Hadia Mubarak. Rebellious Wives, Neglectful Husbands: Controversies in Modern Qur’anic Commentaries. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2022.

The contours of Muslim feminism emerged in Egypt during the late 19th century, subsequently filling out and culminating in a rapid rise of Muslim feminist thought near the end of the 20th century and into present day.As Muslims grappled with a changing moral landscape in modernity, scholars began to question some of the defining features of gender relations in Islam, particularly if they stood in contrast with modern ideals of gender equality and individual autonomy.A handful of Qur'ānic verses -4:3, 4:34, 4:128, and 2:228were extricated and closely examined because their apparent meanings were felt to be in tension with modern values.This, at least, is a reading of the history of Muslim feminist thought in Islamic studies circles.A widely held belief in this field is that only with the advent of modernity did Muslim scholars view these verses through the lens of gender-balancedness.Scholars prior to this, it is said, acceptedand insisted uponmisogynistic, or at least patriarchal, ideas regarding women, reinforced by these four verses.Hadia Mubarak contends with these claims in Rebellious Wives, Neglectful Husbands: Controversies in Modern Qur 'anic Commentaries (2022), where she engages with two subfields of Islamic studies: tafsīr (Qur'ānic exegetical studies) and gender in the Islamic tradition.Mubarak examines four modern Sunni exegetes -Muḥammad 'Abduh (d.1905), Rashīd Riḍa (d.1935), Syed Qutb (d.1966), and Ibn 'Āshūr (d.1973)and compares them with seven well-known pre-modern exegetes.Through this process, she attempts to answer three questions: (1) is the Qur'ānor the exegetical traditionmonolithically patriarchal, (2) how do the modern exegetes' social milieus and their own beliefs and personalities influence their engagement with the textual sources, and (3) how have modern exegetes posited new interpretations while at the same time grounding themselves in the tradition?Mubarak's primary goal is to demonstrate the folly of starting with a fixed premise of either egalitarianism, patriarchy, or misogyny when examining the Qur'ān and its exegetical tradition.We say, she argues, that the tafsīr tradition is "decidedly misogynistic," and yet there has been no "substantive engagement" with it for us to know this (p.4).Analyzing four verses dealing with polygyny, husbandly nushūz, wifely nushūz, and men's "degree" over women, Mubarak outlines differences in interpretations between the eleven Sunni exegetes, exploring how some of their interpretations were genderbalanced, perhaps even pro-women, and how others were patriarchal or even misogynistic.This exercise reveals the complexity inherent in the tafsīr tradition, as well as the complexity of labeling an individual exegete as either gender-balanced or patriarchal, as they posited varyingly egalitarian, balanced, patriarchal, or misogynistic interpretations for different verses.Both premodern and modern exegetes, Mubarak proposes, advanced exegetical interpretations that ran along this spectrum and were rarely uniformly genderbalanced or gender-imbalanced even within their own exegeses.