Contested Religious Authority: Sufi Women in Ethiopia and Eritrea

The African experience in works dealing with Sufi women shows a concentration of
classical and more recent works in the Maghreb and in West Africa. There is an observable
gap in academic writings on the Horn of Africa where only scarce and fragmentary
studies are available on women’s involvement and leadership in Sufism. Works focusing
on Somalia address such themes as women’s oral literature, religious practices, and
everyday religion. The challenges Sufi women face in legitimizing their power, their
experiences in a strong patriarchal society, the dominant discursive gendering strategy
in defining religious orthodoxy, and the different mechanisms used by these women
to establish and protect their religious power are marginalized themes in the region.
Furthermore, by clearly showing the different coping mechanisms adopted by two
religious figures and the different activities they lead as custodians of Sufi shrines, this
paper stresses the need to go beyond the dominant academic discourse that overshadows
the agency of women and instead magnify the passive status women have in the
African sociopolitical landscape. This paper focuses on these themes and contributes
to this gap through a comparative case study of two prominent Sufi figures from two
different parts of the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia and Eritrea.