Response to Zainab Bint Younus’ Review of "Women and Gender in the Qur’an"
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Keywords
Qur'an, Female Sexuality, gender and sex, Hermeneutics, women, afterlife
Abstract
I thank AJIS for recently reviewing my monograph Women and Gender in the Qur’an (Oxford University Press, 2020) and thank Zainab Bint Younus of MuslimMatters.org for taking the time to review the work. I must, however, take issue with the reviewer’s line of critique.
As an academic exercise, Women and Gender in the Qur’an offers a reading of the scripture that investigates intra-textual coherence through philological and structural methods. To miss this point is to miss the theoretical foundation of the project. The book does not purport to analyze hadith corpuses or the tafsīr tradition writ large, and I do not attempt to systematically analyze other early Muslim representations of female figures. In constructing a book-length work, a scholar must discern how to narrow the source material to an appropriate scope. In seeing that no previous scholar had produced an intra-textual reading that examines all Qur’anic verses involving female figures, this is where I contributed. The justifications for my scope and methodological focus are included in the book but are unfortunately not presented clearly in the review.
References
1 See discussions of tafsīr tawḥidī in Celene Ibrahim, “Of Poets and Jesters: Methodologies and Reception Politics in Qur’anic Studies,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 39, no. 2 (2023): 79–81.
2 Celene Ibrahim, “The Tentative Mufassira,” Feminist Studies in Religion 37, no. 2 (2021): 213–19.
3 For my work on ʿaqīda, see Celene Ibrahim, Islam and Monotheism (Cambridge University Press, 2022), a concise academic primer on the divine nature and attributes.
4 Readers can appreciate the breadth of promising new methodological work in the latest issue of “Gender-Attuned Research in Qur’anic Studies: A Roundtable on Influential Methodologies and Promising New Directions,” Feminist Studies in Religion 39, no. 2 (2023): 57–102.
5 A dozen other academic publications have reviewed the book. Among them, Nimet Şaker, a Qur’anic studies scholar with a specialization in women and gender on the faculty of Humboldt-Universität, offers a detailed and especially accurate review that discusses my research methodology and conclusions at length in Die Welt Des Islams 63, no. 3(2023): 367–71. For critical discussions on the merits of each chapter’s methodology, see contributions by Qur’anic studies specialists Aayah Musa (chapter 1), Martin Nguyen (chapter 2), Hadia Mubarak (chapter 3), and Rahel Fischbach (chapter 4) in Feminist Studies in Religion 37, no. 2 (2021): 191–212.
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