Critical Studies of Hadith and of Islamic Masculinity: Two Important Frontiers for Future Qur'anic Scholarship

Critical Studies of Hadith and of Islamic MasculinityTwo Important Frontiers for Future Qur'anic Scholarship Yasmin Amin (bio) This roundtable offers frameworks for critical reading, methods for challenging subjectivity and methodological rigidity, strategies for engaging with qurʾanic interpretive traditions, and avenues for conducting rigorous philological, grammatical, rhetorical, and structural analyses. But at least two additional critical and interrelated issues remain to be explored. First, the majority of feminist works separate qurʾanic narratives about women and men and focus on verses that deal with social issues pertaining predominantly to women (most notably Q 2:282, 4:1, 4:34, and 24:31); however, this approach preserves much of the logic on which patriarchy is built. Future feminist scholarship should devote more energy to understanding the construction of masculinity in the Qurʾan and in extra-qurʾanic sources. Second, many studies focus solely on the Qurʾan and its exegesis by employing works from the inherited canon to deconstruct, undermine, or expose inherent gender biases. However, the inherited canon, especially in the traditionally grounded episteme of qurʾanic sciences, consists of interconnected scholarly disciplines. Authors writing in the tafsīr genre use hadith (aḥādīth) to interpret the Qurʾan, but in doing so, they often disregard the painstaking classification system developed over the centuries to discern the authenticity of hadith reports. Future feminist qurʾanic scholarship should critique the misuse of hadith, particularly in instances where the misuse entrenches male privilege and undermines other instances in the Qurʾan which depict an egalitarian ethos in marriage and gender relations more broadly.1 [End Page 75] Over centuries and generations, male scholars have advanced male legislative and scholarly privileges while female interpretive authorities have been marginalized.2 Therefore, to generate more gender-based research that positively affects women's lived realities, the narrow focus on Qurʾan and tafsīr should be widened to reconstruct a more egalitarian, inclusive, and gender-just ethos for qurʾanic scholarship. Given that the Qurʾan constitutes the foundation of Islamic epistemology and given that scholars interpret it through the prophetic Sunna (the reported actions and behaviors of the Prophet Muḥammad), through qiyās (deductive analogy), and through ijmāʿ (consensus), a reexamination of the whole interpretive foundation is paramount. In particular, the abuse of aḥādīth and prophetic sīra (biographical narrations) when used to entrench prevailing gendered hierarchies and bolster discriminatory laws constitutes a complete disregard for the model prophetic legacy. Current and future generations deserve the right to interpret the Qurʾan and thereby also change the laws in the context of their changing lived realities and circumstances, thus restoring the dynamic relationship between reason and consensus.3 As Rahel Fischbach points out in this roundtable, extra-qurʾanic material is historically contested, contradictory, and often inconclusive. As Islamic legal scholar Mohammad Omar Farooq contends, interpretive constructs emanate from fallible humans.4 This renders them changeable in contrast to the Qurʾan itself, which remains unalterable in an Islamic understanding. Using these extra-qurʾanic materials, scholars, at times, disregard the Qurʾan and the prophetic legacy to generate interpretations that advance male privilege. By privileging extra-qurʾanic sources, some scholars effectively transgress the Qurʾan and the prophetic legacy, the two most formative sources of Islamic moral and legal reasoning. Yet, as esteemed historian Aziz Al-Azmeh argues, variant and highly divergent narratives and histories can be constructed from the very same sources.5 In light of these dynamics, a truly integrative approach to the foundational sources—and one that robustly considers the social repercussions of any given line of interpretation—is a needed and beneficial line of inquiry that holds the potential to reform laws and lived realities. [End Page 76] [End Page 77] Yasmin Amin Yasmin Amin is the representative of the Orient-Institut Beirut in Cairo. She is the author of many publications on gender in early Muslim society, culture, literature, and law and is coeditor with Nevin Reda of Islamic Interpretive Tradition and Gender Justice: Processes of Canonization, Subversion and Change (2020), among a multitude of other publications. Amin@orient-institut.org Footnotes 1. For further discussion, see Yasmin Amin, "'Your...