Female mosque participants invoke juristic plurality to challenge male religious authority.
Evidence
The principle of talfiq not only informed the practices of upper..class mosque participants, but was also commonly evoked in poor neighborhoods. For example, a woman who wore the full body and face veil once challenged the_ male imam of the Ayesha mosque (fr the humble Cairene suburb), asking whether it was appropriate for him to deliver a dars to women without a barrier between them. The imam responded that there was no clear ruling in the Quran or the Q.adith on this issue; the woman, unsatisfi with this answer, posed the same question to other male imams of adj acent mosques. When attacked by her neighbors for sowing seeds of social dis.. cord (jitna in the community by doubting their local imam’s words, this woman defended herself by arguing that it was her right to determine the most correct ruling (�ukm �al). ) on a religious is.. sue, an argument that seemed to convince her critics. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 620
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Relates to the reader’s interest in micro-level religious practice challenging institutional authority; parallels Milgrom’s work on how institutional norms evolve from below.
Related
- Juristic pluralism is asserted by working-class women, not only elites (similarity 0.90)
- Women justify religious leadership through juristic disagreement, not gender equality (similarity 0.85)
- Islamic doctrine is contested within the mosque movement over how principles apply in practice (similarity 0.82)
- Pious women’s conflicts with authority do not reduce to gender-equality arguments. (similarity 0.81)
- Women’s mosque teaching is historically unprecedented in Egypt and reshaped male-centered Islamic pedagogy. (similarity 0.80)