There is a view circulating among some Muslims that women should not seek education, and that this extends even to Islamic education. Some of what is said about Western secular education in this context is fair, and I have no interest in defending the modern university. But the claim I want to deal with here is that women should not seek Islamic knowledge either.
In this article I will present a simple argument in favor of women seeking Islamic knowledge, and then I will look at the main objections raised against it.
Before getting into the argument, let me separate three different things that usually get lumped together as “women studying:”
Farḍ ʿayn knowledge. What a Muslim needs in order to perform her own obligations correctly. How to pray, how to purify herself, what she must believe.
Further learning. Studying Quran, hadith, fiqh, aqeedah, Arabic and tafseer beyond the minimum her own worship requires.
Specialized study. Sustained formal training with the aim of real proficiency in one or more of the Islamic sciences.
Nobody seriously disputes the first one. The argument against women seeking Islamic education is about the second and the third. That being the case, I will not be arguing that women need to learn what is required for them in their faith. I will be focusing on women going out of their way to learn more than what they need, and women specializing in a specific Islamic field in, say, a madrasah or a university.
With that out of the way, let us get started.
The argument:
Argument 1
If God commands something, it is good for whoever does it.
God commands seeking religious knowledge.
Therefore, seeking religious knowledge is good for whoever does it.
Argument 2
Seeking religious knowledge is good for whoever does it.
Women are included in “whoever.”
Therefore, seeking religious knowledge is good for women.
Argument 1 defense
Let us first look at argument 1. This is pretty straightforward and I really do not believe anyone will have an issue with argument 1. In terms of the first premise, it is pretty clear both intuitively and from the Quran that if God commands X, then X is good for the individual. In the Quran Allah explicitly states: “Indeed, Allah commands justice, grace, as well as generosity to close relatives. He forbids indecency, wickedness, and aggression. He instructs you so perhaps you will be mindful.” (Al-Nahl 90). Justice, grace and being generous to one’s relatives are all intuitively good things. God will never command people to murder innocent civilians or to steal from the poor. God is the Most Merciful, the All-Good and so on.
In terms of the second premise, this too is clear from both the Quran and Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad. In terms of the Quran, Allah states: “and say, ‘My Lord, increase me in knowledge.’” (Ta Ha 114). As Ibn Hajar points out, Allah did not command His Prophet to seek increase in anything except for knowledge. This is in addition to the many places in the Quran where Allah contrasts those who know with those who do not know. Allah asks: “Are those who know equal to those who do not know?” (Al-Zumar 9). He tells us that He raises in rank “those who believe among you and those given knowledge” (Al-Mujadala 11). He tells us that “it is only those of His servants who have knowledge that truly fear Allah” (Fatir 28).
But more directly than all of these, Allah gives the command in the plural to anyone who does not have knowledge: “So ask the people of knowledge if you do not know” (Al-Nahl 43, and repeated again in Al-Anbiya 7). Notice the condition Allah attaches here. It is not “ask if you are a man.” It is not “ask if you are a scholar.” It is if you do not know. Whoever does not know is commanded to ask. There is no third category of person who neither knows nor has to ask.
Allah also commands understanding of the religion as a communal duty: “Why does not a group from every party among them go forth to gain understanding of the religion?” (Al-Tawba 122). And Allah even puts knowledge before action when He says “So know that there is no god but Allah, and seek forgiveness for your sin” (Muhammad 19), which is the exact verse Imam al-Bukhari used as a chapter heading in his Sahih to make the point that knowledge comes before speech and action.
In terms of the hadiths of the Prophet, there are many that show the importance of seeking knowledge. The Prophet Muhammad said: “Seeking knowledge is an obligation upon every Muslim.” (Sunan Ibn Mājah 224) The wording here is especially important. The Prophet did not merely encourage Muslims to seek knowledge; he explicitly called it an obligation. And this obligation is stated generally: it applies to every Muslim. Women are Muslims just as men are Muslims, so the basic wording of the hadith includes both. Therefore, whatever knowledge is obligatory for a Muslim to know is obligatory for Muslim women as well as Muslim men.
Therefore, given the evidence for these two premises, which I hope no Muslim will argue against, the conclusion simply follows that seeking religious knowledge is good for whoever does it.
Argument 2 defense
Now let us look at argument 2, the more controversial argument for some (even though I think this is really apparent and there really should not be any controversy around it). The first premise was dealt with in the previous argument as it was the conclusion of that argument. If you accepted the first argument, then you must also accept the first premise of the second.
