Download PDF | (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization) Professor Asma Sayeed - Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam-Cambridge University Press (2013).
234 Pages
Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam
Asma Sayeed’s book explores the history of women as religious scholars from the first decades of Islam through the early Ottoman period (seventh to the seventeenth centuries). Focusing on women’s engagement with h _ ad¯thı , this book analyzes dramatic chronological patterns in women’s h _ ad¯thı participation in terms of developments in Muslim social, intellectual, and legal history. Drawing on primary and secondary sources, this work uncovers the historical forces that shaped Muslim women’s public participation in religious learning.
In the process, it challenges two opposing views: that Muslim women have been historically marginalized in religious education, and alternately that they have been consistently empowered thanks to early role models such as ‘A¯ ’isha bint Ab¯ Bakr, the wife of Prophet Muh ı _ ammad. This book is a must-read for those interested in the history of Muslim women as well as in debates about their rights in the modern world. The intersections of this history with topics in Muslim education, the development of Sunn¯ orthodoxies, ı Islamic law, and h _ ad¯thı studies make this work an important contribution to Muslim social and intellectual history of the early and classical eras.
Asma Sayeed is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has published articles in Studia Islamica and Islamic Law and Society and has contributed a number of encyclopedia articles on women’s history in early and classical Islam.
Introduction
These two accounts bookend several centuries of the history of Muslim women as transmitters of religious knowledge. Even stripped of context, they evoke women’s spiritual aspirations and authority in disparate settings. Ra¯’it _ a, the speaker in first report, is the sole earner of her household. Worried that her expenditures on her family prevent her from gaining the heavenly rewards for charitable spending, she takes her concern directly to Muh_ ammad. His reassurance and her transmission of it are preserved in Muslim tradition not merely as a historical artifact. Rather, her narration conveys an authoritative legal precedent to all Muslims about charity. The second account encapsulates Zaynab bint al-Kama¯l’s educational career, which spanned nine decades.
She was taken in her infancy to acquire certification for religious texts that she taught later in her life, apparently undeterred by her opthalmia, an eye disease. In her seniority, she attracted large numbers of male and female students eager to partake of her knowledge. These intriguing descriptions whet our curiosity about Muslim women’s religious learning. What else did Ra¯’it _ a transmit? Where does she stand with respect to other Companions who also narrated reports? Did Muslims contest her authority, or Zaynab’s? What does it mean for a two-year-old girl to be brought to teachers, and how does she then go on to transmit that knowledge as a ninety-year-old woman? How did women’s religious learning change during the centuries separating Ra¯’it _ a and Zaynab and thereafter? And what do women’s intellectual endeavors tell us about their times? This book, inspired by such questions, uncovers a surprising history, and in the process unsettles two well-known and opposing narratives about Muslim women’s religious education.
One view, projecting backward from contemporary news reports about the repression of Muslim women by extremists, reads similar oppression into most of Muslim history. The second, extrapolating from the impressive achievements of well-known early women such as Prophet Muh_ ammad’s wife ‘A¯ ’isha bint Ab¯ Bakr (d. 58/678), promotes an unfailingly positive account of educa- ı tional access and opportunities for Muslim women throughout history. My analysis highlights the fluctuating fortunes of Sunn¯ female religious ı scholars across nearly ten centuries (seventh–sixteenth centuries) and nuances monochromatic views about their education. These shifting, uneven patterns of women’s transmission of religious knowledge (specifically h _ ad¯thı ) structure the narrative of this book. My central thesis is that women’s initial participation – a largely ad hoc, unregulated enterprise – was sharply curtailed by the professionalization of this field in the early second/eighth century, only to be resuscitated in the mid-fourth/tenth century as “traditionism” and “traditionalism” became prevalent expressions of Sunn¯ Islam. ı 3 H _ ad¯thı transmission emerged early on as the principal arena for Muslim women’s religious education. Conveying Muh_ ammad’s words, decisions, and actions on innumerable matters, h _ ad¯thı constitute the bulk of normative religious knowledge transmitted from the earliest decades of Islam.
