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A review by misspalah
Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an by Asma Barlas
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
More than that, it also assumes that in order to be men's awliya, women must have the freedom, right, and authority to be able to guide them and be their "custodians." In other words, the notion of mutual guardianship presupposes a structure of male-female authority that does not privilege males. As things stand, however, a majority of Muslims read another Qur'änic injunction as saying that men are "in charge" of women and their guardians. However, to accept this interpretation—which can be questioned on various grounds (as I argue in chapter 7)—would mean letting go of the truly radical nature of the concept of awliya' and its far-reaching social ramifications for how men's authority could be structured in Muslim societies. Even though the Qur'änic conception of mutuality that is explicit in the term awliya' necessitates an absence of gender hierarchies and inequalities based in the idea of sexual differentiation, Muslims continue to read all three (hierarchy, inequality, and differentiation) into the Qur'än by differentiating between the moral and the social realms. They concede that the Qur'än treats women and men similarly, hence equally, in the moral realm (conceived as the realm of worship, or 'ibadah), but they argue that the Qur'än treats women and men differently, hence unequally, in the social realms by giving them different kinds of rights in marriage, divorce, and so on.
- The Quran, Sex/Gender and Sexuality : Believing Women in Islam - Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of Quran by Asma Barlas
.
.
Excellent book, I must say. Asma Barlas left no stone unturned in her research to unread patriarchal interpretation of the Quran. The book consisted 8 chapters which analysed Quran in its textual, epistemological and together with critical outlooks from philosophical, both conservative and feminism POV. Asma encouraged Muslims to not simply accept the current translation of Quran which mostly served the agenda of Muslim Men at that time but to re-learn why it was being interpreted in that manner and how some has been misogynistic in nature despite Quran prohibition on decoding its message wrongly. While Quran strongly preserved the status for both men and women equal specifically in terms of ‘Ibadah’ and ‘good deed’ but some men decided to insert their agenda of highlighting that women status and action is somehow inferior. They are being emboldened by some (questionable) Hadith, Ijma and Ijtima rulings that used to further the agenda of pushing women further behind - specifically in resuming the Patriarchal Interpretation of the Quran and masking it as God’s exact word. I truly believe that this book should re-read for a second time as there are some parts that are too technical especially when they discussed the exegesis of the Quran. I still have to applaud the author’s attempt in simplifying some of the methods on how to comprehend the literal text of the Quran to the readers. She also put on a discourse on why the context could have meant different things which honestly such an eye opening analysis. BUT As Much as i want to elaborate each chapter, i believe i may do the disservice towards her concise dissection on the Patriarchal Aspect of the Quran. What i would do below this is to share some excerpts in each chapter to show how brilliant her writing in trying to untangle the complexity of the Qur'anic hermeneutics. Overall, A must read for muslim women who’ve wanted to ask and discuss certain things in the Quran but afraid that their questions might caused a controversy - I truly believe Asma Barlas wrote this book for us.
.
.
1. The Qur'än and Muslim Women:
Reading Patriarchy, Reading Liberation
- [ ] If we need to keep in mind the historical contexts of the Qur'än's revelation in order to understand its teachings, we also need to keep in mind the historical contexts of its interpretations in order to understand its conservative and patriarchal exegesis. The most definitive work—not only in Qur'änic exegesis but also in law and Islamic/Muslim tradition-is considered by many Muslims to have been produced during the first few centuries of Muslim history. Here it is important to note that what is nominally called "the" Islamic tradition has many, and sometimes contradictory, tendencies within it and is, moreover, "a synthetic rather than a 'natural' product, bearing clear signs of selective endorsement," as al-Ghazali argued in the twelfth century. In this context, he pointed out that traditions do not pass into the present "unprocessed and unmediated... Instead, someone has to make decisions about which aspects of the past are non-essential and thus allowed to drop out, and which elements of the present are consistent with the past and thus eligible for admission into the sanctum of tradition" (quoted in Jackson 2002, 20, 24). The reason Muslims seemed not to recognize this fact, according to al-Ghazali, had less to do with the imitativeness of tradition itself than with "that blindness that condemns people to being led around by others (taglid)" (Jackson, 88.)
