Forum

Un-reading Patriarchal Interpretations
of the Qur’an: Beyond the Binaries

of Tradition and Modernity
Asma Barlas

I would like to thank AMSS, and specially Jamin Zine, for inviting me to
address your conference on “Islam: Tradition and Modernity” today. Since I
am in the midst of enjoying your splendid hospitality, I feel I should begin
with an apology for what I am about to say. A polite guest would have
praised the food and your conference and gone home without being critical
of anything. But unfortunately for you, I was born with an impolitic gene
and so I am going to take this opportunity to critique the way in which your
conference is framed.

The basic point I will make is a simple one: It is not very productive to
study Islam through the lenses of tradition and modernity. This is not because
one cannot say anything meaningful about Islam in those two contexts;
rather, it is because binary modes of thinking are themselves problematic. I
will make this point in two ways: first by critiquing the tradition vs. moder-
nity binary and binaries in general and, second, by sharing my own work on
Qur’anic hermeneutics as an example of how we might get beyond binaries.
Whether my comments will serve to muddy the waters or to clarify them
remains to be seen.

This paper was presented at the Association of Muslim Social Scientists’ conference on
“Islam: Tradition and Modernity,” held in Toronto, Canada, on 4 November 2006. Asma
Barlas is a professor of politics and the director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race,
and Ethnicity at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York. She is the author of “Believing Women”
in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2002) and several other books.



130 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 24:2

Tradition, Modernity, and Binaries
Personally, I find these seemingly inexhaustible debates about whether or
not Islam is compatible with modernity – in other words, whether it can
coexist with science, democracy, human rights, pluralism, rationalism, and
what have you – somewhat exhausting and increasingly unfruitful. And this
may have to do with the fact that I first encountered these debates, albeit in
a very different form, in grad school – and that was already some fifteen
years ago. At that time, Latin American Dependency Theory was becoming
all the rage this side of the border and, as many of you probably know,
dependency theory (DT) was a response to modernization theory (MT),
which was a response to the political and economic chaos following WWII.
Faced with the prospect of massive decolonization and what was seen as an
encroaching socialism, United States policymakers and academics fretted
about the future of what would one day come to be called the Third World.
Their solution, then, as now, was brilliantly simple if also catastrophically
simple-minded: Let’s bring development and “democracy” to these poor
benighted countries!

The argument was that in order for Third World countries to pull them-
selves up by their bootstraps, the United States needed to pump capital into
them so as to modernize their traditional sectors that were keeping them
“underdeveloped” and “backward.” Heaven knows how many academics,
policymakers, and government wallahs built their careers trying to quantify
tradition and modernity. To many, it meant capitalizing agriculture; to some,
it meant undoing commitments to religion, communal ties, and tradition;
and, to others, it meant nothing less than “making men modern.”

Then, as now, people in other parts of the world paid the price for this
social engineering. And one of the first to do so was Pakistan, my country of
birth, that became a playground for the Harvard school, the Chicago boys,
and all those gung-ho types in the 1950s. Well, we know how modern
Pakistan is today!

By the time I left grad school, the Dependenistas, as they were called,
were still giving MT a good drubbing. Their argument, basically, was that
the reason the Third World lagged behind the First [World] was not because
it was pre-modern or pre-capitalist, but because of the way in which global
capitalism had developed. To put it simply, capitalism had underdeveloped
one part of the world even as it had overdeveloped the other. In effect, it was
not a schizophrenic split between tradition and modernity within Third
World countries that explained their “backwardness,” but the nature of the
global political economy. DT was, of course, ultimately sidelined and, in the



end, did little to undermine the tradition/modernity binary. It simply amped
it up to the global level.

Since then, the debates on tradition and modernity have been reframed
and, in the intervening years, seem to have been dis-placed and re-mapped
onto Islam. The project is no longer to make the Third World modern; it is
to make Islam modern. (Of course, not everyone is committed to such a lib-
eratory enterprise; on the flip side, many want to keep Islam in the clutches
of so-called tradition.)

One of the good things about grad school is that one gets to leave it,
even if only eventually and in a state of utter disillusionment. And, as the
years have slipped by, I have discovered another universe outside the con-
fines of graduate work. This process of discovery has involved recognizing
the absurdity of trying to shoe-horn Islam into tradition and modernity or,
for that matter, trying to shoe-horn tradition and modernity into quantifiable
variables. It has also meant figuring out what is wrong with thinking about
social reality in terms of binaries. 

