Her Faith, Her Voice

Review of "Her Voice, Her Faith" by Riffat Hassan.

Note: This is a personal study guide for my course on Islam.

Riffat Hassan begins her paper with a discussion on the four major sources that Islam takes its views from. These are the Qu'ran; Sunnah and Hadith; Ijma; and Ijtihad. The Qu'ran is the primary source of normative Islam. The Sunnah and Hadith are the next most important sources in Islam. These are the practices and the sayings of the Prophet. The Hadith is somewhat controversial in scholarship because some conform to the Qu'ran and others do not; laws in the Shari'ah that are based on the latter cannot be binding on Muslims. Each hadith has to be tested for authenticity by technical criteria and each hadith must be scrutinized for context and content to discern whether or not it is simply descriptive or also normative. Ijma is the "consensus of the community." Traditional Islam views the Ijma of the first three centuries as protected from error and binding on all future generations. Ijtihad is the thought processes by which the Ijma were constructed. Ijtihad is considered closed, but scholars like Syed Ahmad Khan and Muhammad Iqbal believe it is important to "reopen the gates" of Ijtihad.

Hassan asserts that while claims have been made that Islam has given women more rights than any other tradition, Islamic societies have remained largely patriarchal. She also concludes that while this is part of the reason for the lower status of women in Islamic countries than in Western countries, the view that the emancipation of women is a symbol of westernization also hampers the status of women.

Hassan has studied the Qu'ranic verses pertaining to women and has reinterpreted them from a non-patriarchal perspective. First, however, she explored the basic theological assumptions for women's status, the foremost of which was that woman was created for man. She concludes that there is no grounds for this assumption in the Qu'ran, because creation is depicted as egalitarian in the Qu'ran. In Islam, the view that Eve was created from Adam's rib has no basis in the Qu'ran; it entered the tradition indirectly through the hadith. Hassan contests that these hadith are not consistent with the Qu'ran and should not be accepted. Furthermore, there is no "Fall" in the Qu'ran.

After analyzing three separate instances in the Qu'ran, Hassan concludes that the Qu'ran is protective of the rights of women when read without a patriarchal bias.