The cover story in the March 2020 issue of Jivan entitled “Will Women’s Struggle for Dignity Ever End?” by Professor Shalini, focusing on the place of women in Christian faith and practice, made an interesting read. As a sequel to her essay, I thought of writing one on women in Islamic religious thinking. As a student of the history and theology of Christian-Muslim relations, I am aware of Muslim theologians engaging with many basic questions vis-à-vis women and their status in Islam. Moreover, Christian brothers and sisters often ask me about the place of women in Islam, often with the issue of ‘triple talaq’ at the back of their minds!
Often, Muslim religious teachers, especially in the rural places, whom we meet in mosques, tell us that women are created of and for men and claim that God made men superior to women and hence women are defective in reason and faith. These men associate femininity overwhelmingly with the concept of fitna (socio-moral chaos) and hence in constant need of very tight control. In contrast, masculinity is constructed in relation to man’s ghira (unreasonable levels of sexual honor and jealousy). Neo-traditionalist Islamic discourses presuppose radical differences in gender roles and norms that are premised on artificial binaries such as associating men with religious authority, reason-based discourse and political and public engagement, and linking women with sexuality, domesticity, emotionality and nearly exclusive preoccupation with matters pertaining to the private domain of human existence.
I am fortunate to have continual interaction with the Australia-based Professor Adis Duderija, one of the leading experts of gender-sensitive interpretations of Islam. In one of our conversations, he underlined the urgent need to develop an Islamic ethical and legal theory which is ever responsive to the contextually sensitive realities in which Muslim women (and men) find themselves, so that gender-based inequalities are not structurally disadvantageous to any of the sexes on the basis of a particular interpretation of Islamic teachings.
Duderija clarifies that gender-egalitarian interpretations of the Qur’an for generating gender-justice and gender-symmetrical formulations of legal rights for Muslim women must come from within the Islamic interpretational and methodological framework. He advocates systematically deriving and justifying these rights on the basis of a particular conceptualization and interpretation of the Qur’an.
Duderija points out that some Muslim reformist scholars from the 19th and 20th centuries such as T. Haddad (d. 1935), Q. Amin (d.1908), and M. Abduh (d.1905) advocated gender equality affirmative interpretations of Islam. However, their efforts in this regard were relatively isolated and were theoretically significantly less robust than the efforts of the proponents of contemporary gender-egalitarian interpretations of Islam.
Coming to the issue of the interpretation of the Qur’an, Duderija highlights several interpretational methods. Here we briefly mention one such method: the interpreter-centred interpretational approach. According to Duderija, this approach is based on the idea that the meaning of a text is significantly influenced or determined by the prior self-positioning of the reader/interpreter herself/himself (in contrast to that of the text or the author). The interpreter does not simply retrieve the meaning of the text but plays an important part in creating meaning.
In this approach, the role of the interpreter in arriving at the meaning of texts is central. In this regard Duderija points out how classical Muslim exegetes such as al-Zamakhshari incorporated many elements of their patriarchal beliefs and worldview into their exegesis. He further notes that the intrinsic contextuality of some of the ethico-legal elements in the Qur’an makes for an interpretational distinction between what the Qur’an reflected as opposed to what the Quran initiated.
Duderija points out that the latter is universal while some aspects of the former (such as the unilateral power vested in husbands to divorce their wives, a practice from pre-Islamic times) were part of the then prevailing customary practice which was considered reasonable and rational for the time and place when and where the Quran was revealed, as Muslims believe. The Quran merely reflected these and sought to mitigate their harmful effects.
Consequently, Duderija believes that it is indeed possible to systematically and authentically engage with much of the patriarchal residue that remains in Islamic traditions, laws and ethics and engender non-patriarchal interpretations of the same. He is convinced it is possible to make a compelling case for the development of gender-egalitarian interpretations of the Qur’an.
Article originally published by Jivan.