Gendered Religious Authority and Digital Islamic Education: A Comparative Study of Muslim Women Preachers on Social Media in Egypt and the United Kingdo

Abstract

The expansion of social media platforms has transformed structures of Islamic education, religious authority, and gendered public participation across contemporary Muslim societies. This article comparatively examines the emergence of Muslim women preachers and digital Islamic educators in Egypt and the United Kingdom, focusing on how gender, religious authority, and online pedagogical practices interact within distinct socio-political contexts. While existing scholarship on digital Islam frequently emphasizes technological democratization and religious fragmentation, comparatively limited attention has been devoted to the institutional, pedagogical, and gendered mechanisms through which Muslim women negotiate legitimacy in digitally mediated Islamic educational spaces. Drawing upon comparative discourse analysis of online lectures, institutional publications, digital educational platforms, and contemporary Islamic studies scholarship, the study demonstrates that Muslim women educators increasingly function as influential mediators between classical Islamic scholarship, public religious ethics, and contemporary gender discourse. The findings reveal that Egyptian digital Islamic educators generally operate within frameworks shaped by institutional religious authority, doctrinal continuity, and state-regulated public religiosity, whereas Muslim women educators in the United Kingdom more frequently employ participatory pedagogical models emphasizing identity negotiation, minority citizenship, and intersectional ethical engagement. The article argues that social media-based Islamic education has contributed to the partial reconfiguration of gendered religious authority by expanding communicative access, pedagogical visibility, and transnational religious participation. This study contributes to Islamic studies scholarship by integrating Islamic educational theory, gender analysis, digital religion studies, and comparative socio-political interpretation into an interdisciplinary framework for understanding contemporary transformations in Muslim women’s religious authority.