For one, as Talal Asad demonstrates, tradition and modernity are of a
piece and not discrete entities. Moreover, as he argues, when we view the
world in binary terms we ignore the political possibilities and “practical
options ... opened up or closed by the notion that the world has no signifi-
cant binary features, that it is, on the contrary, divided into overlapping, frag-
mented cultures, hybrid selves, [and] continuously dissolving and emerging
social states.”1

For another thing, as Islamic theology shows, it is not just possible for us
to think beyond binaries, but [doing so is] an almost inevitable consequence
of embracing the concept of tawhid, or the notion of divine indivisibility. As
we know, Muslims derive their view of reality from their conception of God
and, inasmuch as they believe that God’s reality and unity “can be described
by opposite and conflicting attributes,” they also view the cosmos “as a vast
collection of opposites,” to quote Sachiko Murata.2 Crucially, however, Mus-
lims also hold that this collection of opposites actually displays “the activity
of the single Principle,” and that “opposing forces [are not] absolutely
opposed,” but, rather, “complementary or polar.”

Roger Ames has pointed out that polar explanations yield a “hologra-
phic” view of the world that emphasizes “interconnectedness, interdepend-
ence, openness, mutuality, indeterminateness, complementarity, correlativity,
co-extensiveness, a world in which continuous foci are intrinsically related
to each other.” In contrast, dualistic theories emphasize separateness and “a
world of ‘things’ characterized by discreteness, finality, closedness, deter-

Barlas: Un-reading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an 131



minateness, independence, a world in which one thing is related to the
‘other’ extrinsically.”3

I realize, of course, that I am counter-posing these theories very much
in terms of binaries! And, my only defense is what Murata offers: Because
we can only get to the distinctiveness of polarity by critiquing duality,
binary modes of thinking are useful for defining certain positions, espe-
cially in theology. My own position, then, is that we forego a “holographic”
view of Islam when we use the tradition/modernity binary to analyze and
investigate it.

Moreover, if we situate Islam in the realm of tradition, we implicitly
acquiesce in the oppression of women, given that the dominant tradition as
it is constructed is both patriarchal and monosemic. Conversely, if we situ-
ate it in the realm of modernity, we buy into a teleology in which Islam can
only become modern if it makes itself over in the image of Big Western
Secular Brother by producing its own Reformation, its own Luthers, its own
secularism, its own androcentric humanism.

Of course, these are not the only ways to think about the relationship
between Islam, tradition, and modernity. But these are some of the theoreti-
cal and political problems with imposing the tradition/modernity binary onto
Islam. I want to switch gears now and speak about how a Qur’anic hermeneu-
tics can get us to move beyond dualistic and binary modes of thinking.

Qur’anic Hermeneutics:
Beyond Binaries
Before I do that, however, I should share with you the basic argument of my
book, which is that we can read the Qur’an as an anti-patriarchal text. In fact,
I make the bolder claim that Qur’anic epistemology is inherently anti-
patriarchal. The wonderful Mohammed Arkoun once quizzed me about this,
so I should clarify that by Qur’anic epistemology I mean a mode of knowl-
edge that stems from our conceptualization of the divine. To me, Qur’anic
epistemology is anti-patriarchal because it is based in a view of a God who
is neither father nor son nor husband nor man nor male and nor even created.
This God is, therefore, beyond affinity with males and hatred for females.

I also believe that Qur’anic epistemology is anti-patriarchal because the
Qur’an does not condone or sanction patriarchy either in its traditional or its
modern forms. I am defining traditional patriarchy as rule by the father/
husband and modern patriarchy as a politics of sexual differentiation that
privileges males. Not only does the Qur’an not sanction rule by the father or
[the] husband, it also does not use biological sex to privilege males. If any-

132 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 24:2



thing, it establishes the ontic equality of women and men by locating their
origins in the same nafs, or self.

The method, or hermeneutics, by which I arrive at this reading derives
from four principles having to do with theology, methodology, ethics, and
authority, which I derive from my understanding of the Qur’an’s teachings.
The theological principle is that since our understanding of God’s word can-
not be independent of our understanding of God, we must seek the hermeneu-
tic keys for reading the Qur’an in the nature of God’s self-disclosure. For
instance, if the Qur’an tells us that God’s rule brooks no other rulers or inter-
mediaries, then we should also not read the Qur’an as setting up men as inter-
mediaries between God and women or as rulers over women. (This is just one
example, and I am grossly oversimplifying it here.)

