эврика! (мое исламоведение)
Nov. 4th, 2008 05:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
babusyatanyaи как раньше не догадалась... а тут вдохновительная книжка (“Believing women” in Islam. Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an. Asma Barlas. 2002) - и вот стало кристально очевидно...
получается если идею Бога помыслить как логическое допущение, то религиозные термины вполне годятся для выстраивания понимания мира... во всяком случае - наравне с другими объяснительными схемами, которые могут быть для кого-то предпочтительнее, для других - не вполне, но без утверждения привилегированного положения одной логики над другими
p.3. If we wish to ensure Muslim women their rights, we not only need to contest readings of the Qur’an that justify the abuse and degradation of women, we also need to establish the legitimacy of liberatory readings. Even if such readings do not succeed in effecting a radical change in Muslim societies, it is safe to say that no meaningful change can occur in these societies that does not derive its legitimacy from the Qaur’an’s teachings, a lesson secular Muslims everywhere are having to learn to their own detriment.
в любой логике (теории, идеологии) есть допущения принимаемые без вопросов, аксиомы на которых выстраивается понимание структуры, процессов и взаимосвязей ... логики отличаются поскольку в каждой определены основания принимаемые без вопросов: берем без вопросов аксиомы Евклида - получаем геометрию плоских пространств, берем аксиомы Лобачевского - получаем геометрию искривленных пространств, или сферы (Римман)... Если верим что человек - существо рациональное, свободное, ответственное, способное к познанию, к совместному переустройству мира по договоренности - получаем светскую либеральную теорию личности и общества; а если верим что человек сотворен по образу божьему и есть существо моральное - получаем религиозную картину мира, которая может быть интерпретирована в терминах эмансипации и социальной справедливости, а может и не - или, как пожелает тот кто санкционирует "правильную" интерпретацию.
p.3.
Muslim women directly experience the consequences of oppressive misreadings of religious texts, few question their legitimacy and fewer still have explored the liberatory aspects of the Qur’an’s teachings.
p.5. In light of this view, the Qur’an’s different treatment of women and men with respect to certain issues (marriage, divorce, giving of evidence, etc.) is seen as manifest proof of its anti-equality stance and its patriarchal nature. However, I argue against this view in the ground both that (as many feminists themselves now admit) treating women and men differently does not always amount to treating them unequally, not does treating them identically necessarily mean treating them equally.
p.6. …recognizing the existence of a patriarchy, or addressing one, is not the same as advocating it. …the historical context of its revelation in a seventh-century (Arab) tribal patriarchy (much like Taliban in Afghanistan today)… the immediate audience and social conditions to which they were addressed… they were profoundly egalitarian; it depends on how we position the Qur’an and also ourselves vis-à-vis it historically.
It does not mean that … all the meanings we derive from it are equally legitimate … or that its teachings were egalitarian only by the standard of a seventh-century society and are irredeemably oppressive by ours.
p.9. we need to keep in mind the historical contexts of the Qur’an’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 (толкования)
Golden Age of Islam, which coincided with the Western Middle Ages. The misogyny of this period is, of course, well known … it was the secondary religious texts that enabled the “textualization of misogyny” in Islam. These texts have come to eclipse the Qur’an’s influence in most Muslim societies today.
p.12 patriarchy is a historically specific mode of rule by fathers… I define patriarchy more broadly, as a politics of sexual differentiation that privileges males by “transforming biological sex into politicized gender, which prioritizes the male while making the woman different (unequal), less than. Or the “Other” … an ideology that ascribes social\sexual inequalities to biology; that is it confuses sexual\biological difference with gender dualisms\inequality (differences based on sex or biology with inequality based on gender dualisms.
p.19 I do not question its ontological status as Divine Speech… I do, however, question the legitimacy of its patriarchal readings, and … a distinction in Muslim theology between what God says and what we understand God to be saying
p.24. Ideally, argues Paul Ricoeur, rather than imposing ourselves on the text, we “unrealized” ourselves in front of it, “receiving from it an enlarged self”. As such, awareness of subjectivity can foster a critical hermeneutic self-consciousness that can lead to better self-knowledge and thus to more meaningful engagements with texts, transforming the hermeneutic circle into what D.A. Carson calls a hermeneutic spiral.
p.33 In the Prophet’s lifetime, the Qur’an was memorized by his companions and had not been compiled in the form of a book at the time of his death in A.D. 632. Mushaf or official recension (рецензия, критический пересмотр текста) being completed only under Uthman.
