At altmuslimah, Mona Sheikh discusses religion, authority and domestic violence:
Muslims and especially Muslim women suffering from silent acceptance of a narrow approach to religion should reconsider what is taken to be “religious knowledge” in the first place. As the Iranian scholar Abdol Karim Souroush has argued, keeping an issue within the five point scale from wajib [compulsory acts] (over mandub [recommended acts], mubah [neutral act neither seen as good nor bad], makruh [disliked] to haram [forbidden]) and moderating positions according to this scale is not sufficient to deal with the challenges that face Muslims today. An intellectual change is needed to broaden our understanding of what constitutes ‘Islamic knowledge,’ and thus what are legitimate sources—where to find our guidelines to ethical behavior.
Exclusively to rely on textual sources and their related sciences is based on a limited concept of revelation. As the European scholar Tariq Ramadan has argued in his recent book on Islamic ethics and liberation, Radical Reform, by basing our discourses and opinions on the reading of the Quran and the ahadith literature only, we are disregarding half of the revelation: the universe. Sciences that make us understand the universe, history, society and human relations are just as Islamic as sciences approaching the Quran and the ahadith. However these are often dismissed as being secular, thus creating an unnatural hierarchy between sciences and knowledge that ultimately are all human.
Read the full piece here.