Tawhid Paradigm and an Inclusive Concept of Liberative Struggle

Abstract

Building on previous studies on a mid- and late-twentieth-century recasting of Islam’s doctrine of monotheism, or tawhid, as a distinctly Islamic framework for liberative praxis, this article considers the interplay between the particular and the universal in the tawhidic paradigms of Iranian lay theologian Ali Shariati (1933–1977) and African-American pro-faith and pro-feminist theologian amina wadud (b. 1952). The article proposes that although it was developed in a distinctly Islamic register by means of Quranic exegesis and intrareligious conversations, the tawhidic paradigm has always been conversant with a range of non-Islamic liberative paradigms, and these conversations have been integral to the negotiation of a more inclusive concept of tawhid. To continue to recast tawhid in a more inclusive register, the article further argues, requires taking account of the non-Muslim ‘other’ as an equal moral agent in liberative struggles and embracing Islam’s theological and ideological ‘others’ as equally significant repositories of liberative potential.

1. Introduction

Islamic liberation theology emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century in the context of the rise of liberation theologies and ideologies worldwide. The embeddedness of Muslim liberation theologians in their particular local contexts and religious traditions cannot, therefore, be considered in isolation from their simultaneous situatedness in a global setting shaped by Cold War geopolitics, postcolonial nation building, and a revolutionary zeitgeist manifested in leftist guerrilla insurgencies, feminist activism, and racial justice movements. To examine the interplay between the particular and the universal in this regard is to take concurrent account of that which distinguishes Islamic liberation theology from, as well as that which connects it to, other liberative theologies and ideologies. Probing this interplay is further helpful for seeing the ways in which Muslim liberation theologians have tried to reconcile their distinctly Islamic perspectives with an inclusive and universal concept of liberative struggle.1

Building on previous studies on a mid- and late-twentieth-century recasting of Islam’s doctrine of monotheism, or tawhid, as a distinctly Islamic framework for liberative praxis (Adhan 2016; Rahemtulla 2017, 2019; Şengül 2015; Timani 2019; Völker 2021), the present article considers the interplay between the particular and the universal in the tawhidic paradigms of Iranian lay theologian Ali Shariati and African-American pro-faith and pro-feminist theologian amina wadud.2 The article proposes that although it was developed in a distinctly Islamic register by means of Quranic exegesis and intrareligious conversations, the tawhidic paradigm has always been conversant with a range of non-Islamic liberative paradigms, and these conversations have been integral to the negotiation of a more inclusive concept of tawhid. To continue to recast tawhid in a more inclusive register, the article further argues, requires taking account of the non-Muslim ‘other’ as an equal moral agent in liberative struggles and embracing Islam’s theological and ideological ‘others’ as equally significant repositories of liberative potential.3 This two-pronged argument is expounded in four sections.

The first two sections examine Shariati’s recasting of tawhid as a theological proposition that entails an active commitment to liberative struggles. A case is made that while Shariati’s particular account was negotiated in conversation with alternative interpretations of tawhid in Iran and beyond, the intersectional turn in his tawhidic paradigm is also the result of his engagements with socialism and postcolonialism as two major non-Islamic liberative paradigms of his time. The third section probes wadud’s recasting of the tawhidic paradigm in a gender-inclusive and non-heteronormative register. Foregrounding her intersectional frame of analysis and her diverse engagements with a range of Muslim and non-Muslim interlocutors, the section further considers the capacities of wadud’s liberation theology for cultivating an inclusive and universal concept of liberative struggle. In the fourth section, the emphasis on Islamic distinctiveness in the tawhidic paradigms of Shariati and wadud is contrasted with the more universalist horizon of Hamid Dabashi’s (2008) proposal for a new Islamic liberation theology—he calls it an “Islamic theodicy” (p. 18)—that embraces its theological and ideological ‘others’.

2. Shariati: A Liberative Recasting of Tawhid

Ali Shariati has been described as “a chief exponent of the sociopolitical implications of tawhid” (Rahemtulla 2017, p. 28). Born on 23 November 1933 into a lower-middle-class religious family, Shariati spent his early years in the northeastern Iranian city of Mashhad.4 His father, Mohammad-Taghi, was a reformist Islamic preacher who ran an educational institute known as the Center for the Propagation of Islamic Truth. It was here that the young Shariati received his early schooling in Arabic, Islamic history, and Quranic interpretation. Upon completing a degree in Persian Literature at the University of Mashhad, Shariati won a government scholarship to pursue his studies abroad. Between 1959 and 1963, he was in Paris, where he earned a doctorate degree in the History of Medieval Islam from Sorbonne University. All the while, in addition to collaborating with other diasporic Iranian dissidents, Shariati developed an abiding interest in Third World revolutionary movements, and he immersed himself in the radical intellectual debates taking place in Paris at the time. He returned to Iran in 1964, and was appointed two years later as a history professor at the University of Mashhad.

The publication in 1969 of Eslamshenasi (Islamology), which was a collection of his lessons on the history of Islam, gave Shariati a national profile. Between 1968 and 1972, he was a regular speaker at the Hosseiniyeh Ershad, a religious center in Tehran, whose aim it was to engage the young educated urban classes in debates about Islamic theology and history. In his lectures, which attracted large audiences and whose tapes and transcripts were circulated widely around the country, Shariati criticized the politically quietist and pro-status quo Shia clerical establishment and offered new readings of the major Islamic and Shia doctrines and historical events. The popularity of these lectures aroused the ire both of the state’s secret police, or the SAVAK, which saw Shariati’s anti-oppression interpretation of Islam as a thinly veiled criticism of the Iranian monarchy, and of the conservative religious establishment, who accused Shariati of heresy. The SAVAK’s forced closure of the Hosseiniyeh Ershad in November 1972 brought an end to the most prolific phase of Shariati’s intellectual life. He was arrested, held in solitary confinement for eighteen months, and placed under effective house arrest thereafter. In May 1977, despite a government-imposed travel ban against him, he managed to leave Iran, arriving first in Brussels and then in Southampton, England, where three weeks after his arrival, he died of a heart attack. Some months later, in the winter of 1978–79, when scores of Iranians marched the streets demanding the downfall of the monarchy, banners with Shariati’s pictures and quotes were ubiquitous. His politically charged religious lexicon, including his concept of an egalitarian tawhidic society, scholars of modern Iran have noted, were instrumental in fashioning the revolutionary consciousness of that period (Abrahamian 1982; Ghamari-Tabrizi 2004).

But Shariati was neither the first nor the only twentieth-century Iranian intellectual to engage in a reinterpretation of tawhid. Shariat Sangelaji, in Tawhid-e Ebadat (Monotheism of Worship) (1940) (Sangelaji [1940] 2014), defined the Islamic doctrine of divine unity as the refusal to deify anyone or anything other than or along with Allah, and he considered such popular Shia beliefs and practices as expecting the intercession of the Prophet and imams on the Day of Judgment, seeking blessings from purportedly sacred objects, and the worship of graves and shrines to be tantamount to a new form of polytheism, or shirk (p. 204). Although his was not a manifestly political rendition of reformist Islam, Sangelaji’s conception of tawhid was not completely devoid of sociopolitical implications. As noted by Ali Rahnema (2015), Sangelaji’s understanding of tawhid as precluding the possibility of any persons or institutions claiming a monopoly over speaking for God or intuiting God’s will defied the socioreligious status of the Shia clerical order (p. 8).

Another interpretation of tawhid in mid-twentieth-century Iran came from Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who, in Science and Civilization in Islam (1968) (Nasr [1968] 2001), described Islam’s primary pillar of faith as a doctrine of unity in multiplicity (p. 146). Distinguishing between the theological and cosmological dimensions of tawhid, Nasr proposed that at the theological level, tawhid was a denial of polytheism through “an affirmation of the Unity of God”, and at the cosmological level, it was an expression of “the unicity of all things” (p. 341). This cosmological interpretation was a central feature of Nasr’s attempt to develop an epistemological critique of modern Western science on the basis of Islamic metaphysics. As Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi (1996) has previously argued, Nasr saw tawhid as the doctrine that furnishes Islam with “an essentially different set of epistemological assumptions” than those of Western modernity. Whereas the latter entails the notion that science can free humans from the capricious forces of nature, the former is based on the “unity of humankind and God, and the unity of humankind and nature” (p. 322).

To be sure, Shariati’s interpretation of tawhid overlaps with those of Sangelaji and Nasr in a number of ways. Describing tawhid as the foundation of all other Islamic teachings, Shariati takes issue with the conventional Twelver Shia belief in the “five pillars of faith”, consisting of tawhid, adl (justice), nubuwwah (prophethood), imamah (leadership), and ma’ad (resurrection). According to Shariati (1982a), Islam has but “one pillar”, and that is tawhid, of which all other principles are subsidiaries and extensions. (p. 109). Shariati shares Sangelaji’s critical disposition toward the Shia clergy, as well as the latter’s conviction that Muslims have strayed away from the path of tawhid. He also shares Nasr’s contention that, as a cosmological proposition, tawhid challenges and offers an alternative to the ontological and epistemological tenets of modern Western thought. Nevertheless, Shariati’s articulation of tawhid as a doctrine with explicitly social, political, and economic implications constitutes a clear departure from the conceptions of Sangelaji and Nasr.

For Shariati ([1970] 1988), the Quranic juxtaposition between tawhid and shirk speaks to the distinction not only between monotheism and polytheism as two mutually exclusive theological and cosmological positions, but also between freedom and oppression as two opposing orientations in worldly affairs. This, according to him, is because the absolute oneness of the divine creator means that no human can lord over another human or claim mastery and supremacy over others. Tawhid, hence understood, is a rebellion against submission to anyone other than or along with the undivided God. Shirk, on the other hand, is a theology of enslavement, which justifies division and stratification in human societies and demands submission and servitude to forces other than or along with Allah (p. 30).

Shariati’s contention that to submit to Allah is to rebel against worldly powers who demand servitude has the unmistakable echo of Muhammad Iqbal’s interpretation of tawhid. Iqbal, in The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930), argued that Islam’s doctrine of absolute divine unity lends itself not only to a vision of “world-unity”, but also to the requirement that “loyalty” is owed to God alone, “not to thrones.” And “since God is the ultimate spiritual basis of all life”, it follows for Iqbal that “loyalty to God virtually amounts to man’s loyalty to his own ideal nature” (p. 117). For this reason, Iqbal argues, tawhid, at its essence, entails a vision of social organization based on the “ideal principles” of “equality, solidarity, and freedom” (p. 122). Evoking Hegel’s dialectic of the spirit, Iqbal further posits that the human endeavor to realize tawhid through social and political formations is part of “the self-realization of spirit” in the world (p. 123).

Shariati’s reinterpretation of the Quranic story of Abel and Cain (5:27–31) expands on Iqbal’s Hegelian conception of history as the course of the dialectical self-realization of the ultimate spirit. Abel represents a tawhidic state of nature—a primitive era of communal ownership and socioeconomic equality that preceded hierarchical social formations. Cain, on the other hand, represents a deviation that is shirk—a subsequent historical era characterized by the advent of private ownership and the unequal division of wealth and labor. That God accepts Abel’s offering rather than Cain’s is indication that God favors the social formation represented by the former (Shariati 1980a, p. 75). And yet, the primordial fratricide of Abel at the hands of Cain sets in motion a perpetual clash in the course of human history between a Cainian clan, who has ruled the earth by means of slavery, feudalism, and capitalism, and an Abelian clan, who has fought for an egalitarian and emancipatory order. This clash—and its resultant material and philosophical contradictions—will come to an end with the complete self-realization of the spirit of tawhid and the triumph of the descendants of Abel over those of Cain (pp. 287–312). The teleological inevitability of this triumph, Shariati believes, is foretold by the Quran’s promise that haq (truth) will prevail over batil (falsehood) and that al-mustadafin (the oppressed) will inherit the earth (pp. 90, 316).