…the confusion of the Mushaf with Divine Speech and the Archetypal Qur’an. Due to this confusion… the written Quran has become identified with the Quranic discourse or the Quran as it was recited, which is itself the direct emanation of the Archetype of the Book. It is the omnipresence of the Mushaf… that has sanctifies the written word in the collective consciousness, which in turn had been an effective instrument of power.
p.44. Even the Shari’ah was formulated not by adhering strictly to the Qur’an, or by imposing a uniform legal code on diverse cultures, but by absorbing it to the principles of jurisprudence (figh) doctrines on which there was communal accord but which were sometimes irreconcilable with the Qur’an’s precepts. In effect, compliance with Muslim rule was acquired hegemonically; that is, not so much through coercion and force as through reliance on consensus.
p.46. there are only about six misogynistic Ahadith accepted as Sahih (reliable) out of a collection of 70,000, it is these six that men trot out when they want to argue against sexual equality, while perversely ignoring dozens of positive Ahadith. Among the latter are the Ahadith that emphasize women’s full humanity; counsel husbands to deal kindly and justly with their wives; confirm the right of women to acquire knowledge; elevate mothers over fathers; proclaim that women will be in heaven, ahead, even of the Prophet; record women’s attendance at prayers in the mosque during the Prophet’s lifetime, including an incident where a girl played in front of him as he led the prayer; affirm that many women (including women from the Prophet’s family) went unveiled in the later years of Islam; and record that the Prophet accepted the evidence of one woman over that of a man.
p.48 the Ahadith represent not so much history-writing as history making (Rahman)… politically inspired reshaping of the past, in which the real and imaginary became fused (Spelberg)
p.49 greatest sensitivity surrounds the Hadith, although it is generally accepted that, except for the Quran. All else is liable to the corrupting hand of history.
In spite of such problems , few reformists advocate the wholescale rejection of Ahadith since that would result also in abandoning the Sunna, which believing Muslims would not want to do.
Refusing to take an historical approach to the Ahadith, Muslims are ruling out this possibility and propagating a “thousand year-old sacred folly” instead … it is “always impossible to think historically of the Quran, of the hadith, of the Sharia, since one would be touching on the foundations of actual powers”.
p.50. Textualities: Texts, History, and Method.
Methods that generate Qur’anic exegesis… tendency to generalize the specific.
The intent of exploring the exegetical methods they generate and the implications of these methods for Qur’anic exegesis.
Conservatives theorize the Qur’an’s universalism (transhistoricity) by dehistorising the Qur’an itself, and/or by viewing its teachings ahistorically. This is because they believe that historicizing the Qur’an’s contexts means also historicizing its contents, [p.51] thereby undermining its sacred and universal character. In this view, time becomes either incidental or irrelevant to explaining or understanding the Qur’an.
Thus, what rendeers classical exegesis (and the religious knowledge produced by early Muslim scholars) sacrosanct to conservatives is their belief that these scholars were able to replicate the Prophet’s own methodology because of their proximity in real time to him and to the first Muslim community. Time thus becomes integral to their advocacy of a specific communal model and the passage of time as “retreat, a gradual moving away from the original Model”… (This view of time-as-decay borrows from Biblical temporalizations of the rift between God and humans represented by the doctrine of the Fall… time as history then represents alienation and degeneration.
Islam does not espouse the idea of the Fall or of a rapture between God and humans, making conservative views of time incompatible with the Qur’an’s teachings.
The conservative position originates in a distinctive view of the relationship between Divine Speech and time. Specifically , it arises in the idea that since time is created, viewing Divine Discourse as occurring in time means viewing it also as created; however since God is not created, God’s Speech (which they regard as an attribute) cannot be created. This view extends into the claim that the Qur’an is uncreated (outside time, hence history), explaining why time and history are irrelevant or incidental to (understanding) its teachings.
God speaks in time, but God’s Speech exists outside time
p.52.This view has its (theo)logical parallel in a view of “the Quran’s noncontextual eternity” … Qur’an’s contents and contexts are coincidental. Hence the conservative belief that contextualizing one will undermine the other’s universality… they draw … on textual/logical time (sequence of words and meanings) within the Qur’an, rather than on reading the Qur’an as a totality revealed over time.
... conservatives rely on a view of sacred time to interpret God’s Speech, they rely on a view of secular (historical) time to elevate some Qur’anic Ayat over others and also to declare the Prophet’s community paradigmatic. Ignoring the doctrine of the Qur’an’s universalism and transhistoricity, which they themselves profess, conservatives want to instead to adhere to the contexts and “unicultural perspective” of the Prophet’s community, a view that “severely limits its application and contradicts the stated universal purpose of the Book itself”. Moreover, instead of conceptualizind the Qur’an’s universalism in terms of its ability to be read anew by each new generation of Muslims in every historical period (recontextualized), conservatives canonize readings of it generated over a thousand years ago in the name of sacred history and historical precedent (as presented in classical Tafsir, the Ahadith, and Ijma’). They thus end up with a historical defense of the sacred/universal even as they refuse to accept (at last formally) a historicizing understanding of it. … in the view of the conservatives, Muslim history should strive to recreate and reproduce the model of the first community.
p.53 by refusing to contextualize the Qur’an, they also render the process of its recontextualization problematic since ”one cannot proceed to the abidingness of the Quran, in word and meaning, unless one intelligently proceeds from its historical ground and circumstance". Not only do conservatives not follow this method, they also want Muslims to read the Qur’an as the first Muslims are said to have read it. Since they claim to do so themselves, they view their own reading practices as privileged over those of others, hence binding upon all Muslims.
