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Welcome to another episode of New Books in Islamic Studies. I'm your host, Elia Bazzano. For every program you choose a new and exciting book and chat with the author. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Aishia Geisinger, associate professor of religion at Carleton College, about her fabulous book, Gender and the Construction of Exegetical Authority, published by Brill in 2015.
Aishia Geisinger's monograph, Gender and the Construction of Exegetical Authority, contributes to the growing field of intersections between Gender Studies and Quranic Studies. Unlike some recent studies that have explored the role of gender in the Qur'an itself, or in applications of the Qur'an, Professor Geisinger takes a step back to explore how exegites broadly conceived have historically understood the relevance and importance of gendered sources in terms of their authority to make sense of the Qur'an. What does it mean for example when a particular Qur'an commentary mentions Hadith with women in the SNAD, while other commentaries do not? Are these rhetorical moves intentional?
Are they significant in their time? In order to address these questions and others, Professor Geisinger looks at traditional works of exegesis, sections on exegesis and Hadith compilations, as well as literature on the virtues of the Qur'an among other topics, all the while engaging with the rich breadth of modern and pre-modern scholarship, ranging from Bukhari to Judith Butler. The funnotes are extensive, the prose is clear, and the book is well organized. The monograph will likely appeal to a number of disciplines, especially Islamic history, Quranic Studies and Gender Studies.
Without further ado, here's my interview with Professor Geisinger. Good morning Aishia, thank you so much for joining us today. Good morning, and thank you for inviting me. Yeah, I'm really excited to talk about this incredibly rich and timely book that you've written, but as our tradition is here in the books and Islamic Studies.
Could you first tell us a little bit about how you became interested in the topics of the book, including Quranic Studies, Islamic Studies, and Gender Studies, and how the topic came into your life? Well, when I was going to begin my PhD, I already had an MA in Islamic Studies, but I didn't think that I wanted to continue with that. So I did a qualifying year with several courses in early Christian Studies, and that was what interested me much more in fact. There seemed to be a lot more scope in that field for pursuing the kind of research that I found interesting.
But when it was time to select courses, for some reason, my department told me that I needed to sign up for a course that was being offered that year on Hadith. I'm not sure why maybe it was under enrolled. I didn't want to take it. It was an inconvenient time, but I also thought it was probably not going to be very interesting.
What were we going to talk about now? The entire semester talking about the debates of whether or not Hadith go back to Muhammad or not. But anyway, I didn't really have much choice. I took it, and it turned out to be an extremely worthwhile course that changed the course of my study plans actually.
So among other things I learned about reading Hadith's as literary texts. And so for me, that opened up a whole new world, and I decided that I absolutely wanted to continue doing Islamic Studies. So we'll get back more into this later, but the idea of reading Hadith's as literary texts, and as you discuss in your monograph, particularly even the S-Nads, the chain of, I heard from so and so, I heard from so and so. I think this might strike a lot of people as an odd claim, although you explain it very well.
So can you say a little bit about how Hadith or its Nads could be understood as a literary text? Well, I mean, one reason why this course was so game-changing for me was that I had always encountered Hadith's as either used as proof texts, usually in discussions of Islamic law or theology, or sometimes as inspirational texts which are supposed to foster certain pious emotions, you know, gratitude to God, fear of the upcoming apocalypse, and so on. And their meaning was usually in my experience treated either as very apparent, especially by people who've been influenced by Salafi perspectives, or for neo-traditionalists as something that was interpreted authoritatively centuries ago, so by people like Ibn Hajar and his commentary on al-Bukhari. So in either case, they're closed texts.
They mean what they mean and there's really nothing that you can say. And so it's a discussion and debate stopper. In my experience, learning to read them is literary texts, then for me, it opened them up in all kinds of interesting ways. So instead of them being texts which can be employed to stop discussion and debate, they opened them up in fact.
And so if I could push a little bit further and connect this to one of the things you mentioned in your acknowledgments section, you mentioned there's some particular mentors and scholars who influenced this project and your scholarship more generally. Could you say anything about some formative encounters you might have had with some of these scholars and mentors? Well, the teacher of that fateful course who then became my advisor was Sebastian Gunther. He was at the University of Toronto at that time now he's in Goating in Germany.
