Gender Issues and Contemporary Quran Interpretation

Abstract

Abstract This chapter is about new trends in contemporary Muslim Quran interpretation and their interrelationship with contemporary Islamic paradigms on gender issues. From the beginning, Muslims have interpreted their eternal and inimitable, mu)az scripture in the light of specific socioeconomic and political situations. The eternal text has thus served as both the foundational basis and as the point of convergence of many different, specific, human interpretations. “Classical Islam” produced a number of methodological approaches to the text (traditionist, rationalist, or a combination of the two), as well as some variations in the paradigms of the status of women. These paradigms had been given shape in Islamic law (sharia) well before the lifetime of the first great Quran interpreter whose exegesis (tafsir) has survived in its entirety. Thus medieval scholastic divergences in approaches to the Quranic text failed to find an “application” in equally divergent readings on questions of women ‘s status. Change came with the modern age and its modernist and reformist scholars. While the nineteenth century produced new approaches to the Quran that were equally “applied” to social questions, the contemporary age has brought forth a whole new Islamic epistemology where scripture-sanctioned gender paradigms play an important part. In what follows, the interrelationship of Muslim exegetic methodology and its “application” lo gender issues is pursued by examining different readings of Sura 4:. ‘34, a Quranic verse that puts men “in charge of” or as “protectors of” women.