Barlas - Believing women in Islam: unreading patriarchal interpretations of the Qurān

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Revised edition, 2019

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Barlas, Asma, author.

Title: Believing women in Islam : unreading patriarchal
interpretations of the Qurn / Asma Barlas.

Description: Revised edition.

Austin : University of Texas Press, 2019.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018012130

ISBN 978-1-4773-1592-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4773-1593-4 (library e-book)
ISBN 978-1-4773-1594-1 (non-library e-book)

eISBN: 9780863564727

Subjects: LCSH: Women in Islam. | Women in the Qurn.

Womens rightsReligious aspectsIslam.

Classification: LCC BP173.4 .B35 2019
DDC 297.1/2283054dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012130

doi:10.7560/315910

Do they not then
Earnestly seek to understand
The Qurn, or are
Their hearts locked up?

THE QURN (47:24 [ALI 1988, 1385])

With love,

FOR

Ulises Ali, who has made his journey into Islam,

AND FOR

Anwar and Iqbal Barlas, who have completed theirs.

1. The Qurn and Muslim Women:
Reading Patriarchy, Reading Liberation

2. Texts and Textualities:
The Qurn, Tafsr, and Ahdith

3. Intertextualities, Extratextual Contexts:
The Sunnah, Sharah, and the State

4. The Patriarchal Imaginary of Father/s:
Divine Ontology and the Prophets

5. Abrahams Sacrifice in the Qurn:
Beyond the Body

6. The Qurn, Sex/Gender, and Sexuality:
Sameness, Difference, Equality

7. The Family and Marriage:
Retrieving the Qurns Egalitarianism

The central question I have posed in this book, whether or not the Qurn is a patriarchal text, is perhaps not a meaningful one from the Qurns perspective since its teachings are not framed in terms of the claims made by either traditional or modern patriarchies. However, since the Qurn was revealed in/to an existing patriarchy and has been interpreted by adherents of patriarchies ever since, Muslim women have a stake in challenging its patriarchal exegesis.

In writing this book, I have wanted not only to challenge oppressive readings of the Qurn but also to offer a reading that confirms that Muslim women can struggle for equality from within the framework of the Qurns teachings, contrary to what both conservative and progressive Muslims believe. I am always disheartened to hear progressive Muslims claim(dis)ingenuously, it seems to methat Islamism is Islamism, as a young Algerian feminist puts it in a critically acclaimed film shown recently in the West. To identify Islam inseparably with oppression is to ignore the reality of misreadings of the sacred text, as Abdolkarim Soroush (2000, 86) calls them. Every religion is open to variant readings; the Christianity of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Conquest that wiped out millions of people in the name of Christ and commerce bears little family resemblance to the liberation theology of today. Confusing Islam with Islamism or Islamists also ignores that Islam does not sanction a clergy or invest anyone with the right to monopolize religious meaning. To accept the authority of any group and then to resign oneself to its misreadings of Islam not only makes one complicit in the continued abuse of Islam and the abuse of women in the name of Islam but also means losing the battle over meaning without even fighting it, as Abdullahi An-Naim (1990) reminds us.

This is not to say that attempts to rethink our understanding of Islam or to reread the Qurn are going to be easy, given the control over religious knowledge of obscurantists and experts alike. Yet more and more Muslims, realizing that no one has a monopoly over the meaning of what God says, as Aref Ali Nayed (1992) puts it, are beginning to reclaim their interpretive rights. In fact, the struggle to reclaim such rights may be related proportionally to attempts by some Muslim states and clerics to keep Muslims from reading, a true irony for a people who believe that Revelation to the unlettered Prophet commenced with the single word Iqra! or Read!

Although the practice of Islam concerns only Muslims, Muslim practices are of concern to the community of nations in which we live. I have thus written this work with both Muslims and non-Muslims in mind. Writing for such different audiences in a shared vocabulary has proven hard to do, not because I could not always find the right words, but because so many people are invested in the myth of radical difference; that is, the false but comforting idea that they share absolutely nothing with Others. To speak to such people simultaneously and in the same language is to threaten in some very real way the imagined borders that serve as the markers of their identities; it is thus to call forth unrelenting animosity against oneself, as I have discovered over the years.

To conservative Muslims, terms like antipatriarchal, sexual inequality, liberation, and even hermeneuticsall of which I use liberallysmack too much of the epistemology of non-Muslim Others to be safely applied to themselves, let alone used in reading the Qurn. Consequently, even though I engage Western/feminist thought only circumspectly, and often to differentiate and privilege what I take to be a Qurnic viewpoint, my language and the mere act of engagement are likely to render me a Western feminist in the eyes of those Muslims who are prone to hearing in such languageand in any criticism of Muslim menthe subversive voices of Western feminists. Mislabeling Muslim women in this way not only denies the specificity, autonomy, and creativity of their thought, but it also suggests, falsely, that there is no room from within Islam to contest inequality or patriarchy.

Conversely, to feminists and non-Muslim Westerners, terms like liberatory and antipatriarchal are much too self-referential to be applied to, or used meaningfully by, Others, especially Muslims. My use of these terms for the Qurn, as well as my favorable reading of it in comparison with Western/feminist discourses, will doubtless render me a Muslim apologist in their eyes. To such people, it is inconceivable that Islam (usually labeled Other/Eastern) has any truths to offer that may be commensurable with Judaism and Christianity (considered Western), much less with insights claimed by secular feminisms. Such views, however, ignore the scripturally linked nature and Middle Eastern origin of all three religions, hence the commonality of some of their truth claims. In positing a hyperseparation between Islam and the West, they also ignore that counterposing Islam to the West is misleading in that Islam is a way of life and not an imagined geography, to borrow Edward Saids (1979) rich phrase; it cannot therefore meaningfully be compared to one. Further, Islam not only exists within the West but also has helped to constitute the West, as Said so compellingly demonstrated two decades ago.