Beyond Gender, Beyond Rights: Woman’s Ontology In Islamic Metaphysics

What does it mean to be human? What inner quality, what metaphysical signature, confers upon a being the dignity of being called human? This question has reverberated across the corridors of philosophical reflection for centuries. From the agora of Athens to the madrasahs of Nishapur, from the Enlightenment salons of Europe to the philosophical meditations of Islamic philosophers, it has been a perennial existential concern, approached with epistemic rigour and existential urgency.

Philosophers across civilisations have attempted to define the essence of the human through some defining attributes—logos, nous, rūḥ, or ʿaql—each elevating the human beyond the merely biological into the realm of metaphysical vocation.

Aristotle defines the human as the only living being that possesses logos, the faculty of reasoned speech and moral deliberation. Descartes, inaugurating the modern turn, locates human identity in the cogito: cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). For Aquinas, the human is a hylomorphic composite: a unified substance constituted by a rational soul (form) and a material body (matter). Kant identifies autonomy and the capacity for moral legislation, that is, treating oneself and others as ends in themselves, as the definitive attributes of the human being. Hume, contrary to Descartes, redefines the human as a creature of sentiment, suggesting that both humans and animals are capable of thought and reason, differing only in degree, not in kind. Baruch Spinoza advances a monistic metaphysics, wherein human beings, like all finite entities, are modes of a single, infinite substance—Deus sive Natura ("God or Nature"), governed by the same immutable laws that structure the entirety of reality. Augustine sees the human as a soul-body composite created in God's image, but fallen through sin; only those united with Christ through faith recover their divine potential and become righteous humans, while others remain fallen humans.

Within the Islamic philosophical tradition, Ibn Sina (Avicenna) grounds human essence in the nafs al-naṭiqa (rational soul), capable of abstraction and immortal subsistence. Al-Farabi envisions the human as both a political and metaphysical agent, destined for felicity through perfected intellect and virtuous association. Mulla Ṣadra, departing from static essentialisms, reimagines the human not as a fixed entity, but as a being-in-becoming, an essence that becomes through substantial motion (al-ḥarakat al-jawhariyyah), the soul’s inner journey toward ontological actualisation. Ibn ʿArabi defines the human (insān) as a singular metaphysical reality fully realised only in the Perfect Human (al-insān al-kāmil), who embodies both divine and worldly realities and serves as God's vicegerent (khalifah); only such a human, created in God's image, fully merits the name "human." Those who merely share the external human form are insān ḥayawān (human as animal) and lack the inner reality of insān, which is defined by knowledge of God and ontological completeness.

Despite their metaphysical divergences, these divergent articulations converge upon a foundational premise: to be human is to possess reason, consciousness and moral agency, capacities through which the soul gestures toward transcendence.

Yet it is precisely at this seemingly universal threshold that a more critical and unsettling inquiry must be posed: Has this conception of the “human” been extended, in truth and in consequence, to all of humanity? Or has it, often tacitly and with historical persistence, been articulated through a male-centred lens, one that has systematically excluded the metaphysical existence of woman?

Where, then, in the grand metaphysical portrait of the human, is woman?

For while these traditions have claimed universality in defining the human, their conceptual architectures disclose an exclusionary logic. The bearer of logos, the subject of reason and transcendental vocation, has often been constructed as implicitly male. Woman, by contrast, has seldom appeared as a subject of metaphysical inquiry in her own right. Rather, she has been rendered an adjunct to man, defined relationally, secondarily and derivatively.

But if woman indeed partakes of all that is constitutive of the human—reason, language, moral agency and spiritual longing—then why has she so rarely been acknowledged as fully human in the deepest philosophical sense? This dissonance calls into question the very standards by which civilisation measures its own progress and humanity its own self-understanding.

The progress of civilisation is not measured solely by the monumental expansion and embellishment of mega-cities, the accumulation of material wealth or the sophistication of technological apparatus. Its true measure lies in the interior maturation of the human soul: its persistent effort to understand itself, its ceaseless search for significance, its moral awakening and its longing for meaning in a universe that remains silent and mysterious. One may thus contend that the apex of civilisation is the elevation of reason, not in its instrumental or calculative form, but as the faculty that seeks intelligibility in the face of existential uncertainty and constructs meaning amid contingency. Through reason, humanity has developed metaphysical systems, ethical doctrines, legal institutions, juridical and political orders that reflect a shared belief in the dignity of rational life. It is through this very faculty that human beings have sought to answer the most fundamental questions that confront human existence: What is being? What is justice? What constitutes order? What distinguishes the good from the evil? Upon what foundations does human freedom and responsibility rest? The cumulative refinement of reason has not merely shaped the external structures of civilisation, institutions, doctrines and codes, but has also transformed the inner architecture of human self-understanding: the manner in which the human being understands itself and its relation to the world.

