Khaled Abou el-Fadl's "Speaking in God's Name"

Abou El-Fadl, Khaled. Speaking in God's Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women. Oxford: Oneworld, 2005, chapters 2 & 7. 

Khaled Abou El Fadl is currently the Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Professor of Law at University of California, Los Angeles, where he has been teaching since 1998. His expertise lies in international human rights, Islamic jurisprudence, national security law, terrorism, and legal systems. He received his J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998 and PhD in Islamic Studies from Princeton in 1999. An Islamic jurist who received 13 years of systematic instruction in Islamic jurisprudence, Khaled Abou El Fadl is known as one of the world’s leading authorities on Islamic law and Islam as well as on human rights. He has received numerous honors and distinctions, including the University of Oslo Human Rights Award and the Leo and Lisl Eitinger Prize; he was named Carnegie Scholar in Islamic Law in 2005. Abou El Fadl has authored 14 books and over 50 articles on various topics in Islam and Islamic law and has lectured on and taught Islamic law throughout the United States and Europe for over twenty years.  

Speaking in God's Name is seven chapters long, but the two chapters most relevant to progressive, contemporary, and feminist interpretations are chapters 2 and 7. Chapter 2, titled “The Authoritative,” is a thorough and extensive discussion on the difficulties that a scholar, jurist, and/or interpreter comes across when interpreting a holy text. In particular, it challenges the perception that there is only one way to interpret a holy text and reminds the readers that the Prophet Muhammad is known to have said that all mujtahids (people who use independent judgment to settle a legal matter)are correct. This is intended as a reminder that scholars do not, and should not, agree on everything, and that such disagreements should be acceptable; after all, Islam has a long-established tradition of disputation and disagreement that started during the time of the Prophet. He observes that, unfortunately, views that do agree with those of the majority fare often shunned and stigmatized as “western,” and the bearer of the view is considered a heretic. Further, he points out that there is no formal institutional and hierarchal structure in (Sunni) Islam; God and the Prophet Muhammad are represented by texts, and it is to God, not man, to whom the Muslim is obligated to submit. These texts are therefore the only authorities that count, and the challenge throughout Islamic history and Muslim scholarship on Islam has been discerning what these texts really mean.

Chapter 7, entitled “Faith-based Assumptions and Determinations Demeaning to Women,” discusses and critiques several hadiths that are seemingly demeaning to women, including those about women being cursed if they do not submit to their husbands’ sexual whims, women’s obligations to prostrate to their husbands if God has so willed, and women as the source of fitnah (“disorder” or “turbulence”) in society. The author challenges these hadith by citing both Quranic verses and other hadiths that contradict those that dehumanize and objectify women.