Teaching Women To Write - Weaponizing Adīth Against Colonialism (Brian Wright)

Die Welt des Islams (2021) 1-31
Teaching Women to Write: Weaponizing Ḥadīth

Against Colonialism
Brian Wright | ORCID: 0000-0001-8908-1596

Department of Islamic World Studies, Zayed University, Abu Dhabi,
United Arab Emirates
brian.wright@zu.ac.ae
Abstract
This article traces the use of a ḥadīth prohibiting women’s literacy during the colonial
period. Although rejected by most ḥadīth scholars and ignored by jurists, it gained
prominence in the second half of the nineteenth century through the works of
scholars who weaponized it as a response to colonial education projects. As debates
on the religious permissibility of modern education spread, the ḥadīth accompanied
them, empowering scholars who attempted to push back against modernizing
national education projects. Through an analysis of the debate around this ḥadīth in
British India and Egypt, I highlight the importance of the ḥadīth as a pragmatic – and
not simply normative – source within Islamic legal discussions as they articulated
responses to colonialism.
Keywords
ḥadīth – colonialism – Egypt – South Asia – Islamic Law – women’s education
Introduction
In one of his public lectures, Ṣāliḥ al-Fawzān, a Saudi cleric and member of the
state-backed Council of Senior Scholars (b. 1933), was asked about the authen-
ticity of a ḥadīth that advises, “Do not allow them [viz., women] to reside in
rooms (al-ghuraf) and do not teach them to write, [rather] teach them the
spindle and Sūrat al-Nūr.” al-Fawzān responded,
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This [statement] has a legal impact (yuʾthar), but it is not a ḥadīth as it

is not proven to have come from the Prophet. [Rather,] it is a statement
from the first generations of Muslims (salaf). They mean [by this state-
ment] that the expansion of a woman’s education causes deficiency in
her service to her husband, her home, and her children, as she will be-
come busy with her job or studies and leave her children, husband, and
home, as is known and observed. As for the legal impact, [the statement]
limits the expansion of women’s education to teaching her only what is
necessary, like reciting the Qurʾān, ḥadīth, and to read and write … you
know, a small amount of education. As for broader [education] and spe-
cialty [in a subject], this causes deficiency [in complying with her] mar-
ital rights and [creates] problems between spouses, as has happened [in
society].1
The ḥadīth presented to al-Fawzān has only limited backing. Most classical
scholars labeled it as a forgery, and therefore jurists ignored it. Only a handful
of writers before the modern period acknowledged the ḥadīth, with most cit-
ing another report that implores women to become literate. Narrated on the
authority of the Companion al-Shifāʾ bt. ʿAbdallāh (d. 20/640), in this ḥadīth,
the Prophet orders al-Shifāʾ to teach his wife, Ḥafṣa, the “treatment of skin pus-
tules (ruqyat al-namla), as you taught her to write”.2
Although al-Fawzān dismissed the ḥadīth for having no connection to the
Prophet, he assessed it as possessing legal value. Despite being one of the fore-
most intellectuals of the Salafī movement – one based on following only ḥadīths
deemed authentic – al-Fawzān feared the social implications of entirely reject-
ing this report and allowing Saudi women unfettered access to education. He,
therefore, extended his judgment, using the authoritative position of ḥadīth in
Islamic legal thought to warn against expanding women’s education beyond
what is necessary to preserve the family and the home.
The use of this ḥadīth in the modern period to justify the belief that Islamic
law prohibits women from learning to write can be traced to debates on the
1 Qanāt Shabakat Sabīl al-Rashād al-Salafiyya, “Lā tuʿallimū nisāʾakum al-qirāʾa wa-l-kitāba wa
ʿallimūhunna sūrat al-nūr. al-ʿAllāma Ṣāliḥ al-Fawzān ḥafiẓahu ‘llāh”, YouTube Video, 1:53, May
7, 2015, https://youtu.be/VGIRI-vLJwc (accessed 1 April 2020).
2 This ḥadīth is found in the following collections: Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. Ḥanbal, Musnad
al-Imām Aḥmad, 6 vols. (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Maymaniyya, 1895), 6:372; Aḥmad b. Shuʿayb
al-Nasāʾī, Kitāb al-Sunan, 20 vols. (Cairo: Dār al-Taʾṣīl, 2012), 9:364, no. 7700; Sulaymān b.
al-Ashʿath Abū Dāwūd, Sunan Abī Dāwūd, 8 vols. (Cairo: Dār al-Taʾṣīl, 2015), 6:152, no. 3839. See
also al-Mawsūʿa al-fiqhiyya, 45 vols. (Kuwait: Wizārat al-Awqāf wa-l-Shuʾūn al-Islāmiyya, 1988),
13:13.
10.1163/15700607-61020019 | Die Welt des Islams (2021) 1-31

teaching women to write 3
nature of education by Muslim scholars in the second half of the nineteenth

century. Against the backdrop of colonialism and the development of national
education systems, jurists applied this ḥadīth to forbid women access to “for-
eign” education. This prohibition, scholars argued, would protect them and the
men around them – their husbands, sons, and male relatives – from what they
perceived as Christian influence.
This topic was first outlined in an article by Werner Ende. Using the fatwās
of the Egyptian reformer Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā (d. 1935) in his magazine
The Lighthouse (al-Manār) as a framework, Ende showed that the issue of
women’s literacy was debated across the Muslim world at the turn of the twen-
tieth century in contexts as diverse as Egypt, India, and Russia.3
In this article, I build on Ende’s outline to trace the emergence and use of
the ḥadīth prohibiting female literacy in the works of Indian and Egyptian
scholars from the second half of the nineteenth century to the first decades
of the twentieth century. By doing so, I attempt to show how scholars used a
long-rejected ḥadīth to address a pressing social issue, despite questions about
its authenticity.
As most of the authors discussed in this article based their arguments for or
against women learning to write on opinions from pre-colonial texts of ḥadīth
criticism and jurisprudence, I begin with a brief overview of the ḥadīth in clas-
sical Sunni sources. This survey leads to the debates of nineteenth-century
British India, where classical works were interpreted in the context of a colo-
nial education system and emerging Muslim movements. I then move to Egypt
to show how the ḥadīth and similar fears of European influence on a modern-
izing education system informed the debate there during the early twentieth
century.
The Classical Approach to the Ḥadīth
The ḥadīth that forbids women from being taught to write is narrated in two
forms. The first, transmitted on the authority of the Companion ʿAbdallāh b.
Masʿūd (d. 32/653) states, “Do not allow them [viz., women] to reside in rooms
(al-ghuraf), and do not teach them to write. [Rather,] teach them the spin-
dle and Sūrat al-Nūr.” It first appeared in al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī’s (d. 320/932)
3 Werner Ende, “Sollen Frauen schreiben lernen? Eine innerislamische Debatte und ihre
Widerspiegelung in Al-Manār”, in Gedenkschrift Wolfgang Reuschel: Akten des III. Arabistischen
Kolloquiums, Leipzig, 21–22 November 1991, ed. Dieter Bellmann (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1994), 49–57.
Die Welt des Islams (2021) 1-31 | 10.1163/15700607-61020019

4 wright
Nawādir al-uṣūl fī aḥādīth al-rasūl.4 al-Tirmidhī explained that the ḥadīth was
meant to convey that women were created from men and that men find peace
in satisfying their desire (shahwa) for women. Women cause discord (fitna)
through writing, as they may write to persons they physically desire. “Through
[writing]”, he continued, “there is an expression of consciousness not uttered
[like that of] the tongue, and therefore it [viz., writing] is stronger than speech.
The Prophet, therefore, preferred to prevent them from [reaching] the causes
of discord, to protect them and purify their hearts.”5
The ḥadīth was also included in al-Muʿjam al-awsaṭ of al-Ṭabarānī (d. 360/918)
with a complete chain of narrators, on the authority of ʿĀʾisha.6 al-Ṭabarānī sug-
gested that this isnād is weak, based on the presence of Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm
al-Shāmī, a Persian who lived in Iraq and quoted ḥadīth chains originating in
Syria. The historian and ḥadīth collector Ibn Ḥibbān (d. 354/965) claimed that
al-Shāmī was a “deceiver (dajjāl) who falsified ḥadīth” and a “liar”.7
The Mustadrak of al-Ḥākim al-Nīsābūrī (d. 405/1014) presented a different
chain that did not include al-Shāmī.8 al-Nīsābūrī claimed that the isnād is
authentic (ṣaḥīḥ) yet it was not included in the canonical texts of al-Bukhārī
and Muslim. The same chain was also mentioned in al-Bayhaqī’s Shaʿb al-Īmān;
here, however, al-Bayhaqī pushed back against the judgment of al-Nīsābūrī and
suggested that the ḥadīth is rejected (munkar) due to the presence of al-Shāmī
in its other isnāds.9
The second form of this ḥadīth, which appeared in the work of ʿAbd
al-Raḥmān b. al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200), reads, “Do not teach your women to
read, and do not allow them to sit in high rooms (al-ghuraf al-ʿalālī).” This
narration is transmitted on the authority of the Companion Ibn ʿAbbās (d.
67/687).10 Despite two different narrations of the ḥadīth with multiple isnāds,
Ibn al-Jawzī classified it as weak, citing one of its transmitters (Jaʿfar b. Ḥafṣ)
as falsely reporting ḥadīths from trustworthy narrators (al-thiqāt). He also
4 Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, Nawādir al-uṣūl fī maʿrifat aḥādīth al-rasūl, 6 vols.
(Damascus: Dār al-Nawādir, 2010), 5:183.
5 Ibid., 184–85.
6 Sulaymān b. Aḥmad al-Ṭabarānī, al-Muʿjam al-awsaṭ, 9 vols. (Cairo: Dār al-Ḥaramayn, 1995),
6:34.
7 Muḥammad b. Fayṣal b. Ḥibbān, Kitāb al-majrūhīn min al-muḥaddithīn, 2 vols. (Riyadh: Dār
al-Ṣamīʿī, 2000), 2:318–20.
8 Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḥākim al-Nīsābūrī, al-Mustadrak ʿalā l-ṣaḥīḥayn, 4 vols. (Beirut:
Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2002), 2:430.
9 Aḥmad b. al-Ḥusayn al-Bayhaqī, al-Jāmiʿ li-shaʿb al-īmān, 14 vols. (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Rushd,
2003), 4:90.
10 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAlī b. al-Jawzī, Kitāb al-mawḍūʿāt, 3 vols. (Medina: al-Maktaba al-Salafiyya,
1966), 2:268.

