Studies on dissent in contemporary Islam have focused on Islamist movements as political rebellion while dissent within religious establishments remains an under-explored topic.1 Moreover, a considerable amount of literature has been published on dissent as anti-religious intellectual thought, mostly advocated by few liberal-secular intellectuals in the Muslim world.2 The existing body of research on dissent suggests that dissent is synonymous with heresy or rebellion and leads to confrontation between Islamist political movements and Western-minded intellectuals on the one hand and the ruling regimes in the Muslim world on the other. Following a Foucauldian type of perspective (seeing the world through a power Weltanschauung and failing to distinguish between authority and power), such approaches have failed to address dissidence as counter-authority; they usually promote dissent as the revolt of the marginalised against the centres of power championed by avantgarde intellectuals, immigrants, minorities, or revolutionaries.3 Dissent does not have to be protest against power, militant, liberal-secular or anti-system in Muslim societies; it sometimes manifests as religious dissidence within the existing religious institutions to the extent that such institutions tolerate certain forms of dissent, contesting religious authority but not necessarily protesting against power or aiming at radical change or upheaval.