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PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS

VOL. 41, NO. 2, FALL 2013

Islamic Feminisms and Freedom

Allison WeirAustralian Catholic University

ABSTRACT. This essay discusses the interaction of struggles for gender equality with a plurality of conceptions of freedom in Islamic feminist scholarship and activism. I discuss Islamic feminist critiques of feminism and rights, the concept of Islamic secularism, and the problematization of freedom in relation to women’s piety movements. Finally I take up Islamic feminist interpretations of the Qur’an to identify conceptions of freedom in this work. I argue, first, that there are diverse conceptions of freedom at play in Islamic feminist scholarship, and second, that a plu-rality of conceptions of freedom can support feminist practice and goals.

In A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America, Leila Ahmed writes that her analysis of American Muslim activism finally brought her to the “astonishing conclusion” that it is after all believing Muslims and Islamists (those committed to the political agenda of Islamizing society), not secular Mus-lims, who are struggling for women’s rights and gender rights in Islam in America. To support this claim, Ahmed points to organizations such as Daughters of Hajar, Muslim WakeUp!, the Progressive Muslim Union, and al-Fatiha, which advocate the equal rights of women, gays, and minorities. She also cites books and public arguments for equality by Muslim public figures and academics, as well as femi-nist interpretations of the Qur’an. In addition, there are movements for equality within mosques, often supported even by conservative Muslim organizations, and radical interventions such as the mixed-gender prayer service led by a woman,

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Amina Wadud, in 2005. Ahmed traces the history of the politicized, social jus-tice-focused Islamic movements that developed in the Middle East through the twentieth century, yet argues that contemporary Islamic activism for gender rights is particularly American: activists for gender rights are “assimilating” and “inte-grating” into the “distinctively American tradition of activism in pursuit of jus-tice” (Ahmed 2011, 296, 303). Ahmed’s astonishment reflects a common assumption: that feminism is a quintessentially Western and definitively secular movement. But this assumption misses both the importance of religious strains of feminism and other resistance struggles in the West and the development of Islamic feminism and gender politics outside of Europe and America. The second wave of Western feminism that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s included many Christian and Jewish feminists who criticized the patriarchal tra-ditions of Christianity and Judaism. While feminist movements in Europe and North America have been grounded in Enlightenment secular rationalist values, various schools of feminist spirituality and feminist theology have developed, as Rosi Braidotti writes, “alongside but in antagonism to the mainstream secularist line” (Braidotti 2008, 7). Woman of color feminisms and Latin American femi-nisms have been rooted in liberation theology, just as the American civil rights movement and black power movements have drawn heavily on Christian ideals as well as Islam. Many African American Muslims have been influenced by this hybrid history, and draw on the example of Martin Luther King as well as that of Malcolm X. Moreover, many Islamic women in many parts of the world today—and not only in the United States or in the “Western” world—are engaged in feminist activ-ism. In the past few decades, Islamic scholars and activists across the Middle East, North Africa, and South-East Asia, as well as North America, have been drawing on the Qur’an and other core texts of Islam to argue for women’s rights and for the equality of women with men. This work of diverse individuals, groups, and movements is sometimes referred to as Islamic feminism. As Hoda El Saadi writes in her review of Ahmed’s book, “for the last two decades, the Arab world has been witnessing the development of an Islamic feminist movement pursuing women’s rights and social justice” (El Saadi 2012, 629). In this essay I shall discuss the interaction of struggles for gender equality with diverse conceptions of freedom in Islamic feminist scholarship. Through this discussion, I shall question the assumption that feminist freedom is necessarily a Western secular concept and will argue for a plurality of conceptions of fem-inist freedom. I shall begin with a brief introduction to Islamic feminisms, and will then discuss Islamic feminist critiques of feminism and rights, the concept of Islamic secularism, and the problematization of freedom in relation to women’s piety movements. Finally I will take up the work of some American Islamic femi-nist interpreters of the Qur’an to identify the conceptions of freedom in this work.

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I will argue, first, that there are diverse conceptions of freedom at play in Islamic feminist scholarship, and second, that a plurality of conceptions of freedom can support feminist practice and goals.

I. ISLAMIC FEMINISMS?

The historian Margot Badran notes that the term Islamic feminism has been invented by observers (including Badran herself) and is often eschewed by its pro-ducers (Badran 2005, 14–15). The term is used to describe both political activists and academics in various contexts, but all are pursuing equality and justice for women within Islam. Many reject the term Islamic feminism as a “hegemonic nam-ing of the other” and prefer “Muslim women scholar-activists” as a self- description (Bahi 2011, 144). Asma Barlas prefers the term “believing women” (Barlas 2002). Badran also claims that Islamic feminism has yet to become a widely based social movement. But this too may be a question of definition. While it may be true that a self-described Islamic feminist political movement does not have a broad base, some argue that there is a growing movement of Muslim women scholar-activists that crosses national borders. Hoda El Saadi names Omaima Abu-Bakr in Egypt, Olfa Youssef in Tunisia, Muhammad Shahrour in Syria, and Abdel Hamid Abu Sulayman in Saudia Arabia as scholars producing some of this work (El Saadi 2012, 629–30).1 There are many Muslim women scholar-activists in the United States and Canada; among the most prominent are Amina Wadud and Asma Barlas, who have each written book-length feminist interpretations of the Qur’an. And Islamic feminist political movements are active in Malaysia, South Africa, and across the Middle East. All of these contribute to what some describe as a movement of “Muslim women engaged in the revision of Islamic traditions, the constitution of new modernity in the twenty-first century, the transformation of the Muslim public sphere and probably the transformation of feminism itself” (Bahi 2011, 145). The historian Margot Badran notes that secular feminisms emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and developed through the twentieth century in Middle Eastern countries, where they were closely connected to nation-alist struggles. Against claims by both westerners and Islamists that feminisms in the Middle East are “borrowed” from “western feminism” Badran emphatically asserts that Middle Eastern feminisms have originated in the Middle East. Like feminisms everywhere, they do “intersect with, amplify, and push in new direc-tions, elements of feminisms found elsewhere” (Badran 2005, 13). Badran argues that while secular feminisms have had considerable success, by the final years of the twentieth century, secular feminism seemed to have reached an impasse, as secular feminists were unable to reform Muslim personal status codes or family law. As Badran writes, “Feminism needed a new edge, and Islamic feminism provided it.

