from stage two to stage three. The prospect of an Islamic conquest of
Europe over the next twenty years is very real and it would destroy
what is left of the West. Iran, on the other hand, has been almost
completely immunized against Islam. Indeed, unlike in the case of
a post-Reformation European thinker like Hegel, for there to be
a figure comparable to Hegel in Iran, that person would have to
unequivocal y reject Islam and preferably not by ignoring it but by
intellectual y destroying it. Otherwise, the person cannot real y even be considered a “philosopher.”
The Iranian Renaissance will only succeed, for the benefit of both
Iran and Europe, if it can produce thinkers that make revolutionary
scientific and sociopolitical breakthroughs. That is not going to
happen with Confucian style readings of the Gathas of Zarathustra or the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi. We have to think from out of the heroic Āryan spirit of Zarathustra and produce a future history that
will be more mythic than anything in the Shahnameh or anything that Ferdowsi could have conceived. Our greatest enemy in this
venture is not Islam, but the Traditionalist mentality of Javidan
Kherad or “Perennial Philosophy” that cannot tolerate fundamental uncertainty and honest intellectual conflict. This Javidan Kherad, which Leibniz imported into the West and Guenon later elaborated
and used to legitimate Islam, has its origins in a false reconstruction of Sassanian culture on the basis of an Islamic-Mongol mentality that
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is truly going to be the death of both Iran and the West if we do not
have the courage to free ourselves from it. If there is going to be an Iranian Hegel first we need another Mani, we need another Mazdak,
even if we also need another Khosrow, and we need this violently
productive intellectual conflict within a few years from now. How
is that possible? If even one man has the courage to be all three, to
divide himself and think against himself, as Plato did, beginning
from out of a wondrous recognition of radical incompleteness.
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VERSE 4:34
Men have authority over women because God has made the
one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth
to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their
unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from
whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to
beds apart and beat them. Then if they obey you, take no further
action against them. Surely, God is high, supreme.
– The Quran, N.J. Dawood Translation
In their struggle for women’s equality in Islam, the
contemporary Muslim women and scholars Amina
Wadud and Asma Barlas have had to face up to this
most notoriously challenging verse of the Quran for an
endeavor such as theirs. Their interpretations depart both from
classical tafsir of this verse, as exemplified by Ibn Kathir (14th century), and traditional tafsir of the modern era such as that of Abdul A’la Maududi (mid 20th century). I hope to demonstrate that
Ibn Kathir and Maududi’s interpretations of this verse are far more
true to the place of women in the greater context of the Quran than the forced and floundering readings of Wadud and Barlas.
In his reading of verse 4:34 Ibn Kathir employs two methods
typical of classical tafsir: he proceeds forward line by line, and he offers hadith and views of previous scholars rather than explicitly stating his own view. However in grasping his essential interpretation 118
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of the verse I will treat his tafsir thematical y (not line by line) and will assume that Ibn Kathir cites certain authorities (out of many
others in a vast corpus) because they do in fact speak for him on a
given point.
Ibn Kathir explains that men are responsible for women’s material
sustenance and welfare and are to guard them from harm.1 He quotes
a hadith to the effect that men must feed and clothe women when they themselves eat or buy clothes, and must guard them by never
abandoning them (leaving them at the mercy of others) in public.2
This responsibility, he explains, is not only given to men on account
of their being endowed with greater material wealth (and thus with
the burden of being the provider), but because God has made men
inherently superior to women in all tasks that involve leadership
(including prophethood and judgeship). He cites a hadith of Bukhari to the effect that female leadership is detrimental to society.3
The righteous wife, according to Ibn Kathir, appreciates the
guardianship and sustenance granted by her husband by protecting
“her honor”, i.e. her chastity, and his property while he is absent
and obeying him and sexual y pleasing him whenever he wishes
while he is present. Ibn Kathir even cites a hadith to the effect that if Muhammad would have allowed any humans to prostrate before
other mere humans (rather than before God alone) it would have
been a wife bowing-down before her husband to acknowledge
his enormous rights over her. He also cites a hadith from Bukhari about how angels curse a woman all night long if she refuses her
