(al-Azmeh 1993 , 42 ); the Islam of the contemporary world comes to look but
a shadow of its glory days, a symptom and symbol of the decay of time, the
plotting of enemies, or both simultaneously.
The claim that the essence of Islam will be disclosed as a set of unambigu-
ous imperatives once purged of the corruption of foreign inXuence or
internal decay is particularly prevalent in a postcolonial world now marked
by the spread of globalization, but it has a long lineage in Islamic history. Yet
there is an equally long if at times subterranean history of the very hermen-
eutic practice of interpretive pluralism Islamists reject. Here the focus is less
on locating the ‘‘real’’ Islam once and for all, of saving it from a world
supposedly intent on its transformation, degradation, or demise. Rather the
emphasis is on sifting through the multiple possibilities and overlapping
interpretations of a rich textual tradition given the radical transformation
of Muslim communities over the centuries and the enormous challenges such
changes inevitably pose to any living religious tradition. Given the outsized
voice currently enjoyed by Islamists in particular, it seems appropriate to
conclude this chapter by foregrounding just two examples of this second
history of interpretive practices that, like an insistent counter-rhythm beating
just beneath the surface, are less aWnal footnote to contemporary Islamic
political thought than a constitutive feature of it.
Among those who comprise this second history are the diverse array of
scholars and activists who have sought, for example, to engage critically the
Qur’an andhadithliterature in the name of gender equality, negotiating a path
between the Islamist insistence that feminism is part and parcel of the new
jahiliyyaand essentializing arguments that reduce Islam to a series of anti-
womanXashpoints such as the burqa, female genital mutilation, and honor
killings. This is evident, of course, as early as Qasim Amin’sTahrir al-Mar’a
[The Liberation of Woman] ( 1899 ) and MumtazAli’sHuquq-al-Niswan
[The Rights of Women] ( 1898 ), but is also evinced in the less recognized voices
of Muslim and Arab women over the last two centuries, often writing on the
margins and without the beneWt of education in the ‘‘Islamic sciences’’
necessary to engage the sacred texts (Badran and Cooke 2004 ). More recently,
self-identiWed feminist activists and theologians such as RiVat Hassan have
sought to undermine what she calls the ‘‘misogynistic and androcentric
tendencies’’ in the Islamic tradition by pointing out the ways in which
patriarchalhadithliterature has crept into translations of the Qur’an, trans-
forming often ambiguous and gender neutral language into readings that echo
308 roxanne l. euben