By Abdennur Prado
Oxford, October 17th 2008
Bismil-lahi ar-Rahmani ar-Rahim
I have entitled this lecture ‘Qur’anic feminism: the makers of textual meaning’. I’m going to defend the centrality of Qur’anic revelation in Islamic feminism, in a radical sense. Not only as a text that has been revealed and fixed many centuries ago, but as a revelation that is happening here and now. Anyone who has study or even smelled the Qur’an knows that the concept of revelation in islam it goes beyond the image of a fixed text. The last part of the title is a quotation of Amina Wadud’s ‘Inside the Gender Jihad’.
In the last years some Muslim intellectuals has developed a Qoranic hermeneutics with gender perspective. I’m referring particularly to the works of Asma Barlas, Amina Wadud, Sa’diyya Sheikh, Riffat Hassan, Aziza al-Hibri, Musdah Mulia, Ali Asghar Engineer and Nae’em Jeenah. Basically, the feminist readings of the Qur’an consider that the Qur’an is essentially a non-patriarchal text, although it admits that there are certain verses and elements that can be read in a patriarchal way, and that these patriarchal lectures have dominated Islamic theology and sexual politics during centuries, and in fact are still dominating. Then, in the expression of Asma Barlas, we need to unread patriarchal interpretations of the Qur’an.
First, we have to put the emphasis on a range of theological and ethical values established in the Qur’an, as the foundation of equality between men and women. These fundamental principles are: tawhid, taqua, ‘adl, khilafa, wilaya and shura. Of course, I don’t have time to develop them as they deserve. In any case, I’m going to present a quick point about this, as a framework to be able to explain my thesis.
Tawhid is the basic principle of the Islamic world view, the idea that everything is united in Allah and there is no other reality than the unique Reality. Tawhid outlines the integration of the multiplicity in the unity: all in the creation is joined by its origin in Allah, so is no appropriate to establish a hierarchy on the basis of physical or political characteristics such as races, nationalities or gender. We can not distinguish humanity of one person from another person’s humanity. That means that we can not create an artificial hierarchy between men and women, which would break with the principle that all creatures are linked directly with the divinity.
Taqua is sometimes translated as ‘piety ‘, but has the meaning of ‘protection, to be careful’. Muhammad Asad translates taqua as ‘consciousness of God’. I had a master in al-Andalus that use to say that to understand taqua you have to think in a cat walking quietly in the middle of the fire, and to understand the absence of taqua you have to think in a foolish dog in the same situation. The fire is dunia, the fire of this world. The Qur’an states that the only principle that distinguishes some people from others is his or her taqua (Qur’an 49: 13). If we apply this principle to gender relations, it seems clear that eliminates any possibility that men are superior to women, simply by virtue of being men. That would negate the ethical message of the Qur’an, imposing a biological consideration that is not in the text.
Justice is not a juridical concept, but a cosmological one. According to the Qur’an, the world has been created in Justice, in a permanent equilibrium. The balance of forces is at the axis of God’s Creation: the Balance between active and passive, heaven and earth, expansion and contraction, change and permanence, male and female, and so on. Here comes the idea of islam as a religion of moderation, that searches the harmony between the price and object, between reason and instinct, between the corporal and spiritual needs, or between the individual and the collective. Any excess in favour of one of these poles is at the expense of the other, resulting in deformed beings and societies. A perfect balance and balancing forces is what gives happiness / serenity, both in this world and in the other. Within this vision, balance between the two poles of the couple (male and female forces) is crucial. Masculine and Feminine attributes do not correspond exclusively to men and women, both of them are internal to each creature. The feminine must be in a perfect equilibrium with the masculine in men as in women. Try to limit the feminine to women and subordinate it to the males as the sole essence of man is to break the internal equilibrium of men and women, the polarity that is present in each one of the creatures.
In the Qur’an, all human beings are seen as potential caliphs of God on earth, responsible for the care of the world, of themselves, their immediate environment and of the creation as a whole. The caliphate implies that everyone has a responsibility, not transferable to other human beings, in front of Allah, who has given to each one of us the government of our lives, without making any distinction between men and women. So we need to recuperate the consideration of women as the caliphs of Allah.
Along with the deconstruction of the concept of female dependency and male protection, Islamic feminists back to the idea of mutual support and protection of men and women, included in the Qur’anic notion of awliya. The Qur’an says that “The believers, men and women, are protectors and supporters one of another” (Qur’an 9:71). This verse establishes cooperation and equality between men and women, and cancels any possibility of male dominance. We are again in front of a non-hierarchical and egalitarian statement.
