Gender and Self in Islam * BY ETIN ANWAR

Abstract

This is an ambitious book that seeks to examine the question of gender and self in Islam from a philosophical perspective, an approach which the author claims is unusual in Islamic scholarship. She justifies this approach by pointing to the revival by Muslim philosophers of Greek ideas pertaining to the status of women; she also considers the philosophical approach effective in disentangling the patriarchal elements influencing the way Muslim women live their lives. An academic, working in America, she writes as a practising Indonesian Muslim, a santri, who attempts to embody Islam in her everyday life. Her aim is to uncover the roots of the patriarchal, hierarchical gender system prevalent in Muslim society and to put forward an alternative model, based on the Qurʾān and traditions of the Prophet, of gender egalitarianism. To achieve this she discusses both general issues raised by a gendered interpretation of the Qurʾān, and examines specific narratives such as the creation stories of Adam and Eve (Ḥawwāʾ), the account of al-isrāʾ and miʿrāj, and the story of Yūsuf and Zulaykha. Unfortunately this detailed analysis, which should provide a precise commentary to illustrate the more general argument, is marred by a lack of clarity in distinguishing between Qurʾān, aḥādīth, and stories, commentary or poems written much later. For example by writing: ‘Even though the “Adam's rib” story has been interpreted in such a way as to support the moral inequality of the sexes, it is not the only Qurʾānic account of the origin of human beings’ (p. 46), she implies that the story of Eve being created from Adam's rib is in the Qurʾān. However on page 54 she says correctly that the Qurʾān ‘does not refer at all to how his [Adam's] female partner was created’. When analyzing the portrayal of Yūsuf and Zulaykhā she moves from Qurʾānic quotation, to modern interpretation (Stowasser), traditional scholarship (al-Ṭabarī), and fifteenth-century Persian poetry (Jāmī) without differentiating clearly between them. The confusion is compounded by a strange use of English: ‘Although men or women can be slyness—depending on what triggers it, this characteristic is more frequently attributed to women rather than men’ (p. 98); ‘She regretted her previous deed and saluted her evil-doer with an awesome utterance’ (p. 99). Indeed the author's English often lets her down in this book, sometimes to the extent of making her say the opposite of what she intends. For example, when discussing abortion, she writes on page 91 that: ‘Islamic law (Shari’ah) rules out the possibility for abortion if pregnancy endangers the mother's life’, whereas on the following page she writes correctly that ‘Muslim countries in general ban abortion, except to save the mother's life’. On page 145 she writes: ‘What differentiates one self from others is intention, deed, and God's conscience’, when clearly she must mean ‘God-consciousness’. A clumsy or sometimes incorrect use of English (the use of the definite article being a particular problem) means that the reader is often distracted in the middle of an interesting argument, and following the author's line of thought becomes difficult. It would have been a better book if it had been more carefully edited. It is, however, worth persevering; the arguments presented are thought-provoking and, although sometimes reiterating common modernist positions, nevertheless do add a new dimension to the current debates on the place of women in the Muslim world.