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

599 Pages·2011·3.023 MB·English

by  Masooda Bano, Hilary Kalmbach

Women, Leadership, and Mosques
Women and Gender
The Middle East and the Islamic World
Editors
Margot Badran
Valentine Moghadam
VOLUME 11
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/wg
Women, Leadership, and
Mosques
Changes in Contemporary Islamic
Authority
Edited by
Masooda Bano and Hilary Kalmbach
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2012
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Women, leadership, and mosques : changes in contemporary Islamic authority /
edited by Masooda Bano and Hilary Kalmbach.
p. cm. — (Women and gender ; v. 11)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-21146-9 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Muslim women—21st century.
2. Muslim women—Conduct of life. 3. Muslim women—Religious life. 4. Sex role—
Religious aspects—Islam. I. Bano, Masooda, 1973– II. Kalmbach, Hilary.
HQ1170.W598 2012
305.48’697—dc23
2011042185
ISSN 1570-7628
ISBN 978 90 04 21146 9 (hardback)
ISBN 978 90 04 20936 7 (e-book)
Copyright 2012 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
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Fees are subject to change.
CONTENTS
Preface ................................................................................................. ix
Author Biographies ........................................................................... xiii
Introduction: Islamic Authority and the Study of Female
Religious Leaders ............................................................................... 1
Hilary Kalmbach
SECTION I
SPACE FOR FEMALE AUTHORITY:
MALE INVITATION, STATE INTERVENTION,
AND FEMALE INITIATIVE
Introduction to Section I .................................................................. 31
1.1 Sources of Authority: Female Ahong and Qingzhen Nüsi
(Women’s Mosques) in China ............................................... 37
Maria Jaschok
1.2 Women Mosque Preachers and Spiritual Guides:
Publicizing and Negotiating Women’s Religious
Authority in Morocco ............................................................. 59
Margaret J. Rausch
1.3 Reshaping Religious Authority in Contemporary Turkey:
State-Sponsored Female Preachers ........................................ 85
Mona Hassan
1.4 From Qurʾānic Circles to the Internet: Gender Segregation
and the Rise of Female Preachers in Saudi Arabia ............ 105
Amélie Le Renard
1.5 The Life of Two Mujtahidahs: Female Religious
Authority in Twentieth-Century Iran .................................. 127
Mirjam Künkler and Roja Fazaeli
1.6 The Qubaysīyyāt: The Growth of an International
Muslim Women’s Revivalist Movement from Syria
(1960–2008) ............................................................................... 161
Sarah Islam
vi contents
SECTION II
ESTABLISHING FEMALE AUTHORITY:
LIMITATIONS, SPACES, AND STRATEGIES
FOR TEACHING AND PREACHING
Introduction to Section II ................................................................ 187
2.1 Leading by Example? Women Madrasah Teachers in
Rural North India ................................................................... 195
Patricia Jeffery, Roger Jeffery, and Craig Jeffrey
2.2 Thinking for Oneself? Forms and Elements of Religious
Authority in Dutch Muslim Women’s Groups ................. 217
Nathal M. Dessing
2.3 Celebrating Miss Muslim Pageants and Opposing Rock
Concerts: Contrasting the Religious Authority and
Leadership of Two Muslim Women in Kazan .................. 235
N. R. Micinski
2.4 Textual and Ritual Command: Muslim Women as
Keepers and Transmitters of Interpretive Domains in
Contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina ............................. 259
Catharina Raudvere
2.5 “She is always present”: Female Leadership and Informal
Authority in a Swiss Muslim Women’s Association ........ 279
Petra Bleisch Bouzar
2.6 Muslimahs’ Impact on and Acquisition of Islamic
Religious Authority in Flanders ........................................... 301
Els Vanderwaeren
2.7 Women, Leadership, and Participation in Mosques and
Beyond: Notes from Stuttgart, Germany ............................ 323
Petra Kuppinger
2.8 Remembering Fātịmah: New Means of Legitimizing
Female Authority in Contemporary Shīʿī Discourse ........ 345
Matthew Pierce
contents vii
SECTION III
THE IMPACT OF AUTHORITY ON MUSLIM WOMEN,
MUSLIM SOCIETIES, AND CONCEPTIONS
OF ISLAMIC AUTHORITY
Introduction to Section III ............................................................... 365
3.1 Challenging from Within: Youth Associations and
Female Leadership in Swedish Mosques .............................. 371
Pia Karlsson Minganti
3.2 Gender Strategy and Authority in Islamic Discourses:
Female Preachers in Contemporary Egypt .......................... 393
Hiroko Minesaki
3.3 Translating Text to Context: Muslim Women Activists
in Indonesia .............................................................................. 413
Pieternella van Doorn-Harder
3.4 Making Islam Relevant: Female Authority and
Representation of Islam in Germany .................................... 437
Riem Spielhaus
3.5 Activism as Embodied Tafsīr: Negotiating Women’s
Authority, Leadership, and Space in North America ........ 457
Juliane Hammer
3.6 Women’s Rights to Mosque Space: Access and
Participation in Cape Town Mosques .................................. 481
Uta Christina Lehmann
Conclusion: Female Leadership in Mosques:
An Evolving Narrative ...................................................................... 507
Masooda Bano
Glossary ............................................................................................... 535
Index .................................................................................................... 557

