This study critically examines the position of women in post-colonial societies across the Arab region and the structuring of female experience and gender by patriarchy, class, literacy, religion and historical conditions such as colonization, neo-imperialism and the rise of capitalism. The male writing of the female body and the perception of the latter as a field of power within the Arabo-Muslim culture constitutes the framework of the thesis. This critical approach also informs the growing feminist scholarship on the subject of the so-called Arab woman in the area under study. The notion of the feminine delivered by male dogmatic discourses, whether old or new, traditional or modern, orthodox or profane, is briefly presented in the first part of the dissertation while the deconstruction of such a referential setting by feminist academic work is undertaken in Part two as an attempt to integrate notions of womanhood, sexuality, identity, culture, religious belief, statehood, and material factors into a discursive order. Sexual difference becomes problematized within the critical assessment of the fictional voices developed by women, their exploration of concepts of sexual behaviour and their analysis of how gender ideology permeates the modernist endeavours of the post-colonial state in its efforts at development. A significant predicament is highlighted by the thesis: the cultural discourse on women, enduringly linked to their functions within the private realm, copulation and reproduction, as indicated by both the fictional and the scholarly literature, clashes with the developmentalist endeavours which require active roles within the public sphere. The conflict and indeterminacies generated by such a discrepancy are projected as an essential framework for understanding the construction of women as the 'subordinate sex' at various levels. It is also read as a fundamental dilemma that post-colonial societies across the Mediterranean have yet to address in order to resolve, at least partly, their present socio-economic crisis. The notion of woman is further essentialized within concepts of difference drawn by other dominant discourses examined in Part three. Perspectives of neo-colonialism emanating from the post-industrial First World become a framework in which to insert the work of feminist academics from North Africa and the Middle East as well as definitions of women, whether in the world at large or in more academic terms. The furthest concern of the debate on the 'women question' is to underline however the significance of feminism to operate as a major socio-political force within the post-colonial world. The findings of this research already indicate that the various movements for female emancipation taking place in the region open up new possibilities of struggle for economic growth, equality and secular democracy.

This research is based upon a collection of generally unutilized ḥadīth literature, and is not only concerned with a study of “authenticity” of the ḥadīth, but is also concerned with the science of ḥadīth transmission as advanced by the master critic, Ibn Ḥibbān al-Bustī (d. 354/965). Although the focus of modern ḥadīth scholarship has placed greater emphasis on transmitter evaluation of the second/eight and the third/ninth centuries, it still the case that a great part of the reliability of ḥadīth transmitter was not simply adopted by ḥadīth critics of the fourth/tenth century, as Ibn Ḥibbān has distinctly demonstrated. By scrutinizing Ibn Ḥibbān’s introduction to his al-Taqāsim wa al-Anwāʿ (“The Divisions and the Categories”) famously known as Ṣaḥīḥ Ibn Ḥibbān, we are afforded a unique insight into the application of his transmitter evaluation, authentic ḥadīth criterion and the concept of khabar and sunna. As the title suggests, this was a very clear conception of the degree to which his work is a collection dealing with the body of ḥadīth by the divisions and the categories which are interpreted with legal theory. Furthermore, there is no consensus on the topic of evaluating persona and it is not germane among Muslim scholars. Thus, we present a synopsis of the history of ḥadīth criticism until the time of Ibn Ḥibbān as well as the techniques that the early critics employed to determine the evaluation of transmitters. Even though a comprehensive analysis of whole of Ibn Ḥibbān’s biographical dictionary of impugned transmitters (namely Maʿrifāt al-Majrūḥīn wa al-Dhuʿafāʾ min al-Muḥaddithīn) would be exceedingly beneficial, this study only concentrates on the introduction of the book. Our discursive approach has pointed out the state of disagreement of transmitter evaluation that occured in the fourth/tenth century and the compelling contribution of Ibn Ḥibbān’s works to the subsequent literature on the science of ḥadīth transmission. The final part of this study is concerned with some of the ways in which Ibn Ḥibbān has presented the biography of the Prophet and the early scholars in the Islamic tradition. The task involves a short analysis of the purposes, history, organization, total of figures, and basic strategies used in Ibn Ḥibbān’s biographical dictionaries. Apart from biographical material of reliable transmitters in the Ṣaḥīḥ, it manifests clearly that Ibn Ḥibbān’s approval of a transmitter is due to the inclusion both in Kitāb al-Thiqāt and Mashāhīr al-ʿUlamāʾ al-Amṣār. The ḥadīth transmitters whose biographies are contained in the Thiqāt and the Mashāhīr are thus presented as the successors of the Prophet through the arrangement of ṭabaqāt. In this manner, Ibn Ḥibbān could reveal of the genealogy of authority since both sources yield information of reliable transmitters who lived during a period of 300 years after the Prophet’s death.