Women Scholars of the Islamic Tradition
The history of Islamic scholarship includes thousands of women whose names appear in the biographical dictionaries — and who have been largely forgotten.
The medieval Islamic biographical dictionary — the tabaqat — is one of the great tools of Islamic historical scholarship: a genre devoted to recording the lives and scholarly credentials of the transmitters of hadith and other religious knowledge. When scholars have gone looking for women in these dictionaries, they have found them — not in the margins but in considerable numbers. The historian Mohammad Akram Nadwi spent fifteen years compiling a multi-volume work on women scholars of hadith and identified more than eight thousand names.
The names include A’isha bint Abi Bakr, the Prophet’s wife, whose transmission of hadith is foundational to Islamic law and spirituality. They include Fatima al-Fihri, founder of the Qarawiyyin in Fez. They include hundreds of lesser-known women who taught in the mosques of Damascus, Cairo and Baghdad, whose students included some of the most famous male scholars of their generations.