What leads them to downplay the significance of the temporal/spatial contexts of the Qur’an’s teachings, and thus to universalize the particular, is a specific view of time and revelation and the relationship between them. This results in readings of the Qur’an that are restrictive for women.
p.56 In mandating the jilbab [veiling], then the Qur’an explicitly connects it to a slave-owning society in which sexual abuse by non-Muslim men was normative, and its purpose was to distinguish free, believing women from slaves, who were presumed by Jahili men to be nonbelievers and thus fair game. Only in a slave-owning Jahili society, then, does the jilbab signify sexual nonavailability, and only then if Jahili men were willing to invest it with such a meaning. Consequently, even though worn by Muslim women, the jilbab served as a marker of Jahili male sexual promiscuity and abuse at time when women had no legal recourse against such abuse and had to rely on themselves for their own protection.
p.57. who view the veil as the hallmark of an Islamic society – ignore the Qur’anic link between the jilbab and Jahili society in one set of Ayat, and its definition of sexual modesty in the other, which extends to both women and men. Hence, Muslim men who feel they have the right to assault or kill unveiled (but decently dressed) women in some “Islamic” societies are living by Jahili precepts, not by Qur’anic ethics that enjoin modesty and restraint on both the sexes.
The rule of the veil, brought on by Jahili male promiscuity. Yet, the Islamization of the veil has made it synonymous today with the rule of Islam. (I do not ignore the fact that the veil has become so overinvested with meaning that one can no longer speak of it in any simple way; not do I hold that unveiling women liberates them. Rather, I am disturbed that the issue of veiling is currently framed in most Muslim societies in a way that results in misrepresenting the Qur’han’s form, purpose, and intent in formulating a specific dress code.
Even if one were to concede that a Jahili ethos persists in Western societies in the normalization of sexual promiscuity, it is important to remember that there also are laws against sexual harassment in Western societies (which Muslim states have yet to promulgate). Veiling is thus not women’s only defense against abuse; their rights in law are. It is ironic that while secular laws give women such protection, laws formulated by many Muslim states often do not because of their embrace of Jahili views of women as sexually depraved and of their sexist belief that males can be expected to be easily provoked, licentious, and out of control.
…jilbab… initially a symbol of Jahili corruption in the Qur’an, it has come to be seen as proof of female immorality and inferiority. This perversion of the Qur’an’s teachings results also in ignoring the critical issue of what constitutes sexually appropriate behavior for men. This frees up Muslim states from the obligation of having to create public spheres in which women do not need to fear Jahili-type misbehavior on the part of Muslim men
Islam also entailed a break with Jewish and Christian teachings, especially with their partiarchalization of God as Father.
p.59. As Faruq Sheruf (1985) argues, many Ayat “relate to a particular time and place and to circumstances which had only a temporary” importance, such as crises in the Prophet’s life, and practices like slavery or the arbitrary rejection of wives, which were routine in Arabia. As a result, most Qur’anic penal provisions are aimed at “the social conditions that were characteristic of the Arabian tribes fourteen centuries ago, “ which is why treating them as “binding today would in many cases be a lamentable anachronism”.
Recognizing the historical contexts and specificity of the Qur’an’s teachings does not require an assumption that the moral purpose of the Qur’an is limited to Arab society, or that we cannot derive universal laws from it; indeed, the Qur’an itself “provides, either explicitly or implicitly, the rationales behind [its] solutions and rulings, from which one can deduce general principles. (Rahman 1982).
p.60 they [conservatives] reject the view that the sacred can be temporalized only within a specific context. They argue that that is what happens when we privilege religious knowledge produced in the first centuries of Islam as the only true understanding of revelation because of its proximity in real time to the Prophet’s community, thus to revelation.
This is why Ijtihad (critical thinking) is a better hermeneutic method than a blind reliance on consensus or tradition. And, while no one can claim “a monopoly” over what God means, critical scholars argue that a hermeneutic method that takes a thematic-historical approach to the Qur’an, in addition to analyzing the semiotic, semantic, and linguistic systems at work in it, can yield better readings than a (conservative) methodology which does not.
Mahmud Mohamed Taha (executed for “seduction” in his native Sudan) finds differences be3tween the Meccan and Madinan Surahs and urges Muslims to evolve a praxis based on the Meccan Surahs, which embody the revolutionary and efalitarian aspects of Islam’s message (the first message). The Madinan phase, on the other hand, he argues, circumscribes some of the principles revealed in Mecca because of the unreadiness of the Madinan community to live by the standards of moral freedom needed for transforming the first message into practice… Madinans.. revelation … focuses more on regulation and control.
p.61. two groups of Surahs result not from “the time and place of their revelation, but essentially [from] the audience to whom they are addressed… it is from the “texts of the second stage” that the Shari’ah is derived.
The “historical Shari’ah”, which draws on the Madinan Surahs, “is merely the level of Islamic law that suited the previous stage of human development… selecting which texts of the Qur’an and Sunnah are to be made legally binding, as opposed to being merely morally persuasive”…
For Taha, the issue of what is universal and what is specific in the Qur’an can be resolved only by distinguishing between the Meccan (universal) and Madinan (particular) Surahs, and thus between different historical contexts of revelation.
For Wadud, the solution is a hermeneutic and not a historical one, for Rahman it is both; while favoring the formulation of hermeneutic principles, he also points out that since ”all interpretations are historically and geographically contextualized. In sum, to critical scholars, the indecidability of the universal and the particular can only be resolved by undertaking several steps. First, it is necessary to study the Qur’an historically (contextually, not chronologically)
p.64. “Sunnah” … ‘to institute, establish or prescribe’. The Sunnah refers to the Prophet’s praxis, including his sayings, actions, or tacit approval of behavior he knew about… the Prophet’s life is deemed the best exegesis of its teachings. Sunnah (with small “s” refer to customary practices in general
the Sunnah also is seen as practice that occurred prior to and independent of ints textualization, and it is in its role of practice that the Sunnah enjoys its “authority [and] legitimacy.
