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| Religious Authorities in
Islam Asma Barlas It also is important to realise that
religious knowledge has been produced within patriarchal states and
societies and almost exclusively by men, which may explain why women have
been excluded from interpretive communities, even though Muslim women were
active participants in the creation of religious knowledge during the
early period of Muslim history How do Muslims define religious authority,
what does it take to be acknowledged as a religious authority, and what
interpretive powers accrue to religious authorities? Several Muslim and
non-Muslim scholars were invited to address these and related questions at
a conference hosted by the Institute of Islamic Studies at the Free
University of Berlin from 5-8th December. In the end, we could not arrive
at shared conclusions due to differences of opinion between us, but the
dialogue was productive in that it allowed us to debate issues that
Muslims often don’t reflect on. What follows is a synopsis of my
position as I presented it in Berlin and also explore at some length in
Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the
Qur’an (University of Texas Press, 2002). I should note first that I became
interested in examining the nature of religious authority when I began to
study how Muslims had interpreted the Qur’an historically. The more I
read about this, the clearer it became to me that, like other forms of
knowledge, religious knowledge also is a function of who produces it, how,
and in what social, political, cultural, and historical contexts. This
means, of course, that such knowledge is inflected by the author’s
biases, open to error, and reflective of social relationships of power
(since only certain views – almost always male and conservative – get
to be heard). This may be obvious, but Muslims generally don’t like to
admit it. Rather, they tend to treat religious knowledge as if it were
infallible and sacrosanct like religion itself because of their tendency
to confuse the two, as Abdolkarim Soroush, the Iranian scholar, points
out. Second, my interest extends only to three
aspects of religious authority: the relationship between authority and
methodology, authority and the state, and authority and gender. With respect to the first, I draw on
Brannon Wheeler’s study, Applying the Canon in Islam: The Authorization
and Maintenance of Interpretive Reasoning in Hanafi Scholar-ship (Albany:
SUNY, 1996) to point out that religious authority “derives not from
closing the canon, or even from ‘fixing’ its contents, but from
certain ways of interpreting them.” As such, “what this system
restricts is not interpretive consensus, or even the canon, but the method
of interpretation” (Barlas, 2002). Customarily, this method relies on a
hadith-based interpretation of the Qur’an and while most Muslims view
this as the only legitimate way to read the scripture, it can result in
misrepresenting some of the Qur’an’s teachings. To take an example: the Qur’an teaches
that women and men originated in a single self (nafs) and are of
“like” nature – in other words, it does not state that men and women
have been endowed with differing, or opposite, attributes – establishing
that sexual equality in Islam is ontological and not sociological in
nature, as Riffat Hassan argues. The hadith, on the other hand, describe
the woman as the product of the man’s body (his ribs), hence as
secondary to him, while also claiming that men and women are opposites of
one another, with the men embodying positive qualities and women negative.
To interpret the Qur’an by way of such hadith then clearly subverts its
own egalitarianism. Second, and more importantly, this method
allows certain interpretive communities to claim authority on the basis of
the assertion “that the authority of the practice defined by later
generations [is equivalent to] the authority of revelation” (Wheeler,
88). Such a claim leads to collapsing the Qur’an with its
(male-authored) tafsir, nullifying the distinction Muslim theology makes
between “divine speech and its earthly realization” (Josef van Ess,
“Verbal Inspiration? Language and Revelation in Classical Islamic
Theology,” in Stefan Wild (ed.), The Quran as Text, Leiden, Brill, 1996:
189). This assertion also ignores the Qur’an’s condemnation of those
“who write The Book with their own hands, And then say: ‘This is from
God’” (2:79; in Abdullah Yusuf Ali). While this ayah was directed at
people who were engaged in forgeries during the Prophet’s lifetime, it
can be read more broadly. That Muslims came to embrace such a method
as lawful early in their history reflects not only on scholarly thinking
about religious matters, but also on the structure of political power in
Muslim societies, specifically on the role of the state in enabling the
hegemony of certain interpretive communities and their readings of Islam
as a way to sustain its own. Thus, we need to understand the intersections
and mutual dependencies of political power and religious authority in the
production of religious knowledge both historically (Tarif Khalidi and
Qasim Zaman offer excellent critiques of this), and in the present. It also is important to realise that
religious knowledge (including tafsir of the Qur’an), has been produced
within patriarchal states and societies and almost exclusively by men,
which may explain why it tends to be anti-women and why women have been
excluded from interpretive communities, even though Muslim women were
active participants in the creation of religious knowledge during the
early period of Muslim history. However, even though the most notable
marker of religious authority among Muslims is gender, the Qur’an does
not state that men have been endowed with any sort of epistemic privilege
or given the right to monopolise religious meaning. Nor does Islam ordain
a class of professional interpreters of religion (in the form of a
clergy), or suggest that only experts should interpret religion. To the
contrary, the Qur’an repeatedly calls on all believers – women and
men, educated or not, laypeople and experts – to reflect for themselves
on its meanings in order to understand its ayah (literally, the
“signs” of God). One may conclude then that the way in which religious authority is structured among Muslims is not necessarily the way it is structured in “Islam” (the two are not the same). One may also conclude that it is unlikely that women will be integrated into interpretive communities or that their scholarship on religion will become authoritative. Even so, I believe that women need to find the courage (and interest) to continue engaging and interpreting our religion, locating our authority to do so in the teachings of the Qur’an. About the author: Source: http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_31-12-2002_pg3_4 |