New book says the Qur'an gives women the same rights as men

Nimat Hafez Barazangi holds her new book, Woman's Identity and the Qur'an: A New Reading, in her office at Olin Library Jan. 14. Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography

By Linda Myers

The Qur'an -- Islam's sacred book -- offers Muslim women the same rights as men but traditionally has been misinterpreted, denying them those rights. That argument is convincingly made in a new book by a Muslim woman who is a scholar in Islamic foundations of education and identity development at Cornell.

The book, Woman's Identity and the Qur'an: A New Reading, is by Nimat Hafez Barazangi, a research fellow in Cornell's Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. It is being released Feb. 1 by the University Press of Florida. The author hopes it will spark debate among American and other Muslims and broaden the way the Qur'an is interpreted.

The author asserts that Muslim women have been generally excluded from equal agency, from full participation in Islamic society, and thus from full and equal Islamic identity, primarily because of patriarchal readings of the Qur'an, which dates back to the seventh century, and early Qur'anic literature.

Arguing that self-identity and Islamic higher learning are prerequisites to social and political change, and that women have equal authority to participate in the interpretation of Islamic primary sources, the author asserts that Muslim women will realize their just role in society and their potential as autonomous spiritual and intellectual human beings only when they are involved in the interpretation of the Qur'an. Her goal for the book: "To ignite the flames for social and attitudinal change, re-interpreting the Qur'an in order to retrieve its dynamics that originally intended to establish social justice while preserving individual autonomy."

Said Barazangi: "The realities of Muslim women haven't changed since the beginning. The men have interpreted the Qur'an up until now, and Muslim women have been taught that interpretations have the same authority as the Qur'an itself." But that practice is directly contradicted in the Qur'an, she said, which "specifically states that each individual is obligated to understand Islam by reading the Qur'an and making sense of it himself or herself. Furthermore, this must be done continually, over time and space."

Traditional tribal laws and varied societal practices among Muslims led to the misinterpretation of specific words in the Qur'an, giving them a male orientation rather than a universal one, noted Barazangi. Words and injunctions in the Qur'an that have been misinterpreted over the centuries in ways harmful to women involve the concepts of guardianship, piety and modesty, said the author. Although in Islam, men and women are mutually responsible to one another, men in many Islamic societies have assumed the role of "guardian" of women in morality, family life and social and political life. Modesty, especially in attire, has been a polarizing and limiting subject for many Muslim women. And piety has been misunderstood as silence.

One reviewer calls the book "the best informed as well as the most visionary and liberating treatise on women's identity and agency in the history of the Islamic tradition." The publisher states: "An original and uncompromising study of the Qur'anic foundations of women's identity and agency, this book is a bold call to Muslim women and men to reread and reinterpret the Qur'an, Islam's most authoritative source, and to discover within its revelations an inherent affirmation of gender equality."

Barazangi's book is based on 10 years of pedagogical study of the sacred text and extensive participatory action research with grassroots Muslim women's groups and non-Muslim feminist groups in the United States, Canada and Syria.

Barazangi, a scholar, activist and concerned feminist of Syrian origin, is the author of numerous articles on education and Muslim women and the coeditor of Islamic Identity and the Struggle for Justice (University Press of Florida, 1996). She has received many awards for her scholarly work, including a multi-year Fulbright Scholarship and International Council for Adult Education and United Nations Development Program fellowships.