Islam’s theology of gender thus contends with a maze, a web of connections that demand familiarity with a diverse legal code, regional heterogeneity, and with the metaphysical no less than with the physical. This complexity should warn us against offering facile generalizations about Islam’s attitude to women. Journalists, feminists, and cultivated people, generally in the West, have harbored deeply negative verdicts here. Often these verdicts are arrived at through the observation of actual Muslim societies, and it would be both futile and immoral to suggest that the modern Islamic world is always to be admired for its treatment of women. Women in countries such as Saudi Arabia, where they are not even permitted to drive cars, are objectively the victims of an oppression that is not the product of a divinely willed sheltering of a sex, but of ego, of the nafs of the male.

In this way, types of “Islamization” being launched in several countries today by individuals driven by resentment and committed to an anthropomorphized, and hence Andromorphic, God, appear to bear no relation either to traditional fiqh discourse or to the revelatory insistence on justice. This imbalance will continue unless actualized religion learns to reincorporate the dimension of ihsan, which valorizes the feminine principle, and also obstructs and ultimately annihilates the ego, which underpins gender chauvinism. We need to distinguish, as many Muslim women thinkers are doing, between the expectations of the religion’s ethos (as legible in scripture, classical exegesis, and spirituality), and the actual asymmetric structures of post-classical Muslim societies, which, like Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Chinese cultures, contain much that is in real need of reform.

By now it should have become clear that we are not vaunting the revelation as either a “macho” chauvinism or as a miraculous prefigurement of late 20th-century feminism. Feminism, in any case, has no orthodoxy, as Fiorenza reminds us. Certain of its forms are repellent to us and are clearly damaging to women and society, while others may demonstrate striking convergences with the Shari`ah and our gendered cosmologies. We advocate a nuanced understanding which tries to bypass the sexism-versus-feminism dialectic, by proposing a theology in which the Divine is truly gender neutral, but gifts humanity with a legal code and family norms which are rooted in the understanding that, as Irigaray insists, the sexes “are not equal but different,” and will naturally gravitate towards divergent roles, which affirm rather than suppress their respective genius.

Biology should be destiny, but a destiny that allows for multiple possibilities. Women’s discourse valorizes the home; but Muslim women have, for long periods of Islam’s history, left their homes to become scholars. A hundred years ago, the orientalist Ignaz Goldziher showed that perhaps 15 percent of medieval hadith scholars were women, teaching in the mosques and universally admired for their integrity. Colleges such as the Saqlatuniyah Madrasah in Cairo were funded and staffed entirely by women. The most recent study of Muslim female academicians, by Ruth Roded, charts an extraordinary dilemma for the researcher.

If US and European historians feel a need to reconstruct women’s history because women are invisible in the traditional sources, Islamic scholars are faced with a plethora of source material that has only begun to be studied. ... In reading the biographies of thousands of Muslim women scholars, one is amazed at the evidence that contradicts the view of Muslim women as marginal, secluded, and restricted.

Stereotypes come under almost intolerable strain when Roded documents the fact that the proportion of female lecturers in many classical Islamic colleges was higher than in modern Western universities. `A’ishah, Mother of the Believers, who taught hadith in the ur-mosque of Islam, is, as always, the indispensable paradigm: lively, intelligent, devout, and humbling to all subsequent memory.

But until past ideals are reclaimed, a polarization in Muslim societies is likely. The Westernized classes will reject traditional idioms, simply because those styles are not Western and fail to satisfy the elite’s self-image. The pseudosalafi literalists will continue to reject Sufism’s high regard for women and its demand for the destruction of the ego. The same constituency will defy legitimate calls for a due ijtihad-based transformation of aspects of Islamic law, not because of any profound moral understanding of that law, but because of a ham-fisted exegesis of usul (principles of Islam) and because those calls are associated with Western influence and demands.

Whether the conscientious middle ground, inspired by the genius of tradition, can seize the initiative, and allow an ego-free and generous Muslim definition of the Sunnah to shape the agenda in our rapidly polarizing societies, remains to be seen. No doubt, the Sufi insight that there is no justice or compassion on earth without an emptying of the self will be the final yardstick among the wise. But it is clear that the Islamic tradition offers the possibility of a truly radical solution, offering not only to itself but to the West the transcendence of a debate which continues to perplex many responsible minds, contemplating an emergent society where the absence of roles presides over an increasingly damaging absence of rules.