Among the many confusiong in Muslim religious discourse, one of the most endemic and detrimental is that between the Qur’an and the Prophet’s sunnah on the one hand and between the Prophet’s sunnah and the ahadith and Muslim customary practices on the other. This is because while Muslims venerate the principle of “imitatio Muhhammadi” most of the content of the Sunnah is not a reflection of the Prophet’s praxis. Rather it is a reflection of “the free thinking activity of the early legists of Islam.
p.65. pre-Islamic ideas, including abidingly misogynistic ones. In spite of its problematic content, however, the Sunnah was ascribed to the Prophet in the second and third Islamic (eighth and ninth C.E.) centuries. As a result, existing practices, especially of the Arabs, were absorbed into Islam and came “to be equated with the Sunnah of the Prophet [thus being] given an unwarranted, elevated religious status”… Arab practices (such as female circumcision and stoning to death for adultery). The boundaries between the two sunnahs thus became blurred , putting an Islamic stamp on pre-Islamic misogyny.
p.67. the Sunnah’s privileging over the Qur’an resulted in part from the very nature of Islamic epistemology and the role of the state in shaping it during the early years of Muslim history.
Expertise in Ahadith thus became a determinant of the personal or political power of their possessors, whether religious scholars (ulama) or state elites.
p.68. critical reasoning – Itjihad and societal consensus- Ijma’
p.69 instead of continuing to rely on reason, deliberation, and consensus to frame religious meaning, Muslims began to refer all issues back to the Ahadith, This move was consummated in al-shafi’s work and originated, ironically in his attempt to protect the Sunnah’s authority by establishing that of the Ahadith on the grounds that the latter represented communal consensus, hence God’s Will. Yet, the effects of his ruling were to reverse the relationship between Ijtihad, and Ijma’ by a priory privileging Ijma’. As the outcome of critical thinking (Ijtihad), consensus (Ijma’) could be progressive; as the means for proscribing it, however, consensus could only foster a tradition based on “theological censorship”. By declaring against Ijtihad, al-Shafi also declared against a democratically evolving Ijma’, even whole criticizing uncritical adherence to precedent (taqlid) as “conducive to ignorance”…
Thus, it was the Sunnah’s authorization in such rigid and fixed terms and the closing of the gate of Ijtihad that, argues Rahman, robbed Muslim tradition of its democratic character.
p.70 Muslims must revive Ijtihad-Ijma’ , both because Ijtihad is the “central hermeneutic” of Islamic reasoning and jurisprudence, and because the Ijma’ inherited from the past rests on an outmoded and thin consensus of jurists, not a consensus of the whole community, and certainly not of the women in the communities of Islam. Adhering to this medieval Ijma’ also ignores that the system inherited from the past obscures “the Quran and the real performance of the Prophet” from both laypeople and ulama alike and engenders a “mechanical and semantic rather than interpretative or scientific” scholarship. Just as importantly, it allows states and conservative clerics derive their authority from managing this system, it is this very process of rethinking that they most rear and discourage, typically by branding it a heresy.
p.74. Sharia was constructed by its founding jurists. In the process, some jurists tried to reconcile it with what they perceived to be the community’s best interests at that time; others “simply disregarded reality and addressed themselves to an ideal situation in theorizing on what ought to be in the case.
Shari’ah… embodies “medieval principles of reason and objects of public good [that] may no longer be valid today”
Shari’ah requires clarifying the “Islamicity” of certain principles, and one way to do so is to make sure that they are “consistent with the totality of the Quran and Sunnah”.
p.75. Rethinking any part of tradition … rises formidable problems; is also can unravel the fabric of religious authority as it is structured in Muslim societies and, to the extent that the state depends on this structure for its own legitimacy, the latter’s hegemony as well, This is why states seek to obstruct reform and this is also why the state became invested in the creation of religious meaning from the early years of Muslim history.
p.76. the modes of knowledge creation among Muslims
p.77. each generation …links interpretation of revelation to that of its predecessors and successors. Interpretive authority in such a system derives not from closing the canon, or even from fixing its contents, but from certain ways of interpreting them.
The canon contents remain open, but there is a closure to how [p.78.] they can be interpreted. What them becomes “canonical about the Quran” is not the text itself, but the principles that can be induced from it. And these principles can be derived by and/logical reasoning … [which is] method rather than certain conclusions” for identifying opinions as authoritative.
p.80 even Al-Ghazali, hardly a conservative, held that real knowledge comes only through unmediated religious experiences and intuition and not through rational or philosophical inquiry, and it was his way of thinking that won the day. They victory… allowed orthodoxies … to proscribe rational thought when they assumed control over educational institutions and processes in the state. As a result, Ilm, or knowledge, came to be confused with knowledge of tradition, in particular, of the Prophet’s Sunnah, and Islam gradually was disassociated not only from philosophy and reason, but from science and culture as well. By reducing Islam to a “mere theology” Muslim scholars also transformed a “culture of knowledge… into a culture of theological censorship.”
