Allegorical Gender The Figure of Eve Revisited

Abstract

Introduction
In the last decade, a number of monographs and forays in the field of
Muslim women’s studies have attempted to examine the place of the
Muslim woman in the interpretive heritage of Islamic exegetical texts, particuly
the hadith tufsir literature from the period of classical Islam.’ The figure
of Eve (Hawwa’ in Qur’anic terminology) is an inevitable topic of discussion
in all of these scholarly studies, primarily due to her definitive role
in the evolution of gender categories in the Islamic exegetical texts, and,
subsequently, how this role has become an indicator of direction for the
Muslim woman’s identity. The figure of Eve, in short, as articulated by
Muslim classical exegetes, has not ony defined the identity of Muslim
woman; it has also set the parameters for how that identity has been forged.
Yet, the traditional view of Eve portrays woman as both physically and
mentally inferior to man, as well as spiritually inept. This classical interpretation
of Eve has come to be endowed with sacred authority, more so by
virtue of its place in our Islamic past than by any Qur’anic sanction.
This is not to imply that all of the medieval classical writings on Islam
constitute a monolithic whole. After all, the sources of the Shari‘ah, namely,
the Qur’an and the hadith, historically have been highly adaptable texts:
In the case of the Qur’an, its directives are general, broad, and flexible
in most cases; therefore they could be translated into the terms
of a specific social reality of each generation of interpreters.
Concerning the hadith . . . given the inevitable gap between the
actual and the idealized. . . it is not surprising that the Hadith contains
an abundance of varied and often contradictory traditions, ...