Lacking or complete? Women’s issue took center stage at Cairo Book Fair

Last update: 2025-03-20 11:00:37

“Read! In the beginning was the Word.” Such was the bold title of the fifty-sixth Cairo International Book Fair, which took place from January 23 to February 5. Bold because it combines the first word of the Qur’an according to the received chronological order (“Read!” 96:1) with the first verse of the Gospel of John: in Arabic, in fact, al-kalima is both the word in general and the Word in its theological sense.

 

An Islamo-Christian collage

Quoting the Gospel is no small choice for a cultural event that for many decades was the most important in the Arab world. While the podium of the first place may have passed to the Sharjah Book Fair in the Emirates, the Cairo event continues to gather thousands of publishers, this year 1,345 from 80 countries according to its official website, and sees intense audience participation.

The evangelical-qur’anic title is in fact in line with Egyptian state policy, which in recent years has greatly emphasized harmony between Muslims and the Coptic Christian minority—between 7 and 10 percent according to estimates. Choices such as this show how deep this point has been interiorized in the official discourse. And of course they raise interesting questions for our Western context as well: would it be possible for the Frankfurt or the Turin Book Fair to propose a similar collage of a Gospel passage and a Qur’anic one? Probably not: some would object out of suspicion against Islam, others out of aversion to their Christian cultural roots.

Incidentally, it is useful to remember that for Islam, too, “in the beginning was the Word”: according to the Qur’an, the universe was created through a divine word, the imperative kun (“be!”) that God addressed to the reality to draw it from non-being into being. And although this consideration did probably not enter in the title’s choice, one cannot help but remember that it was in Alexandria, Egypt, in the first centuries of Christianity, that an intense debate developed over the status of this divine word. Out of it came the Creed of Nicaea, exactly 1,700 years ago.

 

The hadīth, them again

And yet not the Nicene Creed or the clash between Arius and Athanasius, but another confrontation took centre stage at the Fair and in the Egyptian media. The bone of contention was Asmā’ ‘Uthmān al-Sharqāwī’s book Complete in Reason and Religion. At first sight, nothing predestined the author, the daughter of a sheikh and a practicing Muslim, to rise to sudden and unwanted media notoriety. With a good record of publications on religious subjects to her credit, she has been working in the field of Islamic preaching for more than 25 years.

Galeotto was the title and he who wrote it, we might say paraphrasing Dante (Inferno 5:137). Complete in reason and religion, in fact, stands in deliberate tension with a famous tradition (hadīth) attributed to Muhammad, which describes women as “lacking in reason and religion.” Reacting to what in their eyes amounted to “an attack on the prophetic tradition,” some vociferous groups immediately launched a virulent media campaign that eventually prompted the publisher, al-Sirāj, to withdraw the book from circulation, adding a letter of apology for having, albeit unintentionally, offended the sensibilities of many believers. It later emerged that this was in fact nothing but a reprint: the text had already been published in 2022 and the first edition sold out slipping under the radar of censorship[1].

This time, however, it was different, thanks to to the visibility associated with the Fair, and because the book hits a raw nerve in contemporary Islamic thought.

The author, who prefers academic argumentation to talk show polemics, explains in her introduction that, while working as a preacher, she has become increasingly puzzled by the presence of a body of misogynistic traditions attributed to the Prophet of Islam. In addition to the unflattering description of feminine believers as “lacking in reason and religion,” these traditions assert, for example, that a people cannot prosper if they are governed by a woman or liken a woman walking down the street to a demon from whom to seek refuge in the privacy of one’s home. And so on and so forth.

 

The last guardian of the Temple of tradition

The problem is that these hadīths are found in al-Bukhārī’s collection, which is regarded as containing only authentic traditions. They are therefore binding for Muslims (male and female). Asmā’ ‘Uthmān al-Sharqāwī’s argumentation is rather straightforward: after recalling the different manner in which the Qurʾān and the hadīths were written down (in a short time span the former, through a longer and more tortuous way the latter), she proceeds to a textual critique of the traditions in question and not just their chains of transmitters. Through a comparison with the Qur’an, Asmā’ ‘Uthmān al-Sharqāwī tries to demonstrate that six of these particularly misogynistic hadīths are false, even though they are found in al-Bukhārī. Finally, to shore up her conclusion, she reviews other Muslim scholars who over the centuries have occasionally questioned the authenticity of this or that tradition in al-Bukhārī’s collection.

Hers would seem to be a rather straightforward argument that remains within the textualist tendency typical of much of contemporary Islam. For example, the author makes no effort in her book to reconstruct the context in which these interpolated traditions may have seen the light, although they present, for those familiar with the late antique Near East, easy parallels with both monastic and rabbinic literature. In the abstract, another and far more dangerous avenue of reasoning would have been possible: one could have asserted the authenticity of these traditions while relativizing their importance for the present. Paradoxically, it is precisely to avoid this kind of contextual criticism, which could have devastating effects on Islamic law, that the author chooses to discard these hadīths. On balance, her proposal is to sacrifice some traditions (six in number) in order to keep the very principle of recourse to tradition alive. Yet, this was enough to set off a media storm.

The episode shows how sensitive the women’s issue is in contemporary Muslim societies, especially when it is a woman who crafts an argument according to the lexicon of Islamic sciences. In fact, as is often the case, censorship achieved the opposite result. A few days after the publisher’s announcement, Asmā’ ‘Uthmān al-Sharqāwī declared that she had made the Pdf of her book freely available online, and her theses were widely debated on some Egyptian channels. Despite all the dangers of echo-chambers to which social media are exposed, the spread of the Internet makes it increasingly difficult for state and religious authorities to control cultural debate. In this sense we can conclude that, despite the unpleasant episode of self-censorship on the part of the publishing house, the Fair’s wish was ultimately fulfilled: “Read! In the beginning was the Word.”

Martino Diez

[1] Ilhām al-Kardūsī, al-Qissa al-kāmila li-sahb “Kāmilāt ʿaql wa-dīn” fī Maʿrad al-Kitāb... Qarār Dār al-nashr [The full story of the withdrawal of “Complete in Reason and Religion” at the Book Fair. It was the Publisher’s decision], “Elwatannews,” February 4, 2025, https://www.elwatannews.com/news/details/7819691#goog_rewarded.