Al-Ghazālī's theological ethics : reimagining Muslim women's moral agency beyond Lila Abu-Lughod and Sabā Maḥmūd

Abstract

This thesis examines the moral agency of Muslim women through a critical dialogue between contemporary anthropology and classical Islamic theological ethics. It argues that although the paradigms of Lila Abu-Lughod and Saba Mahmood are influential in going beyond the liberal dichotomy of autonomy and resistance, they are methodologically insufficient in that they bracket the theological, metaphysical, and soteriological dimensions that constitute the moral significance of ethical action within the Islamic tradition. Instead of replacing anthropological analysis, this study proposes al-Ghazālī's Theology of the Human Person ('Ilm al-Insān) as its necessary theological complement for a more comprehensive understanding of the moral agency of Muslim women. The research is underpinned by Taha Abdurrahman's philosophy of trusteeship (al-i'timāniyya) as the main theoretical framework, and Gabriele Marranci's theory of embodied Muslim identity as an additional analytical lens. Methodologically, it employs a hermeneutical, inter-textual, and theological-interpretive method, which places al-Ghazālī's ethical writings, particularly the Iḥyā' 'Ulūm al-Dīn and Mīzān al-'Amal, and The Alchemy of Happiness in a reciprocal dialogue with the ethnographic writings of Abu-Lughod and Mahmood. The study shows how practices conventionally understood in anthropology as social negotiation, embodied discipline, or ethical self-formation, such as modesty (ḥayā'), patience (ṣabr), and kinship obligations, function within al-Ghazālī's ethical framework as practices of self-purification (tazkiyat al-nafs), moral discipline (mujāhada), and cultivation of virtue for the sake of divine proximity (qurb) and eternal felicity (sa'āda). Anthropological approaches demonstrate the workings of these practices within specific social and moral worlds, but it is al-Ghazālī's theological ethics that reveal their ultimate ethical and soteriological orientation. This study contributes to the anthropology of Islam by showing that ethnography and theological ethics operate at distinct yet mutually enriching levels of analysis. It provides a theological account of Muslim women's moral agency that preserves the insights of anthropological scholarship, while incorporating the theological self-understandings through which many Muslim women understand the purpose and significance of their ethical lives.