Book Talk - Female Religiosity in Central Asia: Sufi Leaders in the Persianate World

Female Religiosity in Central Asia: Sufi Leaders in the Persianate World traces the remarkable story of the Sufi master Aghā-yi Buzurg and her ascent to religious prominence as the “Great Lady” of sixteenth-century Bukhara. Through her life and legacy, the book opens a window onto the little-known world of female religious authority in early modern Islamic  Central Asia, revealing a far more complex and dynamic gender history than previously understood.

Rather than treating gender as a fixed category, the study approaches it as a historically contingent construct—one actively shaped through religious discourse, social practice, and institutional life. By mapping female religious authority onto the spiritual and narrative landscapes of the early modern Persianate world, the book offers an intervention into broader debates on women and religion in Islam. Drawing on previously unexamined primary sources, Female Religiosity in Central Asia brings to light a vibrant world of female piety—marked by communal leadership, competition for spiritual prestige, and negotiations with political power—that reshapes prevailing understandings of women’s roles in the religious and social life of the region.

Aziza Shanazarova is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Columbia University, where she specializes on the religious history of Islamic Central Asia and the broader Persianate world with an emphasis on the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. She holds a dual PhD in Religious Studies and Central Eurasian Studies completed at Indiana University-Bloomington in 2019. Before joining the Department of Religion, Aziza was a UCIS/REEES Postdoctoral Associate in the Humanities at the University of Pittsburgh.

Sponsor(s): Program on Central Asia, APC, Center for Near Eastern Studies, Department of History, UCLA History of Gender and Sexuality Group