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JFSR 30.2 (2014) 115129

FEMINIST INTERPRETATION OF THE QURAN IN A

COMPARATIVE FEMINIST SETTING
Aysha A. Hidayatullah

The two major tasks of this paper are to outline current challenges in feminist interpretation of the Quran, and to assess
where feminist Quranic interpretation stands in relation to feminist scholarship on the texts of other religious traditions. The
first half summarizes some of the observations of Hidayatullahs
book, Feminist Edges of the Quran, in which she reevaluates
the core assumptions about gender equality upon which feminist
interpretations of the Quran have been based, concluding that
contemporary expectations for gender equality are perhaps not
reconcilable with the Quranic text. The second half compares
the use of feminist methodology to interpret the Quran with
its use to interpret the texts of other traditions; this comparison
sheds new light on the questions engaged by feminist Quranic
interpretation and contributes to discussions on the contours and
possibilities of comparative feminist studies of religious texts.
I want to begin by thanking Elisabeth Schssler Fiorenza and the organizers of the Comparative Feminist Studies of Scriptures panel for inviting
me to participate in this discussion about comparative feminist approaches to
religious texts. I appreciate the opportunity to step back from the specificities
of my own work and think more carefully about the possibilities of engaging
with feminist scholars working on different religious traditionsto examine if,
why, and how we might undertake collective feminist endeavors with regard
to our religious texts. The first half of this paper, which I presented at the
conference panel, traces the trajectory of my own work on feminist interpretations of the Quran, where my discussion is restricted to Islam. The second
half of this paper is prompted by my reflections subsequent to the panel on
the convergences and divergences between the use of feminist methodology
-115-

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Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 30.2

in interpreting the Quran and its use by my copanelists. In the second section, I attempt to gain a broader view of where feminist interpretation of the
Quran stands in terms of the strategies and objectives of feminist scholarship
on the texts of other religious traditions. My larger aim is to contribute to an
understanding of the contours and possibilities of comparative feminist studies
of religious texts.
Feminist Interpretation of the Quran
My work on feminist exegesis of the Quran originally began by studying
the works of pioneering Muslim feminist scholars of the 1990s and early 2000s.
These scholars (including Riffat Hassan, Azizah Al-Hibri, Amina Wadud, and
Asma Barlas) had embarked upon reinterpretation of the Quran in order to
recover principles of male-female equality that they saw as inherent to it, but
that, according to them, had become submerged or distorted by the exclusively
male tradition of Quranic exegesis. Thus they held that the word of God was
unequivocally just to women but that patriarchal interpretation had suppressed
this quality of the text, thus necessitating the development of interpretive approaches to the Quran unencumbered by male bias in order to recover the
justice of the Quran. In my doctoral work, I studied these feminist works collectively, noticing along the way how they revealed the influences of, and parallels to, works of Jewish feminist theology and Christian feminist theology, most
notably in their location of male bias and normativity in scriptural exegesis. My
major task at that time was to identify common interpretive strategies within
the works and to offer a systematic analysis of their methods, with the overall
objective of arguing that the works collectively signaled the emergence of a coherent new field of feminist Quranic interpretation. I proceeded to map their
shared interpretive methods: historical contextualization, intratextual reading,
and the tawhidic paradigm (an interpretive lens based on the singularity and
incomparability of God).
However, after completing my doctoral work, I began paying closer attention to some of the problems that remained unresolved within the emerging
field of feminist Quranic interpretation. Namely, I noticed a lack of clarity in
many of the works about the concept of equality, andprompted by works
Kecia Ali and Amina Wadud published in 2006I began to pursue the question of what to do when the application of the feminist exegetical strategies I
had studied did not seem to successfully rescue the Quranic text, in certain
instances, from its sexist meanings. Ali had pointed out how certain verses on
sexuality in particular presumed a measure of male control that could not be
interpreted out of the text; Wadud revised her reading of verse 4:34s apparent allowance of striking ones wife, unable to get around a violent meaning she
could not condone. The verses Ali and Wadud identified presented stubborn

