Sa'diyya Shaikh

Knowledge, women and gender in the adīth: a feminist interpretation

This article examines gender constructs embedded within the book on ‘Knowledge’ in Bukhārīs adīth collection. This text provides a site for exploring Islamic constructions of human nature, knowledge, rationality and authority. Out of a sum total of 136 adīths contain in Bukhārīs book on ‘Knowledge’, there are eight concerning women. These have multiple levels of meaning and interpretive possibilities. Employing a feminist hermeneutic, the article examines some of the gender ideology implicit in these formative adīths for Islamic understandings of the human person. The articles twofold approach firstly engages critically with dimensions of androcentricism and patriarchy within the texts, and secondly lifts out marginalized aspects embedded within the texts that offer counter–narratives to dominant constructions of gender. The intention of this reading is to name and illustrate both the functioning patriarchy as well as alternative liberatory positions of gender within the legacy. This represents part of an Islamic feminist approach that destabilizes patriarchal gender constructs and provides alternative approaches to the tradition informed by a religious commitment to gender justice.

Engaging Disability and Religion in the Global South

Religion is enormously important for many disabled people, their families, and communities, especially in the Global South, but it is not given a great deal of attention. This chapter is a collaboration between religious studies scholars from different faith traditions (Christian and Muslim) and an atheist disability studies scholar. We explore the central role of religion in many disabled people’s lives, and we suggest that a new theology taking clearer account of disability may be productive in understanding the central role of faith in people’s lives. We acknowledge the historical and contemporary nexus between religion and oppression but suggest that there are far more productive ways of engaging with religion than seeing it unidimensionally and solely as an instrument of oppression.