Reddit mentions of Qur'an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective

I really loved 5 books we read, so I’ll just mention them all and you can pick if any sound good.

First was Amina Wadud’s Quran and Woman . It’s basically exegesis on the Quran from a female perspective. It challenges a lot of what is presented as evidence that Islam is inherently sexist using textual support. It’s a controversial book, but it’s worth reading for sure. Wadud is brilliant and the perspective definitely gave me some food for thought.

We also read So Long a Letter by Mariama Ba. It’s fictional, but still extremely insightful. It’s essentially a narrative told through letters that discusses polygyny in Senegal. It is a critique of the affects of the Islamic tenet of taking multiple wives, but one from an actual Muslim perspective. It’s fair and from a place of understanding. This is also just one of the best pieces of 20c African literature in general. I love reading outside of the canon.

Next is Sex and the Citadel by Shereen El Feki. This is about sex and sexuality, primarily in urban Egypt. It was extremely readable and gave absolutely fascinating insight on a taboo topic. It’s shocking how much El Feki was able to get women to reveal.

Engaged Surrender by Carolyn Moxley Rouse focuses on African American Muslim women. Once again, we’re getting their stories on their terms. It helps to shed light on why they convert, how Islam affects their lives, and what their religion means to them. As an American, I found this really fascinating. There was a lot of valuable commentary on America within the book.

Finally, I’m gonna bring up a book that deals with men. Farha Ghannam’s Live and Die Like a Man covers the construction of masculinity in Egypt, specifically Cairo, from birth through death. Each chapter essentially tells the story of 1 or 2 men and their experiences. This book was a really important complement to the rest of the course, as it mainly focused on women. Reading an ethnography on men was a shockingly unique experience.


The last 3 I mentioned are ethnographies that I feel are extremely well-done. All of the writers were extremely fair in their analysis. There’s not really explicit praise or criticism of Islam, but just discussion of how it manifests and affects the life of Muslims. Or how Muslims navigate being Muslim in their day-to-day lives. Two of the authors are Muslims themselves and the other discusses how she considered conversion in the book.

I didn’t really leave the class with a different opinion on Islam, as I was never anti-Islam or anti-religion despite being non-religious. I just now have a much more nuanced opinion and ideally a better understanding. As it was a woman’s studies/anthropology course, we were just focused on understanding the lives of Muslims on their terms. Obviously discussion of how we felt about these things and how we can navigate morality across cultures came up, but my professor was wonderful and we primarily focused on understanding, even when we didn’t necessarily agree.

I think if you read literally any of these books, you’ll be left feeling similarly to how I do. They’re all wonderful. Hopefully this was helpful and sorry it was so long! I could talk for hours about this class.

(Also none of these actually discuss Iran even though that’s what I initially brought up. We mainly covered that through lecture)

That verse is highly debated, and is subject to translator bias. I use a different translation which reads as thus

> The men are to support the women by
what God has gifted them over one
another and for what they spend of their
money. The reformed women are
devotees and protectors of privacy what
God has protected. As for those women
from whom you fear disloyalty, then you
shall advise them, abandon them in the
bedchamber, and separate them; if they
obey you, then do not seek a way over
them; God is High, Great.

I never use Islamqa so I can't tell you. I read books put together by scholars whose research and credentials I can research, not an anonymous gaggle of website developers and content creators.

I find Islam to be very empowering to women, more so than Muslims are. Try reading this or this.

>Would you mind if you suggested a list of books I may read to get a different perceptive on Islam?

I can certainly try. I was a voracious reader as a teenager, but much of what I read went over my head. For example, Huck Finn is an entirely different read at 25 than at 14. Still, you are most certainly smarter than I was as a teenager :). Here's a few things that ought to help. Of course, take it all with a grain of salt and, as always, you are not obligated to agree with everything. Nuance is a subtle, lost art these days.

