I handed in my paper on women's reform in islam, focusing on Asma Barlas and amina wadud and their rereading of the Quran.
Both scholars had an enormous influence on me and I am so grateful that I got to experience both of them speaking in a conference at my university. They both opened a window in my mind to a liberating reading of the Quran that focuses on justice, mercy and compassion.
Both scholars develop their own methodology to derive gender justice as a premise from the quranic text. While wadud claims that the Quran makes no comment on gender hierarchies but rather emphasizes compassion between humans espacially between spouses, Barlas asserts that the Quran is anti-patriarchal.
From writing this paper I have learned that 'islamic feminism' is a very broad term and that the discussion of gender justice in islam has a huge history leading back to the 1920s. And that, in the end, it's not about the text, but what one makes of it. Meaning is not something that is handed to us on a platter. Islam and the Quran have no voice of their own, people have to make it speak, and this is the duty of all believers, in every new age.
Now, I'll be preparing my essay on the topic of commemorative culture and the ethical implications of the imperative "Remember!". In our seminar we have talked a lot about german commemorative culture, but I might pursue a different path and put my focus on palestinian commemoration. I was waiting for an opportunity to dive into palestinian history anyways.
(min. 33:46) "A lot of the misogynists in our society basically believe that the woman is biologically inferior. And some of them believe that the only role that women [must] play on earth is to be a mother and basically to serve men. But, you know, misogyny predates Islam and misogyny has beaten down Islam; misogyny sometimes has won over Islam because male privilege is much older than Islam. […]
Fatema Mernissi has done a wonderful study of how when the Quran was still in the process of being revealed to the Prophet Muhammad how the early Muslims are already busy trying to figure out how they could deprive women of the new rights that the Quran was giving them based on “Oh well, you know there's a verse which says: ‘Don't [hand] over the property to those who are weak minded.’”. So immediately they came up with the idea that women are weak minded.
But what I want to say is that these constructions of gender have nothing to do with the Quran. They have zero relationship to the Quran. I always ask Muslims to show me one verse which actually says that the different rights that the Quran gives women and men with respect to some issues are rooted in the claim that men are biologically superior [to] women or because women and men are opposites or unequal or incommensurable with each other. Not one verse says that. So, I see these differential rights as simply representing the sexual division of labor that existed in 7th century Arabia. And I believe in an omniscient God.
That is to say, I believe in an all-knowing God, and I believe that God knew that that patriarchy would not last forever and would fade away along with all of its institutions of war mongering, concubinage, multiple marriages, slavery and everything else. [The Quran] tried to ameliorate the rights of women at that time and it's enormously progressive. But it's a disservice, not just to the Quran, but to a very conception of God to assume that what was OK in the 7th century specifically based on what existed there that it should be OK now even though many of those circumstances don't exist. So, it’s a very big disservice to Islam to deny the Quran’s universalism by tying it to a 7th century tribal Arab patriarchy and insisting on reading it only through the lenses of that patriarchy, and only when it suits you." (min. 36:30)
Asma Barlas, "Riada talks to Asma Barlas on 'Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an'", Dignified Resilience with Riada Akyol, 13.8.2020, Spotify.
(min. 7:56) "When it comes to qur’anic hermeneutics and method, what is it that you seek to critique and what are the alternative methodologies that you are asking your readers to take?"
"Well, essentially, I’m critiquing dominant interpretations of the Quran that allow Muslims to associate God with women’s abuse and oppression. And of course, most Muslims may not think it’s oppressive to claim that God has made men superior to women and prefers them to women, but I feel that such a view is at best theologically indefensible and at worst sacrilegious since it makes God a partisan in men’s sexism and misogyny.
I also think that such a view is unacceptable from a strictly interpretive and hermeneutical perspective since it arises from focusing selectively on only those six or so verses and partial verses out of a total of 6236 in the Quran that give men and women some different rights and such readings also fail to contextualize these verses or to accept that we can interpret them differently than they have been interpreted in the past.
And what I find ironic is that the same Muslims who insist on the fixity of the Quran’s meanings like to boast that Arabic is so rich that it has 100 words for a camel. They even admit that the Quran has at least two levels of meanings and if they incline to Sufism that each verse has thousands. So only when it comes to men’s rights does Arabic suddenly become plain sense and monosemic and the Quran the only text in the world’s history to have just one fixed and transparent meaning.