rebuked al-Nīsābūrī’s authentication, stating, “It is astonishing how he was

unaware of the state [of Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm al-Shāmī].”11
Most Sunni ḥadīth scholars were therefore suspicious of the origins of the
ḥadīth and rejected it from the standpoint of its isnād. In their analysis, the
ḥadīth most likely emerged in Iraq at the turn of the third century ah, sup-
ported by the narration of Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm al-Shāmī.
Women Learning to Write in Jurisprudence (Fiqh)
Accepting the negative verdict of ḥadīth scholars, jurists largely ignored the
ḥadīth of prohibition. Only a few scholars even took note of it, beginning
with the Shāfiʿī Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī (d. 973/1565) in his Fatāwā ḥadīthiyya.12
al-Haytamī responded to a question about the authenticity of the ḥadīth for-
bidding women to learn to write, as it appeared in the Tafsīr of al-Wāḥidī.13
He began by confirming the ḥadīth’s authenticity, quoting al-Nīsābūrī and
al-Bayhaqī (although the latter felt otherwise, as mentioned above). This
ḥadīth “includes many provisions regarding them [viz., women], protect-
ing them from all tribulation (fitna) and doubt (rayba), and [this benefit is]
apparent to all those who consider it.” He included a citation of the alter-
nate isnād of al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, adding another story told by the Prophet
in which the Qurʾānic figure Luqmān “passed by a concubine [sitting] in a
school (kuttāb) and asked, ‘for whom is this sword being sharpened?’”14 “If a
woman learns to write”, al-Haytamī argued,
11 Ibid., 269.
12 Aḥmad b. Ḥajar al-Haytamī, al-Fatāwā al-ḥadīthiyya (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Maymaniyya,
1887), 85; Cornelis van Arendonk and Joseph Schacht, “Ibn Ḥad̲ ja̲ r al-Haytamī”, EI2, Brill
Online, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_3179 (accessed 11 August 2020).
13 The ḥadīth is referred to at the beginning of Sūrat al-Nūr (36) in many tafsīr works, without
mention of the legal rulings associated with it. See, for example, ʿAlī b. Aḥmad al-Wāḥidī,
al-Wasīṭ fī tafsīr al-qurʾān al-majīd, 4 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1994), 3:302;
Manṣūr b. Muḥammad al-Samʿānī, Tafsīr al-qurʾān, 6 vols. (Riyadh: Dār al-Waṭan, 1997),
3:497; Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Qurṭubī, al-Jāmiʿ li-aḥkām al-qurʾān, 24 vols. (Beirut:
Muʾassasat al-Risāla, 2006), 15:100; Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Shawkānī, Fatḥ al-qadīr (Beirut: Dār
al-Maʿrifa, 2007), 995; ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAlī b. al-Jawzī, Zād al-masīr fī ʿilm al-tafsīr (Beirut:
Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 2002), 974.
14 I have been unable to trace this ḥadīth to al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī or any other Sunni source.
Most of al-Tirmidhī’s works were lost, so the ḥadīth could have been reported in one of his
non-extant works.

6 wright
it leads her to corrupt purposes, and those who are corrupt can reach
her with much greater speed, eloquence, and treachery than [they
would be able to do] otherwise. As a person conveys through writing
much more than through a messenger, and because writing conceals
more, it is more eloquent in its trickery. Therefore, after [learning to]
write, a woman becomes like the brandished sword that swiftly cuts
everything it passes by. Similarly, after learning to write, a woman can
respond to anything that [her husband] may request from her with the
utmost speed and eloquence.15
al-Haytamī cited another ḥadīth in which the Prophet stated, “Verily the
responsibilities a father [must fulfill] for his child are [that] he teaches him
to write, protects his lineage, and marries him off when he reaches puberty.”
The term “child” (walad), according to al-Haytamī, refers only to males. He
tempered this argument by saying that forbidding women to write does not
prohibit them from learning Qurʾānic recitation, Islamic sciences, and the arts,
as this leads to “public benefit without the fear of corruption”. Writing, on the
other hand, “even if it [results in] some benefit, it [leads to] corruption, and
avoiding corruption is preferred to bringing benefit.”
In closing, al-Haytamī responded to the point that women are encouraged
to learn to write in other ḥadīths, particularly those narrated by al-Shifāʾ bt.
ʿAbdallāh. “This [ḥadīth] is not [sufficient] evidence to encourage women to
learn to write”, al-Haytamī argued. “Rather, it is evidence for the permissibility
(jawāz) of teaching them to write. Although we acknowledge [the ḥadīth], the
ultimate [ruling] in the matter is prohibition, based on the corruption that it
brings.”16
The discussion appeared again in the Ḥanafī jurist Mulla ʿAlī al-Qārī’s (d.
1014/1606) juristic commentary on the fourteenth-century ḥadīth collec-
tion Mishkāt al-maṣābīḥ by Muḥammad b. ʿAbdallāh al-Khaṭīb al-Tabrīzī (d.
741/1340). In his explanation of the ḥadīth mentioned above, in which the
Prophet orders Ḥafṣa to learn to write, al-Qārī remarked that permission to
write was granted only to women from the first generations of Muslims. He
stated:
It is possible that [writing] was permissible for early generations of

Muslims (salaf) but not for their descendants (khalaf) due to the cor-
ruption of women in [our] time. Additionally, I have seen others state,
15 al-Haytamī, al-Fatāwā al-ḥadīthiyya, 86.

16 Ibid.

‘[Permissibility] is specific to Ḥafṣa because [the Prophet’s] wives have

unique rulings.’ The [other] ḥadīth, ‘Do not teach them to write,’ ap-
plies to women in general because of the fear that they will [cause]
tribulation.17
In another commentary on the same text, the South Asian Ḥanafī jurist ʿAbd
al-Ḥaqq Dihlawī (d. 959/1642) echoed similar sentiments.18 “Regarding the
issue of teaching [women to] write”, he observed,
One can understand permissibility (jawāz) from this ḥadīth. Another

ḥadīth [prohibiting (nahī) writing] states, ‘Do not teach them to write.’
General permissibility is preferred over prohibition. However, some have
said that the Prophet’s wives are specifically [excluded from this ruling].
The prohibition of writing applies to lay women (nisāʾ ʿāmāt), due to the
fear of tribulation (fitna) that can occur in this matter.19
Finally, the Yemeni revivalist Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Shawkānī (d. 1255/1839)

qualified this more general ruling as being “applicable only to those from
whom it is feared that education will bring corruption”.20
Alongside the mentions of prohibition, other scholars spoke positively about
the ability of women to learn to write using the alternative ḥadīth of al-Shifāʾ
bt. ʿAbdallāh. For example, Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal stated in his commentary on this
ḥadīth that “this is a license (rukhṣa) to teach women to write”.21 The later Ḥanbalī
jurists Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) and his student Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya
(d. 751/1350) repeated these sentiments. Following their respective discussions
of this ḥadīth, each added the statement of Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal with only a small
change: “[Contained] within the ḥadīth: evidence of the permissibility (jawāz)
of teaching women to write.”22 Both Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim allowed
17 Mulla ʿAlī al-Qārī, Marqāt al-mafātīḥ sharḥ mishkāt al-maṣābīḥ, 11 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub
al-ʿIlmiyya, 2001), 8:378–79.
18 Scott Kugle, “ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Dihlawī, An Accidental Revivalist: Knowledge and Power in the
Passage from Delhi to Mecca”, Journal of Islamic Studies 19:2 (2008), 196–246.
19 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Dihlawī, Ashʿat al-lamʿāt fī sharḥ al-mishkāt, Mss. 14704, Library of the Iranian
Parliament.
20 Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Shawkānī, Nayl al-awṭār min asrār muntaqā al-akhbār, 16 vols. (Cairo:
Dār Ibn al-Jawzī, 2006), 9:105.
21 Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, Musnad al-Imām Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, 50 vols. (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Risāla,
ND), 45:46.
22 Muḥammad b. Abī Bakr b. Qayyim al-Jawziyya, al-Ṭibb al-nabawī (Riyadh: Dār al-Salām,
2011), 272.