.
2. Texts and Textualities: The Qurän, Tafsir, and Ahadith
- [ ] As a result, legal norms often came to be based on the opinions of the Prophets Companions, even when these opinions were not based on his Sunnah. Not only does the Shariah not always adhere to the Sunnah, then, but it embodies "medieval principles of reason and objects of public good that may no longer be valid today" (An-Naim 1990, 71). For instance, its restrictive stance on human rights may have been "justified by the historical context, [but] it ceases to be so justified in the present drastically different context" (170). Also, implementing the Sharlah can curtail the rights not only of women under secular law but also those of men due to the extensive power given to political and state rulers (9). We therefore need to rethink the Shariah, says An-Naim, a process that is of special concern to women because its hold is "strongest in family law [due to] the greater degree of detailed regulation of these fields in the Quran and Sun-nah" (32).20 Rethinking the Sharah requires clarifying the "Islamicity" of certain principles, and one way to do so is to make sure that they are "con-sistent with the totality of the Quran and Sunnah"; the problem, however, is that there are inconsistencies between "certain verses of the Quran and Sunnah" (45). Mahmud Mohamed Taha," as An-Naim argues, believed that the tensions can be resolved by drawing on the Meccan surahs, which embody "the fundamental values of justice and the equality and inherent dignity of all human beings" (Taha 1987, 54). According to Taha, it was only in the aftermath of the Prophet's migration to Madina that the Qur'än and Sunnah "began to distinguish between men and women," and it is in this period that the Qur'än's "discriminatory verses" were revealed. This is why he wanted Muslims to implement the Meccan surahs, which jurists view as having been abrogated.
.
3. Intertextualities, Extratextual Contexts:
The Sunnah, Sharỉ'ah, and the State
- [ ] In effect, the method Muslims sacralize as Islamic nullifies the distinction Muslim theology has always made between "divine speech and its earthly realization." This so-called Islamic method collapses the Qur'än with its male-authored exegesis, displacing the Qur'än's authority by the authority of (conservative) male exegetes. In this way, it confuses God's authority with the authority of interpreters of sacred knowledge, thus infringing on the cardinal tenet of God's absolute sovereignty, a function of Gods indivisible unity (Tawhia).Ironically, like other aspects of religious knowledge, this method of interpreting the Qur'än began as the opposite of what it eventually became. It originated in attempts—by the ubiquitous al-Shafi in the second/eighth century—to make the Sunnah paradigmatic, but it ended up generating a paradigm that enabled its users to further their own hegemony instead. For al-Shafi, the problem was how to authorize interpretive variations within an Islamic framework. His solution was to link variations to the same textual sources: the Qur'än and the Sunnah. However, the use of this inter-textual method in the hands of various schools in the following centuries came to preclude variations, for reasons that Wheeler (1996) considers in detail but which are too complex to condense meaningfully here. The point is that a method devised to protect the integrity of the Qur'än and the Sunnah instead enabled its users to extend "authority from a posited [canonical text)" to themselves thus permitting them to install "a paradigm that authorizes [their] own interpretive privilege" (237, 226). This method has developed into a system of scholarly lineage, or nasab, in which one's authority derives not so much from knowledge of the subject matter or the merits of one's work as from one's association with a specific interpretive community and one's acceptance of a thin consensus of medieval jurists. It also rests on an epistemology that, by confusing divine speech with its human interpretations, undermines the doctrine of Tawhid and enables and legitimizes the displacement of misogyny onto the divine.
.