получается если идею Бога помыслить как логическое допущение, то религиозные термины вполне годятся для выстраивания понимания мира... во всяком случае - наравне с другими объяснительными схемами, которые могут быть для кого-то предпочтительнее, для других - не вполне, но без утверждения привилегированного положения одной логики над другими
p.3. If we wish to ensure Muslim women their rights, we not only need to contest readings of the Qur’an that justify the abuse and degradation of women, we also need to establish the legitimacy of liberatory readings. Even if such readings do not succeed in effecting a radical change in Muslim societies, it is safe to say that no meaningful change can occur in these societies that does not derive its legitimacy from the Qaur’an’s teachings, a lesson secular Muslims everywhere are having to learn to their own detriment.
в любой логике (теории, идеологии) есть допущения принимаемые без вопросов, аксиомы на которых выстраивается понимание структуры, процессов и взаимосвязей ... логики отличаются поскольку в каждой определены основания принимаемые без вопросов: берем без вопросов аксиомы Евклида - получаем геометрию плоских пространств, берем аксиомы Лобачевского - получаем геометрию искривленных пространств, или сферы (Римман)... Если верим что человек - существо рациональное, свободное, ответственное, способное к познанию, к совместному переустройству мира по договоренности - получаем светскую либеральную теорию личности и общества; а если верим что человек сотворен по образу божьему и есть существо моральное - получаем религиозную картину мира, которая может быть интерпретирована в терминах эмансипации и социальной справедливости, а может и не - или, как пожелает тот кто санкционирует "правильную" интерпретацию.
p.3.
Muslim women directly experience the consequences of oppressive misreadings of religious texts, few question their legitimacy and fewer still have explored the liberatory aspects of the Qur’an’s teachings.
p.5. In light of this view, the Qur’an’s different treatment of women and men with respect to certain issues (marriage, divorce, giving of evidence, etc.) is seen as manifest proof of its anti-equality stance and its patriarchal nature. However, I argue against this view in the ground both that (as many feminists themselves now admit) treating women and men differently does not always amount to treating them unequally, not does treating them identically necessarily mean treating them equally.
p.6. …recognizing the existence of a patriarchy, or addressing one, is not the same as advocating it. …the historical context of its revelation in a seventh-century (Arab) tribal patriarchy (much like Taliban in Afghanistan today)… the immediate audience and social conditions to which they were addressed… they were profoundly egalitarian; it depends on how we position the Qur’an and also ourselves vis-à-vis it historically.
It does not mean that … all the meanings we derive from it are equally legitimate … or that its teachings were egalitarian only by the standard of a seventh-century society and are irredeemably oppressive by ours.
p.9. we need to keep in mind the historical contexts of the Qur’an’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 (толкования)
Golden Age of Islam, which coincided with the Western Middle Ages. The misogyny of this period is, of course, well known … it was the secondary religious texts that enabled the “textualization of misogyny” in Islam. These texts have come to eclipse the Qur’an’s influence in most Muslim societies today.
p.12 patriarchy is a historically specific mode of rule by fathers… I define patriarchy more broadly, as a politics of sexual differentiation that privileges males by “transforming biological sex into politicized gender, which prioritizes the male while making the woman different (unequal), less than. Or the “Other” … an ideology that ascribes social\sexual inequalities to biology; that is it confuses sexual\biological difference with gender dualisms\inequality (differences based on sex or biology with inequality based on gender dualisms.
p.19 I do not question its ontological status as Divine Speech… I do, however, question the legitimacy of its patriarchal readings, and … a distinction in Muslim theology between what God says and what we understand God to be saying
p.24. Ideally, argues Paul Ricoeur, rather than imposing ourselves on the text, we “unrealized” ourselves in front of it, “receiving from it an enlarged self”. As such, awareness of subjectivity can foster a critical hermeneutic self-consciousness that can lead to better self-knowledge and thus to more meaningful engagements with texts, transforming the hermeneutic circle into what D.A. Carson calls a hermeneutic spiral.
p.33 In the Prophet’s lifetime, the Qur’an was memorized by his companions and had not been compiled in the form of a book at the time of his death in A.D. 632. Mushaf or official recension (рецензия, критический пересмотр текста) being completed only under Uthman.
…the confusion of the Mushaf with Divine Speech and the Archetypal Qur’an. Due to this confusion… the written Quran has become identified with the Quranic discourse or the Quran as it was recited, which is itself the direct emanation of the Archetype of the Book. It is the omnipresence of the Mushaf… that has sanctifies the written word in the collective consciousness, which in turn had been an effective instrument of power.
p.44. Even the Shari’ah was formulated not by adhering strictly to the Qur’an, or by imposing a uniform legal code on diverse cultures, but by absorbing it to the principles of jurisprudence (figh) doctrines on which there was communal accord but which were sometimes irreconcilable with the Qur’an’s precepts. In effect, compliance with Muslim rule was acquired hegemonically; that is, not so much through coercion and force as through reliance on consensus.