So his work on literary readings of Hadith was very important to me. While it's all his work on Tefsir, especially as a genealogical genre, and he ended up on my committee, was also absolutely central to the work that I ended up doing, especially on the book. Well, great. And you get a chance to get into some of that scholarship in the text as well, which we can talk about as the interview unfolds.
So in terms of thinking about the book project in particular, I'd like to start things off with one of your opening questions. And so if I can quote from your book, you ask, is it possible to chart a history of the pre-modern genre of crayon commentary without considering gender? Or if one were to attempt to do so, would anything fundamental be omitted? So obviously you write a whole book about this and we have the next hour or so to talk about it.
But could you say a little bit about your own preliminary answer to that as well as how some of your interlocutors who may or may not agree with you might respond to that question? Well, when I was writing my dissertation and people would ask me what my topic was on and I would tell them the most common response I would get would be extreme puzzlement. And the question, is there even the material to write an entire dissertation on that? And this would be often from people who are quite familiar with tough-seared texts.
So it wasn't that they had never encountered them before. So yeah, that was a common view. But among my findings is that if you want to understand how interpretive authority works in pre-modern tough-seared texts. And here, I mean primarily, some neat tough-seared texts.
That was the focus of my book simply due to the problems of trying to have a wider focus. So I did not look at, say, souffy tough-seared texts. I've used 12 or she exegetical works for comparative purposes, but that was not my focus. The only involvement of these tough-seared texts was hood.
And again, for comparative purposes, I mean, what I'm saying here is primarily talking about some neat tough-seared works and how this might relate to others is unclear and present. But if you want to understand how interpretive authority works in the text that I was using, then gender is an absolutely simple component in understanding that. And as you demonstrate in the text, the classical scholars are constantly thinking about gender, but not necessarily in ways that we might think about in the modern world, which relates to one thing that you point out, is that oftentimes when modern people are thinking about gender, they equate this with, like, womanness, which is obviously a very contextualized, maybe even odd way to conceptualize things. So nonetheless, you look at Judith Butler and other people that think through ideas of gender.
So can you say something about how people in the pre-modern world and these scholars and societies that you're surveying, how did they understand this 21st English term gender that is used in your title and throughout the book? Well, when I was researching it, I initially did read the text through the lens of common-sensical ideas about gender that we find in late from the 8th century, North America. Well, that was when I was researching and writing. It was still the 20th century.
So, you know, gender is a binary where you have males and females. Those are the only two possible categories. There are two opposite sexes, which are always naturally, quote unquote, attracted to one another. I mean, that was ubiquitous in almost anything that I had ever read or heard about Islam and, I mean, in the culture I was raised in.
Along with a notion of gender complementarity that, well, men and women are spiritually and for many authors intellectually equal, they have different social roles due to their innate differences and so on. So, that was what I started out assuming that the texts would say. But this quickly fell apart for me when I actually began to read the texts. And, I mean, you asked what texts and persons were more most fundamental in my scholarly formation.
I mean, really the, aside from those mentioned and others, which I have not yet mentioned, the experience of spending hours reading primary source texts, particularly Tuftsio text, was absolutely foundational. It's an experience like none other. And it certainly did bring me up short very quickly in terms of the inadequacy of the ideas about gender that I was bringing to the text. So, I mean, I was immediately confronted with questions like, well, you know, what on earth is a mohannath?
How do eunuchs fit into this? Why is it that according to the exegetes only free women have to cover their heads and bodies completely and slave women don't? You know, aren't female slaves women? And where was the gender complementarity?
So, I realized that I had to ask how it was that pre-modern exegetes understand gender. Whether they're underlying assumptions. And are these the same as the ones that I'm assuming ought to be there? And I mean, the short answer to that is no, definitely not.
So, the works of a son and ajmabadi were very important in my thinking about this. So, she wrote an article Beyond the Americas, Our Gender and Sexuality, Useful Categories of Historical Analysis. Her book also, Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards. Jorzeve's work on Ottoman history also covers some of the same kind of ground.