PREFACE
The ability of women to exercise various types of Islamic religious
authority has increased significantly since the early twentieth century,
especially during the last two or three decades. Scholarship, however,
has focused overwhelmingly on certain facets of this increase, in par-
ticular female leadership in Sufi groups and attempts to reinterpret
Islam to accommodate gender equality, whether through an explicitly
feminist framework or not. Largely missing from the literature is seri-
ous analysis of the growing acceptance of women within mosques and
madrasahs, spaces which have long been centers of Islamic author-
ity, but which have traditionally excluded or marginalized women.
The acceptance of female leadership and activities in these spaces is
a significant change from historic practices, signaling the mainstream
acceptance of (some forms of ) female Islamic leadership.
Intellectual curiosity about the causes, parameters, and conse-
quences of this shift led us to organize a conference that was entitled
Women, Leadership, and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Islamic
Authority and was held at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford,
in October 2009. Our goal was to keep a tight focus on changes in
the formal sphere of religious authority—the mosque and madrasah—
while bringing together a geographically and methodologically diverse
range of papers discussing female leaders in both Muslim majority and
minority contexts. We invited a number of leading scholars already
working on this under-researched topic and issued a call for papers.
We were pleasantly surprised when this call yielded an overwhelm-
ing response, including sixty abstracts of good quality. This interest—
from both leading academics and younger scholars in the US, Europe,
Africa, and Asia—further confirmed the timely nature of our project.
We expanded the number of places at the conference, but had to make
many difficult decisions in selecting the twenty-one papers that were
presented there, twenty of which are presented in the volume.
While reviewing the accepted abstracts, we identified three dominant
themes related to female leadership: factors related to its emergence,
factors related to its consolidation, and factors related to its impact—
specifically, the multiple ways in which these women use their Islamic
authority to reinforce or change norms within their communities.
x preface
Concentrating on these three themes helped focus our analytical work
before, during, and after the conference, as we moved towards produc-
tion of this volume.
We asked each participant to prepare an in-depth study of the author-
ity of a female leader or leaders in their region of study that focused
on one of our three themes and addressed mosque or madrasah space.
Because it was a publication-driven conference, we required authors to
submit papers in advance for pre-circulation, and structured the con-
ference such that the emphasis was on dialogue instead of presentation.
At the conference itself, we were fortunate to have Walter Armbrust (a
co-sponsor of the project), Francis Robinson, David Parkin, and Karen
Bauer chair sessions and help steer debates, which greatly enriched the
quality of discussion. The end result was an extremely stimulating and
enriching debate over two days that highlighted the complexities of
each theme, and provided each participant with focused feedback on
their paper that was incorporated into subsequent revisions. We hope
to have captured the depth of these debates in our introductory and
concluding pieces.
We are extremely grateful to have been able to work with such a
skilled and dedicated pool of authors. Unsurprisingly, a volume of this
scale posed many logistical challenges, and we had to work hard to
ensure consistency in thematic depth as well as style across the chap-
ters. Interestingly, it was often easier to fix the former than the latter.
We faced several challenges related to terminology and translation
that should be mentioned at the outset.
With respect to translation of terms, we have let our authors decide
when to preserve local terminology and when to translate into English,
which has resulted in significant presence of foreign words in the text.
Given the diversity of contexts represented in this volume, it is also
important to recognize that the meaning of commonly used terms—
often those of Arabic origin—shifts in important ways over time and
space, and these terms need to be read and interpreted in the context
of each chapter.
To assist our readers, our editor at Brill suggested that we try to cap-
ture these tensions by providing two sets of glossaries. First, there is a
standard glossary, which lists all the foreign terms and abbreviations
used in the volume with translations. In addition, we have prepared
a second glossary that groups terms describing female leaders and
leadership activities thematically, so that the reader can get a sense of