Female Religious Authority in Shi'i Islam

Mirjam Kuenkler is Research Professor at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. Her books include Female Religious Authority in Shiʿi Islam: Past and Present, Edinburgh University Press, 2021; A Secular Age Beyond the West, Cambridge University Press, 2018; Democracy and Islam in Indonesia, Columbia University Press, 2013; and the forthcoming The Rule of Law in the Islamic Republic of Iran: Power, Institutions, and Prospects for Reform, Cambridge University Press, among others. She is a PI of the Iran Data Portal, co-editor of the Cambridge Journal of Law and Religion, co-editor of the Brill Research Perspectives in Religion and Politics, and a member of the editorial boards of the International Journal of Islam in Asia (Brill), the Digest of Middle East Studies (Wiley), the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (Wiley), and Iranian Studies (Cambridge). In 2023, Künkler was elected President of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies (ASPS). 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.

This volume is a substantial and welcome contribution to a growing body of literature on female religious authority in Islam. The introduction and individual chapters, covering a wide temporal and geographical range, address some of major unanswered questions, such as how particular contexts affect women's religious authority. This volume is of importance not just to scholars of gender or Shi'ism, but of religious authority broadly construed.

• List of Tables and Figures Note on Transliteration Notes on the Contributors Acknowledgements 1. Introduction – Female Religious Authority in Shi’i Islam: Past and PresentMirjam Künkler and Devin J. Stewart2. Forgotten Histories of Female Religious Authority in IslamMirjam Künkler3. Umm Salama: A Female Authority Legitimating the AuthoritiesYasmin Amin4. Heiress to the Prophet: Fatima’s Khuṭba as an Early Case of Female Religious Authority in Islam Alyssa Gabbay5. Female Authority in the Times of the Shi‘i ImamsLiyakat Takim6. ‘She Should Not Raise Her Voice When among Men’: Imāmī Arguments against (and for) Women JudgesRobert Gleave7. Husniyya’s Debate at the Court of Harun al-Rashid: Sectarian Polemics and Female Religious AuthorityDevin J. Stewart8. Layli as Queen of Heaven by Muhammadi of Herat, c. 1565Michael Barry9. Princesses, Patronage and the Production of Knowledge in Safavid IranYusuf Ünal10. The Lives of Two Mujtahidāt: Female Religious Authority in Twentieth-century IranMirjam Künkler and Roja Fazaeli11. The Other Half of the Mission: Amina ‘Bint al-Huda’ as a Representative (Wakī la) of Muhammad Baqir al-SadrRaffaele Mauriello12. The ‘Ā limāt of Sayyida Zaynab: Female Shi‘i Religious Authority in a Syrian SeminaryEdith Szanto13. Women’s Religious Seminaries in Iran: A Diversified System Despite State Attempts at Unification and StandardisationMaryam RutnerIndex