IntroductionIn the last decade, a number of monographs and forays in the field ofMuslim women’s studies have attempted to examine the place of theMuslim woman in the interpretive heritage of Islamic exegetical texts, particulythe hadith tufsir literature from the period of classical Islam.’ The figureof Eve (Hawwa’ in Qur’anic terminology) is an inevitable topic of discussionin all of these scholarly studies, primarily due to her definitive rolein the evolution of gender categories in the Islamic exegetical texts, and,subsequently, how this role has become an indicator of direction for theMuslim woman’s identity. The figure of Eve, in short, as articulated byMuslim classical exegetes, has not ony defined the identity of Muslimwoman; it has also set the parameters for how that identity has been forged.Yet, the traditional view of Eve portrays woman as both physically andmentally inferior to man, as well as spiritually inept. This classical interpretationof Eve has come to be endowed with sacred authority, more so byvirtue of its place in our Islamic past than by any Qur’anic sanction.This is not to imply that all of the medieval classical writings on Islamconstitute a monolithic whole. After all, the sources of the Shari‘ah, namely,the Qur’an and the hadith, historically have been highly adaptable texts:In the case of the Qur’an, its directives are general, broad, and flexiblein most cases; therefore they could be translated into the termsof a specific social reality of each generation of interpreters.Concerning the hadith . . . given the inevitable gap between theactual and the idealized. . . it is not surprising that the Hadith containsan abundance of varied and often contradictory traditions, ...
