Dr Alex Henley Receives Major European Commission to Research Changing Forms of Religious Leadership in the Middle East

NEWS |

Dr Alex Henley, Pembroke Senior Research Fellow in Islam, has been awarded a major European Commission grant to pursue research on changing forms of religious leadership in the Middle East.  The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, worth almost 200,000 Euros, will support a two-year project based in the Faculty of Theology & Religion and supervised by Pembroke Fellow Professor Justin Jones.

This intensely competitive annual grant scheme supports internationally-mobile researchers across Europe working in all disciplines, with a record number of applications this year, totalling over 9,000.

Dr Henley’s project, ‘A Genealogy of Islamic Religious Leadership in Post-Ottoman States’, will lead to a book on the rise of ‘Grand Muftis’ as official religious leaders.  In contrast to traditional notions that Islam has no clergy or hierarchical institutions, some Middle Eastern states have in the twentieth century created centralised religious institutions headed by Grand Muftis with wide-ranging powers over shari’a courts, religious education, mosques and local imams. 

By tracing the rise of this new kind of religious leadership, Dr Henley’s research will explore a shifting paradigm of Islamic clerics as freelance scholars to bureaucratic officials and formal representatives of religion, showing how they have come to define what is religion and what is secular/non-religion in Islamic societies.

The project will involve fieldwork in Jordan and Palestine, where Dr Henley plans to feed back the results of his research into local civil society stakeholders, holding workshops with women’s organisations to discuss productive ways of understanding, engaging and lobbying religious institutions in their countries.  This builds on recent work done by Prof. Jones with Muslim women’s groups in India.