Women and Islamic Cultures

General Editor
Suad Joseph (University of California, Davis)

Associate Editors
Marilyn Booth (University of Edinburgh)
Bahar Davary (University of San Diego)
Sarah Gualtieri (University of Southern California)
Elora Shehabuddin (Rice University)

Hoda Elsadda (University of Cairo)

Virginia Hooker (The Australian National University)
Amira Jarmakani (Georgia State University)
Therese Saliba (The Evergreen State College)

Copy editor
Margaret Owen

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ewic

Women and Islamic Cultures
Disciplinary Paradigms and Approaches:
2003–2013

General Editor
Suad Joseph

Associate Editors
Marilyn Booth
Bahar Davary
Sarah Gualtieri
Elora Shehabuddin

Leiden • boston
2013
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Women and Islamic cultures : disciplinary paradigms and approaches, 2003–2013 / general editor,
Suad Joseph ; regional editor, Marilyn Booth.
  pages cm.
 Includes index.
 ISBN 978-90-04-26453-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-26473-1 (e-book) 1. Women in
Islam. 2. Women—Islamic countries. I. Joseph, Suad. II. Booth, Marilyn.

 BP173.4.W697 2013
 305.48’697—dc23

2013036668

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ISBN 978-90-04-26453-3 (paperback)

ISBN 978-90-04-26473-1 (e-book)

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 Contents

Acknowledgments ........................................................................................... vii

Introduction (Suad Joseph) ........................................................................... 1

 1. Anthropology (Azza Basarudin) .......................................................... 21

 2. Art and Architecture (Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh) ................. 37

 3. Cultural Studies (Amira Jarmakani) ................................................... 51

 4. Demography (Sajeda Amin) .................................................................. 65

 5. Film Studies (Kamran Rastegar) .......................................................... 87

 6. Geography (Robina Mohammad) ......................................................... 103

 7. History: Europe (Annika Rabo) ............................................................. 127

 8. History of Science (Ahmed Ragab) ..................................................... 151

 9. Sources and Methodologies: History: Southeast Asia

(Vannessa Hearman) ............................................................................... 177

10. Islamic Studies (Bahar Davary) ........................................................... 203

11. Literary Studies (Michelle Hartman) ................................................... 227

12. Oral History in the Twenty-First Century (Hoda Elsadda) .......... 249

13. Philosophy (Nerina Rustomji) ............................................................... 261

14. Political Science (Amaney A. Jamal and Vickie Langohr) ............. 269

15. Population and Health Sciences (Hania Sholkamy) ...................... 283

16. Religious Studies (Zayn Kassam) ......................................................... 305

vi contents

17. Sexualities and Queer Studies (Samar Habib) ................................. 325

18. Sociology (Rachel Rinaldo) .................................................................... 339

Appendices 
 Appendix 1 .................................................................................................... 361
 Appendix 2 . ................................................................................................... 362
 Appendix 3 .................................................................................................... 370
 Appendix 4 ................................................................................................... 371
 Appendix 5 .................................................................................................... 372
 Appendix 6 ................................................................................................... 373
 Appendix 7 .................................................................................................... 375

Index .................................................................................................................... 377
 Acknowledgments

The idea for this volume emerged at the November 2011 EWIC Editorial
Board meeting. I was keen to have a special issue and event to celebrate
the tenth anniversary of the publishing of Volume I of Print EWIC, which
appeared in the Fall of 2003. When I proposed the idea to the Associate
Editors and to Brill, they enthusiastically started planning with me. First
and foremost then, I must thank the Editors and Brill for their unstinting
loyalty to the EWIC project and their brave and committed engagements
with all the many ideas we have developed together over the years. For
this special volume of the EWIC Project, I am indebted to Associate Editors
Elora Shehabuddin, Therese Saliba, Amira Jarmakani, Sarah Gualtieri,
Virgina Hooker, Bahar Davary, Hoda Elsadda, and Marilyn Booth. They
have devoted innumberable hours to soliciting articles, following up with
authors, editing, revising—always warmly and kindly responding to my
many questions and requests.
Similarly Brill has been very supportive. Kathy van Vliet worked with us
to conceptualize the project before she transferred to another section of
Brill. Nicolette van der Hoek long a friend of EWIC, stepped into Kathy’s
position and gracefully continued the editorial work on the Brill side.
Isabella Gerritsen, as she had for the previous twelve years, was the staff
support, helping editors to contact and track authors for their articles.
Diana Steele diligently and brilliantly stepped in when Isabella retired in
2012—the longest serving staff at Brill. Throughout, Brill has been part
and parcel of every EWIC idea and project.
We thank the authors of this volume who kindly responded to our
requests for revisions to pull together the state of the art as we conceived
of it. We also thank the over 1,000 authors of the EWIC project. And we
thank the authors of the 2003 Section II of Print Volume I, who offered
the template on which we built this volume, some of whom elected to
contribute to this volume by updating their 2003 articles.
Throughout the EWIC project, I have had the good fortunate of hav-
ing numerous student assistants at UC Davis who have helped with every
phase of EWIC production. The past two years, I am especially grateful
to Hazel Crawford who has served as both my Lab Manager and as the
EWIC Davis staff. She has worked on the Joseph EWIC web page, the
EWIC Public Outreach Project, planning Editorial Board meetings, and
viii acknowledgments

has co-authored articles for EWIC. Julia Jackson preceded Hazel in that
capacity and similarly did a marvelous job. Several undergraduate Interns
have helped, especially with the web page. Niat Afeworki created the aca-
demia website for EWIC. Helen Min worked on the website and outreach
projects. Chathurika Peiris worked as an intern prior to Niat and helped
with the EWIC Scholars Database. Nikolay Voronchikhin worked tirelessly
to revise and update the EWIC web page for two years. George Pantazes
stepped into those shoes in 2013.
Similarly EWIC Associate Editors have had assistants helping them in
their editorial work. Marilyn Booth would like to acknowledge the good
work of Lina Mohamed. Bahar Davary’s student assistant, Shannon
Wheeler, was similarly important to her editorial work.
Without Yoke Dellenback, my grant manager, much of this work would
have been difficult to undertake. She supported all my efforts at writing
and submitting proposals, and managing the grants and subcontracts
once I had been given awards for the EWIC project. At times, she came in
on weekends and worked into the evening, to make sure the grants were
running smoothly and all editors and staff had the resources they needed
for their work. I am deeply indebted to her.
Mary Dixon, Chief Administrative Officer for Anthropology and Socio­
logy, rose above and beyond the call of her job to help me in moving
the EWIC Lab from off campus to on campus and negotiating the fur-
nishing of the lab. Jeremy M Phillips, Carol McMasters-Stone, and Janine
Carlson (Division of Social Sciences IT staff) have provided invaluable
technical support for the EWIC web page and EWIC Scholars Database.
George R. Mangun, Dean of the Division of Social Sciences, and Li
Zhang, Chair of Anthropology provided space for the EWIC Lab within
Anthropology, facilitating my access to and work with my staff.
I express deep gratitude to the Ford Foundation (Cairo and New York)
for seven years of grant support of the EWIC project, to the International
Development Research Center (Ottawa) for three years of grant support,
and to the Henry Luce Foundation (New York) for the past two years of
grant support. Without the visionary leadership of these program officers
and foundations, EWIC could not have accomplished much of the work
we have managed in the EWIC project.
As in all my research, I express my thanks to my beloved Sara Rose
who has had to share me with EWIC and my many projects—and now
her beloved Ferguson Mitchell who has risen to the challenge of joining
the Joseph family, winning Sara Rose as his wife.
 acknowledgments ix

The EWIC project, like much of my work of the past decade or more, is
a collaborative feminist project. Regardless of where any particular idea
originated, its development, maturation, and materialization depended on
all of the many many participants in the EWIC project working together
seamlessly. All the ideas are all our ideas. We birthed them, worked them,
raised them together. Now we set them free for engagement in the public
space.

Suad Joseph
Davis, California
August 2013
 INTRODUCTION

Women and Islamic Cultures:  

Disciplinary Paradigms and Approaches 2003–2013

Suad Joseph

The EWIC Project: The First Decade Anniversary

In the Fall of 2003, Volume I of the print edition of the Encyclopedia of

Women and Islamic Cultures, Methodologies, Paradigms and Sources was
published, with the final print Volume VI, Supplement and Index, pub-
lished in 2007. This book celebrates the tenth anniversary of the publi-
cation of the EWIC Project’s first print volume. The six volumes of Print
EWIC represented twelve years of partnership with EWIC’s publisher Brill,
the pioneering collaborative vision of the Editorial Board (General Editor,
Suad Joseph; Associate Editors: Afsaneh Najmabadi, Julie Peteet, Seteney
Shami, Jacqueline Siapno, Jane I. Smith; Assistant Editor Alice Horner),
and the creative contributions of 907 scholars who collectively produced
1,246 articles ( just under 2 million words), covering 410 topics from the
perspectives of all disciplines for every region of the world in which there
was a significant Muslim presence. EWIC was the first scholarly encyclo-
pedia to undertake global coverage of research on women and Islamic
cultures through a comparative, collaborative, interdisciplinary, and
transnational feminist project. When Volume I was published, Choice, the
magazine of librarians, awarded it is highest rating—“essential” for librar-
ies. The production of EWIC offered a landmark in the development of a
field study.
Volume I of Print EWIC made a concerted effort to direct itself to schol-
ars and graduate students engaged in research on women and Islamic
cultures. It consisted of my introduction, forty-five thematic entries,
twenty-two disciplinary entries, and an appendix. The thematic entries
reviewed the methodologies and sources used by scholars in the study of
women and Islamic cultures in specific historical periods, under specific
political regimes, and in specific world regions. The disciplinary entries
covered paradigms and approaches used by scholars in different academic
disciplines for the study of women and Islamic cultures. The appendix
2 suad joseph

offered an extensive resource for scholars—a 175–page bibliography of

works published on women and Islamic cultures written in European lan-
guages between 1993 and 2003.
This volume addresses Section Two of Volume I: the disciplinary entries.
This section critically reviewed paradigms, approaches, and topics utilized
and addressed in the scholarship on women and Islamic cultures, disci-
pline by discipline up through 2003. This volume covers disciplinary work
on women and Islamic cultures from 2003 to 2013. The introduction out-
lines the capacious vision of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cul-
tures, offers an overview of how this volume came about, and proposes an
analysis of the issues and insights gained from compiling a “disciplinary”
volume in the second decade of the 21st century. It considers the vision
of the EWIC Project since 2007—a vision which has taken the form of
EWIC Online and the EWIC Public Outreach Project.

Covering Women and Islamic Cultures

The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, as a project, has been
designed as an interdisciplinary, transhistorical, collaborative, and global
feminist project. From the outset, EWIC aimed to assess the research on
women and Islamic cultures and its entries were meant to cover every
topic for which significant research could be found in every area of the
world. Scholars were invited from wherever we could find the expertise to
address defined topics. EWIC Editors extended themselves beyond their
own capacities to solicit articles and send invitations to researchers who
are not as frequently represented in the Western/English scholarly circuits
as they ought to be.
Muslims are projected to number 2.2 billion by 2030—26.4% of the
world’s population of 8.3 billion (Pew Forum 2011)—doubling their cur-
rent population numbers. They are the fastest growing religious group in
the world and the fastest growing religion in the United States. Accord-
ing to the Pew Forum findings (2011), the world’s Muslim population is
expected to grow at twice the pace of the world’s non-Muslim popula-
tion. According to that study, 79 countries are projected to have one mil-
lion or more Muslim residents by 2030. The center of gravity for Muslims
globally will remain in the Asia/Pacific area where 60% of the world’s
Muslims will reside, while only 20% will be in the Middle East and
North Africa. The largest Muslim country in the world will be Pakistan,
no longer Indonesia. The number of Muslims in the United States is
 introduction 3

expected to double, while in Europe, the Muslim population will grow

by one-third. In France, Muslims will be over 10.3% of the population, in
Belgium 10.2%, in Sweden, 9.9%, and in the United Kingdom, 8.2%.
Given the global reach of Islam, from its outset, EWIC’s scope has always
been global. Recognizing that Islam is not only about religion, EWIC has
taken a civilizational approach. EWIC focuses on women and Islamic cul-
tures, on the dynamics of the civilizations and societies in which Islam
and Muslims have been a significant presence. EWIC set out to cover all
aspects of social life—politics, arts, economy, health, labor, culture, litera-
ture, demography, environment, sports, medicine, and so forth, in every
region of the world for which we could find scholarship and authors.
EWIC Editors were always aware of the problematics of encyclopedic
knowledge production. We debated what was to be covered, how we could
find local authors, how to organize topics, what style of writing would be
acceptable, what citational styles would we systematize, which authorial
voices would we support. These and many other questions—including
what does it mean to produce encyclopedic knowledge—occupied meet-
ing after meeting of the Editorial Board. Yet, we pushed forward, creating
entry topics, soliciting authors, editing, revising our format, rethinking
our topics and guidelines. We have engaged with over 1,000 scholars who
have worked with us on various articles or aspects for the EWIC Project.
The engagement included not only the conversations with scholars, as
we solicited or edited articles, but numerous workshops and panels we
organized on the EWIC Project at the Middle East Studies Association
Meetings, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, in radio and
television interviews, on the EWIC webpage (<http://sjoseph.ucdavis.edu/
ewic>), on Wikipedia, with local community groups and K-12 teachers,
with translations into Arabic, and workshops in Egypt, Lebanon, Pales-
tine and other countries. The EWIC Public Outreach Project (see below),
funded initially by the Ford Foundation and later by the Henry Luce
Foundation, systematically set out to make the project findings available
to a large public, for free.
As a result of these extended engagements (for me since 1995, eighteen
years), the vision, conceptions, and practical work of EWIC has evolved
with time. EWIC is not just a product. It is a project. Its dynamism and
innovativeness derive from its unrelenting self-critical gaze on its own
process and production. It is this insistence on questioning the catego-
ries, methods, paradigms, and outcomes of scholarship that constitutes
the limits and the ambition of EWIC, as a project. Towards this continuing
4 suad joseph

process of engagement, some of the problematics of undertaking a vol-

ume such as this are reviewed.

Doing Disciplines
The idea of preparing an EWIC anniversary volume emerged at the annual
EWIC Editorial Board meeting in November 2011. With the tenth anni-
versary of the publishing of Print EWIC Volume I two years ahead of us,
we wanted to mark the occasion by reflecting on the developments and
advances in scholarship over the decade since 2003. Rather than focusing
on specific topics or “new” scholarship, we thought an overview of the
“field” could be effectively completed by assessing transformations within
the disciplines—that is, updating Section Two of Volume I of Print EWIC.
Our intent, at the time, was to cover disciplines we had missed in 2003.
We had missed disciplines because we did not find authors or authors
did not deliver on time. We additionally wanted to cover new disciplines
that had emerged or old disciplines that had recently developed an opus
of work on women and Islamic cultures. In 2011, this seemed a straight-
forward project, launched in a timely manner, to achieve an up to date
landmark overview. Authors were to be offered a full year to write their
articles of around 10,000 words. We decided to invite the authors of the
2003 disciplinary articles to revise and update them. If they were not
available we sought new authors.
We intended to solicit around thirty-five entries to produce two online
supplements to be uploaded after publication of the print edition (Supple-
ment VIII and IX). After months of solicitations, twenty-seven disciplinary
articles were confirmed with authors: Anthropology; Art and Architec-
ture; Cultural Studies; Demography; Economics; Film Studies; Geography;
History of the Americas; History of the Middle East and North Africa;
History of Central Asia; History of East Asia; History of Europe; History
of Southeast Asia; History of South Asia; Islamic Studies; Legal Studies;
Linguistics; Literary Studies; Oral History; Philosophy; Political Science;
Population and Health Studies; Religious Studies; Science and Technol-
ogy Studies; Sexualties and Queer Studies; Sociology; Women’s Studies/
Gender Studies. In the end, we achieved eighteen.
In 2003, although we had solicited many more, we published twenty-
two disciplinary entries: Anthropology; Art and Architecture; Demogra-
phy; Economics; Folklore; Geography; History of Middle East and North
Africa; History of East, South and Southeast Asia; History of Science;
Islamic Studies; Legal Studies; Linguistics; Literary Studies; Oral History;
 introduction 5

Orientalism; Philosophy; Political Science; Population and Health Studies;

Sexualities and Queer Studies; Religious Studies; Euro-American Women’s
Studies and Islamic Cultures; Women’s Studies/Gender Studies.
The continuities and discontinuities in the apprehension of what we
defined as “disciplines” for this volume merit attention. For most “disci-
plinary” articles, we used standard academic categories, such as Anthro­
pology, Economics, History, Philosophy, and Political Science. Some
articles solicited for the 2013 publication represent the institutionaliza-
tion of new academic fields with production on women and Islamic cul-
tures, such as Cultural Studies and Film Studies. Some of our disciplinary
organization for this volume represents the densification of research on
women and Islamic cultures, such as the splitting of the 2003 article on
History of East, South and Southeast Asia into three separate articles, one
for each “region” (itself a category which needs problematization).
Noteworthy is the fact that, other than the History articles, we did not
seek out reviews of “area studies” fields, such as Middle East Studies, Afri-
can Studies, or South Asia Studies. Given that these fields exist in many
universities in advanced degree granting departments, it is interesting to
reflect upon the Editorial Board’s lack of solicitation of area studies as
disciplinary fields. Similarly, some ethnic studies programs offer courses
on Muslim women and are themselves in undergraduate and graduate
degree-granting departments—such as Asian American Studies, African
American Studies, and American Studies. Yet the Editorial Board did not
solicit “disciplinary” articles on ethnic studies fields.
A number of other fields recognized with departmental and advanced
degree status which have produced varying degrees of scholarship on
women and Islamic cultures were likewise not solicited: Education; Child
or Human Development; Psychology; Urban Studies; English; and lan-
guages such as Arabic, French, German, Hindi/Urdu, Persian, and Turkish.
In some instances, we assumed that the disciplinary articles would
catch the research carried out in what seemed more like cross-disciplinary
fields (Child or Human Development, Urban Studies, regional or global
languages). In others, we had tried and failed to solicit articles before and
did not try again (Psychology, Education). We hoped to conflate fields
where the scholarship seemed amenable (Art and Architecture to cover
Art History, Music, Theatre and Dance).
That we achieved only eighteen articles when we thought we had
twenty-seven authors/articles confirmed (we solicited many more), par-
allels some of the article completion problems of any volume and was
not unlike problems we had with Volume I when certain articles never
6 suad joseph

materialized. In most cases, this was due to the inability of authors to

deliver for various personal reasons. In some cases, it was the struggle
some authors had to identify a subfield of women and Islamic studies
within their disciplines.
Most interestingly, undertaking disciplines has become more problem-
atic in the twenty-first century than it seemed to EWIC Editors to have
been at the end of the twentieth century. When we devised Volume I in
1999 and decided to produce Section Two on disciplines, we did not worry
much about the capacity of scholars trained in a discipline to evaluate the
paradigms, methods, and approaches utilized in their discipline for the
study of women and Islamic cultures. Of course, the discourse of inter-
disciplinarity had emerged, scholars read and cited across fields, and the
idea of disciplinarity was being problematized by the last decade of the
twentieth century and indeed much before then.
Reflecting on the problematics we encountered with this volume called
for a consideration of disciplinarity, its detractors and discontents. There
are several terms which are often used interchangeably, but which evoke
different sensibilities among scholars. On July 4, 2013, the term “interdisci-
plinarity” produced 778,000 results in Google; “transdiciplinary” produced
1,520,000 results; “multidisciplinary” produced 18,100,000 results; and
interdisciplinary produced 32,700,000 results. “Disciplinarity” produced
192,000 results and “disciplinary” at 43,300,000 was the least meaningful
search—it brought up corporal punishment and the like.
Browsing through bibliographies and references among the mound of
articles chucked up by Google, it was clear that the majority of references
are relatively recent, largely post-2000. Numerous articles and books in
defense of disciplinarity also emerged largely post-2000 (Christie and
Maton 2011). Many of the articles are predictably about the sciences
and the emergence of fields such as “science and society,” “science and
technology studies,” as well as articles about Engineers, Biologists, and
Plant Scientists working together to solve problems such as sustainable
urban developments or sustainable agriculture and the like. These articles
tended to focus on the technical and practical needs of sharing methods
and knowledge across disciplines to solve specific problems. The Social
Science and Humanities articles tended to focus on issues of creativity,
innovation, generativity, and transgressiveness inspired by interdisciplin-
arity—or the enduring merits of disciplinary paradigms.
We had not intended to engage a philosophical debate on disci­
plinarity interdisciplinarity in undertaking this volume. We intended a
 introduction 7

straightforward state of the art review of shifts in research on women

and Islamic cultures between 2003 and 2013, and thought to achieve it by
asking scholars to review what had transpired in their own fields during
this decade. It turned out to be not a straightforward task.
Many of our authors, reviewing the achievements, problematics, and
research in their own disciplines, cited scholars from outside their disci-
plines repeatedly, with no mention of the disciplinary training of those
scholars—that is, cited them as if they were trained in the discipline
being reviewed. Some of the disciplinary articles are so replete with inter-
disciplinary referencing, that it became difficult to understand how the
article authors or the discipline thought of itself in terms of its work on
women and Islamic cultures. Requests to the authors to focus on their
own disciplines were met with resistance. The argument was made that
the scholars they were citing (especially Anthropologists Lila Abu-Lughod
and Saba Mahmood) were already being reviewed in the articles about the
disciplines of those authors and that it would be better to not have rep-
etition. Authors were not persuaded, arguing that scholars such as Saba
Mahmood had had an impact on disciplines such as Political Science, and
therefore should be reviewed in a disciplinary article about Political Sci-
ence. Saba Mahmood’s book, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the
Feminist Subject had won the Victoria Schuck Award from the American
Political Science Association in 2005; if the American Political Science
Association was willing to give a book by an Anthropologist a Political
Science award, then who were we to say it should not be reviewed in a
disciplinary article on Political Science.
Finally, we came to a compromise with some of the authors, requesting
them or their EWIC Editors to input disciplinary identification for authors
who were being reviewed outside their disciplines. Even this turned out to
be not straightforward. While for some scholars, we could find their disci-
plinary fields, for others, it was difficult. Internet searches did not always
reveal the disciplinary training of the scholars cited. Identifying their depart-
mental homes in their universities was often misleading, as Humanists and
Social Scientists are often housed in inter-disciplinary homes or homes in
disciplines outside their formal training. Direct requests to the authors at
times resulted in complicated answers. A number responded that they
had been trained in a particular discipline but now considered themselves
something else, or had had several migrations over the course of their
careers and that labels of any kind could not capture the nature of their
research or their intellectual identities (See Appendix # 1 for disciplines
8 suad joseph

of authors of this volume; Appendix # 2 for disciplines of authors of EWIC

Online Supplements I–VII).
These reflections are by way of alerting the reader that what we have
produced in this volume by way of reviews of scholarship on women and
Islamic cultures through the lens of disciplinary articles must itself be
unraveled. They represent some preliminary considerations involved in
unpacking the project of this volume.
Yet, while interdisciplinary referencing is pervasive, the degree to which
“interdisciplinarity” has been achieved in the actual training of scholars
and the methodological and paradigmatic practices of scholars is still to
be assessed. It may be that citational practices do not necessarily offer
a fine scrutiny of the methodological and paradigmatic practices within
disciplines. The Arab Families Working Group (<http://www.arabfamilies
.org>), a collaborative and comparative research project I founded in
2001, is a case in point. AFWG has been a 13–year experiment in inter-
disciplinary research on Arab families and youth in Egypt, Lebanon, and
Palestine, and their diasporas. The project includes sixteen scholars with
training in anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, his-
tory, public health, linguistics, and English. While several of the AFWG’s
research projects did result in interdisciplinary collaborations over years
of work together, we often found that the interdisciplinarity was more to
be found in the dialogue, conversations, and exchanges, rather than in
the on-the-ground research projects. This could be the consequence of
the expansive vision we had for AFWG—covering a broad swath of topics
from historical transformations, to literary representations, to health, to
labor, to migration, to sexualities, to marriage, and the like. Had we had
a more diminutive vision, perhaps interdisciplinarity work would have
been more focused.
Another reflection on the constraints of disciplinary training emerged
in these articles. These articles were all meant to be overviews of each
discipline in terms of their research globally. We invited authors to review
the achievements of their disciplines in research on women and Islamic
cultures from the Middle East to South/Central/East/Southeast Asia, to
Africa, to Europe to the Americas. A number of the articles offer that
global reach. For other authors, their comfort zone was their “area stud-
ies” training. That some authors did not feel qualified to review literature
outside of their regional areas of expertise, is itself a reflection of regional
“disciplinarity” that remains central to the training of scholars. (See
Appendix 2 for countries covered in EWIC Online Supplements I–VII).
 introduction 9

State of the Art

The findings of the articles in this anniversary volume offer a striking sum-
mary of the capaciousness of the field of women and Islamic studies. The
articles assembled cover eighteen disciplines, rather evenly split between
the Humanities and Social Sciences. Some of the disciplines are relatively
new such as Cultural Studies and Film Studies. Most are standing disci-
plines. Certain thematics string themselves through a number of the disci-
plinary reviews: colonialism, post-colonialism, Orientalism, Islamophobia,
empire, power, politics, transnationalism, the War on Terror, the agency
of Muslim women, representation of Muslim women in the media, the
veil, the political uses of women by states and other actors, and the like.
Anthropology, perhaps one of, if not the dominant discipline producing
research on women and Islamic cultures, is reviewed by Azza Basarudin.
Basarudin contextualizes anthropological production of knowledge about
women and Islamic cultures around key problematics: gender and state,
law and kinship, Islamic discourses, survival and resistance, veiling, and
sexuality. She observes that Islamophobia and xenophobia in the past
decade have triggered considerable research on women and Islamic cul-
tures. The genres include native testimonials, liberal feminism, postmod-
ernism, and post-colonialism. Anthropology has troubled standing binaries
(traditional/modern; secular/religious/; public/private). While Anthropol-
ogy has focused on the Middle East in its production of scholarship on
women and Islamic cultures, in the past decade there has been significant
research on India, Southeast Asia, and Muslim minorities of Europe and
the United States. Anthropologists have privileged the lived experiences
of Muslim women, and have offered multi-sited and comparative ethno-
graphic approaches to the study of women and Islamic cultures.
Heghnar Zeitlan Watenpaugh updates her 2003 article on “Art and
Architecture,” by discussing intersections of gender and visual culture in
Islamic societies. She addresses the issue of primary sources for research.
She offers a nuanced answer to the question of “Why Have There Been No
Great Women Artists,” identifying the many capacities in which Muslim
women have been makers of art as well as sophisticated users of art and
architecture. She explores the gendered nature of art and architectural
practices and products, offering critical insights into the changes in the
field in the past decade.
Cultural Studies, one of the relatively new fields of scholarship, is
reviewed by Amira Jarmakani who reflects on the epistemological foun-
dations of Cultural Studies as a discipline. She begins by problematizing
10 suad joseph

the key term of “culture”—a key term claimed also by Anthropology as

a discipline—offering the historical usages of the term in the field of
Cultural Studies. She explores the locations for the study of women and
Islamic cultures within Cultural Studies, as an interdisciplinary field. She
examines who studies women and Islamic cultures, the shift away from
its earlier masculinist and positivist epistemologies. Heavily influenced
by Edward Said’s Orientalism, Cultural Studies has had a strong focus on
post-colonial studies. Jarmakani considers the default location for the
study of women and Islamic cultures in the Middle East Studies Associa-
tion and the American Studies Association, and the key journals in which
the scholarship is published. She examines the “interdisciplinary” nature
of Cultural Studies, and its overlapping with key fields, especially feminist,
queer, and sexualities studies.
Sajeda Amin’s disciplinary review of Demography focuses on the spe-
cific findings of the field of Demography on women and Islamic cultures.
She outlines how demographic research of the past decade has challenged
the theories of demographic transition in Muslim communities that were
standing theory a decade ago. The research that she summarizes finds a
wide diversity of patterns within Muslim communities in terms of trends
around births, deaths, migrations, marriage, education, and the like. She
reviews the literature on birth rates, family planning, abortion, death
rates, migration rates, age structure, and marriage structure. She offers
specific comparative case studies.
Film Studies is a relatively new discipline for literature on women and
Islamic cultures, according to Kamran Rastegar. He argues that the very
framing of “women and Islamic cultures” is problematical as a point of
departure in Film Studies. There is no conception of “Islamic cinema,”
as Film Studies does not organize itself around religious categories. He
contends that his article cannot review a coherent and already-existing
disciplinary area as such. Instead, he proposes certain commonalities to
be explored in the highly varied landscape of scholarship on cinema in the
regions of world with significant Muslim communities. Rastegar views
cinema in Muslim majority sites where he finds thematics often focusing
on the politics of colonialism, anti-colonial struggles, and post-colonial
contexts. He discusses national cinemas, third cinemas, and world cin-
emas. He outlines the standing of film studies as a field in Muslim major-
ity societies, the relationship between film studies and feminism, and the
scholarship on cinemas of Muslim-majority societies.
 introduction 11

Robina Mohammad offers the decade review of Geography. Noting

that Geography, like many disciplines, has focused on white, middle-class
women, she observes that literature on women and Islamic cultures in
Geography is rather limited. As a field, Geography increased its focus on
Muslim women as identities in Western societies came to be understood as
more fragmented and plural. The “War on Terror” drew world attention, as
well as disciplinary attention to Muslims in general. Such measures raised
ethical concerns in the discipline as to the nature and motivations for
research. State securitization, especially in Europe and the United States,
targeted Muslims for research as well as surveillance. Topically, consider-
able research in Geography has been concerned with Muslim migrations,
transnationalism, and ethnic violence. Women were often subtextual sub-
jects of geographic research in the past decade. Yet they were at times
seen as victims of Islam or as allies of those fighting the War on Terror.
Mohammad notes that the increased popularity of qualitative methods in
Geography represented a major shift in knowledge production.
As a disciplinary field, the History of Europe has become critical for
women and Islamic studies. The growing Muslim population of Europe,
hovering around 10% for a number of countries and projected to continue
to grow, has spurred new research. Annika Rabo discusses why Islam and
women and Islamic cultures have been neglected in European History
research, even though Islam has been integral to Europe since the early
eighth century—over a thousand years. The population shift has stimu-
lated rethinking by historians of Europe. Among the questions is a basic
consideration of what and where Europe is, Rabo argues. She outlines the
impact of Muslims in Europe, European amnesia about Islam, and the
approaches to the study of Muslim women in European history. Of par-
ticular note is the work by European historians on transnational migra-
tion, the focus on women’s bodies, the work on clothing and veiling, the
research on Islamic fatwas in Europe, and research on family law.
Ahmed Ragab suggests that in the field of History of Science, the category
of “Muslim women” needs to be problematized given current understand-
ings of racial, cultural, epistemic identities and that these problematics
are reflected in the practices of science and technology. He is concerned
with reviewing women as producers of science and as subjects of scientific
inquiry. The production and consumption of scientific and technological
knowledge about “women and Islamic cultures” must be situated in terms
of the shifting global geographies. He reviews literature evaluating the
12 suad joseph

category of “third world women” as a homogeneous location, standing at

the edge or outside of the production of knowledge. He appraises the sites
of scientific knowledge production, especially in the STEM fields (science,
technology, engineering, mathematics) and raises concerns over the lack
of epistemic authority for local universities and their scholars around the
world.
Southeast Asia holds the distinction of having the largest Muslim-
majority country in the world—Indonesia—for now. Vannessa Hearman
summarizes the methodologies and sources typically used in the study
of women and Islamic cultures in Southeast Asia. She outlines research
on the history of the region in the pre-modern and early modern period.
She discusses the methods used and locations of archival research in
Southeast Asian History. The paradigm of the nation-state remains cen-
tral to Historians of Southeast Asia, she finds. Hearman reflects on his-
tory writing and the impact of democratization on the writing about and
by women and Islamic cultures. She offers case studies on Singapore,
Malaysia, and the Philippines.
Bahar Davary’s article on Islamic Studies distinguishes between Islamic
Studies as an academic discipline and the teaching of Islam as a professed
faith. Critically reviewing the impact of colonial, imperial feminism (as
opposed to feminist Orientalism), she sets out the basis for the historical
development of Islamic studies. She discusses Islamic studies as religious
literacy and traces the uses of interdisciplinary methodologies within
contemporary Islamic studies. Offering an overview of women in Islamic
studies, she raises the questions of who speaks for Islam, the Islamization
of knowledge, women and the Qur’an, the changing roles of women as
leaders within Muslim communities, resistance to Islamic fundamental-
ism, the new Orientalism, sexuality and the queering of religious texts.
Literary Studies, according to Michelle Hartman, exhibits an unequal
power relationship between the study of women and Islamic cultures
and mainstream academic disciplines in English-language academic
institutions. Literary Studies has been organized around national lan-
guages and the notion of the nation-state. How Literary Studies defines
what constitutes literature is an on-going crisis-inducing process for
the field. Offering a history of Literary Studies as a discipline, Hartman
observes that women and Islamic studies are not absent from main-
stream Literary Studies. She reviews the locations of Literary Studies
within the academy, and its relationships with English, Comparative Lit-
erature, and national language-based literary studies. She outlines key
 introduction 13

approaches within Literary Studies, such as Marxist literary criticism,

feminist and womanist approaches, post-colonial and subaltern studies.
She discusses the approach to “world literatures,” and the development of
a sub-field of writing by women from Islamic cultures.
Hoda Elsadda updates her 2003 article on Oral History arguing that
the past decade has brought the recognition that the discipline is an inte-
gral part of historical inquiry. This is a dramatic change from the three
decades ago, when oral historians were not recognized as credible his-
torians. In part, she argues, this is the result of the democratization of
the field of History. This scholarly recognition has been spurred by and
has itself spurred, the rapid development of oral history projects globally.
Elsadda offers an example of oral history projects in the Middle East, not-
ing the close relationship between Oral History and activist movements—
especially resistance movements, such as the Palestinian resistance to the
colonial project which occupies them. Oral History, here, becomes a tool
of decolonization, she contends. It is a venue for reclaiming voices, espe-
cially gendered voices. She observes the rise of digital oral history archives
and projects, especially the relatively high representation of women in
digital archives.
Nerina Rustomji opens up new scholarship on gender, authority, and
Qur’anic interpretation in the discipline of Philosophy. She reviews herme-
neutics on how to read the Qur’an—a central question in philosophical
debates. Citing recent feminist contributions in hermeneutics, she raises
the new methodological and epistemological frontiers advanced by schol-
arship of the past ten years which have significantly challenged standing
readings of holy texts. She traces the conversations within the field on eth-
ics and jurisprudence as they raise issues about women’s authority. Engag-
ing the field-changing work of Muslim women scholars on the authority of
women to address truth claims, to self-learn Islamic texts, and to exercise
leadership in the Islamic community as a whole, Rustomji outlines the
dynamic transformations in the discipline of Philosophy around women
and Islamic cultures.
Amaney Jamal and Vickie Langhor observe that Political Science has orga-
nized research on women and Islamic cultures around three main debates:
the lack of democracies in the Muslim world; the question of why Muslim
women lag behind women in the rest of the world in political and labor
force participation; and the presumed patriarchal structure of the politi-
cal societies in which Muslim women live and work. Jamal and Langhor
review the work on women and rights, on modernization and gender, the
14 suad joseph

roles of women in Islamist political parties, and the challenge to liberal

feminism in the works on women and politics.
Population and Health Studies, a growing field of investigation for
women and Islamic studies, is covered by Hania Sholkamy, who updates
her 2003 article. She argues that during the past decade the discipline has
focused heavily on the rapidly changing political and economic condi-
tions under which Muslim women live. Population and Health Studies, she
finds, has shifted from research on reproduction, fertility, and medicaliza-
tion and systemization of populations to a political economic paradigm.
Targeting Arab countries for her review, she summarizes the demographic
changes affecting family structures and gender dynamics. The tension
emerging from the political economy paradigm and the rise of religion
as a determinant of social behavior has produced ongoing debates in the
field. A key issue for Population and Health Studies, Sholkamy observes, is
the world of donor aid which has been driven by an anti-natalist agenda.
She notes that scholars of the field are increasingly involved in more criti-
cal knowledge production. Much Population and Health Studies research,
she notes, is policy oriented.
Religious Studies has perhaps been one of the most impacted by events
of the past decade. Zayn Kassam observes that the rise of Islamophobia
emerging from an anxiety over Muslims in Europe and the United States
in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 lead to a deepening of Orientalist
approaches to Islam. The “War on Terror” fed these anxieties as did the
wars and violence of the past decade in the Middle East—the wars on
Afghanistan and Iraq, the revolutions or uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya,
Yemen, and Bahrain, the instability in Lebanon, the civil war in Syria, and
popular protests in Iran and Turkey. These and ongoing events lead to
daily headlines across the world, often cast in religious terms having to
do with Islam. Kassam finds that simultaneously, feminist and new critical
studies in Religious Studies, have resulted in rethinking of gender issues,
the representation of Muslim women in Western and other world media,
the political uses of the veil by states and other actors, and the like. Schol-
arly debates on religion and secularism, especially secular feminism found
their way into Religious Studies. Kassam reviews the approaches in Reli-
gious Studies to issues of religion and sacred hermeneutics, religion and
law, religion and globalization, and religion and transnational feminism.
Samar Habib’s article on Sexualities and Queer Studies reflects on a
rapidly changing disciplinary field. In particular, she discusses the rapid
developments in queer Islamic studies or queer Muslim scholarship. She
 introduction 15

observes the breakthroughs that have opened spaces for this research,
including the establishment of queer-inclusive mosques, the rise of activ-
ism around sexualities and queer politics, and the emergence of queer
Muslim counter-cultures in many countries around the world, including
in the Middle East. She reviews the relationship between Islamic feminist
methodologies and queer Islamic hermeneutics.
In 2003, Print EWIC Volume I did not receive the article solicited on
Sociology. Rachel Rinaldo was therefore invited to offer a larger overview
of the discipline, not confined to the past decade. She observes that, unlike
Anthropology, Sociology produced little on women and Islamic cultures
until recently. The emergence of work on globalization and the increasing
attention to religion and culture stimulated interest in women and Islamic
cultures in the discipline of Sociology. While Sociology, as a field, local-
ized itself in North American and Western European research, Rinaldo
notes, in the past decade, it has expanded its landscape of research to
become more global—pushing not only the regional boundaries of the
discipline, but also its methods and paradigms. Research on women and
Islamic cultures in Sociology tends to focus on economic development,
nationalism, the state, civil society, social movements, immigration, and
the veil. Increasingly Sociology is considering how gender and sexuality is
linked to religion, the state, and the economy.
In all, these eighteen disciplinary reviews, while not exhaustive, pro-
vide foundational analysis for doing and undoing disciplines. They cap-
ture critical research done within, between, and against disciplines. They
update a decade of new research, revealing the broad span of work that
emerged in a tumultuous first decade of the twenty-first century. It has
been a decade marked by the aftermath of the events of September 11,
2001; the watersheds of the Arab Uprisings; the popular protests in Iran
and Turkey; major regime changes throughout Southeast Asia; rapid racial-
ization of Islam in Europe and the United States; the rise of Islamophobia;
the demographic explosions of youth; the global massive migrations of
people, ideas, products; and the historical interventions of the internet,
Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. It has been such a decade.
And the literature on women and Islamic cultures has often reflected, has
been shaped by, and has helped to shape the understandings of this major
period of world history.
16 suad joseph

The EWIC Project 2003–2013

From its inception, the EWIC Project intended to produce an online edi-
tion after the completion of Print EWIC. The EWIC Project formally began
in 1998 (see Joseph 2003 for a history of the EWIC Project), when, three
years after I was invited to become the General Editor (during which time
the project was conceptualized and formulated), the contract between
Brill and myself to produce the encyclopedia was signed. The Print EWIC
Editorial Board joined the EWIC Project in the Spring of 1999 and worked
overtime from 1999 through the end of 2007 to produce the six volumes.
All of them elected to transition to the International Advisory Board in
2008, while I composed a new Editorial Board for EWIC Online. Within
a year of the completion of Print EWIC, EWIC Online featured all 1,246
articles of Print EWIC in a subscription online database.
EWIC Online’s Editorial Board in the six years starting in 2008 has
included Therese Saliba (Evergreen State College); Hoda Elsadda (Man-
chester University, then Cairo University); Virginia Hooker (Australian
National University); Elora Shehabbudin (Rice University); Amira Jarma-
kani (Georgia State University); Bahar Davary (University of San Diego);
Sarah Gualtieri (University of Southern California); and Marilyn Booth
(University of Edinburgh). In EWIC Online, despite some concerns, we
continued the Print EWIC’s practice of assigning editors to solicit arti-
cles from specific regions (with some flexibility). Therese Saliba, Amira
Jarmakani and Sarah Gualtieri had overlapping terms as the editors for
the Americas. Virginia Hooker and Bahar Davary had overlapping terms
for East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Hoda Elsadda and Marilyn
Booth had overlapping terms covering the Middle East and Europe, and to
some degree Africa. Elora Shehabbudin covered South and Central Asia.
Since the social sciences (especially Anthropology) were heavily repre-
sented on the Print EWIC Editorial Board, I was keen to have Literature,
Languages, Arts, and Religious Studies represented in the EWIC Online
Board. Theresa Saliba, Hoda Elsadda, Amira Jamakani were trained in
Comparative Literatures, including English; Sarah Gualtieri in History and
American Studies; Marilyn Booth in Arabic Literature and Middle East
History; Bahar Davary in Religious Studies; Elora Shebuddin in Politics;
and Virginia Hooker in History. My degree is in Anthropology.
Global representation within Print EWIC and EWIC Online has come
not only in the form of author solicitations and in the country coverage
(See Appendix #3 for country coverage, and Appendix #2), but also in
 introduction 17

the Editorial Board. The Editors are themselves from or situated in many
parts of the globe, with complex transnational personal and scholarly
genealogies. In EWIC Online, as in Print EWIC, we continue to have dif-
ficulties in soliciting articles for Sub-Saharan Africa. In Print EWIC, we
eventually allocated funding to invite an Assistant Editor for Sub-Saharan
Africa—Alice Horner. However, in the early years of EWIC Online, we had
no external funding. Our early funder, the Ford Foundation, had changed
its funding programs and EWIC no longer conformed to those priorities.
Several years and dozens of failed submitted proposals later, the EWIC
project won a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation for Public Outreach,
which now allows us to seek an editor for Sub-Saharan Africa.
EWIC Online was designed to produce two supplements a year, com-
prising of 20–25 articles each, to be uploaded in Spring and Fall of each
year. EWIC Online supplements I–VII averaged 20 articles per supple-
ment. This book will become Supplement IX. Supplements I–VII produced
127 articles for a total of 687,533 words—the equivalent of a Print EWIC
volume (see Appendix #2 for a complete list of articles in EWIC Online
Supplements I–VII).
With the 1,246 Print EWIC articles already online, Supplements I–VII
brought the total articles in the EWIC database to 1,373. The 127 articles
were produced by 131 scholars from around the world. The overwhelm-
ing number of articles are single authored, and the majority of the word
output came from authors who wrote only one article for EWIC Online.
Of the 687,533 words written for Supplements I–VII, 659,407 words were
written by authors who wrote only one article for EWIC Online; 58,139
were written by authors who had written two articles; 11,891 were writ-
ten by authors who wrote three articles (See Appendix #4 for number of
articles on specific countries, and Appendix #2 for full article list in EWIC
Online Supplements I–VII).
One of our first editorial conversations for the EWIC Online concerned
adding new topics. The Print EWIC entry list had been designed between
1999–2003. Much had happened in the following decade, including the
birth of social media, Twitter, Facebook, blogs; the emergence of “secu-
rity regimes”; rethinking of NGO’s (non-governmental organizations); and
new work on cinemas and literatures and the like. We created thirty new
topics for solicitations, bringing the total number of topics up to 440 (See
Appendix #5 for new entries developed for EWIC Online).
As Print EWIC Editors were constrained to find authors for every topic,
for every region of the world, I thought it important in EWIC Online, to
18 suad joseph

give editors leeway to solicit articles on topics of their interests. Editors

were free to solicit from any of the previous 410 topics, especially since
we had many topics for which there had been no articles or authors for
specific regions of the world. Most of the EWIC Online editors found it
rewarding to solicit on our thirty newly created topics. This meant that
supplements, drawing on 440 different topic possibilities, did not have
unifying themes. We thought this would not matter as the supplements,
once uploaded, were merged with the existing database of the Print
EWIC’s 1,246 articles.
An additional feature of EWIC Online, is that we were not constrained
in the number of visuals we could use. As a result, a number of EWIC
Online articles have extensive visuals. With EWIC’s online capabilities, we
were no longer concerned about word count either, the effect of which is
that the average article length tripled from about 1,500 to 4,500+ words.
This significantly improved the depth of analysis and the richness of
EWIC Online articles. EWIC Online also has the capacity to use audio
and video, though we have not taken advantage of that capacity as much
as we might have.
After several years of editorial free grazing of topics, we became inter-
ested in producing some thematic topics. As a result, in 2011, 2012, and
2013, EWIC Editors, lead by Therese Saliba, organized Thematic Conversa-
tion panels at the annual Middle East Studies Association meetings, focus-
ing on Muslim women, the Arab Uprising, and protest movements. That
focus led the Editorial Board to be interested in doing a special issue on
Muslim women and political violence. This thematic will be the subject
of Supplement X. We are simultaneously considering special issues on
specific historical periods and other thematics.

The EWIC Public Outreach Project

The EWIC Project continues to expand its vision. In 2011, EWIC won a
Henry Luce Foundation award for the EWIC Public Outreach Project,
of which the aim is to invigorate and qualitatively shift work begun
under the Ford Foundation grants. In this project, the Editorial Board
undertakes outreach to local community groups, K-12 schools, teach-
ers, religious organizations and the media to expand the reach of the
scholarship that has been produced since the publication of EWIC Vol-
ume I. Towards the goal of outreach, the Editorial Board has received
permission from Brill to produce selected EWIC articles in brochure
 introduction 19

format for free public dissemination, including on the EWIC webpage.

We have also produced free EWIC Data sheets, FAQ sheets, and Topical
Notes and Concept Notes for use by the public at large. In addition, we
have carried out training workshops at the Middle East Studies Associa-
tion annual meetings, for graduate students and scholars on media-out-
reach, as well as writing for encyclopedia projects.
We have continued to update the EWIC Scholars Database, which now
houses the templates of over 1,800 scholars and experts on women and
Islamic cultures. We have published the 175-page bibliography on women
and Islamic cultures from Volume I on the EWIC webpage, as well as the
75-page analysis of 50 years of Ph.D. dissertations on women and Islamic
cultures undertaken by a team of Interns under my supervision at the
University of California, Davis. EWIC was also able to translate Volume
I into Arabic, subsidized by a grant from the Ford Foundation and the
Swedish Institute of Alexandria. The EWIC Arabic has been distributed in
print form to about 100 libraries around the world, though mostly in the
Middle East; and in digital form to over 2,000 scholars and institutions
globally. It is also uploaded on the EWIC webpage, along with all of the
documents discussed in this paragraph. These can be found on the EWIC
webpage: http://sjoseph.ucdavis.edu/ewic.
The EWIC Public Outreach Project has taken a variety of forms (See
Appendix # 6 for EWIC Public Outreach web resources). The Topical
Notes are designed with K-12 teachers in mind to provide materials and
resources for classroom instruction. They are of use to the public at large
as well. They cover topics such as Islamophobia, Muslim Americans, veil-
ing fashion styles, women and education in selected Muslim majority
countries, women and science, and the like. The Topical Notes are some-
what longer than their counterparts, the Concept Notes, which are meant
to be short and easy to read informational sheets on a variety of topics
covered by EWIC. Bibliographies offer reading lists on selected topics for
the general public. We are preparing selected reading lists for children on
women and Islamic cultures.
In addition, the EWIC Public Outreach Project has uploaded numer-
ous short scholarly articles published in Print EWIC and EWIC Online, for
free public access, on the EWIC webpage (see Appendix # 7 for scholarly
articles published on the EWIC webpage). These articles were reprinted
with the generous permission of EWIC’s publisher, Brill, and the authors.
The scholarly articles were selected from EWIC’s online database of
1,373 articles with K-12 teachers and the general public in mind. New
scholarly articles from the database are selected and uploaded regularly.
20 suad joseph

Though this volume celebrates the tenth anniversary of the pub-

lishing of Print EWIC’s Volume I, the EWIC Project’s history is much
longer, having launched in 1995. In the nearly two decades of working
with a stellar group of Associate Editors, a rotating set of Brill editors (10+
since EWIC’s founding), over 1,000 authors from all over the world, and
outreach projects which have linked EWIC with innumerable constituents,
I have been humbled by the interest in the EWIC Project which I encoun-
ter almost everywhere I travel. While the impact of EWIC on scholarship,
disciplines, and the public is for others to evaluate, its impact on the
team of scholars who have produced it is profound. We learned to work
together in a collective, collaborative, “interdisciplinary,” feminist project
to produce and circulate knowledge about, from, and towards women and
Islamic cultures beyond the vision of any one of us. The lessons of the
EWIC Project continue to guide its production towards its ever-evolving
vision and promise.

References

Christie, Frances and Karl Maton, Eds. Disciplinarity: Functional Linguistics and Sociologi-
cal Perspectives. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. 2011.
Joseph, Suad. “Introduction.” Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures. Methodologies,
Paradigms and Sources. Leiden: Brill. 2003.
Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life “The Future of the Global Muslim Population: Pro-
jections for 2010–2030.” <http://www.pewforum.org/The-Future-of-the-Global-Muslim-
Population.aspx. 2011>.
 Anthropology

Azza Basarudin

Introduction

Contemporary scholarship on gender and Islam has challenged the endur-

ing stereotypes of women in Muslim communities as acquiescent and of
Islam as the sole force shaping women’s condition by presenting intricate
portraits of their lives and experiences. This body of literature has included
historical Islamic discourse on gender, studies about gender and the state,
law and kinship networks, creative strategies of survival and resistance,
debates on veiling, and sexuality as a tool of social dissent (Ahmed 1992,
Hale 1996, Joseph 2000, Abu-Lughod 2000, Lazreg 2009, Mahdavi 2008).
Despite the sophisticated scholarship, Orientalist and imperialist render-
ings of Muslim women tied to religio-cultural othering continue to circu-
late, buttressed by the state of world politics post-2001.
The rise of Islamophobia and xenophobia post-2001 and the burgeon-
ing genre of nonfictional “native testimonial” bestsellers of neoconserva-
tive supporters such as Azar Nafisi, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji have
coincided with the tropes of liberalism and democracy being instrumental
in “saving” Muslim women, shaping foreign policy, and justifying war and
occupation (Abu-Lughod 2002, Mahmood 2006, 2008). This particular
crystallization of the “Muslim other” as a site of humanistic and cultural
difference has heightened the urgency to demonstrate the diversity of
interpretations within the Islamic tradition and the complexity of legal
systems, cultural mores, economic and political arrangements, and trans-
national connections in the study of women, gender, and sexuality in
Islamic cultures.
This entry reflects the significant developments in the discipline of
anthropology since 2003. It takes as its point of departure the review and
analysis of methods and sources related to this research in the entry on
anthropology in the first volume of this encyclopedia (Mahmood 2003).
There is now considerable scholarship related to the analysis of women’s
activism, social and political participations, religious movements, scrip-
tural interpretation, and women’s agency that illuminates historically and
geographically situated hierarchies of power and unequal social relations.
22 azza basarudin

A large portion of this scholarship centers on troubling the binaries of

modern/traditional, secular/religious and submission/resistance by stress-
ing the significance of working with contradictions in analyzing the gen-
dered dimension of modernity and the various forms of its mediation
through local cultures, ideas and actions (Hafez 2011, Deeb 2006, Mah-
mood 2005, Salime 2011).
There is a notable expansion of geographical focus in anthropological
research on women, gender and sexuality into Islamic cultures outside
of the Middle East, such as Indonesia, a country with the largest Mus-
lim population in the world, countries with Muslim minorities such as
India, and pockets of diasporic Muslim communities in North America
and Europe. Such an expansion has contributed to diversifying Islamic
discourses of gender beyond the Middle East and, more importantly, has
re-centered regions (e.g., Southeast Asia) that have long been relegated to
the periphery of Islamic knowledge production for a variety of reasons,
one of which being that they are often perceived as lacking the intellec-
tual rigor and originality of Islamic discourses in the Middle East (Abaza
2002).
Research that falls within this development includes: the study of orga-
nizations led by Muslim women in Indonesia that employ scriptural inter-
pretation as a vehicle to promote women’s rights, religious leadership, and
social transformation (Doorn-Harder 2006); the spiritual healing practices
of a Muslim woman in Hyderabad who exemplifies a tradition of popular
Islam by working across religious traditions and communities (Flueckiger
2006); urban women’s reclamation of mosque spaces and public roles as
religious educators in Malaysia (Frisk 2009); rural women’s negotiation of
state, Islam, and secularism in Bangladesh (Shehabuddin 2008); a Bulgar-
ian Muslim community’s mediation of gender relations post-Communism
amidst an influx of funding from Saudi Arabia (Ghodsee 2009); the poli-
tics of identity and transformation of religiosity of young Muslim women
in Berlin (Bendixsen 2013); elite women’s participation in the transna-
tional Islamist piety movement in Pakistan (Ahmad 2009); diasporic Arab
and/or Muslim communities in the United States navigating questions of
national belonging, gender, religion and sexuality against the backdrop of
immigration policies, xenophobia, and political activism (Naber 2012); and
the lived experiences of North African migrant women within the context
of French secularism that casts gender equality, modernity and democ-
racy as values inimical to Muslim immigrants and Islam (Selby 2012).
Although anthropologists undertake the majority of such research,
there has been an increase in ethnographic production by scholars
 anthropology 23

trained in women and gender studies, political science and/or religious

studies (Basarudin 2009, Shehabuddin 2008, Salime 2011, Doorn-Harder
2006). Whereas this entry focuses on significant developments in anthro-
pology, it also pays attention to ethnographic production by non-formally
trained anthropologists to illuminate ethnography’s appeal as a valuable
tool for seeing and making cultural interpretations across academic dis-
ciplines. The breadth and depth of interdisciplinary intellectual projects
have enriched the discipline of anthropology in general, and ethnographic
research in particular, by borrowing and co-mingling epistemological,
pedagogical, and methodological frameworks.

