Women’s Political Leadership: One Question and Two Divergent Fatwās

Abstract Women’s political leadership is one of the abiding controversial issues among Muslim scholars. The question of whether a Muslim woman can lead in her country is generally answered negatively by Muslim scholars, but some modern scholars explicitly support women’s political leadership without any restriction. Where the scholars stand on the issue is influenced by their social context. With the intent of examining the interaction between social context and Islamic legal methodologies in fatwās—Isalmic legal opinions—related to women, the author discusses as exemplary texts the fatwās issued by two well-known religious institutions, the Dār al-Iftā’ in Saudi Arabia and the Diyanet in Turkey. The institutions function in different social contexts: Saudi Arabia is a theocratic monarchy that applies Islamic law; Turkey is a democratic country whose legal system is based on a secular law. Through a detailed analysis of the spatio-temporal fatwās regarding women’s political leadership, the author provides insight into the influence of contextual elements during the process of issuing fatwās, suggesting that these differences of opinion among Muslim scholars and religious institutions will continue.