ABSTRACT
Historically, the majority of Muslims have regarded it as impermissible for a Muslim woman to act as an imām and lead men in congregational prayers. A small number of Muslims today are beginning to challenge this stance, and they face considerable opposition from the broader Muslim community. Likewise, women have historically been regarded as legally unqualified to hold high public office. Though there is more openness today to the idea of women serving as political leaders, it still faces considerable opposition in conservative Muslim circles and in many Muslim countries where women’s leadership is regarded as contrary to Islamic teachings. These prohibitions are articulated in Islamic law as specific legal rulings pertaining to prayer, judicial procedure and political authority. This research investigates the post-formative Islamic legal literature to explore why Muslim jurists arrived at those legal rulings, and why those rulings have persisted. The Islamic legal corpus provides a body of rulings governing religious and worldly practices. Some of these rulings define the role of women in religion and society, including those which prohibit women from assuming various positions of leadership. Traditionally minded Muslims defend these rulings as the inevitable consequence of embracing the Qur’an and Sunnah as the primary sources of law. Recently, feminist scholarship has challenged this assumption, arguing that such rulings are dependent upon the patriarchal nature of the society in which Islamic law developed, which they claim must have inevitably introduced bias into the interpretations of the (almost exclusively male) Muslim juristic community. For instance, Amina Wadud contends that ‘interpretations of the textual sources, applications of those interpretations when constructing laws to govern personal and private Islamic affairs and to construct public policies, and institutions to control Islamic policies and authority, are based upon male interpretive privilege’.1