And yet, if reason is the very faculty through which humanity has claimed its dignity, how has it historically failed to recognise that same dignity in woman?

The maturation of reason finds its emblematic expression in the Enlightenment, wherein modernity is ideally construed as the historical realisation of humanity’s capacity for autonomous self-legislation. In this light, Kant famously defined Enlightenment as der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit, the emergence of the human from a self-imposed immaturity, not through external compulsion but through the sovereign exercise of reason.

With that said, If reason is to remain the criterion of the human and the axis of civilisation, then its legitimacy must be measured not only by the luminosity of its achievements but also by the shadows it casts through its exclusions. Has the emancipation that reason promises extended equally to every bearer of rational faculty? Or has it remained circumscribed by the conceptual boundaries of a male subject, whose experiences, inquiries and judgements were taken as the universal norm, thereby casting woman as secondary, derivative or conceptually peripheral? Woman—no less a bearer of reason, moral agency, and existential longing—has, across centuries and civilisational imaginaries, been denied entry into the polis of rational deliberation. Across epochs and intellectual traditions, the question of woman has been mediated through the masculine lens and framed in relation to man, her existence framed not as an autonomous subject, but as a contingent being, an auxiliary presence, an “other.”

What emerges is a sobering realisation: the conceptual erasure of woman has not remained confined to classical texts or ancient traditions. Even today, she continues to be spoken of through the vocabulary of roles and responsibilities, debated within frameworks of rights and functions and measured by proximity to male-defined standards

Simone de Beauvoir, the French existentialist philosopher, gave eloquent expression to this condition in The Second Sex (1949), when she wrote: “She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other.” Beauvoir gave voice to what millennia of male-constructed metaphysical orders have silently presupposed: that woman, rather than being encountered as being, has been interpreted through a borrowed lens, denied the ontological dignity that reason, by its very logic, demands.

That the question of woman has remained conceptually peripheral across the architectures of philosophical thought is no minor oversight; it constitutes a metaphysical failure of profound consequence. From antiquity to modernity, the dominant intellectual traditions have systemically subordinated women through the distortions of conceptual reduction.

She has been spoken of, but seldom encountered in her being.

Aristotle, whose metaphysical schema shaped the foundations of Western thought, regarded woman not as a full ontological presence but as a deviation from the male norm: biologically passive, teleologically subordinate, and ontologically incomplete. Within his hylomorphic theory, where form functions as the animating, rational principle and matter as the passive substratum, the male is aligned with form and logos, the female with mere matter. This division codified a hierarchical ontology of the sexes. In On the Generation of Animals, Aristotle writes, “the first principle of movement… whereby that which comes into being is male, is better and more divine than the material whereby it is female.” The male, as bearer of the formative seed (semen), is cast as the originator of life and reason; the female provides only the material ground for its actualisation. He infamously describes the woman as a “deformed male,” whose reproductive capacity is marked by a fundamental deficiency: her inability to produce seed (semen), and the presence instead of an “impure” form of semen—menstrual blood—lacking the animating principle of soul. This biological reductionism was not merely incidental, it was deeply philosophical: it supported his broader view that women were naturally deficient in rationality and thus unsuited for public and political life. In Politics, this logic translates into institutional hierarchy: “the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; the male ruler, and the female subject.”

