JEWISH AND ISLAMIC RELIGIOUS FEMINIST

EXEGESIS OF THE SACRED BOOKS:

ADAM, WOMAN AND GENDER

Ruth Roded

From the 1970s and 1980s, Jewish and Islamic religious feminists—
diverging from earlier Jewish and Muslim feminists—undertook to rein-
terpret problematic and even misogynistic narratives and verses in the
Hebrew Bible and the Quran. Comparative analysis of their feminist
exegesis of the creation story reveals some remarkable similarities in
purpose, method and even results. Religious feminist re-interpretation
of the parallel phrases in the holy books defining gender—“he shall rule
(yimshol) over you” (Gen. 3:16) and “Men are in charge (qawwāmūna)
of women” (Quran 4:34)—has been undertaken with innovative, dynamic
methodologies, along with grounding in “tradition.” The term qawwāmūn
seems far more salient to contemporary Muslims, however, than yimshol
is to Jews. Jewish and Islamic religious feminist exegetes have engaged
similar language issues, strategies, some methods and use of second-
ary sources, but the innovative methodologies that they have fashioned
are dissimilar. In conclusion, I shall highlight some differences between
Jewish and Islamic feminist exegetes relating to their background and
environment, as well as to the significance of the creation story and the
gender phrase for their lives. I shall also point to some innovations in
interpretative methods and some consequences of their endeavors.

Modern agriculture, medicine, science and culture have, each in

its field, eased the difficulty of removing bread from the earth,
the difficulty of childbirth and its dangers, and life expectancy.
There has even been a devaluation in the eternal “he shall rule
over thee,” the governance of the man over the woman.
—Hayuta Deutsch, Kolech Pamphlet, no. 3 (2007)1

56  NASHIM: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues. © 2015

 Jewish and Islamic Religious Feminist Exegesis

In order to campaign and advocate for laws and practices that

promote equality and justice in the Muslim family, we need new
knowledge and perspectives on qiwāmah and wilāyah. This proj-
ect seeks to show how laws based on outdated interpretations
of qiwāmah and wilāyah no longer reflect the justice of Islam,
and that other interpretations are both possible and more in tune
with human rights principles and contemporary lived realities.
—“An Egalitarian Understanding of Qiwamah and Wilayah,”
Musawah Global Movement (2011)2

Jewish and Islamic religious feminists emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Departing
from earlier Jewish and Muslim feminists by expressing their feminism in explicitly
religious terms,3 they undertook to reinterpret the holy books—the Hebrew Bible and
the Quran—with the aim of reclaiming the sacred text from centuries of exegesis
produced in patriarchal societies.
Parallels between the sociologies of Judaism and Islam allow a comparative analy-
sis of exegetical endeavors by believing Muslim and Jewish feminist women.4 Both
faiths emanate from holy books regarded as the eternal word of God—books that are
imbued with gendered norms, narratives and socio-legal material. In both traditions,
learning is highly valued, and similar methodologies are applied in interpreting the
sacred texts. Moreover, to an extent, the profiles of Muslim and Jewish religious femi-
nists resemble each other. Their academic background prompts them to adopt certain
types of knowledge production and methods of research. They have become familiar
with a hierarchy of learning in which professors replace the rabbi and the shaykh, and
independent study with the aid of dictionaries and libraries is encouraged. This study
aims to highlight identifiable similarities between the work of Muslim and Jewish
feminist exegetes, while not ignoring the differences between them.
In the first section of this article, I shall place Jewish and Islamic feminists’ read-
ings of their sacred books in their respective historical and exegetical contexts. In
the second section, I shall examine the story of human creation in the Quran and the
Hebrew Bible and undertake a brief review of Jewish and Islamic feminist exegesis
of this narrative, in chronological order and in tandem, highlighting parallel and dis-
similar developments among feminist interpreters of the different faiths.5 In the third
section, I shall offer an in-depth analysis of the treatment of two parallel phrases in
the holy books defining gender—“he shall rule over you” (Gen. 3:16) and “Men are
in charge of women” (Quran 4:34). After examining the original context of these
phrases, I shall describe the remarkably similar exegetical traditions faced by Jewish
and Muslim feminist commentators and the differing ways in which they redefined the
crucial terms yimshol (“he shall rule”) and qawwāmūn (“are in charge”). In the fourth
section, I shall explore language issues, strategy, methods and secondary sources. In
conclusion, I shall highlight differences between Jewish and Islamic feminist exegetes
relating to their background and environment, as well as to the significance of the

57
 Jewish and Islamic Religious Feminist Exegesis

In order to campaign and advocate for laws and practices that

promote equality and justice in the Muslim family, we need new
knowledge and perspectives on qiwāmah and wilāyah. This proj-
ect seeks to show how laws based on outdated interpretations
of qiwāmah and wilāyah no longer reflect the justice of Islam,
and that other interpretations are both possible and more in tune
with human rights principles and contemporary lived realities.
—“An Egalitarian Understanding of Qiwamah and Wilayah,”
Musawah Global Movement (2011)2

Jewish and Islamic religious feminists emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Departing
from earlier Jewish and Muslim feminists by expressing their feminism in explicitly
religious terms,3 they undertook to reinterpret the holy books—the Hebrew Bible and
the Quran—with the aim of reclaiming the sacred text from centuries of exegesis
produced in patriarchal societies.
Parallels between the sociologies of Judaism and Islam allow a comparative analy-
sis of exegetical endeavors by believing Muslim and Jewish feminist women.4 Both
faiths emanate from holy books regarded as the eternal word of God—books that are
imbued with gendered norms, narratives and socio-legal material. In both traditions,
learning is highly valued, and similar methodologies are applied in interpreting the
sacred texts. Moreover, to an extent, the profiles of Muslim and Jewish religious femi-
nists resemble each other. Their academic background prompts them to adopt certain
types of knowledge production and methods of research. They have become familiar
with a hierarchy of learning in which professors replace the rabbi and the shaykh, and
independent study with the aid of dictionaries and libraries is encouraged. This study
aims to highlight identifiable similarities between the work of Muslim and Jewish
feminist exegetes, while not ignoring the differences between them.
In the first section of this article, I shall place Jewish and Islamic feminists’ read-
ings of their sacred books in their respective historical and exegetical contexts. In
the second section, I shall examine the story of human creation in the Quran and the
Hebrew Bible and undertake a brief review of Jewish and Islamic feminist exegesis
of this narrative, in chronological order and in tandem, highlighting parallel and dis-
similar developments among feminist interpreters of the different faiths.5 In the third
section, I shall offer an in-depth analysis of the treatment of two parallel phrases in
the holy books defining gender—“he shall rule over you” (Gen. 3:16) and “Men are
in charge of women” (Quran 4:34). After examining the original context of these
phrases, I shall describe the remarkably similar exegetical traditions faced by Jewish
and Muslim feminist commentators and the differing ways in which they redefined the
crucial terms yimshol (“he shall rule”) and qawwāmūn (“are in charge”). In the fourth
section, I shall explore language issues, strategy, methods and secondary sources. In
conclusion, I shall highlight differences between Jewish and Islamic feminist exegetes
relating to their background and environment, as well as to the significance of the

57
Ruth Roded

creation story and the gender phrase for their lives. I shall point to some innovations
in their interpretative methods and to the consequences of their endeavors.

Feminist Reading in Historical and Exegetical Contexts

Jewish and Islamic religious feminist movements began to emerge in the 1970s in
the United States (and somewhat later in France6) in response to the feminism of the
1960s, which was largely secular and even anti-religious in character. Eventually,
religious feminism spread to the rest of the Jewish and Muslim worlds. Religious
feminist exegesis was a reaction to prevalent readings of the holy books, such as those
reflected in translations widely used at the time, such as the 1917 edition of the Jewish
Publication Society of America’s translation of the Hebrew Bible7 and Marmaduke
Pickthall’s Meaning of the Glorious Koran from 1930.
Feminists had been active in the Islamic and Jewish worlds at least since the nine-
teenth century. Jewish feminists were associated with the women’s rights and suffrage
movements in the United States and England, as well as the socialist and socialist
Zionist movements in Europe, mandatory Palestine and Israel.8 However, they rarely
engaged their Jewish religious roots, and some actually abjured them.9 Notwithstand-
ing individual efforts by Jewish women to bring feminist ideas to bear on their reli-
gious traditions, these discrete endeavors did not meld into a wider movement, as the
religious feminism of the 1970s did.
Similarly, calls for the education and liberation of Muslim women emerged in
Istanbul and Cairo from the mid-nineteenth century.10 The first waves of feminism
in the Middle East were liberal. While these theorists and activists are often referred
to as “secular,” most were Muslims, and they bolstered their cause by using Islamic
references and symbols alongside universal feminist discourse.11 However, they did
not systematically study Islamic foundation texts with a feminist agenda in mind, nor
did they address gendered aspects of Islamic religious practices. Radical feminism,
whether communist, socialist or Arab socialist, has also been disseminated in the
Middle East through party platforms, government programs and opposition activ-
ists.12 Only since the 1970s and 1980s have Muslim and Jewish women expressed their
feminism in explicitly religious terms.
Prior to the rise of religious feminism, the Hebrew Bible and the Quran were read
in the context of patriarchal societies. Classical commentators often expanded on the
original sense of the sacred books to reflect gender relations in their own time and
place, and their negative views overshadowed more woman-friendly versions of gender
relations in the holy texts. These unfavorable ideas about women were disseminated
in simplified commentaries, while more positive interpretations were marginalized,
as I shall discuss below.
From the nineteenth century, some Jewish and Muslim scholars, referred to as
reformers or modernists, responded to the challenges of Bible criticism and Oriental-
ism by using new methodologies to interrogate the Bible and the Quran. As we will

