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  • "… and say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty"Teaching about Islam, Gender, and the Law
  • Mary Ann Fay (bio)

Many of the students who come to my classes in Middle East history, including my courses on the history of women and gender, would not find much in the above excerpt from the Qur'an to challenge their preconceptions of women in the Islamic world or of Islamic society generally. Bombarded as they are by media depictions of Islamic society as violent and misogynistic, they could very well read the verse as confirmation of the media image of Muslim women forced into niqabs or burqas that conceal everything but their eyes and deprived of such basic rights as education, work, property ownership, and even the right to drive a car. However, while students might not be surprised by the Qur'anic injunction to women to be "modest" and "lower their gaze," they are usually not prepared for the preceding verse, which is directed at believing men who are also enjoined to "lower their gaze" and be modest.1 If both men and women are required to be modest, then students should consider that the Qur'an is describing the ideal society that Muslim men and women should build together, one that requires both men and women to avoid eye contact, provocative clothing, and situations that might lead to sexual encounters outside the bounds of legal marriage. Notice also that the verses are directed to "believing men" and "believing women" and not to the universal male subject "believers" accompanied by male pronouns and masculine forms of the verbs. The Qur'an addresses women directly, which, according to the Qur'anic scholar Asma Barlas, is an example of the sexual equality and general egalitarianism she believes exists in Islam.2

The two verses, or ayat, cited above are numbers 30 and 31 from sura, or chapter, 24 of an English translation of the Qur'an, although it is mostly from the surat al-nisa', the chapter of the women, that I have chosen most of the eleven verses that I use in my courses and present to my students for critical reading and interpretation. The Qur'an is accessible in English translations such as the one I use by A. Yusuf `Ali.3 By reading, discussing, and interpreting these verses together, my students become acquainted with Islam's sacred text, believed by Muslims to have been revealed to the Prophet Muhammad between the first revelation in 610 CE and his death in 632. They also become aware of the rights that the Qur'an accords to women and the fact that there are sometimes multiple interpretations of such key verses as the ones about modest dress or polygamy. The issue of [End Page 136] interpretation provides an extremely important teachable moment because it goes to the heart of a crucial issue in Islamic society: Who speaks for Muslims and where does religious authority in Islam reside?

The context for the Qur'an and the selected verses is the history of the Prophet Muhammad, the emergence and spread of Islam in Arabia and the development of shari`a or Islamic law. The Qur'an and shari`a should be discussed together because the Qur'an is the most important source of the law. It is also necessary to historicize and contextualize Islamic law about which there are so many misconceptions, including the erroneous view that there is one codified Islamic law in force everywhere in the Islamic world and that one group or individual has the authority to speak for all Muslims. In fact, there are four schools of Sunni law and a Shi`a school of law, and there are important differences among them. There are also multiple poles of Islamic authority including the Grand Muftis in Sunni Islamic countries and the Ayatollahs among the Shi`a but no one comparable to the Catholic pope, for example, who speaks with undisputed authority on faith and doctrine. Islamic law was never the sole legal system in the Islamic empires that rose and fell in the Middle East. Tribal law did not completely disappear and Christians and...

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