In Sufi Women and Mystics: Models of Sanctity, Erudition and Political Leadership, Minlib Dalh undertakes the ambitious task of repositioning female mystics as central actors within Islamic intellectual, social, and political history.Footnote ¹ The book aligns with a growing scholarly effort to reconsider women’s religious authority beyond juridical or domestic frameworks; it does so particularly within Sufism, where charisma, sanctity, and learning have historically provided alternative routes to legitimacy. While substantial scholarship has examined women’s roles in hadith transmission and legal pedagogy, the intellectual and symbolic contributions of female mystics remain comparatively understudied. Dalh’s work seeks to address this lacuna by offering a transregional and diachronic survey of women whose authority was articulated through sanctity, erudition, and political engagement.

The book examines five women from diverse historical and geographical contexts: ninth-century Nishapur, thirteenth-century Maghreb, fifteenth-century Syria, seventeenth-century Mughal India, and nineteenth-century West Africa, arguing that the institutional flexibility of Sufism enabled women to exercise religious and social authority through nonconventional means. Dalh’s central claim is that these women were not merely tolerated exceptions but active participants in shaping Islamic piety, learning, and power. While this ambition is commendable and the scope impressive, the execution is uneven. The study offers a valuable synthesis of existing scholarship but is frequently undermined by theoretical inconsistencies, reliance on dated binaries, and serious philological and editorial shortcomings.

One of the book’s most problematic areas is already encountered in the theoretical underpinnings discussed in the introduction. Here, Dalh juxtaposes what he presents as the inherently gendered hierarchies of the Qurʾān, Sunna, and fiqh against an allegedly egalitarian Sufi ethos. This contrast, long familiar in both popular and academic discourse, reproduces a reductive binary that obscures the historical engagement of Sufism with legal, theological, and scriptural traditions. By portraying Sufism as a space of spiritual equality standing in opposition to a restrictive legalistic Islam, Dalh risks flattening the complexity of premodern Muslim societies. Female mystics were often accomplished transmitters of knowledge, participants in legal cultures, and figures whose authority was recognized within, not outside, normative religious frameworks.

Related to this is Dalh’s claim, drawing on Ragab’s (Reference Ragab2010) classification, that women in hadith sciences possessed only “circumstantial epistemic authority,” while men held “essential epistemic authority.” Such generalizations overlook the ways in which authority functioned relationally and performatively in premodern Islamic societies. They also obscure the fact that mystical authority, legal learning, and scriptural mastery were frequently intertwined rather than segregated into opposing domains.

Where Dalh’s argument gains considerable strength is in his engagement with the work of Mahmood (Reference Mahmood2005) and other scholars who caution against imposing modern liberal notions of agency and freedom onto premodern subjects. His insistence that women’s agency must be understood within the religious logic of their own historical contexts represents one of the book’s most theoretically robust contributions. Dalh rightly argues that concepts such as agency cannot be equated with modern emancipatory paradigms and that motherhood, piety, and authority were often mutually constitutive rather than oppositional. His reflection on the need to read classical biographical and hagiographical literature on its own epistemological terms, rather than through contemporary ideological frameworks, is both sound and necessary.

Yet this theoretical sensitivity is not consistently sustained throughout the book. This becomes particularly evident in the discussion of ʿĀʾisha al-Manūbiyya, one of the most compelling figures in the study. Drawing on the work of Amri (Reference Amri and Monkachi1997) and Kugle (Reference Kugle2007), Dalh explores how al-Manūbiyya’s sanctity was articulated through ecstatic attraction (jadhb), public presence, and charismatic authority. He notes the gendered dimensions of Sufi language and the ways in which al-Manūbiyya’s sanctity was framed through tropes of spiritual excess and divine election.

However, Dalh simultaneously adopts and reinforces modern assumptions about transgression and normativity. He repeatedly characterizes al-Manūbiyya’s public preaching and refusal of marriage as violations of social norms, framing her as a rebellious woman in a male-dominated society. This interpretation relies heavily on Kugle’s (Reference Kugle2007) analytical model, which identifies three recurring themes through which women’s apparent transgression of social norms was rendered intelligible within patriarchal contexts: affiliation with a broader familial network that included a recognized male saint; the adoption of a spiritual marriage accompanied by the rejection of conventional marital roles; and symbolic designation as “men” in the sense of possessing spiritual aspiration, discipline, and fortitude. While this framework is analytically valuable for mapping patterns of recognition, it may be worth considering that this typology does not fully account for more complex cases, in which female Sufis appear to have drawn simultaneously on multiple, overlapping strategies in order to negotiate their participation in the spiritual sphere. It is equally plausible that the medieval North African milieu was more accommodating of charismatic female figures than Dalh assumes, and that al-Manūbiyya’s conduct was understood not as transgressive but as a recognized expression of walāya, in which sanctity could reconfigure rather than violate social expectations. This leads to a contradiction in his analysis: al-Manūbiyya is first described as spiritually male, only to be later framed as embodying a distinctively “female” sainthood (p. 62), without sufficient clarification of what this distinction entails.

Similar tensions emerge in Dalh’s discussion of whether a uniquely female form of Sufi piety exists. Following Melchert (Reference Melchert2016), he initially argues that Islamic piety was fundamentally ungendered in its ideals, aspiring to a masculine-coded model of ascetic and spiritual excellence. While this theoretical position is defensible, it sits uneasily with his later analyses, particularly in the chapters on ʿĀʾisha al-Bāʿūniyya and Nana Asmaʾ bint Usman, where gendered modes of expression, pedagogy, and authority clearly shape the women’s contributions. The book thus oscillates between denying and affirming gender specificity without fully resolving the tension.