Plato, by contrast, appears to offer a more egalitarian metaphysics. In The Republic, he advocates for women’s education and argues that, insofar as reason resides in the genderless soul and not in the incidental body, women should be permitted to ascend as philosopher-rulers. His analogy comparing sexual difference to the superficial difference between bald and long-haired men underscores this metaphysical egalitarianism: differences in physical sex should not determine one’s social function, as natural capacities are distributed across both sexes. However, this egalitarian posture is complicated by the hierarchical metaphysics articulated in the Timaeus, where Plato suggests that unjust and morally deficient men may be reincarnated as women. Here, womanhood is symbolically associated with moral failure and spiritual regression. Yet because all souls retain the capacity for ascent through philosophical discipline and moral refinement, women must be given access to education and governance, not as a matter of rights or justice, but to facilitate political and cosmic harmony. As Christine Garside Allen argues, Plato’s support for the political inclusion of women is inextricably tied to his doctrines of soul, immortality, and transmigration. What emerges, therefore, is not a full affirmation of woman as being, but a conditional metaphysical inclusion contingent upon the moral history and potential of the soul. In this way, Plato’s legacy is less that of a feminist thinker than of a philosopher who, despite inherited prejudices, opened conceptual space for the rethinking of gender through the primacy of the soul over the body, while falling short of affirming woman as a complete ontological presence.

Arthur Schopenhauer, the 19th-century German philosopher, presents perhaps the most vitriolic philosophical condemnation of women in modern thought. In his essay On Women, he portrays them as intellectually inferior, morally trivial, and biologically designed and destined for subordination. With misanthropic rigour, he regards the female body—narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and delicate—as designed by Nature solely for reproduction and manipulation, not reason or labour. Their beauty, he asserts, is a transient tool that Nature cunningly bestows only to bind men into obligation and withdraws it once the reproductive function is served. He compares the post-childbirth loss of female beauty to ants shedding their wings after mating. Intellectually, he dismisses them as "big children," their reasoning powers permanently stunted at adolescence, incapable of abstract thought, justice, or artistic genius. Morally, they are driven by vanity, duplicity, and rivalry. He denies them political agency, dismissing gender equality as a European absurdity, and valorises Eastern models of rigid female subordination. Schopenhauer’s On Women is a scathing reductio ad absurdum of womanhood, stripping it of dignity, autonomy, and humanity, and reducing it to a mere instrument of the species’ will, whose highest virtue is obedience and whose greatest crime is ambition.

Aquinas, drawing from Aristotelian metaphysics, refers to woman as deficiens et occasionatus, defective and accidental, and argues that her subordination is not a consequence of sin but inscribed into the created order itself. He insists this subjection serves her own good, since man, in whom the discretion of reason predominates, must govern the weaker. Rousseau, similarly, conceived woman’s purpose as that of pleasing and serving man. Her education, he claimed in Émile, should not mirror that of men, for “once it is demonstrated that man and woman are not, and should not be constituted the same... it follows that they should not have the same education.” Even Hegel, whose dialectical system promised the unfolding of freedom through reason, excludes woman from the sphere of universality. She belongs not to the rational structures of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) in its civic manifestation, but to the particularity of the family, where feeling, not reason, reigns. Nietzsche, for his part, vacillates between aesthetic glorification and philosophical dismissal of woman. His aphorisms often romanticise feminine beauty, only to deny her metaphysical substance and intellectual depth. For Nietzsche, woman is not to be understood or reasoned with, she is to be ruled.

It is a profound irony that Enlightenment, which championed universal rights and rational emancipation, structurally excluded women from its vision. This exclusion was not a marginal oversight but a constitutive element. The Enlightenment conception of the “human” was modelled on attributes historically aligned with masculinity—rationality, autonomy, and public agency—while femininity was cast as its dialectical other: emotional, dependent, and domestic.

Much like the Western philosophical canon, the Islamic intellectual tradition, particularly in its classical exegetical and juridical articulations, has often perpetuated hierarchical constructions that deny woman metaphysical autonomy, despite the Qurʾanic emphasis on justice and spiritual equality. This paradox, between scriptural egalitarianism and interpretive patriarchy, has deep roots in historical readings that imported extratextual assumptions into theological discourse.

As Sanaa Mohiuddin insightfully observes in The Destiny of Woman: Feminism & Femininity in Traditional Islam, the narrative of Eve’s creation, though the Qurʾan remains silent on any claim that woman was created from or after man, has been consistently shaped by patriarchal frameworks drawn not from the Qurʾanic text itself but from inherited mythologies and androcentric worldviews. Theories positing woman’s secondary creation have been used to imply ontological deficiency, imposing a hierarchical symbolism alien to the Qurʾan’s own vision of human creation and dignity. Feminist scholars such as Amina Wadud and Asma Barlas have rigorously challenged these interpretive traditions. In her seminal work Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an, Barlas contends that no verse in the Qurʾan explicitly states that woman was created from or subsequent to man. Therefore, the doctrine of ontological inferiority is unsupported by the text. Instead, the Qurʾan articulates a vision of human creation rooted in shared origin, mutual responsibility, and spiritual parity.