p.46. there are only about six misogynistic Ahadith accepted as Sahih (reliable) out of a collection of 70,000, it is these six that men trot out when they want to argue against sexual equality, while perversely ignoring dozens of positive Ahadith. Among the latter are the Ahadith that emphasize women’s full humanity; counsel husbands to deal kindly and justly with their wives; confirm the right of women to acquire knowledge; elevate mothers over fathers; proclaim that women will be in heaven, ahead, even of the Prophet; record women’s attendance at prayers in the mosque during the Prophet’s lifetime, including an incident where a girl played in front of him as he led the prayer; affirm that many women (including women from the Prophet’s family) went unveiled in the later years of Islam; and record that the Prophet accepted the evidence of one woman over that of a man.
p.48 the Ahadith represent not so much history-writing as history making (Rahman)… politically inspired reshaping of the past, in which the real and imaginary became fused (Spelberg)
p.49 greatest sensitivity surrounds the Hadith, although it is generally accepted that, except for the Quran. All else is liable to the corrupting hand of history.
In spite of such problems , few reformists advocate the wholescale rejection of Ahadith since that would result also in abandoning the Sunna, which believing Muslims would not want to do.
Refusing to take an historical approach to the Ahadith, Muslims are ruling out this possibility and propagating a “thousand year-old sacred folly” instead … it is “always impossible to think historically of the Quran, of the hadith, of the Sharia, since one would be touching on the foundations of actual powers”.
p.50. Textualities: Texts, History, and Method.
Methods that generate Qur’anic exegesis… tendency to generalize the specific.
The intent of exploring the exegetical methods they generate and the implications of these methods for Qur’anic exegesis.
Conservatives theorize the Qur’an’s universalism (transhistoricity) by dehistorising the Qur’an itself, and/or by viewing its teachings ahistorically. This is because they believe that historicizing the Qur’an’s contexts means also historicizing its contents, [p.51] thereby undermining its sacred and universal character. In this view, time becomes either incidental or irrelevant to explaining or understanding the Qur’an.
Thus, what rendeers classical exegesis (and the religious knowledge produced by early Muslim scholars) sacrosanct to conservatives is their belief that these scholars were able to replicate the Prophet’s own methodology because of their proximity in real time to him and to the first Muslim community. Time thus becomes integral to their advocacy of a specific communal model and the passage of time as “retreat, a gradual moving away from the original Model”… (This view of time-as-decay borrows from Biblical temporalizations of the rift between God and humans represented by the doctrine of the Fall… time as history then represents alienation and degeneration.
Islam does not espouse the idea of the Fall or of a rapture between God and humans, making conservative views of time incompatible with the Qur’an’s teachings.
The conservative position originates in a distinctive view of the relationship between Divine Speech and time. Specifically , it arises in the idea that since time is created, viewing Divine Discourse as occurring in time means viewing it also as created; however since God is not created, God’s Speech (which they regard as an attribute) cannot be created. This view extends into the claim that the Qur’an is uncreated (outside time, hence history), explaining why time and history are irrelevant or incidental to (understanding) its teachings.
God speaks in time, but God’s Speech exists outside time
p.52.This view has its (theo)logical parallel in a view of “the Quran’s noncontextual eternity” … Qur’an’s contents and contexts are coincidental. Hence the conservative belief that contextualizing one will undermine the other’s universality… they draw … on textual/logical time (sequence of words and meanings) within the Qur’an, rather than on reading the Qur’an as a totality revealed over time.
... conservatives rely on a view of sacred time to interpret God’s Speech, they rely on a view of secular (historical) time to elevate some Qur’anic Ayat over others and also to declare the Prophet’s community paradigmatic. Ignoring the doctrine of the Qur’an’s universalism and transhistoricity, which they themselves profess, conservatives want to instead to adhere to the contexts and “unicultural perspective” of the Prophet’s community, a view that “severely limits its application and contradicts the stated universal purpose of the Book itself”. Moreover, instead of conceptualizind the Qur’an’s universalism in terms of its ability to be read anew by each new generation of Muslims in every historical period (recontextualized), conservatives canonize readings of it generated over a thousand years ago in the name of sacred history and historical precedent (as presented in classical Tafsir, the Ahadith, and Ijma’). They thus end up with a historical defense of the sacred/universal even as they refuse to accept (at last formally) a historicizing understanding of it. … in the view of the conservatives, Muslim history should strive to recreate and reproduce the model of the first community.
p.53 by refusing to contextualize the Qur’an, they also render the process of its recontextualization problematic since ”one cannot proceed to the abidingness of the Quran, in word and meaning, unless one intelligently proceeds from its historical ground and circumstance". Not only do conservatives not follow this method, they also want Muslims to read the Qur’an as the first Muslims are said to have read it. Since they claim to do so themselves, they view their own reading practices as privileged over those of others, hence binding upon all Muslims.