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 Jewish and Islamic Religious Feminist Exegesis

see, some of them marshaled the modern sciences to support notions of patriarchal
gender relations. Initially, these reformist exegetes were all men. Their approaches to
women’s issues in the Bible and the Quran may to some extent have reflected early
stages of the feminist movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and chang-
ing attitudes toward gender, but this was not their main concern, and they came to the
texts with a male perspective.
In the mid-twentieth century, a handful of Jewish and Muslim women approached
the daunting task of exegesis, although not from an overtly feminist perspective. Israeli
Nechama Leibowitz (1905–1997) and Egyptian Aisha Abd al-Rahman (1913–1998)
both adopted revolutionary but different techniques of exegesis.13 They had in common
a degree of caution regarding women’s issues such as often accompanies the endeav-
ors of pioneering women, reflecting the modest development of women’s rights and
feminism in their formative periods.
“Islamic feminism” (as opposed to Muslim feminism), whose roots go back to the
1970s, has been defined by historian Margot Badran as “a feminist discourse and prac-
tice articulated within an Islamic paradigm.”14 Put simply, it may be said that Islamic
feminism is an attempt to reconcile belief in Allah and His Prophet with feminism,
while Jewish religious feminism, which emerged at about the same time, is an effort
to combine belief in the God of Israel, “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” with
feminism. These minimalist definitions of Muslim and Jewish beliefs allow us to bring
women of faith with a wide variety of understandings and practices of their religions
into the tents of both religions, without judging who is more authentic than whom.
Jewish women who are associated with Orthodoxy and with the more liberal Jewish
movements are included. There are no direct parallels in Islam to these Jewish move-
ments, but Muslim women who choose to cover their heads—regarded as a sign of
authentic religiosity among many—as well as believing Muslim women who choose
not to, are both included in this definition of Islamic feminism.

The Narrative of Human Creation

The challenges that Jews and Muslims faced in interpreting the story of human cre-
ation differed as a function of the dissimilarity of the texts in the Hebrew Bible and
the Quran. The Hebrew Bible relates two versions of the creation of humans: One
refers to the simultaneous creation of male and female (Gen. 1:26–27), while the
other describes the creation of Adam followed by the creation of a female help-mate
from his tsela‘, usually translated as rib (Gen. 2:7–22). The Quranic text describes the
creation of the first woman as contemporaneous with and similar to that of the first
man. (4:1, 7:189, 35:11, 39:6, 49:13).
Despite the essential differences between the two fundamental texts, Jewish and
Muslim patriarchal exegeses have interpreted them similarly to mean that Eve was cre-
ated secondarily to Adam. The story of Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib, “unquestion-
ably influenced by the Biblical narrative as well as by local tradition,” is reflected in

59
Ruth Roded

ḥadīth sayings and “deeds of the Prophet” literature.15 Moreover, Adam is considered a
prophet in Islamic tradition,16 an honor not bestowed on Ḥawwā’ or any other woman.
Islamic and Jewish religious feminists thus were similarly motivated in returning to
this sacred text to neutralize a foundation stone of patriarchy—the creation of the
first woman after the man, from him and for him. The efforts of these religious femi-
nists will be presented below in chronological order, to highlight parallel as well as
distinctive developments among feminist interpreters of different faiths.
In 1973, American Bible scholar Phyllis Trible published “Depatriarchalizing in
Biblical Interpretation,” a feminist discussion of the story told in Genesis 2.17 Though
not Jewish herself, Trible was familiar with the Jewish sources on the Hebrew Bible
and shored up her view with a reference to “a remnant of ancient (male) rabbis,”18 the
famous midrash in Genesis raba 8:1 about the androgynous creation of the first human.
Her article was reprinted in 1976 in The Jewish Woman, a feminist anthology, giving
the impression that she, like the other authors, was Jewish, and earning her a place in
the Jewish Women’s Archive.19 Trible argued that since the word adam is ambiguous
in the biblical text until the differentiation of female and male, the first human was
one creature incorporating two sexes. The creation of ishah, woman, thereby defining
a separate ish, man, signified the creation of sexuality, simultaneously for woman and
man. Trible’s publication in a widely read scholarly journal brought her ideas to read-
ers of all religious beliefs, and it struck a chord with the Jewish feminist audience.20
At about the same time, in 1972, Jewish American feminist theologian Judith Plas-
kow fleshed out a feminist story based on the midrashim about Adam’s first wife, the
one created along with him in the first version of the creation of humans in Genesis
1.21 This wife, later referred to as Lilith, was found wanting, according to tradition,
because she claimed to be equal to him, and she was said to be rebellious, sexually
aggressive and evil. Adam and Lilith were equal in all ways, recounts Plaskow, but
Adam, “being a man,” ordered her to wait on him, so she left. Adam complained to
God about “that uppity woman,” but even He could not get her back. So God created
Eve out of Adam’s rib. Later, despite all attempts to demonize Lilith and limit Eve,
they developed a bond of sisterhood. Plaskow returned to the creation story in her
1990 book Standing Again at Sinai, writing that Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib is a
clear “patriarchal inversion” of biological reality.22 The labeling of Lilith as an evil
demon, she asserted, reflects the whole history of male naming of women who refuse
to yield to male authority.
In 1985, Muslim American Riffat Hassan pioneered feminist interpretation of the
Quran in an article entitled “Made from Adam’s Rib: The Woman’s Creation Ques-
tion.” In principle, Hassan’s task was relatively easy, because she had only to explain
to contemporary Muslims that what they believe to be in the Quranic text—that Adam
was created first and Eve was made from Adam’s rib—is not in the sacred book at all,
but rather entered Islamic tradition from the Hebrew Bible and its interpretations.23
Hassan went beyond this, however, to state that the term adam is not a name but rather
a collective noun, synonymous with al-insān or basher, undifferentiated humanity,
neither man nor woman. Moreover, the Quran does not mention Ḥawwāʼ but refers to

60 • Nashim 29 (2015)
 Jewish and Islamic Religious Feminist Exegesis

Adam and his zawj (Surah 2: al-Baqarah 35; Surah 7: al-A’raf 19; Surah 20: Ta-Ha
117) or mate. Zawj (a cognate of Hebrew zug), a masculine noun, is used in the Quran
to refer not only to humans but to all creatures, including animals, plants and fruits.
So if adam is not necessarily man, his zawj is not necessarily woman. Hassan’s article,
published in an obscure Pakistani journal, was not easily accessible, but it became an
important source for Islamic feminists.
In her groundbreaking Qur’an and Woman (1992),24 African-American Muslim
convert Amina Wadud-Muhsin, an expert in Arabic and Islamic Studies, took the
philological method a step beyond Hassan’s work. Wadud explored a number of Arabic
words before analyzing the verse she believes epitomizes the story of human creation
(Surah 4: al-Nisā’ 1). She concluded not only that “the creation of both the original
parents is irrevocably and primordially linked,” but that femininity and masculinity
are not created characteristics but culturally determined factors. The Quran links the
bearing of children to the female (35:11–12, 13:8), she argued, but all other aspects of
childcare and rearing in the Quran are never essentially female.
In her book Engendering Judaism (1998), Jewish-American theologian Rachel
Adler searched for redemptive meanings in the Hebrew Bible.25 Turning Trible’s argu-
ment upside down, she argued that in Genesis 1 human sexuality is a metaphor for an
element of the divine nature—creativity, delight, or the ingrained yearning for com-
munion with the other. She accepted the reading of adam as a sexually diverse human,
but she challenged the words zakhar and nekevah, used in Genesis 2 to distinguish
male and female—literally, the creature with the male member, and the pierced one.
Genesis 2, she concluded, is creation from a patriarchal perspective. Over a decade
later, Engendering Judaism was translated into Hebrew.
Comparative analysis of Islamic and Jewish religious feminist exegesis of the
creation story reveals some remarkable similarities in purpose, method and even
results. The Quranic narrative of human creation, stripped of patriarchal interpretation
regarding the formation of woman from man’s rib, seems more amenable to feminist
interpretation. Muslim feminists marshaled the philological method—so similar to
that used by Jewish feminists—to arrive at a new understanding of human creation.
Jewish feminist commentators used midrash, a technique that has no direct parallel
in Islam, to challenge patriarchal exegesis. The non-gendered adam seems to have
been arrived at more or less independently by feminist commentators of both faiths.

Sacred Phrases Defining Gender: Context and Patriarchal Exegesis

Joan W. Scott’s classic definition of gender (1986) was the “perceived differences
between the sexes, and . . . a primary way of signifying relationships of power.”26 More
simply, this pioneering definition of gender refers to the difference between “man” and
“woman,” and the (power) relationship between them. Both the Hebrew Bible and the
Quran contain phrases that define gender relations in this sense.27 In Gen. 3:16, God,
referring to “your man” (ishekh), tells “the woman”: vehu yimshol bakh, “he shall rule

61
Ruth Roded

over you.”28 In the Quran, the phrase al-rijāl qawwāmūna ‘alā al-nisā’ has been ren-
dered: “Men are in charge of women.”29 The two parallel definitions of gender appear
in differing contexts in the Hebrew Bible and the Quran and evoke different problems
for commentators. The challenge faced by Jewish and Islamic feminist exegetes is
similar, however, because of the remarkable parallels in the development of classical
exegesis of the two gender phrases.
The phrase vehu yimshol bakh appears in the narrative of the sin committed by
Adam and his wife in the Garden of Eden and the punishments meted out to each of
them: “Unto the woman He said: ‘I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy travail; in
pain thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he
shall rule over thee,’ ” as it reads in the 1917 JPS translation. In this context, it seems
clear that the pain of childbirth was decreed for the first woman and for all women,
and that she and they would be ruled by their husbands, although not necessarily by
all men. This reading is consistent with the view of the treatment of women in the
Hebrew Bible as subordinate to men. Judith Hauptman has emphasized that although
the covenant at Sinai was gender neutral, addressing both women and men who were
present at the event, the Bible views men as the heads of households, responsible
for their wives and for protecting them.30 Moreover, the prevalent and most obvious
meaning of the word yimshol implies supremacy and domination. The verb m.sh.l, in
the biblical context, refers to a ruler who governs his subjects (parallel to m.l.kh, as
in Gen. 37:8).31 In his early translation of the Hebrew Bible into Arabic, Sa‘adya Gaon
(Saʻadya b. Yosef / Saʻīd al-Fayyūmī; Egypt, 882/892—Baghdad, 942),32 a renowned
Jewish scholar who lived in the Islamic, Arabic-speaking Middle East, rendered
yimshol as mutasalliṭ (from the same root as sultan), i.e., to prevail over, subdue, rule
over or have mastery or authority over.33 The original meaning of vehu yimshol bakh
thus seems quite clear in reference to husband and wife, but the verb opens the door
to various metaphors of governing.
It is more difficult to contextualize the Quranic phrase al-rijāl qawwāmūna ‘alā
al-nisā’, because the verse in which it appears is not part of a clear narrative. The full
verse deals with a number of gender issues and is extremely problematic.34 The Quran,
in Pickthall’s 1930 translation, states:

Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel
the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So
good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded.
As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds
apart, and scourge them. Then if they obey you, seek not a way against them. Lo!
Allah is ever High, Exalted, Great. (4:34)35

The references to women’s obedience, rebellion and punishment, including beating,

support the view that the first part of the verse means that men are responsible for
women. Moreover, women, though held in the Quran to be spiritually equal to men,
are viewed as symbolically weak, justifying their need for male supervision. In social

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 Jewish and Islamic Religious Feminist Exegesis

matters, women’s position in the Quran is depicted ambivalently—empowered in some

areas and limited in others.36
The meaning of the term qawwāmūn (sing. qawwām), in the context of the Quran,
is far from clear. It appears in two other places—4 (al-Nisā’): 135 and 5 (al-Mā’ida):
8—and in both, the believers are told to be staunch or upright, in justice or fairness
toward others.37 Taking it in this sense, the phrase al-rijāl qawwāmūna ‘alā al-nisā’
means that men should treat women justly and fairly. The word qawwām could also
refer to a man who used to arise at night to pray. In short, there seems to be an inher-
ent ambivalence in the Quranic term qawwāmūn as it appears in verse 4:34: men are
responsible for women socially, but they must treat them justly. Moreover, the phrase
is very unclear, particularly because the justification given for qawwām is that men
are created superior to women. Thus, the expression is open to extremely varying
interpretations.
Despite the differing contexts and difficulties posed by these foundational phrases
in the area of gender relations in Judaism and Islam, the development of their classi-
cal exegeses exhibits some remarkable similarities. So, although Jewish and Muslim
exegetes were probably more familiar with their own interpretive traditions than each
other’s, I shall deal with these two phrases below in tandem, following their exegeses
chronologically, in order to highlight possible similarities and throw light on claims
of religious exclusivity.
An important parallel in classical exegesis of the Quran and the Hebrew Bible that
was to prove relevant to religious feminists was the seemingly “woman-friendly”
views of some early Jewish and Muslim interpreters of the sacred books. One of
the earliest Muslim commentators on the Quran, Muhammad Ibn Jarir al-Tabari
(Persia, 838—Baghdad, 923),38 roughly Sa‘adya’s contemporary in both time and
place, explained the term qawwāmūn in Quran 4:34 in a surprisingly positive way for
women. Noting that the word had many meanings, he declared that the most appropri-
ate ones in this context were “responsible for,” “caring for their needs” and “supporting
them.”39 Though he connected men’s role of caring for women with the superiority
of men over women expressed immediately after, he limited men’s advantage to the
narrow economic sense described elsewhere in the Quran. How do we explain Tabari’s
seeming support for women’s rights in his interpretation of the Quranic definition
of gender relations? Perhaps, it should be linked to other positive determinations by
Tabari regarding women.40 Karen Bauer, in her in-depth study of Quranic exegesis and
gender,41 reaches a somewhat different conclusion: “just as his doctrine that women
can judge is not a sign of feminism, his belief that men have control in the home is
not a symptom of misogyny.” Bauer demonstrates that Tabari and other interpreters
of the Quran were influenced by their social milieu as well as their personal opinions.
Rashi (R. Shelomo Yitzḥaki,42 northern France, 1040–1105), famed for his com-
mentaries on both the Pentateuch and the Talmud, has been described by Avraham
Grossman as a defender of women because of his narrow interpretation of vehu
yimshol bakh.43 Commenting on Gen. 3:16, he linked the husband’s rule over the wife
to the preceding phrase, “thy desire shall be to thy husband,” and limited it to sexual

63
Ruth Roded

intercourse: The wife does not have the nerve to openly summon him; he, not she, is
in charge in these matters. Grossman posits that Rashi’s interpretation of this verse
dovetails with the concern for women’s dignity and status in society that characterizes
many of his writings.44 Rashi’s reading has remained influential, as his commentary
is printed in many editions of the Hebrew Pentateuch, including those for schoolchil-
dren, and it has been translated into English. Nevertheless, his narrow interpretation
was ignored by many later exegetes. Tabari’s woman-friendly reading of the Quranic
verse, too, seems to have been marginalized as a minority opinion until fairly recently.
Both Jewish and Muslim exegetes developed extremely patriarchal interpretations of
vehu yimshol bakh and qawwāmūn in the Middle Ages, influencing the understanding
of these phrases for centuries and remaining relevant for religious feminists. These
parallel views of gender relations were reflected in the commentaries of two promi-
nent twelfth-century exegetes, Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089–1164),45 who lived in Muslim
Spain and later in Italy, France and England, and al-Zamakhsharī (d. 1144), of Iranian
origin, who lived most of his life in Bukhara, Samarkand and Baghdad.46 Ibn Ezra, a
Hebrew poet, grammarian and philologist who dedicated himself to ascertaining the
“straight” meaning of the text, concisely summarized the meaning of vehu yimshol
bakh as requiring the woman to listen to everything the man commands her, because
she is under his authority to do his bidding. Similarly, al-Zamakhsharī, renowned
as an advocate of rationalist theology and known for his deep linguistic analyses,
explained in his treatment of the word qawwāmūn that men rule women just as rulers
govern their flock of subjects, that is, with kindness. This metaphor—echoing the
political overtones of the Hebrew root m.sh.l—moves the phrase defining gender from
the family circle to the polity. In elaborating the reasons for men’s dominance over
women, Zamakhsharī provides a long, detailed list of men’s qualities and privileges:

reason, discretion, determination, strength, kitāba [literacy, scribe], usually, horse-

manship [chivalry], spear-throwing, the emergence of prophets and scholars from
among them,47 the greater imamate [leading the Muslim community] and the lesser
imamate [leading the communal prayer], jihad, the call to prayer, the Friday sermon,
the i’tikāf [pious retreats], reciting “Allah is the greatest” [takbīr, after compulsory
prayer during the month of Dhū al-Ḥijja], testimony in ḥudūd [penal offenses]
and qiṣāṣ [retribution], a greater share in inheritance, privileging male agnates in
inheritance, taking the burden of bloodwit [a fine paid as compensation for shed-
ding of blood], performing a collective oath, guardianship in marriage, divorce and
repeal of divorce, the number of spouses, patrilineal descent [from the agnatic line],
and having beards and wearing turbans. And [the men are qawwāmūn] because
they spend of their wealth on dowers and support of their wives.48

Zamakhsharī appears to echo ideas that were common in Islamic literature from
an earlier time and were drawn in part from Jewish tradition.49 His direct influence
was mainly limited to other scholars, but the expansion of men’s dominance from
the family to the public sphere had important implications for women. Ibn Ezra’s

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 Jewish and Islamic Religious Feminist Exegesis

commentary, by contrast, is printed to this day along with Rashi’s in standard editions
of the Hebrew Pentateuch with commentaries.
The wife’s subservience and women’s limitations were described in even stronger
terms in the thirteenth century, both by the great Jewish scholar Ramban (Nachman-
ides, 1194–1270), 50 from Christian Catalan, and by the Iranian Muslim commentator
al-Bayḍāwī (d. 1286).51 Commenting on Gen. 3:16, Ramban stated that a wife must not
only obey everything that her husband commands, but the relations between a husband
and wife are like those of a master and a slave woman. A wife differs, however, from
a slave, in that a slave does not want a master and will run away from him, while a
wife “desires” her husband. This was a commensurate punishment, Ramban added:
Since she had ordered the man to eat of the tree, the wife would no longer be able
to command him, but he would command her to do whatever he wished. Bayḍāwī
augmented Zamakhsharī’s seemingly extensive list of the different ways that “men
stand superior to women”: good counsel, performance of duties and carrying out of
[divine] commands (al-ṭāʻāt), so that only men are holy persons, perform rituals and
have prerogative in divorce.
Two medieval Muslim commentaries on the Quran that are very influential to this
day, paralleling the impact of Rashi’s and Ibn Ezra’s exegeses of the Hebrew Penta-
teuch, solidified a negative view of gender relations in Islam: that by Damascene Ibn
Kathīr (1301–1373), 52 whose work has been translated into English and Urdu, and
the very short and simple Egyptian Jalalayn (1505), 53 used by beginning students of
Arabic and the Quran. Ibn Kathīr interpreted the phrase al-rijāl qawwāmūna ‘alā
al-nisā’ minimally, but he invoked a solid misogynist ḥadīth tradition of the Prophet
Muhammad: “People who appoint a woman to be their leader will never achieve suc-
cess,” thus linking the two most frequently cited Islamic supports for limiting women’s
power.54 Jalalayn’s deceptively simple message is that men have authority over women,
discipline them and keep them in check, because God has given them the advantage
over women, “in knowledge, reason, authority and otherwise, and because of what
they expend, on them [the women], of their property.”55
Modern commentaries on the Hebrew Bible and the Quran provided women with
minimal succor. David Ẓevi Hoffmann (Verbo, Slovakia, 1843—Berlin, 1921)56 stated
that vehu yimshol bakh “does not necessarily mean the subjugation of the woman to
her husband as is customary in the eastern lands; rather, it means the natural relation-
ship between the two sexes, in which the weak and dependent woman willingly submits
herself to the superiority of her husband” (my emphasis, RR).57 Hoffman here echoed
the view of “the subjugated Muslim woman” disseminated by European Orientalism,
which carried the implication that western women were more liberated. His definition
of woman as naturally weak and dependent reflected the European mobilization of the
natural sciences to bolster patriarchal gender relations. In the same period, the Tafsīr
al-Manār58 Quran exegesis, by Egyptian Shaykh Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) and
his Syrian student Rashid Rida (1865–1935), 59 interpreted qawwāmūn to mean that
men rule over women as heads of the family, but they must treat women kindly, with
their heads, not their hands.