Hidayatullah: Feminist Interpretation of the Quran

117

cases in which it seemed that the text could not produce meanings that were
fully just to women through any interpretive technique.
Inspired by Ali and Waduds observations, I zeroed in on the central unresolved problem of feminist Quranic exegesis from my perspective: insisting that
all sexist meanings of the Quran resulted from interpretation of the text rather
than the text itself. The resistance to faulting the Quranic text was the direct
result of the position held by Muslim feminist exegetes (and the vast majority of
Muslims) that the Quran is the direct and inerrant word of God. Placed alongside the belief that male-female equality is divinely ordained, this meant that all
meanings of the text that supported male-female inequality had to be attributed
to faulty human interpretation; the text itself could not be treated as the source
of unjust meanings for women. However, this premise left the Muslim feminist
exegetical project in a bind: How were we to account for unjust meanings that
could not be explained away through the new interpretive techniques developed while still upholding the divinity of the entire Quranic text?
When I first approached this question in the conclusion of my dissertation,
I suggested that these stubborn cases, in which problematic meanings of the
text could not be successfully reinterpreted through feminist methods, meant
that Muslim feminist understandings of the nature of the Quranic text and its
revelation would need to be revised in order for the feminist exegetical project
vis--vis the Quran to proceed as one that was still committed to the texts divinity. I maintain that position today; however, my reasoning has changed radically.
Initially, I had seen these cases as exceptionala few aberrations in a text that,
for the most part, redeemed the principle of male-female equality in Islam. But
when I eventually sat down to expand my dissertation into Feminist Edges of the
Quran and attempted to explain the setbacks of these verses, the problem appeared far larger and more complicated than I had once imagined.1 Eventually,
it was as though the length of the thread I was pulling out of feminist exegetical
arguments had no end, and soon the entire endeavor began to unravel before
me, challenging the very foundations of the project of feminist interpretation of
the Quran as I had understood them.
Taking cues from Alis insistence that feminist exegesis must carefully defend the project of feminist interpretation and acknowledge the full impact of
problematic Quranic verses,2 and heeding Raja Rhounis warning against treating feminist exegesis as a simple act of retrieving a norm of gender equality
already assumed a priori to be at the center of the Quran,3 I began to look more
closely at the core assumptions about gender equality upon which feminist in 1 Aysha A. Hidayatullah, Feminist Edges of the Quran (New York: Oxford University Press,2014).
2 See Kecia Ali, Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Quran, Hadith, and Jurisprudence (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006), chap. 7.
3 See the conclusion of Raja Rhouni, Secular and Islamic Feminist Critiques in the Work of
Fatima Mernissi (Boston: Brill, 2010).

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Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 30.2

terpretation of the Quran had been based thus far. In the process of writing my
book, I came to the difficult conclusion that the contemporary expectations for
gender equality at the heart of the feminist exegetical project perhaps cannot
ultimately be reconciled with the Quranic text. A claim to the contrary is often
based on distortions of the text and anachronistic positions. Here, my aim is to
explain in abbreviated form some of the observations in my book; I offer them
as a way to acquaint my copanelists with my view of some of the most pressing
questions and problems at the center of current feminist interpretation of the
Quran. I hope that what I have observed will point to parallels in the kinds of
challenges we face in approaching our various scriptures, and hopefully contribute to the process of learning new ways of understanding and grappling with
them together.
For those who are new to the topic, I briefly summarize the content of
certain verses that feminist interpretations of the Quran most commonly confront. For simplicitys sake, I divide them into two broad categories. One group
consists of mutuality verses (my shorthand for them), those that according
to our contemporary sensibilities connote male-female inclusiveness and reciprocity, as well as kindness and respect for women. I call the second group
hierarchy verses, those that from our contemporary perspective endorse male
control over women and presume hierarchical male-female relations. Here, I
enumerate a few examples from each group of verses. (My summaries of each
verse are of course oversimplified to relay their very basic elements, as I cannot
here explain their nuances and complexities.) The mutuality verses include
4:1, which states that human beings are created from the same soul; verse 30:21,
which states that God created mates for human beings from among themselves,
endowing them with relationships of tranquility and mercy; verse 9:71, which
states that men and women are each others moral guardians; and verse 33:35,
which states that both men and women will be granted forgiveness and reward
by God for their pious qualities and acts. Some of the hierarchy verses include: 2:223, which instructs men to approach their wives sexually as they wish,
referring to women as something to be cultivated (utilizing the word for a field);
verse 2:228, which points out that mens entitlements, presumably in matters
of divorce, are of a degree greater than those of women; and the lengthy verse
4:34, which refers to men as occupying a conditional role of responsibility vis-vis women, describes the deferential roles of righteous women, and instructs
men on how to relate to their wives when the latter cause marital discord, outlining the steps of admonishing their wives, separating themselves from them,
and striking them.
In order to combat sexist male interpretations of the Quran, feminist interpreters had set out to recover the meanings of the mutuality verses, arguing
that they supported universal meanings of the Quran and pointed to the texts
overall trajectory toward gender equality. With regard to the hierarchy verses,

