The Women's Bay'a in Qur'an and Sira*

This article is about the Muslim woman's Islamic right to active participation in public space. I contend that this right was established by the Qur'anic revelation and practiced in the Prophet's community in Mecca and Medina. Later generations of scripturalist and legal experts downplayed or even disregarded this right. Progressive Muslim thinkers have now rediscovered the principles of gender equality, including women's political rights, both in the scripture and also the Sira, life history of the Prophet and his first community. A study of these sources yields rich detail on the interaction between the normative and the factual, that is, the interaction between the revelation's a-historical normative meaning, and the historical context of its event.

In this article, I examine the issue of women's membership in the early Islamic state, and their participation in its affairs, by way of Sura 60:12, the women's bay'a (pledge of allegiance) to the Prophet in Medina. On the women's bay'a, the Sira and other Hadith literature provides full detail that fleshes out the event's historical, political and legal significance but also contains textual proof that some later (post-Muhammadan) traditionists downplayed the event's political significance; their position prevailed in the religious writings of the classical period and continues to prevail in much of today's clerical and other traditionalist writings. This section is followed by a brief look at Sura 9:71 that, in part, identifies believing men and women by the fact that they "command right and forbid wrong." The wording of this latter revelation thus clearly indicates the obligation of both men and women to play an active role in guiding and defending the moral order. The Sira literature fails to provide a specific historical narrative behind this verse. The theological experts who for a millennium or more have penned this verse's interpretations in their Tafsir (Qur'anic exegesis) works have downplayed it; the full liberationist force of this revelation's political and social import is now emphasized by the reformist scholars of Islam but remains unacknowledged in most of today's traditionalist writings. The article concludes with a few examples of new, Qur'an-centric reformist interpretative strategies on the topic of women's political rights by contemporary Muslim authorities.

The Qur'an and History

To the faithful, the Qur'an provides eternally valid legal principles and...