ABSTRACT
Recent decades have seen important changes, not only in religious leadership in Muslim societies, but in the very nature of religious authority and how the message and teachings of Islam are communicated and received by a mass audience. One aspect of that change is in the population itself. Most Muslim majority nation-states that emerged in the postcolonial era promoted government supported mass education up to the university level. For the fi rst time such state education became accessible to males and females from diverse class backgrounds, raising both rates of literacy and expectations for meaningful employment on the part of graduates.
