Ayubi: Gendered Morality: Masculinity, Marriage, and Social Relations in Premodern Islamic Ethics



Gendered Morality

Gendered Morality: Masculinity, Marriage, and Social Relations in Premodern Islamic Ethics
Ayubi, Z. M. (2015). Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society. (Doctoral degree), University of North Caroline, Chapel Hill.  
Ayubi, Z. M. (2019). Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society. New York: Columbia University Press.


Analyze gender constructions as well as moral and religious gender relations
Gender as social behavior related to sex that reflect religious, cultural, political, psychological and social understanding of masculinity and feminity pp 2 
Gender discourse is required to fully understand how these text influenced Muslim notions of gender roles and practices pp 6
Because the ethicists view women’s nafses as having intellectual defects, they essentialize women’s roles in two ways. Their first role is as wives, which involves managing the home so that their husbands can occupy themselves with the lofty goals of transcendence, and become microcosms of the world. Women’s second role is being biological vessels for carrying and nourishing children in their early years. Men of lower social classes provide ancillary support to men of higher social classes by fulfilling social and economic functions according to their skills. P.305


Islamic scriptural sources offer potentially radical notions of equality. Yet medieval Islamic philosophers chose to establish a hierarchical, male-centered virtue ethics. In Gendered Morality, Zahra Ayubi rethinks the tradition of Islamic philosophical ethics from a feminist critical perspective. She calls for a philosophical turn in the study of gender in Islam based on resources for gender equality that are unlocked by feminist engagement with the Islamic ethical tradition.
Developing a lens for a feminist philosophy of Islam, Ayubi analyzes constructions of masculinity, femininity, and gender relations in classic works of philosophical ethics. In close readings of foundational texts by Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, Nasir-ad Din Tusi, and Jalal ad-Din Davani, she interrogates how these thinkers conceive of the ethical human being as an elite male within a hierarchical cosmology built on the exclusion of women and nonelites. Yet in the course of prescribing ethical behavior, the ethicists speak of complex gendered and human relations that contradict their hierarchies. Their metaphysical premises about the nature of the divine, humanity, and moral responsibility indicate a potential egalitarian core. Gendered Morality offers a vital and disruptive new perspective on patriarchal Islamic ethics and metaphysics, showing the ways in which the philosophical tradition can support the aims of gender justice and human flourishing.

This dissertation analyzes gender constructions and notions of moral gender relations in three widely influential medieval Persian treatises of Islamic ethics (akhlaq), Kimiya-i Sa`adat by Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (d. 1111), Akhlaq-i Nasiri by Nasir-ad Din Tusi (d. 1274), and Akhlaq-i Jalali by Jalal ad-Din Davani (d. 1502). In examining these prescriptive works that instruct Muslims on how to live ethical lives, the main question I ask is how have medieval Muslim ethicists constructed morally guided notions of masculinity, femininity, and marriage and male homosocial relations. I argue that these texts reveal a metaphysical tension between an ethical principle that all human selves (nafses) are created equal and a hierarchical organization of humanity based on intellect and spirituality, in which some men are above others based on ethical and rational capacity and all men are above women. The ethicists define ultimate masculinity in terms of power, intellectual potential, and ethical comportment in the domestic realm as well as in homosocial structures of court, civic, and community life. They define women as instrumental to men's ethical activities since they view women themselves as lacking full rationality and limited by their biological functions.


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Resource type
Rights statement
  • In Copyright
Advisor
  • Ali, Kecia
  • Safi, Omid
  • Styers, Randall
  • Ernst, Carl
  • Hammer, Juliane
Degree
  • Doctor of Philosophy
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
Graduation year
  • 2015
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Place of publication
  • Chapel Hill, NC
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  • There are no restrictions to this item.



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