Methodologically, I privilege the Qur’an’s foundational verses over its
allegorical and I read the text as a whole, since the Qur’an warns us against
dividing it into “arbitrary parts” or making it “into shreds” (15: 89-93) (read-
ing it selectively or piecemeal).4

The third principle is an ethical one and derives from two Qur’anic
verses: one in which God instructs Moses to “enjoin your people to hold fast
by the best in the precepts” (7:145) and another which says that “Those who
listen to the Word and follow the best (meaning) in it ... are the ones whom
God has guided” (39:18). The Qur’an itself, then, establishes that not all its
readings may be appropriate, places on us the moral responsibility of judg-
ing between them, and leaves it to us to define what is “best.” This not only
shows that revelation is polysemic, but also leaves room open for continual
reinterpretation, since our understanding of what is best is historically con-
tingent, hence liable to change. Emphasizing the best also shows that
hermeneutic and existential questions are connected, since to be able to
choose between readings one must have the civil liberties and religious free-
dom necessary to engage in open debate and dissent, which one cannot do
in anti-democratic and repressive societies and communities.

The last aspect of the hermeneutics I am describing has to do with
authority and, specifically, with who is authorized to interpret the Qur’an.
Historically, of course, only male scholars and socially sanctioned inter-
pretive communities have done so. However, the text itself calls on all believ-
ers to use their own intellect and reasoning (`aql and `ilm) to decipher its
ayat (verses). Significantly, in the Qur’an, `aql and `ilm are not a function of
scholarship or even of literacy, since the Qur’an says it came also for the
unlettered bedouin in the desert. As such, I believe that the authority to inter-
pret the Qur’an derives from the Qur’an itself, not from public sanction or
existing structures of interpretive authority. In fact, the structure of Muslim

Barlas: Un-reading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an 133



authority and public reason have effectively closed off the Qur’an to fully
half the ummah, namely, women.

Naturally, this is just a simplified outline of my argument, and I shared
it with you with the intent of illustrating the irrelevance, if you will, of the
tradition vs. modernity binary in producing or understanding work of this
sort. By way of a conclusion, I want to draw out this point more explicitly.

Conclusions
In some obvious ways, I am reading the Qur’an in light of modern con-
cepts and language (patriarchal, hermeneutics, equality). But I am [also]
trying to recover a Qur’anic episteme that predates these concepts and
language. Presumably, this episteme is traditional by virtue of the fact that
it is 1,400 years old. So, then, how should I situate my work: within moder-
nity or tradition?

I guess one could say that religion and the very idea of God are tradi-
tional; but, then, what about us “moderns” who believe in God? Which part
of modernity makes room for our traditionalism, or is it the other way
around? And if the idea of God is traditional, is the idea of a God beyond
sex/gender and, indeed, beyond representation not modern? On second
thought perhaps not, since early Muslim theologians were engaged in trying
to rid representations of God of any anthropomorphisms even before we
came to call them that!

You might argue that I am using a definition of patriarchy that encom-
passes both its traditional and its modern forms and that this is an important
distinction to make. Fair enough! But since the Qur’an does not support
either one, at least in my reading, does that make its stance traditional or
modern or both? Then, too, the Qur’an was speaking of issues of contextual
legitimacy, polysemy, and textual holism before modern hermeneutics. Does
the Qur’an then have a modern sensibility? If so, how did it speak to people
in the seventh century?

I could go on, but, I think you have gotten my drift. The point is, here
we are today and with us is the Islam that we practice in the midst of moder-
nity or alongside it, though on whose terms and in what forms is not always
clear to me. So I am all for interrogating these terms and forms. But I won-
der whether doing so in terms of the tradition/modernity binary is actually
productive. To the contrary, I have tried to suggest that we close down cer-
tain spaces, certain questions, and certain possibilities when we embrace a
bipolar view of the world. Particularly at this moment of war between

134 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 24:2



“Islam and the West,” us and them, good and evil, binary thinking smacks
too much of an imperialist sensibility.

And, of course, binary modes of thought imprison us in adversarial lan-
guages that keep us from imagining an open and “unfinished world”5 in
which we can work to build shared understandings and solidarities. I believe
that Muslims can contribute to building such solidarities by envisaging an
Islam beyond tradition and modernity, East and West, Self and Other, in
order to embrace the inclusive vision inherent in the Qur’an’s teachings that
at the heart of all creation is diversity, and that the function of diversity is,
ultimately, to allow us all to “know one another.”

Endnotes

1. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity
(California: Stanford University Press, 2003), 15.

2. Sachiko Murata, The Tao of Islam: A Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in
Islamic Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 10-12. 

3. Ibid., 10.
4. Abdullah Yusuf Ali, The Holy Quran: Text, Translation and Commentary

(New York: Tahrike Tarsile Quran, 1988), 653. All verses in this article are
taken from this source.

5. Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell, eds. The Norbert Elias Reader
(Oxford, UK and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 229.

Barlas: Un-reading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an 135