasm for this quest. Thirdly, disinhibition. The neurotransmitters of the typical male
allow the comparatively swift loss of moral control over the sex drive, when compared with women.
Fourthly, boredom. The male brain is more susceptible to boredom when carrying out routine and
repetitive tasks.

What are the religious implications of this? There are feminists who point to these factors as
evidence for the categoric moral inferiority of men. Islamically, however, they can all be understood,
and addressed, in ways that again demonstrate the conformability of the fitra, as understood by
Islam as a quasi-metaphysical quality, with the purely physical processes and geography of the
human brain. The first of Zuckermans distinctions is not necessarily to the discredit of men. Courage
is, after all, a Prophetic virtue; and without emotional surges the Muslim would make a poor
horseman, or warrior, or risk-taking builder of an Istanbul mosque. Secondly, with regard to the
category to which the lubb, the inner core of humanity, most fully relates, it is clear that scientific
evidence exists for the spiritual equal opportunities of the sexes. The Quran locates the source of
religious faith in the lubbs ability to experience the divine origin of Gods signs in nature. Men and
women are clearly equally good at this. Likewise, faith-sustaining aesthetic achievements such as
music, literature, crafts, and architecture, are likely to be no less effective for women than for men.
The Quran itself is perceived as beautiful and true by both sexes without distinction. It is on this
level, then, (and only here) that we can meaningfully speak of the equality of the sexes.

The third of Zuckermans categories appears to place men at a disadvantage; but in reality this
applies only to the secular. In the believer, the virtue described in the Quran as taqwa, which is
produced from the faith generated in the second category, overcomes this shortfall. The spiritual
technologies of Islam allow a compensation for the serotonin lack and a proper disciplining of the
darker passions which dwell in the limbic system. The actualised sharia is, in a sense, the victory of
the frontal cortex, and allows the male to retrieve the balance which is already implicit in the female
metabolism. No doubt this is why women are deficient in intellect and religion. It is not that the
Creator has given them innate disadvantages in the quest for understanding and salvation, but
rather that He requires men to make more effort to reach their degree of fitra.
The fourth (the quest for novelty, and the dislike of repetitive tasks) privileges women over men in
the duties of the home. Insofar as modern office jobs are repetitive and tedious, women are clearly
also gifted with more stamina in the workplace as well. Whether the biologists can demonstrate that
men should, or are likely to, occupy fifty percent of jobs requiring attention to repetitive tasks,
seems unlikely.

A further explanation of the glass ceiling phenomenon may be located in the primordial female
tendency to nurture. Consistently through the pre-modern world, women were primarily involved in
care for the young, the sick, and the elderly. As the feminist writer Carol Gilligan observes, women
not only define themselves in a context of human relationship but also judge themselves in terms of
their ability to care. Girls are more person-oriented, while boys tend to be more object-oriented.

Historical biology, and anthropology, can help us to understand why these key behavioural
differences should exist. How they exist is also now discernable, thanks to the molecular biologists
and the endocrinologists. The male and female foetuses begin life in the womb almost identical. The
key difference is the XY chromosome couple which signify the male, where the female has an XX
pair. The function of the Y chromosome is to trigger the release of androgens which approximately
two months into pregnancy initiate the development of the male gonads. (Hence the view of many
biologists that the female is in fact the basic human shape, and the male a divergence from it the
opposite of the Aristotelian view.)

These androgens, however, do more than shape the reproductive organs of the unborn child.
Between the sixteenth and the twenty-eighth week of pregnancy, they also trigger fundamental
divergences in the male and female brains. At this point, congenital deficiencies can produce not
only forms of hermaphroditism of the kind recognised by classical fiqh, but can also affect the
behaviour of the subsequent person. A well-studied example is the problem known as CAH:
congenital adrenal hyperplasia. This results from an abnormal secretion of androgens in an XX
foetus, that is, a child that is genetically female. The child suffering from this condition, which in its
classical form may affect one in every 20,000 births, is typically born with both male and female
reproductive organs; and the male ones are routinely removed by surgery. Although the females
appear normal and are fertile they display very distinct behavioural patterns, because of being
bathed in male hormones while still unborn. The numerous papers published on this phenomenon
conclude that the CAH females may be characterised as tomboys. They are more aggressive, they
like games with rules, and they are ready to take more risks than girls who have been born without
this defect.

Mirroring the CAH girls are the boys who suffer from the genetic abnormality of an additional X
hormone. These XXY boys are superficially normal males, but their behaviour is typically feminine,
lacking competitive and risk-taking impulses, and showing a preference for play with girls in
cooperative and non-aggressive games.

CAH and XXY studies are increasingly cited as evidence of the immense influence which hormones
exert on gender behaviour. Further proof is now emerging from studies on women who were given
hormones to overcome difficulties during pregnancy, an increasingly common practice and one
which is thought to be responsible for producing an increasing number of children whose
behavioural traits do not tally with their bodily gender features. Female criminals, for instance,
frequently suffer from abnormally high testosterone levels, and these are often the consequence of
earlier medical interventions.

