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women and islamic law 219CHAPTER FIVEWOMEN AND ISLAMIC LAWSince the age of Islamic reformism in the nineteenth century numerousattempts have been made to improve the position of women inIslam by reformulating sharÊ#a law in the light of social change andmodern developments. And yet, to our knowledge, not a single studyhas tried to propose legal reforms by exploring the dialectical relationshipbetween ‘straightness’ and ‘curvature’ in human legislationand by studying this relationship in consideration of the human naturaldisposition, al-fiãra. We propose therefore to start our investigationinto the possibilities of legal reform with the notion of Allah’s limits,which not only stipulates boundaries (straightness) but also allowshuman legislation the freedom to move and change (curvature).We can see three major reasons why previous attempts to radicallyreevaluate the situation of women in the Arab-Muslim world havefailed:In their study of the ‘mother of the book’ (umm al-kit§b), jurists havefailed to distinguish between verses that stipulate Allah’s limits andverses that are purely informative and legally nonbinding (suggestingonly good practice). Also, in their study of MuÈammad’s sunnathey confused compulsory with optional categories of law. In moregeneral terms they simply overlooked the existence of limits inIslamic legislation. In defence of medieval scholarship we mightsay that their understanding of Èudåd All§h was bound to be ratherprimitive and that their scholarship could not significantly improvebefore the introduction of Isaac Newton’s revolutionary theories,which gave Allah’s limits a solid mathematical underpinning. Itwas only after the introduction of Newton’s theory of ‘limits’ 1 that1MS alludes here to Newton’s groundbreaking solutions to inherently difficultproblems in analytical geometry by drawing tangents to curves (differentiation) andby having defined areas bounded by curves (integration), which are both elementaryfor MS’s approach to solving the problems of Islamic inheritance law. The specificmathematical reference here is to Newton’s method of approximation that is iterativeand that employs a differential expression which is the derivative f″(x) of the