by Zhinia Noorian and Brian Griffith.
Back during the Arab–Persian Abbasid empire, before women were barred from religious leadership, we find records of many female officials or scholars. Queen Qatr al-Nada, the wife of caliph al Mu’tadid (r. 892–902 CE), served as court judge, passing verdicts on legal cases brought by the public at her Friday audiences. As an official representative of the caliph, she received foreign ambassadors and advised ministers of state. During the 1000s CE, a female scholar named Shayka Shada was known as “the Pride of Women,” serving as a professor of religion, law, history, and literature in the schools and mosques of the Baghdad-based caliphate. A vast study by Mohammad Akram Nadwi collected references to female scholars in medieval Islam. He reported, “I thought I’d find maybe twenty or thirty women.” He ended up finding close to 8,000.
Only later, during the 1500s, were Persian women formally barred from public teaching about religion. Such roles were reserved for clerics certified by schools that were only open to men. Then, as in medieval Christianity, men appeared to take monopoly control of religion. But still, many women retained leadership by dint of popular appeal, without any need for institutional power. Their authority came from their personal qualities, not from any position of rank or office. As always, there was a profound difference between authority born of respect, and externally imposed dominance. And as already noted concerning Islam as a cult of love, Persia’s mothers remained influential teachers of popular religion, in every century and in most families.
From Mother Persia: Women in Iran’s History, by Zhinia Noorian and Brian Griffith