Hidayatullah: Feminist Interpretation of the Quran

119

they applied the techniques I had identified (historical contextualization, intratextual reading, and the tawhidic paradigm) to argue that their meanings
were contingent, that is, that their meanings applied only to specific historical
contexts and therefore did not suggest anything about the overall worth or value
of women, or else the verses were describing rather than prescribing gendered
practices and views specific to seventh-century Arabia. Feminist interpretations
advocated the prioritization of the meanings of the mutuality verses over meanings of the hierarchy verses by citing the exegetical principle that the Quran
could not contradict itself, and the theological principle of Gods oneness as a
guarantee against idolatrous prescriptions for womens obedience to men.
As I stepped back to examine the logics that governed such arguments,
the outlines of a structure of apologetics became visible. Feminist readings had
correctly noticed the differences between verses of mutuality and hierarchy,
but the problem was in assuming that those differences necessarily produced
a dissonance. The presumption of dissonance was produced by projecting contemporary understandings of gender equality onto the Quran. Confronting
what registered as a dissonance between the verses and guided by the principle
that the word of God could not contradict itself, the exegetes then attempted
to reconcile the apparently conflictual tendencies of the verses by privileging
mutuality verses over and above hierarchy verses. And yet, this privileging
of mutuality verses still could not satisfactorily mitigate the impact of some of
the most problematic moments in the Quranic text with regard to women.
Others before me had identified this as another manifestation of the interpretive problem of trying to distinguish historically contingent elements of
the Quran from its universal principles. But for me the problem emerged as
even more primary, beginning with the assumption that hierarchy and mutuality verses presented a dissonance in the first place. I agree that both kinds
of verses exist, but I must admit that perhaps they appear as different kinds
to me only because of my own contemporary feminist perspective. It is crucial to note that such a dissonance is perhaps not a necessary feature of the
premodern views of gender relations that inform the revelatory context of the
Quransomething I address below. If feminist interpretations had stopped at
the observation of both tendencies in the Quran and noted that they appeared
as differing tendencies from the viewpoint of a contemporary perspective, I
would have no objections. However, I do object to forgetting the historical particularity of our own idea that male-female mutuality contradicts hierarchy, and
then attempting to try to forcibly resolve these two tendencies in the Quran
when the apparent dissonance we are trying to resolve is perhaps the product
of a very particular contemporary perspective that we do not acknowledge as
operative. Failing to account for the historical particularity of our own demand
for gender equality, we try to resolve something in the Quran that I suggest
may not in the end be possible to resolve, in part because there may be nothing

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Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 30.2

to resolve, unless we are superimposing a contemporary demand for equality

upon the text.
In the premodern world in which the Quran was revealed, there may not
have been a necessary contradiction between the values of male-female mutuality and hierarchy. The view of the apparent necessity of such a contradiction is
perhaps informed by radically different views of human autonomy and relationships developed in much later historical contexts. If we are to acknowledge the
historical context of the Qurans revelationas feminist interpretations of the
Quran have themselves advocatedthen we must acknowledge that verses of
mutuality and hierarchy could possibly exist harmoniously in the Quran. That
is, perhaps according to premodern logics of the revelatory context, men and
women could have been created from the same soul, as mates of tranquility
and mercy for each other, and as moral equals deserving equal recompense
for their actions at the same time men could reign over womens bodies and
discipline them. In the premodern framework of the texts revelation, there
may not have been a necessary contradiction between notions of love, respect,
and mutual kindness and notions of female passivity/male dominance; female
passivity in certain arenas may have been understood by the first Quranic audience, through schemes of protective patriarchy, as congruent with ideals of
kindness and mutuality between men and women and in keeping with their
distinct natures. When taking this possibility into account, it becomes difficult
to fully justify the feminist exegetical endeavor of downplaying the texts hierarchal connotations and privileging its messages of mutuality, as though the latter
must necessarily supersede the former. In proceeding in this manner, feminist
exegesis has perhaps projected contemporary sensibilities onto the text and attempted to attribute priorities to the text that may not be defendable on the
basis of the text itself. When understood in its historical context, the text itself
might not support the privileging of mutuality verses.
What this has meant for me is that the techniques of feminist Quranic exegesis have not fallen short just in the case of a few stubborn verses; rather, the
entire endeavor of trying to argue for Quranic support for gender equality may
be flawed to begin with. I am unconvinced that there is clear textual support
for treating mutuality between the sexes as an overarching value of the Quran.
For me, mutuality is simply one set of values alongside another, and the two sets
of values are perhaps not to be reconciled in favor of either one or the other.
Therefore, Quranic endorsements of sexual hierarchy are real elements of the
text, and we must own up to the reality of what this could mean about the text
from our feminist perspective. While the Quran makes some remarkable and
heartening assertions about the value and dignity of women, those statements
do not necessarily mitigate its hierarchical statements. And since, from our contemporary feminist perspective, hierarchy cannot be reconciled with equality,
in the end, the Quranic text itself perhaps cannot be reconciled with a feminist

