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Abdennur Prado
3) Justice (adl) is not a mere juridical concept, but a cosmological one. According
to the Quran, the world has been created in justice, in a permanent equilibrium. The
balance of forces is at the axis of Gods Creation: the balance between active and
passive, heaven and earth, expansion and contraction, change and permanence, male
and female, and so on. Here comes the idea of Islam as a religion of moderation that
searches for the harmony between the price and object, between reason and instinct,
between corporal and spiritual needs, or between the individual and the collective.
Any excess in favor of one of these poles is at the expense of the other, resulting in
deformed beings and societies. A perfect balance and balancing forces are what
gives happiness/serenity, both in this world and in the other. Within this vision,
balance between the two poles of the couple (male and female forces) is crucial.
Masculine and feminine attributes do not correspond exclusively to men and
women; both of them are internal to each creature. The feminine must be in a perfect
equilibrium with the masculine in men as in women. Trying to limit the feminine to
women and subordinating it to the males as the sole essence of man is to break the
internal equilibrium of men and women, the polarity that is present in each one of
the creatures.
4) In the Quran, all human beings are seen as potential caliphs of God on earth,
responsible for the care of the world, of themselves, their immediate environment
and of the creation as a whole. The caliphate implies that everyone has a
responsibility, not transferable to other human beings, in front of Allah, who has
given to each one of us the government of our lives, without making any distinction
between men and women. So we need to recuperate the consideration of women as
the caliphs of Allah.
5) Wilaya. Along with the deconstruction of the concept of female dependency and
male protection, Islamic feminists go back to the idea of mutual support and
protection of men and women, included in the Quranic notion of awliya. The
Quran says that The believers, men and women, are protectors (or supporters) one
of another (Qur'an 9:71). This verse establishes cooperation and equality between
men and women, and cancels any possibility of male dominance. We are again
presented with a non-hierarchical and egalitarian statement.
6) The last principle is shura, or mutual consultation. The Quran establishes that the
believers, men and women, are those who conduct their affairs by mutual counsel.
This is a democratic principle that we must apply to marriage, to break with male
dominance and its pretensions of superiority.
intellectuals, such as Ebrahim Moosa1, Rashid Benzine2 and Nasr Abu Zayd3.
Basically, these authors have accused feminist readings of constituting a mere
subjective projection of a previous ideology upon the text.
Asma Barlas and Amina Wadud have answered this criticism. According to Asma
Barlas, there is no possibility of a non-subjective interpretation, as she considers that
to be human is to live a life that is politically, economically, sexually, culturally,
and historically situated.4 So Barlas proposes to be open and honest about that.
Amina Wadud not only does not deny her involvement as a subject, but also claims
to be co-agent of Allah in the realization of the Quran:
What I am proposing is that the collective community has always
manipulated the text in concert with civilizational, or, better still, human
development. We must now simply acknowledge that it has always been
done and accept the responsibility of agency in doing so openly and in
consultation with the community. I have already argued that the text can be
interpreted with egalitarianism in mind: I now propose a step that some
consider as beyond even that. We are the makers of textual meaning. 5
All this deserves some clarification, as it affects the very basis of Islamic
feminism. A feminist theology is always a critical one, a hermeneutic of suspicion
originated in an experience of contradiction and it shows that those traditional
interpretations that were supposed to be neutral (simply objective translations of the
message of the Quran into rules, laws, customs and ideas) in fact were influenced
by the previous ideology of its interpreters. Every human community is doomed to
interpretation, debate and social construction of consensus among different
subjectivities. In this sense, the pretension of absolute objectivity tends to become
orthodoxy and is suspected of totalitarianism. Here emerges the concept of an
Islamic community as an interpretive one, based in mutual consultation and
hassan if we improve through it, if we open ourselves to Allah and towards our
fellow men and women, if it increases our iman and our taqwa, if it inspires
believers and non-believers to grow as human beings. That is the real test for
validation; this is the approach that I believe is in accordance with the message of
the Quran, and not a supposed objectivity as claimed by philologists and experts, an
objectivity that ossifies the text as a reflection of the arrogance of the human mind.
The experience of revelation is the foundation of Islamic feminism. It is not a pun,
and it is no merely political or belongs to the field of sociology. The foundation of
Islamic feminism is spiritual, is an experience of God as the overcoming of
opposites. It has more to do with the mystical experience of tawhid than with secular
feminist ideology. We are fully within the prophetic paradigm. This is not only to
reinterpret certain Quranic controversial verses. This is about living and updating
the eternal message of the Quran, here and now, in our concrete circumstances.
If you consider quietly the contents of this text, you will come to the conclusion that
from this perspective, the Quran is no longer a book of laws or a catechism to be
interpreted by the religious experts or scholars, but a revelation which speaks
directly to believers in its individuality. We are therefore seeing a democratization of
religious knowledge; the recognition of the spiritual needs of believers and of their
moral agency, as individual persons, beyond the collective. Then, it is the
recognition that we all are potentials caliphs of Allah, responsible for the care of the
world, of ourselves and our immediate environment.
And it is precisely this experience that enables us to do politics, not from the
perspective of achieving power, but from the ethical imperative of confrontation
with an order of things that we recognize as unfair. It is this experience of tawhid
which leads us to political and social activism, according to the example of Prophet
Muhammad, sala allahu alayhi wa salam.
We, as believing men and women committed with the understanding of the word of
Allah. We, as believers who open our hearts and ask Allah for the revelation of
better meanings of the Quran, and who try to embody ourselves the message of
Quran and who accept the responsibility that Allah has given to every human being;
we, as believing women and men, as protectors and companions, sisters and brothers
in Islam, in the hope of justice and a new equilibrium in the ummah, we are the
makers of textual meaning.
Wa Allhu alim.
1 The Debt and Burden of Critical Islam, in Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender
and Pluralism (Oneworld Publications, 2003)
2 Rachid Benzine, Lire le Coran autrement: http://oumma.com/Lire-le-Coranautrement-partie1
3 Abu Zayd: Reformation islamic thought. Riffat Hassan and others: feminist
hermeneutics.
4 Asma Barlas: Still Quarrelling over the Quran: Five theses on interpretation and
authority, Conference on Redefining Boundaries: Muslim Women and Religious
Authority in Practice, Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, Amsterdam,
June 24, 2007.
5Wadud-Muhsin, Amina: Inside the Gender Jihad (Oneworld Publications, 2007),
p.189.