Women in the Qur'an, Traditions, and Interpretation.

• Author: Lawson, Todd

While Islam is frequently perceived as a patriarchal religious system in which women occupy a subservient or secondary role, it is nonetheless true that the basic textual resources, the Quran, Hadith, and, in this case, Quranic commentary (tafsir) and Tales of the Prophets (qisas al-anbiya) are populated with numerous women whose lives and stories are important to Muslims, in general, and Muslim women, in particular. Indeed, as Stowasser reminds us, one of these, Mary, the mother of Jesus, is so revered in the sources that discussions have taken place throughout the history of learned Islam as to whether she might not have been a prophet.

The text is enhanced by fifty-two pages of notes (there are fourteen references in the book's opening paragraph), a bibliography, glossary, and index. The brief preface is mainly a short history of the author's interest in the subject, with acknowledgments to individuals and institutions. An introduction sets forth what the author sees as the five most important theses of the book: 1) the quranic "tales about the women of the sacred past are profoundly Islamic"; 2) the "Bible-related" material in Islamic exegesis is extremely important in showing how far that material was claimed as Islamic by the exegetes; 3) exegesis is a "valuable record of [Muslim] scholarly debate on sociopolitical questions"; 4) neither exegesis nor other "Quran-based literature can be classified as 'interpretation' in the sense of analytical and/or unengaged inquiry"; 5) an appreciation of the difficulty in discerning the difference between revelation and interpretation.

The book highlights the extent to which women inhabit Islamic religious sources (and therefore consciences) in two parts: 1) "Women in Sacred History," and 2) "The Prophet's Wives." Part one has seven chapters: "The Quran," "Eve," "The Women of Noah, Lot, and Abraham," "Zulaykha," "The Women in the Life of the Prophet Moses," "Bilqis, Queen of Sheeba" (sic), "Mary." Part two has three chapters dealing with the subject on the basis of 1) the Quran, 2) Hadith, and 3) "Modern Muslim Interpretations." This second part goes far beyond the simple account of the contents of the sources that characterizes part one to engage with such questions as the semantics of hijab throughout Islamic history.

Stowasser is arguing a familiar hypothesis: the Prophet sought to improve a society in which deplorable inequities between men and women called out for a radical critique...