Once established these fundamental principles of the Qur’anic worldview and anthropology, feminist hermeneutics shows that the Qur’anic theology is a non-patriarchal theology. In the Qur’an, God is neither a father nor a male. Of course, to attribute to God a genre is a form of Shirk. The Qur’an states ontological equality between men and women. It talks about the creation of men and women from a single nafs (soul), from a unitary and undifferentiated principle from which emerged men and women. In the Qur’an there is no distinction of values or characteristics between the sexes, and its spiritual and ethical message is addressed equally to men and women. The Qur’an does not establish parental authority. At no time the father is presented as the head of the house. There is no the slightest reference to the segregation of the sexes. I’m not able to find in the Qur’an any reference that justifies the social distinction of roles for men and women for biological reasons.
Only when these premises are established, it is possible to tackle the controversial reading of certain verses, which isolated from the rest of the Qur’an seem to support the subordination of women to men and even the right of men to beat the rebel women.
We have seen some of the basics of reading with a gender perspective, in a very basic way. Now, I want to talk about some of the implications of this kind of approach to the Qur’an. First, it has to be noted that we are talking of some of the most powerful values established in the Qur’an. We are not talking of making bizarre interpretations which will lead us to the point we want, but to recover the Qur’an as an eternal message to all humankind, as the word of Allah. I say this because some time ago Nawal al-Sadawi said he did not believe in Islamic feminism, and compared it with the theology of a Christian African-American feminist who interpreted the Gospel under the premise that had been manipulated, and that in fact Jesus was a black woman.
On the contrary: it seems evident that feminist readings or Qur’an focuses more on the text itself than in the context of the revelation or in extra-Qur’anic considerations. This means not only to interpret the Qur’an by the Qur’an, in a self-referential manner and with the subsequent displacement of Hadith. This means to go beyond the text and to interpret the Qur’an according to the central values and Qur’anic worldview. In other words: the feminist readings moves of what is contingent to what is structural, from the normative to the ethical principles, considering that the norms of conduct stipulated in the Qur’an can only be understood in relation to the spiritual and ethical world view that supports it. That is: not only moves the Hadith in favour of the text, but even moves the text in favour of a holistic understanding. We can say that we are moving from the text of the Qur’an towards the heart of the Qur’an and we would say that towards the matrix of the Book.
In that sense, it seems clear that the feminist readings of the Qur’an differs from other approaches made by intellectuals who are often qualified as liberals, modernists or progressives, according to fashionable adjectives. And it is precisely this perspective that helps us to respond to the criticism of Islamic feminism realized by some Muslim intellectuals, such as Ebrahim Musa, Rashid Benzide and Nasr Abu Zayd. Basically, these authors have accused the feminist readings of constituting a mere subjective projection of a previous ideology upon the text.
These criticisms have been answered by Asma Barlas and Amina Wadud. According to Asma Barlas, there is no possibility of a non-subjective interpretation, as she considers that “to be human is to live a life that is politically, economically, sexually, culturally, and historically situated”. So Barlas proposes to be open and honest about that. Amina Wadud not only does not deny his involvement as a subject, but claims to be co-agent of Allah in the realization of the Qur’an:
What I am proposing is that the collective community has always manipulated the text in concert with civilizational, or, better still, human development. We must now simply acknowledge that it has been always done and accept the responsibility of agency in doing so openly and in consultation with the community… I have already argued that significantly that the text can be interpreted with egalitarianism in mind: I now propose one step that some consider as beyond even that. We are the makers of textual meaning.
All this deserves a clarification, as it affects the very basis of Islamic feminism. A feminist theology is always a critical one, a hermeneutic of suspicion originated in an experience of contradiction and shows that those traditional interpretations that were supposed to be neutral (simply objective translations of the message of the Qur’an to rules, laws, costumes and ideas) in fact were influenced by the previous ideology of its interpreters. Every human community is doomed to interpretation, debate and social construction of consensus among different subjectivities. In this sense, the pretension of absolute objectivity tends to become orthodoxy and is suspected of totalitarianism. Here emerges the concept of an Islamic society as an interpretive community, based in mutual consultation and protection, a community in which all members are considered as potential caliphs of God, as Allah proposes to humanity in the Qur’an.
Then, this means the acceptation that Islamic feminism is a projection of feminist ideology in the Qur’an? My thesis is that the feminist readings of the Qur’an are not merely subjective, but the result of an experience of revelation, here and now. The experience of revelation is in a deep sense the experience of Tawhid, the Unity of Reality, the inner connection between the Creator and the creatures. The experience of Tawhid is the spiritual basis of Islamic feminism, and is this experience that moves us to the deconstruction of patriarchal readings of the Qur’an.
