Mohammed Akram Nadwi is an unlikely champion for a Muslim gender-quake. Soft-spo-ken and shy, he is a graduate of madrassas in his native India, and an unabashed religious conservative. But the current work of this Oxford-based alim, or religious scholar, could shatter the stock notions of Muslim women’s roles, both in society and Islamic scholarship. Hunting through classical texts, Akram, 43, a researcher at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, has uncovered a tradition of female Muslim scholars dating back to the 7th century.
Muslim women’s religious scholarship is seen as sort of a cottage industry: if women study, it is pretty much in the purdah of their own homes or in segregated rooms in mosques or madrassas. If they teach, they usually teach only women. But trawling through centuries of biographical dictionaries, madrassa chronicles, letters and travel books, Akram has found evidence of thousands of muhaddithat, or female experts in Hadith, the deeds and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. He has found accounts of women teaching men and women in mosques and madrassas, touring Arabia and the Levant on lecture circuits, issuing fatwas, and making Islamic law. Who knew that in the 15th century, Fatimayah al-Bataihiyyah taught Hadith in the Prophet’s mosque in Medina, and that the chief male scholars of the day, from as far afield as Fez, were her students? (Such was al-Bataihiyyah’s status that she taught at the grave of the Prophet, the mosque’s most prestigious spot.) Who knew that hundreds of girls in medieval Mauritania could recite al-Mudawwana, a key book of Islamic law, by heart? Or that Fatimah bint Muhammad bin Ahmad al-Samarqandi, a jurist in medieval Samarkand, used to issue fatwas and advised her far more famous husband on how to issue his?
Presumably not the Taleban, who banned women from education while in power, and even now threaten administrators at Afghan girls’ schools. Nor, one imagines, Saudi Arabia, which bans women from driving or travelling freely. A few Islamic historiographers have known about a few women Hadith experts. A century ago Ignaz Goldziher, the Hungarian orientalist, estimated that about 15 per cent of medieval Muslim scholars were women. And Muslims widely acknowledge there have long been learned women, starting with Aisha, the Prophet’s favourite wife. It is less well-known that she narrated about a quarter of the laws forming the basis of Sharia, and was the preferred interpreter of Sharia by the founders of three of the four schools of Islamic law.
Akram, himself a Hadith expert who has written more than 25 books, is shocked at the scope of his discoveries. When he started on the project, he expected to find 20 or 30 women, enough to fill a single-volume biographical dictionary. Seven years on, he has found more than 8,000, and his dictionary now stands at 40 volumes. It is so long that his usual publishers, in Damascus and Beirut, have balked at the printing cost. (An Oxford publisher, Interface Publications, will publish the preface to the book in English this summer.) And he is convinced that the women he has found only hint at the true numbers of working women scholars. “If I can find 8,000 in the sources,” he notes, “it means that there were many, many more than that.”
Since Islamic knowledge is based on oral transmission through chains of scholars linking back to Muhammad, narrators’ reliability is crucial. Weighing Hadiths’ authenticity is itself a branch of Islamic science. Few muhaddithat have been accused of fabrication or inaccuracy, notes Akram.
As women didn’t work, they had no reason to invent or embellish prophetic traditions. “Hadith wasn’t a source of income for them, and they didn’t do it because they wanted to become famous,” he observes. Purdah kept their accounts pure.
After the 17th century, women’s scholarship dwindled. Colonial governments, favoring Western-style education, neglected the madrassa system, so custom flourished in lieu of solid Islamic scholarship. Weak leadership from the ulama, many of whom have busied themselves with politics rather than scholarship, has left Muslims ignorant of their own history. Akram believes that Islam’s current cultural insecurity has been bad for both Islamic learning and Muslim women: “Our traditions have grown weak, and when people are weak, they grow cautious. When they’re cautious, they don’t give their women freedoms.”