So, these authors look at how gender is a construct that's historically situated. They talk about especially zovey, ancient Greek theories of gender, which Muslims end up encountering when they translate Greek words, works on medicine and science into Arabic. So, Galen's theories, for example. Galen saw gender as a hierarchical structure where you have free men who are at the top.
And everyone else is basically a not man who are ranged at various stages below. So, in other words, he's not working with a binary. He's working with a situation in which the assumption is that male is the norm. And it's really the only kind of human body.
And then the other type of body is simply of the partridge of various degrees from that norm. It's not its own separate thing in the sense that we understand or conceive of gender binaries. So, this has all kinds of implications for how one's going to read these texts. And I think it's helpful the way you demonstrate that although pre-modern ideas of gender in general are clearly not identical to contemporary ideas, they're nonetheless existed as spectrum.
And the simple binary, at least in practice, couldn't often be helpful. And so, another thing, after you begin things with this big question that you go on to answer over the next several hundred pages, you start off with a tradition, something called the gecko tradition. And I think to a listener or a reader who's unfamiliar with the contents of this will just sound quite odd and strange, but perhaps it's a literary trope that works well because it catches the reader's attention. So, could you tell us about this gecko tradition and why you wanted to capture your reader's interest at the very beginning with this text?
Well, I mean, on one hand, this is a tradition which you find in a number of different exegetical works, according to which I show usually is the person who's supposed to have transmitted it, though some other versions have uncher eat another female companion. So, according to that, you know, Muhammad told her that when Abraham was thrown into the fire in the famous story that's in the Quran where Abraham refuses to worship the idols of his people, so they throw him into the fire, but the fire doesn't burn him because he's finally protected. So, according to the story, then Abraham was thrown into the fire and all of the animals who witnessed this tried to put out the fire except for the gecko, and it blows on the fire. So, therefore, the messenger of God from Muhammad orders that gecko should be killed.
So, I mean, from the perspective of a modern reader that might seem to be a very strange kind of story. In a famous article by Norman Calder, where he's talking about the Tefsir genre and how it works, he quotes this particular tradition, in fact, it appears in Ibn Kathir's stories of the prophets work as an example of material that really is rather trivial, but that ends up being foregrounded by a very marginal current of Qur'anic interpretation because it comes in the form of a hadith. So, traditions like this do raise interpretive questions, and that was what I was trying to discuss there. That's a particularly ostensibly trivial hadith, especially from our perspective where it raises all kinds of ethical questions too, and environmental questions.
But so many hadith attributed to women that find their way into Tefsir texts. When you look at them and say, well, in comparison to all the masses of material that Tefsir texts contain, why would you focus on these few hadith which have female transmitters? Aren't you distorting the study of Tefsir if you do that? You're just focusing on this relatively minor thing.
So, I mean, that is a very important question of method. How do you focus on an aspect of the Tefsir tradition without turning it into a search for something that might be of interest to contemporary people for our own reasons, but really historically wasn't of great interest to the exeges. So, I'll take a quick example there is how you do that, and I lay out a number of methodological prepositions for how that can be done. And I think that's a central contribution of the book, actually, these issues of method.
And one of the things, obviously, by recounting a sketch of a tradition is you get into the idea of Aisha the wife of the prophet and what role she played in the later formation of tradition as a hadith transmitter. Now, on that note, one thing you point out that struck me as particularly interesting is you look at the book of Tefsir sections of various hadith collections, and you know that their citation of female authorities has a somewhat unprecedented manifestation. Could you say something about that, and why these books of hadith began this ostensibly novel tradition of incorporating females as part of the chains in a widespread manner? Well, in the book, I argue that it's not so much a novel thing.
I mean, when hadith collectors, such as Bukari and the term of the Anand, they're doing this, I would argue that they're actually responding to something that's going on already. These traditions are already being used exegetically. Sometimes female transmitters are being quoted as their putative origins, sometimes not. But these hadith collectors were concerned with what they regarded as sound is not in accordance with their ideas of how one grades hadith according to their soundness or not.
