Gender and Legal Authority

An Examination of Early Juristic Opposition to Women's Hadīth Transmission

Bibliographic Data

ID12192513
AuthorsAsma Sayeed (1Department of Religious Studies, 324 Pardee Hall, Lafayette College, Easton, PA 18042, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume16
Issue2
Pages115-150
Publication date2009-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueIslamic Law and Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0928-9380 • E-ISSN: 1568-5195
PublisherBrill (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1163/156851909x461681
OpenAlexW2069537254
LanguageEN
Citations received3

This article analyzes two cases of early juristic opposition to the legal authority of hadīth narrated by women. These cases appear as striking anomalies for two reasons: first, jurists broadly agreed that the gender of narrators in a chain of transmission was not a criterion in evaluating hadīth; and second, the cases involve female Companions of the Prophet whose value as transmitters came to be universally acknowledged by Muslim scholars of the classical period. In this article, I demonstrate that these incidents of gender-based disparagement are more useful because of what they reveal about the development of hadīth transmission (riwāya) and legal testimony (shahāda) as technical categories rather than for what they can tell us about normative gender discourse in early and classical Islam. I also contextualize the cases in terms of early methodological debates on the legal authority of isolated reports (khabar al-wāhid, akhbār al-ahād)

Islam · Normative · Opposition (politics · Political science · Sociology · Theology · Families in Therapy and Culture · Gender Studies · Islamic Finance and Banking Studies · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Philosophy

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