Nonetheless, patriarchal interpretations have persisted, especially in relation to verses such as Qurʾan 4:34, frequently cited as a linchpin for male authority. This verse, which reads: “Men are qawwamun over women because God has granted some of them more than others and because they spend out of their wealth…”, has become a site of deep hermeneutical contestation. Abu al-Aʿla Mawdudi interpreted this verse as a proof of men’s innate superiority, describing women as “tragic beings” inherently incapable of reasoning on the same level as men. For him, male authority was not only divinely ordained but intellectually necessary. Classical exegetes reinforced such readings: al-Ṭabari interpreted the faḍl (“degree”) as referring to men’s greater responsibilities in providing for and protecting women, whereas Ibn Kathir read it as evidence of biological and moral superiority.

These interpretations, entrenched in centuries of legal, theological, and cultural production, have shaped the structure of Islamic social imaginaries and jurisprudence, often to the detriment of the Qurʾan’s deeper egalitarian ethos. Such readings have not merely reflected patriarchal norms; they have helped institutionalise them, codifying a metaphysical hierarchy that stands in tension with the Qurʾan’s ethical commitment to mutual respect, spiritual equality, justice and the universality of moral responsibility.

Al-Ghazali, one of the most revered thinkers in the Islamic intellectual tradition, institutionalised female inferiority in Iḥyaʾ ʿUlum al-Din and Kimiya-ye Saʿadat, sanctioning women’s seclusion, discouraging their education, and justifying polygamy, all under the mantle of divine legitimacy. Zahra Esmaeili, in her paper Critical Analysis of Ghazali's Thoughts About Women Based on the Historical Context of Islamic Society, argues that such prescriptions often conflict with both the Qurʾan’s ethical foundations and the Prophetic model, reflecting instead the influence of post-Prophetic patriarchal developments and pre-Islamic cultural residues. F. R. Barazangi, in The Absence of Muslim Women in Shaping Islamic Thought: Foundations of Muslims' Peaceful and Just Co-existence, calls for a rigorous distinction between the divine ethos of Shariʿah and the historical accretions of jurisprudence (fiqh) and custom (ʿurf), which have often congealed into systems that marginalise and instrumentalise women.

What explains the near-universal tradition across civilisations—philosophical, scientific, and religious—to define the woman through the logic of inferiority?

Eliza Burt Gamble’s The Evolution of Woman (1894) offers a crucial historical diagnosis: the subordination of woman was not biological, but institutional, ideological and historically constructed. Drawing on anthropological and historical evidence, Gamble challenges the assumption that patriarchy is a primordial social order. She argues instead that early human societies, such as the Iroquois and Seneca, were often matriarchal or matrilineal. In these societies, women held authority over kinship structures, property and governance. However, the rise of agriculture, private property and organised warfare gradually shifted power toward men. This shift led to practices such as wife-capture, wherein women were exchanged as property between male-dominated clans. This economic and social restructuring solidified male authority and initiated the decline of women's autonomy. The new patriarchal order was cemented through law (e.g., Roman paterfamilias), religion (a shift from goddess-centred to male deity worship) and philosophy (Aristotle’s claim that woman is a “defective male”).

Theories positing woman’s secondary creation have been used to imply ontological deficiency, imposing a hierarchical symbolism alien to the Qurʾan’s own vision of human creation and dignity. Feminist scholars such as Amina Wadud and Asma Barlas have rigorously challenged these interpretive traditions

Gamble’s core insight is that patriarchy was not the origin of civilisation, but a seizure of power that was later rationalised as “natural” through male-controlled institutions. Even modern science, she argues, was complicit.  Her critique of Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) reveals how evolutionary theory absorbed and reinforced patriarchal assumptions. Darwin claimed that males, due to their exposure to competition, hunting and warfare, had evolved to be more advanced, while females remained passive and less developed. Gamble dismantles this male-centric reasoning, arguing that it is women—through discernment, selectivity and biological continuity—who ensure the refinement and survival of the species. The supposed inferiority of women, she concludes, is not an empirical discovery but a culturally constructed presumption, embedded in the frameworks of science, law, religion, and philosophy. Her work reveals patriarchy as an epistemic and political construct, maintained through the exclusion of women from the institutions of knowledge production.