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Islamic feminism offered new thinking and new tools” (Badran 2005, 13). Badran argues that Islamic feminism has actually been more radical than secular feminism in promoting full gender equality in the Middle East. While secular feminisms had advocated the full equality of women and men in the public sphere, they accepted a model of gender complementarity and hierarchical gender roles privileging male authority in the private or family sphere. In contrast, Badran argues that Islamic feminisms affirm the unqualified equality of men and women. “Islamic feminism extended secular feminism’s Islamic modernist strand and made it more radical by affirming the unqualified equality of all human beings (insan). It affirmed the equality of women and men as insan across the public/private spectrum, and it grounded its assertions in new readings of the Qur’an” (Badran 2005, 14). Badran argues that this affirmation of equality is grounded not in secular arguments but in interpretations of the Qur’an.

Inasmuch as “gender equality and social justice are embedded in the Qur’an we are not speaking of these principles as products of ‘moder-nity’ understood as western modernity. People worldwide come to concepts of gender equality and social justice through different routes, through different texts—religious or secular.” For Muslims, as Badran points out, “Ideas of gender equality and social justice were introduced in early seventh-century C.E. Arabia through the words that became enshrined in the Qur’an.” (Barlas 2005, 107)2

As Asma Barlas writes, “the reason Muslims have read the Qur’an as a patriarchal text has to do with who has read it (basically men), the contexts in which they have read it (basically patriarchal), and the method by which they have read it (basically one that ignores the hermeneutic principles that the Qur’an suggests for its own reading” (Barlas 2005, 97). So Muslim women scholars are producing interpretations of the Qur’an that affirm the principles of justice and equality that they argue are central to the text. While Badran and Barlas assert that the Qur’an supports full gender equal-ity in both public and private realms, some Islamic feminist scholars have more recently begun to question this claim. While the Qur’an clearly affirms the equal moral worth and spriritual equality of men and women, passages in the Qur’an assign different social roles to men and women. So arguments that the Qur’an affirms full social equality are based on the claim that social gender roles are com-plementary—equal but different. This argument will convince few secular femi-nists today. It clearly fails to address feminist critiques of fixed and heteronorma-tive gender identities and roles. Badran’s general claims about the relative roles of secular and Islamic femi-nisms in the Middle East are problematic as well: gender politics and power rela-tions necessarily vary across contexts. The essays in this volume by Paria Gashtili on feminism in Iran and by Fulden Ibrahimhakkioglu on feminism in Turkey clearly show that Islamic feminist struggles within a theocratic state are very different from Islamist feminist struggles within a state that has outlawed many Islamic institutions.

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It is certainly the case that Islamic feminisms everywhere are engaged in a plu-rality of struggles. They struggle against patriarchal and misogynistic interpretations of Islam and against reductive dismissals of Islam as an essentially patriarchal and misogynistic religion. They struggle against patriarchy within both Islamic and sec-ular Islamic societies, and they struggle against Islamophobia, antireligious secular-ists, and Western imperialism. They criticize the assumption that gender equality is an essentially Western ideal, and they criticize Western feminists for falsely univer-salizing secular Western perspectives and for claiming that Islam oppresses women, thereby supporting and justifying imperial oppression and invasion. And they strug-gle in contexts where women are used as objects in various conflicts, among Western colonizers, anticolonial nationalists, and Islamic fundamentalists.

II. CONTROVERSIES: CRITIQUES OF RIGHTS, CRITIQUES OF FEMINISM

While Islamic women activists advocate feminist ideals and values such as gender equality, many resist the term feminist, arguing that Western feminism has been grounded in imperialism and racism. Wadud, a convert to Islam, writes, “as an African-American, the original feminist paradigms were not intended to include me” (Wadud 2006, 79–80). Azizah al-Hibri, once a secular feminist who has sub-sequently reaffirmed her Islamic faith, uses the term womanist, arguing that “many Muslim women have felt silenced by the very western movement that claims to stand up for their rights.”3 Al-Hibri rejects attempts by westerners to force on the Muslim world “a certain model of gender relationships suitable primarily for some other country, belief system, or culture” (al-Hibri 2000, 55). Some Muslim women scholar-activists argue that Islamic women’s struggles against oppression cannot be adequately understood in terms of struggles for indi-vidual rights, or human rights, because these approaches assume a secular nonre-ligious individual subject. Maysam al-Faruqi argues that a human rights approach fails to provide an adequate understanding of or solution to the problems faced by Islamic women. A human rights approach reduces the Islamic woman to “a universal concept of womanhood, battered by a universal concept of manhood along universal lines of cultural patriarchal oppression that can be identified by a ‘universal’ list of human rights” (al-Faruqi 2000, 74). While she writes that women in the Muslim world often face social, economic, and political oppression, and that “of course, women are concerned about their rights,” she argues that Muslim women identify themselves primarily as Muslim. “Muslims take Islam to be the first source of identity, not an ‘additional’ ideological superstructure. Indeed there is for a Muslim, man or woman, whatever the ethnicity or the race, only one source of definition and one reference—Islam” (al-Faruqui 2000, 74). Al-Faruqi argues that Islamic belief is defined in the text of the Qur’an, which is accepted as divine revelation, and thus Muslim women seek to address their

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oppression through interpretations of the Qur’an. Drawing on al-Faruqi, Theresa Weynand Tobin writes, “many Muslim women do not identify primarily as women, or even as human, but as Muslims. . . . Since a human rights approach emphasizes the rights of all members of the human family (qua human), from the perspective of many Muslim women, this approach fails to identify the particular violations they suffer in terms that are meaningful to them and that accurately capture the nature of these violations as these women experience them” (Tobin 2007, 158). For Tobin, attending to the specificity of Muslim women’s experience requires an attitude of contextual transparency rather than moral liberalism. “Many Muslim women understand the particular forms of oppression they experience as an assault on their personhood as Muslim and as a perversion of the good life that revelation proclaims, and they seek resolutions to these problems in terms of their faith. What al-Faruqi and other Muslim scholar-activists are calling for is not an uncritical acceptance or reliance on religion, but rather a way of engaging in moral reflection while remaining in their own skin and relying on sources of moral knowledge and processes of moral knowledge production that are tied to the particular moral-social worlds they inhabit” (Tobin 2007, 158). Al-Faruqi and Tobin stress the importance of attending to specific identi-ties rather than just invoking and applying universals. And this is the point of Muslim women’s scholar activism: Islamic women are developing their own argu-ments, and engage as agents in their own struggles as Islamic women, not as a subset of a universal category of women, or humans. But Tobin’s claim that many Muslim women identify primarily as Muslim rather than as human misrepresents al-Faruqi’s argument. Consistent with Badran’s analysis, al-Faruqi argues for gen-der equality on the grounds that the Qur’an affirms the unqualified equality of all human beings (insan) (al-Faruqi 2000, 79). Thus the equality of women with men is grounded in the affirmation of a shared status as human. Moreover, many Islamic women scholar-activists affirm both their specific identities as Islamic women and their status as human. Asra Barlas argues that Muslim women struggle against Western secularist assumptions about what it means to be human. While Western secularists view the human as “ontologically singular” and consider “gods and spirits” to be only “social facts,” for many of the world’s peoples, “being human means . . . discovering ‘the possibility of calling upon God [or gods] without being under an obligation to first establish his [or their] reality’” (Barlas 2005, 102; quot-ing Chakrabarty 16). Many Muslims argue that the Qur’an upholds human rights,4 and many Muslim women scholar-activists do affirm their identities as women and their participation in a larger struggle for women’s rights. For many Muslim women, “their activism represents a ‘double commitment’ that leads to the emergence of a new, complex self-positioning that confirms ‘belonging in a religious commu-nity while allowing for activism on behalf of and with other women’” (Bahi 2011, 146, quoting Miriam Cooke 2001, 59–60). As Fulden Ibrahimhakkioglu points out, Islamic feminists in Turkey have framed their right to veil in the language of

