The Qur'an cannot be usurped: an interview with Amina Wadud Martina Sabra

The Qur'an cannot be usurped: an interview with Amina Wadud Martina Sabra

Bonn, Germany - Islam, gender equality and human rights are compatible – this is a basic conviction of Amina Wadud, author of several books about Islam and women. Martina Sabra interviewed the Islamic feminist at a recent conference about Women's power in Islam in Germany. Until the age of 20, you were a Christian. Your father was a Methodist minister. Today you are one of the best-known Muslim reform thinkers worldwide. Why did you become a Muslim? Wadud: I was always interested in theological ideas. As you're saying, my father was a Methodist minister. I was raised as a Christian and very, very interested in ideas about God, about morality, about human nature and about spirituality. So before converting to Islam I was a Buddhist and lived in an Ashram and practiced meditation, which I still practice today. When I was 20, I stepped into a mosque not far from where I lived. I wanted to know about Islam. I am very interested in the relationship between the profane and the sacred. For me, Islam gave me a language, and actually Arabic was an important part of it – it gave me the language of tawhid, the language of God's intimate relationship with the creation, but also the power to bring harmony to things which are disparate. That for me is the epitome of surrender. Islam helped me to understand my experience with Christianity and Buddhism. It is a reasoned revelation. This is maybe not for everyone; some people have a more simplistic understanding of Islam. But this is how I lived it. When I was given the opportunity to study a little bit about Islam, I was very impressed, especially with the Qur'an. For me, the Qur'an opened up a relationship between my logic, my reasoning, my understanding of the world, my love and desire for nature, and for the world beyond the world, for the unseen. And so I have developed my work specifically with the area of Qur'an and gender, and that is the area that I think it is sort of a gift to me because it is something that I love doing. As a child, you witnessed the civil rights movement in the United States. As an adolescent, you say that you were very conscious about personal freedom and intellectual independence. Wasn't that in strong contradiction with the conservative mainstream Islam of the 1970s? Certainly, I faced many contradictions. The struggle to be Muslim was easiest at the beginning, when I made the transformation from my post-Christian, post-Buddhist state into being a Muslim. Then, knowledge was the main impetus. Now it is more difficult, there is more that I understand and therefore more responsibility. My perspective is part of a reform and that makes it sometimes difficult because it is not mainstream. When I first began to work on things that I considered to be gender mainstream, or gender-inclusive, the notion of Islamic Feminism had not been discussed. I wrote Qur'an and Woman in the end of the 1980s. In fact, many see the book as the beginning of female-centred exegesis of the Qur'an, which is an important part of what we now recognise analytically as Islamic feminism. Muslim women are not all interested in Islamic Feminism. Some of them are not even interested in being Muslim. For me, I have not had a problem with Islam so much as I had a problem with the way in which Islam is practiced. And that this kind of Islam can sometimes be aggressive against women's full rights. In your writings, you often refer to Christian and Jewish religious thinkers, among others Paul Tillich and Martin Buber. In your books Qur'an and Woman and Inside the Gender Jihad you defend pluralism, the freedom of opinion and the right to be different from an Islamic perspective. According to your writings, the Qur'an should be re-read from a gender perspective and in the light of its historical context. Yet, the Qur'an is considered to be eternal and unchangeable. How does that match? I think that unless you have had a real connection with the Qur'an, you will not understand how it is a force in history as well as in spirit. You will not be able to understand that there is cooperation between the reader and the text. You will say that there is some flaw with methodology. But you have to understand that the readers can use the text for whatever they want, because there is a dynamic relationship between the text and the interpretation. The text is both created in time but also evolves beyond time. Could you give an example of how that works in practice? We are now participating in a global reform movement for a Muslim personal status law, and the very fundamental basis for that yields back to the egalitarian trajectory of the Qur'an. The Qur'an did not complete that in the context of the prophet's lifetime. But the Qur'an is not usurped by even its own historical context. But some people have grown up in a culture where the Qur'an is used for a narrow and restrictive interpretation so they consider that interpretation the only interpretation. And that's problematic from my perspective. My work has shown that the interpretation is never complete. Meaning is never fixed. ### * Martina Sabra is a freelance writer based in Germany. This abridged article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews). The full text can be found at www.qantara.de. Source: Qantara.de, 29 August 2008, www.qantara.de Copyright permission is granted for publication.

