The Position of Women in Islam: A Progressive View.

• Author: Marcotte, Roxanne D.
• Position: Book review

The Position of Women in Islam: A Progressive View. By MOHAMMAD SYED ALI. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 2004. Pp. xiv + 135. $59.50 (cloth), $19.95 (paper).

Publishing the work of a Muslim who proposes a "progressive" view is laudable, as it provides an opportunity for Muslims to speak for themselves, without a need for any western interpreters. Syed Ali's work provides a "criticism" of traditional understandings of the role, status, and rights of women in Islam. His "progressive" view owes much, however, to the works of Muslim women, such as Leila Ahmed's Women and Gender in Islam (1992), Fatima Mernissi's Women in Islam (1991), Amina Wadud Muhsin's Quran and Women (1992), and Azizah al-Hibri's "A Study of Islamic Herstory" (1982). The author also manages to find elements of this progressive view in some works by medieval scholars, and in the writings of nineteenth-and twentieth-century reformers and modernists of the Indian subcontinent, with which he is most familiar, e.g., Asghar Ali Engineer.

The first four chapters, supported with ample scriptural evidence, provide the "egalitarian context" (Qur'anic as well as hadith) against which the rulings of Islamic law are then measured. In chapter one, Syed Ali reviews the role of Qur'an and hadith in Islamic law, and proceeds to demonstrate, mostly with verses from the Qur'an, that the prescribed rewards and punishments of God do not depend on gender. In chapter two, he explores Qur'anic equality, by focusing on the Qur'anic notion of retribution of souls in the afterlife. In chapter three, he highlights Qur'anic statements about the identical origins of both women and men. In chapter four, he assesses some alleged sayings of the Prophet (hadiths) that are contradictory to the Qur'anic idea of equality of deeds, retribution and origin of women and men. In the following six chapters, he focuses on different issues of Islamic law.

In chapter five, he discusses marriage and rejects, as contrary to the rules of (Sunni) marriage in Islam, a number of pre-Islamic practices: temporary marriage, concubinage, and the rules of akfa or equality between the spouses. He then reviews Muslim women's ability to marry without a marriage guardian, child marriages, polygamous marriages and marriages of Muslims with non-Muslims. In chapter six, he introduces the notion of equality that must govern the relationship between wife and husband. In chapter seven, he presents the rules of "dissolution" of...