Hidayatullah: Feminist Interpretation of the Quran

121

demand for male-female equality in Islam. Feminist exegesis of the Quran has
been demanding support for male-female equality that the text may not be able
to supply.
At this point, I want to address some possible counterarguments as a way
to clarify my positions. One is the argument that the hierarchical tendencies of
the text are evidence only of the possible lack of functional (i.e., social) equality
of men and women in the Quranthat even if the Quran cannot support the
functional equality of the sexes, it can still support the moral-ontological (i.e.,
spiritual) equality of men and women, which is far more significant and sufficient enough for supporting a Quranic norm of ultimate equality. However, as
I point out in my book with the help of Rebecca Merrill Groothuiss work on
the Bible,4 the functional inequalities the Quran endorses may not be related
simply to transitory roles; rather, they might be related to the fact of being a
man or woman. When attached to permanent features of being, functional inequalities are more than just functional. They are the effect of what one is, not
just what one does, and may therefore be based upon ontological inequality. In
a number of hierarchy verses in the Quran, the roles of dominance and passivity are clearly related to being a man or being a womanthus making it difficult
to fully maintain the position that the inequalities between men and women
endorsed by the Quran are merely functional.
I would also like to address what I have called the trajectory argument
offered by feminist exegeses of the Quran. This argument holds that because
of the historical context of its revelation, the Quran could only lay out reforms
promoting gender equality according to what was possible or intelligible in its
own time. Even though the Quran does not articulate guidelines for full equality between men and women, it at least points to a trajectory of ongoing reform to lead to the eventual goal of full male-female equality. The words of the
Quran may have been restricted by its immediate historical context, but the
Quran points to the realization of justice beyond the level of its own language.
In my view, the major problem with such an argument is that due to the hierarchical pronouncements of the text, we would be forced to demand kinds of
justice that are so far beyond those supportable by the text, that we would end
up having to disregard much of the content of the Quranic text. And in doing
so, we would no longer be basing our demands for gender equality directly on
the text itself. In other words, once again, the text itself does not fully support
our contemporary demands for gender equality.
In rejecting the trajectory argument, I am ultimately asking us to take re 4 Rebecca Merrill Groothuis, Equal in Being, Unequal in Role: Exploring the Logic of
Womans Subordination, in Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity without Hierarchy,
ed. Ronald W. Pierce and Rebecca Merrill Groothuis (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press,
2004), 31620.

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Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 30.2

sponsibility for our roles as human beings in the interpretive endeavor of seeking male-female equality in Islam. I have attempted to demonstrate that in the
project of feminist exegesis of the Quran, we have perhaps always been taking
our cues from outside the text even if we have not admitted to doing so, and in
order to continue this endeavor, we must acknowledge that our demands for
gender equality perhaps cannot be based purely on the Quranic text. As I point
out in my book, we can see in the case of the trajectory argument, for instance,
that one is not simply moving past historically contingent elements of the text;
one does not move merely past these textual elements, but also toward things
other than the text. We come to see that the equality we seek is grounded in a
conception of justice that perhaps lies outside the text. The interpretive search
for equality is a thoroughly human endeavor that may eventually prompt us to
depart from the text in one way or another.
This admission leads back full circle to my initial observations about the
key challenge of feminist interpretation of the Quran, to the place where I first
began to observe feminist exegesis difficulties in accounting for all instances
of apparent injustice within the text. I had located the cause of this problem
in the restrictions produced by maintaining the divinity and inerrancy of the
Quranic text, which meant that all unjust meanings of the text had to be attributed to bad human interpretation instead of to the text itself. In designating
the Quranic text the ultimate guarantor of contemporary notions of male-female inequality, feminist interpretation was essentially forced to try to make
the text say what it perhaps does not (and to un-say what it perhaps does). It
located the responsibility for feminist justice in the text itself because it located
the ultimate authority for feminist justice in the text itself. Doing so not only
placed unbearable demands on the text that resulted in apologetic readings but
also produced an equally, if not more, detrimental consequence: that of reinforcing the authority of the Quranic text at the expense of our own authority
as human beings. Inadvertently casting ourselves in the role of passive readers
of the text, we bolstered the authority of a text that perhaps cannot supply us
the justice we demand while diminishing our own authority to demand forms
of justice perhaps beyond those to be found in the Quran. In order to continue
the work of feminist interpretation of the Quran, we can no longer afford to
grant the Quran an unassailable authority. We must own up to the humanness
of the endeavor, unafraid of the risks and responsibilities of our own authority as
human interpreters seeking to discern the divine. In coming to this realization,
I maintain the position that feminist interpretation of the Quran must pursue
new ways of understanding the divinity of text and the nature of its revelation.
However, that position has taken on a new urgency and purpose for me, now
serving as a means to relocate the authority of feminist interpretation in us as
human interpreters, rather than as a way to maintain the ultimate authority of
the text.