Akram’s discoveries are particularly powerful because they have been made by a working alim, not a Western academic or a self-styled Muslim reformer. Muslim feminists such as the Dutch reformer Ayaan Hirsi Ali may make headlines in the West, but they often lack credibility among ordinary Muslims. Akram’s approach is fundamentally conservative. Uncovering past muhaddithat could help to reform present-day Islamic culture. Many Muslims see historical precedent — particularly when it dates back to the golden age of Muhammad — as a road map for sound modern societies. “The way Muslim society is now isn’t the way it was in the time of the Prophet,” observes Akram. “Muhammad didn’t hide the accomplishments of his wives or daughters, which many Muslims still do today.”
When Akram lectures at mosques and madrassas around Britain, his research has met with cautious interest. Women are far keener on his research than men, he wryly notes. His audience is a conservative crowd, wary of teachings that unpick social mores.
“People think my work will change the structure of society,” he says. Critics have accused him of championing free mixing between men and women. He is not, and believes that many segregations should be preserved. “I’m not issuing a fatwa that men and women need to study together,” he says. “But Muslim women scholars are part of our history. And by looking at that history, we can bring Muslim society closer to what it once was."
Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist whose case has become a flashpoint of Pakistani-American tensions, plotted to smuggle explosives into America and offered to manufacture biological weapons, according to the Guantánamo files.
The allegations are a combination of US intelligence analysis and direct testimony by at least three senior al-Qaida figures, including the 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. They cannot be independently corroborated and the testimonies were likely to have been extracted under conditions of torture.
Muhammad, known as KSM in intelligence circles, was waterboarded 183 times in the month after his capture in Pakistan in March 2003.
But several of the accounts do overlap, linking Siddiqui, a diminutive 39-year-old mother of three, with some of Osama bin Laden's most senior lieutenants. They help explain why the FBI placed her on a list of the world's seven most wanted al-Qaida fugitives in 2004.
Siddiqui disappeared from Karachi in March 2003 only to reappear five years later amid murky circumstances in Ghazni, central Afghanistan. There was an altercation in a police station and the US accused Siddiqui of trying to shoot two soldiers and two FBI agents.
She was sent to the US, tried and last year sentenced to 86 years' jail. At home in Pakistan she became a cause célèbre widely viewed as an innocent victim of American injustice.
During the recent stand-off over Raymond Davis, the CIA spy who shot two people in Lahore, a chorus of Pakistani politicians demanded the US repatriate Siddiqui in exchange for the American.
The Guántanamo files offer a murky perspective, placing Siddiqui at the heart of an al-Qaida cell based in Karachi between 2002 and 2003. Emboldened by the success of the 9/11 attacks and led by KSM, the cell conspired to mount fresh attacks in the US, on Heathrow airport and inside Pakistan.
According to the files, the cell planned to smuggle explosives into America under the cover of textile exports – 20 and 40ft foot containers filled with women's and children's clothes. The explosives would be used to attack "economic targets" inside the US, according to KSM.
The operation would take place through an import-export business run by Saifullah Paracha, a Pakistani businessman who worked as a New York travel agent for 13 years before developing ties to Osama bin Laden. Paracha, 64, is currently in Guantánamo Bay.
According to Paracha's file, Siddiqui's role was to "rent houses and provide administrative support for the operation". As part of this brief she travelled from Pakistan to the US in January 2003 to help renew the American travel papers of Majid Khan, a co-conspirator who had been ordered to bomb petrol stations and water treatment facilities in America.
According to Khan, he provided Siddiqui with money, photos and a completed application for an "asylum travel form" that "looked and functioned like a passport".
Then, according to Khan's file, "Siddiqui returned to the US and opened a post office box in detainee's name, using her driver's licence information".
The plot collapsed after Khan was picked up in Pakistan and sent to Guantánamo. A co-conspirator in America, Uzair Paracha, was arrested in possession of the post box key.
Paracha, son of Saifullah Paracha, was sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment in 2006; details of Siddiqui's role in the plot surfaced during his trial.