husband sex for some reason or another.4 So long as a wife fulfil s
her obligations, her husband must not harass her in any way for fear
of God’s power to punish his injustice.5
However, if a wife is disobedient – which Ibn Kathir interprets as
not subordinate to her husband, ignoring her husband or disliking
1 Ibn Kathir, Tafsir (Dar-us-Salam Publications , 2000), 442.
2 Ibid., 445.
3 Ibid., 442-443.
4 Ibid., 444-445.
5 Ibid., 446-447.
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him – then the husband should verbal y rebuke her, reminding
her of the wrath of God. He should refrain from cursing her in the
process of doing this. If such a rebuke does not persuade her to
change he should deny her sex (by sleeping with his back to her)
or possibly shun her (within his own house) in general.6 Final y, if
neither of these measures work, a man should beat his disobedient
wife, but – according to hadith and various authoritative interpreters
– he should do so only lightly and should not strike her face.7
Maududi’s reading of 4:34 is very concise. He interprets men’s
guardianship of women in accordance with the full range of meaning
of the Arabic word qawwam as: “governor, director, protector, and manager” of their affairs. He explains that men are given this role
in respect to their wives (and families) because men are natural y
endowed with “qualities and powers” that women have only to a
lesser degree or lack altogether. Thus women are the dependents of
men for their own good, so that being the weaker of the two sexes
they may enjoy the protection of the stronger.
Wives have certain obligations to the men who protect and
provide for them, and Maududi summarizes these by quoting a
hadith also cited by Ibn Kathir, who claims that it was a comment made by Muhammad immediately before reciting verse 4:34: “The
best wife is the one who pleases you when you see her; who obeys
your orders and who guards your property and her own honor
when you are not at home.” However, unlike Ibn Kath
ir, Maududi
goes beyond the lines of verse 4:34 itself and in fact puts a check
on the verse’s authority by sternly warning that a wife is obliged to
not obey any command or wish of her husband that goes against the obligatory “commandment(s) of Al ah.” A wife (or any woman’s)
obedience is first and foremost to God, and only then to her
husband, argues Maududi.
If a wife disobeys her husband he must try admonishing
persuasion (verbal rebuke and sexual abandonment) first, before moving on to the last resort of beating her. Maududi agrees with
6 Ibid., 444-445.
7 Ibid., 445-446.
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Ibn Kathir that this beating was not to be severe. He says (without
providing hadith) that Muhammad disliked it and forbade that it be administered on the face or with any implement or force that could
bruise or mark the wife’s body.
Wadud begins her tafsir of verse 4:34 by arguing that fadl (preference, superiority) is a relative term in the Quran, as evidenced by the fact that some prophets are ‘preferred’ over others in certain
verses and yet at the same time other verses say that God makes no
distinction between any of them. She acknowledges that fadl is god-given and cannot be earned through one’s effort.8
Wadud then turns her focus to the preposition bi, which appears between qawwamun ‘ala and fadl, etc… which she claims suggests that men are only guardians of women when the conditions are
met that they are preferred and they in fact support women from their means.9 This if-then clause reading is based on the translation
of bi(ma) as “on the basis of (what)…”. Based on my very limited knowledge of Arabic, it seems this is a mistranslation of bi(ma), which actual y is “through (what)” or “by means of (what)” as in
“I go to work ( bi- sayyara) by means of car” or “I study Arabic ( bi-alqra’a) through reading books.” In this case, there is no conditional doubt expressed as to the divine preference and financial support
that follow the preposition.
Her argument is furthered by the assertion that the only
specified preference or thing that God has given a greater portion
of to men than to women in the Quran is inheritance. This is not true. The verses on women’s testimony in court say that the need
for two female witnesses to make up for the lack of only one of the two legal y required male witnesses is due to the feeblemindedness
of women.10 Women are also clearly allotted a lesser portion in
polygyny laws, which assume that women are not as sexual as men
8 Amina Wadud, Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 69.
9 Ibid, 70.
10 Dawood, N.J. (translator) The Koran (New York: Penguin Classics, 1995), 2:282.
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and should be satisfied with only one man.11 Wadud’s argument,
elsewhere, that polygyny was not established to cater to the desires
of men but to suit the socio-economic situation of the time does not
hold given that the many ‘temporary wives’ or ‘slave-concubines’
which men are allowed are not provided guardianship by them in
any meaningful sense, yet women are not allowed to sleep with male
slaves who they may desire.12
Nonetheless, Wadud supports this connection to the verse on
inheritance by translating amoulhm as “their (m.) property” rather than “their wealth” or “their means” as most translators do. She then
uses this to make a circular argument justifying why women only
inherit half of the property that men do, so that that the man who
gets double a woman’s share will be responsible for her welfare.13
Wadud argues that the ambiguous usage “some of them over
others” suggests that men as a class and on the whole are not
superior to all women. Some women may be superior to some men.14
Even if this is the case (which based on the intellectual inferiority
seen in the verse on legal testimony, and other examples, is not true) these women would still be exceptions to the generality that men are
superior, otherwise this sentence in 4:34 would make no sense at all
in the context of explaining men’s guardianship of women.
Ultimately, Wadud views men’s qiwammah or guardianship over
women as something meant to protect them from the oppressive
situation of having to both bear and care for children and to provide for themselves by their own labor or effort. It is a biological necessity of the family structure that women must bear the children in their
wombs and nurse them in their infancy. Men are thus obliged to
provide everything a woman needs both to sustain herself and to
devote herself to properly performing the function of mother. The
man also thereby takes part in child rearing himself.15
11 Ibid., 23:1-6; 4:16.
12 Ibid., 23:1-6.
13 Wadud,
Qur’an and Woman, 70-71.
14 Ibid., 71.
15 Ibid., 73.
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Wadud argues that 4:34 does not enjoin women to obey their
husbands but that in the phrase “good women are qanitat”, the
men. She extends this by arguing that in “those from whom you fear
nushuz” the Arabic word means something causing marital discord and not “disobedience”. She then cites the preliminary means of
settling a dispute before moving on to ‘beating’. Wadud tries to argue that daraba does not only mean “to strike” in the sense of using force but can mean to set an example or “strike out on a journey”.16 Neither the word ‘example’ nor ‘journey’ follows daraba here such that it may alter its usual meaning, but it refers instead to the wife and so
such a suggestion is ridiculous. Even Wadud seems to recognize
this half consciously as she continues to squirm around the word by
arguing that the injunction was not an allowance but was intended
to severely curb existing marital violence against women. This is
an untenable claim in light of sparse and unreliably contradictory
historical accounts of seventh century Arabian society.
Final y, Wadud ends by considering the line “if they obey
( ta’a) you do not seek a way against them.”17 Here she admits that obedience to the husband (not God) is intended by ta’a, a word she contrasted to the earlier words in the verse whose usual translation
as “obedient” or “disobedient” she contested. This contradicts
her claim that these other words (namely qanitat and nushuz) are referring to submission to God alone. In light of this last phrase, the preceding remarks “good women are obedient [ qanitat]” and “those from whom you fear disobedience [ nushuz]” are more probably
(though not definitely) referring to the husband as the recipient of
wifely obedience.
Wadud tries to contextualize this one admitted usage of
obedience to the husband by again appealing to a mythical
seventh century Arabia. She baselessly asserts that this phrase was
acknowledging the kind of marital relation then prevalent, but since
the Quran is divine, it must also “present a compatible model to 16 Ibid., 74-76.
17 Ibid., 76-77.
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the changing needs and requirements of developing civilizations
worldwide.” This is real y
the crux of her ‘argument’, which is not
an argument at al . In the last analysis, she does, in fact, admit that verse 4:34 is concerned with wives’ obedience to their husbands as
a condition for husbands not to harass their wives. Yet she asserts that this statement is historical y conditioned and no longer applies
in the modern context, even though this contradicts the Quran’s claims regarding the eternal validity of its specific decrees and the
worthlessness of human social conventions (see below).
Barlas’ tafsir of verse 4:34 refers to Wadud’s repeatedly and draws on it heavily for support. Like Wadud, she interprets the advantage
of men over women as purely financial and in this context interprets
their guardianship as merely being the ‘breadwinner’ of the family.
Also, like Wadud, she argues that the phrase “more on some of them
than on the others” means that some women are more financial y
endowed than some men, and thus men of lesser means cannot be
the guardians of these women.18
Barlas quotes Wadud’s interpretation of “obedience” verbatim
and at length, arguing like Wadud, that obedience to God is
intended. However, unlike Wadud, Barlas completely shies away
from the use of ta’a in the phrase “if they obey you do not seek a way against them.” As we saw above, the admission that obedience to
husbands is clearly intended here, and Wadud’s failure to effectively
qualify or excuse it, is what ultimately unravels her interpretation
of the verse. That Barlas treats every line of verse 4:34 except this
line at its conclusion not only makes her tafsir incomplete and out of context, but also (given her obviously close reading of Wadud)
suggests overt deception or at least her own repression and denial in
confronting the text.
Unlike Wadud, who clearly believes that women are natural y
meant to be mothers within a family, Barlas cites other modern
authors to the effect that a self-supporting woman does not live
18 Asma Barlas, “Believing Women” in Islam, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 186-187.
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under the guardianship of a given man.19 While it is true that the
Quran never explicitly says that a woman cannot support herself financial y or otherwise, the vision of marital relationship in verse