4. The Patriarchal Imaginary of Father/s:
Divine Ontology and the Prophets
- [ ] Given the Qur'än's unrelenting rejections of God's sacralization as Father, it seems unconscionable to read Islam as a theological patriarchy. If God can only be a patriarch or God can only be patriarchalized—to the extent that God can, in fact, be sacralized as Father-then how can God's self-disclosure in the Qur'än be interpreted as providing the basis for either patriarchalized views of God or theories of father-right/rule based in such views? If God is not Father in Heaven in either a literal or a symbolic sense, how can fathers represent their rule on earth as replicating the model of divine patriarchy? And if—as the Qur'än makes clear—we cannot represent fathers' rule as replicating God's rule, in what sense is God "on the side" of fathers or of patriarchy? Indeed, if God is not father, son, or hus-band, in what sense is God male ("He")? Ironically, while Muslims reject misrepresentations of God as father/ male, most see no problem in continuing to masculinize God linguistically and to propagate, on the basis of their linguistic references, theories of male rule/privilege over women. One therefore needs to inquire into the paradox of masculinist conceptions of God and the idea of a symbolic continuum between God's rule and man's in the absence of the Qur'änic view of God as Father/male.
.
5. Abraham's Sacrifice in the Qur'än:
Beyond the Body
- [ ] It is within the context of these teachings that I understand God's rescue of Abraham from his father, and of Abraham's son from him, and I consider the two to be very different. For one, the sons and fathers could not be more different themselves. Both sons, for instance, are monotheists, but one falls victim to his unbelieving father's depredations, while the other submits of his own volition to the God of his fathers. Both face death, but for different reasons and at the hands of very different fathers. One father (Abraham's) tries to kill his son for his faith, and the son has no choice in the matter. In contrast, the other father (Abraham), while also ready to sacrifice his son as a matter of faith, can only proceed with it at his son's expressed wish. If these differences did not exist, Abraham would have been no different from his own father, and the story of his near-sacrifice of his son would have proved little more than the omnipotence of fathers in patriarchies. How-ever, the morals of the two stories are not the same, and that is the second way in which they are different. One reveals an outright conflict between obeying God and obeying fathers, especially those who are "devoid of wisdom and guidance" (2:170 [Ali, 67]). The message of the other story is that in order for God's will to be done, believers must submit to it voluntarily. And since God is not Father, one cannot view God's rule (monotheism) as a divine surrogate for father's rule (patriarchy). To the contrary, and borrowing from Derrida (1995), there is an "insoluble and paradoxical contradic-tion" between father's rule and God's rule. That is why Abraham's story can be read as "a moral allegory about the consensual and purposive nature of Faith, its primacy over kinship and blood, the existential dilemmas that can result from submitting to God's Will (specially where it comes into conflict with one's own life, and, not least, the insignificance of the father's will in comparison to God's Will" (Barlas 2002, 116).
.
6. The Qur'än, Sex/Gender, and Sexuality: Sameness, Difference, Equality
- [ ] It seems that sex as presented in the Qur'än is an ontological as well as a sociological category; at the same time, however, the Qur'än does not use sex to construct ontological or sociological hierarchies that discriminate against women. Thus, the Quãn recognizes sexual differences, but it does not adhere to a view of sexual dif ferentiation; put differently, the Qurän recognizes sexual specificity but does not assign it gender symbolism.18 Since the Qur'än does not invest biological sex with content or meaning, being male or female does not in itself suggest a particular meaning of gender. And to the extent that it is difficult to theorize a determinate relationship between sex and gender based on the Qur'än's teachings, it is also incorrect to claim that it ascribes sex/ gender hierarchies or inequalities to biological sex. Conversely, while the Qur'än recognizes sexual differences, it does not sexualize difference itself; in other words, it does not define women in terms of attributes that are unique only to women, or suggest that they are opposites of men or that they manifest the lower aspects of creation. Nor does it define men in terms of attributes that are unique only to men,° or suggest that they are opposites of women or that they alone manifest the higher aspects of creation. Indeed, Wadud (1999, xxi) argues that there is no "concept of woman" or of "gendered man" in the Qurän. As such, whatever differences exist between women and men "could not indicate an inherent value" because, if they did, the concept of "free will would be meaningless" (35).
.
