Changing Structures of Islamic Authority and Consequences for Social Change

In a public lecture given at Qatar Faculty of Islamic Studies, Dr Masooda Bano (Oxford University) presented her continuing project on the study of centers of Islamic authority. The “ambitious project”, as she defines it, is expected to take 5 to 6 years to be finalized. It aims to study ongoing reform attempts both in the “majority Muslim societies” and Muslim minority contexts in order to identify how reform is understood by various institutions, what kind of methodologies have been developed in those reform attempts, and which sort of following these reforms attract.