In a newly designed course on Muslim-Christian encounter at a Jesuit University, the class, comprised of self-identifying Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, Protestants, agnostics and atheists, turns to Aysha Hidayatullah’s “The Qur’anic Rib-ectomy: Scripture Purity, Imperial Dangers, and Other Obstacles to interfaith Engagement of Feminist Qur’anic Interpretation” to open a month-long unit on comparative scriptural study. Hidayatullah’s text is introduced following a week’s study of Muslim feminist interpretations of the Qur’anic story of Adam and Eve, centering the voices of Barlas, Wadud and Lamptey. Specifically, before Hidayatullah’s text is introduced, the class has walked through Lamptey’s constructive theological anthropology, and theology of religions, as rooted in the original divinely intended difference in Surah An-Nisa; the distinction of a single nafs (soul) into zawj (pairs) is the launching point from which to articulate divinely intended lateral difference. This Qur’anic interpretation is read in comparison to the Genesis text, and Christian feminist struggles (specifically Elizabeth Johnson’s analysis) to counter both the Christian tradition’s interpretations, and the inherent limitations of the scriptural text itself.
Hidayatullah’s text warns against the potential negative impacts, points of impasse and alienation that can occur in reading the Qur’an’s story of Adam and Eve in engagement with Jewish and Christian feminist theologies (Hidayatullah, 2013). Hidayatullah’s text provides the class with a framework to consider the “tokenizing and surface character of multi-faith feminist conversations” and the still-felt harms of colonialistic feminism, problematizing the student-lead project of comparative scriptural study the class is about to begin. This practice of comparative scriptural study has gained momentum in the context of Muslim-Catholic dialogue in the last two-plus decades, evolving from the Scriptural Reasoning movement (SR), where the “Abrahamic” traditions read selected, thematic-focused texts from the three traditions in tandem (Madigan 2022: 335). I personally bring the practice from my experience on the United States Conference for Catholic Bishop’s National Catholic-Muslim Dialogue, and it's more theologically focused offshoot Scholars in Dialogue. The practice of reading together is ond where Christians and Muslims intend to move from “contending against one another to the point where we find ourselves contending together with the great questions of God, humanity and the broader creation” (Madigan, 2022). Reading side by side requires practitioners to contend with interlocutor's commitments to their lived communities in a much more visceral and responsible way. Hidayatullah’s text is used to highlight the barriers and preexisting forces that limit the move from contending against, to contending together.
Hidayatullah outlines the negative impact on interreligious partnership of feminist Qur’anic interpretation’s that center the nafs/zawj creation story as a correction of Jewish and Christian accounts of female creation from and for man. She outlines how, in the intra-religious efforts to deconstruct patriarchal hierarchies of othering, feminist theologians may be unknowingly constructing new taxonomies of othering with those who could have been potential partners. This critical analysis of developments in the field lends caution to our classwide effort–where we think we may be building connection, we may be doing harm. We must proceed with caution and care. Hidayatulah’s critical analysis of the work of constructive Muslim feminist theology, a form of scholarship she identifies herself within, becomes an invitation to center doubt as a part of our project’s practice of comparative scriptural study.
Hidayatullah’s “The Qur’anic Rib-ectomy: Scripture Purity, Imperial Dangers, and Other Obstacles to interfaith Engagement of Feminist Qur’anic Interpretation” introduces a framework to articulate the “tokenizing and surface character of multi-faith feminist conversations” and the still-felt harms of colonialist feminism, problematizing the student-lead project of comparative scriptural study the class is about to begin. Her work outlines how, in the intra-religious effort to deconstruct patriarchal hierarchies of othering, feminist theologians may be unknowingly constructing new taxonomies that “other” those who could have been partners. This critical analysis of developments in the field lends caution to our class-wide effort–where we think we may be building connection, we may be doing harm. We must proceed with caution and care. Hidayatulah’s critical analysis of the work of constructive Muslim feminist theology, a form of scholarship she identifies herself within, becomes an invitation to center doubt as a part of our project’s practice of comparative scriptural study.