So they're taking hadith majority in circulation, but they are very concerned about, especially in the case of Bukari, he wants all of the is not to be sound. So the result of that, and that's not intentional, it was a byproduct really of the method, was that more traditions which are attributed to women become foregrounded. So in his tough seer chapter, for instance, then that's about 12% of the traditions, which are attributed to female figures, mostly to Aisha Bintabi Buk. So could you say a little bit more about Aisha Bintabi Bukari?
This is a name, obviously, that comes up a lot in terms of hadith transmitters, famous Muslims, famous wives of the prophet in particular. So why is she a central figure in your study? Because there are so many hadith which are ascribed to her that end up being quoted by Sunni exegites, though not only by Sunni exegites. I mean, one thing that very much interested me and that I hope to do further research on later is how they're taken up by a couple of 12 or Shia exegites.
So in a tosy, as well as a toprisse, tough seer works, then you have hadith which are attributed to her being quoted. Now, I mean, they're echoing what Sunni exegites are doing, but still, anyway, it's complicated. I want to look at it further some other time. But it's partly because of the volume of hadith, including those which are deemed exegetical, which are traced back to her.
So they find their way into the tough seer works as more hadith are being incorporated. And so what was it about her as opposed to other companions or wives that made her stand out so many years later? This is a complicated historical question that the number of people have tried to deal with, not in terms of tough seer, but in terms of why so many hadith have been ascribed to her. It's hard to say.
Probably a combination of factors that's something to do with it. So she was about 18 when Muhammad died, apparently. And she lived for several decades after. She was very well connected, being the daughter of Abu Bakr.
And according to what is presented to us in certain hadith collections, anyway, she seems to have had a lively correspondence with certain leading male figures of the day. And to have been active also in terms of people consulting her and to a much lesser extent, Umm Salama on questions of Muhammad's practice and so on. So, I mean there are a number of social and political factors that are linked to why she might have been memorialized in that way. In terms of whether or not the hadith actually go back to her, did she see herself as quote unquote doing tough seer?
I mean, I do not get into the question of whether or not they can be traced back to her in my book. I actually don't really think it's relevant because first of all, even if you can show that something goes back to the seventh century and this can turn in foranias with that person, that's certainly no guarantee that they actually said it or that their words were taken out of context. I mean, we can see that nowadays in real time with the disaster that is the internet. So, there's that.
And then there's also the question of what happens when some of these words are quoted and used exegetically. So, I get into that especially in chapter three of my book where you have exegetes who are quoting words sometimes of pre-Islamic poets, male much more so than female. Exegetically. So, in that case, is exegetes happening?
Could one possibly imagine that the pre-Islamic poet thought that he or she was interverting the Quran? Obviously not. So, to what extent is that relevant to our understanding of what hadith are doing? I mean, for the exegetes, they're functioning exegetically evidently.
For the original speaker, no, they couldn't have foreseen that this was what their words were going to be doing. So, there's definitely a historical gap between, on one hand, you know, seventh century figures. And again, male as well as female. So, I mean, people like Evan Abuzz were quoted all over Tuftseer works.
Probably would be very surprised and perhaps very unhappy with some or many of the interpretations that are credited to them. So, there's a gap between historical people and what ends up being represented in Tuftseer works. But, I mean, ultimately, the more interesting question to my mind is, regardless of the historical veracity of what's being said, what happens to these texts? They take on the life of their own because they're being quoted and re-quoted and reworked and so on.
So, what do they end up meaning for the genre? And what does it mean that you have these traditions which are ascribed to Aisha or much less commonly to other female figures from early Islam and being repeated and repeated? Right. And I think your discussion of the, you know, ostensibly irrelevant question of like if these traditions go back historically is well taken, you know, in part just because of like the title of your book, you're looking at constructions of exegetical authority.
And part of this, something else that struck me is you observed that more female successors than companions are mentioned regarding Tuftseer, whereas the inverse is true for males. So, could you? The other way around. Okay, please correct me.
Sorry. It's many more male successors than male companions are presented as sources of material that are relevant to Tuftseer, whereas in the case of females, it's the reverse. So many more female companions than female successors. So, if you picture it like a funnel, right, in the case of male figures, the point of the funnel is down.
