70 No god but God
wealth (to provide for them).... As for women you feel are averse,
talk to them suasively; then leave them alone in bed (without
molesting them) and go to bed with them (when they are willing).Men are in charge of women, because Allah has made some of them
excel the others, and because they spend some of their wealth....
And for those [women] that you fear might rebel, admonish them
and abandon them in their beds and beat them [adribuhunna].Because of the variability of the Arabic language, both of these
translations are grammatically, syntactically, and definitionally cor-
rect. The phrase qawwamuna ‘ala an-nisa can be understood as “watch
over,” “protect,” “support,” “attend to,” “look after,” or “be in charge
of ” women. The final word in the verse, adribuhunna, which Fakhry
has rendered as “beat them,” can equally mean “turn away from
them,” “go along with them,” and, remarkably, even “have consensual
intercourse with them.” If religion is indeed interpretation, then
which meaning one chooses to accept and follow depends on what one
is trying to extract from the text: if one views the Quran as empower-
ing women, then Ali’s; if one looks to the Quran to justify violence
against women, then Fakhry’s.
Throughout Islamic history, there have been a number of women
who have struggled to maintain their authority as both preservers of
the hadith and interpreters of the Quran. Karima bint Ahmad (d. 1069)
and Fatima bint Ali (d. 1087), for example, are regarded as two of the
most important transmitters of the Prophet’s traditions, while Zaynab
bint al-Sha’ri (d. 1220) and Daqiqa bint Murshid (d. 1345), both tex-
tual scholars, occupied an eminent place in early Islamic scholarship.
And it is hard to ignore the fact that nearly one sixth of all “reliable”
hadith can be traced back to Muhammad’s wife Aisha.
However, these women, celebrated as they are, were no match for
the indisputable authority of early Companions like Umar, the young,
brash member of the Quraysh élite whose conversion to Islam had
always been a particular source of pride to Muhammad. The Prophet
had always admired Umar, not just for his physical prowess as a war-
rior, but for his impeccable moral virtue and the zeal with which he
approached his devotion to God. In many ways, Umar was a simple,