Allegorical Gender

Abstract

Introduction In the last decade, a number of monographs and forays in the field of Muslim women’s studies have attempted to examine the place of the Muslim woman in the interpretive heritage of Islamic exegetical texts, particuly the hadith tufsir literature from the period of classical Islam.’ The figure of Eve (Hawwa’ in Qur’anic terminology) is an inevitable topic of discussion in all of these scholarly studies, primarily due to her definitive role in the evolution of gender categories in the Islamic exegetical texts, and, subsequently, how this role has become an indicator of direction for the Muslim woman’s identity. The figure of Eve, in short, as articulated by Muslim classical exegetes, has not ony defined the identity of Muslim woman; it has also set the parameters for how that identity has been forged. Yet, the traditional view of Eve portrays woman as both physically and mentally inferior to man, as well as spiritually inept. This classical interpretation of Eve has come to be endowed with sacred authority, more so by virtue of its place in our Islamic past than by any Qur’anic sanction. This is not to imply that all of the medieval classical writings on Islam constitute a monolithic whole. After all, the sources of the Shari‘ah, namely, the Qur’an and the hadith, historically have been highly adaptable texts: In the case of the Qur’an, its directives are general, broad, and flexible in most cases; therefore they could be translated into the terms of a specific social reality of each generation of interpreters. Concerning the hadith . . . given the inevitable gap between the actual and the idealized. . . it is not surprising that the Hadith contains an abundance of varied and often contradictory traditions, ...