The wide end is up. So, as time goes on, you know, many, many more manifest, every generation are quoted as possible sources of exegesis. Whereas in the case of female figures, the funnel is the other way. The wide end is down.
So, it's the companions who are the most commonly quoted, far fewer female successors after the successor generation. In the sources that I used, it's very rare. And when they appear, it's usually actually hard to tell whether these are real people or whether these are even intended to be understood as real people or whether these are pious stock figures from stories. And so, also related to this question of historical period, you choose to focus on just mostly just a few hundred years in the early and early classical period.
What made you want to pick that time period, as opposed to something later or even something more broad? Well, first of all, that was where I started out from. I mean, in that street Vohadith course, I started out. That was when I encountered the, you know, Bukhari's chapter on Tuftseer in his Hadiath work.
And noticed that there were so many Hadiath, which were attributed to women, mostly to Aishan, went looking in the secondary literature for any clue as to what this means and whether its implications for Tuftseer and found very little and really nothing that analyzed it, so hence the project. So, on one hand, yes, that was where I started in the formative period. And wanting to understand what Bukhari was doing, then I was looking at other sources which are conventionally dated to the formative period to see what he was doing was unusual and if so, in what ways and so on. So, there was that.
So, that was my starting point. At the same time, it's because of the funnel shape of quoted authorities that we were talking about, right? You have primarily female companions who are quoted. So, it made sense to focus on earlier work because this was closer to the ostensible historical period that these figures are coming from.
But, I mean, I intended this work to be in part a way of establishing the ground for later study of medieval and later medieval Tuftseer works. So, in the path to, as far as I could see, look at the earlier period first for historical reasons, but that's just the beginning really. And I think the funnel visual is helpful for thinking about who are the women initially that were included in these traditions and how, as you look at different Tuftseer works, you see which traditions continue and which exegetes are citing, other exegetes who happen to be citing women. And so, obviously, there's a certain logic to start early in that regard as well.
Who's your audience for this book if you wanted to whittle it down to a particular sub-fuel? Well, Tuftseer studies, definitely. Well, I didn't intend it to be exclusive. It is situated across a confluence of disciplines.
So, I mean, it's about Tuftseer, but it focuses primarily on Hadith among all the various types of exegetical materials, which are attributed to women. So, people who are interested in Hadith and reads these texts through the lens of gender. So, people who are interested in gender. So, it does have a possible resonance to a number of people with different types of interests.
So, you've mentioned some of the surprises that you encountered in the sense of just things that you didn't expect. Could you say, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced either in terms of structuring the project or intellectually challenging questions on their own right that you encountered? During your research and writing? Well, because there's so little secondary literature that deals directly with the issues that I was attempting to look at, then it was challenging simply deciding what to do.
I mean, it's like being in a field of freshly fallen snow and there's no path has been made already by anyone, so where do you go? How are you going to cross it? So, yes, it was difficult to decide what would be the best way to approach the question, how to deal with it methodologically, and how to cut it down to size so that it wouldn't turn into the never-ending research project of doom. So, what kinds of projects do you hope others take up in light of your research?
Well, I mean, I'm very glad to see that there is a lot of interest and a growing amount of scholarship on questions related to women in the Corps on, women and Tafsir. So, I hope that there will be a lot more research dealing with various aspects of both of these questions. I mean, we know really very, very little about the history of the interpretation of the Corps on. The Tafsir works that we have available to us in print are only a very small proportion of what once existed.
It's unclear the extent to which what we have is representative of general interpretive friends that once were out there. And even what we have is an absolutely immense literature. So, there's plenty of scope for all different types of research into it, and I hope that it proceeds. And can I say also that the scrutiny with which you document your sources is very user-friendly, perhaps daunting to be un-initiated, but nonetheless extraordinarily helpful.
And I think it will clearly lay the ground for people to continue. Thanks, in large part, to your extensive citations. So, you mentioned a little bit about the challenges you faced writing it and thinking about it. What do you think for scholars, so people that pick up this book with interest as professionals, academics, what do you think the biggest challenge is that readers will encounter going through the book?
