JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION最新文献

{"title":"Decolonizing the Body, Pedagogies, and Anti-Asian Hate","authors":"Najeeba Syeed","doi":"10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.22","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.22","url":null,"abstract":"Decolonizing the Body, Pedagogies, and Anti-Asian Hate Najeeba Syeed (bio) A student emails me, telling me she is in tears, grappling with what it means to let go of definitions of her identity that had held her hostage to the claims of colonized religion. She asks, \"What is left?\" I've had many students send me these types of emails. They struggle with the process of coming into their own agency and defining their heritage, articulating their experiences of marginalization, and also speaking openly about their strengths and dreams. Here are four pedagogical approaches I've adopted as a professor to respond to student needs and experiences like those named above: 1. Sequence the syllabus in ways that center decolonial framing before teaching religion itself. For example, I assign Linda Tuhiwai Smith's book Decolonizing Methodologies before other texts, before teaching texts on religion and spirituality.1 This framing allowed for colonial constructs we studied later to be interrogated and examined as students were learning them. It changed the method of ending a course with critique and centered the course in this constant questioning of how religions are studied and how religion is constructed in the overall academic framework and institutional settings. 2. Teach more women. I cannot emphasize this enough. So often decolonial critique is taught only from the perspectives of authors who identify as men; adding the voices of female-identified authors may mean stretching the boundaries of what is decolonial. I've used traditional religious writers who do not name [End Page 123] the decolonial method but execute it nonetheless. They may be writing in forms that are not readily accessible as academic texts. For my Indigenous students, for instance, this meant reading firsthand narratives that were not always scholarly works, but the embodied experience of decolonizing was evident, a roadmap in the text. 3. Pay attention to what I am modeling as professor. My body is the first text in the classroom interreligious encounter that a student reads. This is especially the case when students have not encountered religious diversity in their prior experiences. Especially as a woman—a Muslim woman, a Brown woman, and an Asian woman—it is important to name when encounters are complex, complicated, or problematic. This has been very hard. So often my age, my qualifications are asked about, personal revelations sought. Familiarity and comfort with me pursued, I had to insist on being \"Professor Syeed\" while my colleagues could be addressed by their first names with impunity. More deeply, I have begun to talk about and name when my own body was experiencing violations by what we read, by what we watched, and by what was said in the moment of interaction in the classroom. This has taken practice and deliberation over time. It is done with strength and honesty and clarity; and the methods of how I handled these conflicts were greatly appreciated by my students. 4. T","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135691395","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editors' Introduction","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/jfs.2023.a908291","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfs.2023.a908291","url":null,"abstract":"Editors' Introduction Michal Raucher and Kate Ott This issue of the journal highlights the comparative nature of the field of feminist studies in religion. In addition to articles and poetry, readers will find three conversations among scholars. Together they approach an issue from their distinct perspectives. Authors learn with and from one another as they think anew about their own interests. It is some of the best kind of work in the academy, where a group of scholars approaches intransigent issues together, in the hope that they can use different lenses to provide new answers to old questions. We hope the rich conversations in this issue will generate new ideas, questions, and answers for you as well. Each year, we honor submissions from scholars who are less than four years postgraduation with the Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholars Award (NSA). This year's winner of the NSA is Magda Mohamed. \"Queer Muslim Piety\" explores queer Muslim women's attitudes toward their hijab. Mohamed's important ethnographic research with queer Muslims disaggregates the hijab and female modesty from heteronormative sexual attraction. Other articles submitted for this award include Emma McDonald's \"Finding the Maternal Divine in the Contextual Realities of Motherhood\" and Eliana Ah-Rum Ku's \"Challenging Texts with Violence toward Women.