Primordial Misogyny and Post-Qur’anic Memory: The Adamic Narrative between the Qur’an, Hadith, Isra’iliyyat, Tafsir, and Narrative Memory

Certain post-Qur’anic exegetical and narrative traditions present Hawwa’ (Eve) as the first woman, derived from Adam’s rib, tempted before Adam, and implicated in humanity’s primordial fall. A linguistic-philosophical reading of Q 4:1, 7:189, 39:6, 2:30–35, 7:19–23, and 20:115–121 shows a different Qur’anic structure: Hawwa’ is unnamed, no rib or serpent appears, and the first transgression is not assigned to woman. The Qur’anic narrative instead emphasises single origin (nafs wahidah), relational pairing (zawj), temptation addressed to Adam or to both, and shared responsibility expressed through dual verbal forms. The gendered Eve-blame sequence is absent at the Qur’anic layer and appears in the selected canonical reports only as separable fragments treated here as reception data. The rib report speaks of woman in general, while the Hawwa’ report in Sahih al-Bukhari 3399 links Hawwa’ to female betrayal without narrating a garden scene in which she is tempted by Iblis, eats first, or persuades Adam. The serpent–Hawwa’–Adam plot therefore belongs, in the materials examined, to sedimented post-Qur’anic exegetical, qisas al-anbiya’, and Isra’iliyyat-inflected narrative memory rather than to the Qur’anic Adamic narrative. This layered distinction clarifies primordial misogyny as a philosophical category: gendered blame becomes powerful when woman is placed at the imagined origin of human moral failure.