Women Households and the Hereafter in the Qur'an: A Patronage of Piety | Book Launch

Naushin Premji: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Naushin Premji and I am the projects and events coordinator here at The Institute of Ismaili Studies. It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to this evening's book launch: Women, Households, and the Hereafter in the Qurʾan: A Patronage of Piety. A special welcome to all of those of you who are joining us online, from wherever you are, and from whatever time zone you're joining us from. We will start tonight's launch with opening remarks from Professor Zayn Kassam, the director of The Institute of Ismaili Studies. And this will be followed by a lively discussion with the authors: Doctors Karen Bauer and Feras Hamza who will be in conversation with Dr Omar Alí-de-Unzaga, who is the series editor for the Qurʾanic study series, and Dr Ziba Mir-Hosseini, legal anthropologist and activist. It now gives me great pleasure to introduce the Director of The Institute of Ismaili Studies, Professor Zayn Kassam, for a few words.

Professor Zayn Kassam: Well, it's lovely to see you all here in this beautiful building, on a very lovely afternoon. I see that the sun has made an appearance again after playing hide and seek all day. And nothing thrills me more than to actually have a book launch on a subject that's very dear to my heart, having spent almost 30 years teaching courses on women in Islam. I recently come from North America, and when you teach women in Islam in North America, it really is challenging because North American students, by and large, come with some predetermined notions about what it means to be a woman in the Islamic world: that you are oppressed by men, your tradition oppresses you, the Qurʾan is a heavily patriarchal text, women have no rights. I've even been told by students that we treat dogs better here than you folks do women in your parts of the world. And as we know, the notion of saving women in Afghanistan was famously put forward by Laura Bush to be partially justification for invading Afghanistan. And the thing is that, Western feminists -- and this is also being noticed in some of the geopolitical events going on today that Western feminists always identify with women in other parts of the world for whom they should also be struggling to put up the good fight and doing the intersectional work that we know in feminism generally, and which is why we like feminist theory, by and large, because it gives us some useful tools. So, the issue is that, to try and convince people that patriarchy is actually a global issue, that violence against women is a global issue, that it is not actually colonized, Neither violence nor patriarchy have been colonized by the Muslim world, let alone the Asian world, let alone the North African or the Middle Eastern world or the South American world, which are all essentially places of colour -- or the East Asian world. But rather, these are global phenomena that those of us who believe in the dignity and the equality of all creatures, human, animal and otherwise, these are principles that are actually human principles that we should, try and hold, wherever in the world they're found. So, you can imagine that coming in as a student of (and I don't mean to make this a lecture, but) coming in as a student of Islamic and Indian philosophy (my world is the medieval world), to be told on the first day when I arrive at my new job at Pomona College, which is a very distinguished liberal arts college in California, in the US... To be told by my chair that I had to teach a course on women in Islam. And, after voraciously reading anything and everything (and I think, at that time, it comprised maybe two shelves of books) you can imagine, finally, my delight, when I came across some academic tools that were going to be really helpful for me in my work. One of them was reading Denise Candiotti’s essay on negotiating with patriarchy because it restored the one thing that I was unable to find in all the reading I had done, which is the importance of agency and how women have mobilized their agency in order to negotiate with patriarchy because they know they cannot get rid of it. So, that gave me a very important theoretical tool to share with my students with respect to how it is done. And the example for how it is done was came from Ziba Mir-Hosseini’s work, which is where we read her comparative study of Islamic marriage courts in Iran and in Morocco, because that's where she very deftly shows how it... Actually, that book puts so many stereotypes about Muslims and women and Muslim men to rest because it shows that, when there are ways forward for upholding the dignity of women, they are followed. And the Shariʿa gives a space for that. It's not always a successful fight, but actually it's there. And for students to be able to see those nuts and bolts examples, is really, really important.

This is now what brings me to Karen and Feras’s book. I really don't think the two of them need an introduction. Karen is an associate professor here; Feras has been off, doing wild and wonderful things in parts of the world, and we hope to string him back to the Institute. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, of course, is very well known to you because she has written books that will change your mind on whatever it is you thought you knew. Because she will make a difference. And Omar: I cannot say enough good things about Omar. Because the conversations alone make it worthwhile for me to have crossed the ocean to have come over here. But in any case, one of the things that Karen and Feras’s book does is that it shows, how the Qurʾan, which is, by outsiders, considered to be a very patriarchal text, looks at the relationships and the role of women, and their situatedness in the household in ways that could be thought of differently when you look at them through the lens of piety. So that last sentence was perhaps totally incomprehensible to you, but I'm going to leave it to them to tease it all out. Okay? If that's okay.

Dr Karen Bauer: So, I think I'll give a couple of minutes of introduction to this book and how it came about. We had worked together for some years on a different book, what's called An Anthology of Qurʾanic Commentaries. And, as the name suggests, that's an anthology. It's translations of primary sources. And they were commentaries on the Qurʾan, on women, on certain verses of the Qurʾan that had to do with women.

And, at a certain point, I had worked with those commentaries even before we got together to translate them into a work that could be used by anyone in classrooms. And at a certain point in this journey of understanding interpretations of these verses, we said to ourselves, actually, we can't leave it with the interpretive tradition. We really should say something about the Qurʾan itself, right? We've been talking a lot about how the interpretive tradition is grounded in particular times and places. We've shown this. We can see that all the interpreters are negotiating the text through their own circumstances and their own preconditioned dispositions and ideas. So, what about the thing, the object itself? Are we saying enough about that?

