Gender and Scripture in Islam: Some Thorny Issues

1. Gender and Scripture in Islam:Some Thorny Issues

2. Why do sacred texts on gender become troublesome? • Orientalist criticism of Islam, particularly role of women • Secular modernists and feminists adopt radical critique of religious patriarchy (Nawal Saadawi) • Fundamentalists insist on “traditional” gender roles as anti-colonial key to reinforcing their authority (“Neopatriarchy”)

3. Responses to the crisis • Reformation • Loyalism: accept authority of text • Revisionism: seek feminist interpretation • Sublimationism: presuppose acceptable position of gender equity or feminine superiority • Reconstruction • Rejectionism: it’s all patriarchy • Liberationism: transform the social order

4. Qur’an 4:34 • “Men are standing over women, by the preference that God has shown to some over others, and by the property they spend [for support of women].” • “in charge of” (Pickthall) • “men are the managers of the affairs of women” (Mawdudi) • economic responsibility (Wadud-Muhsin)

5. Qur’an 2:228 • “Men have a degree over women.” • a technical advantage in divorce proceedings rather than a general superiority (Wadud-Muhsin)

6. 4 wives (Qur’an 4:3) • “ . . . If you fear that you might not be able to treat them with equal fairness, then [marry only] one.” • Amounts to a prohibition of polygamy (Muhammad `Abduh) • Clearly impossible (Tunisian law code)

7. Hadith sayings of the Prophet • “Those who entrust their affairs to a woman will never know prosperity” (via Abu Bakra, in regard to `A’isha) • critique of narrator’s character defects (indecisive in civil war, guilty of false accusation of adultery), part of traditional discipline of hadith criticism (Fatima Mernissi)

8. Hadith (via Abu Hurayra) • “The dog, the ass, and woman interrupt prayer if they pass in front of the believer, interpolating themselves between him and the direction of prayer” • critique of narrator’s misogyny (Yemeni), gender insecurity (“man with a female kitten”), and notorious falsehoods • cf. Bukhari’s omission of hadith that declare menstruation non-polluting

9. Hadith saying • “Treat women kindly. The woman has been created from a rib, and the most crooked part of the rib is in the upper region. If you try to make it straight, you will break it, and if you leave it as it is, it will remain curved. So treat women kindly” (via Abu Hurayra) • rejected on basis of questionable transmitter (Riffat Hassan, Wadud-Muhsin)

10. The Qur’an as a Scriptural Resource for Feminism • “The believing men and the believing women, the righteous men and the righteous women, the pious men and the pious women . . . For them there is a reward in heaven” • the world’s first gender-inclusive scriptural language?

11. Responses to the crisis • Reformation • Loyalism: accept authority of text • Revisionism: seek feminist interpretation • Sublimationism: presuppose acceptable position of gender equity or feminine superiority • Reconstruction • Rejectionism: it’s all patriarchy • Liberationism: transform the social order