When Beruriah Met 'A'isha: Textual Intersections and Interactions Among Jewish and Muslim Women Engaged with Religious Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study explores various understandings of religious authority, law and empowered textual interpretation among two distinct yet inter-related groups of Jewish and Muslim women: contemporary academics and laywomen in North America who are engaged in the study of classical religious texts. There are two modes through which I examine these interpretive activities by women: the first approach involves a comparative textual analysis of academic writings on religious texts by women, while the second utilizes feminist ethnography to zero in on the textual experiences of Jewish and Muslim laywomen who spent time studying religious texts together. \nAlthough the entitlements offered to women under secular laws in North America generally surpass those granted to them under Jewish and Islamic law, rather than abandoning religious laws entirely, Jewish and Muslim laywomen and exegetes continue to grapple with religious legal texts and praxis, since these are bound up with notions of identity, community and belonging. But rather than accepting the status quo, this highly-educated subset of Jewish and Muslim women empower themselves to reinterpret traditional texts and adapt communal practices to better reflect more inclusive and egalitarian values. Through their academic works, scholars such as Amina Wadud, Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Judith Hauptman, Fatima Mernissi, Kecia Ali and Rachel Adler revisit religious law and succeed in broadening the communal spaces, leadership roles and personal status entitlements available to Jewish and Muslim women. Similarly, when Toronto-based laywomen challenge the ideas coming from the pulpits of their local mosques and synagogues, or use their own knowledge of texts and other extra-textual sources to redefine how they eat, dress and pray as Muslims and Jews, they are pushing the boundaries of how each community views women, traditional praxis and authority, forcing us to confront what it means to be a Jewish or Muslim woman scholar in the twenty-first century. These acts of empowered interpretation and religio-legal reform among both laywomen and exegetes arise from a similar source: a "textual confidence", which is a strange alchemy of a solid traditional and secular education, strong familial and communal supports, but is equally related to one's geography, conceptions of gender and perceptions of authority.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".