Contortions
Sad.
[T]he Qur’an’s message of equality resonated in the teaching that women and men have been created from a single self and are each other’s guides who have the mutual obligation to enjoin what is right and to forbid what is wrong. But, then, there are those other verses that Muslims read as saying that men are better than women and their guardians and giving men the right to unfettered polygyny and even to beat a recalcitrant wife. To read the Qur’an in my youth was thus to be caught up in a seemingly irresolvable and agonizing dilemma of how to reconcile these two sets of verses not just with one another but also with a view of God as just, consistent, merciful, and above sexual partisanship.
Right. And the solution is to realize that the Qur’an is a book like other books, and that one is free to take from it what one admires and ignore or dispute the rest; that, indeed, one is free to ignore all of it. That is the only real solution, because anything short of that commits one to paltering with bad harmful unjust ideas.
It has taken the better part of my life to resolve this dilemma and it has involved learning (from the discipline of hermeneutics) that language–hence interpretation—is not fixed or transparent and that the meanings of a text change depending on who interprets it and how.
It’s too bad that it took so long, and that so much effort was wasted, but anyway, yes, of course. Language and interpretation are human, and therefore fallible and subject to change, and there is no requirement to take any of it as sacred and beyond criticism or alteration. That’s all there is to it – so there’s really no need to fret about how to interpret the Qur’an, or any other book.
Most Muslims, however, are unconvinced by this argument and it may be because viewing God’s speech (thus also God) as patriarchal allows the conservatives to justify male privilege…
Ya think? But at any rate, that is why all this hermeneutics is a waste of time and effort. Believe in a just god if you like, but don’t waste your energy trying to reconcile a centuries-old patriarchal book with your own view of sexual equality.
Pathetic that the New Statesman thinks it’s worth wasting time and effort on such an enterprise.
And this entry will be held up by religious apologists as proving that Islam and feminism are somehow compatible, much in the same way that scientists who are religious are held up to show that religion and science are compatible in the trivial sense that one person can hold two incompatible ideas in their head at once. It’s called cognitive dissonance, and more people should be aware of it.
to give voice to my intuition that a God who is beyond sex/ gender has no investment in favoring males or oppressing women either
It really is Design Your Own God, isn’t it, a la Armstrong? In fact, I can see anachronistic confusions arising a hundred years hence. People with a vague notion of early twenty first century intellectual history will be saying, “Intelligent design? Was that when everyone started designing their own Gods as they weren’t comfortable with the one their religions had told them about?” Though it’s not so much “design” as “cobble together”.
“As for me, I continue to respond to the Qur’an’s call to use my reason and intellect to decipher the signs (ayat) of God. Thus far, such an exercise has only brought me to more liberatory understandings of the text itself.”
Martin Luther read the Bible in much the same way. 30,000 + Protestant denominations later, plus the spinoff of a vibrant rationalism, here we are today.
It’s not so much design your own god as an Ikea or Lego approach to God: assemble your own out of standard components.
Cognitive dissonance is very much part of the process.
“It has taken the better part of my life to resolve this dilemma and it has involved learning (from the discipline of hermeneutics) that language–hence interpretation—is not fixed or transparent and that the meanings of a text change depending on who interprets it and how.”
So Barlas resolved this dilemma by learning to pretend that things can mean whatever you want them to if you obscure them with enough bullshit?
I’d have thought the more obvious solution would be to conclude that a self-contradictory book can’t be inerrant, and then just ignore it.
“Most Muslims, however, are unconvinced by this argument and it may be because viewing God’s speech (thus also God) as patriarchal allows the conservatives to justify male privilege…”
It might also have something to do with that fact that they take the Koran at its word rather than concocting absurd explanations of what it “really” means.
I’ve read the Qur’an. It’s a thoroughly silly book and it’s tempting to conclude that anyone who believes it to be the inerrant word of god must be bonkers.
It sounds as though Barlas has spent most of her life on an entirely pointless activity. It may or may not mean something, but there’s no reason to care about that.
(I didn’t read it in Arabic, but of course an eternal book for all mankind wouldn’t have been inaccessible to most people, now would it?)
