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Introduction
This lecture will review some of the key arguments by leading Muslim
women scholars Amina Wadud and Asma Barlas. These scholars are
concerned with epistemological reform within the Islamic traditions that take
into account women's reading and interpretations of religious texts as valid
sites of discursive authority. They challenge the patriarchal interpretations of
religious texts that have led to problematic interpretations regarding
women's issues in Islam. They regard this as a process of androcentric
readings that reflect particular historical and cultural worldviews and
highlight the need for new analysis and interpretations to better capture the
spirit of social justice and gender justice within the message of the Qur'an.
Lecture Topics
1. Gendered Politics of Religious Interpretation
2. Mapping the Historical, Discursive and Political Context for
Conservative, Fundamentalist and Critical Approaches to Religious
Interpretation
In her book Qur'an and Woman, Amina Wadud situates her discussion of
alternative Qur'anic exegesis (interpretation) within the context of identity
formation in a post-colonial context . She argues that Muslim Women's
rights have faired better in contexts where there was greater stability within
a communal sense of Islamic identity. When that is threatened, that is
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Muslim women are more closely guarded due to perceived external threats
and resulting internal flexibility- women's bodies bear the burden of the
honour and retention of collective identity (see Zine, 2004). In the current
context, external pressures such as global, cultural and economic
imperialism occurring as the by- products of globalization present the same
threat to Islamic identification. These factors have played into the rise of
fundamentalisms and political extremism in many parts of the Muslim world.
N/A
Ideological and Epistemological
Reform
There is also a need to engage ideological reform- alternative exegesis in
this process that scholars like Amina Wadud and Asma Barlas are
undertaking- the sanctity of the sources are maintained- but the
hermeneutics or how they are interpreted and understood and then applied
are based on a process of human understanding and engagement.
Wadud asks the important question: "Is Islam what Muslims do, what
governments establish, what the intellectual legacy articulated or what the
primary sources imply?"
Such ideologies get their groundings from particular readings of the Qur'an
or tafseer as these exegetical practices are known. But Wadud reminds us
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Wadud notes that if justice and equity are clear principles of the Qur'an-then
justice and equity must be manifest in any social system deemed to be
Islamic.
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To understand this we have to examine the role of both tafsir and hadith as
part of a meaning making process. The need for interpretation according to
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Barlas is threefold:
1. The polysemous nature of the Qur'an or the fact that verses were
open to multiple levels of interpretation
2. The lack of transparency of some verses
The need for tafsir was also to make the Qur'an relevant to all periods of
history and time. Barlas notes that while the need to deal with diverse social
contexts facilitated tafsir, in time these social contexts came to shape the
contents of interpretation.
She also contends that despite the human interpretive nature of tafsir, it has
often come to be confused with the Qur'an itself and held to the same
unquestionable standard of authority and that secondary and tertiary texts-
the hadith, tafsir and corpus of jurisprudential knowledge, have in some
cases come to be elevated to the same and sometimes higher level than the
Qur'an.
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classical medieval period- that also made tafsir static and closed. She
advocates opening the gates of ijtihad- the use of independent judgment and
reasoning - to a discourse which many regard as having been closed
somewhere during the tenth century.
Conservatives
Conservative scholars have this tendency to generalize the particular. While
all believing Muslims agree that the Qur'an is universal and is relevant to all
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times and places, there are different ways that interpretive communities
have derived meaning from the text. Conservatives advocate a de-
historicized reading of the Qur'an as a means of adhering to its universality,
so they do not take into account the historical context of revelation.
Critical Views
Critical interpretive perspectives reverse the premises of conservative
views.
They argue for example that Divine speech does occur in historical time and
that there is a coherence between the context and contents of God's words.
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Yet in making this argument they are not rejecting the Qur'an's universalism,
but they are rejecting the conservative notion that the Qur'an can only be
temporalized within a specific context.
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Video
Cover Girls
Window Media Hi-Bandwidth
Orientalism
Window Media Hi-Bandwidth
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