Hidayatullah: Feminist Interpretation of the Quran

123

Reflections on the Comparative Feminist Setting

In reflecting on my discussion above in relation to the papers of our comparative panel as a whole, I will proceed carefully, offering only some hypotheses, given that the comparative endeavor perhaps always means that I cannot be
sure that my observations clearly or fully resonate with others. (Perhaps, however, any glitches in my observations will also be instructive; they may in themselves reveal some important limitations in the comparative endeavor.) First,
there appears to be a shared general approach to the texts we are studying. We
all seem to assume that the texts we are readingwhatever their relationship to
the divinehave meaning through us as readers; they are not mere repositories
of divine meaning. Thus we seem to share the premise that meaning making is
a human process. This is the case even when, for some of us, the texts of our traditions remain divine or maintain their divine origins; that is, the identification
of meaning making as human does not disqualify them as in some way divine.
(For some of us, this entails an implicit or explicit call for the expansion of how
texts can be understood as divine in our religious traditions.) It is this human
aspect of meaning making and the historical record of patriarchy that makes us
especially suspicious of the male interests and male normativity discernible in
our texts and their interpretation. Second, I would venture to say that a number
of us come to our texts with some sort of an investment in our texts relationship to the divine. For some of us, this might take the form of a faith-based
commitment that prompts ones engagement in the project of pointing out a
texts androcentrism or its unjust apportioning to women. In this case, it is an
investment in the divine significance of the text that perhaps in the first place
inspires an outrage at what we see as manipulations of the text; this investment
gives our work its impetus and urgency. Perhaps, but not necessarily, following
from this investment is another one: an investment in recovering some divine
or devotional meaning, or the possibility of one, that is just to women. A number of us seem to hold out at least the possibility that some divine/devotional
resonance that is unencumbered by sexism and androcentrism exists and might
be recovered. (This possibility may or may not be called faith, or a premise of
faith.) This possibility perhaps drives some of us to continue with our work.
Third, despite our having perhaps different aims in relation to our communities
and different interests in what we are saying being authoritative or persuasive,
we perhaps share the desire for the result of our projects to have meaning for
others than ourselves, that they bear some significance or usefulness for others
invested in that religious traditionthat at the end of the day we are not just
playing around with words and our interpretations and retellings have some
weight and some importance for someone else.
Despite commonalities, some important differences emerge between our
projects. To begin, the texts we are studying all relate to the divine in distinct

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Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 30.2