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women to write, expanding upon Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal’s assessment that they may
take license to do so only in exceptional circumstances.
The opinions cited above outline the pre-colonial approaches to the ḥadīth,
which later scholars would utilize. For those who ruled against women learn-
ing to write, the critical element was fear of the corruption (fasād) and tribu-
lation (fitna) caused by education. al-Haytamī, Mulla ʿAlī al-Qārī, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq
Dihlawī, and al-Shawkānī each expressed this fear despite their differing meth-
odologies and school affiliations. However, Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, Ibn Taymiyya,
and Ibn al-Qayyim followed the approach of their school and judged the ḥadīth
on its merits without taking account of the potential corruption, ultimately
approving the sounder narration of al-Shifāʾ.
Outside these direct references to the ḥadīth of prohibition, Sunni jurists
were largely silent on the specific question of women learning to write, and
only general rulings about the merits of education in Islam are found in the
fiqh literature. For most, therefore, as long as one followed the framework
of the Sharīʿa, such as a male teacher not sitting with a female pupil alone
(khalwa) or a woman not removing her veil in the presence of a male teacher
who is not a member of her immediate family, a woman learning to write was
not a pressing issue.23
In the nineteenth century, the approach of scholars changed. Opinions
against the idea of women learning to read and write resurfaced in places like
British India, Egypt, and Russia, and the long-rejected ḥadīth rose to promi-
nence. I now turn to these opinions, beginning with examples from both sup-
porters and detractors of women’s literacy as they materialized in India as a
response to changes made in education policy.
Popularization of the Prohibition in the Nineteenth Century
As British power and influence expanded across most of the Indian subcon-
tinent, the East India Company moved beyond its trade interests and entered
the realm of policy. Law, tax collection, and education came into its purview.
With regards to the latter, new ideologies of education – implemented by both
23 For more on the issue of women’s education in Islam and the interaction with the law, see
Wael Hallaq, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009),
64–71; Haifaa Jawad, The Rights of Women in Islam: An Authentic Approach (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 1998), 16–29; Judith Tucker, Women, Family, and Gender in Islamic Law (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 24–37; ʿAbd al-Karīm Zaydān, al-Mufaṣṣal fī aḥkām
al-marʾa wa-l-bayt al-muslim fī l-sharīʿa al-islāmiyya, 11 vols. (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Risāla,
1993), 4:228–58.

British and Indian Muslim reformists alike – began to interact in a system that
had previously been dominated by centuries-old madrasas and their teachers,
curricula, and methods.
This process was gradual and uneven, the result of a compromise between
sometimes conflicting and contradictory goals. For example, some British
officers and Indian reformers lobbied the colonial government to promote
English as the primary medium of instruction in local schools. These indi-
viduals, known as Anglicists, wrote against others, called Orientalists, who
promoted education in native languages (Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit). In
the 1830s, a prominent supporter of the Anglicists, Lord Thomas Babington
Macaulay, was tasked by the Company to head an education commission and
propose new legislation that would regulate the funding of native schools. In
his Minute in 1835, he argued for the objective “superiority of the European
[languages]” over Arabic and Sanskrit. Although he never learned either of
these languages, he remarked,
I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the ori-
entalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could
deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole
native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of Western
literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee
who support the oriental plan of education.24
The opinion of Macaulay and other Anglicists influenced the resulting

Resolution of March 1835 that, although maintaining financial support for the
Sanskrit College of Benares and the Muhammadan College of Calcutta, called
for a priority to be placed on the “promotion of European literature and sci-
ence among the natives of India; and that all the funds appropriated for the
purpose of education would be best employed on English education alone.”25
In the following decades, however, the implemented education policy was a
compromise between the Orientalist and Anglicist positions, with English as
the preferred medium of instruction. Still, other important Orientalist meas-
ures, such as the support of translation of works into local languages and the
24 Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Minute by the Honorable T.B. Macaulay dated the 2nd of
February 1835”, in Bureau of Education: Selections from Educational Records, Part I (1781–1839),
ed. H. Sharp (Delhi: National Archives of India, 1965), 110.
25 Ram Nath Sharma and Rajendra Kumar Sharma, History of Education in India (New Delhi:
Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, 2004), 84.

10 wright
acceptance of qualifications from non-English schools, continued to play an

important role.26
Following the Uprising of 1857, the British position towards the Indian pop-
ulation shifted. Concerned that too much intervention in Indian society would
cause further rebellion, colonial officers distanced themselves from the Indian
population. Unlike the Orientalists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries who admired – and sometimes emulated – Indian cultural norms,
officers were now discouraged from interacting with locals.27
In education policy, this meant curtailing previous efforts of Christian pros-
elytization and adopting a stance of religious non-intervention. According to
Thomas Metcalf, this position was facilitated by making English literature the
central element of the school curriculum. “Although education in India was to
be secular”, he argued, “moral training was to be supplied by study of the great
works of England’s historic literature.”28 Recent observers of the education
system in British India have questioned the secular nature of this policy, see-
ing the focus on uplifting of Indian “morality” – particularly through English
literature – as a euphemism for Christian ethics and arguing that, at its core,
the education policy never fully shed its Christian roots.29 Although the devel-
opment of education continued gradually in the subcontinent into the twen-
tieth century and remained largely secular, it was the fear of the promotion
of non-Muslim and foreign values that drove scholars to employ the ḥadīth of
prohibition in their rulings.
While the British influenced Indian education policy, Muslim institutions
developed their own diverse visions for the future of the community in the
subcontinent. Although ventures such as the Delhi College promoted an
atmosphere of cooperation between Islamic and European systems of learn-
ing, these and other traditional centers of Muslim learning in Delhi lost much
of their influence following the Uprising of 1857.30 As a result, Muslim-led edu-
cation in the second half of the nineteenth century would be based around
26 Martin Moir and Lynn Zastoupil, eds. The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating
to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843(London: Routledge, 1999), x; Stephen Evans,
“Macaulay’s Minute Revisited: Colonial Language Policy in Nineteenth Century India”,
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 23:4 (2002), 260–81.
27 William Dalrymple, “Transculturation, Assimilation, and its Limits: The rise and fall of the
Delhi White Mughals, 1805–57”, in The Delhi College: Traditional Elites, the Colonial State, and
Education before 1857, ed. Margrit Pernau (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 60–101.
28 Thomas Metcalf, The New Cambridge History of India: Ideologies of the Raj (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 40.
29 Krishna Kumar, The Politics of Education in Colonial India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014), 25.
30 Margrit Pernau, ed. The Delhi College: Traditional Elites, the Colonial State, and Education
before 1857 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), ii.

a collection of new institutions in provincial centers. In Deoband, for exam-

ple, the Dār al-ʿUlūm seminary, established by former Delhi College students
in 1866, promoted traditionalist education and shunned Western colonial
influence.31 In contrast, the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh,
founded in 1875 by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (d. 1898), was based on a secular cur-
riculum yet taught traditional Islamic subjects as well.32 At the heart of these
new institutions was a focus on the individual, with a top issue of contention
being women’s education and their proper role in society. According to Gail
Minault, women for these movements were simultaneously symbolic “of all
that was wrong with their culture and religious life” and “of all that was worth
preserving”.33
It is against the background of changes in the ideology and medium of
education that South Asian Muslim scholars began to question whether they
should allow Muslim women to participate in the colonial education sys-
tem, particularly to become literate. The earliest work dealing with this issue
after 1857 was A Section on Clarifying [the Issue of ] Teaching Women to Write:
Is it Permissible without Disapproval, Reprehensible, or Prohibited? by Ṣibghat
Allāh al-Madrāsī (d. 1280/1863). Writing five years before his death, Ṣibghat
Allāh challenged earlier scholars – namely, his Ḥanafī colleague ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq
Dihlawī – and argued that the weakness of the ḥadīth of prohibition necessi-
tated its rejection. He confirmed the approach of classical ḥadīth scholars and
rebuked voices who prohibited women from learning to write.34
Ṣibghat Allāh belonged to the South Indian extension of the school at Farangī
Maḥall, established in Lucknow in 1700 and a prominent Islamic intellectual
movement throughout the subcontinent. The scholars of Farangī Maḥall were
known for their revival of the rational sciences (maʿqūlāt), attempting to create
a balance with textual and linguistic studies of the Qurʾān and Sunna (man-
qūlāt), and advocated adherence to the Ḥanafī madhhab.35
31 Barbara Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1982).
32 David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
33 Gail Minault, Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial
India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 6.
34 Juzʾ fī bayān taʿlīm al-nisāʾ al-kitāba. Hal huwa jāʾiz min ghayr karāha, aw huwa makrūh aw
mamnūʿ?, cited in Muḥammad b. Ḥamad al-ʿAssāfī al-Tamīmī, al-Iṣāba fī istiḥbāb taʿlīm
al-nisāʾ al-kitāba (Riyadh: Dār Kunūz Ishbīliya li-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawzīʿ, 2008), 25.
35 ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḥusaynī, “Taḥbīr al-kurrās fī tarjamat Ṣibghat Allāh al-Madrās”, Shabakat
al-Alūka, https://www.alukah.net/culture/0/128821/ (accessed 3 August 2020); Francis
Robinson, The ‘Ulama of Farangi Mahall and Islamic Culture in South Asia (London: C. Hurst
& Co, 2001).

12 wright
There were other scholars who both adhered to the Ḥanafī school while uti-
lizing the ḥadīth to prohibit women from learning to write. Perhaps the most
important of these was Ahmad Reza Khan (d. 1340/1921), founder of the late
nineteenth-century revivalist Barelvi movement. According to the Barelvis –
referred to internally as the People of the Sunna (Ahl-i Sunnat wa-l-Jamāʿat) –
Muslims had a personal responsibility to preserve their identity through strict
adherence to the example of the Prophet Muhammad and devotional prac-
tices at Sufi shrines. They were strongly opposed to the seminary at Deoband,
as well as to those who rejected the Sunni madhhabs.36
Although Ahmad Reza Khan was a Ḥanafī, his followers also considered him
a “renewer (mujaddid)” of the Islamic tradition.37 This gave him the ability to
approach the Qurʾān and Sunna directly, as well as significant legal authority in
the production of fatāwā, a position that he inherited from his father when he
was only fourteen. His family was also affiliated with the Qādiriyya-Barkatiyya
Sufi order. The attachment to a chain of spiritual authorities (pīr) who drew
their authority from the Prophet impacted the work of Ahmad Reza Khan
and the coherence of his broader movement, providing him with a “guiding
hand” that he believed would protect him from falling into error in his religious
interpretations.38
In his fatwā collection, Ahmad Reza Khan received a question from the
western United Provinces town of Marehra on 3 Rabīʿ al-Awwal 1316/22 July
1898, asking him to clarify the Sharīʿa’s position regarding women learning to
write. He responded:
Dear sir, teaching women to write is religiously prohibited [as it is] the
practice of Christians and opens the door to thousands of tribulations,
placing a sword in the hand of the dedicated madman, whose intense
corruption has been duly attested to by experience. Several ḥadīths pro-
hibit this [writing] and, upon investigation, the different [narrations of
the ḥadīth] buttress one another. The [original] content of the ḥadīth
is known and preserved through [the work of] Imām al-Bayhaqī. The
[ḥadīth’s] numerous chains of narration are a second strength. The prac-
tice of the Umma and acceptance of scholars is a third strength, while
precaution and prevention of tribulation are a fourth strength. The
36 Usha Sanyal, Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and His
Movement, 1870–1920 (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2010), 336–37.
37 Usha Sanyal, Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi: In the Path of the Prophet (Oxford: Oneworld
Publications, 2005), 64–68.
38 Ibid., 89.

