Degrading The Role Of Women In The Nineteenth Century

2.1 Introduction

Women in the past have been acknowledged with high contributions in study of Hadith as reported in numerous literature since the ninth century. Their roles in transmission and preservation of Hadiths also are highly valuable and never been criticised. Women also become one of the important issues discussed in the Hadith literature. Hadiths concerning women have been used by many previous scholars as reference in their works including the Qur’anic exegesis and Hadith commentary. However, some of the Hadiths concerning women begin to be debated and argued by scholars in the early nineteenth century. This chapter analyses the emergence of debates on Hadiths concerning women from the nineteenth century until today by applying

Feminists have argued that interpretations of Hadiths by previous scholars who were predominantly male, had negative impacts on women’s social and religious life. Due to this reason, women need to produce their own interpretations pertaining to women’s issues. In contrast to these feminists, there are women scholars who have interpreted Hadiths on women but with a fundamentalist approach. These women, however, understand the Hadith literally and metaphorically, which is different from the approach applied by feminists. As such, this chapter perceives the role of women from the feminists’ and fundamentalists’ point of views and their approaches in interpreting and understanding the Hadith, which will be discussed at the end of this

Muslim scholars have justified the conditions of authentic reports attributed to the Prophet as early as in the ninth century, but they have different views on reliability of weak Hadiths such as Hadith on targhīb (exhortatory) and tarhīb (dissuasive). These Hadiths aim to attract people towards outrageous rewards for doing good deeds (targhīb) and warn them about the consequences of bad deeds (tarhīb). Moreover, such Hadiths are among weak ones that may have been conditionally accepted by scholars (Al-Qaradawi, 2006), for not all traditional and contemporary Muslim scholars reject the application of weak Hadiths. One example of Hadith on targhīb and tarhīb, which concerns on women’s issues, is a warning for women to not perform certain kind of actions, and if they did, they will be punished. Besides that, in the Hadith, these can be found: if a wife ignores her husband, she will be cursed; if a wife is ungrateful to her husband, she will be in Hellfire; if a woman needs to be straightened, it will make it worse, which will break her; if a woman passes a praying person, it will nullify the prayer; etc. Such Hadiths were aimed at women and none were dedicated to men. Hence, why did women become an important subject mentioned in the Hadith? Also, why are those Hadiths not among weak Hadiths, but were reported from authenticated canonical Hadith collections? These are among the important