7. The Family and Marriage: Retrieving the Qur'än's Egalitarianism
- [ ] In fact, it is questionable whether daraba actually refers to striking a wife, even symbolically. Rafi Ullah Shahab (1993, 231), for instance, says daraba also means "to prevent." On his reading, the ayah is telling the husbands to "leave [the wives] alone in their beds and prevent them from going outside of houses." In support of his reading, he points out that the Qur'än provides for similar treatment of lewd wives in 4:15. However, while Shahab reads the ayah as pertaining to lewd behavior, Hassan (1999, 355) has an entirely different understanding, not only of daraba, but of the second half of the ayah as well. She argues that the word "salihat, which is translated as righteously obedient,' is related to the word salahiat, which means 'capability' or 'potentiality,' and not obedience." As such, she takes it to be a reference to women's child-bearing potential, suggested also by the word ganität, which refers not only to obedience but also to a water container (a metaphor for the womb). She thus reads this ayah as referring to "women's role as child-bearers" and argues that only if all the women rebel against this role must they be disciplined by the community, not their husbands. This does not imply random acts of violence, however, because in a "legal context" the word daraba "means 'holding in confinement" (Hassan, 355-56). Her reading not only accords with Shahab's interpretation of daraba as confinement, but it is also more in line with the Qur'än's counsel to husbands to deal kindly with their wives, even those who are their enemies or whom they hate.
.
8. Secular-/Feminism and the Qur'än
- [ ] Ali cites Farid Esack's observation that the Qur'än's "essen-tial audience is males," while women "are essentially subjects being dealt with—however kindly—rather than being directly addressed" (quoted in Ali 2006, 125-26). However, whereas Esack calls women "subjects" even in such instances, Ali argues that the Qur'än objectifies and otherizes them. Neither one, however, defines what they mean by "subjects." However, if what makes men subjects is that the Qur'än speaks to them, then it speaks to women as well. If, on the other hand, what makes men subjects is that the Qur'än speaks to men about women, then those yat are less than o.1 percent of the text. Moreover, it speaks to men "in the present or present continuous tense, as if they already are in authority over women, and not in the imperative or future tense, as if they should always be so" (Barlas 2008, 25; italics in the original). For the Qur'än to have recognized where authority resided in the patriarchy to which it first spoke is not evidence that God treats women as objects. After all, God made both men and women khalifa (vice-regents) and one another's awliya' (custodians, guides, protectors). If anything, the Qur'än's teachings about moral individuality assume that men and women are both "epistemological, thinking subjects" and selves who are the "locus of subjective experience";" that is, individuated, self-reflexive people capable of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. If Ali has a different understanding of what it means to be a subject, she should clarify it. Or, she could explain why both subjects and objects would be called khalifa and awliya'.
- The Quran, Sex/Gender and Sexuality : Believing Women in Islam - Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of Quran by Asma Barlas
.
.
Excellent book, I must say. Asma Barlas left no stone unturned in her research to unread patriarchal interpretation of the Quran. The book consisted 8 chapters which analysed Quran in its textual, epistemological and together with critical outlooks from philosophical, both conservative and feminism POV. Asma encouraged Muslims to not simply accept the current translation of Quran which mostly served the agenda of Muslim Men at that time but to re-learn why it was being interpreted in that manner and how some has been misogynistic in nature despite Quran prohibition on decoding its message wrongly. While Quran strongly preserved the status for both men and women equal specifically in terms of ‘Ibadah’ and ‘good deed’ but some men decided to insert their agenda of highlighting that women status and action is somehow inferior. They are being emboldened by some (questionable) Hadith, Ijma and Ijtima rulings that used to further the agenda of pushing women further behind - specifically in resuming the Patriarchal Interpretation of the Quran and masking it as God’s exact word. I truly believe that this book should re-read for a second time as there are some parts that are too technical especially when they discussed the exegesis of the Quran. I still have to applaud the author’s attempt in simplifying some of the methods on how to comprehend the literal text of the Quran to the readers. She also put on a discourse on why the context could have meant different things which honestly such an eye opening analysis. BUT As Much as i want to elaborate each chapter, i believe i may do the disservice towards her concise dissection on the Patriarchal Aspect of the Quran. What i would do below this is to share some excerpts in each chapter to show how brilliant her writing in trying to untangle the complexity of the Qur'anic hermeneutics. Overall, A must read for muslim women who’ve wanted to ask and discuss certain things in the Quran but afraid that their questions might caused a controversy - I truly believe Asma Barlas wrote this book for us.