They are vital as sources of law, second only to the Qur’a¯ n, and as records of the early Islamic past. After the death of Muh_ ammad, his Companions (those Muslims who had actually met him) became valued sources about the practice of the new faith. Men and women participated in a free, unregulated exchange of information. This matrix produced the tradition of the female h _ ad¯thı transmitter and provided a template that would be revisited and refashioned to accommodate the needs and visions of subsequent generations of Muslims. Over the course of ten centuries, women’s participation in h _ ad¯thı transmission rose and abated in four distinct phases. In Chapter 1, I treat the earliest decades of Islamic history, when many female Companions shared their firsthand knowledge of the Prophet. The communal memory of Muslims preserves not just numerous sayings from ‘A¯ ’isha bint Ab¯ı Bakr, but also the few words of more obscure women such as al-Jahdama, known to us only because she reported seeing Muh_ ammad with henna in his hair. Further, some women of this first generation are portrayed as interpreting the legal significance of reports with a view to guiding and shaping Muslim practice. As may be expected, several of the Prophet’s wives are prominent transmitters during this period. This early acceptance of women as authoritative sources for information about Muh_ ammad quickly faded – a development that I analyze in Chapter 2. By the end of the first century, these sayings were increasingly deployed to serve political, legal, sectarian, and theological agendas.
Forgery became rampant, prompting widespread calls for professionalization and more stringent criteria for determining valid transmission. Legal acumen, linguistic training, direct (face-to-face) contact with teachers, and an ability to undertake long, arduous, solitary journeys in order to acquire even a single report became a sine qua non for accomplished transmitters. Most women could not compete in this environment, and their participation dropped precipitously, remaining negligible for the next two and a half centuries. Remarkably, in the mid-fourth century of Islamic history, women reemerged as trustworthy shaykhas coveted for their religious learning and revered for their piety. In Chapter 3, I assess how new developments, among them the canonization of h _ ad¯thı collections, the growing acceptance of written (as opposed to oral) transmission, and the increased incidence of kinship-based groupings within the scholarly class (‘ulama¯’), created favorable conditions for this trend. The revival drew strength from precedents of the female Companions whose contributions as transmitters of reports were recalled in modeling feminine piety and religious learning.
Chapter 4 explores how the ascendancy of Sunn¯ traditionalism as an ı orthodoxy provided the final impetus for a full-scale mobilization of women in this arena from the sixth/twelfth to the ninth/fifteenth century. My narrative ends with another sharp contraction in female participation in h _ ad¯thı transmission in the late Mamlu¯ k and early Ottoman period (tenth/sixteenth century). Here, the trajectory of women’s religious education takes a different turn as attested by scattered references in the contemporary literature to their legal training and increasing involvement with organized S_ u¯fism. This latter period of decline is therefore substantively different from the one that occurred during the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries. To make sense of how trends in women’s education are intertwined with a host of social, intellectual, and political factors, I draw on interdisciplinary theoretical insights. Studies on the sociology of education, for example, have highlighted the multiple social uses of knowledge.4 In this vein, the history of women as h _ ad¯thı transmitters affirms that evolving social uses of religious knowledge (specifically h _ ad¯thı ) shaped women’s educational access and participation. Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the different forms of capital is helpful in understanding the trend in the classical period when women reemerged as celebrated teachers of h _ ad¯thı . 5 Bourdieu has prompted us to think of capital not just as accumulated material resources, but also as assets that can accrue in the form of social dispositions and cultural goods, which in turn confer coveted status and upward social mobility.
Women’s accumulation of h _ ad¯thı learning during the classical period translated well into cultural capital and lent status to the scholarly families who supported their endeavors.6 Women’s resounding successes from the fourth/tenth to the ninth/fifteenth century were built on two foundations. First, their participation was seen as a continuation of established tradition, based on the precedent of the prominent female transmitters of the Companion generation. However, notwithstanding the appearance of and claims to continuity, the roles of female Companions were distinct from those of women of the classical era. The former, as witnesses to Muh_ ammad’s life, were authors of the accounts they narrated. Some of them were also sought out for their opinions on legal, ritual, and credal matters. In their time, the reports lacked the formal structure of h _ ad¯thı , namely an isna¯ d (chain of transmission) appended to a distinct matn (text). The formulaic accounts preserved in the collections of h _ ad¯thı should not mask that their contribution lay in the very origination of these reports. By contrast, women of the classical period were honored primarily as faithful reproducers of h _ ad¯thı proper, which by their time had been sifted and arranged and had generated extensive commentary. Additionally, women of the later eras are praised in the historical literature for embodying feminine piety by espousing asceticism and engaging with h _ ad¯thı transmission from the cradle to the grave. Talal Asad has distilled the theoretical underpinning of such reworking of past models in his outline of an Islamic discursive tradition, thereby providing a framework for analyzing evolutions in the forms and contents of women’s h _ ad¯thı transmission. Asad states: A tradition consists essentially of discourses that seek to instruct practitioners regarding the correct form and purpose of a given practice that, precisely because it is established, has a history.
