A Secret History
of Muslim Women Scholars
By CARLA POWER
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, 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. |
