Gender and disability in the Qur’an: rereading the Qur’an’s conceiving and barren bodies

The Qur’an is rife with representations of women in reproductive contexts. Readers often evoke verses illustrating creation in ‘the wombs’ or recounting Mary’s miraculous pregnancy to emphasize the Qur’an’s positive treatment of conceiving bodies. This suggests an Islamic reverence for biological motherhood while implicating women imagined as ‘reproductively disabled.’ Drawing on cultural disability studies, this article argues that the Qur’an demonstrates a more complicated relationship with female embodiment, both affirming and resisting dichotomous understandings of (non)conceiving bodies. While a structural analysis of the text’s maternal citations supports binary readings, a disability-conscious investigation of these terms in their cultural-textual contexts disrupts this classification. The term ‘barren’ used to describe Sarah, for example, is semantically linked to the notion of Divine Judgment, suggesting an undesired body. However, Sarah’s physical reaction to the annunciation echoes the response of other Qur’anic characters in undesired situations, thereby inviting alternative readings of maternity in the Qur’an.