What do people do when they don’t agree with scripture? Especially when a sacred text, or the way it has been interpreted, doesn’t align with their own sense of justice, equality, or human flourishing?

This week, I’m taking you into my Intro to the Study of Islam classroom to think about that question. I start with an exercise I give my students using two passages about slavery, one from the New Testament and one from the Quran, and the little “gotcha” moment that happens when I ask them to imagine building a society based on those texts. Because the point is to get them to see that sacred texts don’t simply tell people what to do. People give sacred texts meaning.

From there, we get into Aysha Hidayatullah’s Feminist Edges of the Qur’an and some of the strategies Muslim feminist theologians have used when interpretations of the Quran don’t align with their commitments to gender justice, including historical contextualization, holistic reading, and the Tawhidic paradigm.

Ultimately, I’m thinking about something I really want my students to leave my classes understanding: critique, disagreement, struggle, and debate are not necessarily departures from religious traditions. They are part of how religious traditions are made, sustained, and transformed.

And maybe disagreeing with scripture is a much more religious thing to do than we think.

Chapters:

00:00 — Teaser: What Do You Do When You Disagree With Scripture?

01:55 — Finding Grounding: Taking Things One Day at a Time

03:40 — The Classroom Exercise: What Would You Do With These Verses?

06:04 — Disagreement Is Part of Religious Tradition

10:50 — Feminist Edges of the Qur’an

14:16 — Strategy #1: Is the Past the Past?

19:14 — Strategy #2: Sacred Texts Have Contradictions

20:25 — Strategy #3: Can Humans Be Gods?

References

Talal Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” Qui Parle 17 no .2 (2009): 1-30.

Aysha Hidayatullah, Feminist Edges of the Qur’an. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Kathryn Lofton, “Religion,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, edited by Sarah Hammerschlag (University of Chicago Press, 2025), 349-365.

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[religion, scripture, sacred texts, Bible, Quran, Islam, Christianity, religious studies, Quran interpretation, Biblical interpretation, disagreeing with scripture]