Literary Women in Islam

Note: this is a personal study guide for my course on Islam.

In "Braiding the Stories", Mohja Kahf seeks to retrieve women's literary heritage in the Islamic tradition. She contends that women were important in the "verbal texts of Islam". Kahf's first step in this search is to redefine literature so that it is a broader category to include compositions that have "rhetorical eloquence". She defines "balagha" as rhetoric, which could include women's writings, but she says that expressiveness was at odds with feminine reticence. Balagha had a male bias. There is a special term for women's writing in classical Islam. She cites the example of Nasaiba's narratives on the Prophet Muhammad (such as the one about the battle of Uhud) as one example of women's literature in early Islam. She also cites the example of Khawla's balagha in the Qu'ran. Kahf also cites gynocentric portrayals of men in the Qu'ran and in early Islamic literature, which is comparative to androcentric literature about women.