Women’s Authority in Patriarchal Social Movements: The Case of Female Salafi Preachers

How do women gain authority in patriarchal religious social movements and how does their authority differ from that of men? This paper examines the authority of female preachers in the Islamist Salafi movement through an analysis of 21,000 texts by 172 men and 43 women on the Salafi-oriented website saaid.net. Salafi gender ideology is not friendly to women’s authority, so why are so many women on this website? I argue that female preachers are useful to the Salafi movement because they can offer persuasive arguments in support of patriarchy rooted in their moral authority as women. This makes female preachers especially effective advocates against Western conceptions of women’s rights and allows them to reach different audiences than men. I find that women support their arguments differently than men. Women are much less likely than men to follow the traditional Salafi method of supporting claims with citations to the prophetic hadith tradition and are more likely to use their moral authority as women to make their claims persuasive. To show that female preachers help Salafis reach new audiences, I examine who reacts when men’s and women’s writings are publicized by the official saaid.net Twitter feed. I find that female preachers reach new audiences that are disproportionately female, but that both men and women respond to their writing. ∗Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I appreciate comments on earlier versions from Amaney Jamal, Marc Lynch, Mirjam Keunkler, Marsin Alshamary, Youssef Ben Ismail, Farah El-Sharif, Henri Lauzière, Jacob Olidort, Aaron Rock-Singer, and Ari Schriber, and participants at the NYU Center for Data Science, the Northeast Middle East Politics Working Group, the 2016 AALIMS conference, the 2016 MESA conference, and the Salafiyya Workshop held at Harvard on 11 March 2016. Thanks to Marsin Alshamary for research assistance in the Twitter analysis.