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muhammad shahrur’s life and workxliiitoothbrush, f an or folded handkerchief; 57 e) does not at all imply‘strike’ but the “confinement of women”; 58 f ) simply means “to createan effect upon her” by employing nonviolent means, 59 or just g) “tostrike out of a marriage”. 60Given his position as a ‘radical’, Shahrur would regard most ofthese interpretations as not far-reaching enough and, in spite of theirwell meaning, still inadequate for a real contemporary reading ofthe Qur"an. His explicit criticism of those feminists who interpretal-qiw§ma as men’s ‘standing in service’, implying that men are notthe masters but in fact the servants of women, shows that he disagreeswith the inherent or hidden structural imbalance in such aview. For him, the above-mentioned interpretations still perpetuatean essential inequality between the sexes. The most innovative aspectof Shahrur’s reading of 4:34 is then that he does not subscribe at allto the men-women or husband-wife polarity that this verse seems tosuggest. He maintains that the main theme of the verse is al-qiw§ma,that is, leadership or guardianship as such, not the relationshipbetween men and women. In order to prove this point he suggestsreading the two terms al-rij§l and al-nis§" not as ‘men’ or ‘women’respectively. Instead, he reads the two terms in a gender neutral wayand proposes that both in fact imply men and women. Quoting versesin which al-rij§l (24:37) or rij§l an (2:239; 22:27) are not exclusivelyused for male persons, he stresses that rajul-rij§l (sing.-pl.) is semanticallynot always restricted to connoting maleness. The generic senseof the lexeme r-j-l is ‘to walk’ or ‘to go on foot’, which in neithercase is a prerogative of the male sex. Similarly, the term al-nis§" doesnot only mean ‘women’ but also expresses an ungendered notion ofdelay, deferral, or postponement. The Arabs say ‘the delivery hasbeen postponed’ or ‘Zayd is late’, both expressions using the relatedterm al-nasÊ" (connoting deferment), as does 9:37 “Verily the transposing(of a prohibited month) ( al-nasÊ" u ) is an addition to unbelief...”.57Murad Hofmann, Islam: The Alternative (Reading: Garnet Publishing, 1993),141.58Riffat Hassan, “An Islamic Perspective,” In Sexuality: A Reader, ed. KarenLe bacqz, 355–56 (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1999).59Hadia Mubarak, “Breaking the Interpretive Monopoly: A Re-Examination ofVerse 4:34,” Hawwa 2, no. 3 (2004): 261–89 (284–85).60Dahlia Eissa, “Constructing the Notion of Male Superiority over Women inIslam: The Influence of Sex and Gender Stereotyping in the Interpretation of theQur"an and the Implications for a Modernist Exegesis of Rights.” WLUML OccasionalPaper, no. 11 (November 1999): 45.