Women, Leadership, and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority

This volume is the first to bring together analysis of contemporary female religious leadership in ideologically-diverse Muslim communities in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, with chapters discussing the emergence, consolidation, and impact of female Islamic authority.

Masooda Bano is Associate Professor at the Oxford Department of International Development. She studies Islamic movements in comparative context. She is the author of The Rational Believer: Choices and Decisions in the Madrasas of Pakistan (Cornell University Press 2012) and has co-edited Shaping Global Islamic Discourses: The Role of al-Azhar, al-Medina, and al-Mustafa (Edinburgh University Press 2015).

Dr Hilary Kalmbach is a cultural and social historian based at the University of Sussex. She is the first director of MENACS, the Middle East and North Africa Centre at Sussex. Her research focuses on Islam and its interaction with Middle Eastern cultures and societies over the past 200 years, with particular attention paid to authority, knowledge, education, and gender. Her article, ＂Social and Religious Change in Damascus: One Case of Female Islamic Religious Authority,＂ won the inaugural British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) Graduate Article Prize.

Contributors to the volume include PETRA BLEISCH BOUZAR, NATHAL M. DESSING, ROJA FAZAELI, JULIANE HAMMER, MONA HASSAN, SARAH ISLAM, MARIA JASCHOK, PATRICIA JEFFERY, ROGER JEFFERY, CRAIG JEFFREY, MIRJAM KÜNKLER, PETRA KUPPINGER, UTA LEHMANN, NICK MICINSKI, HIROKO MINESAKI, PIA KARLSSON MINGANTI, MATTHEW PIERCE, CATHARINA RAUDVERE, MARGARET J. RAUSCH, AMÉLIE LE RENARD, RIEM SPIELHAUS, NELLY VAN DOORN-HARDER, and ELS VANDERWAEREN