?”Believing Women” in Islam is a study of Muslim women’s roles in society as determined by most current interpreters/readers of the Qur’an. Asma Barlas feels the Qur’an clearly establishes equality between men and women. In working to prove this point, she hopes to answer two questions. “First, does Islam’s Scripture, the Qur’an, teach or condone sexual inequality or oppression?” Second, “Does the Qur’an permit and encourage liberation for women”? In the end, Barlas succinctly answers both questions by guiding the reader step-by-step through the historical foundations of Islam and the Qur’an. She also focuses on some specific Scripture (veiling, divorce, and the rights of fathers and mothers) to illustrate her position of female equality/liberation.
The core of Barlas’s argument lies in her discussion of texts pertaining to the two sexes/genders. She states that the Qur’an does not define men and women as two “binary oppositions,” men as the Subject and women as the Other, but as “two complete differences”. She illustrates this by examining the Creation story in the Qur’an. “The theme that women and men commenced from a single Self and constitute a pair is integral to Qur’anic epistemology”.
This is also evident in the discussion of the veil. Barlas notes that the Qur’an’s distinction of the gaze and the body pertains to both men and women. “Thus, many commentators of old, who took this Ayah to mean that the gaze was the messenger of fornication, sought to mitigate it not as the Qur’an does by counseling modesty for both men and women, but by segregating and veiling women in order to protect men’s sexual virtue…. The Qur’an however, rules out both male and female scopic activity. Moreover, its injunction to cast down one’s eyes establishes that people must, in fact, be free to look upon one another publicly”.
Barlas clearly lights a path in the Qur’an that allows Muslim women to break free of many patriarchal readings previously established. However, she acknowledges that precedent, established since the time of the Abbasids, is difficult if not impossible to change. Her hope is that her work will facilitate discussion among Muslims. “We cannot reinterpret Islam without rereading the Qur’an, and many Muslims do in fact recognize the urgency of such an exercise given its abuses at the hands of many Muslim clerics and states to oppress women”.
More here.