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Two other influential modern commentaries on the Hebrew Bible and the Quran
were not much more helpful for feminists: that of M.D. Cassuto (1943),60 and that of
the Indian-Pakistani “father of modern Islamism,” Sayyid Abu A’la Mawdudi, whose
Urdu commentary on the Quran, developed from 1930 to 1972,61 has been translated
into Chinese, English, Bengali and Malayalam.62 Like Hoffmann, Cassuto’s com-
mentary describes Eve’s punishment as measure for measure. “You influenced your
husband and caused him to do what you wished; from now on, you and your daugh-
ters will be dependent on your husbands. You will yearn for them; but they will head
families and rule you” (my emphasis, RR). Mawdudi notes that man is “governor,
director, protector and manager of the affairs of women” and that he is superior to
women in “natural qualities,” although not in honor. In a move reminiscent of Hoff-
mann, Mawdudi invokes not only the divine origin of the sacred text but also “nature”
to buttress his argument for women’s inferiority.
One more highly influential modern commentary on the Quran, by Egyptian
Muslim Brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutb (1951–1965),63 is of interest because Islamic
feminists have cited it, despite the author being an Islamist. Qutb, whose work has
been translated into English, French, German, Urdu, Turkish, Indonesian, Persian
and Bengali,64 appealed not only to the natural sciences but also to psychology and
the social sciences in defining gender relations in the Quran. In the Islamic view
of the family, he asserted, the assignment of duties is based on natural abilities and
fair distribution of responsibilities.65 “Women prefer for the man to assume author-
ity and responsibility for the family,” he claimed. Moreover, “Many women worry,
feel dissatisfied and are unhappy when they live with men who relinquish their role
for any reason.” The children suffer as well. The Quran comes to define women’s
role in the family, not to negate it or her position in society at large. Women have
virtues and rights, including the rights to choose their own partner and to administer
their personal and financial affairs. Qutb’s fairness doctrine, his evident concern for
women and his emphasis on women’s rights seem to reflect the liberal and feminist
discourse of his time, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood’s mobilization of women
and even reliance on them. Nevertheless, speaking for women, he claimed that they
wish to be dominated by men.
In one of her famous gilyonot on the weekly Torah readings, published over sev-
eral decades from the mid to late twentieth century, Nechama Leibowitz avoided
the issue of vehu yimshol bakh by dealing with a seemingly technical aspect of the
verse.66 In another, she emphasized the love, companionship and mutual assistance
that characterize human pairing, along with traditional interpreters’ views of the
wife’s equality and importance to her husband. She also cited a famous midrash
in Genesis raba (18:1) declaring that the woman was given greater wisdom (binah
yeteirah) than the man. 67
The first female Muslim interpreter of the Quran, Aisha Abd al-Rahman, also took
a rather conservative approach to gender relations, although she affirmed the equal
humanity of woman and man.68 She did, however, raise a potentially empowering idea
of conditional male guardianship:

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 Jewish and Islamic Religious Feminist Exegesis

Guardianship, according to Islam, is a right for manhood, and we, as Muslim

liberated women, would like nothing better than to willingly and gladly admit
this guardianship to our men. It is also about time for our men to understand that
their legitimate right of guardianship over us is neither absolute nor is it for all
men in general over all women. It is a conditional right, “because Allah has given
the one more (strength) than the other, and because they support them from their
means” (4:34), and if a man could not meet this condition, he loses his right to
guardianship.69

Abd al-Rahman presented the notion that women want to be dominated by men as
Muslim women’s wish. That men’s guardianship over women is a conditional right that
men may lose if they are not stronger or able to provide for their wives is not really
a full-fledged feminist idea, but it does raise the prospect of wives being stronger or
better able to provide. One can see why some credit Abd al-Rahman with being a fore-
runner of Islamic feminism, despite her quite conservative views on gender relations.
The door to Muslim women’s agency was fully opened for the first time by Paki-
stani-American Fazlur Rahman in 1980.70 Rahman rendered the phrase in the Quran
as: “Men are in charge of women because God has given some humans excellence
over others and because men have the liability of expenditure [on women].”71 Men
have a functional, not an inherent superiority over women, he declared. If a woman
earns an income and contributes to the household expenditure, the male’s superiority
is reduced. Here we have an approach to qawwām that could be adopted by Islamic
feminists.

Religious Feminists Redefine yimshol and qawwāmūn

In approaching the challenge of the definition of gender relations in the sacred texts,
Islamic and Jewish religious feminists have mined the classical and modern sources
described above, and they have also brought new ideas and methodologies to their
interpretations. However, despite the parallel between the two phrases in the Hebrew
Bible and the Quran, the term qawwāmūn seems far more salient to Muslims than
yimshol is to Jews, and it has consequently been dealt with more extensively. For
Jewish women, some phrases in the oral law seem far more relevant to everyday life
than the sacred book, although the Torah is read regularly. Moreover, many of the
laws in the Hebrew Bible have been moderated in compendia the Oral Law, and it is
the latter works that inform the decisions of male religious specialists to this day.72
In 1982, Lebanese-American Aziza al-Hibri, citing Quran 4:34, identified the
alleged supremacy of men over women as one of the three most serious problems faced
by Muslim women.73 The term qawwāmūn is difficult to translate, she pointed out. A
mild modern translation presents men as “protectors” and “maintainers,” but Hibri
redefined the term herself, arguing that the basic idea in the Quranic verse is of “moral
guidance and caring.” Echoing Abd al-Rahman and Rahman (although she doesn’t cite

67
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them), she emphasized that only some men are qawwāmūn over some women and, as
stated in the continuation of the Quranic passage, “in what they spend of their money.”
Only on the condition that God has given the man more wealth than the woman, and
the man provides for her, may he guide and care for her. The right of qawwāmūn is
individual and conditional, and it should not violate women’s autonomy, in financial
matters for example. Moreover, the traditional interpretation of qawwāmūn is incon-
sistent with another portion of the Quran (71:9) and a ḥadīth tradition of the Prophet,
in which women are described as equal to men “as the teeth of a comb.”
In her above-mentioned 1992 book, Amina Wadud followed Hibri in her relative
and conditional approach to the concepts of preference (faḍḍala) and qawwāmūn of
men over women,74 but Wadud reinforced these ideas with grammatical and philologi-
cal analysis. She cited Islamist Sayyid Qutb’s view that the qawwāmūn relationship
refers only to a husband and wife, not to all men and women in a family, or to men
and women in general, and that it is linked to the husband’s responsibility to provide
materially for the wife.75 Wadud extended this concept to society at large, but not as a
basis of men’s inherent superiority over women. Rather, she extended the functional
relationship proposed by Qutb to the qawwāmūn responsibility and to the right of
women to bear children. If women have the crucial and difficult responsibility of
bearing children for the future of humankind, Wadud argued, then men and society at
large must provide for them. This includes not only material support and protection,
but also moral, spiritual, intellectual and psychological sustenance.
Rachel Adler, in Engendering Judaism, interrogated the power that was granted
to Adam—power to rule over nature and living things, including woman.76 Power
granted as a blessing is positive if it is used properly, declared Adler; if power is
abused, however, it can lead to sin. In the context of the gender relations described in
Genesis, power causes suffering both for the man who wields it and for the subaltern
woman. Adler also argued that this verse describes the origins of patriarchy and is
not a normative prescription.77 “We can invent ways of coexisting without dominating
one another,” she concluded.78
Rivkah Lubitch applied the subversive technique of “critical feminist midrash” to
Gen. 3:16 in 1999. In her midrash, Tanot, a mythical female figure created by her, asks
the Shekhinah (God’s feminine Presence): “In Beruria’s hidden Torah, it is written:
‘Your desire shall be to your wife, and she shall rule over you’ ” [my emphasis, RR].
The Shekhina answers her: “Both Torahs are true and both were said simultaneously,
for s/he who desires another is ruled by him/her, but Moses’ Torah spoke in human
language, which is male.”79
In 2002, building on the work of al-Hibri, Wadud and a 1999 article by Riffat
Hassan,80 Pakistani diplomat, journalist and academic Asma Barlas accepted the
Quran’s depiction of men in 4:34 as breadwinners, a reading that, as she pointed out,
dates back to Tabari. The Quran does not, however, designate the husband as head
of the household, a patriarchal definition that Barlas refuted at length in her book.81
In American-Israeli Tamar Ross’s traditionalist Jewish feminist view, as elaborated
in her 2004 book Expanding the Palace of Torah, interpreting vehu yimshol bakh is

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 Jewish and Islamic Religious Feminist Exegesis

irrelevant, because women’s subordinate status in biblical times is clear.82 More rel-
evant for her is the daily prayer that men recite, blessing God “who did not make me a
woman.” Ross emphasized the social context in which the Bible is read and regarded
God’s words to Eve as an evil to be overcome.
Israeli Orthodox feminist Hayuta Deutsch, in an article published on the website of
the Orthodox feminist organization Kolech in 2007, asserted that the dictum that men
should rule over women is gradually being undermined, like the pains of childbirth
and the difficulty of producing food. In our world, she declared, rebellion is consid-
ered essential to creativity, and it creates independence. Through a long and difficult
process, humans liberate themselves from the punishments of Eden, and women are
liberating themselves from the rule of men.83
In the same year, Sa’diyya Shaikh posited a “tafsīr of praxis”—an exegesis of Quran
4:34 based on the way ordinary Muslim women in South Africa actually experience
gender relations.84 The women she interviewed had been taught that a Muslim woman
is expected to be obedient, submissive and an emotional minor, but they contested
their husbands’ behavior in religious terms. They felt that God bears witness to the
oppressed and went on active searches for alternate understandings of Islam.
Israeli Dana Pulver’s midrash on vehu yimshol bakh,85 published in a 2009 collec-
tion of feminist midrashim, draws on an alternative meaning of the root m.sh.l as “to
compare in similes,” as men do. In the Talmud, Pulver points out, the rabbis compared
women to everything in the world: a cup, meat, a piece of bread, ground, a dish, lambs,
geese, man’s body; a full water-skin and genitalia. In the future, she wrote, the pro-
phetic verse will be fulfilled: “I will make this proverb (mashal) to cease, and they
shall no more use it as a proverb (yimsholu) in Israel” (Ezek. 12:23).

