Introduction: The New Voices of Muslim Women Theologians

While it is clear that, historically and doctrinally, there is no barrier to females commenting on and interpreting Islamic sacred texts, after the first generation of Muslims, women primarily functioned as transmitters rather than as interpreters of the tradition.¹ It is only with modernity and the rise of mass literacy that Muslim women, beyond the circle of a few elite scholarly families, began to have access to the education and tools needed to engage in writing interpretive theology. Of course, this could also be said to a greater or lesser extent of all major religious traditions. While much of this