Book Talk | Rebellious Wives, Neglectful Husbands: Controversies in Modern Qur'anic Commentaries

Announced by the University of Pittsburgh

The last 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 Qur'anic exegesis (tafsīr) as a scholarly genre. This lack of engagement with Qur'anic exegesis (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. In her new book, Rebellious Wives, Neglectful Husbands, Hadia Mubarak argues that this evaluation requires a critical reassessment. Rather than discard the exegetical tradition as meaningless to Muslim’s contemporary efforts to recover the Qurʾan’s ethics, this book brings into conversation the distinct fields of Qur'anic exegesis (tafsīr) studies and women’s studies.

The book 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. Mubarak illustrates the ways in which colonialism, nationalism, and modernization set into motion new ways of engaging with the subject of women in the Qurʾan. Focusing her analysis on Qurʾanic commentaries as a scholarly genre, Mubarak offers a critical and comparative analysis of these three modern commentaries with seven medieval commentaries, spanning from the ninth to fourteenth centuries, on verses dealing with neglectful husbands (4:128), rebellious wives (4:34), polygyny (4:3), and divorce (2:228). Rather than pit a seemingly egalitarian Qurʾan against an allegedly patriarchal exegetical tradition, this book captures a Qur'anic exegesis (tafsīr) tradition with pluralistic, complex, and evolving interpretations of women and gender in the Qurʾan.

Speaker:

Hadia Mubarak is Assistant Professor of Religion at Queens University of Charlotte. She previously served as Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Guilford College and as Research Fellow at New York University-Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). Her forthcoming book, Rebellious Wives, Neglectful Husbands: Controversies in Modern Qurʾanic Commentaries (Oxford University Press, March 2020), explores significant shifts in modern Qurʾanic commentaries on the subject of women against the backdrop of broader historical, intellectual and political developments in twentieth-century North Africa. Mubarak completed her Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from Georgetown University, where she specialized in modern and classical Qur'anic exegesis (tafsīr), Islamic feminism, and gender reform in the modern Muslim world. She currently serves as a scholar-in-residence with the Muslim Community Center of Charlotte (MCC) and a scholar with the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU).
Mubarak’s publications include, among others, “Women’s Contemporary Readings of the Qur’an” in The Routledge Companion to the Qur’an (Routledge, 2021), ed. George Archer, Maria M. Dakake, Daniel A. Madigan; “Violent, Oppressed and Un-American: Muslim Women in the American Imagination” in The Personal is Political, ed. Christine Davis and Jon Crane (Brill, 2020); “Gender and Qurʾanic Exegesis” in The Routledge Handbook of Islam and Gender, ed. Justine Howe (Brill, 2020); “Change Through Continuity: A Case Study of Q. 4:34 in Ibn ʿĀshūr’s Al-Taḥrīr wa-l-Tanwīr” (Journal of Qurʾanic Studies 20.1 February 2018); “Breaking the Interpretive Monopoly: A Re-Examination of Verse 4:34” (Hawwa 2.3); and “Crossroads,” I Speak For Myself: American Women on Being Muslim (White Cloud Press, 2011). You can read her work at https://Queens.academia.edu/HadiaMubarak