The ultimate authority in Shi?i Islam rests with the Imams. Much has been written about what legitimates an Imam and confirms his authority. This paper looks at the role ascribed to Umm Salamah in legitimating three of the twelve Imams, most importantly ?Ali, his son al-Husayn and his son Zayn al-?Abidin. It also looks at how she kept the na??, designating the Imams as the rightful and legitimate authority, safe until they were able to retrieve it to assume their rightful position and enact their authority. The paper is in three parts and starts by looking at the term ahl al-bayt and its interpretations, as it shapes the Imamate and is a term of contention between Sunnis and Shi?is. This is followed by introducing Umm Salamah and the reasons she was particularly revered in Shi?i traditions, as well as her main narrations from the Prophet in support of the ahl al-bayt in general and ?Ali in particular, such as for example ?ad?th al-kis??, ?ad?th Ghad?r Khumm, ?ad?th al-manzalah, as well as ?ad?th al-thaqalayn. These reports emphasize ?Ali’s exclusive rights to succeed the Prophet, and therefore by extension the right of his progeny to the Imamate. Finally, the last part looks at the Imam’s authority and the necessity of a na??, designating the Imam as legitimate and Umm Salamah’s role that earned her the honorific ??fi?at al-na?? (‘Keeper of the na??’). The paper concludes that while the Imamate was a distinctly male prerogative, the na?? granting legitimacy was delivered to them by a woman, whether it was Umm Salamah as in the majority of reports, or Fatimah bt. al-Husayn, or Zaynab bt. ?Ali, as found in some solitary reports. In serving this crucial role, the women of ahl al-bayt, including the Prophet’s wife Umm Salmah in particular, come to share in a significant fashion in legitimating the authority of the Imams.

This paper examines works dedicated to princesses of the Safavid dynasty, finding that the authors and translators of these works regularly portrayed the princesses as religious and temporal authorities, supplementing their being cast—those who were unmarried, in any case—as brides of the Twelfth Imam in other contexts, connecting their own authority with that of the Imam of the Age while also allowing them to maintain an autonomy, being free of obligations to an ordinary husband, that their peers could enjoy. The writers repeatedly styled the princesses as modern incarnations of Bilqis, the Queen of Sheba, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, and furthermore granted them titles such as murawwij al-madhhab, “propagator of the sect,” which ordinarily were reserved for the Safavid kings. These perhaps surprising titles and epithets, which cannot be dismissed as frivolous hyperbole, indicate an acceptance of female members of the Safavid dynasty as participants in the divinely sanctioned sovereignty accorded to the Shahs.

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.

The chapter presents a survey of various instances in which Muslim women in Twelver Shi?ism have become learned in the Islamic religious sciences and wielded religious authority, concentrating on women hadith experts and women jurists. The paper makes the point that the frequent total neglect of women as religious authorities throughout the Islamic world during the various historical periods is belied by an objective consideration of the evidence on the ground, whether historical or contemporary. The paper ends with a plea for the programmatic examination of the factors that enable women to wield authority in some Islamic contexts but not in others.