ABSTRACT
Muslim scholars have long worked on the intersection of gender and religion, but for reasons of propriety perhaps, they paid less attention to sexuality, as the opening quote from Leila Ahmed confirms. Youssef is mainly concerned with Muslim youth in Muslim societies and discusses the concrete influences that medieval Islamic jurisprudence has on contemporary Islamic legislation. Ali’s focus is the Muslim-minority society in North America which faces the challenge of maintaining Islamic ethical behaviour in a society that is guided by civil (non-religious) law. Youssef goes one step further and considers the verse as an indicator not only of the “biological” but also the “cultural” and claims that the Qur’an refers to the biological and psychological sexual duality that each human contains.