These discourses relate conceptually to a past (when the practice was instituted, and from which the knowledge of its point and proper performance has been transmitted) and a future (how the point of the practice can best be secured in the short or long term, or why it should be modified or abandoned), through a present (how it is linked to other practices, institutions, and social conditions).7 Tradition and its maintenance are valuable not because “traditional practices” are blind imitations of past practices. Rather, discursive traditions enable stable evolution by orienting practices to the past while allowing for modification of original models. Asad conceives broadly of an “Islamic discursive tradition” to address shortcomings in previous anthropological approaches to Islam. Qasim Zaman, in his study of contemporary South Asian ‘ulama¯’, draws out the utility of applying Asad’s model to multiple discourses within Islam: the Shar¯ı‘a, classical Islamic historiography, and S _ u¯fism are other such examples that Zaman notes.8 I extend Asad’s model to understand evolutions in the arena of h _ ad¯thı transmission.
In Chapters 3 and 4, I cast the revival of female h _ ad¯thı transmission as exemplifying a discursive tradition in which the ‘ulama¯’ as a social class responded to profound changes in the field of h _ ad¯thı studies (such as the canonization of h _ ad¯thı literature and the acceptance of written transmission) and reintegrated women into this arena of Islamic learning. This reintegration, in turn, facilitated adaptation by the ‘ulama¯’ to changing political and social orders that accompanied the dissolution of central ‘Abba¯ sid power and the rise of autonomous dynasties. A second and related foundation for women’s success was that the collective gatekeepers of tradition embraced and sanctioned their accomplishments. Here too Talal Asad’s theoretical insights and conceptual model of “orthodoxy” are instructive. Critiquing the prevalent definition of Muslim orthodoxy as “a specific set of doctrines at the heart of Islam,” Asad defines orthodoxy not as “a mere body of opinion, but a distinctive relationship – a relationship of power.”
He continues: “[W]herever Muslims have the power to regulate, uphold, require, or adjust correct practices, and to condemn, exclude, undermine, or replace incorrect ones, there is the domain of orthodoxy.” 9 Asad’s assertion that orthodoxy exists wherever Muslims exercise such power is balanced by his emphasis that the Islamic discursive tradition maintains the centrality of foundational texts (the Qur’a¯ n and h _ ad¯thı ). By retaining the referents of foundational texts while accounting for localized interpretations of doctrine and practices, Asad advocates a view that acknowledges the existence of multiple orthodoxies synchronically and diachronically. Traditionalism was one of several Muslim orthodoxies that existed between the early Islamic centuries and the late classical period. The term “traditionalism,” one of academic coinage, is contested and its connotations vary depending on historical context.10 I have incorporated it here to evoke a particular set of characteristics that are important for understanding the history of women’s religious education. My own usage is broad and references a worldview inspired by the following beliefs: that h _ ad¯thı reports are of primary importance in interpreting the Qur’a¯ n and in deriving Islamic law; that consensus (ijma¯‘) is an important guarantor of the righteousness of the Muslim community; and that the pious early ancestors (salaf), irrespective of their political affiliations and other differences, are exemplary for all future generations. Traditionalists also tend to either avoid speculative theology altogether or strive to mitigate its influence in their religious discourse.11 This is the worldview that Marshall Hodgson has famously called Jama¯‘¯ Sunnism. For him, the de ı fining characteristics include a collective interest in minimizing division among the four major Sunn¯ schools of law and an understanding that theological ı reasoning within acceptable boundaries was permissible.12 As an orthodoxy, traditionalism enjoyed tremendous success and exercised pervasive influence in the central Islamic lands from approximately the sixth/twelfth to the tenth/sixteenth century. Women were able to promote this orthodoxy because those who articulated its social vision upheld the tradition of female transmission of religious knowledge, as originally instituted by the Companion generation, and adjusted the practice in accordance with their needs in the classical era.
