Women and Gender in the Qur'an

Stories about gendered social relations permeate the Qur'an and nearly three hundred verses involve specific women or girls. The Qur'an features these figures in accounts of human origins in stories of the founding and destruction of nations in narratives of conquest in episodes of romantic attraction and in incidents of family devotion and strife. Overall stories involving women and girls weave together theology and ethics to reinforce central Qur'anic ideas regarding submission to God and moral accountability. <p/>Celene Ibrahim explores the complex cast of female figures in the Qur'an probing themes related to biological sex female sexuality female speech and women in sacred history. Ibrahim considers major and minor figures referenced in the Qur'an including those who appear in narratives of sacred history in parables in descriptions of the eternal abode and in verses that allude to events contemporaneous with the advent of the Qur'an in Arabia. Ibrahim finds that the Qur'an regularly celebrates the aptitudes of women in the realms of spirituality and piety in political maneuvering and in safeguarding their own wellbeing; yet women figures also occasionally falter and use their agency toward nefarious ends. <em>Women and Gender in the Qur'an</em> outlines how women and girls - old young barren fertile chaste profligate reproachable and saintly -enter Qur'anic sacred history and advance the Qur'an's overarching didactic aims.<br>