Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence (review)

Kecia Ali’s book, Sexual Ethics and Islam, is an unblinking examination of tensions that arise when contemporary Muslims confront the most painful issues concerning sex and gender in the interpretive history of their revelatory sources. Unlike many lay and academic scholars who have written engaged critiques of these explosive issues in the past, Ali’s analysis is firmly rooted in textual study of the history of Islamic jurisprudence. Ali typically limits her discussion to topics in, or closely related to, her area of specialized knowledge, particularly Imam al-Shafi‘i’s work. Her command of the material evinces the wisdom of a scholar—to put it in age-old terms—who knows what she knows and what she does not know. Thus when she steps away to consider matters outside her area, such as female genital mutilation, the reader has reason to continue to trust her intellectual judgment.

Ali further sets herself apart by refusing to cover over, selectively quote, or apologize for what she finds in the sources to suit anyone’s agenda. Her rigorous, insightful, and intellectually honest treatment of the sources pays off when she turns to examine the various attempts by contemporary Muslims to resolve the ethical incongruity they experience in their own engagement of the sources. She deftly exposes the weaknesses in these contemporary texts (both in print and online). There is enormous pleasure in watching her cut back layer after layer of foolishness, hypocrisy, and plain bad thinking in their responses. No reader will confuse Ali’s finality of purpose. More so the case, because she extends the very same intellectual acuity to identifying whatever strengths the responses have to offer. Her work proves itself to be a constructive resource for a more ethical and effective critique of sexuality and gender in Islam. Cries of the heart aside, the gender justice movement in Islam needs more such scrupulous scholarship and fewer jeremiads if it is going to have continuing impact.

Ali locates three key intentions for pursuing constructive interpretation: the need to acknowledge complexity within the Muslim tradition, the need to take responsibility for one’s interpretive choices, and the need to take theological issues seriously. Contemporary Muslim scholars and lay people of all stripes have typically given short shrift to the complexity of the intellectual tradition by laying claim to or rejecting its supposed interpretative authoritarianism. Ali counters these approaches with a well argued account of the diversity of opinion and the subtlety of premodern legal interpretation and thus its continued potential as a resource for contemporary thought. But it is no romantic call for a reinstatement of once-pure tradition.

Likewise, Ali points out the tradition’s glaring self-contradictions and weaknesses. She thus calls on contemporary Muslims to take responsibility for their own engagement of the intellectual tradition, which includes continuing to develop new paths of interpretation. Some matters, such as female consent, are irresolvable within the present interpretive boundaries. Further, any honest reading of the Qur’an in keeping with contemporary egalitarian norms must account for such knotty theological matters as the liberal use of androcentric language in the Qur’an. Ali shows that such language is so ineluctably woven into the Qur’an that it cannot be dismissed as mere rhetoric suited to the time of revelation or as simply misread by sexist interpreters.

With Sexual Ethics and Islam, Ali has become a pivotal thinker in her generation of American Muslim feminist scholars. Her work has been and will continue to be frustrating to those who would prefer the rootless certainty of categorical thinking. For the rest of us, her work stands as a motivating resource to think effectively about gender.