Woman’s Identity and the Qur’an: A New Reading (review)

In Woman’s Identity and the Qur’an: A New Reading, Nimat Hafez Barazangi states that she wishes to “generate a shift in the discourse of Islamic studies, Muslim women’s studies, and Islamic pedagogy, a shift that is at once theoretical and practical” (ix). This is a work of scholarship-activism, in which scholarly concerns are shaped by a desire to affect current practices. Barazangi focuses much of her discussion on the need for “self-identification” with the Qur’an. The self-identified Muslim is one who “recaptures the meaning and the practice of being a Muslim by choice; who intimately accesses (without any intermediary), consciously understands, and rationally interprets the Qur’anic text using its own rules” (24). By actively identifying and engaging with the Qur’an, she says, Muslim women in particular will cease to be seen, and to see themselves, as passive receptors of learning, and will actively create new interpretations that reflect their own circumstances. Key to her argument is the concept that Qur’anic interpretation must change according to time and place.

In the early chapters of the book, Barazangi describes what she sees as the problem of women’s lack of participation in interpreting the text of the Qur’an, and argues that the Qur’an itself encourages all humans to participate actively in interpretation. Chapter 2 is a reinterpretation of the story of creation as told in Sura 4:1 (fear your Lord, who created you from a single soul, and from it created its mate), to be a statement of human equality before God. Chapter 3 is a description of how male interpreters have held that women have a “proxy morality” in which their main source of salvation is obedience to their husbands, rather than their actions as individuals regardless of the marital bond. In chapter 4, she critiques the view, common in Muslim discourse today, that men’s and women’s roles are complementary rather than equal. Her final chapter deals with curriculum development, which is beyond my area of expertise and will not be reviewed here.

There is much in this New Reading to interest scholars of Islamic studies and gender studies. The author consistently speaks of the need for a context-based interpretation, but rather than identifying “context” as specific locations, she seems to imagine it to be contained in the consciousness of individual readers. Her approach is unusual for the importance she places on the individual’s relationship with the Qur’an, which, in her view, supersedes considerations of history and previous generations of interpreters. This sometimes leads her to the fairly radical step of questioning the Prophet’s behavior. For instance, the Prophet is reported to have said, “We [prophets] do not have heirs,” which meant that Fatima did not inherit from him. Barazangi describes this as an occasion when women were excluded from “leadership and knowledge construction” (41). She interprets the hadith as a reference not to monetary inheritance, but to monarchy, and says that she is “concerned” that the Prophet did not tell his wives or daughters of “such an important ruling, assuming that the narration is accurate” (41). She also critiques the understanding of the Prophet’s wife ‘A’isha, who, according to Barazangi, did not apply “Qur’anic pedagogy” because “she did not change her prior conception of women being in competition to gain the favor of the males in their household” (130). In Barazangi’s view, there is either a problem in the narration of many of the stories regarding the Prophet’s household a. airs, or there was a problem in the way that his household a. airs were conducted.

One of the most engaging elements of this book is Barazangi’s direct confrontation of the belief prominent in commentaries today regarding “proxy morality,” in which husbands are responsible for their wives’ moral standing, and the roles of the sexes are complementary rather than...