ways. For example, the text may represent divine speech itself; it may represent
divine guidance through human narrators; it may narrate the speech, acts, guidance, or reflections of a figure of enlightened wisdom; it may be a devotional
text reflecting (on) the divine; or it may be a commentary on any of these. Thus
the texts we examine are positioned differently in relation to the divine and
perhaps therefore the religious authority to interpret it as well. The religious
traditions in which each text originates perhaps treat the concept of a text
differently in the first place, to the extent that the term scripture may be an
inappropriate descriptor. Furthermore, each of us seems to have different investments in the authority of our knowledge production within the religious
communities we are concerned with and their responses to it; some of us may
not consider ourselves insiders or adherents to the traditions we speak of in the
same way, or at all. There are clearly different risks, kinds of accountability, and
transformations at stake.
Furthermore, I am struck almost as much by what I do not understand in
my copanelists papers as what (I think) I do. My unfamiliarity with some of the
names, terms, concepts, and narratives that are at the center of their papers
(and the nature of texts/revelation in their traditions) poses an obvious obstacle
to my ability to draw connections between our works. I must admit that I do not
understand some of the specific content in each paperI simply do not know
enough to be able to do so. This suggests to me that I have a certain responsibility to seek a base level of knowledge about each religious tradition discussed
in a comparative setting if I am going to be a full participant; the onus is on me
as part of the conditions of engaging in such a collective endeavor. However,
at least some of this lack of understanding may also be related to the fact that
each paper provides varying degrees of background information to enable readers unfamiliar with that tradition to understand its subject. I suspect that this
difference stems from different assumptions about ones reading audience and
perhaps in some cases from the privilege of working on a dominant religious
tradition, a privilege that allows one to worry less about speaking in ways that
are foreign. In noting this, I become aware of my tendency to provide basic
introductory information about the Quran, how differently my voice registers
in those moments, and how much content I perhaps sacrifice in those places.
Indeed, the burden of multicultural representation weighs unevenly and can
place limitations on the depth of our work in many places.
Despite my lack of full understanding of others work, however, what is
equally remarkable is how much I actually am able to understand and engage
within my copanelists papers. In the following pages, I narrate my interaction
with each paper and demonstrate how my perspective as a Muslim feminist
scholar affects what I notice in each paper and what I come away with after
reading it. I hope my reflections might provide some concrete examples of the
operations and benefits of comparative feminist studies of religious texts. My

Hidayatullah: Feminist Interpretation of the Quran

125

aim is to contribute to an articulation and greater understanding of the kinds of

new insights made possible through such comparative exercises within feminist
studies of religion.
In her paper, Karen Derris defends the undertaking of prescriptive interpretive work with greater justice as its goal as part of the endeavor of ethical
scholarship on Buddhism. Her gratitude of learning from Buddhist texts inspires her hope in doing responsible scholarship that is of service to Buddhists
seeking greater justice within their tradition. She upholds the practice of seeking liberatory potential in Buddhist texts while also facing androcentric or even
misogynistic material within the tradition. She cautions, however, that interpretive transparency must be a foremost concern; a scholar must acknowledge her
own interpretive choices and commitments in the way she approaches the texts.
Derris looks to revise patriarchal understandings of motherhood in the texts as
an unproductive attachment that impedes ones spiritual awakening; she aims
at reviving the empathetic imagination limited by such patriarchal views and
crucial to rediscovering the universal value of mothering (61). In relation to my
own work, I am particularly interested in how Derriss recovery of the universal
ethics of compassion within motherhood and its empowering modes of realization might help me revisit the conundrums of difference within equality
in Quranic frameworks of male-female relations. The unthought of motherhood in Buddhist texts perhaps sheds new light on the potential unthought
of human dependency in feminist discussions of male control and female passivity in the Quran. Perhaps there are ways yet to be found to view gendered
Quranic roles as productive of ones agency and subjectivity in relationship to
God. Derriss paper leads me to question, in a way I had not before considered,
whether there is any meaningful universalism to be gleaned from what appear
to be only the limiting particularities of gender roles in the Quran.
In a paper that also raises issues of universalism, Karen Pechilis thinks
with the female Hindu poet-saint of her study, with the poet-saints male
biographer, and with the devotional subjectivity voiced by the poet-saint.
Pechilis goes directly to the poet-saints own words to yield a different view
of her devotional subjectivity than the poet-saints authoritative biography has
produced; Pechilis connects her work to an interest in representations of womens religious capacities in religious texts (101). In performing her readings,
she both counters the idea that only an elite group of authorities may correctly
understand Hindu texts, and she is recovering a female voice in history (102).
Pechiliss work recovers the potential within the poet-saints speech to present
universal guidance and to speak to the whole human condition through her
lived experience as a woman; a woman can, in fact, speak universal truths even
through the particularity of her embodied subject position. In relation to discussions of feminist religious authority, I am particularly interested in Pechiliss
statement that she is not trying to be an authority within a given religion but in-

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Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 30.2

