A fundamental gap is being felt in the current discourse on Islamic feminism – the lack of direct access to the scholarly achievements of the great women mujtahids and scholars in Islamic history who played a key role in the formation and development of Islamic sciences. This paper introduces a completely new intellectual and technical framework called “Digital Islamic Feminism,” which aims to reconstruct the lost intellectual heritage of the 11th century through the latest tools of artificial intelligence and digital humanities. Our research reveals that during the golden age of Islamic history, there existed a significant number of women mujtahids who played important roles in the compilation and interpretation of religious sciences, but over time, most of their scholarly achievements were lost in the pages of history. This project not only aims to restore the scholarly status of these women scholars but also presents a systematic and scientific methodology for rediscovering women’s historical role in the field of Islamic jurisprudence and exegesis.

The 11th century Islamic world was an extremely fertile period academically, when women scholars and mujtahids were performing duties of teaching and issuing fatwas in mosques and madrasas. In academic centers like Baghdad, Cordoba, Cairo, and Nishapur, a significant number of women were knowledgeable in religious sciences and provided education not only to women but also to male students. Prominent women scholars of this era included personalities like Fatimah bint Abbas, Zaynab bint Kamal, and Aisha bint Muhammad, whose scholarly achievements are frequently mentioned in historical sources. These women not only served in the fields of jurisprudence and hadith but also made notable contributions to exegesis, Sufism, and other religious sciences. The greatness of their scholarship can be gauged from the fact that thousands of students attended the teaching circles of many of these women, and their fatwas were accepted in distant regions.

There have been several historical, cultural, and intellectual reasons for the loss of scholarly achievements of women mujtahids. The primary reason has been the practice of giving secondary status to women’s roles in historical writings, due to which many women scholars’ contributions were either completely ignored or presented in the shadow of male scholars. The second major reason was the destruction of documents and loss of books over time, which erased the works of numerous women from the pages of history. The third important reason was political and social changes that gradually led to the disappearance of women’s academic centers. The fourth reason was the lack of priority given to women’s work in the process of academic translations and manuscript copying, resulting in the gradual extinction of their works. All these factors combined played a significant role in nearly forgetting an important aspect of Islamic intellectual history.

For the digital reconstruction of women mujtahids’ intellectual heritage, we propose a multidimensional technical framework that includes the latest tools of artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, and data mining. The first phase of this framework consists of digitizing historical texts, converting thousands of pages of ancient manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish languages into digital format. The second phase involves discovering references to women scholars, their works, and their scholarly influences in these texts through text mining. The third phase involves examining these women’s academic networks and their students’ circles through network analysis. The fourth phase involves organizing and connecting their scholarly services through semantic web technology. This comprehensive framework will not only recover lost intellectual heritage but also present it according to the requirements of the modern digital age.

For the recovery of women mujtahids’ intellectual heritage, we propose a systematic methodology for critical review of sources and data collection. The first step of this methodology is identifying primary sources, including biographical dictionaries, rijāl books, historical chronicles, travelogues, and letters. The second step involves analyzing secondary sources, including modern historical research and monographs. The third step involves discovering relevant material from manuscript collections, reviewing rare manuscripts found in libraries worldwide. The fourth step involves analyzing oral traditions and local historical material related to non-written sources. We will employ modern critical principles to verify the authenticity and reliability of each source, including examining the source’s period of composition, author’s background, chain of transmission, and internal coherence of content. Subsequently, the data will be converted into digital format and collected in an integrated database.

Through modern text mining methods, we will be able to discover patterns of women mujtahids’ biographies, their scholarly services, and their juristic positions in historical texts. For this process, we are developing an integrated system where the first phase consists of text pre-processing, including text cleaning, converting words to their basic forms, and sentence segmentation. The second phase will involve feature extraction, identifying words, terms, and expressions related to women. The third phase will separate different academic topics through topic modeling. The fourth phase will identify names of women scholars, their kunyas, their teachers, and students through entity recognition. The fifth phase will examine the style of these women’s biographies in historical texts and the attitudes of narrators about their scholarly status through sentiment analysis. All these phases together will form a system that can automatically discover hidden information in historical texts.

Through semantic web technology and knowledge graph usage, we will be able to present women mujtahids’ intellectual heritage in the form of an integrated and interconnected database. In this system, each woman scholar will be presented as a central entity with various properties – such as her name, birth and death dates, place of birth, teachers, students, works, scholarly services, juristic school, and specific juristic opinions. Relationships will be established between these entities, such as teacher-student relationships, contemporary relationships, affiliation with the same school, and scholarly tradition relationships with each other. Through this graph, not only will information about individual women scholars be consolidated, but it will also help in understanding their mutual academic connections and their collective scholarly role. This system will be searchable through query languages like SPARQL, enabling researchers to ask complex questions and discover new academic connections.

