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Women's Intelligence and the Islamic Tradition: Difference between revisions
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Women's Intelligence and the Islamic Tradition (view source)
Revision as of 12:20, 19 May 2021
, 19 May 2021→Deficiency is only about giving financial testimony
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===Deficiency is only about giving financial testimony=== | ===Deficiency is only about giving financial testimony=== | ||
Some others have argued that while Muhammad did say that women were less intelligent than men, he only meant this in the very limited sense of their being less intelligent with respect to financial transactions. Islamic modernists and feminists have added to this reduction of scope | Some others have argued that while Muhammad did say that women were less intelligent than men, he only meant this in the very limited sense of their being less intelligent with respect to financial transactions. Islamic modernists and feminists have added to this reduction of scope the statement's time-bound nature, arguing that not only was the claim limited to women's intelligence with respect to financial dealings, but that that limitation in their intelligence was itself limited to the premodern times where one could expect that women, being home-bound for the most part, had less experience dealing with sums of money. It is important to note that this latter argument presented by modernist and feminist voices in Islam has been wholeheartedly rejected by mainstream Islamic authorities. This is because in declaring the legal disability of women to be time-bound, the entirety of the Sharia is made susceptible to revision under changing circumstances. Sunni orthodoxy is vehemently opposed to such thorough-going modern revisionism, since it deems the Sharia to be eternal, perfect, and unchanging, and thus does not consider this modernist and feminist perspective to have any theological legitimacy. | ||
While non-Muslim participants in this discussion have welcomed these otherwise | While non-Muslim participants in this discussion have welcomed these otherwise incredible revisionist perspectives for humanitarian reasons, the interpretation the revisionists rely on have strained credulity. The biggest problem facing these new interpretations is that {{Quran|2|282}} itself gives a reason for why two women testifiers are required in lieu of one. The verse states that the reason for this requirement is so that if one woman forgets something, the other may remind her. Such a stipulation is, by contrast, not made for male testifiers, and the implication is that women are more likely to forget. This, it appears, is what Muhammad is alluding to when he links women's deficiency in intelligence to their legal disability rather than lack of familiarity. What results, leaving little room for interpretive maneuvers, is that the hadith about women's deficiency in intelligence directly cites the verse about their legal disability, and the verse about women's legal disability directly cites the idea that women are somehow mentally deficient. | ||
Also important is the fact that classical authorities did not usually interpret {{Quran|2|282}} as limiting women's legal disability as testifiers to financial transactions only. While the verse gives a particular example of a case where two women are required in lieu of one, the hadith on women's intelligence sees Muhammad generalizing this disability to all legal contexts. While classical authorities typically made exceptions for accepting the testimony of women in cases relating directly to women, such as those involving facts of menstruation, pregnancy, and the like, the common assumption was that, notwithstanding these exceptions, two women would be required to testify in the place of one man. Modern Islamic voices, including most modernist and many traditionalist figures, have only very recently shifted heavily in favor of restricting women's legal disability to financial cases alone. While this development has been welcomed for its humanitarian qualities, it cannot be said to alter historical facts about the Islamic tradition. What remains the case is that, for the longest time, Islamic authorities interpreted Muhammad's restriction on female testimony as being a general one with few exceptions, and that they held, without apology, that the reason for this restriction was, in Muhammad's own words, "the deficiency in her intelligence." | |||
===Muhammad was joking=== | ===Muhammad was joking=== | ||