Shariati’s spelling out of the sociopolitical and socioeconomic dimensions of tawhid and shirk is inextricably tied to his anti-oppressive Quranic exegesis. Thus, in explicating shirk, he draws on Quranic passages, in which those who call on people to worship false gods (taghut), and those who claim to be lords (rabb) over other people are castigated and condemned. The term taghut, which appears in the Quran often in relation to pagan deities in pre-Islamic Arabia, was reinterpreted by Shariati ([1970] 1988) as the symbol of an unjust non-tawhidic order, in which people are held captive by and forced to submit to the will of their powerful and wealthy rulers (pp. 39–40). Also a Quranic term, rabb appears in the Islamic scripture primarily in reference to Allah. Shariati’s use of the term, however, is informed by a passage in Surah Al-Nazi’at that narrates the story of Moses and Pharaoh. After dismissing Moses, the Pharaoh summons his people, declaring: “I am your lord, the most exalted!” (ana rabbukum al-‘ala) (79:24). According to Shariati, the Pharaoh is well aware that he is not the divine creator, and yet, by declaring himself a rabb over others, he assigns partnership to God’s sovereign authority (p. 48).

Likewise, to illustrate the sociopolitical and socioeconomic implications of tawhid, Shariati draws on two Quranic terms: al-mustadafin and al-nas. The former is understood by Shariati to mean the historically oppressed masses, to whom the Quran (28:5–6) promises redemption and final victory. Whereas Muslim theologians had previously taken the term to mean the powerless and meek victims of injustice (Abrahamian 1993, p. 47), in Shariati’s exegesis, al-mustadafin is reconceived as victims of oppression who are engaged in “a perpetual war to avenge the blood of Abel … and to restore equality, freedom, and true faith” (Shariati 1980a, p. 89). Rather than passive victimhood, Shariati’s use of the term connotes indignant agency. Importantly, for Shariati, the historical inevitability of the triumph of tawhid over shirk, and the emancipation thereby of al-mustadafin, does not abrogate the agency of the victims of injustice and the moral responsibility of all Muslims to fight against oppression. This, he argues, is because “even though history moves forward on the basis of divine determinism, … I, as an individual, must choose either to move in the direction of history … or to oppose it ignorantly, egotistically, and from the position of my vested class interest” (p. 90).

The latter, al-nas, is understood by Shariati to mean the masses of the people as distinct from elites and rulers. Whereas social shirk is realized through the subjugation of al-nas at the hands of the taghut, social tawhid is the empowerment of al-nas through the eradication of all social, political, and economic structures that allow the taghut to lord over others. According to Shariati ([1970] 1988), not only does the Quran explicitly proclaim Allah’s support for al-nas and disdain for the taghut, but also the terms Allah and al-nas are interchangeable in Quranic social commands. Thus, when Quran 24:33 speaks of God’s property (mal Allah), the implication is that what belongs to God belongs to the people (mal al-nas) (p. 47), and when Quran 64:17 calls for lending a fair loan to Allah (tuqridul llah), it is indeed a command to give to the people in need (tuqridul nas), “otherwise it is obvious that God does not need our good loan” (Shariati 1980a, p. 98). Likewise, when Quran 6:57 or 13:41 declare that all authority belongs to God (hukm Allah), or when Quran 8:39 states that religion in its entirety belongs to God (wa yakun al-din kulluhu li-‘llah), the connotation is that political and religious authority lies with al-nas, and no single person or group may monopolize political or religious authority (p. 99).

3. An Intersectional Turn

Even as he was articulating his Islamic liberation theology by the method of Quranic exegesis and intrareligious conversations, Shariati was aware of and conversant with some of the non-Islamic liberation theologies of his time. During his Paris years, he had met and come under the influence of Louis Massignon, a leading French scholar of Islam and a Catholic priest of the Melkite Order, who contributed to the reformist discourse that culminated in the Second Vatican Council. In the same period, Shariati had learned about the Catholic left in France through Esprit magazine and the writings of its founder Emmanuel Mounier. It was in Paris, too, that he first read Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1948 novel, Christ Recrucified, a work that, according to Shariati (1980a), revives the liberative spirit of “true Christianity” (p. 261). Moreover, Shariati saw Rabindranath Tagore, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and Mahatma Gandhi, as pioneers of an effort to articulate liberative renditions of Hindu theology (pp. 293–96). Shariati’s spiritual writings, to which he collectively referred as Kaviriyyat (Desert Musings), contains frequent references to these Christian and Hindu reformists.5

Equally important to the articulation of his tawhidic paradigm and the cultivation of an intersectional concept of liberative struggle in his Islamic liberation theology are Shariati’s extrareligious engagements.6 Shariati’s use of analytical tools, such as class analysis and historical dialectics, has been attributed by a number of scholars to the influence of European socialism.7 Less attention has been paid to the ways in which Shariati, in conversation with postcolonial and Black Consciousness thinkers, such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, invokes race as a distinct category of analysis, as well as a site of liberative struggles.8

In his discussions on tawhid and shirk, Shariati frequently invokes race in conjunction with other identity markers, including class, nationality, ethnicity, tribe, and family lineage—although, glaringly, not gender. In one instance, he lists “racial shirk” (shirk-e nezhadi), along with “class shirk” (shirk-e tabaghati) and “familial shirk” (shirk-e khanevadegi), as three distinct manifestations of social shirk that work to normalize existing inequalities by attributing them to the hierarchical standing of the deities that represent different races, classes, and families (Shariati 1980a, p. 185). A recognition of the intersection of class and race in the formation of the modern world-system also animates Shariati’s criticism of European socialists for focusing exclusively on class, while neglecting the racial and colonial dynamics of capitalist exploitation. His assertion that capital accumulation in Europe was less a consequence of the exploited labor of “the European proletariat” than of the “theft of the lives and resources of yellow and black people, of Muslims and of Hindus” (Shariati 1971b) is reminiscent of Fanon’s declaration that “the wealth which smothers [Europe] is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples” in Asia, Africa, and the Americas (Fanon [1961] 1963, p. 102).