ḥadīth, therefore, [should be classified as] at least good (ḥasan). The fact
that the prohibition [contained therein] is explicit (ṣarīḥ) stands on its
own, as opposed to the ḥadīth of al-Shifāʾ bint ʿAbd Allāh [which is not
clear] … there is [therefore] no clear ḥadīth regarding its permissibility
(ijāza).39
Ahmad Reza Khan then provided a detailed explanation of each of these points.
He began with the three isnāds as described above, citing the opinions of Ibn
Ḥajar al-Haytamī and al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī. When discussing the opinion of
al-Bayhaqī, Ahmad Reza Khan quoted the fifteenth-century Egyptian scholar
Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505), who stated that when al-Bayhaqī rejected
the ḥadīth he meant to say, “with another isnād, it would not be rejected”.40
Ahmad Reza Khan contributed to the classical opinions establishing the
authenticity of the ḥadīth by applying the methodology of al-Imām al-Nawawī
(d. 676/1277), who argued that “no questioning of a narrator’s veracity (jarḥ) is
to be accepted unless the reasons for doing so are made clear.”41 The ḥadīths
in question, as seen above, rely mainly on the narration of Muḥammad b.
Ibrāhīm al-Shāmī, who many commentators characterized as a liar. In Ahmad
Reza Khan’s view, if scholars provided no reason for why he was a liar, that
criticism should not be considered valid. For Ahmad Reza Khan, it was com-
mon amongst ḥadīth scholars, even al-Bukhārī, to reject ḥadīths from narrators
about whom they had little personal knowledge, calling them liars without jus-
tification, even though their narrations may well have been accurate.
For Ahmad Reza Khan, the most decisive proof of the strength of this ḥadīth
is that it is narrated on the authority of three Companions (ʿĀʾisha, ʿAbdallāh
b. Masʿūd, and Ibn ʿAbbās), as “no fabricator or liar has achieved this [level of
fabrication]”.42 He returned to al-Suyūṭī, who stated, “If a [ḥadīth’s] chains are
numerous, [a weak, rejected, or ignored] ḥadīth may be elevated to the degree
of weak and strange (al-ḍaʿīf al-gharīb), or even to [that of] good (al-ḥasan).”43
The next argument supporting preventing women from learning to write
was the absence of prominent female scholars in historical texts. He cited
ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Dihlawī, who was only able to find nine “female writers (kāti-
bāt)” throughout Islamic history. Ahmad Reza Khan argued that this was an
39 Ahmad Reza Khan Barelvi, Fatāwā Raḍawiyya, 30 vols. (Lahore: Riḍā Foundation, 1921),
23:654.
40 Ibid., 656.
41 Ibid., 658.
42 Ibid., 657.
43 Ibid.

14 wright
overstatement on the part of ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq and that at the most, there were only
six. “This is evidence”, in Ahmad Reza Khan’s view, “of the Umma’s restraint in
[permitting] women to [learn to] write”.44
There were three additional reasons as to why this was so. Firstly, a weak
ḥadīth may qualify for legal use if it guards against potential harm (iḥtiyāṭ).
Applying this concept, Ahmad Reza Khan presented an alternative under-
standing of the ḥadīth of al-Shifāʾ, stating that it should read, “Why don’t you
teach her [Ḥafṣa] something that she may benefit from [viz., medicine] rather
than something from which there is no benefit [viz., writing].” Secondly, the
ḥadīth of al-Shifāʾ refers only to Ḥafṣa and the wives of the Prophet, and not to
women in general. Other scholars like ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Dihlawī, whose judgment
on the issue was discussed above, had already expressed this view. Thirdly,
Ahmad Reza Khan argued that the rules of fiqh change with the times, as hap-
pened with the idea of women attending mosques. ʿĀʾisha herself, in a state-
ment (khabar), mentioned, “If the Prophet had seen what we have, he would
have forbidden women to attend mosques, just as the women of Israel [were
forbidden from attending synagogues].”45
In his conclusion, Ahmad Reza Khan appealed to historical precedent to
prohibit women from writing. “Hundreds of thousands of men in every age
have become writers”, he argued, “while in over thirteen centuries only a lim-
ited [number of] women [have done so]. If it was so beneficial that women
[learn to] write, why then has the Umma, from the first generation to today,
agreed on ignoring this [issue]?” No scholar can be aloof from the world in
which he lives, and, quoting al-Haytamī and a Hindu proverb, giving women
the ability to write would be the equivalent of brandishing a sword that would
be used to slaughter men.46
Ahmad Reza Khan’s fatwā is evidence of the identity crisis that was heav-
ily discussed by Indian Muslims, as shown by the literature of the period.47
Although his primary focus was on the authenticity of the ḥadīth, he also
included a range of other legal devices to bolster his point. The “practice of
the Umma” is a reference to consensus (ijmāʿ), while “precaution and preven-
tion of tribulation” refers to “blocking of the means” (sadd al-dharāʾiʿ). Each of
these was a device employed by jurists for centuries, used in combination to
44 Ibid., 669.
45 Ibid., 676.
46 Ibid., 677.
47 The crisis of Muslim identity in British India is discussed in Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty:
Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1800 (London: Routledge, 2000).

strengthen legal arguments.48 The most telling point of Ahmad Reza Khan’s
argumentation, however, is the fact that he began his fatwā with a rejection of
women’s education as “the practice of Christians” before mentioning any basis
for it in the ḥadīth. This shows that Ahmad Reza Khan’s legal stance was not
motivated solely by textual authenticity but rather by the circumstances of the
time, namely, Muslim hesitation regarding sending their children, particularly
girls, to English schools.
The colonial government was aware of the difficulties the changes in the
education system presented to the Muslim community, and early reports sub-
mitted to the Indian government stated that “the endeavor to impart a high
order of English education to the Muhammadan community [had] completely
failed.”49 Although the situation had improved by 1882, when the Hunter
Commission on Indian Education published its final report, Muslims were
among the main classes of Indians who did not attend English schools. The
government concluded that the primary reason for this was “the absence of
instruction in the tenets of their faith, and still more the injurious effects of
English education in creating disbelief in religion.”50 Education for women
“encounter[ed] peculiar difficulties”. According to the report, women were not
meant to gain employment, which was the primary purpose of English educa-
tion. Additionally, “social customs of India regarding child-marriage, and the
seclusion in which women of the well-to-do classes spend their married life in
most parts of the country”, contributed to the removal of girls from education
at the age of nine or eleven.51
Pushing Back: Shams al-Ḥaqq al-ʿAẓīmābādī
The opinion expressed in the fatwā of Ahmad Reza Khan was not without its
detractors in South Asia, and several scholars pushed back against the use of
this ḥadīth. The most prominent of these responses was given by Muḥammad
Shams al-Ḥaqq al-ʿAẓīmābādī (also cited as al-Dayānwī, d. 1329/1911) in his
Strings of Pearls in the Permissibility of Teaching Women to Write, written in
48 Wael Hallaq, “On Inductive Corroboration, Probability and Certainty in Sunni Legal
Thought”, in Islamic Law and Jurisprudence: Studies in Honor of Farhat J. Ziadeh, ed. Nicholas
L. Heer (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990), 3–31.
49 Report of the Indian Education Commission (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government
Printing India, 1883), 483.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., 521.

16 wright
1307/1889, one year after the fatwā of Ahmad Reza Khan.52 al-ʿAẓīmābādī
belonged to the “Followers of the Prophetic Tradition” (Ahl-i Ḥadīth). The Ahl-i
Ḥadīth, although not an organized movement, were an extension of the calls
to a renewal of independent reasoning (ijtihād) in the Indian subcontinent
through a renewed focus on the ḥadīth. Prominent advocates of the Ahl-i
Ḥadīth, such as Nadhīr Ḥusayn Dihlawī (d. 1902) and Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān (d.
1890), were influenced by the opinions of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim,
as well as the writings of eighteenth-century figures such as Shah Walī Allāh
Dihlawī (d. 1186/1762) and Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Shawkānī.53 Methodologically,
the Ahl-i Ḥadīth rejected adherence to or imitation (taqlīd) of a school of law,
arguing that the only true guide for Muslims should be garnered directly from
the Qurʾān and the authentic traditions of the Prophet.54
In response to questions from his students and friends, al-ʿAẓīmābādī began
his treatise by conceding that some ḥadīths permit women to learn to write,
while others forbid them from doing so. However, he argued, “it is not per-
missible to use as evidence those narrations which deny teaching [women to
write] as they are weak and invalid, and one cannot establish a Sharīʿa ruling
with them.”55 He then analyzed each narration of the ḥadīth of prohibition,
presenting the same isnāds as mentioned above.
Opposing the view of Ahmad Reza Khan, al-ʿAẓīmābādī stated that once a
transmitter of ḥadīth is labeled as a liar or his ḥadīths are rejected (matrūk), no
opinions stating otherwise are to be considered. Citing the ḥadīth scholars Ibn
al-Ṣalāḥ (d. 643/1245) and al-Sakhāwī (d. 902/1497), al-ʿAẓīmābādī asserted that
it is more important to question a narrator’s veracity (jarḥ) than any support
that they might receive (taʿdīl). No Muslim scholar has ever found the ḥadīth
of prohibition to be authentic, except for al-Ḥākim al-Nisābūrī. He was not to
be trusted, however, as “his laxity in authenticating ḥadīth is well-known, and
his judgments are not valid unless they correspond with those of other ḥadīth
scholars.”56 Additionally, the citation of the ḥadīth in tafsīr texts is not a vote
52 Muḥammad Shams al-Ḥaqq al-ʿAẓīmābādī, ʿUqūd al-jumān fī jawāz taʿlīm al-kitāba li-l-
niswān (Karachi: al-Majmaʿ al-ʿIlmī, 1988).
53 Daniel Brown, Rethinking Tradition in Modern Islamic Thought (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 27–29; Claudia Preckel, “Khān, Ṣiddīq Ḥasan”, EI THREE, Brill Online,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_35472 (accessed 6 February 2021).
54 Shaikh Inayatullah, “Ahl-i Hadith”, EI2, Brill Online, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_
SIM_0380 (accessed 7 August 2020).
55 Muḥammad Shams al-Ḥaqq al-ʿAẓīmābādī, ʿUqūd al-Jumān, 21.
56 Ibid., 24.