Living Islam

Ethnographic fieldwork about women in communities of Muslims cre-

ates opportunities to ask new questions, seek new directions, and craft
new theories to expand anthropological inquiry on an increasingly vital
study of gender and Islam. By privileging the lived experiences of Mus-
lims in situated geographical, economic, and political contexts, ethnog-
raphy remains important and is the most widely used qualitative
research method to demonstrate the multilayered factors that intersect
with Islam to influence life choices, activism, gender ideals, and national
politics. Instead of focusing on the structural and/or ideological dynamics
of the secular modern versus the religious traditional, details gleaned from
studying women’s everyday lives expose counter-hegemonic processes
and strategies of survival that can contribute to broadening anthropologi-
cal frameworks of analyses. This is in line with Lila Abu-Lughod’s (2010)
urging that debates on “Muslim women’s rights” be approached from the
vantage point of multi-sited and comparative ethnography for a more
nuanced understanding of the complex terrain of women’s lives, local-
global intersections, and constellations of power.
Based on research of how women “live Islam,” that is, the integration of
Islam into their daily lives, work ethics, community activism, and political
participation, scholars have demonstrated how the meanings of “modern,”
“secular,” and “religious” are being reconfigured by historical specific-
ity, the local/global processes, human agency, and shifting structures of
power. Extensive ethnographic research undertaken in Turkey, Lebanon,
Bangladesh, India, Morocco and Egypt, illustrates this point.
Ayşe Saktanber (2002) documents how Turkish women in a com-
munity of what she termed “conscious Muslims” in Ankara fuse Islamic
24 azza basarudin

obligations with their familial, communal, and political lives and collapse
the boundaries of private-public and religious-secular. In doing so, she
demonstrates how these women claim visibility in highly contested public
spaces and mediate the complex relationship between Islam and secular-
ism in Turkey.
The lives of women in a Shiʿi community in the Dahiya neighborhood
of Beirut are Lara Deeb’s focus (2006). She documents social services man-
aged by Hizbullah, an influential political presence in Lebanon’s history,
by focusing on women’s activism and their negotiation of the meaning of
modern piety. Deeb dismantles the binary of religion and modernity by
demonstrating how women value both spiritual and material progress—
“pious modern”—and showing that “modern” does not presuppose secu-
larism but instead denotes a reaffirmation of Islam, or what she terms
“authenticated.” Deeb’s scholarship is notable for subverting the miscon-
ception of Islam as the opposite of modernity, challenging normative for-
mulations of emancipated feminist subjects, and humanizing Hizbullah, a
group that in the imagination of many is merely a terrorist organization.
Elora Shehabuddin (2008) researched how rural women in Bangla-
desh respond to social and political forces insistent on shaping their
lives, political participation, and faith and spirituality. Through extensive
observations and interviews, Shehabuddin charts the social and political
mobilizations of rural women’s creative strategies of engaging the state,
elite and secular NGOs, and Islamist politics by refusing to reject their
faith or to embrace a secular modernity. By focusing on how women con-
sider their economic, social, and political security and on how they vote,
Shehabuddin takes readers into the heart of the political contestations
between secularist and Islamists, and of the rural women caught between
the groups vying for political power. In this way her book forces one to
rethink the conception of piety and political agency.
The life and practices of a Muslim female spiritual healer—Amma
(Mother)—in the south Indian city of Hyderabad are analyzed by Joyce
Flueckiger (2006) in a rich and persuasive ethnography. Amma, with
whom Flueckiger developed a close relationship spanning more than a
decade, sees both female and male patients in her “healing room.” Amma
attends to various spiritual, bodily, and social ailments such as sleep dis-
order, infertility, colicky babies, and high fevers, as well as unfaithful and/
or abusive husbands, intrusive neighbors, troubled youth and suitable
marriage partners, and provides appropriate diagnosis and treatment.
Amma’s healing room is almost always packed with patients seeking her
healing expertise, kindness and motherly advice. For the female patients
 anthropology 25

in particular, Amma’s attentiveness to their problems and the opportunity

to have a space to trade stories of ailments has created a community in
her healing room. Amma’s healing room is where different social and reli-
gious communities—Muslims, Hindus and Christians—come together for
a common purpose, and thus, in that context, time and space, allow for
shifting and overlapping boundaries and identities between Islam, Hin-
duism and Christianity. This book makes an important contribution to
the study of Islam in general, and to the study of Islam in South Asia in
particular, because local forms of vernacular Islam are under-researched.
Flueckiger’s ethnography illuminates the creative ways that Islam func-
tions in people’s daily lives in an ordinary community and provides a
glimpse into a religious tradition that is often studied on an institutional
level and represented as monolithic.
Zakia Salime’s (2011) research into the transformation of Morocco’s fam-
ily code, or the Mudawwana, focuses on how both the Islamist women’s
movement and liberal feminist movement organize and mobilize on the
issue. Through interviews, observations, discourse analysis, and archival
research, Salime demonstrates how both movements inform and trans-
form each other and reshape public debates and state policies through
what she terms “feminization of Islamist women” and “Islamization of the
feminist movement.” Salime’s cogent research shows that “feminists” and
“Islamists” are not necessarily always polarized. Instead, the groups strug-
gle over political legitimacy, and access to political power necessitates a
co-mingling of strategies dependent on situated local politics as well as
global and structural changes.
In the field of health and reproductive issues, medical anthropologist
Marcia Inhorn’s scholarship urges the rethinking of gender, sexuality, mas-
culinity and femininity, as well as the relationship of Islam to technolo-
gies of reproduction (2003, 2012). Her work (2003) on how elite Egyptian
couples cope with medical and social problems brought on by infertil-
ity and the influence of Sunni Islam on the in-vitro fertilization process
demonstrates the importance of alternative avenues for remaking families
and marital relationships. It also calls for a re-evaluation of gender rela-
tions, as well as biologically based parenthood, family life and kinship.
Inhorn’s latest groundbreaking book (2012) calls attention to the intersec-
tion of masculinity, religion and technology in the lives of Middle Eastern
men. Suggesting that assisted reproductive technologies are reconfigur-
ing men’s own understanding of manhood and fatherhood, Inhorn calls
for an understanding of what she terms “emergent masculinities,” a con-
cept that captures the transformative process of selfhood that is neither
26 azza basarudin

resolutely patriarchal nor stereotypically Orientalist/neo-Orientalist (for

example, backward, misogynist, violent). Instead, her research illuminates
how men’s embodiment of masculinities shifts over the course of their
life, including their relationships to women in their family, expectations
in marriage, investment in the reproductive process, and support for a
daughter’s education. Whether it is Sunni clerics’ opposition to or Shiʻi
clerics’ approval of the donor reproduction system, or the Vatican’s ban on
all forms of assisted reproduction, the desire for family of Middle Eastern
men and their wives necessitates negotiating the web of religious dictates
and, sometimes, going against them. In doing so, concern for family life,
identity and subjectivity are also reconfiguring men’s relationship to their
faith traditions. Inhorn’s work, which re-centers men’s lived realities and
the rapidly changing gender relations in the reproductive process fills the
lacunae of masculinity studies in the Middle East and/or Islamic world.
It reminds scholars that in moving away from archaic understanding of
Middle Eastern men and the patriarchal systems that have characterized
much of the scholarship on them, there are many aspects that are yet to
be explored.

Muslim Minority Communities in Europe and North America

In the past decade there has been increasing ethnographic research of

Muslim minority communities across Europe and North America (Dhossa
2009, Ghodsee 2009, Selby 2012, Naber 2012). In European countries with
significant Muslim immigrant populations such as France, Britain and
Germany, increasing anxiety about Islam following Samuel Huntington’s
theory of the “Clash of Civilizations” is evident from the debates over the
headscarf, the banning of religious symbols in public space, the status of
Muslim women, minority rights and identities, and so forth. For instance,
in 2004, the French parliament passed a law that bans Islamic headscarves
and other religious symbols from public schools while in 2009 Switzerland
prohibited the construction of minarets. In the United States, opposition
over the proposed Islamic community center, Park51 (formally known
as Cordoba House), two blocks from the World Trade Center site gener-
ated heated protest from right-wing organizations. Against the backdrop
of xenophobia and Islamophobia, Muslim women have been relegated
to the domain of the subordinated, Muslim men are seen as violent and
misogynistic, and Islam is perceived as antithetical to democratic values.
While there is a solid body of scholarship on Muslim immigrants in
Europe, many focused on institutional discourse of Islam, secularism and
 anthropology 27

migration (Bowen 2008, Cesari 2006, Laurence 2012). Jennifer Selby’s eth-
nography of North African migrant women in the Parisian banlieue of Petit
Nanterre (2012) is a delightful work that explores the everyday lived expe-
riences of these women and their attitudes towards the French response
to Muslim migrants. Selby’s central contribution lies in her articulation
that the parameters of the discourse of the Muslim migrant community
has been shaped by French laïcité (secularity) that overwhelmingly casts
Muslim women as oppressed and backward, thus denying them spaces
for self-representation and erasing practical issues that matter to them,
such as educational and economic opportunities, prejudice and racism,
halal food in schools, and drug trafficking in their neighborhoods. A note-
worthy aspect of Selby’s analysis points to mutually exclusive stereotypes
that undergird the interaction between migrant and French women. Selby
highlights how conceptions of the “Oppressed Muslim Immigrant” and
“Liberated French Whore” police the boundaries of individuality, moral-
ity and community. Through the politics of gossip and public surveillance,
the migrant women of Petit Nanterre who transgress migrant culture or
assimilate into French culture are perceived to have been morally and
spiritually corrupted, and are thus liable to be estranged from their com-
munity, exposing the complexities of the racialized and gendered dimen-
sion of stereotypes.
Kristen Ghodsee’s (2009) ethnography of the Pomaks (Slavic Muslims)
in the southern Rhodope Mountains of Bulgaria explores the shifting local
meanings of Islam and Muslim practices and gender relations following
the Cold War. Set in a country with the largest population of indigenous
Muslims in the European Union, Ghodsee’s study of a community whose
faith was severely repressed under Communist rule is central to under-
standing local variants of Islam, as well as the influence of transnational
political Islam on ordinary communities. The community Ghodsee studied
is based in an area with an economy largely derived from lead and zinc
mining. The collapse of the state-subsidized economy after Communism
and mismanagement of the privatization process led to economic hard-
ship and high male unemployment. As men became heavily dependent
on women’s income, their control and authority over the family lessened,
thus reconfiguring gender roles. The flow of financial resources, mainly
from the oil rich Islamic states, brought what Ghodsee terms “orthodox”
Islamic ideologies and practices into this community, and given anxieties
over gender instability, this interpretation of Islam took root. The com-
munity views this brand of Islam as “purer,” with men embracing its strict
gender roles as a reaffirmation of their masculinity and patriarchy. The
28 azza basarudin

women, while adapting to their more conventional roles in the family,

utilize it as method to resist violence and alcoholism. For the Pomaks,
trying to adapt to post-Communist transition rife with consumerism and
inequality, the appeal of “orthodox” Islam also lies in its critique of oppres-
sion and exploitation, as well as its message of social justice. Ghodsee’s
analysis of the interconnection of gender roles, new forms of Islam and
sociopolitical transition highlights how a community of Muslim minori-
ties in Bulgaria negotiates its Marxist-Leninist legacy amidst a renewed
commitment to Islam.
Middle-class Arab Americans lives, political activism and gender power
dynamics in the San Francisco Bay Area are explored by Nadine Naber
(2012) in an intimate ethnography that centers gender and sexuality as
key elements of analysis to subvert normative cultural framings of “Arab
tradition” and “American modern.” In seeking a more nuanced method
of understanding the issues confronting a diasporic community that are
internal (family, respectability, religion, gender, sexuality) and external
(xenophobia, model minority myth, orientalism, imperialism), Naber sug-
gests moving away from the overwhelming focus on debunking pervasive
stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims, instead moving towards address-
ing contentious issues within Arab families and communities. Through
participant observation, in-depth interviews and immersion in the lived
realities of her interviewees, Naber, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay
Area, offers a glimpse into the intergenerational dynamics of immigration,
positing that for second generation Arab Americans, religion and religious
identity play an important part in shaping a sense of belonging and polit-
ical activism. The view of “Muslim first, Arab second” that is prevalent
among second generation Arab Muslims dictates that understanding Islam
and its teachings is a backdrop to political activism confronting injustice,
exclusion and racism. Naber’s work, which brings together ethnic stud-
ies, transnational feminist theories, and cultural anthropology, is a salient
contribution to the budding field of race studies of Arab and/or Muslim
Americans. It is also an excellent example of a study that subverts nor-
mative understanding of the topography of the transnational as, almost
always, located elsewhere (Mohanty and Alexander 2010).
Parin Dossa’s work (2009) on the intersection of gender, disability
and race of Muslim immigrant women in Canada makes an important
contribution to anthropology of Islam and disability. Employing narra-
tive analysis, Dossa studied South Asian Muslims from East Africa and
Iranian Muslims with disabilities, as well as those who serve as caregivers
for family member with disabilities. She argues that because Canadian
 anthropology 29

immigration and disability policies impose heterogeneous identities on

Muslim communities, social services have failed to account for the varia-
tions in gender, ability, age, and intergenerational responsibilities of Mus-
lim migrants, causing many to fall between the cracks and become unable
to secure necessary services in healthcare, education, and the workforce.
The fact that policies are compounded with racial prejudice towards Mus-
lims creates challenging obstacles that Dossa’s interlocutors confront on a
daily basis. Her documentation of their life history and their agency to live
as productive citizens not only exposes a seemingly open Canadian immi-
gration policy that is deeply nationalized and racialized, in that native-
born citizens are given preferential treatment compared to the naturalized
and immigrant population but, more importantly, also illuminates how
women are reconstituting their abilities in their own terms as workers and
caregivers beyond institutional parameters of disabled bodies.

Scriptural Interpretations and Faith-Centered Activism

In the past two decades or so, there has been an explosion of Muslim
feminist scholarship calling for the re-examination of practices and scrip-
tures similar to feminist movements that have taken place in Judaism and
Christianity. This scholarship centers on gender justice initiatives that
highlight women’s capabilities to interpret and produce religious mean-
ings within a situated and historically specific context. This effort to link
reinterpretation of religious ideas to the protection of rights and freedoms,
and to re-conceptualize discourse of gender, is slowly but steadily gaining
momentum across the Islamic world and beyond. Some of the goals of this
scholarship include increasing the role of women as religious authorities,
reinterpreting patriarchal language about God, debating women’s rights
and roles, excavating the contributions of women, and deconstruct-
ing classical Islamic jurisprudence (Ali 2006, Wadud 1999, Mir-Hosseini
1999).
While the production of theories on feminist and/or gender egalitar-
ian hermeneutics and exegesis, along with the field of jurisprudence, is
encouraging, the transmission of theories into strategic practices and
policy initiatives, specifically through ethnographic details that examine
how women disrupt historical religious authority and re-conceptualize
understandings of rights, is still under-researched (the works of Doorn-
Harder 2006, Frisk 2009, and Basarudin 2010 are exceptions; they also
contribute to understandings of Islam and women’s activism beyond the
30 azza basarudin

Middle East). Given the contemporary reassertion of Islam as a politi-

cal and cultural motivation, ethnography of women engaging religious
reforms is ever more pertinent.
Indonesia, home to the most populous Muslim nation, is the focus
of Pieternella Doorn-Harder’s study of religious female leaders who are
interpreting Islamic texts and educating women to produce other Mus-
lim female leaders who can then disseminate their Islamic knowledge to
their communities. By studying the women’s sections of the two largest
Indonesian Muslim organizations, Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama,
she captures the efforts of women who intend Islam to be a force of social
transformation. Doorn-Harder’s depiction of the desire of these women to
become active interpreters of Islamic teachings is invaluable in the light
of the growing gender justice movement calling for women’s equal access
to the production of Islamic knowledge.
Similarly, Sylva Frisk’s work on Malay Muslim women’s everyday reli-
gious practices in urban Kuala Lumpur fills the gap in ethnographic schol-
arship in this area. Her research documents how these women engage
various creative avenues to practice their faith, such as learning to read
the Qur’an in Arabic, earning credentials as religious teachers, gendering
mosque spaces through collective prayer sessions and communal activi-
ties, choosing to veil and, above all, folding Islam into all aspects of their
daily life. The mode of becoming pious and claiming agency is predicated
on dismantling the binaries of Malay adat (custom) and Islam; lay and
state Islam; and reasoning and desire, important binaries that Frisk dis-
mantles through her detailed ethnography.
Azza Basarudin (2010) has carried out ethnography of the renowned
group of Muslim feminists in Malaysia called Sisters in Islam (SIS), an
organization dedicated to protecting the rights of Muslim women and
promoting an understanding of Islam grounded in justice and equality.
Basarudin’s research reveals that SIS members’ refusal to surrender Islam
to patriarchal interpretation is based on their feminist reading of Islamic
texts, which are then translated into legal and social activism for gender
justice. She shows how these Malay Muslim women work from within
their own religious tradition, combining the two interpretive strands of
Qur’anic hermeneutics and exegesis and jurisprudence with human rights
principles and women’s lived experiences to create a distinct strategy for
reforming Shariʿa and public policies. Their strategy, which undermines
male religious authority, has been instrumental in halting reforms aimed
at reversing women’s rights within the family, holding the state account-
able for moral policing of Muslim women, and calling attention to the
 anthropology 31

need for a public debate of Islam if it is to remain relevant to Muslims in

the twenty-first century.
While ethnographies of scriptural interpretations and women’s activ-
ism are a budding field of study, men and masculinity have largely been
absent from this area of research. Feminist scholarship and masculinity
studies have been instrumental in proposing that visible/invisible patri-
archy has shaped our thinking and social structures, and that its perva-
siveness has an impact upon the private and public lives of both genders.
Men as well as women bear the brunt of the gendering of power through
categories of inclusion and exclusion. While women cannot and should
not be solely relegated to the task of including men as equal investors and
partners in gender justice mobilizations, there is a need to acknowledge
that the path to claiming rights for women in communities of Muslims
will continue along the lines of gender dichotomies unless collaborative
work that incorporates differences and varying justice-oriented perspec-
tives is included.
It is crucial for scholars engaging the contentious terrain of scriptural
interpretations and women’s activism to redefine Muslim masculinities
in order to highlight the roles and responsibilities of men in fostering
a relational co-existence that privileges respect, equality, and diversity.
Situating the discourse of masculinity within the framework of intersec-
tionality that considers the multiplicity of self-formation and social rela-
tionships (for example, race, class, ethnicity, education level, sexuality)
lends a greater possibility for subversion of constructions that foreclose
dialogue. Favoring a comparative and historicized approach by taking
into account factors of colonialism, imperialism, and Islamophobia that
are instrumental in shaping perceptions of Muslim masculinity lends
itself to the production of complex masculinities irreducible to religion
or culture. This production of masculinity that re-evaluates gender role
expectations for both men and women, as well as accountability to the
project of gender justice requires a radical commitment to spiritual, per-
sonal, and societal transformation. The multi-dimensional masculinities
outlined earlier must not be confined to a religious dimension but must
indeed take into account intersecting factors and historicity that inform
a man’s identity formation. With an unprecedented number of women
partaking in religious discourse, the re-imagining of Muslim masculinity
and repositioning of men within this discourse will hopefully engender a
proactive and creative strategy of transformation privileging sustainability
in reforming Muslim engagement with religion.
32 azza basarudin

Beyond Agency as Resistance or Domination

Subjectivity and identity are formed within a set of power relations and
reflect a continuous process of negotiating a particular way of being in
the world. Many of the debates on cultural construction of personhood or
agency in anthropological and feminist theories are bounded within rigid
liberal humanist notions of freedom/unfreedom and submission/resis-
tance. Such theorizing negates the agency of subjects who do not neatly
fit such conceptualization, specifically those struggling to resist structures
of domination but whose end goals cannot simply be identified as femi-
nist liberatory projects and/or the overthrow of patriarchy. It is the need
to think beyond Western liberal humanist imagery and to bring it under
rigorous scrutiny that Saba Mahmood’s study (2005) explores, opening up
exciting theoretical possibilities.
Mahmood’s (2005) ethnographic account of a women’s mosque move-
ment in Egypt has been influential in shifting conceptual frameworks of
the study of women’s piety in feminism and anthropology. Mahmood
demonstrates how women of the mosque movement discipline their bod-
ies and cultivate piety through religious rituals and desires in public and
private spaces. Her theorizing of agency that moves beyond the binary
model of submission/resistance and that dislocates agency from the goals
of feminist politics provides an avenue to the understanding of women’s
processes of self-formation in all its complexity. Mahmood urges us not
to ask questions that affirm a world made possible by the desires and
modalities of the liberal humanist subject, such as “how does the piety
movement reflect feminist consciousness?” or “how do women of the
piety movement undermine hegemony in the process of claiming spaces
of self-determination?” Instead, by asking a different set of questions such
as, “how are pious bodies cultivated?,” “how are values of modesty, shy-
ness and piety embodied?,” and “how do embodied rituals produce exte-
rior morality?,” Mahmood moves away from the trappings of a subject
resisting patriarchal ideologies, thus enabling her to generate new insights
for historically specific agency beyond universal notions of “feminist” or
“nonfeminist.”
Mahmood’s refusal of normative formulations of Islamist politics and
gendered subjectivities of women in religious based movements deliver
a powerful cultural criticism of secularism and its tools of analysis. Con-
versely, some scholars have criticized her work for its cultural essen-
tialism and relativism in parochializing non-liberal forms of desire and
agency (Waggoner 2005) and undermining the larger liberatory project of
 anthropology 33

feminism (Veer 2008). In addition, the exclusion of class differences

between members of the movement (Bangstad 2011) and the dearth of
ethnographic details has been criticized. While not distancing the piety
movement from political significance, Mahmood’s decision to allow “theo-
retical inquiry some immunity from the requirements of strategic political
action” (2005, 196) invites questions of whether the reworking of agency
forecloses the relationship of the subject to the political. What is the link
between piety and citizenship? Is it a mistake that feminist scholarship
must automatically turn to political action? What do we make of how
Mahmood’s work distances itself from the extensive hermeneutical and
exegetical scholarship that is central to the study of Islam and gender?
Sherine Hafez (2011) has expanded Mahmood’s analysis to question
further the consistency of non-liberal agency in understanding the desires
of women in Islamic activism in Egypt. In her ethnographic research
Hafez focuses on Gamʻiyat al-Hilal, an Islamic women’s private voluntary
organization with extensive membership numbering in the thousands.
With branches throughout Cairo, al-Hilal promotes Islam as a blueprint
for living and for social activism. Hafez contends that the non-liberal
model cannot fully account for the subjecthood of al-Hilal members that
is embedded within the overlapping discourses and practices of religios-
ity and secularism in Egypt’s history. Instead of suspending the political
project as Mahmood had attempted, Hafez argues that piety and political
projects are inseparable if we are to comprehend in all their complexities
women’s desires and sense of self. Hafez’s contribution lies in blurring the
boundaries between religious and secular by demonstrating how Islamic
women’s conceptions of piety and subjectivity are informed as much by
religious teachings as they are by secular policies of the Egyptian state.

New Direction for Research

The study of sexuality and masculinity remains under-researched with a

few exceptions, such as: sexuality as a tool of dissent and/or refusal of
state Islamic sexual/moral codes for urban middle- and upper-class youth
in the Islamic Republic of Iran (Mahdavi 2008); formations of masculini-
ties and male desire within Lebanon’s gay travel industry (McCormick
2011); and reproduction technologies (Inhorn 2012). There are also emerg-
ing and unpublished works on queer activism and feminist mobilization
in Lebanon by Nadine Naber and Zeina Zaatari. Through their participa-
tion in the research collective of Arab Families Working Group, Naber
34 azza basarudin

and Zaatari are working on this project within the context of the 2006
invasion of Lebanon. Much more work is necessary in these areas of study
to explore more fully the variations in constructions of masculinity and
sexuality.
More research is needed in the following areas: studies of Muslims in
Muslim minority countries and the diasporas; youth culture and social
networking; migration; kinship; violence and revolutions; and human
rights and legal systems. Some of these topics are already being addressed
in dissertations by graduate students who will no doubt take the field in
new and exciting directions.

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 Art and Architecture

Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh

Since the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures,
significant advances have been made in the study of the intersection of
gender and visual culture in Islamic societies. The discipline of art and
architectural history has been the main, but not only, site of these inves-
tigations. Anthropologists, architects, and historians, as well as scholars
of literature and cinema, have provided some intriguing contributions.
Perhaps the most notable advance since 2003 has concerned the investi-
gation of modern and contemporary visual culture, long neglected in the
case of the Islamic world, whose medieval and premodern art and archi-
tecture were traditionally privileged over creations that evinced moder-
nity. This entry considers the sources available for the study of women
and art and architecture in Islamic societies, as well as women as makers
and users of art and architecture, and highlights examples of research that
place gender questions at the center of studies of art and architecture.

Introduction

Islam posits some basic differences in society, including the sexual differ-
ence between women and men. Gender—the socially constructed set of
differences between men and women at given historical periods—is there-
fore a foundational feature of Islamic societies. Gender roles for women
as well as men inform the production and the use of art and architecture
in Islamic societies. In addition to gender, attributes such as social status,
age, religion, and wealth influence artistic and spatial practices. Conse-
quently, societies where Muslims constitute a majority or where Islam is
a dominant influence feature certain common aesthetic choices and spa-
tial patterns that correlate with gender norms. The best known examples
are the low public profile of female artists and architects, the gendered
regulation of access to public space, and ideals of feminine behavior that
privilege seclusion and limit physical and visual access to women of high
status. This entry considers the sources available for the study of women
and art and architecture in Islamic societies, as well as women as makers
and users of art and architecture, and highlights examples of research that
place gender questions at the center of studies of art and architecture.
38 heghnar zeitlian watenpaugh

Sources

It is commonly asserted that the intersection of gender and the visual arts
is little explored in the Islamic world because primary sources addressing
these issues are rare. However, given the fact that few systematic inves-
tigations of the sources available for the study of gender and visual cul-
ture have actually been conducted, it is difficult to be certain that they do
not exist. In addition to locating previously overlooked primary material,
much can be learned from re-reading what is available with a critical eye.
For example, Afsaneh Najmabadi has shown that modern heterosexist
readings of premodern Sufi poetry have consistently obscured and elided
the homoerotic content of these texts (Najmabadi 1998, 2005). The nature
of the sources and their investigation by scholars differ according to
geographic and temporal context, resulting in significant asymmetries in
the scholarly coverage.
The sources for the modern and contemporary period differ greatly from
those for the premodern and early modern period. Today the institutional
settings of the production of art and the practice of architecture allow
the emergence of major women artists (Shirin Neshat, Mouna Hatoum),
filmmakers (Annemarie Jacir, Moufida Tlatli, Assia Djebar), architects and
theorists (Zaha Hadid), and performers and political activists (Shabana
Azmi, Hend Al-Mansour) (Nashashibi 1994, 1998). Today, in addition to
studying exceptional persons and named artists, it is also possible to con-
duct fieldwork to document oral history and the lives and creations of
underprivileged women and anonymous artists engaged in so-called tra-
ditional crafts such as nomadic architecture (al-Radi 1994, Prussin 1995)
and textiles (Stillman and Micklewright 1992, Stillman 2000). Work of the
latter kind has provided new ways of thinking about gender and labor,
the meaning and value of art and architecture, and the commodification
of “tradition.” It is also possible today to observe and interview individu-
als about their uses of space: anthropologist Susan Slyomovics’s work on
women and public space in 1990s Algeria relies on ethnography, in addi-
tion to textual research, to map the behavior of women and men in public
space (Slyomovics 1995).
The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have left behind a wealth
of written sources as a result of such developments as the increased use
of the printing press, the emergence of modern writing about the self, and
the higher survival rate of visual materials, which make for a varied and
rich evidentiary field. The advent of photography enabled Nancy Mickle-
wright to explore the depiction of modernizing Ottoman interior design
 art and architecture 39

and family life (Micklewright 2010), and Afsaneh Najmabadi to study nine-
teenth-century portraits of female prostitutes in Tehran (Najmabadi 1998).
Zeynep Çelik focused on urban renewal projects in Algiers under French
colonial rule by examining the gendered terms of architectural discourse
on the colony, as well as the interplay between urbanism, French scholar-
ship on the “indigenous” architecture of North Africa, and the perceptions
of the social roles of Algerian women in public space (Çelik 1992, 1996,
1997). Gülsüm Baydar examined the gender politics of the resolutely mod-
ernist architectural culture of the early Republic of Turkey (Baydar 2002).
By contrast, the challenge of carrying out research on women in the pre-
modern period lies in creatively working around the limitations imposed
by both the small volume and the difficult nature of the surviving textual
and visual sources. The visual productions of the poor and the less power-
ful rarely survive, and consequently they tend to be excluded from discus-
sion. Any investigation into the intersection of gender and sexuality and
visual culture must begin with a systematic interrogation of conventionally
used sources. This type of research requires the use of the analytical tools
and methods provided by theory and the commitment to rethink many
of the accepted conventions and methods of art and architectural history.
Then it becomes possible to extract insight from the available sources.
For example, endowment deeds (waqfiyyas), a type of document critical
to the study of Islamic architecture, are rich in information but present
some difficulties (Singer 1997). Leslie Peirce detected unusual and telling
aspects of endowment deeds that she then correlated with the gender of
the patron and the resultant social expectations (Peirce in Ruggles 2000).
Sources not often used for art history, such as mystical biographies, can be
combed for information relevant to spatial studies and collated with other
kinds of visual and textual sources (Watenpaugh 2005). The challenge for
the premodern period, then, is to map the kinds of discourses that address
issues of gender—even tangentially—in a manner relevant to the study
of art and architecture.

Women as Makers of Art and Architecture

Because of the difficulties the evidentiary field presents, as outlined above,

it is difficult to reconstruct the contributions of women as creators to the
visual arts of the Islamic world for most but the most recent historical
periods. This is a difficulty inherent in the study of world art, as discussed
eloquently in Linda Nochlin’s landmark article, “Why Have There Been No
40 heghnar zeitlian watenpaugh

Great Women Artists?” (Nochlin 1971). Nonetheless, research on women

and gender in the broader discipline of art and architectural history has
made major strides since then. Feminist art history initially focused on
the recovery of evidence of women artists ignored by mainstream histori-
ography. An important section of the scholarship focused on exceptional
individuals, usually exceptional women artists. However, thus far, there
appears to be no evidence of named female creators of elite works of art
and architecture for the premodern period. The types of art that were the
province of women, such as certain kinds of textile weaving and embroi-
dery, apparently remained anonymous. Further, they have not received
the careful and systematic attention scholars have devoted to luxury
textiles, such as carpets or robes of honor, made or supervised in work-
shop settings by male craftsmen. Alternatively, within the Islamic world,
scholars have privileged the contribution of women to art and architec-
ture through their role as patrons.
Indeed, many women in the Islamic world can be considered makers
of art and architecture in their capacity as patrons. Women’s patronage is
the best-studied aspect of the relationship of architecture to women and
gender in the Islamic world. Patronage is an appealing subject as the sur-
viving evidence favors studies of elite patrons and philanthropists. A pio-
neering work in this vein was the 1993 special issue of Asian Art, devoted
to “Patronage by Women in Islamic Art,” as well as the essays in Women,
Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies (Ruggles 2000, also
Harithy 1994, Humphreys 1994). Most of the studies focus on the patron-
age of wealthy and powerful women in a variety of geographical and
chronological contexts. They are therefore as revealing about status and
wealth as they are about gender or sexuality in a given society. In some
fields, such as Ottoman history, research by several scholars has allowed
the emergence of a solid body of knowledge and of innovative theoretical
insights. Ülkü Bates’s initial work on the architectural patronage of Otto-
man women (Bates in Asian Art 1993) was followed by Tülay Artan, who
used archival research to investigate the intersection between material
culture, wealth and power among Ottoman princesses in eighteenth-cen-
tury Istanbul (Artan 1993, 2010). Leslie Peirce, through systematic exami-
nation of the patronage of urban institutional complexes by high-ranking
female members of the Ottoman royal household, charted the expecta-
tions of patronage by women by tracking the shifts in the type of build-
ings commissioned and through a study of responses to such commissions
 art and architecture 41

(Peirce in Ruggles 2000). Lucienne Thys-Senocak analyzed mosque com-

plexes commissioned by women of the Ottoman dynasty in seventeenth-
century Istanbul in terms of their gendered use and their manipulation
of the gaze. The restrictions on the movement and visibility of women
of rank prompted specific design solutions: female patrons mandated
the creation of sight lines to enable them certain privileged viewpoints
without being visible to the public. Thus the Yeni Valide mosque complex
in Eminönü, Istanbul (1597–1665) included a pavilion whose windows
afforded the patron, royal mother Hatice Turhan, commanding views of
the surrounding urban spaces and the harbor of the Golden Horn. Thys-
Senocak thus highlighted how vision staged relations of power and how
it related to gender (Thys-Senocak 2006). The manipulation of space and
the staging of privileged viewpoints were part of the established Ottoman
imperial repertoire of architecture, and these were adapted by powerful
women to suit their social roles. Elsewhere, Ellison Banks Findly showed
in her study of the patronage of Nur Jahan (1577–1645), the wife of the
Mughal emperor Jahangir and the mother of the emperor Shah Jahan, that
she built tombs, mosques and caravanserais in accordance with the norms
of her social class, and often blended artistic forms and techniques from
the Persianate and Hindu traditions as developed on the Indian subconti-
nent (Findly 1993a, 1993b, 1996, 2000).
In the modern and contemporary periods, women artists have become
more visible in Islamic societies. As the study of modern and contempo-
rary art from the Islamic world gains momentum, studies that foreground
gender politics in this period will no doubt appear in addition to those
that document the work of women artists (Khal 1978, Lloyd 1999). Kirsten
Scheid has shown that in the twentieth-century Arab world, despite the
presence of prominent and influential female gallery owners and art crit-
ics, gender issues did not seem central to the work of important female
artists until recent decades, when gender became a subject of art, as in the
work of Mona Hatoum (Scheid 2007, Hatoum 2008).
In the contemporary period, women have become makers of architec-
ture by entering the architectural profession themselves. The late Selma
al-Radi’s career was directed towards the preservation of historical archi-
tecture. To restore the Amiriyya Madrasa in Yemen, al-Radi and her col-
leagues reinvigorated local building crafts on a large scale, an achievement
acknowledged by an Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2007 (Al-Radi
et al. 1997). Most prominent is Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-British creator
42 heghnar zeitlian watenpaugh

of contemporary global architecture’s most intriguing and celebrated

designs, and the first female recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize
in 2004, among many other distinctions. Through her London-based
practice Hadid has proposed highly influential theoretical designs. Most
of the buildings she has constructed are in the West (Hadid 2009), and
her career and work exemplify the condition of the Muslim diaspora in
Europe in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
In general, less effort has been spent investigating low-cost art objects,
vernacular architecture, and the building practices of women of low socio-
economic status. One of the Aga Khan Awards for Architecture of 1989
was presented to the Grameen Bank Housing Project, which enables poor
and rural women to build their own housing based on a standard module
and materials provided by Grameen Bank in Bangladesh (Al-Radi 1994).

Women as Users of Art and Architecture

Apart from women’s role as creators of art and architecture, scholars have
increasingly begun to shed light on the gendered manner in which they
use works of art and architecture. Activities such as collecting, manipulat-
ing, consuming, and transforming are some of the culturally loaded ways
in which female social actors exerted their agency as users of art objects.
Tülay Artan’s research on gendered collecting practices and consumption
studies in the Ottoman context has yielded insights on the choices elite
women in Istanbul exerted in their collections of imported luxury porce-
lain (Artan 2010).
Two main issues concern women as users of architecture: spaces
meant specifically for women, and the regulation of women’s use of pub-
lic spaces. The space most commonly associated with women in Islamic
societies is the harem (Booth 2010). The word harem may refer to the
female members of a household or to their designated living space. In a
general sense, the Arabic root ḥ-r-m and its derivatives (including ḥarīm,
harem in English) designate a thing or space that is considered forbidden,
inviolable, or sacred. Spatially, such terms can designate sacred precincts,
such as the Sacred Mosque of Mecca. In the domestic sphere, the harem
designates those quarters and persons—including the female members of
the household—that are forbidden to all but the lawful owner. Residences
with separate quarters for women and the spatial seclusion of women have
historically been a social ideal attainable only by the wealthy and power-
ful. The best known architectural harems are also the most exceptional
 art and architecture 43

because of their royal or imperial status. The first royal harems appeared
in the Umayyad period, and by the Abbasid period they had become part
of a repertoire of prestigious spaces associated with the powerful. Recent
studies have examined the notion of the harem in Islamic law and prac-
tice, historical examples of harems, the architectural features of known
historical harems, and the representation of the harem. The dominant
impression is one of tremendous variability across time and space. One
example is the architectural layout of the imperial harem at Topkapi Pal-
ace in Istanbul (fifteenth–eighteenth centuries); it used carefully guarded
passages, thresholds, and enclosed spaces in order to enforce the seclu-
sion of the Ottoman sovereign and the female members of his household
from the outside world, to stage hierarchies within the household, and to
enable or prevent certain kinds of movements between subdivided areas
(Lad in Booth 2010).
The regulation of women’s use of public spaces is a loaded issue. A
traditional perception associated public space with men and the private
sphere with women. This dichotomy is no longer widely accepted, as devel-
opments in research show the complex processes through which space is
gendered in all societies. In Islamic societies the accessibility or inacces-
sibility of public space was regulated on the basis of the user’s gender in
addition to other social indicators such as age, social status, and religion.
Certain public institutions such as mosques or baths included special sec-
tions reserved for women (for example, elevated galleries, separate rooms,
and screened windows), or special times set aside for exclusive use by
women. Some of these spaces reserved for women had particular histories
in regions considered peripheral to the Islamic world, such as China and
Indonesia (Jaschok and Shui 2000, Aryanti 2012, Whalley 1998). Landscape
design also lent itself to gendered use, as Lisa Golombek has shown in the
case of Timurid gardens (Golombek 1996). More broadly, Traki Zannad
has investigated the relationship between space and the body in an Islamic
context (Zannad 1984).
Recent research on the contemporary period foregrounds issues of
boundaries and movement, ranging from women’s prayer spaces in Indo-
nesian mosques (Aryanti 2012) to theoretical designs for “wearable prayer
space” (Aksamija 2005). The issue of gender and access to public space in
particular has interested scholars. Susan Slyomovics researched Algerian
women’s claim to use public space in conjunction with their claims for
civil rights (Slyomovics 1995), an issue that played out in India as well
(Devji 1991). Talinn Grigor examined the daily dramas of transgression
44 heghnar zeitlian watenpaugh

and resistance that take place on the strictly segregated public transpor-
tation systems of Tehran (Grigor 2006). Scholars have also focused on
urban dynamics and their implication for gender in imperial Ottoman and
French colonial contexts (Seni 1984, Taraud 2006).
Among public spaces, saints’ shrines have been, and still are, a particular
focus for women’s piety. Throughout Islamic history, certain exceptional
women were revered and their tombs became sites of visitation (ziyāra)
and sources for blessing (baraka). Women saints’ tombs have not been
well studied despite their architectural, social, and economic importance.
These saints include widely revered female members of the family of the
Prophet and the Imams, as in the case of the shrine of Sayyida Zaynab
bint ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib in Damascus. By contrast, certain shrines to women
Sufis attract mostly local devotees, such as the shrine of Setti Fatma in the
Ourika Valley of Morocco, studied by Michelle Rein (Rein 2007).

Gender at the Center of Studies of Islamic Art and Architecture

The depiction of women in Orientalist art is certainly one of the most

loaded and discussed aspects of the intersection of the visual arts, gender,
and Islamic cultures. Orientalist art stages and manipulates gender tropes
in the context of Western art and the West’s relation to world cultures.
For some time now feminist art history has shifted towards embracing
critical theory, especially gender theory that has emerged from disciplines
such as film studies and literature, in interpreting artistic representations
in a historical context. Major methodological breakthroughs led scholars
to focus productively on the institutional contexts of the production and
consumption of works of art (Pollock 1988), the politics of the representa-
tion of women in Western art, especially of the nude female body (Nead
1992), and on the exploration of the gendered nature of architecture and
spatial practices (McLeod 1996, Agrest 1991, among others). However, the
overwhelming majority of this work has focused on Western art and West-
ern contexts, addressing non-Western women only in the context of their
representation in Western art (for example, the important work on Orien-
talist imagery: Alloula 1981, Nochlin 1983, Porterfield 1994). These studies
provide valuable insights into representation and alterity (Lewis 1996) and
have injected issues of sexuality and space into these discussions (Schick
1999). However, this is no substitute for exploring non-Western contexts
in their own right and on their own terms.
 art and architecture 45

The study of gender alongside art and architecture in Islamic societies

reveals unexpected insights and provides unique opportunities for meth-
odological innovation. For example, authors have scrutinized contempo-
rary popular television serials in Egypt and Syria both to deconstruct the
way in which they present gender relations, and to document the way
in which they are viewed and consumed by female citizens (Semerdjian
2008, Abu-Lughod 2005). Issues of gender are increasingly centered in
studies of film (Shohat 1997).
Even for the premodern period, clusters of material with potential
implications for feminist analysis await investigation. The case of premod-
ern Persianate painting presents a good example. Several of the essays in
the 1993 issue of Asian Art focused on portraits representing specific his-
torical female figures. It is possible to move beyond a project of recovering
such evidence to inquire into the very means of making gender legible in
the format of the illustrated book. Researchers are often struck by the fact
that it is difficult to identify the gender of the human figures depicted in
Timurid painting, which have sometimes been called “asexual” (Grabar
2000, 57). However, closer examination reveals that while the bodies
are depicted identically—that is, gender is not represented on the body
itself through anatomical markers—gender is represented through other
means: headdresses, clothing, compositional conventions—all markers
of social identity. A discussion of the depiction of gender in the context
of Persian painting, freed from the burden of the Western convention of
locating gender on the body, can become an opportunity to discuss the
social role of gender, its intersection with power, and its relation to other
social categories such as status, kinship group, and profession. This also
highlights the hollowness of some basic assumptions about gender and
its visual representation in conventional Western art history. At the same
time, the example of Persianate painting brings to the fore the complexity
of interpreting visual representation: in this context, the fact that the bod-
ies of males and females were depicted in an identical manner certainly
did not correlate with any degree of social equality, but rather reflected
notions of abstract beauty (Najmabadi 1998).
The issues of the frequency of the depiction of women, the manner of
these depictions, and the context of their use are complex and require
careful consideration. Islamic art provides an opportunity to theorize
issues of visibility and invisibility. While the public invisibility of women
in Islamic society is often attributed to disempowerment, this correlation
is far from being clear-cut or simple. Indeed, the seclusion of women and
notions of privacy were often ideal practices associated with the wealthy
46 heghnar zeitlian watenpaugh

and powerful rather than practices available to all members of Islamic

society. To complicate the issue of invisibility and power even further, one
can consider the position taken by many contemporary feminist artists in
the West. Most prominently, Mary Kelly has rejected the depiction of the
female body in a gesture of protest against the historical use of the female
body as an empty signifier in Western art, and as a feminist strategy of
empowerment.
The architecture and the practice of space in Islamic societies provide
opportunities to theorize issues of visibility and invisibility. Recent studies
of women’s spaces and sociability in nineteenth-century Tunis and Istan-
bul explore the spaces and activities of elite women in two modernizing
cities (Clancy-Smith and Micklewright in Booth 2010). Modern writers in
the Islamic world, both male and female, frequently depicted the spaces
and activities of both respectable and “fallen” women (Booth, Bashkin,
and Schissler in Booth 2010). These textual depictions of women’s spaces
evince a strong preoccupation with issues of class. Elsewhere, an analysis
that places gender at the center focuses on Syrian texts written in the
1990s and discerns that their discussion of domestic feminine space para-
doxically obscures and displaces the creative contribution of women to
public life (Watenpaugh in Booth 2010).
It would be productive for feminist research in the field of architectural
studies in the Islamic world to interrogate the categories used for the built
environment, especially the binary opposition of public/masculine space
and private and domestic/feminine space. Furthermore, studying a work
of art or architecture includes not only the context of production of the
work (the artist, architect, patron, and the process of making or building),
but also the context of its reception and consumption. What is the role of
audiences, viewers, and users of public spaces, such as worshippers in the
women’s section at the mosque? Those who use works of art and archi-
tecture and those who interpret them participate in creating their mean-
ing, which is therefore constantly negotiated. Art historian Carel Bertram
investigated how the meaning of domestic architecture was created by its
users through analyzing the image of the home in the construction of the
self for mid-twentieth-century Turkish women (Bertram 2008). Norma-
tive gender roles as well as the subversion of such roles frequently feature
key spaces and their normative or subversive use. An antinomian saint in
sixteenth-century Aleppo challenged gender roles, referring to himself in
the feminine grammatical gender, just as he challenged normative social
behavior in urban spaces by staging inversions of domestic and religious
practices (Watenpaugh 2005). Recent work on the social roles and spaces
 art and architecture 47

of eunuchs expands and refines the notion of gender in specific histori-

cal contexts. These and many other important problems at the intersec-
tion of gender and architecture in Islamic societies still await systematic
investigation. It is clear nonetheless, that even seemingly innocuous mass-
produced consumer objects can be better understood when the visual is
analyzed through the lens of gender, as in the case of “Islamic Barbie”
(Yaqin 2007). The evolving archive of studies of gender and visual culture
in Islamic societies is thus increasingly interdisciplinary and innovative.

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 Cultural Studies

Amira Jarmakani

Introduction

An overview of how the broad category of “women and Islamic cultures”

has been treated in the field of cultural studies must begin with a con-
sideration of two related questions. The first takes up the keyword “cul-
ture” itself, particularly in terms of the way the field of cultural studies
has framed its epistemological project in relation to this term. The second
asks: where (i.e., in what fields and disciplines) has the study of women
and Islamic cultures been intelligible and why? This entry begins with
the first question as a way of framing the field of cultural studies from the
outset, before moving on to the second question as a way of sketching the
constellation of fields and sub-fields that are integrally connected to cul-
tural studies. Having drawn a general map of the field vis-à-vis its engage-
ment with women and Islamic cultures, the entry ends by focusing on the
major works that have defined the field (and its related sub-fields).

Culture as Keyword

Raymond Williams begins his influential Keywords with a discussion

of the word “culture”; indeed, his early observations about simultane-
ous contested meanings of the term set the backdrop for the project of
writing a book about “keywords” at all. While in the “culture” entry, he
begins with the simple claim that “culture is one of the two or three most
complicated words in the English language” (Williams 1983, 87), in the
introduction to the book he describes the complexity of the word on
an affective register—as a felt complexity that insinuates itself through
observations about the way the word is used in different contexts, both
temporally (i.e., over time) and spatially (e.g., in the university as opposed
to the tea shop). He describes having a “sense” of two distinct meanings in
the usage of the word “culture”—one that indicates “some central forma-
tion of values” and another with a use that “makes it almost equivalent to
society: a particular way of life” (12). If the latter meaning can be loosely
tied to the discipline of anthropology, the former can be loosely tied to
52 amira jarmakani

the study of literature. Cultural studies can be understood as a field that

critically engages both (and many) kinds of meanings that attach to the
word culture, while refusing allegiance to any one of them. In its attention
to popular culture, it confronts the fabricated divide between “high” and
“low” culture by affirming the importance of popular culture (usually seen
as degraded, or “low,” culture) as a valid venue for critical inquiry, and as
one, moreover, that can reveal a great deal about the power inherent to a
particular “formation of values.” At the same time, cultural studies is inter-
ested in the various “ways of life” that take shape in a particular cultural
context, especially minoritarian or “subcultural” formations as revelatory
of larger structures of social and political power. As a field that is usu-
ally credited as having emerged in relation to the “Birmingham school”
at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the United Kingdom,
it has also employed critical theory from the start, and was particularly
grounded in Marxist (and post-Marixist) theory in early work. As is likely
evident from this brief and broad background, the field of cultural studies
is therefore interdisciplinary—both in its topics and materials of interest
as well as in its methodologies.
Further, it directly acknowledges the political dimension of epistemol-
ogy—a fact that coincides with some of the methodological trends in the
field. Like many of its interrelated fields and sub-fields—e.g., postcolonial
studies; American studies; ethnic studies; women’s, gender, and sexual-
ity studies; and film studies (to name a few)—cultural studies does not
adhere to positivist models of research-based inquiry as it questions both
the attainability and, more importantly, the value (and validity) of objec-
tivity in the research pursuit. One is therefore more likely to find focused,
deep critical readings of specific cultural formations, and much less likely
to find broad, sweeping, generalizable studies of cultural phenomena in
the field. This is not to say that there are no discussions of rigor and valid-
ity in cultural studies, but rather that the field tends to valorize critical
methodological tools—such as reflexivity, deep contextualization, and
democratizing tools such as reciprocity and dialogical strategies—as a
means of attending to the integrity of the project as a whole. In short, it
views all forms of knowledge production as inherently political and there-
fore encourages scholarship that is engaged with the critical analysis of
power. Such a stance is crucial with respect to the question of how one
understands culture, and because of the way that many disciplines have
traditionally taken up the general topic of women and Islamic cultures
(the issue to which the entry now turns).
 cultural studies 53

Who Studies Women and Islamic Cultures and Why?

