Reading Patriarchy

Asma Barlas

Al. - Asma Barlas, "Believing Women" in Islam - Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an. University of Texas Press, Austin, 2002, ss.7-10

Muslims read patriarchy and sexual inequality into the Qur'an on the basis both of specific verses (Ayat, s.Ayah) and of the Qur'an's different treatment of women and men with regard to such issues as marriage, divorce, and inheritance. From these, they infer that men and women are not only biologically different but also unequal, and are opposites, a view mirrored in the claim that in Islam the masculine and feminine principles also are strictly separated. On the readings of conservatives,²² male superiority is both ontological, since woman is said to have been created from/after man and for his pleasure, and moral-social, since God is alleged to have preferred men in "the completeness of mental ability, good counsel, complete power in the performance of duties and the carrying out of (divine) commands."²³ God also is said to have given men a "degree" above woman and to have appointed them guardians (in some accounts, rulers) over woman. The woman, on the other hand, is represented as a "tragic being [whose] sex functions and physiology make her unfit for any work or activity except child-bearing." which is her "biological tragedy" (Maududi in Khan 1983,21). Not only do biological and mental functions and capacities differentiate the two sexes, argue conservatives, but they also justify a sexual division of maintenance of this system be he her husband, father or brother" (61-61). On conservative views, it is clear that

The Book of Nature, the sciences and the philosophers of Europe have emphatically proclaimed that though woman may try her best...she cannot be the equal of man in physical and intellectual powers...Her natural functions oblige her to be subjected to man, by which alone she can have any meaningful identity. (Vajidi in Khan, 129)

Surpassing the audacity even of Europeans like Freud, some conservative Muslims label a woman's anatomy her "pre-destiny," claiming that nature itself "has given man superiority over woman" and made her redundant to civilization (Vajidi in Khan, 173).

Such misogynistic readings of Islam derive not from the Qur'an's teachings, however, but from attempts by Muslim exegetes and Qur'an commentators "to legitimise actual usage of their own day by interpreting it in great detail into the Holy Book."²⁴ In fact, one can trace changes in Muslim women's status "through a comparative study of  [Qur'anic] interpretations such as those of Tabari (d.923), Zamakhshari (d.1144). Baydawi (d.1286).. al-Suyuti (d.1505),"²⁵ and so on, all of whose works form part of the Sunni canon ²⁶ today. This is why we need to examine not just the methods by which Qur'anic exegesis and religious meaning have been and continue to be produced, but also the extratextual contexts of their production.

Recent scholarship increasingly makes clear that conservative readings of the Qur'an are a function of the methods Muslims have used -or have failed to use- to read it. In particular, argue critical scholars,²⁷ Muslims have not read the Qur'an as both a "complex hermeneutic totality"²⁸ and as a "historically situated"²⁹ text. Instead, says Mustansir Mir (1986,1), they have relied on a "linear-atomistic" method that takes a "verse-by-verse approach to the Qur'an. With most Muslim exegetes, the basic unit of Qur'an study is one or a few verses taken in isolation from the preceding and following verses." As a result, the Qur'an is not read as a text possesing both "thematic and structural nazm  [coherence]" (24). As Amina Wadud (1999, 2) also argues, the exegetes of the classical period.

begin with the first verse of the first chapter and proceed to the second verse of the first chapter -one verse at a time- until the end of the Book. Little or no effort is made to recognize themes and to discuss the relationship of the Qur'an to itself, thematically.

Even when they do refer to the relationship of two Ayat, contends Wadud, they do so without applying any "hermeneutical principle" since a method "for linking similar Qur'anic ideas, syntactical structures, principles, or themes together is almost non-existent" (Wadud 1999, 2).

Not surprisingly, this method has failed to yield a creative synthesis of Qur'anic principles,³⁰ since it does not recognize the connections between different themes in the Qur'an. (As my reading will show, recognizing the Qur'an's textual and thematic holism, and thus the hermeneutic connections between seemingly disparate themes, is absolutely integral to recovering its antipatriarchal epistemology). By ignoring the fact that the Qur'an is "a unified document gradually unfolding itsel"³¹ in time, classical exegetes have also ignored that in the Qur'an content and context possess one another³² such that one cannot grasp the signifiance of the Qur'an's teachings without considering the contexts of their revelation.

If we need to keep in mind the historical contexts of the Qur'an's revelation in order to understand its teachings, we also need to keep in mind the historical contexts of its interpretations in order to understand its conservative and patriarchal exegesis. The most definitive work, not only in Qur'anic exegesis but also in law and tradition, is considered by many Muslims to have been produced during the first few centuries of Muslim history, the Golden Age of Islam, which coincided with the Western Middle Ages.³³ The misogyny of this period is, of course, well known. It was assimilated ³⁴ into Islam by way of the commentaries and super-commentaries on the Qur'an (Tafsir) and the narratives detailing the life and praxis of the Prophet (Ahadith) (Ahmed 1992; Spellberg 1994; Stowasser 1994). In other words, it was the secondary religious texts that enabled the "textualization of misogyny"³⁵ in Islam. These texts have come to eclipse the Qur'an's influence in most Muslim societies today,³⁶ exemplifying the triumph not only of some texts over brothers in Muslim religious discourse but also of history, politics, and culture over the sacred text,³⁷ and thus also of the cross-cultural, transnational, and nondenominational ideologies on women and gender in vogue in the Middle Ages over the teaching of the Qur'an. However, since we often do not distinguish between texts, cultures, and histories when studying Islam, we tend to ignore this inversion. As a result, we end up confusing the Qur'an with its Tafsir, and confusing Islam with patriarchy and the practices of repressive Muslim states that have a history of using Islam for their own political ends (Mernissi 1991, 1996; Khalidi 1994; Marlow 1997; Zaman 1997).

The fact that the Qur'an "happens against a long background of  patriarchal precedent"³⁸ may also explain why its exegesis, the work entirely of men, has been influenced by their own needs and experiences while either excluding or interpreting, "through the male vision, perspective, desire, or needs," women's experiences (Wadud 1999,2). The resulting absence of women's voices from "the basic paradigms through which we examine and discuss the Qur'an and Qur'anic interpretation," argues Wadud, is mistaken "with voicelessness in the text itself"; and it is this silence that both explains and allows the striking consensus on women's issues among Muslims in spite of interpretive differences among them.

However, we know that women participated actively in the creation of religious knowledge in the early days of Islam. As Ahmed (1992, 72) says, women of the Prophet's community felt they had a right "to comment forthrightly their "right to speak out and readily responded to their comments." It is necessary, therefore, to reexamine the details of  Muslim history, in particular the processes of knowledge formation, in order to understand women's exclusion from interpretive communities over time.

In sum, in order to understand patriarchal readings of the Qur'an, we need to study the relationship not only between hermeneutics and history, but also between the content of knowledge and the methods by which it is generated. It is not "enough to as what we know about religion, but equal attention must be paid to how we come to know what we know" (King 1995, 20; her emphasis). We need to realize that our understanding of the Qur'an's teachings is contingent on how we have, or have not, read it; on the sorts of questions we have asked of it; and the voices we have preferred to hear in response to our questions. As such, if we want to read the Qur'an in liberatory and antipatriarchal modes, we will need to use a different method to read it and also to ask different sorts of questions than we have been willing to as thus far.