Forgotten Histories of Female Religious Authority in Islam

Abstract

The chapter presents a survey of various instances in which Muslim women, both Sunni and Shiʿi, have become learned in the Islamic religious sciences and wielded religious authority, concentrating on women hadith experts and women jurists. The chapter proposes that the frequent near complete neglect of women as religious authorities throughout the Islamic world during the various historical periods is belied by an objective consideration of the evidence on the ground, whether historical or contemporary. Rather than a general absence of the phenomenon, there is great diversity across time and space regarding the question of whether women were regarded as religious authorities, and if so, in what function precisely and to what effect.