I want now to move on, and deal with some of the consequences of these discoveries for our
understanding, as Muslims, of the society to which we aspire, and whose guidelines are set out in
revelation. Clearly, older feminist polemic against Islam on the grounds of its essentialism, its belief
in the inborn nature of male and female traits, will no longer hold water. In the Muslim world itself,
the new science, and the new feminism, are not yet known, and secularists, from the Turkish
government to Taslima Nasreen in Bangladesh, continue to insist that gender differences, and
inequalities in the workplace, can be wished away through social engineering and the inculcation of
new attitudes. This was the mentality invoked by the Turkish government in preparing its 2001
gender equality legislation.

Living in the West, and being more in touch with contemporary trends in science and social theory,
we can easily see how thin such polemic has become. Intelligent thinkers such as Greer are no longer
demanding equality. It is not that they are demanding inequality or injustice instead: far from it.
Instead, they are recognising that our awareness of the categoric difference between the sexes
makes the whole concept of equality rather too simpleminded. Men and women are neither equal
nor unequal. We can no more say that men are better than women than we can say that the rain is
better than the earth. To use the old language of equality is in fact to be guilty of what the
philosopher Wittgenstein called a category mistake.

Modern Muslim theologians who have assimilated the new insights insist that the demand for
equality is less helpful than the demand for opportunity and respect. Here there is clearly a
congruence between Islamic discourse and the new difference feminism of Greer, Gilligan and a
growing number of others.

It remains for us now briefly to sketch some of the ways in which the Sharia and science now
vindicate each other. Equality is no more envisaged by nature than it is by the law of God; indeed,
the law of God, for us, is commensurate with natural law. Since we reject ideas of the radically fallen
nature of our kind, we acknowledge nature, that is the fitra, as inherently good. Christianity,
wherever it followed Augustine, believed until the eighteenth century that unbaptised infants, and
miscarried foetuses, would be tormented forever in hell since their unregenerate nature, stained by
original sin, could only lead to damnation. Jansenists and some evangelicals still hold to this
disturbing belief.

Islam is non-sacramental; or rather, we acknowledge that the remembrance of our Lord is the only
sacrament necessary. And the natural order, as the Qur'an richly documents, is a world of signs
which point to its source, and to ours. Hence the fitra of our kind, discernable we may say through
consistent patterns maintained in homo sapiens across the globe and the generations, cannot be
displeasing to Allah subhanahu wa taala.

Perhaps one of the most interesting questions which modernity poses to traditional religion has to
do with divine providence amid a world which is now unimaginably more ancient than our ancestors
suspected. There is no dating by numbers in the Qur'an or the Hadith, but medieval Muslims
typically thought that the world was about five thousand years old. Now, whatever view we may
take of Darwin, we must accept that our species is tens of thousands of years old. Recognisably
human remains have been recovered, and reliably dated by radiocarbon methods, which show the
antiquity of humanity - unless we are, by misunderstanding the logic of piety, to deny scientific
evidence entirely. In 1997 the worlds oldest cricket bat was dug up in the county of Essex (of
course). It is recognisably a bat, designed for some form of game, and is apparently 40,000 years old.
Our theological question would therefore be: if Essex Man, in time out of mind, had the self-
awareness and the humanity and the sophistication needed to play cricket, surely he was also a
creature accountable to his Maker. In other words, the story of salvation is much, much older than
we ever suspected. To claim that humanity had to wait for most of its history before learning about
its source and destiny requires an intolerable interrogation of the divine justice.

Now, this antiquity of our species fits in with Islamic salvation history very elegantly. The hadith
indicates that there have been 124,000 prophets. The Quran says, Wa-li-kulli qawmin had - for
every nation there has been a guide. The existence of cricket matches in Chelmsford thirty-eight
thousand years before the hijra is not a problem for us: homo religiosus existed then, just as
did homo ludens, and presumably had access to a chapter of revelation which has since disappeared.

For Christianity, of course, the problem is more acute. Medieval theologians struggled with the fact
that millions lived before the coming of Christ, and hence died without receiving the sacraments or
accepting him as saviour. Complicated theories of post-mortem evangelisation, or of the harrowing
of hell, were developed to make this challenge to the divine moral coherence less scandalous.
Today, with our awareness of humanitys antiquity, the theology is harder still: why should a loving
God have waited for a million years before sending his Son to redeem humanity?

For us, as I have said, this is a non-problem. For every nation there has been a guide. And, as Surat al-
Insan says, Has there ever come upon man a time when he was not something remembered? And a
necessary concomitant of this acceptance of the dramatic, splendid length of prophetic history, so
commensurate with the grandeur of God and the universe, has to be that recurrent and biologically-
grounded patterns of human society must be considered as in some sense normal, and hence as
divinely sanctioned. Moreover, our conviction, as Muslims, that the human being has been created
in the best of forms, that we have ennobled the children of Adam, makes any attempt to decry
the natural endocrinology of our bodies blasphemous. We are as we have been created, and Allah,
blessed is He, is the best of creators.

