Female Religious Authority in Muslim Majority Contexts: Past Examples and Modern State-Initiatives

Abstract

This chapter addresses questions of female religious authority across early Islamic history and their modern developments in Iran in a comparative perspective. Public religious leadership has remained a male domain for much of Islamic history. Against an increase in state-sponsored female religious education across the Muslim world, this chapter provides an overview of training programs for women in Iran in comparison with Turkey. It is argued that these programs have the capacity to redefine Islamic authority and religious spaces through increased attention to women’s agency. As such female religious education programs are observed to be important, and in some contexts moderating, components of Islamic propagation. At the same time in both Iran and Turkey such programs remain part of a state propaganda apparatus designed to strengthen the social and political control of religion and religiosity.