ABSTRACT
The usual approach to understanding Islamic law is to start with the sources, namely, the Quran and the Sunna as found in the hadith literature. However, this may not be the best way to study gender in Islam: these texts are not unequivocal and this is certainly the case with regard to issues related to gender (or, for that matter, any other subject). Scholars disagree on whether or not the Quran’s message is one of gender equality. There are textual arguments for this position, but they exist also for the notion of inequality. The Quran itself was revealed over a period of time representing changing historical circumstances in the consolidation of Muslim power, while the Prophetic traditions and the exegetical commentaries are even more reflective of wide-ranging geographical and socio-economic variations throughout the Islamic lands. Despite the source texts that can be read as supporting gender equality and the minority opinions of even some key jurists to this effect, the majority of jurists became increasingly more conservative in their interpretations, undesirous of going against the tide. Most jurists from the premodern period interpreted texts in such a way as to create legal doctrine in some domains of the law that assigned women a role under the protection of men and subordinate to them, for instance in the law of evidence, where the commonly given justification for a woman’s credibility being half that of a man-a sociological, not religious justification-was that women were more emotional than rational and that, being mainly confined to their homes, they were not familiar with society. For the same reason, most jurists held that women could not hold public functions such as head of state or judge. In criminal law doctrine, the blood money for killing a woman was therefore half that for a man. In other fields of the law, such as family relations and inheritance, the legal position of woman was dominated by the notion of complementarity of the distinct social functions of men and women.
