The Epistemology of Interpreting Hadith Texts: An Intertextual Deconstruction of the Narrative of the Creation of Woman from a Rib (Dhila’)
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Abstract
The hadith al-mar‘atu khuliqat min dhila’in (“woman was created from a rib”) sits at the center of a methodological deadlock in contemporary hadith studies. Literalist readings freeze a rhetorical idiom into a biological-ontological dogma of female subordination, while feminist and revisionist scholarship tends to dissolve matn criticism into pure sociology and to demand wholesale rejection of the text (rafd al-matn). This article argues that neither move is necessary, because the internal apparatus of Ulum al-Hadith already contains the instruments to dismantle literalist distortion without amputating a sound narration. Using a qualitative-philological design grounded in intertextual theory, it executes a sequence of integrated procedures. A takhrij that separates transmitter-grading (jarh wa ta’dil) from generational transmission (tabaqat) recovers the simile narration (kal-dhila’) recorded as muttafaq ‘alayh. A lexical dissection through Gharib al-Hadith, drawing on Lisan al-’Arab and Ibn al-Athir's al-Nihaya, shows that the crookedness (i’wijaj) of the rib denotes protective function rather than moral deficiency. An intertextual munasabah binds the report to the qat’i premise of nafs wahidah (Q. 4:1) and the hadith of shaqa‘iq al-rijal, while tracing the literal reading to isra’iliyyat material transmitted into al-Tabari's exegesis and parallel to Genesis 2:21–22. The discussion advances a deliberately dialectical position. Internal critique is necessary and powerful, yet the claim that it is fully self-sufficient overstates the unanimity of the classical tradition and understates the catalytic role of external critique. The study proposes a transferable three-layer intertextual model for matn analysis
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