A Response to "Islam Beyond Patriarchy"

Dear Dr. Amina Wadud,

On Wednesday night (the 25th), I had the opportunity to attend your lecture, “Islam Beyond Patriarchy,” and today I’d like to share with you the ways in which your lecture impacted me. Your lecture, to me, illustrated powerfully the potential uses and importance of language. While language can limit or distort the understanding of the metaphysical, it also, through metaphor, creates the possibility of transcending those limitations and materially re-forming the realities in which we live. I think recognizing this dual nature (that language both creates the tension and has the ability to solve, or dissolve, that tension) within the discourse on Islam was important for me.

In my own faith as a Christian woman, I have encountered many of the difficulties you mentioned in your lecture. How can one conceive of Allah beyond gender in a language that insists on gendering everything? God must be referred to and, to those people eager to view God through the lens of patriarchy, “He” is naturally the privileged pronoun, despite the theological belief that Allah is neither he nor she and despite the possibility of the occasionally employed “We” who, you mentioned, appears in the Qur'an. Patriarchy also uses this binary to maintain the originary status of (an assumed to be) Adam which in turn creates and maintains the supplementarity of (an assumed to be) Eve. In these ways language, through its binary nature, allows for patriarchy to impose itself in Islam. It also allows patriarchy to instate the male between the female and Allah in the vertical, hierarchical model you counter with your Tawhidic Paradigm.

Your Tawhidic Paradigm helped to impress upon me the power of metaphor in confronting the limitations of the binary. You stated that the goal of your lecture was to examine root metaphors and sacred postulates of Islam in order to discover their manifest potentialities. By looking directly at the text, it seems to me, you found a point of access to a truth and to Allah not clouded by the doctrine of adversarial secularists or of neo-conservative Islamists and, most of all, not clouded by the lens of patriarchy. Rather than imaging a static Islam, to be viewed either as an ideal to return to, or as an obsolete belief system to reject, the text of the Koran allows for the recognition of a dynamic Islam that can manifest justice and our foundational ontological equality in our lived realities.

I find this inspiring, this opportunity you see for Islam to contribute its voice to the debate on international human rights. On a more personal level, I find inspiring the possibility of reclaiming agency within religion as well as our God-given equality. This ability and responsibility to materialize religion within the world, I think, requires walking the Wasatiyyah you mentioned; approaching the relationship between the metaphysical and the empirical with both faith and critical analysis.

Again, thank you for your lecture.
Sincerely,

Alayna Fisher
Scripps College ’11