What does Islam say about education for girls?

Islam calls girls to learn as it calls boys. The first word of the Quran revealed to the Prophet ﷺ was a command to read, and nothing in the Quran or the Sunnah reserves knowledge for men. Education for girls is a right Allah honors and a trust (amāna) for parents and societies, and the history of Islam is full of women who studied, taught, and founded places of learning.

What does the Quran say about seeking knowledge?

The revelation began in the cave of Ḥirāʾ with a command to read and a praise of the pen:

ٱقۡرَأۡ وَرَبُّكَ ٱلۡأَكۡرَمُ ٱلَّذِي عَلَّمَ بِٱلۡقَلَمِ عَلَّمَ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنَ مَا لَمۡ يَعۡلَمۡ

“Read, for your Lord is the Most Generous, who taught by the pen, taught the human being what he did not know.”

Quran 96:3-5

The Quran then asks a question that answers itself:

قُلۡ هَلۡ يَسۡتَوِي ٱلَّذِينَ يَعۡلَمُونَ وَٱلَّذِينَ لَا يَعۡلَمُونَ

“Say: are those who know equal to those who do not know?”

Quran 39:9

The Quran gives believing women and believing men the same task of calling to what is right and forbidding what is wrong (Quran 9:71), and no one can carry out that task without knowledge. A girl who learns to read, to reason, and to understand her faith is preparing for the work the Quran gives her. More on this is in What does the Quran say about women?

Did the Prophet ﷺ teach women?

He did, and the women of Medina asked for it. They came to him and said, “The men have taken all your time; set aside a day for us.” He promised them a day, met them, and taught them (Sahih al-Bukhari 101). Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) praised the women of the Anṣār because shyness never kept them from learning their religion (Sahih Muslim 332c).

He also encouraged women to teach one another. Al-Shifāʾ bint ʿAbd Allāh had taught his wife Ḥafṣa to write, and the Prophet ﷺ asked her to teach Ḥafṣa a healing prayer as well (Sunan Abi Dawud 3887, graded sahih by al-Albani).

He promised a double reward even to a man who educated an enslaved woman in his household, in a world that gave such women nothing:

«وَعَلَّمَهَا فَأَحْسَنَ تَعْلِيمَهَا، ثُمَّ أَعْتَقَهَا فَتَزَوَّجَهَا، فَلَهُ أَجْرَانِ»

“He taught her and taught her well, then freed her and married her: he has two rewards.”

Sahih al-Bukhari 97

If teaching a woman with no rights in her society earned a double reward, teaching one’s own daughter is the more obvious duty. The famous saying “Seeking knowledge is an obligation on every Muslim” is reported through several chains, and the version in Sunan Ibn Majah (224) is graded weak, but its meaning stands on the Quran, and “every Muslim” includes every girl.

Who were the great women scholars of early Islam?

Aisha was one of the leading teachers of the Companions. Abu Musa al-Ashʿarī said that whenever a hadith puzzled the Companions and they asked Aisha, they found knowledge about it with her (Jami’ al-Tirmidhi 3883).

She was the first of many. The scholar Mohammad Akram Nadwi spent years gathering the lives of women who narrated and taught hadith, and his biographical dictionary, al-Wafāʾ bi-Asmāʾ al-Nisāʾ, runs to forty-three volumes and records some ten thousand women. See Who were the great women scholars of Islam?

Women also founded places of learning. Tradition credits Fāṭima al-Fihrī with founding the al-Qarawiyyīn mosque in Fez in 859 with the fortune she inherited from her father. Historians debate how much of her story is legend, and the mosque grew into a center of learning that UNESCO and some scholars call the oldest continuously existing university in the world.

Is it haram to keep girls out of school?

Keeping a girl from education because she is a girl is haram. It withholds from her what the Quran praises for every believer, and it wrongs the trust Allah placed with her parents. The jurists made a father responsible for his daughter’s upbringing and maintenance, and in the modern world a good upbringing includes schooling.

When the Taliban kept girls out of secondary school from 2021 and barred women from universities in December 2022, the bans met near-universal condemnation, including from governments and clerics across the Muslim world who said the restrictions had no basis in Islam. The senior Pakistani scholar Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani was among those who urged the Taliban to reopen secondary schools for girls. Malala Yousafzai, shot by a Taliban gunman in Swat in 2012 for speaking up for girls’ schooling, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 at seventeen.

Can Muslim girls study any subject and pursue a career?

Yes. The Quran’s praise of knowledge has no list of subjects reserved for men. Medicine, engineering, law, the sciences, and the arts are all open to Muslim women, and a community needs women doctors, teachers, and judges. Islam’s long encouragement of science is described in Does Islam encourage science?, and the right to use that learning in work is explained in Can Muslim women work?

A closing duʿāʾ

Allah taught His Prophet ﷺ a prayer that every student, girl or boy, can make before a lesson or an exam:

وَقُل رَّبِّ زِدۡنِي عِلۡمٗا

“And say: My Lord, increase me in knowledge.”

Quran 20:114

May Allah open the doors of learning for every daughter, and make her knowledge a light for her and for everyone she teaches.