What emerges is a sobering realisation: the conceptual erasure of woman has not remained confined to classical texts or ancient traditions. Even today, she continues to be spoken of through the vocabulary of roles and responsibilities, debated within frameworks of rights and functions and measured by proximity to male-defined standards. But what if these debates themselves rest upon an insufficient grammar—one that fails to approach woman not as a derivative of man, but as a mode of being in her own ontological right?

If woman’s historical subordination is neither natural nor metaphysically necessary, then the imperative before us is not merely to revise legal codes or rebalance social duties and rights, but to re-encounter woman ontologically, as wujud, as a being as complete in her existence as man. This is not a political diversion but a philosophical necessity: to move beyond debates centred on role, function or utility. Equality, before it is juridical or political, must be ontological. That is, woman must be recognised not merely because she resembles man in certain faculties, but because she exists—fully, originally, and independently.

Ṣadra, in his Tafsīr al-Qurʾān reinforces this ontological egalitarianism. He reads the descent (hubūṭ) of Adam and Eve not as a fall from grace but as a necessary stage in the actualisation of the soul’s infinite potential

To ground equality on functional sameness is to risk reproducing the very hierarchies it seeks to dismantle, for it makes woman’s worth contingent upon her capacity to mirror a male-defined norm. True philosophical equality begins with the recognition that woman, like man, is a complete bearer of being—not by analogy, not by deficiency, but by virtue of her own ontological reality. Only on such a foundation can discourse on rights and responsibilities break free from the gravitational pull of implicit inequality.

In this spirit, it becomes necessary to turn inward to the resources of Islamic metaphysics and ask whether the subordination of woman has any grounding within its foundational grammar of being. For the enduring ontological marginalisation of woman—her fragmentation into the incomplete, the adjunct, the secondary—cannot be addressed merely by ethical correction or legal revision. It demands a return to the most fundamental metaphysical inquiries: What is being? What constitutes the human essence? Does gender belong to the core of human identity, or is it an accidental attribute (ʿaraḍ) that bears no weight upon the essence (dhāt) of the human being?

While classical Islamic philosophers did not explicitly pose gender as a question of ontological distinction, their metaphysical architectures, particularly their conceptions of soul (nafs), essence (māhiyya) and the distinction between essential and accidental properties, offer a profound framework through which such a question can now be critically re-examined.

This inquiry can be meaningfully pursued across the three major philosophical traditions in Islamic thought: the Peripatetic (masha’i) school of Ibn Sina and Farabi, the Illuminationist (ishraqi) philosophy of Suhrawardi and the Transcendent Theosophy (al-ḥikma al-mutaʿāliyah) of Mulla Sadra.

The Peripatetic (masha’i) Conception of Human Essence: Ibn Sina

For Ibn Sina and other mashshaʼi (Peripatetic) philosophers, the human being is defined as a ḥayawan al-naṭiq—a "rational animal." In this classical metaphysical framework, “rationality” (nuṭq) serves as the faṣl (differentia) that distinguishes the human species (nawʿ) from other animals within the genus (jins) of living beings. The rational soul (nafs al-naṭiqa) constitutes the essential reality of the human being, while all corporeal attributes, - including physical characteristics such as race, colour or gender - are classified as accidents (aʿraḍ): contingent qualities that do not constitute the essence (dhat) of the human.

Ibn Sina’s metaphysical framework makes this distinction unequivocally clear. In al-Ilahiyyat, he asserts that "the human qua human is constituted by the rational soul," while in al-Najat he describes bodily differences as "accidents of matter, not of the soul's essence." This ontological demarcation between essential rationality and accidental physicality is not peripheral but structurally central to Avicennan philosophy. Later scholars including Naṣir al-Din Ṭusi developed this classification further by specifying gender as 'araḍ lazim (inseparable accident), acknowledging its empirical persistence while affirming its metaphysical contingency. The philosophical implications emerge directly from these categorical distinctions: if rationality alone defines human essence, and biological differences belong to the realm of accidents (arad), then any assertion of ontological distinction or hierarchy between male and female humans represents a fundamental category error within this system.

