Consider the following passage, Women attended the mosques as men attended. Hind bint Usayd ibn Hudayr al-Ansariyyah learnt surah Qaf from hearing the Prophet recite it in the prayer. Ibn Jabir and Uthman ibn Abi l-Atikah says: Umm al-Darda was an orphan under the guardianship of Abu l-Darda; she used to come to the mosques …
Category: Islam
On Interpreting the Qur’an and Subjectivity
As someone who has studied Arabic for a couple of years, compelled primarily by a desire to understand the Qur’an, and who remembers the frustration of not being able to understand it (and is aware of it still, because I have not mastered the language) I’m heartbroken when religious people—particularly women—dismiss their own interpretations on …
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Lilith / Eve, a Question of Translation
Has it been over a week since I’d last written? Hi. It’s me. Are you still there? =P I haven’t much time, unfortunately. But here’s an entry of what’s been on my mind, though hastily written. If you remember from this post, the creation of Hawwa (translated as Eve) and Adam in Islam differs from …
Rejecting Your Sense of Justice is Rejecting a Device of God
This post is brought to you by a bewildering conversation I had a while ago in which an XY tried to mansplain to me that his interpretation of a specific verse pertaining to women is not unjust because it is from God, and therefore [what is from God] cannot unjust. (Read: His interpretation is from …
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Taken Out of Context: the Feminization of Divinity
I’ve received questions, a couple in passing and one in an email, regarding the intense opposition in the Qur’an against worshipping female deities as well as the incidental clarification that angels are not female (chapter 53) and the apparent misogyny that this suggests, particularly when men explain the occasional verses away by stating that God …
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The Legacy of Fatima
Though men and women may have appropriated Fatima in different ways, men as usual authored nearly all of the preserved literature regarding her biography, so that censored writings of history function as a paradigm. This symbol of Fatima has consequently and predictably been molded throughout the centuries to fit political needs or inspirations: Fatima is …
Sectarianism and Privilege
In studying Islam and researching religious tradition, I naturally encounter sectorial differences in the perception of religious figures and in the practice of religious rituals; —while I’ve described my renouncing approach to Islamic sects, in dismissing sectarianism and contemplating its contraints from the position of a religious woman, without disclosing with which sectorial teachings I …
the fatal feminist 