In relation to the notion of culture, anthropology has operated as a key

disciplinary frame for approaching the topic of women and Islamic cul-
tures. While the discipline has certainly shifted away from some of its mas-
culinist and positivist epistemological origins (Mahmood 2003), some of
the general imperatives toward discovering essential truths about women
in Islamicate societies have continued to plague cultural studies scholars.
This becomes apparent when noting some of the professional institutional
locations for presenting and discussing cultural studies scholarship. Per-
haps due in part to the influence of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) in
both postcolonial studies and cultural studies (Shohat 2009), one default
location for presenting cultural studies scholarship has been at the Mid-
dle East Studies Association conference, a fact that already reveals much
about the contingent nature of cultural studies scholarship. The presence
of early cultural studies scholarship at MESA has more to do with its fit
within the regional rubric offered by the association, since the method-
ological or epistemological framework of this scholarship was likely to
be misunderstood. Just as Said’s Orientalism continues to be widely cri-
tiqued for a purported political and even polemicist stance, cultural stud-
ies can be subject to the same kind of critique since it begins from the
general premise that all knowledge production is a political project. It is
important to discuss these overlapping epistemological stances because of
the way that the intelligibility of “women and Islamic cultures” has been
framed in many traditional disciplines—as a curious object of discovery,
almost as if it is new terrain to be explored. It is in this sense—the old
refrain of anthropology being colonialism’s handmaiden comes to mind
(Asad 1973)—that anthropology operates as a primary framework through
which cultural studies scholarship has often been read. Surprisingly stub-
born and pervasive ideas about Muslim women as optimal objects for
knowledge production tend to obscure the scholarly project of analyz-
ing representations of Muslim womanhood to better understand what it
reveals about the (usually colonialist or imperialist) culture that produces
them. Due in part to this framing legacy, cultural studies scholarship can
still be misread in domains such as Middle East studies as simply bad
anthropology, either because it does not privilege ethnographic methods
or because it takes “culture” to mean cultural formations like film, televi-
sion, or other forms of (popular) representation.
Indeed, this focus on representation is one feature that distinguishes it
from conventional anthropology. Rather than privileging an understanding
54 amira jarmakani

of culture that focuses on lifeways (e.g., customs and kinship), cultural

studies critically focuses on representation practices (e.g., visual culture,
film, popular culture, ephemera, etc.) as key sites of meaning-making, and
as constitutive of (rather than simply constituted by) the definition of cul-
ture in a particular context. For cultural studies scholars, representational
practices do not simply reflect an already existing cultural formation; they
also work to shape that culture in ways that demonstrate its contingent
and shifting nature. As a result, the body of scholarship that falls under
the cultural studies rubric can also be identified by its interest in con-
structions of authenticity—rather than seeking to uncover the “real” cul-
ture behind representations, it asks what is at stake in scholarly claims of
the “actual” or “real” cultures of women in/and Islamic cultures. In this
context, cultural formations (particularly as investigated through various
forms of representation) reveal a notion of “culture” as fundamentally
defined by contestation and dissent; culture is therefore understood to be
fluid—constantly subject to being dismantled and reconfigured.
Though the Middle East Studies Association and the American Stud-
ies Association can hardly be claimed as spaces in which cultural studies
scholarship about women in/and Islamic cultures has been welcomed and
encouraged, they are nevertheless two of the key venues through which
cultural studies scholarship about women and Islamic cultures have sur-
faced. If it found a home at MESA despite a devaluing and/or misunder-
standing of its epistemological project, it found a home in ASA through
ethnic studies paradigms thanks in large part to the way that the events of
11 September 2001 forced an acknowledgement of Arabs and Muslims as a
critical part of the racialized landscape of the Americas (rather than sim-
ply another white ethnic group). Continuing to chart the study of women
and Islamic cultures through MESA and ASA, then, reveals another layer
of epistemological bias through which cultural studies scholarship is often
filtered. Embedded in an area studies paradigm, Middle East studies serves
as a framework oriented toward understanding and regulating a region of
the world determined to be critical to U.S. national security, particularly
within the larger frame of the Cold War, which provides the historical
and political contextual landscape for area studies. Likewise, if somewhat
ironically, the larger institutional home of ethnic studies (which is rooted
in a social justice framework arising out of a general civil rights context) is
located in American studies, which has roots in the fervently anti-Marxist
context of the McCarthy era. For both of these larger fields, one main
operating assumption had been that the chief scholarly goal is to produce
knowledge about the geopolitical region described by the general moniker
 cultural studies 55

“Middle East” or “America” (as a euphemism to actually mean the United

States). In this respect, it is no surprise that cultural studies scholarship
was long marginalized in these spaces, since its founding impetus is to
interrogate the very project of creating knowledge, and to unpack the rep-
resentational apparatus that surrounds the construction of these region-
based areas of study.
In her plenary remarks at MESA upon the 30 year anniversary of the
publication of Said’s Orientalism, Ella Shohat notes that cultural stud-
ies work focused on the Middle East and its diasporas has often found
a professional audience either in area studies, “defined as ‘over there,’ ”
or in ethnic studies, “defined as ‘over here’ ” (Shohat 2009, 20; see also
Shohat 2013). Indeed, cultural studies scholarship is often situated on the
uncomfortable margins of one body of scholarship or another. In addition
to being oriented to the study of “over there,” as Shohat puts it, the area
studies paradigm is rooted in a Cold War framework with U.S. national
interests at its core. These two larger frames—Middle East studies and
American studies—are therefore in some ways paradigmatically hostile to
the project of cultural studies, which is heavily indebted to Marxist critical
theory. At the same time, in its failure to claim allegiance either to study-
ing the Middle East as “over there,” or to studying Arab America as “over
here,” cultural studies scholarship focusing on women in/and Islamic
cultures occupies a liminal position in the established multidisciplinary
formations under consideration here in a number of ways—methodolog-
ically, theoretically, and geopolitically.
Shohat addresses the geographical binaries that have tended to inhere
in these fields and sub-fields—as being focused on one or the other region
of the world—by insisting upon the importance of a transnational and
diasporic analytic to inform the study of women and Islamic cultures,
whether it is in cultural studies or women’s, gender, and sexuality stud-
ies (Shohat 2009, 23–24). In fact, she is joined by scholars such as Minoo
Moallem and Therese Saliba in calling for the kind of interdisciplinary
work that could complicate the constructed boundaries of these various
fields and sub-fields (Shohat 2001, Moallem 2001, Saliba 2000). Moallem
puts it this way: “I align myself with those feminist theories that throw
Middle Eastern studies into crisis by challenging masculinist disciplinary
practices, and at the same time I support the work in Middle Eastern stud-
ies that throws global feminism into crisis by emphasizing the historical
specificity of the region in general and each locality in particular” (Moallem
2001, 126–127). Indeed, the notion of throwing a field of study into ques-
tion is an apt and descriptive one for the project of cultural studies, which
56 amira jarmakani

has generally been much more interested in questioning the epistemo-

logical biases in academia than in finding an institutional home there.
Notably, the conversation charted above takes place in one of the pre-
mier journals for women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, Signs: Journal
of Women in Culture and Society, which highlights the affinity (and the
overlap) between cultural studies as a field and other fields of study that
emerged out of political movements. While these include ethnic studies
as well as women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, it is worth noting, again,
that it has been in the more traditional (and, one could argue, conserva-
tive) field of Middle East studies that cultural studies work specifically
focused on women and Islamic cultures initially gained more traction.
In addition to the common conflation of cultural studies with anthropol-
ogy, another potential explanation has to do with the persistent paradigm
of foreignness through which the general subject of women and Islamic
cultures is read. Perhaps in part because of the ambiguity in classifying
Arab and Muslim Americans (in the United States), for example, general
scholarship about the Middle East has only recently begun to be a regular
feature in ethnic studies venues, such as at the American Studies Associa-
tion conference.
Some of the earliest scholarship to take up the intersections of gen-
der, the Middle East, and Islam in relation to the field of cultural stud-
ies explored the general topic of representation in three main areas: art
(including photography), film studies, and media studies and communica-
tions more generally. Likely due to the influence of Said’s Orientalism, and
to his own focus on British and French orientalist art, a spate of work took
up the question of representations of women in orientalist (“Western”)
art, particularly through the themes of the harem and the Turkish bath.
These include a range of scholarship, from Leila Ahmed’s relatively short
though influential “Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem”
(1982) to Linda Nochlin’s “The Imaginary Orient” (1983), a key work in
the field of art history. The general topic of representations of Muslim
womanhood vis-à-vis the space of the harem (including an interrogation
of Western constructions of the term harem itself ) have subsequently
been addressed by a number of scholars (Yeazell 2000, Edwards 2000,
Djebar 1992, Jarmakani 2008). Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem (1986)
has served as a highly influential piece of scholarship on the broad topic
of representations of Arab and Muslim womanhood, and it also operates
to bridge considerations of the harem as represented in traditional West-
ern art with photographic representations that appeared in the form of
 cultural studies 57

(French) colonial postcards. In avowing to “return this immense postcard

to its sender,” Alloula’s project here clearly articulates with the decoloniz-
ing epistemology of cultural studies, which centers a critical interrogation
of the very project of knowledge production as one that is also deeply
embedded in troubling power dynamics. Particularly because photo-
graphs have historically been understood as simply documenting reality,
they are key materials through which scholars have sought to intervene
in the problematic “truths” that have been constructed and perpetuated
about Muslim (and Middle Eastern) womanhood. Two examples of this
kind of work are Sarah Graham-Brown’s Images of Women (1988), which
contextualizes the photographs within the conditions of their production
and therefore complicates the reading of the realities they portray and
Linda Steet’s Veils and Daggers (2000), which builds on a key cultural
studies piece of scholarship—Reading National Geographic (Lutz and Col-
lins 1993)—to complicate the truths constructed about Arabs and Mus-
lims in the National Geographic magazine, particularly due to its influence
as a purportedly objective and educational magazine.
Photographic collections popularly documented world’s fairs and exhi-
bitions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and they therefore
provide an indirect link to another main arena of cultural studies work—
that which focuses on performance and exhibition venues. In terms of
Muslim womanhood, belly dancing serves as one of the primary cultural
formations through which “Western” perceptions of “Eastern” femininity
and sexuality have been filtered. In terms of world’s fairs themselves, belly
dancing exhibits at the 1889 French Exhibition in Paris and the 1893 Chi-
cago World’s Fair provided concrete venues through which perceptions of
the dance would proliferate (Çelik 1992, Carlton 2003). As it was debuted
in Western Europe and the United States during the Victorian era, it also
served as a way of defining white femininity against a perceived lascivi-
ous and even crude “oriental” femininity (Edwards 2000, Nance 2009).
Spreading into popular consciousness through performances at amuse-
ment parks (Kasson 1978); by merging into other kinds of performance
styles, such as vaudeville, burlesque, and striptease (Allen 1991, Shohat
1997a); and by eventually being integrated into feminist discourses about
liberation and positive body image (Jarmakani 2006, Maira 2008, Jarma-
kani 2013), belly dancing provides an excellent example of how Muslim
and Middle Eastern femininity can be simultaneously appropriated and
commodified in Western European and U.S. popular culture. Recent and
emerging scholarship extends this work to look at the ways this kind of
58 amira jarmakani

cultural appropriation and commodification plays out in the Americas

more broadly, and specifically in South America (Karam 2010, Alsultany
and Shohat 2013).
Another key arena in which cultural studies scholarship has emerged
is in the field of film studies. In this realm, Ella Shohat’s work has played
a formative role. Integrating a postcolonial framework into feminist film
studies, which had tended to universalize “womanhood,” Shohat dem-
onstrates the ways that gender and sexuality operated as key constructs
triangulating with orientalist representations of Middle Eastern feminin-
ity and masculinity in popular film (Shohat 1991, 1997b, Shohat and Stam
1994). Shohat’s corpus of work extends the critical focus on “Western” rep-
resentations of the Orient. Not only does her work demonstrate the way
that Orientalist tropes have informed mainstream Hollywood cinema—as
in the incorporation of “harem structures” in films featuring no Muslim
or Arab characters, and, indeed, in mass-mediated culture more broadly
(Shohat 1997b, 51)—it also connects representations of Arabs and Mus-
lims in these traditions to representations of other disenfranchised and
racialized groups in popular media, thus allowing for a more integrated
analysis of the way these representational tropes overlap with, and build
on, similar traditions. Finally, through her focus on homoeroticism in the
Orientalist tropes deployed in mainstream film, Shohat’s work critically
centers both gender and sexuality as key frameworks for analysis, an inter-
vention that has been crucial for subsequent work, which has sought to
further unpack the tensions between a feminized Orient and its simulta-
neous portrayal as a hyper-patriarchal landscape. Critical interrogation of
the representation of masculinity and sexuality vis-à-vis the Middle East
is exemplified in scholarship on the films Lawrence of Arabia (notably in
Steve Caton’s 1999 book-length treatment of it) and The Sheik (Shohat
and Stam 1994, Studlar 1989, Garber 1992, Caton 2000), and also in recent
scholarship exploring the popularity of the sheikh-hero in mass-market
romance novels (Teo 2012, Jarmakani 2010).
As the examples thus far demonstrate, one of the primary concerns
of the field of cultural studies is to examine how popular cultural forma-
tions can actually function to shape the material and political realities of
the regions they represent. Insofar as “Muslim” has (especially recently)
been conflated with “Arab” and “Middle Eastern,” scholarship focusing on
the Middle East in general and on the conflation of Arabs and Muslims
more recently, has sought to chart the ways that cultural formations—
such as film, television shows, and advertisements—both constitute and
are constitutive of popular Western assumptions about Muslims and the
 cultural studies 59

Middle East. Utilizing a wide range of materials, from “epic” Hollywood

films, to Holy Land exhibitions, a King Tutankhamun museum exhibit,
and advertisements, Melani McAlister (2001) demonstrates how U.S. per-
ceptions of the Middle East are shaped by U.S. interests in particular his-
torical moments. While early twentieth century U.S. interest in portrayals
of the “Holy Land,” for example, might emphasize religiously-identified
narratives of the origins of the nation (i.e., the United States as promised
land), cultural formations in the 1960s and 1970s emphasize oil resources
as key to U.S. national interests, and representations of terrorists and ter-
rorism in the last two decades of the twentieth century reflect the growth
of the United States as “benevolent” global superpower. In Imagining Arab
Womanhood, Jarmakani (2008) makes a parallel argument about the way
that shifting representations of Arab and Muslim womanhood in U.S.
popular culture demonstrate changes in the power dynamics between the
United States and the Middle East over time. Charting these shifts through
the first decade of the twenty-first century, Evelyn Alsultany (2012) looks
critically at media coverage of Arabs and Muslims, particularly after the
events of 11 September 2001. Here, she notes how discourses of multicul-
turalism, diversity and tolerance can operate to refigure representations
of Arabs and Muslims in ways that nevertheless reinforce U.S. political
and military interests.
A significant concern of this group of scholarship has been to take up
the ways in which feminist and LGBTQ rights and liberation discourses
have been appropriated by the (U.S.) state to justify military action against
Arab and Muslim peoples. Especially helpful are Nima Naghibi’s Rethink-
ing Global Sisterhood (2007), which situates the phenomenon within a
larger tradition of “global sisterhood” as a key discourse of some versions of
Western feminism, and Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages (2007), which
traces the way that the narrative of U.S. exceptionalism operates through
refabricated narratives of sexual exceptionalism—i.e., the relative libera-
tion of women and queer people in the United States—to perpetuate
Orientalist discourses that are central to the logic of the War on Terror.
Taken as a whole, these scholarly works have highlighted how culture
shapes U.S. orientations toward Muslims and the Middle East.
To return again to the question of the relationship between anthropol-
ogy and the field of cultural studies, there are two main ways in which the
overlap between the two fields has manifested. Methodologically, the field
of cultural studies has introduced popular culture materials as important
tools through which to understand the way culture operates, both in terms
of the idea of culture as a “way of life” and in terms of culture as “some
60 amira jarmakani

central formation of values,” to recall Raymond Williams’s formulation of

the term. Lila Abu-Lughod’s Dramas of Nationhood (2005) is exemplary
here, as she combines classic ethnography with audience reception to
interrogate how television serials in Egypt (which could be loosely likened
to soap operas) function to uphold and perpetuate national narratives.
Since cultural studies foregrounds an epistemological dedication to decol-
onizing frameworks of knowledge production, it can also operate to frame
ethnographic studies. Nadine Naber’s Arab America (2012) is exemplary
here, as she uses a transnational feminist analysis to interrupt common
narratives of nationhood, cultural authenticity, and orientalism that tend
to rigidly frame and define Arab American communities.

New Directions

As should be evident by now, cultural studies has many fruitful overlaps

with a whole set of interdisciplinary fields, particularly in its affinities
with the democratizing and social justice-oriented methodologies in fields
such as ethnic studies; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; and queer
studies. As evinced by the examples of recent scholarship, the future of
scholarly work that combines cultural studies methodologies with the
broad topic of women and Islamic cultures will likely move in the follow-
ing directions: it will continue to take up some of the key epistemological
interventions of queer theory and it will broaden its focus on transna-
tional considerations, particularly expanding beyond a focus on U.S. and
Western European representations of the Middle East. The implications
of these two new directions are briefly explored below.
Though queer theory is sometimes understood as analogous to identi-
tarian fields (like the early years of women’s studies and African American
studies), and is therefore seen as being engaged in a somewhat limited
notion of recuperative politics, that perception actually runs counter to its
main epistemological investments. It is epistemologically oriented toward
interrupting patterns like some of those found in much of the research on
“women and Islamic cultures.” Insofar as women in/and Islamic cultures
have been subject to developmental narratives about how far they have
come, or how far they have yet to go (usually in relation to some other
party presumed to be more liberated than they), queer theory provides a
useful means of interrogating the normativizing impulses of these kinds
of narratives (see, for example, Albrecht 2012). It also offers a helpful way
of intervening in narratives that construct the idea of cultural authentic-
ity through the figure of the woman as symbolic signifier of the nation
 cultural studies 61

(see, for example, Shomali 2012), another key trope through which women
in/and Islamic cultures have been read. Finally, queer theory is interested
in dismantling the primacy of binaries, and the hierarchization inherent
to them (see, for example, Cable 2012). Insofar as the study of women in/
and Islamic cultures has been defined by rigid notions of femininity and
masculinity as complementary and dichotomous terms, queer theoretical
interventions can help to interrupt traditionally static ways of thinking
about gender and sexuality in relation to various cultural formations.
In the introduction to their recent collection of essays, Between the
Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora (2013),
Evelyn Alsultany and Ella Shohat describe a “diasporic turn” informing
the new directions in scholarship that considers cultural formations of the
Middle East and its diasporas. In this framework, “geography constitutes
not a point of origin or final destination, but a terminal in a transnational
network” (27). Such a conception points to the kinds of ways in which
the critical study of orientalism as intersecting with cultural production is
being expanded. The collection itself expands the classic orientalist East/
West binary to look at it in relationship to a North/South axis across the
Americas. This addition, in turn, takes a longer historical view of (post)
colonial studies, suggesting that the conquest of the Americas in the fif-
teenth century provides a critical reframing of the project of Orientalism.
Exploring transnational trajectories that traverse the Atlantic ocean, the
example of comparative Orientalisms in the Americas expands Paul Gil-
roy’s formulation of the “Black Atlantic,” located in Enlightenment-based
constructs, to critically map what some scholars have called the “Moor-
ish Atlantic” (Stam and Shohat 2012, 4, Aidi 2003 and forthcoming). As
Stam and Shohat have argued, the conquest of the Americas and the
reconquista of southern Spain are linked in key ways, which demands a
closer look at the ways that the “Red Atlantic” and the “Moorish Atlantic”
are connected—in other words, it demands the integration of the con-
cept of settler colonialism into the logic of racial formation, particularly
in terms of the way the “discovery doctrine,” which was used to justify
conquest of the Americas, was incubated in the reconquest (reconquista)
of southern Spain. Introducing settler colonialism as a key critical and
theoretical framework for interrogating cultural formations about women
in/and Islamic cultures not only expands the geographical focus on this
area of study, it also stimulates a shift in understanding the architecture of
colonialism itself. It therefore provokes new considerations of power and
imperialism, and the subtle ways in which they are manifested through a
wide and supple set of cultural representations.
62 amira jarmakani

Queer studies as a critical framework and a diasporic or transnational

turn in cultural studies methodologies represent just two of the possible
new directions within the sub-field of cultural studies focused on women
in/and Islamic cultures. As is clear from its location on the peripheries of
multiple scholarly fields, the future of cultural studies work in this area
will continue to build on fruitful intersections with other multi- and inter-
disciplinary fields of study, particularly those that are oriented toward
social justice.

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 Demography

Sajeda Amin

Introduction

For several decades, the production of demographic knowledge about

countries in the developing world has relied heavily on surveys such as
the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), or the UNICEF sponsored
Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey. Cross-country comparisons and within
country reports continue to draw on these standardized household sur-
veys for information on basic social sector trends and levels. However,
in recent years, the interdisciplinary use of demographic knowledge has
increased. For example, the advocacy of well-being indicators that do not
rely on income alone but also reflect dimensions of well-being such as
health and fertility, has meant that institutions such has the UN Develop-
ment Program and the World Bank are now more systematically engaged
in collecting and disseminating a wide array of demographic, social, and
economic indicators. At the same time, parallel technological develop-
ments, such as the increased accessibility of the internet, as well as new
data processing technologies, have meant that such data are now widely
used. Thus, whereas ten years ago the production and utilization of demo-
graphic analysis was limited to academic disciplines, in recent years we
have seen a wider group of actors—journalists, public health advocates,
gender rights advocates, and other civil society actors—become engaged
in the production of knowledge derived from demographic data. While
the internet has been critical in expanding access to data, the widespread
access to data and information on the internet has also brought about
fundamental changes in how scholarship is produced, most consequen-
tially in terms of peer review processes in the production of knowledge.
Even as there is wider use, there is less oversight and control overall on
the information and analysis that is disseminated on the internet relative
to the production of books and journals.
As more and more countries undergo demographic transitions, the
attention of demographers has moved from a focus on the causes of
demographic change to their consequences. These consequences include
an aging population, changes to the labor force, and migration associ-
ated with labor force opportunities or lack thereof. This entry follows
66 sajeda amin

that general progression and reviews the current demographic features

of contemporary Muslim majority countries with a focus on social and
economic factors that have strong implications for the lives of women
living in Islamic cultures.
Twenty-five years ago, when newly available national data from Demo-
graphic and Health Surveys allowed in-depth exploration of demographic
characteristics of countries where such data were not previously avail-
able, an influential article on the demography of 37 Muslim countries
highlighted high fertility, early marriage, and poor health indicators as
being their salient demographic features (Clarke 1985). In the discussion
on factors that may be responsible for observed patterns and characteris-
tics, John Clarke identified specific aspects of the religion. In particular he
argued that strong prognostics in Islam on how families should be orga-
nized is a common feature of Islamic cultures, and predicted that such
characteristics would likely prevent a demographic transition in settings
dominated by an Islamic worldview. He went on to predict that these
demographic features would also prevent any significant improvement in
the status of women.
The record has proved otherwise. Systematic data collected in subse-
quent Demographic and Health Surveys, as well as other national surveys,
have consistently documented rapid demographic and social change glob-
ally and in most Muslim countries. Most Muslim majority countries have
experienced rapid change in fertility and mortality. Surveys of women have
consistently demonstrated that Islam has not prevented rapid change in
birth and death rates. In his 2003 overview of the discipline of demog-
raphy, Philippe Fargues (2003) concluded that women’s empowerment,
a strong concomitant, may similarly not be prevented by the pursuit of
Islam.
Thus, contrary to continuing popular perceptions that all Islamic cul-
tures are laggards when it comes to demographic modernization, there is
evidence that many Muslim countries have attained low levels of fertility
and mortality as well as associated variation in social and political charac-
teristics of society. A report published by the Pew Research Center (2011)
on projections of global Muslim populations, and based on comparisons
of Muslim majority countries with other developing countries and devel-
oped countries, describes the overall trends, but with an emphasis on this
diversity. The report considers trends in fertility, mortality, age structure,
and migration as direct components of population size projections, as
well as correlates such as education, economic well-being, contraception,
urbanization and religious conversion.
 demography 67

Demographic Diversity in Muslim Countries

In this entry on demography and women in Islamic cultures, the direct

components of demographic change, births, deaths and migration, as
well as several indirect but important factors such as age at marriage
and women’s education, are discussed. Female age at first marriage is an
important correlate of both demographic trends and women’s status. As
such, trends in marriage can be important for understanding the ways in
which demographic trends can influence the situation of women.
On average, for the Muslim majority countries taken together, birth
and death rates have declined substantially, and the pace at which these
changes have occurred is similar to trends in non-Muslim countries. The
levels and trajectories of change vary across countries and regions, mak-
ing it difficult to describe a definitively distinctive pattern to characterize
Muslim majority countries defined as countries where 50 percent or a
greater proportion are followers of the Islamic faith.
The Pew report identifies 49 countries as Muslim majority countries.
The number of countries included is substantially greater than the 37
listed by Clarke (1985). The expansion of the list is attributable in large
part to the inclusion of the newly emerged countries that are Muslim
majority. The addition of a number of countries of Europe and Central
Asia has bolstered the argument of considerable diversity within Islamic
cultures. New countries that are featured in the list of Muslim countries
are Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan
and Uzbekistan. Also included in the new list and not the old, probably
because of data inadequacy in the past, are Brunei, Burkina Faso, Malay-
sia, Mayotte, Sierra Leone and Western Sahara. Yemen is now counted
as one country rather than two. Seventy-four percent of the world’s Mus-
lim population lives in these 49 countries. It is projected that Nigeria,
currently the largest African population not yet counted among the 49
Muslim majority countries, will join this list by 2030 when it is expected
to be more than 50 percent Muslim. The criterion of 50 percent Muslim
excludes several large Muslim populations living in non-Muslim coun-
tries. India and China both have large Muslim populations although as a
proportion of the population Muslims are not in the majority.
It is worth noting at the outset that Muslim majority countries differ
from each other demographically in terms of the size of their populations.
Five countries have populations of more than 100 million, whereas 18
have populations smaller than 5 million. Table 1 describes some selected
68 sajeda amin

characteristics of the Muslim majority countries that are at the extremes

of the distribution on rates of births, deaths, migration and marriage age.

Table 1: Fertility, Mortality and Marriage Diversity in Muslim

Majority Countries.
Average Number of Children Born per Woman (Total Fertility Rate)*
Low High
Country 2010–2015 Country 2010–2015
Iran 1.7 Niger 6.9
Tunisia 1.8 Afghanistan 6.3
Albania 1.9 Somalia 6.2
Lebanon 1.9 Chad 5.8
United Arab Emirates 1.9 Burkina Faso 5.6
Maldives 1.9 Mali 5.2
Average Life Expectancy in Years (Number of Years Expected to Live)*
High Low
Country 2010–2015 Country 2010–2015
Afghanistan 45 Kuwait 78
Sierra Leone 49 United Arab Emirates 78
Chad 50 Brunei 78
Mali 50 Albania 77
Somalia 51 Oman 77
Percentage of Women Married before Age 18**
High Low
Mali 55 Algeria 2
Guinea 63 Maldives 4
Bangladesh 66 Djibouti 5
Chad 68 Kazakhstan 6
Niger 75 Lebanon 6
 *  Data from Pew Research Center 2011.
** Data from UNICEF Global Data Base 2013. UNICEF measures child marriage as the
percentage of women 20–24 years old who were first married or in union before they
were 18 years old.
 demography 69

Birth Rates
An exploration of the detailed and country level demographic data on 49
Muslim majority countries shows that relative to other country data from
the same period they include the low as well as the high birth and death
rates. In 10 of these countries, fertility is very low, at or below replace-
ment level; that is to say women have just enough children to replace
themselves. Demographically, an average of 2.1 births is the rate at which
populations neither grow nor decline in the long run. Low fertility Muslim
countries include Iran, Tunisia, Albania, Lebanon, United Arab Emirates,
Maldives, Brunei, Indonesia, Turkey, Kuwait, Bahrain and Azerbaijan. Iran
is notable for its rapid and recent fertility decline as a response to strong
population policies pursued by the government. Perhaps more remarkable
is the switch there from a strongly pro-natalist population policy in the
recent past that resulted in very high birth rates to a strongly anti-natal-
ist policy in the present coupled with provision of supportive services in
health and family planning. It is generally recognized that the switch to
anti-natalist policies in Iran was associated with rising economic hardship
and having smaller, better planned families was seen as a solution by the
government. In the process of instituting anti-natalist policies, and to bal-
ance it with conservative values, the government of Iran adopted some
highly unusual but apparently successful programs. Recognizing that the
promotion of birth control requires improved reproductive health knowl-
edge, laws were instituted to introduce mandatory premarital counseling
sessions. These sessions provided comprehensive reproductive health
education as well as sexuality education to young men and women. In
recent years, a sex education video has been made widely available with
a seal of approval from the Ministry of Health (Moghtader 2011). Low fer-
tility in Tunisia is attributed to early and strong policy commitment to
family planning. Whereas, in the 1960s, Tunisia’s fertility was over 7 births
per woman, by the early 1980s it had reached replacement level fertility
(Eltigani 2009). By contrast, fertility decline was more recent in several of
the countries that now have extremely low fertility. In the Maldives, fertil-
ity was as high as 6.4 births per woman in 1990 (Government of Maldives
2006) and declined to 1.75 births in 2011 (World Bank 2012). In an analy-
sis of fertility decline among Muslims, Eberstadt and Shah (2011) further
make the point that while it has been largely overlooked, on average fer-
tility decline in Muslim majority countries has been considerably greater
in magnitude at 2.6 births 1975–1980 and 2005–2010, compared to an
aggregate decline for the world as a whole of 1.3 births and for developed
70 sajeda amin

regions as a whole of 2.2 births. Twenty-two Muslim majority countries

halved their birth rates or more during those three decades.
At the other extreme there are six Muslim-majority countries that
have very high fertility with women bearing more than five children in
their lifetime on average. These countries are Niger, Afghanistan, Soma-
lia, Chad, Burkina Faso and Mali. These are all countries characterized by
high poverty, low literacy, and low levels of urbanization.

Family Planning
In addition to Iran and Tunisia, mentioned above as countries with strong
programs for promoting the use of birth control, albeit in somewhat
unusual ways, several Muslim countries are notable for their pursuit of
traditional and aggressive family planning programs to bring down popu-
lation growth. Albania, Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Tunisia,
Turkey, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have strong family planning pro-
grams that have been in existence for several decades (Pew Research Cen-
ter 2011). These are also countries among the Muslim majority countries
that have been most successful in providing access to contraception and
expanding choice of methods to bring down fertility. Two countries with
very large overall population size and high population density, Bangla-
desh and Indonesia, have promoted the use of contraception and the idea
of limiting family size through information and motivational campaigns.
Family planning programs offer easy access to contraception, often pro-
vided free of cost or at highly subsidized rates. Both these countries have
large family planning programs tied to the promotion of maternal and
child health. In Bangladesh there is also a social marketing and commu-
nication campaign to encourage smaller families. Both of these programs
are largely credited with bringing down fertility in the country while they
remained at low levels of development. However, on average, Muslim
countries have lower contraceptive use relative to non-Muslim countries.
Low contraceptive prevalence rates are associated with high fertility.
Countries that have low use of contraceptive use are also characterized
by low literacy, poverty and are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa where
non-Muslim countries also have low contraception and high fertility.
Contraceptive sterilization is a surgical procedure that is widely used
to stop childbearing permanently in some settings. Men and women may
undergo surgical procedures to prevent conception. Female sterilization is
widely used in some contexts such as Brazil and India as a means of birth
control. Sterilization for contraceptive purposes is legal in 74 countries of
 demography 71

the world. These include the following Muslim majority countries: Ban-
gladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, Niger, Tunisia and Turkey. In the rest of the
Muslim world the status of contraceptive sterilization is either unclear or
restricted (Engenderhealth 2002).

Abortion
Muslim countries vary widely in terms of laws regulating abortion. Varying
interpretations of Islam in the main schools of interpretation or Ḥadīth
allow for a divergence of opinions and policies. Abortion laws range from
highly permissive to absolutely restrictive. In ten countries abortion is
available without restriction as to reason but with some gestational and
other limits; these include the Eastern European/Central Asian countries
of Albania, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan,
and Uzbegistan, but are not limited to this region. Tunisia, Turkey and
Bahrain have similarly liberal abortion laws. Another four countries have
somewhat liberal policies that allow abortion under circumstances that
would otherwise lead to mental stress. These are Algeria, Gambia, Malay-
sia and Sierra Leone. In six countries abortion is not permitted under
any circumstances. These are Egypt, Iraq, Oman, Mauritania, Senegal and
Somalia. All the remaining countries allow abortion under circumstances
where a woman’s health or her life is at risk. Bangladesh is included in this
category but has a curious situation with regard to abortion: although the
laws on late-term abortion are restrictive, services for menstrual regula-
tion (popularly referred to as MR) whereby the conceptus is extracted
from the uterus using a manual aspiration technique, are widely used
during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy (Amin 2003). It is estimated that
approximately 1 in 4 pregnancies are terminated in this manner.

Death Rates
In general, countries that have low birth rates also have good health indi-
cators. Health indicators are often measured by demographers in terms
of the average number of years a person can expect to live, called a life
expectancy rate. Countries that have high birth rates have poor health
and low life expectancy. There are five Muslim majority countries where
the average life expectancy is only 50 years or even less. Afghanistan has
the poorest health indicators with a life expectancy of 45 years and 147
out of every 1,000 children born are expected to die before their first
birthday. On the other hand, a large number of Muslim majority coun-
tries have very good health indicators. In twelve countries the average
72 sajeda amin

person can expect to live 75 years or more, and the number of children
expected to die in their first year is fewer than 15 per 1,000 live births.
The average for all Muslim majority countries is 68 years for life expec-
tancy and 40 deaths in every 1,000 births. This is comparable to the aver-
age for all underdeveloped countries and is about 10 years less in terms
of life expectancy compared to the average for all developed countries,
where the average is 78 years. There has been rapid improvement in a
number of health indicators that have contributed to the improvement
in survival chances and longevity. These are access to skilled birth atten-
dant, high rates of immunization to protect against the major childhood
diseases, and access to clean drinking water.
A study on recent changes in health and mortality indicators in the
contemporary world concludes that a quietly exceptional success has
been achieved by the Muslim countries (Kuhn 2010). Data on rapidly
improving health indicators in the decades since the publication of an
influential article by John Caldwell (1986) on routes to low mortality iden-
tified improvements in women’s education and a more circuitous route
of improvements in governance and politics as being key to mortality
decline. Randall Kuhn (2010) suggests that further beneficial effects of
increased education on health cannot be expected, given the considerable
gains that have already been made in this regard in the high achieving
countries. Noting that recent improvements in life expectancy in Latin
America and the Muslim world bear further scrutiny, Kuhn suggests that
countries have benefited from investments in health systems and clos-
ing male–female differential achievements in education. Looking closely
at the successes and failures among Muslim countries it is noted that
Morocco, Syria, Jordan and Bangladesh reaped considerable benefits by
investing in development of human capabilities. By contrast, poor achiev-
ers such as Lebanon have been stymied by sectarian divide, civil conflict,
and the repeated onslaughts of occupation and invasion by Israel. The
analysis also suggests that greater ethnic homogeneity is associated with
better success in health. In several settings, such as Bangladesh, Bosnia
and Herzegovina, and Eritrea, rapid improvements in health followed
considerable collective trauma at the national level when conflicts led to
secession. These were also settings where development relied on human
resources rather than on extractive industries and minerals.
Whereas the countries that have low fertility, and are performing well
in terms of health, are similar to the best performing developed countries,
the poor performers in the Muslim majority countries are ranked at the
bottom of all developing countries as well. Afghanistan, Chad, Burkina
 demography 73

Faso, Niger and Somalia rank lowest in all country lists as well as continu-
ing to rank low in the Muslim country list.

Bangladesh and Pakistan (a tale of two wings)

Two large countries from South Asia can be compared in terms of demo-
graphic parameters to serve as an example of how divergent paths of
social investment can lead to very different demographic trajectories.
Bangladesh and Pakistan were East and West Pakistan respectively until
Bangladesh became independent after a protracted civil war in 1971. At
that time, both countries were about the same population size of around
75 million and fertility was high, with an average of over 6 births per
woman, in both wings of the country. Following independence, Bangla-
desh engaged in a prolonged process of recovery from a devastating war
that claimed thousands of lives and rendered many more to illness and
disease. Part of the recovery program included strong investments in
health, family planning, social development, and education. Pakistan was
not affected in the same way by war. It was wealthier to begin with and
continued a pattern of development that did not include similar invest-
ments in social development or women’s empowerment. In 2013 Paki-
stan remains considerably wealthier, but in almost every social indicator,
Bangladesh has done better. Both countries are predominantly Muslim,
so religion has little bearing on the different paths of development pur-
sued by the two countries. However, as a result of the underinvestment
in social development, and particularly women’s health and education,
fertility has remained relatively high in Pakistan (3.4 births per woman)
while the average number of births to women in Bangladesh is 2.2 births,
which is near replacement. Recent calculations show that the population
of Bangladesh (149 million in 2010) is approximately 40 million less than
that of Pakistan (178 million in 2010).

Muslim Mortality in India

Higher fertility among Muslims relative to Hindus, Christians and Bud-
dhists, is widely noted in the demographic literature and in popular writings
about Hindu–Muslim differences. High fertility is consistent with a gen-
eral pattern of disadvantage that Muslims experience as a minority group
in India. Muslims are disadvantaged because of poor education levels,
fewer opportunities for work, and lower income. The Sachar Commit-
tee’s 2006 report on the Social, Economic and Educational Status of the
Muslim Community of India, commissioned and published by the Indian
74 sajeda amin

government, documents and analyzes much of this research. However, it

also finds contrary trends, for example, that Muslim children have better
health and persistently lower mortality relative to other religious groups
(Sachar et al. 2006). Since the release of this highly influential report, sev-
eral groups have attempted to explore the question further in an effort
to explain these mortality differentials. There is an emerging consensus
that while several factors, such as stay-at-home mothers, better diet and
nutrition, better access to clean water and better sanitary conditions may
have played a role, models that control for all of these factors find some
differentials remain that they are not able to explain.

Migration Rates
Migration is an important driver of population change and has important
gender implications. In particular, male and female labor force migra-
tion patterns can have an important impact on both the receiving and
the sending communities. There has been some research on the circu-
lation of workers to and from the Middle East following the petroleum
boom of the 1970s. Countries as diverse as Mali, Niger and Bangladesh
are increasingly dependent on remittance income, often the most impor-
tant source of foreign exchange earnings. While the fact of migration
is not new, the increasing importance of remittance in national econo-
mies and dependence on foreign workers in labor-importing countries
poses news challenges. Homa Hoodfar (1996) describes the considerable
impact of international migration of men on the lives of women in Egypt.
High rates of male migration from Egypt to the Gulf countries resulted
in many women becoming de facto household heads, managing and
running households on remittance earnings. Hoodfar suggests that the
specific pattern of male labor migration and household dependence on
remittance income triggered contradictory processes of change, promot-
ing feminization because women were left to cope on their own, but also
dependence because they relied completely on men’s income.
As a whole, Muslim majority countries are characterized as being net
out-migration countries; that is, on average more people are leaving these
countries than are entering to live there. As with birth and death rates,
there is considerable diversity within the Muslim majority countries in pat-
terns of migration and the importance of in-migration versus out-migra-
tion. The Middle Eastern countries include the highest net out-migration
and net in-migration countries. Jordan and Syria have the highest rates
of people leaving every year among the Muslim majority countries. Other
 demography 75

countries with high out-migration are Albania, Mali, Tajikistan, Kyrgyz-

stan, Morocco, Uzbekistan and Chad. The United Arab Emirates tops the
list of countries that take in the highest number of migrants. Others on
this list are also located in the Gulf States: Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Brunei
and Saudi Arabia. Other countries in the list of Muslim majority countries
include a range of variation in migration patterns.

Age Structure
Large demographic changes, such as those reported for fertility and mor-
tality change in Muslim majority countries, can have important social
and economic consequences. Age structural factors that are of concern in
countries that have experienced substantial fertility and mortality change
in the recent past are populations growing older on average (population
aging) and large populations entering adulthood. While an aging popu-
lation adds to dependency ratios, large cohorts of young people enter-
ing adulthood and joining the workforce, if accompanied by appropriate
investments in education and health, can offer “demographic dividends”
(Bloom and Williamson 1998). When a high proportion of the population
is dependent because they are very young or because they are very old,
the age structure of a population can itself be a significant determinant
of economic growth. By and large, all of the countries identified above as
having very low fertility also have the highest proportion in the older age
groups. In countries with low fertility and low mortality, the proportion
of population in the oldest age group is increasing, leading to an aging
and dependent population. All the Muslim majority countries that have
below-replacement fertility have a growing proportion of the population
that are over 60 years of age. Albania tops this list followed closely by
Azerbaijan, Tunisia, Lebanon, Indonesia and Turkey. By contrast, the
high fertility countries have the highest proportions in the younger ages
leading to high proportions of dependent young and the youngest age
structure. Burkina Faso, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Mali and Chad are coun-
tries with very high proportions in the youngest age groups.
Recent political commentary on the “Arab Spring” has brought into
sharp focus several demographic determinants underlying social pro-
cesses. Commentary on these dramatic events has identified factors asso-
ciated with the age structure, specifically the existence of a youth bulge,
as being an important underlying cause of social unrest and upheaval.
However, young age structure in and of itself does not necessarily lead
to social unrest. Kuhn (2012) argues that it is not the size of youth
76 sajeda amin

unemployment per se that is behind the discontent that fueled the social
unrest in settings such as Tunisia and Libya, but grievances associated
with rising unemployment and falling opportunities after a period of sus-
tained improvement of human development indicators. To make the case,
Kuhn highlights trends in Tunisia and Libya, two countries that topped
the list of progress in human development indicators and were also the
forerunners in the Arab Spring revolution that swept across a large swath
of the region.
A recent edited collection of essays based on data from eight countries
in North Africa and the Middle East—Iran, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Jor-
dan, Morocco, Syrian and Yemen—documents the grim situation of the
swollen cohorts born during 1980–1995 who are bearing the brunt of high
population growth of the past (Dhillon and Yousef 2009). Exploring data
from these varied settings, the authors identify poor education qualities
and a number of structural factors or institutional rigidities as important
influences on the low absorption of youth into the labor force, leading
to high levels of unemployment and underemployment in these settings.
Unemployment among young people ranges from 20 to 40 percent in
these settings.
Globally, there are many other examples of countries that survived
young age structures and youth bulges without similar upheavals. Indeed,
the influence of youthful age structure on broader social and economic
indicators is more commonly associated with improved economic devel-
opment, the “demographic dividend” mentioned earlier. These more posi-
tive associations between a youthful population and economic prosperity
are found in examples of East Asian countries that invested in education
and work opportunities for youth and reaped the benefits of these invest-
ments in terms of subsequent economic growth.
Arab countries in North Africa and the Middle East have been the focus
of attention for rapid improvement in human development indicators.
Six Muslim countries were recently highlighted in data presented in the
2010 Human Development Report published by the United Nations (UNDP
2010). The report identified countries that have developed most since the
1970s and ranked them by a most improved criterion. A surprising six
out of ten most improved countries were Muslim majority countries and
three are in North Africa. The authors of the report identified that the fac-
tors behind such improvement relative to their status in 1970 is linked to
women’s empowerment, through investments in education and health, in
countries such as Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco.
 demography 77

This discussion of the diversity in fertility, mortality and migration in

Muslim-majority countries highlights the considerable social and cul-
tural heterogeneity within the Muslim world. Most importantly, there is
more variation within contemporary Muslim countries as countries with
more divergent trends from Central Asia and Europe are now added to
the list. There have also been some very rapid changes in rapidly pros-
pering countries of North Africa and the Middle East. The presence of
several large and relatively poor countries—Afghanistan, Pakistan and
Bangladesh—contribute significantly to weighted averages. In order to
allow for size variation across countries, the average has to be weighted
by the population size. Thus, large countries contribute proportionately to
an average. In order to provide a more nuanced picture, it is important to
look at data for the average as well as for the extremes, and show several
primary demographic indicators for Muslim countries that represent the
extremes; this will illustrate the wide variation and diversity within Muslim
countries.

Marriage in Muslim Majority Countries

While internationally comparable statistics on age at marriage are hard to

come by because the available data are of poor quality and not uniformly
collected, what data exist allows for some broad generalizations. As with
other indicators, there is a great diversity within Muslim majority coun-
tries: Muslim countries include very early patterns of marriage for girls as
well as very late patterns of marriage. Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Chad,
Niger, and Mali are among the earliest marrying societies with more than
50 percent of women marrying before age 18. Most countries with a Mus-
lim majority have relatively late marriage for both men and women. At the
other end of the continuum, less than 7 per cent of women are married
before age 18 in Algeria, Maldives, Djibouti, Kazakhstan and Lebanon.
Data on regional aggregates show that the proportion of men and
women who remain unmarried in the late 20s is highest in the Middle
East and Central Asia. A report published by the United States National
Research Council and Institute of Medicine of the National Academies
(Lloyd 2005) shows that the highest average ages at marriage in the con-
temporary world are in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia.
Although Muslim countries adhere to the general pattern of late marriage
in their respective regions in the Middle East, North Africa and Central
78 sajeda amin

Asia, the five countries that have early marriage have an exceptional early
pattern, and their relative contribution pulls the average down.
Late marriage for women and for men is of relatively recent origin and
there is evidence that Iran and Egypt in particular have experienced very
rapid rates of change. Delayed marriage in these contexts is variously
attributed to rising costs associated with marriage, primarily because of
fairly rigid expectations of contributions by the bride and the groom or
their families to setting up a new household. Later marriage is associated
with rising standards of living and expectations, and various rigidities in
the labor and housing market combined with greater competition in large
birth cohorts that frustrate the realization of those expectations. Regard-
less of the reasons for delayed marriage, its net impact on demographic
trends is likely to be strong, to the extent that delayed marriage means
later births, leading to longer spans between generations (Lloyd 2005).
As with other demographic indicators, the inclusion of Muslim majority
countries of Central Asia adds to marriage diversity. Emerging data from
ex-Soviet bloc countries reinforces the data on internal diversity within
Muslim majority nations. The demography of the former Soviet Union has
long been noted for having considerable demographic diversity. The for-
mer Soviet Central Asian countries, with their large Muslim populations,
have now joined the ranks of developing countries. Data are also available
on the costs associated with marriage, a factor that receives much atten-
tion in popular and academic writing on marriage in many of the settings
where it is considered an important force of change. For instance, while
marriage transactions have long been a centerpiece of Egyptian mar-
riages, there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that such exchanges are now
more onerous than in the past, both because the value of transactions has
increased in absolute terms and because couples are less able to afford the
things they aspire to.
Some part of marriage change may be driven by changing expectations
regarding post-marriage residence. While co-residence with the parents
of the husband is slightly less common now than in the past, there is
strong evidence of a shift in preference for nuclear residence among new
couples. These changing preferences may contribute in important ways to
dynamics in the marriage market by raising the cost implications of mar-
riage. The role of expectations vis-à-vis post-marriage residence in driving
the shifting marriage patterns is explored below.
 demography 79

Trends in Age at Marriage

While the proportion of women marrying at young ages has declined con-
siderably in the last three decades all over the developing world, in the
Middle East the delay in age at marriage has been as or more dramatic
than in other regions. Indeed, a recent National Academy of Sciences
study on transitions to adulthood concluded that while many regions
have witnessed declines in the proportions married among young people
of both sexes, in the Middle East and in China the change has been most
consistent across multiple age groups for women and men (Lloyd et al.
2006).
Among the five Middle Eastern countries that have conducted Demo-
graphic and Health Surveys (DHS) since 1990, and thus have recent data
on age at marriage, nearly half of women currently aged 40–44 were mar-
ried by age 18, compared to fewer than one-quarter of women currently
aged 20–24. The declines in the proportion married by age 20 are equally
striking: approximately 65 percent of 40–44 year olds were married by age
20 compared to 40 per cent of 20–24 year olds.
The delays in age at marriage are substantial among men and exceed
the rate of delay among women. While DHS data are not available for
men, the United Nations database indicates that among 20–24 year olds
in the 1990s only 17 percent were married compared to 25 percent in the
earlier period. Among those aged 25–29, the comparable percentages are
53 and 63. The annualized rate of change in marriage age for men was
0.78 for the 20–24 age group and 0.91 for the 25–29 age group, whereas
for women the rate of change was 0.56 for the 20–24 age group and 0.18
for the 25–29 age group.
Among the eight countries in the Middle East region that are included
in the United Nations marriage database, the trends are similar. (Unlike
the DHS, which provides information on age at marriage, the United
Nations data only give the percentage of an age group currently mar-
ried; however this current status information is available for more coun-
tries and also for multiple censuses and surveys allowing us to observe
trends.) Comparing aggregated data from censuses/surveys conducted in
the 1970s–1980s with data collected in the 1990s reveals that 21 percent
of women aged 15–19 were married in the earlier time period compared
with fewer than 15 percent in the recent period. The analogous percent-
ages for women 20–24 are 65 percent for the earlier period and 55 per-
cent for the recent decade.
80 sajeda amin

Data for Egypt shown in Tables 2 and 3 tell a very similar story. The
DHS conducted in 2000 indicates that the percentage of women married
by ages 18 and 20 has declined considerably across age cohorts. Whereas
43 percent of women aged 40–44 were married by age 18, among 20–24
year olds the proportion has fallen dramatically to just below 20 percent.
The delay in marriage has not been universal; it has occurred among those
with lower schooling levels rather than among the better educated, who
have traditionally married later. Among women with fewer than four years
of schooling, 60 percent of those aged 20–24 married by age 20 compared
to 76 percent among those aged 40–44 (data not shown). The same pat-
tern of delay is observed for those with four to seven years of schooling:
a decline across cohorts from 60 percent to 47 percent. However, among
those with more than eight years of schooling, to the extent that there
is change in the proportions married by age 20, a greater fraction of the
younger cohort is married: 22 percent among 20–24 year olds versus 19
percent among 40–44 year olds.
The census data from the United Nations in Table 3 give a more precise
picture of when marriage began to be postponed in Egypt. Among both
men and women there is very little difference in the proportions married
in 1976 and 1986 except for the fact that more men aged 15–19 report
being married in 1986, although the fraction married at that age is still
quite small. Comparing 1986 and 1996, it is clear that for women up to age
24 and men up to age 29, the proportions married began to decline during
this period. However, it is important to note that while there has been a
delay in when young people wed, the data for the older ages suggest that
there has not yet been a retreat from the institution of marriage. In 1996,
approximately 95 percent of women aged 30–34 and 94 percent of men
aged 35–39 were married.
Changing age at marriage has not taken place in a vacuum. A range
of indicators related to marriage such as marriage timing, costs, spousal
age difference and post-marriage living arrangements have shown signs
of change, some more than others. Demographic and Health Survey data
permit reasonably confident estimates for changes in marriage timing,
consanguineous marriages, and prevalence of own choice versus arranged
marriage. Some recent surveys even provide estimates of the rise of unof-
ficial or urfi marriages. However, data on marriage costs and family living
arrangements are more problematic.
While it widely believed that the cost of marriage in Egypt, and the
Middle East and North Africa more broadly, has been rising, little research
has been done to confirm this belief with statistical analysis. Getting
 demography 81

Table 2: Percentage of women married by ages 18, 20 and 25.

Egypt 2000, Married by age 18 Married by age 20 Married by age
DHS 25
Current age 20–24 30–34 40–44 20–24 30–34 40–44 30–34 40–44
19.5 34.6 43.0 35.9 50.8 59.5 81.7 83.8
Source: Mensch 2004.

Table 3: Percentage of women and men ever married.

Egypt: Aged 15–19 Aged 20–24 Aged 25–29 Aged 30–34
censuses
Yr. of 1976 1986 1996 1976 1986 1996 1976 1986 1996 1976 1986 1996
census

Women 22.8 20.7 14.5 61.1 60.6 56.1 86.0 86.3 87.1 92.9 92.7 94.9
Men 3.8 10.4 2.1 19.7 19.3 11.8 57.7 56.0 49.2 83.0 83.4 82.2

Source, ages 15–29, 1986 and 1996: Mensch 2004.

