Female Islamic Scholars

[Ms DD]

Salaam

 

I came across the following artcile which appeared in the New York

Times.

 

A Secret History

 

By CARLA POWER

Published: February 25, 2007

For Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the stock image of an Islamic

scholar is a gray-bearded man. Women tend to be seen as the subjects of

Islamic law rather than its shapers. And while some opportunities for

religious education do exist for women — the prestigious Al-Azhar University

in Cairo has a women’s college, for example, and there are girls’

madrasas and female study groups in mosques and private homes — cultural

barriers prevent most women in the Islamic world from pursuing such

studies. Recent findings by a scholar at the Oxford Center for Islamic

Studies in Britain, however, may help lower those barriers and challenge

prevalent notions of women’s roles within Islamic society. Mohammad Akram

Nadwi, a 43-year-old Sunni alim, or religious scholar, has rediscovered

a long-lost tradition of Muslim women teaching the Koran, transmitting

hadith (deeds and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) and even making

Islamic law as jurists.

 

Akram embarked eight years ago on a single-volume biographical

dictionary of female hadith scholars, a project that took him trawling through

biographical dictionaries, classical texts, madrasa chronicles and

letters for relevant citations. “I thought I’d find maybe 20 or 30 women,”

he says. To date, he has found 8,000 of them, dating back 1,400 years,

and his dictionary now fills 40 volumes. It’s so long that his usual

publishers, in Damascus and Beirut, have balked at the project, though an

English translation of his preface — itself almost 400 pages long —

will come out in England this summer. (Akram has talked with Prince Turki

al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s former ambassador to the United States, about

the possibility of publishing the entire work through his Riyadh-based

foundation.)

 

The dictionary’s diverse entries include a 10th-century Baghdad-born

jurist who traveled through Syria and Egypt, teaching other women; a

female scholar — or muhaddithat — in 12th-century Egypt whose male students

marveled at her mastery of a “camel load” of texts; and a 15th-century

woman who taught hadith at the Prophet’s grave in Medina, one of the

most important spots in Islam. One seventh-century Medina woman who

reached the academic rank of jurist issued key fatwas on hajj rituals and

commerce; another female jurist living in medieval Aleppo not only issued

fatwas but also advised her far more famous husband on how to issue

his.

 

Not all of these women scholars were previously unknown. Many Muslims

acknowledge that Islam has its learned women, particularly in the field

of hadith, starting with the Prophet’s wife Aisha. And several Western

academics have written on women’s religious education. About a century

ago, the Hungarian Orientalist Ignaz Goldziher estimated that about 15

percent of medieval hadith scholars were women. But Akram’s dictionary

is groundbreaking in its scope.

 

Indeed, read today, when many Muslim women still don’t dare pray in

mosques, let alone lecture leaders in them, Akram’s entry for someone like

Umm al-Darda, a prominent jurist in seventh-century Damascus, is

startling. As a young woman, Umm al-Darda used to sit with male scholars in

the mosque, talking shop. “I’ve tried to worship Allah in every way,”

she wrote, “but I’ve never found a better one than sitting around,

debating other scholars.” She went on to teach hadith and fiqh, or law, at

the mosque, and even lectured in the men’s section; her students included

the caliph of Damascus. She shocked her contemporaries by praying

shoulder to shoulder with men — a nearly unknown practice, even now — and

issuing a fatwa, still cited by modern scholars, that allowed women to

pray in the same position as men.

 

It’s after the 16th century that citations of women scholars dwindle.

Some historians venture that this is because Islamic education grew more

formal, excluding women as it became increasingly oriented toward

establishing careers in the courts and mosques. (Strangely enough, Akram

found that this kind of exclusion also helped women become better

scholars. Because they didn’t hold official posts, they had little reason to

invent or embellish prophetic traditions.)

 

Akram’s work has led to accusations that he is championing free mixing

between men and women, but he says that is not so. He maintains that

women students should sit at a discreet distance from their male

classmates or co-worshipers, or be separated by a curtain. (The practice has

parallels in Orthodox Judaism.) The Muslim women who taught men “are part

of our history,” he says. “It doesn’t mean you have to follow them.

It’s up to people to decide.”

 

Neverthless, Akram says he hopes that uncovering past hadith scholars

could help reform present-day Islamic culture. Many Muslims see

historical precedents — particularly when they date back to the golden age of

Muhammad — as blueprints for sound modern societies and look to scholars

to evaluate and interpret those precedents. Muslim feminists like the

Moroccan writer Fatima Mernissi and Kecia Ali, a professor at Boston

University, have cast fresh light on women’s roles in Islamic law and

history, but their worldview — and their audiences — are largely Western or

Westernized. Akram is a working alim, lecturing in mosques and

universities and dispensing fatwas on issues like inheritance and divorce.

“Here you’ve got a guy who’s coming from the tradition, who knows the stuff

and who’s able to give us that level of detail which is missing in the

self-proclaimed progressive Muslim writers,” says James Piscatori, a

professor of Islamic Studies at Oxford University.

 

The erosion of women’s religious education in recent times, Akram says,

reflects “decline in every aspect of Islam.” Flabby leadership and a

focus on politics rather than scholarship has left Muslims ignorant of

their own history. Islam’s current cultural insecurity has been bad for

both its scholarship and its women, Akram says. “Our traditions have

grown weak, and when people are weak, they grow cautious. When they’re

cautious, they don’t give their women freedoms.”

 

When Akram lectures, he dryly notes, women are more excited by this

history than men. To persuade reluctant Muslims to educate their girls,

Akram employs a potent debating strategy: he compares the status quo to

the age of al jahiliya, the Arabic term for the barbaric state of

pre-Islamic Arabia. (Osama Bin Laden and Sayyid Qutb, the godfather of modern

Islamic extremism, have employed the comparison to very different

effect.) Barring Muslim women from education and religious authority, Akram

argues, is akin to the pre-Islamic custom of burying girls alive. “I

tell people, ‘God has given girls qualities and potential,’ ” he says.

“If they aren’t allowed to develop them, if they aren’t provided with

opportunities to study and learn, it’s basically a live burial.”

 

When I spoke with him, Akram invoked a favorite poem, “Elegy Written in

a Country Churchyard,” Thomas Gray’s 18th-century lament for dead

English farmers. “Gray said that villagers could have been like Milton,” if

only they’d had the chance, Akram observes. “Muslim women are in the

same situation. There could have been so many Miltons.”

 

Carla Power is a London-based journalist who writes about Islamic

issues

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/magazine/25wwlnEssay.t.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin