Decoding the Egalitarianism of the Qur'an

This volume challenges a long history of normalizing patriarchal approaches to the Quran and calls for a questioning of the interpretive credibility of many inherited Quranic commentaries. The author presents a fresh reading of the sacred text and Islamic teaching traditions as the rediscovery of a lost humanitarian and gender-egalitarian textual richness that has been poorly and loosely handled for centuries. The book stresses the importance of reviewing the interpretive linguistic choices that jurists and exegetes over the last fourteen centuries have adopted to semantically reshape the Quranic text. The vigilant reading the author provides of carefully chosen texts and commentaries suggests that many interpretive approaches to the Quran are dominated by sociopolitical factors alien to the intrinsic values of the text itself. More importantly, inconsistencies across putatively sound books of tafsr indicate that the Quranic text often suffers from historical and systematic drainage of its humanitarianism, gender-egalitarianism, and religious pluralism.