Gender and Succession in Medieval and Early Modern Islam

Alyssa Gabbay is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. She received her PhD (for which she won the Foundation for Iranian Studies award for best dissertation) in 2007 from the University of Chicago. She is the author of many peer-reviewed articles and chapters and Islamic Tolerance, published by Routledge in 2010. She will shortly be publishing The New Moon of Perfection and Other Prefaces.

• Transliteration, Periodization, and DatesList of FiguresIntroductionPart I: Mothers1. Umms and Wombs: How and (Maybe) Why Shi‘is Reckoned Descent Through Fatima2. Other Mothers, Other SonsPart II: Heiresses3. Heiress to the Prophet: Fatima, Fadak and Female Inheritance4. Endowing Agency: Daughters, Waqfs, and Semi-Matrilineal InheritancePart III: Successors5. Speaking in Her Father’s Name: Fatima as Successor to the Prophet Muhammad6. Fatima’s Royal Shadow: Muslim Female Rulers’ Quest for Legitimacy and SovereigntyEpilogue: Whither Fatima?NotesBibliography

Will be seen as a major contribution to the discussion of gendered inheritance in Islam, and the mechanisms whereby Muslim female authority was safeguarded and passed on to new generations.