Amina Wadud’s Fantasy Islam

Some Muslim scholars, such as Amina Wadud, read the Qur’an differently regarding women’s rights. Wadud wrote: “In the area of gender, conservative thinkers read explicit Qur’anic reforms of existing historical and cultural practices as the literal and definitive statement on these practices for all times and places. What I am calling for is a reading that regards those reforms as establishing precedent for continual development toward a just social order.” Wadud can call all she wants for considering the changes that Islam brought to existing practices in the early 7th century as a precedent for continuing to develop — here and now — continuing changes in the reading of the Qur’an, but almost no Muslim clerics or scholars of Islam agree with her naively optimistic ways. They regard the Qur’an as immutable, and have 1,400 years of Qur’anic commentary that supports that view. Wadud’s “call” has fallen on deaf ears; she has almost no following among the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims. But since Unbelievers find her message soothing, in its suggestion that Islam is “evolving” in all sorts of welcome ways, she receives far more coverage in the Western press than she merits.

Wadud has even said: “The confirmation of women’s equality that resulted from my studies in the Qur’an was overwhelming.” Her hypertrophied sense of her own significance is disconcerting. After 1,400 years, along comes Amina Wadud and she — alone — has found that the “confirmation of women’s equality that resulted” from her, Amina Wadud’s, “studies,” was “overwhelming.” She’s a Daniel come to judgment. What everyone else missed, Amina Wadud found, and the evidence for her conclusions was not just convincing; it was “overwhelming.” Case closed. Or so she wishes us all to think.

But apparently almost no Muslims — mainstream, not “extremist” — share her views. How is it that she concluded that Muslim men and women can be equal in inheritance? Or what led her to conclude that, according to Islam, the testimony of a woman should now be equal to the testimony of a man? In what Sharia Court, anywhere in the world, would that view be followed? Muhammad himself described in a hadith “the insufficiency of [woman’s] intelligence” as justifying such a rule. Does Amina Wadud think Muslims will choose to believe her “studies” of the Qur’an rather than the words of the Prophet Muhammad?

For 1,400 years, Muslims have read the Qur’an and Hadith and come away with the clear understanding that men are superior to women. It is said in the Qur’an: “Men are in charge of women by [right of] what Allah has given one over the other and what they spend [for maintenance] from their wealth.” (4:34) They are the guardians and guides of their womenfolk, for they are “superior” to them in intelligence. A husband can “beat” a wife whose disobedience he fears (4:34). He is the absolute ruler of the family; he, and not any of his wives, even has the power of life and death over his children. He can take up to four wives, and divorce any of them by merely repeating the triple-talaq. A Muslim wife can have only one husband, and divorce for her is a much more complicated affair, requiring a Muslim cleric’s approval. The hundred or so Muslims who follow Wadud are not going to convince 1.5 billion other Muslims that what the Qur’an has taught, unchanged and unchallenged, for 1,400 years, now needs to be modified to ensure the equality of men and women in Islam.

As for the Ibn Rushd-Goethe mosque founded by Seyran Ateş in Berlin in 2017, where men and women can pray side by side, after nearly seven years, it still remains in one small room. A fatwa has been issued against her from Al-Azhar University in Egypt. Ateş requires a security detail at her one-room mosque, on the third floor of a nondescript building. Just weeks ago, Islamic State jihadis were arrested for a plot to attack it. That much-discussed Muslim “reformation” in relations between the sexes Ates hoped to start does not appear to be taking off. At the last meeting there were about 30 congregants; sometimes there are only a half-dozen. And I wish to remind you that there are 1.5 billion Muslims.