Gender and Scripture in Islam: Some Thorny Issues

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Gender and Scripture in IslamSome Thorny Issues
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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)

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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 its all patriarchy
• Liberationism transform the social order

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Quran 434

• 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)

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Quran 2228

• Men have a degree over women.
• a technical advantage in divorce proceedings
  rather than a general superiority (Wadud-Muhsin)

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4 wives (Quran 43)

• . . . 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)

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Hadith sayings of the Prophet

• Those who entrust their affairs to a woman will
  never know prosperity (via Abu Bakra, in regard
  to Aisha)
• critique of narrators character defects
  (indecisive in civil war, guilty of false
  accusation of adultery), part of traditional
  discipline of hadith criticism (Fatima Mernissi)

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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 narrators misogyny (Yemeni), gender
  insecurity (man with a female kitten), and
  notorious falsehoods
• cf. Bukharis omission of hadith that declare
  menstruation non-polluting

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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)

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The Quran 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 worlds first gender-inclusive scriptural
  language?

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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 its all patriarchy
• Liberationism transform the social order