.
.
1. The Qur'än and Muslim Women:
Reading Patriarchy, Reading Liberation
- [ ] If we need to keep in mind the historical contexts of the Qur'än's revelation in order to understand its teachings, we also need to keep in mind the historical contexts of its interpretations in order to understand its conservative and patriarchal exegesis. The most definitive work—not only in Qur'änic exegesis but also in law and Islamic/Muslim tradition-is considered by many Muslims to have been produced during the first few centuries of Muslim history. Here it is important to note that what is nominally called "the" Islamic tradition has many, and sometimes contradictory, tendencies within it and is, moreover, "a synthetic rather than a 'natural' product, bearing clear signs of selective endorsement," as al-Ghazali argued in the twelfth century. In this context, he pointed out that traditions do not pass into the present "unprocessed and unmediated... Instead, someone has to make decisions about which aspects of the past are non-essential and thus allowed to drop out, and which elements of the present are consistent with the past and thus eligible for admission into the sanctum of tradition" (quoted in Jackson 2002, 20, 24). The reason Muslims seemed not to recognize this fact, according to al-Ghazali, had less to do with the imitativeness of tradition itself than with "that blindness that condemns people to being led around by others (taglid)" (Jackson, 88.)
.
2. Texts and Textualities: The Qurän, Tafsir, and Ahadith
- [ ] As a result, legal norms often came to be based on the opinions of the Prophets Companions, even when these opinions were not based on his Sunnah. Not only does the Shariah not always adhere to the Sunnah, then, but it embodies "medieval principles of reason and objects of public good that may no longer be valid today" (An-Naim 1990, 71). For instance, its restrictive stance on human rights may have been "justified by the historical context, [but] it ceases to be so justified in the present drastically different context" (170). Also, implementing the Sharlah can curtail the rights not only of women under secular law but also those of men due to the extensive power given to political and state rulers (9). We therefore need to rethink the Shariah, says An-Naim, a process that is of special concern to women because its hold is "strongest in family law [due to] the greater degree of detailed regulation of these fields in the Quran and Sun-nah" (32).20 Rethinking the Sharah requires clarifying the "Islamicity" of certain principles, and one way to do so is to make sure that they are "con-sistent with the totality of the Quran and Sunnah"; the problem, however, is that there are inconsistencies between "certain verses of the Quran and Sunnah" (45). Mahmud Mohamed Taha," as An-Naim argues, believed that the tensions can be resolved by drawing on the Meccan surahs, which embody "the fundamental values of justice and the equality and inherent dignity of all human beings" (Taha 1987, 54). According to Taha, it was only in the aftermath of the Prophet's migration to Madina that the Qur'än and Sunnah "began to distinguish between men and women," and it is in this period that the Qur'än's "discriminatory verses" were revealed. This is why he wanted Muslims to implement the Meccan surahs, which jurists view as having been abrogated.
.
