Women, Leadership and Mosques: Contemporary Islamic Authority
Conference and Edited Volume
University of Oxford, St Antony’s College, October 16-17 2009

EVENT UPDATES
The conference will start at 8:30AM on Saturday and Sunday, October 16 and 17, 2009 at St Antony's College. The full conference agenda is here. The organizers have put together a page with logistical information to aid conference attendees. Contact Hilary Kalmbach with questions or inquiries. Please note that the conference sessions are restricted to paper presenters and other participants.

Please join us on Friday evening for our public film screening of two documentaries about female activities in mosques, Veiled Voices and Women's Mosques: A Space for Women. It will be held from 5:15-7:30PM on Friday, October 16 in St Anne's College (Seminar Room 7 in the Ruth Deech Building). For more details, click here.

This conference is generously sponsored by St Antony's College and University of Oxford's Faculty of Oriental Studies.

For information about the follow-up mailing list and research network click here.

OUR TOPIC
In the last two or three decades, Muslim women from around the world have overcome significant barriers to carve out positions as teachers and preachers in mosques and madrassas. These women have gradually expanded activities for women within mosque and madrassas, spaces which have long been centres of Islamic authority but from which women have traditionally been excluded or marginalised.

The acceptance of female leadership in these spaces is a significant change from much (but not all of) historical practice, signallying the mainstream acceptance of (some forms of) female Islamic leadership. The nature, dynamics and scope of female leadership activities within mosques vary widely, with differences between and within North and West Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and various communities in North America and Europe.

This conference brings together scholars with geographically-diverse expertise with the aim of applying their knowledge of specific cases of female Islamic leadership to larger questions of changes in the structure of Islamic religious authority.

This conference and the edited volume that will be published from its proceedings marks the first attempt to bring together fully-contextualized accounts of female Islamic leadership from across the globe, uniting the accounts of scholars normally divided by discipline, area specialization and research language.

WHO WE ARE
The conference is being organized by HILARY KALMBACH and DR MASOODA BANO.

Masooda Bano is an ESRC postdoctoral fellow at Oxford’s Department of International Development and has an article in the Journal of Islamic Studies (18:1, 2007) as well as a forthcoming monograph on Pakistani madrasas.

Hilary Kalmbach is an Oxford doctoral student whose master’s thesis on the religious authority of female mosque instructors in Syria won the 2007 BRISMES Graduate Article Prize and was subsequently published in the British Journal for Middle Eastern Studies (35:1, 2008). Her current work includes looking at the historical dimensions of this phenomenon.

Our panel chairs include PROFESSOR FRANCIS ROBINSON (Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, University of Oxford's Faculty of History and Brasenose College, and Royal Holloway, University of London), DR WALTER ARMBRUST (University of Oxford's Middle East Centre and St Antony's College), PROFESSOR DAVID PARKIN (University of Oxford's School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and All Souls College), and DR KAREN BAUER (Institute for Ismaili Studies). DR LUC BOROT (Director, Maison Française d'Oxford) is joining us as a guest speaker.

Our participants include MARIA JASCHOK, Director, International Gender Studies Centre, University of Oxford; NELLY VAN DOORN-HARDER, Professor, Department of Religion, Wake Forest University; CATHARINA RAUDVERE, Professor, History of Religions, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen; PATRICIA JEFFERY, Professor of Sociology, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh; MONA HASSAN, Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies, Duke University; ROJA FAZAELI, Lecturer, Trinity College Dublin (presenting paper co-authored with MIRJAM KÜNKLER, Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University); MARGARET J. RAUSCH, Assistant Professor, Religious Studies, University of Kansas; JANET BAUER, Associate Professor, Trinity College (Hartford, CT); PETRA KUPPINGER, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Monmouth College; AGATA S. NALBORCZYK, Assistant Professor, Department for European Islam Studies, University of Warsaw; JULIANE HAMMER, Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies, George Mason University; AMELIE LE RENARD, PhD candidate and Teaching Assistant, Sciences Po, Paris; SARAH ISLAM, MA candidate, Princeton University; MATTHEW PIERCE, PhD Candidate, Islamic Studies, Boston University; NATHAL M. DESSING, Researcher, Leiden Institute for Religious Studies, Leiden University; PETRA BLEISCH BOUZAR, PhD candidate, University of Fribourg, Switzerland; ELS VANDERWAEREN, Research Fellow, Centre for Migration and Intercultural Studies, Antwerp University; NICK MICINSKI, Young UnLtd Research Coordinator, UnLtd- The Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship; HIROKO MINESAKI, Research Fellow, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science; Institute of Oriental Cultures, University of Tokyo; PIA KARLSSON MINGANTI, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Ethnology, Stockholm University; RIEM SPIELHAUS, PhD Candidate, Humbolt University Berlin; and UTA LEHMANN, Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS), University of Osnabrueck.