What is meant
Shahrur distinguishes between the Qur’anic text and the reports that attached to it an image of women’s deficiency or of woman as the cause of temptation. He holds that the Qur’an does not affirm the inferiority of women, does not make Eve responsible for tempting Adam, and does not describe women as lacking in intellect or religion.
The atom’s structure in the atlas
- Type of argument: Interpretive
- Direction of the argument: It denies that the Qur’an is a source of women’s inferiority or of Eve’s responsibility for temptation.
- Key terms: the Qur’an, woman, Eve, inferiority.
- Degree of centrality: Core.
An alternative reading of the Qur’anic text is established in the file on women, separating Qur’anic meaning from the interpretive accumulation that attached judgments of deficiency to women.
Reading aids
- Muhammad Shahrur, Qur’anic Stories, vol. 1
- Women, Family, and Dress
- the Qur’an
- Islam Is a Universal Human Message
Basis
- Supporting text: «Shahrur criticizes the reports that portray woman as the cause of deficiency or temptation, and he يرى that this view contributed to entrenching women’s inferiority and their exclusion. He affirms that the Qur’anic text itself does not establish this view, and that Eve is not responsible for tempting Adam, nor is woman lacking in intellect or religion».
Place of support in the book
- Book: Qur’anic Stories, vol. 1.
- Location: At the beginning of the book within the critique of the narrative corpus
- Type of support: Close witness.
- Marker that helps verification: a cognitively displacing understanding vis-à-vis the traditional approach
- Reading note: The location is suitable because it states that the contemporary reading deconstructs the system that governed Muslims’ view of revelation, and it is close to the inherited critique of women’s inferiority.
Degree of documentation
- Level: Directly documented
- Meaning of the level: The atom relies on an explicit witness close to the wording of the claim.
- Limits of the reading: The wording above is an analytical summary and is not treated as a verbatim quotation unless the witness is quoted textually.
Its function in the book
Its function here is declarative; it establishes a result on which what follows in the course of the argument depends.
Related to
Editorial note
This atom is among the most interpretively sensitive atoms, because its implications touch the social structure of the family and women.