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Watching Global Islamic Relations for better understanding الموقع
العربي
Wednesday, 28 February 2007 09:14: AM
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A Secret History
http://www.MuslimsToday.com/EN/Contents.aspx?AID=5385
Carla Power
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