So, we started out thinking, well, let's do a chapter on women in the Qurʾan for this anthology. We gathered together every verse in the Qurʾan that had anything to do with women, the feminine, any mention of daughters, of anything feminine, even the mothers, anything like that. We gathered them all together and we thought, let's do a methodological experiment here, doing something that has been done in the field of Qurʾanic studies, but that has never really been applied to the subject of women, which is let's put these in what we supposed to be a chronological order of the revelation: the earliest verses, then coming to the slightly later verses and then the last verses that came about when the when there was more of a state and a polity. So, the movement of the nascent community is tracked in this way. And the Qurʾan itself is not arranged chronologically. It's not that type of a text. And so we had to excerpt the verses and put them in that order. And suddenly this picture began to emerge that we hadn't expected, and we could tell a story of that development of women in the text. We started to tell the story. We wrote 10,000 words. We wrote 20,000 words. We wrote 50,000 words. We said, you know, this is a pretty long chapter. So, we gave it to our editor and we then said, hang on! We kept writing. 70,000 words. 75,000 words. We said, we think this could be a book. We spoke to Omar. We said, can we excerpt parts of this and make it into a chapter? Yes, but actually just keep writing the book.

Suddenly we had... I don't even remember how many words it ended up being, 150,000 words? I don't know, something like that. So, there is a chapter in that anthology, but that which represents our nascent understanding. And then there is now a book that represents much more of what we understand the Qurʾan to be saying, which is significantly different from what we think that the tradition said about it. And that's how this came about.

Professor Feras Hamza: And, I guess, we also discovered, and I think this is, for us, even more important, that this methodological read of the Qurʾan, for us, uncovered that kind of relationship between concepts which are difficult to square together: hierarchy and justice, for example, social inequality and moral agency, for example. That, depending on your social status, what can you do about your situation, whatever it might be or however it might be configured? So, we learned, I think, to see the Qurʾan as a moral framework, as a moral vision which was urgent, and urgently narrated in the Qurʾan. There's a sense of urgency about moral transformation. And then, surely, the idea that the Qurʾan is concerned with justice, it's a message that's supposed to emancipate people. So, one assumes that it wants to do good things.

You then have to square it with a thousand years plus of a very peculiar jurisprudential reading for Muslim societies and of the status of women as well. So, I think we learned much more, having, as Karen was saying, looked at the chronological developments of women in the Qurʾan and how they acquire importance.

Of course, one of the other things that we ought to say is that it's also a topic such as the houris ends up displacing the thought of women in the Qurʾan. And it's that kind of discourse problem that we always have. It's like, how do you teach a course on jihad? But we did that yesterday with your students. Do you start by talking about Rambo before you talk about the Qurʾan? Yes, unfortunately. So, I think, there's a lot of work to be done outside of the tradition necessarily, I think, in order to try to understand what's going on in the Qurʾan. So, we see it as a kind of method that really uncovers relationships between different parts of the Qurʾan that otherwise are treated, I think, as separate parts. There's lots of piecemeal approaches in the tradition that might want to just extract verses on women and say, look how women are treated here. Look how it describes the relationship between women and men here. And that becomes an agenda for perhaps some kind of feminist emancipation. But it doesn't work because it throws everything else, right?

Dr Omar Alí-de-Unzaga: Great! So, we thought we would have, a kind of informal discussion. but since we have, Professor Ziba Mir-Hosseini here, maybe we can start with your impressions on the reading on the book itself.

Professor Ziba Mir-Hosseini: This was a book that I was waiting for, for a long time, to read. Because, as you say, there is a lot about women in Islam, women and Qurʾan, but it's always a part of it and presents as piecemeal. And I loved it because it is chronological, and I always wanted to understand the whole story, chronologically. And what is available on the Qurʾan chronological order? It's really complex. But I think, the way that you put it, allows the story to evolve. And it is an incredible story. It is story, as you said, something which was so important for me. That's something that I have been thinking and, in fact, in my own last book, in conversation with Muslim reformists, there is this consensus that is emerging: the importance of morality and the importance of ethics. There is this belief that Shariʿa, the law, is the central idea in Islam. Whereas, what emerges is the moral responsibility. And it's God who decides and law is the consequence of that moral responsibility. Law is mundane. It is human. But at the same time, that moral responsibility is so strong, and it comes across. So that is what I love about the book.

And I have other questions that I can ask, but I want to congratulate you for grounding this and making it. But, in the book, you say several times, several chapters in different ways that the Qurʾan does not separate law and ethics. And, also, you said that you're using an expansive notion of law. And so, I'm confused. What is law and how the Qurʾan does not separate law and ethics? And why do you keep on repeating this?

Hamza: I'll go first on the idea of why law and ethics. I think we're also challenged by the language used in by scholarship. We're challenged by the limits of our own scholastic language, which speaks of law and Islam, ethics in Islam, or law in the Qurʾan, ethics in the Qurʾan. So, we may not have perhaps overcome that challenge, very simply. But let me answer you by reference to the point you just made about morality and law. I think it's unfortunate that we start with law and expect the morality to come from that. Whereas, you'd think if you had an a broad understanding of morality, you could then have a much more expansive approach to law. Laws then become much more possible in various forms. Once you stipulate that, social relationships are governed by certain things. Because the morality is there. The moral vision is there, right? But you can see that the history of jurisprudence has been that the law comes first, and you're supposed to understand morality from it. That, I think, is much more straightjacketing.