3. Intertextualities, Extratextual Contexts:
The Sunnah, Sharỉ'ah, and the State
- [ ] In effect, the method Muslims sacralize as Islamic nullifies the distinction Muslim theology has always made between "divine speech and its earthly realization." This so-called Islamic method collapses the Qur'än with its male-authored exegesis, displacing the Qur'än's authority by the authority of (conservative) male exegetes. In this way, it confuses God's authority with the authority of interpreters of sacred knowledge, thus infringing on the cardinal tenet of God's absolute sovereignty, a function of Gods indivisible unity (Tawhia).Ironically, like other aspects of religious knowledge, this method of interpreting the Qur'än began as the opposite of what it eventually became. It originated in attempts—by the ubiquitous al-Shafi in the second/eighth century—to make the Sunnah paradigmatic, but it ended up generating a paradigm that enabled its users to further their own hegemony instead. For al-Shafi, the problem was how to authorize interpretive variations within an Islamic framework. His solution was to link variations to the same textual sources: the Qur'än and the Sunnah. However, the use of this inter-textual method in the hands of various schools in the following centuries came to preclude variations, for reasons that Wheeler (1996) considers in detail but which are too complex to condense meaningfully here. The point is that a method devised to protect the integrity of the Qur'än and the Sunnah instead enabled its users to extend "authority from a posited [canonical text)" to themselves thus permitting them to install "a paradigm that authorizes [their] own interpretive privilege" (237, 226). This method has developed into a system of scholarly lineage, or nasab, in which one's authority derives not so much from knowledge of the subject matter or the merits of one's work as from one's association with a specific interpretive community and one's acceptance of a thin consensus of medieval jurists. It also rests on an epistemology that, by confusing divine speech with its human interpretations, undermines the doctrine of Tawhid and enables and legitimizes the displacement of misogyny onto the divine.
.
4. The Patriarchal Imaginary of Father/s:
Divine Ontology and the Prophets
- [ ] Given the Qur'än's unrelenting rejections of God's sacralization as Father, it seems unconscionable to read Islam as a theological patriarchy. If God can only be a patriarch or God can only be patriarchalized—to the extent that God can, in fact, be sacralized as Father-then how can God's self-disclosure in the Qur'än be interpreted as providing the basis for either patriarchalized views of God or theories of father-right/rule based in such views? If God is not Father in Heaven in either a literal or a symbolic sense, how can fathers represent their rule on earth as replicating the model of divine patriarchy? And if—as the Qur'än makes clear—we cannot represent fathers' rule as replicating God's rule, in what sense is God "on the side" of fathers or of patriarchy? Indeed, if God is not father, son, or hus-band, in what sense is God male ("He")? Ironically, while Muslims reject misrepresentations of God as father/ male, most see no problem in continuing to masculinize God linguistically and to propagate, on the basis of their linguistic references, theories of male rule/privilege over women. One therefore needs to inquire into the paradox of masculinist conceptions of God and the idea of a symbolic continuum between God's rule and man's in the absence of the Qur'änic view of God as Father/male.
.
5. Abraham's Sacrifice in the Qur'än:
Beyond the Body
- [ ] It is within the context of these teachings that I understand God's rescue of Abraham from his father, and of Abraham's son from him, and I consider the two to be very different. For one, the sons and fathers could not be more different themselves. Both sons, for instance, are monotheists, but one falls victim to his unbelieving father's depredations, while the other submits of his own volition to the God of his fathers. Both face death, but for different reasons and at the hands of very different fathers. One father (Abraham's) tries to kill his son for his faith, and the son has no choice in the matter. In contrast, the other father (Abraham), while also ready to sacrifice his son as a matter of faith, can only proceed with it at his son's expressed wish. If these differences did not exist, Abraham would have been no different from his own father, and the story of his near-sacrifice of his son would have proved little more than the omnipotence of fathers in patriarchies. How-ever, the morals of the two stories are not the same, and that is the second way in which they are different. One reveals an outright conflict between obeying God and obeying fathers, especially those who are "devoid of wisdom and guidance" (2:170 [Ali, 67]). The message of the other story is that in order for God's will to be done, believers must submit to it voluntarily. And since God is not Father, one cannot view God's rule (monotheism) as a divine surrogate for father's rule (patriarchy). To the contrary, and borrowing from Derrida (1995), there is an "insoluble and paradoxical contradic-tion" between father's rule and God's rule. That is why Abraham's story can be read as "a moral allegory about the consensual and purposive nature of Faith, its primacy over kinship and blood, the existential dilemmas that can result from submitting to God's Will (specially where it comes into conflict with one's own life, and, not least, the insignificance of the father's will in comparison to God's Will" (Barlas 2002, 116).
.