The second premise is really the most important part of this argument, as if this is properly defended, then we can reach the conclusion that seeking religious knowledge is good for women. The defense of this premise is pretty simple: the ayat and hadiths referencing seeking knowledge or the importance of knowledge are general. If they are general, then in order for one to argue that women should not seek knowledge (going against the generality of the evidences), they would need to bring evidence that states otherwise, that is, that women should not seek knowledge.
A response someone might have is that when the Prophet mentioned that seeking knowledge is obligatory for every Muslim, he meant men only, because the Arabic grammatical form is masculine. However, this argument fails because the same people would agree that praying five times a day, fasting the month of Ramadan, performing hajj, and so on are all obligatory for both men and women, even though the hadiths and the ayat that reference the obligation of these are in the masculine grammatical form. In Arabic, when referring to a large group of individuals (three or more), and there are both men and women involved in the discussion, we use the male pronoun. Hence this objection does not work.
Another response one might have is that women are deficient in intellect as per the hadith of the Prophet Muhammad where he said the following:
The Prophet said, “Isn’t the witness of a woman equal to half of that of a man?” The women said, “Yes.” He said, “This is because of the deficiency of a woman’s mind.” (Sahih al-Bukhari 304; Sahih Muslim 79)
However, people tend to forget the other part of the hadith where the Prophet also explained to the women why they are deficient in their deen (faith). The Prophet said the following:
“Is it not that when you menstruate you do not pray, nor fast?” They (the women) said, “Of course.” The Prophet said: “That is the reduction in your religion.” (Sahih al-Bukhari 304; Sahih Muslim 79)
The Prophet did not say that women are deficient in every aspect of intellect (i.e., that they are simply less intelligent) but that when it comes to some legal issues in terms of testimony, women are more deficient than men in this specific issue. Now someone might say that while the hadith only references legal matters, we can do analogous reasoning for other elements such as women’s general intelligence.
However, and this is the importance of looking at the entire hadith, that means we should also do analogous reasoning for women being deficient in their deen outside of menstruation. Meaning, if one wants to do analogous reasoning for women being deficient in matters outside of a specific legal issue, then they would by necessity also have to do analogous reasoning for women being deficient in their religion outside of the issue of menstruation, since both are in the same hadith. But I have yet to see anyone extend the second half of the hadith in the same way. People understand that the Prophet ONLY meant that women are deficient in their faith because they do not pray when they are menstruating. Hence, no one has done analogous reasoning outside of menstruation. The same, then, should apply to women being deficient in their intelligence because, as clearly shown in the hadith, the Prophet gave the reason as to what he meant by them being deficient.
For me at least, these seem to be the two main objections to the second premise. The only other way to disprove this second premise is to find evidence that the Prophet told women not to study, or that women should leave studying to men, or whatever else the case may be. Since there is no such evidence, these objections do not overturn the second premise.
If it is the case that the second premise is proven to be true, and in the absence of a defeater, the premise stands, then it simply follows that seeking religious knowledge is good for women.
Objections
Now, prior to claiming victory over this matter, there are some objections one can throw at my overall argument. The objections we have dealt with so far were looking at the Quran and Sunnah, but some people have objections outside of those in order to argue that women should not seek Islamic knowledge. I want to take these in their strongest form rather than the weakest, so let us run through them.
Objection 1: Knowledge does not increase femininity
The objection here is that women need to be feminine. In order to increase femininity, women need to be mothers and wives and not go study Islamic knowledge. If a woman were to go study Islamic knowledge, she is actually decreasing her femininity. Study is a masculine activity, or at least an activity that pulls a woman away from the roles she was created for, and the more of it she does the further she gets from what she is supposed to be.
There are a couple of problems with this. For starters, this entire argument assumes that seeking knowledge and being a wife and mother are mutually exclusive. That is simply not the case and neither is there strong evidence to show a causal link between a woman having more Islamic knowledge and her moving away from femininity. In fact, as I will delve more into later, if we look at Aisha, the wife of the Prophet Muhammad, we see that she not only studied a lot and had the ability to give fatwas, but she was in fact not masculine. From the outset, this objection is working with an underlying premise that has not been justified.
But let us go further. As Muslims, we value motherhood and femininity for two basic reasons: first, because we believe they accord with the fiṭrah, the natural disposition Allah created us with; and second, because Allah and His Messenger taught that men should embody masculinity and women femininity. The problem is that, with the rise of atheism, liberalism, and feminism, many people no longer take these assumptions for granted. That is precisely why Islamic knowledge is so important. You can tell a woman to obey her husband, care for her children, or embrace her role as a mother, but without understanding the religious basis and value of those duties, such obedience can remain fragile. The moment those beliefs are challenged—by friends, social media, or the wider culture—she may have no reason of her own for continuing to hold them. Islamic knowledge turns inherited practice into informed conviction. And if the goal is to preserve Islamic femininity in a culture that constantly questions it, then knowledge is actually the solution to that problem.
