Karen Bauer and Feras Hamza: Women, Households, and the Hereafter in the Qur’an: A Patronage of Piety

Bauer and Hamza's Women, Households, and the Hereafter in the Qur'an: A Patronage of Piety offers methodological innovation through its synthesis of intratextual Qur'anic studies with historical inquiry into gender and class-based social relations in late antiquity.  The authors identify the paterfamilias figure as the addressee of many Qur'anic ethical imperatives—due to his accumulated social capital and not an inherent spiritual superiority.  The Qur'an reconfigures his social authority to some degree by emphasizing female dignity and the rights of the poor and oppressed within the existing patronage structures of the period. The work advances feminist scholarship by emphasizing a Qur'anic vision in which social privilege demands greater moral accountability. By centering their analysis on Qur'anic moral imperatives, Bauer and Hamza highlight didactic aspects of Qur'anic discourse that have been deemphasized in the broader field of academic Qur'anic studies, a field that has focused on cross-religious convergences until recent decolonial Muslim scholarship has insisted on the novel contributions of the Qur'an to humanistic virtue ethics.