ملخص الجهاز:
Book Reviews Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society Zahra Ayubi New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.
Zahra Ayubi's new book, Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society, challenges this assumption by proposing that the genre of akhlāq is equally crucial, both for the comprehension of Islamic trends in the past and for the formation of a genuinely liberatory understanding of Islam in the present.
Arguing that "the construction of masculinity that the ethicists present is synonymous with the process of becoming ethical" (63)—and, one, might add, vice versa—she shows how the texts' account of human potentialities and moral traits, as well as of the household and of society, are pervasively structured around the pursuit of ethical perfection by the elite male.
Nevertheless, the ideal "ethical mascu- linity" constructed in these works is defined in contrast with undisciplined and violent "hegemonic masculinity," such that "akhlāq texts provide a cor- rective discourse against unethical activities that were perceived as manly in premodern Muslim societies" (64, 65).
In chapter two, Ayubi shows how the ethicists' account of the human nafs is suffused by a tension between a formally egalitarian model in which each human nafs is characterized by the same faculties and (implicitly) the same potential for perfection, and a pervasive pattern in which the ethical per- fection of the elite male nafs is nevertheless articulated in contrast with the attributes associated with women and non-elite men.