The chapter on ʿĀʾisha al-Bāʿūniyya is among the most important in the volume, yet it also exemplifies its methodological limitations. Dalh rightly situates her work within a broader literary, devotional, and intellectual context, highlighting her engagement with poetry in praise of the Prophet (madīḥ nabawī), her didactic writings addressed to Sufi audiences, and her integration of the mystical theories current in her time into a coherent and accomplished literary style. Unlike earlier figures such as Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya, whose spirituality appears largely God-centered, al-Bāʿūniyya places the Prophet at the heart of the mystical experience, reintegrating prophetic mediation into the affective and experiential dimensions of Sufism.

This is a significant insight, yet Dalh does not fully develop it. He characterizes al-Bāʿūniyya’s poetic language as “erotic” and draws parallels with thirteenth-century Beguine mystics in Western Europe. This terminology is imprecise and potentially misleading. Love imagery and affective language in Islamic devotional poetry operate within distinct symbolic and theological registers that cannot be easily mapped onto Christian mystical categories. The invocation of “eroticism” risks obscuring rather than illuminating al-Bāʿūniyya’s literary innovations.

More importantly, Dalh largely refrains from close textual analysis of her works. His discussion of al-Mawrid al-ahnā fī al-mawlid al-asnā, including al-Bāʿūniyya’s visionary encounters with the Prophet in Mecca and Medina, relies heavily on secondary scholarship without engaging the metaphors, structures, and symbolic systems of the text itself. Al-Bāʿūniyya’s conscious adoption of al-Qushayrī’s structural model is noted, but the ways in which she reworks and surpasses it deserve a far more sustained analysis. Dalh’s assertion that her insights were no different from those of her male contemporaries is unconvincing. Her synthesis of prophetic praise, a mystical language of love, and an autobiographical vision constitutes a distinctive contribution that cannot be reduced to imitation; indeed, a close reading of al-Bāʿūniyya’s rhetorical style reveals distinctive discursive markers through which a recognizably female authorial voice emerges.

The chapter on Jahan Ara Begum is one of the most engaging sections of the book, particularly in its challenge to Orientalist representations of the Mughal harem (a term mistakenly rendered as haram). Dalh effectively demonstrates how imperial women navigated religious and political authority, and his treatment of Munis al-arwāḥ and al-Risāla al-ṣāḥibiyya highlights the rarity of female-authored historiographical and hagiographical writing in Islamic tradition. Jahan Ara’s adoption of patriarchal modes of self-representation as a means of cultivating both imperial and spiritual legitimacy is perceptively noted.

Yet here too, Dalh stops short of fully exploring the implications of his observations. The autobiographical and visionary elements of Jahan Ara’s writing, her self-description as a beggar and slave despite her royal status, her eroticized visions of her shaykh Mullā Shāh, and her emphasis on death before death, represent a radical development in female Sufi authorship. These passages constitute a significant innovation in mystical literature, yet they are not analyzed in depth.

The final chapter on Nana Asmaʾ bint Usman brings the discussion into the nineteenth century and effectively demonstrates the inseparability of religious, intellectual, and political authority. Dalh presents her as a poet and polyglot scholar whose primary achievement was the establishment of the Yan Taru educational network, an adult education scheme directed especially toward women that has continued to operate from its inception in the nineteenth century to the present day. Through this initiative, Nana Asmaʾ created sustained spaces for women’s access to religious learning, extending her pedagogical vision beyond elite circles to include poor and rural communities, and thereby fostering forms of theological, social, and political agency. Her efforts to translate Arabic texts into local languages exemplify a form of engaged piety grounded in education and outreach, while her advocacy of jihād and institutional reform further underscores the close integration of religious learning and political action in her thought.

Beyond these conceptual issues, the book would have benefited from closer philological and editorial refinement. A number of inconsistencies, such as occasional misspellings of scholars’ names (for example, Fatima Mernissi rendered as “Bernissi,” Amina Wadud as “Ameeta”), as well as variations in the spelling of historical figures like Shaqīq al-Balkhī (appearing as Shafīq al-Balkhī), may momentarily distract the specialist reader. Some translations are similarly problematic, such as rendering kutub al-tawārīkh as “history of books” (p. 43), while a small number of biographical details, including the death date of al-Tirmidhī, would merit reconsideration. Similarly, the early characterization of Fāṭima of Nishapur as an “ascetic-Gnostic” risks anachronism.

Sufi Women and Mystics offers a wide-ranging overview of female sanctity, learning, and leadership across Islamic history and brings together diverse case studies within a single analytical frame. By assembling this material, the book provides a useful basis for further research that may move beyond synthesis toward more focused analytical inquiry. In particular, it invites closer examination of how Sufi institutional structures enabled learned women to exercise religious authority in ways that differed from those available within formal scholarly institutions. How did women navigate the balance between scholarly credibility and social legitimacy within Sufi milieus and how did the biographical and historiographical reshaping of learned women’s legacies reflect changing conceptions of female religious authority in premodern Islamic societies? Framed in this way, the main contribution of Dalh’s study is its clarification of a set of questions that remain central to the continued study of gender, authority, and knowledge in Islamic history.