The History of Women's Mosques in Chinese Islam: A Mosque of Their Own

Maria Jaschok and Shui Jingjun's The History of Women's Mosques in Chinese Islam is a scholarly history of a distinctive tradition, women led mosques with female imams serving Muslim women in parts of China, published by Curzon Press, an academic press specializing in Asian studies. The book draws on fieldwork and archival research in China specifically to document a practice with few close parallels elsewhere in the Muslim world. Its authority rests on that direct access to the communities and institutions themselves, unusual research access for a topic this specific. Its limit is that it documents this particular Chinese tradition in its own right rather than situating it within a broader comparative study of women's religious leadership across the wider Muslim world, so a comparative claim needs additional sources addressing other regions.