Historical criticism has especially proved useful for religious reform intellectuals to reconstruct an original renewalist Islam, which was totally different from the belief and practice of later Muslims. However, this historical perspective has also suffered from certain theological, historical, and political problems. In this essay, I look at three works that have used historical criticism to give a liberatory vision for women’s rights and freedoms: Amina Wadud’s Qur’an and Woman, Asma Barlas’s Believing Women in Islam, and Amir-Hossein Torkashvand’s Hijab at the Time of the Prophet. These three books are built on the assumption that divine rules may different from our perception of those rules, and try to adapt our understanding with values of justice. However, these works suffer from several problems. Their theological approach in exegesis is not sustained consistently in a single work, they sometimes refer to their historical sources selectively, they sometimes impose modern categories on pre-modern works, overlook particular experiences of embodied men and women, do not consider the points in primary literature that lend themselves to patriarchal interpretations, and only limit themselves to the Qur’an. Considering these issues may help us develop interpretations of the Qur’an that both serve the causes of justice and are methodologically rigorous.