Source, ages 30–34 and 1976: United Nations Population Division Database on Marriage
Patterns (Pop/1/DB/2000/3).

married is a substantial financial undertaking for individuals and families,

and has unexplored implications for national economies; yet poverty/eco-
nomic analysis ignores the “one time expenditure, for which entire fami-
lies spend years saving, and results in the spending of four and a half times
GNP per capita” (Manal 2001, 2).
As standards of living rise and the resources used for the accumula-
tion of household goods multiply, the length of the engagement period is
reported to be growing longer. While data are not available for all Arab
countries, “there is indirect evidence that it does take longer to complete
a marriage than in the recent past” (Singerman and Ibrahim 2001, 4). The
period of engagement has become longer as couples grapple with the
huge financial undertaking. It is believed that there is also a “trend toward
shifting resources away from the bride price, or mahr, in favor of con-
tribution to necessary items like furniture and furnishings” (Singerman
and Ibrahim 2001, 5), with the bride price becoming more symbolic. This
is especially true in urban areas. This trend indicates that both parties are
willing to accommodate the rising costs of higher expectations regarding
marital life. There is also some evidence that within the region, negotia-
tions are now “fiercer” because people are marrying out of their kin and
neighborhood groups, thereby warranting added protection in marriage
bargaining.
82 sajeda amin

There is general agreement that increases in girls’ school attendance

in the recent past is an important force behind the delay in marriage of
women (Mathur, Greene and Malhotra 2003, United Nations Commission
on Population and Development 2002). A similar case can be made for
the influence of education on male age at marriage. A purely mechanistic
influence of education is that spending long years in schools precludes
early marriage. Since male age at marriage is typically later than female
age at marriage, years spent in school have to be considerably longer for
schooling to interfere with marriage. Indeed, there are relatively few coun-
tries in the developing world where such a long time spent in education is
likely to be the case. The possibility of acquiring human capital through
education can have indirect effects through the labor market. Extended
educational paths taken by men in recent years in many countries may
contribute to the rise in their age of marriage (Hertrich 2002).
There are also suggestions in reports of change in marriage practices of
more profound developments related to structural economic change that
can have implications for the way in which households and social rela-
tionships around households are organized. For example, commenting
on the changing nature of marriage in Indonesia, Terence H. Hull argues
that “the assumption in the past that marriage formed a basic productive
economic unit for farming or trading, has been modified by the current
requirement that basic consumption needs such as capital for a house, or
consumer goods, and basic educational attainments much be achieved
before a marriage can ‘wisely’ take place” (2002, 5).
In economically diverse settings, researchers have observed that the
decisions about marriage timing for men and women are increasingly
influenced by economic considerations (Dhillon and Yousef 2009). Rising
costs associated with housing are considered the dominant component
of such costs in reports from Egypt, Jordan and Iran, all settings where
housing prices have increased sharply in recent years. There are also some
indicators of rising expectations with regard to assets that are accumu-
lated and about minimal requirements for couples starting a new life. In
Egypt, the costs of marriage include housing, appliances, furniture, bed
linens and kitchen utensils, in addition to clothing for the bride and the
groom with specific responsibilities assigned to the bride and the groom,
as described by tradition (Amin and Bassussi 2003). These responsibili-
ties are formally listed during the engagement in the katb al-kitāb (official
marriage contract). An estimation based on survey data that compares
recently married cohorts with couples married some 30 years ago sug-
gest that costs associated with accumulation of goods for marriage have
 demography 83

increased dramatically. There are also indirect data that rising marriage
costs have resulted in longer waiting times to marriage after engagement,
typically the period during which such accumulation takes place. Between
1986 and 1996, there was a four-fold increase in the number of marriages
in which couples found themselves waiting, having signed the katb al-kitāb
and registered the marriage, but then being unable to establish a marital
residence and consummate the marriage (Singerman and Ibrahim 2003).
Underlying the discussion of data on the importance of rising housing,
and other costs associated with setting up households, is a fundamental
change in aspirations and expectations with regard to living arrangements
of young adults. Rather than living in joint households headed by their
parents, newly married couples may prefer to form independent house-
holds. In general, studies of household structure and formation show that
there is a positive association between rising income and rise of nuclear
households. Notwithstanding this trend there is also evidence, on the other
hand, that increasing poverty in agricultural settings, as in Bangladesh
in the 1970s, was also associated with family nucleation and separation
from multigenerational joint households. Sajeda Amin (1998) described
data from a village study where wage labor-dependent poor and landless
households were more likely to be nuclear, because sons left their father’s
households earlier to set up their own household. In these same villages,
joint ownership of land was an incentive for joint living arrangements.
Thus, while changing living arrangement may be driven by an increas-
ing taste for privacy, it may also be related to economic transformations
driven by rising landlessness and a reduced reliance on land for liveli-
hoods. Of course, one must also consider that the direction of causation
could be reversed, that changing norms about age at marriage may bring
about a change in household structure: postponement of marriage may
result in greater accumulation of resources and increased demand for a
household separate from parents.

Conclusions

Changes in all of the demographic trends of births, deaths, marriage and

migration can have profound implications for the lives women are now
living, and can be expected to live in the near future. Declining birth rates
can have far-reaching implications for women’s education, workforce par-
ticipation and empowerment. A purely mechanistic pathway of influence
is through the number of years that women spend pregnant or lactating,
84 sajeda amin

periods of time that make it difficult to combine productive and repro-

ductive roles. Sajeda Amin and Cynthia Lloyd (2002) estimate that this
amount of time has been reduced drastically with birth rates declining
from over seven to fewer than three children in a lifetime. Similarly, lon-
ger life also has purely mechanistic impacts in terms of individual and
household planning horizons. Expectations of a longer life have impor-
tant implications for time spent in schooling, the timing of marriage, as
well as the timing of household formation. Increasing life expectancy also
has indirect but profound implications about risk and vulnerability and is
likely to have important implications for planning horizons. Individuals
who are not under the constant risk of premature death, and who can
expect their own children to survive to adulthood, are likely to have dif-
ferent attitudes about the fragility of life. Finally, there is growing evi-
dence that changing marriage regimes have far-reaching implications for
household formation, intergenerational relationships, as well as conjugal
relationships. The pace at which these parameters are changing and the
rate at which societal structures can adapt to these changes are important
quality-of-life questions.

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 Film Studies

Kamran Rastegar

Introduction

This entry examines the state of the field of film studies with regard to
scholarship that is situated at the intersection of film studies and “women
of Islamic cultures.” It must be stated from the outset that framing the
subject in this way is problematic, given the predominant methodologi-
cal and disciplinary orientations in the field of film studies, as well as the
impossibility of generalizing about either the representations of, or the
material realities for, women living in Muslim societies. It is furthermore
difficult to conceive of the study of cinema with this religious identity
as a significant aspect of the framing, in part because no conception of
an “Islamic cinema” has been accepted by scholars or practitioners, as
has ostensibly been conceived in some other areas of scholarship on cul-
tural practice (for example, Islamic art or Islamic architecture). Moreover,
emergence and development of cinema as an area of cultural expression
(much less, as an “industry”) has been uneven and has resulted in highly
differentiated cultural histories across various Muslim-majority societies.
The frame may be narrowed to include only films that have a significant
religious context (in the way that “Christian cinema” is used in the United
States to refer to a small subgenre of religiously-oriented films), but the
number of films that would fit this definition would be very few. In this
sense, this entry does not propose to examine a coherent and already-
existing disciplinary area, one within which a particular focus may be
placed on the category of women. Rather, here we may simply propose
certain commonalities in the diverse landscape of scholarship on cinema
from various parts of the world where communities of Muslims exist, and
where gender may be seen to play different and varied roles with regard
to cinema, from one context to another.
The social positions and experiences of women in these societies are
inevitably multifarious. Over the course of the last century or so, while
certain shared conditions—for example colonialism, nationalism and the
rise of postcolonial systems—may legitimize a certain degree of general-
ization, the experiences of women in these societies are diverse, and this
88 kamran rastegar

is reflected within cinematic expressions, even if these expressions have

unevenly represented these realities. For these reasons, this entry will
make use of the phrase “Muslim-majority societies,” rather than “Islamic
culture” or an “Islamic world” (or their plurals). The former category will be
understood to be itself less than sufficient as a comprehensive descriptive
label, given that the large populations of Muslims and the long presence
of an Islamic cultural heritage in places such as India, or parts of Western
Africa, are not fully accommodated in the term “Muslim-majority societ-
ies.” Additionally, it is important to recognize that “Islamic” has always
included non-Muslims, whether as assimilated members of a society (for
example as “Arabs”) or as culturally distinct but living within, and under
the political and legal umbrella of, a political and territorial entity defined
as “Muslim.” Additionally, the works of diasporic filmmakers are unfortu-
nately marginalized by the identification of their creators as members of
a minority group, whether, for example, in France, the United Kingdom,
or North America; this status is not fully engaged by the term “Muslim-
majority societies.” In this sense, the cinemas of Islamic cultures will be
here seen as reflected in the complex and divergent histories of Muslim
societies, both as majorities and as minorities, including also minority cul-
tures/identities within them, and the various histories of the emergence
and development of cinematic cultures within these contexts.

Cinema of and in Muslim-Majority Societies: Frameworks for Study

Before addressing the question of gender as it relates to cinema, it is

important to examine how the field of film studies has more broadly pro-
duced scholarship on filmmaking from Muslim-majority cultural contexts.
To begin with, given the history of cinema, we must take as given that our
discussion is strictly limited to the modern period, and thus is deeply inter-
twined with the cultural politics of colonialism, anticolonial struggles, and
the postcolonial context. The historical coincidence of the rise of cinema
and the apex of formal European colonialism makes any understanding of
cinema history contingent upon recognition of the role of cinema within
the project of colonialism, and later as a vehicle for anticolonialist nation-
alism as well. Cinema’s origins with the work of the Brothers Lumière, for
example, includes a series of films produced by the Frères company that
were shot in Egypt, Palestine and other colonial settings in the 1890s. This
focus on colonial settings—many of them Muslim-majority societies—
continued as the industries of cinema were established in the 1920s and
 film studies 89

1930s, in both the United Kingdom and Hollywood (and to a somewhat

lesser extent in France).
The colonial adventure film supplied some of the most popular works
of the cultural form as it took shape, and these films supplied potent
images and imaginaries concerning the societies of the colonized world.
In this sense, cinema’s links to colonialism resulted in Western audiences
often experiencing “Islamic cultures” most fully within cinematic repre-
sentations. The representations of Muslim women, in particular, in these
films, thus took on a fullness and power that was unprecedented. While
the visual repertoire of these films found their origins in pre-cinematic
technologies and forms—photography by travelers, the genre of Orien-
tal painting, and of course the “Oriental Tale” novels of the nineteenth
century—cinematic representations furthered and gave a novel rich-
ness to these tropes. Many of these earlier texts were directly adapted to
cinema—Rudyard Kipling’s colonial writing, for example, was many times
translated to screen. Thus, the harem girl, the oppressed Muslima seeking
a “white savior,” the seductive temptress, and many other similar stock
characters, populated the narratives of the colonial adventure film. One
of Hollywood’s first major successes, Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik (1921),
was marketed on the exoticism of the harem fantasy, by placing a white
woman into the forbidden inner sanctum of an Arab shaykh’s household
and having her submit to the shaykh’s sexual power, before finally reveal-
ing that the anxiety of miscegeny that drives the film was misdirected:
the shaykh is revealed at the end to in fact be racially a white European
man. John Ford’s 1929 The Black Watch casts Myrna Loy as the beautiful
Yasmina, who after seducing a British officer is revealed to be the leader of
a murderous Muslim cult. These tropes remain common in later decades
as well. Even as the political system of colonialism was facing its inevi-
table end, on movie screens in the West, white colonial travelers and set-
tlers continued to explore the dark corners of the colonial world, finding
these landscapes inhabited by women who were drawn from a familiar
orientalist repertoire. These films were not marginal to the industry, but
rather offered many lucrative vehicles that buoyed the commercial cin-
ema industry in both the United Kingdom and the United States in the
pre-Second World War period.
Nonetheless, on the other side of the colonial divide, the origins of cin-
ematic arts in societies with significant Muslim populations are anything
but uniform; some of these societies have had a presence of a cinema
culture for nearly a full century (for example Egypt, India and, to a lesser
extent, Turkey and Iran). In others, one may be hard-pressed to be able to
90 kamran rastegar

argue that cinema has had any significant indigenous cultural presence at
all (for example parts of sub-Saharan Africa, some of the Gulf Arab king-
doms). As with other formerly colonized societies more generally, in these
societies the development of a cinema industry most often arrives as part
of the post-independence setting, frequently as part of cultural policies of
the new postcolonial regimes.
The exceptions to this pattern are, however, quite notable. For exam-
ple, the film industries of both Egypt and India, where the development of
indigenous film industries may be followed back to the first decades of the
twentieth century, emerged as productive venues with universalist aspira-
tions but also highly localized terms of reference, well before the end of
colonialism in either country. However, even in these two contexts, the
role of colonialism (and of neo- and postcolonialism) is of central impor-
tance to any framing of cinematic expression. In some settings, especially
Turkey, colonialism plays a less significant role, but across the societies
discussed here colonialism remains a salient frame of reference, given the
greater cultural dynamics that resulted from colonialism, where cinema
plays an important role in staging forms of modern cultural identity, and
where women play a very significant role. Colonial films had a signifi-
cant viewership even within colonized (and formerly colonized) societ-
ies. Thus, the emergent cinemas from these societies are often marked by
the problem of whether to simply assimilate these visual and narrative
tropes, or to attempt to set out new discursive strategies for representing
their own societies, and in particular the women within them. Thus, an
Egyptian film such as Henri Barakat’s Fatma (1945), which casts the popu-
lar Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum in the role of a lower-class woman,
beloved and respected in her neighborhood of Cairo for being trained as a
nurse, who overcomes unjust accusations to marry into the upper classes,
may be read not only as a modernist fable celebrating a new professional
and socially active Egyptian woman. It must also be thought of as in some
part responding to the predominant Western representations of Egyptian
women. Films such as Ana Hurra (I am free, dir. Salah Abu Sayf, 1958) and
Al-Bab al-Maftuh (The open door, dir. Henri Barakat 1963) present Egyp-
tian women in the wake of the 1952 revolution as seeking forms of per-
sonal liberation from social, gender-based oppression, and achieving this
through commitment to the nationalist cause. In these and other similar
films, women characters inhabit very different social roles from those of
the dominant Western industries that had already developed an elaborate
but static repertoire of Muslim women characters.
 film studies 91

In this sense, again, cinematic expressions in Muslim-majority contexts

are generally viewed by film studies scholars through sociocultural frames
that are similar to those that apply more broadly to cinema from the for-
merly colonized nations of the world. This is borne out by the fact that
the conceptual categories most often used do not differ: national cinema,
“third” (or third-world) cinema, world cinema, and postcolonial cinema.

National Cinema
This phrase is often taken nearly for granted as a category of analysis: it
presumes a certain coherence based on economic, linguistic, and thematic
commonalities in the cinematic expressions that emerge from a particular
national context. Discussions of national cinema began first in the con-
text of emerging debates around the distinctions between Hollywood film
techniques and those of continental cinemas—for example, Weimar Ger-
man cinema, the French nouveau vague, or Italian neorealism, as well as
certain trends in Eastern European filmmaking. In these framings, Euro-
pean cinemas were studied as offering aesthetic and thematic alternatives
to the emerging domination of Hollywood cinema. With the rise of the
newly independent nations out of the former colonies, the national cin-
ema debate was reframed to explore other “emerging” cinema cultures;
early among them were those of India, Egypt, and Japan, with further
later additions such as the Iranian new wave of the 1990s, Palestinian
cinema, Turkish cinema, and so on. While these trends continued to use
the language of national cinema studies to articulate perceived formal or
thematic unities that came to give legitimacy to the national framing of
works of cinema, by the 1990s trends in the financing and distribution
of cinematic works began to raise questions about the coherence of this
category, given that repeatedly the films from certain national contexts
that have come to critical notice were films that had been funded and dis-
tributed by Western or transnational institutions and interests. This latter
dimension has some important—if as yet largely unstudied—bearing on
filmmaking that addresses gender-based oppression, as many works that
take these issues as their central theme are films that emerge through
these transnational frameworks. Examples of this approach include Viola
Shafik’s Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class and Nation (1997), Gonul
Dönmez-Colin’s Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging (2008)
and Ranjana Khanna’s Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation 1830–Pres-
ent (2007), or article length works such as the study of Iranian women in
cinema by Norma Clare Moruzzi (2001), and Lindsey Moore (2005).
92 kamran rastegar

Third Cinema
This emerged in the 1960s in the context of struggle against neocolonial
regimes of that period and is identifiable as a movement at least through
the 1970s, particularly in Latin America, but with significant influence
in other parts of the formerly colonized world. Third cinema is defined
both by thematic coherence (in political/ideological terms) and by a less
well-defined desire for aesthetic and formal innovation to escape from the
paradigms of a dominant, Euro-American, cinema. While the third cin-
ema movement is identified with political commitment and transnational
solidarity, it is not known for having foregrounded feminist critiques or
for having given significant attention to the political or social questions
relating to women’s roles in neocolonial societies.

World Cinema
The concept of world cinema emerges as a particular project to set forth
a universalizing perspective on non-Western cinemas, marking them
in their difference as “world cinemas.” Emerging in the 1980s, this term
(which finds a rough analogue in the project of “world literature”) has
most often referred to the study of canonical figures from non-Western
cinemas who have already found critical interest as film auteurs; thus the
Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray is approached as an auteur of world cinema
rather than as a constituent figure in either Indian, or in third-world, cin-
ema. In its most generalized form, world cinema maps along neoliberal
models of globalized economy, celebrating the access and translatability
of certain films and their accommodation of metropolitan views on dis-
tant cultures. Women’s roles both on screen and behind the camera, in a
world cinema approach, tend to be evaluated either through the extent to
which they affirm Western preconceptions (for example, on the presumed
oppression of cultural practices such as hijab-wearing) or the extent to
which they celebrate characters who challenge such practices. For exam-
ple, this approach may well view Jafar Panahi’s Dayereh (The circle, 2003)
primarily as a work that extols women struggling against Iran’s norms of
gender oppression, associating these norms with the Islamic Republic’s
policies and religious conservatism—a reading that pervaded much of
the critical attention the film was given upon its release in the United
States (the film’s poster features the eyes of a woman peering as from
behind a veil that covers the rest of her face). However, other readings
of the film may allow for it to be seen as a critique of more socialized
 film studies 93

gender oppression not only in Iran but also elsewhere, a philosophical and
aesthetic exploration of social limitations that delimit and confine people
in their lives—a view also advocated by the filmmaker in various inter-
views. While “world cinema” has generally presumed its own universality,
often this claim appears only to mask the deeply Euro-American roots of
the concept, and of its valuative systems.

Postcolonial Cinema
Finally, postcolonial cinema is a much broader conceptual category that
seeks to use the commonalities of experience in the postcolonial context
to search for grounds for cross-cultural comparison of cinematic expres-
sion. The framing of postcolonial cinema also offers critical linkages to the
work of postcolonial feminists, and thus affords significant opportunities
not only to explore the colonial dimension of gender-based oppression,
but also to articulate comparative critiques of postcolonial societies. In
comparison to the above-mentioned categories, a postcolonial framing
arguably also gives greater space for explorations of issues of identity and
hence of gender as well.

Film Studies in Muslim-Majority Societies

Before the 1970s, within Muslim majority societies—as with much of

the non-Western world—one finds very little by way of an institutional
grounding for the sustained academic study of local cinemas, much less
the study of women in these cinemas. While by the mid-twentieth century
vibrant women’s movements, which include many scholars and critics,
are found in many Muslim-majority societies, it is similarly rare to find
significant interest in these settings for the critical study of cinema. This is
not to say that a practice of film criticism is not appreciated in these soci-
eties. In some countries where local cinema industries were strong, such
as Egypt, Iran, Turkey and India, film criticism as a journalistic practice
has been commonly practiced and widely published. While many of these
countries have university-level film production training, even in these set-
tings film analysis scholarship has infrequently been accorded significant
value, with some exceptions. In Egypt, the Academy of Arts University has
offered training in arts criticism, including film studies, since 1970. More
recently, in Turkey more than one university has begun to offer graduate
training in film studies, including Istanbul Sehir University and Kadir Has
94 kamran rastegar

University. However, in other countries with less established cinema tra-

ditions, such institutional settings for the study of cinema have not devel-
oped, and these represent most Muslim-majority societies.
Despite these obstacles, from the 1980s through to the present we find
a slow but increasingly rich body of scholarly work dedicated to study-
ing film arts in certain Muslim-majority societies. While from the 1990s
onward, we do find increasing examples of universities or cultural institu-
tions that are dedicated to film studies, where a body of local criticism has
been developed, often focused upon the local national cinema, much of
this work has been of a journalistic nature, and not closely related to gen-
eral trends in the academic field of film studies. Sadly, contacts between
the indigenous scholars of Muslim-majority societies and scholars located
in the West remain somewhat weak or sporadic overall.
The primary theoretical framing used by those who have studied the cin-
emas of Muslim-majority societies has been that of national (or, at times,
regional) cinema. Thus there are framings that produce works on Turkish,
Iranian, Israeli, Palestinian and other national cinemas, alongside works
that frame their subject regionally (or even ethnically) as “Arab cinema,”
“Middle Eastern cinema(s),” and “Maghribi cinema” or “African cinema,”
and so on. These framings have often served to codify these as inherently
separated from, and in some sense distant from, comparison to European
and North American cinemas. Effectively, these framings reproduce the
area-studies model for study of the non-Western world, and retain the
effect of conceiving of these cinemas as somehow requiring a specialized
language that is distinct from that which is used in the study of European
and North American films. These framings are further borne out in the
distribution and consumption of film works from these societies within
the Western metropole. Many of these works are screened at film festivals
and at events that codify the presentation of them as national/regional/
ethnic cinemas.

Film Studies and Feminism

Among Western film critics—and later, film theorists—the intersection

of film studies with the study of women has its origins in the post-Sec-
ond World War period, with significant advancements made in the area
over the course of the 1960s and 1970s. A robust sub-field emerged in this
period, one that came to be known as feminist film studies. This included
both feminist film theory/criticism and historical studies that focus
 film studies 95

on women’s contributions to film arts as directors, actors and in other

roles. Feminist film theory came to its own in the mid-1970s with the
work of Haskell (1974), Johnston (1973), and Mulvey (1975), among oth-
ers, opening new vistas on the study of women’s representations in cin-
ema. Although initially focused on the typology of stereotypes, this work
quickly came to draw heavily from post-structuralist and psychoanalytic
theory in examining the gendering of cinematic viewing practices through
the study of the gaze, subject interpellation, reception, and the semiot-
ics of gender in films. Within this field, a significant body of scholarship
was dedicated to the critical study of canonical cinematic texts, largely
those of narrative fictional works from Hollywood—what has been often
referred to as “dominant cinema.” These readings sought in part to illus-
trate the deeply gendered manner in which the ideal cinema viewer was
constructed. Some scholars studying dominant cinema aimed to explore
the inner contradictions of the gendered ideals represented within these
works. Yet other scholarship sought to champion alternatives in the emer-
gence of what was termed a “counter-cinema.”
However, it is noteworthy that very little of this work concerned non-
Western topics or materials, and the prominent scholars of this genera-
tion were rarely equipped to engage deeply with cinematic works from the
non-Western world. In particular, little if any of the first wave of feminist
film theory reached beyond into the cinemas of the Arab world, Turkey
or Iran. The filmmaking of South and Southeast Asia, similarly, was very
infrequently the subject of this work. The emergence of a body of femi-
nist film studies scholarship that addressed filmmaking from one or more
Muslim-majority contexts may be dated to the 1990s, although the bulk
of this work was dedicated to Francophone cinemas of North Africa and
to some extent West Africa, and to Lebanese post-war cinema (Lebanese
cinema has long been the preeminent cultural venue for the promulga-
tion of Francophonie in that country). Most of this work has been limited
to article-length studies (rather than monographs) and is deeply indebted
to national cinema framings.
However, as of this writing, the mainstream of feminist film stud-
ies remains deeply concerned with European and North American cin-
emas, with little focus on specific non-Western cinematic contexts. Janet
McCabe’s Feminist Film Studies (2005) is illustrative. This work includes a
discussion of race and postcolonial theory, but only discusses cinematic
works of diasporic or Black filmmakers—no engagement is offered with
either canonical or counter-canonical works from non-Western cinemas.
Hilary Radner and Rebecca Stringer’s edited volume, Feminism at the
96 kamran rastegar

Movies (2011), includes no discussions of non-Western works, much less

any from a Muslim-majority society. Similarly, Karen Hollinger’s Feminist
Film Studies (2012) includes some discussion of colonial cinemas, but only
a single passing reference to one film by a filmmaker from a single Mus-
lim-majority context: Moufida Tlatli’s Silences of the Palace (1993).
The general absence of a significant presence of scholarship on cinemas
from Muslim majority societies within the field of feminist film studies
remains an unfortunate gap. Given that new scholarship on these cinemas
has been emerging, and has been of increasing sophistication and depth,
the absence of reference to these social contexts may only be understood
as a function of the history of the institutionalization of feminist film stud-
ies. Nonetheless, even within these institutions, some exceptions to this
general phenomenon may point to possible changes in the future. For
example, Laura Mulvey, who is generally seen as having been one of the
early founders of this field, has long shown a capacity to draw both textual
and theoretical references from non-Western cinema, in her 1993 discus-
sion of Xala by Ousmane Sembene, and in her 2006 study of the works of
Abbas Kiarostami.

Scholarship on Cinemas of Muslim-Majority Societies

The preponderance of scholarship on women in the cinemas of Islamic

cultures, therefore, is not to be found within the mainstream of feminist
film studies, but rather as a subset of work that is primarily focused upon
these cinematic cultures. So as to position the emergence of scholarship
on women in these cinemas, we must first look more broadly at the field
as a whole.
Scholarship on many non-Western cinemas, and among them constitu-
ent North African, Middle Eastern, South and Southeast Asian cinemas,
emerges in tandem with, but not necessarily from the center of, the insti-
tutional centers of the field of film studies. The regional and national cin-
emas that are constituent to Muslim-majority societies have more often
been a subject of study by film historians, cultural historians, and cultural
studies scholars with an expertise in one of the regions where Muslim-
majority societies are located, with some of these figures arriving at their
study of film from an area studies training. Others have come to a study of
the cinemas of these societies after first working in European or American
cinema.
 film studies 97

It is useful to outline some of the canonical works on the various cin-

ema cultures of Muslim-majority societies. On Western and North African
cinemas, the work of Roy Armes has been central, including Postcolonial
Images: Studies in North African Film (2005), African Filmmaking (2006),
Arab Filmmakers of the Middle East (2010), and The Cinema of North Africa
and the Middle East (2011). Interestingly, Armes’ interest in non-Western
cinema (his early career was dedicated to the study of French and other
European cinemas) was marked by an early study titled Third World Film-
making and the West (1987). So with Armes we may observe a scholar who
has used not only national/regional frameworks that cover various Mus-
lim-majority societies, but also one whose work, at one point, embraced
the category of third-world cinema.
Further foundational work may be found in the scholarship of Viola
Shafik, whose study Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (1998) was
an important contribution to the broader category of Arab/Arabic cinema.
Later, her work Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class, Nation (2008) has
also served to offer a foundational study of this national cinema. For Iran,
Hamid Dabashi’s Close-up: Iranian Cinema (2001) established a grounding
for the study of this national cinema, a project that has expanded many
times since this work with several further general studies. This trend
has perhaps reached maturity with Hamid Naficy’s four-volume study,
A Social History of Iranian Cinema (2011). In recent years, other national
cinemas have also been the subject of general, foundational studies: Leb-
anon (Khatib 2008), Turkey (Arslan 2010), Syria (Salti 2007), Malaysia
(Heide 2002), Bangladesh (Hoek 2013), to name only a few.

Studies on Women in Cinemas of Muslim-Majority Societies

The scholarship addressed in this entry may be divided under two some-
what distinct headings. The first area is scholarship on women as produc-
ers of cinemas from Muslim-majority societies and contexts. The second
area addresses scholarship on women as subjects of cinematic works in
these contexts.

Scholarship on Women Filmmakers

In most of the cultures that are the focus of this reference work, the partic-
ipation of women as filmmakers emerges somewhat after the first genera-
tion of post-independence filmmakers began to develop a national cinema.
98 kamran rastegar

The presence of women filmmakers is first to be noted in the 1960s and

1970s, although these directors are usually seen as exceptional in their
own times, and not infrequently cinematic contributions by women were
canonized. The Iranian director Forough Farrokhzad’s highly influential
The House is Black (1966) is an excellent example of this. While this film
remains as her only fully completed cinematic work (she is better known
for the poetry she composed before her untimely death), it has often been
cited as a seminal work to later formally innovative directors of the new
Iranian cinema.
In the Arab Middle East, women have only recently entered the ranks
of filmmakers in Egypt, the most productive cinema industry in the
region. Egyptian women documentarians began emerging as a small but
significant force in the Egyptian film scene in the 1970s, with filmmakers
such as Ateyyat al-Abnoudy, Asma al-Bakri, and Nabiha Lutfi, followed by
feature filmmakers such as Hala Khalil. In North Africa, Tunisian Selma
Baccar’s Fatma 75 (1975) broke ground as a full-length fictional narra-
tive work directed by a woman, followed by the pioneering experimental
documentary works of Assia Djebar such as Nuba (Algeria 1978). Moufida
Tlatli (Tunisia, 1993) set out new imperatives for women filmmakers in
the early 1990s, and her pioneering work has been followed by filmmak-
ers such as Raja ‘Amari, Yasmine Kassari, and Leila Farrokhi in the first
decade of the 2000s. In countries without an established film industry,
women’s presence since the beginning of the century has been perhaps
even more remarkable. The list of active Palestinian women filmmakers
is long and represents a high proportion of the overall film productions
of that society, including Annemarie Jacir, Cherine Dabis, Najwa Najjar,
Alia Arasoughly, Larissa Sansour, Dima Abu Ghosh, among many others.
In Turkey, also, women’s presence in cinema was first registered seriously
in the 1990s, and has only increased since then. In Iran, Farrokhzad was, in
her time, an absolute exception, but in the post-revolutionary period the
number of women taking on prominent roles in the cinema industry has
significantly expanded over the 1990s and 2000s, with names such as
Tahmina Milani, Rakhshan Bani Etemad, Samira Makhmalbaf, Marzieh
Meshkini, and others.
Scholarship on women filmmakers from Muslim societies has increased
slowly since the 1990s, in tandem with their increasing visibility as direc-
tors, screenwriters, and producers. Over the course of the 1990s, much
of this work was confined to journal articles, often studies of one or two
films. One important contribution to this area of study is Rebecca Hil-
lauer’s Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers (2005), which quite
 film studies 99

comprehensively covers a wide range of women working in film arts

across the Arab world and in its diasporas. In the English-language press,
women filmmakers have not been the subject of many book-length stud-
ies. Florence Martin’s study of North African women filmmakers, Screens
and Veils: Maghrebi Women’s Cinema (2011) is a notable exception, includ-
ing several chapter studies of different women auteurs. Within some of
the societies discussed here, however, local women filmmakers have been
featured in books: for example, in Iran, books have been published study-
ing the filmmaking of Tahmina Milani (Maza‌ʾih 2001) and Rakhshan Bani-
Etemad (Qukasian 1999), to name just two prominent women cineastes.
In Western scholarship, women filmmakers have in general, rather
than as individuals, been subject to such scholarly interest. Some works
have studied women filmmakers in a regional context, for example
Zahia Salhi’s study on Maghrebi women cineastes (2004), while others
examine filmmakers as auteurs, such as Peer’s research on Salma Baccar
(2010). Most common, perhaps, are journal article studies of individual
films, such as Mohammed Hirsi’s study of Laila Marrakchi’s Marrock
(2011), among many others. Not a little attention has been devoted to the
increasing presence of women in the cinemas of the Arab world, in Iran,
and in other Muslim-majority societies (this at a time when Hollywood
remains a highly male-dominated industry, in particular among the ranks
of directors).

Scholarship on Women as Subjects of Cinematic Works

The featuring of women as subjects of cinematic works from contexts of
interest has its origins in the various national cinemas of each society, and
gendering both in terms of mimetic social realism, and in more allegori-
cal terms, as well. Film scholars, in particular those located in the West,
have shown an interest in the question of gender and representation in
the cinemas of Muslim-majority societies that is perhaps greater than the
interest shown in any other thematic question relating to the content of
these works. Many of the “canonical” works noted earlier include chapters
or sections dedicated to exploring questions of gender in these cinemas.
For example, as much as one-third of Viola Shafik’s Popular Egyptian Cin-
ema (2008) examines the representations of women, and Gonül Dönmez-
Colin similarly dedicates one full chapter of her Turkish Cinema (2008) to
the same question.
However, dedicated studies of women in these national cinemas
have also been produced. For example, in Iranian cinema studies, Negar
100 kamran rastegar

Mottahedeh’s Displaced Allegories (2008) is one of the most sophisticated

works of film scholarship on this cinema, and is dedicated entirely to rep-
resentations of women in post-revolutionary Iranian films. Beyond the
relatively small number of book-length studies, however, there are many
more journal article-length works on various aspects of the representation
of women in Muslim-majority cinemas. For example, there is Lina Khatib’s
work on the ideological use of women in Egyptian films (2004), or Ziba
Mir-Hosseini’s research on representations of women and sexual love in
Iranian cinema (2007). Diaspora cinemas of Muslim majority societies
also features as an area of increasing interest, with the representation of
women in Beur French cinema, British South Asian cinema, and Arab-
American cinemas as areas of specific focus. For example, Hamid Naficy’s
An Accented Cinema (2001) is a highly influential study of diaspora film-
making which includes discussions of several women filmmakers from
Muslim-majority contexts, including Mona Hatoum, Shirin Etessam, and
Mitra Tabrizian. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster’s 1997 study Women Film-
makers of the African and Asian Diaspora, looks comparatively at several
diasporic contexts while highlighting women filmmakers’ attempts at pre-
senting a counter-view of the diasporic experience. In article-length stud-
ies such as Patricia Geesey’s study of Magrebi-French women filmmakers
(Geesey 2012) we find more specific and focused discussions of the cin-
ematic expressions of diasporic women. More recent studies have gone
further into exploring questions not only of gender but also of sexuality in
diaspora filmmaking, for example, Gayatri Gopinath’s Impossible Desires:
Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (2005).

Conclusion

When viewed broadly, the study of women in cinemas of Muslim-majority

societies in the field of film studies remains comparatively marginal to
the general field. Despite the important contributions made by a range of
scholars to the field, when compared to the study of women in Western
European or North American cinemas, the volume of scholarship is rela-
tively meager. However, since the mid-1990s the range, depth and quality of
scholarship in these topics has increased and newer scholars have emerged
who have been able to move out of the formerly predominant area-studies
and national-cinema molds, approaching their topics with greater theo-
retical sophistication than earlier film scholars did. Additionally, a per-
ceptible shift has been ongoing within Western academic institutions,
 film studies 101

with increasing numbers of students undertaking doctoral research on

topics relating to gender and cinema with an interest in Muslim-majority
societies; concomitantly, the number of academic positions and venues for
research and publication linked to these topics has been slowly increas-
ing. Also, in very recent years, within certain Muslim-majority societies,
the study of cinema, including questions of women’s representation in
cinema, has found institutional support in some universities.
This change in the academic realm has coincided with a dramatic shift
in the presence of women in the cinemas of some Muslim-majority soci-
eties, with increasing numbers of women represented as directors, and
increasing numbers of films about women appearing on the screen since
the 1990s. The conjunction of these two trends portends much greater
opportunities in the future for these studies to find a place at the center
of debates in the field of film studies, rather than existing at the margins.
New opportunities also may be discerned for the study of sexuality and
identity, as increasingly this issue has found grounds for expression in
cinematic form. Finally, new trends in both scholarship and film produc-
tion will require a move away from the orthodoxies of national-cinema
framings, and an increased incorporation of comparative or thematic
approaches to what has been termed “transnational cinema.” More and
more, the political economy of cinema has moved away from nationally
delimited funding structures to ones that are multi-national and delocal-
ized; these trends also increasingly affect the content of cinematic works.
What impact may these trends have upon women’s presence in these cin-
emas, and to what extent may we continue even with the framing of “from
Muslim-majority societies”? These and other questions will demand the
attention of future scholars in the field of film studies.

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 Geography

Robina Mohammad

Introduction

As in many other disciplines, much of the early scholarship in geography on

gender issues focused on the experiences of white, middle-class women. In
a 2001 review essay, Caroline Nagel observed, “Geographical literature on
the Muslim world is sparse, and on Muslim women, even sparser” (Nagel
2001, 69). Indeed, the study of Muslim women emerged only in the 1990s,
focusing on spatializing marginality and exclusions at the intersection of
gender, class and ethnicity. This work addressed questions of identity and
belonging, locating diasporic Muslim women with respect to homeland,
host nation, and the global umma (Dwyer 1999, 2000, Mohammad 1999).
Some of this early work also explored the role of space in the negotiation
of visible difference in the form of dress, particularly the veil/hijab, read
as a potent symbol of Islam (Dwyer 1999). This would become pertinent
in the following decade as the issue of the headscarf raised questions in
Europe and beyond about the place of religion in secular societies. The
emergence of geographical research on Muslim societies and communi-
ties can be situated within a moment in which identities within Western
societies became recognized as more fragmented and plural as differences
of gender, race and sexuality gained greater visibility alongside class. In
this context, the difference and diversity of cultures—rather than assim-
ilationism—were valorized and even celebrated. Methodologically, this
was part of the reflexive turn in social sciences. Authorial self-reflexivity
would become all the more necessary with the emergent geopolitical con-
text in which Muslims around the globe found themselves under intense
scrutiny. A preoccupation with global and national security issues over
the past decade has also resulted overall in greater attention to Muslim
masculinities than femininities.

Polyphonic Geographies: Managing Methods

Qualitative methods such as ethnography, in-depth semi-structured inter-

views, overt and covert observations, as well as focus groups have been
104 robina mohammad

recuperated in response to the critiques of positivist epistemologies and

ontologies charged with negating questions of power and the situatedness
of all knowledges through reference to false universalities (Mohammad
2001). The popularity of qualitative methods represents an epistemic and
ontological shift regarding what we know, how we can know it, and what
exists out there to be known. The politics of knowledge production and
representation has gained greater significance in the last decade with the
growth of Islamophobia and the demonization of Muslim populations
globally.
In the context of global geopolitical conflicts and the “War on Terror”
bringing the world’s intensified gaze on Muslims, research on Muslim
communities and societies has become fraught with new as well as exist-
ing concerns precisely because it involves populations made vulnerable
by a web of repressive gazes from the police as well as the media. At the
same time, ethical concerns arising from research in medicine have been
extended to social science research contexts. The guidelines informing
medical research are increasingly deemed to be applicable whenever and
wherever human subjects are involved in research processes in order to
minimize any perceivable harm to vulnerable populations. While it is vital
to protect human subjects from potential harm, there are also competing
and contradictory logics at work where human subjects are put at risk
from the very bodies that seek to ensure their security, as is the case of
Muslim populations who, as the target of United States homeland securi-
tization strategies, are made vulnerable (Falah and Nagel 2005).
The concern with ethics builds on earlier scholarly debates that emerged
from the critiques of positivism and its tendency to “god-trick” (suggest-
ing the omnipresent vision of the researcher). Drawing on the work of
postcolonial scholars such as Edward Said (1978) and Gayatri Spivak
(1988), feminist geographers critiqued the politics of representation and
fieldwork praxis in the field of human geography (McDowell 1992, Gilbert
1994, England 1994, Katz 1994, 1996, Nast 1994, Mattingly and Falconer-
Al-Hindi 1995). This work is particularly concerned with uneven power
relations—either geographically, in terms of the global north and global
south, and/or the relationship of the research to the researched and the
balance of power at an individual level.
Much of this debate has been concerned with the ethics of unequal
exchange whereby geographers parachute into what might be non-West-
ern, non-white, non-male, and/or non heterosexual context(s), excavat-
ing the field and mining data, before leaving as abruptly as they came.
 geography 105

The data not only forms the basis for publications through which scholars
build reputations and careers, but such scholarly publications also pro-
duce some of the most powerful representations of the world, truth-claims
whose legitimacy is guaranteed by science. Yet within the academy the
legitimacy of authorial claims has to be established and in the aftermath
of the critiques of positivism new measures for guaranteeing the authen-
ticity of representations were required. It is in this context that identity
became central to research and representation. It was argued that the
identity and experiences of the researcher should align with those of the
researched in order to guarantee true knowledge and understanding. The
social proximity of the researcher to the researched could also address the
problems of unequal exchange that arise when researchers are from social
positions vastly different from the researched.
This created new economies in which Third World researchers and
intellectuals found new currency in explaining the experiences of their
‘own communities’ (see Mohammad 2001). These arguments have been
critiqued on a number of levels, for example the claims that they operate
on false assumptions about the field and about identity. Scholars have elo-
quently argued that identity is always fluid in the process of production
(Hall 1993), constituted through intersectionality, shaped within matrices
of overlapping, competing and contradictory discourses making it difficult
to fully and finally align with the researched community. At the same time,
as Gillian Rose has so cogently argued, mobilizing identity and sameness
in support of research and authorial claims relies on the ability of the
researcher to be competently self-reflexive in order to perform as “a trans-
parently knowable agent . . . [that] looks outward, to understand its place
in the world, to chart its position in the arenas of knowledge production, to
see its own place in the relations of power” (Rose 1997, 309). Yet a human
subject can never fully know itself in order to discern all the ways in which
it might be positioned. Just as the identity of the researcher is complex,
so too is that of the field and the researched community. They are rarely
homogeneous enough to enable a perfect fit between the researcher and
the researched. For example, in Robina Mohammad’s research with the
Pakistani community in Reading in the United Kingdom, the intergen-
erational nature of the research meant that competing versions of reality
were present: those of the older women and those of youthful femininities
(Mohammad 2001). Compelled to make a political decision about whose
position to represent in her study, Mohammad concluded that, in order to
ascertain the validity of authorial claims rather than rely on the fiction of
106 robina mohammad

authorial biographical sameness or proximity, it was necessary to consider

whose interests were being served by particular representations, and with
what effects.
In recent years, ethnographers researching Muslims have had to
contend with fear, distrust, and suspicion in communities that feel the
intensity and intrusiveness of the web of gazes, including both the gov-
ernmental and the scholarly. For South Asian Muslim migrants in the
Gulf countries, for example, these fears combine with the Khafala (labor)
regulatory framework and a sense of the omnipresence of the state, to
close off opportunities for formal, overt interviews. This leads to a reli-
ance on street-level conversations as research (Mohammad and Sidaway
2012). These may be conducted covertly through everyday interactions on
the street as well as by engineered encounters enabled by different forms
of consumption. In the Gulf, capitalist consumption offers channels into
migrant lives that would otherwise not be accessible.
In the United Kingdom, intrusive gazes may not be readily discernible
amid rumors of intelligence services recruiting locals to spy on their own
communities in mosques and other community sites. There is a palpable
anxiety around talking and opening up. As informants declared, there is a
fear of “what is going to be pinned on me.” Diverse informants from com-
munities across the United Kingdom suggest that distrust within commu-
nities is widespread so that even longstanding neighbors may no longer
be fully trusted. In these contexts, confidentiality is absolutely paramount;
yet biographical similarities of the researcher and her potential links
with others in the community and concern for slippages in confidentiality
may well heighten fears rather than offer informants a sense of security
and comfort in familiarity. Thus, whether informants clam up and close
conversation, or open up and disclose information, both attitudes must
be viewed in terms of a presentation of the self, a performance, a set of
“situated” truth-claims given a coherence in narrative form to be inter-
rogated rather than taken as “the truth.”
Thus, whereas during the 1990s, geographers, alongside other social sci-
entists, began to scrutinize the production of knowledge, from the field to
the politics of representation, foregrounding power relations and unequal
exchange in the field, the last decade has seen these debates folded into
questions of ethics. Research and fieldwork with human subjects is more
thoroughly regulated by institutions than at any point earlier. Alongside
these more stringent criteria it is also important to consider the sociopo-
litical context within which research is produced. The topic of research
may be influenced by several factors, including the personal interests
 geography 107

of the scholars and the issue of funding. Thus, highly competitive pub-
lic money steers researchers towards questions that are deemed to be of
national significance. In Britain and Europe more widely more funding
has been allocated to research addressing issues around securitization,
bringing a greater focus on migrant Muslim communities. The Research
Excellence Framework, the new measure for assessing the publicly
funded research undertaken at British institutions of higher education,
values research that is publicly funded: the assessment is about providing
accountability for the investment of public money, tying research more
closely to questions that are viewed to be of national significance.
In the discipline of geography, the focus on Muslims has seen the con-
solidation of geographies of religion as a new sub-field of the discipline in
recognition of the continued significance of faith in the social world (Gale
2007). In her work about the new figure of the “Asian gang” in Britain,
published even before the events of 11 September 2001, Claire Alexander
(2000) pointed to the shift in terms of the regendering of Muslim commu-
nities in the popular imaginary, from a preoccupation with the patriarchal
oppression of women around forced marriages and honor killings, to a
focus on Muslim masculinities that have taken over from Black masculini-
ties as the new folk devil. This focus has, in turn, drawn scholarly atten-
tion somewhat away from Muslim women to Muslim masculinities now
holding center stage (Hopkins 2006, 2008, 2009).
The “War on Terror” and state securitization agendas across Europe have
seen the rise of populist parties and the fetishizing of borders, heightening
xenophobia, and promoting a frenzied concern with difference (Moham-
mad 2012). As Claire Alexander (2000) has noted, Muslims have become
the emblematic “other,” marking the limits of national belonging. Helen
Crowley and Mary J. Hickman (2007) demonstrate how the figure of the
“other” has a function for the displacement of anxieties and uncertainties
of post-industrial economies. It distracts attention away from (unpopu-
lar) government policies for home and overseas as well as any festering
social tensions. Moreover, it enables governments to evade more critical
questions of social justice and equity (Amin 2002, Lyon 2005). Much of
the geographical research on Muslim communities has been preoccupied
with the interrogation of governmental discourses centering on three dis-
tinct sets of questions: 1. difference, identity, belonging, home, and the
production of Muslim landscapes; 2. social cohesion, socio-spatial integra-
tion, and the residential patterns of visibly different migrant groups; and
3. the geographies of Muslim women, mostly with reference to the issues
surrounding the headscarf/hijab/veil.
108 robina mohammad

There is also now a growing body of work on Muslim migrant workers

in the Gulf that addresses a different set of issues relating to the regu-
latory framework of states and gatekeepers through which migrants are
recruited to labor in the Gulf and the structural marginality and exclu-
sion that circumscribes their experiences (Silvey 2005, Mohammad and
Sidaway 2012).

Location and Perspective

It is notable that much of geographical scholarship has brought an exter-

nal perspective on Muslims as objects of analysis. Scholarly scrutiny is
directed by and framed within the governmental perspective, which con-
structs Muslims as a problematic presence, as communities or individu-
als confronting hostile national or supranational environments across and
also on the margins of Europe (Phillips 2006).

Islam in the Mirror of Local-Global Tensions

Global and localized social tensions—such as the urban disturbances in

Britain’s northern cities in the summer of 2001 between South Asian Mus-
lim and white youth; the events of 11 September 2001 in New York, 11
March 2004 in Madrid, 7 July 2005 in London, 30 June 2007 in Glasgow;
and the assassination of film director Theodor van Gogh in the Nether-
lands on 2 November 2004—all fueled the association of bounded, eth-
nic difference with insecurity and danger. Governments responded with
securitization agendas drawing together “a profusion of shifting alliances
between diverse authorities” (Rose and Miller 1992, 174), encompassing a
range of state apparatus, both ideological and repressive, from the acad-
emy to the police. Securitization signaled a rightward shift across Europe,
evidenced in the rise of right-wing populisms and the concomitant retreat
from the celebration of difference towards an assimilationist position.
The ideological opposition of Islam and the putative secularity of the
West (Mir 2007, Wade 2009) reinforces the sense that Muslims are “out
of place” in Europe and North America. Scholars have documented the
revitalized approach to the management of visible difference within
North American and European nation-states that has implicitly, if not
explicitly, centered on Muslims. Multiculturalism, a state policy for the
management of difference since the post-Second World War period, has
been in retreat across Europe. Deborah Phillips (2006) documents how
 geography 109

official reports into the urban disturbances of 2001 in Britain suggested

that essentially different values, nurtured and propagated through mul-
ticulturalism, were points of weakness in the social fabric, and allowed
for the eruption of social tensions. Indeed, some commentators argued
that there was an excess of alterity that diluted the national community
and prohibited national cohesiveness and belonging (Goodhart 2004). In
this view, migrants act as channels to the dangerous “outside” (see, for
example, the 2005 speech of Trevor Phillips, head of the then Commission
for Racial Equality). Cultural homogeneity, shared language, and shared
national values were seen to define Britishness. In this view, the main-
stream integration of those groups whom Trevor Phillips (2005) referred
to as being “marooned” on the “outside” offered a form of security, a pro-
tection against alien ideologies defined mostly in terms of Islam.