Bauer: So, we expanded this point in an article right after writing this book. We've actually picked up on the fact that we didn't fully explain this in the book, and we ourselves grew in our understanding of this exact point, right after it. Like, I mean, immediately after… While the book was in proofs, we were writing the article, right? And so, when we say words like law and morality, we might have specific things in mind. It's exactly the same when we say the word patriarchy. We have in mind a certain image of what that might mean. Law: I have in mind the laws of my country that I'm living in, right? Or the laws of any country that I've lived in. And those sorts of laws that that are governing a country will govern the, your behaviour. They'll govern your poor behaviour, let's put it that way. So, if I break the law here in the UK, like,if I steal an apple, it's breaking the law; if I were to assault somebody, like, don't ask the wrong question. You know, you might know… I’m joking! If I were to assault somebody that's worse breaking the law. So, you have gradations of badness in the law. And this is correlated with gradations of punishment for that. But, in the Qurʾan, what you see is gradations of goodness, as well. And, what we would consider law, an expanded notion of law, might encompass all the Qurʾan’s commands. We didn't see, when we tried to figure out, well, what is law in the Qurʾan? We couldn't see a difference between those commands that say, pray or treat people well or be nice if somebody is aggressive towards you, then respond in the best way, in the most virtuous way: ʾidfaʿ billatī hiya ʾāḥsan [Q 41:34]. We didn't notice a difference between that kind of command and the ones that say, don't eat pork or those other ones. They're all described using the same kinds of language.

Hamza: There's the same moral urgency.

Bauer: And the same moral urgency. There's nothing in the Qurʾan that says, this is a law, yet you shouldn't do that other thing. That separation is never made. And so then if you count that Qurʾanic… Yeah, go ahead.

Mir-Hosseini: So, there is no law in the Qurʾan, is what I hear. I is because the punishment comes after life. It is God who judges what is wrong and what is right. And ethics is about what is right and what is wrong, and morality is about that. But law is quite different.

Hamza: Well, once we've decided what we're going to mean by law, that's the problem. But no, somebody will throw back at you like the chapter 24, verse 2 to 4.

Bauer: On the adultery, right?

Hamza: But I think what we're trying to say is that it's difficult, once you try to separate the idea that turning one's cheek arrogantly against someone is different from not performing your prayer, then you get into trouble trying to understand the moral framework of the Qurʾan. That matters as much as this matters, if it's going to be part of a whole. And I think what's happened in jurisprudence is that it's the taking one narrow meaning of what law is. And that's been part of the problem of, I think, understanding the moral framework of the Qurʾan. But it's a thorny issue: what do you mean by law? There’s an instinctive sense of what law is because, if you break a law, there ought to be consequences, right?

Bauer: Right. And there are only, say, 4 or 5 instances in the Qurʾan where actually these punishments are specified. And of course, in one of those, most famously the adultery verse, the later Islamic tradition changed the rule, right? In the Qurʾan, it's that they get some lashes and in the later jurisprudential tradition, it's that they are stoned to death. And so actually, even though there are 4 or 5 instances of communal punishment for a crime, that didn't even correlate to what later became fiqh, the Islamic legal tradition. So, it just calls into question, if we use a word like law in the Qurʾan. I understand your point that, we did go back and forth, ourselves. And also, a colleague has spoken a lot about law in the Qurʾan, Holger Zellentin. Is it all morality or is it all law? And yet, we couldn't get… My position at first was it's all morality and none of it's law. But then, it's hard to explain the ritual. It's hard to explain things that don't have necessarily a moral consequence for anyone other than the self. Like the duty of prayer or something like that, you know? And so then maybe it's all law, but there's not necessarily a difference. The problem comes when you try to separate them and you try to say, well, there's a legal realm and an ethical realm. I think that that's extremely problematic in Qurʾanic terms. It's a separation that the Qurʾan itself doesn't ever make. You can either take it as all one or all the other.

Hamza: it's useful to divide things. I once learned this from Sajjad [Rizvi], the Aristotelian imperative of using categories. We have to use them to make some headway, but I think it also gets in trouble. But we don't see the, the larger force of the Qurʾanic narrative on where it's headed and how it's getting there. And I think that's what we tried to capture.

Alí-de-Unzaga: So, we have the book itself and then we have the topic of the book. So perhaps we can spend some time talking a little bit about the book, but I think we all want to hear about the topic. One, can you explain to us what the image of the cover of the book expresses and how you came to find it and use it?

Bauer: This is this wonderful artist, Joumana Medlej, and she creates these beautiful images. She's originally Lebanese but she's in London, she's a local artist. And what she's done here is she's used the, the root raḥma, which is the same root in the Qurʾan for mercy and for the womb. You have the arḥam which is the wombs, and this signifies all ties of kinship in the Qurʾan and simply, a woman's womb, which are both mentioned in the Qurʾan. And it also is mentioned over 300 times to talk about God's mercy and God as the merciful one. And of course, interpreters through time have made that connection, that there's this idea of mercy of womb-likeness in God's mercy. Or the other way around that: the idea of God's mercy in the womb. She had also made that connection describing this piece of art which, happened to be, she was picking up found objects and put them in with the script. And we just thought this idea of in the objects of decaying and life growing up through decay and early spring. And then the, the mercy and womb elements were just ideal for our book. Do you want to say anything?

Hamza: No, because it was all your idea.

Bauer: We loved that.

Alí-de-Unzaga: So, for those of you who are students and have not published yet, choosing the image of a book is a very important process, at least for us here. So, this was very carefully selected and searched for by Karen. So, we put a lot of care in the images that we choose. Can you share with us how you see your approach in the context of other books that may have been written on the subject from a different point of view? Maybe some ideological points of view? Books written by men, books written women, by Muslims, by non-Muslims? When we sent this book, this TypeScript to peer review, one of the reviewers said, oh no, another book on women in the Qurʾan. And I said, no, no, no, don't worry, this is different. And in the end, it turned out to be different. This is perhaps the most academic book on the subject. it's a very solid project, but how do you see yourselves in the midst of other takes on women in the Qurʾan?

