Speaking of daily Qur’an reading, I just finished surah Maryam and surah TaHa, chapters 19 and 20, respectively. As its name would indicate, surah Maryam is one of the places where the story of Mary and her child Jesus (Isa) is told. Their story is told at other places in the Qur’an with different details or sometimes the same details but different emphasis. This is the nature of the Qur’anic unfolding of these ancient stories. The stories of many Prophets known from the Torah and the Bible are retold and retold within certain contexts.
For example, if the topic is about patience, the stories are told with details related more to that value or virtue. There are lots of times when the emphasis is on keeping to the truth and avoiding deception, especially the “lie on Allah.” It’s important in the Qur’an to avoid spreading lies about God. If you think about it, the significance will ring out loud. How many times do we hear of people doing horrific things in the name of God?
Anyway, the section of the Qur’an I am reading now reviews these stories of the Prophets in many different ways; including details about their extended family relations, and the women in their lives. It talks about women who are barren being given glad tidings of fertility. It talks about women who do not want to follow the path of truth and justice, and so will be amongst those destroyed by earthly calamities. It talks about women who struggle against the tyranny of their time and will be forever rewarded. It talks about women who persevere through difficulties and commends their actions.
While very few women stand on their own in the Qur’an, those who do have been the subject of researches for more than 1400 years. They leave a very special mark on my heart regarding the relationship of the Qur’an to women and women’s struggles far beyond the patriarchal contexts of its 7th century period of revelation.
Let me be clear on this: the context was patriarchal, tribal, desert-like, replete with violent practices, and things like slavery or barbaric forms of punishment. Although the Prophet practiced non-violence for the first 13 years of his 23 year prophetic mission, eventually, the call to take up arms was made. This was the only way to stand up in a circumstance which knew no other means for resolving disputes. I do not limit Allah or Allah’s Qur’anic message to that circumstance.
As the scholars say, the context shaped some of the particulars without limiting the universals. I know, sometimes people read the devil in the details. So it is good to analyze them, to see their relationship to the whole. After all, the Qur’an itself exhorts us to “believe in the book the whole of the book.” It is also true in Qur’anic studies that there is a system of hierarchies, prioritizing the universals over the particulars, the ‘aam over the khass. That way when the Qur’anic revelation includes details that are only relevant to the Prophet or his household we are not confused to extend their application beyond. For example, the Qur’an tells the Prophet’s wives that they are not permitted to remarrying after his death. What kind of general ruling can be made from this? None. So none was made.
For almost four decades now I have been making gender-inclusive reading of the Qur’an to augment over a thousand years of male-only tafasir, or textual interpretation. Women read as human beings and as women. Men read as human beings and as men.
Sometimes the extensive Qur’anic literature comes without distinguishing between that which is read by a man as a man and that which is read by a man as a human being. Fortunately in our time, we have seen the error of this and have been blessed with a significant contribution. Women can read as women and as humans. As such women’s readings add to our overall understandings of the Qur’an.
We have no record of women’s response to the text for the first 1350 years. Yes, women read, yes, women memorized, yes, women were hadith reporters, yes, women contributed to the formation of Islamic history; but we have no record of women’s response to this text, until the Twentieth century. The results are significant to Qur’anic understanding. Take for example the (male) scholar who reads the story of women tempting the Prophet Yusuf (Joseph). He makes a point about a single line, “Indeed their (female plural) trickery, kayd, is wicked”. In the end of his analysis (and in much of the Arabo-Islamic culture) the idea is expressed that some how women are particularly prone to deception. All based on one word, kayd.
If we simply review the entire Qur’an for the use of this word, we see there is neither restriction to women nor any particular emphasis on it with regard to women. This is just something the author has made up perhaps because of the culture from which he comes. In other words, according to the Qur’an there is kayd all around: women do it, men do it, animals do it, and even Allah does it. So why would some one come up with the false conclusion that it is specifically a woman’s thing?
It is equally necessary for women to explicate certain passages because women alone are the ones that experience what is being discussed. As such women would know better how to explain it to others, other women and other men. Maryam (Mary), the mother of Jesus (Isa), and the mother of Moses, are indispensable to the argument. Their experiences in labor and as a nursing mother, respectively, have a wonderful place in my heart and in my reading of the Qur’an.
I will not expose all the details from all the many places in the Qur’an where the story of Mary is discussed, but in surah Maryam she is in labor. Here we have the most sensitive accounts known to religious literature—especially in the Abrahamic family: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It is especially significant, I think, that the Qur’an has this account when Mary and her son are of much greater significance to Christianity, even to the point of deification of the son. No where in the Bible is the labor of Mary discussed.
The Qur’an says:
“And when the pangs of childbirth drove her unto the trunk of a palm tree, she said, “Woe is me. Would that I had died before this and had become a thing of naught, forgotten!”
This now famous Maryamic cry is referred to by men and women when faced with an overwhelming situation. In other words, what happens exclusively to a woman has become a model for what happens to any human being in an overwhelming situation. But a woman in labor should not be forgotten so easily. Nor should what she was experiencing specific to a woman be forgotten, even as the cry itself expresses the wish to be a thing forgotten!
So the next few verses in surah Maryam discuss the ways in which she was consoled in her labor and given cool water to drink and dates to eat until the labor was over and the child safely delivered. There is no exhortation for her to neglect the experience of labor because she will be the mother of the Prophet. Her labor experience is hers alone, but equally significant in this Qur’anic account.
So likewise the story of the mother of Moses. We know the deal. Pharaoh’s soothsayers have predicted the end of the reign of Pharaoh at the hands of a (male) child to be born in the house of the children of Israel. To be certain that no one will grow up to fulfill this prophecy, he orders all male children under the age of two murdered. A dark day indeed: for every mother, every father, every sister and every brother of these slaughtered babies.
The warning was given to the mother of Moses before the soldiers reach her house. She puts her suckling infant in a basket and places the basket on the river. It eventually floats up to the house of Pharaoh himself and is taken in by the household. But he refuses to suckle at any of the palace wet nurses, so Moses’ sister, who had followed the basket along the river, makes a recommendation: I know a woman who could be a wet nurse.
“Then we returned you to your mother, so that her eyes might be refreshed and so that she might not grieve. “
What is this: avoiding grief in a nursing mother? Refreshing the eyes of that mother, who wishes to see her son? Why are these as significant to the story as the eventual fulfillment of the divine decree and the fall of the reign of Pharaoh under the Prophet Moses? More importantly, where was the consideration of the experience of women as women given the emphasis necessary for the story to be complete? We had to wait until the 20th century to get this emphasis. And thank God we now have it.
Later in surah Taha, Moses gives a prayer I will give in closing: “My Lord, expand for me my bosom and make my affair easy for me”. Amin
Editor’s Note: To follow all of Amina Wadud’s daily posts, as she blogs from Ramadan through her first hajj, check here.