Jakob, shame on you for being so disparaging. Ms. Barlas studied with no lesser luminary than H. Umpteed Umpty, Ph.D. & D.Div., who occupies the Charles Dodgson Chair for Modern Theology at Carrollton College and is the world’s most renowned expert on hermeneutic exegesis of sacred texts. He literally wrote the book on postmodern eschatology! Such scholarly acumen ought not be dismissed as mere “bullshit.” Such language!
Ha! You owe me a new glass tumbler, G. I broke one laughing at your post. H Umpteed Umpty – LOL!
I find as much to object to in Asma Barlas’s Qu’ran heremeeutics as in Schussler-Fiorenz’s feminist heremeneuetics of the Bible. They are both based on a several mistakes.
First, they assume that this is important. Second, the assume that it will actually make significant change to the religion. Three, they misundestand (and yet make use of) the authority of religious texts.
Religious texts are not taken as the products of human imagination, which they most obviously are. And so, if there are to be taken seriously by those who are unhappy with the surface meaning of the text, they reinterpret. The fault is that they leave the text precisely as it is, because nothing can diminish the standing of such texts in the context of religious community. So feminisms have to find feminism expressed it in. And, if you ignore enough and interpret the rest, the text is – who have thought it? – actually a femninist text! It is also is a spiritual resourse for homosexuals as well as for thoese show are sick and suffering.
And this really is a game we play with words. Let’s get rid of the texts and start to think about the social problems that most concern us. For instance, there is no overriding concern in the Bible for the environment. But if you stretch a point or two, it can be made to seek as radical as Greenpeace.
It’s really time to stop playing games. We read what we want to read into the Bible or the Qu’ran. Some of the readings are much more natural than others, and you have to really stretch a point to find feminism in either the Qu’ran or the Bible. But a few dauntless people have tried. People even try to edit out the antisemitism from the Bible, and from the Qu’ran. And of course you can do this, if you pay attention and apply a special hermeneutic. But in the end, someone will come back and tell you that this is not reading to text, but interpreting it out of all proportion, and they’re likely to be right.
Sacred texts are, by definition and choice, conservative. Of course they are. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t be asked to read Asma Barlas almost laughable idea in this article. And even if a few find it liberating, most Muslims will be offended, and the interpretation, in any event, will be quickly forgotten, but the text of the Qu’ran won’t be. And Asma Barlas has made it more likely that others will return to the text, not to find messages of liberation, but to show exactly where she went astray.
G Felis,
Disparaging? To the brilliant Prof. Umpty? I wouldn’t dream of it!
I have only the utmost respect for Umpty’s radially transgressive hermeneutic the/ology (as I believe he insists on spelling it). If you detected any hint of criticism in my earlier post, it could only be because you have not yet hit upon the correct interpretation.
You must contextualise my text in terms of post-colonial transgender psychoanalysis to discover its true reading.
Religions would have been much better off if each had stuck with an oral tradition, then the “text” could be updated simply by retelling it in an altered form. It is like having a first edition of a textbook which cannot be revised. Imagine if we were still using a science text from 2500 years ago.
We see the same thing here in the states with the constitution. Conservatives worship it as if it were penned by a god when even its authors knew it was a flawed document and would need revision.
Amazing. I read both the Quran and Bible, and discovered that they not only promoted feminism, but were actually advocating humanism, plus laying out the beginnings of the scientific method. I also found a large butterfly — or maybe it was two people dancing, with hats or something on their heads.
The Quran and the Bible are both ouija boards. They are also both the hand of a paralyzed hospital patient of uncertain amount and quality of consciousness, which miraculously types at high speed on a computer while the patient’s eyes are closed. They are also both Clever Hans. They are everything, and thus nothing.
There should indeed be a (legal) right to unfettered polygyny, as well as a right to unfettered polyandry. How many sexual partners a man has or a woman has is none of the state’s business, even if he or she is cohabiting with them.
Indeed, that right probably already has constitutional protection in American law – though of course not a right to a polygynous or polyandrous state-recognised marriage. Of course there’s that old 19th century case about Mormons that might be seen as authority to the contrary, but I’m betting it would be applied very narrowly post Lawrence v. Texas. As it should be.