Detox
RECONSIDERATION
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, 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.
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
Mohammad Ayub Khan/DDN
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