So, those are the tendencies I’m critiquing. As far as my own methodology… well, firstly I acknowledge that there is a relationship between meaning and method, so that what we take the Quran – for that matter, any text – to be saying, depends on who reads it, how, and in what sorts of social, political and historical contexts and circumstances.
I also take it as a given that languages and texts are polysemic and that interpretation is “an open process which no single vision can conclude” – that’s from Paul Ricoer. More to the point, I read the Quran in light of its descriptions of God because after all the Quran is God’s word and I feel we ought not to ascribe ideas to it that run counter to its claims about God. So for instance, it says, God is one, God is just, God is incomparable, so I read the Quran in light of these precepts of divine unity, justice and incomparability.
To give just one example, since God is unlike all else in creation and since the Quran forbids using similitude, that is to say comparisons for God, or calling God “father”, I think God to be minimally beyond sex and gender and since God rejects patriarchalization, in other words, God rejects being a patriarch, I take the Quran’s own episteme, and I use the word loosely, to also be anti-patriarchal.
On this note, I’ve applied a comprehensive definition of patriarchy to the Quran which, it appears, no prior reader had done, at most amina wadud had argued in her book that it’s “neutral to social and marital patriarchy” though without clarifying what she meant by the term.
The way I define it (patriarchy) has appeared in two major forms: one is as the historical tradition of rule by the father/husband which in its religious iterations draws on depictions of God as both male and as father; and the other is the more modern politics of sexual differentiation that privileges men and discriminates against women because of their biology. So this half of the definition I borrow from my colleague and friend Zillah Eisenstein.
Lastly I’ve drawn on some criteria the Quran itself suggests like reading it intra-textually, that is as a whole, contextualizing some of its provisions, since it refers to what Kenneth Cragg calls the “necessarily periodic nature of some of its contents”. I privilege it’s foundational aya [verse] and I search for the best in its teachings because these are all things the Quran urges us to do and I know that we may differ on what is best but my own view is that an exegesis which offends against God’s self-disclosure or ignores the Quran’s holism and/or the context of specific verses is contextually a misreading.
So it’s based on this approach that I’ve tried to illustrate that the Quran doesn’t advocate patriarchy and in fact that its foundational teachings incline towards sexual equality and as for the hierarchy verses I argue that these refeel (?) an infinity of traces, I have borrowed the phrase from [Antonio] Gramsci, of the 7th century tribal Arab patriarchy to which God first spoke but which, as we know, has long since passed into history along with its specific forms of male authority and gender hierarchy." (min. 14:01)
Asma Barlas, “Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an” (U Texas Press, 2019), New Books in Islamic Studies, 3.8.2020, Spotify.
It has been months since my last post. Much has changed, most importantly: I handed in my master thesis and passed the oral exam, both with a very good grade, thank God!
The topic of my thesis was Quran verse 4:34 and its premodern and modern feminist interpretation. I looked at al-Ṭabarīs, az-Zamaḫšarīs, amina waduds and Asma Barlas' interpretation of the verse and which norms they derive from the quranic passage regarding gender roles. I ended up writing about 75 pages - the longest piece of writing I ever did -, a little below the required number of 80-100 pages.
Quran verse 3:34, translated by Yusuf Ali, reads:
Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because God has given the one more (strength) than the other, and because they support them from their means. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient, and guard in (the husband’s) absence what God would have them guard. As to those women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (next), refuse to share their beds, (and last) beat them (lightly); but if they return to obedience, seek not against them means (of annoyance).
My key findings:
The premodern exegetes (al-Ṭabarī and az-Zamaḫšarī) both assume authority of the husband over his wife. While al-Ṭabarī argues that the wife has to obey the husband only in certain matters such as sharing his bed and being kind to his family, az-Zamaḫšarī holds that men are by nature, collectively, superior to women and thus have authority over them, much as rulers have over their subjects.
