Women have always been present among the ranks of the ulama, but their role has almost always been invisible. Of the inestimable library of books produced by scholars of the Shariah before the twentieth century, no more than a handful issue from the hands of women. As one fourteenth-century (male) jurist observed with more pride than disapproval, it was surely the Shariah’s emphasis on female modesty and protecting women’s honor that prevented them from a greater role in scholarship, though he notes that many of the greatest scholars would issue fatwas with their learned wives’ or daughters’
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