The accomplishment of traditionalism in including women comes into sharper focus in comparison with Mu‘tazilism, a rationalist orthodoxy that enjoyed success primarily among the ruling and intellectual elites in the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries. Unlike traditionalists, Mu‘tazil¯s appear to have ı eschewed women’s active participation in the promulgation of their ideology, and we find few records of accomplished female Mu‘tazil¯ theologians ı in the annals of Islamic history. This pattern will appear counterintuitive from our modernist perspective, which conditions us to think of rationalist ideologies as more amenable to women’s empowerment and participation and traditionalist ones as being inimical to their interests. Asad’s theoretical contribution sensitizes us to the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that underpin different orthodoxies, which in turn profoundly impact women’s involvement.
sources and methodological issues Given the centrality of h _ ad¯thı to Muslim life, the traditions and their transmitters were subject to scholarly scrutiny. While women’s lives are largely overlooked in the male-authored annals of Islamic history, their participation in the field of h _ ad¯thı was more diligently documented. As a result, this is one of the few areas of premodern Muslim women’s history for which we have considerable source material. Arabic biographical dictionaries and chronicles are among the most important sources for reconstructing women’s h _ ad¯thı participation. These include compilations arranged according to generations of scholars and noteworthy persons, such as the T _ abaqa¯ t of Ibn Sa‘d (d. 230/845) and the Siyar A‘la¯m al-Nubala¯’ of al-Dhahab¯ (d. 748/ ı 1348), as well as centenary dictionaries, such as al-Durar al-Ka¯mina f¯ı A‘ya¯ n al-Mi‘a al-Tha¯mina of Ibn H_ ajar al-‘Asqala¯ n¯ (d. 852/1449) and ı al-D_ aw’ al-La¯mi‘ f¯ Aı ‘ya¯ n al-Qarn al-Ta¯ si‘ of al-Sakha¯w¯ (d. 902/1497). ı Such works amply attest women’s activities and the widespread acceptance of their participation in religious education. The abundance of data, however, should not blind us to its inherent limitations.
First, these sources were composed by men, and we have few self-narratives of women’s experiences in this arena. Second, most entries on women in biographical compendia are formulaic and frugal, hindering our ability to compose a nuanced history. Lineages, death dates, teacher-student networks, and remarks on the moral character and personal piety of various women comprise the bulk of what early and classical biographers preserved for posterity. Such information goes only so far in our attempts at historical reconstruction. Needless to say, classical Muslim biographers were not interested in issues of women’s empowerment or the role of gender in determining women’s educational access. Questions about women’s concerns, their daily lives, and their routines can only be answered inferentially, sometimes by reading into the silences of our sources. Two other sources of more limited utility that contain scattered references to women’s narration of reports are legal compendia and manuals on the sciences of h _ ad¯thı transmission.
The prescriptive nature of both genres dictates a different methodological approach. For example, al-Kifa¯ ya f¯ı ‘Ilm al-Riwa¯ ya, the h _ ad¯thı manual of al-Khat_ ¯b al-Baghda ı ¯ d¯ (d. 463/ ı 1071), prescribes a curriculum for study and the appropriate etiquette for teachers and students. We cannot, of course, assume that students maintained these standards. In fact, the presumption is often that if authorities repeatedly insist on a protocol, it is because that protocol is being violated. In general, the extent to which individual men and women adhered to the standards enunciated by leading scholars must be gleaned from other sources related directly to the individual in question. Similarly, legal manuals present historical evidence only to the extent necessary to substantiate or undermine the claims of jurists. On the topic of women’s access to public space such as mosques (popular sites for religious instruction), h _ ad¯thı reports are presented selectively to support a juristic prescription. Nevertheless, judicious use of these sources can help us recreate some of the historical circumstances affecting women’s participation in the transmission of religious knowledge. For the earliest decades of Islamic history, we can look to the individual h _ ad¯thı credited to female narrators. The chains of transmission (isna¯ ds) appended to these reports can augment our knowledge of the teacherstudent networks of the women who appear in them. An analysis of the h _ ad¯thı texts (matn) themselves reveals the subjects about which women imparted knowledge. Finally, because the Companions are portrayed as the first authors of the texts they convey, various narrative elements can at times be used to reconstruct the circumstances of women’s participation and their own perceptions of their roles. Use of h _ ad¯thı and historical reports from the earliest decades of Islam, however, requires grappling with debates about the authenticity of this material.
