Women's Intelligence and the Islamic Tradition: Difference between revisions

Some others have argued that while Muhammad did say that women were less intelligent than men, he only meant this in the very limited sense of their being less intelligent with respect to financial transactions. Islamic modernists and feminists have added to this reduction of scope its time-bound nature, arguing that not only was the claim limited to women's intelligence with respect to financial dealings, but that that limitation in their intelligence was itself limited to the premodern times where one could expect that women, being home-bound for the most part, had less experience dealing with sums of money. It is important to note that this latter argument presented by modernist and feminist voices in Islam has been wholeheartedly rejected by mainstream Islamic authorities. This is because in declaring the legal disability of women to be time-bound, the entirety of the Sharia is made susceptible to revision under changing circumstances. Sunni orthodoxy is vehemently opposed to such thorough-going modern revisionism, since it deems the Sharia to be eternal, perfect, and unchanging, and thus does not consider this modernist and feminist perspective to have any theological legitimacy.  

While non-Muslim participants in this discussion have welcomed these otherwise unwelcome revisionist perspectives for humanitarian reasons, the interpretation they rely on have strained credulity. The biggest problem facing these new interpretations is that {{Quran|2|282}} itself gives a reason for why two women testifiers are required in lieu of one. The verse states that the reason for this requirement is so that if one woman forgets something, the other may remind her. Such a stipulation is, by contrast, not made for male testifiers, and the implication is that women are more likely to forget. This, it appears, is what Muhammad is alluding to when he links women's deficiency in intelligence to their legal disability rather than lack of familiarity.