In hermeneutical terms, is the experience of the ontological unity between the reader and the text, between the believer that opens to Allah and the Word that descends. The word of Allah descends into the heart of those who are open to Him. Allah is not contained by the heavens and the earth, but it’s contained in the heart of those who are open to Him.
And here we are ready to answer the question: Is the feminist hermeneutics purely subjective? Yes and no. It’s subjective to the extent that hermeneutical circle requires an individual who receive the Qur’an. Any experience is interpretative; any interpretation belongs to the subject. But this do not necessarily refers to the individual subject, seen as a being separated from the rest of beings. The subject that is in the position to receive the Qur’an is a subject that has recognized his dependence on the Source of all creation. It is not a subject barricaded himself in his miserable certainties, but a creature of God, aware of its limits and its fraternal unity with the rest of the living. He is a subject oriented to the everlasting live. And this opening makes possible embodied interpretations, emerged between the cracks of a dialogue between the subject and a Reality that embodies his subjectivity, a dialogue in which the subject is the agent of revelation. The revelation flows like a mercy through us, we are annihilate and fertilized. Revelation breaks with the limits in which the creature lives locked up. The duality between the subject and the object is transcended.
Then, is it an objective hermeneutics? Yes and no. Feminist hermeneutics is a form of critical thinking, arising from an experience of contradiction that only can be surpassed in Allah. As such, it appeals to a new objectivity, but refuses to become orthodoxy, and appeals to believers, as individuals endowed with reason and capacity of decision. This has very clear theological implications, in the sense that the objectivity that seeks to achieve a feminist reading of the Qur’an does not purport to establish itself as an orthodoxy that can be imposed. The feminist reading of the Qur’an is not posited as a dogma. It is offered to all Muslims as a potential trigger of the Qur’anic revelation, here and now. One possibility for the spiritual regeneration of the ummah, overcoming a prejudice that traditional Muslim societies have posed between themselves and the Qur’an, a gender bias that does not belong to the text and that has led to limit the scope of the Qur’an.
At this point we can ask ourselves: what is the criterion that validates an interpretation? First, we could say that the internal consistency it is the minimum requirement that we must demand from a critical perspective, the coherence with regard to the Qur’an as a whole. And yet, we must recognize that there are classical interpretations of certain verses which have become part of Islamic tradition that does not hold the slightest analysis, and a critical look reveals that are inconsistent with other passages from the Qur’an. So why have these interpretations become part of the canonical closure that is nowadays defended so intransigently by traditionalists?
My answer is that consistency or textual coherence is not all, and that there are other factors. On many occasions, the validity of an interpretation is measured in relation to its social and vital implications. If an interpretation or a reading of the Qur’án do not move us, if is not rooted in our daily live. So why should we accept it? What argument could convince us? If an interpretation is not presented as a possibility of liberation from the shackles of this world, if it does not help us to get rid of shirk and our personal veils, what matter if it is coherent or incoherent?
One interpretation of the Qur’an is valid to the extent that is consistent with the semantic possibilities of Qur’anic language. But that does not mean that all possible interpretations of the Qur’an are legitimate, much less that it is hassan, beautiful and good. If the interpretation is hassan, generates life. Is inserted into the live of the people and moves people to the realization of good deeds. One interpretation is hassan if we improve, if open ourselves to Allah and towards our fellow men, if make increase our imam and our taqua, if we wake up and put in place, if inspires believers and non-believers to grow as human beings. That is the real test for validation; this is the approach that I believe according to the message of the Qur’an, and not a supposed objectivity only to the extent of philologists and experts, an objectivity that ossifies the text as a reflection of the arrogance of the human mind.
The experience of revelation is the foundation of Islamic feminism. It is not a pun, is no mere political or belongs to the field of sociology. It has more to do with the mystical experience that with the secular feminist ideology. The foundation of Islamic feminism is spiritual, is an experience of God as the overcoming of opposites. We are fully within the prophetic paradigm. This is not only to reinterpret certain Qur’anic controversial vesicles. This is about living and updating the eternal message of the Qur’an, here and now, in our concrete circumstances.
And it is precisely this experience that enables us to do politics, not from the perspective of achieving power, but from the ethical imperative of confrontation with an order of things that we live as unfair. Is this experience of Tawhid which leads us to the political and social activism, according to the example of our beloved prophet Muhammad, sala alahu aleihi wa salam.
We, as believing men and women compromised with the understanding of the word of Allah. We, as believers who open our hearts and ask Allah for the revelation of the better meaning of the Qur’an, and that try to embody ourselves with the message of Qur’an and that accept the responsibility that Allah has given to every human being. We, as believing women and men, as protectors and companions, sisters and brothers in islam, in the hope of justice and a new equilibrium in the ummah, we are the makers of textual meaning.
Wa Al-lâhu ‘alim.