\" McDonald argues for a new exploration of maternal metaphors for God in Catholic and Protestant theology. These new metaphors, McDonald demonstrates, can be drawn from more diverse experiences of motherhood than those that have historically been incorporated into divine imagery. Eliana Ah-Rum Ku's article also attends to the voices of those not often heard. Ku reads challenging texts through a postcolonial feminist framework and argues that this approach allows readers to witness suffering and lament alongside injustice. Following the new scholar essays, this issue features two conversations among scholars. These formats reflect our feminist commitment to engage in challenging conversations and promote a multiplicity of opinions. Additionally, the [End Page 1] conversations in these pages are continuations of dialogues started many years ago. Readers will enjoy seeing how the discourse has shifted and grown. In the first roundtable, twelve feminist scholars of the Qurʾan discuss influential methodologies and promising new directions in gender-attuned research in qurʾanic studies. These scholars are expanding a conversation from seven years prior in JFSR 32.2, when scholars published a roundtable on feminist discourse in Islamic studies. This group of twelve scholars collaborated on a roundtable at the International Qurʾanic Studies Association (IQSA) 2022 conference in Palermo, Italy, and subsequently published their conversation in our pages. This roundtable reflects the many ways the feminist study of the Qurʾan has expanded to include extra-qurʾanic corpora, critique of masculinity, and spirituality, among others. Poetry ","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135639238","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gender-Based Research in Qur'anic Studies: Concluding Remarks","authors":"Nevin Reda","doi":"10.2979/jfs.2023.a908307","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfs.2023.a908307","url":null,"abstract":"Gender-Based Research in Qur'anic StudiesConcluding Remarks Nevin Reda (bio) To conclude, this roundtable has demonstrated a variety of new and continuing directions in gender-based research in qurʾanic studies. It suggests that the field is diverse and pluralistic, not always univocal, and often engaging a plethora of methodological and theoretical frameworks. Feminist and other gender-based Qurʾan scholarship has moved beyond the immediate confines of the Qurʾan and has widened the scope of scholarly investigations to encompass tafsīr (exegesis), hadith, āthār (reports transmitted from the first two generations of Muslims), and other extra-qurʾanic corpora, as can be noted in the work of Hadia Mubarak, Rahel Fischbach, and Yasmin Amin in this volume (and Fatima Mernissi before that).1 It continues to be in conversation with multiple discourses and conversation partners, including non-Muslim Western academia, as one can note in Halla Attallah's engagement with the ideas of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson on the intersection of femininity and disability. While in the past feminist engagement focused more on masculinist constructions of women and femininity, today women scholars are seeing the need to critique constructions of masculinity and to offer their own readings of ideal masculinity, as one can note in the work of Yasmin Amin (and the broader work of Omaima Abou-Bakr).2 The tightrope that faith-based Muslim women scholars must walk when introducing constructive methodologies and theologically grounded epistemes into largely \"secular\" academic settings, while at the same time maintaining credibility in practical, faith-based settings, is eloquently addressed in the contributions of Celene Ibrahim and Mahjabeen Dhala. One can note the connection between Muslim women's lived experiences and the [End Page 101] questions that Islamic feminist scholars pose in Mulki Al-Sharmani's ethnographic research and Roshan Iqbal's arguments for reappraising fiqh related to sexual ethics. The spiritual turn is vividly illustrated in the scholarship of Amira Abou-Taleb and Omaima Abou-Bakr, who highlight the importance of the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions, as well as their connection to the Qurʾan's moral foundation, including the central value of justice. The focus on language and intra-qurʾanic coherence remains alive and well, as one can note in the work of Abla Hasan, who embodies an intertextual Qurʾan-centric hermeneutic, highlighting the gap between the literal text of the Qurʾan and heritage-based interpretations. Always, however, we remain conscious of the debt we owe to those who established the cornerstones of Muslim women's Qurʾan scholarship before us, upon whose work we build and from whose accomplishments we take inspiration. Foremost among these trailblazers are amina wadud, Asma Barlas, Riffat Hassan, and Azizah al-Hibri, who established this field in the Western academy, and Omaima Abou-Bakr, who works in both local Arabic-speaking and inter","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135638946","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Extra-Qurʾanic Sources and Gender-Just Hermeneutics","authors":"Rahel Fischbach","doi":"10.2979/jfs.2023.a908299","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfs.2023.a908299","url":null,"abstract":"Extra-Qurʾanic Sources and Gender-Just Hermeneutics Rahel Fischbach (bio) Indeed, as noted in this roundtable by Hadia Mubarak, gender justice-seeking readings often circumvent or dismiss extra-qurʾanic literature. There are several reasons for this hermeneutical situation. The most apparent is the Qurʾan's status as the primary religious source for Islamic faith and practice. Some scholars consider the exegetical literature—not the Qurʾan itself—to be androcentric and patriarchal.1 Some argue that the extra-qurʾanic material is historically questionable or otherwise insufficiently authentic. Others may shy away from the sheer quantity of extra-qurʾanic literature and the sophisticated hermeneutical strategies