Reinstating the Queens Reassessing the Hadith on Women’s Political Leadership

Abstract

The leadership of women at the highest political level remains an ongoing
controversial issue for Muslims.1 And yet women have led both medieval
and modern Muslim societies – Pakistan, Indonesia, and Bangladesh –
thereby rendering this debate, in practice, moot. But quite a few Muslim
men consider this reality as an abomination and perversion.
In his Al-Aḥkām al-Sulṭānīyah wa al-Wilāyāt al-Dīnīyah, al-Mawardi (d.
1058) discusses the imamate in the sense of the caliphate (khilāfah: Islamic
leadership) and lists its conditions.2 Rather surprisingly, gender is not one of
them. However, Asghar Ali Engineer writes that “al-Mawardi maintained that
a woman cannot be made head of state.”3 Although the gender clause is not
found in Al-Aḥkām al-Sulṭānīyah written by the Hanbali Abu Ya‘la al-Farra’
(d. 1113) and other early works, later scholars categorically include it.
The Shafi‘i Ahmad ibn Ali al-Qalqashandi (d. 1418) cites masculinity as
the first of the fourteen conditions of eligibility. He bases his decision on the
hadith reported by al-Bukhari and narrated by the Companion Abu Bakra.
This scholar explains how a leader has to mingle with other men to discuss
state affairs, an act that Islam prohibits for women. He adds that “because a
woman is incomplete in her own right, as she does not even control her marriage,
she cannot be made a leader over others.”4 I contend that his and similar
remarks are seriously influenced by cultural circumstances, ones that are not
truly reflective of Islam.