British Muslims

Germany, France and the United Kingdom host the largest Muslim popu-
lations in terms of absolute numbers. In the case of the France and the
United Kingdom, this presence is related to former colonial ties. While
scholarly studies across sociology, anthropology and political science have
brought attention to Muslim presence in Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium,
France and Italy, geographers have focused primarily on the United King-
dom and, to a lesser extent, Germany. In the United Kingdom, media
and governmental representations serve to homogenize a highly hetero-
geneous set of Muslim communities that are differentiated by national
origin, ethnicity, class and gender as well as affiliations to branches of
Islam and forms of religious practice (see Ehrkamp 2007 for a discussion
about Turkish migrant communities in Germany). According to Deborah
Phillips, these representations portrayed “British Muslim families . . . [as]
pathologised . . . inward looking, reluctant to learn English, and clinging
to ‘unacceptable’ traditions, such as forced marriage and the ritual slaugh-
ter of animals” (Phillips 2006, 28). British Muslims are cast alternately as
disruptive, “strange,” “unruly” (Amin 2003), fanatical, intolerant and vio-
lent when compared to a secular, tolerant, liberal Europe (al-Azm 1991).
The threat to the nation was underlined by the charge leveled against
“others”—though directed largely at Muslims (see Gale 2013)—of a wil-
ful isolationism, a spatial self-segregation, and a disengagement from
society that was so profound that it could be referred to as “a series of
parallel lives” (United Kingdom, Home Office 2001, 9). Peter Hopkins
110 robina mohammad

(2006) has discussed the dramatic shift over time in representations of

youthful Muslim masculinities. Once characterized as benign, effeminate,
“passive,” “soft” and “weak,” Muslim males were now depicted as violent
aggressors.
Women largely disappeared from dominant popular and political narra-
tives; when they did appear, they occupied two distinct positions. The first
was an extension of their earlier role as victims of patriarchal societies;
see, for example, the ways in which the Bush administration justified the
invasion of Afghanistan with reference to the Taliban’s atrocities against
Afghani women (Aaftaab 2005). In the United Kingdom, male Muslim
youth have replaced the Taliban as pathological upholders of patriarchy
subjugating Muslim women.
The second position occupied by British Muslim women is as allies
of those fighting the “War on Terror.” Thus, in 2008, British Prime Min-
ister Gordon Brown and the Secretary of State and Local Communities
Hazel Blears launched the National Muslim Women’s Advisory Group to
complement a range of government policies to combat violent terrorism.
Scholars critiqued this move for dividing women into those who saw this
as an opportunity for empowerment and to have their voices heard and
those who were critical of the government’s instrumental use of Muslim
women (Afshar 2012).
Geographers have not directly addressed these issues affecting Muslim
women. Instead, they have sought to critically examine changes around
patterns of non-white residential settlement and clustering, or in Arjun
Appadurai’s terms, ethnoscapes, landscapes marking the bounded, post-
colonial presence in the former colonial metropoles (1990). Some of this
work examines the production of minority religious landscapes. For Mus-
lims, the development of religious landscapes is part of the negotiation of
home, belonging and identity production. As Noha Nasser points out, the
mosque “forms the most powerful symbol of Muslim identity, not sim-
ply a religious or social identity, but more aptly a political statement to
legitimize the community’s presence” (2005, 73). Thus the production of
religious landscapes is testimony to the degree to which Muslims have
embedded themselves within the nation.
Through a series of studies of towns and cities across the United
Kingdom, Richard Gale’s (2005) work brings under critical scrutiny the
institutional framework: the planning system and policies mediating the
production of minority religious landscapes. This work draws attention
to the ways in which racialized and discriminatory planning discourses
and policies opposed to applications by Muslims and other faith-based
 geography 111

communities began, by the 1980s, to adjust and accommodate the need

to engage positively with such applications. Gale’s case study of Birming-
ham (2005) illuminates the emergence from the 1980s of a convergence
of interests between urban planners and Muslim groups around the build-
ing of mosques in the city. Birmingham’s built environment reflects its
status as home to one of the largest Muslim communities in the United
Kingdom. This presence, it is argued, has created “a new terrain in which
the frontier between the ‘Islamic city’ and the ‘Western city’ is becoming
increasingly eroded” (Nasser 2003, 7). The construction of the purpose-
built Central Mosque in Birmingham, completed in 1970, not only fulfilled
a social function through the provision of a place for worship and com-
munity gatherings, but was also important for inscribing Muslim identity
into the urban landscape. The dome and minaret, for example, were part
of the design not because of any essential requirement for a mosque, but
more because these are widely recognized symbols of Islam and so cen-
tral to the spatializing of Muslim identity (Nasser 2005). Since the 1990s,
Birmingham City Council has collaborated with minority groups for the
development of areas with a distinctive aesthetic as part of deliberate city
marketing strategies. It is in this context that Pakistani Muslim areas have
been given a distinctly Pakistani identity through the provision of green
street furniture (street lights, bins, bollards) and marketed as the city’s
“Balti Belt.” The striking Dar al Uloom mosque in Small Heath, built in the
1990s, offered the council another opportunity to construct a landmark
building that would contribute to the character of the area and form a fea-
ture of the city skyline. Yet, after 2001, such ethnoscapes became a source
of national anxiety and the target of securitization agendas.
Historically, in the United Kingdom, residential clustering has been a
source of anxiety that has intensified at particular moments. Within this,
minority religious landscapes have become a particular source of concern
around the issue of incompatible difference. Deborah Phillips writes:
Persistent ethnic residential segregation, especially when coupled with the
emergence of distinctive religious landscapes, has also been seen by some
as a signifier of (possibly immutable) cultural difference. For example, Mus-
lim spaces, anchored around mosques, and “other” Islamic institutions, are
read by some as symbols of insularity and possible sites of insurrection,
prompting questions about minority ethnic citizenship, national identity
and belonging (2006, 27).
There is an implicit sense of Muslim embeddedness as an intrusion into
a hitherto homogeneous, coherent (white) British life. It seems that the
source of anxiety is not so much the issue of disengagement with the
112 robina mohammad

mainstream, but a fear of the “other” that becomes associated with dis-
belonging, dis-affinity and latterly dis-loyalty. Thus the U.K. government
formulated a series of measures to develop and strengthen migrants’ sense
of belonging, citizenship and loyalty. Citizenship tests were designed as
part of a series of measures to promote “community cohesion” and inte-
gration. But what this would look like, what integration might mean, was
far from clear or simple.
Geographical studies have sought to explore these concepts from a vari-
ety of perspectives. Gill Valentine, Sarah Holloway and Mark Jayne (2010)
explored how the growth of the hospitality industry and the nighttime
economy organized around bars, restaurants and clubs, might affect com-
munities that practice abstinence. Muslim communities’ abstention cul-
ture is an important factor in shaping access to, and use of, urban spaces.
Thus the expansion of leisure spaces that are characterized by drinking
cultures and alcohol-mediated socializing is exclusionary, undermining
social cohesion.
Other studies have explored the ways in which migrants negotiate
belonging and membership in national communities (Nagel and Staeheli
2008), while yet others have suggested that the focus on national belong-
ing and cohesion occludes exclusionary material inequalities. The figure
of the “other” distracts from the harsh realities of deindustrialization,
economic restructuring, and urban decline that are key sources of urban
discontent. Urban social tensions, rather than incompatible differences
and alternative values, are the effect of the disappearance of working class
jobs (McDowell 2001). High levels of unemployment amongst youthful
masculinities have intensified the competition for scarce resources (Amin
2003). For second- and third-generation working class Muslim youth, the
frustrations are all the greater precisely because they have a stronger
sense of entitlement as British citizens (Amin 2003).
Similarly, the charges of self-segregation in governmental discourses
ignore the structural inequalities that mediate patterns of residential clus-
tering. Geographers demonstrate that while concentration of particular
groups of Muslims (Pakistanis) has increased in some British cities, levels
of segregation are declining at the same time (Gale 2013). Other studies
demonstrate that the tendency for residential clustering amongst Mus-
lims is less the effect of wilful disengagement or a refusal to integrate cul-
turally, but emerges from a combination of factors at the intersection of
ethnicity, class and deprivation. As Gale points out, “one-third of Muslims
in England and Wales (i.e., slightly more than 500,000) live in areas that
 geography 113

are in the decile of worst deprivation” (2007 1021). Moreover, the effect
of clustering is, in part, produced by white out-migration, referred to as
“white flight,” which leaves a concentration of non-white populations
(Abbas 2005). The housing choices of Muslims, unlike those of the white
population, are more bounded, so that, despite a desire to move to more
prosperous suburbs with better schools, higher costs of housing, fears of
racial violence, and exclusion and isolation within a majority white main-
stream society militate against such moves. In the study by Peter Hopkins
(2008), some Muslim youth suggest that clustering offers a line of protec-
tion, a safety in numbers from the hostility that exists beyond the Muslim
areas. Others concede that it is too insular and creates distance from the
mainstream society. Either way, the clusters offer proximity to amenities
and, importantly, a gemeinschaft type of community built through solidar-
ity and dense, emotional ties, creating strong attachments and a sense of
home and belonging (see Mohammad 2013). Over the last decade, geogra-
phers have extensively explored issues of identity and belonging, particu-
larly with respect to youthful Muslim diasporic communities.

Youthful Geographies

Much of geographical research focuses on diasporic Muslim youth who

are at the forefront of the popular imaginary and governmental agendas.
Urban Muslim youth are the future public face of Islam and British Mus-
lim communities (Lewis 2007). They are also part of the global and local
visibility of Islam that, together with the changing demographic, is “main-
streaming” Muslim identity in Britain. Multinational supermarkets are
moving into niche markets catering to Muslim observances, for example,
for the holy month of Ramadan and festivals such as Eid al-Fitr, but also
for everyday needs such as halal foods. The recognition of Muslim identity
is indicated in the proliferation of gender-segregated Islamic spaces such
as prayer rooms and the enabling of the daily ritualistic practice of Islam,
thereby enabling greater integration into the public world (Bhimji 2011).
These sites are more egalitarian and diverse than mosques. Mosques are
normatively the domain of men from which women are excluded. Amin
(2003) has noted how British South Asian Muslim communities revolve
around the mosque, dominated by the elders of the community, margin-
alizing the voices and concerns of youthful masculinities. By contrast,
prayer rooms in sites such as schools, universities, and other places of
work are cosmopolitan sites enabling the cross-national, cross-ethnic,
114 robina mohammad

cross-class mingling of Muslims. These facilitate the shift away from cul-
turally inflected Islam that South Asian Muslim youth have come to asso-
ciate with backward traditions attributed to the pre-partition influence of
Hinduism (see Mohammad 2013). A global Islam perceived to be distilled
of local, cultural influences can be combined with alternative, modern
practices such as gender equality, new forms of love and intimacy and
family arrangements that are part of the assertion of modern, cosmopoli-
tan, Muslim identities.
During the latter part of the 1990s, scholars such as Claire Dwyer (1999,
2000) were suggesting that Islam could offer a means for South Asian
Muslim femininities to negotiate cultural constraints within the commu-
nity. This has become more pronounced in the decade that followed. The
first decade of the twenty-first century saw religion taking on a greater sig-
nificance in the lives of diasporic Muslim youth, who are more detached
from the ancestral homeland and in search of alternative means through
which to anchor belonging.
For youthful, urban, British, Pakistani Muslim femininities, Islam’s
seductiveness lies in its deterritorialized identification that is readily
inhabitable and gives meaning to their lives. Line Predelli argues that:
Islam . . . [becomes] a flexible resource . . . [in] that religion is not so much a
set of fixed rules and beliefs as a malleable resource that can be adapted to
various social circumstances. Religion, in other words, is a “dynamic tool-
kit” . . . that can be used to support a range of views and practices among
adherents of a particular faith tradition (2004, 473).
These generations are referred to as “reformist” to mark a break with the
past, from an Islam that had as much to do with ethnicity and culture
as it did with faith, to an Islam that is a faith, and importantly also, in
many regards, a political identity and practice. Thus reformist femininities
are able to draw on Islam alongside secular resources such as citizenship
rights in challenging culturally constituted patriarchy (Gale 2007) and to
access equal opportunities in the field of education and work, as well as
the choice of life partner, intimate relationships, and egalitarian family
arrangements (Charsley 2005).
Amongst Pakistani Muslims, who make up the largest Muslim commu-
nity in the United Kingdom, femininities have been seen as central to the
reproduction of the collectivity in their roles as mothers. As the primary
carers, they are responsible for the transmission of culture to future gen-
erations. The feminine body is not only the vehicle for biological repro-
duction, but its surface is drawn on to emit signs, like a flag, marking
the cultural identity of the collectivity. In keeping with this, it is required
 geography 115

to perform chasteness and morality by wearing particular forms of dress,

by practicing deportment, spatial presence or absence, and through the
observance of purdah (Mohammad 2005a, 2005b). The latter is a tech-
nology for negating the embodied co-presence of feminine bodies with
those of unrelated masculinities who are perceived to threaten morality
and chasteness by what Banu Gökarıksel and Anna Secor (2012) refer
to as managing a web of gazes in the public sphere. Youthful Pakistani
Muslim femininities are expected to dress in apne kapde (our clothes).
The Punjabi suit, reconstructed since the 1980s as Muslim dress, signifies
a membership of the nation/community. This becomes more significant
in the diaspora where it is a marker of both ethnicity and gender (Hiro
1991). The growing detachment from the ancestral homeland and a youth-
ful focus on faith over ethnicity as the primary identification has implica-
tions for body and territory (see Mohammad 2013).
Processes of globalization—increased travel, access to a growing range
of global television channels, increasing diversity of Muslim groups on the
streets of urban Britain as a result of more recent migration flows—offer
youthful femininities a greater range of scripts through which to re-imag-
ine and remake the self. This is notable in the proliferation of Muslim
dress styles adopted amongst youthful Pakistani Muslim femininities in
the multicultural, multinational, multiethnic, yet predominantly Muslim
clusters of Birmingham (Mohammad 2013). Dress styles such as the jilbab,
the abaya, and tudong from Muslim societies such as Somalia, the Gulf
States and Muslim Southeast Asia are increasingly found on the streets
of Britain’s large urban centers. Globalized Western wear that historically
was highly taboo, particularly for women, is also becoming more com-
mon in its Islamified version. Islamification involves drawing selectively
on forms of Western clothing that comply with the modesty tenets of
Islam, such as long skirts or trousers worn with long sleeved, high-necked
blouses, combined with a head-covering. Muslims and non-Muslims alike
view the headscarf as a potent symbol of Islam.

Geographies of the Hijab

During the last decade, across and beyond Europe, the issue of the head-
scarf and its presence within the secular public arena has drawn the atten-
tion of politicians and feminists alike who denounce it as a symbol of
patriarchal oppression. The French state banned the hijab from schools,
arguing that it was an affront to secularism. It is viewed in both popu-
lar and governmental discourses as a symbol of oppression and taken as
116 robina mohammad

evidence for oppositional and backward values of Muslims, hindering

assimilation and integration in Europe and the West more widely (Big-
ger 2006). In the United Kingdom, former foreign secretary Jack Straw
made news when he criticized the wearing of the niqab (more extensive
than the hijab, including coverage of the face as well as the head) as a
technology for distancing and separating. Nonetheless, the wearing of the
headscarf is on the rise globally, although the reasons for this are highly
diverse.
The contemporary practice of the hijab is distinct from that of the
past in a number of ways. It is not just a religious and/or cultural prac-
tice but is often simultaneously a political practice. The practices of hijab
in the urban centers of cities across the Muslim world are distinct from
the modes and meanings of hijab in rural areas. This urban reformist
practice is often a self-conscious choice as both a form of consumption
and a complete embodied practice. It marks membership of a religious
community, the umma. Thus for Muslims it signifies faith, piety, chaste-
ness, and morality. For those residing in Muslim states such as Brunei, for
example, where 80 percent of women wear the hijab, it is not always worn
as a choice, but as a form of compliance, a sign of respect for authority
and regulations, particularly in the public sector that includes university
campuses. For these women, the wearing of the hijab is not necessarily
a complete, embodied practice as it might be for those who consciously
choose to veil. The study by Gökarıksel and Secor (2012) of the hijab in
Turkey explores the relationship between headscarf as a religious practice
and a form of fashion. The article illustrates aptly the importance of state
contexts in shaping Islamic subjectivities and the meanings of the hijab.
In Turkey, established as a secular state in 1923 with the evacuation of
religious ideologies and practices from the public sphere, the wearing of
the headscarf as a religious practice, rather than fashion or just a form of
consumption, has taken on a political significance, just as it has in Europe.
Those who wear it choose to do so despite considerable obstacles and
risk of downward economic mobility (see Arat 2005). In the Turkish con-
text, the headscarf signifies a form of self-governmentality, a discipline
and control of nefs, bodily desires and passions (Gökarıksel and Secor
2012). It enables the management of one’s own and others’ troublesome
desires by negotiating a web of gazes in the public arena. In this regard,
it is comparable to secular forms of self-governmentality, such as dieting
and keeping fit that are also about the exercise of forms of control for
remaking or reworking the site and form of the physical body. Dieting and
physical exercise are technologies that enable the staging of a body that
 geography 117

is compliant with hegemonic notions of beauty and, in this way, achieves

value through a secular economy of gazes. The practice of the headscarf
is constituted within specific forms of scaled governance at the level of
the body, home, street and state. Thus it is not always oppositional, but
may well be, as in the case of Turkey, an inherently modern, liberal and
individualistic practice.
Sonja van Wichelen’s study (2007) of Indonesia identifies two distinct
discourses through which veiling practices are configured. They are part
of the gendered constructions of Indonesian Muslim womanhood juxta-
posed to the constructions of Islamist masculinities through discourses of
polygamy. Wichelen explains how these discourses have emerged in a par-
ticular political context within the nation-state influenced by the Iranian
revolution of 1979 and have evolved in response to national, regional and
local political, socioeconomic and cultural conditions. Thus, in Indone-
sia, new forms of veiling were a form of resistance to the Suharto regime.
These were mainly amongst urban university students. By the 1990s, veil-
ing practices intensified after the fall of Suharto, spreading spatially as
well as diversifying. Two distinct forms of practice can be identified: an
individual form that is also about consumerism, and a collective politi-
cal form that is more about protest and resistance. The consumerist form
has some parallels to the work by Gökarıksel and Secor (2012) on veil-
ing fashions in Turkey. In this mode, Indonesian Muslim womanhood
is expressed through the use of the headscarf as a form of pious adorn-
ment, particularly amongst elite women. This challenges the headscarf ’s
stigmatized associations with backwardness or extremism. Instead, the
veil becomes part of the construction of modern Muslim womanhood.
It is notable that, in this mode, rather than distracting from the (hetero)
sexualized feminine body, the veil is frequently represented as glamor-
izing, enhancing feminine (hetero)sexual allure. In this way, it aligns with
exoticized, Western representations of women marked as Muslim with
the ubiquitous veil and naked eyes. Celebrities and movie stars who begin
to veil may imbue it with celebrity value and glamor, while also enhanc-
ing their own celebrity value. Lila Abu-Lughod (1995) identified a similar
phenomenon in the Egyptian context, where celebrity endorsements of
veiling enabled its spread from urban to rural areas amongst women who
wanted to perform piety like the stars. Greater religiosity offers new modes
of consumption creating new economies, from travel agents marketing
umra and hajj tours, as well as holiday packages combining leisure and
pleasure, to Islamic education, to new Islamic fashions including Islamic
swimwear and sportswear for the modern, active woman.
118 robina mohammad

The second veiling practice in Indonesia is a collective, classed prac-

tice of resistance. Wichelen (2007) suggests that, in developing states, reli-
gious identity may be constructed as an alternative form of social capital
by the poorest populations who have been excluded from the gains of
development. In this instance, the stigmatized veil is reappropriated as a
symbol of freedom and equity much as the racialized black identity has
been reappropriated as part of a politics against racial discrimination.
Thus, for those who associate women’s agency and equality with secu-
lar modernity and, by the same token, Islam with women’s patriarchal
oppression, it is difficult to grasp that a growing number of women are
seeking to assert their agency through reference to Islam. Veiling, regarded
by secular modern society as a symbol of women’s oppression, is being
reappropriated and reinscribed with the values of equality, liberty and
social justice. Veiling practices highlight the ways in which the form that
Islam takes as a discursive and material praxis is never a given. Rather, it
is constituted in time and situated at the intersection of a range of spatial
scales from the body to globe.

Embodied Geographies of Gender across the Public and Private

The nation-state is an important mediator of gender relations in the

Muslim world and beyond. In the Muslim world, the nation-state, with
reference to Islam, often acts to legitimate, formalize and regulate spa-
tialized gender divisions and differences which are then naturalized in
and through everyday practices. A number of studies, by geographers and
others, on states as diverse as Uzbekistan (Koch 2011), Malaysia (Ong
2003), Iran (Najmabadi 2005), Pakistan (Saigol 2008) and Indonesia (Sun-
indyo 1998), foreground the centrality of (heterosexual) gender relations
to patriotic, nation-building and/or nationalist/militarist discourses. Nata-
lie Koch (2011) highlights how the Uzbek state draws on and reaffirms
spatialized gender identities in which masculinities are constructed as
the protectors and femininities as the protected, using women to legiti-
mate war. These discourses may draw on a range of ideologies, including
religion, to align women with land and territory (see Mohammad 2007).
In the Qur’ān, for example, men are advised that “your wives are as a
tilth unto you, so approach your tilth when or how you will” (2:223). In
Iranian nationalist discourse, the nation is portrayed as a modern, ter-
ritorialized vatan (homeland) conceived of as the female body, “to love
and be devoted to, to possess and protect, to kill and die for” (Najmabadi
 geography 119

2005, 98). This enables a “heterosexualised familial embodiment” (Sunin-

dyo 1998, 3) to infuse the territorial body with emotion and affect, pro-
moting intimacies that can be drawn on to mobilize masculinities for war
in defence of the honor of the mother or beloved. The figure of the mother
is also significant because they are not only the biological reproducers of
the nation, but as nurturers they also culturally mark/make the borders
of home. This status and responsibility depends on their (hetero)sexual
purity, thus ensuring that women are not only the guardians of tradition
but also the guarded. Thus in Muslim states such as post-revolutionary
Iran and Zia ul-Haq’s Pakistan (1980–88), policies were focused on regu-
lating women’s dress, deportment and embodied presence in masculine
public sites. In Iran, such matters were policed by the Bureau for Combat-
ting Corruption. Political scientist Farhat Haq (2007) refers to this as the
retraditionalization of women’s role in the service of the state, a process
that situates women more firmly within the private domestic sphere, a
microcosm of the state itself. Activist and scholar Rubina Saigol examines
state nationalist discourses in Pakistan to demonstrate how
women’s sexuality can find legitimate expression only in national service
through the family; it is otherwise denied, controlled and hidden behind
the chadar and chardivari, the personalised boundaries placed around the
woman, equivalent to the boundaries, frontiers, and borders of the state, all
of which are under the protection of the son/mujahid or other male mem-
ber” (Saigol 2008, 171).
Scholars note that, in Pakistan, state discourses place women under the
protection of their “sons,” yet women are increasingly made vulnerable by
the rise of masculinist violence and rape so that the ideology of protection
does not translate into greater security for women. Militarist movements
such as the Lashkar-i-Tayyabia in Pakistan seek to mobilize women as
mothers to sacrifice their sons to jihad, to take up arms in the interests of
the Islamic polity and battle for Kashmir. Yet as Haq argues:
Its mobilization of women for the struggle for an Islamic polity that ulti-
mately will severely limit women’s rights puts into sharp relief the tensions
pointed out by feminist scholars between the imagining of a nation that
gives women a central cultural mission, on the one hand, and the creation
of a civic state that extends equal citizenship to women, on the other (2007,
1024).
While nationalist discourses idealise and glorify the mother and mother-
hood, such idealised representations often contrast sharply with women’s
everyday lived realities of social reproduction and mothering, particularly
among those who are socio-spatially marginalized.
120 robina mohammad

Sarah Halvorson (2011) highlights the struggles of women farmers in

Pakistan’s Karakoram mountains, a region transitioning from subsis-
tence to a market-based economy. Outward male migration has meant
that women are left behind to struggle in their roles as primary carers
responsible for raising children. They must juggle childcare responsibili-
ties with productive activities with little state support. When children
fall ill, expenses increase because of the need for medical treatment, and
income falls because time is taken up with more intensive childcare as
well as travel to medical facilities. These are women who have been pre-
pared for marriage and motherhood from girlhood. The religion-backed
state ideologies frame the pattern of gendered lives in these mountainous
communities as they do elsewhere in Pakistan. But the growing influence
of Islamism in the region has seen an erosion of the legal rights of the girl
child. The Islamist status as the guardian of tradition configures the spa-
tialities of everyday lives. While the lives of girls in Gilgit may be freer in
some respects than those in urban centers, nevertheless, unlike boys who
may organize their days around labor and leisure time, girls are steered
towards domesticity and the home. This accounts for a marked difference
in the spatial ranges of girls vis-à-vis boys. For girls, the carefree days of
childhood are limited by domestic responsibilities in the natal home and/
or early marriage. In the patrilineal system, girls migrate to the patrilocal
household upon marriage, where they are often considered as additional
domestic labor. As young daughters-in-law, they are situated at the bottom
of a household hierarchy and, as such, have little control over their time,
movements, work schedule, or childbearing practices (Halvorson 2011).
Given limited family planning, woman often have more than five children
to care for, and with time, also aging in-laws; all this in the absence of a
husband and brothers-in-law who have migrated to the urban centers to
boost the household income.
The spatial restrictions and limited spatial ranges of girls in rural areas
are also highlighted by the experiences of Afghani girls, whose access
to schooling raises issues about their embodied presence in the public
worlds associated with masculinity. From a developmental rather than
an ideological focus, nation-building would encourage the education of
women, yet a lack of worldliness and greater social conservatism in the
rural areas combine with the strong association of women with domes-
ticity to become obstacles to women’s schooling. The sharp gendering of
space, in which women are considered “out of place” in the public arena,
hinders the access of girls to schooling. When schooling is accessible, it is
halted by early marriage. Naheed Aaftaab (2005) argues that the schooling
 geography 121

of rural Afghani girls requires careful building of trust with the commu-
nities through reference to Islam to offer an “amalgam space,” a space
that must be encoded with socially, religiously sanctioned gender norms
supporting the “(re)constructions of private spaces . . . in which the pri-
vate honour and roles of women are ensured” (Aaftaab 2005, 59). In this
way, the schooling of girls is predicated on the school space becoming an
extension of the home to which they will be returned upon marriage.
While the gendered division of labor and its spatialities are natural-
ized across the Muslim world, Farhana Sultana (2009, 2011) demonstrates
the ways in which it is reproduced and negotiated within specific politi-
cal, socioeconomic, cultural and ecological contexts through her study of
access to safe drinking water in Bangladesh. Arsenic is found in much
of the ground water in the deltaic landscape of Bangladesh, water that
is used for household consumption. Government response has been to
mark the tube wells where the supply is contaminated water, but this
does not ensure adequate supply for each household, with the poorest
being affected the most. This has implications for women’s spatial ranges
and gendered geographies because of the existence of a sharp gender divi-
sion of labor, under which irrigation is viewed as masculine labor while
supplying water for household needs is a feminized activity. With much
of the household water supply identified as being contaminated, women,
particularly young daughters-in-law who are allocated the task of water
provision, must go further to obtain safe water. As elsewhere in the Mus-
lim world, in Bangladesh, the patriarchal gendered distinction of space
means that young women’s presence in public spaces, particularly those
further away from their own neighborhoods, is associated with dishonor
and shame, yet the need for safe water compels women to transgress and
disrupt these these socio-spatial boundaries (Sultana 2009, 2011).
Elsbeth Robson (2006) also picks up on the theme of women’s seclu-
sion within the private domestic arena and the ways in which women
challenge patriarchal encoding of space through a focus on the space of
the kitchen in Hausa, rural Nigeria. Her study provides an insight into the
multiple functions and meanings of the space of the kitchen as women’s
space in a context again in which the socio-spatial parameters of wom-
en’s lives are marked by the sharp gender segregation of space. As part
of the private sphere, the kitchen is a space that is opaque and supports
women’s seclusion while men dominate the more open and visible public
sphere. The gendering of space is so sharp in rural Hausa that men are
effectively visitors in their own home, utilizing the space in front of the
home compound just outside the front door for rest and recuperation.
122 robina mohammad

The kitchen is merely an open space within the “stomach” of the home in
which women in a multigenerational, polygamous household congregate
and labor (paid/unpaid) together. Cooking is a communal activity that
brings women together to share news and information. This is particularly
valuable for married women who are not permitted to enter the public
sphere. The kitchen is the site in which women negotiate power amongst
each other; for example, as co-wives competing for a husband’s attention
and affection. It is a site that may empower women by functioning as an
informal means of production, where they prepare food and snacks, not
just to be consumed in the family, but also to be sold on the streets by
the children of the household. Rarely, women may also use the kitchen as
an informal café or restaurant space, thus transgressing the gender norms
of space. These studies demonstrate the ways in which the gendering of
space configures women’s everyday experiences across the Muslim world.
Yet Muslim women’s spatial mobility and spatial ranges are not fixed, but
historically and spatially contingent on the political, socioeconomic, cul-
tural and ecological contexts.

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 History: Europe

Annika Rabo

Introduction

Islam and Muslim women have long been integral to the development
of Europe and European civilization. This, however, is generally forgot-
ten and instead Islam is seen as a new entrant to Europe through recent
migration, even as it is recognized that there are important and historically
deep-rooted Muslim communities in southeastern and eastern Europe.
Yet, research on Muslim women in the rest of Europe is a fairly recent
development. Muslim women in Europe, as Muslim women, were gener-
ally “discovered” by scholars after large-scale labor migration to Europe
from Muslim-majority nations had ended, and Muslim women’s newly
visible presence is associated with “troublesome” Islam. Bodies, beliefs
and family law are important themes in this research, as discussed later.
Researchers do generally try to combat stereotypical notions of Muslim
women as victims of patriarchal family structures. Research methods are
varied but there has been a shift towards studying discourses about Mus-
lim women in Europe rather than studying Muslim women themselves.
However, examples of long-term fieldwork and contextualized analysis of
everyday life are also part of the research picture.
In June 1986, the Centre for Research in International Migration and
Ethnic Relations at Stockholm University and the Royal Swedish Academy
of Letters, History and Antiquities arranged a conference, “The New Islamic
Presence in Western Europe,” later resulting in a book (Gerholm and Lith-
man 1988). By stressing “new,” the convenors underlined that Muslims have
historically been part of the development of Europe and European civiliza-
tion. More than 25 years later, there is still a need to reiterate the fact that
Europe has been shaped and shared by people with a variety of religious
and cultural backgrounds. It is not surprising that, in the past, those hostile
to Islam claimed that Muslims were strangers to, and in, Europe. But con-
temporary anti-Muslim voices also get nourishment from the overall lack
of interest in the historical Islamic presence in Europe.
But what and where is Europe? The simplest geographical definition
of Europe—extending from the Mediterranean Sea in the south to the
Atlantic Ocean in the west, and from the Ural Mountains in the east to
128 annika rabo

the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea—makes it obvious that Muslims have
been in, and of, Europe since the early eighth century. Sicily and most
of the Iberian Peninsula were Islamic societies centuries before northern
Europe became Christian. Between the eighth and tenth centuries the
population in large parts of the Caucasus and in parts of today’s Russia
became Muslim. Despite the enormous repression of Muslims within the
Russian empire, and later in the Soviet Union, Islam survived. The heri-
tage of the Ottoman conquest of southeast Europe in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries resulted in the ongoing settlement of Turks as well as
in conversions of local inhabitants.
A political definition of Europe yields the observation that Mediter-
ranean Algeria, as an indivisible part of French territory, was part of
Europe between 1848 and 1962. When Pierre Bourdieu collected ethno-
graphic material in Kabylia in the late 1950s and early 1960s he thereby
studied European Muslims. The Spanish enclaves Ceuta and Melilla are
until today politically part of Europe. This is physically and very con-
cretely manifested in European Union-financed walls to stop the entry of
unwanted non-Europeans into “Europe proper.” Fortress Europe is today
politically extended into Africa. But although the very old and continu-
ous presence of Muslims in Europe is well known among archaeologists,
historians and philologists, it is not central to contemporary European
self-understandings. The history of Ottoman conquests in European geo-
graphical territory is, on the contrary, still popularly imagined as a threat
to Christianity. Certain politicians and researchers have made a point of
lauding the multicultural and pluri-religious composition of premodern
Andalusia, and its importance for the transmission of Greek philosophy
“back” into Europe is recognized. The political and intellectual history of
the old Muslim presence in Europe has thus been mapped, but mainly
through the history of elite men, and without wide recognition of its per-
vasiveness. Considering the lack of sources on social history and particu-
larly on women, this is not surprising. There are no court materials such
as those which have been so important for the understanding of economic
and social life of women in Ottoman land.

New Muslim Presence and Old

The amnesia, or perhaps denial, concerning the old presence and impact of
Muslims in Europe is in sharp contrast to the massive interest in, concern
over and even obsession about, the “new” Muslim presence in western
 history: europe 129

and northern Europe. Clearly gender relations are central to this uneven-
ness. The cultural identity of contemporary Europe, or at least the nations
of the European Union, is in large parts shaped by the projected Other-
ness of its Islamic neighboring region, and the identity of “real” Europeans
is today shaped by the presence of Muslim Others within Europe. The
smallest common denominator of contemporary Europeanness is gen-
der equality, and gender relations and gender ideology are in no small
part shaped in contrast to the perceived gender inequality among Mus-
lims. The relatively abundant research carried out since the mid-1980s on
Muslim women in Europe, or about gender relations among Muslims in
Europe, is clearly a reaction against such popular tendencies to dichoto-
mize and stereotype “the self ” and “the other.”
How did the “new” Muslim presence, particularly of women, come about
and how has it been reflected in research? The conventional ­narrative
in English-language research is that the new Muslim presence in west-
ern Europe took off after the Second World War. It was driven by labor
demands in Europe: male laborers came from former colonies. The abil-
ity to have wives and other family members join the men, and the speed
with which this came about, varied, but the pattern was seen as essen-
tially the same. First the Muslim men came and then the women came
as dependants of male family members. There are three important flaws
in this narrative. First, although migration of Muslims from former colo-
nies to western Europe became large-scale only in the 1950s and 1960s,
migration—permanent, periodic or cyclical—had taken place much ear-
lier. Sailors from Aden, for example, came to English and Welsh ports in
the late nineteenth century. Muslim Algerians (as well as Tunisians and
Moroccans) were already coming to France as workers in the early twen-
tieth century. Muslim Tartars settled in Finland—then part of the Russian
empire—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Second, links to former colonies were important for the Muslim migra-
tory paths into France and Great Britain, but this is not the case for Ger-
many or Scandinavia. Here, and instead, the numerically most important
“Muslim” labor migration came about through agreements with the Turk-
ish state (not all migrants from Turkey were Muslims although most were).
In Sweden, “Muslim” workers were also recruited from Yugoslavia, while
the vast majority of labor migrants in the post-war period were recruited
from neighboring Finland. Muslim migration has thus taken place not
only from former colonies to Europe, and not only to Europe from Africa
and Asia, but also within geographical Europe.
130 annika rabo

Third, although it is true that most early labor migrants were men, they
were not exclusively so. By 1963—that is, two years after the first bilateral
agreement between West Germany and Turkey—female laborers consti-
tuted 11 percent of the Turkish workforce in Germany. By the mid 1970s
they constituted 25 percent, according to Nermin Abadan-Unat, who has
conducted research on Turkish migrants in Europe since the early 1960s.
Women were attractive to certain German industries where manual dex-
terity was needed; indeed, male relatives urged women to go to Germany
in order to have their husbands, brothers or fathers join them (Abadan-
Unat 2011, 89–90). Hence in many cases it was women who came first
and not men.

Discovering Muslim Women in Europe

But is it not anachronistic to stress the religious affiliation of the migrants

and settlers in the period before “Islam” became the major classifying
principle for these migrants? In much of the labor recruitment it was the
national rather than the religious identification or marker which was an
important bureaucratic classificatory principle for the receiving countries.
Western and northern Europeans did not really “discover” Islam and Mus-
lims until after the recruitment of labor migrants had more or less ended.
For “Muslim” labor migrants in Germany and Sweden, organized Islam
only appeared when settlement in the host country became permanent
rather than temporary.
The study of Muslim women (and men) in Europe (and elsewhere)
is thus faced with a crucial conceptual difficulty. What do we mean by
“­Muslim”? Do we employ a broad and wide classification and include
persons born in a country where the majority is classified as Muslim, or
whose parents are born in such a country? Or are we using a narrower
classification, including only those who identify themselves as Muslims,
or only those who practice Islam in some way? Or do we, finally, only
include those who are members of religious organizations? There is an
intimate relationship between naming, seeing and analyzing on the part of
researchers, bureaucrats, and non-Muslim and Muslim publics in Europe.
The classificatory choices thus have a profound impact on methods and
theory, while theoretical and methodological stances have a profound
impact on the way we classify, and yet such issues are not sufficiently
pondered by policy-makers, journalists and researchers.
 history: europe 131

When did “Muslim women” enter the research scene in full force? Dif-
ferent western and northern European countries exhibit varying trajec-
tories. The conventional narrative of Muslim migration to these parts of
Europe continues as follows: after the demise of labor migration—in gen-
eral in the mid-1970s—refugees appeared from war-torn countries such
as Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, former Yugoslavia, Sudan and Somalia. Through
family reunification policies from the 1980s on, Muslim refugees and resi-
dents became visible in a variety of ways. In Sweden, for example, in 1986
when the conference on the new Islamic presence in western Europe
took place, Muslim women had already been “discovered.” They—and
Muslim men—were associated with patriarchal family structures which
encouraged, it was believed, specific phenomena such as sex segregation,
endogamy, forced marriages and honor killings. The degree to which such
problems are attributed to economic and social factors such as unemploy-
ment and discrimination, or to “culture and religion” is still hotly debated.
As early as 1983 a conference on “Islam, Family and Society” took place
in Denmark, sponsored by the Danish Research Council. About a third of
the 17 articles in the conference publication focus on Muslim immigrants
to western Europe and problems of integration. In 1996 Naser Khader, a
Danish citizen who was born and brought up in the Middle East, pub-
lished a book in Danish whose title translates into English as Honour and
Shame: The Islamic family and life-patterns from the cradle to the grave.
The title of the Swedish translation (1998) was less eye-catching: Fam-
ily Life and Patterns of Living among Muslims of the Middle East. Khader
emphasized not only that Scandinavians lacked knowledge about the
backgrounds of Muslims, but also that Muslim migrants were ignorant
of the lives of native Scandinavians, even if they had lived in Scandinavia
for a long time. Similar publications, often with the explicit mission of
bridging so-called cultural gaps, appeared in other parts of western and
northern Europe. Thus, differences between “Muslims” and “Europeans”
have been underlined in public and popular discourse rather than simi-
larities emphasized.
The narrative of Muslim refugee migration typically focuses on north-
ern and western Europe, and it is flawed in at least two ways. First, labor
migration has continued, particularly to southern Europe, and second, it
has continued in especially informal and unregulated arrangements. But
unlike labor migration that was facilitated by agreements between states,
labor migrants in recent decades have relied on social networks and per-
sonal contacts. The boundary between refugee and laborer is furthermore
132 annika rabo

not exact. Female labor migration from the southern rim of the Medi-
terranean to southern Europe has mainly been destined for jobs in the
domestic sector. Turkish women, as noted earlier, came alone to Germany
in the 1960s and 1970s and “pulled” male relatives along. In the late 1980s
and early 1990s Moroccan women started to migrate alone to Italy, not
always in order to facilitate the migration of a husband, son or brother
(Salih 2003, 37).

Transnational Migration

There is thus a need to fill in the gaps concerning the historical narrative
on “Muslim” labor migration in order to reconceptualize Europe and its
boundaries and to reconceptualize gender and migration. A great stride
forward has been made with the development of a transnational perspec-
tive on migration. Researchers working within this perspective are theo-
retically diverse but they share an interest in both the “sender” and the
“receiving” nation and analyze if and how social, economic and cultural
relationships are sustained across national borders. Ruba Salih’s work on
female Moroccan migrants in Italy (2003) is one example, as she collected
material in both countries. Her informants expressed different reasons for
working in Italy and also had varying dreams and hopes for the future.
Salih also shows that many of her informants have networks of kin and
family members extending across many countries in Europe. Women
in Moroccan villages and Moroccan women in Italy thus have opinions
about, and sometimes experiences with, a number of countries.
There is a great deal of interest among researchers in transnational
migratory patterns, in female domestic work, in so called care-chains, and
in the links women have to their families in “sending” countries. But there
is a lack of research focusing on domestic work itself. This might be linked
to difficulties of access; employers are not keen to open their homes to
scrutiny. Researchers focusing on women and migration underline that a
transnational perspective is helpful in the understanding and analysis of
how family and kinship ties are sustained across time and space. It is theo-
retically possible to follow migrants and their transnational links across a
number of national borders, but transnational research has shown that
this is not so easy from a practical or a methodological point of view.
Most research is thus still typically conducted with a focus on one par-
ticular national category of migrant in one or two particular national are-
nas. While many migrants are able to maintain transnational connections,
 history: europe 133

it is important to underline that not all are able to do so or wish to do

so. Sustained family obligations may affect especially female migrants in
negative ways.
Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, research on Muslim women in
Europe has shifted from an interest in work and labor conditions to a
concern over identity politics. As noted earlier, this shift is linked to the
fact that “Muslim women” were discovered as Muslim women after large-
scale labor migration came to an end. Researchers underline that Muslim
migrants face discrimination on the job market and that employment is
crucial for successful integration into the majority society. Yet paradoxi-
cally there is less interest in studying those who actually have jobs than
those who are without. Since the late 1990s, however, there has been a
renewed interest in the links between labor migration and economic
development—or lack of it—in sender and receiver countries. Perhaps
we will see a return to theories of gender and political economy as used in
the 1970s among researchers focusing on domestic modes of production.
A transnational perspective has not made national classifications obso-
lete. The criticism of methodological nationalism (where social, politi-
cal, economic and cultural phenomena seem to neatly end at a national
­border) among proponents of a transnational perspective does not mean
that nation states are deemed irrelevant. Many researchers in this field,
on the contrary, underline that national laws and policies are vital to
the understanding of contemporary migration processes. There are over
40 countries in Europe and while the Muslim population (widely defined)
is almost non-existent in some, it constitutes a significant minority in
Bulgaria, France, Macedonia and Russia, and the majority in Albania and
Kosovo.
This variation and heterogeneity in terms of economic and political con-
ditions makes it a daunting task to delineate research on Muslim women
in Europe. One possible approach is to map research in a historical and
geographical manner along variables of Muslim settlement and migration
and along the variable of the national context of the researchers them-
selves. From this perspective, taking into account the specific national
contexts of Muslim women, the setting and the researcher, the dearth
of easily available research on Muslim women in eastern and southeast-
ern Europe becomes clear. The strong migratory and transnational links
between Germany and Turkey, France and Algeria, and Great Britain and
South Asia also stand out, and it becomes equally clear that Moroccan
and Turkish migrants are found in large numbers in many Western Euro-
pean countries.
134 annika rabo

Another way to discuss research on Muslim women in Europe is to

use academic disciplines, methods used and theoretical tools as variables.
It then becomes clear that since the late 1980s, political economy, soci-
ology, social anthropology and ethnology are no longer the main disci-
plines in which such research takes place, and that theoretical debates
on religion, identity and agency have become more salient. Research
on Muslim women in Europe—as native or immigrant Muslims—has
shifted away from stressing the importance of “folk” practices and rites of
passage embedded in particular regional, national or linguistic contexts
and towards research on more formal, scholarly and organized religious
practices. This shift reflects not only research interests but also what has
been, and still is, happening on the ground in many places in Europe,
as well as in countries where Muslims constitute the majority. Discourse
analysis and postcolonial theories have become pervasive and even quasi-
hegemonic since the late 1990s; material is typically collected through
interviews or through study of mass media. The following discussion is
organized around themes rather than according to disciplines, methodol-
ogies or country-specific issues. Themes have been selected because they
say something important not only about research on Muslim women in
Europe but also about Europe itself. The major themes can be summarized
as bodies, beliefs and family law. The bulk of the research discussed has
been published since the mid-1990s and the selection of works, it must
be underlined, covers only a small part of what has been published in the
vast and growing research on Muslim women in Europe.

Bodies

In most parts of Europe the “new” Muslim presence has been increas-
ingly debated through women and their bodies. We are all familiar with
the harem as an aesthetic trope of the colonial period reflecting fantasies
of female sexual availability, and the veil as a symbol of the hidden and
obscure Orient itself. The contemporary dismantling of such Orientalism
has not stopped this obsession with Muslim sexuality and female bod-
ies. Depicting “new” Muslim women in Europe as oppressed and in need
of liberation is common not only among Islamophobic political parties
and organizations of the far right but also in mainstream discourse. Pub-
lic discussions about female dress, female bodies, forced marriages and
so-called crimes of honor are closely associated with Islam in contempo-
rary Europe. Most serious researchers in the social and cultural sciences
 history: europe 135

wish, and try, to dismantle or go beyond stereotypes of Muslim women

in Europe as (passive) victims of patriarchy. Researchers in the social
and cultural sciences often act as explicit or implicit spokespersons or
champions of Muslims. But this also creates epistemological paradoxes.
All too often a focus on redressing a balance may be counter-­productive.
The more Islam and Muslims are “explained,” the more generalized
and homogeneous the categories of “Islam” and “Muslims” appear to be.
Stefano Allievi makes a very important theoretical point when he calls for
the need to “de-Islamize the study of Islam and Muslims” (2006, 142).

Fashion and Veiling

Emma Tarlo (2010) has found a balance for the dilemma brought about
through overexposure of phenomena associated with Islam or Muslims.
Her Visibly Muslim: Fashion, politics, faith, based on ethnographic field-
work carried out mainly in or close to London, demonstrates the incred-
ible variety of meanings attached to “Islamic dress” by those who wear it.
The book is also about the rapidly changing sartorial landscape of Islamic
fashion in Europe. The many illustrations and photographs bear witness
to this. Many opponents and proponents of Islamic dress claim that it
makes the wearers invisible but Tarlo, on the contrary, underlines that
it makes Muslim women not less but more visible when living as a minor-
ity in Europe (2010, 9). When women publicly appear as visibly Muslim
they take part in and respond to ideas about gender, citizenship, poli-
tics and consumption among both non-Muslims and Muslims in Europe
today. Tarlo makes use of a variety of informants and social and politi-
cal contexts, as well as a variety of theoretical and methodological entry
points. There are sartorial biographies, a discussion of how the hijab is
used and “read” by different kinds of people in a city such as London, and
a chapter on how young and fashionable Muslim women actively work
to find their own particular style. There is also an analysis of how Hizb
ut-Tahrir, an international organization founded in the 1950s and banned
in many countries, has used “radical dress activism” (Tarlo 2010, 118) to
lay claims to represent true Islam by contrasting the difference between
modest Muslim female dress with immodest and improper “secular” West-
ern female attire. An organization such as Hizb ut-Tahrir thus depends
on, and mirrors, claims in the majority society about gender and sexual-
ity and the links between sexuality and dress. Tarlo also discusses Islamic
fashion as design and consumption and the availability of merchandise in
both virtual and physical shops. She concludes that in an arena and time
136 annika rabo

of rapid change most Islamic fashion designers and owners of businesses

want to reconcile their faith with their interest in mainstream fashion.

Head-Scarf Fear in France and Elsewhere

Some researchers try to combat stereotypical depictions of Muslim women
in Europe by working very closely with a few informants and then featur-
ing their voices in excerpts from interviews. Another way to approach
the complex issues of the position of Muslim women in Europe is to ana-
lyze debates or discourses about women classified as such. Analyses of
discourses about Muslim women in Europe can contribute to our under-
standing of the political culture in contemporary Europe and the nation-
ally specific concerns and fears. Joan Wallach Scott’s The Politics of the Veil
(2007) and John R. Bowen’s Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves (2007)
both exemplify this approach, by focusing on France and the 2004 law
which made it illegal to wear clothes showing religious affiliation in public
schools. The law was very clearly directed towards visibly Muslim female
dress. Both authors are interested in delineating and understanding how
ideas and discourses of laïcité, a particular French type of secularism that
regulates relations between the public and the private domains, has been
used to channel fears about increasing Islamic extremism and political
use of Islam among French Muslims. Both authors underline the need to
understand French colonial history and republican universalist ideology
to pinpoint and explain why female Muslim dress galvanized politicians
and intellectuals from across the political spectrum. France is an interest-
ing and important European country for anyone interested in the “new”
Muslim presence in Europe, since it has the largest percentage of Muslims
(broadly defined) in the European Union.
Earlier hijab incidents in France are important to the understanding of
the development towards the ban in 2004. In 1989, for example, three girls
were expelled from a public school in a small town outside Paris for wear-
ing hijabs. This incident quickly became a media event where the head-
scarf became iconic. It was turned into “a veil” and even into “a chador”
in the imaginations of many secular French. In 1989, with the 200th anni-
versary of the French revolution, many public intellectuals fueled the con-
cern over “Iran-type” mobilization in France. Bowen (2007) pays a great
deal of attention to how France has regulated religion through law and
how the lives of Muslim migrants have been regulated in France. Wallach
Scott (2007) analyzes what she sees as French racism and its strong link
to ideas about sexuality. While many French feminists before the affairs of
 history: europe 137

the headscarves had been critical of how dress in contemporary consumer

society reduced women to sex objects, they generally changed their view
when the “veil” came under scrutiny. The Islamic headscarf was deemed a
symbol of an inferior way of organizing gender and practicing femininity.
Banning the Islamic headscarf was thus, in this logic, a way to underline
and safeguard a French (universalist) gender equality.
In Europe today, different countries latch on to different symbols con-
nected to women and women’s bodies to demonstrate the inferiority of
Muslims. In Sweden, for example, so-called honor killings are attributed to
Islam. In the United Kingdom and Norway, so-called “limping marriages”
and forced marriages are linked to Muslim migrants. In France, as shown
by Bowen, Wallach Scott and others, the covering of the female Muslim
body is deemed a threat not just to individual women subjected to this,
but to the nation itself. The same is true in other countries. There are now
laws in Belgium, France and the Netherlands banning the use of face-veils
in public places. In the Dutch case Annelies Moors (2009) shows how
public debates after the turn of the century became increasingly heated
although the actual use of face-veils were—and have been—very rare.
Face-veils, she underlines, have become a threat to public security and
they create a sense of discomfort among many Dutch. The signal sent to
Muslim women in the Netherlands is paradoxical. On the one hand they
are told that in a liberal society they have the right to self-determina-
tion and freedom of expression. But when they exercise this in a man-
ner not deemed suitable, they are stigmatized and seen as simultaneously
oppressed and threatening.
But not only “white” non-Muslims campaign against what they see
as misogynist Islam in Europe. In many European countries, there are
organizations founded by women with an Islamic background who laud
liberal secular Western traditions as the liberators of women including
themselves. One such well-known organization is the French Ni Putes
Ni Soumises (Neither whores nor doormats), which has received a great
deal of attention in media and among researchers. The organization has
become transnational with branches in Sweden and elsewhere. Ni Putes
Ni Soumises was founded in 2002 to combat violence and discrimina-
tion against “migrant” women by “migrant” men in the French suburbs.
In 2003 Fadela Amara, one of the founders of the organization, published
her autobiography (with the same name as the organization), which has
been widely sold (and translated into, for example, English and Swed-
ish). In 2004 it won the French National Assembly’s political book prize.
Amara is a “publicly secular Muslim” and her book, Mayanthi Fernando
138 annika rabo

(2009) argues, is very welcome for those who want to deny the structural
problems in the French suburbs, such as unemployment and social seg-
regation. Instead, the problems in the suburbs are linked to Islam and
lack of gender equality. Yet, argues Fernando, although Amara became
the darling of the French establishment by underlining her allegiance to
the republic and its “universalist” values, she was still labeled and seen
as a Muslim, albeit a secular one. Thus she, like women labeled as pious
Muslims, will continue to be seen as different and as not really French
(Fernando 2009, 390).

Beliefs

“Publicly secular Muslim” women receive a lot of media attention in many

European countries, as do women who have chosen to convert to Islam. Such
converts are the focus of a growing body of research and are typically based
on narratives of conversion (for example, Jensen 2006, Mansson McGinty
2006, Sultán Sjöqvist 2006, Niewkerk 2006, 2008). These researchers see
conversion as an on-going process rather than a single event, and there
is interest in how converts make meaning of their lives both before and
after conversion. Anna Mansson McGinty uses the term “targeted selfhood”
(2006, 183) to underline that her Swedish informants reflect on the often
negative attitudes they confront as converts. Converts, many researchers
stress, are just as heterogeneous as women who are brought up as Muslims.
There is an image that European women convert to Islam because of pres-
sure from a partner, but this is not corroborated by research (for example,
Niewkerk 2008, 446). Gender relations and sexuality are, however, fre-
quently talked about in such narratives, not least because of expectations
that these are central issues in how non-Muslims view Islam.
Swedish female converts interviewed by Madeleine Sultán Sjöqvist
underlined that Islam had liberated them from the dominant gender
expectations in society. They had actively chosen to live in patriarchal
family arrangements. Since these women stress their active role and
agency in conversion and in practicing Islam, she interprets this religiosity
as a choice of life-style and “both part of and as a reaction to the demands
of late modern life” (Sultán Sjöqvist 2006, 287).