Although his simultaneous invocation of race, class, nationality, etc., signals an intersectional turn, albeit incomplete, in Shariati’s Islamic liberation theology, his less-than-adequate attention to the imperative of gender equality as a necessary measure of a non-oppressive social order points to the limitations of his particular rendition of tawhid. As one critic points out, even though Shariati’s revolutionary Islam encouraged women’s active participation in social and political life, “there was no place in his ideology for a concept of women’s liberation that involved a radical change in traditional gender roles and sexual emancipation” (Afary 1996, p. 42). Some of his feminist critics have faulted Shariati for espousing a “patriarchal and traditional conception of women” (Moghissi 1996, p. 70), and it is argued that his neglect to critically consider women’s position in Islamic law betrays an ambivalent position “on the issue of women’s rights” (Mir-Hosseini 2002, p. 79). That, in his discussions on tawhid and shirk, gender is rarely considered as a distinct category is perhaps indicative of the same ambivalence.9

An exception occurs in Shariati’s rendition of the story of Hagar (Hajar), where Hagar’s gender is recognized as a site of her oppression. The story appears in connection with the drama of Abraham’s prophethood. It begins with an aged Abraham and his wish to have an offspring to inherit and continue his tawhidic struggle. Unable to produce a child, Sarah, Abraham’s wife, whom Shariati ([1978] 1993) describes as a “barren” woman and a “fanatical aristocrat” (p. 87), permits her husband to have a child with her Abyssinian slave, Hagar. When Hagar gives birth to Ishmael (Ismail), however, Sarah becomes increasingly jealous and intolerant, ultimately demanding that Hagar and Ishmael be expelled from the house. Abraham takes the two to a “dry and lonely valley” near Mecca (p. 49), where he leaves them in God’s hands. Although she submits to God’s will, Hagar’s is not a passive submission. As if personifying all of history’s al-mustadafin, determined and agential, she endures much pain running back and forth between the two foothills of Safa and Marwa in search of water. Having failed in her pursuit, she returns to Ishmael. And then, a miracle. Suddenly, from underneath Ishmael’s heels, water begins to flow; “It is Zamzam, a sweet and life-giving fountain of water flowing from stone!” (p. 50). Some years later, upon Hagar’s death, God tasks Abraham and Ishmael with building a symbolic house of God next to the site of Hagar’s burial. According to Shariati, Hijr Ismail, the semi-circular low wall opposite the northwest wall of Kaaba, symbolizes Hagar’s lap, on which Ishmael laid as a child (p. 32).

That Kaaba extends toward Hagar’s grave, and that Hagar, among the entire human race, is chosen to be God’s neighbor, is seen by Shariati as a permanent reminder of a divine creator who is on the side of the oppressed. Invoking an intersectional understanding of oppression, Shariati ([1978] 1993) locates Hagar at the intersection of various inequalities: “From among all humanity [God chooses] a woman, from among all women a slave, and from among all slaves a black maid!” (p. 32). Whereas Hagar’s victimization at the intersection of class, race, and gender is the result of a system of social shirk that divides people into rich and poor, master and slave, white and black, and man and woman, all such divisions disappear before the God of tawhid, who grants protection to Hagar and her young child (p. 46). And this spirit of tawhid is memorialized in the ritual of hajj, during which pilgrims are called upon to take on the role of Hagar and to retrace her steps in the distance between Safa and Marwa (p. 33).

The story of Hagar signals a recognition by Shariati of gender as a category of oppression. This, however, is a fleeting recognition, and one would search in vain for a nuanced gender analysis or a tawhidic critique of patriarchy in Shariati’s oeuvre. Indeed, Shariati’s very narrative of Hagar reads as an appendix to the drama of Abraham, who is depicted as the undisputed hero in the primordial struggle between tawhid and shirk. It is he who breaks the idols of wood and stone with his axe; faces Nimrod’s furnace; defeats the temptations of Satan; submits to God’s will, even when he is asked to sacrifice his son; and builds the Kaaba as a symbol of tawhid (Shariati [1978] 1993, p. 146). Abraham, thus, becomes a transhistorical protagonist, who stands outside of the prevailing class, race, and gender structures of his time. That he fathers a son with his wife’s slave does not indicate a patriarchal desire to ensure, through polygamy, the continuity of his lineage; instead, it is motivated by a selfless commitment to a tawhidic struggle, which must continue after his death. Shariati does not use this as an opportunity to comment on polygamy in Islamic law, and he refuses to acknowledge Abraham’s role in Hagar’s fate, instead placing the blame squarely on Sarah and her jealously.

4. Wadud: Tawhid and Islamic Intersectional Feminism

Whereas Shariati neglects—barring fleeting moments—to take account of gender equality and inequality as measures of tawhid and shirk, a number of contemporary Muslim liberation theologians have advanced their own renditions of the tawhidic paradigm, precisely by foregrounding gender.10 Among them is amina wadud, for whom tawhid is central to the struggle against patriarchy in Islam. Echoing Shariati, she proposes that tawhid, in addition to being a theological proposition affirming God’s oneness (wadud uses the term “unicity”), is also the basis of a “non-discrimination” worldview with social and political implications (Wadud 2008, p. 437). This, she argues, is because, as the operating principle of cosmic harmony, tawhid requires an ethical commitment to “the unity of all human creatures beneath one Creator” (Wadud 2006, p. 28). If God alone stands above and unites all things, “then no person can be greater than another person, especially for mere reasons of gender, race, class, nationality, etc.” (Wadud 2008, p. 437).

