Critical-Progressive Muslims: On Islamic hermeneutics, Gender and Interreligious Dialogue

PROFESSOR KHALED ABOU EL FADL’S PREFACE TO MY BOOK : Constructing a Religiously Ideal “Believer” and “Woman” in Islam   Neo-traditional Salafi and Progressive Muslims’ Methods of Interpretation ,Palgrave 2011. https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9780230120570 There is a growing number of academic studies on contemporary Islamic thought published in the West each year. Yet despite the sharp increase in books that attempt to study the works of modern Muslim theologians and jurists, only a few of these studies manage to offer original insights on the normative assumptions and choices made by the internal participants to the current Muslim discourse. Fewer still are successful in analytically engaging the internal debates of contemporary Muslims on their own terms without projecting onto these debates assumptions and values that inevitably distort and even misrepresent them. It is the relative absence of sound and thorough scholarship in this critical and timely field that make...

Shaikh is prominent progressive scholar who has offered us system­atic non-patriarchal interpretations of the hadith literature. Anchored in a fundamental commitment to justice as a spiritual core of Islam and inspired by a feminist hermeneutic derived from this spiritual core, Shaikh (2004) critiques the implicit androcentric and patriarchal gender ideologies embedded in a selection of hadith found in a traditionally highly esteemed hadith collection, Sahih of Bukhari. She (2012, 26–27) elsewhere terms this approach as a feminist ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ which “exposes discriminatory struc­tures and values embedded within texts emerging from an exclusively male experiential reality”. Unlike Mernissi, Shaikh does not adopt the methodology of the classical hadith scholars when engaging in an alternative reading of the hadith literature. She writes: My paper is not concerned with isnad criticism and historical authenticity. In short, I am concerned with approaching the Had...

Hadith and Gender in the Thought of Faqihuddin Abdolkodir A contemporary Indonesian progressive Muslim scholar, Kodir is another important contributor to a non-patriarchal approach to hadith literature. Kodir’s starting premise is that classical hadith sciences and principles of Islamic jurisprudence contain useful mechanisms for a contextualist reading of hadith on the basis of which gender-just interpretations of the same can be developed. The contextualist interpretation of hadith for Kodir entails a critical reading of the hadith by means of ijtihad of the text ( matn ) of the hadith conceived of as a linguistic text that functions within a certain cultural environment. The hadith texts are historical records. As such, they are intimately connected to the social dynamics of Arab society at the time of the Prophet. Consequently, in light of the fundamentally contextual character of the hadith, a number of scholars have adopted an understanding of the hadith which is informed b...

Khaled Abou El Fadl's   Approach to the Hadith Khaled Abou El Fadl (b.1963) is one of the most distinguished scholars of Islamic law today. He is also one of the few progressive Muslim scholars who has fully engaged with the postmodern episteme, post-enlightenment hermeneutics, and literary theory, as well as applied them in relation to gen­der issues in Islam, including the interpretation of hadith pertaining to gender. Much of his Qur’anic hermeneutics and approach to Islamic jurisprudence is in agreement with scholars such as mohsen Kadivar and nasr Abu Zayd , and need not be repeated. However, El Fadl’s work also includes discussions pertaining to (in)determinacy of meaning, ambiguity of textual hermeneu­tics, and the process of meaning derivation as employed, for example, in literary theory and semiotics (which he has applied to both Qur’an and hadith texts) (El Fadl, 2001, 88). El Fadl has systematically engaged in these discussions and has applied them to the issue ...

UNEDITED SECTION OF A CHAPTER IN PROGRESS  ON GENDER AND HADITH  Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist, was a pioneer of Islamic feminism. Her most relevant work for the purposes of this chapter is her book The Veil and the Muslim Elite in which Mernissi engages in a critical re-reading and critical reassessment of   the authenticity of two misogynist hadith found in Al-Bukhari’s Sahih hadith collection. [1] Mernissi’s   broader thesis is that the egalitarian if not the   feminist message and the persona of the Prophet of Islam has been manipulated   and distorted by the Muslim male (scholarly ) elite. Recognising the importance of hadith on the collective consciousness of Muslims and their societies and especially the detrimental effect that they have had on women’s rights, Mernissi adopts the methodology and the criteria of the classical hadith scholars themselves to cast doubt on the reliability of the transmitters of the following two hadith:...