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Mirjam Künkler is a Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Göttingen and currently a senior research fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. Before joining Göttingen, she taught Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, where she also directed the Oxford-Princeton research cluster on “Traditional authority and transnational religious networks in contemporary Shi’i Islam” and co-directed the Luce Program on “Religion and International Affairs” for several years.
Künkler has guest-edited special issues and symposia for the journals Party Politics (March 2013), Cambridge Journal of Law and Religion (Jan 2013), Modern Asian Studies (March 2014), the American Behavioral Scientist (July 2016), and the Asian Studies Review (December 2016). Her books include Indonesia, Islam and Democracy (co-edited with Alfred Stepan) Columbia University Press, 2013, published in Arabic as Al-Dimokratia va al-Islam fi Indonisia, All Print Publishers, Beirut, 2015, A Secular Age Beyond the West, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming June 2017, as well as a volume co-edited with Devin Stewart on Female Religious Authority in Shi’i Islam, forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. She is a PI of the Iran Data Portal.
Training Women as Religious Professionals: Iran’s Shiite Seminaries
The state-run system of women’s religious seminaries in Iran is today probably the most successful in the entire Muslim world. No other country boasts so many women in its institutions of religious learning, and they enjoy popularity not only among Iranian women but Muslim women from all over the world. However, the scope of the religious education on offer for women is nonetheless limited. In this essay, Mirjam Künkler suggests why.