Wadud was born as Mary Teasley on 25 September 1952 to an African-American family in Bethesda, Maryland.11 Her father was a Methodist minister and her mother a member of the Baptist church. Her family’s perpetual struggle with poverty, including an episode of homelessness, marred wadud’s early years. Another event that loomed large was the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. When she was eleven years old, wadud’s father took her to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech. After completing high school, she attended the University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 1975 with a bachelor’s degree in education. While attending university, she became a practicing Buddhist, before being attracted to Islam. Her conversion came on Thanksgiving Day in 1972, when she proclaimed the shahadatain (declarations of faith in Allah’s oneness and Muhammad’s prophethood) at a Washington, D.C., mosque. According to Wadud (2006), despite knowing relatively little about the religion at the time of her conversion, Islam’s egalitarian message resonated with her conviction that “divine justice could be achieved on the planet and throughout the universe” (p. 2).

Seeking to learn more, and cognizant of a tension between what she perceived as Islam’s message of equality and a lived reality of patriarchal practices and norms in many Muslim communities, she began to systematically study her newly embraced faith tradition. After graduating from the University of Michigan with a Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic Studies, she moved to Kuala Lumpur in 1989, where she taught at Malaysia’s International Islamic University. In Malaysia, she was among the founding members of Sisters in Islam, a civil society organization that promotes equal women’s rights within the frameworks of Islam and universal human rights. It was also in Malaysia that she published her first book, Qurʼan and Woman (1992). This short, but widely influential, book challenges the depictions of women in classical Quranic exegesis and proposes as an alternative a female-inclusive approach. In a Preface to a 1999 reprint of the book, wadud referred to her alternative approach as “a hermeneutics of tawhid.” Contrary to “the atomistic approach” of traditional exegesis, in which each verse is interpreted individually and independently of the scripture’s overall ethos, a hermeneutics of tawhid reveals “how the unity of the Qur’an permeates all its parts.” Such an approach, she argues, is necessary for considering the dynamics between Islam’s universal moral outlook and the concrete form and content of Islamic revelation within a particular historical context (Wadud [1992] 1999, p. xii).

Although she returned to the United States in 1992 to take up a position as a professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she remained until her retirement in 2008, wadud has continued her work with Muslim organizations and communities around the world. In 1994, at a landmark event defying the dominant practice of a male imam (prayer leader) delivering the Friday khutbah (sermon), wadud gave a khutbah at the Claremont Main Road Mosque in Cape Town, South Africa. Nearly a decade later, she led a mixed prayer in the Synod House in New York City. These events, although they were met with disapproval from conservative corners, helped to initiate new discussions on Islam and the imperative of gender equality. wadud’s second book, Inside the Gender Jihad (2006), brings her hermeneutics of tawhid together with her lived experiences as a scholar and activist. Although she considers the struggle for gender equality to be indispensable to the objective of organizing human relations on the basis of tawhid, wadud is nevertheless emphatic that to live in accordance with Islam’s tawhidic worldview is to strive to eliminate all manners of inequality “for reasons of race, class, gender, religious tradition, national origin, sexual orientation or other arbitrary, voluntary, and involuntary aspects of human distinction” (Wadud 2006, p. 28).

In advancing her particular rendition of the tawhidic paradigm, wadud is conversant with a range of Muslim interlocutors, including Shariati, Fazlur Rahman, and Malcolm X. Citing an English translation of a 1962 lecture by Shariati titled “Jahanbini-e tawhid” (“The Worldview of Tawhid”), Wadud (2006) takes Shariati’s anti-oppression rendition of tawhid and recasts it in a consciously and persistently gender-inclusive register (p. 28). She shares Shariati’s understanding of tawhid as a distinctly Islamic worldview as well as a framework for moral praxis, and her emphasis on exercising subjectivity while surrendering to Allah’s just will—what she calls “engaged surrender” (Wadud 2006, p. 23)—is reminiscent of Shariati’s idea of agential submission. Rahman’s influence is most evident in wadud’s exegetical method. As Rahemtulla (2017) has previously argued, wadud’s hermeneutics of tawhid builds on Rahman’s “double movement theory”, according to which in interpreting the Quran, one must endeavor first to understand the specific manner and the particular historical context of Quranic revelation, and then to decipher the universal message of the scripture and apply it to present circumstances (p. 106). No less significant than Shariati’s or Rahman’s, Malcolm X’s influence on wadud goes beyond his larger-than-life presence as a leading figure of the Civil Rights Movement and one of the most prominent Muslim Americans during wadud’s formative early years. His interpretation of tawhid as a principle of racial equality and an egalitarian doctrine of “the Oneness of Man under One God” (Malcolm X and Haley [1965] 2001, p. 443) set the stage for wadud’s intersectional concept of tawhidic liberation.

But wadud’s tawhidic paradigm is also the result of her engagements with a range of non-Muslim interlocutors, including the Jewish existentialist philosopher Martin Buber. Buber’s influence can be seen in the way in which wadud challenges the image, prevalent in classical Islamic ethical and jurisprudential discourse, of a hierarchical model with “Allah at the top, male in the middle, female at the bottom” (Wadud 2021, p. 5). Such a formula, grounded as it is on the assumption of an asymmetrical relationship between the male and the female and a “separation between Allah and the female”, stands in stark contrast to the tawhidic premise of Islamic theology (p. 6). Using Buber’s I-Thou ethical formula as a point of reference “for understanding the sacred union between self and other” (Wadud 2006, p. 32), wadud re-envisions “Islamic ethics according to a reciprocal model”, in which Allah remains “on the top, as the highest metaphysical reality”, but the male and the female are imagined as two symmetrical points “on a line of horizontal reciprocity.” This reformulation, she argues, enables the faithful to “operate in such a way that the divine reality of One is expressed in all human to human relationship only with reciprocity and equality” (Wadud 2021, p. 6).