Muslim Female Converts

Research on converts straddles the themes of bodies and beliefs. The kind
of Islam converts engage in is of interest to researchers, as well as how
 history: europe 139

they reflect on religious beliefs and organizations. Here the availability of

Islamic organizations clearly plays a role. In Denmark, for example, there
is no umbrella organization gathering all Muslims. In her research on
Danish female converts, Tina Gudrun Jensen (2006, 655) found an orga-
nizational flux with both mobilization and conflict about how to practice
“true Islam.” The converts she interviewed often changed organizational
allegiances and Islamic orientation. While believers who had been brought
up as Muslims underlined the need to coach the Danish converts along a
“true” path, the converts themselves displayed an often eclectic trajectory
in their development as practicing Muslims and many did not want to
be associated with any particular group (Jensen 2006, 653). In Jensen’s
analysis, religious authority and personal autonomy are intertwined for
these converts. It can be said that converts express and reflect issues that
are central also in the majority society. The attention researchers give to
Muslim female converts does not reflect their numerical importance, but
rather the importance which is attached to them by both pious Muslims
and non-Muslim Europeans critical of religion in general and Islam in
particular. It is also interesting to note that this research demonstrates
the emergence of national differences in being a convert. Danish, Swedish
and Dutch converts speak to and reflect on discourses which are nation-
ally particular. More comparative research in Europe is needed to deepen
and broaden this line of analysis.
Converts are also active in researching gender and Islam in contem-
porary Europe. Anne Sofie Roald is a Norwegian-born and Swedish-edu-
cated convert with long research experience in Europe and elsewhere.
For Women in Islam: The Western experience (2001) she studied Islamic
texts and also used questionnaires, interviews, group discussion, and par-
ticipant observation to analyze how a selection of Arabic-speaking well-
educated Sunni Islamist female and male migrants view the challenges
and changes for gender roles in a minority situation. Roald (2001, 300 ff.)
concludes that attitudes towards women are changing among Islamists
in Europe, due to the minority situation and due to globalization more
broadly. She focused on Arabic speakers because, in her mind, such speak-
ers are able to make more independent and critical textual analyses than
Muslims who are not able to read the Qur’an and other important sources
in Arabic. Well-educated Arabic-speaking Muslims have, she believes,
theoretically the “best resources” for reinterpreting the classical sources
(Roald 2001, 59). Muslims with other linguistic backgrounds might object
to this assumption, but it does reflect a kind of “ethnic” hegemony quite
prevalent in the Islamic world.
140 annika rabo

Fatwas on Muslim Families in Europe

Texts and handbooks in classical fiqh (jurisprudence) do not systematically
sort issues along variables of family or gender. But among contemporary
Islamic scholars such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi (b. 1926), closely associated
with the theology of the Muslim Brotherhood, this is now taking place.
The views and fatwas of this Egyptian scholar are well known in the
Arab world and also among (Arabic speaking) Muslims in the European
diaspora. His fatwas on family and women have been very influential;
they are disseminated through his programs on the Al-Jazeera channel
as well as the website Islam Online. He has also become associated with
“minority jurisprudence,” the study of how Muslims should, and can, live
as Muslims in the West.
Religious authority is fundamental in Lena Larsen’s research (2011) on
fatwas and the challenges Muslim women face in western Europe. Like
Roald, Larsen combines text-oriented research with qualitative social sci-
ence methods. She participated in sessions of the Dublin-based European
Council for Fatwa and Research between 2002 and 2006, took part in the
yearly meetings of the Union des Organisations Islamiques de France in
Paris, Cairo and Istanbul between 2004 and 2009, interviewed religious
scholars, and in general immersed herself in sites where Islamic legal
issues were debated, produced and disseminated, especially Great Britain
and France. Larsen is a Norwegian convert and has been active in Scan-
dinavian and European Islamic circles, which opened many doors for her
during her research. Her analysis is clearly dependent on both her knowl-
edge of fiqh and on her understanding of the social context of contem-
porary fatwa-making in Europe, but her research is not mainly directed
towards the Muslim community.
Pious or believing European Muslim women—like Muslim women in
many other places—are pulled between two conflicting sets of norms,
according to Larsen. On the one hand they are faced with a gender ideal
where women and men have complementary roles stressing obligations
rather than rights and where women are subordinated to men. On the
other hand they are faced with ideals stressing the rights of women and
gender equality. Believing women try to find religiously acceptable solu-
tions to this dilemma and Larsen scrutinizes fatwas given after 1992 on
women-related issues by dominant Islamic scholars in Europe, to ascer-
tain whether they are able to reconcile Islamic tradition with gender
equality. The vocabulary used to characterize “fatwas” varied; for some it
was framed as an “answer” to a “question” and to others it was at times
 history: europe 141

framed more as a “decision.” The contexts of fatwa-giving differ between

the nationally oriented Union des Organisations Islamiques de France
and the more broadly based European Council for Fatwa and Research.
The development of these organizations shows how important both
national and transnational contexts are for the emergence of different
European forms of Islam where France and the United Kingdom have
represented different approaches to immigrants, religious pluralism and
social cohesion. Most fatwa-givers in Europe are men but women with
religious authority are emerging.
Larsen found that most fatwas related to women and family were con-
cerned with marriage and how to reconcile Islamic prescriptions with
legal frameworks in various European countries. Very little discussion has
so far emerged concerning mahr (bridewealth) and inheritance. ­Larsen
also found that the different legal contexts in multicultural United King-
dom and republican France influence the Islamic scholars when giving
fatwas. Following Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Larsen classifies the opinions of
most of the scholars as neo-traditional (Larsen 2011, 308); women and
men do not have the same rights but they have the same value. But she
also finds a tendency towards gender equality in fatwas on ritual practice.
Many fatwas underline the right of women to be present in the mosque
or to make a pilgrimage. But there are also fatwas stressing the need to
follow national laws for marriage in order for Muslims to be recognized
as properly married. Larsen indicates that gender equality may thus
enter European Islamic jurisprudence through the back door. Although
most fatwa-givers in her research see men as heads of the family, they
also acknowledge that Muslims in a minority situation in western and
­northern Europe live in social contexts that differ from Muslim majority
societies.

Organized and Non-Organized Muslim Women

Transnational links are obvious in both Roald’s and Larsen’s material.
They also show that theological influence not only flows from the Arab
or Islamic world to western Europe, but that debates on Shariʿa and fiqh
in western Europe also flow in the other direction. The development of
“immigrant” (and “convert”) Islamic organizations, and the methods they
use to attract members, vary from one country to another in western
and northern Europe. The extent to which believers of different national,
ethnic or linguistic background join the same organizations also differ.
But, generally speaking, Muslim women in Europe have entered these
142 annika rabo

r­ eligious organizations and have made their presence felt in mosques.

Most researchers focusing on “formal” Islam see this development as
positive in contrast to much populist and media discourse in many Euro-
pean countries. Based on interviews from the early twenty-first century
among young Muslim women in France and Germany who had joined
Sunni organizations, Jeanette Jouili and Schirin Amir-Moazami (2006),
note how these women underlined the importance of religious knowl-
edge. This enabled them to return to “pure” or “true” Islam different from
the traditions of their parents. The women did not challenge the comple-
mentary gender roles prescribed in the mainstream Islamic organizations
they had joined, but claimed that “knowledge” was a duty which enabled
them to become better mothers and citizens.
Muslims who are, or have been, members of formal organizations are
clearly over-represented in research on beliefs and “new” Muslim women
in Europe. It is easier to find and to interview women who have reflected
on what it means to be a Muslim and who are able to articulate ideas of
beliefs and practice to a researcher. But, as Lene Kühle (2011) reminds us,
there are also “practicing” Muslims who are not members of organizations
and who do not take part in collective religious celebrations. Surveys in
various countries try to pinpoint and classify if, how, and in what ways
Muslims are “religious.” Such classificatory efforts can clearly be under-
stood in terms of forms of governance which non-Muslims in Europe
are subjected to as well. Surveys generally show that the vast majority of
“minority Muslims” are not members of religious organizations. But even
for non-organized Muslims in Europe, “religious” family arrangements
may remain, or become very important, especially for individuals with
transnational family links and arrangements. This importance can also be
seen in the rapid development of research on “Muslim” family issues, fam-
ily law and legal pluralism in Europe.

Family Law

In February 2008 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, gave

a talk which created an enormous stir and controversy in the United
Kingdom and elsewhere in western Europe. Dr Williams talked about the
rights of religious groups in secular states. He did not advocate for parallel
legal systems where, for example, British Muslims would be consigned to
an “Islamic” legal framework, but this is how many interpreted his talk.
“Shariʿa courts” were in the headlines of most English newspapers. In a
well-argued response to Dr Rowan’s talk and to the public debate, Samia
 history: europe 143

Bano (2008) delineates several very important points. The heated argu-
ments against Dr Rowan show that many commentators think that while
“Islamic law was unreasonable and patriarchal,” Western law was seen to
be “both secular and egalitarian” (Bano 2008, 285). The hostile presuppo-
sitions were such, Bano continues, that it made any kind of level-headed
debate almost impossible. But she also critiques Dr Rowan for failing to
address the complex ways Shariʿa manifests itself among Muslims in Brit-
ain. Perhaps the archbishop thinks that all Muslims—because they are
Muslims—actually want and demand “Shariʿa” in Britain? Bano under-
lines that Muslim identity in Britain is not fixed and Muslim identity is
not a question of all or nothing. Finally she stresses that “the experience
of British Muslim women” was not addressed in the talk (Bano 2008, 309).
It seems that the history of Muslim women in Europe has not yet been
recognized for its depth and complexity.

Shariʿa Courts, Shariʿa Councils and Limping Marriages

The fear of Shariʿa courts is widespread in many countries in Europe but
officially recognized courts of this sort exist in only one European country,
Greece. In 1881, an agreement was made between Greece and the Otto-
man authorities whereby Greece promised that Muslims in the country
would be allowed to follow Islam in matters of marriage, divorce and cus-
tody of children. This agreement is still in force for the approximately
100,000 Muslims who live in western Thrace. While the Turkish Republic
removed all Shariʿa and church courts from its legal system in 1926, reli-
gious courts are still present in Greece. For Muslims in Turkey religious
marriages are not legally recognized by the state, but among Thracian
Muslims in Greece—which is a member of the European Union—it is
different. Aspasia Tsaoussi and Elena Zervogianni (2008) are critical of
this minority arrangement and claim that over time it has reinforced a
regional Thracian Muslim subculture detrimental to women. They would
rather see a system where culturally sensitive mediators could be used for
family conflict, much like the Shariʿa councils already found in the United
Kingdom.
Shariʿa councils emerged in the United Kingdom in the 1980s and are
often closely associated with specific mosques. The most common ques-
tions relating to how to reconcile national European legislation with
Islamic prescriptions concerned marriage and divorce, according to Lar-
sen, as already noted. Councils are often used when Muslims need to have
a religiously sanctioned divorce, perhaps to be able to marry again or to
have the divorce recognized in their country of origin. Especially women
144 annika rabo

turn to the councils when they find themselves in so-called “limping mar-
riages.” Their husbands may have left them but will not agree to a full and
final divorce, Islamic or “secular.” While the councils may force women
into accepting endless and unwelcomed efforts at reconciliation, women
also get support by being released from unhappy or abusive marriages
(Bano 2008). While media debates depict Shariʿa councils and “Islamic
law” as a great threat to secular and liberal values, legal scholars such
as Lisa Pilgram (2012) stress that in practice there is an incipient legal
field containing practices of British Muslim family law, and this legal field
needs to be studied rather than condemned outright.
“Limping marriage” is a phenomenon that underlines the fact that there
is no equality between women and men in access to divorce or to dissolu-
tion of marriage. It is closely—and wrongly—associated with Islam and
hotly debated in different European countries. In 2003, Norway passed
a law that all persons wanting to marry in Norway had to sign an agree-
ment that both spouses have an equal right to divorce. The overt aim of
the law was to help Muslim women in Norway with what was depicted as
a problem of an enormous magnitude. But as Berit Thorbjörnsrud (2005,
10) noted, the Norwegian lawmaker had not realized that the real opposi-
tion to this law did not come from Norwegian Muslims but rather from
representatives of the Catholic and Orthodox churches. A faithful Catho-
lic or Orthodox Christian cannot enter a marriage on the premise that it
can be dissolved.
Questions of limping marriage and forced marriage are emotionally
charged issues and stigmatize mainly Muslims in Europe. These issues
also directly point to the intersection between family law in Europe and
transnationally connected members of Muslim families. This area covers
large and complex phenomena studied, analyzed and interpreted from
many different perspectives. One important aspect is how citizenship is
gendered and interpreted and how various national laws meet or collide
when citizens migrate and settle in new countries. Another important
issue is how various states handle parallel or plural jurisprudence in the
field of family law. Finally, it is crucial to study not only formal law but
also how people actually practice family relations across national borders
(Rabo 2011).

Mobile People, Immobile Laws

Mobility across national borders and family law with links to more than
one national legal system are not novel phenomena. The traditional tool
 history: europe 145

used to solve problems arising from cross-border conflicts is private inter-

national law. But this tool is becoming less useful in a world of increased
transnational connections and the increased possibilities of double citi-
zenship. Where do the litigants actually belong and which national law
should be applied? The drive towards a convergence of family law can be
seen as one way to address the difficulty of multiple national belongings.
Discussing legal pluralism and its limits in European family law, Andrea
Büchler (2011, 130) concludes that some form of Islamic law is already
applied as a result of the existence of private international law. Although
European countries may be facing similar difficulties in developing accept-
able pluralism, the legal solutions might differ because of past history and
legal culture. Sweden, for example, has developed a legal tradition where
domicile is the most important criterion for judging family cases involving
people who reside in Sweden but who might have strong links to Iran or
Iraq, for example. Germany has typically not paid the same attention to
domicile. These differences also reflect that obtaining citizenship is easier
in Sweden than in Germany, and that persons with permanent residence
permits in Sweden are regarded as de facto citizens. In Germany immi-
grants may be judged by the family laws of Morocco, Egypt or Pakistan
even if they have been residents for decades. In Germany Shariʿa is pres-
ent through private international law.

Family Reunification
In many countries family reunification has become the most important
way to gain access to northern or western Europe. There is a widespread
idea in Scandinavia that young Muslim women are forced to marry rela-
tives from the “homeland” in order to bring them to Scandinavia, or that
young Muslim men marry from the “homeland” in order to obtain a doc-
ile virgin untainted by the sexual laxity in Scandinavia. Family reunifica-
tion as a field of research in Europe points to the need to combine an
analysis of migration law and family law. Family reunification is deemed
to be a human right by, for example, the European Court of Justice, but
since the late twentieth century restrictions have been increasing. In
2002 the criteria for family reunification in Denmark were changed in
response to moral panics about forced marriages and increased “integra-
tion” of immigrants from Turkey and Pakistan, in particular, who brought
spouses from their “homelands.” Couples wanting to reunite needed to be
older than the formal marriage age in Denmark, the Danish partner had
to have housing, a certain stable income, financial collateral and “national
146 annika rabo

a­ ttachment” to Denmark. Mikkel Rytter (2010) analyzes these criteria

in terms of the dominant Danish kinship ideology where “the family of
Denmark” emerges. The law has been readjusted a number of times so
that the “right” kind of Danes—for example, those who had lived abroad
for many years as diplomats or employees for Danish firms—would not
suffer. But, as Rytter points out, while “the family of Denmark” connotes
certain characteristics today—white, nuclear, heterosexual families—
these are changing as families in Denmark become more heterogeneous.
In the future this might lead to a definition of “the family of Denmark”
that includes citizens with an immigrant background. As of 2010, how-
ever, Rytter (2010, 317) notes that opinion polls show that the majority in
Denmark support the exacting criteria for family reunification.
The strict law in Denmark has forced thousands of people to leave the
country and settle in Sweden which until now (2013) had more liberal
rules for family reunification. Mikkel Rytter (2012) has conducted field-
work among Danish-Pakistani couples who live in a kind of Swedish-
Danish borderland. The “Danish” partner often commutes to Denmark to
work and some couples actually live clandestinely with relatives in Den-
mark but maintain an official residence in Sweden. These couples live in
a semi-legal condition (Rytter 2012, 97) which creates tensions and worry.
It is difficult for many of his informants to understand why they are not
allowed to live in Denmark when Danish companies are allowed to bring
non-European Union labor migrants into the country on special contracts.
Rytter also demonstrates how some couples enjoy or take advantage of
being separated from larger kinship networks in Denmark. Political rela-
tions between the bordering countries are also affected by the differences
in family reunification policies. In Denmark the “multiculturalism” of
Sweden is denigrated by certain political actors and the Danish policies
are called “silly and discriminatory” by some Swedish politicians (Rytter
2012, 104). But the differences in law and the ease of obtaining Swedish
citizenship, especially for persons with Danish passports, creates a situa-
tion of family life that straddles the two countries. The European Court
of Justice passed a verdict against Denmark because its strict law of fam-
ily reunification blocks mobility inside the European Union (Rytter 2010,
317). Thus the EU aim to enhance mobility for its citizens, while simul-
taneously locking its borders against, for example, Muslim non-citizens
from Asia and Africa, is complicated by the rights of immigrant residents
or “new” European citizens.
The question of family reunification is, as demonstrated by research, a
very sensitive issue. Gender relations and family arrangements have strong
 history: europe 147

symbolic value as indicators of democracy, progress or cultural authentic-

ity (Rabo 2011, 31). Thus a stress on the superiority of the “Scandinavian”
way of organizing family life may easily turn family law into a battleground
of morality. Anniken Hagelund (2008) shows how such moral accounts in
Scandinavia have led to strident demands that the state intervene to save
the women and children of mainly Middle Eastern or Muslim migrants.
“Native” women are subjected to hegemonic ideas of individual capability,
of choice and autonomy, while Muslim women are seen as weak and inca-
pable and needing to be saved from their families. Liberal democracies in
contemporary European countries are faced with a dilemma concerning
family law. Researchers emphasize that the rights of religious minorities
must be safeguarded but that family law must protect the weaker parties,
typically women and children.

Fieldwork Immersion in Old and New Muslim Communities

Research on Muslims in Europe and Muslim women in Europe is, as has

been discussed here, a very good entry point from which to detect and
analyze national similarities and differences. Europe itself appears differ-
ent through this research, which also indicates how “Europe” has taken
on new ideological meanings in the past decades. The fall of the Soviet
Union and the “new” Muslim presence have contributed to the empha-
sis on (an imaginary) Europe. But while the “new” presence of Muslim
women constitutes a large and growing field of research, no matter how
we define “Muslim women,” accessible research on Islam and gender in
the former Soviet bloc is lacking. The Muslim—including female—pres-
ence in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the communist period is
documented within folklore and in studies where religion and traditions
regarded as “backward” were seen to disappear as modernity and social-
ism developed. Hence the monographs by Tone Bringa (1995) and Kristen
Ghodsee (2010) are very important contributions to the anthropology of
Islam in former communist countries. Bringa’s ethnography, Being Muslim
the Bosnian Way, focuses on a village with a mixed Muslim and Catholic
population in Bosnia where she collected material mainly in the Muslim
part of town at the end of the 1980s. For a long time the Catholics and the
Muslims had lived together, but at one point Muslims were attacked by
Croat forces and were forced to flee. Bringa returned with a film crew in
1993 to depict the fate of the village and to try to find surviving Muslim
villagers who had fled. Ghodsee did fieldwork in 2005–2008 in a region
148 annika rabo

of Bulgaria where Pomaks—“Bulgarian” Muslims—live. Muslim Lives in

Eastern Europe is set in a former mining region which saw rapid change in
the socialist period. Miners were regarded as communist heroes and their
living standard increased dramatically. The fall of communism destroyed
this privileged and masculine economy and people in thie region faced
great hardship.
Islam in former Yugoslavia and in socialist Bulgaria was recognized but
also denigrated. In Bulgaria for example, Muslims were forced to change
their names. In both cases the state controlled Islam through salaried reli-
gious leaders and kept a tight control of the religious educational institu-
tions. “Traditional” forms of worship, and life-crisis rituals where women
had skills and knowledge, were especially stigmatized as old-fashioned or
simply wrong. Both books are important in offering analysis of an “old”
female Muslim presence in Europe, and how these women are rooted
in—and also become uprooted from—local and regional histories. Both
Bringa and Ghodsee also show the impact of political and economic tur-
moil—and war, in the case of Bosnia—on religious identity. Islamic reviv-
alism—transnationally linked to the Middle East—has spread among the
Pomak Bulgarians, resulting in increased gender segregation.
In order to examine changes towards more formal and scholarly reli-
gious practices in many places and among many Muslim women, the
context of these practices needs to be described and analyzed. Assessing
the development of research on Muslim women in Europe clearly affirms
the potential of “traditional” anthropology to enrich our understanding of
human action and human thought through an immersion in the lives of
others, whoever they may be and wherever they might live. Such research
immersion, as demonstrated by Bringa and Ghodsee, is perhaps more dif-
ficult in situations where Muslim women constitute a minority or where
“Muslim space” is both limited and sharply delimited. But Marianne
Pedersen Holm shows that immersion is not impossible, even among
Muslim women in a minority situation. In Practices of Belonging: Ritual
performances and the making of place and relatedness among Iraqi women
in Copenhagen (2009), she describes her informants as firmly linked in
time and space to Copenhagen, to specific named quarters, and to other
parts of Denmark where some lived before moving to the capital. But her
informants—and their family members—are also firmly tied to locali-
ties in Iraq: to Baghdad, Karbala and Najaf. They also have strong links
to other parts of the world where family members live. Holm Pedersen
has visited both Jordan and Syria where there are many Iraqi refugees.
All these contexts and all these localities are crucial for her analysis and
 history: europe 149

her understanding of how her adult informants make sense of their place
and purpose in the world. Holm Pedersen contends that there has been
too much emphasis in European research on young Muslim migrants or
citizens. By focusing on adults who have migrated she is able to under-
stand how her informants vary in their responses to processes of change
and continuity.
Holm Pedersen is concerned with the importance of rituals for the
women in their everyday lives in a migrant setting; many of her infor-
mants emphasize that life in Copenhagen has made them practice Islam
more faithfully. Some claimed this was a result of new increased possibili-
ties and their own increasing age. Others said it was linked to exile and a
sense of being outsiders in a rather hostile Danish environment. Still oth-
ers stressed the importance of teaching their children how to be righteous
in a society with too many “Danish” temptations. For Holm Pedersen the
different rituals should be analyzed as addressing—in a rich and multi-
faceted manner—questions of belonging. Thus she is able to show that
although her informants are part of the new Islamic presence in Europe,
they share worldly and deeply existential issues that are similar to those
of European women in general.
From the discussion presented here it is clear that more historical
research on Muslim women in Europe is needed to reconceptualize
Europe and its boundaries. Comparative historical research is also needed
in order to analyze the development of patriarchy in Europe, not least to
understand if, how and when family law becomes an instrument for the
oppression of women or gender equality.

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 History of Science

Ahmed Ragab

Introduction

Evelyn Fox-Keller’s biography of Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the

Organism: The life and work of Barbara McClintock, in 1983 represented
an important point in the history of research about women in science,
as well as women and science. McClintock was one of the world’s most
distinguished cytogeneticists and had won the Nobel Prize in Physiology
or Medicine in 1983. Fox-Keller’s history of this important woman scien-
tist proposed significant arguments in relation to the presence of women
in the laboratory, the ability of women to achieve success under what
are admittedly biased standards, and the ability/desire to create or stimu-
late the making of a new science. The question posed then, and now, is
whether McClintock and others were examples of women “making good”
in science, or whether this was a beginning of a different paradigm in
scientific production that would allow for more equitable constructs and
more diverse understandings of the world.
In 1989, Fox-Keller engaged in a debate on the pages of Hypatia with
Kelly Oliver that ran under the title “The Gender/Science System,” where
the relation between science and nature was analyzed and understood
in light of the relation between sex and gender (Keller 1987, 1989, Oliver
1989). These questions about the place and role of gender in scientific
epistemologies continue to animate important debates in philosophy of
science and in science studies (Rolin 2004), along with other important
questions that touch on issues in sociology of science and in the making
and communication of scientific knowledge (Rolin 2002, Clough 2003).
Many of these writings address major questions about women’s pres-
ence in circles of scientific knowledge production, the number and ratio
of women studying or practicing science, the presence of “glass ­ceilings,”
“sticky floors” or “stone walls,” and the hegemony of male-­oriented
and androcentric metaphors of scientific success (see, for example,
Myers 2010).
The study of the question of “women in science” in Islamic societies is
conditioned in many cases by similar concerns about the accessibility of
152 ahmed ragab

scientific knowledge production and about different educational and pro-

fessional gender biases. Similar to research on the topic around the world,
scholarship about women in Islamic societies was also concerned with
such general questions as those related to women’s education and profes-
sional fulfillment, and engaged with feminist and women’s rights move-
ments; this had direct and indirect effects on women’s ability to engage
fields of science and technology. Scholarship on women in pre- and early
modern history of science and technology were rooted in a perception
of women as gendered subjectivities located in the social and cultural
spheres in a manner that reflected their relations with, and their identi-
ties compared to, other gendered subjectivities. In this view, the gendered
performance of the self is reflected in a performance of the scientific or
technological self, and conditions how the latter is expressed in the social
space. The question of “women in science” is rooted in the understanding
of women as a gendered category that can be understood through and
related to other genders. It is also premised on the understanding that
“women” when performing “in science” will or are expected to perform
or produce these gendered subjectivities within the larger gender system.
Similarly, scientific and technological knowledge produces patterns of
gendered performances that are rooted in scientific epistemologies and
legitimacies and that enhance the expression of the concerned gendered
subjectivity.
However, when discussing “women in science” in Islamic societies,
“women” is not only a gendered subjectivity that is erected in relation to
other gendered subjectivities but is also a “Third World” subjectivity (on
the question of race, feminism and science and the perception of Third
World subjects, see Harding and Hintikka 1983, Harding 2006, 1991).
This subjectivity is performed discursively within “Islamic societies” and
implicitly within the meaning of “science” as it refers to “modern” and
“Western” sciences. In her article on African women studying in American
universities, Josephine Beoku-Betts analyzed the experiences of different
African women scientists as they went through their graduate education
and argued that their experience was not colored only by biases against
women that white women witnessed, but also by their dual identities
as black and as coming from the Third World with different biases, per-
ceptions and views attached to each of these designations (Beoku-Betts
2004). In addition to prejudices attached to Third World subjects, being a
Third World subject is also a location within global networks of scientific
and technological knowledge production, distribution and consumption.
In this epistemic geography, the Third World represents a homogeneous
 history of science 153

location at the periphery of knowledge production and stands as an other

to the producer of knowledge because of inherent differences and deep
rooted biases. At the same time, the peripheries play an important role
as consumers of technological and scientific goods and are able to influ-
ence the general trends in technological knowledge production in this
­manner.
The notions of “Islamic” or “Muslim” in a world after the events of
11 September 2001 engage with this epistemic geography in yet another
layer. In conceiving the global dangers connected to weapon proliferation
and to the potential harm of emerging technological producers in Iran
or Pakistan, the authorizing and legitimizing universality and impartiality
of scientific epistemology is wrapped in perception of “good” and “bad”
science. This good/bad science designation is based on the perception of
either the producer of scientific and technological knowledge, such as the
case of Iran’s nuclear proliferation programs, or the consumers, as in the
cases of non-state actors purchasing “legitimate” technological ­products,
or in the cases of actors in African civil wars and genocides performed by
European and American technological products. Therefore, the Muslim,
Third World woman actor is a complex one where gendered subjectivities,
perceived in orientalist and orientalizing gazes, interact with Third World
identities, in security-obsessed and paranoid geography of knowledge, to
create the subject of the study: women, in science, in Islamic societies.
This complex identity is transported and implanted into “Muslim” women
who engage with science and technology in the West. For these Muslim
women in the West, the gendered identity is colored with imageries trans-
ported across time and space, creating a suspect yet vulnerable object of
inquiry and subject of knowledge production. The experience of Muslim
women in the process of knowledge production in the perceived centers
is therefore not identical to “white” women or even to other Third World
and Third World-looking subjects since it is colored by the new (or newly
found) meaning of “Muslim” in a post-9/11 world.
The study of premodern subjects does not escape the modern or con-
temporary coloring. Originating from specific modern-designated regions,
premodern historiographies are asked to explain how this geography of
modern science came to be as such and how modern science emerged
from premodern epistemic practices. Although history of science has
moved rapidly and successfully from a teleological story of the Dark Ages
giving birth to a bright present and future, the historiography of science
in contemporary peripheries is still unable to escape the question of why
these peripheries failed to emerge as the centers did. In the case of history
154 ahmed ragab

of science in Islamic societies in particular, a teleological reading of history

provides substance for apologia that displace the Islamic world from its
perceived marginality to a position in the geography of the center, albeit a
historical one. The Golden Age of Islamic civilization allows for divorcing
the contemporary political entities from their present epistemic geogra-
phy by implanting them in a new/old geography where they belonged to,
if not constituted, the center. This reading employs the modern and con-
temporary notions of precedence and of “who first did it” to legitimize this
imagined geography. In relation to women, the perceived modern values
of equality, equal access to resources and outdoor activity are implanted
in the past along with other epistemic virtues such as empiricism and
progress-oriented epistemology. The Muslim woman in the historical sci-
ence is not just a history but is rather a chance to narrate a different self,
based on essentialisms and fundamentally rooted identities.
This entry attempts to survey disciplinary questions and methodologi-
cal concerns in relation to the study of women in/and science in Islamic
societies and also in relation to Muslim women in/and science in the West.
Here, it examines the positionality of the woman in relation to scientific
and technological knowledge as an organizing principle and discusses the
study of women as producers, consumers and objects of this knowledge
respectively. Methods, tools and theories differ, sometimes remarkably,
between disciplines of history of science (in its different periodizations
and various sub-disciplines), philosophy of science, sociology and anthro-
pology of science, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). But many
of these disciplines and sub-disciplines share similar animating concerns
and similar a priori perceptions and views that allow the liberty of dis-
cussing such different types of scholarship across thematic lines, while
admitting the limitations inherent in this generalizing approach. As in
many other review entries, the works discussed here do not represent a
comprehensive or exhaustive list of recent works on the subject but are
rather presented as examples of different concerns and questions that
scholarship on the topic needs to address.

Women as Producers of Scientific Knowledge

In the larger global regime of scientific knowledge production, women in

Islamicate societies are located as subjects in sites that exist at the periph-
ery of the production geography. Many scholars have outlined how mod-
ern technological production remained centered in specific places around
 history of science 155

the world and that the distribution of the production follows particular
patterns that distribute not only epistemic and intellectual authority but
also environmental and labor costs of technological goods. It is not the
place of this entry to discuss these patterns of distribution. However, it is
instructive to highlight the fact that such distribution leads to structural
changes in the local institutions of knowledge production in the Third
World environment. The Third World site is, therefore, marginalized
by virtue of the lack of resources—scientific, technical and financial—
to produce knowledge, and is also deprived of the ability to produce or
receive scientific and epistemic authority. In other words, the Third World
site does not have the capacities of the first-world site to perform experi-
ments, in the larger sense of the word; it exists outside networks of com-
munication, and is therefore temporally delayed behind the first-world
networks, is burdened by the high environmental and labor costs required
for its share of production of scientific and technological goods, and is
removed from the ability to acquire Latourian “black boxes,” whether in
the forms of machines, tools or techniques of production. All these factors
play a significant role in determining the nature of the institutions and
actors involved in the production of scientific knowledge as they influence
not only the institution’s ability to grow or develop but also its missions,
both perceived and actualized, and the development of the actor both as
a member of the local institution, and of the larger global network.
In the case of different Islamic societies, the national independence
and liberation movements in the mid-twentieth century were coupled
with significant emphasis on scientific and technological knowledge pro-
duction that were part of rising nationalist ideologies. This emphasis led
to specific developments in the educational system that carved more
space for teaching natural sciences and for the development of vocational
schools that intended to create an educated and trained labor force. At the
university level, science programs expanded and the number of graduates
increased with the rise in social esteem of natural and medical sciences
as well as engineering. However, the lack of an institutional structure
capable of absorbing these graduates created yet more complexity in the
image of the scientist, a title given to graduates of science, technology,
engineering and mathematics (STEM) programs with little reservation.
These graduates were housed in the major sites of knowledge production,
in universities or in a number of state institutions and research centers,
which grew more and more overpopulated. In this environment, new
methods of work and new expectations for productivity are formulated
within a bureaucratic ethic of reproducing familiar patterns.
156 ahmed ragab

This nature of sites of scientific knowledge production poses important

challenges to the field as it dramatically changes the nature of the studied
subject. Here, the subject is no longer just another knowledge producer or
agent of scientific networks who is marginalized by patriarchy and gen-
der identity, whether at the level of knowledge production or at the level
of paradigm construction. More than that, the woman scientist in this
context struggles to define the scientist component of her identity and
suffers in a precarious position in global networks. The nature of the local
institutions and their history, which coincides with the history of mod-
ern science and technology in the region, creates a different paradigm of
knowledge production where women suffer from different degrees and
types of marginalization.
At one level, the existence of mandatory science curricula in all primary
and secondary school education is a significant question as it challenges
a number of assumptions related to the study of women in science in the
West. Similarly, the national exams at the end of secondary education
become the only manner through which students gain access to university
education, where different faculties select their students based solely on
their scores in the national exam. The rise of teaching-to-exam in secondary
education erases some of the perceived gender differences since teachers
are no longer in such a strong position to differentially enhance any stu-
dent’s opportunity based on their own gender biases and views. It is also
important to underscore that schools of medicine, pharmacy and dental
medicine remain at the top of the educational pyramid, producing yet more
incentives for both men and women to excel in the science components of
secondary education but without reflecting on the place of women in STEM
teaching and education (apart, perhaps, from engineering).
The crucial issue here is the lack of a guaranteed or even expected path
for graduates of science faculties since most of them will end up working
as school teachers or in other non-related professions. The study of women
at this stage of their science education remains drastically underdeveloped
in a manner that reflects the poor state of the field of the study of pre-
college education in Islamic societies in general. Here, the field faces the
necessity of developing new tools to read the text and subtext of gendered
identities and marginalized subjects and to understand how women are
marginalized in pre-college education in general. Though it is tempting
to isolate the teaching of science from other questions and dilemmas of
women’s education, it is not possible to understand or to analyze these
issues without proper study of women in pre-college ­education in general
where statistics show their numbers being lower than male students.
 history of science 157

Women graduates of faculties of science, their identities and their

careers, are important subjects for research but are not discussed suffi-
ciently. An important component of this discussion is rooted in the separa-
tion of the educational sphere from the marketplace, even its government
controlled part. In 2012, Diana Samulewicz, Georgeta Vidican, and Noor
Ghazal Aswad published a study in Gender, Technology and Development
discussing the barriers facing women in developing science careers in the
United Arab Emirates (Samulewicz et al. 2012). The study carries particu-
lar interest since the UAE has been pursuing an aggressive program of
emiratization of the workforce, providing better opportunities for citizens
to engage in different fields, with emphasis on science and technology. In
their interviews, women students of science and technology in Emirati
universities cited mismatches between the educational system and the
demands of the market (127). Here, the local university, although well-
funded in the case of UAE, remains at the margin of knowledge produc-
tion in a manner that renders its instructions either outdated or delivered
in an outdated manner.
It is important to remark that the outdatedness of the local univer-
sity instruction is not solely related to the subjects that are taught but
is also related to the perception of inferior levels of epistemic authority
in these universities. In other words, the teaching of basic sciences in
local universities may not effectively differ from teaching in US or Euro-
pean universities. However, the relative lack of epistemic authority in the
local university renders this teaching insufficient in terms of its authoriz-
ing and legitimizing function. Here, the label outdated is not necessarily a
description of a temporal relation between sciences taught here and there,
but is rather a discursive derogation that borrows the scientific epistemic
virtues of modernity, progress and communication to describe the per-
ceived weakness of the local institution. Similarly, the disconnect between
the university system and the market is also a discursive expression of a
peculiar relationship between the university and the specific sectors of
technological production that are located in the periphery and which are
normally of high labor and environmental cost. The local university is not
equipped to deliver graduates for US and European technological produc-
tion, and is not equipped to deliver graduates for local technologies either,
much of which entail higher environmental and labor costs.
Although the science graduate will occupy a higher position within
the structures of these “dirty” and “costly” technologies, this technology
is perceived as distinct and isolated from other more advanced forms of
scientific knowledge production, and the practical and technical nature of
158 ahmed ragab

the graduate’s future role becomes another barrier in the face of women
graduates. In the study, it was clear that women graduates perceived this
distinction and lamented the fact that all jobs are located in engineer-
ing rather than in research (Samulewicz et al. 2012, 135). The distinction
between research and engineering is significant as it reflects the specific
nature of technological practice and innovation in the Third World local-
ity, where engineering is reduced to a technical form of reproduction.
This nature of the professional field places more burdens onto the Emi-
rati woman graduate as these territories remain largely within the social
structures of masculinity. The subjects of the study cited issues such as
difficulty of transportation (Samulewicz et al. 2012, 137), ambivalence
towards mixed-gender work environment, and the lack of women role-
models (127). Although the question of women role-models and success-
ful female actors in the field was discussed and analyzed by many scholars
in the field studying European and American contexts, the female role-
model here is not only another successful scientist or professor who can
provide an image of how to make it. She is also a person who is able to
reincarnate the perceived scientific values and provide an image of the
scientist that is legible, and that can be identified both in navigating dif-
ferent professional networks and in solving social problems that stand
in the face of these young graduates.
The study, however, did not question the identity of the Emirati woman
and woman scientist in an environment where Emirati citizens are a little
more than one tenth of the population. It is not clear how the non-na-
tional women scientists and engineers behave or whether systems of local
recruitment effectively exclude these women when recruiting expert labor
from around the world. The socioeconomic background of the women in
the study influenced the necessity or the prospect of work in a manner
that needs to be further elaborated. Here, the animating research question
was formulated in a distinctly different environment, where networks of
science and technology production are of different natures and require
different forms of engagement. Therefore, the assumption that women
graduates of science faculties are necessarily seeking a career in science is
problematic since it neglects the peculiar nature of science college educa-
tion in this particular context and the social meaning and value of educa-
tion for these women and their families.
The value of education and the questioning of its sociocultural mean-
ing was more significant in Fauzia Ahmad’s study of South Asian Muslim
women in British universities (Ahmad 2001). Ahmad’s subjects of study
are remarkably different as they perform their educated selves in the
 history of science 159

­ ritish context, where science, technology, engineering, and mathemat-

B
ics are perceived differently, and where the capacity of engagement in
knowledge production is dramatically dissimilar. However, Ahmad and
her subjects perceive their collective selves in a framework of racism that
transformed them into Third World subjects, in spite of living in a non-
Third World site of knowledge production. This subjectivity animates
different perceptions of higher education in general and of science educa-
tion in particular. For these women, education and career were perceived
as instruments and guards against racism and marginalization; they
reported consistently that their families viewed education and careers as
necessities (Ahmad 2001, 143). The harsh economic environment and the
experienced racism and Islamophobia forces a gendered distribution of
earning power that relies on male offspring for work and pushes female
offspring towards education and more advanced careers (144). Here, the
prevalent perceptions of Islam and its role in these women’s lives colored
their experiences in specific manners that they may or may not identify
with or embrace (138).
Zehavit Gross studied Muslim Arab women as a minority in higher edu-
cation in Israel (Gross 2012). Her analysis reveals that more Arab women
than men are enrolled in higher education in Israel (153). She argues that
“Arab Women” feel “the need to excel” (155), and wonders whether this
is their way of establishing gender equality in their communities (153).
Gross’s analysis is important in its focus on the different social values of
education and on questioning the general roles played by education in
different social contexts. However, unlike Ahmad, she fails to recognize
the societal views surrounding these minority women and seems to be
interested only in the apparent contradiction of how more women take
part in higher education, while this education is, in itself, a mode of inte-
gration and assimilation. The studies of both Gross and Ahmad engage in
formulating definitions of a Muslim subject, who is constantly conflated
with the Arab subject in Gross’s study, and who is rooted in biographical
experience in Ahmad’s work. The definition of the object of study is itself
an important area for discussion that reveals a number of challenges fac-
ing the field, as will be shown later.
The definition of the subject is also important in Nuraihan Matt Duad’s
1999 study, “Women’s participation in scientific and technical fields in
Malaysia”; here the author starts with an ethno-religious mapping of the
field that identifies specific religious and cultural views in the Malay
Muslim community as worthy of analysis, in order to understand these
women’s participation in scientific and technical fields. Duad’s analysis
160 ahmed ragab

was connected to the Malaysian government’s attempt to evaluate its own

efforts over the last decades of the twentieth century. It is remarkable
in its transcendence of the ubiquitous Euro-Americo-centric definition of
the field that fails to recognize vocational schools and technical education
as part of science production. Duad is, indeed, very interested in the rise
of the number of women in “scientific and technical fields” (as opposed to
science and technology) and how this was connected to the development
of vocational schools in a manner that allowed more women to engage
in these professions. The different nature of scientific and technological
knowledge production outside the categorical West/North requires deep
analysis in order to understand the position of women in these contexts.
Here, vocational education does not produce scientists or engineers,
but rather practitioners of scientific and technological knowledge that is
an important component of the non-Euro-American science studies field.
More importantly, developing deeper studies on vocational schools will
enable us to understand different patterns of knowledge production; these
rely on expertise and aim at the maintenance of machine-life through fix-
ing and (a)mending in a manner that represents economic resistance, and/
or coping with a developing market of technological goods. This places
significant burdens on non-Euro-American markets. Here, the virtue of
maintenance, which is rooted in these peculiar patterns of knowledge
production, interacts with universality and progress as virtues of mod-
ern scientific knowledge at the epistemic level. The study of women in
these atypical sites of scientific knowledge production will reveal different
forms of gender identification and types of gender discrimination, in ways
that are dramatically different from the tropes of reduced mathematical
abilities prevalent in Euro-American discourses. Here, the effectiveness of
the practitioner, and therefore her justification, will be related to values
of dexterity, technical acumen, and rapid learning, which rely on different
gendered values; it will also be connected with issues of gender mixing
and gender segregation and, sometimes, questions of physical power and
prowess.
In the same vein of exploring different and non-traditional methods of
producing scientific and technical knowledge, Nelofer Halai’s 2005 study
of women science teachers in Pakistan produces a different view of who
should be considered a practitioner of science. Halai’s article, written in
the first person as a personal account of the teacher under study, is quick
to connect the practice of science teaching to laboratory practice; this is
because the subject of the article was not able to find work in laboratories
and ended up as a science teacher (Halai 2005, 28). The science teacher
 history of science 161

is not only a conduit of scientific knowledge in the pre-college context

but is also a conduit of the meaning and perception of science. As a Third
World subjectivity, our science teacher is aware of the limitations related
to her collective position in the production of scientific knowledge, and
is also deeply connected to mid-twentieth century discourses about the
role of science and technology in national liberation. At one level, the
woman science teacher can be perceived as an important step towards
inserting gender diversity into science education, and towards creat-
ing women scientists more frequently and more efficiently by providing
important examples of women in science. On another level, it is impor-
tant to ­recognize the gendered nature of teaching and how the presence
of the woman teacher of science could, in part, be an incarnation of the
gender bias that limits the ability of women practitioners of science to
follow laboratory careers.
The symbol of the laboratory in many of the studies discussed so far,
and in many others, is equally significant. Here, the laboratory is not a
locale of interaction where the student of science, especially at college
level, interacts with machines, tools, and discursive presentations with
the expectation of repeating such interactions after graduation. Instead,
it is rather a rarified space, which exists at the level of iconic presence, to
condition the practice of science and to remove it from local and regular
life. The “lab” as an icon of science does not “live” in the local university
or school, and the woman science student is unable to engage in a first-
hand experience with this environment before graduation. Moreover, this
unfamiliarity is compounded with the reality of the absence of women
scientists as role models who would familiarize the iconic site and cre-
ate recognizable bridges between the present and the imagined future.
The lack of symbols further highlights the barriers facing women in access-
ing non-familiar objects and places, which are restricted metaphorically
to men.
Understanding how the expression of the scientist as a professional dif-
fers in Islamic societies, in part due to their location in a Third World
sphere, highlights the artificial and contrived definition of the scientist as
a sociocultural category; it also highlights the significance (and the con-
textuality) of grouping science, technology, engineering and mathematics
under one category. It appears that a fuller understanding of the condi-
tions of women in science in Islamic societies would require a deeper
investigation into the scientific practice itself that would reveal the local
meaning of the practice. In the studies discussed in this entry, the cat-
egory of scientist is always contrasted, rather than coupled with, that of
162 ahmed ragab

engineer. While the former is iconically connected to the non-existent or

the inaccessible laboratory and symbolizes progress and innovation, the
latter is connected to applied and imported technologies, and to processes
of constant reproduction rather than innovation. Moreover, the engineer
is located in a genderscape that connects the position with manual work
and with disciplining and managing a labor force, who belong to a differ-
ent socioeconomic class. All these issues further remove the “engineer”
from the “woman” science student in this structure of gender roles. In the
case of minority women, the disconnect between education, career, and
engagement in the production of knowledge is also the result of discrimi-
nation, racism and Islamophobia, and can only be understood through
analysis of how Muslim women are perceived and understood in the
society. The peculiar position of Muslim minorities post-9/11 adds more
dimension to the experience of these women and cannot be divorced
from their work in the school, laboratory or factory.

The Woman Scientist as Interlocutor

So far, the focus here has been on the “absent woman” in science; an
attempt has been made to discuss how we should analyze the limited
participation of women in science and technology careers. However, the
study of women in science has to include a detailed discussion of women
scientists in Islamic societies as well as in their capacity as minorities.
In the past decade, leading publications in natural sciences were inter-
ested in “understanding” the place of Muslim women scientists and the
obstacles they face as well as their place in their societies. Three examples
can show us how the woman scientist is perceived, auto-perceived and
constructed within the gendered and religio-cultural subjectivities that
these actors perform: Farkhonda Hassan’s “Islamic Women in Science”
(2000), Ehsan Masood’s “Women at Work” (2005) and Rana Dajani’s “How
Women Scientists Fare in the Arab World” (2012). In these instances, the
Muslim “woman-scientist” is given a voice by spokespersons, in the works
by Hassan and Dajani, both of whom are scientists working and teach-
ing in university systems; or, in Masood’s piece, through interviews and
investigative reporting conducted by another (Muslim or Muslim-looking)
woman-journalist. The choice of these spokespersons and the manner in
which they address the larger scientific audience are important to the
understanding of how these women perceive their own identities as sci-
entists; as they publish in the leading science journals in the world yet
 history of science 163

not about their science but about their identities, how they relate to the
audience of these journals (or how they perceive this audience), and how
they understand the difficulties facing them in their own practice.
Both Hasan and Dajani begin their discussion by connecting the con-
temporary conditions of women in science with a perceived Islamic past,
where women practiced science in the medieval period, and by arguing
that Islam does not preclude or prevent women’s education. Recalling the
Islamic medieval past is an important trope that reveals the relative posi-
tion of the Muslim or Muslim-located scientist in relation to the West; this
animation of medieval Islamic sciences provides an opportunity to reclaim
a scientific heritage that removes the Muslim subject from the Third World
locality into a different, “more advanced” identity. For women scientists,
recalling the Islamic past is also linked with denying a presumed prohi-
bition against women’s learning and working, which the three authors
appear to be expecting from their audience. Immediately, the “Muslim”
woman scientist, writing in a leading scientific journal, is faced with her
own alienation and with the level of marginalization imposed on her not
only as a scientist from the periphery of knowledge production but also
because of perceived prejudices that she can sense in her readers. The
Muslim woman scientist is perceived in the journal in this order: Muslim,
then woman, then scientist.
Dajani writes:
Despite the impression given by extremists, Islam gives women the right to
education. More than four in ten women who go to university in Jordan go
into science, engineering or medicine. Women outnumber men in courses
in natural science, pharmacology and agriculture; numbers are equal in
maths and computer science; and one in three engineering students is a
woman” (Dajani 2012).
Dajani’s arguments are rooted in a defensive posture that intends to
provide “the correct image of Islam” to a largely prejudiced audience.
Similarly, Hassan begins her article by enumerating names of important
medieval Islamic scholars, whom she presents as evidence contrary to the
notion that Islam is antagonistic to science. In an attempt to authorize
a specific part of her identity in the eyes of her readers, she also cites
verses from the Qurʾān and prophetic traditions that discuss the necessity
of learning and education.
Dajani’s article moves to a more detailed discussion of problems facing
women such as herself in science. Her major contention is related to what
she perceived as male-centered standards of measuring achievements
164 ahmed ragab

that are produced by a male-dominated world. She gives an example of

a competition for women scientists in the Islamic world, sponsored by
L’Oréal and UNESCO, that accepted submissions from women under 40.
She explains: “This is biased, and based on metrics from a male-dominated
world, in which if a man doesn’t make it by 40 he is a failure” (Dajani
2012). In her view, this male-centered metric is not only the fault of the
male-dominated world but is also connected to the feminist movement,
which “was a good thing, but it was too focused on equality with men and
failed to enable us to respect ourselves as women and to be proud of who
we are.” Dajani’s article appears to be concerned with two major issues
that are at the heart of her identification as a Muslim woman scientist: the
connection between Muslim women and other women around the world
who share similar problems, and the status of women in the Islamic world
and their specific problems.
In relation to the first, Dajani explains how all women suffer from lack
of mentoring and networking and that the extra time needed for mentor-
ing provides an unfair advantage for men: “Men mentor each other and
spend time together after work, fostering the men’s club. Women rush
home to take care of children, not because they have to but because they
want to” (Dajani 2012). It is significant here to see how she highlights her
belief that women are not forced by specific gender roles to provide more
time for family care but rather want to do so, in a manner that assumes
a natural role and disposition for women. She believes that the exclu-
sion of the home as a workspace is a sign of male dominance: “The years
we spend taking care of children are not calculated as part of the gross
domestic product of a country. What is more important—to build physi-
cal things or to nurture a human being?”
In discussing what she perceives as the central problems facing Middle
Eastern and Muslim women that are unique to them and specific to their
conditions, she does not, in fact, outline any single problem. Instead, she
explains how certain problems that face women scientists in the West
are not applicable to the Islamic world and how misconceptions about
women in the Muslim world may produce the illusion of non-existent
problems. She explains that a study on American women scientists that
highlighted biases against women scientists would not apply to the Mus-
lim women because “the prevailing attitude among both men and women
is that women work hard and are more dependable than men.” She also
explains that a “much-misunderstood issue is the covering of the hair and
sometimes the face by Muslim women”; this covering gives the impres-
sion of oppression whereas many of her students make a choice to cover
 history of science 165

their hair, and sometimes their faces, while engaging in scientific learning
and careers. Dajani’s arguments about Muslim women are imbedded in a
fear and skepticism of Western/feminist intervention, which she believes
is often misguided: “I know of an American researcher who went to Bul-
garia to help women fight for their rights. She went assuming that they
would want to demand to work. But Bulgarian women who had lived
under Communism wanted the exact opposite. They wanted the freedom
to stay at home if they chose.”
Dajani’s article, seen as a public testimony of a scientist directed
towards other scientists, published in one of the important science jour-
nals, reveals important questions for scholarship on women in science
that need to be addressed. The foremost issue is related to the apparent
inability of Dajani to identify with a proclaimed global community of sci-
entists and her desire, and failure, to integrate in this socio-intellectual
community. Dajani’s identification is rooted both in her location in sites
of science production, where her major work and activity is in teaching
and not in research. She is also deeply aware of the prejudice that sur-
rounds her “Muslim” identity; this moves her into a defensive position
and a process of self-justification that obstructs the causes and problems
of [Muslim] women in science. In this view, the question that animates
Dajani becomes the problems facing Muslim women rather than those
facing Muslim women.
In his study of gender in the Palestinian nationalist discourse, Joseph
Massad argues that the place occupied by Palestinian women in the
sphere of nationalist discourse production and consumption is rooted
in their identification as Palestinian first and foremost; this leads to the
inclusion of the woman question under the larger nationalist paradigm
(Massad 1995). Similarly, Dajani’s work exemplifies how the question of
Muslim women in science becomes subsumed under a larger discussion
of “Islam and the West”, presented only in relation to questions that are
related to the perceptions of Islam in the contemporary world. On the
other hand, Dajani’s contribution is not only subsumed under this discus-
sion but is also regulated within the discursive space by considerations
that perceive “Islam,” “Muslim” and “Muslim woman” as particular objects
of knowledge. In other words, the production of her article, in one of
the leading journals in the field, is regulated by Dajani being a Muslim
woman and her contribution is expected and formulated within this cat-
egory that precludes her, or others in her category, from engaging with the
question of women in science. In this view, the “woman” as a universal
object of knowledge is immediately coupled with “science,” which is also
166 ahmed ragab

identified as universal yet squarely housed in particular sites of knowledge

­production. The “science” that is produced outside is equally connected
to the “women” who are “produced” outside the center, and both are per-
ceived as specific, unique and particular. The visual presentation of the
article locates a quote in the center that reads “One must not fall into the
trap of transferring solutions from one culture to another” with “fall into
the trap” and “one culture” highlighted even further and shown in a dif-
ferent color.
Farkhonda Hassan’s article (2000) presents a more complex and detailed
picture than that presented by Dajani. Hassan is a professor of geology at
the American University in Cairo and served as a member of the Egyptian
parliament upper house and as a co-chair of the Gender Advisory Board
at the United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Devel-
opment. The introduction speaks of how Islam is not in contradiction
with science and does not prohibit people from learning and practicing
science. Next, Hassan appears to be concerned to explain how it is not
possible or legitimate to generalize assumptions about Muslim women;
social customs and traditions differ not only from one country to another
but even from urban to rural contexts. At the same time, she explains that
many of the problems that women in Islamic societies face are similar to
those faced by women in the West:
Other factors, well-known to Western women, also exist, such as the chal-
lenges of combining responsibilities for a household and family (usually
extended family) with a professional career. In addition, because scientific
communities are highly resistant to change and science itself advances at
a remarkable pace, it is extremely difficult for a woman to re-enter the
­scientific workforce once she has put her career on hold to raise a family
(Hassan 2012).
Hassan’s work shows, contrary to Dajani’s, how women scientists in
Islamic societies perceive themselves as part of the larger network of
women scientists and how they can animate a relationship with centers
of production of scientific knowledge in a manner that underscores dif-
ference and similarity. Hassan’s positions in parliament and in the United
Nations allow her to express this integration and to formulate a deep and
effective discourse. However, she is still under the pressure of defining
and defending the “Muslim” component of her perceived identity.
The highlighting of the “Muslim” component of the perceived identity
as a sign of locality within the larger discourse can be more evidently
visible in Masood’s journalistic report on women scientists in Pakistan
(Masood 2005). In this report, Masood interviewed a number of women
 history of science 167

scientists and explained how the biases and the social pressure against
women working alone or working late were influential in threaten-
ing their careers: they were unable to do fieldwork and were prevented
from working late or “socializing after work with male colleagues” (452).
Masood tries to portray the complexity of the situation and how women
were actually fighting against these rules and coming up with solutions
and ways to circumvent these difficulities. The article is accompanied by
a photo of a woman scientist who is sitting at her computer and the cap-
tion reads: “To love, honour and assay: chemist Shazia Anjum had a clause
put in her marriage contract allowing her to continue working” (Masood
2005).
Although Masood’s article can be easily dismissed as another sign
of the marginalization of Muslim women and of how the perception of
“Muslim” is central to how the scientific community and its major pub-
lications perceive these scientists, it is important to recognize that the
discussion of women scientists in Muslim societies cannot ignore the
specific and material obstacles and difficulties that they face. The prac-
tice of science and technology should not be seen as a rarified practice
where the major question becomes one of “access” in the most ephem-
eral meanings of the term; nor should it be seen as a formalized percep-
tion of access as translated into the number of women or percentages
of them in different positions of scientific and technological knowledge
production. Instead, the practice of science and technology is essentially
an embodied practice where the gendered selves perform, not only their
expertise, their epistemes and their accesses to specific sites of knowl-
edge, but also, and more importantly, their genders in manners that are
regulated by different sociocultural factors. Here, the embodied practice
of collecting samples or of visiting marine biology sites at certain times of
day or night must be perceived in terms of how these various indicators
are lined against a larger understanding of gendered selves, spaces and
times. Masood’s interviewees, much like Hassan and Dajani, are located in
a gendered performance that regulates and narrates their embodied prac-
tice in a technology of the self that organizes their presence in sites of sci-
entific and technological knowledge production. Without careful analysis
of these embodied practices, the study of women as science agents and
actors will remain limited, and will continue to be locked in a defensive
posture that is also preoccupied with how “Muslim women” are used by
the “women in science” discourse to foreground the “Muslim” perception;
and it will not seriously engage with how these women live and perform
their identities in their own context, be it local or global.
168 ahmed ragab

The discussion of women as subjects and agents of scientific knowl-

edge production, which takes into consideration the local and contextual
­perceptions of science and technology and of the woman’s gendered iden-
tity in the society, must distinguish between women in Islamic societies
and Muslim women in the West. While it is important to deal with the
Third World identity of Muslim women in the West, it is equally impor-
tant to recognize the structural differences that govern the agent’s access
to sites of knowledge production. In fact, introducing local gendered
­performances in the analysis of women as agents of science produces
important distinctions between women in different regions and allows
for more diversity in the analysis of women in Muslim societies by empha-
sizing the locality, historicity and contextual nature of gendered perfor-
mances. In Fauzia Ahmad’s study of Southeast Asian Muslim women in
England, the specific nature of the gendered performance of a minority
woman is evident in the different valuation of education as a commodity
that is, per se, independent from career, and in the differential distribution
of educational goods between males and females within this particular
environment (Ahmad 2001). Here, the women studied by Ahmad perform
a specific collective identity that projects them in the social sphere and
that rearranges the meaning, significance and value of different social
and technical goods.

