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Part of
The Complexity of Social-Cultural Emergence: Biosemiotics, semiotics and translation studies
Edited by Kobus Marais, Reine Meylaerts and Maud Gonne
[Benjamins Translation Library 164] 2024
► pp. 109–127

Chapter 5
Sex and the stability of a legal gender system

Dilemmas of defining intersex in Islamic law

| New York University Abu Dhabi
Islamic law’s gender system is based on a conception of humans as sexually dimorphic. The presence of nonbinary bodies, specifically the khunthā, posed a challenge to the gender system. Law practitioners, like ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-Isnawī (d. 722/1322), attempted to redefine sex and intersexuality to stabilise the legal gender system. In an exploration of al-Isnawī’s writings, I argue that he engages in a form of object translation, following Marais’s typology of translation. Al-Isnawī incorporated the khunthā into the gender system by unravelling the challenge posed by their ambiguity onto Islamic law. This redefinition effectively defines them into impossibility by legal technicalities.
Keywords: gender, intersexuality, Islamic law, legal gender, Islam and gender, religion and intersexuality, religion and gender, differences of sexual development and law, translation and law
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The Khunthā
  • The law
  • From tracing historical trajectories to tracing conceptual trajectories
  • Three instances of translating gender variance
    • Event A: ʿĀmir Ibn al-Ẓarib al-ʿUdwānī
    • Event B: Al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān
    • Event C: ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-Isnawī
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 3 May 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.164.05alm
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