Women in the <i>Ḥadīth</i> Literature

Abstract Ḥadīth literature is rich in its many references to women and women’s stories. A close examination of the contents of ḥadīth literature reveals that women played key roles in the establishment of the early Muslim community and demonstrated equal levels of dedication, piety, and religious leadership as their male counterparts. A holistic study of the ḥadīth corpus also reflects the Prophet Muḥammad as empowering Muslim women in a pre-Islamic context in which fathers buried their baby girls alive and women were regarded as property to be inherited. This chapter challenges some of the careless assumptions often made about representations of women in ḥadīth literature through analyzing reports about women that have been commonly overlooked or not considered in terms of their broader context of intertextual reports to obtain a more profound understanding of the perceptions of gender in early Islam.