The Forgotten Scholarship of Women in Pre-Partition South Asian Dars-e-Nizami Madrasas:

Recovering Biographical and Intellectual Histories

Abstract

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This article undertakes a historical recovery of women’s intellectual participation in the Dars-e-Nizami curriculum in pre-partition South Asia (c. 1750–1947). Challenging the dominant narrative that frames Islamic education in this period as exclusively male, the study draws on biographical dictionaries (ṭabaqāt), family archives, correspondence, and oral histories to reconstruct the lives and scholarly contributions of women who studied, taught, and transmitted the Dars-e-Nizami texts—often within domestic or semi-institutional settings. While formal madrasa enrollment for women was rare, elite and scholarly families frequently provided rigorous instruction in ḥadīth, tafsīr, fiqh, logic (manṭiq), and philosophy (ḥikmah) to daughters, wives, and sisters. This article examines case studies from Delhi, Lucknow, Rampur, and Lahore, highlighting figures such as Nana Asma’u’s South Asian counterparts, female muhaddithāt (traditionists), and women who issued fatāwā or authored marginalia (ḥawāshī) on canonical texts. It argues that women’s scholarship, though often unacknowledged in institutional records, was integral to the preservation and transmission of Islamic knowledge. By centering gendered epistemologies and recovering obscured intellectual lineages, this research contributes to decolonial historiography and redefines the boundaries of Islamic scholarly space in South Asia.