Bauer: Well, you know, you say in the subject, but what subject are we talking about? Are we talking about women in the Qurʾan, or are we talking about the subject of the Qurʾan? And people writing about the Qurʾan where they think they're writing about the Qurʾan and you're in the field of Qurʾanic studies, you're just writing a book about the Qurʾan? They will often omit or just disregard these verses on women. So, the subject of our book is, in a sense, women and households in the Qurʾan, but the real subject of our book is the Qurʾan. And one of the major points that we make in the book is what does happen if you leave out the verses on women in households? You assume there's this longstanding trend, of course, started by Mircea Eliade, to think about the sacred and the profane. This has gone through the field of Qurʾanic studies and is still somehow remaining there, even though many years ago, this has been called into question by many people like Saba Mahmoud and, you know, other scholars who have who have clearly shown that this is… But, in the field of Qurʾanic studies, there are still lingering elements of this idea of sacred in the profane. So, all the all the verses on divorce, all the verses on marriage, all those verses, would these count as theology, or as something that you could get saved for, or a sacred, a sacred moment? No, that's the profane! We don't need to pay any attention to that if we're writing about the Qurʾan, theology or anything like that. And this is exactly how the field of Qurʾanic studies proceeds. How it proceeds is that none of this is taken into account. We can answer, also, about books on feminism. And that's what that's you know, what Ziba has already picked up on that. That we've undertaken a completely different methodology, and this leads us to a different approach. But the major reason that that our approach has been different is that we started out with a method and trying to understand it from the Qurʾanic perspective. And to do that, we had to understand the Qurʾan as a larger picture.

Hamza: And I think just to add to that, I think we were trying to bring women back to where they belong in the Qurʾanic story. Which, in the Qurʾanic story, is not a story about men to men. It’s to whoever's listening, male or female. But women have been kind of itemized as a topic of concern in the Qurʾan. The topic of concern for the Qurʾan is what the Qurʾan wants to say to you as a moral individual. Which is that this life is a moral test, and there's never enough time, death is impending, and you have to live a virtuous life. And that goes beyond gender. And so, I think we're trying to bring all the characters back into the Qurʾanic story. And the women were the biggest lacuna in that sense, the biggest gap in that story. Because the assumption is that, because of the way it's structured, because of the forms of address, this has to do with the level of language as well. It's the sense that it's a text speaking to men in the plural and then to powerful men in the plural as well. In the same way that it doesn't speak to slaves directly, but it speaks about them. So, there's an assumption and then those kinds of dependencies, women, slaves, orphans, and so on come via the address to men. And so, I think we were trying to recalibrate that in some sense, trying to understand the Qurʾanic story is, then to understand all the various parts, whether it's women or men or any other thing. So I think that's been part of the challenge.

Bauer: Exactly. It's about kind of putting the Qurʾanic ethics in their historical perspective. In order to understand that that the Qurʾan has a coherent ethical perspective, you have to look at it within its historical context and you have to understand why are women so often in the text? Why are they everywhere? What's going on? Why aren't they left out? Why isn't it a text just about men, men to men and other men? And I don't think that this is commonly the perspective that's employed by people writing about the subject.

Mir-Hosseini: There's one question, but then I have another question. One, what I really love is the way that you engage with the feminist literature. Not with all of them, but, because there are some feminists, even Muslim feminists, who see the Qurʾan as addressing men. The main audience the Qurʾan addresses are men and therefore women are marginalized, and they are not there. And you show very clearly that this is not the case. First of all, when it comes to that moral agency, women have the same moral agency. In ontological creation, the same status as men in afterlife. But at the same time, you make it so clear, the hierarchical context. And I think this is something very important, because when we talk about family law in our time, the institution of family is so different than what it was. And you make it very clear: household, and the term that you use pater familias (the head of the household) who is responsible and, whereas these extended household is very rarely is there. So, that is very important but at the same time, something you say in the book is that egalitarianism is an idea which is alien to the Qurʾan. It's not there. Egalitarianism is a modern idea. And if we expect egalitarianism from the Qurʾan, then we are not going to find it because it was not part of the fabric of the society. It was not an issue in the society. And hierarchy was the order. But patriarchy: it’s not that Qurʾan affirms the patriarchy. But to me, it is about justice. And also, justice means different things in different contexts. It is more context bound and time bound, the same as ethics. The ethics of seventh century Arabia is quite different from our ethics and justice. And equality, especially gender equality, is a very modern idea. So, it is totally absent to the fiqh. Also, I would say to a large part of interpretation of the Qurʾan and to the theology in Islam. And to me, your book provides seeds of arguing for gender equality. Only the seeds. But I wonder, why didn't you go further to argue for it?

Hamza: It's a good question. I think we're both convinced that the Qurʾan opens up the way: if you want to go towards gender egalitarianism, go for it. That's the best way. It’s telling the story of moral transformation and salvation in a seventh century context in which there isn't gender equality.

Bauer: Social equality.

Hamza: But that doesn't mean that hasn't, in the way that it tells people to become pious and to transform their relationships and how to treat others, it certainly opens the way for that path that you're talking about, towards equality. I mean, it certainly makes hints. If we were, what did you say, planting the seeds, but we didn't grow it. I mean, that's what the Qurʾan, I think, is doing in the seventh century, for sure. I mean, we've since got rid of slaves.

Bauer: Yeah, exactly. That's the thing. What we were trying to do is explain the Qurʾanic morality in its own context. We were trying to explain why there isn't social equality, even though there's spiritual equality. Why would it be that the Qurʾan doesn't just come out and say, well, let's abolish slavery? Let's just have everybody just be a free agent, and you can go off? You don't have to live in households. You can be divorced, live alone. And it's just impossible in that social milieu. Maybe abolishing… I don't know about… Slavery is not my real topic. But in that milieu, people didn't act as individuals, they didn't act solely as an individual entity. Their salvation, of course, their moral choices are individual. Their salvation is based on their individual choices. But socially, nobody was alone. You didn't get divorced and move out and get a flat and live the high life. You got divorced and move back to daddy's house or your brother's house or your son's house. It wasn't a social milieu in which women lived in unprotected circumstances. And the households were supposed to be these places of protection. And that's what we were trying to draw out: in our minds, patriarchy might mean a certain thing that it's come to mean because there is a possibility these days of social equality. So of course, patriarchy ends up being the opposite of it. But in its social milieu, where that's not even a possibility, maybe there are more nuances to that social structure than we would have recognized, if we don't take a close reading.

