ABSTRACT
Islamic ethics is an academic construct which scholars have used to describe the values imparted in various genres of the Islamic tradition, including Qurʾan and hadith, which together serve as the scriptural ethics tradition; the intellectual ethics tradition including jurisprudence (fiqh), Sufism, theology (kalam), philosophical ethics (akhlaq), and literature (adab). Scholarship on these genres all contain descriptions of moral values and/or practices that Muslims have distilled as the way to live an Islamic life, whether or not it adheres to any tangible theoretical or prescriptive discourse. Rather than complicating this picture, paying attention to the underlying philosophy of gender or gender ethics clarifies, whether historically or now, how is life that is lived in accordance with an Islamic ethos gendered or variable given a person’s gender. It also means taking a feminist standpoint – that is a focus on how the discussions about how to be Muslim while inhabiting a gendered body has been a normative male one. While new ethics movements are critical of gender ethics in the intellectual tradition, they are also creating a new Islamic ethical tradition based on their experiences and what they believe a moral life today requires.
