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women and islamic law 301of a consciousness of sin marked, in evolutionary terms, the transitionto humans as moral beings—Adam and his wife desperately tried tocover it up with the leaves of the Garden hoping that this wouldundo it. In doing so they expressed the primitive belief that if somethingis visibly concealed it will magically disappear. This gesturewas certainly not meant to conceal their nakedness because nakednessis only considered to be improper if a particular social contextrequires people to assess it as socially unacceptable.But neither in the Garden nor in the Open Land was there acontext that made them feel ‘naked’, that is, improperly dressed! Ifthe incident occurred outside Paradise, on earth, it certainly happenedduring a very early evolutionary stage in which people livedprimitively. Humans, known as Homo erectus, who were alive at thattime would have found nakedness the most natural way of existence.Even if the arrival of Adam and his wife meant the transition fromHomo erectus to Homo sapiens, their nakedness would not have beenjudged as improper in the surrounding milieu. Therefore, we maintainthat the collection of leaves was not meant to cover their nakednessbut was rather an attempt to hide and undo their disobedienceto God. We should therefore regard Adam as the ‘father of humankind’(abå ’l-ins§n) only in this figurative (moral) and symbolic (nonbiological)sense, not literally as our genetic forefather (and note thatthe Book does not refer to him as father, the ‘birth-giver’, w§lid, butas abå, indicating nonbiological fatherhood).Although the Book corrects the Old Testament’s account of originalsin by not putting the blame on Adam’s wife, it is astonishing to seethat Muslim exegetes such as al-•abarÊ have found it appropriate tohave recourse to the older version. Not only that; they have alsoelaborated on the old narrative and changed it to such a degree thatits misogynous tone has become the dominant feature of the wholestory. The old accusations against Adam’s wife, now called \aw§",were revived: it was she who lured Adam into thinking that he coulddisobey God; it was she who tempted Adam to go near the tree; itwas she who gave in to the temptations of IblÊs, and, even worse, itwas she who acted as if she was the Devil. And since \aw§" waswrongly understood to be humankind’s biological foremother, allwomen on earth were indiscriminately seen as sharing genetically\aw§’s devilish nature of disobedience and seductiveness and werecollectively punished for her sin. Suffering for her original sin, womenhad now to endure the ‘pain’ of menstruation and childbirth. Theexegetes completely ignored the fact that the Book categorically rejects