What is it about?
For centuries, Western philosophy and science inherited from Aristotle the idea that the male body is the natural standard of humanity, while the female is somehow incomplete or deficient by comparison. This idea shaped not only ancient Greek thought but also medieval Christian and Islamic philosophy in ways that are still felt today. This paper asks a direct question: does the Qur'an share this view of gender, or does it offer a fundamentally different understanding of what it means to be human? By carefully reading Aristotle's biological writings alongside the Qur'an and major Islamic commentaries, as well as the works of thinkers such as Avicenna, Ibn Rushd, and Thomas Aquinas, the paper shows that while both traditions recognize biological differences between men and women, the Qur'an consistently refuses to turn those differences into a hierarchy of human worth. Instead, the Qur'an grounds human value in piety and moral responsibility, qualities it presents as equally available to all people regardless of sex. The paper argues that this comparison opens fresh and philosophically serious ways of thinking about gender that go beyond modern debates without ignoring them.
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Why is it important?
Debates about gender, biology, and human nature are among the most contested in contemporary philosophy, theology, and public life. Yet these debates rarely look carefully at the deep historical roots of gender essentialism — the idea that biological sex determines essential human worth or capacity. This paper makes an important contribution by tracing those roots directly to Aristotle and showing how his framework shaped medieval thought across both Christian and Islamic traditions, often in ways that later thinkers accepted without sufficient critical examination. What is distinctive about this paper is its comparative and hermeneutical approach, bringing primary texts from Greek philosophy, Qur'anic scripture, and medieval commentary into genuine dialogue rather than treating them in isolation. The finding that the Qur'anic framework structurally resists ontological hierarchy based on biology is significant not only for Islamic thought but also for broader philosophical conversations about the foundations of gender. This paper will be of interest to scholars working in Islamic studies, philosophy of religion, gender theory, medieval philosophy, and comparative theology, as well as to anyone seeking historically grounded perspectives on contemporary debates about human nature and equality.
Perspectives
I began this research with a question that felt both intellectually urgent and personally important: how much of what we take for granted about gender — about what is natural, what is normal, what is human — actually comes from philosophical assumptions we have never examined closely? What I discovered is that Aristotle's influence on this question runs much deeper and wider than most people realize, shaping medieval Islamic philosophy just as it shaped Christian thought, sometimes in ways that sat uncomfortably alongside the very scriptural sources those thinkers were trying to interpret. What moved me most in this research was reading the Qur'an on its own terms on this question. The insistence that all human beings are created from one nafs — one soul or self — and that moral worth is measured only by piety, is not a modern liberal accommodation. It is there in the text, and it stands in genuine and interesting tension with the Aristotelian assumptions that medieval commentators sometimes brought to their reading of it. I hope this paper encourages readers, whether they come from philosophy, theology, Islamic studies, or simply a curiosity about ideas, to take that tension seriously. These are old conversations, but they have everything to do with how we think about human dignity today.
Dr. Jamil Akhtar
University of the Punjab
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Qurʾānic Anthropology of Gender in Conversation with Aristotle’s Biological Essentialism, Conatus, June 2026, National Documentation Centre,
DOI: 10.12681/cjp.42431.
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