Hamza: And, I also think that when we speak about social equality and gender egalitarianism, we are so conditioned by our contemporary structures that we have for the protection of individuals (at least in the places where we're all doing well) that, I think that sometimes causes a more scandalous thinking about why the Qurʾan is saying this or that. So, I think we also, after, temper our expectations of how we extract certain ideas from a text from the seventh century. But I think that's what makes the text so interesting, that it is a historical text and it still opens up the way. I think if we did something as crude as suggests that the Qurʾan could speak to us and come back now and, we told it we've since emancipated slaves and women have been enfranchised. I think it would say, well done! Took you long enough! So I think that's clear from the chronic message, itself.

Mir-Hosseini: You know, that comes across beautifully, what both of you said in the book because it's nuanced but, at the same time, it enables a different way of thinking. And that different way of thinking is very important. So that is why I said this is a book that I was waiting for. Because it is solid. You provide that the documentation. The methodology, I love it, it is very important. But at the same time, the evidence is there. And it is evidence based. And that makes it very important for me, at least.

Bauer: But Ziba! That was a key point of why it was so important for me. Actually, I did not start with any of these arguments. If you read my first book, which you know, we've talked about it in the past, and we've spoken together on stage together in the past. And, I didn't have this understand of the Qurʾan and I didn't believe it, actually. I started out this book without believing any of the things that I ended up saying in it. And that is because the evidence showed me that this was… And Feras would say something like, well, no…  I can't even remember the things that you used to say. You probably remember them better than me. “Life is a moral test.” I was like, what? What is that about? Or “no, you have to trust that there is a type of justice going on here.” And this is because of Feras’s deep knowledge of the Qurʾan from many years of reading the Qurʾan. And I would and I would say, no, I don't believe you. And, luckily, we got along well enough that he didn't just hang up the Zoom. It was it was COVID, right? So, he said, “well, let me show you then.” And so, we came up with the evidence and that's partly why the book is written the way it was. And say, take the issue of free will. So, we were talking about moral agency, and we realized that we needed to discuss the issue of human free will versus predestination, or at least we needed to mention it, because there was no other way of understanding the Qurʾanic morality. And at first, again, I did not believe this. I said, no, the Qurʾan is incoherent and contradictory on this point, and I was only convinced by the evidence. So, this was my own journey of that.

Mir-Hosseini: Yes, yes, it's very clear because I clearly remember your article on verse 4:34 about hierarchy. So, reading this, is it the same Karen? But it actually shows that all of us go through this journey. And you have documented this. So, that is very important.

Alí-de-Unzaga: I wanted to mention something that many of you will not be aware, but there is some something in common, between Karen and Feras and perhaps even me. There is a link. And this link is in the dedication of the book. The book is dedicated to Patricia Crone. I won't talk about my own relationship to the giant of Islamic studies. But I want to ask you: clearly she wrote this famous book, Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law (1987) on patronage, and a big concept that you work with in the book is, actually, two ideas. One is working with, ideas and concepts of late antiquity, if I may use that term. And I want to ask you how you see that? How important is it to study the text of the Qurʾan in that context? And more specifically, you mentioned the term pater familias (head of the household, the head of the family). Why are you using a Latin phrase from Roman law to explain the Qurʾan?

Hamza: I think we learned different things from Patricia. The work ended up being complementary. I certainly learned from her the ability to look for a wider context and a historical, wider context. And I think that's really key. It just ends up helping you because you realize that, the Arabs of the Hejaz were not that far away from Graeco-Roman centres where established social structures must have seeped in as you would be culturally contaminated by the centres of cultural civilization. So naturally, I assume that let's try it. Let's see that let's imagine that Arabia was an extension of Graeco-Roman late antiquity. And let's read the Qurʾan. And it kind of worked and it's a kind of when you think back of it, you think, well, why not? No brainer.

Bauer: There are a few things that I'd add. So, first of all, of course, we're by no means the first to think about the Qurʾan in antiquity. But, what often happens in the study of the Qurʾan is that it's studied in relation to specific types of late antique discourse, like the “religious” discourse, like those Syriac homilies of the Church Fathers, for instance. Very commonly used, a brilliant source for the like for understanding the wider picture around the Qurʾan. That's great, but what nobody had studied was the social structures! Why not? I mean, male-headed households where around, yes, in Greek law and Roman law. This had been around for a long time before the Qurʾan and understanding that social milieu. And a part of the dedication was that in the beginning of our collaboration, we kept saying to each other, what? How is it that we are collaborating? We're coming from opposite viewpoints, how are we even collaborating on this? What would Patricia Crone have thought about this? Because she was my mentor and she was a mentor to Feras as well, at different times. And, what would she have thought? And then, of course, her Roman provincial in Islamic law takes that institution, the social institution of patronage. Which is a social institution that goes beyond any specific term of client and patron. It's got a specific manifestation of clients and patrons. But what it's based around is the whole idea that the wealthy are supposed to look after the poor, that this happens within big households. Households were not just, a mother, father, children; a major household would have had so many other people. It would have had many, many dependents of that wealthy household, including the slaves and the servants, but also including single women, from everywhere, who needed a place and would have included, from Roman times, the mawlā, the clients. The people who started calling themselves by the name of the patron, which turns into the idea of adoption. Those hangers on that kind of end up being… When Patricia wrote about clientage and patronage, she looked at it in its narrow manifestation and she skipped the Qurʾan because, for her, the Qurʾan couldn't be verified as a historical text because she was a major revisionist! And she was not going to use the Qurʾan as a historical text! And so, the dedication is, in a way, an answer to that. But look, Patricia, what would have happened if you had used the Qurʾan? What would have happened if you had taken it into account and looked at it in its historical context? Look at the much richer picture that we can get of that entire milieu.