stead a scholar whose work has interpretive integrity (101). From my perspective as a Muslim feminist, I ask: Toward what end does a feminist scholar seek
interpretive integrity? If at least one end is to locate some liberatory potential in
a text, through what steps does such a liberatory potential become realized from
the reading that scholar has produced, and who is it realized for? Who must access and be persuaded by that scholars reading in order for such liberatory possibilities to be meaningful? Who judges the interpretive integrity of her work?
Through what kinds of visible or invisible authority does one come to think with
the poet-saint and with her biographer? From the perspective of my work, I am
interested in the ways that the liberatory potential of feminist readings may or
may not be intrinsically tied to notions of religious authority, however different
the forms it takes may be in different circumstances. Pechiliss paper helps me
ask a question about religious authority in my own context: Must the liberatory
potential of a feminist reading be tied to its authoritative acceptance within a
religious community?
In her feminist reading of the Book of Esther, Rachel Adelman draws
on the midrashic tradition, whose tools she reclaims and adapts for herself.
She sees herself as an heir to the rabbinic interpretive tradition (84), which
demonstrates a two-millennia-old method of filling in gaps in the biblical story
(83). Using the Rabbis own interpretive methods to critique patriarchal readings of the story, she directly challenges the objectivity of the storys authoritative male interpretations, reconfiguring the trope of female deception into
a gendered category of acts with the potential for female agency. There is a
certain ease with which Adelman accomplishes her re-reading of the text that I
cannot help but marvel at as a Muslim feminist. Somehow, Adelman is able to
defy rabbinic readings and critically transform patriarchal interpretations of the
story while maintaining a clear confidence that she is still using rabbinic forms.
As she states, I respect the confessional norms of the community even as I
push against them and, when necessary, challenge, transform, or reject them
(84). Reading her statement from my perspective (framed by the Quranic commentarial tradition) is nothing less than disorienting, even jarring. How is it that
one can respect and reject confessional norms in the very same breathhow
can it be possible to respect the readings of authoritative commentaries of biblical texts and also transform or even reject them? Adelmans positioning signals
that there is already some existing Jewish setting in which rejecting communal
norms is not seen as contradictory to respecting them. This observation about
communal norms points to interpretive circumstances that are rather foreign
to me as a Muslim. Thus Adelmans paper prompts me to note how drastically
different our interpretive endeavors perhaps are, as well as to wonder if this
observation could ever translate into a Muslim context, especially given the
self-protecting behavior of Muslims in a climate in which they are politically besieged. How much can change? Adelman also helps me think about the bound-

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aries of tradition and interpretive authority. In Feminist Edges of the Quran, I

argued that the authority of the Islamic interpretive tradition may be constitutively androcentric because of a number of factors: the ways in which access to
objective meaning is deemed possible by the tradition due to particular views of
time and the nature of texts, the accumulative and self-confirming aspects of the
tradition, and the location of authority in congruent interpretive results (rather
than in congruent interpretive methods alone). In other words, in my own work,
I am skeptical that feminist readings of the Quran can gain authoritative status with respect to communal norms, as I question if feminist readings might
be fundamentally opposed to what is constitutive of interpretive authority in
Islam. Adelmans paper, then, prompts me to think further about my suspicions
regarding interpretive authority. Can the rejection of what is authoritative itself
ever become authoritative or otherwise persuasive in an Islamic context?
In her womanist re-reading of the biblical story of Lot, Wil Gafneys stated
goal is not only to explore feminist and womanist interpretive methods for reading biblical texts but also to observe their impact for the confessional communities of which feminists and womanists see themselves as members. Gafneys
work involves reclaiming and even reconstructing stories of women in the Bible,
with one of her goals to introduce religious hearers and readers to the many
overlooked female characters in the text and those who are omitted altogether.5 From a Muslim perspective, I immediately notice Gafneys freedom in
pointing out not only that biblical interpreters are overlooking and omitting
womens experiences and voices but that the actual texts are doing so as well.
Like others on the panel, Gafney emphasizes that womanists aim to make our
hermeneutics plain and that womanism respects the confessional norms of
the community even as it pushes against them and when necessary, challenges,
transforms, or rejects them. Since Gafney and Adelman share this position
with respect to communal norms, my response here is similar to my response
to Adelman, but I am intrigued by one additional element: Gafneys assertion
that womanist interpretation actively resists methodology insofar as the category is articulated and wielded in male-stream and other dimensions of biblical interpretation, including feminist interpretations. Here, Gafney maintains
the ability to respect communal norms while also being able to transform or
reject them as well as the ability to respect communal norms while resisting
the category of interpretive methodology altogether. In my understanding, this
seems to amount not only to the rejection of the problematic content of certain communal norms regarding the text and its interpretation but also seeks
5 Note that Gafneys paper is not included in this special section, so I am quoting from the
paper I reviewed for the conference. Wil Gafney, A Womanist Hermeneutic, Reading From, With,
and For a Black Christian Community (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for
Biblical Literature, Baltimore, MD, November 24, 2013).