Drawing from Ibn Sina's metaphysical framework, one can deduce that male and female characteristics pertain exclusively to the reproductive dimension of human existence and remain entirely irrelevant to the metaphysical essence of the rational soul. Consequently, men and women share complete identity at the level of ontological essence. While gender manifests invariably in the empirical realm as an inseparable accident, it holds no constitutive role in defining the essential nature of the human being. This does not project modern conceptions of gender onto classical texts, but rather elucidates how the internal logic of Islamic metaphysics inherently challenges hierarchical interpretations. The essential/accidental distinction establishes principles that systematically undermine patriarchal claims of women's metaphysical inferiority. While the classical philosophers themselves may not have drawn these egalitarian conclusions explicitly, the rigorous consistency of their ontological system leaves no legitimate conceptual space for gender-based essentialism or ontological differentiation between the sexes.

Ontological Equality in al-Fārābī’s Political Metaphysics

Abu Nasr al-Farabi, revered as the “Second Teacher " (al-mu‘allim al-thani)” after Aristotle in the Islamic philosophical tradition, offers a metaphysical account of the human being that directly undermines any essentialist hierarchy between the sexes. In Al-Madina al-Fadila (The Virtuous City) and Al-Siyasah al-Madaniyyah (The Political Regime), he systematically analyses human potential without qualifying his universal category of al-insan (human being) by gender. His framework examines two fundamental aspects of existence: the essential structure of human nature (al-bunya al-dhatiyya) and its capacity for intellectual transcendence (istikmal al-‘aqli), both of which apply equally to men and women.

In Al-Madina al-Fadila, al-Farabi acknowledges that men and women differ in their bodily constitutions and in certain psychological faculties. He notes, for example, that strength, aggression and severity are more commonly observed in men, whereas compassion, gentleness and receptivity are more often associated with women. However, he does not essentialise these traits; rather, he treats them as mutable dispositions, subject to cultivation, moderation or suppression through habituation (ta‘ammul), education (ta‘lim), and spiritual exercise (riyaḍa ruḥiyya). More significantly, al-Farabi asserts that the primary cognitive and epistemic faculties of the soul—sensation (ḥiss), imagination (takhayyul) and intellect (nuṭq)—exhibit no intrinsic difference between the sexes. These faculties are constitutive of the human essence and function independently of gender.

In Al-Siyāsah al-Madanīyyah, al-Farabi advances this position further, explicitly affirming the equality of men and women with respect to the rational faculty (quwwah naṭiqah). For al- Farabi, it is this faculty that grounds the human being’s capacity for moral agency, philosophical reflection and metaphysical ascent. The ʿAql al-Faʿʿāl (Active Intellect), a cornerstone of his epistemology, guides all rational beings, male and female alike, toward the highest degree of perfection (kamal). He explains that through the disciplined exercise of this faculty, the soul may attain a station where it transcends dependence on corporeality, matter or accident, and realises its telos through pure volition. He further distinguishes three interrelated components of rationality: the theoretical intellect (ʿaql naẓari), which concerns the apprehension of universal truths; the practical intellect (ʿaql ʿamalī), which governs ethical conduct; and the appetitive faculty (quwwah nuzūʿiyyah), which regulates desire and volition. The development of philosophical inquiry, craftsmanship and the sciences all emerge from the structure and cultivation of these faculties—faculties equally available to both men and women.

By anchoring the human telos in rationality rather than biology, al- Farabi articulates a metaphysical vision in which men and women, as rational beings, share the same potential for intellectual and spiritual perfection. His philosophical anthropology thus rejects any ontological or epistemological hierarchy based on gender. Within the framework of Islamic metaphysics, al-Farabi offers a universalist account of the human being, one in which woman is not a deviation from a male norm, but a full participant in the rational structure of existence. This leaves no room for any ontological justification of gender-based hierarchy within a metaphysics grounded in reason and shared human potential.

The Illuminationist (ishraqi) Position: Shihab ad-Dīn Suhrawardī

Shihab al-Dīn Suhrawardī, founder of the Ishrāqī (Illuminationist) school of Islamic philosophy, advances a metaphysics that privileges light (nur) as the fundamental principle of reality. In his ontology, all beings are degrees of light and darkness arranged in a hierarchical, vertical order of intensity and perfection. At the apex of this nuri hierarchy stands the Pure Light (al-Nur al-Mujarrad), while material and corporeal realities occupy the lower rungs as increasingly dimmed manifestations of that same Light. Drawing upon both rational demonstration and intuitive unveiling (kashf), Suhrawardi treats human identity as grounded in the immaterial soul, not in the body or its features. Therefore, the human soul (nafs) is not defined by its material characteristics but by its participation in the realm of immaterial Lights.

