BAGHDAD, Feb. 24 -- During what turned out to be the last Friday
prayer he led, Imam Mohammad al-Marawi urged worshipers at a Sunni
mosque in the western city of Habbaniyah to stand firmly against
al-Qaeda in Iraq, a Sunni insurgent group that has a strong following
in the area.
"A bunch of corrupted individuals," the imam called the group's
members, according to a man who was at the service.
Less than 24 hours later, someone in a Mercedes truck drove up next to
the mosque and detonated explosives hidden under a load of stone and
marble. At least 40 people were killed, including 15 who were praying
inside....more
posted by annie at 7:17 AM 0 comments
NYTimes: In the Middle Ages, many Islamic scholars were women. Will their
rediscovery affect Muslim women today?
Reconsideration
A Secret History
Lynsey Addario, Corbis
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. (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."
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