Response to Zainab Bint Younus’ Review of 'Women and Gender in the Qur’an'

I thank AJIS for recently reviewing my monograph Women and Gender in the Qur’an (Oxford University Press, 2020) and thank Zainab Bint Younus of MuslimMatters.org for taking the time to review the work. I must, however, take issue with the reviewer’s line of critique. As an academic exercise, Women and Gender in the Qur’an offers a reading of the scripture that investigates intra-textual coherence through philological and structural methods. To miss this point is to miss the theoretical foundation of the project. The book does not purport to analyze hadith corpuses or the tafsīr tradition writ large, and I do not attempt to systematically analyze other early Muslim representations of female figures. In constructing a book-length work, a scholar must discern how to narrow the source material to an appropriate scope. In seeing that no previous scholar had produced an intra-textual reading that examines all Qur’anic verses involving female figures, this is where I contributed. The justifications for my scope and methodological focus are included in the book but are unfortunately not presented clearly in the review.