Wadud’s other non-Muslim interlocutors include a range of Christian theologians, particularly African-American, whose influence, even when it is not explicitly referenced by wadud, seems to be ever present in the background. Recalling her early exposure to a justice-centric Christian theology that was championed by King Jr., and preached by her own father, wadud comments that she was raised “not only to link conceptions of the divine with justice, but also to link notions of justice with the divine” (Wadud 2006, p. 4). She also acknowledges that the rise of the Civil Rights Movement saw the concurrent emergence of an effort by African-American Christians to “draw from their religiosity to resist racial injustices” (p. 103). Among the leading figures in this effort were James Cone, whose interventions throughout the 1970s and 1980s were integral to the development of Black liberation theology,12 and Delores S. Williams (1987), who, building on Alice Walker’s (1983) concept of womanism, advocated for a womanist theology based on the particular experiences of African-American women. wadud credits womanist theology with simultaneously challenging white privilege and male privilege, and she shares Williams’ commitment to reading the scripture from the vantage point of othered women. This shared commitment, as Lara Dotson-Renta (2022) has noted, is on display in the manners in which Williams and wadud interpret the story of Hagar/Hajar.

Although Wadud (2006) develops her “Hajar paradigm” (p. 120) within a distinctly tawhidic frame, her female-inclusive account finds more in common with Williams’ (1993) rendering of the story than with Shariati’s. Whereas Shariati’s acknowledgement of Hagar’s gender as a site of her oppression does not rise to the level of a critique of patriarchy, wadud’s “Hajar paradigm” is advanced precisely by stripping away the patriarchal coating of the story and by foregrounding the lived reality of Hagar-like single-mother heads of household, including many African-American women, “whose legal category in shari‘ah deviates from the patriarchal, man-centered norm” (p. 150). Her particular attention to the lived experiences of African-American single mothers is reminiscent of Williams’ centering of similar lived experiences in her interpretation of Hagar’s story in the Bible.13 Furthermore, wadud’s critical depiction of Abraham as a “dead beat dad” (Wadud 2013a) finds more in common with Williams’ (1993) account, in which Abraham and Sarah are both recognized as Hagar’s “slave holders” (p. 97), than with Shariati’s, in which Abraham stands outside of the prevailing gendered and racial norms of his time. Relatedly, whereas Shariati suggests that Abraham’s marriage to Hagar was facilitated by Sarah, who gave her explicit permission, and that it was Sarah’s jealousy that resulted in the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael to the desert, Wadud (2013a) identifies patriarchy as the structure in which Sarah and Hagar are rendered as equally invisible reproductive vessels, and by which Hagar is abandoned upon losing her status in Abraham’s household.

Wadud’s observation that the story of Hagar is “the ultimate expression of the intersectionality of race, class and gender” (Wadud 2013a) betrays an unmistakable affinity between her work and intersectional Black feminism. Noting this affinity, Farid Esack (2015) has commented that although wadud’s discourse is firmly anchored in Islam, her tawhidic paradigm resonates with the interventions of such African-American feminists as Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks (p. 37). The former’s work on the intersection of race, class, and gender as “the three axes of oppression” that shape the lived experiences of African-American women (Collins 2000, p. 248), and the latter’s formulation of “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks 1995, p. 17)—subsequently to be reformulated as “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy” (hooks 2000, p. xiv)—as a matrix of intersecting systems of oppression, have greatly contributed to the emergence of an intersectional black feminist theory, with which wadud is fully conversant.14 Wadud’s (2021) effort to account for “sexual diversity and nonbinary gender identity” (p. 9) in her tawhidic conception of a non-oppressive social order also resonates with similar efforts in intersectional black feminism.

Wadud’s recasting of the tawhid paradigm in a gender-inclusive and non-heteronormative intersectional register is regarded by some commentators (Ali 2019; Ayubi 2012; Khaki 2012) as a key intervention in negotiating a more inclusive and universal concept of tawhidic liberation. Helpful as these observations may be for highlighting the novelty of wadud’s intersectional theology, they neglect to consider the way in which wadud’s move toward an inclusive universalism is hampered by her overemphasis on Islamic monotheism as a uniquely liberative theological and ideological proposition. This overemphasis is at play when wadud suggests that tawhid entails a more comprehensive account of liberation than the Christian doctrine of trinity (Wadud 2006, p. 69), and when she proposes that, compared to Christianity, “the relationship between God and justice is more articulated in Islam” (Wadud 2013b). This overemphasis on the singularity of tawhid, I will propose in the following section, ultimately prevents wadud both from sufficiently recognizing the non-Muslim ‘other’ as an equal moral agent in liberative struggles, and from embracing Islam’s theological and ideological alternatives as equally significant repositories of liberative potential. Moreover, while Buber’s formula is central to wadud’s reimagination of the status of the male and the female before Allah, there is little indication that she has considered the implications of this formula for the relationship between the Muslim self and the non-Muslim ‘other’ and for critiquing the unequal status of the latter in traditional Islamic jurisprudence.

5. Accounting for Non-Muslim and Non-Islamic ‘Other’

In Islamic Liberation Theology (2008), Hamid Dabashi makes a case that for Islam to find its proper place in the worldwide resistance against American imperialism and global capitalism, Muslims must shed all identitarian proclivities and recognize that no singular ideology of resistance—religious or otherwise—“is capable of mobilizing and sustaining enough revolutionary synergy” to undo a globalized empire (p. 14). In Dabashi’s account, throughout the previous century, Islamic liberation theology’s combative conversations with an abstracted and essentialized Western colonial ‘other’ resulted in Islam’s gradual transmutation into “a singular site of ideological resistance to foreign domination” (p. 60). This transmutation, critical as it was for mobilizing popular anti-colonial and anti-imperialist resistance, distorted Islam’s worldly disposition and gave rise to fanatical tendencies, which rejected the universal notions of gender equality and equal civil rights (p. 44). Undermining the latter development, however, the ongoing decentering of the empire and the correspondent globalization of Islam through massive labor migration has created a condition whereby Muslims are able to rediscover their worldly cosmopolitanism (p. 160). The urgent task before Muslims is to articulate a new “Islamic liberation theodicy” that can speak to the collective predicament not only of Muslims, but of all the historically disenfranchised peoples around the globe (p. 235). Such a liberation theodicy must necessarily be in coalition, rather than combative rivalry, with its own alternatives. It must be conversant with non-Islamic ideologies of resistance while remaining decidedly Muslim, and it must “speak a universal language, from the bosom of its particularity” (p. 255).

