Abstract

Gender is an important topic in contemporary anthropology, central to disputes among various philosophical approaches. This study, employing a descriptive-analytical method and relying on the sources of Islamic philosophy, examines the ontology of gender in Islamic philosophy. Although the term gender in its current sense within contemporary social sciences does not exist in Islamic philosophical texts, concepts such as masculinity and femininity are considered its closest equivalents and have been analyzed in discussions of natural philosophy, philosophical psychology, and philosophical anthropology.



Muslim philosophers have regarded masculinity and femininity not as quidditative essentials of the human being, but rather as accidents and qualities supervening on matter and reproductive organs, whose telos is the preservation of the species, not the constitution of the human essence. Furthermore, gender in Islamic philosophy comprises two domains: corporeal and psychic. The corporeal domain refers to temperamental and physiological differences, while the psychic domain includes acquired psychic qualities related to the body.



In Transcendent Philosophy, by accepting the gradation of existence and the union of soul and the body, gender is perceived as a gradational reality, some characteristics of which manifest in the corporeal domain and others in the psychic domain. Subsequently, based on the foundations of Islamic philosophy and utilizing Allameh Tabatabai’s theory of conventionalities, a tripartite model of gender is articulated, comprising the corporeal, psychic, and socio-conventional domains. This model can provide a middle ground between biological reductionism and social constructivism, revealing the capacities of Islamic philosophy in encountering contemporary theories of gender.