When we dissect Islamic religious authority into its various manifestations – leading prayer, preaching, issuing fatwas, transmitting hadith, judging in court, shaping the Islamic scholarly tradition – nuances emerge that question the conventional accounts of this authority that proceed from the assumption that it is male. This collection of case studies, covering the period from classical Islam to the present, and taken from across the Islamic world, allows for women’s role to be compared across time and space. This allows for the formation of hypotheses regarding which conditions and developments (theological, jurisprudential, social, economic, political) enhanced or stifled female religious authority in Shi’i Islam.