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human rights and individual liberties. As Haleh Afshar, cited in Paria Gashtili’s essay, argues, Islamist women in Iran frame their demands not as rights and free-doms but as entitlements balanced by duties, within complementary roles. Thus, Muslim women activists in diverse locations and diverse situations develop diverse arguments and forms of activism, grounded in diverse individual and collective identities, as well as in diverse social and political discourses. What they share in common is that they are concerned with the affirmation of women’s agency and equality with men, and they ground this affirmation in interpretations of the Qur’an.

III. ISLAM, SECULARISM, AND ISLAMIC SECULARISM

“Despite their differences,” writes Riham Bahi, “a certain commonality remains between secular and faith-based woman activism; that is the interest in the promo-tion of women’s rights” (Bahi 2011, 149). Bahi argues, with Abduallahi An-Naim, that we need to build bridges between secular and Islamic feminisms. “Secularists need to critically reexamine their views of Islam and seriously reconsider the pub-lic role of religion as a force of empowerment and liberation. Secularism must be understood in a dynamic and deeply contextual sense for each society, rather than through Western analytical categories, such as the so-called strict separation of ‘church and state,’ to be transplanted from one setting to another” (Bahi 2011, 149). Thus Bahi connects the work of Muslim women scholar-activists to arguments for Islamic secularism. While “Islamic secularism” may sound like an oxymoron, Bahi notes that some Islamic theorists are rethinking the concept of secularism in a way that is “not merged with liberalism, not confused with the marginaliza-tion of religion and not imposed by neo-colonialism” (Bahi 2011, 149). What does Islamic secularism mean, then? The term secular means “worldly” or “temporal.” While secularism has come to be associated with Western modernity, and with an opposition to religion, An-Naim has pointed out that the secular and the religious were once enmeshed in the idea of Islam as din wa dunya (religion and the world) (Badran 2005, 11). An-Naim proposes a renewal of a “synergic and interdepen-dent model of a mutually supportive relationship between religion and civil soci-ety” (Bahi 2011, 151). Heba Raouf Ezzat and Ahmed Mohammed Abdalla suggest Islamic secularism as a third option between secularism and Islamism, expressed in diverse spheres of civil society. As Bahi notes, “Islamic secularism ensures that Islam and Muslims are always concerned with issues of human rights, democracy and social justice,” including the liberation of women. This approach “redefines the public role of religion in empowerment and social change” and “re-imagines politics and civil society in a way that encompasses the centrality of religion” (Bahi 2011, 149). Islamic secularism then involves realizing in the public sphere the core principle of Islam: justice.5

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The idea of Islamic secularism may seem less strange if we consider that the concept of individual freedom as it has developed in the West is rooted in Christianity—in the idea of God incarnate in the individual. Thus Western secu-larism is very much enmeshed with religion. This does not mean that there isn’t a conception of individual freedom in every culture; but the concept has devel-oped in a particular way, and with a particular emphasis, in the Christian West. As Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, we need to recognize the particular provincialism of the Christian West. Many theorists argue that the core principle of Islam is justice, whereas the core principle of Western liberalism is freedom.6 In fact, concepts of justice and freedom can be found in each culture. But to what extent is individual freedom a Western liberal concept?

IV. ISLAMIC WOMEN’S PIETY MOVEMENTS AND QUESTIONS OF FREEDOM

Saba Mahmood raises the question of freedom in her study of the Islamic women’s mosque movement, or piety movement, in contemporary Egypt. Mahmood argues that the study of the piety movement raises crucial questions about the normative liberal assumptions that underlie feminism: in particular, the feminist allegiance to an unquestioned ideal of individual freedom. It’s important to note that according to Mahmood the piety movement that she studied is not a feminist movement, so it should be differentiated from Islamic feminisms. The piety movement is not focused on the achievement of gender equality. Mahmood describes this movement as characterized by women who are choosing to conform more closely to the will of God and to the authority of the medieval religious teachings. As Mahmood notes, the piety movement poses a dilemma for feminists: while the movement stresses the responsibility of each individual to study and interpret the conflicting interpretations of religious doc-trine, and while each woman has made the choice herself to engage in this study, often against the wishes of husbands and other family members, the goal of the practice is to discover and adhere as closely as possible to the authority of that doc-trine. Moreover, their acceptance of this doctrine entails their acceptance of femi-nine virtues such as shyness, modesty, and humility. More disturbingly, it can also involve their acceptance of claims of the inferiority or shamefulness of women.7 Mahmood argues that for the women in the piety movement, the focus of their practices is not to follow their own law, but to follow God’s. And while it is true that they are choosing to do this, to focus on this choice would be, for them, a misunderstanding. The focus of their practices is not to follow their own desires, but to align their desires and their choices with the will of God. If we are to under-stand the women in the piety movement as agents, and not just blind followers of