The most comprehensive early collections of h _ ad¯thı from which it is possible to draw data for this study date to the latter part of the second/ eighth century.13 The first extensive biographical work, the T _ abaqa¯ t of Ibn Sa‘d, dates to the beginning of the third/ninth century. We are therefore confronted with one of the enduring debates of early Islamic historiography: the use of h _ ad¯thı as primary sources, especially for the first decades of Islam. The literature on this issue is extensive. Here I present only the contours of the debate and the position I take in this study. It is a cornerstone of faith for many Muslims that authenticated h _ ad¯thı convey the sayings and actions of Muh_ ammad as reported by his Companions.14 Some modern scholars of Islamic history also maintain that these traditions form a relatively accurate record of the rise of Islam and the formation of the first Muslim polity, as well as Muh_ ammad’s ritualistic practices and injunctions.15 At the opposite end of the spectrum, other scholars hold that the h _ ad¯thı are primarily fabrications and cannot be utilized for meaningful historical inquiry into the first century of Islam.16 Scholars have articulated diverse approaches to testing the authenticity of Muslim tradition. These include assessments of patterns in the provenance and regional circulation of h _ ad¯thı , quantitative analyses of transmission patterns, and investigations into the social and historical developments that gave rise to particular traditions.17
These methods have yielded varying results, with a few studies convincingly dating selected traditions to the first decades of Islam.18 Several scholars have concluded that there is a “genuine core” to which much of Muslim tradition belongs.19 Others have maintained, however, that overlays of forgeries and tampering with the “core” make it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish the real from the forged. My own view is that judicious use of h _ ad¯thı can yield valuable insights into a range of issues in early Islamic history. Accordingly, I analyze the reports ascribed to early Muslim women to understand the Muslim communal memory of the role of women as transmitters.20
As such, I am not concerned with decisively establishing whether the women to whom the reports are ascribed actually uttered them. Because the authoritative h _ ad¯thı collections date from the late second/eighth to the late third/ninth century, we can at the very least use them to explore what was ascribed to women and in circulation about them in the period contemporary to the compilers of these collections. Through these h _ ad¯thı and the associated biographical literature, we can also extract the profiles of the women who were portrayed as narrating the h _ ad¯thı . Thus our historical evidence permits us to address several questions: Were the female narrators remembered as scholars or more as purveyors of oral tradition acquired through happenstance? To what extent does the portrayal of the narration activity of the female Companions resemble that of women of the Selju¯ q, Ayyu¯ bid, and Mamlu¯ k periods? And how did Muslim women who were culturally and religiously restricted in their interactions with men negotiate a field of learning that placed a premium on direct contact and oral transmission between students and teachers? Even though we cannot decisively answer the question of the authenticity of any of the h _ ad¯thı ascribed to women of the earliest generations, we can certainly arrive at conclusions about the perceptions that later generations had regarding female participation in the transmission of religious knowledge. A final methodological comment concerns the type of h _ ad¯thı that I use for this study. The first two chapters, focusing on early h _ ad¯thı transmission, draw data from the six authoritative collections (al-kutub al-sitta) 21 as well as from the Muwat_ t _ a’ of Ma¯lik b. Anas (d. 179/796); the Musnad collections by al-H_ umayd¯ (d. 219/834), Ibn H ı _ anbal (d. 241/855), ‘Abd b. H _ umayd al-Kiss¯ (d. 249/863), and al-Da ı ¯ rim¯ (d. 255/869); and the ı S _ ah _ ¯hı _ of Ibn Khuzayma (d. 311/924).22
There are other important Sunn¯ı compilations not accounted for here. My selection, which includes the six most authoritative works and other widely circulated ones, provides a representative sample of the h _ ad¯thı narrated by women.23 For the most part, the traditions analyzed here are classified by h _ ad¯thı critics and scholars as muttas_ il and marfu¯‘. That is to say, they are distinguished by an uninterrupted (muttas_ il) chain of transmission (isna¯ d) that goes back to Muh_ ammad himself (marfu¯‘).24 The traditional Muslim approach has deemed such chains of transmission to be the most trustworthy and most valid for legal discourse. Conversely, these are precisely the isna¯ ds most stringently questioned by those who doubt the authenticity of Muslim tradition.25 In such circles, they are regarded as patently forged chains attached to fabricated texts; both the isna¯ ds and their texts have been “perfected” in order to enhance their status as legal proofs. In addition, the h _ ad¯thı narrated by women tend to carry another type of chain, namely a family isna¯ d, in which members of one family narrate to each other or in which a client (mawla¯) narrates from his/her master or patron.
