Adjacent Authority: Madam Leila’s Islamic Pedagogy, Radio Psychology, and Gendered Boundary-Work on Tanzania’s Swahili Coast

This paper examines how Tanzanian media personality Leila Abubakar Chamshama (“Madam Leila”) constructs Islamic authority as a woman without traditional scholarly training through her weekly “Mondays with the Psychologist” segments on Radio Nuur in Tanga. Drawing on ethnographic observation, linguistic analysis, and recordings from 2023–2025, I argue that Madam Leila exemplifies adjacent authority—a hybrid, gendered mode of legitimacy grounded in Islamic moral discourse, professional psychological expertise, Swahili concepts of sitara and heshima, and the affordances of contemporary Islamic media. Through trilingual code‑switching and a mix of therapeutic and Islamic idioms, she offers ethical guidance to mixed‑gender publics while strategically deferring to male scholars on doctrinal matters. Her broadcasts expose a paradox: she incisively critiques structural male behavior yet often counsels women to accommodate those very patterns. The case illustrates how Islamic media in East Africa expand women’s public religious voice even as they reproduce enduring gendered constraints.