Religions allow monks but not nuns

Hi!

I'm listening to a course on Sacred Texts of the World and it mentions that the Buddha was originally reluctant to ordain women as nuns given cultural mores at the time. What would have happened if Buddhism and some of the other monastic religions allow only men to become ordained?
 
I know that they're not the same as monks (especially re celibacy) but all the imans, mullahs,etc. of Islam are men with no female branches whatsoever. Moreover, it was a bit shocking to the Ottomans of the idea of Orthodox nuns in Constantinople,etc.. I guess they just couldn't understand why a religion would encourage a large number of women to become celibate and completely withdraw from men. But then, I don't think Judaism had anything like nuns either despite the occasional 'wise woman' who studied Talmud and religious texts.
 
I know that they're not the same as monks (especially re celibacy) but all the imans, mullahs,etc. of Islam are men with no female branches whatsoever. Moreover, it was a bit shocking to the Ottomans of the idea of Orthodox nuns in Constantinople,etc.. I guess they just couldn't understand why a religion would encourage a large number of women to become celibate and completely withdraw from men. But then, I don't think Judaism had anything like nuns either despite the occasional 'wise woman' who studied Talmud and religious texts.
The Hui Chinese Muslim have had female Imam for century.
 

Magical123

Banned
Being a nun in medieval Europe could often be a grinding and boring life but it got lots of women out of the peasantry and unmarried noble women something to do.

It also had benefits nuns would assist travelers for the night, would aid in terms of if a community had illness and so on and so forth.

The roots of nunnery in Europe go back to early Christiantity with women devoted to God's work as described in the Acts.
 
Have they traditionally been in communion with the Muslim heartlands?

Not particularly strongly, to be honest, although the concept of being in "communion" with the likes of Mecca or the Ottoman caliph is a tenuous equivalency at best.
 
Not particularly strongly, to be honest, although the concept of being in "communion" with the likes of Mecca or the Ottoman caliph is a tenuous equivalency at best.

sure, I know the concept doesn't translate cleanly, but the point still stands that if they are distant enough, you'd might well be able to argue that for the purposes of the discussion, they would be a unorthodox sect and not be a valid picture of Islam at large on this issue
 
sure, I know the concept doesn't translate cleanly, but the point still stands that if they are distant enough, you'd might well be able to argue that for the purposes of the discussion, they would be a unorthodox sect and not be a valid picture of Islam at large on this issue

Hmm, fair point, but I think the issue of this is that the "Islamic heartland" is essentially the Arabic heartland. I take some issue with the equivalency of Islamic and Arabic cultural practices. It can be quite difficult to determine at times what individual practices come from an Arabic (pre-Islamic) background and what are actual "Islamic" teachings.
 
Monastic religions? Pretty much just Buddhism there. Must say, I found it odd when I read recently how charity of feeding the hungry in some of those texts is only to feed the monks. Not so surprising, perhaps. Anyways, I imagine that the Japanese will still have them and perhaps some in Southeast Asia. Maybe Ceylon as well, southern India tended to be filled with matriarchal societies, which should spill a bit southward. We also should look at how we define monks and such here. The Lamaism of Tibet is the odd one out among Buddhists, though Mongolia apparently was once somewhat similar. In their case they had over twenty percent of males in Monastaries, though of course I can't find the original texts and sources for these. Ahhh, the language barrier.
 
sure, I know the concept doesn't translate cleanly, but the point still stands that if they are distant enough, you'd might well be able to argue that for the purposes of the discussion, they would be a unorthodox sect and not be a valid picture of Islam at large on this issue
Elizabeth Fernea's classic ethnography/memoirs of El Nahra, a 1950s Shi'ite village in southern Iraq, features a good number of female mullahs.
 
Hmm, fair point, but I think the issue of this is that the "Islamic heartland" is essentially the Arabic heartland. I take some issue with the equivalency of Islamic and Arabic cultural practices. It can be quite difficult to determine at times what individual practices come from an Arabic (pre-Islamic) background and what are actual "Islamic" teachings.

Sure, its (very) difficult to untangle what is Arabic culture (optionally proto-Islamic Culture that was co-opted into Islam such as Niqab and Burka IIRC), and what is Islamic culture. But really, this is probably an aside not suited for the discussion at hand since, IIRC Islam is fairly anti-monasticism, at least in the meaning that often surrounds it in Christian and Buddhist traditions
 
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