Asma Barlas

Works

• 2002Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an

  Study of the Qur’an and its exegesis: the text represents neither God as male nor men as God’s deputies over women; read as a whole, in its historical context and by the principles of divine unity, justice and incomparability, it treats women and men as equal moral agents.

Position

Asma Barlas is on the map as one of the authors who founded a feminist hermeneutics of the Qur’an from within the tradition. “Believing Women in Islam” (2002) distinguishes the Qur’an from its exegesis: the patriarchal readings that dominate classical commentary and law, she argues, arise from the interpreters, their societies and the secondary texts on which they relied, not from the Qur’an itself. Three principles guide her reading. Because of God’s unity (tawḥīd), no human being shares God’s sovereignty, so that a husband’s or father’s rule over women would amount to setting up a rival to God; because of God’s justice, the Qur’an cannot be read as commanding injustice to women; and because God is incomparable, God is beyond sex and cannot be represented as male or as father. Read as a whole, through its own internal relations and in the historical context of its revelation, the Qur’an addresses women and men as equal moral agents; where it seems to grant men authority, it responds to the conditions of seventh-century Arabia without making them a norm. Her method takes up Fazlur Rahman’s insistence on reading the Qur’an historically and as a whole, and Amina Wadud’s intratextual reading, on whose hermeneutics she wrote a study (2004). Margot Badran (2009) counts the book among the founding works of Islamic feminism; Barlas herself has preferred to describe her work as a critique of patriarchy from within Islam rather than to adopt the label “feminist”.

Life & context

Asma Barlas was born on 10 March 1950 in Pakistan. After studying English literature and philosophy and taking a master’s degree in journalism, she entered Pakistan’s foreign service in 1976 as one of its first women officers. She was dismissed in 1982 on the orders of General Zia ul-Haq, worked for a time as assistant editor of the newspaper The Muslim, and in 1983 received political asylum in the United States. She took a doctorate in international studies at the University of Denver and from 1991 taught politics at Ithaca College in New York, where she directed its Center for the Study of Culture, Race and Ethnicity; in 2008 she held the Spinoza chair of philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.

Further main works

• Democracy, Nationalism and Communalism: The Colonial Legacy in South Asia (1995)
• Islam, Muslims, and the US: Essays on Religion and Politics (2004)
• “Amina Wadud’s Hermeneutics of the Qur’an: Women Rereading Sacred Texts”, in S. Taji-Farouki (ed.), Modern Muslim Intellectuals and the Qur’an (2004)