6. The Qur'än, Sex/Gender, and Sexuality: Sameness, Difference, Equality
- [ ] It seems that sex as presented in the Qur'än is an ontological as well as a sociological category; at the same time, however, the Qur'än does not use sex to construct ontological or sociological hierarchies that discriminate against women. Thus, the Quãn recognizes sexual differences, but it does not adhere to a view of sexual dif ferentiation; put differently, the Qurän recognizes sexual specificity but does not assign it gender symbolism.18 Since the Qur'än does not invest biological sex with content or meaning, being male or female does not in itself suggest a particular meaning of gender. And to the extent that it is difficult to theorize a determinate relationship between sex and gender based on the Qur'än's teachings, it is also incorrect to claim that it ascribes sex/ gender hierarchies or inequalities to biological sex. Conversely, while the Qur'än recognizes sexual differences, it does not sexualize difference itself; in other words, it does not define women in terms of attributes that are unique only to women, or suggest that they are opposites of men or that they manifest the lower aspects of creation. Nor does it define men in terms of attributes that are unique only to men,° or suggest that they are opposites of women or that they alone manifest the higher aspects of creation. Indeed, Wadud (1999, xxi) argues that there is no "concept of woman" or of "gendered man" in the Qurän. As such, whatever differences exist between women and men "could not indicate an inherent value" because, if they did, the concept of "free will would be meaningless" (35).
.
7. The Family and Marriage: Retrieving the Qur'än's Egalitarianism
- [ ] In fact, it is questionable whether daraba actually refers to striking a wife, even symbolically. Rafi Ullah Shahab (1993, 231), for instance, says daraba also means "to prevent." On his reading, the ayah is telling the husbands to "leave [the wives] alone in their beds and prevent them from going outside of houses." In support of his reading, he points out that the Qur'än provides for similar treatment of lewd wives in 4:15. However, while Shahab reads the ayah as pertaining to lewd behavior, Hassan (1999, 355) has an entirely different understanding, not only of daraba, but of the second half of the ayah as well. She argues that the word "salihat, which is translated as righteously obedient,' is related to the word salahiat, which means 'capability' or 'potentiality,' and not obedience." As such, she takes it to be a reference to women's child-bearing potential, suggested also by the word ganität, which refers not only to obedience but also to a water container (a metaphor for the womb). She thus reads this ayah as referring to "women's role as child-bearers" and argues that only if all the women rebel against this role must they be disciplined by the community, not their husbands. This does not imply random acts of violence, however, because in a "legal context" the word daraba "means 'holding in confinement" (Hassan, 355-56). Her reading not only accords with Shahab's interpretation of daraba as confinement, but it is also more in line with the Qur'än's counsel to husbands to deal kindly with their wives, even those who are their enemies or whom they hate.
.
8. Secular-/Feminism and the Qur'än
- [ ] Ali cites Farid Esack's observation that the Qur'än's "essen-tial audience is males," while women "are essentially subjects being dealt with—however kindly—rather than being directly addressed" (quoted in Ali 2006, 125-26). However, whereas Esack calls women "subjects" even in such instances, Ali argues that the Qur'än objectifies and otherizes them. Neither one, however, defines what they mean by "subjects." However, if what makes men subjects is that the Qur'än speaks to them, then it speaks to women as well. If, on the other hand, what makes men subjects is that the Qur'än speaks to men about women, then those yat are less than o.1 percent of the text. Moreover, it speaks to men "in the present or present continuous tense, as if they already are in authority over women, and not in the imperative or future tense, as if they should always be so" (Barlas 2008, 25; italics in the original). For the Qur'än to have recognized where authority resided in the patriarchy to which it first spoke is not evidence that God treats women as objects. After all, God made both men and women khalifa (vice-regents) and one another's awliya' (custodians, guides, protectors). If anything, the Qur'än's teachings about moral individuality assume that men and women are both "epistemological, thinking subjects" and selves who are the "locus of subjective experience";" that is, individuated, self-reflexive people capable of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. If Ali has a different understanding of what it means to be a subject, she should clarify it. Or, she could explain why both subjects and objects would be called khalifa and awliya'.