Women as Objects of Knowledge

In addition to their presence as agents of scientific and technological

knowledge, the place of women in the scientific and technological dis-
course includes how women are perceived, understood and studied as
objects of scientific knowledge. Women-as-agents and women-as-objects
exist on two seemingly opposing sides of the relations governing ­scientific
and technological knowledge production. But the complex identity of
either group remains influenced by the larger gendered performances
of “the woman” as an object of sociocultural knowledge and experience;
these gendered performances condition and regulate the making of “the
woman” in the previously discussed categories. As objects of scientific
knowledge, women are recreated into specific molds and categories of
knowing that mandate the proper, natural and scientifically expected
behavior, which acquires the authority of the scientific discourse itself.
In the case of “Muslim” women as a minority group in the West, or in the
view of sites of knowledge production, even if they are physically located
 history of science 169

in Muslim societies, the scientific discourse becomes a tool of normaliza-

tion-through-discovery as it charts the normalcy of the Muslim Woman
in relation to different views and convictions. This form of normalization
is also rooted in a deep sense of difference that singles out the concerned
minority group and motivates the act of normalization.
In 2006, Karen J. Aroian, Anne Katz and Anahid Kulwicki published a
study, “Recruiting and Retaining Arab Muslim Mothers and Children for
Research.” The study was motivated by what the authors found to be a
significant research problem related to recruiting Arab Muslim women
in the United States and to retaining them, a problem which threatens
the development of research on subjects related to such communities.
The authors located their research within the framework of other studies
on recruiting and retaining subjects from other minorities; they presented
their findings about the tools that they used to retain women in a study
about women’s and children’s adjustment in post-9/11 United States. The
research is foregrounded in the uniqueness of the object of study and in
the perceived inability of scientific research to engage with these objects
effectively and efficiently. In this view, “Arab Muslim Women” share a
common “property” with other minorities. However, the research argues
that they stand apart due to the specific nature of Arab culture and
Islamic religious law, which proposes specific gender roles and makes
these women more difficult to deal with.
The first step, in their recruitment and retention efforts, was to hire and
use “local” informants and cultural consultants who were able to advise
the researchers on how to address this community. The authors explain
the identity of the consultants: “Their cultural expertise was through being
Arab immigrants themselves and from their experiences as longstanding
health and social services providers to Arab Muslims.” The consultants’
epistemic power was brought about by their locality and their ability to
“translate” the specificity of the objects under study to the research team.
Moreover:
One of the coinvestigators was also an expert on Arab culture. This coinves-
tigator (A. Kulwicki) is an immigrant from an Arab country and has years
of research experience with Arabs, both locally in the US and abroad in the
Middle East. These consultants and the coinvestigator (hereafter collectively
referred to as the cultural experts) made recommendations about which
gatekeepers to engage, where and how to advertise for study participants,
whom to hire as data collectors, how and what data to collect, and how to
track and encourage participation in subsequent points of the longitudinal
study (Aroian et al. 257).
170 ahmed ragab

Here, the third coinvestigator, who started the paper as one of the women-
agents, was dislocated from the position of agent of knowledge ­production
to the position of object translator, by virtue of her identity as a woman
of an (unidentified) Arab country. Following this dislocation, Kulwicki
loses part of her authorial voice in the article and becomes one of the
“cultural experts,” who represent not only translators but also objects of
the study.
Here, it is important to note that the study is not really concerned
with the adaptation of women and children in post-9/11 United States but
mainly and openly with how to recruit and retain Muslim Arab objects.
This is not just a study of a particular collection of objects of knowledge
that are organized in a certain way or under specific circumstances. It
is rather a study of how to collect these objects and keep them without
attrition, promising to help other research projects in many other fields.
Here, the “cultural experts” are not just tools in a larger project but are,
in fact, part of the research, as they become an intervention that worked
and a strategy that the paper advocates using. At this level, Kulwicki’s
metamorphosis into a cultural expert is all the more significant because
it foregrounds the fact that Muslim women-as-agents of knowledge are
formed in part through the scientific discursive understanding of wom-
en-as-objects. However, Kulwicki’s role as part of, and not as the whole,
group of cultural experts can be read as an act of resistance to her role as
an object of knowledge and the result of an attempt at maintaining the
position as agent.
The transmutation of researchers’ identities around their perceived
“Muslim” and “Arab” subjectivities was not limited to Kulwicki. It extended
to the data collectors who were also chosen for their Arab origin and
because they had commitment and connections to the community:
We expected attrition to be higher if the data collector changed. Thus, we
tried to create positive work experiences for our data collectors. We paid
them generously and were highly cognizant of their needs. Because the
data collectors were professionals and mature women who were balanc-
ing the study with other employment and family commitments, they were
allowed to autonomously manage their workload to suit their individual life
circumstances. Their goal was to earn additional income during after-work
hours (i.e., late afternoon, early evening, and weekends), which coincided
with when the study population was accessible. The only stipulation was
that data collectors were asked generally to collect data from at least one
mother-child dyad per week, but we relaxed this expectation during reli-
gious holidays and if they had more pressing priorities (Aroian et al. 259).
 history of science 171

What is significant about the discussion of data collectors is how the pro-
cess of providing a comfortable work environment, which is usually not
part of the discursive structure of papers and is often taken for granted,
becomes part of the paper’s discussion; the data collectors’ motives, circum-
stances and their availability become a component of the paper’s analysis.
Here, the collectors are investigated and their religious affiliations and
familial commitments are underscored in line with how the authors high-
lighted similar factors in their other studied objects. In this framework, the
research reinforces a number of views and discursive statements about
“Arab Muslim Women” and renders them into regularized and controlled
objects of scientific inquiry. In the process, the identity of the quintes-
sential “woman in science,” who is normally and normatively identified
with the woman-as-agent of scientific knowledge, becomes connected
and derived from the perceived identities of other “women in science,”
who function as objects of knowledge and whose gendered performances
and ethnocultural representations are all the more ­pronounced.

Conclusion

The study of Muslim women and women in Islamic cultures and societ-
ies in their relationship and interactions with scientific and technological
knowledge and discourse suffers from many of the problems that affect
the study of modern and contemporary science and technology in the
region. These include paucity of sources, difficulty in conducting research,
and the discursive devaluation of the study of non-Western scientific
discourse, particularly in the South, and/or Third World; this results in
a smaller community of scholars and researchers, especially in humani-
ties and qualitative social sciences. Moreover, the study is influenced by
other problems that relate to how contemporary scholarship deals with
women in Islamic cultures and how many writings fall somewhere on a
continuum of Islamophobia and Islamophilia with little problematization
of categories such as women and Islam, among others.
The future of the study of women in science in Islamic societies and
cultures requires central and deep revision of our understanding of these
different categories in ways that would open up different spaces for read-
ing and for investigation. The space of what constitutes women in sci-
ence must be expanded to include women acting as agents of scientific
knowledge, but also as objects of this knowledge. Here, important works
on reproductive policies and women’s health, on women’s education
172 ahmed ragab

projects, which were part of a larger framework of modernization, lib-

eration and postcolonial projects (Sayyid-Marsot 2005), on children’s
health in their connection to mothers (such as campaigns for vaccination
against polio, for treatment of diarrhea, and for improvement of infant
mortality statistics), and on perceptions of population growth and sexual
health among other issues (Hughes 2011, Inhorn 2003, 2012), represent
one of the brightest and most developed parts of the field. For instance,
Hibba Abugideiri’s “Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colo-
nial Egypt” is an excellent example of engaging the history of women as
“objects” of scientific knowledge and practice, and of socio-medical con-
trol or “biopolitics” (Abugideiri 2010, Hassan 2011).
Women in science should also include women as consumers of sci-
entific and technological knowledge and products. Some work was pro-
duced on the production of certain “women-oriented” technologies, such
as vacuum cleaners, dish-washers, cookers and other home appliances,
in the post-Second World War era. But we are still to see similar discus-
sions analyzing the rise of such products in the Middle East and Islamic
world, especially since the 1980s, and how these products were directed
towards women in a manner that reformulated the woman consumer
into the perfect object of these technologies. We also need to know how
these women, with their rising collective and variable identities and per-
formances in different societies and settings, influenced the directions of
these products (for an interesting example of this type of work, which falls
outside the period covered by this entry, see Joubin 1996). Similarly, the
study of women in science in the premodern world remains in its infancy,
suffering from the deep lack of sources in a largely androcentric archive,
where women hardly figure. However, this paucity of sources is also self-
inflicted, a result of the delay in rearranging the premodern archive in a
manner that yields more information and that allows for better readings.
A gendered reading of the premodern archive gave birth to significant
works by many scholars of women’s history in pre-modern Islamic societ-
ies but these methods wait to be introduced to the archives of premodern
Islamic sciences (see, for instance, Najmabadi 2005, 1999, El-Cheikh 2005,
2004, 2002, 1997, Roded 1994, Spellberg 1994, Sonbol 2005, Keddie and
Baron 1991).
The study of Muslim women in the West made important contribu-
tions over the past decades but these contributions did not result in
serious discussion of Muslim women in Western scientific communi-
ties and discourse. For this mission to be accomplished, the category of
Muslim women needs to be deconstructed to reveal the internal dynam-
ics of minority groups and the different local strategies that are used to
 history of science 173

provide and protect common identities. The analysis of how these women
engage scientific and technological discourses requires deep engagement
with the Third World persona and how this view colors the development
of scientific discourse.
Finally, a re-evaluation of the category science-technology-engineering-
mathematics is very much in order. The prototypical and normative per-
ception of the agent in STEM, as the scientist-in-laboratory, appears to be
insufficient to understand the myriad subjectivities of the STEM agent in
the non-West. Here, it is important to analyze how the mid-twentieth cen-
tury state fashioned its new institutions of science within specific bureau-
cratic structures. The division scientist/administrator became inadequate
to describe the professional situation, and defined the practice of science
and technology in a way that differed significantly from how it is treated
in the West. Similarly, the presumed connection and continuity between
education and career needs to be re-evaluated to allow for recognizing
and understanding deeper and more complicated gendered practices,
and hierarchal and patriarchal structures. STEM should be expanded to
include other practitioners and producers of local knowledge that may
not be part of the regular method of STEM knowledge production.
The study of Muslim women and women in Islamic cultures and societ-
ies in relation to science and technology is at the intersection of different
performances, the most significant of which is the sociocultural perfor-
mance of the “woman” as a gendered entity, which is defined, regulated
and ritualized through different social forces and practices. It is necessary
to analyze and understand how scientific and technological discourses,
institutions and actors foreground patriarchal and, often, misogynistic
practices; the larger making of the gendered identity of women and their
performances as women-in-society are also significant parts of this image.
Without understanding questions of gender segregation, limitations of
women’s political and legal rights, violations of women’s bodies and regu-
lation of their sexualities, institutionalization and decriminalization of
assault and mutilation among other similar practices, it is not possible to
arrive at genuine understanding of women-in-science because we would
lose “women” in our attempt at a “scientific” study.

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 Sources and Methodologies: History: Southeast Asia

Vannessa Hearman

Introduction

This entry provides an overview of the sources and methodologies for the
writing of history related to women, gender and sexuality. It deals primar-
ily with the countries of Southeast Asia where Islam has a strong influence
on women’s lives, namely Indonesia and Malaysia, in which Muslims form
the majority of the population. Muslims also form a majority in Brunei
Darussalam and Muslim minorities can also be found in Philippines and
Thailand, but the bulk of new historical research and writing deals with
Indonesia and Malaysia. This entry will explore how in the last decade
historical research and writing about and in this region have taken shape.
Since 1998, Indonesia has experienced the most significant changes politi-
cally and socially and therefore quite some attention will be devoted to
discussing that part of Southeast Asia. Renewed interest in histories that
deal with women and gender in the Southeast Asian region are guided by
developments in the field of history, but also by how women’s lives are
affected as a result of global changes affecting Muslims worldwide. The
first disciplinary entry on the history of the region in the Encyclopedia of
Women and Muslim Cultures was written by Virginia Hooker (2003) and
covered the issues of sources and methodologies of women in Islamic
cultures in East, South and Southeast Asia. This entry covers the period
subsequent to that covered by Hooker, but focuses attention on Southeast
Asia only.

The Premodern and Early Modern

In her entry of 2003, Virginia Hooker examined premodern and early mod-
ern Southeast Asia primarily through the work of Barbara Watson Andaya,
which analyzes the role of women prior to the arrival of Islam as a domi-
nant religion in these areas and the arrival of the nation-state. In the dis-
cussion below on premodern and early modern sources and approaches
for the study of women and gender in Southeast Asia, this entry draws
on Andaya’s (2006) study, the Flaming Womb, in which she argues that
it is possible to conceive of women as a Southeast Asian category and
178 vannessa hearman

that women in Southeast Asia shared a similar set of circumstances, par-

ticularly in the early modern period and at the onset of capitalism. Islam
began to be practiced in Southeast Asia from approximately the thirteenth
century. In analyzing women’s lives during premodern and early modern
Southeast Asia, it is possible, in Andaya’s view, to conceive of Southeast
Asia as a region. In this region, women enjoyed a relatively important
status in the political realm and as economic agents.
Access to sources in the writing of the history of women in Southeast
Asia, particularly in the “early modern” period, the period from about 1400,
is still a major constraint. For one, women occupied little historical space.
Second, Southeast Asia occupies the zone between the Pacific’s high level
of orality and the text-rich East and South Asia. It does not have the rich
repositories of manuscripts and documents that China and India have for
example. In Andaya’s view (2006, 42), the fifteenth century becomes the
primary gateway for studying the history of women in Southeast Asia, due
to the increase in source material, which occurred with growing trade and
commerce, increasing “religious coherence” and political centralization in
the region. Women are also still accorded little historical space in this early
modern period because of problems in regard to sources. Access to a wide
range of sources is still a constraint, particularly if a historian’s research
approach was through privileging written documents in the archives. The
region’s cultural and linguistic diversity pose a constraint for the histo-
rian. Visual resources unlike in East Asia are few. This is a result of the
lack of technology, such as in woodblock printing, in the early modern
period and the impact of restrictions under Islam on depictions of ani-
mate beings. In response, Andaya (2006, 43) suggests approaches using
other sources that might at the same time also “transverse the boundaries
of the contemporary nation-states.” As modern nation-states have come
about, historical research and writing have shifted to a firm focus on each
nation-state and its colonial experience, rather than a regional approach.
In dealing with the period prior to the early modern in Southeast Asia,
Andaya suggests the importance of “interdisciplinary conversations,” for
example with archaeologists in reading historical sites and early inscrip-
tions, which can shed some light on the role of women in society.
While there are more source materials from the early modern period,
the fourteenth century onwards, many documents, such as royal edicts,
codes, chronicles and texts derived from this period have not survived
due to the tropical climate, natural disasters, the long years of conflict that
afflicted the region, or through mismanagement. Priorities accorded by
government to the preservation of historical sources have also varied. For
 sources and methodologies: history: southeast asia 179

example, a project to digitize and upload 3,000 Balinese lontar (palmyra

leaf ) manuscripts was funded by the American-based Internet Archive
Foundation, but has faced a lack of government funding to continue the
project to the next phase; this involves translating the manuscripts from
the old Javanese language of Kawi into Balinese, Indonesian and English
to make them more accessible (Erviani 2012). Problems with theft and
looting of artifacts, such as in the case of the 2006 theft and substitution
of six Hindu statues at the Radya Pustaka Museum in Solo, show the fra-
gility of these historical sources ( Jakarta Post 2008). As the case of the
lontar manuscripts has shown, without translation, linguistic access to
the historical records contained in these manuscripts depends on some-
times increasingly few scholars trained in the languages. Translation itself
is only a partial answer, as meanings also shift, however slightly, as a result
of translation and mediation by third parties. As “low enrolment” languages
such as Sanskrit are cut from university curricula (Lall 2006), the train-
ing of historians in these languages comes under threat. Other difficulties
include the predominance of male ethnographers who found it difficult to
access the female world, and low levels of female literacy. Andaya (2006,
53) argues that female expression relied on a high level of orality, such as
in laments and chants in the Batak culture of North Sumatra. Despite the
increase of documentary sources from the fourteenth century on, these are
still inadequate for researching women’s history in Southeast Asia.
Chinese traders and travelers were some of the earliest ethnographers
who documented their experiences over the course of their travel to the
Nanyang, as Southeast Asia was described. Later as Westerners, travel-
ers, traders and religious clergy, arrived in Southeast Asia, indigenous life
in Southeast Asia became more documented, for example by members
of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie,
VOC) and Portuguese and Spanish clergy. Observations by travelers and
ethnographers about local peoples describe their ways of life, but this by
no means renders women less invisible. For example, Daniel Beeckman
in his accounts about the Dayak in southeast Borneo in the early eigh-
teeenth century, wrote that he never saw any of the Dayak women and
therefore could not write anything about them (Andaya 2006, 64). The
moral preoccupations of those who observed and wrote these accounts
also strongly inflected their reports about indigenous customs and prac-
tices. In the sixteenth century, Spanish clergy who had arrived to spread
religion viewed indigenous sexual practices, such as the use of the penis
pin in the Philippines, with contempt and as indicative of the lack of
modesty of the indigenous people. Carolyn Brewer (2004) remarks upon
180 vannessa hearman

the constraint of sources in her study of the imposition of Catholicism

in the Philippines. Brewer’s sources were European missionary accounts,
which lamented indigenous resistance to evangelization, without the cor-
responding indigenous women’s voices. Despite, as Andaya (2006, 65) has
shown, growing sophistication in Europeans’ approaches towards under-
standing indigenous practices, many other factors mitigated against Euro-
peans’ capacity to understand and in turn explain what they observed.
Given Europeans usually lived separately from indigenous people, mis­
understandings about the meanings of what they observed often occurred.
As a result of the separation of the races and their different living circum-
stances, Dutch women’s letters from Batavia, for example, deal with life in
a European household, rather than the geographic context in which it was
situated. Stefan Amirell (2011) has successfully combined the use of Chi-
nese, Malay and Western sources to investigate the endurance of female
rule in the Malay kingdom of Patani, located in present day Southern
Thailand, from 1584 to 1718, in the face of the spread of Islam to Patani.
Chinese and Western visitors wrote accounts of their contact with the
Patani royal court and the Hikayat Patani was a Malay royal chronicle
that Amirell estimates to have been set down at the turn of the eighteenth
century to record the past glories of Patani. He found that with the arrival
of Islam, the rulers of Patani did not seem to have been interested in pro-
moting Islamic scholarship or culture and “idol worship” continued until
the sevententh century (Amirell 2011, 308). In contrast to Aceh, there do
not seem to have been instances of protest or opposition on the basis of
Islam to female rulership. He concludes that the relatively weak status
of Islam contributed to the institutionalization of female rule until the
seveteenth century and the decline of Patani was caused by European
expansionism rather than the shortcomings of female rule. This case study
has shown us that historical knowledge about the early modern period of
Southeast Asia can develop by analyzing accounts by outsiders combined
with indigenous documents.
The Western historiographical approach of separating history from
“literature” and performance is “singularly unhelpful in the non-Western
world” (Andaya 2006, 55). Literature, folk stories, dramatic performances,
material culture and objects such as weavings and pottery are also sources
of understanding women’s lives in Southeast Asia. These can pose diffi-
culties in analysis however, as there is still a high likelihood that non-
conventional historical sources have altered significantly over the years.
Folklore, morality tales and plays are not stable repositories of meaning
 sources and methodologies: history: southeast asia 181

and are highly contingent on the context in which they are performed.
For example in the context of growing Islamization in East Java, certain
performances or rituals, such as the prayer-meal (selamatan) are seen as
more associated with the Hindu-Buddhist past, and therefore indicative
of an unenlightened time and less likely to be performed (Beatty 2009).
Hence the constraints of these performative sources of history return us to
the question of the importance of interdisciplinary dialogues, such as with
anthropology, archaeology and religious studies, for greater understand-
ing about what our sources are telling us.

Archival and Other Types of Research

The most significant contribution of the colonial period to historical

research is the production of records and documents and the resulting
archives. Meticulous record keeping, of the style to which Western his-
torians are accustomed, tends to be associated with the period after the
arrival of Westerners. For present-day Indonesia, these came in the form
first of the records of the Dutch East India company in the sixteenth cen-
tury and, after its demise in 1800, Dutch colonial administration records.
Andaya has argued that women’s histories can be also be found through
population records and since no indigenous government in Southeast
Asia has succeeded in producing the volume of documentation available
for China, for example, colonial records are valuable sources in histori-
cal research and writing. Some qualification is required at this point. In
researching women’s lives, VOC and other colonial records require care-
ful analysis and at times do not record areas that are directly related to
women’s lives. Ann Stoler (2009) has also cautioned against exaggerating
the level of order and categorization under colonial rule as reflected in
the Dutch colonial archives. Rather, she argues that “producing rules of
classification was an unruly and piecemeal venture at best” (2009, 1). Her
study of the colonial archives has suggested that Dutch colonial admin-
istration, together with its kilometers of archives, were not as rigid and
planned as they have been painted in the past. This contention is also
echoed in Marieke Bloembergen’s (2007) study of Dutch colonial policing,
suggesting that the police’s mission was at times contradictory in its aims
to ensure public safety and enforce political order. It was therefore not as
all-powerful as was originally thought. Thus a revisionist reading of these
archives is possible, even to the point where new readings of the archives,
if not new archives per se, can yield valuable insights.
182 vannessa hearman

In the course of re-investigating and re-reading the Dutch colonial

archives, coupled with an interest in social history from below and a
desire to challenge the common belief that the colonial archives speak
little of women’s history, there have been new revisionist works such as
Eric Jones’s (2010) historical treatment of the female underclass in the
Netherlands East Indies. Jones examines colonial society particularly in
Batavia (present day Jakarta) and its treatment of women before 1800
by researching the aldermen records of Batavia. He shows that colonial
records, such as court records, can tell us a great deal about life in the
colonies for those about whom the VOC records are usually silent. These
include, for example, women, the underclass and criminals. Jones’s meth-
odology involves examining case studies of disputes heard before the alder-
men court of Batavia that he has identified from the archives, involving
slaves, wives and concubines, and women involved in sexual ­relationships
with Dutch men. Agreeing with the contention of others such as Andaya
and Reid (1988, 6) that women occupied a distinctive status in Southeast
Asia, Jones found that women married to VOC officers occupied a certain
unique ­authoritative position as a result of interracial relationships that
were common in the Indies during the VOC. These relationships resulted
from the lack of female colonial migration to Asia. Jones shows the limi-
tations of prior assumptions of restricted sexual contact between indig-
enous women and Europeans. Because of the peculiarities of VOC legal
codes, for example, Asian wives of VOC officials received legal recogni-
tion as Europeans in order to maintain wealth in Company families. Jones
shows how ethnically mixed societies operated, through a study of non-
elite women, using sources in the colonial archives.
In the analysis of interracial sexual relations in the colonial world,
newspapers are another source for historical research and writing. In her
study of the death of a Dutch man, Grutterink, an accountant employed
on a tea plantation in West Java, and the trial of his concubine Nyi Anah
for his murder, Sally White (2004b) draws on reports from Malay lan-
guage and Dutch newspapers of the time, the Kemadjoean Hindia and De
Locomotief respectively. Grutterink was found to have died of arsenic poi-
soning and Nyi Anah was sentenced to death by hanging for his murder.
The case ignited much interest because of the issues it raised about con-
cubinage. Nyi Anah’s case became a cause célèbre for reformist Muslims
and nationalists. Reformist Muslim leader Haji Agus Salim railed against
unions between Muslims and non Muslims, while for nationalists, concu-
bines were a symbol of the subjugated state of the nation. On 28 February
1924, after an appeal against the original verdict and following a vigorous
 sources and methodologies: history: southeast asia 183

public campaign, Nyi Anah was acquitted of all charges and allowed to
go home (White 2004, 90). Newspapers provide a public record of some
of the social attitudes of the times and are particularly useful in analyzing
high profile case such as that of Nyi Anah. White’s doctoral thesis (2004a)
is a larger study on reformist Islam and marriage in the colonial Dutch
East Indies.
Using mainly archival sources found mostly in Singapore, Malaysia and
the United Kingdom, Syed Muhid Khairudin Aljunied (2009) examines
the Maria Hertogh/Nadra case, in which a girl of Dutch parentage was
adopted by a Malay Muslim family and became the subject of a custody
battle in Singapore in 1950. After the court ruled that she ought to be
returned to her Dutch mother, Malay Muslims rioted, resulting in the
death of 18 people. Aljunied concentrates his study on responses by the
British after the riots and argues that the case was significant in ending
British colonial rule in Malaya. In Southeast Asia, the survival of colo-
nial government and company records and newspapers which have been
stored meticulously in libraries and archives, both inside and outside the
region, can ensure the dominance of these sources in historical research
and writing.
The limitations of such sources are several. As Eric Jones (2010) notes,
criminal archives, for example, might tell only one side of the story and do
not disclose whether a court defendant’s confession was obtained through
the use of force. Colonial records may also not cover the nuances of indig-
enous attitudes based on religious or any other pre-existing belief systems
in the face of colonial policies. Along similar lines, nationalist newspapers
are imbued with exhortations of how “things should be” and desires for
modernity without the enslavement of colonial rule. These statements of
aspirations do not necessarily encapsulate the everyday life of indigenous
people from all classes. Hence we must also keep in mind Andaya’s sugges-
tion of using other forms of evidence such as folklore, rituals, manuscripts,
and material objects, as well as knowledge of certain practices, such as
particular ways of weaving, in researching Southeast Asian gender-based
histories, including in colonial times.
In transgressing the boundary between history and literature, to
break the Western historiographical tendency of keeping the two sepa-
rate, Mulaika Hijjas (2011) has shown how literary works can shed light
on women’s role in society. Hijjas has examined the creation, reading,
patronage and collection of the Malay syair (romantic poetry) by women
in the nineteenth century in Riau Sultanate and the Malay world in gen-
eral. Dutch philologists who studied the syair, a lesser known and pres-
184 vannessa hearman

tigious form of literature, noted the identity of those who created and
lent them these works and attributed most of them to women. Through
analyzing the content of such works and the act of creating and collect-
ing the works, Hijjas shows that women were evidently both creators and
collectors of these kinds of poems and possessed a higher level of literacy
than originally thought. Hijjas analyzes six syair in particular and notes
that Malay women are portrayed in old Malay syair as enjoying a high
status and possessing a great deal of wisdom. For example, the theme of
the woman in the syair as a “heroine in disguise,” rescuing male relatives
from danger (Hijjas 2011, 171) was a common one. She argues that this
was possibly because women came under increasing pressure to retreat
into the domestic sphere. In one of the better known syairs dealing with
this theme of heroine-in-disguise, Syair Siti Zubaidah, a woman’s heroic
role was justified on the basis of bakti, of service and tawakal, submitting
oneself to God. Tensions are evident, in this Malay world of the nine-
teenth century, between expectations that women should display submis-
siveness and their strong social and economic role. Similarly, Mina Elfira
(2007) reinterprets the well-known local story of the Kaba Cindua Mato in
Minangkabau, West Sumatra, in which the female ruler Bundo Kanduang
is depicted as balanced between her powerfulness and her responsibilities
as a mother. The Minangkabau is the largest and most stable matriar-
chal society in the world and with four million people, the Minangkabau
constitutes the fourth largest ethnic group in Indonesia (Sanday 2002, x).
Elfira finds that this notion of powerful female leadership, buttressing
Minangkabau’s matrilineal society, must have been accepted alongside
Islamic principles, since the story was traced to the sixteenth century,
after the spread of Islam into Minangkabau. Through analysis of the con-
tents of literary works such as the syair and folklore such as the Kaba
Cindua Mato as historical sources and the conditions in which they were
created and circulated, it is possible to demonstrate shifts in women’s sta-
tus in Southeast Asia.
Letters exchanged between educated women in the colonized and the
colonizer countries sometimes also provide evidence of historical change
and ideas, as well as the conditions experienced by women in vastly dif-
ferent places (Coté 2005, 2008). Joost Coté (2005) has compiled and
translated letters to Dutch women from the Javanese noblewoman Kar-
tini, usually touted as Indonesia’s first feminist, in which she describes her
daily life and her dreams of educating girls in Java at the turn of the twen-
tieth century. Clearly there are limitations as to how much one should
rely on letters as sources for research on a low literacy population in the
 sources and methodologies: history: southeast asia 185

Southeast Asia of the nineteenth century since such a population was

unlikely to write and send many letters. Letter writing was confined to a
certain educated layer of women, even in Europe. Javanese women such
as Kartini and her sisters (Coté 2008) were preoccupied with demonstrat-
ing to their Dutch correspondents that they shared the Dutch women’s
ideas of modernity. As Coté notes, the very practice of letter writing was
one manifestation of this modernity. Coté suggests that the women’s con-
cerns were thus still largely related to achieving modernity and grappling
with ideas of nationalism. It is unsurprising that the Javanese women
tended to underplay the role of customs and religion in their daily life, in
spite of the fact that Kartini and her sisters were subjected to, for example,
the practice of dipingit, confinement after puberty until marriage. At the
same time, the letters demonstrate the stirrings of Javanese nationalism
at the time they were written.

Researching the Nation-State

Andaya’s study of women in early modern Southeast Asia considers South-

east Asia as a region. Her work overcomes the dominance of the modern
nation-states of today as the unit of analysis, since they had not come into
existence in the period she examines. Western colonialism in most parts
of Southeast Asia and the resultant nation-states created mostly on the
geographic traces of these colonial empires have proven to be the most
dominant categories of scholarship. Scholars have questioned the extent
that Southeast Asia represents a region, given the somewhat divergent
colonial experiences of the modern nation-states. At the most extreme,
Southeast Asia is seen as a construct and a product of the Cold War and
the consequent rise of Area Studies in the post-Second World War period.
The reason for this preoccupation with questioning to what extent South-
east Asia can be treated as a coherent region is that while premodern
states had had trading and other relationships, the national borders we
see today are relatively recent. Yet present-day national boundaries heav-
ily shape our historical understanding of this region. Histories of Southeast
Asia still take the nation-state that often mirrored the borders of colonial
possessions as the most important unit of analysis.
There remains analysis to be done about the kinds of historical cooper-
ation and linkages that existed between women in Southeast Asia, either
through an analysis of organizational links or other forums which brought
women from the region together. Even a historical study of women in the
borderlands of Southeast Asia could illuminate these regional links and
186 vannessa hearman

cooperation. In spite of the lack of studies about intra-regional coopera-

tion, there exist rather a small number of studies of transnational linkages
between women in different countries of Southeast Asia with women from
other regions, such as in the work of Fiona Paisley (2009) and Katharine
McGregor (2012). Using sources such as the archives of the Pan Pacific and
South East Asia Women’s Association, diaries of conference participants,
newspapers and personal papers, Paisley looks at the participation of two
Afro-American women, Pearl Sherrod Takahashi and Ella Stewart, at the
Pacific and Southeast Asian women’s conferences in 1937 and 1955. At
the Pacific Women’s Conference in 1937, Takahashi made an appeal for
equal rights for all races, explicitly making references to the prevalence
of lynching in the United States. Somewhat in contrast to Takahashi,
­Stewart was enrolled into becoming a U.S. goodwill ambassador and
toured South and Southeast Asia speaking positively of the gains enjoyed
by Afro-­American people in the United States. Stewart faced intense
questioning from audiences in 1955 who were concerned with decoloni-
zation, peace and equal rights during the Cold War. Along similar lines to
­Paisley, McGregor (2012) traces the relationship between Indonesia’s larg-
est women’s organization, Gerwani (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia, Indone-
sian Women’s Movement), and its links with the Women’s International
Democratic Federation, in the period 1951–1965 when Gerwani was vio-
lently suppressed as a result of its association with the Indonesian Com-
munist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI). McGregor shows how a
sense of internationalism was built in Indonesia when Gerwani organized
its members in support of causes such as campaigning against the atomic
bomb and the war in Vietnam, and for the end of apartheid.
Histories of how women and their organizations engaged with the
state, in particular the postcolonial state, have been the focus of new
works on Indonesia (Blackburn 2004, 2008, Martyn 2005). Both Susan
Blackburn and Elizabeth Martyn use a combination of archival research
in state archives and those of women’s organizations, and interviews with
women activists, where possible. Elizabeth Martyn argues that there is a
lacuna in studies about women in Indonesia in the 1950s. Between 1950
and 1959, during Indonesia’s period of parliamentary democracy, Indo-
nesians were constructing a new nation in which questions of gender
were a key part of the debate. Yet the repression of the history of this
period under the Suharto regime has rendered women “doubly invisible”
(Martyn 2005, 8). In particular, Martyn shows the vibrancy of a women’s
movement that was suddenly presented with a host of possibilities as
to how their new nation should be fostered. Blackburn’s (2004) seminal
­history of the relationship between women, the women’s movement and
 sources and methodologies: history: southeast asia 187

the state in Indonesia examines issues of key concern to women, such as

marriage, polygamy, economics and violence. Blackburn was then moti-
vated to produce a translation and introductory essay to a report of the
first Indonesian women’s congress in 1928, which she found during her
research for the earlier work (Blackburn 2008). The 1928 congress estab-
lished the Indonesian Women’s Alliance (Perikatan Perempoean Indone-
sia, PPI). The speeches and congress documents show the ways in which
women from Islamic and nationalist organizations approached various
issues, such as marriage reform as well as the kinds of rhetorical styles
employed by women depending on their organizational backgrounds. The
report shows the breadth of the Indonesia’s women’s movement in the
late 1920s, although participants were still mainly drawn from the Java-
nese ethnic group. Many participants came from Aisyah, the women’s
organization founded in 1917 and affiliated to Muhammadiyah, Indone-
sia’s oldest Islamic organization. The congress report shows how the issue
of polygamy and marriage reform divided women from Islamic organi-
zations and secular organizations. These divisions over the question of
polygamy continued into the post-independence period, the 1950s and
1960s (Martyn 2005, 129).
A marriage law that protected women’s interests was a preoccupation of
the Indonesian women’s movement throughout the 1950s and 1960s until
the promulgation of the 1974 Marriage Act. Related to this, O’Shaughnessy
(2009) offers a legal history of divorce in Indonesia from 1965 to 2005.
O’Shaughnessy examines divorce in the state and religious courts by ana-
lyzing sources such as legislations, court records of divorces, newspaper
reports and interviews with court and government officials in the Special
Region of Yogyakarta. Through this study, she shows how women were
able to exercise agency in negotiating the laws and resisting state and
religious authority. O’Shaughnessy (2009, 14) mentions the difficulties
researchers faced under the New Order regime in gaining access to gov-
ernment records, and how her own access to court records was assisted by
the change in political circumstances in Indonesia. This brings us to some
recent transformations in Indonesia that have given rise to new sources
and methodologies in historical research and writing.

Democratization and History Writing

The fall of the New Order regime in May 1998, and its replacement by a
more democratic system, has altered women’s lives and given rise in turn
to new scholarship in the study of gender and its relationship with Islam.
188 vannessa hearman

As well as providing an overview of the ways gender was understood and

deployed under the different orders, Kathryn Robinson (2008) outlines
how the changes have affected women. Following the demise of the New
Order regime, women’s organizing has become more diverse and pluralis-
tic than it had been under the regime. There has been growing Islamiza-
tion, an emphasis on individual piety, and increasingly diverse forms of
what can be categorized as “religious worship” (ibadah). With Islam no
longer a source of ideas subject to government control, many adherents
fostered a new relationship with it in the post-New Order period.
The fall of the Suharto regime ushered in significant changes for
Indonesian politics and society. Three of the most notable changes are
interlinked: changing attitudes to Islam, regional decentralization, and
loosening state control on historical research have expanded possibilities
for Islamic practice in everyday life and have opened new debates about
issues such as polygamy and the role of the religious fatwa. This renewed
interest in, and debates about, Islamic philosophy and religious tenets
have therefore also demanded new research and scholarship.
Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno (1949–66), and the New Order
regime (1966–1998), led by his successor President Suharto, greeted Islam
with some caution. Nationalist politicians such as President Sukarno
aimed to construct a pluralist and diverse Indonesia after the end of
Dutch occupation in 1949 and drew up a constitution and state philoso-
phy that did not explicitly allocate a central role for Islam (Elson 2008).
Islamic law was restricted in its jurisdiction to matters of marriage and
family. This ambivalent relationship between Islam and the state contin-
ued under the New Order regime led by Suharto. Suharto rose to power
as a result of alliances with religious organizations, the most important of
which were Muslim organizations, such as Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), now
Indonesia’s largest Islamic organization (in the 1960s it had also been a
political party). NU supported the suppression of the Communist Party,
the PKI, and the eventual replacement of Sukarno. However, the fate of
these organizations was far from secure after the transition to Suharto.
Although Islamic groups such as the Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadi-
yah and other religious groups supported the crushing of the PKI and the
rise of the New Order, the new regime proved also to have an ambiva-
lent relationship with Islam. Suharto amalgamated all political parties
into three large parties in 1973. He regarded Islam as a potential source of
opposition to his rule, despite compelling all citizens to profess a religion
or run the risk of being seen as an atheist. Under the Suharto dictator-
ship, the writing and interpretation of history remained the domain of
 sources and methodologies: history: southeast asia 189

the state, in particular of the military (see McGregor 2007). Enemies

of the state were perceived variously as being Communists, secession-
ists in Aceh, West Papua and East Timor, and Islamic “extremists.” While
Islamic organizations were not suppressed outright, Islam was treated
warily by the government and closely observed. As well as the suppres-
sion of political opposition, a key plank of the founding of the New Order
regime was in undermining women’s political participation. Indonesia’s
largest women’s organization, Gerwani, was banned for its links with the
PKI. As with the PKI, Gerwani members were killed and imprisoned. Sub-
sequently, women’s role became defined as one sketched out according
to kodrat, or the intrinsic role of women, and they derived their identi-
ties from their husbands. Women’s organizations and their activities were
tightly controlled by the regime. Discourses about women and women’s
role were circumscribed under the New Order.
With the demise of the regime, historical research and writing has
turned to trying to recover a more varied range of voices about the past,
including charting the history of Islamic women’s activism. This has been
inspired by a new interest in Muslim feminism that is also a product of the
student and non-governmental activism prior to and during democratiza-
tion. By necessity, examining Muslim feminism engages with ideas circu-
lating globally about activism and women’s role in Islam; it also requires
an examination of the history of women’s activism in Muslim organiza-
tions in Indonesia. Blackburn (2004) argues that Islamic and secular liberal
women’s organizations have been the most enduring and traces the rise of
a new group of Islamic women’s organizations. Some of these groups exist
to monitor and resist the encroachment of restrictions on women’s lives
by Islamic organizations intent on introducing the sharia or more Islamic
tenets into daily life. Oral history interviews and organizational records
and publications have formed the basis for sources in studies of Muslim
women’s organizations. Life stories of women involved in Muhammadi-
yah and NU, two of Indonesia’s largest Islamic organizations, show that
their activism in these organizations resulted from their concern with
understanding and reinterpreting Islamic teachings where they pertain
to women (van Doorn Harder 2006). As Siti Syamsiatun (2007) has noted
in her study of Nasyiah, from the 1960s, when the young women’s orga-
nization became an autonomous section of Muhammadiyah, the figure
of “youth” and young women became symbolic as representing progress
and modernity. Nasyiah activists argued that young women had different
interests in accordance with the times, such as an emphasis on educa-
tion and prevention of early marriage (Syamsiatun 2007, 75). ­Syamsiatun
190 vannessa hearman

sees in the history of Nasyiah that there is competition between the state,
women’s organizations and religious organizations in trying to shape gen-
der discourse. For example, most Nasyiah leaders were drawn from the
ranks of women who had links to leaders of Muhammadiyah and there
was little involvement by women in the Muhammadiyah religious council
until 1995.
With the depoliticization of Indonesian society following the rise to
power of the military in 1966, it was difficult for women’s organizations
to speak of a past in which they were politically and socially active. Using
organizational documents and interviews with its activists, Monica Arnez
(2010) has researched the history of Fatayat, the young women’s wing of
Nahdlatul Ulama. By looking back at the history of this organization from
before the New Order regime, we can see its changing fortunes. In the
1950s and 1960s Fatayat and NU women were active in trying to combat
illiteracy and running a few educational institutions for poor women. They
also occupied local government and parliamentary positions (Arnez 2010,
67). All these ended, however, when the New Order regime froze their
activities, until Fatayat was able to take up activities under the banner
of “family welfare,” promoting reproductive health and steering carefully
around the regime’s restrictions. Recent doctoral theses have analyzed
case studies of Muslim women’s NGOs to understand how these organi-
zations, and activists within them, mobilize ideas of Islam and feminism
in their activities (Hidayah 2012, Rinaldo 2007).
As well as this work of recovering histories that were difficult to
research under the New Order regime, historical research and writing are
responding to new circumstances of grassroots Islamic revival, restrictions
on women’s dress and behavior, and the growing influence of bodies such
as the Majelis Ulama Indonesia (Indonesian Ulama Council) in regulat-
ing various aspects of Islamic life (Lindsey 2012). There were also debates
about whether Indonesia could have a female president according to Islam
when it seemed Megawati Sukarnoputri was likely to become president.
Debates about the public role of women have given rise to examinations
of provisions of the Qurʾān on this issue. Correspondingly, there has also
been more interest in reinterpretation of ideas drawn from the Qurʾān and
challenging oppressive readings of the Qurʾān with other interpretations
(see White and Anshor, 2008). Lily Zakiyah Munir (2005) writes about
how the Qurʾān can be used to fight domestic violence against women.
In Indonesia, debates about abortion, for example, have given rise to a
reinterpretation of the fiqh dealing with abortion (Anshor 2006). Anshor
shows that there are a wide variety of opinions in the fiqh about ­abortion.
 sources and methodologies: history: southeast asia 191

These attempts to reinterpret doctrine are a product of the debates in

Indonesia about what role Islam should have in regulating women’s lives.
Nina Nurmila (2009) has intervened in the debates about polygamy and
women’s rights by discussing six detailed case studies about polygamous
marriages showing that while the women held various attitudes about
polygamy, their lives were generally unhappy. By undertaking a study
based on the women’s voices and experiences, Nurmila has avoided the
easy characterization of these women as voiceless victims. Based on col-
laboration between academics and Muslim leaders in Southeast Asia,
Greg Fealy and Virginia Hooker (2006) compiled and edited a sourcebook
of extracts of primary sources, accompanied by country overviews. The
collection is divided into topics such as gender and the family, personal
expressions of faith, and the sharia. It provides an overview of discus-
sions and statements made by Muslim organizations and leaders on these
topics and others, over the recent past.
Historically, Indonesian Islam has been practiced alongside local beliefs
and customs; but there are now debates on the correct ways to practice
Islam and pressure against minorities within Islam such as the Ahmadiyah
group. Local studies of Islam and what might seem quite antagonistic con-
cepts, such as matriliny, can also be seen as a response to these regional
manifestations of intolerance. Minangkabau has attracted attention from
historians and anthropologists alike (Sanday 2002, Hadler 2008) in inves-
tigating the operation and resilience of a matriarchate, in the face of both
political change and widespread adherence to Islam. Jeffrey Hadler (2008)
investigates how ordinary objects and institutions such as the house and
the family, systems of authority and ideas of modernity, changed over the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries in West Sumatra. Hadler’s sources
included newspapers, pamphlets, literature, both modern and traditional
novels, and schoolschriften, books written by students and native teaching
assistants in colonial village schools. He finds that most of all, Minangka-
bau culture and its matrilineal system show a high level of adaptation and
compromise that has ensured its survival, despite challenges from politi-
cal tumult and Islam. Sanday concurs with this in arguing that both Islam
and matriliny are firmly seen as part of the local customs and that the
accommodation of each belief system resulted from a process of negotia-
tion between Islamic and local customary leaders (Sanday 2002, 239).
In light of Andaya’s encouragement for interdisciplinary conversations,
the work of anthropologists in documenting gender identities, sexuality
and sexual practices through ethnography (Peletz 2008) is very impor-
tant. Peletz (2012, 897) has claimed that a division of labor exists between
192 vannessa hearman

“historians and others who deal primarily with archival records” on gender
in Southeast Asia “to concentrate on heteronormativity,” and anthropolo-
gists who investigate non-normative genders and sexualities. This divide,
according to Peletz, is related to access for different communities of schol-
ars to the sources, ranging from written records to voices and other data.
While this division might be true historically, interdisciplinary conversa-
tions with anthropologists who are researching questions of gender and
sexuality help us in understanding different concepts of gender in South-
east Asia and reactions to them over time. Furthermore, in arguing for
greater interdisciplinary conversations, Tom Boellstorff (2007) has argued
for a close intertwining between anthropology and queer studies, because
of their ability to unsettle or denaturalize assumptions about gender and
sexuality. In a similar vein, Boellstorff (2006) has called on scholars to be
aware of the heteronormativity of Islamic jurisprudence and the limiting
effect this in turn has on their work. For example, how would Islamic
jurisprudence deal with instances of same-sex unions?
One important question on the topic of queerness and sexuality is, for
example, how to explain the relative acceptance in Islamic society of gen-
der identities beyond male and female and to demonstrate past historical
acceptance in a context of rising intolerance in Indonesia. In Indonesia,
in spite of both the lack of official restrictions on queers and a history of
broad social acceptance, this liberal attitude has come under attack under
the guise of Islam. Regional Indonesia has been the focus of several recent
studies about transgendered people and communities (Davies 2010, Black-
wood 2011, Boellstorff 2007). Boellstorff ’s predominant research sites are
the large cities of Surabaya and Makassar and the island of Bali, explor-
ing queer media, gay language and the waria (transvestite), and political
homophobia or attacks by a certain section of Islamic fundamentalists
against gay men’s gatherings. Davies has employed the word “queer” to
describe a range of gender identities in her research on three categories:
calalai (transgender females), calabai (transgender males) and the bissu
(androgynous shamans) in Bugis South Sulawesi (Davies 2010). Davies
has shown how in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when areas of South
Sulawesi came under the influence of Kahar Muzakkar and Darul Islam,
bissus were persecuted and killed (Davies 2010, 197). In the city of Padang,
West Sumatra, Evelyn Blackwood (2011) conducted an ethnographic study
of tombois, masculine females who identify as men, and their partners
( femmes), women who desire men. They adhere strictly to the gender
binary in their relationships, creating further complexity in terms of rela-
tionships and power structures.
 sources and methodologies: history: southeast asia 193

Following the demise of the New Order regime, scholars have turned
to the gendered way in which the repression against the Indonesian Com-
munist Party and Gerwani was carried out and examined various aspects
of the destruction of Indonesia’s vibrant women’s movement in 1965
(Wieringa 2002, Pohlman 2011). One of the challenges researchers face is
how to study a community that has largely disappeared or been effectively
censored/silenced for so long (Hearman 2013). As the informants about
this period have been long silenced under the New Order regime and are
entering their senior years, there is a limited time in which to gather oral
history interviews with the survivors of the violence in 1965. Auto/biogra-
phies of leftist women in Indonesian have also appeared (Hearman 2009,
McGregor and Hearman 2007). In the context of Indonesia, a question
that has preoccupied both memoirists and scholars researching this past
is to see how leftist women saw themselves fitting into an Islamic society.
The portrayal of Islam’s unbridgeable separation from communism was a
crucial element in the army’s success in gaining the cooperation of reli-
gious groups in the repression of the PKI. In addressing this, memoirists
have linked their past as leftists with their observance of religion. A simi-
lar phenomenon is also evident in male memoirs showing that Islam and
communism were not incompatible (Moestahal 2002, Raid 2001), but it is
arguable that the force of New Order propaganda was unleashed the most
against leftist women. New works that have appeared recently in both
Indonesian and English, exploring Gerwani’s activities, the imprisonment
of their members and their lives after their release, show, however, that
the regime’s suppression of this history is starting to fade (Amurwani 2011,
Wieringa 2002, Hikmah 2007, Susanti 2006, Sukanta 2011).

