For some years now, a claim has been circulating, particularly among English-speaking Muslims, which has become so widespread that it is worth addressing it directly rather than merely mentioning it in passing: that Allah can be referred to as hiya or “She” or can be addressed alternately with various pronouns in order to correct the patriarchal distortions under which Muslim women have suffered at the hands of Muslim men.
This claim has both a scholarly form, developed over the last three decades in Western academic circles, and a popular form, which is now disseminated in personal accounts, devotional narratives and memes. For reasons that will become clear, it has not found its way into Arabic, Urdu, Turkish or Malay discourse, yet it has found adherents within the English-speaking diaspora, and its argumentation deserves a response.
Allah is neither male nor female. Allah is not a physical being, has no gender, is not a gendered entity and does not fall into any category in which gender is a meaningful characteristic.
لَيۡسَ كَمِثۡلِهِۦ شَيۡءٞ
“There is nothing whatever like unto Him.” (Surah ash-Shura, Ch.42: V.12)
لَمۡ يَلِدۡ وَلَمۡ يُولَدۡ
“He begets not, nor is He begotten.” (Surah al-Ikhlas, Ch.112: V.4)
Scholars have been in agreement on this matter since the early days of the Islamic tradition. When a Muslim woman says, “Allah is beyond gender”, she is repeating a tenet of faith that is more than a thousand years old.
The point of contention lies not in this, but in what can be inferred from it. The argument in favour of using the feminine form of address is as follows: since no human pronoun does justice to the Transcendent, Muslims may address Allah as “She,” or alternate between forms or otherwise reform the manner in which Allah is addressed in prayer and speech. The traditional view takes the opposite stance. Since human language already reaches its limits when it comes to addressing the Absolute, we adhere all the more carefully to what revelation has given us rather than letting go of it.
The grammar
Grammatical gender in Arabic is not the same as the use of gender-specific pronouns in English, and almost every argument in favour of referring to Allah in the feminine form has overlooked this distinction. The Arabic masculine is morphosyntactically unmarked: it functions both as a specifically masculine form and as the default designation for referents that are not explicitly female. The feminine is marked: hiya refers to a specific woman, to a grammatically feminine noun (shams, the sun, is feminine; qamar, the moon, is masculine, though in neither case is there any gender implication) or to specific morphological categories. Huwa for Allah is the only option Arabic offers for not attributing a specific gender to the Absolute, as the only alternative is marked as feminine.
The argument that “‘He’ is just as gendered a reference to Allah as ‘She’ is, so why only use gendered terms in one direction?” is therefore based on a misunderstanding of how the two pronouns function. In Arabic, the masculine form already fulfils the function that the generic “one” fulfils in English. Using hiya instead of huwa does not mean switching from a marked form to an unmarked one, but rather from the unmarked to the marked, assigning a specific feminine reference to Allah where previously there was no gender-specific reference. Referring to Allah as hiya is more anthropomorphic than referring to Him as huwa, not less so. The apparent symmetry between “He” and “She” in English does not exist in the language of revelation.
This also explains why the suggestion has not spread beyond the English-speaking world. Arabic speakers do not adopt it, as the grammar of the Quran does not create the kind of grammatical dissonance that would prompt them to do so. Nor do Urdu or Persian speakers adopt it, as these languages do not have grammatical gender for pronouns at all. What is presented as a theological insight is, in fact, an artefact of the translation into English.
At this point, there is a tempting response that I would like to set aside before it is put forward. If huwa is grammatically neutral, one might say, then the choice between the pronouns is irrelevant and the use of hiya where this offers comfort to a woman in pain cannot really matter. That does not follow.
The masculine form of address for Allah is the expression chosen by the revelation itself, and the linguistic form of the Quran is not a disposable shell that can be exchanged as required.
The principle of tawqif applies: the names and forms by which Allah may be addressed are known only through what the revelation has authorised. Muslims are taught how they should address Allah. It is not left to us to figure this out for ourselves. Using hiya instead of huwa in public teaching or devotional practice is not linguistic freedom, but a presumption of authority over divine naming that has never been granted to us. “Call upon Allah or call upon Rahman; (by) whichever name you call (Him), His are the most beautiful names” (Surah Bani Isra’il, Ch.17: V.111) points us to His names, which He has taught us and not to any form of address we might find helpful.
Rahman and rahim
One argument in favour of the feminine form is of an etymological nature. Ar-Rahman and ar-Rahim, the two great names of divine mercy with which all but one of the surahs begin, share the same root as rahim, the womb. The hadith explicitly establishes this connection: “I am ar-Rahman. I created the rahim and derived its name from My name.” (Sahih al-Bukhari, Kitab al-Adab, 5988) Every act of devotion begins with an invocation whose root is the womb. The Holy Prophet (sa) taught divine mercy using the image of a nursing mother reunited with her lost child: “Allah is more merciful towards His servants than this woman is towards her child.” (Sahih al-Bukhari, Kitab al-Adab, 5999; Sahih Muslim, Kitab at-Tawba, 2754)
This is part of the teaching of the tradition itself and the point must be acknowledged. Yet the etymology does not prove what the suggestion requires it to prove. The direction of derivation in the hadith is clear: the womb is named after the divine attribute, not the attribute after the womb. If the etymology were taken as proof that Allah is female, one would, by the same logic, have to conclude that because Allah is al-Basir, the All-Seeing, He possesses eyes and that because He is al-Qahhar, the Overwhelming, He exercises physical force. Such reasoning collapses into tashbih, the likening of Creator to creation, the very error that tanzih, the affirmation of divine transcendence, exists to correct.
