. Debunking the Fallacy of Women’s Sinisterness in Prophetic Tradition

. Debunking the Fallacy of Women’s Sinisterness in Prophetic Tradition
Eman Ahmad Shalaby Othman.
Department of Hadith and its Sciences, Faculty of Islamic and Arabic Studies for Female Students, Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt
Email: eman.shalaby@azhar.edu.eg
Abstract:
In Islam, women have attained preferment, unprecedented in any other religion. Allah honored them and retained them rights long enjoyed exclusively by men. Despite this clear dignified Islamic view of women, many skeptics of the Prophetic Sunnah falsely claim that the Sunnah disdains women. Among these suspicions raised is a mistaken understanding of the authentic hadith of Ibn Umar, who said: Bad omens were mentioned in the presence of the Prophet (pbuh), so he said: “If something was of ill omen, it would be the house, the woman (wife), and the horse.” The rumormongers have used this hadith to support their false claim about the degradation of women's status in Islam and the immoral, inferior view of them as a sinister gender. This ill understanding contradicts the proven Sunnah that denies pessimism and bad omens in general. This research refutes this fallacy and proves the innocence of the Sunnah of these false accusations. The inductive, analytical, and deductive methods have been used to achieve this goal. One of the most important findings of the research is that the bad omens mentioned in the hadith do not mean that women are intrinsically impure or of cursed nature, but they rather refer to the evil that occurs by being with a woman of bad traits, as other hadiths have shown. Therefore, there is no contradiction between the hadiths as they explain one another, and hadiths must be understood in light of the established fundamentals and constants of Islam.