Contemporary trends amongst Muslim women globally show the increasing attention women are paying towards the study of religious texts. These developments signal the ways in which modern forms of knowledge and learning have not impeded but braced the pursuit of religious knowledge among women. Despite such widening participation of women in religious learning, we are only beginning to understand how women are engaged in the pursuit of religious knowledge and how they come to assume the mantle of an authoritative voice in the field of religious learning. Similarly, the relationship between religious learning and self (re)formation amongst Muslim women remains under explored. This is the case, in part, because academic studies of Muslim religious scholarship, authority and learning have often taken the male participant as the subject of religious knowledge and locus from where it is produced. This panel will seek to expand an understanding of religious learning and authority in Islam as it is reconceptualized through the frame of gender, modernity and religious forms of knowledge. Participants will explore the diverse and unexpected ways in which the field and forms of religious learning have been constituted both historically and contemporaneously by Muslim women. Questions that animate this panel include: how does women's engagement with Muslim textual sources, rituals and practices, both historically and in the present, offer innovative ways to rethink the field of Islamic learning and knowledge? How do modern textual practices and knowledge categories intertwine with religious discourse to shape understandings of Islamic beliefs? How are belief and practice mutually reconstituted through and for the acquisition of religious knowledge? How are such forms of knowledge and practice deployed in the quest to become the 'authentic' Muslim subject? Papers that offer an historical, contemporary, or a theoretical focus will be given full consideration.

Please send an abstract of approximately 250 words including your name, institutional affiliation, and contact to Nadia Loan, PhD candidate, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University at nl254@columbia.edu by March 26th, 2009.