Gender belongs to the realm of bodies and accidents (ʿawariḍ), while the essence of the human being lies in the soul’s luminosity and potential for ascent. Later Illuminationist commentators and philosophers classified gender as an inseparable accident (ʿaraḍ lazim), comparable to other non-defining characteristics that accompany, but do not constitute, the essence (dhat) of a being. That is, although every human being appears as either male or female, these distinctions are contingent, not essential. Thus, while a person is always male or female in the empirical world, their essential nature as a rational being can be fully understood without reference to gender. In this schema, masculinity and femininity do not define the being of the human; they accompany it without determining it.

Furthermore, Suhrawardi’s epistemology, based on dhawq (taste), mukashafa (unveiling), and ishraq (illumination), treats knowledge as a function of ontological receptivity, not of gendered embodiment. Insofar as both men and women are capable of inner purification and luminous receptivity, they possess equal potential for spiritual realisation. The journey of the soul, as described in works such as Ḥikmat al-Ishraq and Hayakil al-Nur, is open to any soul that undergoes ascetic discipline, philosophical reflection and intuitive awakening.

Mulla Sadra's Transcendent Theosophy (al-ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya) and the Ontology of Self

Ṣadr ad-Din Muḥammad Shirazi, widely known as Mulla Sadra, is the founder of al-ḥikmah al-mutaʿaliya (Transcendent Theosophy), a philosophical system that integrates elements of mashshaʾi(Peripatetic), ishraqi (Illuminationist), and ʿirfani (gnostic) thought, grounded in a distinctive metaphysics of being (wujud). Sadra offers perhaps the most transformative metaphysical account of human nature in the Islamic tradition. Departing from the static essentialism of earlier schools, Ṣadra reimagines the human being not as a fixed species (nawʿ), but as a “middle species” (nawʿ-i mutawassiṭ), dynamically unfolding through the soul’s substantial motion (ḥarakat al-jawhariyya).

Unlike Ibn Sina or Suhrawardi, who viewed the human being as a composite of body and a rational soul (nafs naiqah), Ṣadra asserts that the soul is not created in a completed state. Instead, it emerges with the body, begins as a corporeal form (jismānīyat al-ḥudūth), and through a process of ontological motion, gradually spiritualises its substance (rūḥānīyat al-baqāʾ). In this framework, the essence of the human being is not fixed but becomes, unfolding across an existential arc from potentiality (quwwah) to actuality (fiʿl). As such, Ṣadrā rejects any essential definitions of “man” or “woman” as metaphysical types; the soul’s reality is determined not by gender, but by its existential capacity (saʿai wujūdi) and its orientation toward perfection (kamāl).

This ontological vision is underwritten by three foundational doctrines:

• Primacy of existence (aṣālat al-wujūd): Being, not quiddity (māhiyyah), is the ground of reality.

• Gradation of being (tashkīk al-wujūd): Existence is not uniform but unfolds in intensities or degrees.

• Substantial motion (ḥarakat al-jawhariyyah): The soul moves within its own substance, rising or falling based on knowledge and action.

In light of these principles, gender, whether understood biologically or culturally, is relegated to the level of accidental attributes (ʿaraḍ), bearing no weight in the determination of a soul’s ontological station. All human souls, regardless of gender, traverse the same metaphysical pathway: from sensory perception to rational reflection, and ultimately toward spiritual union with the Divine. In this context, perfection (kamāl) is nothing other than proximity to God, and that proximity is measured by one’s progress in the theoretical and practical intellects (ʿaql naẓarī and ʿaql ʿamalī). This applies equally to men and women, with no metaphysical privileges assigned to either. Furthermore, in his writings on saʿādah (happiness), kamālāt (perfections), and the soul’s journey, no distinction is made between male and female capacity.

