Shii Studies Seminars VII: Thulfekar Ali

Which Eve, Which Women? Creation Narratives, Qurʾānic Hermeneutics, and Female Authority in Islamic Thought

This paper examines how competing narratives of Eve’s creation shaped assumptions about women’s status in Islamic thought. It begins with a simple question: which Eve is being read into the Qurʾān? While popular and some scholarly accounts often present the rib narrative as the Islamic account of Eve’s origin, the sources reveal a more complex and contested archive. Jewish interpretive traditions already preserve multiple images of Eve, ranging from life-giver and companion to subordinate and morally culpable figure. These motifs later appear, in different forms, within Muslim ḥadīth, tafsīr, and legal discussions.

The paper first traces the plurality of Eve traditions in Jewish sources, before examining the prominence of the rib motif in Sunnī ḥadīth. It then turns to Shīʿī materials, where both overlap and divergence appear, including cases where creation narratives enter legal reasoning, such as discussions of the khunthā. The paper then returns to the Qurʾān’s own language, especially 4:1, arguing that the Qurʾān does not explicitly state that Eve was created from Adam’s rib. Rather, the rib account becomes Qurʾānic for many readers through ḥadīth reception, isrāʾīliyyāt, and inherited interpretive habits.

The final section proposes a constructive Twelver Shīʿī hermeneutical opening through Sayyid Kamāl al-Ḥaydarī’s Qurʾān-centric method, especially his ideas of the unity of concept and multiplicity of referents, symbolism and parable in the Qurʾānic text, and the distinction between tafsīr āfāqī and tafsīr anfusī. This approach offers a way to reconsider female legal and political authority by distinguishing Qurʾānic concepts from historically male referents and by asking whether gendered exclusions are truly grounded in the Qurʾān itself or in later narrative and juristic formations.