of confidence in its authenticity, as exegetes only mean to reference the ḥadīth

as it mentions a chapter of the Qurʾān in its body (matn), without regard to its
legal value.
al-ʿAẓīmābādī then presented the ḥadīth of al-Shifāʾ. After describing each
narrator in its isnāds, he concluded that “there is no space for doubt in the
authenticity of this ḥadīth. However, it is not out of the question that a skep-
tical, argumentative [person] might reject this sound ḥadīth and hold to the
false ḥadīth, as do many [who] reject the truth.”57 This is possibly a veiled ref-
erence to Ahmad Reza Khan.
Finally, al-ʿAẓīmābādī addressed the opinion of ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Dihlawī and
others who argued that only the Prophet’s wives should be allowed to learn
to write, or that the prohibition of writing applies exclusively to those who
might become corrupted. Regarding the former, al-ʿAẓīmābādī stated, “I am
shocked at such great scholars as these. How can they establish such odd con-
tingencies? The specification [for the Prophet’s wives] can only be established
through the presence of decisive, strong evidence; otherwise, any person can
claim a ruling is [applied to a specific group] and confuse [the laity] … The
entire Muslim community is equal, [regardless of generation] when it comes
to ḥarām and ḥalāl.” To the latter claim, al-ʿAẓīmābādī mentioned, “The fear
of corruption was clear in early generations, as attested to by the Qurʾān.”58
Concluding his argument, al-ʿAẓīmābādī stated,
There is no doubt that adult women are permitted to learn how to write
at the hands of other women or their [male] relatives. Pre-pubescent
women shall [be able to] learn what they desire [without restriction].
Writing is not a cause of tribulation because if it were, then it would not
have been made permissible by the Sharīʿa. A woman afflicted with tribu-
lation reaches [such a condition through other means] than writing, and
God knows best.59
For a scholar who rejected imitation (taqlīd) of the Sunni madhhabs like
al-ʿAẓīmābādī, it was necessary to evaluate the issue of women writing based
on the veracity of the ḥadīth and its narrators alone. He provided no evidence
that the social problem of British education policy factored into his analysis.60
57 Ibid., 36.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid., 36–37.
60 It should be noted, however, that the Ahl-i Hadith did take political arguments into
account in their informal writings. See Martin Riexinger, “Ibn Taymiyya’s Worldview and
the Challenge of Modernity: A Conflict among the Ahl-i Ḥadīth in British India”, in Islamic

18 wright
This approach put him at odds with scholars like Ahmad Reza Khan and ʿAbd
al-Ḥaqq Dihlawī who, despite their attachment to the Ḥanafī school, were
willing to entertain thoughts of the potential negative social consequences of
women writing.
The conflict that resulted from constructing a judgment based on the
acceptance of the ḥadīth alone or the integration of the circumstances of the
time can be most clearly seen in the opinion of another scholar of Farangī
Maḥall, ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Laknawī.
Hesitation in Two Fatwās of ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Laknawī
The preeminent scholar of Farangī Maḥall in the second half of the nineteenth
century, Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Laknawī (d. 1304/1886), was aware of the
evolving relationship between Indian Muslims and the British, despite having
only once directly interacted with colonial officers.61 In his fatwā collection, he
was asked about a range of issues, including working for the colonial govern-
ment, the validity of British court judgments, and even whether eating British-
made biscuits was religiously permissible.62
Methodologically, ʿAbd al-Ḥayy was more flexible than his Ḥanafī peers.
He accepted the adoption of opinions from other Sunni madhhabs, allowing
Muslims to take whatever legal opinion they felt was best to remove hard-
ship.63 He was also a staunch supporter of the Sunna, arguing in one of his
works that rejecting or failing to apply the practices of the Prophet accurately
was one of the most significant faults of Muslims of his time.64 However, ʿAbd
al-Ḥayy never encouraged a wholesale abandonment of the Ḥanafī tradition
when faced with authentic texts, placing him at odds with al-ʿAẓīmābādī and
the Ahl-i Ḥadīth. On multiple occasions, ʿAbd al-Ḥayy wrote against one of
the movement’s proponents, Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān, calling him out for labeling
Theology, Philosophy and Law: Debating Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, ed. Birgit
Krawietz and Georges Tamer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 493–517.
61 This was on a trip to visit a Muslim convert in Darbhanga, Bihar, where he was reportedly
welcomed by the colonial officials as a scholar. Walī al-Dīn Nadwī. ʿAllāma ʿAbd al-Ḥayy
al-Laknawī Farangī Maḥallī: Ḥayāt wa khidmāt (Azamgarh: Markaz al-Shaykh Abī al-Ḥasan
al-Nadwī, 2012), 94.
62 Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Laknawī, Majmūʿat al-fatāwā, 2 vols. (Lucknow: al-Maṭbaʿ
al-ʿAlawī, n.d.).
63 ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Laknawī, Majmūʿat al-Fatāwā, 1:28.
64 Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Laknawī, Ẓafr al-amānī fī mukhtaṣar al-Jurjānī, ed. ʿAbd
al-Fattāḥ Abū Ghudda (Aleppo: Maktabat al-Maṭbūʿāt al-Islāmiyya, 1995), 21–24.

mainstream Ḥanafī jurists such as the Egyptian Kamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b.

al-Humām (d. 861/1457) as extremist Ḥanafīs.65
ʿAbd al-Ḥayy was asked twice in his fatwā collection about women learning to
write. The first question was in Jumādā I 1303/February 1886 from Muḥammad
Ṣiddīq, the principal of the Hāshim School in the Zakariya Mosque of the
Bombay Fort, who asked, “Is it correct or not for women to learn to write?”
ʿAbd al-Ḥayy responded, “It is correct (durust ast), as testified to by the ḥadīth
and statements of the jurists. The practice of major scholars (akābir-i ʿulamāʾ)
[also] confirms its permissibility.”66
ʿAbd al-Ḥayy based his argument on the ḥadīth of al-Shifāʾ, stating that this
sound narration of the Prophet’s command is clear proof of permissibility.
He also cited the fourteenth-century Ḥanafī treatise Khazānat al-Muftīn by
Ḥusayn b. Muḥammad al-Samaqānī (d. 746/1345), which allowed menstruat-
ing women to leave their home to attend school.67 Concluding his answer, ʿAbd
al-Ḥayy cited the biographical dictionary Ṭabaqāt al-Ḥanafiyya, pointing out
that it was commonplace for women to become scholars in families of Ḥanafī
jurists. For example, the wife of the author of the seminal Ḥanafī text Badāʾiʿ
al-Ṣanāʾiʿ, ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn al-Kāsānī (d. 587/1191), became a jurist in her own right
and regularly corrected her husband on legal issues.
ʿAbd al-Ḥayy then challenged those whom he viewed as amongst the laity
(ʿawāmm) who claimed that women should be prohibited from learning to
write because of the corruption it brings. Their evidence is the above-men-
tioned ḥadīth narrated on the authority of ʿĀʾisha, which he refuted on three
grounds. First, the ḥadīth was weak. Even if scholars such as al-Suyūṭī argued
that it could be strengthened through the presence of other narrations, it
could not reach the degree of authenticity required to usurp the ḥadīth of
permissibility. Second, the content of the ḥadīth only indicated a ruling of
disapproval (karāha tanzīhiyya), not prohibition (ḥurma) or reprehensibility
(karāha taḥrīmiyya). Third and finally, if the ḥadīth prevented women from
learning to recite a single chapter of the Qurʾān (Sūrat Yūsuf), it logically fol-
lowed that women would be prohibited from reciting the entire Qurʾān. To
call for such a ruling would be to oppose an issue upon which there is con-
sensus (khilāf al-ijmāʿ).68
65 Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Laknawī, al-Nāfiʿ al-kabīr li man yuṭāliʿ al-jāmiʿ al-ṣaghīr
(Lucknow: Maṭbaʿ Dabdaba-i Aḥmadī, 1885), 104.
66 Ibid., 2:442.
67 Ibid., 443.
68 Ibid.

