the Feminist Rewriting of Creation

A brother mentioned in the comments about an article that he read by a woman named Zahra Ayyubi in which she challenges the traditional Islamic understanding about the origin and the creation of Hawa, and he asked me to give my impressions of the article. This actually presents a good opportunity to address another issue that I think deserves some discussion, discussion. And that is that we need to be able to identify what is and is not feminism and feminist influence, and more importantly, what manifestations of feminism are actually worthy of our concern and opposition. Because here we have an article, like so many modernist Muslim academic articles, that essentially says that Muslim scholars have misunderstood the Quran and hadith for a millennium and a half. And finally, we have a western educated, western indoctrinated, non Arabic speaking professor of an American university arisen to correct centuries of error.

Zahra Ayubi is a feminist, and as such, she wants to rewrite the history of the creation of Nabi Adam and Hawa in a way that does not make Hawa a derivative creation of Nabi Adam because she feels that that is unjust insofar as it inevitably means that we are inherently not equal. Now, obviously, the religious texts on this matter are quite clear, so she tries to inject ambiguity where it doesn't exist. The opening ayah of Surat An Nisa explicitly states not only that there was a sequence in the creation of the first and then second human beings, but that the second human being was derived from the first. There's nothing dubious about the ayah, and its meaning is made clearer in other relevant ayat about the story, and then clarified even further in Sahih hadiths. Her attempt to muddy our understanding of the ayat and the hadiths is conspicuously forced and flimsy.

In order to substantiate her interpretation, which is basically that Adam and Hawa were created simultaneously from a single source and are thus equal in creation and in nature, she happily throws Abu Hurayrah under the bus and is perfectly willing to call into question strongly authenticated hadiths even though she lacks any rudimentary training in the hadith sciences. And then because she sees a similarity between the biblical version of the story of the creation of Adam and Hawa with the Islamic version of the story of the creation of Navi Adam and Hawa, she makes the familiar mistake of thinking that means that our version of the story was copied from the Jews and Christians rather than understanding that when two witnesses give testimony about a single event, their testimony is likely to coincide even if one of those witnesses is often wrong in their report. In other words, if the Islamic version happens to agree with certain details from the biblical version, it simply means that those happen to be details that were not corrupted in the biblical version. Version. Anyone with a basic understanding of Tafsir would know this and would also know that the Mufasireen treated the stories of Bani Israel with a grain of salt except where they agreed with what we knew from authentic sources.

But you see, this is a feminist literally trying to rewrite the story of our origin, the history of our creation, which gives us the most crucial gateway to understanding of ourselves and understanding of each other, understanding of our natures as men and women. Essentially, she's trying to subvert reality and our understanding of it, which would leave us completely blind in any attempt to navigate relations between the sexes in a natural and positive way. She wants to separate us from the knowledge that Allah gave us about ourselves and our origin because the reality of our respective origins does not adhere to her feminist ideology. Now, of course, we don't actually need the origin story of to know that men and women are not equal and to know that women are derivative of men. We have the entire history of human race to prove that.

But we need the knowledge that Allah gave us if for no other reason than to appreciate each other, to be fair to one another, to have appropriate expectations of one another and of ourselves, and to have a deeper understanding of who and what we are. And we need it obviously because Allah gave it to us and because it is true. So this is dangerous feminism. It seeks to distort the deen, to disrupt our access to genuine knowledge and understanding, and to dismiss not only authentic information but those who transmitted it to us. This is truly toxic feminism.

Aniqabi training in self defense is not. A Muslimah getting an education is not. A Muslim woman having a halal career is not. High mahar is not. Muslimah who believe in Allah and his messenger, who believe in the prophets, who believe in the books, who believe in the angels, who believe in the last day, who believe in qadr, and who also want to be financially independent and have satisfying sex lives with their husbands in whatever way both of them desire are not dangerous to Islam.

Sisters who refuse a suitor because he doesn't meet their criterion for marriage are not a threat to the dean. But ideas being pushed by feminists who are Western educated, Western indoctrinated, non Arabic speakers, Islamically untrained like Zahra Ayyubi, which attempt to subvert reality and the correct understanding of what Allah has revealed, those are legitimately harmful and should be opposed. On a side note, we as Muslims need to learn how to differentiate between scholars, the ulama, and academics. A professor at a western university who sits on the faculty of Islamic studies who's not even fluent in Arabic is not a scholar. They are academics who study Islam like an outsider, even if they're Muslims.

The difference between an Islamic scholar and an academic is like the difference between the citizen of a country and a tourist, and we shouldn't learn our theology from them.