Hamza: The historians like Patricia had offered a possible context for Arabian society but had not followed it through in the Qurʾan. And there are reasons for that. I mean, the reasons of the challenge of the Arabic of the Qurʾan. The questions of the of the historicity of the Qurʾan. But I think if you give it the benefit of the doubt, we looked at the text and it's elusive. But once you're working with a model, it begins to correspond. You know, there are hints of this in the Meccan chapters, for example. Especially in the apocalyptic passages. You get this sense that there is a wealthy person being addressed, a person with many dependencies, who's suddenly lost all privileges, all access to resources. And you might get this in one or two verses. So, I can't think of the reference now, but I know the Arabic says: mā ‘aghna ʿannī mālīah! Halaka ʿannī sulṭaniyah! [Q 69:28-29] I mean, the kind of person being addressed here is a real… It just fits that kind of pater familias: large household, wealth, resources, Graeco-Roman.

Bauer: These are the words of a person on the Day of Judgment and what it says is: “my wealth has not availed me” and

Hamza: “and my social influence (sulṭan) has withered, disappeared.” And I don’t think these are just random.

Bauer: That’s not random! That’s specific!

Hamza: It’s very specific! It’s not rhetoric!

Bauer: That’s talking to a very specific person in the society!

Hamza: So, you have to do all this detective work…

Alí-de-Unzaga: You’re beginning to speak like a couple: complementing each other.

Mir-Hosseini: And one question that I wanted: what were the challenges of working together? Because doing a book, jointly, to be co-authors, it’s difficult. How did you work together? Who wrote the first draft or it came through conversations?

Bauer: Well, it was really interesting. You know, this came about in COVID. We both had kids at home, at that point. There was such time pressure and such: I would have these three days to work and then I would have to do the homeschooling on the other three days and my husband was looking after the kids in those days, and then I was doing the homeschooling so that he could work. And, you know, it was so pressured, like such a pressure cooker. And this incredible thing happened in our conversations where there was this moment of discovering something and ease. You would expect it to be really fraught. And I’d say maybe in the moments when it was, about practical challenges like, I don't know, like moments of all the drafts or the proofs or the editing or the index, for goodness’ sake! In those practical moments, sure. Then there was loads of tension. Yeah, I won't deny that.

Hamza: But I think it was the momentum of the discovery of all of this. I mean, if you're excited by the contents of the book, you can imagine that we were quite driven by that.

Bauer: You can't imagine how incredible it was. But also it was so complimentary because I think that I came in with a lot of assumptions from the field of Qurʾanic studies and peers from that field that I whose work I've been familiar with for years and I've been reading them and wanting to think about their methods. And Feras came in with this depth of understanding of the Qurʾanic text that I could have never matched at that stage. And we might have come in with certain assumptions about each other. But of course, we had had a working experience together with that anthology. So, we knew each other, and we could trust each other, as colleagues. It wasn't that we decided to do a project together and we came together on the project. It's that the project came about, it was a confluence. And in in that first year of working together, nothing has ever come easier to me and my entire academic life, actually, it was incredible. Like I said, the words just kept multiplying it like it was like it was writing, you know? It was like nothing, I was just (writing noises) just happening. Then we would talk about it and yeah, that was amazing. That was an amazing experience. So that was very incredibly positive, I'd say. And the learning curve was so steep. I think, actually for both of us in different ways, maybe.

Mir-Hosseini: That actually comes through because it is conversation and collaboration. That makes really that work so rich and that is one of the values of your book. And I think I don't have much else to say apart from praising your book and also making a complaint. And the complaint is I think you miss, at least about, Fazlur Rahman. Because you are saying that Fazlur Rahman assumes egalitarianism is in the Qurʾan and therefore, if this assumption is there, also Fazlur Rahman's method is that he basically says his critique of the fiqh and the entire Islamic sciences is that they did not understand the ethics in the Qurʾan because we don't have such a thing as Islamic ethics or ethics of the Qurʾan. And the fiqh is basically looking at the laws. And he has this double movement methodology and everything, but to me, he doesn't expect egalitarianism because, to me, he understands that there is something deeper in what is being understood as a law. And his method is to go back to the Qurʾan and try to separate what he calls the essence of the Qurʾan, the spirit from the legal. And this is the methodology that all reformists, in one way or the other, are doing: separating the accidental from the essential, or separating all these different words. But he doesn't expect egalitarianism. But, he says that there is a way, if you want to argue for egalitarianism, because it is in our world, you can do it. So, I wonder why you misunderstand him. Or maybe, I have my own bias about him.

Hamza: We had a whole thing on Fazlur Rahman that we discussed; I think. But I would try to recollect it, but if I can slightly offset your reprimand, Ziba, by suggesting that when it began to work for us not to separate any sections of the Qurʾan into this or that (in other words, into a law category or into an ethics category) that we could get a positive reading, a positive result, what one would call a good hermeneutical result. We couldn't separate anymore. I think that's the simple answer, but I don't know if you want to help me

Bauer: Well, I think that it has been a key, as you say, and, you know through lived experience, it's a key, tenet for reformists. Yet to make such a separation and to say, look, these laws are very specific to that time, but there's a spirit underneath them. And it's not that I think that we specifically disagree with that point of view. It's that what we were looking for is: But what did the Qurʾan mean by those laws in that time? And there are moments where we totally agree with Fazlur Rahman, but to have engaged with all the secondary literature (and we hope that our colleagues are indulging us if we didn't engage them properly; and they mostly are. Thank you, colleagues) To engage in the depth with all of the people who have written about the Qurʾan, it would have created a different book. We had to take one kind of essential thing that we thought represented an assumption that many modern people might have, and we had to show where our method was differing slightly from that, not to discount it entirely: him or his method, which has been useful for so many people. But, just to say that, because we're looking at the Qurʾan in its historical context, we actively don't want to discard any of it. We just want to see what those things meant at the time. And then it opens up in a different way. And then, sure, it can be used in this frame.

