Inside the Gender Jihad

"Wadud is a theologian with a PhD from the University of Michigan and a long-time professor of Islamic studies. The book of hers that I am eager to talk about is her second book, which came out in 2006. Her first book, Qur’an and Woman, is a pioneering text of Islamic feminism. She brings together new methodologies from the humanities and social sciences, especially linguistics, and she stays quite close to the text. She skilfully deconstructs the Arabic vocabulary and syntax in the Arabic, and, in that way, is able to open up complex meanings found in the texts. So when the scripture says, for example, it is possible for a husband to strike a disobedient wife, she can deconstruct that so that the literal meaning is dissolved. Or the idea that a husband has authority or qawwama over his wife. Such things can be explained away. It was quite revealing for many because she showed how, through careful reading, you could come up with multiple understandings and certainly to move away from facile literalism. And she took us quite far, but there are, of course, limitations to that approach. But by 2006 she had got to a new spot and with the book Inside the Gender Jihad has moved from foundationalism into a post-foundationalist phase. She emphasises even more than before the need to contextualise, the need to engage in dialogue with the text and she doesn’t talk about equality as a norm in the text, but equality as a principle and justice as a principle – and how you can’t have justice without equality. She says we need to elaborate this more. The Qur’an exists, but meaning is extracted by us. She emphasises that gender equality is an unfinished project – it needs human intervention, strenuous human intervention. We need to struggle, we need to engage, to understand what is going on and not maroon ourselves in tired old literalist understandings of the Qur’an. If we need to, we just have to reject what seem to be evident or literal meanings. If something seems to be against a notion of, say, justice – one of the maqasid or goals of the Qur’an – we just have to declare it and move on. So when the Qur’an says that if a wife is disobedient her husband can hit her, however lightly (as it might be interpreted), her answer is no. This is not acceptable; it is not acceptable according to the standards of our day and our context and we just have to say it isn’t – the same way as we did with slavery. She has this very nice phrase, ‘We are the makers of textual meaning.’ So we go beyond the foundationalist approach and re-make the textual meaning. The Qur’an is supposed to furnish guidance, it’s suppose to elevate us wherever we are, and we are now in the 21st century and we have understandings of equality that patriarchal ideas, institutions, and practices are subverting. We have to make meaning – or make sense – and we don’t have to get bogged down if there are spots in the scripture where it’s difficult to get our heads around. She stresses this idea that we have to look at the descriptive dimension of the Qur’an, the scripture’s description of a patriarchy and how to deal with it, and not to mistake description for prescription. Wadud is very inspirational to this rising generation of younger women and also gives non-Muslims a whole different way of grasping Islam."