God the Father *

The Prophet said that women totally dominate men of intellect and possessors of hearts. But ignorant men dominate women, for they are shackled by an animal ferocity. They have no kindness, gentleness or love, since animality dominates their nature. Love and kindness are human attributes; anger and sensuality belong to the animals. She is the radiance of God; she is not your beloved.

- Jalal Al-Din Rumi

The 1969 female eunuch was nothing but womb. The 1997 female eunuch has no womb.

- Germaine Greer

In her book Sexism and God-Talk, Ruether objects to ways in which Christian metaphors about God's maleness are taken literally. For her, the Decalogue's prohibition of idolatry “must be extended to verbal pictures. When the word Father is taken literally to mean that God is male and not female, represented by males and not females, then this word becomes idolatrous.” She acknowledges that Christian doctrine affirms that all language about God is analogous. Nonetheless, the use of male terms for the Ultimate Reality, and the characteristically Christian emphasis on the personhood of God, has regularly resulted in this kind of idolatry. Her solution is to urge the use of inclusive language, so that God is referred to from time to time as the “Goddess,” or as “She.” Ruether even objects to the idea of God as parent, suggesting, no doubt absurdly, that this encourages what she calls a virtue of spiritual infantilism, which makes “autonomy and assertion of free will a sin.”

Despite her promethean confidence in her ability to revise tradition, Ruether has been famously outstripped by Mary Daly, a former Catholic theologian, who now, like several influential feminists, describes herself as a “witch.” Her book Beyond God the Father rejects even the metaphorical possibilities of traditional language. To call God “Father,” she insists, is to call fathers God. The Trinity is thus revealed as “an eternal male homosexual orgy.” As the engendering matrix of the world, God is, in fact, paradigmatically female. And the world itself, as mirror of heaven, “bears fruit,” and is hence female also. The male principle is the alien force, the nexus of disruption, aggression, and sin. Daly seems to approach the almost dualistic notion that God is female, while the “horned” devil is male. This gendered Manicheanism may seem a bizarre inversion of Augustine's androcentrism, but her books are hugely influential, selling in hundreds of thousands of copies.

Not every figuring of the divine is androcentric, of course. Luce Irigaray observes that it is in the West that “the gender of God, the guardian of every subject and discourse, is always paternal and masculine.” Even Orthodoxy is more aporetic in its metaphorical gendering of the sacred. The paintings of El Greco, as they reflect his trajectory from the timeless icon-painting of his native Crete, through his studies in Venice under Tintoretto, to the Toledo of the muscular Counter-Reformation, reveal a process of increasing concretization, with growing attention to perspective, expression, and sharpness of form. His Christ, in his late, “Catholic” paintings, is more human than divine; and hence more humanly and authentically male.

* This was originally published as “Islam, Irigaray, and the Retrieval of Gender” and is republished here with minor editorial changes, with the kind permission of the author. The original text can be viewed at Masud.co.uk.

Shaikh Abdal-Hakim Murad is a celebrated Muslim scholar and a translator of traditional Islamic texts. He is currently secretary of the Muslim Academic Trust (London) and director of the Sunna Project at the Centre of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Cambridge University.