Siddiqui's family have always insisted she was framed. Her lawyer, Elaine Sharpe, suggested she had been the victim of identity theft; her sister Fowzia said the purpose of the postbox was to apply for jobs at American universities.
The Guantánamo files give fresh details on Siddiqui's relationship withAmmar Baluchi, the nephew of KSM and a senior al-Qaida figure facing a raft of serious allegations – facilitating the 9/11 attackers, acting as a courier for Bin Laden and plotting to crash a plane packed with explosives into the US consulate in Karachi.
Siddiqui reportedly married Baluchi during a secret ceremony near Karachi in February 2003, six months after divorcing her previous husband who said he had grown alarmed by her extremist views. Siddiqui's family denies the marriage took place.
Baluchi said he told Siddiqui, who has a biology degree from MIT, that al-Qaida had set up a laboratory to make biological weapons. Siddiqui replied that she "was willing to participate in a biological weapons (BW) project if al-Qaida tasked her to do so".
After that conversation, Baluchi said, "he never tasked Siddiqui to participate in the BW project and never considered to let her work in the laboratory".
Al-Qaida has a biological weapons programme based in Afghanistan stretching back to the late 1990s. When Siddiqui was arrested in Ghazi in 2008 her handbag contained several bottles of deadly chemicals, extracts from an "arsonist's handbook" and details of several prominent American landmarks.
According to Balochi's file, he told interrogators that he became aware of a plan to attack Heathrow airport in January 2003 and had intended to seek help from a more senior al-Qaida operative, Walid bin Attash, to carry it out.
An "analyst note" in the files notes that the plot called for "crashing numerous airplanes into Heathrow, with a secondary explosion immediately outside of the airport as a diversion". It collapsed after KSM was arrested in March 2003.
Despite the serious nature of the allegations against Siddiqui contained in the Guantánamo files, the US has never attempted to prosecute her for them. In last year's court case she was charged with attempted murder; afterwards her lawyer said the case had been decided on "fear not facts".
The Obama administration had planned to bring Baluchi and his uncle KSM to New York to stand trial for their their part in the 9/11 attacks. But the plan was dropped following fierce criticism from US politicians.
When in 1999 Merve Safa Kavakçı was elected as a Virtue Party deputy (MP) for Istanbul, she faced protests from colleagues in Parliament simply because she wore the hijab (headscarf).
She was prevented from making her parliamentary oath because of her hijab, which is banned for civil servants in secular Turkey. She was eventually stripped of her Turkish citizenship, on the grounds that she had not disclosed her US citizenship (which she obtained on March 5, 1999).
In 2007 the European Court of Human Rights found that her expulsion from parliament was a violation of human rights.
The 42 year-old’s supporters received another boost earlier this month after a opinion poll revealed that the overwhelming majority of Turks are in favour of allowing women to enter Parliament with their hijabs.
78.1 percent of the 2,000 Turks who took part in the Strategic and Social Research Center poll said women should be allowed to wear the hijab in Parliament if they wanted to.
Another 19.5 percent said hijab wearing women should not become deputies.
The hijab debate was reignited earlier in March when a group of women, including journalists, representatives from NGOs and activists, launched an initiative.
The initiative demands the nomination of headscarf-wearing deputies in the parliamentary elections on June 12. The initiative calls itself “We want headscarved deputies.”
There is a strict ban on the wearing of the hijab in Turkey. Women wearing the hijab are not allowed to enter military facilities, including hospitals and recreational areas. There is currently no hijab wearing deputy in Parliament.
Asked if they find the number of women in such fields as politics, public administration and business adequate, 71.9 percent said “no” while only 23.4 percent said “yes.”
The international NGO Assembly for the Protection of Hijab (Protect-hijab) welcomed the study findings.
In a statement to The Muslim News a spokesman for the Assembly described the research as “positive feedback” adding that Turkey’s “legislators should take this research into considerations and address the current injustice experienced by Turkey’s hijab wearing women.”
