The position of Sudanese women religious scholars and preachers is a part of an old tradition in Islamic history where women played a unique role in the transmission and dissemination of Islamic knowledge.

The Qurʾān makes no distinction between men and women in this regard, and in a famous ḥadīth the Prophet Muḥammad advised his companions to “learn half of your religion from that woman,” in reference to his wife ʿĀʾisha, who transmitted “some 2,210 ḥadīth” narratives to the “foremost early Muslim traditionists” (Ahmed 1992, 73). Sudanese written sources such as Kitāb al-ṭabaqāt by Mu…