Editor's Note: This is Part II of the series, "I Used To Think Islam & Feminism Were Mutually Exclusive." Click here to read Part I. 

It is easy to believe in the general and the fluffy - in relatively meaningless and overarching phrases like, “Islam gave women their rights one thousand four hundred years ago.”

Or, “Islam actually gave women their rights before the West.”

Or, “It's just culture that's backward and that’s what hurts Muslim women, not Islam.”

Of course I believe that God and the religion of Islam are good for women--but these statements assume Islam is one large monolithic set of laws that have been revealed by God and not a tradition of 1439 years of human interpretations of the word of God and his messenger that contain a tremendous breadth of differences of opinion that span multiple centuries, classes, and cultures. We repeat to ourselves all the time that the one thing that really separates Islam from other traditions is how well preserved and how rigorous the processes of authentication is, but we deny the humanity of this tradition in the process. And that means that when we come up against something that seriously clashes with the human and culturally relative ideals we’ve set up for ourselves, we fall into spiritual crisis.

We set ourselves up for failure every time we forget that the thousands of scholars in our tradition - men and women - were flawed human beings, each products of their time, each coming at the Qur'an and the Sunnah with their preconceived notions of morality and their own culture.

Oversimplifying our tradition, and demonizing Muslim cultures (something western Muslims are far more likely to do, in their moral indignation and naive superiority), doesn’t help anyone. It's just the lazy way out - until someone puts you face to face with a hadith or a verse or an opinion by a scholar that challenges everything you’ve believed about the spirit of Islam and mercy and justice.

The irony is that my ex-husband did both; he challenged my faith, but he also sent my way the keys that eventually helped me out of the intellectual and spiritual crisis I was buried knee-deep in.

So yes, reader, I married him.

In principle, he was a feminist. He said all the right things to my parents when they asked him, “So what if she disagrees with you?”

“We’ll just agree to disagree.”

“But what does that look like?” my mom pushed back, “If a decision has to be made, are you going to be the one who makes it? Every time?”

“We’ll take it one scenario at a time.”

My mom didn’t like the way he answered her questions by avoiding them. I married him anyway, because I was in love with him.

He never expected me to clean or cook - and sometimes, I wished our incompatibility was based on something as straightforward as dividing chores.

...

When we had the Islamic marriage ceremony, he asked to come into my dorm room. I told him no, I had a roommate. He pushed, knowing she probably wasn’t home yet. I hesitated, rummaging in my head for an excuse that wasn’t just “I don’t want to.” I used my parents as an excuse; we had agreed we would only consummate the marriage after the wedding. That was the wrong route to take, and he said, coolly, “You owe me loyalty now, not your parents.”

I collapsed into myself almost immediately.

One of us, I can’t recall who pulled our hand from the other’s.

I put my hand on my lap and I got quiet.

A boomerang of the beginning of the universe: after collapsing into myself, I wanted to explode into an infinite number of pieces.

We had many conversations about my repeated refusals.

One we had on a greyed and worn out wooden bench in front of a yellow house with a beautiful garden. He said, “You know the angels curse every woman who refuses her husband sex for no reason from the night until the morning.”

La‘na, that was the word in the hadith, and the word he used.

I thought I had a good background in Islamic law, but he knew more names, more books, more laws, more hadiths, and more ways to justify his point of view. Arguing with him about anything was exhausting.

All he needed to do was repeat the ahadith he knew I had heard growing up and then present my interpretation as one that belonged to a sellout to the West, to feminism, and the liberal agenda. All he had to do was paint my ideas of right and wrong as a refusal to submit to God, and his as the default understanding, the orthodox opinion, and the opinion of the majority of the scholars. All he needed to do was tell me not to bring my campaign home.

It was the easiest power-play in the book, and I swallowed it whole.

He overestimated the strength of my faith--he could not have known that with every proof he gave me that he was right, for every time he shot my arguments down, he wasn’t just winning an intellectual battle, but making more room for the doubts in my heart, the gaps in my faith, and the anger at myself and the scholars of our tradition.

In retrospect, I could have told him that. Instead, the inside of me became all shame and self-doubt.

