Members of both groups are sure to misinterpret Murata's...

Members of both groups are sure to misinterpret Murata's thesis as the claim that the law can be jettisoned in favor of vague statements of symbolic value. The key to the misinterpretation is the idea that when it is claimed that a term has a certain symbolic or metaphorical reading, nothing else can remain.

If "woman" is read as a code for "the base soul", and if this reading is used to derive the statutes of Islamic law, the result will be either nonsense or the denial of the civil code of Islamic law altogether, for to claim that a man is to inherit twice the share of a woman cannot mean that the jurist is to allot the intellect with twice the inheritance of the base soul.

So, the jurists will complain the Murata has abandoned the law, and the opponents of Islamic law will celebrate the alleged abandonment. However, for the attentive eye, even a quick browse through the book will be enough to show that there is no attempt here to replace the law by a set of symbolic relations. Murata repeatedly stresses the great respect for the sacred law of Islam, the shari'ah, which pervades the mainstream of the mystic tradition of Islam.

Here we find a much-needed antidote to the lawless quietism propagated (especially in the West) in the name of sufism. The figurative is introduced not to replace the literal, but to illuminate it. The traditional differences in gender roles that are canonized in Islamic law are not to be justified by sexist claims of a natural inferiority of women to men, but by showing how these differences fit into a more comprehensive hierarchical understanding of reality.

This is not to say that Islamic values have never been invoked, abused and misapplied to do injustice to women-they most certainly have; nor is this to say that women do not have rights similar to men according to Islam-they most certainly do, as it is stated in the Noble Qur'an itself, (2:228); and no one should deny the importance of scholarly investigations into these areas. But Murata's work is not sociology of Islam, nor is it a work in Islamic law.