20 wright
In his closing section, ʿAbd al-Ḥayy tempered his initial ruling and followed
more closely the opinion of ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Dihlawī. “Teaching women to write
is neither forbidden nor strongly disliked”, he stated. “Rather, in the interest
of removing unnecessary hardship, if it [writing] leads to corruption [it is
forbidden].”69
The second question posed to ʿAbd al-Ḥayy on the issue is not dated,
although it likely came later than the first as it is placed near the end of his
chronologically arranged fatwā collection. Here ʿAbd al-Ḥayy took a very dif-
ferent approach than that in his first fatwā. An unnamed questioner asked, “Is
teaching women to write ordered by the Lawgiver or prohibited?” ʿAbd al-Ḥayy
answered, “It is clear from the ḥadīth that the Prophet Muḥammad prohibited
women from learning to write.” He cited as his primary evidence the ḥadīth of
prohibition from al-Bayhaqī and the opinion of ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Dihlawī rejecting
the ḥadīth of al-Shifāʾ. According to the principles of the Ḥanafī school, ʿAbd
al-Ḥayy argued, “one must provide evidence to supplant a prohibition with
permissibility, and the preponderance of permissibility is not proven here.”
As a result, “Muslims have necessarily acted with caution and restraint in this
matter.”70
Placing these two fatwās together shows that ʿAbd al-Ḥayy was hesitant to
issue a definitive ruling on the matter of women’s literacy, with his reasoning
for one contradicting his reasoning for the other. In his first fatwā, he was sure
that the ḥadīth of prohibition was weak and preferred the stronger ḥadīth of
al-Shifāʾ. In the second, he called that very ḥadīth into question, preferring the
ḥadīth of prohibition despite its apparent weakness. ʿAbd al-Ḥayy died sud-
denly in November 1886 at the age of 39, only nine months after writing his
answer to the first question. There was, therefore, little time for him to change
his approach so drastically. Since he passed away two years before the fatwā
of Ahmad Reza Khan and al-ʿAẓīmābādī’s counterargument, he was not influ-
enced by their debate either.
ʿAbd al-Ḥayy was concerned about the rise of Christian missionary activity
and its impact on the Indian Muslim community. Just seven months before
issuing his first fatwā, in Shawwāl 1302/July 1885, he received a question from
the imām of the main mosque of Saharanpur asking how to deal with children
who were attending missionary schools. “They teach their religious books to
Muslim boys and girls of six, eight, ten, and even twenty years old”, the imām
complained, “ … they pass out boxes of sweets and recite poems about the
Messiah, and sing [songs] about God and His Son.” ʿAbd al-Ḥayy responded
69 Ibid., 444.
70 Ibid., 456–58.

strongly, ruling that anyone who knowingly teaches in these schools or sends
their children to study there is an apostate (murtadd) and an unbeliever (kāfir).
The community should take action to stop the proliferation of these schools
and missionaries, stating, “All Muslims should work to stop [these missionar-
ies] and prevent them [from doing their work].” However, they should only do
so according to their abilities, following the ḥadīth, “Whosoever among you
sees a wrong should oppose it with his actions, and if he cannot, then with his
tongue, and if he cannot, then with his heart.”71
The fatwās of ʿAbd al-Ḥayy and the debate between Ahmad Reza Khan and
al-ʿAẓīmābādī show the depth of divisions between Indian scholars on this
issue. By the end of the nineteenth century, jurists were aware of the problem
colonial education presented to women and broader society and searched for
solutions. However, they were bound by the legal framework of basing rules
upon authentic texts. Those who favored prohibition used the authoritative
position of the ḥadīth, focusing on the sources that confirmed its authenticity
and using it as a basis for their opinions along with supporting legal proofs.
Others continued to support the judgment of most classical scholars: that this
ḥadīth was a forgery. ʿAbd al-Ḥayy was himself trapped between these two
approaches, unable or unwilling to reconcile the question of ḥadīth authentic-
ity with the pragmatic needs of a Muslim identity perceived to be under siege.
Solving the Problem through Reform: Ashraf ʿAlī Thānawī and

“Proper” Women’s Education
As the debate on the permissibility of women’s education unfolded, an alter-

nate opinion appeared, breaking the deadlock focused on the authenticity of
the ḥadīth: that women could be taught to write, but within broader Islamic
ethical boundaries. This emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century
in the Paradisiacal Jewels (Bahishti Zewar) by the Deobandi scholar Ashraf ʿAlī
Thānawī (d. 1943).
In this work, described by Barbara Metcalf as “one of the most influential
texts of the scripturalist reform movements characteristic of Muslim socie-
ties in the past century”,72 Thānawī suggested that women could be “properly”
educated as long as they confined themselves to the ethical limitations pro-
vided by the Qurʾān and Sunna. By staying within these boundaries, Thānawī
71 Ibid., 431–33.
72 Barbara Metcalf, Perfecting Women: Maulana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi’s Bihishti Zewar, A Partial
Translation with Commentary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1.

22 wright
believed, women could reach the same level of knowledge as men. In Book
Ten, Thānawī directly addressed his female readership about learning Arabic
and summarized his goals for them, stating,
The short and quickly mastered method of studying Arabic, devised by

me and given in the first pages of this book, will permit you, God willing,
to become a maulawi – that is, a scholar of Arabic – within three years.
You will achieve the rank of a learned person, and you will be able to give
judicial opinions, as learned men do. You will begin to teach Arabic to
girls, just as learned men do. Then, as are learned men, you will be grant-
ed the reward equal to that bestowed on the person to whom you have
given guidance with your preaching and opinions, teaching, and books.
You will then, moreover, be rewarded for the guidance given by each one
of them in turn right up to the Day of Judgment … This is the best method
of acquiring knowledge of religion.73
Thānawī advocated teaching women much more than Arabic, providing advice
in every aspect of a woman’s life, from the etiquette of writing letters and
organizing household finances to curing tobacco. Knowledge and influences
that led to corruption, the fear expressed by those who prohibited teaching
women to write, could be easily purged and avoided. For example, in terms of
books, Thānawī provided an exhaustive list of works deemed as “worthwhile”
and an alternative list of those that were “harmful”.74
Ashraf ʿAlī Thānawī, therefore, found a way out of the seemingly intractable
debate based on either confirming or denying the authenticity of the ḥadīth.
Creating a “proper” space within Islamic norms in which women could func-
tion – and become some of the most educated people in society – allowed
him to pave a path forward for both Muslim women and jurists. Faced with
two unacceptable solutions – a Christian-influenced education system or the
forced ignorance of women – Ashraf ʿAlī Thānawī chose to develop a new way
that he felt would result in a better outcome.
The debate on women’s education and literacy began in the Indian subcon-
tinent in response to the changing education policies implemented by British
officers, the work of diverse local actors, and the fears of traditional scholars
that foreign-influenced education would lead to the dissolution of Muslim
identity. This debate continued into the twentieth century when scholars like
Ashraf ʿAlī Thānawī attempted to create an alternative to satisfy the fears of
73 Ibid., 375.
74 Ibid., 376–80.

jurists. This problem was not unique to South Asia, and, as will be seen in the
following section, the questions posed in British India were also occurring
elsewhere in the Muslim world, particularly Egypt.
The Ḥadīth of Prohibition and Women’s Education in Egypt
As in British India, Muslim scholars in colonial Egypt shaped debates over

women’s education. Opposition to European influence in education, however,
developed later than in South Asia. For example, during the second half of the
nineteenth century, many scholars developed a respect for and worked within
the European intellectual tradition. When Muḥammad ʿAlī (r. 1805–1848)
instituted programs to send Egyptian students to complete their education in
Europe in the 1820s, even the scholars he sent as chaperones such as Rifāʿa
al-Ṭahṭāwī (d. 1873) studied in Europe without raising questions of a threat to
Muslim identity. In 1836, upon his return to Egypt, al-Ṭahṭāwī was appointed
the head of the School of Languages (Madrasat al-Alsun) and sponsored a new
movement of translation of European texts that would shape the development
of Egyptian higher education and create the teachers, judges, and intellectuals
who would lead Egyptian social reform throughout the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries.75
According to al-Ṭahṭāwī, equal access to education for men and women was
key to society’s development. In his Secure Guide for Girls and Boys, first pub-
lished in 1872, al-Ṭahṭāwī focused on the ability of women to work, both within
and outside the home.76 “When their hands are free from work”, al-Ṭahṭāwī
argued,
their tongues are busy with nonsense, their hearts [busy] with desires
and the feelings and statements [of others]. Work protects women from
what is inappropriate and brings them closer to virtue. If idleness is
disparaged for men, then it is even more so for women, for the woman
who is without work spends her time embroiled in [the affairs] of her
75 Jamāl al-Dīn al-Shayyāl, Rifāʿa Rāfiʿ al-Ṭahṭāwī (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1958), 19; Peter Hill,
Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 51.
76 Roswitha Badry, “Rifāʿa Rāfiʿ al-Ṭahṭāwī (1801–1873) as an Early Advocate for Women’s Rights:
An Analysis of His Murshid al-Amīn li-l-Banāt wa-l-Banīn”, in Contacts and Intersections
(Proceedings of the 27th Congress of the UAEI, Helsinki 2014), ed. J. Hämeen-Anttila, P.
Koskikallio, and I. Lindstedt (Leuven: Peeters, 2017), 17–30.

