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Rebellious Wives, Neglectful Husbands

The past two decades have witnessed a proliferation of scholarship focused on women and gender in the Qurʾan. Yet, much of the scholarship evades a substantive engagement with tafsīr as a scholarly genre. This lack of engagement with tafsīr in the field of women in the Qurʾan partially stems from evaluations of the exegetical tradition as patriarchal and incapable of offering egalitarian interpretations. This book argues that this evaluation requires a critical reassessment. Rather than discard the exegetical tradition as meaningless to Muslims’ contemporary efforts to recover the Qurʾan’s ethics, this book brings into conversation the distinct fields of tafsīr studies and women’s studies. More specifically, it explores the impact of modernity on three influential, Sunni Qurʾanic commentaries in the twentieth century through the lens of gender: Tafsīr al-Manār, Fī Ẓilāl al-Qurʾan, and Al-Taḥrīr wa’l-Tanwīr. This book identifies significant shifts in modern Qurʾanic commentaries on the subject of women against the backdrop of broader historical, intellectual, and political developments in the early twentieth century. A serious engagement with tafsīr opens up its gateways and provides a clearer understanding of the genre’s intellectual history, development, methods, and construction of interpretive authority. Rather than pit a seemingly egalitarian Qurʾan against an allegedly patriarchal exegetical tradition, this book captures a tafsīr tradition with pluralistic, complex, and evolving interpretations of women and gender in the Qurʾan. The capacity to bring new meanings to bear on the Qurʾan is, therefore, not only intellectually viable but is inherent in the exegetical tradition.