Gender and Islamic Authority

Banner photo: Sayyida Seynabou Mbathie (centre) at a Friday litany of her disciples, 2009, Dakar.

Since around 2009, a primary area of research for me has been the relationships between gender and Islamic authority in the Fayḍa Tijāniyya Sufi community in Senegal. I have especially focused on the growing number of female spiritual guides (muqaddamas) who lead both men and women. I have also interviewed women who perform Sufi chant (sikkar or dhikr) in large gatherings, an activity that has long been limited to men. I have looked at the historical and cultural conditions that have led women into these positions of religious authority without any apparent debate.

I am especially interested in how women perform roles and attributes conventionally associated with pious Muslim women—deferential wifehood, motherhood, interiority, cooking, etc.—in ways that amplify rather than diminish their authority (see the publications below).

My first book on this subject, Wrapping Authority: Women Islamic Leaders in a Sufi Movement in Dakar, Senegal (University of Toronto Press, 2018), was the 2020 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion First Runner Up (awarded by the Society for the Anthropology of Religion). I am also working on a second book that provides more historical and doctrinal background to the question of gender and authority in Sufism, tentatively entitled Women Who Are Men: Transforming Gender and Leadership in the Fayḍa Tijāniyya Sufi Community.

Photos on the topic can be found on my Flickr site.

Some publications so far on this topic:

• 2025. “Technologies of Self-Wrapping: Female Chanters in the Fayḍa Tijāniyya Sufi Community in Senegal.” Religions 16 (4): 423. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16040423.

• 2022. “Des mères qui sont des hommes : nouvelles autorités féminines au Sénégal.” In Le Sahel musulman entre soufisme et salafisme : subalternité, luttes de classement et transnationalisme, edited by Jean Schmitz, Abdel Wedoud Ould Cheikh, and Cédric Jourde, 317-344. Terres et gens d’islam. Paris: IISMM-Karthala.

• 2021. “Islam and the Question of Gender.” In Routledge Handbook of Islam in Africa, edited by Terje Østebø, 123–42. London: Routledge.

• 2019. “Women Who Are Men: Shaykha Maryam Niasse and the Qur’an in Dakar.” In Approaches to the Qur’an in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Zulfikar Hirji, 369–400. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• 2018. Wrapping Authority: Women Islamic Leaders in a Sufi Movement in Dakar, Senegal. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. (2020 Clifford Geertz Prize First Runner Up.)

• 2017. “Charismatic Discipleship: A Sufi Woman and the Divine Mission of Development in Senegal.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 87 (4): 832–852.

• 2016. “Entrepreneurial Discipleship: Cooking Up Women’s Sufi Leadership in Dakar.” In Cultural Entrepreneurship in Africa, edited by Ute Röschenthaler and Dorothea E. Schulz, 58–80. London: Routledge.

• 2014. “Picturing Islamic Authority:Gender Metaphors and Sufi Leadership in Senegal.” Islamic Africa 5 (2): 275–315.

• 2014. Britta Frede and Joseph Hill. “Introduction: En-Gendering Islamic Authority in West Africa.” Islamic Africa 5 (2): 131–165.

• 2014. Britta Frede and Joseph Hill, eds. En-gendering Islamic Authority in West Africa. Special issue of Islamic Africa 5 (2).

• 2013. “Niasse, Mariama Ibrahim.” Edited by John L. Esposito. Oxford Islamic Studies Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/opr/t343/e0087.

• 2010. “‘All Women Are Guides’:Sufi Leadership and Womanhood among Taalibe Baay in Senegal.” Journal of Religion in Africa 40.4: 375-412.