The OIB (Cairo Office) together with COSIMENA is pleased to invite you to the second lecture in the new series on “Knowledge Transfer, its History and its Future in the Age of Digital Humanities,” titled “Women and the Transmission of Knowledge in pre-modern Islamic Societies: Muftis, Muhadithat and Faqihat” 

Concept note:

The presentation highlights the role of women in the transmission of Knowledge in pre-modern Islamic societies. Women in these Islamic societies had a definite participatory role, as well as an active historical presence in the fields of theology and religious sciences. They participated in the transmission of religious knowledge and scholarship, through the teaching of these sciences and were present among the intellectual elite as muftiyat, faqihat, and muhaddithat. The focus of the presentation is not the ‘representation’ of the ‘feminine’ in religious texts, but rather Muslim women as historical agents, as subjects, not objects. It focuses on their contribution to the field of religious knowledge.  In what way did they have access to knowledge and what was their role in its transmission? 

The space of historical documentation afforded to women, in general, was not equal to male elites connected with state authority and official institutions of knowledge ‘madrasa’. However, information can be found, either in biographical dictionaries that record the lives and deaths of prominent figures in special categories and professions or can be ‘hunted’ and ‘dug out’ from other types of historical sources. The methodology followed for this research is content analysis of the above sources and the discourse embedded in them.

Presentation title: “Women and the Transmission of Knowledge in pre-modern Islamic Societies: Muftis, Muhadithat and Faqihat”

Speaker:

Dr Hoda El-Saadi - Adjunct Assistant Professor, American University in Cairo (AUC)

Hoda El-Saadi is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and a co-founder of the Woman and memory forum. She received both her BA and MA from the American University in Cairo and her PhD from Cairo University in Islamic History. She has a wide variety of teaching experiences at both national and international Universities and through participating in graduate educational workshops at different national universities. El Saadi developed an interest in gender issues in the Islamic tradition. The objective of her research is to empower women by making available historical information that demonstrates women’s involvement in public life. She believes that social and cultural issues should be studied in relation to larger issues such as Islamic law, Islamic civilization, and the changing social political, and economic structures. There is an urgent need to study Islamic law in order to understand the development of the social practices and to find out how Islamic law and local practices shaped Islamic societies. This made her join the Islamic studies program at AUC, and earn a diploma in the field.

Registration link:https://www.daad.de/surveys/616895?lang=en
Deadline for registration: June 23rd, 2024

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