 Female Leadership in Shia Islam: Women on the Way from Mujtahid to Marja’Akif Tahiiev ()
Societies, 2024, vol. 14, issue 1, 1-10 Abstract: Marja’ al-taqlid are Shia religious scholars of the highest level, something which takes decades to achieve. At present, most Shia scholars agree that women cannot be Marja’, i.e., create religious rulings for other people. But there is a space for discourse, and there are even a few scholars who disagree with the mainstream narrative. In this paper, I argue that, with time, the number of these scholars will increase, since Shia Islamic thought is ‘live’ and flexible, and adapts to the changing social conditions. The main obstacles that prevented women from reaching this level were the conservative views of some scholars and the lack of access to education. As the number of women with religious education constantly increases, the appearance of a female Marja’ will be a matter of time, but will still cause some resistance from some patriarchal members of society. Keywords: women in Islam; Shi’ism/Shia Islam; Islamic law; Fiqh/Islamic jurisprudence; ijtihad; women’s rights (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsoctx:v:14:y:2024:i:1:p:2-:d:1312437 Access Statistics for this article Societies is currently edited by Ms. Farrah Sun More articles in Societies from MDPI |
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