Women’s Right to Learn as a Foundation for Gender-Responsive School Policy: A Recension Analysis of Eight Ḥadīth Narrations on Women's Request for a Dedicated Learning Day

Abstract

Disparities in educational access persist across Muslim societies despite formal equality commitments. This study analyses eight authenticated narrations preserved in Musnad Ibn al-Ja’d, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī (two recensions), Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, Musnad Abī Ya’lā, Ṣaḥīḥ Ibn Ḥibbān, al-Bayhaqī’s al-Sunan al-Kubrā, and Shu’ab al-Īmān. Here, women asked the Prophet Muhammad for a learning day of their own, stating men overwhelmed their access to him. These eight recensions converge on one pivot transmitter (madār), ‘Abd al-Raḥmān ibn al-Aṣbahānī. Thus, the study employs comparative recension analysis rather than corpus-based saturation logic common in thematic social science. Chains were assessed through classical rijāl criticism; textual variants were compared clause by clause and coded for normative content. Every recension reports identical sequences. The Prophet granted the request, fixed a time and place, taught the women from what God had taught him, answering a question about two deceased children. Five normative values are derived: acknowledgement of a gendered constraint on access as a legitimate claim, accommodation through dedicated time and space, curricular parity across separated settings, a learning environment that permits questioning, and instruction that addresses affective alongside doctrinal need. Read through Fredman's four-dimensional model of substantive equality, the prophetic response supplies an indigenous Islamic warrant for differential provision as a remedy for disadvantage rather than as discrimination. Four constraints govern translation into school policy: temporariness, curricular parity, learner initiation, and orientation toward mainstream transformation. The study also examines the competing segregationist reading of the same text and specifies the exegetical grounds on which it is rejected.