I'd first start with Huston Smith's Islam: A Concise Introduction. It's basically the chapter on Islam from his seminal classic, The World's Religion. Also, he felt compelled to publish it separately after 9/11. Smith is easily one of the foremost scholars of religion for the last 100 or so years. While deceptively small, this book provides a generous overview of Islam devoid of partisanship and doctrinal quibbles. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by the book. I certainly was.

Another small book that allowed me to begin exploring the vital role women played and continue to play in Islam is Amina Wadud's Quran and Woman. Do I agree with all that Wadud says? No, but that is not the point when we explore. The aim is discover, not to find corroboration to previously held ideas - that is the vital imperative to learning and to growth.

Another quite controversial and sometimes acerbic site that has many important things to say about Islam and what so many of us have sometimes falsely construed to be Islam is the following site: https://asharisassemble.com/ Certainly posting it here all but insures downvotes followed by some flaming. I think you will find reasonable answers to many of your questions that will also reaffirm your faith in Islam. Again though, none of us have to agree with all that is being said, it's about pursuing knowledge and exploring.

>“Go in quest of knowledge even unto China.” - Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)

>“One learned man is harder on the devil than a thousand ignorant worshippers.” - Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)

Again, start small. You have your whole life ahead of you to explore and grow. There are headier books available and in time you may find those more palatable and to your liking as you grow. Salaams :).

See:

http://www.misconceptions-about-islam.com/wife-beating-quran.htm

http://corpus.quran.com/qurandictionary.jsp?q=Drb

I've never read the following book but you may want to get it if you can afford and read for yourself: https://www.amazon.com/Quran-Woman-Rereading-Sacred-Perspective/dp/0195128362

1. Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism
   
   
2. Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society
   
   
3. Quran and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective
   
   
4. Deconstructing the American Mosque: Space, Gender, and Aesthetics
   
   
5. The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists
   
   
6. How to Read the Quran
   
   

Islam has perhaps the most fascinating and the most complex form of jurisprudence known to man. Encompassing two branches of the faith (Shia and Sunni), five legal schools (Hanafi, Hanbali, Jafari, Shafi'i, and Maliki), and over 1400 years of legal interpretations, Islamic law has a lot of baggage to consider when interpreting and reinterpreting surahs so many centuries after they were revealed.

One of my favourite Muslim scholars, Fazlur Rahman, developed a method of interpretation that was meant to deal with issues like this (verdicts passed by Muhammad and the early Muslim community that seem incompatible with modern values) by bypassing the baggage of 14 centuries and going straight to the source: the Qur'an.

Rahman's method was called the "Double Movement" method of interpretation. The steps were:

• Faced with a situation in the present moment, you look towards the Qur'an for guidance.
  
• When you find a section of the Qur'an that applies to the current situation, you attempt to understand the context in which it was originally revealed.
  
• Understanding the context in which a verse is revealed allows us distill the intent/meaning behind it.
  
• When we understanding the intent of the verdict/surah, we can apply it to our current situation and come to a conclusion that is compatible with the Qur'an and our current cultural context.
  
  In short, we move from the present situation to the past, look for inspiration in the Qur'an, separate the meaning of the verdict from its context, and then move back to the present situation and apply the meaning we distilled from the Qur'an.
  
  It was Rahman's belief that the Qur'an should be reinterpreted by every generation of Muslims to ensure that it's meaning would be preserved and not corrupted by beliefs and interpretations that no longer held any relevance.
  
  It should also be noted that he did not believe that Muslims should only reinterpret each verse as it suited them; he believed that the Qur'an should be reinterpreted according to the current context as a whole. He understood the Qur'an to be a coherent whole (a way of life) and not something that could be cherry picked (something some modernists and fundamentalists are guilty of). An example of someone who has reinterpreted the Qur'an according to this method is Amina Wadud.
  
  If we applied this method to the hypothetical argument you mentioned above, we would likely come to the conclusion that in our current society fining or imprisoning the offending individual would fulfill the same same intent as amputating a hand would in 6th century Arabia.

trying to pick up this that was recommended to me years ago.