24 wright
neighbors and what they eat, drink, wear, and possess as furniture, [com-
paring between] what they have and what she has.77
For al-Ṭahṭāwī, literacy was at the core of the education needed to gain employ-
ment. Opponents of women’s literacy focused too closely on the potentially
corrupting influences that writing has on them. This focus was misplaced, in
his view, as men are just as susceptible to corruption as women. In contrast,
al-Ṭahṭāwī argued that history was on his side. Women became great scholars
at every stage of Islamic history, and “the practice of many nations has shown
that the benefit of educating girls is greater than its harm. Rather, it contains
no harm at all.”78
al-Ṭahṭāwī, therefore, was not concerned by the hesitations and fears of cor-
ruption prevalent amongst his South Asian counterparts. The lack of direct
colonization and the development of a native education system as early as 1816
combined to give writers like al-Ṭahṭāwī a sense of agency and control over
educational policy. This did not exist in South Asia, where, as discussed above,
the national education system was largely taken out of the hands of traditional
Muslim scholars. Of course, this does not mean that there was no opposition to
Egypt’s reform projects, particularly from conservative scholars at al-Azhar.79
However, this opposition was sidelined as it ran counter to the goals of those
who advocated for modernization efforts within the state. ʿAlī Mubārak (d.
1893), for example, who was tasked with developing the country’s school sys-
tem, viewed al-Azhar’s role negatively. Although it remained an important
center of religious authority and national identity, he stated that al-Azhar’s
“moral, pedagogical, and philosophical failings” had rendered it irrelevant to
the future of education in Egypt.80
European influence slowly increased in the latter decades of the nineteenth
century due to the Egyptian state’s debt crisis, culminating in the country’s
occupation by the British in 1882. The British colonial officers placed in control
of Egypt had gained their previous experience with the administration of India
and brought their ideologies of education to Egypt. For example, the coun-
try’s first consul-general, Lord Cromer, believed in affording the masses only a
77 Rifāʿa al-Ṭahṭāwī, al-Murshid al-amīn li-l-banāt wa-l-banīn (Alexandria, Egypt: Bibliotheca

Alexandrina, 2012), 143.
78 Ibid., 145.
79 Indira Falk Gesink, Islamic Reform and Conservatism: Al-Azhar and the Evolution of Modern
Sunni Islam (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 2.
80 Michael Reimer, “Contradiction and Consciousness in Ali Mubarak’s Description of
al-Azhar”, IJMES 29:1 (1997), 54.

limited education and creating an elite responsible for the management of the
government, as had been done in India.81
In practice, however, protecting the interests of European creditors proved
to be a higher priority, with only limited new funding directed to the Ministry
of Education during the first decades of British rule.82 Indeed, throughout
most of the nineteenth century, it was French influence that had shaped
the development of the Egyptian education system, with al-Ṭahṭāwī and ʿAlī
Mubārak both receiving their higher education in France. The institutions
and models of education that they promoted were based mainly on those of
France, and the French language was preferred to English well into the twen-
tieth century.83
Nevertheless, calls for reform based on Western models continued, with
many highlighting the cultural necessity of educating women. For example,
the British Orientalist James Heyworth-Dunne, reporting on the Education
Commission of 1881, remarked,
The children of the Islamic community were at the greatest disadvantage

of being almost entirely deprived of the benefits of a home life, and par-
ticularly the educative influence of the mother who did so much in the
West for the preparation of the child for its place in society. The teach-
ing of the schools of the foreign colonies and missionaries was based on
this important background which undoubtedly made them superior to
the Egyptian or Moslem schools; in Moslem society, even with the new
type of school, the child was prepared for a society in which the woman
had no function beyond that allotted to her by nature. If the Egyptian ex-
periments in modern education were a failure, it was hardly the method
which was at fault, but rather the whole structure of Moslem society and
the material with which the would-be educators had to build up their
system.84
81 Mona Russell, “Competing, Overlapping, and Contradictory Agendas: Egyptian Education

Under British Occupation, 1882–1922”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the
Middle East 21:1–2 (2001), 51.
82 M.A. Faksh, “An Historical Survey of the Educational System in Egypt”, International Review
of Education 22:2 (1976), 234–44.
83 Alain Silvera, “The First Egyptian Student Mission to France under Muhammad Ali”, MES
16:2 (1980), 1–22.
84 James Heyworth-Dunne, An Introduction to the History of Education in Modern Egypt
(London: Luzac & Co., 1938), 437.

26 wright
In addition, the debate on women’s education in Egypt was bolstered by the

growth of print and a revival of classical literature.85 Early texts that espoused
the merits of the ḥadīth prohibiting women from learning to write, such as the
Fatāwā ḥadīthiyya of al-Haytamī, as well as the works of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn
al-Qayyim, were published and distributed by the growing print industry in
Cairo. The Fatāwā ḥadīthiyya, for example, was printed by the Syrian-owned
al-Maṭbaʿa al-Maymaniyya in 1887, with further editions in 1889, 1905, 1909,
and 1910.86
The question of women learning to write in Egypt, therefore, developed
against the background of an emerging modern state and European influence
in the development of the education system, backed by the support of new
printed editions of classical literature that made the ḥadīth and juristic opin-
ions against women writing available to a broader reading public.
During this period, two scholars writing in Egypt framed the local debate:
the judge and women’s rights campaigner Qāsim Amīn (d. 1908) and the Syrian
religious scholar Mukhtār b. Aḥmad Muʾayyad Bāsha al-ʿAẓmī (d. 1920). Qāsim
Amīn, although not referring to the ḥadīth, believed that the formal educa-
tion of women was key to national development. Complaining about the posi-
tion of women in Egypt, he wrote, “People in [our country] still believe that
raising and educating women are not requirements. Rather, they ask whether
teaching a woman to read and write is religiously permissible or whether the
rules of the Sharīʿa forbid it.”87 He recalled an instance in which he had met a
man with a beautiful and intelligent nine-year-old daughter. When he recom-
mended that she be educated, her father responded, “Do you want to give her
a position in government?” Qāsim Amīn was shocked. He asked, “Is it part of
your belief that only government employees receive an education?” The father
answered, “I teach her all that is required for her to manage her household,
nothing more.” “He said this in a way that made me feel as though he did not
want to discuss his opinion”, Qāsim Amīn continued,
this stubborn father means by “managing the household” that his daugh-
ter [should] know something about knitting, preparing food, using the
iron, and other skills that I do not deny are beneficial. Instead, they are
necessary for any woman. However, I say without fear of deniers that he
85 Ahmed El Shamsy, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How editors and print culture
transformed an intellectual tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 4–5.
86 Each of these editions is available in the catalogue of the Egyptian National Library (Dār
al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya).
87 Qāsim Amīn, Taḥrīr al-Marʾa, 2 vols. (Alexandria: Bibliotheca Alexandrina, 2010), 2:23.

is incorrect to imagine that a woman who possesses no value other than

this is qualified to manage her household.88
In Qāsim Amīn’s view, no woman can effectively run her home, much less work
towards the nation’s development, without receiving primary education. “If a
woman learns to read and write and understands the fundamentals of scien-
tific truths, geography, the history of nations, as well as biology and natural
sciences, all based upon her knowledge of the faith and religious morals”, he
argued, “her mind is prepared to accept sound opinions and cast aside the
superstitions that plague the minds of women today.”89 Knowledge of the nat-
ural world and the fundamental truths of science, therefore, was essential to
the progress of society and the removal of traditions such as veiling that he felt
oppressed Egyptian women.
On the other hand, Mukhtār Muʾayyad al-ʿAẓmī viewed Qāsim Amīn’s call
for women’s education without boundaries – particularly teaching them to
write – as an affront to the Sharīʿa as it meant the rejection of the ḥadīth. “The
ignorant man [viz., Qāsim Amīn] is confused [regarding the prohibition]”,
al-ʿAẓmī wrote, “but the educated man is not, applying the uninterrupted
(mutawātir) ḥadīth of the Prophet cited by [al-Ḥakīm] al-Tirmidhī and others
whose authenticity is established, as opposed to the imaginative [belief] of
some that it is forged.”90
Like al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, al-ʿAẓmī argued the Sharīʿa’s wisdom is in pre-
venting harm over bringing benefit, and that the advantage gained by teach-
ing women to write “is not comparable, nor is even mentionable next to the
harm created by teaching them.” He claimed that one needed only to look at
the state of women just twenty years earlier (the 1880s) in Constantinople,
Izmir, Alexandria, Cairo, Beirut, and Damascus, “before the scourge of learning
to write, languages, and the meeting of foreign women afflicted their moral-
ity.” He cited the Ottoman novelist Muḥammad Tawfīq Effendī (d. 1938), who
wrote, “The man sits to read the news of France, and the woman reads the
news of England. Who then checks on the status of the family, the children,
and the kitchen?” For al-ʿAẓmī the debate needed to be answered by returning
to the limits of the Sharīʿa, applying God’s words in the Qurʾān: “And whatever
88 Ibid., 24.
89 Ibid., 24–25.
90 Mukhtār b. Aḥmad Muʾayyad Bāshā al-ʿAẓmī, Faṣl al-khiṭāb aw taflīs iblīs min taḥrīr al-marʾa
wa-rafʿ al-ḥijāb (Beirut: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Adabiyya, 1900), 63.

28 wright
the Messenger has given you – take; and what he has forbidden you – refrain
from it. And fear Allah: indeed, Allah is severe in penalty.”91
al-ʿAẓmī responded strongly to those who believed that forbidding women
from writing prohibits them from participating in educated society and leav-
ing them in darkness. They argued that by ignoring a fundamental pillar of
the religion – education – illiterate women would be left on the sidelines.
“Absolutely not”, he wrote,
for this is an error and concealment [of the truth], as clarified by two
points. Firstly, seeking knowledge is not based upon knowing how to
write; instead, writing merely assists the acquisition of knowledge, like
[seeking knowledge] has been aided by the spread of print. Secondly,
women are neither commanded nor permitted by either their religion
or their mental [capacity] to learn that which is not necessary. This point
has significant textual evidence. Did you know that most of the Prophets
and great scholars of the past were illiterate? Or that the Companions, all
the Prophet’s wives, and the female Followers who preserved the religion
were [also] illiterate? Did you [also] know that the four women whom
the Prophet mentioned as reaching perfection were illiterate?92
al-ʿAẓmī claimed that the Islamic educational system was far superior to that
of the West. At al-Azhar, for example, students were taught religious knowl-
edge by listening to their shaykhs without the need for books. al-ʿAẓmī stated
that at the age of eleven, he memorized the entire Qurʾān in only six months by
listening to his teacher, “without a blackboard or a [written] Qurʾān”.93
Like scholars in South Asia, the resistance of al-ʿAẓmī to women’s educa-
tion reflected a fear of the influence of foreign education and its impact on
not just women but all of society. For women, standardized primary education
would entail breaking the rules of the Sharīʿa and mixing freely with men. Even
worse, it would subject them to education and “upbringing at the hands of
foreign female teachers who do not know a single thing about the morals of
their own religion, much less ours.”94 Therefore, it was better to implement
the ḥadīth of prohibition, as it contains the wisdom of God and His Prophet in
protecting women from foreign influence.
al-ʿAẓmī’s reliance upon the ḥadīth prohibiting women from learning to
write was rebuked by his contemporary Rashīd Riḍā. Believing that the rulings
91 Ibid.; Q 59:7, Sahih International Translation.

