New book series on Women Interpreting Islamic Law
Edinburgh University Press has launched a new book series, co-edited by Professor Masooda Bano, that will provide a home for new scholarship on women’s Islamic-juristic authority from the prophet’s era until today.
About the series
The question of who has authority is one of the core questions in Islam: it determines whom believers listen to, whom they follow in ritual practices, and what they understand Islamic law to mean. Islamic authority has been studied with a particular focus on the role of male scholars, ʿulamāʾ, in acquiring expertise in the Islamic legal sources, particularly the Qur’an and Hadith. However, there were and are influential women (ʿalimāt, muftiyāt, qadiyāt, mujtahidāt) in Islam’s past and present who exercise(d) juristic authority, by issuing fatwas, informing Islamic legal court judgments, writing judicial treatises, and contributing to highly expert juristic scholarship. This series features the best of new scholarship on women who built their religious authority primarily through writing, interpreting or commenting on Islamic legal and juristic texts.
The series is edited by Professor Masooda Bano, Professor Mirjam Künkler, and Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl.
It will prioritize empirically rich single-authored monographs but is also open to publishing edited volumes. Where deemed sufficiently ground-breaking, the series will also include translations of women’s juristic treatises and collections of fatwas or other juristic source texts.