Female Religious Authority in Shi'i Islam

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. – Karen Bauer, Senior Research Associate, The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London
This masterfully edited volume brings together twelve original contributions that not only enhance our understanding of female religious authority in Shiʿi Islam across time and space but also address wider conceptual debates in Islamic Studies. It is a brilliant complement to recent growth in scholarship on female religious authority in Sunni Islam; by providing opportunity for comparative analysis, it is of equal interest to scholars and students working on Shiʿi and non-Shiʿi contexts. – Masooda Bano, Professor of Development Studies, University of Oxford
Female Religious Authorities in Shi’i Islam, Past and Present is the first study (not only in English but also in Middle Eastern languages) on the role of female religious authority in the Shi’i tradition from Fatima and Umm Salama to contemporary female authorities such as Amina Bint al-Huda and Nuṣrat Amīn, as well as the Twelver Shi‘i legal tradition on women. Mirjam Künkler and Devin J. Stewart’s book presents the forgotten history of female religious authority in Islam. It provides essential first-hand materials for researchers of Islamic religious authority, Shiʿism, and especially the role of women in the Islamic tradition. – Mohsen Kadivar, Research Professor in the Department of Religious Studies, Duke University
Female Religious Authorities in Shi’i Islam, Past and Present is the first study (not only in English but also in Middle Eastern languages) on the role of female religious authority in the Shi’i tradition from Fatima and Umm Salama to contemporary female authorities such as Amina Bint al-Huda and Nuṣrat Amīn, as well as the Twelver Shi‘i legal tradition on women. Mirjam Künkler and Devin J. Stewart’s book presents the forgotten history of female religious authority in Islam. It provides essential first-hand materials for researchers of Islamic religious authority, Shiʿism, and especially the role of women in the Islamic tradition. – Mohsen Kadivar, Research Professor in the Department of Religious Studies, Duke University

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.

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