Summary
Karen Bauer and Feras Hamza’s co-written book An Anthology of Qur’anic Commentaries (vol. 2): On Women (Oxford UP, 2022) is a collection of historical and contemporary commentaries on the Qur’an(also Koran. Arabic term meaning, ‘recitation’ or ‘scripture’): Muslims believe that the Holy Qur’an contains divine revelations to the Prophet Muhammed received in Mecca and Medina over a period of… More. It covers five issues: human creation and the idea of “a single soul”; marital roles, specifically Qur’anic verse 4:34 and women’s status in a marriage; Mary, mother of Jesus; women’s legal testimony; and Qur’anic ideas of modesty, specifically of veiling. A chapter is devoted to each of these topics, comprising classical, medieval, modern, and contemporary interpretations of these verses. All chapters include various Muslim perspectives, such as Sunni, Twelver Shia, Ismaili, Ibadi, and Sufi; with the exception of the chapter on Mary, each chapter also includes interviews with contemporary scholars, namely amina wadud, Sa’diyya Shaikh, Fariba Alasvand, Yusuf Saanei, and Nasser Ghorbannia.