92 Ibid., 64.
93 Ibid.
94 Ibid., 65.

of classical jurists held Muslims back from progress, Riḍā promoted a return to
the Qurʾān and Sunna through the lens of “idealized accounts of early Islamic
heroes known as the Salaf”.95 Although similar in style to the Ahl-i Ḥadīth,
the substance of Riḍā’s legal rulings was very different, with a desire to show
Islam’s compatibility with the modern world. His acceptance of technological
innovations such as the gramophone and paper money, for example, has been
described as “laissez-faire Salafism”, facilitating the liberalization of Islamic
law.96
In 1903, a Russian Muslim named ʿAbd al-Kabīr Effendī al-Muṣṭafawī asked
about the writings of al-ʿAẓmī in a question published by Riḍā in his maga-
zine, al-Manār. “A book published in your country [viz., al-ʿAẓmī]”, it followed,
“states that the ḥadīth prohibiting women from writing and residing in rooms
is uninterrupted (mutawātir). How did the author find the ḥadīth to be sound
(ṣaḥīḥ) and uninterrupted?” Riḍā responded:
The author of this book is ignorant of both the ḥadīth and the Sharīʿa,
and his pronouncements are not to be considered. He took his statement
from other laymen like him. We have not read the book because it would
be a waste of time to read the small talk of those who assault knowledge
and religion with their prideful statements. You have witnessed ḥadīth
scholars state that [the ḥadīth of prohibition] is a forgery, and we recom-
mend that you do not rely upon any ḥadīth [cited in] any work by any
author unless citations exist from well-known ḥadīth scholars.97
This was not the first time Riḍā was faced with the ḥadīth against women’s
literacy, receiving a question from another Russian Muslim in the same year,
as well as from an Egyptian in 1914.98 In his answers to both, Riḍā repeated the
opinion he provided during an entire article on the subject he had published in
al-Manār just a few years earlier in 1899. Described by Werner Ende, here Riḍā
rejected opinions of the pre-modern jurists who cited the ḥadīth of prohibition
to caution against women writing due to potential corruption.99 “Although the
Qurʾān and Sunna praise knowledge”, he wrote,
95 Leor Halevi, Modern Things on Trial: Islam’s global and material reformation in the age of
Rida, 1865–1935 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 9.
96 Ibid.
97 Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā, “Taʿlīm al-nisāʾ al-kitāba”, al-Manār 6 (3 February 1904), 861–62;
reprinted in idem, Fatāwā al-Imām Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā, ed. Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Munajjid, 6
vols. (Cairo: Dār al-Kitāb al-Jadīd, 2005), 1:66–67.
98 Werner Ende, “Sollen Frauen schreiben lernen?”, 54.
99 Ibid., 49–50.

30 wright
encouraging and imploring men and women alike to obtain it – as is the

foundational juristic principle [viz., that texts in the masculine form are
to be interpreted as referring to both men and women unless specified] –
some jurists have claimed that seeking knowledge does not include writ-
ing. Then they cite ḥadīths that indicate women should be prohibited
from learning to write. When no scholar can be found to confirm any
part of the ḥadīth as authentic, they turn to analogy (qiyās) to claim that
corruption is brought by teaching women to write, making it at least dis-
approved (karāha).100
In Riḍā’s view, if the Prophet Muḥammad had genuinely intended for women
not to learn to write, he would have left no question about the matter through
the alternative ḥadīth of al-Shifāʾ.
The debate between Qāsim Amīn and Rashīd Riḍā on one side and Mukhtār
al-ʿAẓmī on the other mirrored the positions of scholars in the Indian sub-
continent. Like Ashraf ʿAlī Thānawī, Qāsim Amīn and Rashīd Riḍā both advo-
cated embracing new education policies and felt that they could be securely
implemented within a Muslim environment. Similar to his predecessor Rifāʿa
al-Ṭahṭāwī, Qāsim Amīn felt assured that foreign influence in the education sys-
tem was of no major concern. Rashīd Riḍā went further, arguing that pre-modern
scholars had erred and for centuries denied women their fundamental Islamic
right to education and writing, guaranteed by the Qurʾān and Sunna. In con-
trast, Mukhtār al-ʿAẓmī saw the threat posed by Western-influenced education.
With the former heeding warnings from British India and the latter expressing
general concerns about Muslim identity in the Ottoman Empire, they turned
to the ḥadīth to prevent women from exposure to European influence, protect-
ing both them and their homes from what they perceived as a foreign intellec-
tual invasion.
Conclusion
This article has traced the origins and application of a ḥadīth used to prohibit
teaching women from writing in British India and Egypt in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. The ḥadīth was rejected as a forgery by most
pre-modern scholars, and jurists gave little attention to its legal implications,
with only a handful of scholars finding any reason to prohibit women from
learning to write. Those who did feared that, through writing, women would
100 Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā, “Taʿlīm al-nisāʾ”, al-Manār 2 (5 August 1899), 332.

become corrupted and their faith threatened. In the nineteenth century, the
fear of corruption found a new justification: colonialism. As a result, scholars
weaponized the ḥadīth and used it to inform and shape Muslim responses to
colonialism and European-influenced national education projects.
Although the authenticity – or lack thereof – of the ḥadīth prohibiting
women from learning to write was important for scholars who wanted to
limit education for women, it was not the deciding factor for its use in the law.
Instead, practical concerns were more pertinent. When the need presented
itself – i.e., colonial education policy based on perceived European values and
seen as a threat to Muslim identity – a ḥadīth that had been rejected for cen-
turies found its way back to the forefront. Only those who demanded strict
adherence to the authentic text, such as the Ahl-i Ḥadīth in India, remained
steadfast in their attachment to the classical approach. The use of the ḥadīth to
limit women’s education remains relevant today. The view of Ṣāliḥ al-Fawzān,
whose ruling on the ḥadīth opened this article, is an example of how this state-
ment continues to be employed by those who, like their colonial predecessors,
are warier of the impact of national education projects on the role of women
than the ḥadīth’s connection to the Prophet.
Finally, the issue of women learning to write also has implications on the
broader discussion of Muslim responses to colonialism and linkages within the
Muslim world in the modern period. In Egypt, actors like al-Ṭahṭāwī worked
within the modernizing state structure to enact localized educational projects
from the first half of the nineteenth century. They ultimately faced similar
resistance to colonial education as India, whose modern education system was
shaped by the British model. Despite differing historical, cultural, linguistic,
and religious circumstances, scholars in colonial environments as diverse as
Egypt and India developed the same questions, and indeed similar answers, to
the issues of the day.101
101 I would like to thank Ian Greer and Temel Ücüncü for their help in reviewing the drafts of
this article, as well as the peer reviewers for their valuable edits and critical viewpoints.


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Die Welt des Islams (2021) 1-31

Teaching Women to Write: Weaponizing Ḥadīth

Brian Wright | ORCID: 0000-0001-8908-1596

ḥadīth – colonialism – Egypt – South Asia – Islamic Law – women’s education

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/15700607-61020019

This [statement] has a legal impact (yuʾthar), but it is not a ḥadīth as it

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nature of education by Muslim scholars in the second half of the nineteenth

The Classical Approach to the Ḥadīth

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rebuked al-Nīsābūrī’s authentication, stating, “It is astonishing how he was

Women Learning to Write in Jurisprudence (Fiqh)

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It is possible that [writing] was permissible for early generations of

15 al-Haytamī, al-Fatāwā al-ḥadīthiyya, 86.

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‘[Permissibility] is specific to Ḥafṣa because [the Prophet’s] wives have

One can understand permissibility (jawāz) from this ḥadīth. Another

Finally, the Yemeni revivalist Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Shawkānī (d. 1255/1839)

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Popularization of the Prohibition in the Nineteenth Century

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The opinion of Macaulay and other Anglicists influenced the resulting

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acceptance of qualifications from non-English schools, continued to play an

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a collection of new institutions in provincial centers. In Deoband, for exam-

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Pushing Back: Shams al-Ḥaqq al-ʿAẓīmābādī

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of confidence in its authenticity, as exegetes only mean to reference the ḥadīth

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Hesitation in Two Fatwās of ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Laknawī

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mainstream Ḥanafī jurists such as the Egyptian Kamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b.

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Solving the Problem through Reform: Ashraf ʿAlī Thānawī and

As the debate on the permissibility of women’s education unfolded, an alter-

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The short and quickly mastered method of studying Arabic, devised by

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The Ḥadīth of Prohibition and Women’s Education in Egypt

As in British India, Muslim scholars in colonial Egypt shaped debates over

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77 Rifāʿa al-Ṭahṭāwī, al-Murshid al-amīn li-l-banāt wa-l-banīn (Alexandria, Egypt: Bibliotheca

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The children of the Islamic community were at the greatest disadvantage

81 Mona Russell, “Competing, Overlapping, and Contradictory Agendas: Egyptian Education

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In addition, the debate on women’s education in Egypt was bolstered by the

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is incorrect to imagine that a woman who possesses no value other than

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91 Ibid.; Q 59:7, Sahih International Translation.

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encouraging and imploring men and women alike to obtain it – as is the