Secondly, this line of argumentation simply fails if we were to put it in another scenario. For instance, imagine that rather than telling men to study the fiqh sections on buying and selling, we tell men to simply go out and trade. Interestingly, when Umar was the Khalifah he actually made it obligatory for those who wanted to trade to learn the fiqh of buying and selling. Imagine that rather than telling men and women to learn about the fiqh of menstruation, we simply tell people to just figure it out. I mean, really, in any other scenario this simply would not work.
If someone wants to do something well, they have to learn how to do it. This is not controversial anywhere else in life and I do not know why it suddenly becomes controversial here. If what we actually want is for women to be excellent wives and mothers, then the fiqh of marriage, the rights owed between spouses, the adab of raising children, all of this is precisely the knowledge that makes someone good at it. The objection ends up recommending that women be bad at the very thing it insists they should be doing.
Thirdly, this claim does not fit with how the Prophet actually dealt with women’s education.
A group of women came to the Prophet and complained that the men were taking up all of his time, and they asked him to set aside a day for them. He agreed, and he appointed a day and taught them. (Sahih al-Bukhari 101)
If it were the case that women seeking Islamic education made women less feminine, thus going against how God created them, then the Prophet would have been the first to act accordingly. He would have told women that their husbands could simply teach them and that they should go back home and take care of the kids and clean the house. Yet, he did not do that.
Some might say that dedicating one day of the week for women is not the same as a woman becoming a scholar and issuing fatwas. Yet that is exactly what Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) went on to do. She became one of the principal sources from which this ummah received its religion. Senior male Companions came to her with their questions and she issued fatwas in response to their questions, and much of what we know about the Prophet’s private life and practice reaches us through her precisely because she was the one asking.
Now if it were the case that issuing fatwas and gaining Islamic knowledge decreased a woman’s femininity, then would that same idea apply to Aisha? Did anyone critique her for becoming more masculine? Did anyone critique her for teaching and issuing fatwas instead of staying out of such matters? Did the Prophet ever discourage her from asking her questions?
And really no one in Islamic history has ever stated that Aisha was wasting her time seeking knowledge, or that Aisha would have been a better wife if she didn’t specialize in fiqh. The point being made here is that if spending hours of the day studying Islamic sciences and spending time away from being a traditional wife would decrease a woman’s femininity, then we would have seen that in Aisha. But because we do not, then it simply is the case that this objection does not hold up.
Objection 2: If women go out and study, they will delay marriage and have fewer children
The second objection is that by women going out and studying Islam, they will inherently want to delay marriage and will want fewer children. In fact, there are a lot of studies that show that in the West, women who go into universities marry later in life and have a lot fewer children. And this is not merely a Western phenomenon either. The correlation between female education and lower fertility shows up across many countries. Hence, case closed, this is a bigger harm than if women were simply to get married and not study.
There are a few problems with this argument. The first is that this is, at best, critiquing a mode of learning. Even if I were to grant every empirical claim being made here, that does not mean that seeking Islamic knowledge in and of itself is bad for women. It simply means that the Western style of education in a mixed university is bad. This objection, however, says nothing about a woman studying online, studying at a local madrasah, or going with her husband to a non-mixed university to study Islam. While it could be the case that these Western universities make women delay marriage, it simply does not follow that that issue would also extend to an Islamic learning environment.
The second problem is that this objection actually undercuts its own goal. The mother is the child’s first teacher. If the woman is ignorant about Islam and has not properly understood certain aspects about the faith, then that mother will raise ignorant children as well. Then we are in an endless loop of ignorant mothers raising the next ignorant generation who might be pushed farther away from Islam. If we want the next generation of women to be feminine, then mothers need to teach them at a young age what it means for a woman to be a woman. But if those mothers have no knowledge or very little knowledge, then the problems we have today will extend to the next generation.
Finally, let us take the argument in another direction. In the West, there are a large number of men who are working full-time jobs and who go to university who are in haram relationships and on Tinder. Does that mean that if a man in Saudi Arabia goes and studies theology at the Islamic University of Madinah, he will also go into a haram relationship and go on Tinder? This may seem pretty ridiculous, but it is nearly the exact same argument but for men. If we find this conclusion absurd, then by analogy we should not prevent women from studying Islam simply because some issues have arisen in Western academia.
