Female religious scholars broke with tradition at the recent Fiqh Conference hosted by Imam Muhammad Bin Saud Islamic University here by responding to queries on jurisprudential issues and presenting papers in the presence of scholars, sheikhs and members of the Board of Senior Ulema, Al-Hayat Arabic daily reported. According to Al-Hayat, women scholars from the Kingdom and the Gulf do not traditionally occupy official posts and males do not seek their opinion on jurisprudential issues, but chairing a session of the conference, Sheikh Saleh Bin Humaid, Chairman of the Supreme Judicial Council, referred questions to female scholars seated in a separate room. Some members of the audience also posed questions directly to the women scholars, who included among their ranks Manal Bint Salim Al-Sadi, assistant professor of Fiqh at Umm Al-Qura University in Makkah, Sahrifa Bin Salem Aal Saeed from Sultan Qaboos University and Taghrid Mazhar Bukhari, a specialist in Contemporary Fiqh at Umm Al
