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Claims to the Sacred

Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 32.2 (2016), 134–138 Copyright © 2016 The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc., • doi: 10.2979/jfemistudreli.32.2.22 Men in Charge? takes up only two concepts, both of which are asymmetrical and were the building blocks of every aspect of male superiority that has been in practice and was part of a mindset for perhaps fourteen centuries: qiwamah and wilayah. Both are interpreted to deliver subservience of the female to the male in every kind of relationship between them: parent to child, brother to sister, and husband to wife. Once a means to overcome this asymmetry is proposed using the primary text to support it, then the path to transforming both the ethics and the politics of gender hegemony and all other forms of oppression is made transparent. Furthermore, this is built upon the faith-based location of accepting the Most Holy as partner in this liberation and even as its primary architect. The Tawhidic paradigm is also useful in addressing the stagnation over issues of international human rights. If the human being is seen as only one part of a set of dynamic relationships that includes other human beings and the sacred, then Tawhid becomes the rubric for equality and justice. Instead, the way Hidayatullah has read it, God stands at one lonely spot in a rigid, literal triangle. As a result, transformation cannot come about. I can only wager that she missed this because it is missing in her experience; for that, I can only offer hope for a broader perspective through a more intimate experience. But she is free to maintain her location, which is the exact place of patriarchal readers, and for the moment, still the dominant reading, the one we are still working to dismantle.