Language Issues, Strategy, Methods and Secondary Sources

In interpreting the holy book, Jewish and Islamic religious feminists faced similar
language issues. Both the Bible and the Quran are written in valorized if not sacred
gendered languages, while the mother tongue of many of these feminist exegetes is
a non-gendered language—English or Urdu. This may help explain how they arrived
at their unique understandings of the text and amplified their sensitivity to linguis-
tic issues. Precisely because the language of the book was not their native spoken
language, many Jewish and Islamic religious commentators did not automatically
assume a certain meaning. Hebrew and Arabic speakers “know” that Adam refers to
“man,” but American Bible scholar Phyllis Trible and Pakistani-American professor
of Religious Studies Riffat Hassan concluded that the biblical and Quranic adam was
a sexually undifferentiated creature, or undifferentiated humankind.
By contrast, religious feminists who have or have acquired native-tongue fluency
in Hebrew or Arabic—such as Azizah al-Hibri, Rivkah Lubitch, Tamar Ross, Hayuta
Deutch and Dana Pulver—may utilize their greater familiarity with the language to
enrich their exegesis, as in the play on the word yimshol. They may also be influenced

69
Ruth Roded

by the commonly understood meaning of words and phrases, most notably qawwamun,
which is always associated with the Quranic verse.
Many native Hebrew and Arabic speakers look askance at the readings of femi-
nists who have acquired the language through study, although some would argue that
it requires serious study to truly understand biblical Hebrew and Quranic Arabic,
even for speakers of the modern tongues. However, production of feminist exegesis
in the hegemonic world language of English enhances transnational distribution of
these ideas to the majority of Muslims in the world who do not read Arabic. Con-
versely, translation of Islamic and Jewish feminist works into Arabic and Hebrew has
increased their influence in the Middle East.
The strategy employed by Islamic and Jewish religious feminists in reclaiming their
holy books has been to challenge the authority of traditional interpreters of the sacred
text through the ages. However, unique, often marginal male voices from patriarchal
societies are cited when they are deemed useful. For example, Amina Wadud cited
al-Zamakhsharī in her discussion of the word min, and Asma Barlas accepted Tabarī’s
reading of qawwāmūn as referring to men as breadwinners. Citing traditional sources
also enhances the legitimacy of feminist exegesis by demonstrating the learning of
these women authors and anchoring their efforts in time-honored religious schol-
arship. Islamic and Jewish religious feminists employ long-established terms like
midrash (homiletic interpretation) and ijtihād (making a decision by personal effort)
to emphasize that they are continuing exegetical traditions in Judaism and Islam.
Both Islamic and Jewish feminists have employed philological methods, deeply
rooted in both religious interpretative traditions, to translate crucial words anew,
thereby changing the meaning of entire verses and narratives. Philology is also valued
both in conventional western scholarship and by the feminist movement, which has
raised consciousness of language use. Religious feminists have devised additional
methods to undermine traditional readings of the Hebrew Bible and the Quran, but
in this regard the methodologies formulated by Jewish and Muslim women diverge.
The innovative methodology of feminist midrash, employed by Plaskow, Lubitch,
Pulver and others, enables Jewish feminists to address the issue of women’s silence
in Jewish writings. Since midrash per se is not considered divine, religious feminists
found this traditional Jewish method of expanding upon the biblical text amenable
for inserting women’s experience into the narrative. If rabbis could compose midrash
to fill in missing dialogue, reconcile seeming contradictions or show how seeming
redundancies actually serve to teach different lessons, feminists could certainly do
likewise. Feminist midrash offers a more dramatic and accessible means than philol-
ogy to generate new interpretations of the sacred text. It resembles feminist philology,
however, in claiming the right and even the duty of present-day women to reclaim
scriptures.
No Muslim has fabricated a story about revelation in the way that feminist midrash
does, but Islamic feminists have produced new and even subversive life-stories of the
Prophet Muhammad and the women who lived in his time.86 “Occasions of revelation”
(asbāb al-nuzūl) of Quranic verses are stories about the Prophet (aḥādīth) which are

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 Jewish and Islamic Religious Feminist Exegesis

believed to explain the occasion upon which the sacred text was revealed. Depending
on the backstory, a revealed verse has been understood as more or less harmful to
women.87 Frequently, classical Islamic scholars will present more than one “occasion
of revelation” for a verse, allowing the interpreting reader to select the one that is most
amenable to him or her. These stories about the Prophet have been deemed more or
less authentic by Islamic feminists.88
Another innovative Islamic interpretive method is the “tafsīr of praxis” pioneered
by Sa’diyya Shaikh, which departed from standard conceptions of tafsīr in being car-
ried out not only by women but by subaltern women, who expressed their life experi-
ence and feelings to the researcher. There does not seem to be a direct Jewish parallel
to this method, which represents a far cry from the scholarly intellectual engagement
of male and female exegetes with scripture.
By contrast, there is much similarity between Islamic and Jewish religious feminist
exegetes in their use of secondary sources. These may include the works of feminist
coreligious predecessors, classical Islamic or traditional Jewish texts, and those pro-
duced by modern thinkers of their own religions, as well as western Bible criticism
and Islamic studies. Even some notorious fundamentalists have been cited. Hassan and
Wadud, for example, referred to the Quran commentary of Mawdudi, who took some
of the most conservative stands on the status of woman in Islam.89 Wadud cited Qutb,
though not his Tafsīr al-Manār. Reference to the works of western experts on Islam
or Bible criticism undoubtedly reflect the academic training of the feminist exegetes,
but it may leave them open to criticism from some religious circles.
Remarkably, although there are significant differences between the biblical and the
Quranic renditions of human creation, some feminist interpretations bear a marked
resemblance to one another, as with the understanding of the word Adam. One reason
for this is the incorporation into the Islamic interpretative tradition of misogynistic
themes from the Hebrew Bible and its exegesis. However, judging by their citations,
Jewish and Islamic feminists do not appear to have influenced each other directly.
Their only point of convergence seems to be through the Christian Eve, based on the
Old Testament, as well as efforts by western Christian feminists to defuse this biblical
tradition.90 Barlas, for example, refers to the Christian rather than the Jewish use of
the story of Adam and Eve and of Eve’s punishment, “and he shall rule over thee.”91
The phrases vehu yimshol bakh and al-rijāl qawwāmūna ‘alā al-nisā’ may abso-
lutely be considered parallel. Some classical and modern exegetes have even under-
stood them similarly. Nevertheless, the treatment of the two terms by Islamic and
Jewish feminists has been quite different. Muslim women have interrogated the term
qawwāmūn intensely, even devoting international conferences and long-term research
projects to it.92 By contrast, only Pulver has reinterpreted the word yimshol, while
other Jewish religious feminists have rewritten the exegetical story. Clearly, Muslim
feminists regard the Quranic verse as extremely problematic for the family and for
society. Jewish feminists have other more pressing concerns, however. For them, vehu
yimshol bakh is descriptive of patriarchal society rather than prescriptive of normative
behavior.

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Ruth Roded

Highlighting Differences

Along with the similarities unearthed in this study between the Jewish and Islamic
feminist exegetes of the sacred books, the disparities between them revealed here are
no less enlightening. They relate to the background and environment of the feminist
exegetes, to the significance of the creation story and the gender phrase for contem-
porary life, and to some of the innovations in their interpretative methods and the
consequences of their endeavor.
The Muslim world is not only numerically larger than the Jewish world but also
more variegated in its cultural and societal spread. Although Islamic feminists are
part of an emerging “globalized Islam,”93 they originate from Pakistan, Lebanon,
the African-American community, South Africa, Malaysia and North Africa. Jewish
religious feminists of the last two generations, by contrast, come mainly from the
English-speaking world and Israel (although the Jewish and feminist North Africa–
France–Israel axis is worthy of further exploration).
Another difference between Jewish and Islamic feminist exegetes is their remove
from the traditional societies of their foremothers—usually by two, three or even
four generations for Jewish feminists in the United States and Israel, whereas most
Islamic feminists in the U.S. have arrived there more recently and maintain contact
with their home countries. Nevertheless, most Islamic and Jewish religious feminists
have in common their high level of academic learning, their participation in the global
feminist moment and their fluency in the same hegemonic language—English.
As we have seen, the relative importance of the parallel gender phrases in scrip-
ture for Jews and Muslims is far different. For Jewish feminists, the relatively minor
importance attributed to dealing with the implications of Gen. 3:16 presumably stems
from the primacy assigned the Oral Law over Scripture in determining the halakhah
that governs everyday life and personal status. Thus, dicta in the Oral Law such as
“Anyone who teaches his daughter Torah, [it is as if] he is teaching her tiflut” (Mish-
nah Sotah 3:4; tiflut is variously interpreted as referring to immorality or triviality)
are more offensive to Jewish women than the scriptural vehu yimshol bakh, which,
as Grossman points out, is rarely cited by Jewish decisors.94 Another highly problem-
atic phrase for Jewish women is the blessing recited daily by men in the traditional
morning prayers, shelo ‘asani ishah, “who did not make me a woman”; in 2008,
two prominent feminists affiliated with the Orthodox feminist organization Kolech
initiated a call to explore this issue.95
By contrast, al-rijāl qawwāmūna ‘alā al-nisā’ is frequently cited to this day in
a wide variety of contexts,96 and it continues to be a subject of intensive study and
discussion. There appear to be several reasons for this, including the difficulty in
interpreting qawwāmūn, from the earliest exegeses; the seemingly misogynistic con-
text of verse 34 in chapter 4; the frequent invocation of the phrase to justify a wide
variety of restrictions on women; and its implications for gender relations not only
in the private, familial realm but also in the very public area of personal status laws
that involve the state.