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convention, Mahmood argues, we need to detach conceptions of self- realization and of agency from the ideal of freedom. We need, she argues, to question the assumption that agency necessarily involves the desire for individual freedom and autonomy. Thus we need to question the assumption that agency necessarily involves the ability to resist and subvert norms. Drawing on Foucault, she argues, then, for a conception of agency entailed “not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms” (Mahmood 2005, 15). Mahmood draws on this reconception of agency in terms of inhabiting, rather than resisting, norms to develop a rich and complex account of the agency of the pietists: their agency is manifested, she argues, in their daily practices of cultiva-tion of their bodies, their behaviors, and their desires, along with their participa-tion in debate and discussion, toward the ideal of realizing a pious self. But the question of the relation of the piety movement to feminism, and to freedom, is more complicated than Mahmood’s analysis allows. First, while Mahmood differentiates among several different groups of women meeting at different mosques, she sees them as belonging to a single conservative Muslim piety movement. But as my brief discussion of Muslim women’s scholar- activism and Islamic feminism has made clear, there are many different Muslim women’s piety movements. Some are conservative, but others focus on interpret-ing the Qur’an to support gender equality. Muslim women scholar-activists can be categorized as belonging to piety movements. While some have taken up the label feminist to differentiate themselves from conservative women’s groups, there are inevitably many different agendas and positions among the women in any partic-ular group, and each individual may endorse a complex mix of beliefs and prac-tices. Many do not belong to any organized groups but simply participate in or attend classes for instruction and discussion with a woman religious teacher. And, as Mahmood notes, even the most conservative groups are asserting their right to interpret the Qur’an and are gathering to do this together in groups of women in the public sphere. This in itself can be seen as a practice of freedom: a “creative and collective practice of world-building” (Zerilli 2005, 94). As Muslims, they accept the Qur’an as the word of God and are to submit or surrender to God. (Of course, we cannot know how many do or do not do these things.) But the Qur’an, and the hadiths, are subject to a great diversity of interpretations, and these are very actively debated. All of this leaves open the question as to whether one can be a feminist if one accepts God as supreme power or authority. Secondly, while Mahmood argues that the pietists are focused not on follow-ing their own wills, but on following the will of God, in fact even some of the most traditional of Muslim women scholar-activists argue that free will and freedom of choice are essential to Islam. Al-Faruqi argues that according to the Qur’an “humankind has free will” and thus human faith is a matter of free choice. For a Muslim, “the starting point is in—and only in—the system of beliefs about the world and about self that the individual willingly and rationally chooses” (al-Faruqi 2000, 78, 74). Amina Wadud argues that while the term Islam is typically translated

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as “submission,” she translates Islam as “engaged surrender,” to emphasize the role of human agency and choice. Mahmood argues that for the pietists “choice is understood not to be an expression of one’s will but something one exercises in following the prescribed path to becoming a better Muslim” (Mahmood 2005, 85). But the role of free choice in Islam appears to be controversial. Finally, while Mahmood criticizes the feminist focus on freedom, and argues that we need to detach conceptions of agency from the goal of freedom, she defines freedom very narrowly in terms of individual free will and resistance to norms. But in fact there are many diverse conceptions and practices of freedom. Elsewhere I have argued that the women in the mosque movement, even if they are conservative traditionalists, can be understood not just as agents but as agents engaged in practices of freedom, if we open our conception of freedom beyond Western liberal proceduralist models (Weir 2013, a and b). Here I shall argue that a plurality of conceptions and practices of freedom can be found in the work of Islamic feminist scholars of the Qur’an.

V. FINDING FREEDOM IN THE QUR’AN

In the remainder of this paper I shall focus on some of the American Islamic fem-inist readings of the Qur’an to identify conceptions of freedom in this work. It should be noted that this work is produced in a context in which Islamophobia and Islamic patriarchy are prevailing threats, where Islamic faith is freely chosen, and where women are not living under Muslim state laws. I shall argue, first, that there are diverse conceptions of freedom at play in Islamic feminist scholarship, and second, that a plurality of conceptions of freedom can support feminist prac-tice and goals. Here I follow Aysha Hidayatullah in using the term feminist even though many of the interpreters may not use this term themselves. Hidayatullah writes: “I use the signifier ‘feminist’ in classifying these works to emphasize their pointed challenge to male power and interpretive privilege—which vitally links them, for better or for worse, to feminist thought regardless of authorial intention or self- identification. While it is, of course, essential to consider authors’ self- identifications carefully, I do not uphold the premise that scholars are the final authorities on what we can call their work” (Hidayatullah 2014, 4). It is particu-larly important to use this term here to distinguish the work of interpreters of the Qur’an who affirm gender equality or gender justice as a normative ideal, from women in the piety movements in general, who may or may not thematize gender equality or male power. All of the Islamic feminist scholarship focuses on the issue of gender equality and looks for the sources of gender equality in the Qur’an, pointedly resisting the authority of men’s interpretations. Amina Wadud writes: “There are more verses in the Qur’an regarding the full human dignity of women than any other issues”

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(Wadud 2006, 205). Azizah al-Hibri argues that “oppression of women is the result of Satanic logic infiltrating Muslim laws and distorting Muslim beliefs” (al-Hibri 2000, 55). While freedom is not a central focus, it is thematized in arguments for women’s agency and liberation from male domination. Some scholars, including Wadud and Hassan, also criticize heterosexism, racism, slavery, and class oppres-sion. Most follow Asma Barlas in affirming “the liberatory potential of women’s reappropriation of theology” (Barlas 2005, 106). These particular affirmations of freedom for women are supported by various claims to freedom as a general ideal upheld by the Qur’an and by Islam. Riffat Hassan argues that freedom, along with human rights, is central to the Qur’an:

To many Muslims the Qur’an is the Magna Carta of human rights and a large part of its concern is to free human beings from the bondage of traditionalism, authoritarianism (religious, political, economic, or any other), tribalism, racism, sexism, slavery, or anything else that prohib-its or inhibits human beings from actualizing the Qur’anic vision of human destiny embodied in the classic proclamation: “Towards Allah is thy limit” (Qur’an 53:42). (Hassan 2000, 241)

Hassan writes that “the Qur’an is deeply concerned about liberating human beings from every kind of bondage” (Hassan 2000, 243). She argues, with Amina Wadud, that the Qur’an affirms the free will of human beings, and cites several passages that proclaim rights to religious freedom and affirm the principle of mutual consultation (shura). She also cites several eminent scholars who argue that the Qur’an affirms the right to responsible dissent and proclaims that there shall be no coercion in mat-ters of faith. But notice that in affirming human rights and human freedom from authority Hassan is saying that what we are free to do is to actualize the Qur’anic vision of human destiny. We are free from anything that prevents us from actual-izing this vision. “The greatest guarantee of personal freedom for a Muslim lies in the Qur’anic decree that no one other than God can limit human freedom (Qur’an 42:21)” (Hassan 2000, 244). Clearly, then, while humans are to be liberated from the authority of other humans, this liberation is grounded in obedience to the authority of the Qur’an, and of God.8 Both of these principles are affirmed by Asma Barlas, Amina Wadud, and Azizah al-Hibri, among others. Al-Hibri writes that shura (con-sultation) is regarded as “the constitutional cornerstone of any Muslim state” and argues for an “overarching principle of freedom of thought” in the Qur’an. And she argues that the ideal of freedom from domination will be upheld by religious people who “will always strive to follow Divine Will” (al-Hibri 2000, 54–55).