What leads them to downplay the significance of the temporal/spatial contexts of the Qur’an’s teachings, and thus to universalize the particular, is a specific view of time and revelation and the relationship between them. This results in readings of the Qur’an that are restrictive for women.
p.56 In mandating the jilbab [veiling], then the Qur’an explicitly connects it to a slave-owning society in which sexual abuse by non-Muslim men was normative, and its purpose was to distinguish free, believing women from slaves, who were presumed by Jahili men to be nonbelievers and thus fair game. Only in a slave-owning Jahili society, then, does the jilbab signify sexual nonavailability, and only then if Jahili men were willing to invest it with such a meaning. Consequently, even though worn by Muslim women, the jilbab served as a marker of Jahili male sexual promiscuity and abuse at time when women had no legal recourse against such abuse and had to rely on themselves for their own protection.
p.57. who view the veil as the hallmark of an Islamic society – ignore the Qur’anic link between the jilbab and Jahili society in one set of Ayat, and its definition of sexual modesty in the other, which extends to both women and men. Hence, Muslim men who feel they have the right to assault or kill unveiled (but decently dressed) women in some “Islamic” societies are living by Jahili precepts, not by Qur’anic ethics that enjoin modesty and restraint on both the sexes.
The rule of the veil, brought on by Jahili male promiscuity. Yet, the Islamization of the veil has made it synonymous today with the rule of Islam. (I do not ignore the fact that the veil has become so overinvested with meaning that one can no longer speak of it in any simple way; not do I hold that unveiling women liberates them. Rather, I am disturbed that the issue of veiling is currently framed in most Muslim societies in a way that results in misrepresenting the Qur’han’s form, purpose, and intent in formulating a specific dress code.
Even if one were to concede that a Jahili ethos persists in Western societies in the normalization of sexual promiscuity, it is important to remember that there also are laws against sexual harassment in Western societies (which Muslim states have yet to promulgate). Veiling is thus not women’s only defense against abuse; their rights in law are. It is ironic that while secular laws give women such protection, laws formulated by many Muslim states often do not because of their embrace of Jahili views of women as sexually depraved and of their sexist belief that males can be expected to be easily provoked, licentious, and out of control.
…jilbab… initially a symbol of Jahili corruption in the Qur’an, it has come to be seen as proof of female immorality and inferiority. This perversion of the Qur’an’s teachings results also in ignoring the critical issue of what constitutes sexually appropriate behavior for men. This frees up Muslim states from the obligation of having to create public spheres in which women do not need to fear Jahili-type misbehavior on the part of Muslim men
Islam also entailed a break with Jewish and Christian teachings, especially with their partiarchalization of God as Father.
p.59. As Faruq Sheruf (1985) argues, many Ayat “relate to a particular time and place and to circumstances which had only a temporary” importance, such as crises in the Prophet’s life, and practices like slavery or the arbitrary rejection of wives, which were routine in Arabia. As a result, most Qur’anic penal provisions are aimed at “the social conditions that were characteristic of the Arabian tribes fourteen centuries ago, “ which is why treating them as “binding today would in many cases be a lamentable anachronism”.
Recognizing the historical contexts and specificity of the Qur’an’s teachings does not require an assumption that the moral purpose of the Qur’an is limited to Arab society, or that we cannot derive universal laws from it; indeed, the Qur’an itself “provides, either explicitly or implicitly, the rationales behind [its] solutions and rulings, from which one can deduce general principles. (Rahman 1982).
p.60 they [conservatives] reject the view that the sacred can be temporalized only within a specific context. They argue that that is what happens when we privilege religious knowledge produced in the first centuries of Islam as the only true understanding of revelation because of its proximity in real time to the Prophet’s community, thus to revelation.
This is why Ijtihad (critical thinking) is a better hermeneutic method than a blind reliance on consensus or tradition. And, while no one can claim “a monopoly” over what God means, critical scholars argue that a hermeneutic method that takes a thematic-historical approach to the Qur’an, in addition to analyzing the semiotic, semantic, and linguistic systems at work in it, can yield better readings than a (conservative) methodology which does not.
Mahmud Mohamed Taha (executed for “seduction” in his native Sudan) finds differences be3tween the Meccan and Madinan Surahs and urges Muslims to evolve a praxis based on the Meccan Surahs, which embody the revolutionary and efalitarian aspects of Islam’s message (the first message). The Madinan phase, on the other hand, he argues, circumscribes some of the principles revealed in Mecca because of the unreadiness of the Madinan community to live by the standards of moral freedom needed for transforming the first message into practice… Madinans.. revelation … focuses more on regulation and control.
p.61. two groups of Surahs result not from “the time and place of their revelation, but essentially [from] the audience to whom they are addressed… it is from the “texts of the second stage” that the Shari’ah is derived.
The “historical Shari’ah”, which draws on the Madinan Surahs, “is merely the level of Islamic law that suited the previous stage of human development… selecting which texts of the Qur’an and Sunnah are to be made legally binding, as opposed to being merely morally persuasive”…
For Taha, the issue of what is universal and what is specific in the Qur’an can be resolved only by distinguishing between the Meccan (universal) and Madinan (particular) Surahs, and thus between different historical contexts of revelation.
For Wadud, the solution is a hermeneutic and not a historical one, for Rahman it is both; while favoring the formulation of hermeneutic principles, he also points out that since ”all interpretations are historically and geographically contextualized. In sum, to critical scholars, the indecidability of the universal and the particular can only be resolved by undertaking several steps. First, it is necessary to study the Qur’an historically (contextually, not chronologically)
p.64. “Sunnah” … ‘to institute, establish or prescribe’. The Sunnah refers to the Prophet’s praxis, including his sayings, actions, or tacit approval of behavior he knew about… the Prophet’s life is deemed the best exegesis of its teachings. Sunnah (with small “s” refer to customary practices in general
the Sunnah also is seen as practice that occurred prior to and independent of ints textualization, and it is in its role of practice that the Sunnah enjoys its “authority [and] legitimacy.