Ṣadra, in his Tafsīr al-Qurʾān reinforces this ontological egalitarianism. He reads the descent (hubūṭ) of Adam and Eve not as a fall from grace but as a necessary stage in the actualisation of the soul’s infinite potential.  Without descent into material existence, their divine capacities would have remained in a state of potential (quwwah) rather than attaining actuality (fiʿl). Importantly, Ṣadra makes no ontological distinction between Adam and Eve, underscoring that both were bearers of divine potential, whose movement through materiality was essential for manifesting the latent capacities of the soul.

In Asrār al-Āyāt, he further attests that the station of khalīfat Allāh (vicegerency of God) is a graded reality (tashkīkī), present—albeit in varying intensities—in every human being. This capacity is not gender-specific; it is the structural potential of the soul as such. The journey toward insān kāmil (the Perfect Human) is thus equally accessible to men and women.

Ṣadra also revisits the classical notion of the human being as ḥayawan naṭiq (rational animal), a concept inherited from both Islamic and Greek traditions. For Ṣadra, this is not a reductionist designation, but a framework that delineates the soul’s ontological ascent. The human soul (nafs), according to Ṣadra, comprises four gradational levels: the vegetative (nabawi), the animal (ḥayawani), the rational (naṭiqah), and the celestial (falaki). Every human being, male or female, possesses all four. The vegetative soul governs growth and sustenance, the animal soul introduces motion, sensation, and desire; the rational soul grants the capacity for intellect and moral reasoning; and the celestial soul represents the summit of spiritual perfection. This ontological structure, being equally present in both men and women, maintains their shared and equal capacity for intellectual and spiritual transcendence.

Mulla Ṣadra’s Transcendent Theosophy not only dismantles philosophical foundations for gender-based hierarchy, but articulates a strong ontological framework in which women are recognised as complete and autonomous bearers of being (wujūd). Their metaphysical dignity is not derivative of man, but intrinsic to their own soul’s journey toward existential fullness.

In conclusion, through a philosophical excavation, it becomes clear that across centuries, many canonical traditions either excluded woman explicitly or rendered her a secondary presence, the Other, the defective male, the emotionally governed, the biologically determined. These exclusions were not incidental; they were etched into the very metaphysical grammars that defined what it meant to be human.

This was not merely a misreading, it was a metaphysical betrayal, an ontological disinheritance, severing woman from her primordial claim to wujud (being) and reducing her to a relational afterthought. The inferiority of woman was never ontologically inscribed; it was historically imposed through the politics of interpretation and power. A grave injustice that did not only marginalise woman socially or politically, but led her to internalise—generation after generation—the belief that she lacked something essential in her being. That her humanity was incomplete. That her existence was always in reference to man’s. She was cast as a derivative, a reflection, a shadow, her presence always defined in relation to his. This slow erosion of self, this ontological disfiguring, distanced her from the recognition that she, too, is in her essence no less a bearer of being. That before she is marked by gender, by biological difference, she is a soul, fully formed, luminous in essence, and destined for the same arc of perfection as any man. Her soul is neither partial nor deficient; it is fully capable of transcendence.

Yet the same traditions that exiled her also hold the keys to her restoration. For when al-Fārābī declares in al-Madīna al-Fāḍila that the philosopher-ruler’s authority stems solely from intellectual virtue (ʿaql), when Ibn Sīnā insists that the nafs al-nāṭiqa (rational soul) knows no gender, when Suhrawardī locates human identity in luminosity (nūr) rather than body, when Mullā Ṣadra declares the soul’s perfection (kamāl) a dynamic becoming open to all, they articulate an ontology that shatters the chains of hierarchy.

This realisation must not remain suspended in abstraction. For if being is the ground upon which all meaning stands, then the recognition of woman’s ontological dignity must ripple across every structure that once denied it. It calls for a hermeneutic awakening, where sacred texts are reread with the presumption of metaphysical parity. It calls for a legal reorientation, where laws shaped by assumptions of deficiency are reimagined in light of essential equality. It calls for educational reform, where the curriculum no longer mirrors the erasures of history, but restores woman to her rightful intellectual and spiritual stature. And it calls for cultural unlearning, where inherited myths that tied dignity to masculinity are finally undone.

This is not merely a philosophical adjustment, it is a civilisational obligation. Before a woman is cast into roles, before she is spoken of as mother, sister, daughter, or wife, she is ḥaqīqa (truth), nūr (light), and ʿaql (intellect). And no structure that denies this can claim to be just, true, or whole.

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