Muslim Women and Devotional Life

Abstract

Abstract Muslim women’s devotional lives have been largely understood within two paradigms: women’s practices as alternatives to those of men and the historical and contemporary recovery of women’s religious learning and authority. This chapter engages with ontological questions posed and complicated by each paradigm. On one hand, the “women’s alternative practices” paradigm raises the question of whether women’s-only rituals are empowering or if the same gender hierarchy and women’s exclusion from public ritual life that necessitates the need for alternative religious practices is an acceptance of an inferior or subordinate ontological status as devotional beings. On the other hand, the “recovery” paradigm asks whether a relationship to the Divine unmediated by men or gender norms is made possible through access to religious education, egalitarian interpretations of Islamic texts, the need for additional theological, ethical, and philosophical materials within the Islamic religious tradition, or a combination of all.