Islam, with so many features including universal brotherhood, indiscrimination towards racial or ethnic origin, also provided hope to the women. As a religious faith, it was stretched over vast areas and over time an elite religious community named Ulema emerged by the 9th century. Just like the Clergy in Europe, the Ulemas made the religion not only rigid and difficult but also molded it according to the whims of aristocracy, so as to benefit them. In such a situation, Sufis emerged and provided a softer and popular side of religion which helped people belonging to lower classes to understand the essentials of Islam without indulging them into learning Arabic or Persian (languages of the elite).nPresent-day Iraq and its neighboring countries are believed to be the home of early Sufis. It was the region that provided an impetus to spreading Islam’s message to rest of the world. In the course of time, these Sufis started dividing into various silsilahs/orders. Each of them was led by a spiritual leader/p?r/murshid, who accepted both male and female disciples under their mentorship. The Quran stresses the equality of both men and women; so, do the Sufis. Throughout their lifetime, those women, from early Sufi period, played a significant role in the expansion of Islam. The present course will help students understand the status of women as to being an important fragment of this world. It will highlight the early pious women of Islam in the life of the Prophet of Islam i.e., Khadijah, Fatimah and Aishah. It will also emphasize on the roles of those women in the lives of early mystics and their own roles as pious women saints of the time who would remain exemplary for the times to come.nThe women during medieval ages were considered less knowledgeable than Sufi men so were domesticated in the name of veneration so they were hardly mentioned in the texts as compared to their male counterparts. While talking about women and Sufism and Sufi literature in South Asia, we can find a number of examples where male Sufis speak in feminine voice in order to present women, their marginalization, grace, elegance, loyalty and submissiveness, and so on. Those male Sufis used the metaphors related to women; they adopted their attire as well as their feminine features such as vir?h?n?. The course will help understand all these concepts through the Punjabi and Sindhi poetical compositions. It will expound in detail how those women Sufis were highly revered by their contemporary male Sufis.