I would like to think that I've written it in such a way as to minimize these challenges, but... I can clarify too, I don't mean it in a logistical sense, like the prose is complicated or something like that, but intellectually or trying to distinguish between two fields what kinds of questions are historical, what kinds of questions are theological. Not that example, particularly, but in your mind, what are the intellectual challenges you think this book presents most to readers? Well, for people, it really does.
The assumption is that people already have a fair amount of familiarity with the Hadith literature, that they know a fair amount about Muslim history, especially early Muslim history, and that they know something about Tefsir and how it works. So that is actually rather a lot to ask readers to come to think of it. So it can present issues simply of having certain types of historical and textual background. It also, I mean, it is a departure from many of the types of things that I had to read today when I was doing my comprehensive.
So for people who are accustomed to reading much of the older scholarship, especially, this might be such a departure that they're struggling to try to contextualize it and relate it to other things that they have read already. And I think, and this is, I think, also clear from someone who surveys Islamic study scholarship from the past several decades, is that the next list of focus on gender isn't something that permeates a lot of work. So even if someone is familiar with early Islamic history and Tefsir, for example, Judith Bothers' ideas on gender, for example, might seem completely foreign to them. And so when you use this from gender in the title and you discuss it throughout the book returning to a topic we touched on earlier, could you say, what are some of the other main categories that affect someone's exegetical authority?
And so you've talked about where they fit in the spectrum of gender, whether they're free or a slave, what are the other considerations that would have affected the legitimacy of someone's exegetical traditions? I just wanted to say something about the question of using gender as a central category in the study of pre-modern Islam. Yes, it's not, it hasn't exactly been the central theme of the discipline up until now, but that is beginning to change. So in a very recent book, I don't know if you've encountered it by Nadia Maria Al-Shay, Women Islam and Abbas at Identity, she does that.
She looks at various representations of female figures in Abbas and texts and she asks, what's gender doing in this representation and how is it being used and how does it relate to wider themes of the text? So that type of scholarship is starting to happen and I think that now that the dam has burst, so to speak, that there'll be a lot of other scholarship that's going to quickly follow. So one hopes in ten years time it's going to be a different situation with regard to that. And I can note as well, this can be a plug for our listeners as well.
The new books in Islamic Studies has interviewed a number of scholars including you and Aaron Katz and Natchit Jotteri and Karen Bauer and others who have been working on these kinds of topics. So if you go back to this category of gender but also other factors such as whether or not someone is free or slave, could you say a little bit about these categories that would have affected the legitimacy of someone as a transmitter? I mean it depends on the time in which you're talking. Potentially any companion of the Prophet, regardless of if they're male or female or they're free or slave, could transmit Hadith and their Hadith are available in the various compilations of Hadith mostly from the, which were compiled mostly in the third slash ninth centuries by and large.
Some earlier, some later. But I mean in proportion, I mean the vast majority of Hadith are from free. In terms of what ends up being taken up by exegites, I mean I do look at some aspects of this in my book. Again it really depends on the exegites when they're writing.
What are their overarching methodologies that they are using for interpreting the Quran? What is the state of Hadith scholarship at the time? So as I discuss in chapter six I believe, once the Hadith collections have been carried out and they're well known, then it no longer is seen as necessary by many exegites to include the entire is not of the Hadith. Well in fact that happens earlier on for a number of exegites.
In the case of Amatoree, he does not include his nods and so on. I mean they are cumbersome. That is one factor which will determine or plays a role in determining whether or not women are being included as authorities, whether it's nods are being cited, whether they're being truncated, whether the Hadith itself is not being cited but it's only being alluded to. Ideas of what is or isn't a reliable Hadith.
So this takes us back to the question of Hadith studies and how Hadith scholars determined this. And whether or not a given exegite, what type of Hadith he wanted to use. So I mean sometimes they're quite happy to quote Hadith which they regarded as weak or even perhaps spurious, like the merit of sword traditions that some of them are happy to quote, for instance. So there are a whole host of factors that go into the decisions of particular exegites around who they are aren't going to quote.