necessary for integrating these sources into qurʾanic reading practices. I will reflect on some challenges and possibilities of utilizing extra-qurʾanic exegetical and narrative literature for gender-just readings of the Qurʾan, since a close relation exists between text, context, and reading practices in the meaning-making process. The stimulus for my ponderings was Celene Ibrahim's work Women and Gender in the Qur'an (2020). There, she suggested that certain Medinan passages addressing or alluding to women can be read as \"case studies,\" originally intended to inculcate new, specific values in the early Muslim society (umma).2 My initial reservations regarding her reading concerned the contextualization of those passages using extra-qurʾanic sources including sīra (biography), naskh (abrogation), and nuzūl (the advent of verses) literatures. These sources are historically contested, at times contradictory, and often inconclusive. Single āyas (verses) often have multiple scenarios as possible contextual background. I also thought that relying too heavily on extra-qurʾanic narrative material [End Page 71] could distract from the Qurʾan-centered approach advanced by Ibrahim.3 My own objections admittedly resulted from an unconscious textual and historical positivism. Contrary to postmodern aspirations, many of us remain trapped in the search for authorial intentions and historical authenticity, or, on the other side of the hermeneutical spectrum, we are so preoccupied with language, representation, and textual synchronicity that we cannot but subscribe to a relativist pluralism. Shifting focus to the discursive system in which the Qurʾan is enmeshed, including the aforementioned sources (sīra, aḥādīth, tafsīr, asbāb al-nuzūl), as well as folktales, ritual, pictorial arts, and the like, directs our attention to the complexity of the reading process. Any reading of the Qurʾan is inescapably linked to—or even determined by—extra-qurʾanic material, ritual, ideas, events, assumptions, and translations. The Qurʾan constantly points beyond itself to other texts, to its context, and to its own statements. Through extra-qurʾanic discursive, visual, and performative practices, each part of the Qurʾan evokes a multitude of associations, feelings, ideas,","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":"66 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135638961","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Negotiating Gender and Religion: Comparative Perspectives from Judaism and Islam","authors":"Lisa Anteby-Yemini","doi":"10.2979/jfs.2023.a908318","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfs.2023.a908318","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Women in Orthodox Judaism and mainstream Islam are discriminated against in Muslim and Jewish family law; subjected to rulings elaborated by men regarding female purity and reproductive rights; segregated in the spaces of synagogues and mosques; and excluded from advanced study, interpretation of religious law ( fiqh and halakha ), and spiritual leadership. Gender-nonconforming believers have no place, either. Nonetheless, since the mid-twentieth century, Jewish and Muslim women as well as sexual minorities have been making claims for gender justice, attempting to change from within these conservative religions. The article shows convergences and divergences in women's strategies to undermine male hegemony on religious authority in both faiths. If numerous works have dealt with female agency and resistance to patriarchy in each tradition, comparative studies are still lacking, and this article suggests areas in family law, ritual purity, and procreation to further feminist and queer interreligious research.","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135639103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Tools, Masters, and Houses: Exploring Leveraging as a Strategy Used by Religious Women Seeking Change","authors":"Elisheva Rosman","doi":"10.2979/jfs.2023.a908317","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfs.2023.a908317","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Religious women see their faith as an important component in their lives and want it to be a positive and constructive force. However, at times they wish to bring about change that affects the religious sphere. Such changes—even if they are minor—require actions that are not always accepted favorably by religious authorities. Religious women must devise strategies to bring about the change they wish to see. Using a typology of strategies employed by religious feminists when dealing with religious systems and the role the state plays in this relationship, this article explores the strategy of leveraging based on two case studies. The first, focusing solely on Jewish women in Israel, examines the issue of ritual immersion in state-owned baths. The second explores marriage captivity in Israel and the Netherlands and involves Jewish Orthodox and Muslim women in both countries (as well as others). The article demonstrates the strategy of leveraging and discusses its potential as a tool for change, concluding with suggestions for future research.","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135639104","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reflections on Asian American Religions: Transformative Hope and APARRI","authors":"Tamara C. Ho","doi":"10.2979/jfs.2023.a908311","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfs.2023.a908311","url":null,"abstract":"Reflections