“She is Always Present”: Female Leadership and Informal Authority in a Swiss Muslim...

“She is Always Present”: Female Leadership and Informal Authority in a Swiss Muslim Women’s Association

Introduction to the chapter

In Switzerland, as in the world in general, female leadership and religious authority within mosques is rare and research on this issue is virtually nonexistent. All of the approximately three hundred prayer rooms established in this small country are guided by men, though most contain a separate space or room for women. Therefore, some Muslim women gather in associations in accordance with Swiss civil law (usually founded by Swiss converts) or in discussion circles (usually run by Muslim women from Bosnia, Kosovo, Turkey, or North Africa), both of which are more or less attached to a mosque. One common goal of these groups and associations is to be centers of religious education that host classes—such as the study of the Qurʾān and ḥadīth, or introduction to prayer—according to their members’ needs. This transmission of religious knowledge is intimately linked to religious authority and leadership. The groups and associations usually lack their own officially trained religious (female) leader, and even the mosques themselves are not always able to engage an imām. This prompts the following questions: Who is teaching these classes? Who is seen as a religious authority within and outside the association? and Which religious questions or problems are answered or solved by different religious authorities and leaders?

In:  Masooda Bano and Hilary E. Kalmbach (eds.), Women, Leadership, and Mosques. Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority, Leiden, Brill, 2012, pp. 279–300