Muslim Women's Studies Two Contributions

Abstract

Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of Aisha hint Abi Bakr.
By D. A. Spellberg. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 243 pp.
Qur'an and Woman. By Amina Wadud-Muhsin. Kuala Lumpur: Fajar
Bakti, 1992, 118 pp.
Denise Spellberg's survey of the legacy of 'A'ishah and Amina
Wadud-Muhsin's exegesis of the Qur'anic exposition of gender are forays
in the field of Muslim women's studies. Both works study the place of
Muslim women in the textual heritage of the community, but their points
of departure are different. Spellberg proposes that 'A'ishah's legacy, a
product of exclusively male writings in texts from the classical Islamic
centuries, is a reflection of Muslim men's interpretations of early Islamic
history and their opinions about the proper place of women in their own
time. Such interpretations, Spellberg shows, are charged with the political
tensions of their contemporary societies. Yet 'A'ishah 's "legacy alone
defied idealization as completely as it denied comfortable categorization"
by the Muslim men whose texts represent and construct her, Spellberg
asserts (p. 190).
Wadud-Muhsin acknowledges the way in which another copious
Islamic scholarship emerged, motivated by the need to understand the
Qur'anic utterances about women. Her focus is not, however, on those
interpretive texts of men that form an authoritative tradition explaining the
meaning of the Qur'an. Wadud-Muhsin argues that the question of
woman in the Qur'an must be reconnected directly to the primary text.
She proposes approaching the Qur'anic text without the assumptions about
gender of the classical interpreters, whose work constitutes the Islamic tradition
of exegesis, but also without the assumptions that undergird contemporary
feminist readings of the Qur'an. She offers a herrneneutical
method for understanding the place and meaning of gender in the Qur'an,
based on the consistencies of the Qur'an itself: its contexts, language, and
the worldview of its texts as a whole. The effect of this, Wadud-Muhsin
suggests, would be to transcend the gender biases of narrower reading
methods and arrive at a fuller appreciation of the text's guidance for men
and women.
Both works began as dissertations, Spellberg's in history, WadudMuhsin's
in religious studies. Each brings to Muslim women's studies a
node of questions about the process of textual interpretation. The ...