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 Jewish and Islamic Religious Feminist Exegesis

It is difficult to assess the relative impact of Islamic and Jewish religious feminist
exegeses. Who reads these works, who attacks them, and who ignores them? Clearly,
feminist performance of Judaism and Islam, as, for example, in the activities of
Women of the Wall and the mixed-gender prayers led by Amina Wadud, have elicited
more attention in the short term than any scholarly work, to say nothing of verbal and
even physical attacks.97 However, the impressive ongoing work of organizations like
Kolech and Musawah, quoted at the opening of this article, seems to indicate that the
audience for religious feminist scholarship is growing.

Ruth Roded is Associate Professor of Islam and Middle East Studies at The Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, specializing in social and cultural history with an emphasis
on gender. Her publications include: Women in Islamic Biographical Collections from
Ibn Sa’d to Who’s Who (1994), Women in Islam and the Middle East: A Reader (1999,
2008), Gender in the Twentieth-Century Middle East, co-edited with Noga Efrati
(Hebrew; 2008), and a special issue of Hawwa: Journal of Women of the Middle East
and the Islamic World (2012), co-edited with Ela Greenberg. She is currently focusing
on comparisons of Islamic and Jewish religious feminism. ruth.roded@mail.huji.ac.il

Notes:

1. Hayuta Deutsch, “The Sin and the Punishment,” Kolech Pamphlet no. 3, 2007 (Hebrew;
www.kolech.com/maamar/‫והעונש‬-‫החטא‬/, accessed December 10, 2015).
2. “An Egalitarian Understanding of Qiwamah and Wilayah” (Musawah: For Equality in
the Muslim Family, 2011), on the Musawah organization’s website www.musawah.org/
egalitarian-understanding-qiwamah-and-wilayah; accessed July 30, 2012).
3. Ruth Roded, “Islamic and Jewish Religious Feminism: Similarities, Parallels and Interac-
tions,” Religion Compass Intertwined Worlds, 6/4 (April 2012), pp. 213–224.
4. Christianity, however, is quite different; it does not have an all-encompassing religious
law like the halakhah or the sharī’a, and, more to the point of this study, it does not have
a parallel learned tradition.
5. This review is based on my more extensive earlier study, “Human Creation in the Hebrew
Bible and the Qur’an—Feminist Exegesis,” Religion Compass Intertwined Worlds, 6/5
(May 2012), pp. 277–286.
6. A good introduction to French feminism of the 1960s may be found in the autobiography
of North African Jewish feminist Gisele Halimi, Milk for the Orange Tree (English transl.
by Dorothy S. Blair; London: Quartet Books, 1991).
7. The translations of the Hebrew Bible in this article are drawn from the “old” JPS transla-
tion: The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text: A New Translation with the
Aid of Previous Versions and with Constant Consultation of Jewish Authorities (Philadel-
phia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1917). It was superseded in 1985 by Tanakh:
A New Translation of the Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia–Jerusalem: Jewish Publication
Society, 1985), known as the NJPS. The Contemporary Torah: A Gender-Sensitive Adap-
tation of the JPS Translation (CJPS), containing only the Pentateuch, was published by
the Jewish Publication Society in 2006.

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Ruth Roded

8. For many articles on Jewish women’s participation in these movements, see the Jewish
Women’s Archive: Encyclopedia (www.jwa.org/encyclopedia; accessed January 8, 2012).
9. Jewish feminists active up to the mid-twentieth century reflected a variety of attitudes
toward their Judaism: For example, Ernestine Rose (1810–1892) was a Jewish atheist
who worked closely with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, while Bertha
Pappenheim (1859–1936), founder of the German League of Jewish Women, devoted
herself to recovering Jewish women’s historical and religious traditions. Henrietta Szold
(1860–1945) studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary of the Conservative Movement,
and Henrietta (Netta) Franklin (1867–1964) was active in Anglo-Jewish liberalism, but
Cécile Brunschvicg (1877–1946) was a French radical. In Mandatory Palestine and in the
early years of Israel’s statehood, Rachel Katznelson Shazar (1885–1975) was a Labour
Zionist, while Ada Maimon (Fishman) (1893–1973) was a religious Zionist who used
her knowledge of halakhah to advocate laws promoting equality in marriage. See their
respective entries in Jewish Women’s Archive: Encyclopedia (www.jwa.org/encyclopedia,
accessed January 8, 2012).
10. A good introduction to the subject, including some primary sources and annotated ref-
erences, may be found in my book, Women in Islam and the Middle East: A Reader
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2008), pp. 213–225.
11. Some Middle Eastern Muslim feminists active up to the mid-twentieth century were:
Aisha al-Taymuriyya (1840–1902), Fatima Aliye Hanim (1862–1936), Qasim Amin (1863–
1908), Halide Edib (1884–1964), Malak Hifni Nasif (1886–1918), Huda al-Shaarawi
(1879–1947) and Doria Shafiq (1908–1975). See ibid., p. 213.
12. Ibid., pp. 226–236. No survey of worldwide Muslim feminism yet has been attempted, to
the best of my knowledge. For an example that is pertinent to this study, see: K. Mumtaz
& F. Shaheed, Women of Pakistan: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back? (London: Zed
Books, 1987); and Ayesha Jalal, “The Convenience of Subservience: Women and the
State of Pakistan,” in Deniz Kandiyoti (ed.), Women, Islam and the State (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1991), pp. 77–114.
13. For an English biography of Leibowitz see Yael Unterman, Nehama Leibowitz: Teacher
and Bible Scholar (Jerusalem–New York: Urim Publications, 2009). Leibowitz used a
question-and-answer method to reach out to a wide audience and employed various tradi-
tional and modern interpretations external to the text. Many of her very numerous studies
of the weekly Torah readings were published in several volumes by the Torah Education
Department of the World Zionist Organization, in both the original Hebrew and in English
translation. Her original versions are collected on the website Gilyonot Nechama (www.
nechama.org.il, accessed on December 5, 2013). Abd al-Rahman focused on understand-
ing the text of the Quran in the context of the Quran itself, free of any extraneous addi-
tions. Her work was aimed at a scholarly audience. On her see “Abd al-Rahman, ‘Aysha
[Bint al-Shati],” Oxford Bibliographies Online (www.oxfordbibliographies.com, accessed
on December 5, 2013); and Ruth Roded, “Bint al-Shati’s Wives of the Prophet: Feminist
or Feminine?,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 33 (2006), pp. 51–66. The
spellings Aisha and ’Aysha reflect different transliterations of the same name.
14. Margot Badran, “Islamic Feminism: What’s in a Name?,” in eadem, Feminism in Islam:
Secular and Religious Convergences (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009), pp. 242–252.
15. Jane I. Smith and Yvonne Y. Haddad, “Eve: Islamic Image of Woman,” Women’s Studies
International Forum, 5 (1982), pp. 135–144.

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 Jewish and Islamic Religious Feminist Exegesis

16. M.J. Kister, “Legends in tafsīr and hadith Literature: The Creation of Adam and Related
Stories,” in Andrew Rippin (ed.), Approaches to the History of the Interpretation of the
Qur’an (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), pp. 82– 114.
17. Phyllis Trible, “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation,” Journal of the American
Academy of Religion, 41 (1973), pp. 30–48; reprinted in E. Koltun (ed.), The Jewish
Woman: New Perspectives (New York: Schocken, 1976). Shortly thereafter, in God and
the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), Trible sharpened her original
portrayal of Adam as “a sexually undifferentiated creature” to describe him as an “earth
creature” (p. 77), drawing on the biblical wordplay in Gen. 2:7: “The Lord God formed
man (adam) from the dust of the earth (adamah).” I have not found this term in Jewish or
Islamic religious feminist works.
18. Trible, “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation” (above, note 17), p.38, citing George
Foot Moore, Judaism, I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), and Joseph
Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (n.p.: Meridien Books, 1970).
19. “Phyllis Trible,” in Jewish Women’s Archive: Encyclopedia (www.jwa.org/encyclopedia/
author/trible-phyllis, accessed May 24, 2010).
20. Trible revisited the subject in 1995 in “Not a Jot, Not a Tittle: Genesis 2–3 after Twenty
Years,” reprinted in Kristen E. Kvam, Linda S. Scharing and Valarie H. Ziegler (eds.), Eve
& Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 439–444. She systematically answered her critics,
stating that she would not change a jot or a tittle of the lengthy study she published in 1978.
21. Judith Plaskow, “The Coming of Lilith” (1972), Jewish Women’s Archive (www.jwa.org/
media/coming-of-lilith-by-judith-plaskow, accessed on February 19, 2012).
22. Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (San Fran-
cisco: HarperCollins, 1990), p. 42.
23. Riffat Hassan, “Made from Adam’s Rib: The Woman’s Creation Question,” Al-Mushir
Theological Journal of the Christian Study Centre, 27 (1985), pp. 124–155.
24. Amina Wadud-Muhsin, Qur’an and Women (Kuala Lumpur: Penerbit Fajar Bakt, 1992),
based on her doctoral dissertation; eadem, Qur’an and Women: Rereading the Sacred
Text from a Woman’s Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); eadem,
Al-Qur’an wa-l-mar’a: I‘ādat Qirā’at al-naṣṣ al-qur’an min manẓūr nisā’I (Al-Qahira:
Maktaba Madbūli, 2006).
25. Rachel Adler, Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society, 1998), p. 114.
26. Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical
Review, 91 (1986), p. 1068.
27. The definition of gender was radically changed by the publication in 1990 of Judith
Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York–London:
Routledge, 1990) where she deconstructs the binary of “men” and “women” and frees it
from the presumption of heterosexuality, asserting that “gender must also designate the
very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established” (pp. viii, 6–7).
Butler’s work opened the way for a plethora of theoretical and empiric studies of gender
and sexuality, including an academic journal of that name founded in 2000. The reread-
ing of the sacred books by Jewish and Muslim homosexuals and lesbians is a fascinating
subject, but it is beyond the scope of this study.
28. NJPS; an interpretive note reflects feminist concerns.

