Claims to the Sacred

It makes sense to me that my book Feminist Edges of the Qurʾan could mask the deep ambivalence, theological struggle, and faithful search that produced it. After all, academic books, in order to be published, must read in a tone of assertiveness that may, or perhaps even must, obscure the vulnerability and tentativeness of the transformations entailed in the act of writing them. I had anticipated the problem of this very masking and had attempted to address it in a careful preface to the book. In hindsight, I was perhaps mistaken, as a first-time book author at the start of my career, to imagine that a mere preface, or maybe any well-intentioned efforts of my own, could preempt misunderstandings related to that obfuscation. How else, then, could a reading of my book, such as Asma Barlas’s, draw such bold, demarcating lines around my positions so as to question my standing as a Muslim and attribute my efforts to an anti-Qurʾan stance?

I have asked myself: What are the conditions that produce such misunderstanding? How could such a reading of my book happen at all? What kind of response is Barlas’s? In the field of feminist scholarship about the Qurʾan, can there be a critique of other scholars’ works that does not appear to—or actually—dismiss them? Is it possible to disagree theologically in a manner that builds and edifies? Can we actually talk with each other at all across major disagreements?

Barlas suggests that my engagement with feminist exegesis of the Qurʾan was a detour I could have avoided if I wanted simply to repeat patriarchal assessments of the Qurʾanic text. I submit that it was not a detour but a journey that itself generated the positions I reach in my book, and it was Barlas’s work that in fact helped make Feminist Edges possible. Her work, and that of others I draw upon, forged a path that I have traced and followed in my own way. When I traced that path, it led me to different conclusions that even I did not expect, ones that have suggested to me that a new direction of thinking is needed to step out of a methodological quagmire I point to in feminist exegesis of the Qurʾan. Grappling with feminist Qurʾanic exegesis, of which Barlas is a pioneering scholar, was central to the process that led me to the conclusion that a reassessment of the Qurʾan’s revelatory nature is in order—a position which, I might add, grants me the ability not to abandon the Qurʾan as a sacred text. My mistake, perhaps, was in hoping that my contributions in Feminist Edges might be readily seen as an expansion of feminist work on the Qurʾan, as a critical and deeply felt tribute to the groundbreaking work of my predecessors, rather than a dismissal of it. I now fear the consequences of this miscalculation, and I am left asking what this might imply about the field.

In Feminist Edges, I am careful not to claim that the Qurʾan is an intractably patriarchal text. I argue that the application of feminist exegetical methods to the Qurʾan has reached an impasse from our vantage point as contemporary readers. Both the Qurʾan’s egalitarian and hierarchical meanings are significant elements of the text that exist alongside each other, and I am unconvinced that we can find clear support in the text itself for privileging either set of meanings over the other. This means we cannot definitively establish that the Qurʾanic text coheres with contemporary values of male-female equality. I reach—with an anguish that perhaps cannot register with every reader—a place of uncertainty about the text’s reconcilability with contemporary values of male-female equality. This is a deeply engaged (or what I call “radical”) uncertainty, which has led to some theological disorientations for me as a Muslim that, while very painful for me to bear, also free me to be hopeful that one can cope with and...