“Confine Your Women!”: Diachronic Development of Islamic Interpretive Discourse on the Creation of Woman

Abstract

This article explores the diachronic development of Islamic interpretive discourse on the Qurʾanic passage khalaqakum min nafsin wāḥidatin wa-khalaqa minhā zawjahā, present in the first verse of Sūrat al-Nisāʾ and conventionally understood as the creation of the primeval couple, Adam and Eve. The analyses, performed within a theoretical framework of feminist discourse analysis, focus on ten medieval Sunni commentaries (tafāsīr) from the late third/ninth to the ninth/fifteenth centuries. The study reveals that the concept of nafs wāḥida, single soul, was interpreted as the first man, Adam, and the mate created from this soul, zawj, as Eve, the latter being created from the former’s rib in all the exegetic accounts examined. These elaborated exegetic suppositions on human creation were strengthened throughout the classical period of tafsīr. Interpretive information both accumulated and transformed in Islamic interpretive tradition through three discursive stages, characterised as normativisation, consolidation, and expanding the concept.