Among the many confusiong in Muslim religious discourse, one of the most endemic and detrimental is that between the Qur’an and the Prophet’s sunnah on the one hand and between the Prophet’s sunnah and the ahadith and Muslim customary practices on the other. This is because while Muslims venerate the principle of “imitatio Muhhammadi” most of the content of the Sunnah is not a reflection of the Prophet’s praxis. Rather it is a reflection of “the free thinking activity of the early legists of Islam.
p.65. pre-Islamic ideas, including abidingly misogynistic ones. In spite of its problematic content, however, the Sunnah was ascribed to the Prophet in the second and third Islamic (eighth and ninth C.E.) centuries. As a result, existing practices, especially of the Arabs, were absorbed into Islam and came “to be equated with the Sunnah of the Prophet [thus being] given an unwarranted, elevated religious status”… Arab practices (such as female circumcision and stoning to death for adultery). The boundaries between the two sunnahs thus became blurred , putting an Islamic stamp on pre-Islamic misogyny.
p.67. the Sunnah’s privileging over the Qur’an resulted in part from the very nature of Islamic epistemology and the role of the state in shaping it during the early years of Muslim history.
Expertise in Ahadith thus became a determinant of the personal or political power of their possessors, whether religious scholars (ulama) or state elites.
p.68. critical reasoning – Itjihad and societal consensus- Ijma’
p.69 instead of continuing to rely on reason, deliberation, and consensus to frame religious meaning, Muslims began to refer all issues back to the Ahadith, This move was consummated in al-shafi’s work and originated, ironically in his attempt to protect the Sunnah’s authority by establishing that of the Ahadith on the grounds that the latter represented communal consensus, hence God’s Will. Yet, the effects of his ruling were to reverse the relationship between Ijtihad, and Ijma’ by a priory privileging Ijma’. As the outcome of critical thinking (Ijtihad), consensus (Ijma’) could be progressive; as the means for proscribing it, however, consensus could only foster a tradition based on “theological censorship”. By declaring against Ijtihad, al-Shafi also declared against a democratically evolving Ijma’, even whole criticizing uncritical adherence to precedent (taqlid) as “conducive to ignorance”…
Thus, it was the Sunnah’s authorization in such rigid and fixed terms and the closing of the gate of Ijtihad that, argues Rahman, robbed Muslim tradition of its democratic character.
p.70 Muslims must revive Ijtihad-Ijma’ , both because Ijtihad is the “central hermeneutic” of Islamic reasoning and jurisprudence, and because the Ijma’ inherited from the past rests on an outmoded and thin consensus of jurists, not a consensus of the whole community, and certainly not of the women in the communities of Islam. Adhering to this medieval Ijma’ also ignores that the system inherited from the past obscures “the Quran and the real performance of the Prophet” from both laypeople and ulama alike and engenders a “mechanical and semantic rather than interpretative or scientific” scholarship. Just as importantly, it allows states and conservative clerics derive their authority from managing this system, it is this very process of rethinking that they most rear and discourage, typically by branding it a heresy.
p.74. Sharia was constructed by its founding jurists. In the process, some jurists tried to reconcile it with what they perceived to be the community’s best interests at that time; others “simply disregarded reality and addressed themselves to an ideal situation in theorizing on what ought to be in the case.
Shari’ah… embodies “medieval principles of reason and objects of public good [that] may no longer be valid today”
Shari’ah requires clarifying the “Islamicity” of certain principles, and one way to do so is to make sure that they are “consistent with the totality of the Quran and Sunnah”.
p.75. Rethinking any part of tradition … rises formidable problems; is also can unravel the fabric of religious authority as it is structured in Muslim societies and, to the extent that the state depends on this structure for its own legitimacy, the latter’s hegemony as well, This is why states seek to obstruct reform and this is also why the state became invested in the creation of religious meaning from the early years of Muslim history.
p.76. the modes of knowledge creation among Muslims
p.77. each generation …links interpretation of revelation to that of its predecessors and successors. Interpretive authority in such a system derives not from closing the canon, or even from fixing its contents, but from certain ways of interpreting them.
The canon contents remain open, but there is a closure to how [p.78.] they can be interpreted. What them becomes “canonical about the Quran” is not the text itself, but the principles that can be induced from it. And these principles can be derived by and/logical reasoning … [which is] method rather than certain conclusions” for identifying opinions as authoritative.
p.80 even Al-Ghazali, hardly a conservative, held that real knowledge comes only through unmediated religious experiences and intuition and not through rational or philosophical inquiry, and it was his way of thinking that won the day. They victory… allowed orthodoxies … to proscribe rational thought when they assumed control over educational institutions and processes in the state. As a result, Ilm, or knowledge, came to be confused with knowledge of tradition, in particular, of the Prophet’s Sunnah, and Islam gradually was disassociated not only from philosophy and reason, but from science and culture as well. By reducing Islam to a “mere theology” Muslim scholars also transformed a “culture of knowledge… into a culture of theological censorship.”