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

The viability of the concept of Islamic feminism has an element of  contestedness in terms of its compatibility with the Islamic tradition and its fountainheads. One central component of the possibility of Islamic feminism pertains to the idea of whether or not Islam’s primary source of normative teachings, the Qur’an (or more precisely the nature of Qur’anic revelation) can be reconciled with the modern ideas and concepts that come under the umbrella of feminism/gender equality/ anti-patriarchy. In this section, we outline the most recent debates surrounding this question between what can be termed ‘radical’Muslim feminists and Muslim ‘feminists’.    A recent overview of the literature, on theorizing about Islamic feminism, written primarily by Muslim women in the non-Islamicate context, suggests that “a carefully articulated and tentative convergence of the two (i.e. Islam and feminism) intellectual traditions” is both possible and potentially beneficial because...

According to Schoeler, it is difficult to determine accurately the extent to which early transmission of tradition was oral or written in nature.44 However, Souaiaia has recently convincingly argued that orality has from the very genesis of Islamic thought been the primary medium for preserving authentic transmission of knowledge.45 The transmitted knowledge (either oral or written) consisted of short solitary report(s), which referred: . . . zu einem bestimmten historischen Faktum oder Verlauf gewesen ist[sind] und nicht (wie in anderen Kulturbereichen) die umfangsreichere Darstellung grosserer Zusammenhaenge unter bestimmten Geschichtspunkten.46  These solitary reports were firstly transmitted orally and later put in writing in the form of small, somewhat more comprehensive, collections.47 Hallaq’s view that the number of Ḥadith up to the end of the first century were “insufficient to constitute the basis of a substantial doctrine of positive law”,48 can be used as one appr...

In the previous part of our discussion we alluded generally to the forces which were contributing towards the growth of the written recordings of (reportedly) Prophet’s actions and words and the absorption of nonwritten- based Sunnah into them. We also saw that a broader and narrower version of Sunnah were co-existent with an increased tendency for ‘Ḥadīthification’ of regional Sunnah. We shall refer to these factors as mechanisms of traditionalisation. Calder describes this process as a transition from a discursive tradition to a hermeneutic tradition (purporting to derive the law exegetically from the Prophetic sources).202 Ansari, similarly, talks in terms of the shift towards “an objectively justifiable juristic theory” at the time of Shāfiʿī.203 Therefore, those religious authorities that fully embraced and adhered to this narrower epistemologico- methodologal definition of Sunnah (Sunnah equals ‘authentic Ḥadīth’) are conventionally referred to as traditionalists...

With the end of the first and beginning of the second century, significant changes to the concept of Sunnah in the minds of the third generation of Muslims started to develop in terms of its source, mode of transmission, methodological and epistemological parameters (that is, its nature, sources and scope). In this context Juynboll asserts that: . . . the approximate date of origin of the narrowing down of the concept of Sunnah, formerly comprising the Sunnah, or exemplary behaviour, of the Prophet as well as his most devoted followers, to the exemplary behaviour of Prophet only . . . [occurred] towards the end of the first century of the Hijrah and was conceived at the time of Caliph Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz (99-101). Hallaq dates this shift somewhat earlier by saying that the isolation of Prophetic Sunnah172 from other Sunān began to emerge by the late 60s AH. The reasons for this process began in the second half of the first century. The continued territorial expansion ...