Women and Men in the Qur’ān

195 Pages·2018·1.706 MB·English

by  Asma Lamrabet

women
and
men
in the
-
qur an
’
asma lamrabet
translated by muneera salem-murdock
Women and Men in the Qur’ān
“In the midst of media and academia dominated discourses about Muslim
women’s discriminatory treatment, the present volume provides a scholarly inter-
pretation of the Islamic primary sources to present women and also men as equal
partners in the life dictated by modernist ideological expectations. Dr. Asma
Lamrabet, without engaging in apologetics, has rendered a great service to w omen’s
cause by responding to the systematic denigration of women’s stature and rights in
Muslim sources, in order to reinstate the dignity and human worth of women in
Islamic tradition. The classical exegetical materials are critically evaluated for their
culturally biased position against women. The inclusive and even-handed approach
to the question of gender discrimination in Muslim culture leaves the study free of
the usual feminist polemics. Dr. Lamrabet’s approach allows the Islamic sources to
speak for themselves about controversial treatment of the gender disparity. Moreover,
the author commendably presents the contemporary lip-service treatment of wom-
en’s rights undertaken by Muslim political and religious leadership. The problems
with governance in the Muslim world have done very little in reorienting Muslim
traditional attitudes to the questions of justice and equality to improve the lot of the
women today. Dr. Lamrabet has correctly concluded that without the democratic
governance committed to promote the fundamental rights of all its citizens, especially
of women, all talk of reform remains empty and unfulfilled in Muslim societies.”
—Abdulaziz Sachedina, Chair, Religious Studies, and Endowed IIIT Professor of
Islamic Studies, George Mason University, USA
Asma Lamrabet
Women and Men
in the Qur’ān
Asma Lamrabet
L’hôpital Avicennes de Rabat
Rabat, Morocco
Translated by Muneera Salem-Murdock, Washington, DC, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-78740-4 ISBN 978-3-319-78741-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78741-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018938336
Translation from the French language edition: Femmes et hommes dans le Coran: quelle
égalité? by Asma Lamrabet, © Les éditions Albouraq 2012. All Rights Reserved. ISBN
978-2-84161-562-9.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
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Cover design: Fatima Jamadar
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In loving memory of Fatema Mernissi who uncompromisingly but gently
pressed me to translate this book. In her words, it was my duty to do so.
Now that it’s completed, I can see her smiling down on me.
F
oreword
While we live in an era in which discussions of Islam—particularly those
that proceed outside the Muslim-majority world—tend to be dominated
by questions relating to violence, there is no question in my mind that at
the heart of the future of this great religious tradition is the question of
women. There is no more salient terrain—intellectual, embodied, lived—
than this one. It is therefore a great honor to be able to pen a brief fore-
word for this new edition of Asma Lamrabet’s 2012 work Femmes et
hommes dans le Coran: Quelle égalité?
Thanks to Muneera Salem-Murdock’s engaging translation, English-
language readers now have access to an important work by one of
the foremost public intellectuals writing on Islam and gender today.
Lamrabet’s work embraces and extends a tradition of scholarship pio-
neered by a towering figure in the historical sociology of women in
Islam, her sister Moroccan the late Fatema Mernissi. Mernissi’s work
not only revealed the social underpinnings of patriarchal hermeneutics
in Islam, it also read back into Islamic history women whose contribu-
tions to the construction and articulation of religious authority have
been eclipsed by the hegemony of narrative frames inhospitable to the
female voice. I always found Mernissi’s work so powerful, so persuasive,
not only because it shined light on new ways of thinking about women
in Islam but also because it also taught us how to identify and critically
explore the various ways in which social relations of power are embed-
ded and reflected in any historical process of constructing “orthodoxy.”
vii
viii FoREWoRD
It is therefore only fitting that Salem-Murdock has dedicated this transla-
tion to Fatema’s memory.
In Women and Men in the Qur’ān, Asma Lamrabet first forces us to
confront and then proceeds to dismantle the chimeric “Muslim woman”
that animates and assuages a predominantly Euro-American discourse
seeking redemption for the Muslim world through her liberation. In a
self-described “decolonizing” reading of Islamic sources, she reveals the
impossibility of a universalized “Muslim woman” through the diverse
experiences of the many women who populate the Qur’ān itself much
less the vast and varied cultural geography of the contemporary Muslim
world. While making a formidable case for the centrality of the equality
of women and men as a Qur’ānic principle of paramount importance,
Lamrabet does not shy away from engaging directly with those verses
and passages of revelation that seem to establish different and seem-
ingly unequal standards for the two genders. This is a skillful work of
contextualized religious hermeneutics that deserves a place alongside
other pioneering works such as Amina Wadud’s Qur’ān and Woman
and Asma Barlas’ “Believing Women” in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal
Interpretations of the Qur’ān.
Women and Men in the Qur’ān enables perspectives and dialogue that
will be crucial to the production of a conception of gender equality that
is as authentic as it is uncompromising—in short, important new direc-
tions and hopeful ideas for highly fraught times.
Prof. Peter Mandaville
Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies
George Mason University
Fairfax, USA
C
ontents
1 Introduction 1
Part I Women in Islam: A New Approach
2 Beyond the Problematic of “The Muslim Woman” 9
3 The Qur’ānic Revelation in Seventh-Century Arabia 13
4 An Alternative Approach to the Qur’ān 21
Part II Women and Men in the Qur’ān: The Key Concepts
5 The Creation of Humanity 35
6 The Construction of Human Civilization 41
7 Moral Integrity as an Evaluation Criteria 47
8 The Egalitarian Call of the Qur’ān 51
9 The Qur’ānic Ethic of the Marital Union 61
ix
x CoNTENTS
10 The Principles of Divorce in the Qur’ān 85
11 The Shared Responsibility of Men and Women 105
12 The Management of Public and Private Spheres 115
13 The Basic Verses on Inheritance 131
14 Foundations of Corporal Ethic 143
15 The Equality of In-Court Testimony 165
Part III Equality, the Time of a Revelation
16 Why Is There a Lag? 179
17 What Alternative Possibilities? 185
18 Equality, the Time of a Revelation 187
References 189
Index 193
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
It is universally recognized that discrimination against women is an
integral part of all cultures and religions. Today, however, only Islam,
both as a civilization and as a religion, continues to be mercilessly
blasted, put on the defensive, and denounced for what is regarded as its
unequal treatment of women, which in turn leads to making the topic of
gender inequality central to any discussion of Islam, making it extremely
difficult to offer an alternative objective methodology to tackle the ques-
tion. Moreover, one continues to perceive the issue through a dou-
ble prism—that of the news media, with its display of stereotypes and
widespread Islamophobia, and that of the political ideology of predom-
inantly Muslim societies. This, added to the current transnational politi-
cal situation, has resulted in Islam being perceived as the religion of the
oppression of women par excellence, in total disregard of the significant
discrimination vis-à-vis differing societies, traditions, or religions prac-
ticed by the accusing cultures.
Persistent discourse and media hype surrounding Muslim women
with their precarious legal status, their trailing emancipation, their con-
fining cultural guardianships, and their various burqas1 and “veils” has
created, in the contemporary collective imagination, a fixed image of a
Muslim woman, eternally submissive and totally overlooked. Such an
underhanded image serves to preserve the view that inequality between
1 A burqa is an outer garment that covers the entire body from head to toe. It is worn by
women when in public in some Islamic countries.
© The Author(s) 2018 1
A. Lamrabet, Women and Men in the Qur’ān,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78741-1_1