Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society By Zahra Ayubi

Abstract

Zahra Ayubi’s Gendered Morality is a sustained study of a single genre of Islamic ethics, namely, akhlāq, and more specifically, ‘Islamic philosophical ethics’. She deftly reveals this genre’s sexist metaphysical and anthropological assumptions as well as their attendant practical implications that maintain gender hierarchy. At the same time, she also identifies certain resources internal to this genre that might be engaged productively in order to construct a fresh ‘feminist philosophy of Islam’. In her own words: ‘despite the ethicists’ marginalization of women and non-elite men, the texts nonetheless speak to complex gendered and human relations that at times defy their own hierarchical cosmology’ (p. 6). Ayubi concentrates on the Persianate inflection of the akhlāq genre by examining three successive texts: Kīmīā-yi saʿādat or The Alchemy of Happiness by Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī or The Nasirean Ethics by Naṣīr ad-Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 1274), and Akhlāq-i Jalālī or...