This paper explores the first Qur’an interpretation published by a woman, Bint al-Shati’s two-volume al-Tafsir al-Bayani li-l-Qur’an al-Karim (1962/1966). A widely circulated text, eleven new editions and re-publications appeared between 1962 and 2008. Bint al-Shati’s other works enjoy similar broad popular appeal. Her biographical Nisa‘ al-Nabi (Wives of the Prophet) was re-published over twenty times between 1961 and 2015 in Cairo, Beirut, Lahore, and Singapore. Bint al-Shati laid the foundation for a new generation—and a new genre—of religious literature more accessible to popular audiences. Yet her immense intellectual production has gone virtually un-mined. There has been a plethora of fine scholarship by and about Muslim women in English, but far less about women exegetes writing in Arabic. In her exegesis, Bint al-Shati uses a linguistic and literary lens, rather than a gendered one, to interpret early Meccan suras. Her work challenges the idea that women’s contributions to Islamic religious discourse should only be on topics that directly address women and gender. This is emblematic of other women-authored tafsirs that followed, by Egyptians Ni‘mat Sidqi, Zaynab al-Ghazali, and Kariman Hamza, all writing in Arabic. This contrasts with English language tafsirs by Amina Wadud, Asma Barlas, and Aysha Hidayatullah. This paper explores how Bint al-Shati’s contribution worked within a gendered framework, but also to transcend it. Bint al-Shati’s Qur’an interpretation is important not just because she was a woman breaking into a male dominated field. She also positioned herself within her era’s contentious debates about literary approaches to Qur’an interpretation. She furthered the literary method of Qur’an tafsir developed by her husband and mentor Amin al-Khuli, as well as her advisor Taha Husayn and colleagues Muhammad KhalafAllah and Sayyid Qutb. Like Qutb, she explores the Qur’an’s aesthetic and sensory elements as a mode of conveying its spiritual depths. In this way she embraces classical ideas about ta’wil or esoteric interpretation as a key to the Qur’an’s mysteries. But she also does so through modern, almost structural, approaches to the Qur’anic text as an organic unity. She gestures to classical theorists like al-Baqillani, even while engaging the luminaries of her age. Bint al-Shati made Qur’an interpretation accessible to modern audiences, with her engaging focus on its aesthetic dimensions as indicative of the Qur’anic miraculous inimitability.

Recent literary and cinematic articulations of queer subjectivity have relied on Qur’anic exegesis to anchor the female body in a distinctly Islamic hermeneutics. I focus on three pioneering works, the Saudi Seba al-Herz’s The Others (2006), the Meem-produced Lebanese testimonials Bareed Mista3jil (2009), and the documentary Le[s]banese (2008). My research traces the new phenomenon of charting a unique Muslim homoerotic identity with local belongings and a simultaneous ability to operate within a global, political context. The quest for the assertion of this Muslim lesbian identity is meant to defy marginalization even within the already marginalized Arab queer subjectivity. It is also designed to challenge the current scholarship that locks female homoeroticism in between a pre-modern “Islamicate” notion of apolitical but “authentic” and permissive desire practiced in secluded private spaces, and a contemporary notion of global queerness that promises political agency at the expense of erasing its cultural specificity. These alternative religious, linguistic, and cultural spaces contribute to the embodiment of a recognized, outspoken Muslim lesbian identity eager to situate itself in the fluid, liminal spaces beyond Islamicate and Western heteroerotic models. All works in question engage in Qur’anic tafsir to ground a queer identity in Muslim religiosity. The authors locate the centrality of the lesbian body in scriptural, sacred Qur’anic images, thus sanctifying its alternate experiences. Famous suras and common motifs such as: al-fatiha (the opening sura of the Qur’an, the Night of Power, Paradise, prayer, and the Hijab) are interpreted in a queer-friendly fashion capable of imagining a homoerotic belonging situated beyond traditional gender roles, feminism, and prescribed notions of religious and queer identitarian politics and belonging.

Assia Djebar published “La beauté de Joseph” in 1998. Though she originally envisioned a project that would become a film and described the piece of writing she ultimately crafted as a story, the work is a sustained reading of Sura Yusuf. My study takes up Djebar’s reading as an exegetical project. In addition to considering the work’s relationship to the genre of literary exegesis, I attend to Djebar’s strategies for engaging with biblical material, treatment of the gendered gaze, as well as speculation about the teachings imparted by the sura. To contextualize her reading, I engage interlocutors who have treated the sura using gender as a category of analysis and a range of mufassireen, some of whose texts become a site for the inscription of androcentric and misogynist readings of key verses. While Djebar is interested in Jami’s project to conceptualize Zulaikha’s desire in mystical terms, her reading works with the themes of the sura to try new trajectories of analysis and shed light on the manner in which received understandings have foreclosed interpretive possibilities of the text. Tracing these tensions, I contend that Djebar’s engagement pursues a remedy to gendered forms of epistemic injustice resulting from the diffusion of misogynistic perspectives embedded in received interpretive tradition. Looking beyond those horizons, Djebar articulates a reading that engages the sura to think about how Islam at once occupies a position of exile vis-à-vis Abrahamic tradition and acts as a reconfiguring force.

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.