In Defense of Historical-Critical Analysis of the Qurʾan

In her introductory essay to this roundtable, feminist Muslim scholar Asma Barlas is addressing other feminist Muslim scholars. From the outside, one might imagine that scholars who have the shared ambition of practicing Islam in a way that is gender egalitarian might also share perspectives on the Qurʾan, but Barlas’s piece highlights the differences between them. Here, Barlas aims a barrage of accusations at her fellow feminist Muslims, culminating in her declaration that they cannot be observant Muslims and that their method raises doubts about whether the Qurʾan is the word of God. Barlas not only raises the question of what it means to be a Muslim feminist but also goes beyond it. For me, the larger issue is how the Qurʾan is read and interpreted, particularly in an academic context. Are traditional readings of the text “anti-Qurʾanic”? Should feminist Muslims take a certain stance, as Barlas seems to insist they must, so as not to feed Islamophobia? And is this a “time of ideological conflicts between Western secularism and Islam” (117), as Barlas states in her piece? All of these questions hinge on the issue of whether Muslim responses to the text of the Qurʾan are (or should) ultimately be characterized by a particular argument or method. My answer, contrary to Barlas’s, is “no.” It is important to preserve a space in which all scholars are free to use whatever tools they deem helpful for understanding the Qurʾan, including commonly accepted scholarly approaches, such as historical and philological analysis, and not to limit the scholarly endeavor to a particular conclusion or set of conclusions.

What has always puzzled me about the liberatory approach to the Qurʾan is that by pursuing one specific vision of “liberation” and thereby ignoring or reinterpreting certain verses, the liberatory approach seems to ignore the full scope of justice and ethics that exist in the text. I have argued elsewhere that the Qurʾan advocates a system of “just rule” in the household.¹ To my mind, none of the Qurʾan’s verses are “anti-woman”; rather, the verses exhort the husband, who is in charge of the marriage, to treat his wife kindly and fairly. In a sense, the wife is like a subject under the husband’s rule (an analogy not lost on medieval commentators), and precisely because he holds power over her, he must be fair and just (4:34). To read some of the verses as though they are in conflict with others seems, to me, to discount the cohesiveness of the text; that is why I would see some traditional readings of the text not as anti-Qurʾanic but rather as reflecting realities in the text of the Qurʾan, which in turn expresses common premodern ideas about gender roles. To state, as Barlas does, that the text makes no reference to sex or gender inequality, is to ignore the verses that enshrine such inequality: two women for one man in testimony (2:282) and inheritance (4:11), wives being tilth for their husbands (2:223), men having sexual access to slave concubines (“what the right hand possesses”), and husbands having more than one wife (4:3). For Barlas, these are isolated verses that should not be taken to represent the Qurʾan as a whole; to me, they are part and parcel of the unified vision of sex roles in the Qurʾan, which also includes verses that speak of men and women as spiritual equals (33:35) and refer to the closeness and loving bond between spouses (30:21).

I am a textual scholar and not a theologian, so it is perhaps natural that I prefer a historical reading of the text. Yet many who have a theological interest also wish to access what the text might have meant to its original audience (and subsequent audiences). This approach is opposite to Barlas’s. For her, “how we read scripture eventually has to do with faith and that faith is inviolably personal” (120); she asserts that “the oversight is ours in...