Bibliographical Essay

There has been an increasing output on the subject of violence against women in early Islam. Most of it focuses on the Qur'anic verse in Surat al-Nisa' (4:34) which gives the husband the right to correct a disobedient or recalcitrant wife, and analyses discussions in the exegetical and traditional literature.

In this connection the articles by Manuela Marin, ‘Disciplining Wives: A Historical Reading of Qur'an 4:34', Studia Islamica 97 (2003), 5-40, and Mohamed Mahmoud, ‘To Beat or Not to Beat: On the Exegetical Dilemmas over Qur'an 4: 34', Journal of the American Oriental Society 126 (2006), 537-50, both review the exegetical literature and provide a novel assessment, bearing in mind the Muslim feminist interventions of, among others, Amina Wadud's Qur'an and Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Fatima Mernissi's The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1993). This feminist intervention has brought about a radical articulation in the interpretation, implying a virtual abrogation of the verse. A special issue of Comparative Islamic Studies in 2008 includes a number of articles interpreting Q 4:34, notably Karen Bauer's ‘Traditional Exegeses of Q 4:34' and Laury Silvers's ‘“In the Book We Have Left Nothing”: The Ethical Problem of the Existence of Verse 4:34 in the Qur'an'. Ayesha S. Chaudhry's Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition: Ethics, Law, and the Muslim Discourse on Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) provides an extensive study of the intellectual history of Q 4:34, tracing the intellectual history of Muslim scholarship on this verse from the ninth century to the present day and providing a nuanced study of how scholars have approached this question juridically and exegetically.

A central issue to this discussion is marriage, which has been brought into focus by Kecia Ali, Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), who analyses the diversity of opinion in early legal thought as well as the influence of hierarchical social structures on the jurist's vision of marriage which is key to any understanding of family and family relations.

While most secondary literature focused on analysing religious and juridical texts for the sake of interpreting the Q 4:34, much less discussion is available for the less prescriptive texts, notably historical chronicles and adab.

In Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), Thomas Sizgorich rereads works of the early Muslim historians as they narrated violence perpetrated by Khawarij in order to help understand the problem of how militant piety was understood within the early Muslim community. Nadia Maria El Cheikh's Women, Islam and Abbasid Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) is useful for its analysis of the way anti-heretical polemic was used in mainstream Abbasid sources, including the historical chronicles and adab sources with respect to the Qaramita.

Nadia Maria El Cheikh's ‘Women History: A Study of al-Tanukhi', in Manuela Marin and Randi Deguilhem (eds.), Writing the Feminine: Women in Arab Sources (New York: I. B. Tauris, 20012), pp. 129-48, looks into the two adab anthologies of al-Tanukhi and analyses the type and quality of information on women they contain, as these compilations tend to focus on situations rather than actions. An analysis of the content of these works offers one route towards understanding women's role and gender relations in the society that produced them. Ultimately, the weight of the investigation will have to be carried by the sheer accumulation of evidence from a multitude of adab and other works.

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Source: Gordon Matthew, Kaeuper Richard, Zurndorfer Harriet (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 2: AD 500-AD 1500. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 696 p.. 2020

Bibliographical Essay

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