VI. GENDER EQUALITY IN THE QUR’AN? APPROACHING FREEDOM

Most of the Islamic feminist scholarship has argued not only that the affirmation of gender equality can be found in the Qur’an but, moreover, that gender equality

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is unequivocally supported by the Qur’an. But the evidence for this argument is problematic. While there are many passages that do affirm gender equality, there are also others that pose significant problems for feminist interpretations. For example, passages discussing sexuality invariably address men as agents and posit women as recipients of sexual acts. And passages discussing marriage and divorce clearly indicate different roles, rights, and responsibilities for men and women. The most difficult is verse 4:34, in which men are first accorded responsibility for women and are then told that a woman who rebels should be first admonished, then left alone in bed, and finally, beaten. A great deal of scholarship is devoted to interpreting this passage: scholars point to the context of other passages that affirm gender equality, arguing that the meaning of this passage must be inter-preted in light of this affirmation. Some note that in the historical context of the revelation of the Qur’an the beating of wives was quite common and that, in that context, this verse in fact directs men to use other methods of expressing their displeasure. Some propose alternative meanings for particular terms.9

Many argue that men are “responsible” for women only because women’s capacity to give birth renders them vulnerable; thus gender equality requires that men take on the burden of supporting her and the family. This argument is also used to account for other passages in which men are told that their rights to inher-itance are greater than those of women. Thus men and women are typically under-stood to have complementary roles, and gender equality is often interpreted to mean “different but equal.”10 There is certainly no room for a plurality of gender identities or sexualities. As to the issue of beating, some argue that the term daraba (typically trans-lated as beat, strike, or scourge) is not to be taken literally but should be under-stood to mean a symbolic gesture. In the first English translation of the Qur’an by a Muslim-American woman, Laleh Bakhtiar translates daraba as “go away from” (Bakhtiar 2007, lii–lv). But Amina Wadud, who in earlier work had attempted to reinterpret this passage, is famous for finally saying “no” in her 2006 book, Inside the Gender Jihad. “There is no getting around this one,” she writes, “even though I have tried through different methods for two decades. . . . I have finally come to say ‘no’ outright to the literal implementation of this passage.” The verse, Wadud writes, is “unjust in the ways that human beings have come to experience and understand justice, and hence unacceptable to universal notions of human dig-nity” (Wadud 2006, 200). Wadud’s “no” has been a radical intervention, marking a sea change in Islamic feminist scholarship. Aysha Hidayatullah notes that there were no faith-based objections to the text of the Qur’an in Islamic feminist scholarship before the publication of Wadud’s book and Kecia Ali’s Sexual Ethics and Islam, both in 2006. Yet Hidayatullah points out that Wadud’s “no” still invokes the authority of the Qur’an: Wadud argues that the Qur’an in fact supports her critique of the Qur’an (Hidayatullah 2014, 138–39). On the other hand, Wadud argues that human lan-guage cannot perfectly express the will of God, and so the Qur’an cannot be the

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only definitive source of knowledge of Islam. “No one text can ever completely disclose the full nature of Allah.” She argues, further, that the Qur’an must be understood as a historical text subject to interpretation. “Whatever sexism might be found in the words of the immutable Qur’an is a reflection of the historical context of Qur’anic revelation” (Wadud 2006, 204). Wadud points out that slavery was accepted as a normal practice at the time of revelation, but is not condoned by Muslims now. Thus, she writes that while the Qur’an cannot be rewritten, modern Muslims can and must rewrite Islamic law. Thus she argues that human beings are agents of interpretation: “We are the makers of textual meaning” (204). While this is a radical claim, given that Islam requires the acceptance of the Qur’an as the word of God, Wadud writes that the history of interpretation of the Qur’an supports it. Thus Wadud’s arguments shift between affirming the authority of the Qur’an as the word of God and arguing for the agency of human interpreters, which in turn is authorized by the Qur’an. In contrast, Aysha Hidyatullah, with Kecia Ali, calls for exegetes to take responsibility for their own interpretive choices (Hidaytullah 2014, 141–42). Echoing critiques by Kecia Ali (2006) and Raja Rhouni (2010), Aysha Hidayatullah argues that while the feminist exegetical work on the Qur’an has been extremely important, the desire to find the sources of gender equality in the Qur’an has led to claims that are overly ambitious and that in fact misrepresent the Qur’an. Hidayatullah’s book is particularly illuminating because she describes her own very painful process of coming to question these claims. She, too, had hoped and believed that Islamic feminist reinterpretations would ultimately prove that the Qur’an upholds complete gender equality, and her doctoral dissertation examined the work of Islamic feminist scholars to show that they had achieved this goal. But through the process of completing this work, her convictions unraveled. She has come to conclude, with Raja Rhouni, that perhaps “Islamic feminist theory based on the postulate of the normativity of gender equality in the Qur’an has reached a theoretical dead end” (viii; quoting Rhouni). With Rouni, she criticizes the “blinding dogma” that gender equality is a norm established by the Qur’an (Hidayatullah 2014, viii, 143, 146; quoting Rhouni 2010). “In the time that has passed since then, I have become only further convinced that if Muslim women are to come fully to terms with cases in which the Qur’anic text lends itself to meanings that are detrimental to them, we must begin to confront those meanings more honestly, without resorting to apologetic explanations for them, or engag-ing in interpretive manipulations to force egalitarian meanings from the text. Furthermore, I have also come to believe firmly that we must begin to radically reimagine the nature of the Qur’an’s revelation and divinity” (Hidayatullah 2014, viii). Hidayatullah argues that “scholars of feminist tafsir generally maintain the unquestioned premise of the liberating content of God’s word, which awaits redis-covery and reclaiming” (143). But in claiming that the Qur’an unequivocally sup-ports gender equality, feminist scholarship distorts the text, and the important

