Articulating the Optimal Features of a Good Muslim Wife: Some Qur’anic expressions that Affiliate with the Woman’s Perfect, Metaphysical and Real Worlds

Abstract

This small-scale study investigates the optimal features of good Muslim woman. It aims to describe, interpret, and explain the rhetorical features of the properties the Qur’anic discourse (QD) maintains for both sexes and those it excludes for the good Muslim woman. The study benefits from corpus, i.e. text, linguistics for data collection. It also applies a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach to the Quotes collected from the Noble Qur’an (NQ). The paper builds on Van Dijk’s 1998 model of analysis at the syntactic, semantic and schematic levels of the properties identified for a good Muslim woman. It has been found that the QD assigns ten properties to describe a good Muslim man and woman; they include submission, belief, obedience, truthfulness, faithfulness, humbleness, alms giving, fasting, chastity, and turning to Allah. Among these, the QD exclusively and inclusively lists ‘being resigned, believing, always turning to Him, being devoted to worship, fasting’, and ‘being a widow or a virgin’ as general semantic features for a good Muslim wife. It has been concluded that the properties identified for a good Muslim woman have directive, informative, meta-linguistic and affective functions. They are part of the sociology of Islam which accommodates the ontological principle of creating women as a different sex having other roles to play with the deontological theory of moral obligation to obey freely the other sex. The Qur’anic engineering tactfully goes beyond reconciling both sexes’ needs and roles to repair some social norms established and entrenched against the woman who has already experienced marriage before.