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to dismantle the category of such norms altogether. This stance prompts me

to think both in terms of different or counter interpretive methodologies and
in terms of the rejection of formal methodology altogether. Equally radical for
me is another of Gafneys assertions. In the process of reading her paper, I immediately recognized a premise that resonates with me as Muslim feminist: no
matter how damaging or offensive it is, womanists do not throw out the whole
androcentric text. This seems rather similar to Muslim feminists unwillingness to throw out any part of the Quran. However, there is a radical twist
to what first seemed familiar to me: while keeping the entire text, womanists
do not ... limit [them]selves to the biblical canon and they wrestle with the
biblical canon, whether its contents, contours or both. That is, the womanist
commitment to respect the communitys relationship to the entirety of the biblical canon is enabled by claiming the ability to add to the canon; one need not
delete from the canon partly because one can add other texts to it. In taking
this liberty, what is empowering is not just direct access to the texts (canonical
or otherwise) to interpret them for ones self; one may also literally rewrite the
texts in light of ones experience. In Gafneys words, the texts serve as a space
in which to reflect on the readers emotional and relational terrain rather than
a container for unerring history, theology or some other orthodoxy. That is,
interpretive agency is located both in reading the text as it is and in telling your
own story. Womanists claim the right to disagree with the text and talk back
to it, rewriting the text for themselves. Here, questions of authority take on
entirely new dimensions for me. How does one rewrite or radically alter a text
while maintaining its integrity and a respect for the communitys relationship
to it? Where does religious authority reside when undertaking the acts of adding to the canon or retelling its stories? For whom are such acts authoritative?
What kind of weight do these acts carry? Does religious authority exist in these
interpretive acts at all?
Across the four papers, I notice common interests in seeking the liberatory
potential of texts while also honestly confronting their androcentric elements;
directly accessing texts to bypass and change patriarchal readings of them, thus
subverting the interpretive monopoly of (male) elites who have been treated
as the only rightful or qualified readers of texts; appropriating the interpretive
tools present within a tradition to challenge patriarchal readings of texts; approaching texts with interpretive transparency, whereby one makes clear ones
feminist interpretive agenda and admits that it is in fact an agenda; examining
womens religious capacities and their embodied religious subjectivities; and
recovering, reclaiming, and reconstructing womens stories and voices in the
religious tradition.
In examining the divergences between our papers, it seems to me that some
of their most important distinguishing features are related to the questions of
who our audiences are, where we ourselves stand in relation to the traditions

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and communities we study, and where we (and our traditions) locate religious
authority. The answers to these questions dramatically impact the objectives
of our work and thus the forms it takes. Differences between the locations of
religious authority in our work seem most crucial. Is religious authority located
in a text or its human interpreters? Does it reside with elite (male) authorities
or with a broader community? Is it derived from interpretive/methodological
norms or personal experiences? These various locations determine the possibilities and consequences of relocating religious authority or breaking from it
altogether, and they may or may not enable one to respect communal norms
while rejecting them, or perhaps make it possible to maintain the integrity or
authority of a text even while altering or adding to it. As a Muslim feminist, I am
thus led back once again to my questions about the nature of divine revelation
and texts, but I now have new ways of asking them.
In reflecting on the outlines of this comparative exercise in examining feminist studies of others religious texts, it seems to me that regardless of which
tradition we are working on/in, we begin with the kernels of many of the same
basic feminist textual strategies; however, we quickly part ways from one another, often quite dramatically, because of our varying relationships to audience,
tradition, and authority. General feminist textual strategies take on specific
varieties in each of our worksthey are translated into the particularities of
our tradition where they may take root and function organically.6 For example,
Pechilis points out that in recognizing a pattern of patriarchal discourse across
religious texts and comparatively understanding how that pattern relates to
archetypes of patriarchal discourses, we must embed the identification of [a]
patriarchal pattern within our engagement with ... [a] specific narrative (105).
Having done so, our specific work benefits our feminist partners working on/
in other traditions by bringing certain interpretive nuances and problems into
sharper focus, raising new questions for us in our own work, and broadening
the scope of our view for how we might apply feminist textual strategies in
our respective specialty traditions. Such insights may bolster or even transform
how we engage feminist agendas with respect to our specialty traditions. These
insights are often not possible precisely until we encounter the work of others,
and they have the potential to aid us in renewing our feminist commitments as
scholars working on/in our specific traditions. It is these new possibilities that
inspire me to continue pursuing comparative feminist endeavors in the study
of religion.

6 The use of feminist interpretive strategies used by scholars of other religious traditions is
not undertaken without political risks, however. I discuss the ways in which Muslim scholars have
drawn on Jewish and Christian feminist works and the risks they incur in chap. 3 of Feminist Edges
of the Quran.