Hamza: Fazlur Rahman is a reformer, I'm not sure that we want it to be reformers… We started out, we were not reformers. We didn’t have an agenda.

Mir-Hosseini: He had a different project, and I have that project as well. So, it is very clear because positionality is very important. It is very important. And, you are just trying to understand. And you also complain that all that anthology of the Qurʾan that you did on the tafsīr: it reflects the worldview of the reader. Why doesn't this [reflect the worldview of the reader]? Why you are exempt from that? Because, at the end of the day, you are reading the Qurʾan through a certain lens, and that lens is your scholarship, your life experiences, your personalities, and everything. So, there is no one right way of doing it.

Bauer: We've thought a lot about the right way. We even were discussing it earlier today. Well, how are we going to answer when somebody says there's no one right way to be and to read the Qurʾan and your method is just the same as everybody else's method?

Hamza: That or the opposite: that there is a right way and that's not how you do it.

Bauer: Yeah, exactly. Or the opposite: that you've done it the wrong way. Exactly. People have thought a lot about subjectivity, objectivity, and the academic enterprise, as you know, because we all have to grapple with where we are as subjects or as subjective parts of our own writing and our own experiences are informing our writing. And, and everybody knows that. And I think that what we come to is that we were willing to change our views entirely. In my case, my view, changed entirely based on the evidence that we found. Some might argue against our evidence. Some might say, no, no, no, the evidence shows something else. If they if they prove to me that the evidence showed something else, I'll change my view again. But so far, it hasn't changed again. And, I think that that's very different from bringing your subjective experience and saying that the Qurʾan has two has to say this. It has to conform to my ideals. And if it doesn't, I'm going to leave parts of it out and I'm going to look at it in this way so that… Or people in the tafsīr tradition who were using very specific lenses to look at it because they were assuming that it confirmed their school of fiqh or their particular worldview. I'm not saying that they were all bad scholars or anything like that, but it's a wonderful question. It's something that we should all be talking about a lot more. Yeah, go ahead, Feras.

Hamza: Can I just say something that I feel is very important, which is, like many other topics in the world of Muslim tradition and the history of Muslim tradition, the politics of something has preceded the understanding of that thing. The politics of the Qurʾan for the 20th century, I think, has preceded as just a simple literary understanding of the Qurʾan, like you’d read any great work of literature, and you get it. You get that there's a plot, there's a purpose, there are characters, there's a message. I think that's completely missed, for the politics of the Qurʾan. Like, who has the right to interpret? Who has the right to read? What kind of tools do we need? Do we jettison a tradition? Tradition, itself, is a literary reading of the Qurʾan in some big sense. We've stopped reading the Qurʾan for our times, so where's our literary reading of the Qurʾan? Where's our historical understanding of that? So, I think that, for us, has been the purpose here with this book.

Alí-de-Unzaga: I want to mention something which I consider is perhaps one of the most controversial points that you make in the book, if I read it correctly. There is an assumption among many people that the Qurʾan (and I'm being quite vague in general here, I realize) that the Qurʾan brings some kind of revolution. That the Qurʾan improves the status of women or that the Qurʾan does not improve the status of women. Or that the Qurʾan brings a spiritual revolution. Or that the Qurʾan brings a social revolution, some kind of radical change from the previous time of ignorance and brutality, etc… And yet, one of the points that you seem to make is that, while the Qurʾan brings, or provides, or gives moral agency to men and women, it doesn't necessarily give men and women social, not agency, but improvement or radical change from established structures. In other words, you seem to be saying that the Qurʾan does not shake the socioeconomic structures, but it does shake the moral structures, which include women's moral agency. Is that a correct representation of what you are saying? And if so, or if not, what do we do with that in terms of can that be manipulated by contemporary readers and say, yes, these authors are proving that women have a certain position in society? This is a different question, which is the contemporary use of scholarship in order to make a political point, which is a different question.

Hamza: Isn’t it always in philosophical discussions and ethical discussions about what is good and what is bad in others? What is socially good for people and what is bad? Isn't it more imperative that one looks at the lower threshold that is, how bad does it have to be for us to think this is very bad? But, the other end, that's an open question. Omar, social status, how good is that? That can be as good as whatever. It can end up as social egalitarianism and gender egalitarianism. That's the end of the good, but we worry about the baseline, the minimum.

Bauer: Well, I think we also have to answer…

Hamza: For one. That’s part of it, there's another part of that.

Bauer: Okay, you can go.

Hamza: No, no, it’s okay. It’s about the afterlife, it's much more complicated.

Bauer: Well, now I can segue to that…

Hamza: The other way to think about it is that it's radically different to ask that question, that you just asked, when there is no sense of the meaning of an afterlife. If it's a materialistic approach to the here and now, you can ask that question and you will require a certain set of answers. But, if you throw in (and it's a big thing to throw in) an afterlife, and that this is a moral test, you can get a different set of answers.

