Gender and Islam

Overview

Recall questions on the Qur'an and hadith on men and women, women in the earliest community, the veiling debate, changing roles, Islamic feminism and the case against it, and L Ahmed and Nasr.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What does the Qur'an say about the creation and standing of men and women?

   Model answer

   It describes humanity as created from a single soul, addresses men and women alike in its commands and its promises, states that they are protectors of one another, and makes reward and accountability depend on faith and conduct rather than on sex. Muslims right across the spectrum start from these passages. What they disagree about is how to read them alongside the legal verses.

2. 2

   Which Qur'anic provisions are read as differentiating between men and women?

   Model answer

   Rules of inheritance that in the commonest case give a son twice a daughter's share; a passage on witnesses to a debt contract; the assignment to husbands of responsibility for maintenance with a corresponding authority; and the much-argued verse on marital discord. Traditional jurists read these as fixed provisions. Reformers read them against the duty of maintenance and the economic conditions of the time, and dispute the translation of the key words.

3. 3

   How is the hadith material used on gender?

   Model answer

   Both ways, and heavily. Reports honouring mothers, forbidding the mistreatment of wives and daughters, and describing the Prophet helping in his own household are cited by those arguing for equality. Other reports, including some on women's religious capacity and on leadership, are cited by those arguing for restriction. Muslim scholars have subjected the second group to the tradition's own criticism of transmitters and challenged the soundness of several of them.

4. 4

   What roles did women hold in the earliest community?

   Model answer

   Khadijah ran a trading business and employed the man she married. Aisha transmitted a large body of hadith and led a faction in the first civil war. Fatimah is central to Shi'a devotion. Women prayed in the mosque, questioned the Prophet directly, and later taught and transmitted; research through the biographical dictionaries has recovered very large numbers of women scholars whose existence had dropped out of memory.

5. 5

   What is the debate about veiling?

   Model answer

   The Qur'an instructs both men and women to lower the gaze, and instructs women to draw their coverings over themselves; jurists have differed ever since over what that requires. Most traditional scholars hold covering the hair obligatory, while a minority argue that the injunction concerned a specific social marker in Madinah and that the enduring principle is modesty rather than a particular garment. Face covering is more often treated as recommended or as custom. The dispute is genuinely internal to Islam.

6. 6

   How have women's roles changed in recent decades?

   Model answer

   Mass education has produced female majorities in universities in several Muslim-majority countries; women's employment and political participation have risen sharply; family law has been reformed in places, notably in Morocco; and women have entered religious authority as state-appointed guides in Morocco, as muftis in Turkey and Indonesia, and as teachers and chaplains in the West. Access to mosque space for women has become an organised campaign in several countries.

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