In this respect, perhaps more than in any other way, ours is not a Western tradition.

Islamic theology confronts us with the spectacular absence of a gendered Godhead. A theology which reveals the divine through incarnation in a body, also locates it in a gender, and inescapably passes judgment on the other sex. A theology which locates it in a book makes no judgment about gender; since books are unsexed. The divine remains divine, that is, genderless, even when expressed in a fully saving way on earth.

The source of this teaching is unproblematic for believers. Secular historians might see it differently, as confirmation that early Islam was not covenantally defined. Andromorphic views of the divine were necessary to Judaism, which was communally constituted in opposition to neighboring goddess-worship, whence the imagery of Israel as “God’s bride.” This continued in the Christian Church, the “New Israel,” the “bride of Christ,” as the Church Fathers waged war on the goddess cults of late antiquity, and also, increasingly, on “woman” herself as the paradigm of responsibility for the Fall. But Islam’s community of believers never saw itself as a feminine entity, despite the interesting matronly resonance’s of the term Ummah. The Islamic understanding of salvation history did not require that Allah should be constructed as male.

From a theologian’s standpoint, it might be said that Islam averts the difficulty identified by Ruether through its emphasis on the divine transcendence (tanzih). The same “desert like” abstract difference of the Muslim God, which draws reproach from Christian commentators, also allows a gender-neutral image of the divine. Allah is not neuter or androgynous, but is simply above gender. Even Judaism, which generally has fewer problems in this area than has Christianity, does not go this far. In the Eighteen Benedictions said by pious Jews every morning and evening, we find the words, “Cause us to return, O our Father, to thy Law,” while in Deuteronomy 8:6, we read, “As a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you.”

Such references to God as Father are less common in the Old Testament than the New, but they are still abundant, and are thorns in the path of gender-sensitive liberal theologians.

When we turn to the Qur’an, we find an image of Godhead apophatically stripped of metaphor. God is simply Allah, the God; never Father. The divine is referred to by the masculine pronoun: Allah is He (huwa); but the grammarians and exegetes concur that this is not even allegoric: Arabic has no neuter, and the use of the masculine is normal in Arabic for genderless nouns. No male preponderance is implied, any more than feminity is implied by the grammatically female gender of neuter plurals.

The modern Jordanian theologian Hasan Al-Saqqaf emphasizes the point that Muslim theology has consistently made down the ages: God is not gendered really or metaphorically. The Qur’an continues Biblical assumptions on many levels, but here there is a striking discontinuity. The imaging of God has been shifted into a new and bipolar register, that of the 99 names.

Muslim women who have reflected on the gender issue have seized, I think with good reason, on this striking point. For instance, one Muslim woman writer, Sartaz Aziz, writes:

I am deeply grateful that my first ideas of God were formed by Islam because I was able to think of the Highest Power as one completely without sex or race, and thus completely un-patriarchal.

We begin with the idea of a deity who is completely above sexual identity, and thus completely outside the value system created by patriarchy.

This passage is cited by the modern Catholic writer Maura O’Neill, who writes on women’s issues in dialogue, and who rightly concludes, “Muslims do not use a masculine God as either a conscious or unconscious tool in the construction of gender roles.”

This does not mean that gender is absent from Muslim metaphysics. The kalam scholars, as good transcendentalists, banished it from the non-physical world. But the mystics, as imamists, read it into almost everything. We might say that while in Christianity, the relationality is in the triune Godhead, and is explicitly male, in Islam, relationality is absent from the Godhead, but exuberantly exists in the names. To use Kant’s terms, the noumenal God is neutral, whereas the phenomenal God is manifested in not one but two genders. The two leading modern scholars of this tradition in Islamic thought are Izutsu and Murata, who have both noted the parallels between Sufism’s dynamic cosmology and the Taoist world view; each sees existence as a dynamic interplay of opposites, which ultimately resolve to the One.