After the actual wedding, he was gentle. He told me he understood that I did not “owe” him anything and that he knew Islamically, there were a whole host of reasons I could say “no”. He said it was about the principle of the thing then--that he didn’t want to feel second to my parents. I shoved all the negativity under my skin, Duchenne-smiled my way out of every memory and sick feeling he wouldn’t listen to me talk about.

But my body didn’t follow through. It was merciless in its expressions. It refused him; my tone dismissed him, and my heart dried up. It was the part of my soul that had come to believe in such a simple and uncomplicated way that his happiness was God’s that told the rest of me to shut up and try to make this marriage work. But my face gave me away, almost every time he wanted to hug me, or when he came close to me or held my hand, I immediately became paranoid, and my body tensed up. He knew I didn’t want him anymore - didn’t want to give him access to anything. He became miserable. Our relationship fell apart and he fell into a depression.

We got divorced for the simple reason that we were incompatible and we were both unhappy-we started off that way and it persisted, made everything else just secondary reasons for us to separate. I remember that I felt guilty for being too easy to read, for resenting him, and for not being a good Muslim wife. But he felt guilty too, for my unhappiness and for his being depressed. I remember the day we actually got divorced, he cried and apologized, and I, by then, had hardened to stone.

It would be disingenuous to assume that he was the source of all of my doubts and my frustration. The reality is--my faith started out sheltered, based on being a part of a majority in a strong but insular faith community. When I was confronted with the world and with the vastness of the Islamic tradition without the community i identified with, I was shaken.

In university, learned about identity politics and the fact that sometimes human beings subscribe to certain groups or form alliances based on aspects of our identities: our race, our class, our religion. And when I had a name for this tendency, it was easier to understand that my hesitation to dig deeper and to challenge my knowledge of the tradition wasn’t just coming from a desire to maintain a spiritual connection with God, but more a desire to keep my relationship with myself and community and my “home” safe and untouchable. Too many things were changing, and I couldn’t let go of this too. Islam was the thing I identified with politically, the culture and a collection of slogans and phrases that I believed in the relative superiority of.

Still, the need to identify with a religious community isn’t strong enough a foundation to hold up a relationship with God.

In his book, Speaking in God’s Name, Khaled Abou El Fadl talks about the “conscientious pause.” His idea is that there will be moments where we as Muslims, and not just women, will come up against ahadith that seriously clash with both our senses of morality and with what we have come to understand the spirit of Islam to be. In this case, he says, we should take a pause and ask, “To what extent did the Prophet really play a role in the authorial enterprise that produced this tradition? Can I consistently with my faith and understanding of God and God's message, believe that God's Prophet is primarily responsible for this tradition?” But, he adds that this also requires the person who engages in that pause to find answers.

We can’t just stop at all the aspects of our tradition that don’t line up with our senses of morality and ignore them or, for the sake of avoiding the hard emotional and mental and spiritual work of questioning and looking for answers just repeat flimsy feel-good slogans like a regular litany.

It is difficult to engage the most doubting parts of my conscience, to separate them from my desires, and to face a world that will not wait to change and will not ask my permission to rip me apart.

Still, there are three things that help:

1. A statement of Ibn Taymiyyah’s that I came across in a modern book on Islamic Socialism where the author quotes him and says, “If you come across something unjust in the shari‘ah, know that there is only one of two explanations: either you don’t understand the ruling or it isn’t part of the shari‘ah.”

2. The knowledge that there are thousands of women in Islamic history who know this tradition better than I do, who are closer to God, who taught this tradition to men, and who are smarter and more just and concerned with humanity than I am. They could not, in good conscience, have transmitted and taught this tradition if they did not believe in it fully. If no one else, I trust at least in these women.

3. Shamela: an online library of hundreds of books on islamic law, hadith, tafsir, islamic history, and the Arabic language. I have spent hours on this application, looking for answers to set my heart at ease with God and his religion, and almost always, I find them.

Do not refuse yourself the right to question out of fear, and do not base your relationship with your faith on your relationships with others, it is unfair to them and unfair to you. Trust that God has revealed a perfect message and you need, like our predecessors, to do the hard work of finding the most ethical and just answers.

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