on Asian American ReligionsTransformative Hope and APARRI Tamara C. Ho (bio) Despite the long history of Asian American authors writing about religion in US communities since the late 1800s (dating back to one of our earliest authors, Sui Sin Far), Asian American faith communities have been marginalized and persistently misrepresented in the larger public narrative of American religion because of the prevailing focus on white and Black communities and white Christian hegemony. Research and pedagogy on Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) religions are often unsupported and unrecognized in the academy, both in secular and theological institutions, because of structural racism, orientalism, and epistemological blinders. US academic scholarship has operated with particularly skewed notions and stereotypical views of Asian Americans and their engagement with religion. Teaching and scholarship rarely take into consideration how race is a defining and intersectional factor in the study of religion. Reshaping public knowledge and the narrative around Asian American religions is not only timely but also urgent because of increasing concern about anti-Asian hate—metastasized during the Islamophobic period following 9/11 and the Trump presidency, and intensified by the COVID pandemic since early 2020. Asian American and Pacific Islander religious communities are important elements of racial justice work and centers of political mobilizing. More critical attention to community dynamics, coalition building, and research in this sub-field can enhance the understanding of not only international relations among the United States, Asian nations, and Oceania (the transnational region often known as the Pacific Rim), but also interracial encounters, alliances, and diverse histories within the United States. Only relatively recently has there emerged a critical mass of scholars who can understand these intertwined, intersectional dynamics of race, gender, and religion, and how they shape perceptions of Asian American religious life. For [End Page 117] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Screenshot of photograph shown by Cabezón during his online 2020 AAR presidential address. example, during his 2020 presidential address on \"The Study of Buddhism and the AAR [American Academy of Religion],\" José I. Cabezón shared an archival photograph from the 1960s of the \"Asian Religions\" section meeting at an annual AAR conference: it showed a room full of white men and an all-male cisgender panel of white scholars at the front (fig. 1).1 It was not until 2019 that the annual AAR conference hosted a panel on \"Asian American Buddhism and American Belonging\" that was comprised entirely of Asian American scholar-teachers of varying genders, ethnicities, and Buddhist traditions. Organized by Sharon A. Suh, this panel was notable not only in its Asian American focus and diverse embodiment, but audience members also praised its remarkable ethos of coll","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135639109","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Censorship, Silence, and the Voices of Catholic Feminist Theologians","authors":"Hille Haker","doi":"10.2979/jfs.2023.a908316","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfs.2023.a908316","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article argues that theological dissent is not only censored by church institutions but also silenced by mechanisms of self-censoring. Calling for recognition of the intertwining of censorship and shame as analytical categories, the article explores the simultaneity of the silencing of feminist theologians about sexual morality and gender theories, and the silence around the clergy sexual abuse committed by priests as well as the abuse committed by Catholic nuns. It examines the systemic control of critique by the institution of the Catholic Church, which is itself immune to any institutional or theological critique, and calls for a renewal process that involves remembrance, recognition, and responsibility.","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135639122","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Qurʾanic Textuality and the Potential of Aesthetic ( Jamālī ) Interpretation","authors":"Omaima Abou-Bakr","doi":"10.2979/jfs.2023.a908303","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfs.2023.a908303","url":null,"abstract":"Qurʾanic Textuality and the Potential of Aesthetic (Jamālī) Interpretation Omaima Abou-Bakr (bio) At the other end of the spectrum from the extra-qurʾanic material and women's lived reality is qurʾanic textuality. Much in alignment with Hadia Mubarak's approach to studying the Qurʾan on its own terms, internal logic, and moral world, and with Amira Abou Taleb's overarching paradigm of iḥsān, as described in this roundtable and in her writing more broadly, I put forth a particular hermeneutical \"textual\" method that draws upon the approaches and interpretive tools of literary criticism and aesthetic theory. Applications on the qurʾanic text would mean analyzing features of textual beauty and harmony—especially in the form of elements of unity, coherence, symmetry, sequence, structural patterns, repetitions, echoes, correspondences, binaries, and counterparts—as a gateway to uncovering deeper ethical and spiritual meanings. The beautiful textual form embodies, illustrates, and conveys an ethical message, and a reader experiences an apprehension