Transmissions of this type have been deemed particularly suspect as chains fabricated to withstand the scrutiny of h _ ad¯thı critics.26 Because the aforementioned chains of transmission have come under heavy criticism, it is important to discuss their utility for this study. The collections chosen for this study, in particular the six authoritative Sunn¯ı collections, are largely composed of traditions that were utilized in legal discussions on matters related to creed and practice. As John Burton writes in his Introduction to the H_ ad¯thı , these traditions and their implications for religious practice were not taken lightly by h _ ad¯thı scholars and jurists.27 The premise in this study is that since these h _ ad¯thı were often considered viable proofs for legal discourse, they had to be transmitted and/or crafted with both credible isna¯ ds and credible narratives.28 In other words, these h _ ad¯thı could not violate with abandon the perceptions that Muslims of later generations had about their predecessors. To succeed within the domain of legal discussion, both the isna¯ d and the matn of a tradition had to appeal to, or resonate in some way with, the collective memory of Muslims of the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries. Thus whether or not these isna¯ ds preserve an actual chain of transmission, they undoubtedly conform to an envisaged portrait of transmission. Even if they are wholesale forgeries, they are still valuable because they reveal the perceptions that Muslims had of the early female narrators as dependable transmitters. Although conclusive comment on the authenticity of individual h _ ad¯thı is not possible, my analysis of chronological trends nevertheless leads to a hypothesis proposing the early dating of traditions ascribed to many of the female Companions.
I outline this hypothesis in the conclusion to the book and present a potentially fruitful avenue for future research into early Islamic social history. Though the source material at hand is rich and varied, women’s engagement with h _ ad¯thı across Islamic history remains understudied. More than a century ago, Ignaz Goldziher appended a brief, anecdotal summary of the topic to his Muslim Studies. 29 Since then, there have been a handful of articles and chapter-length contributions such as those of Jonathan Berkey and Omaima Abou-Bakr on women in the Mamlu¯ k period (thirteenth to sixteenth centuries), and that of Richard Bulliet on Iranian elite women in the pre-Mongol period (eleventh and twelfth centuries).30 More recently, Muhammad Akram Nadwi has authored a detailed overview of female h _ ad¯thı transmission as an introduction to his forthcoming Arabic biographical dictionary of female h _ ad¯thı scholars.31 While Nadwi collates valuable information about the range of women’s participation, he does not aim to provide historical synthesis and analysis.32
Similarly, a number of Arabic biographical dictionaries and monographs relevant to this topic offer a wealth of intriguing anecdotes but do not advance broader historical or conceptual conclusions.33 My book is thus the first detailed investigation of female h _ ad¯thı transmission that employs a rigorous historical methodology to explain patterns in women’s activity from Egypt to Iran over the course of nearly ten centuries in the context of broader currents in Sunn¯ Muslim intellectual and social history. ı My analysis bears out the view that major developments in Muslim history cannot be fully grasped without an inquiry into the dynamics of gender relations. The emergence of the ‘ulama¯’ as a social class and their increasing use of h _ ad¯thı transmission to forge communal identity has been highlighted by Richard Bulliet, Jonathan Berkey, and Michael Chamberlain.34 My work complements their studies with a thorough investigation of how women’s educational activities perpetuated scholarly networks across time and place. I also draw on the insights of George Makdisi and William Graham who, among others, have elucidated the doctrinal history of Sunn¯ traditionalism. ı 35
I extend the purview to consider the social construction of orthodoxies as a process implicating women as well as men. The demands of manageability circumscribe the scope of my study in three respects. First, my selection of h _ ad¯thı compilations means that I focus on women’s transmission of religious knowledge that was deemed authoritative in the context of the broader legal project of systematically articulating Sunn¯ law and normative practices. Women who transmitted other ı types of reports, such as akhba¯ r, are not represented.36 Second, I do not analyze h _ ad¯thı in which women or issues related to them are mentioned but for which the ascribed authorities (after Muh_ ammad) are all male. The latter would entail a separate study on broader issues of the social perceptions and roles of women in early Islam in general. Finally, I limit my analysis to Sunn¯ Islam and do not include women ı ’s religious learning in other sectarian contexts.37
