In early 2011, local and national media reported on a violent incident in the village of Ajun Jeumpet, in the district of Aceh Besar, Aceh province. A group of (male) villagers had forced its way into a house to "arrest" the resident, a middle-aged man, as well as his visitor, an eighteen-year-old woman. The two were dragged out of the house and accused of khalwat (illicit proximity of an unmarried couple of opposing

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In Malaysia women exercise authority as they combine professional expertise with Islamic knowledge to engage with contentious religious debates. In the context of transformations caused by mass education and mass mediatization, professional experts without Islamic (seminary) education—such as doctors, lawyers, and psychologists—can successfully claim religious authority and establish themselves as part of the Islamic public sphere. This creates possibilities for women. Contemporary cultures of professionalism enable them to challenge long‐standing configurations of religious authority, including the perception that this authority is (primarily or necessarily) male. Their performances, although not without constraints, require an analysis that moves anthropological debates about women's roles and autonomies beyond a Foucauldian concern with discourse and the modes of (self‐)disciplining and resistance associated with it. [religious authority, professionalism, expertise, women, gender, Islam, Malaysia]

This volume investigates the dialectical relationship between pursuits of religious coherence and experiences of moral fragmentation by focusing on self-perceived senses of failure. Our premise is that senses of failure offer an important and productive entry point for the study of lived religion in today's world, where religious commitments are often volatile, believers are regularly confronted by alternative lifestyles, worldviews or desires, and religious subjects tend to be self-reflexive. While the experience of failure in religious life has always been a central theme in theology and religious thought, it has long received little attention in the study of lived religion by anthropologists and others. In recent years, however, there has been a growing interest in various modes and moments of (self-perceived) failure, including feelings of incoherence and imperfection in religious life (Lechkar 2012; De Koning 2013; Jouili 2015; Strhan 2015), uncertainty about one's religious identity and the risk of falling back on pre-conversion relationships or habits (Marshall 2009; Pype 2011), doubt about religious truth claims (Luhrmann 2012; Liberatore 2013), ambivalent moral commitments (Schielke 2015), suspension or lack of religious meaning (Engelke and Tomlinson 2006), and unsuccessful careers of aspiring religious leaders (Lauterbach 2008).We focus on Islam and Christianity, not only because these are the main religious traditions in terms of adherents, but also because the anthropology of