The Debate On Anti-Woman Discourse In The Hadith Literature

• Main Authors: Nur Saadah Hamisan@Khair, Nurdina Mohd Dahlan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia 2018
• Subjects: Anti-Woman, Gender, Hadith, Misogyny, Woman
• Online Access: http://ddms.usim.edu.my:80/jspui/handle/123456789/16288

In Islam, Hadith has been regarded as a secondary source after the Qur’an and covers various aspects including the rights and protection for women. It refers not only to the words of the Prophet but also covers on his attitudes, behaviour and advices towards women. Many have recorded that he was the kindest and the gentlest to his wives, and he had shown the best action to women as a whole. However, there are arguments on few hadiths which reported as authentic but have been claimed as antiwoman hadith because of its bias content and discrimination against women. This issue has been gradually raised since the nineteenth century and has been seriously debated in the twentieth century until present day. This paper aims to discover the discourse on anti-woman issue or also known as misogyny, particularly in the Hadith literature. The misogyny is clearly against the equality between genders, but the question is whether the Hadith intrinsically hostile to women or is it the interpretation of the Hadith that has a serious problem in gender discrimination? Therefore, this study attempts to examine some scholar’s interpretation in understanding the related hadiths which have been claimed as anti-woman. Those hadiths have been exclusively selected from Sahị̄ḥal-Bukhāri due to a reason that it carries the highest rank in terms of its reliability and authenticity among the collections of hadith. The finding shows that although there might be anti-woman discourse in Sahị̄ḥal-Bukhāri, however, there are imbalance numbers of hadiths to prove that the Hadith encourages gender bias. Moreover, new approach is needed in evaluating and understanding these hadiths concerning women.