Female Shi‘i seminary teachers in Syria can all be classified according to sociologist Max Weber’s three categories of religious authority – traditional, charismatic, and legal-rational – or as a combination of categories. Traditional authority is based on customary status as exemplified by hereditary monarchy. This also pertains to teachers who hail from renowned scholarly families. Charismatic authority requires an individual to have charm or strength of character. Legal-rational authority presupposes institutionalised hierarchies and is exercised by office-holders. In contexts such as Bahrain and Lebanon legal-rational authority and authenticated, disciplined piety have recently become the dominant form of Shi'i religiosity. However, in Syria female Shi'i leaders were most effective when they were able to resort to traditional and charismatic forms of authority because seminaries were operating in a state of exception. Moreover, as this paper will demonstrate, charismatic and traditional modes of authority among Shi'i 'alimat in pre-revolutionary Syria from roughly 2003 to 2010 were strengthened discursively because 'aql, which constituted their educational telos, emphasises virtue rather than discipline. Based on ethnographic research conducted in the Syrian shrine and town of Sayyida Zaynab between 2007 and 2010, this paper interrogates the specific content of this form of piety (moral reason) as well as the authority of the female teachers who support it. This paper begins by introducing the seminaries in the Syrian shrine-town of Sayyida Zaynab, approximately fifteen kilometres south of Damascus (as they existed prior to the 2011 Syrian Uprising). As the seminaries’ students and teachers were for the most part transient Iraqi asylum seekers, institutional structures played an extraordinary role in shaping the kind of authority and education women could have. The paper examines the following questions: What constitutes Shi'i learning and knowledge in this context? How do seminaries engender learning? What makes a Shi'i woman into a leader and an 'alima? Can women become 'alimat outside of the seminary and what roles do they play in the public sphere? I answer these questions primarily by examining the teachers and students at the Zaynabiyya seminary. Although the analysis is based on a narrow snap-shot, it makes occasional wider claims about Shi'i female leadership and learning in pre-revolutionary Syria.