Objection 3: Women will issue fatwas designed to empower women
The final objection is that if women spend years pursuing Islamic education, this in turn will empower women. If it empowers women, women will issue fatwas, religious rulings, designed to empower women even further. For instance, imagine a woman who studies at a madrasah or at a university. By studying, she feels empowered and superior to the average layman or laywoman out there. Due to this empowerment, she will issue fatwas that favor women even when the evidence from the Quran and Sunnah points elsewhere. She will misuse ayat and ahadith for women’s empowerment. This is obviously bad, hence women should not get an education.
This is a really bad objection for a variety of reasons. For starters, notice that the problem being described here is not specific to women at all. There are numerous imams who have issued fatwas that clearly favor a political view or that clearly favor a certain ideology. By the logic of this objection, men should not study the Islamic sciences either, because it will empower them to produce fatwas that go against the Quran and Sunnah and misuse the Islamic texts. If that conclusion is unacceptable, and it obviously is, then the argument that produced it does not work.
Secondly, granting that study empowers women, that does not mean that women will then issue fatwas that favor women. There is a key missing premise here, which is that when women are empowered, the only thing they think about is empowering other women and not about truth, reality, or what God and His Messenger have stated. I really have no reason to believe this, and it is simply taken as an assumption. They would need evidence for this claim. But no such evidence has been provided, so the assumption remains unsupported.
Thirdly, where in the Quran and Sunnah is empowering women wrong? Obviously we can agree that empowering women (or men) in things the shariah did not allow is haram. However, for just the idea of empowering women in things that are halal, I know of no evidence for that from the Quran, the Sunnah, from the scholars, or from any other usul principle one wants to use.
Then there is the fact that we Muslims have a safeguard to fight against those who misuse the Quran and Sunnah. That safeguard is returning claims to the Quran and Sunnah and evaluating them according to sound principles. Claims and fatwas can be tested against the Quran, Sunnah, and established principles of interpretation. If a woman, for instance, makes a fatwa that women should not be mothers, there are numerous hadiths that clearly show a contradiction with that view. If a woman makes a fatwa that women can get a divorce from their husbands without asking them, we can, once again, point to the scholars of the past and to the Quran and Sunnah and disprove that fatwa. Fatwas are assessed by their evidence, not by who issued them.
I would also add one more thing here, which is that this objection actually points in the opposite direction from where it thinks it is going. Ask yourself who is more likely to misuse an ayah: a woman who has studied Arabic grammar, usul and hadith sciences for ten years, or a woman with no training at all who picked up her entire framework from social media. It is obviously the second one. Lack of knowledge makes misuse easier, not harder. The remedy for bad fatwas has never been less knowledge. It has always been more of it. And on top of that, the demand for women teaching women does not disappear just because trained women do not exist. It gets filled by whoever is available. So if you keep orthodox women out of serious study, you do not end up in a world where no woman speaks about Islam to Muslim women. You end up in a world where the only ones doing it are the untrained and the ideologically committed, which is the exact outcome this objection claims it wants to avoid.
Conclusion
To conclude, I think it is clear that seeking Islamic knowledge, whether for men or for women, is good and should be encouraged. Not only is it clear from the Quran and Sunnah that both men and women should seek Islamic knowledge, but the objections that many have used to argue against women seeking it simply fall flat. None of them actually shows that women are excluded from the general virtue of seeking knowledge. They are predictions about a supposed set of consequences: that study will weaken femininity, delay marriage, or produce self-serving fatwas. Even if some of those concerns were valid in particular cases, that would only raise questions about how Islamic education should be pursued, not whether it is good in itself.
So if someone wants to argue that women, as a class, should be discouraged from serious Islamic study, they need evidence for that restriction. General fears about what might happen are not enough.
That also means nothing I have argued says that a woman should study instead of being a wife or mother. The Qur’an and Sunnah clearly give importance to both roles. My point is simply that motherhood, marriage, and seeking knowledge are not inherently in competition. Treating them as though they are is an assumption that still needs to be argued for.
And today, Islamic study is easier to combine with family life than ever before. Women can study through institutes such as AMAU, Abu Taymiyyah’s institute, or online university programs, including the Islamic University of Madinah’s online bachelor’s program. These options remove many of the costs assumed by the second objection. A woman does not necessarily have to choose between raising children and studying Islam.
More importantly, a Muslim community is better off when its women know their religion well. Mothers teach their children long before anyone else does. Women teach other women. Some will give lessons, answer questions, and, if properly qualified, contribute to Islamic scholarship.
That need will exist whether trained women fill it or not.
So the real choice is not between women teaching Islam and women remaining silent. It is between women speaking with knowledge and women speaking without it.