ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to examine the topic of how the hadith body of literature can be read/interpreted in women affirmative ways. It focuses on recent scholarship that discusses a number of interpretational mechanisms applied to the hadith by scholars committed to gender egalitarian interpretations of Islam that are necessary for this to be possible. The etymological meaning of the word hadith is “communication”, “story” or “conversation”; religious or secular, historical or recent. To understand the significance of hadith in Islamic ethics and law a brief discussion as to what constitutes an authentic hadith according to classical Islamic hadith sciences is in order, and how the canonical hadith body of literature depicts the persona of the Prophet Muhammad is useful. Many reformist minded Muslim scholars have highlighted the androcentric and, at times, misogynistic nature of the hadith and their role in the construction of gender non-egalitarian cosmologies in the Islamic interpretative tradition.