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work of interpretation becomes dishonest, avoiding acknowledgment of passages that contradict egalitarian ideals. While there are many passages that do support claims to gender equality, there are also many that do not. Male and female gender roles are often allocated according to subject/object and public/private divisions. Interpreters need to acknowledge, writes Hidayatullah, that “feminist exegetical conceptions of gender equality are historically specific to us and thus perhaps not in the end fully reconcilable with the Qur’anic text” (147). While Kecia Ali argues that equality is not a necessary component of justice in the Qur’an, Hidayatullah suggests that it might be, but not in the way that modern readers recognize. It could be that in the context of revelation, in the seventh century C.E., mutuality and hierarchy were not understood to be incompatible, and that “in the Qur’an’s framework of male-female relations, mutuality between the sexes does not nec-essarily preclude or contradict hierarchical division between them” (160). While feminist scholars have been at pains to reinterpret all passages to erase the appar-ent contradiction between the support of gender equality and the support of male authority, Hidayatullah writes that the contradictions that are apparent to us may not have appeared to be contradictions in the premodern context of the Qur’an. “I do not find any definitive reason to assume that male control over women in the Qur’an would conflict with its values of kindness and mutuality between men and women” (165). Hidayatullah argues that gender equality is a modern ideal, and so “the ‘dissonance’ that registers with us between Qur’anic statements on mutuality and hierarchy is produced through our contemporary point of view” (151). Thus, she argues that while scholars of feminist tafsir have attempted to find sources of gender equality in the Qur’an in order to persuade Muslim commu-nities, and to reconcile their faith with their feminist convictions, the necessary next step is to move beyond the Qur’an, to stop appealing to and thus reinforcing the authority of a text that cannot definitively support feminist demands. “My position is that while the Qur’an takes remarkable steps toward equality as defined by our contemporary standards, it is still problematic enough by those standards so that the Qur’an perhaps cannot in the end be fully reconciled with our under-standings of sexual equality and justice” (152). Hidayatullah argues that feminist scholars need to take responsibility for their own positions and engage with the Qur’an as active, not passive, readers; they should also question the authority of the text. “The only thing we can be fully certain of is that we prioritize the Qur’an’s statements on male-female mutuality; we cannot be certain that the text priori-tizes them” (173). “The demand for feminist justice is ours” (176). With Raja Rhouni, Hidayatullah argues that it is possible to question while maintaining belief in the divine revelation of the Qur’an. Here Hidayatullah fol-lows Nasr Abu Zayd, who argued, along with other modern Islamic scholars, that the Qur’an should be understood as a discourse or dialogue open to interpreta-tion, rather than a text that must be read literally. Wadud also argues that “the substance of the Qur’an cannot be constrained by its particular utterances,” but she uses this argument to affirm the Qur’an’s fundamental egalitarianism (Wadud

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2006, 197). While she acknowledges that Wadud has taken an important step, Hidayatullah argues that feminist scholarship needs to move beyond the Qur’an. “We will need to pursue a vision of the Qur’an as a divine text that allows us to imagine justice outside the text’s limited pronouncements. I propose this not as an act of irreverence but rather as an act of faith that upholds the divine guidance of the Qur’an while acknowledging the Qur’an’s framing within the time of its revelation” (173). She notes that this is a position that has been upheld by some of the most respected Muslim scholars and cites early theological debates about the createdness of the Qur’an.11 Finally, Hidayatullah argues that the inclusion of women as interpreters of the Qur’an is not enough; feminist scholars need to question the structural basis of male power in the exegetical tradition. “We must question how the authority of Qur’anic exegesis might fundamentally rely on—be constitutionally dependent on—androcentrism as its premise” (184). Islamic feminists must question the authority of the Qur’an. For Hidayatullah, this questioning is an essential practice of freedom. “I argue that we should stop handing over the weapons for our own argumentative demise to the vanguard of Islamic authority and allow ourselves the freedom to think in new ways” (193).

VII. DIVERSE CONCEPTIONS OF FREEDOM

At the end of her book Hidayatullah confronts the most difficult question for believing Muslim women: “When the certainty of our views about the Qur’an and our place in the Islamic tradition is thus shaken, what are we left with? How do we go on?” (193). Her answer is to embrace “radical uncertainty”—which can be terrifying, but can also be experienced as freedom. “There have been times in the past when I have feared that questioning the certainty of the Qur’an’s justice for women would send me headlong into an abyss of uncertainty that would inevita-bly result in the end of my faith and my demise as a Muslim feminist,” she writes. But she has come to see the abyss “as a place of life and not only of death” (194). Drawing on Catherine Keller, Hidayatullah writes that the abyss of uncertainty can be the site of becoming rather than a void, and that this becoming is a kind of freedom. When undecidability is acknowledged as a capacity for receptiveness to the unexpected, then “it need not paralyze action. It may free us to make our uncertain decisions” (Hidayatullah 2014, 195; quoting Keller 2011; italics in origi-nal). Hidayatullah argues that the recognition of the androcentrism of the Qur’an and the critique of its authority will open up “freedom to think in new ways” (193). And she concludes: “I am free to consider new, unexpected ways of pursu-ing feminist justice in Islam that were previously unimaginable or impossible. . . . Once we are able to view this questioning not as the ending of something but also as the beginning of something else, not only as the closing of a door but also as the opening of another, we can forge ahead toward new possibilities” (195).

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At this point, as a secular feminist reader, I experience a kind of relief: Islamic feminist theory is finally questioning the authority of the Qur’an and embrac-ing freedom. Hidayatullah is advocating a practice of questioning and critique of authority and the freedom of beginning anew. Hidayatullah’s views are surely shaped by her education and socialization as an American—but just as surely she is naming conceptions of freedom that are probably universal. And it seems clear that feminist theory requires a questioning and critique of sacred texts. Isn’t such critique necessarily central to feminist practices of freedom? But things are not quite so simple. Hidayatullah notes that, as Saba Mahmood has pointed out, the US State Department has endorsed historicized critical readings of the Qur’an as part of a strategy to “civilize Muslims” and to demonize all other forms of Islam (Mahmood 2006). Is this questioning the necessary next step in a practice of free-dom, or is this conception of freedom as questioning the authority of a sacred text specific to Western secular worldviews? Is questioning and critique the true or best or only conception of freedom, or are there other possible practices of freedom? While she affirms freedom as critique and questioning, and opening up to uncertainty, Hidayatullah also gestures toward some other conceptions of free-dom, particularly in the work of Amina Wadud. Wadud writes that her concept of “engaged surrender” has been the most sig-nificant concept for her identity and work as a Muslim woman in the “gender jihad.” While many Muslims argue that a Muslim must submit, as if there were no choice, Wadud notes that if this were true the continual failure of Muslims to submit would be impossible.12 “Muslims disobey Allah’s will,” she writes, “because they can exercise choice” (Wadud 2006, 23). For Wadud, Islam is “the voluntary choice of surrender.” As she writes, “This makes it easier to understand Allah’s unique gift to humans as morally free beings” (24). Wadud insists on the centrality of free will in Islam.13

Thus far it appears that the conception of free will that Wadud and others find in the Qur’an is pretty much the same conception with which Western sec-ular feminists are familiar. But Wadud’s description of free will is also different from a conception of the individual as author and source and is different again from Hidayatullah’s affirmation of critique and questioning, new beginnings, uncertainty, and an open future. For Wadud, human freedom is agency as trust: humans are the trustees of God. She cites verse 2:30 of the Qur’an in which Allah announces “Verily I will create a khalifah, vicegerent on the earth,” to argue that human beings are created as morally free beings. Wadud argues that the term khalifah, commonly translated as vicegerent, can be better understood by mod-ern readers as trustee or moral agent.14 Thus, she writes, “Human beings are cre-ated to be trustees on the earth. They are trustees of Allah. That is, human beings are charged with fulfilling a trust with Allah. Throughout the Qur’an, fulfilling the terms of this trust necessarily involves: (1) (voluntarily) obeying the will of Allah . . . and (2) participating in that obedience while here on earth. This implies

