Qur’anic Literacy as Women’s Empowerment: Cultivating Interpretive Authority at the Women’s Mosque of America
This study shows how the Women’s Mosque of America, an emergent women-only mosque in Los Angeles, is a useful locus to engage contemporary global debates about Islamic authority. In these debates, scholars of religion have not yet attended to the recent appearance of women-led mosques in the West, t...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
2021
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| In: |
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Year: 2021, Volume: 89, Issue: 4, Pages: 1434-1461 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | This study shows how the Women’s Mosque of America, an emergent women-only mosque in Los Angeles, is a useful locus to engage contemporary global debates about Islamic authority. In these debates, scholars of religion have not yet attended to the recent appearance of women-led mosques in the West, thereby overlooking American Muslim women as legitimate mediators of the Islamic tradition. This article takes seriously American Muslim women’s interventions in authority and analyzes the Women’s Mosque of America as a discursive space that arises from the genre of American Muslim feminist exegesis, which treats the Qur’an as an essentially gender-egalitarian text. Using a lived religions approach, I draw on a close reading of its inaugural sermon and ethnographic interviews with congregants to argue that the Women’s Mosque of America challenges hegemonic understandings of Islamic authority by advocating for English translations of the Qur’an and lay Muslims’ right to interpret scripture. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4585 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: American Academy of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/jaarel/lfab098 |