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Ruth Roded

29. Marmaduke Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran (1930; www.al-quran.info/
?x=y#&&sura=4&aya=34&trans=en-marmaduke_pickthall&show=both,quran-uthmani
&ver=2.00, accessed on July 31, 2012).
30. Judith Hauptman, “Women,” in David L. Lieber (ed.), Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary
(The Jewish Publication Society, 2001), pp. 1356–1359. Of course, other feminists read
the Torah differently.
31. Avraham Grossman, “Vehu yimshol bakh: Bein te’oriya lemetzi’ut” (www.daat.ac.il/
mishpat-ivri/skirot/93-2.htm, accessed on 30 July 30, 2012).
32. On him see P.B. Fenton, “Sa‘adyā Ben Yōsēf,” Encyclopaedia of Islam (second edition
[henceforth: EI2]; http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/
saadya-ben-yosef-COM_0949, accessed on July 31, 2012); Haggai Ben-Shammai, “Sa‘adya
Gaon,” Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World (http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/
entries/encyclopedia-of-jews-in-the-islamic-world/saadya-gaon-COM_0018750, accessed
July 31, 2012); Abraham Solomon Halkin et al., “Saadiah (ben Joseph) Gaon,” Encyclo-
paedia Judaica (second edition; http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CCX258751
7213&v=2.1&u=imcpl1111&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w., accessed February 15, 2012).
33. Saadya Gaon ben Yosef al-Fayyumi, Al-Tafasir wal-Kutub wal-Rasa’il, ed. J. Deren-
bourg, I (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1893), p. 9; Lisan al-‘Arab (Bulaq: Al-Matba’ah al-Kubra
al-”Amiriyyah, 1883); Edward William Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon (London: Wil-
liams & Norgate, 1863); J.G. Hava, Al-Faraid: Arabic–English Dictionary (Beirut: Dar
el-Mashreq, 1982). I wish to thank Miriam Goldstein for helping me find Saadya’s original
Arabic translation.
34. Literally every phrase and most of the terms in this verse have been analyzed extensively
in classical, modern and feminist Islamic exegesis. This study focuses primarily on the
word qawwāmūn as a parallel to Hebrew yimshol.
35. For the Arabic and the Pickthall translation, see, e.g., the site al-quran.info (al-quran.
info/?x=y#&&sura=4&aya=34&trans=en-marmaduke_pickthall&show=both,quran-
uthmani&ver=2.0, accessed December 5, 2013).
36. An exposition of this view may be found in Ruth Roded, “Women and the Qur’an,” Ency-
clopaedia of the Qur’an, V (Leiden–Boston: E.J. Brill, 2006), pp. 523–541. The support-
ing citations from the Quran are: 9:67, 68, 71, 72; 24:12; 33:35, 36, 58, 73; 48:5–6, 25;
52:12, 13; 71:28; 85:10. The most commonly quoted is 33:35:
Lo! Men who surrender unto Allah, and women who surrender, and men who believe
and women who believe,
and men who obey and women who obey,
and men who speak the truth and women who speak the truth, and men who persevere
(in righteousness) and women who persevere,
and men who are humble and women who are humble,
and men who give alms and women who give alms,
and men who fast and women who fast,
and men who guard their modesty and women who guard (their modesty),
and men who remember Allah much and women who remember—Allah hath pre-
pared for them forgiveness and a vast reward.
A major exception to this spiritual equality is presented by the heavenly rewards prom-
ised to men and women. See Jane I. Smith and Yvonne Y. Haddad, “Women in the After-
life: The Islamic View as Seen from the Quran and Tradition,” Journal of the American
Academy of Religion, 43 (1975), pp. 39–50.

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37. Abd al-Ra’uf al-Masri, Mu’jam al-Quran (second edition; Cairo: Matba’a Hejazi, 1948),
p. 109. The second two references in the Quran are to qawwāmīn from qa’im. Ideally, the
meaning of a word in the Quran could be clarified by reference to its use in pre-Islamic
Arabic poetry, but the concordances of jahili poetry available at present do not include
this word. Definition of qawwāmūn in the standard classical Arabic dictionaries cited in
note 33 are clearly influenced by the understanding of the Quranic verse. See below for
the development of classical, modern and feminist exegesis of this crucial yet problematic
term.
38. C.E. Boswor t h, “al -Ṭabarī, Abū Ḏjafar Muḥammad b. Ḏjar r b. Yazīd,” EI2 (http://
referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/al-tabari-COM_1133,
accessed July 31, 2012).
39. al-Ṭabari, “Tafsīr jāmi‘ l-bayān fī tafsīr l-Qur’ān” (www.altafsīr.com/Tafasir.asp?
tMadhNo=1&tTafsīrNo=1&tSoraNo=4&tAyahNo=34&tDisplay=yes&Page=1&Size=1&​
LanguageId=1, accessed on December 16, 2013).
40. Some examples of woman-friendly interpretations by Tabari are: (1) Preferring the reading
of “qarna fī buyūtikunna” in Quran 22:6 as “qirna” (as they read it in Kufa and Basra), so
that it means “comport yourself with dignity and calm in your houses” (kunna ahl waqt
wa-sakina fī buyūtikunna) instead of “Stay in your houses!” See Jami’ al-bayan (Beirut:
Dar al-Fikr, 1415 AH [1994]), 22, pp. 5–6 (altafsir.com, accessed on December 10, 2013);
Mostafa Hashem Sherif, “What is Hijab?,” The Muslim World, 77 (1987), pp. 151–163;
and Behnam Sadeghi, The Logic of Law Making in Islam: Women and Prayer in the
Legal Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). (2) Permitting women
to lead men in ritual prayers (from behind) if they should be the best qualified to recite
the Quran. See Christopher Melchert, “Whether to Keep Women Out of the Mosque: A
Survey of Medieval Islamic Law,” in B. Michalak-Pikulska and A. Pikulski (eds.), Author-
ity, Privacy and Public Order in Islam: Proceedings of the 22nd Congress of L’Union
Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), pp. 59–69, relying on
references in several classical sources. (3) His minority opinion that women may serve as
qadis (judges), as quoted in Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali ibn Muhammad al-Mawardi, al-Ahkam
al-sultaniyya (Beirut: Dar al-kutub al-‘alimiyya, 1990), p. 83. Of course, no one would
suggest that Tabari was a feminist.
41. Karen A. Bauer, “Room for Interpretation: Quranic Exegesis and Gender” (Ph.D. disserta-
tion, Princeton University, 2008), p. 184.
42. On him see Aaron Rothkoff et al., “Rashi,” Encyclopaedia Judaica (above, note 32,
accessed February 15, 2012).
43. Grossman, “Vehu yimshol bakh” (above, note 31); idem, Ḥasidot umoredot: Nashim
Yehudiyot be’Eropa biymei habeinayim (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2001), p. 54.
44. Grossman, Ḥasidot umoredot (above, note 43), pp. 54–56; idem, “Rashi,” Jewish Women’s
Archive: Encyclopedia (www.jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/rash, accessed July 31, 2012).
45. On him see Uriel Simon and Raphael Jospe, “Ibn Ezra, Abraham ben Meir,” Encyclopae-
dia Judaica (above, note 32, accessed February 15, 2012).
46. C.H.M. Versteegh, “ al-Zamakhsharī,” EI2 (http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/
encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/al-zamakhshari-SIM_8108, accessed July 30, 2012).
47. This exclusion of women from the ‘ulamā’ is quite surprising, since he must have been
aware of the famous learned women of previous centuries, see: Ruth Roded, Women in
Islamic Biographical Collections: From Ibn Saʻd to Who’s Who (Boulder, CO–London:
Lynne Reinner, 1994).

