Abstract
Women’s position, identity, and value in Islam have been affected by androcentric interpretations of the Qur’an and hadith throughout Islamic history. Women’s roles in society, as well as their position vis-à-vis Islamic sources and authority, have been shaped by these interpretations. In Shi’a Islam, due to the majority male clergy’s resistance, women have rarely reached the highest loci of Shi’i authority and jurisprudence. However, there have been women scholars who have transgressed these normative frameworks. Lady Amin, who was one of the most prominent Iranian theologians of the 19th and 20th centuries, is a notable example. Lady Amin had great knowledge of jurisprudence and gained the status of mujtahida at the age of forty. Her scholarly work addressed not only interpretations of the Qur’an and hadith, but also women’s issues and gender politics of her time. This study addresses women’s ijtihad in Shi’a Islam and investigates Lady Amin’s teachings on the topics of womanhood and motherhood. This study focuses on Lady Amin’s book of Islamic ethics, titled Ways of Happiness: Suggestions for Faithful Sisters, written as a Shi’i source of guidance with a specific focus on women and gender in Shi’a Islam.
Highlights
Shi’i Women’s IjtihadThe weak presence of women in the field of hadith transmission unites Sunnis and Shi’as (Mirshahvalad 2017, p. 87)
Some religious scholars have suggested that it is sharia, which is the religious law of Islam, that constitutes the basis for the unequal status of women, while others have argued that it is fiqh that fails to address issues of gender in an egalitarian manner
Sharia is considered the religion itself in the form of the holy book, hadith, and sunnah, which offer a path to salvation, while fiqh is considered to be the interpretation of the content of sharia by religious scholars
Summary
The weak presence of women in the field of hadith transmission unites Sunnis and Shi’as (Mirshahvalad 2017, p. 87). Lady Amin had great knowledge of jurisprudence and gained the status of mujtahida (the official Islamic juristic authority) at the age of forty.2 Her scholarly work addressed interpretations of the Qur’an and hadith, and women’s issues and gender politics. This article aims to investigate Lady Amin’s Islamic ethics on Womanhood and Motherhood, with a specific focus on her views on women’s roles in society For this purpose, Lady Amin’s book of Islamic ethics titled Ways of Happiness: Suggestions for Faithful Sisters was selected. I aim instead to do a feminist analysis and to find possible transgressive theological and socio-political potential in the work of Lady Amin as a mujtahida, on the one hand, and to position her theological perspectives on gender and motherhood within the context of Islamic feminism and gender issues in Shi’a Islam on the other.
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