When Gender Is a Problem in Islamic Theology and Qur’anic Tafsir

Abstract

This paper critiques the tendency to map sex/gender onto God and to interpolate sex/gender partisanship into God's speech in Islamic theology and tafsir (classical and feminist), which generates patriarchal readings of the Qur'an. The first practice violates the theologeme of God's incomparability, while the second imputes a gender hierarchy to the Qur'an even though there is no concept of gender itself in the text. Instead, the paper proposes an anti-patriarchal reading that is more congruent with God's self-disclosure as well as with key Qur'anic teachings that affirm the ontic equality of women and men.