Washington, Feb.26 : A Muslim scholar at Britain’s Oxford University has compiled a 40-volume dictionary of at least 8,000 women scholars of the Hadith and Quran.

The list dates reportedly back to 1,400 years, according to an article in the New York Times.

The article reports that recent findings by Mohammad Akram Nadwi, a 43-year-old Sunni scholar at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, may help lower those barriers and challenge prevalent notions of women’s roles within Islamic society. Nadwi has rediscovered a long-lost tradition of Muslim women teaching the Quran, transmitting Hadith and even making Islamic law as jurists.

Akram embarked eight years ago on a single-volume biographical dictionary of female Hadith scholars, a project that took him trawling through biographical dictionaries, classical texts, madrassa chronicles and letters for relevant citations, reports the Daily Times.

“I thought I’d find maybe 20 or 30 women,” he was quoted by the paper as saying.

An English translation of his 400-page preface will come out in England this summer.

Akram has talked with Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s former ambassador to the United States, about the possibility of publishing the entire work through his Riyadh-based foundation.

Post Date: 2007-02-27 News Source
Author: ANI