Engaged scholarship on women and gender in Islam, and particularly in the Qur’an, have typically concentrated on prescriptive passages – first and foremost those that are legal in nature, and secondarily those that are ethical in nature. Such studies have yielded important insights as well as new interpretations of what the Qur’an may be prescribing for its audiences. While the prescription-oriented method has continued apace and remains productive, some scholars have found discussion of Qur’anic prescriptions to be of limited utility, arguing that problems raised by the Qur’an’s prescriptions on gender ultimately cannot be solved without consideration of the Qur’an’s descriptive passages – those that are theological or anthropological in nature. This attention to the Qur’an’s theological and anthropological content, and consideration of what that content tells us about the scripture’s views on women and gender, have yielded a second rich body of Islamic feminist scholarship. Yet there is a third Qur’anic genre, and a third method of scriptural analysis, that has been little explored for their implications on questions of women and gender. This genre is the genre of narrative – that is, of stories – and this method is that of narrative ethics. Narrative ethics – and its sister method, narrative theology – are hermeneutical methods that were developed in the fields of Biblical studies, as avenues for drawing theological and ethical lessons from the considerable content of the Bible that relates stories rather than provides prescriptions or direct assertions about the nature of divinity or humanity. Narrative methods have scarcely been applied to the study of the Qur’an, and especially not on the topics of women and gender, despite the recent “literary turn” in the study of the scripture, and the seeming closeness of narrative approaches and literary approaches. At the same time, the various studies of women in the Qur’an – significant though they have been – have not honed in on identifying ethical or theological (anthropological) ramifications of their stories as stories, nor have they focused on the theoretical problems of drawing prescriptive lessons from the Qur’an’s narrative content. My research proposes to analyze the Qur’an’s stories about women using the specific lens of narrative ethics, and to address at least two theoretical problems – first, the problem of using descriptive content (stories) as a source for ethical prescriptions, and second, the applicability of a method developed for the study of the Bible to the study of the Qur’an.