阿斯玛·巴拉斯

作品

• 2002伊斯兰中的信女：摆脱对古兰经的父权式解释

  对古兰经及其注释的研究：经文既没有把真主表现为男性，也没有把男人表现为真主派来管辖女人的代理人；作为整体、结合历史语境并依据真主独一、公正和无可比拟的原则来读，它把女人和男人都视为平等的道德行动者。

立场

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”.

生平与背景

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.

其他主要作品

• Democracy, Nationalism and Communalism: The Colonial Legacy in South Asia (1995)
• Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an (2002; revised edition 2019)
• 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)