Divine attributes, whenever they are conveyed in words drawn from human experience, function as pointers to perfections befitting the majesty of Allah alone and must be freed from the material, bodily and biological connotations that those words carry in ordinary usage. The connection between rahma and rahim, accordingly, tells us something about the nature of divine mercy, namely that it surpasses even the deepest biological intimacy known to human beings. It does not tell us that Allah has a womb, nor does it render the divine Essence feminine.
The hermeneutical argument
The argument underpinning the academic literature goes something like this: Tawhid requires that Allah transcend gender roles. In practice, the patriarchal interpretation has projected masculinity onto God. An interpretation faithful to Tawhid must therefore dismantle this projection. The use of feminine, gender-neutral or alternating pronouns is proposed as a means of resolving this.
The first premise is orthodox and the second applies to many Muslim communities. The problem lies in the transition to the third premise, which causes a confusion between two very different things that the word “interpretation” is supposed to cover. One is the subjective conception of ordinary believers, who imagine God in anthropomorphic terms, which constitutes an ancient and real pastoral problem. The other is the revealed linguistic form in which Allah addresses us. These are not the same objects. Correcting what a believer imagines when she hears huwa does not justify revising the word huwa itself. The traditional response to the first problem is not to alter the pronouns of the Quran, but to teach tanzih and al-asma’ al-husna until the false image dissolves from within.
Furthermore, there is another error to consider. What is being proposed here is not actually an act of tafsir at all, it is a change in the way Muslims address Allah in prayer and in speech, which is presented as if it were an interpretative step. Tafsir interprets what a verse says. Pronoun substitution alters what the community says to the One to whom the verses are addressed. The traditional interpretative tools, that is, contextual reading, asbab an-nuzul, muhkamat and mutashabihat, etc., perform legitimate and sometimes important work in addressing patriarchal readings of scripture. However, it does not extend to revising the forms in which Muslims have traditionally addressed their Lord.
There is also an internal problem within the argument of incorrect gender assignment. If every human pronoun assigns gender to God equally incorrectly, then hiya assigns gender to Allah just as incorrectly as huwa. Alternating between them does not solve the problem highlighted by the argument; it commits the same error in the opposite direction. The honest conclusion from the premise is not pronoun rotation, but apophatic humility within revealed language, i.e., affirming the forms of address prescribed by the Quran whilst restraining the imagination from treating these forms as descriptions of divine anatomy.
The pain beneath the proposal
A potential factor that may drive some women to this practice in the first place is not theoretical, but rooted in lived experience. Women may have turned to the feminine discourse and applied it to God due to bad experiences with men and male authority in their lives, such as dealing with a toxic husband or father. The pain and trauma caused by such experiences may be real. This must be acknowledged. However, to then project the feminist discourse onto God is not the solution.
If a woman has been presented with a bad experience of the male gender in her life, the answer does not lie in reimagining Allah. It lies in guiding her to Allah as Allah has actually revealed Himself: Whose rahma “encompasses all things” (Surah al-A‘raf, Ch.7: V:157), Who is closer to her than her jugular vein (Surah Qaf, Ch.50: V.17), Who has called himself al-Wadud, al-Latif, al-Halim, ar-Ra’uf and al-Karim and Who, when He names the two greatest human examples of iman, that is, faith, presents two women as role models not only for women, but for the entire community of believers, whom the faithful are to emulate, “Allah sets forth for those who believe the example of the wife of Pharaoh […] And (the example of) Mary, the daughter of ‘Imran” (Surah at-Tahrim, Ch.66: V.12-13). The Promised Messiah (as) read the passage precisely in this sense, noting that the spiritual journey of every true believer is mapped onto the likeness of these two women. (Malfuzat [English], Vol. 3, pp. 232-233)
A woman who switches from huwa to hiya in her du‘a’ imagines God in anthropomorphic terms; she has merely reversed the gender of the image. What is needed is to dissolve the image entirely, and tradition possesses the means to do so: tanzih, taught alongside the complete al-asma’ al-husna, together with the immense corpus of female scholarship in Islamic history, which Muslim communities have allowed to slip from view and which no change of pronoun can restore.
The very meaning of Islam
Behind the debate over pronouns lies a more profound question: whether one accepts Allah as He has revealed Himself or whether one reinterprets this self-revelation so that it conforms to the categories one applies to it. Islam is the word for the first choice. It means submission, in the specific sense that one allows one’s linguistic, imaginative and devotional habits to be shaped by revelation, including those parts of revelation that one did not expect and would not have chosen.
This is not because reason is worthless, but because, when addressing the One who is not part of creation, one cannot rely on the trained imagination of the created to invent the language of its own devotion. The current dispute is, frankly speaking, not a dispute over pronouns. It is a dispute over whether the manner in which Allah has taught us to address Him – the names, the attributes, the forms of invocation given in the Quran and the Sunnah – is within our power to revise if some of it becomes disagreeable to us. That is not the case.
Without this realisation, a person may well continue to pray, continue to feel, continue to yearn for God, yet the act of devotion that defines taslim has, in that respect, been tacitly set aside. The Promised Messiah (as) has put it with characteristic plainness: “We neither add to, nor remove anything from the Shariah, even by the weight of an atom. We accept everything that has come to us from the Messenger of Allah, may peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, whether or not we understand its mystery or comprehend its reality.” (The Light of Truth, p. 9)