Whereas wadud draws on Buber’s I-Thou formulation to negotiate a gender-inclusive conception of tawhid, Dabashi’s proposal for an Islamic liberation theodicy that accommodates the inclusion of the non-Muslim ‘other’ and accepts Islam’s theological and ideological ‘other’ is modeled after Emmanuel Levinas’s (1961) conception of the ‘other’ as the locus of ethical responsibility. A liberation theodicy predicated on Levinas’s ‘other’-based ethics is one that “embraces its own otherwise” (Dabashi 2008, p. 14) and learns the logic of its own “inauthenticity, syncretism, pluralisms, and alterities” (p. 16). To move in this direction, Dabashi suggests, would require a rethinking not only of the sectarian divide between Sunni and Shia Islam or the binary construction of Islam and the West (p. 208), but also of a doctrinal bifurcation, fundamental to Islam’s very constitution, between monotheism and polytheism. Drawing on the medieval Islamic doctrine of “Unity in Diversity”, he makes a case that for an Islamic liberation theodicy of the future to reconcile diversity in creation with the singularity of the divine, it “will have to posit a polytheist vision of the world at the root of its monotheist theology” (p. 258).

Although he acknowledges Shariati as a Muslim revolutionary who took steps in the direction of “cosmopolitan and transnational solidarities” (Dabashi 2008, p. 115), Dabashi nevertheless argues the liberative potential of Shariati’s Islamic theology was severed and exhausted by his gravitation toward Islamist identitarianism (p. 111). Diverging from Dabashi’s reading of Shariati, elsewhere, I have argued that despite the latter’s emphasis on his Iranian, Islamic, and Shia identity, a perpetual oscillation in his thought between particular attachments and a decidedly cosmopolitan intellectual horizon ultimately allows him to transcend identitarian pigeonholes (Saffari 2019). His vision of a tawhidic society, as we have seen here, entails the emancipation not only of the oppressed among the Muslim ummah, but of all the human masses (al-nas) (Shariati 1980a, p. 100). Furthermore, despite his emphasis on the theological capacities of Shi’ism for sustaining a liberative struggle, Shariati (1971a) explicitly opposes those who perpetuate an identitarian antagonism between Shia and Sunni Muslims, and he calls for unity between Muhammadan Sunnism (tasannon-e Muhammadi) and Alid Shi’ism (tashayyo-e Alavi) against the encroachment of imperialism and Zionism (pp. 300–12).15

Be that as it may, the inclination to treat Islam as the singular site of liberative ideological production is present in Shariati’s conception of Islamic monotheism as a singularly valid theological proposition and the sole ideological standpoint capable of sustaining a struggle for total human emancipation. Even though he acknowledges the existence of emancipatory elements in religions other than Islam, Shariati considers these religions emancipatory only to the extent that their fundamental theological propositions resemble the doctrine of tawhid.16 The latter, thus, becomes the universal measure of a religion’s liberative potential, and Shariati’s acknowledgment of Islam’s theological and ideological ‘other’ serves only to authenticate Islam’s basic truth claims. This is at play when Shariati (1980a) praises Gandhi, Tagore, and Radhakrishnan for rediscovering and reviving Hinduism’s monotheistic origins (pp. 293–96).17 Implicit here are the assumptions that polytheistic theology is devoid of emancipatory potential and that only a monotheistic cosmology can inspire liberative praxis.

At least three bifurcations in Shariati’s thought further perpetuate the view of Islam as having a singularly authentic claim to liberation. The first is between Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic religions. Whereas Abrahamic religions emerged in defiance of the status quo and were represented by “shepherd prophets” and “worker prophets”, who understood the suffering of the poor and the oppressed (Shariati [1970] 1988, p. 53), non-Abrahamic religions accommodated the prevailing relations of domination, and their prophets and patrons either hailed from or dedicated themselves to the service of the society’s ruling elites (p. 61). The second bifurcation is between Islam and other Abrahamic religions, particularly Christianity. Whereas Christianity is a religion of mercy and compassion, whose prophet was crucified by the Roman Empire, Islam is a religion of social struggle, whose prophet declared a war on the dominant powers of his time (Shariati 1980a, p. 261). Furthermore, the doctrine of trinity, which, according to Shariati (1982a), is a form of shirk that was invented by the Roman Empire to justify socioeconomic stratification, stands in sharp contrast to Islam’s strict adherence to the principle of divine unity (p. 35). The third bifurcation is between Islam and non-religious ideologies. Although he acknowledges the liberatory disposition of humanism, socialism, and non-theistic existentialism, Shariati insists that removing God from human affairs and severing the link between the physical and the metaphysical results in nihilistic despair and moral relativism (Shariati 1980a, p. 132). His contention that the universal ideals of equality and freedom, which have inspired the struggles for socialism and democracy in the modern world, will foster genuine liberation only when they are brought together in a tawhidic framework of perfect harmony between humans, God, and nature (Shariati 1976), renders Islamic monotheism as the sum of all other liberative paradigms.

