Re-understanding Islam: A Double Critique

"Spinoza Lectures Asma Barlas is Professor of Politics and Director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity, at Ithaca College in New York State. She is the author of Islam, Muslims, and the U.S.: Essays on Religion and Politics (2004), ¿Believing Women¿ in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur¿an (2002), and Democracy, Nationalism and Communalism: The Colonial Legacy in South Asia (1995). She has received awards from the International Center for Islam and Pluralism in Indonesia, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, the American Association of University Women and the United Nations Department for Public Information. For her c.v. see http://faculty.ithaca.edu/abarlas/. In these two lectures, Barlas offers a double critique: of Muslims for reading sexual inequality and oppression into Islam¿s scripture, the Qur¿an, and a critique of ¿the West¿ for failing to develop morally relevant ways of speaking about Islam and Muslims. In ¿¿Believing Women¿ in Islam: Between secular and religious politics and theology¿ she considers some approaches to the so-called anti-women verses in the Qur¿an (and to the Qur¿an generally) that are putatively liberating for Muslim women. These approaches range from saying an outright ¿no¿ to the Qur¿an to saying an unqualified yes to it. Barlas explores, and also critiques, the religious and political terrain that lies between this ¿no¿ and ¿yes¿ as a way to explain what is at stake for Muslims in different approaches to the text. While she does not build toward one conclusion, she illustrates both the problems with the secular Muslim politics of saying no to the Qur¿an and the liberatory possibilities inherent in the scripture providing one reads it in light of certain theological and hermeneutic…