This is why we say, respectfully ignoring the protests of old-fashioned feminists, that men and
women, in a Godfearing society, will tend towards different concerns and spheres of activity. Our
aim, after all, is human happiness, not political correctness. Any attempt to impose a crudely
egalitarian template on the data of the Quran and Sunna, and of the Sira, and the recurrent patterns
of Islamic social history, will underestimate them drastically. Walaysa al-dhakaru kal-untha, says the
Quran: the male is not like the female. Egalitarianism is reductionism, and diminishes the bivalence
of our kind, whose fertility is apparent in many more ways than the merely reproductive.

We insist, therefore, that our revealed law, confirmed so magnificently in its assumptions by the
new science, upholds the dignity and the worth of women more reliably than secularity ever can. A
materialistic worldview, which measures human worth in terms of earning power and status and
access to sexual plenitude, will inexorably glorify the male. For the male, conditioned by the
androgens from the time he was almost invisibly small in the womb, is assertive: his metaphors are
projection, conquest, single-mindedness. As the facts of science trickle down into popular culture,
and as old-style equality feminism breaks down, the male is going to be magnified as never before in
history. Materialistic civilisations will, in the longer term, favour and revere male traits. In the
shorter term women may appear to be overtaking the men, because of the energy generated by the
congratulations of modernity, and because of the reciprocal atrophy of male identity and self-
regard. But in the longer term, unless the logic of Adam Smiths capitalism is mysteriously
terminated, the future belongs to the androgen.

As Muslims, we refuse such a favouritism. Inevitably, given the nature of the fitra, there must be
aspects of sharia which favour the male in functional, material terms. Ours is a religion of absolute
justice. But because we reject any identification of human worth with conspicuous functionality, or
power, or status, or consumption, we are able to insist on the worth of women in a way that is not
possible outside a religious context. For we have not been created for the idols worshipped in the
pages of GQ or Loaded Magazine. The biological advantages of the male, which, unless one day a
massive reconstructive surgery and hormonal reprogramming is carried out on every one of us, do
not for us denote superiority, as they must for the secular mind when it follows its own arguments
through.

The key to understanding this is supplied by our rich theology of the Ninety-nine Names of Allah.
And these reveal what the biologists describe as gender dimorphism. That is to say, just as
procreation bears fruit through the shaping received from androgens and estrogens, so too creation
itself is bathed in androgens and estrogens. The entire cosmos is gendered; in fact, it comes into
being, and attains the complexity of manifestation after the experience of undifferentiated unity,
through the interaction of the divine Names, where the supreme and governing category is the
polarity of Jalal and Jamal. I have attempted some further reflections on this principle of a
hormonally-coded cosmos in another place. (www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/ahm/gender.htm))

The gender issue ramifies massively into every other area of religion, and far more could be written.
What I have tried to do in this essay is show that an opposition to the Sharia is an opposition to
science, inasmuch as science is currently affirming an innate distinction between the sexes, a
distinction that Allah taala clearly calls us to celebrate rather than to suppress. The social
architecture of Islam is very different to that of the modern secular West: that should be a source of
pride to us. We are permitted to speculate, however, that the disastrous social problems now
overcoming the West, and westernising classes elsewhere, will combine with the new science to
provide a revised definition of gender and social roles which will, in the longer term, convince our
critics of the superior wisdom and compassion of the Prophetic social model.

wa-akhiru dawana anil-hamdu liLlahi rabbil-alamin

FURTHER READING

Kingsley Browne, Divided Labours: An Evolutionary View of Women at Work. London, 1998.

Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman. London, 1999.

Anne and Bill Moir, Why Men Dont Iron: The New Reality of Gender Differences. London,
1998.
 N. Koertge, How Feminism is now Alienating Women from Science, Skeptical Inquirer,
March/April 1995, 42-3.

Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice. London, 1990.

Hoyenga, K, and Hoyenga, K, Gender-Related Differences. London, 1993.

A. Booth, Testosterone and Winning and Losing Human Competition, Hormones and
Behaviour (1989), 556-72.

E. Maccoby, Gender and Relationships, American Psychologist (April, 1990), 513-20.

D. Halpern, Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities. New York, 1992.

Nuh Keller, Evolution Theory and Islam. London, 1999.

N. McCrum, The Academic Gender Deficit at Oxford and Cambridge. Oxford Review of
Eduation (1994), 3-26.

Jared Diamond, Why is Sex Fun? London, 1998.

A. Burgess, Fatherhood Reclaimed. New York, 1997.

www.tylerforlife.com/Disorders/cah.htm

Ian Gemmell, Injuries among female army recruits. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine,
January 2002, 23-27.