Shariati’s theological and ideological privileging of Islamic monotheism finds parallels in wadud’s rendition of the tawhidic paradigm. Wadud’s (2006) contention that Hinduism ultimately adheres to a “tawhidic” conception of the sacred (p. 194), for instance, recognizes Hinduism only through its proximity to Islamic monotheism, thus reaffirming the latter’s singular authenticity. This perpetuation of Islamic singularity is inseparable from what Rahemtulla identifies as a shortcoming in wadud’s Islamic liberation theology to adequately account for the religious ‘other’. According to Rahemtulla (2017), the tendency to explain away theological polytheism as a misunderstood or mispracticed form of monotheism does not do “justice to the religious Other and the Hindu Other in particular” (p. 80).18 Rahemtulla further observes that despite wadud’s own lived experiences in three religious traditions (Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam), as well as her expressed position “underscoring the chosen-ness of all people as opposed to solely Muslims”, her interest in interreligious engagements is secondary to her commitment to intrareligious conversations, and her views on religious pluralism fall short of adequately accounting for and embracing religious difference (pp. 145–47).19

Rahemtulla’s latter point concerns a passage in wadud’s Inside the Gender Jihad (2006), where she proposes the Quranic condemnations of shirk do not amount to a rejection of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and a range of other traditional polytheistic and animistic religions in Africa, Australia, and the Americas, because none of these religious traditions are directly mentioned in the Quran (pp. 194–95). wadud’s reluctance to acknowledge the tension between the Quran’s explicit prohibition of associating partners with God and the polytheistic and animistic principles of the religions to which she refers stands in contrast to her explicit position regarding the fundamental irreconcilability between tawhid and the Christian doctrine of trinity (p. 69). Furthermore, her seemingly pluralistic gesture toward the recognition of the non-Muslim (Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, etc.) ‘other’ in the light of the Quran’s silences works yet again through her privileging the Muslim self. Recalling wadud’s own reformulation of Buber’s I-Thou ethical standard, one might consider the implications of recasting the relationship between the Muslim self and the non-Muslim ‘other’ in a Buberian register. It is true that in wadud’s account, the I-Thou proposal is maintained by “the presence of Allah” (p. 30). Still, wadud does not seem to suggest that entering into ethical and equal relations ought to be contingent on the affirmation by the ‘other’ of Allah’s presence and oneness. Rather, her key insight is the ethical imperative of creating horizontal relationships of reciprocity based on the recognition of the “equal significance” and mutual codependence of the self and its others (p. 168). The presumption of Islamic singularity seems to be at odds with this paramount insight.

6. Conclusions

While recognizing their distinctly Islamic framings, the present article has identified a move in the tawhidic paradigms of Shariati and wadud toward an inclusive concept of liberation. This move, it was shown, has been advanced through a recognition of the intersectionality of liberative struggles, and it has been negotiated in conversation with a range of non-Islamic liberative paradigms. To further move Islamic liberation theology in a more inclusive direction requires, among other steps, a genuine embrace of the non-Muslim ‘other’ as a subject of and an equal moral agent in liberative struggles. This begins with taking account of the particular condition of the oppressed non-Muslim ‘other’ in Muslim-majority contexts—be it Bahais in Iran, or Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan—and cultivating intersectional solidarities in a world where the structures of oppression are increasingly globalized.20 And yet, as F. Tormos (2017) reminds us, intersectional solidarity is not merely a strategic decision, but one born out of “love for the other” (p. 713).21 Dabashi’s mediation of identity through alterity offers one possible path for a loving embrace of the ‘other’ within a liberative Islamic framework. His vision of an Islamic liberation theodicy that “embraces its ideological rivals and theological alternatives” (Dabashi 2008, p. 15) is predicated on a conception of Islam’s theological and ideological ‘others’ as equally significant repositories of liberative potential. A similar epistemic humility is present in Rahemtulla’s (2019) call for a “humble acceptance of the rich plurality of ways in which to respond to the Transcendent” (p. 39).

Somewhere between the desire for particularism and the proclivity toward universalism lies the main challenge ahead of Islamic liberation theology. Shariati’s and wadud’s attention to the distinctiveness of tawhid as a uniquely Islamic theological and ideological position ought to be reconciled with Dabashi’s (2008) emphasis on the need to transcend “denominational divides and speak a metaphysics of liberation beyond the theology of one or another divisive claim on God” (p. 255). Shariati’s occasional references to tawhid as a non-denominational theological proposition have important implications for reconciling Islamic particularity with the universality of liberative struggles, as does Wadud’s (2021) attention to the Quranic prohibition of “thinking of oneself as better than another” (p. 6). Despite these pluralistic gestures, the turn toward the ‘other’ in the liberation theologies of Shariati and wadud is often thwarted by the tendency either to privilege the Muslim/Islamic self at the expense of dismissing the liberative agency and potential of the non-Muslim/Islamic ‘other’, or to explain away difference. A similar explaining away of difference appears to occur in Dabashi’s search for a genuinely universal concept of liberation. Moreover, the tension, in his account, between speaking from a distinctly Islamic perspective and moving toward a syncretic non-denominational theodicy is underexplored and ultimately unresolved.

Their tensions and limitations notwithstanding, the interventions of Shariati, wadud, and Dabashi have helped to chart a path in Islamic theology toward a more intersectional and inclusive concept of human liberation. Their contributions are matched by those of other Muslim liberation theologians, including the anti-capitalist Turkish exegetist İhsan Eliaçık, whose intersectional understanding of tawhid and rejection of the bifurcation between Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic religions opens new vistas for recasting the tawhid paradigm in a more inclusive register.22 This recasting, as I have suggested here, must take simultaneous account of the Muslim and non-Muslim subjects of liberative praxis, and it must entail the embrace of Islam’s theological and ideological alternatives. For a paradigm that is firmly anchored in an absolutist claim regarding the oneness of the divine and the bifurcation between monotheism and polytheism, regarding the non-monotheistic and non-theistic ‘other’ as equally significant repositories of liberative potential has thus far proven to be difficult.