The sources that inform this study document women who were active in the urban centers of the H_ ija¯ z, Khura¯ sa¯ n, Syria, and Egypt, areas with vastly different geographies and their own political, social, and intellectual histories. In presenting case studies, I contextualize the activities of women in terms of the local variables that shaped their careers. The wide-ranging scope of my work permits a greater understanding of the factors that unified women’s educational experiences in spite of the diversity of their specific historical contexts. I have also encountered records of women similarly engaged in far-flung regions including al-Andalus, North and West Africa, the Caucasus, Anatolia, China, and South Asia. I hope that this work will inspire future studies on women’s religious education in other geographical and historical contexts. Although this book spans the first ten centuries of Islamic history, its relevance extends beyond an understanding of early and classical female h _ ad¯thı transmission. My study also contributes to the critical project of historicizing women’s religious activism in the modern period, a prevalent phenomenon in Muslim countries from Morocco to Indonesia.
For example, the Qubaysiyya¯ t, a conservative, S_ u¯fistic women’s organization originating in Syria, has intrigued both academics and the Western media due to its members’ assiduous and secretive pursuit of Islamic learning.38 Another prominent example is Farhat Hashemi, who, from her base in Pakistan, has drawn legions of upper-class Muslim women globally into the orbit of traditional Muslim learning.39 Saba Mahmood’s landmark study of Egyptian women’s religious revival has prompted critical reflection on how Western feminist ideals relate to such contemporary pietistic movements.40 Yet, the dearth of rigorous analyses on women’s religious participation in early and classical Islam hinders our appreciation of the way in which the activities of modern Muslim women relate to and draw on the past. My own work complements scholarship on contemporary women’s Islamic activism and elucidates continuities and ruptures.
The history of women as h _ ad¯thı transmitters in early and classical Islam has mixed implications for contemporary feminist discourse about Muslim women’s agency and empowerment. In interpreting the significance of gender in premodern eras, leading historians such as Joan Scott and Caroline Bynum have cautioned that questions borne of feminist concerns run the risk of producing anachronistic analyses.41 Mindful of this danger, I aim to represent women’s commitments in terms of the historical contexts that produced them. To understand the fluctuating trends of Muslim women’s participation in early and classical Islam, we must avoid reading into our texts either misogyny or alternatively explicit desires to empower women. As I show in Chapters 3 and 4, women’s agency expressed by a subversion of patriarchal norms is not a theme in the dramatic increase of Muslim women’s pious activism in the classical era. Rather, what was at stake was the faithful preservation of Muh_ ammad’s legacy, an endeavor intended in no small part to counter deleterious factors such as the perceived corruption of the times and the ever-increasing temporal distance from the life of the Prophet.
The mass reproduction and consumption of traditionalist literature and the promotion of short chains of transmission (isna¯ d [pl. asa¯ n¯dı ] ‘a¯l¯ı) back to Muh_ ammad were measures taken to mitigate this damage. These impulses rendered women authoritative in limited contexts. It would stretch our imaginations as well as the historical realities conditioning these women’s actions to view them as reflections of the concerns that animate contemporary feminist discourses. The ranges of action of classical Muslim women were constrained by the norms of their communities, which channeled their intellectual potential toward h _ ad¯thı transmission rather than law or theology. It is through embracing and upholding those norms, not subverting them, that they acquired stature and, in all likelihood, personal fulfillment.
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