Women's access to the world of Sufism
Through studying the biographies of Sufi women it becomes clear that women's access to the world of Sufism had not been easy. A variety of obstacles, not only religious and social, but also biological, stood in their way.
The feminine body is very present in the texts. It is presented, with its needs and constant demands, as a hindrance to the exercise of spirituality. In the process of sanctification a preponderant place is given in the hagiographies to the theme of purification. The tension between the pure and the impure runs through the hagiography from the first experience of sanctity. Many female Sufis are described as 'aged women', as if a woman had to have reached menopause before she could claim to have achieved a degree of sanctity.
If menstrual blood is considered as an involuntary defilement of women, that is not the case for the body as a source of seduction. Access to the path to God's divinity and the accomplishment of sanctity for women cannot be achieved until after the negation and rejection of the body. The female body is presented in all the descriptions as a source of pleasure and lust. Faced with this commonplace, the female Sufi has to work twice as hard to rid her body of all seductiveness.
The struggle against these desires is, for the female saint, a constant battle. The hagiographies cite examples of women who have been beautiful and attractive but whose bodies have been transformed by the experience of mysticism. Female Sufis are often described as testing their bodies with rigorous spiritual practices combining the withholding of food, sleep, and all forms of pleasure in order to achieve the conditions for female mystical experience.
The hagiographer Al-Tadili[1] insists on this castigation of the body: “I went to see an old woman blackened by her efforts, with only dried skin on her bones.” It was the same for an anonymous women in Marrakech: “We saw an old woman with skin hanging from her bones”. The portrayal of saints with ravaged faces, skeletal bodies, blind from weeping, with a complexion that is sometimes yellow (safar), sometimes black (sawad), represent the mortifications that were willingly undergone in order to make their desirable body, source of seduction, into one which, by its weakness, evoked compassion and sometimes disgust. In certain cases these bodies are described not only as weak, but also as masculine, thus conforming to the model of a body which is not attractive; the hagiographer Al-Kettani[2] says of Manana al-Bassyounia[3] that she “had a beard like a man”.
While certain texts show 'ordinary' saints combining mysticism with family life in all its aspects, the hagiographies put greatest emphasis on young women having rejected marriage as an obstacle to the spiritual path. The early mystical experiences of women who were still virgins is thus considered much more pure because these women had not yet been sullied by a man.
Thus Sufism allowed women to choose a life of celibacy and to refuse to marry in a society where single women did not generally have that choice. Women thus isolated from worship, men and marriage, could no longer be accused of flouting their honour; very much the contrary. Their choice of celibacy and their attitude towards marriage became an integral part of their religiosity and were seen as positive by the whole of society.
