Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Ruptures and Continuities in Modern Islamic Thought

Chapter 2: Modern Approaches to Qur'anic Interpretation

Chapter 3: Reflecting the Colonial Gaze: Women in Modern Qur'anic Exegesis

Chapter 4: Sexually Neglectful Husbands: Classical and Modern Interpretations of Q. 4:128

Chapter 5: Rebellious Wives: Medieval and Modern Interpretations of Q. 4:34

Chapter 6: A New Rationalization for Polygyny: Medieval & Modern Interpretations of Q. 4:3

Chapter 7: Men's "Degree:" An Unconditional Privilege?

Conclusion

About the Author

Hadia Mubarak is Assistant Professor of Religion at Queens University of Charlotte. Mubarak's publications include, "Violent, Oppressed and Un-American: Muslim Women in the American Imagination" in The Personal is Political, ed. Christine Davis and Jon Crane, "Gender and Qur'anic Exegesis" in The Routledge Handbook of Islam and Gender, ed. Justine Howe, and "Women's Contemporary Readings of the Qur'an" in The Routledge
Companion to the Quran.

Reviews

Mubarak's study is a welcome contribution to the emerging academic literature on the Quran and gender. Particularly, for any scholar or student interested in Islamic studies, the book will be a valuable resource for comprehending the Qur'anic exegetical tradition with great nuance and intricacy. Inspired by Barbara Stowasser's work on women and gender, the author insists on two central themes: that hermeneutics has a vital role in the sustainability of Islamic knowledge, and the boundaries of the Tafsir genre continue to be malleable in both the pre-modern or modern period.
*Mohammed Salih, Reading Religion*

Rather than add to the robust scholarly literature on women and gender in the Qur'an, Mubarak (Queens Univ. of Charlotte) begins her exploration of tafsir works by arguing for the significance of the exegetical tradition, past and present, for understanding Muslims' engagements with the Qur'an itself. She identifies a lacuna in feminist Muslim scholarship: for the most part, scholars have dismissed tafsir as patriarchal to rescue the Qur'an from that same charge. Mubarak offers readings of several 20th-century Muslim commentators in conversation with premodern tafsir scholars to argue that their views of women and gender norms are nuanced and provide openings for critiques of patriarchal perspectives as eternal and universal, thereby offering her own commentary on commentary.
*Choice*

Joining a vigorous and vibrant debate about patriarchy, hierarchy, and interpretive authority in Islamic texts and Muslim thought, Hadia Mubarak's new study offers detailed engagement with the work of prominent twentieth-century male exegetes. Scholars of jurisprudence and ethics have shown that those genres combine hierarchical gendered presuppositions with attention to women's concerns and needs; Mubarak argues that the Sunni tafsir tradition does the same and thereby offers resources to contemporary advocates of egalitarianism
*Kecia Ali, author of Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur'an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence*

In Rebellious Wives, Neglectful Husbands, Hadia Mubarak provides a fresh, engaging and major study of the extent to which modern Quranic commentaries, responding to the impact of European colonialism and modernity, resulted in new and diverse orientations (Islamic modernism, Islamism, and neo-traditionalism) in modern interpretations of gender and the status and role of women in the Quran.
*John L. Esposito, University Professor and Professor of Islamic Studies, Georgetown University*

This book is a fresh engagement with medieval and modern Qur'an interpretation on questions of gender and women's status. Hadia Mubarak's reassessment of modern tafsīr highlights the pluralism in the genre and shows how the interpreters have used the tradition to put forth their own new interpretations. Significantly, Mubarak raises the possibility that tradition can be used as a locus for modern reform.
*Karen Bauer, author of Gender Hierarchy in the Qur'an: Medieval Interpretations, Modern Responses*

This book is about the intersection of modernity and Sunni exegetical thought...The book can be read from a number of perspectives. On one level it is a response to and an accusation of 'well meaning' Muslim feminists who do not engage with the Tafsir genre and yet are quick to discard it as monolithic, patriarchal, misogynist and bereft of women's voice...It is a call to Muslim feminists not to indulge in disciplinary confusion. If one wants to engage with the Qur'an, then one needs to do so within the methods of the field of Tafsir studies and not superimpose methods from other disciplines. The book is also about the interpretive powers of pre-modern exegetes to have a say in modern issues.
*Mansur Ali, Cardiff University, UK, Muslim World Book Review*