The ‘ Ālimāt of Sayyida Zaynab: Female Shi‘i Religious Authority in a Syrian Seminary

Between 2007 and 2010, the hawza of the Syrian shrine-town of Sayyida Zaynab, located south of Damascus, consisted of twenty-one individual seminaries, eleven of which ran women’s sections. The largest of these was the Zaynabiyya founded by Sayyid Hassan al-Shirazi (d. 1980). The chapter analyses the teaching in Zaynabiyya seminary, in particular the ways in which different female teachers constructed their religious authority through pious activities and various invocations of Sayyida Zaynab’s precedents. It also discusses the examples of ritual mourning gathering leaders or mullayāt, who also commanded religious authority in Sayyida Zaynab. The chapter examines the kinds of authority and influence that were available to women of differing backgrounds, as well as the diachronic conditions that enabled women to claim authority in the shrine-town of Sayyida Zaynab.