Qur’an and Woman by Wadud Muhsin

Wadud Muhsin, the author of Qur’an and Woman, provides her interpretations of specific texts and key words which have been used to justify the unequal treatment and violence towards women in Islamic culture. By revealing the original meanings of those texts and key words, Muhsin argues that the Qur’an both affirms and ensures woman’s equal status with man.

I agree that everyone has his or her own version of examination and interpretation of religious texts. Yet, I wonder, if Muhsin’s reexamination and reinterpretation of Qur’an can be fully accepted/truly effective in Muslim communities. I also would like to know, if the book, Qur’an and Woman is initially aimed at a Muslim audience or a non-Muslim audience.

Is Muhsin telling Muslim men not to mistreat women due to their misinterpretations of the Qur’an? Is Muhsin telling Muslim women that the Qur’an grants women equal rights with men? Or, is she telling non-Muslims not to misunderstand Islam due to Muslims’ misinterpretations of the Qur’an (the mistreatment of Muslim women in the Muslim world due to misinterpretations of the Qur’an)?

Sura 4:1

I really enjoyed our conversation class today about the different meanings of the arabic words that are part of the sura. It is clear that in the quran the authors incorporate feminine word meanings as there way of including women in the quran. I think because this way of incorporating women in to the quran makes it harder to clearly see a womans role and it can be interpreted as women are not included at all, which is clearly not the truth.

Qur'an and Woman

While reading Qur'an and Woman, I came up with a similar question to the one posted about women in Judaism. Muhsin says, "The existence of one in such a pair is contingent upon the other in our known world. These are the Qur'anic pairs. Night flows into day; the male is irrevocably linked with the female as man is compatibly linked with woman" (21).

Though Muhsin is trying to show that this idea of pairs shows equality between men and women - each is equally important to the pair - this could be a dangerous perspective. What does this idea mean for homosexuals or people who choose not to marry? Is a man without a woman incomplete; is a woman without a man incomplete?

Averroes: The Decisive Treatise

This treatise seems to say that philosophy is not only allowed by the Law, but demanded by it. However, it concludes by saying, "Thus whoever tampers with them, by making an interpretation not apparent in itself, or [at any rate] more apparent to everyone than they are (and that [greater apparency] is something nonexistent), is rejecting [25] their wisdom and rejecting their intended effects in procuring human happiness (184).

How is one to determine whether an interpretation is "apparent" or not? This treatise seems to believe it has solved the problem of philosophy and religion, but who can judge this matter of "apparent interpretation" when everyone has his or her own perspective?

How does this idea relate to Midrash and the arguments of interpretation?

Understanding the Qur'an

The experience of the Qur’an in traditional Islamic countries is different from Western attempts to read it as a story with a beginning, middle, and end. For all Muslims, the Qur’an is first experienced in Arabic. When they are learning the Suras, they are not memorizing them like Westerners would, Sells says they are interiorizing the inner rhythms, sound patterns, and textual dynamics-taking it to heart in the deepest manner.

In response to JBK's post, Sells says "the Qur'anic sound figures occur in connection with 3 moments: prophecy, creation, and the day of reckoning. Because the Qur’anic experience is not about reading the text from beginning to end, one does not need to be a Muslim to have this experience, but I believe that one has to act like a Muslim and be open to reciting the text, just as Muslims do. This is because when you read the Qur'an, these 3 moments appear seperate. However, they become intertwined when they are said in Qur'anic recitation. Sells also references gender as a major aspect of Qur'anic sound figures. Although books like the Bible and Torah are male dominated, the Qur'an is gender balanced. He also talks about how the word spirit in Arabic can be both masculine and feminine. If the Qur'an lost these sound figures, it would ultimately damage the way Islam is perceived to treat women in society.

Revelation of the Qur'an on an Experiential Level

Nearly all of the scholars we've read on the Qur'an refer to its emotional effect on Muslim believers when they recite or hear it being recited. Its sacred qualities as revelation have been described by Muslims as wahy "a sort of idea-word inspiration that came upon Muhammad's 'heart,' as the Qur'an itself declares (26:192-195) [Corrigan et al., p. 60], or ijaz "inimitability," or the Quranic "voice" nazm (its distinctive style of sound and composition) [Sells (2005), p.184]- qualities that apparently are accessible more on an experiential level than a purely analytical or intellectual one. And also, accessible only in its original Arabic.

That being said, Michael Sells in Approaching the Qur'an (and many others), still tries to point to specific features in the form and sounds of the text of the Qur'an, and the ways it is recited and heard, that convey these rather intangible qualities of what Andrew in class called the Qur'an's "sacrality." What are the specific, precise features we can point to in the Qur'an itself, and/or the way Muslims relate to it, that both Muslims and non-Muslims could equally recognize as features of a sacred scripture? How would you as a critical interpreter of religions explain to a non-Muslim what in the text itself makes the Qur'an sacred? Is the experience of the Qur'an as a sacred scripture something only Muslims can know or feel?

Sells suggests that the Qur'an's understanding of "spirit" - ruh in Arabic - is a particularly good example of the distinctively sacred way the Qur'an conveys its message:

One key aspect of Qur'anic articulation is the sound figure. The sound figure is particularly subtle. It is developed within particular Suras (intratextually) and across Suras that are widely separated in the written version of the Qur'an (intertextually)...The Qur'anic sound figures occur in connection with three moments: prophecy, creation, and the day of reckoning. These are boundary moments, points of contact between eternal and temporal realms, in which the structures of language (with temporality built into them) are transformed through contact with a realm beyond temporality. In each moment, the Qur'an invokes the spirit (ruh). [p. 185, my emphasis].

What is he talking about? What are examples of these "sound figures?" (E.g., in Sura 97, the Sura of Destiny "al-Qadr" [go to pages 31 and 32]) And are the "sound figures" structures of language that are universally accessible, i.e., for which one need not be a Muslim to see, hear, and experience? Is the expression of ideas through sound figures the Qur'an's distinctively sacred mode of expression? Is this similar or different to the main ways Jews have classically related to the Torah as a sacred scripture?