Discourses on Marriage, Religious Identity and Gender in Medieval and Contemporary Islamic Preaching: Continuities and Adaptations
Discourses on Marriage, Religious Identity and Gender in Medieval and Contemporary Islamic Preaching: Continuities and Adaptations
Because homiletics has been associated with marriage since the origins of Islam, analysing sermons on marriage from different historical periods allows us to identify continuities within the homiletic tradition and detect developments reflecting the preacher’s adaptation of his message to suit the needs, expectations and values of his audience. This chapter explores Islamic homiletic discourses about marriage, gender, and marital relations in an anonymous sixteenth-century Egyptian hortatory sermon (mawʿiẓa) on ‘the inalienable rights of the two spouses’ and a contemporary Friday khuṭba on ‘the path to a healthy marriage,’ preached by a Los Angeles-based American Muslim in 2016. This cross-cultural diachronic analysis seeks to explain how each preacher interprets the meaning of marriage, represents spousal relations and defines gender identities and roles for his audience. It then addresses the broader question of how to account for the continuities and adaptability of Islam as a religious tradition in light of changing circumstances.
Keywords: gender in Islam, Islamic homiletics, Islamic marriage, Islamic sermons, marital relations in Islam, khuṭba
Edinburgh Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
