Amina Wadud - Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective

T HE research for Qur'an and Woman started as early as 1986. At that time, I was quite naive about how significant it would be to pursue a female inclusive reading of the Qur'an. I was also unaware of how to develop such a reading. Although interest in the question of woman in Islam was not unique, attempting to pursue an answer to that question exclusively by examining the notion of woman in the Qur'an turned out to be nearly unprecedented throughout fourteen centuries of Islamic thought. However, in these times of post-modernist critique when the very foundations of knowledge are challenged to move beyond certain value laden tendencies, such a method can be viewed as part of a larger area of discourse by feminists who have constructed a valuable critique of the tendency in many disciplines to build the notion of the normative human from the experiences and perspectives of the male person.

One objective behind my research was to establish a definitive criteria for evaluating the extent to which the position of women in Muslim cultures accurately portrays the intention of Islam for women in society. It was easy to designate the Qur'an as the ultimate criteria available within the Islamic intellectual legacy, as well as its most authoritative reference point, because it enjoys an overwhelming consensus among Muslimshowever variously understoodas the word of Allah, revealed to the Prophet Muhammad for the purpose of guidance to all humanity. Hence, it could be used as criteria for checking if the status of women in actual Muslim societies could be defined as Islamic.

Because women are not deemed as important as men in most Muslim majority or minority communities, Muslim women do not enjoy a status equal to men. If the definitive basis for what Islam means is determined by what Muslims do, then women and men are not equal. However, I reasoned that only explicit Qur'anic indication that women and men were other than co-equals could require acceptance of this inequality as a basis of faithfulness to Islam. Mer-cifully, the more research I did into the Qur'an, unfettered by centuries of historical androcentric reading and Arabo-Islamic cultural predilections, the more affirmed I was that in Islam a female person was intended to be primordially, cosmologically, eschatologically, spiritually, and morally a full human being, equal to all who accepted Allah as Lord, Muhammad as prophet, and Islam as din. What remained was to advocate the details of this research as legitimate grounds for contesting the unequal treatment that women have experienced historically and continue to experience legally in the context of Muslim communities.

The confirmation of women's equality that resulted from my studies in the Qur'an was overwhelming and the research evolved into the publication of the book Qur'an and Woman. At the time of its publication in 1992, when my scholarly role in Islamic studies was advancing, I was beginning the activist phase of my work in the gender jihad as a Muslim woman. Indeed, Qur'an and Woman became a major contribution to and my entryway into the discourse over rights in both the Muslim and global contexts.