Abstract
Islamic legal discourse is mainly developed by men, particularly in communities that many assume they are male-dominated. The study seeks to explore this assumption to unravel whether early legal discourse is biased against women in the first place or today's translators, for some reasons, are influenced by modern societal norms. We will explore whether the translations of some legal rulings containing linguistic gender forms or introduced by modal auxiliaries, which function as performative verbs of action, are gender-sensitive. The paper first investigates linguistic gender forms to probe their functions in either equal/unequal representation of women in religious legal language by means of a corpus-based quantitative analysis. To achieve a homogeneous and representative design of the data, we focused on two main reliable sources of legal discourse in Islam: The Glorious Qur'an and the Prophet's Traditions (Hadith) and two translations of both the Qur'an and Hadith by men and women. The chosen Hadith Collection is legally oriented. Using corpus linguistics techniques helped us to identify how men and women are addressed and whether women are more subjected to legal constraints than men by examining the linguistic gender forms and the behavior of the performative modal verbs in early legal texts.