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responsibility: we are charged to manage our affairs on the earth in a fashion that demonstrates our surrender” (33–34). This means, Wadud argues, quoting a had-ith, that we must serve our fellow creatures. Our freedom is given by God and is meant to enable us to consciously carry out the will of God: to surrender, submit to, or obey God’s will. For Wadud God’s will is the creation of social justice here on earth. And social justice requires the elimination of relations of oppression among humans: the end of sexism, heterosexism, racism, and other oppressions. Wadud notes that in the Qur’an humanity is charged with a trust (amanah) or a covenant (mithaq) between themselves and Allah, and argues that the rela-tionship between God and humans involves cooperation. While all of creation is “muslim,” human beings are unique in having the capacity of free will, which allows us to consciously surrender and fulfill the trust, or to follow our own egos and violate the trust. So our freedom, for Wadud, is our freedom to fulfill God’s will—or not. Wadud is arguing, then, not only that humans must freely choose to submit. More than this, she is arguing that agency—freedom—is enacted through sub-mission. She writes that the practice of Muslim prayer, which involves alternately standing and bowing, is an expression of this agency. Here we have a conception of agency that is related to the one found in the work of Foucault and Butler: our agency is enabled through our subjection to the Law. And surely this con-ception of agency is as old as monotheism. This produces what Butler calls the “paradox of subjection”: “‘subjection’ signifies the process of becoming subordi-nated by power as well as the process of becoming a subject” (Butler 1999, 2). Hidayatullah cites Butler in arguing that Wadud’s understanding of agency rests on an understanding of human beings who become ourselves through relations of dependency. But as Saba Mahmood has pointed out, Butler tends to privilege a conception of agency as the capacity for critique and resistance to norms. Thus the normative political subject for Butler and for poststructuralist feminist theory often remains a liberatory one, focused on a liberal ideal of freedom as resistance to norms. Wadud’s conception of agency seems to be closer to the one Mahmood argues for in Politics of Piety: Mahmood argues that Foucault’s work offers a con-ception of agency as the capacity to inhabit norms. This seems to be what Wadud is arguing here. Humans exercise our free will through submitting to God’s will. I’ve argued elsewhere that while Mahmood argues for a conception of agency as inhabiting norms, she still tends to equate freedom with resistance to norms, so the agency of inhabiting norms is set up in opposition to freedom. I argue that the conception of agency that Mahmood takes from Foucault is also a concep-tion of freedom (Weir 2013 a, b). Similarly, Wadud seems to be arguing that not just agency but free will is enacted through submission. For Wadud this is the expression of a relationship of trust between human beings and God. (Again, it is important to stress that for Wadud this act of submission to God is required of all humans: the point of her book is to argue that the Qur’an does not support the

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submission of any human to another, and thus it supports gender equality and condemns slavery.) Wadud is also invoking another conception of freedom as the realization of an ideal: human freedom is ultimately found in the fulfillment of God’s will, which is social justice. This conception of freedom as the realization of a substantive ideal has been central to the tradition of positive freedom. Charles Taylor has argued that this is the essential distinction between negative and positive freedom: whereas negative freedom is the capacity or opportunity to act, positive freedom is the real-ization of a substantive end (Taylor 1985). As Quentin Skinner notes, for those who believe that we attain our highest ends only by consecrating our lives to God, the service of God will be “perfect freedom” (Skinner 2002, 242). This seems to be exactly what Wadud is claiming: freedom is found precisely in the realization of God’s will, which is social justice on earth. Those who strive to fulfill this ideal are engaging in a life of freedom. “Being khalifah is equivalent to fulfilling one’s human destiny as a moral agent, whose responsibility is to participate in upholding the harmony of the universe. With respect to society, harmony means working for justice” (34). “All humankind is created with the purpose of trusteeship for Allah on earth. This purpose is the most significant feature of the moral agent” (35).15

Wadud is, I think, also describing a conception of freedom in relation with God. If human agency is our trust with God, then freedom is found not just in the choice to submit or not, or in the act of submission or nonsubmission. Freedom is in the relationship of trust with God. Wadud describes this relation as a “Creator-creature cooperation” (35). The responsibility of agency involves a “dynamic partnership” between Allah’s will and one’s individual choice as agent (40). This relational conception of freedom is rooted in a conception of relationship with God and extends to relations with other humans, and with all of creation. Thus, being khalifah means “upholding the harmony of the universe” and working for social justice (34). “By agency or khalifah, therefore, I mean the responsibility of each human being to establish social justice, as a representative of the divine will or cosmic harmony” (35). For Wadud, our relationship to God is reflected in our relations to each other, and particularly in care for each other. Wadud argues that our free moral agency finds its expression on earth in care, and cites Joan Tronto and other feminist care theorists to argue that the work of care is an aspect of “moral agency indispensable to human well-being and equally available for men and women” (44). Thus our freedom in relation with God is expressed in our free-dom in relation with other humans, through care.

VIII. CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS: ISLAMIC FEMINISM AND PLURALITIES OF FREEDOM

I have argued that many conceptions of freedom can be found in contemporary Islamic feminist scholarship, including freedom from oppression, resistance to

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authority, religious freedom, freedom of dissent, free will, capacities for choice, practices of world-building, freedom to question and criticize, freedom as accep-tance of uncertainty, and freedom to begin anew, freedom to choose whether to obey God’s will, freedom as engaged surrender, freedom in trust with God, free-dom through submission, freedom as realization of God’s will, freedom as the real-ization of social justice, and freedom in relation with God and with other beings, enacted through care. These various conceptions of freedom do not all cohere: many exist in tension with each other. When Hidayatullah argues for freedom to question and criticize the Qur’an, to move beyond the Qur’an and to embrace the uncertainty of new beginnings, she is assuming a very different kind of freedom from Wadud’s understanding of freedom as a relation of trust with Allah. Wadud is clearly also engaged in critique and questioning, but she assumes that our ques-tions have an answer, given by God. For Wadud our freedom is ultimately found in our realization of God’s will, and critique and questioning are means to that end, not ends in themselves. Can the conception of freedom as obedience to God’s will support feminist goals? It helps if we change terms, from “obedience” to “realization” of God’s will. For Wadud, God’s will is the realization of social justice, including gender equality, and the end of oppression: the end of sexism, racism, and heterosexism. If that is God’s will, then I can’t see that obedience to God’s will would be opposed to fem-inist freedom. Wadud has clearly engaged in critique and questioning to support her conviction that God’s will is the equality of all human beings. But for her, these questions are part of a practice of obedience to God’s will, and this is a feminist practice of freedom. But can a feminist accept any authority—even God’s? To turn the question around, can we be feminists only if we open everything to questioning and cri-tique? I think that the belief that we are free only if we open everything to question involves an unwarranted restriction of what freedom might be. Feminism requires some pretty strong convictions. As a Western-raised philosopher I feel compelled to open my convictions to question (too often in the hope of strengthening them), and feminists must be open to diverse conceptions and critiques of feminism, but does feminist freedom require that we question feminism? Is Hidayatullah right to insist on the importance of critique of the Qur’an’s authority as the necessary next step in Islamic feminist scholarship? Is she fur-ther along the path of freedom than Wadud and the other members of what Hidayatullah calls the “first generation” of Islamic feminist scholars? In describing the first generation as those who affirm the authority of the Qur’an and the sec-ond generation as those who question this authority (while maintaining faith in the divinity of the Qur’an), Hidayatullah is maintaining a narrative of progressive stages of freedom, just as Wadud affirms a narrative of development toward free-dom as the ultimate realization of an ideal. In some ways the shift from the first to the second generation of Islamic feminism parallels the shift from “second-wave” Western feminism, which tended to affirm a narrative of development toward an ideal of women’s liberation, to “third-wave” feminism, which rejects utopian

