Anwar-Gender and Self in Islam (Routledge-Review ).pdf

Islamology

Particularly in the last decades, due to the rapid development of theoretical perspectives across disciplines, the notion of gender has evolved into an umbrella term that today refers to a broad array of themes: from gender-defined social behaviour to sexual and reproductive rights and to matters related to control over one’s body. Following major trends in the humanities and social sciences, also the field of Islamic studies has been contributing to the ongoing scholarly discussion on gender. Two recent volumes that focus specifically on gender issues in Muslim societies (Duderija et al., 2020; Howe, 2020) have marked the expansion of the field, away from dealing primarily with topics related to Muslim women and femininity to a cautious but firm engagement with a broader spectrum of gender-related themes.

Islam and Gender: Major Issues and Debates draws attention to the debates on gender in Islam, emphasizing on lived experiences of Muslim women and men. It focuses on the evolving cultural interplay between women studies, critical feminist theories, and normative religious study (p. 2) and discusses the epistemological advancement of the first three waves of feminism and evolving applications of the woman and gender problems in the disciplinary study of religion and theology. Adis Duderija, Alina Alak, and Kristin Hissong explain various theories behind the traditional construction of masculine and feminine dichotomy and trace Muslim women's ontological and epistemological advancement from diverse nationalities. Finally, they contextualize the debates and discourses initiated by Islamic feminists Fatima Mernissi, Rifat Hassan, Amina Wadud, Asma Barlas, and others. The book traces the evolution of gender in Islam and examines the tensions between the modern and Islamic understanding of gender. The book traverses two major themes. First, it examines a traditional gender discourse in the Islamic jurisprudence, and how they have been interpreted through the Quran and Hadith. It scrutinizes the concept of "topos," known as assumption theory, as the basis of the gender hierarchical and patriarchal nature of the religion. The book has a broad discussion on the nature of the premodern Islamic tradition on gender issues, noting its subscription to the "gender oppositionality" theory that operates behind the tradition of patriarchal construction (p. 25). It explores the logic and the dynamics behind the conceptual patriarchal honor and female modesty law concerning the practice of veiling, seclusion, gender segregation, honor-based violence, and female genital mutation. The main argument provided in the book is whether or not these practices are "Islamic"; all these practices are rooted in the same operative logic, termed as "the logic of patriarchal honor," to control and regulate the female sexuality to uphold patriarchal honor (p. 44). The book argues the importance of the interpretative and hermeneutical approach to the Quran and Sunna in forming gender norms and rules in Islam. It includes a short history of the evolution of Quranic exegesis in Islamic thought and also presents the interpretative methods applied to the Quran in classical Islam that facilitated the construction of a hierarchical gender relation (p. 59).

Islamology, 2021

An introduction to the special issue of the Islamology journal on gender. http://dx.doi.org/10.24848/islmlg.11.1

The Humanistic Psychologist

Australian Journal of Islamic Studies, 2019

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2020

Body and Religion, 2023

This special issue of Body and Religion examines how discourses of masculinities and femininities are naturalized in Islamic theologies of the self, and consequently impact ritual access in historical and modern Sufi, Salafi-Sunni, and conservative Shi'i spaces. The publication of Zahra Ayubi's monograph, Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society (2019), generated meaningful discussions among the authors of this issue. Although research on Sufism and the body had clearly delineated the gendered ways bodies are coded in Islam (Bashir 2011; Kugle 2007), Ayubi harnessed this work and earlier critical scholarship on Islam and gender to powerful effect. She brought to our attention the misogynistic logics that underscore many Islamic theologies of the self. We were grappling with these logics in our source materials, and Ayubi established a critical vocabulary through which we could meaningfully discuss our findings. What Ayubi's research uncovers is the fact that the normative self (the acceptable self and the virtuous self) in Islamic ethics is consistently coded cis-gender, male, and elite. She demonstrates how several foundational Islamic ethicists rendered anyone outside this androcentric norm as inferior and instrumental in the spiritual development of their elite male peers (Ayubi 2019). Moreover, she documents how various intertextual ideas from diverse Islamic theological traditions work together to universalize this gendered paradigm (Ayubi 2020b).