Female Religious Authority in Shi'i Islam: Past and Present - Paperback

by Mirjam Kuenkler (Editor), Devin J. Stewart (Editor)

When we dissect Islamic religious authority into its various manifestations - leading prayer, preaching, issuing fatwas, transmitting hadith, judging in court, shaping the Islamic scholarly tradition - nuances emerge that question the conventional accounts of this authority that proceed from the assumption that it is male. This collection of case studies, covering the period from classical Islam to the present, and taken from across the Islamic world, allows for women's role to be compared across time and space. This allows for the formation of hypotheses regarding which conditions and developments (theological, jurisprudential, social, economic, political) enhanced or stifled female religious authority in Shi'i Islam.

Author Biography

Mirjam Kuenkler is Senior Research Fellow at Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. Her books include Indonesia, Islam and Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2013), A Secular Age Beyond the West (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and The Rule of Law in the Islamic Republic of Iran: Power, Institutions, and Limits of Reform/i> (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2021).

Devin Stewart is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Emory University. He has published numerous journal articles, including in Islamic Law and Society, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies and Journal of Qur'anic Studies.