Furthermore, both premodern exegetes defend the right of the husband to discipline his wife by beating her. Interestingly enough, both exegetes seek to mitigate this form of disciplining: 1. by making the beating the third and last disciplinary method, 2. by specifying that the beating would have to be non-severe, causing no harm and leaving no traces. The first form/step of disciplining according to the exegetes is the verbal admonishing of the wife. Regarding the second step, al-Ṭabarī proposes an opinion that would be criticised and opposed by later exegetes, including az-Zamaḫšarī. Al-Ṭabarī argued that wa-hǧurūhunna fi l-maḍāǧiʿi, widely translated as refuse to share their beds, means not 'abandoning' but 'tying up' the wife in the bed. Here, he leans on the arabic word hiğār, which denotes ropes that are used to tether animals such as camels. Az-Zamaḫšarī rejects this interpretation.
Both al-Ṭabarī and az-Zamaḫšarī cite a report on the alleged cause of revelation of the verse: According to the report, a women came to the prophet (saw) to complain about her husband who hit her. The prophet decreed that she should retaliate against her husband, but before she could go and do so, verse 4:34 was revealed, causing the prophet to annul his judgement. For the two exegetes, the case is clear: A husband is allowed to beat his wife, and she has no means to retaliate against him. For other exegetes, this report poses a new question: How is it possible that the prophet deemed one thing as right - granting the women the right for retaliation -, but God (swt) another?
The modern feminist interpreters of the verse, amina wadud and asma barlas, contest the notion of a godly ordained hierarchy within marriage. They both argue that verse 4:34 calls for the husband to provide for his wife, and that the 'obedience' required of the wife is not to her husband, but to God. Now, the beating passage poses a real problem for the two authors, who believe that the quranic message is inherently gender egalitarian or anti-patriarchal. Both authors go ahead and show that the arabic word ḍaraba, widely translated as 'to beat', has other meanings like 'to strike out on a journey', or is used within the phrase ḍaraba mathalan 'to give an example'. These uses appear in the Quran several times. Of course, both authors cannot deny the lexical possibility that ḍaraba in this verse does mean 'to beat'. For Barlas, it is enough to point out that the reader is not forced to follow a reading of ḍaraba as meaning 'to beat'. Elsewhere she argues that the Quran urges the reader to look for its best meanings, and that the reader is in part responsible for the lessons they take away from the Quran. For wadud, she outright rejects the application of the verse with ḍaraba meaning 'to beat'. She refuses to condone a reading of the Quran which allows a husband to strike his wife, even symbolically. This 'intervention with the text', as she calls it, is not arbitrary, but necessary in order to prevent harm in muslim communities.
I have learnt so much writing this thesis: I worked with the arabic quranic text itself, with arabic quran commentaries and their english translations, and a wide range of english and german literature on verse 4:34, gender and women's rights in islam, methods and the history of interpretation of the quran, and domestic violence in muslim households. I know that a lot of what I have been writing in my thesis has been written before, but what matters is that I thought it through and presented the information in a way that made sense to me. I'm really proud of myself for pulling through.
And now on to new adventures... I still have to do three more written assignments. The next one on top of the pile is a short paper (20 pages) on verse 49:13, on human diversity, in premodern and modern interpretation. Currently I'm reviewing the literature - I might settle for al-Ṭabarī again and for Sayyid Qutb.
Ponovno štampanje karikatura Charlie Hebdoa ne tiče se slobode govora
Ponovno štampanje karikatura Charlie Hebdoa ne tiče se slobode govora
Asma Barlas
Francuski satirični časopis Charlie Hebdo ponovo je na djelu: odlučio je ponovo objaviti pogrdne karikature Poslanika Muhammeda koji su isprovocirali nasilni napad na njih 2015. Urednici kažu da je “ključno“ ponovo ih štampati uoči suđenja počiniteljima tog nasilja.
Prije deset godina, 2005, danski list Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten također je objavio desetak pogrdnih karikatura…
Letter to the Editor: Politics professor responds to Ithacan editorial
Letter to the Editor: Politics professor responds to Ithacan editorial
Author: Asma Barlas / Source: theithacan.org
Thank you for your editorial on IC Loves Israel Day pointing out that the name is politicized and misleading, hence inappropriate (April 18). I would have said as much had I accepted The Ithacan’sinvitation to share my thoughts on the subject, but I didn’t. I feel it shouldn’t fall largely to Muslim critics of Israel’s policies to do the work of…
