Free Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam by Amina Wadud Page A

not in the sense of

    What’s in a Name? 29

    being alien to them; and He is inside things, but not in the sense of being
    identical with them.” 25 The full understanding of the
    divine– human
    relationships is a paradox beyond the restrictions that mental reasoning places upon conceptions of Allah. Yet we would be less than human beings endowed with wisdom were we not to exert the limits of our reasoning in deciphering the mysteries of this paradox.
    In the Qur’an, all shay’ (things) are part of a system of dualism, divisible and necessarily contingent. Like male and female pairs in humankind, some of these pairs coexist as complementary and contingent equals. Other pairs, like night and day, in and out, up and down, are drawn into mutually necessary opposition. All of creation, according to the Qur’an, is intercon- nected in this way, except Allah, described as not like shay’ . In this way, Allah can be seen as the tension holding the pairs in balance and harmony. This Qur’anic system of correlated and contingent pairs at the meta- physical level is further emphasized on the material level, especially in social–moral terms, by another passage. Whenever two persons come together, Allah is the third among them (58:7). To illustrate, each and every human-to-human relation can be represented as a triad formed with Allah as a supranatural component. Allah, the Ultimate, is in a transcendent place supporting and sustaining the horizontal juxtaposition between any two human beings or any human group. The presence of Allah maintains the
    “I–Thou” proposal of Martin Buber. 26

    Buber indicates that ‘the primary word I–Thou can only be spoken with the whole being.’ In other words this combination forms a unit that implies the relationship of reciprocity. Otherwise, ‘(t)he primary word I–It can never be spoken with the whole being.’ One aspect in this relationship is asymmetrical and reduced to a state of less than wholeness. 27
    This relational paradigm looks like this triad: Allah
    I Thou

    Each two persons are sustained on the horizontal axis because the highest moral point is always occupied metaphysically by Allah. The real center of this metaphysical occupation coincidentally is the heart. So only when two people reflect through the clear mirror of each other’s heart can they avoid violation of tawhid . Then the vertical diagram:

    30 inside the gender jihad

    I
    (no existential symbol of balance, harmony, and reciprocity)
    It

    can appear only if Allah is absent from the formula. If Allah is present in any way, a new horizontal plane is created since Allah operates at the highest point. What appears as hierarchical between the two humans on the physical plane:

    I

    Thou

    Allah

    would not be hierarchical in reality because Allah, the highest point in the composition, constructs a new horizontal axis that sustains parity between the I and the Thou. In fact one must think in terms of a sphere, or in three- dimensional terms, to put this diagram in its fullest conceptual framework. The continual awareness and active reflection of Allah’s presence – the metaphysical component of all human-to-human relations – creates a means for understanding that there can only be parity on a horizontal basis between any two persons or any two collectives. To keep Allah present in all our encounters on the corporeal level a certain moral consciousness is required. That moral consciousness is taqwa , according to the Qur’anic worldview. Yet taqwa is a volitional function of our khilafah or agency. If consciousness of Allah is absent, it is possible to think of others on the vertical plane of inequity and transgression, leading to oppression, abuse,
    and transgression.
    This linguistic reference to a triad does not mean that Allah is a physical thing, an object, let alone a person. She or He is not separate from the creation, especially from the human creature. St. Augustine’s articulation to consider