Rearing Gendered Souls: Childhood and the Making of Muslim Manhood in Pre-Modern Islamic Ethics

Abstract

AbstractMost studies of religious beliefs and praxis, including those in Islamic Studies, assume the subjects of investigation to be adults. In childhood studies of religion, however, we find a lens for exploring how foundational pre-modern Islamic ethics discourses, such as those of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and Nasir ad-Din Tusi, taught how children were supposed to be reared and educated, which uncovers important insights about the gendered nature of ethics itself. Specifically, classical Islamic ethics is so deeply entangled with gender roles that the Islamic ethicists’ instructions for rearing children are in essence instructions for inculcating gender roles from birth. Ethical cultivation was the purview of elite men, whereas women were marginalized from ethics instruction. The childhood-studies-of-religion lens enables us to see the synonymity between Islamic ethics and the creation of the man or the man-as-process.