Bauer: But also, I don't actually think that we're exactly saying that. We don't exactly say that at all, actually. What Feras is saying is absolutely right. There is the structure of the afterlife, which structures everything in this life. So, all hierarchies in this life would be overturned in the afterlife and replaced by some hierarchy determined by piety. So, that doesn't matter about gender, social status, anything like that. So, that's the first perspective of the Qurʾan, is that the afterlife structures absolutely everything about your world or should structure everything about your world. But the second point is our intention was definitely not to say that the Qurʾan actually revalidates and is an improper like social structure in this world. And this is, again, why we didn't want to separate out law, because actually looking closely at those laws that we perceive is totally unjust and unfair, like the inheritance law: two for one, right? What is it about men getting double what women get? From today's perspective? No way, that's totally unethical. But in a perspective where men are needing to look after women, it's their duty, they must do this. And then women are also given a provision so that they can't get exploited or they can't become exploited, in that social milieu. Then, women are getting their own provision and they're getting what the men are looking after them with. And I don't mean to sound apologetic for some… What I'm saying is that, by looking carefully at the laws, it’s not that it's revalidating those social structures. It's that the rules being applied are controlling men's abuses of those social structures. Once they're being abused (and these social structures which are inherently prone to abuse are turned into mechanisms for abuse) then those people have lost everything by doing that. Can you put this better than I've been putting it? I'm somehow losing my ability to speak coherently.

Hamza: It’s complex question, Omar. But one, I think that the message essentially is that there is agency in this moral journey. And that shouldn't be taken as saying, well, okay, stay miserable just because you found moral agency in piety, for example. No, no, not at all. We’re establishing baselines.

Bauer: And you have these key moments where, of course, women have agency that they don't have in modern state structures. Like the believing woman who can leave her unbelieving husband and join the community of the believers, for instance. Her husband can't say anything about it, she just has the freedom to go. The unbelieving woman who can leave her believing husband, including even in Surat al-Aḥzāb, the wives of the Prophet are even given that choice. They're given the free choice to go, he's going to let them go. They make their own moral decisions and that kind of agency, to give somebody of that social status that kind of agency and say, even a prophet can't control you, morally. You have to make your own moral choices, to those women, that is a message to the entire community, saying every single individual has their own choices to make. And then, that comes with the social agency of actually choosing: we stay in this community and we obey God's laws or we go to the other community and we don't.

Hamza: And that moment that you have (and is it in al-Taḥrīm, chapter 66, as well) The idea that the male prophet, or somebody of authority, cannot decide, that's a radical message in the 7th century. It might not seem exciting now because we have women's rights, and we expect women to be as human as men. But in the 7th century, that was radical.

Bauer: And also equally, the women who had unbelieving husbands, like Pharaoh's wife is held up as an example of somebody who has made a moral choice for herself that was different from her husband, who's like a classic example of a person who's gone astray in the Qurʾan, so Pharaoh is just the ultimate bad guy. But his wife is a believer and she's saved because of her own moral choices. And so, it's much more complicated than saying… It's a complex question, actually. But, we absolutely didn't mean to say that it reifies the same social structures.

Hamza: And this constant displacement between what we expect to be masculine and feminine in the Qurʾan is very intentional. It's very important, I think. Just like Karen was saying, we have the wife of Pharaoh, who is a morally upright character. And then we have… So, we're constantly displaced in our expectation of what the particular sex means about particular emotional posturing and dispositions. You get the maternal aspects of certain prophets, the emotionality of somebody like Jacob or Abraham. And then, you get a story that stands apart like the Queen of Sheba. Mary looms so large, it's incredible. How can she be missed? But she is.

Bauer: But all of these stories show women and men on a moral trajectory and, to separate out the women's stories as though they're only applicable to women or the wives of the prophet, as though they're only models for other women and not for all believers, is a misreading of what's actually going on there. Actually, what's going on is that they are they are showing that, no matter what your social status seems to be or who you seem to be, you might think that these women are controlled by people, but they're not. They're making their own moral choices constantly, and so are the men.

Mir-Hosseini: I didn't have that impression when reading it. Those people who are going to complain, they find everything. And whatever you do, they are against a certain position. But I what I really loved is the importance, the way that you made this qaṣaṣ, this story so powerful. And the plot, it's something that I never came across in every day. So, it is very important, and I really encourage all of you to read it because this is a difficult book, but it is quite readable. And it is readable: the paragraphs are long that I wish you had cut it, but it is readable. I found myself getting up in the morning, wanting to know where are they going next? So that was a sense of: you take the reader with yourself. And so, that this is one of the important things that you do in the book. But, at the same time, something which is for a reformist like me, who is really interested in law, I want to say that what’s most incredible is saying about the law in the Qurʾan. So, this legislation says that whatever, first of all, he said the Qurʾan is not a book of law, a book of morals, book of values. And also said all the laws in the Qurʾan were just for their time, standards of the time. They were moral by the standards of the time. They were accepted by people, and they were better and more effective than other laws. This is the four criteria that we need to have for a law which claims to be derived from the Qurʾan. And when you look at the corpus of fiqh, it's non-existent. And in so many ways, I wrote that many years ago, that CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, is closer to Shariʿa than any Muslim family law that we have seen. Because it is just, it makes sense. It is moral and that is a very important way of reading it. And after, reading your book makes this really clear that yes, that was the best that could have been done at that time. That was totally just at that time. But the question is that we need, as a Muslim, to ask ourselves, is it just? The laws that we have in the name of Islam: are they moral? Are they accepted by people? No. I think your book has really implications for law as well, for a reformist approach.

Hamza: Thank you, Ziba, I think this point on morality and law is really crucial. It's absolutely fundamental. I hope you that most of us agree that, it is meaningless to derive morality from laws as opposed to laws from morality, because it's much more expansive this way. In fact, what we have in many contemporary societies are laws without any morality, you’re not checked for your morality, right? It is just laws that you abide by. But I think the Qurʾan opens it up and says, this is the best morality and here are some examples of what you could do about the in the seventh century. But it’s open.

Mir-Hosseini: Yes, but also allows us to understand it in our own context, and that is important.