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Ruth Roded

48. Zamakhshari, Tafsīr Al-Kishaf (www.altafsīr.com/Tafasir.asp?tMadhNo=1&tTafsīrNo=

2&tSoraNo=4&tAyahNo=34&tDisplay=yes&UserProfile=0&LanguageId=1, accessed
December 5, 2013).
49. Similar lists of women’s limitations are found In the Tales of the Prophets of al-Kisa’i,
which dates back to the eighth century, see al-Kisa’i, Qisas al-Anbiya’ (Leiden: Brill,
1922), p. 43; and The Tales of the Prophets of al-Kisā’ī (English transl. by W.M. Thackston,
Jr.; Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), p. 44. On Al-Kisa’i, see Aviva Shussman, “Sipurei
HaNevi’im bamasoret HaMuslemit al pi qisas al-anbiya’ shel kisa’I,” doctoral disserta-
tion (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1981). Al-Kisa’i includes: “I destine thee to
menstruation and the pain of pregnancy and labor, and thou wilt give birth only by tasting
the pain of death along with it.”
50. On him see Joseph Kaplan et al., “Naḥmanides,” Encyclopaedia Judaica (above, note 32,
accessed February 21, 2012).
51. J. Robson, “al-Bayḍāwī, ‘Abd Allāh b. ‘Umar b. Muḥammad b. ‘Alī Abu’l-Khayr Nāṣir
al-Dīn,” EI2 (http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/
al-Bayḍāwī-SIM_1310, accessed July 30, 2012).
52. H. Laoust, “Ibn Kath̲īr, ‘Imād al-Dīn Ismā’īl b. ‘Umar b. Kathīr,” EI2 (http://reference
works.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/ibn-Kathīr-SIM_3237, accessed
February 21. 2012).
53. Composed by the two “Jalals”—Jalāl al-Din al-Maḥallī (d. 864 AH / 1459 CE) and his
pupil Jalāl al-Din al-Suyūtī (d. 911 AH / 1505 CE). Ch. Pellat, “al-Maḥaḥallī, Abū ‘Alī
Ḏj̲alāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm al-Anṣārī al-Shāfi‘ī,”
EI2 (http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/al-mahalli-
SIM_4776, accessed July 30, 2012). And: E. Geoffroy, “al-Suyūṭī, Abu ‘l-Faḍl ‘Abd
al-Raḥmān b. Abī Bakr b. Muḥammad Ḏj̲alāl al-Dīn al-Ḵh̲uḍayrī,” EI2 (http://reference-
works.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/al-suyuti-COM_1130, accessed
July 30, 2012).
54. Ibn Kathīr, “Tafsīr Al-Quran Al-Qarī” (www.altafsīr.com/Tafasir.asp?tMadhNo=1tTafsīrNo
=7&tSoraNo=4&tAyahNo=34&tDisplay=yes&UserProfile=0&LanguageId=1, accessed
February 21, 2012).
55. “Tafsir al-Jalalayn” (www.altafsīr.com/Tafasir.asp?tMadhNo=0&tTafsīrNo=74&tSora
No=4&tAyahNo=34&tDisplay=yes&UserProfile=0&LanguageId=2, accessed July 30,
2012).
56. On him see Moshe David Herr and David Derovan, “David Ẓevi Hoffmann,” Encyclo-
paedia Judaica (above, note 32, accessed November 26, 2015).
57. David Tsvi Hoffman, “Commentary on Genesis 3” (www.daat.ac.il/daat/tanach/hofman/
hof_br03.pdf, accessed July 31, 2012).
58. Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā, Tafsīr as Tafsīr al-Qur’an al-Hakim al-Shahīr bi Tafsīr
al-Manār (Cairo: Maṭba‘atu l-Manār, 1325/1910).
59. J. Schacht, “Muḥammad ‘Abduh,” EI2 (http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/
encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/muhammad-abduh-SIM_5378); W. Ende, “Rashīd Riḍā,” EI2
(http://brillonline.nl/subscriber/entry?entry=islam_SIM-6240, both accessed July 30
2012).
60. M.D. Cassuto, Perush ‘al Sefer Bereishit (first edition; Jerusalem: Magnes, 5704/1943).
61. Zohair Husain, “Maulana Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi: An Appraisal of His Thought and
Political Influence,” South Asia, 9 (1986), pp. 208–223; “Mawdudi: Orthodox Funda-
mentalism,” in Aziz Ahmad (ed.), Islamic Modernism in India and Pakistan, 1857–1964

78 • Nashim 29 (2015)
 Jewish and Islamic Religious Feminist Exegesis

(London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 208–209; F.C.R. Robinson, “Mawdudī,
sayyid abu ‘l-a‘lā,” EI2 (http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-
islam-2/mawdudi-SIM_5052, accessed July 31, 2012).
62. Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, “The Meaning of the Qur’an” (www.englishtafsīr.com/
Quran/4/index.html, accessed July 31, 2012).
63. Sayyid Qutb, In the Shade of the Qur’an (English transl. by Adil Salahi, available on the
site www.kalamullah.com/shade-of-the-quran.html, accessed July 31, 2012).
64. J.J.G. Jansen, “Sayyid Ḳuṭb,” EI2 (http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclo
paedia-of-islam-2/sayyid-kutb-COM_1012, accessed July 31, 2012).
65. Qutb, In the Shade (above, note 63), IV, p. 108, 110.
66. Gilyonot Nechama, “Parashat Bereishit” (www.nechama.org.il/pages/1021.html?1,
accessed December 6, 2012).
67. Gilyonot Nechama, “Beri’at ha’ishah” (www.nechama.org.il/pages/570.html, accessed
August 27, 2011), citing Isaac b. Moses Arama (Spain, fifteenth century), and Judah Loew
b. Bezalel, the Maharal of Prague (sixteenth century).
68. Smith and Haddad, “Eve” (above, note 15), p. 140; Roded, “Bint al-Shati’ ” (above, note 13).
69. ‘Aysha Abd al-Rahman, “The Islamic Conception of Women’s Liberation” (English transl.
by Nazih Khater), al-Raida, 125 (2009), p. 41; see her book, al-Mafhūm al-Islāmi li Tahrīr
al-Mar’a (Islamic understanding of women’s liberation; Cairo: Matba‘at Mukhaymir,
1967).
70. Frederick Mathewson Denny, “Fazlur Rahman: Muslim Intellectual,” Muslim World, 79
(1989), pp. 91–101.
71. Fazlur Rahman, Major Themes of the Quran (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1980).
72. I deal in depth with the relative accessibility of and relevance to Jewish and Muslim
women of the sacred book as opposed to the oral law in my forthcoming article, “Islamic
and Jewish Religious Feminists Tackle Islamic and Jewish Oral Law: Maintenance and
Rebellion of Wives.”
73. Aziza al-Hibri, “A Study of Islamic Herstory,” Women’s Studies International Forum, 5
(1982), pp. 135–243.
74. Wadud-Muhsin, Qur’an and Women (above, note 24), pp. 69–71.
75. Ibid., pp. 72–73.
76. Adler, Engendering Judaism (above, note 25), p. 114.
77. Ibid., pp. 119–124.
78. Ibid., p. 125.
79. Rivkah Lubitch, “Midrashim Feminisṭiyim” (Feminist midrashim), in Nahem Ilan (ed.),
‘Ayin Ṭovah: Du-siaḥ vepulmus betarbut Yiśrael (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1999),
pp. 305–306.
80. This article by Hassan was not available to me.
81. Asma Barlas, “Believing Women” in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the
Qur’an (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), pp. 184–187.
82. Tamar Ross, Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism (Waltham, MA:
Brandeis University Press, 2004), pp. 14, 174.
83. Hayuta Deutsch, Kolech Pamphlet, 3 (above, note 1).
84. Sa’diyya Shaikh, “A Tafsīr of Praxis: Gender, Marital Violence, and Resistance in a South
African Muslim Community,” in Dan Maguire and Sa’diyya Shaikh (eds.), Violence
Against Women in Contemporary World Religions: Roots and Cures (Ohio: Pilgrim
Press, 2007), pp. 66–89.

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85. Nehama Weingarten-Mintz and Tamar Biala, Dirshuni: Midreshei nashim (Tel Aviv:
Yediot Aharonot, 2009).
86. Assia Djebar, Loin de Medine (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991); English transl. by Dorothy S.
Blair: Far From Medina (London: Quartet Books, 1994).
87. M.H. Sherif, “What is ḥijāb?” Muslim World, 77 (1987), pp. 151–163.
88. The pioneer of this feminist critique is Fatima Mernissi, Le harem politique: Le prophète
et les femmes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1987).
89. Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi, Purdah and the Status of Woman in Islam (Delhi: Markazi
Maktaba Islami, 1994).
90. A full description of Christian religious feminist exegesis of the Old Testament is beyond
the scope of this article. Its influence on Islamic and Jewish religious feminists is worthy
of further study.
91. Barlas, Believing Women (above, note 81), p. 138.
92. Women Living under Muslim Laws,” For Ourselves: Women Reading the Qur’an
(Musawah, 1997: www.wluml.org/node/567, accessed September 6, 2011), pp. 58–63.
93. Oliver Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004).
94. Grossman, “Vehu yimshol bakh” (above, note 31).
95. Rivkah Lubitch and Ruti Feuchtwanger, “A Call to Participate in a Survey on the Subject
of the Morning Prayer” February 3, 2009, on the Kolech website (Hebrew; www.kolech.
com/maamar/‫הש‬-‫ברכת‬-‫בנושא‬-‫סקר‬-‫בהכנת‬-‫להשתתפות‬-‫קריאה‬/; accessed December 17, 2013).
The call elicited 15 on-line responses, posted on February 3, 2009. The same website had
one article by Hayuta Deutsch dealing with vehu yimshol bakh (above, note 1).
96. E.g., Mawardi cites it to justify why only men may be judges, and Nizam al-Mulk, to sup-
port the view that kings’ wives should not assume the part of rulers; see Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali
ibn Muhammad al-Mawardi, al-Ahkam as-sultaniyyah: The Laws of Islamic Governance,
(English transl. Asadullah Yate; London: Ta-Ha Publishers, n.d.); The Book of Govern-
ment or Rules for Kings: The Siyasat-nama or Siyar al-Muluk (English transl. by Hubert
Darke; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), pp. 185–192. The Fatwa Center of Al-
Qasami Academic College of Education in Baqa al-Gharbiyya, Israel, received a question
from a woman asking if she may be the supervisor of a man at work, quoting this phrase.
They answered: Al-Rijāl qawwamuna ala al-nisa’ means that the man is responsible for
women, both as spouses and as girls, since it is men’s responsibility to support women.
Therefore, there is no prohibition against a woman being a man’s supervisor at work, as
long as she strictly follows the shar‘i rules of morals when she goes out to work. Fatwa
no. 63.02.2006, collected by Tajreed Kaedan.
97. For Women of the Wall see their site: www.womenofthewall.org.il/; on Muslim women
see Rachel Ukeles, Debating New Religious Roles for Women in Contemporary Islamic
Law (unpublished paper, Van Leer Institute, February 2006); and Juliane Hammer, Ameri-
can Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism: More Than A Prayer (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2012).

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