And so that's one reason why reading tough seer works often presents you with things that you weren't expecting to see necessarily because it's often difficult to predict how they're going to make decisions. So sometimes you can look at a tough seer which you can place several different types of seer with side and look at particular verses and see that they're all quoting this particular variant reading from Aisha. On the other hand, perhaps not. And so sometimes it's difficult to see why it is that they're making certain interpretive choices and why they're not but it's definitely a complicated undertaking.
So on the note of complicated undertakings and related to how we began things, have you had a chance to use the book or excerpts from the book with your students? No, not yet. So since you work at an academic institution, I'm guessing you've thought about the book pedagogically, to some extent, would you have any advice or guidance for educators that would be interested in using the text in the classroom setting? Are there any other things that you would like to do with the book?
I would like to talk about the text in terms of studying particular parts of the text and the introduction might be a good reading, actually. If they want to talk about constructions of women in as punitive sources of exegetical materials, then chapters three and four, especially chapter three, because it gets into the whole issue of volition or not. And to what extent we can read any type of volition into the exegetical materials which are used. I mean, that relates not only to female figures as punitive sources of exegetical materials, but also to men.
So that could give rise to all kinds of interesting classroom conversations. I'm wanting to talk about the interface between theories of interpretive authority and then how they end up being, you know, translating into actual lived practice. So do theories which apparently prioritize masculinity as something which is preeminently authoritative? Does that mean that necessarily in the real world, all women are unable to engage in the interpretation of a text?
I deal with that in chapter six, well also in chapter one. So there are a number of different ways that it could be used. And I think it's helpful too. And I think one of the qualities of real publications in general is the very meticulous organization of the chapters and the table of contents.
And I think it could make it very user friendly in that regard to identify even particular passages that could be helpful in a teaching context. So before we conclude things up, I think there's one question. If someone picks up the book or maybe for our listeners might be present upon first glance, but you addressed early on that it's not the focus of your text. But this question of where are all the female exegetes throughout Islamic history?
So obviously in terms of like classical exegetes, your book is not about focusing on female exegetes. Could you say a little bit about why that was not an interest or why that would be an unproductive or not unproductive? But yeah, why is that something you chose not to particularly tackle in your project? Well, to my knowledge, there are no female exegetes per se until the 20th century.
So exegetes in the sense of those who write tussier works. Now the whole question of whether or not there could be out there somewhere, I do deal with a bit in chapter six. It is to my mind conceivable that perhaps somebody someday will unearth a hadith-based interpretation of perhaps some verses of the Quran offered by medieval women or perhaps the place to look would be in Sufi literature. And there were some late medieval Sufi females, scholars who wrote so Aijel Bowne as who I'm thinking of at the moment.
Who was familiar with Sufi tussier anyway? I mean, she does reference it in some of her works. I mean, it's possible that it's out there, but it was not something that was memorialized as central in any way as far as we know. So finally, one of our students, new books and songs today as well is to conclude things by having our authors share a little bit about future and current projects.
So related to the book project or not, what are some things that you're currently working on or see yourself pursuing in the next 10 years or so? Lots of things. Well, I mean, the book has suggested some avenues of further research. So what is it that happens with exegetical materials attributed to women in later medieval works?
I mean, I talked about that to some extent, but it's only really a preliminary examination. One about the interface between Hadith commentaries. So, I mean, earlier we were mentioning that certain Hadith works, so Bukhari, Etermavi, Anasayam, Hakim, these have chapters on tussier. So, I mean, a number of Hadith commentaries also then necessarily, well, not necessarily necessarily, but I mean, they do end up with these chapters on tussier as part of them.
And in some cases, so, within Hunter's, Fatabari, for instance, he is quoting, among other things, certain exegetical works. So, there's an interplay between Hadith and tussier in these medieval texts, in fact, which nobody has really researched. So, there's that. They're quite a few things.
Well, I'll look forward to keeping my eyes tuned. And it's been a pleasure chatting with you. Aisha, and thank you so much for letting us interview you about your fantastic book. Well, thank you very much for having me.
Our pleasure. That was my conversation with Aisha Geisinger, Associate Professor of Religion at Carleton College about her fabulous book, Gender and the Construction of Exegetical Authority. I wish my braille in 2015. Thank you for listening.
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