of \"harmony-in-the-text\" as a means and guide to the inner layers of thought. In other words, the process seeks a synthesis of aesthetic sense, emotive response, and reflection (tadabbur)—with a focus on gender ethics. This method of examining language, rhetorical devices, structure, and style has both classical and modern roots. Classical concepts like iʾjāz (the Qurʾan's inimitability), such as in Kitāb Ḍalāʾil al-Iʾjāz (Proofs of Inimitability) and Asrār al-Balagha fī ʿIlm al-Bayān (Secrets of Rhetoric in the Science of Eloquence) by ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī' (d. 471 H/1078 CE), Nazm al-Qurʾān (Structural Organization of the Qurʾan) by al-Jāḥiẓ (160–256 H/776–869 CE), and Sufi symbolic interpretation (al-tafsīr al-ishārī), dealt with diverse textual facets, though rarely leading to holistic considerations, such as making clear links with ethical meanings and gender justice. Modern developments and special interest in coherence-focused exegesis begin with Hamīdudīn Farāhī (1836–1930) and Amīn Iṣlāḥī (1904–97), and contemporary scholarship's revivification of this trend includes the literary school of Amīn al-Khulī (1895–1966) and Āʾisha Abd [End Page 87] al-Raḥmān (1913–98) in Egypt, initiating her work of exegesis that focuses on stylistic features of eloquence and psychological effect entitled al-Tafsīr al-Bayānī lil-Qurʾān al-Karīm (1962). More scholarship centering coherence and unity followed, including the studies of Mustansir Mir (b. 1949) on the \"sura as a unity,\" al-Waḥda al-Bināʾiyya li-l-Qurʾān al-Majīd (Structural Unity of the Glorious Qurʾan, 2006), by Taha Jabir Alalwani (1935–2016), and Salwa El-Awa's Textual Relations in the Qurʾan (2006). Currently, this scholarly movement of holistic approaches in qurʾanic studies is led and applied by Nevin Reda.1 Building on this tradition, I seek more applications of this kind of hermeneutics through what is termed in literary theory as \"close reading\"","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":"72 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135639505","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Critical Studies of Hadith and of Islamic Masculinity: Two Important Frontiers for Future Qur'anic Scholarship","authors":"Yasmin Amin","doi":"10.2979/jfs.2023.a908300","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfs.2023.a908300","url":null,"abstract":"Critical Studies of Hadith and of Islamic MasculinityTwo Important Frontiers for Future Qur'anic Scholarship Yasmin Amin (bio) This roundtable offers frameworks for critical reading, methods for challenging subjectivity and methodological rigidity, strategies for engaging with qurʾanic interpretive traditions, and avenues for conducting rigorous philological, grammatical, rhetorical, and structural analyses. But at least two additional critical and interrelated issues remain to be explored. First, the majority of feminist works separate qurʾanic narratives about women and men and focus on verses that deal with social issues pertaining predominantly to women (most notably Q 2:282, 4:1, 4:34, and 24:31); however, this approach preserves much of the logic on which patriarchy is built. Future feminist scholarship should devote more energy to understanding the construction of masculinity in the Qurʾan and in extra-qurʾanic sources. Second, many studies focus solely on the Qurʾan and its exegesis by employing works from the inherited canon to deconstruct, undermine, or expose inherent gender biases. However, the inherited canon, especially in the traditionally grounded episteme of qurʾanic sciences, consists of interconnected scholarly disciplines. Authors writing in the tafsīr genre use hadith (aḥādīth) to interpret the Qurʾan, but in doing so, they often disregard the painstaking classification system developed over the centuries to discern the authenticity of hadith reports. Future feminist qurʾanic scholarship should critique the misuse of hadith, particularly in instances where the misuse entrenches male privilege and undermines other instances in the Qurʾan which depict an egalitarian ethos in marriage and gender relations more broadly.1 [End Page 75] Over centuries and generations, male scholars have advanced male legislative and scholarly privileges while female interpretive authorities have been marginalized.2 Therefore, to generate more gender-based research that positively affects women's lived realities, the narrow focus on Qurʾan and tafsīr should be widened to reconstruct a more egalitarian, inclusive, and gender-just ethos for qurʾanic scholarship. Given that the Qurʾan constitutes the foundation of Islamic epistemology and given that scholars interpret it through the prophetic Sunna (the reported actions and behaviors of the Prophet Muḥammad), through qiyās (deductive analogy), and through ijmāʿ (consensus), a reexamination of the whole interpretive foundation is paramount. In particular, the abuse of aḥādīth and prophetic sīra (biographical narrations) when used to entrench prevailing gendered hierarchies and bolster discriminatory laws constitutes a complete disregard for the model prophetic legacy. Current and future generations deserve the right to interpret the Qurʾan and thereby also change the laws in the context of their changing lived realities and circumstances, thus restoring the dynamic relationship between reason and consen","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135639778","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}