God Beyond Patriarchy: Recovering the Feminine in the Islamic Imagination Adis Duderija "I believe femininity is at least as close to divinity as masculinity. The masculine bias in this matter is one of the worst forms of anthropomorphism." So wrote the process philosopher Charles Hartshorne. Decades later, Christian writer Sarah Bessey would make a related claim in a different register: "Patriarchy is not God's dream for humanity." While these statements emerged from Christian and philosophical contexts, they raise a question that Muslims should not dismiss too quickly: What happens when we confuse God with our own social arrangements? More specifically, what happens when patriarchal culture becomes so deeply embedded in religious interpretation that divine reality itself begins to appear male? The irony is striking. Islam's central theological principle, tawhid, insists that God is utterly unlike creation. "There is nothing whatever like unto Him...
Revelation, Reason, and the Courage to Keep Thinking Adis Duderija Miroslav Volf , the yale Professor of Theology, once observed that for religious exclusivists, those who access truth through an authoritative positive revelation, “reasoning stops before the most fundamental decisions are made about the nature of ultimate reality, the character of the self, the shape of social relations, and the account of the good.” It is a striking insight because it exposes a tension at the heart of much contemporary religious discourse. The issue is not whether religion makes truth claims. Every serious worldview does. The issue is what happens once those claims have been made. For many religious exclusivists, the most important questions are already settled. God has spoken. Reality has been explained. The purpose of human existence is known. Moral truths have been delivered. The task of believers is therefore not to question these foundations but to defend and apply them. There is an obviou...