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narratives of liberation and instead affirms practices of freedom in relations of power. But to what extent does this shift buy into another narrative of freedom from an old and outmoded faith in utopia? And does it merely affirm another claim to true freedom as the questioning of everything? Should Hidayatullah’s narrative end in questioning the divinity of the Qur’an and ultimately questioning faith in God? The arguments and controversies among Islamic feminists challenge all of us to rethink relationships among feminism, freedom, and faith. Clearly all of the feminist interpreters of the Qur’an are engaged in critique and resistance to authority, and these practices seem to be essential to practices of freedom. But, like the rest of us, they do not all agree as to what should be criticized or resisted. Islamic feminists combine critique and resistance to authority with other concep-tions of agency and freedom, including affirmations of faith in God. So it’s not just that they combine both freedom and faith, but that freedom itself is pluralistic and complex: faith itself can be a practice of freedom. Anyone with any faith in feminism knows this. Islamic feminists are exploring a very creative tension between conceptions of freedom as critique and as faith. Hidayatullah ends her book with this sentence: “Once we are able to view this questioning not just as the ending of something but also as the beginning of something else, not only as the closing of a door but also as the opening of another, we can forge ahead toward new possibilities” (195). But she ends her preface, in which she describes the journey that she has traveled to come to the end of the book, with a different sentence: “And in the very end, as Muslims say, God knows best” (x).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Naser Ghobadzadeh for very helpful discussions and references.

NOTES

1. To date only Abou-Bakr has been translated into English. 2. Barlas is quoting an unpublished paper by Badran. 3. Quoted by Hidayatullah 2014, 12. Al-Hibri founded the feminist philosophy journal, Hypatia, in

1986. At this point she had become a believing Muslim, and was working on the reform of Islamic family law. There has been to date almost no scholarship in Hypatia on Islamic feminism.

4. See Riffat Hassan’s claims below. 5. These discussions of Islamic secularity focus on civil society, rather than on the state. Naser

Ghobadzadeh notes that the religious secularity discourse in Iran calls for the secular democratic state to realize the core principle of Islam: justice. With other Iranian political theorists he rejects the notion that Islamic holy texts offer a blueprint for governance and argues instead that inclu-sive secular democratic principles champion a sociopolitical polity conducive to the cultivation

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of genuine religiosity, whereby faith and religious practices are free of coercion by fellow citizens or state institutions.

6. See, for example, N. H. Barazangi, M. R. Zaman, and O. Afzal Islamic Identity and the Struggle for Justice (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996).

7. See the discussion of woman as aura in Mahmood 2005, 106 ff. 8. Hassan’s assertion that “the right to exercise free choice in matters of belief is unambiguously

endorsed by the Qur’an” (245) is contradicted by several verses of the Qur’an that proclaim that a Muslim who leaves Islam should be killed. Later I shall discuss the feminist exegetes’ failure to acknowledge passages that contradict affirmations of freedom and equality.

9. Aysha Hidayatullah identifies three interpretive strategies employed by feminist exegetes: histor-ical contextualization, intratextual reading (comparing terms and verses across the text of the Qur’an and in light of the Qur’an’s overall movement toward justice for all human beings), and the “tawhidic paradigm” (the argument that given God’s oneness and omniscience, no human interpretation can be considered final, but can only be an attempt to understand God’s meaning, and that any claim of superiority of men over women is a form of idolatry, since it attributes God-like roles to men).

10. This issue is complicated. Wadud explicitly criticizes the patriarchal argument for “different but equal” gender roles, yet she herself makes the argument for complementary roles based on the vulnerability of women who are childbearers. Wadud and Barlas both argue that these gender roles do not necessarily correspond to biological sex. Hidayatullah notes, however, that this case is difficult to credit, given that the roles are based on women’s capacity to give birth and to nurse infants. See Hidayatullah for an extensive discussion of the various kinds of arguments in the work of the Islamic feminist scholars.

11. In fact, there is a body of modern Islamic scholarship in which the status of the Qur’an as the literal word of God is questioned. While feminist interpretations draw on some of this work (for example, Wadud draws on the work of Fazlur Rahman and Hidayatullah cites Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd), it has tended to resist any separation among links in the chain of divinity: God, revelation, the Prophet, and the Qur’an.

12. Wadud’s discussion accounts for a puzzling kind of logic that I heard in discussions among undergraduate students in Western Sydney: young Muslim women who did not veil would explain to non-Muslims that “we must veil, but we do not.” (They claimed that they did not veil because they were not pure of heart. They also said that many young women who do veil are being dishonest because they ogle men, indicting that they are not pure of heart.)

13. Wadud notes that there are “endless and circular theological discussions” about free will in the Qur’an (35). She does not provide references for these debates, and writes that she will disregard them.

14. The Oxford Dictionary defines “vicegerent” as “a person exercising delegated power on behalf of a sovereign or ruler. A person regarded as an earthly representative of God or a god, especially the Pope. . . . mid 16th century: from medieval Latin vicegerent—‘(person) holding office,’ from Latin vic—‘office, place, turn’ + gerere ‘carry on, hold.’”

For a feminist philosopher, Wadud’s conception of the kalifah as trustee might resonate with Annette Baier’s conception of women’s moral agency as engagement in a relation of trust.

15. It can be argued that what is involved here is an understanding of freedom as aligning one’s will with God’s, and thus is not very different from Kant’s categorical imperative. I discuss this con-ception of freedom as realization of an ideal and the conception of freedom in relation with God at greater length in 2013a and b.

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