Islam and Gender

Abstract

Gender and sexuality in the Muslim world is decided both on interpretations of the Qur'an and on the respective social and political contexts in which people live. Edward Said argued that the Middle East and the Muslim world were imagined in particular ways by the Orientalists that had little to do with the Middle East itself. The manner in which Islam and its gender prescriptions were understood constitutes a large part of such an imagining. While long understood in terms of the global narrative of modernization and progress, the place of women in the Muslim world and the Middle East in particular has come to stand for the success and the failure of these countries. Today, scholars have found new ways to both critique the modernization narrative and also explore alternative understandings of developments in the Middle East. At the same time, Islamic feminist are exploring ways of challenging the “textual misogyny” they claim is ingrained in the secondary Islamic literature oftafsir,fiqh, and hadith. They are doing this through the analyses of the Qur'an using contemporary poststructuralist textual reading techniques in order to reclaim women's humanity and the liberatory promise of the Qur'an.