This panel examines how Islamic authority is being reconfigured across diverse global contexts, with attention to media, education, gender, and transregional connections. Rather than treating authority as fixed, our panelists explore how Muslim actors negotiate legitimacy within shifting social and institutional landscapes. Focusing on the Swahili Coast, one paper analyzes how a female religious figure builds influence through pedagogy and radio, showing how gendered expectations both constrain and enable new forms of authority. Another considers Islamic Studies in African universities, highlighting tensions between inherited scholarly traditions and contemporary academic frameworks, and the resulting negotiations over knowledge and legitimacy. A third expands the discussion to Latin America and the Caribbean, tracing how Muslim identities and authority are shaped through migration, minority positioning, and global networks. Together, these contributions reveal the dynamic, context-specific processes through which Islamic authority is mediated and reimagined across the globe.
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.
This paper examines how Islamic Studies is taught in African universities through a comparative analysis of Bayero University Kano and the University of Jos. It argues that university Islamic Studies programs occupy an epistemologically liminal space between the transmission of classical Islamic sciences — including fiqh, tafsīr, ḥadīth, and kalām — and the methodological demands of the modern academy. Drawing on curricular analysis, interviews, and madrasa comparisons, the study analyzes pedagogical design, language of instruction, and structures of scholarly authority. It highlights a linguistic and epistemological divide in which madrasa graduates often develop encyclopedic mastery of Arabic textual traditions, while university curricula are structured to provide training in critical historiography, research methodology, and interdisciplinary approaches to the academic study of Islam, though preliminary findings suggest uneven implementation. By placing these institutional formations in dialogue, the paper interrogates the future of Islamic Studies in African higher education.
This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Argentina, Barbados, Mexico, and the U.S./Mexico borderlands to examine emergent Muslim infrastructures and embodied forms of knowledge production beyond traditional centers of Islamic authority. Focusing on migrant shelters in Mexico, philanthropic and professional networks in the eastern Caribbean, and halal export initiatives in and from Argentina, I suggest that these so-called peripheries are generative sites of Islamic innovation and Muslim futurism. These cases recast religious authority as infrastructural, gendered, and commercially embedded, while challenging dominant frameworks that equate Muslim politics with state power or Islamism. In conversation with the theme “Futures / Future(s),” the paper suggests that Muslim communities in the Americas are crafting locally grounded yet globally entangled political and religious futures that reconfigure hierarchies of knowledge and representation within the contemporary landscapes of globalized Islam.