For the visual presentation of historical data, we will use modern visualization technologies, including maps showing the evolution of academic centers over time, genealogical trees showing women scholars’ academic families, graphs of their writing activities, and network diagrams of their scholarly influence. Through these visual means, researchers will be able to easily understand complex historical information and discover new historical patterns. For example, through an interactive map, we will be able to show how women scholars’ academic influence spread from one region to another in different periods. Through another graph, we will be able to show how women’s academic participation changed over time. These visual tools will not only facilitate research work but also make historical information interesting and understandable for general readers.

For the success of this project, we are adopting an interdisciplinary approach where digital humanities experts, Islamic studies researchers, computer scientists, and historians will work together. Digital humanities experts will ensure effective use of technology, Islamic studies researchers will maintain content authenticity and academic importance, computer scientists will develop required software and algorithms, and historians will ensure accurate interpretation of historical context. As a result of this mutual cooperation, a system will emerge that will not only be technically correct but also academically reliable. This interdisciplinary approach is extremely necessary for solving complex research problems of the modern era, especially when it comes to the recovery and reinterpretation of historical heritage.

Our project focuses on recovering the scholarly achievements of several women mujtahids from the 11th century. These include Fatimah bint Abbas (d. 1089 CE) who was a renowned Hanafi jurist in Baghdad and incidents of her fatwa-giving are preserved in historical sources. Zaynab bint Kamal (d. 1075 CE) who led a large teaching circle in Damascus and her students included prominent male scholars. Aisha bint Muhammad (d. 1092 CE) who taught hadith in Cordoba and her chain of transmission was considered reliable in later periods. Khadijah bint Ahmad (d. 1101 CE) who taught Shafi’i jurisprudence in Nishapur and her fatwas were accepted in distant regions. There are also several other women whose names are scattered in historical texts and whose scholarly services need to be presented systematically.

The digital reconstruction of women mujtahids’ intellectual heritage will have several academic and social impacts. Academically, this project will recover a forgotten chapter of Islamic intellectual history and help in understanding the complete history of Islamic jurisprudence and exegesis. Socially, this project will serve as a means of recovering historical role models for contemporary Muslim women and provide them encouragement for active participation in Islamic sciences. Educationally, this project will help in appropriately incorporating women’s role in Islamic sciences curriculum. Culturally, this project will present a more complete picture of Islamic civilization’s intellectual tradition. In terms of interfaith dialogue, this project will help eliminate misconceptions about women’s role in Islam.

For the implementation of this project, we propose a systematic five-stage plan. The first stage is collecting basic data, envisioned to take two years and involving identifying historical text repositories, their digitization, and creating a basic database. The second stage is data processing and analysis, envisioned to take one year and involving text mining, entity identification, and discovery of academic connections. The third stage is creating semantic web and knowledge graph, envisioned to take one year and involving data modeling, linking, and creating query systems. The fourth stage is visual presentation and user interface development, envisioned to take six months. The fifth stage is publication and dissemination, envisioned to take six months and involving web portal completion, research paper publications, and project promotion in academic circles.

This project has several important implications for the global academic community. First, this project is an important addition to the field of digital humanities that shows how modern technology can be used for historical research. Second, this project is a revolutionary advancement in Islamic studies that recovers a forgotten aspect of Islamic intellectual history. Third, this project promotes intercultural dialogue as it presents a balanced picture of women’s role in Islam. Fourth, this project serves as a model for educational institutions on how interdisciplinary sciences can be combined to open new research fields. Fifth, this project presents a modern methodology for cultural heritage preservation that is replicable for other cultures.

During the implementation of this project, we will pay special attention to historical integrity and ethical principles. The first principle is fidelity to historical texts, according to which we will not alter or distort any historical text. The second principle is critical perspective, according to which we will critically review every historical statement and examine its sources and references. The third principle is transparency, according to which we will transparently present all our methodologies and results. The fourth principle is academic humility, according to which we will acknowledge that our results are not final and can be modified in light of new evidence. The fifth principle is cultural sensitivity, according to which we will respect the internal principles and values of Islamic academic tradition. These ethical guidelines will ensure the academic quality and integrity of this project.

After the project of digital recovery of women mujtahids’ intellectual heritage, a vast universe of future research directions and possibilities will open before us. The first possibility is the recovery of scholarly achievements of women scholars from other periods, which could include the 12th to 18th centuries. The second possibility is the discovery of women’s role in other Islamic sciences, such as exegesis, hadith, Sufism, and Islamic philosophy. The third possibility is comparative study of women’s scholarly services in other Islamic regions, such as Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and African countries. The fourth possibility is analysis of the impact of women scholars’ intellectual heritage on the contemporary era. The fifth possibility is discovering ways to incorporate this data into educational curricula. All these possibilities together will open new doors for research in Islamic studies.

The project of digital reconstruction of women mujtahids’ intellectual heritage is a systematic effort to recover a forgotten chapter of Islamic intellectual history. This project not only introduces new methods of historical research but also provides a strong historical foundation for academic discussions on Islamic feminism. In the future, the results of this project will not only give new direction to research in Islamic studies but also provide academic depth to current discussions about women’s role in Muslim societies. This project proves that beneficial integration between modern technology and traditional sciences is possible, and that through this integration we can not only preserve our intellectual heritage but also make it more understandable and effective for new generations.