Peace and Islam are not strangers

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One of the key problems in discussions of Islam and peace is exceptionalism: the belief that Islam is profoundly different from other religions, and stands outside the Judeo-Christian heritage. Here in the West, we have constructed a notion of Islam as the “other” – as a reality that exists in contrast to and against Western values. We need to challenge this notion of exceptionalism, without denying the particularity and specificity of the Islamic experience.

Islam shares a great deal in common with its sister Abrahamic faiths, Judaism and Christianity and Western civilisation, to which it has made vital historical contributions. Like Christianity, Judaism, and the religions of the East, Islam is rich with precepts and traditions that support peacemaking. And like the followers of other religions, Muslims have often failed to live up to these precepts and traditions.

Peace and Islam have a long history together.

In its purest form, Islam is a fatwa (command) of peace. The Qur’an mandates “peace is a word from a merciful God”. For a devout Muslim, Islam is peace. Though this perception contrasts sharply with commonplace non-Muslim impressions, it is rooted in Islamic theology. In the Qur’an, Al-Salam, which means peace, is one of the most beautiful names of Allah, the Arabic word for God. Allah is also used by Christian Arabs in their prayer. It is the same God.

The yearning for peace derives from the innermost nature of humankind. The Qur’an affirms a positive view of human nature.

This characterisation of Islamic values is likely to appear unfamiliar to many non-Muslims, who are much more familiar with militant calls for jihad, a word that has frequently been (mis)translated as “holy war”. Jihad is much more than armed struggle against an enemy from the outside. The more important jihad is the struggle within the soul of Muslims for spiritual purification.

Abuses notwithstanding, there is a clearly articulated preference in Islamic social ethics for non-violence over violence, and for forgiveness over retribution. The Qur’an discourages unnecessary conflict, and condemns bringing about destruction, oppression and violence.

In traditional Muslim societies, the ideal of a harmonious social order was closely associated with the prescriptions of shari’a, (laws based on Islamic principles of jurisprudence). The objectives of shari’a are closely related to those of religious law in the Biblical tradition: the maintenance of proper, just relationships between the individual and God, within the family and community, among Muslims, between religious groups and ultimately between humanity and other created things.

Dear friends, together we can make peace.

Leaders on both sides of the Muslim-Western divide have much to gain from moving beyond preoccupation with symbols, toward genuine openness to a new experience of the “other”. Only active engagement through sustained dialogue can help us to transcend the fear and anger that produces conflict escalation, and discover the common humanity that these emotions conceal. And we are only likely to commit ourselves to such dialogue if we can begin to narrate a new story, a story about complementarity instead of the dominant story about confrontation.

Active engagement permits us to understand and recognise the authentic expressions of human religiosity, and protects us from the politics of manipulated symbolism. Active engagement is needed to move beyond negative reactions to discover human commonality, shared experiences and compatible aspirations.

Muslims and Westerners need to experience themselves “in relationship” rather than “out of relationship”. They have an opportunity to find meaning in the common tragedy of their estrangement as well as in the possibility of reconciliation.

Establishing peace in the present climate of mutual recrimination will not be easy. Peacemaking, in contrast to war-making, is proactive and requires deliberate efforts to move: from the superficial to the essential, from morbidity to creativity, from defensiveness to openness, and from the politics of fear and projection to a politics of hope.

The fact that the “war on terror” framework for responding to our present insecurity has increasingly become the subject of constant debate suggests a need for a new strategic doctrine. Using the “war on terror” concept to justify actual wars has undermined genuine efforts to promote international security. By avoiding pessimistic oversimplifications and slogans (for example, a “long war against Islamofascism”), leaders in the West as well as in the Muslim world can set the stage for effective responses to current insecurities.

Friends, it’s true, the new story of complementarity exists only in the form of a working outline, and can begin with the simplest of acknowledgements: Islam and the West are “stuck” with each other, and have no choice but to learn to co-exist. Both are here to stay, prosper and learn from one another. The dignity and security of one is connected to the dignity and security of the other. We can become co-authors of this new story.

We are all heirs of the story of confrontation. When we leave aside symbols and seek to know one another, we can become architects of a humane global order based on solidarity. It involves the head and the heart.

Let us spread peace. The whole world needs the whole world.