Review: Al-Muhaddithat: The Women Scholars in Islam

Dec 9

Al-Muhaddithat: The Women Scholars in Islam - Mohammad Akram Nadwi (2006)

Review by Yasmin Ismail

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

This book began as a preface or the Muqaddamah (introduction) to a 40-volume work biographical Arabic dictionary of the women hadith scholars in Islam. Expecting to find perhaps 20-30 accounts of influential women, Sheikh Nadwi instead found accounts of more than 8,000 women teaching hadith to men, and women as important teachers and scholars in mosques and schools, women who issued Fatawa, who interpreted the Quran who debated rulers and whose opinions were much sought after by fellow jurists [i]. These scholars taught and practiced from Egypt to India and were respected by all alike. As Nadwi states in his introduction “There is no period when men have certain privileges to speak or think or act, and then women find a way to 'invade' the men's ground. Rather, the women and men both know, from the outset of Islam, what their duties are." In this case, understanding, learning, teaching and disseminating knowledge was a duty held by all irrespective of gender.

Yet despite such a rich history of female scholarship, it had been confined to the margins, as Nadwi himself found out when he began his work. Despite finding the names of numerous women noted as authorities in classical hadith texts, discovering more about them was difficult, and he spent considerable time searching the margins, finding information tucked into biographical dictionaries, travel books, private letters, sourcing accounts in histories of mosques and madaris slowly piecing together these brief details [ii]. Brief as they might be, the details nevertheless provide valuable insight into the significance of these scholars, that they taught Bukhari, considered one of the most important hadith books, or that they taught in the Prophet’s mosque in medina, highlighted women as active and central to the formative history of Islam and Islamic scholarship.

Throughout the course of the book, we are introduced to the various ways women were responsible for narrating, teaching and acting upon the hadith, their role in issuing Fatawa and their presence within important scholarly circles in the Hijaz, Andalusia and Khurasan, to give some examples. Beyond the more well-known examples of the Prophet’s wives such as Aisha (ra) who played central roles in hadith scholarship and as points of reference, there are several fascinating examples of later female scholars. One such example included the 7th century jurist Um al-Dardaa who taught students in the mosques in Damascus and Jerusalem. One of her more famous students being none other than the 5th Umayyad Caliph Abdul Malik Ibn Marwan (d. 705CE). Another fascinating woman was the 11th Century scholar Fatimah bint Sa’d al-Khayr who was born in Western China and moved through madaris in Bukhara, Samarkhand and Isfahan, settled for a time in Baghdad, taught in Damascus and Jerusalem and eventually died in Cairo. Equally important to shed light upon is the fact that prominent Islamic scholars such as Ibn Taymiyyah were themselves taught by female scholars of hadith.

This book is a must-read for everyone. If as Muslims we look to Islam as a blue-print for how to live our lives, then in this rich history of female scholarship is a precedent for a future we should have.

[i] C. Power (2015) If the Oceans were Ink: an Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran. Holt Paperbacks: New York. 129.

[ii] Ibid., 131