Re: Why are two woman witnesses, equivalent to only one male witness in Islam ?
There is an excellent article by Mohammad Fadel called "Two Women, One Man: Knowledge, Power, and Gender in Medieval Sunni Legal Thought." Here are some extracts:
"the Qur'an seems to be saying, at least by way of implication, that the testimony of a woman is less credible than that of a man."
"the celebrated Egyptian modernist and reformer Muhammad 'Abduh...he denied that the requirement of two female witnesses was based on the different natures of men and women; instead, he argued that both men and women have the same capacity for remembering and forgetting, the sole difference being that the different economic roles of men and women in society made each vulnerable to forgetting those things which were not part of his or her daily experience."
"Thus, while a woman was more prone than a man to make a mistake regarding a commercial transaction, she would be more likely to be correct concering a household matter. Muslim modernists have taken 'Abduh's lead in interpreting this verse as being the result of a temporal division of labor between the sexes. According to them, the apparent rule established by this verse was neither universally applicable across time nor generally applicable to all cases tried by a court."
"Had there been a natural inherent quality in women rendering their statements more unreliable than those of mean, the law should have consistently discriminated against the statements of women, whether in the normative or in the political domain."
"...a woman's opinion (fatwa) in law was just as valid and morally binding as the legal opinion of a man. Thus, a woman could legitimately be a mufti, a legal expert whose task it is to communicate legal rules to non-specialists, including at times judges and other holders of political power."
"The most prominent [example] of these women was 'A'isha bint Abi Bakr...she was not only an important transmitter of religious doctrine, she was also recognized as an independant legal authority...to issue legal opinions on controversial legal matters."
"Evidence of female participation in this realm can be found in the many diplomas (ijazas) containing women's names and in the colophons of manuscripts that mention women as teachers and students...many ...] were given academic titles, such as *al-musnida, *which can be translated roughly as 'the authority'."