Malaysia and Singapore

Since the mid-1970s, Malaysia has undergone a dramatic Islamization, as

a result of developments in Islam globally, the rise of dakwah (missionary)
groups in Malaysia and the state’s modernizing project under the lead
ruling party, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) (Stivens
2006). UMNO has competed with other parties to demonstrate its Islamic
credentials while at the same time embracing “moderate” Islamic moder-
nity. The electoral successes of the Pan-Malayan Islamic Party (PAS, Parti
Islam Se-Malaysia) in the state of Kelantan have pressured UMNO also to
lay a claim on its Islamic nature. The dismissal of Deputy Prime Minister
Anwar Ibrahim in 1998 spurred the development of a Reformasi (reform)
194 vannessa hearman

movement, in which Muslim political forces such as PAS were also

involved. Pressure for political change in Malaysia has continued with the
Bersih movement demanding electoral reform. The Bersih movement is a
multiethnic association involving a cross-section of civil society, includ-
ing Malaysians living overseas, and makes extensive use of social media
(Welsh 2011). The multiethnic nature of Bersih is remarkable because it
seems to counter the entrenched racial divisions that have resulted in
Malaysia following British colonial rule. After independence, with the
New Economic Policy, the Malaysian government sought to ameliorate
past disadvantage by prioritizing the bumiputera (sons of the soil), mostly
those of Malay ethnic origins who comprise 53 percent of the population
(Stivens 2006, 355). While Malaysia is not an Islamic state, Islam is the
official religion of the country and Malays are assumed to be Muslim.
Since the 1970s in Malaysia, women’s participation in the workforce
has increased, including in new middle-class jobs, while at the same
time there has been a widespread adoption of the veil by Malay Muslim
women as one of the most visible markers of Islamization. The dramatic
Islamization of Malaysia has led to an engagement with Islam that juxta-
poses the conservativeness of Muslim resurgence with the modernizing
project represented by the Malaysian state. Stivens cautions that viewing
the two as mere rivals overlooks the complexities of the support for Isla-
mism in Malaysia (Stivens 2006, 356) and that the Malaysian state has
also purported to represent Islamic values in furthering its own agenda.
The rivalries in Islamization projects between the state and Islamist orga-
nizations ironically create a convergence on gender issues and entrench
“gender difference, segregation and inequality” (Stivens 2006, 356). For
example, Islamic groups have drawn on the global discourse of “westoxi-
fication,” seeing “the West” as poisoning the morality of the world, and
the government has introduced the concept of “Asian Values” in Malaysia,
supposedly to promote community rather than individual interests. Both
these sets of ideas restrict the kinds of roles that women are expected to
play. The context of new historical research and writing in Malaysia on
women, gender and sexuality therefore responds to this particular set of
circumstances.
The interest by the Malaysian state and Islamic dakwah groups in reg-
ulating family life has ensured their emphasis on observance of Islamic
values in family life and parenting. Maila Stivens argues that “ideas about
gender relations and ‘the family’ have been critical to reinventions of
Islamic ideology in Malaysia” (Stivens 2006, 358). She has examined two
case studies related to this, one on the government’s Family Values ­project
 sources and methodologies: history: southeast asia 195

as a “moral project of family values” and another comparing two child

custody cases in Malaya/Malaysia (Stivens 2010). Questions of marriage
and parenting, and their intersection with those of nation and ethnicity
have preoccupied Malaysia recently as well as in the past. Echoes of the
Maria Hertogh/Nadra case of the 1950s were to be found in the media
coverage and discussions of the Jacqueline Pascarl-Gillespie case in the
1990s. The two children that Pascarl-Gillespie had with Raja Bahrin were
“abducted” from Australia where they had resided with their mother, to
be brought up in Malaysia. Stivens argues that cases of parenting disputes
are still often written with an emphasis on the macro level, seeing them
more through the lens of nationalism and ethno-nationalism. This is cer-
tainly the case with another recent addition to the scholarship on the
Hertogh/Nadra case, that of Syed Muhid Khairudin Aljunied (2009), who,
as mentioned earlier, pointedly avoided examining the details of the case
or the persons involved, because his intention was to situate the case in a
nationalist framework. His main contention is that the Hertogh case was
significant in ending British colonial rule in Malaya. He thus situates the
Maria Hertogh case within the broader framework of the nation—more
specifically Malaya’s decolonization process. In studying shifts about how
women and girls’ roles are understood in Malaysia, Patricia Sloane White
has examined changing views and experiences of middle-class girls in
Malaysia from the 1960s until today (White 2010). After independence,
there gradually began to be an emphasis and expectation that middle-
class girls would take part in education. Women in the 1970s and 1980s,
however, began to join the dakwah movement, though many middle-class
educated women avoided this involvement. With changing ideas about
the role of women in Malaysia, those who had been educated and raised
as “sisters” to take part in the developmentalist project experienced the
pressure of becoming Muslim mothers and wives in their families in
the 1990s.
Identification with feminism seems slightly problematic in Asian
women’s movements, including in Malaysia and Singapore, in that some
activists prefer not to use the term because of the association in Asia of
feminism as a Western concept that entails being anti-men (Roces 2010, 4,
Lyons 2004). Therefore the work of Cecilia Ng, Maznah Muhammad and
Tan Beng Hui in examining the interaction between feminism as a global,
if not entirely Western, concept and the Malaysian women’s movement
is intellectually refreshing (Ng et al. 2006). They contend that there are
many varieties of feminism in Malaysia. Arising out of a project initiated
by the Women’s Development Collective (WDC) in Malaysia, the authors,
196 vannessa hearman

all of whom are also activists in the women’s movement, explore several
case studies, such as the Violence against Women campaign beginning in
the 1980s, and attempts to unionize women workers. They identify four
phases of the women’s movement: the nationalist anti-colonial phase; the
post-independence “consociational” phase in which elite feminist groups
such as the National Council of Women’s organizations dominated; the
developmentalist phase in which the beginnings of identity politics arose;
and finally the post-Reformasi realignment in which the market and con-
sumerism dominated (Ng et al. 2006, 39). In their view, Malaysian women
have been more successfully engaged in well-funded male-directed orga-
nizations such as political parties or their women’s wings, rather than
in autonomous civil society groups. In the section dealing with political
Islam, the authors show that Malay-Muslim women are active participants
in a wide range of organizations such as those associated with UMNO and
PAS, and NGOs such as the Sisters of Islam. They argue that these wom-
en’s ideological and practical pursuits have been crucial in countering the
hegemonic effects of “a male centric political Islam” (Ng et al. 2006, 105).
Their account provides a much-needed history of the Malaysian women’s
movement from the point of view of activist-scholars.
Nevertheless, the involvement of women themselves in Islamization,
including modifying personal behavior and beliefs in order to further their
understanding and practice of Islam, has given rise to new studies deal-
ing with women’s subjectivity and examining why women have become
interested in observing Islamic religious norms. As Stivens (2006, 362)
has shown in her interviews with middle-class Malay households, many
interviewees stressed the centrality of Islam in their lives and their sense
of identity, to the extent that being “Muslim” had displaced their identi-
ties as “Malay.” Sylva Frisk (2009) has written an ethnographic study,
based on fieldwork conducted in the 1990s and several visits afterwards,
of how women enacted their religious involvement in their daily life, such
as through attending religious classes, study groups, and performing acts
of worship. In this way Frisk shows that women are active agents in the
process of Islamization underway in Malaysia, rather than passive subjects
upon which a predominantly male-driven, religious oppression is enacted.
With the influence of Islam strengthening in Malaysia, those who are
not Malays and Muslims or who wish to pursue a “secularist” agenda risk
being marginalized. This has led to a re-examination of the Malay past
outside an Islamist lens. As a response to Malaysia’s growing Islamization,
writers, filmmakers and artists challenged resurgent Islam in ­Malaysia by
recuperating adat or Malay custom in facets of their work (Khoo 2006).
 sources and methodologies: history: southeast asia 197

They reacted to the suggestion in the early 1990s that traces of Malay cus-
tom that were animist and originated from the Hindu-Buddhist past were
problematic. Through a close study of literature and film, Gaik Cheng
Khoo (2006) examines how notions such as magic and traditional healing
and reworkings of female sexuality were reflected in the works of these
intellectuals. Discussing sexuality remains sensitive; however, recent stud-
ies have attempted to establish acceptance for types of sexuality beyond
heterosexuality. In postcolonial Malaysia, Yik Koon Teh (2008) shows how
British law and Islamic sharia law have combined to criminalize homo-
sexual and transsexual sexual practices and to mold negative attitudes
and stereotypes towards these groups. She then demonstrates how indig-
enous male-to-female transsexual practices could be found in the past, as
evidenced by the linguistic terms to denote categories of male-to-female
transsexuals, homosexuals and effeminate men. Teh has used approaches
outside of history in order to demonstrate that there has been an earlier
recognition of these gender categories. Approaches such as literary stud-
ies and sociology are therefore useful in mapping how different categories
of people deploy understandings of history to challenge prevailing views.
Recuperating women’s radical lives is not a task that has been con-
fined to Indonesia. The thawing out of the Cold War has also brought a
re-examination of women active in other left parties in Southeast Asia,
for example those in the Malaya Communist Party (MCP), which has tra-
ditionally been marginalized in Malaysian historiography. One example
is Agnes Khoo’s (2004) collection of women’s oral histories conducted in
Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore about their involvement in anti-Japa-
nese campaigns through the Second World War, in the MCP, and their
subsequent exile to Thailand. Adrianna Tan has also researched oral his-
tories of MCP women combatants (Tan 2008). Recent autobiographies of
women political leaders include, for example, that of communist Shamsiah
Fakeh (2009, written in Malay). Her account as a Malay woman leader of
the MCP who was exiled for many years in China challenges the notion
that the MCP support base was predominantly Chinese. The experiences
of women from non-Malay, non-Muslim backgrounds have perhaps been
less researched in the recent past. However there are some notable excep-
tions. Sarawak is a part of Malaysia in which Malays are not the majority.
Hew Cheng Sim and Rokiah Talib (2011) have written a biography of Iban
politician Tra Zehnder and her experiences of being involved in Dayak
politics in Sarawak (Ting 2012). Tobias Rettig (2008) has researched the
experiences of Indian women in the Rani Jhansi regiment during the
­Second World War. While it is arguable that these women were marginal
198 vannessa hearman

to the dominant Malay Muslim national narrative of Malaysia, their sto-

ries challenge this very narrative and show how women from marginal-
ized communities engaged with the predominantly “Islamic cultures” in
which they lived.
There is a small amount of new research on the history of women’s
activism in Singapore, such as that by Lyons (2004) on the Singaporean
women’s organization, Association of Women for Action and Research
(AWARE), its activities and ideas. AWARE has also engaged with questions
of how to position itself in relation to feminism and how to deal with the
state in Singapore and the intersections of race, religion and gender. Lyons
interviewed activists and leaders in AWARE as sources for her study. Lyons
(with Williams and Ford, 2008) has also researched Singaporean masculini-
ties and sexual practices of Singaporean working-class men. The Singapore
Women’s Charter, its origins in 1961 and significance for women today,
has drawn some scholarly attention (Devasahayam 2011, Leong 2011).

Philippines

The Muslim minority in the Philippines lives predominantly in the south,

in the region of Mindanao. This region has hosted Muslim separatist
groups, which have been actively fighting the Philippines government
for decades, such as the Moro Independence Liberation Front and the
Moro National Liberation Front. No recent book length study on Filipino
women’s history deals with Muslim women in the south of the country
(see Roces 2012, Lanzona 2009). One of the few studies is Anne-Marie
­Hilsdon’s research on women from the Maranao ethnic group in Mind-
anao, the most religiously conservative of the three ethnic groups. Her
research shows that their work as peace activists in Mindanao is often
overlooked (Hillsdon 2009). This invisibility occurs despite Maranao
women being involved in many Muslim, interfaith and secular NGOs and
actively drawing on Muslim scriptures, and also being part of a “home
grown Muslim feminism embedded in the culture of revivalist Islam”
(Hillsdon 2009, 360).

Conclusion

This entry has explored a range of sources and approaches that have
been deployed by historians or social scientists that have yielded histori-
cal insights about women, gender and sexuality in Southeast Asia. With
 sources and methodologies: history: southeast asia 199

a high degree of orality, Southeast Asia does not necessarily possess large
amounts of tangible records for investigation and analysis by historians. A
tropical climate, long years of conflict and periodic natural disasters make
the task of preserving tangible records such as manuscripts, documents
and prints difficult. Colonial administrations in most parts of Southeast
Asia did, however, produce documents and records that historians have
studied both in the region and outside. The process of Islamization since
the 1970s until now in two of the largest Muslim population countries
in Southeast Asia, Indonesia and Malaysia, has created interest in how
women have fared, but also in how women have actively shaped their
society given these changes. Democratization in Indonesia since 1998 has
also created new openings in historical research and writing.

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 Islamic Studies

Bahar Davary

Introduction

This entry provides an overview of the methods and sources for research
on women, gender, sexuality, and Islamic cultures in the interdisciplin-
ary field of Islamic Studies. The academic field of Islamic Studies has
for the past four decades been engaged in interaction and cooperation
with the broader discipline of Religious Studies. The study of Islam and
Muslim peoples and cultures has, by interdisciplinary relations, joined
methods and theories applied in Religious Studies with those of the social
sciences and humanities. Prior to this, from the sixteenth century onward
and in particular from the nineteenth century through 1970, it was a
branch of Orientalism within European and especially in British universi-
ties. In many Western academic institutions up until the 1990s the study
of Islam was regional, and therefore housed in the departments of Middle
Eastern and Near Eastern Studies and Languages. This regional approach
restricted the study of Islam on a broader scale; it excluded the study of
Malaysia and Indonesia, for example. Some Western universities still con-
fer degrees to their graduates in Arabic and Islamic Studies as part of the
Oriental Studies program. It is only in the past three decades that Islamic
Studies—within the Western academic context—have evolved as a cat-
egory within the study of religion, with the consequence that teaching
positions and scholarship have moved to the Theology and/or Religious
Studies departments/programs. Many in the field of Islamic Studies today
agree with the point Charles Adams made in 1974 about parochialism
of Religious Studies, noting a favorable bias towards archaic religions to
the exclusion of Islam (Ernst and Martin 2012). Accordingly, this has led
to the continued isolation of Islamic Studies from Religious Studies. The
past decade has shown marked change in this regard with its attention
to modernity, post-modernity, gender, justice, and politics. The first vol-
ume of this encyclopedia included an article written by Patrice Brodeur
(2003) which covered the sources and methodologies of Islamic Studies
within the Western context. This entry will cover the period subsequent
to 2003 by setting out the distinction of method and sources within both
204 bahar davary

Muslim and non-Muslim contexts. Because of the significant role that Ori-
ental Studies and the legacy that Orientalism has and continues to play in
theorizing the study of Islam, this entry will include more than a passing
comment on the complex relation between the two and their oft contin-
gent or antagonistic symbiosis. This requires a general historical account
of the field of Islamic Studies and its different and competing visions of
scholarship in academia.
The entry begins with a discussion of the role of Orientalism and colo-
nial feminism in the study and the perception of women and Islam as well
as women’s research and teaching. It is true in almost every organized
religion that women have historically been marginalized from the fields
of interpretation. Despite the early presence of women among notable
religious figures, they have had a marginal voice in interpreting Islam and
especially scripture (Qurʾān) and the law (Sharīʿa). The past few decades
have seen developing changes in participation of women in the field of
Islamic scholarship, in both Muslim and non-Muslim contexts. This entry
is mainly focused on the field within the United States with references to
influences and currents of thought in other countries. It begins with the
inception of Islamic Studies as a discipline and its challenges. The entry
will specify the changes in theory and method employed by or applied
to women in the field of Islamic Studies with attention to the insider/
outsider dichotomy and Islamization of knowledge. Special attention will
be given to both Muslim Women’s Studies and Women’s Islamic Studies,
as the line between the two is often a very narrow one. Women and inter-
pretation of the foundational text of Islam, the Qurʾān, will be followed
with a section on women’s leadership and the changing roles of women.
The new Orientalist approach as well as the progressive Muslim outlook
and its systematic theory of interpretation will proceed by a discussion of
sexuality and queering religious text.

After Orientalism: Historical Overview

It is important at the outset to make a distinction between Islamic Studies

as an academic discipline based on phenomenological or other methodi-
cal approaches on the one hand and teaching Islam as a professed faith
from a perspective that is informed by an Islamic worldview and epis-
temology on the other. That is not to say that the two are in contradic-
tion or that a fusion of the two methodologies is categorically impossible.
In Western academe, the study of Islam today is categorized within the
multi-disciplinary field of Religious Studies, also called Science of Religion
 islamic studies 205

or Comparative Religion. The history of Religious Studies in the United

States is most commonly traced back to the 1950s and the work of the
University of Chicago’s Romanian historian of religion, Mircea Eliade. Reli-
gious Studies as a discipline approaches religion as a pure phenomenon
to be studied from outside any particular religious tradition. It is a study
of beliefs, rites, rituals, and communities of believers, in which the sacred
is essential. It cannot be reduced to the social, psychological, economic,
and political. The study of religion does not require a specific affiliation
with any given particular religion. Religion is not the sacred. The study of
religion is sensitive to multiculturalism and contradicts exclusive claims
to truth. In terms of method it is comparative.
The study of Islam in the West has historically been a branch of Ori-
ental Studies, a mere regional study, allocated to Near Eastern or Middle
Eastern Studies and Languages programs. Given the imagined polarized
debates between Islam and the West, and real controversies between
­Islamists, feminists, and others over the proper role of women, it is impor-
tant to begin this entry with a brief overview of the impact of colonial
“imperial” feminism, as distinguished from feminist Orientalism, on the
representations and self-image of Muslim women. In many respects both
are alive and well and have a profound impact on how research methods
and theories evolve in the field, and it is therefore essential to understand
their history.
The oft-prevailing Orientalist assumption of superiority, and domina-
tion of the West over the East, has been the underpinning for the more
enduring fascination with the harem and with the veil. Leila Ahmed’s
1982 essay “Western Ethnocentrism and the Perception of the Harem”
challenged the Western feminists’ monolithic and unchanging represen-
tation of Islam and Muslim women and charged them with complicity
in perpetuating the tropes that depict Muslim women as simultaneously
oppressed and exotic/erotic. That was thirty years ago. In 2001 Lila Abu-
Lughod wrote an essay entitled “Do Muslim Women Really Need Sav-
ing?”, wherein she mentioned Laura Bush’s enlisting of Muslim women’s
need for liberation as a justification for the intervention and occupation
of Afghanistan. In the past decade’s “war on terror” and the occupation
of Iraq and Afghanistan, the same tropes used by colonialist males who
opposed the women’s suffrage movement but promoted it in the colonies
as the justification for their presence—that is, to save Muslim woman
from Muslim man—continue to emerge both in academic and non-ac-
ademic representation of Muslim women. In more ways than one it sets
the agenda (both in teaching and research) for women engaged in Islamic
Studies as well as in Muslim Women’s Studies.
206 bahar davary

The efforts of feminist Orientalists active in the International Alliance

of Women (IAW) to offer visions of a less xenophobic Orientalism and
to distance themselves from the hegemonic notions of colonial feminism
were not met with success. The first wave of feminism adhered to the
main element of Orientalist legacy, namely superiority of Western ways.
They articulated the idea that the harem and the veil are categorically
and inherently more oppressive than monogamy (an idea based in part
on the perception of harems as automatically polygamous) and Western
dress, even as they realized that the veil was not an important symptom of
women’s condition. Though the feminist Orientalist approach subverted
and challenged orientalism at times by recognizing a shared patriarchal
oppression and even rebutted the common misperception of Islam as
being equated to the patriarchy, it ultimately affirmed the superiority of
Western culture. This proved stronger than the ideal of global women’s
sisterhood and the hopes to connect the East to the West. The idea of
liberation and emancipation was to come from the West and not from
Islam (Weber 2001).
In a body of work that counters such presuppositions, Meena Sharify
Funk (2008) reflects on women’s agency and meaning-making in trans-
national networks. Her interviews with Muslim women in various parts
of the globe reflected their eagerness to discuss the political and exis-
tential ramifications of the distinction between self and other. Even self-
­identified secular Muslim women activists did not welcome Western
discourse about Muslim women, and in fact expressed strong discomfort
with Western images of Muslim woman and of political Islam. As Lila Abu-
Lughod has said (1982), there is room for suspicion when neat cultural
icons cover up messier historical, cultural, and political narratives and
when saviors and liberators of Muslim women have military troops behind
them. It becomes even messier when private security contractors such as
the neo-crusader mercenary firm Blackwater USA (est. 1996) are deployed
to the occupied regions, where they have been known to make a game of
slaughtering civilians as part of an effort to eliminate Muslims and the
Islamic faith from the globe.

Islamic Studies: Inception

Muslim women in the early periods of Islam played an important role in

preserving and transmitting Islamic knowledge, in particular the ḥadīth.
The sixteenth-century author Ibn Hajar has recorded names of over 2,000
women among the notables, the Ṣaḥāba (companions of the Prophet and
 islamic studies 207

his contemporaries) and the tābiʿūn (followers, contemporaries not of the

Prophet himself, but of the Ṣaḥāba). The reference to the large number of
women scholars and teachers is the prelude to most discussions about the
essential role of women in the teaching and study of Islam today.
In the United States, one of the main venues for academic scholarship
in Islamic Studies is the American Academy of Religion (AAR), its annual
meetings, and its publication, the Journal of the American Academy of Reli-
gion. The organization was named in 1964 as a transformed version of NABI
(an organization established in 1909 for the purpose of stimulating scholar-
ship among professors and scholars of Biblical Studies). While the academic
study of Islam in the West dates back to the early 1500s at the University of
Oxford, in the nineteenth century it became a leading discipline in the field
of historical philology and was dominated by German scholars. Opening up
Islamic Studies to all social sciences and humanities finally resulted in the
first Islamic Studies program session at the AAR in 1986.
A recently established scholarly association dedicated to advancing
intellectual inquiry in advancing Muslim ethics is the Society for the
Study of Muslim Ethics (SSME), developed in 2009. It emerged out of a
working group on Islamic ethics created in 2003 at the Society for Chris-
tian Ethics and is now partnered with the Society for Christian Ethics and
the Society for Jewish Ethics. Unlike the other two organizations, both the
membership and board of directors of the SSME include non-Muslims as
well as Muslims. Unlike the other two organizations, it is not called the
Society for Muslim Ethics, but the Society for the Study of Muslim Ethics.
The interest in the study of Islam by non-Muslims seems to be far greater
than the interest shown by non-Christians in the study of Christianity or
by non-Jews in the study of Judaism. Hence, the inclusion of “Study” in
the name of the organization, i.e., the Society for the Study of Muslim
Ethics, not the Society of Muslim Ethics. In regard to matters of gender,
if the number of women involved with SSME is any indication, it is living
up to its ideals of ethical conduct. Its board of directors currently has an
even number of men and women. At the 2013 annual conference in Chi-
cago there was a strong female representation. None of the sessions were
dedicated to the discusion of gender and women, yet several women were
among the presenters and panelists on various other subjects.

Islamic Studies as Religious Literacy

Religious Studies and its subfields provide critical religious literacy within
each specific academic field. Religious literacy in general and Islamic
208 bahar davary

l­ iteracy in particular can be acquired in three distinct ways: devotional,

textual, and interdisciplinary/cultural. The devotional approach defines
Islam as rites, rituals, beliefs, and practices and is informed by an Islamic
worldview. The most common exposure to all world religions is often
through devotion. Women have often been at the forefront of devotional
Islam. However, the devotional approach does not count as religious lit-
eracy within the academic field of Islamic Studies. The textual approach
was highly common in nineteenth-century academic circles of Oriental
Studies. Heavy emphasis on the text and on textual Islam has led to the
perception that equates Islam with the text (generally with the Qurʾān
and the ḥadīth) in a way that confers absoluteness on the text and deifies
it. Women have often been marginalized within the context of textual
Islam and in the realm of the commentarial tradition. The third approach
is interdisciplinary and cultural; it is concerned with Islam as a phenom-
enon embedded in the life of Muslim women and men.
It is the textual and the interdisciplinary approach, the meta-theories,
theories, and methodologies of it, that are the subject of this entry. Text
and textual criticism (especially of the body of ḥadīth and ḥadīth literature)
has been a significant part of Islamic Studies. However, Islamic Studies is
not only presented in the classical texts but is also an engagement with
the lived experiences of Muslim women and men in the particularities of
time and space. Therefore Islamic Studies demands more than knowledge
of Arabic and of classical texts; it entails the study of historical, economic,
artistic, political, and cultural aspects of its diverse traditions. Islamic
Studies courses at American universities explain Islam through the arts,
literature, architecture, politics, history, and culture as an introduction
to the traditions of Islam. In other words, It is not unlikely that scholars
and professors of Islam (Islamicists)—whether they are Muslim or non-
­Muslim—will define Islamic Studies as an effort to understand what it
is to be a Muslim, in much the same way that American Studies is an
attempt to understand what it means to be American. For women profes-
sors and scholars of Islamic Studies who are Muslim the question is ulti-
mately about defining what it means to be a Muslim or a Muslim woman.

Interdisciplinary Methodologies

Today, within the Western academic discourse as well as major academic

institutions in many Muslim majority countries, Islamic Studies generally
refers to the historical study of Islam, Islamic civilization, Islamic law,
 islamic studies 209

theology, philosophy, mysticism (Sufism), ethics, sciences, literature, arts

and architecture, sociology and psychology, comparative religion, and
economics. While Islamic Studies is a well-defined discipline, the schol-
ars in the field (as well as those in Religious Studies) apply methodologies
from a variety of disciplines such as Anthropology, Philology, Sociology,
History, and Psychology. Within Islamic contexts, Islamic Studies focus
largely on the study of the Qurʾān and its commentaries, the ḥadīth, the
sunna of the Prophet, logic, uṣūl al-fiqh (foundations of jurisprudence),
fiqh (jurisprudence) as well as Arabic grammar and syntax, Islamic civili-
zation and history, and Islamic theology (kalam) and philosophy.
Masters or doctoral programs in Islamic Studies often require or offer
linguistic and theoretical tools as well as archival and/or field research.
The tracks within Islamic Studies vary by focus and can range from foun-
dational texts (Qurʾān, ḥadīth, and tafsīr), to historical texts (sīra al-na-
bawiyya), traditional Islamic sciences (kalam, fiqh, adab, balāgha), history
of law (primary sources), and modern Islamic thought, movements, and
practices. While this entry is about the discipline of Islamic Studies, it can-
not ignore the scholarship of women and men from other disciplines who
have been influential in the scholarship of women and Islam, for example
scholars in anthropology, history, and law. Given their attention to Islamic
law, history, current practices, and movements, they cannot be excluded
from a study such as this.
The debates on approaches to the study of Islam were naturally varied
long before the beginnings of the program sessions at the AAR. The con-
tributors to Approaches to Islam in Religious Studies (Martin 1985) point
to disagreements that are still part of the discourse of the study of Islam
in the West. In the 1980s the dichotomy was described as that between
historians of religion on the one hand and Islamicists on the other. The
authors placed emphasis on increasing Muslim sensitivity towards Islamic
Studies in the West, which in their view created further divisions. More
than two decades later the debate still continues and is sometimes rep-
resented as a dichotomy between the insider and the outsider to the
tradition. A non-Muslim Islamicist may be criticized for not understand-
ing Islam authentically while a Muslim scholar of Islamic Studies can be
blamed for lack of objectivity. In the current milieu there is a difference in
the political demands made on those who work on Islamic communities
and movements as compared with those who work on other projects, as
Saba Mahmoud (2005) has aptly predicated. Those who work on Islamic
movements around the world, she notes as an example, are hard pressed
to denounce the harm done by those movements lest they will be accused
210 bahar davary

of being apologists. If an anthropologist working to understand Muslim

communities or Islamist trends within those movements is hard pressed
to view those movements as categorically harmful to women, so much
more is the pressure on those whose work is centered on Islam, Islamic
texts, and women in those texts and in communities around the world.

Women in Islamic Studies: An Overview

The past twenty years and especially the rise of the new millennium have
brought about an increase in the activity of women in Islamic Studies
in both Muslim majority countries and the West. In his brief history of
Islamic Studies in Western academe published in the Journal of the Ameri-
can Academy of Religion (2010), Richard Martin makes mention of two
female scholars, Marcia Hermansen (in passing) and Marilyn Waldman, as
part of a dozen shapers of the AAR section on Islam in the 1980s. The two
important figures in the study of Islam and Sufism, Annemarie Schimmel
(1922–2003) and Sachiko Murata (b. 1943), the first woman who studied
in a Ph.D. program in fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) at the University of Teh-
ran, were not among those involved in the shaping of the program. The
contributions of Schimmel to the study of Islam—particularly her analy-
sis of Rūmī’s work—is unparalleled in the West. The depth of Sachiko
Murata’s understanding of Islam surpasses that of many contemporary
scholars.
The AAR study of Islam group itself is indebted to the untiring efforts of
Professor al-Faruqi. Faruqi’s presentations were met by hostility through-
out the 1960s and 1970s by scholars such as Franz Rosenthal, Joseph
Solomon Goitein, and George Makdisi. Martin reports that one conflict
stemmed from Faruqi’s claim that the founders of Biblical and textual crit-
icism had derived their methods from Medieval Muslim exegetes (Martin
2010). The establishment of the study of Islam group was not achieved
without facing hostility and challenge. Faruqi was a Palestinian-­American
philosopher, the founder of the program in Islamic studies at Temple Uni-
versity and the founder of the International Institute for Islamic Thought
(IIIT). Despite his unfailing smile and soft-spoken mannerism during
his student days at McGill, Martin reports that he was accused of being
an angry young Arab. The same report depicts Faruqi as being biased
against the Shiʻa and the Sufis, a claim that can hardly be supported by
Faruqi’s works or by the measure of respect held for him by his friend
and colleague, Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a prominent Shiʻa scholar
 islamic studies 211

and a Sufi master himself. Professor al-Faruqi and his wife Lois Lamya
al-Faruqi—an expert in Islamic art and music—were assassinated in their
home in Pennsylvania in 1986. The brutal killing of the two leading con-
temporary Muslim scholars carried out by Zionist fundamentalists/agents
was understood by Muslim communities and leaders to warn other Mus-
lim intellectuals against cultural self-expression and/or standing up for
Palestinian rights.
The jubilation over the end of Orientalism at the Middle Eastern Studies
Association (MESA) annual conference in 1998, where Edward Said was
feted for the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Orientalism (Martin
2010) was at best premature. It wrongly assumed that the dehumaniza-
tion of Islam and of Muslims in academic circles ended with the transition
of the central place for the study of Islam from one field to another. It
also predicated that all Orientalists were involved in this dehumanization.
Neither statement is true; hence the struggle over who has the right to
speak for Islam is an ongoing debate.

Insider/Outside Dichotomy: Who Speaks for Islam?

While the question of who speaks for Islam remains one of the major, if
rather covert, concerns in the study of Islam, the question of who speaks
for Muslim women is even more nuanced. The Muslim/non-Muslim
dichotomy simplifies the diversity of views expressed by scholars in the
field and does not consider the complexity of personal connections to
the Muslim identity. Nor does it acknowledge the diverse interpretations
of what it means to be Muslim/a. Among the struggles of Muslim women is
the formation of their identities in the face of stereotypical categories. Self-
defined identities, as Sharify-Funk (2006) has noted, seem to get rejected
in favor of collective labels that fit under the following four categories:
1. Traditional other, which depicts Muslim women as nurturing, depen-
dent, and submissive; 2. Oriental other, which defines them as passive,
subjugated, and uneducated; 3. Occidentalized other, which reflects Mus-
lim women as becoming Westernized and individualistic; and 4. Islamized
other, which sees Muslim women becoming defensively Islamic. It would
be myopic to assume that the insider perspectives of the last decades
have been monolithic or free from oppositions. There have been healthy
academic disagreements as well as differences in understanding over the
meaning of being Muslim/a, as what follows will reflect.
212 bahar davary

Women and Islamization of Knowledge

Women had little say—perhaps none at all—in the idea of Islamization of

knowledge, a process which started in the writings of Muhammad Naguib
al-Attas in 1978. The purpose of Islamization of knowledge was the syn-
thesis between the ethics of Islam and various fields of modern thought
in an attempt to produce a new consensus on a scientific method that
does not violate Islamic ethics and a new consensus among Muslims on
jurisprudence ( fiqh). A different kind of Islamization, the imposition of an
Islamist social political discourse in a Muslim society by varied interpre-
tations of Islam, has often left women with fewer rights than their male
counterparts.
The amazing character of religion is its contradictory role in people’s
lives. As ʿAlī Shariʿatī (1979) has aptly pointed out, religion can destroy
or it can revive, put to sleep or awaken, enslave or liberate; it can teach
docility or it can teach revolt. In Fatima is Fatima (1981) and his other
writings he argued that Islam is the religion of action, that docility was
neither the way of the Prophet nor of the women of his household, and
that his daughter Fatima was especially active. In Iran in the 1960s to
1970s, Shariʿatī’s work was intended to create a new model for Muslim
women who could not see themselves as following their mothers’ and
grandmothers’ traditionalism or the foreign-imported models of woman-
hood. Instead, he presented Fatima as a model of an ideal woman in Islam
and blamed the scholars for not introducing the exemplary women in the
life of the Prophet to Muslims. The idea that the Qurʾān is action-oriented
is at the heart of some Muslim feminists’ work, and it has also found much
support among scholars of Islam who are not focused on women and gen-
der issues. For example, Fazlur Rahman (1988) suggested that the stage of
creative knowledge would only be achieved when we come to the realiza-
tion that “the Qurʾān is an action-oriented book,” which inculcates in us
values that must lead us to act in its accordance. Fazlur Rahman’s his-
toricism included a three-stage process: first, to understand the historical
processes by which Islam has come to assume the form it has today; sec-
ond, to analyze and to distinguish between essential principles and their
particular formation in specific social, political, and economic contexts;
and third, to consider how best to apply the essential principles of Islam
in the contemporary period. Unlike his contemporary, Isma⁠ʾil al-Faruqi,
he was not a scholar-activist, yet his systematic approach to rethinking
Islam made him one of the most influential figures of the past fifty years
in the study of Islam and the target of a death sentence by the Pakistani
ʿulamāʾ in the 1960s.
 islamic studies 213

The notion of “truth” in its Aristotelian sense—the one synonymous

with the concept of telos (qayah or purpose)—is a good place to embark
upon the methodologies and theories in Islamic studies. Based on the
Aristotelian notion, “truth” is tantamount to “being.” In other words, hav-
ing access to a “world of truth” (being mediators of truth) is tantamount
to actualizing the potentiality of one’s being. The question of women in
Islamic history is an existential question for all involved in the academic
study of Islam.
The indispensible resource in Islamic Studies, interpretation (tafsīr)
has led many to a double quandary in understanding the Qurʾān and its
multiple representations and interpretations in the commentarial tradi-
tion. On the one hand, the interpretations have been viewed at times as
the word of God. On the other hand, the absoluteness of God has been
transferred to the absoluteness of the word of God, as it is represented in
the commentarial tradition. As such it edges towards shirk, idolatry, with
its claims that our human understandings of the Qurʾān reveal absolute
truth despite having evolved in time and space and by filtration through
the human cognitive universe. One of the important topics in the work
of women in Islamic Studies is the relationship between the Qurʾān and
its interpretations and the absence of women’s voices, especially in the
portrayal of woman and of gender relations within the texts.

Women and the Qurʾān: Interpreting the Foundational Text

Leila Ahmed (2000) makes a distinction between textual Islam, which

is associated with men, and oral/aural Islam, which is associated with
women. She questions the dissemination and promotion of textual Islam
as the “true” and “authentic” Islam simply because it represents that which
has been considered to be true by male Muslim authorities for centuries.
In an older paradigm, Riffat Hassan (1996), an early figure in the devel-
opment of feminist theology in the framework of Islam, referred to the
Qurʾān as the Magna Carta of human rights. She explains that in “real
Islam,” “the Islam of the Qur’an,” women and men are equal. Hassan states
that the concern of the Qurʾān is to free human beings from tribalism,
racism, sexism, slavery, and other injustices that would inhibit human
beings from actualizing their destiny. Yet the myth of women’s inferiority
is the dominant view within many Muslim communities due to verses of
the Qurʾān being taken out of context or read literally. Her motto follows
that of her mentor Muhammad Iqbal: “back to the Qur’an, forward with
Ijtihad.” She called into question the interpretation of creation of Eve from
214 bahar davary

Adam and for Adam by pointing out that the ḥadīth literature used in
the interpretations of the related verses in the Qurʾān are not supported
by the Qurʾān itself. Furthermore, she argues that the interpretation is
made by male commentators who gave themselves the authority and the
task of defining the status of woman in all its aspects: ontological, theo-
logical, sociological, and eschatological. Ultimately, Hassan calls for the
demolishing of the theological foundations of misogynistic and androcen-
tric aspects of Muslim culture, a demolition without which emancipation
cannot be achieved.
Amina Wadud (1993) presents a new hermeneutical approach, based
on tawḥīd (unity of God permeating all of being). She questions the notion
of the normative human being drawn from the experiences and perspec-
tives of the male person by using the Qurʾān as providing the ultimate
definitive criteria. Her method is holistic, in opposition to the common
atomistic hermeneutic that she criticizes as limiting. In her reading of the
text, the verses about women are not interpreted in isolation but in the
holistic framework of the entire text. She focuses on the significance of a
female-inclusive exegesis aimed to augment the exegetical process and to
end the absence of women’s voices within Islam by expressing the mean-
ing of the text. If the sacred is known through the text, then it cannot
be expressed in a gendered language but should point to un-gendered
spheres of reality. Wadud proposed a “hermeneutic of Tawhid” to argue
against the common atomistic approach to the Qurʾān and to suggest a
holistic approach that permeates throughout the scripture.
While the 1980s and 1990s saw the beginnings of Islamic feminist theol-
ogy with the works of Riffat Hassan, Tahera Aftab, and Amina Wadud, the
new millennium has been witness to the flourishing of other feminists such
as Kecia Ali, Asma Barlas, Nimat Hafez Barazangi, and Tazim Kassam. The
works of these scholars have created a new feminist Islamic scholarship
of the Qurʾān and of the Sharīʿa. In regard to the Qurʾān, Muslim feminist
scholarship has worked from the position that the text of the Qurʾān itself
is free from sexism and that it therefore is the androcentric interpretations
of the Qurʾān that have led to sexism in tafsīr. In other words, sexism is
imposed on the Qurʾān by association with the commentarial tradition.
The assumption is that the Qurʾān is divine and its Just Author (God) can-
not be charged with sexism. Assuming otherwise would result in a denial
of the wholly divine nature of the Qurʾān, as Aysha Hidayatullah has stated
(2011). However, the assumption that the literal text of the Qurʾān is free
from privileging men in some respects entails a disregard for two or three
verses that challenge Muslim feminist readers, believers, and interpreters.
 islamic studies 215

Hidayatullah suggests that the work laid before the scholars of Islam and
women entails facing, explicating, and accounting for elements of the text
of the Qurʾān that are sexist when read literally, and further for women to
declare their relationship with the text as such.

Gender Jihad: Islamic Leadership and the Changing Roles of Women

Islamic scholarship in the past decade has witnessed a rise in literature on

women’s Islamic leadership as well as a growth in the number of women
leaders in religious schools, mosques, and women’s seminaries across the
globe. The question of whether or not Islamic leadership—or, in a larger
scope, political leadership—is gendered is central to discussions of women
in Islamic Studies. Despite theoretical legitimacy of female leadership for
the community, in practice only men have retained the right, responsibil-
ity, and privilege to lead. One of the most important developments within
Islamic Studies in the past two decades is the study of dāʿiyāt (women
preachers) in various Muslim cultures. In An Islam of Her Own: Recon-
sidering Religion and Secularism in Women’s Islamic Movements (2001),
Sherine Hafez examines the desire and subjecthood of activist Muslim
women “by exploring the inseparability of piety and the political project.”
Her theory in her research on women and Islamic activism in Egypt in
general, and Gamʿiyat al-Hilal, in particular, is rooted in a reversal of the
role of researcher and the researched and the “possibility of other ways
of learning,” “the thrill of unlearning.” Hafez begins with the assumption
that religion and secularism are seldom distinct and that women’s Islamic
activism in Egypt takes on social reform movement on a larger scale than
the scope of religious movements are often credited with. She not only
questions her own subjectivity but, more importantly, in the process of
developing six years of ethnographic data, she questions the hegemonic
framework in which religious practice and those engaged in it are often
perceived.
In America a few Muslim women writers have sought to confront issues
of Muslim women by taking leadership roles within their community.
Amina Wadud has questioned the legitimacy of male-exclusive religious
leadership, including that of Friday prayer. Leading the 2005 prayer event
in a New York city mosque, she actively challenged the legitimacy of male-
exclusive leadership at mosques. Encoded in this act was the debate about
traditional legitimacy of female leadership in matters such as communal
prayer. This led to controversial debates on the issue, including some
216 bahar davary

among like-minded scholars. This reaction pointed to the vastness of

unread Islamic tradition. It brought about the deeper debate about inno-
vation (bidʿa) vs. renovation (tajdīd) and the legitimacy of either prac-
tice. Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, President and co-founder of Zaytuna College
in Berkeley, California, stated that within the Maliki tradition prayer led
by women has been considered permissible, and that within the Hanbali
school, Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) allowed women leadership in prayer,
though this was conditional on their level of knowledge and their physi-
cal positioning vis-à-vis men during the prayer at the mosque. In other
words, Islamic tradition has within itself rich resources for renewal, but it
necessitates institutions and professionals to engage deeply with the vast
and rich literature of Islamic knowledge. In the words of Masooda Bano
(2012), the engagement of women with teaching and preaching Islam is
an evolving narrative. From the emergence of Mallama (women Muslim
teachers/preachers) in Niger to the Qubaysiyyat (an international Mus-
lim women’s revivalist movement) in Syria, and female ahong (religious
authority) and qingzhen nüsi (women’s mosques) in China, women are
engaging in the production of the Islamic accumulative tradition. Within
the Islamic Republic of Iran women have long challenged the use of the
word rajol (man, pl. rejal) in its constitution as a requirement for male-
exclusive position of presidency. Azam Taleghani, the daughter of Seyed
Mahmoud Taleghani, is a prominent cleric who claimed that the word
rajol is used in the Qurʾān for both men and women and is the equiva-
lent of the gender-inclusive word adam (which means simply “a human
person” in Farsi). One of the important methodologies in discussion on
women and gender in Islam is attention given to language and the impact
of value-laden words. This is not limited to the language of the Qurʾān but
extends to the languages of Muslims all over the globe in which interpre-
tation of the text takes place, both in everyday life practices and in the
realm of scholarship.
Amira Sonbol’s work on women and the history of law makes her an
important contributor to the discussion of gender jihad. She is a professor
of history at Georgetown University and the editor-in-chief of HAWWA:
the Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World and co-
editor of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, a quarterly journal co-
published with Selly Oak Colleges, Birmingham, England). Her study of
Sharīʿa court documents of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth
centuries shows that modern reforms in Muslim nation states do not
reflect positive changes on gender-related issues. She refutes the idea
that the present subjugation of women by the Sharīʿa code as adopted
 islamic studies 217

and applied by modern nation-states is a vestige of the past. In her view,

the causes of subjugation lie not in the past but in how modern reforms
handle personal laws.
In a 2003 contribution to Progressive Muslims, Kecia Ali presents a dif-
ferent image of the Islamic laws of marriage and divorce. Comparing the
four Sunni schools of law, Ali acknowledges that while they differ in mat-
ters that could cause drastically divergent effects on the lives of women,
it is important to understand the mindset of the founding four jurists. In
doing so, she argues that in the minds of early and Medieval jurists there
was an amalgamation between the concept of wife and slave, in such a
way that marriage (relation with the wife) and ownership (relation with
the slave) became interchangeable. This confusion, according to Ali, led
to establishment of Sharīʿa regulations regarding tamkīn (sexual availabil-
ity of wife to the husband) and nushūz (often defined as the opposite of
tamkīn), as well as child custody laws. Ali’s approach entails criticism of
two other approaches to Islamic law, which she labels: 1. Neoconserva-
tive, those who call for complementarity of women and men and who are
comfortable with gender-specific roles for each and 2. Feminist apologet-
ics, including the prominent figure of Azizah al-Hibri, who for Islamic law
use Sharīʿa rules from different schools as well as from the Qurʾān and
ḥadīth according to whichever champions the women’s cause. Ali calls for
a reformulation of Islamic jurisprudence, which is not dependent upon
the mindset and prior text of the ninth and tenth-century jurists.
New gender-inclusive approaches to the Qurʾān and to jurisprudence
are the two main essentially positive strides in the positioning of women
in Islamic discourse. Even more notable is the emergence of a new legal
discourse resulting from the persistent paradigm of the larger numbers
of women receiving education, and entering the labor market, in addi-
tion to being active supporters of religious causes in countries such as
Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, and Iran. A rise in the numbers
of educated women who are also committed to a pro-gender activism due
to their religiosity has led from the realization of the value of women’s
support of political agendas. Muhammad Akram Nadwi’s research on
muḥadīthāt (female ḥadīth scholars) and his 53-volume biographical dic-
tionary in Arabic of 8,000 female ḥadīth scholars is another step forward
in women’s Islamic Studies literature. The introduction to the work is
translated into English and is entitled Al-Muhadithat: Scholars of Islam
(2007). Nadwi’s views on women and education fit well within the estab-
lished prophetic tradition that supported and encouraged learning and
scholarship for women and men, even if his views on the segregation of
218 bahar davary

genders is different from that of Muslim feminist scholars involved in the

scholarship of Islamic Studies in US academia.

Velvet Jihadists, Material Culture and Quiet Resistance

Recent scholarship within the discipline of Religious Studies—and by

extension within Islamic Studies—has given attention to ritual and mate-
rial culture. The argument for such focus is rooted in the idea that reli-
gious aspirations are often interconnected with objects, and that beliefs
are often articulated through material culture. In other words, overlook-
ing the objects of everyday religiosity is tantamount to missing a very
complex meaning-making within any religious context. Objects of mate-
rial culture are not to be viewed as empty signifiers but as receptacles
of complex meaning-making. The study of ritual objects therefore has
become one of the prominent venues in teaching Islamic Studies as well
as a great medium for the teaching and study of Muslim women’s prac-
tices and rituals.
Faegheh Shirazi’s Velvet Jihad: Muslim Women’s Quiet Resistance to
Islamic Fundamentalism (2009) is an attempt to bring together resources
and information on the ways in which women respond to extremist poli-
cies by participating in grassroots global activism. The goal is to express
the modes in which Muslim women from around the globe oppose
oppression and oppressive institutions by means of culture and specifi-
cally material culture. Invoking the term jihad (struggle) is expressly vis-
ible in both scholarly and popular works, from Amina Wadud’s Inside
the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam (2006) to Azadeh Mo’aveni’s
Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America and American
in Iran (2006). Velvet Jihad claims to be a response to the resurgence of
fundamentalist Islamism, but it does more by engaging in a mildly com-
parative view of other forms of fundamentalisms, including secular ones.
One of the prominent forms of resistance, and one increasingly accessible
to people regardless of their geographical location, is the internet.
Islamic Studies in the past ten years has become more global, inter-
disciplinary, and comparative in its approach to Islam and Muslim cul-
tures. After all, the fourth wave of feminism is online, with websites such
as feministing.com claiming 600,000 readers. Because of this and other
online sites and blogs, information on women around the globe can be
easily found online, where censure is more difficult. In the recent revolts
and uprisings in the Middle East, online social media, especially ­Facebook
 islamic studies 219

and Twitter, have been named as major facilitators of organized pro-

tests. While different from the Czech and Slovak velvet revolution of
1989 against Soviet domination, Shirazi uses the phrase velvet jihad to
imply quiet, soft, or nonviolent resistance to systems of oppression against
women. It is important to note that because the term velvet revolution is
otherwise understood as revolt in an anti-Western country supported by
Western governments, it sometimes has a negative connotation. Implied
in that meaning is the intrinsic way in which a people sees itself through
the eyes of the other. The cultural field of the internet reaches a wide
range of people, making their communications easy; people can see their
own lives and society through the lens of those outside of their localities,
countries, and continents. Accordingly, the impact of such things as rock
music in the fall of the Soviet Union can come within the realm of politi-
cal scientists, as can the study of Dial a Fatwa or 1-800-95-FATWA for the
study of women in Islamic jurisprudence.
Discussions on concepts such as shame, honor, and virginity have been
central in debates about Muslim women and the control of their bodies
and sexuality. Debates include, but are not limited to, the topics of rape,
virginity, voluntary virginity, revirginization by hymenoplasty, homosexu-
ality, and the specific silence on the issue of lesbianism. Other topics range
from Pakistan’s tribal tradition of marriage of young women to the Qurʾān
(promising to remain a virgin to protect the economic prosperity of the
family by preserving the ancestral land for the father or brother rather
than a husband) to karo-kari (honor killing of the accused adulterer),
vani (or soowa, giving the wife or daughter of a murderer to the family
of the victim to make peace between the families), watta satta (exchang-
ing brides between two families in Urdu tribes), to studies of Medieval
Islamic literature where taboos regarding same-sex love did not have
the same force as today. All these topics are comprehensively discussed
on the internet, from Pakistani gang rape survivor Mukhtar Mai and the
organization named after her, MMWO (Mukhtar Mai Women’s Organiza-
tion, established 2003), the champion of women’s rights in the southern
region of Punjab province, to HOMAN—the website for the purposes of
supporting Iranian gays and lesbians—as well as khaneye doost (literally
“friend’s house”), specifically designed for Iranian lesbians. The fact that
the information about these organizations can be found only on online
sites furthers the argument that one of the most important developments
of the past ten years is the use of online media for learning as well as
a venue for fighting exclusivism and oppression. However, all kinds of
fundamentalisms utilize this technology to further their agenda as well.
220 bahar davary

The velvet jihad is described by Shirazi as a response given by courageous

women and men to the Qurʾānic call to “invite to all that is good, to enjoin
what is right, and to forbid what is wrong.” She herself engages in that
jihad and debunks the solely negative portrayals of Islam and Muslims by
providing historical contexts and appropriate compelling comparisons of
women from various Muslim and non-Muslim cultures to avoid reducing
Islam and Muslims to fanaticism and fanatics. This has not been the case
in all the literature produced in relation to Islam in the past ten years.

The New Orientalist Approach

The last decade has been witness to great public interest in Islam and Mus-
lim cultures. In colleges and universities, this has led to additional courses
in the curriculum on Islam as a religious tradition and to the creation of
faculty positions to teach them. Although only 10 percent of U.S. universi-
ties and institutions of higher learning have incorporated such courses in
their curriculum to date, the nonacademic public realm has boomed with
new Orientalist narratives specifically about women and Islam. While
the new Orientalist writings—both fiction and non-fiction—are not
authored by scholars of Islam, Islamic Studies, or even Religious Studies,
they have received much credence and have been accepted as authori-
tative because of their insider authorship. Fatemeh Keshavarz has vocif-
erously criticized Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) in her
Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran (2007) for being
an example in the genre of literature that distorts the objective realities
of Muslim countries and cultures by representing only the negative and
the malevolent.
A trend of a more radical new Orientalist approach has surfaced in
the past ten years among the non-academic literature by self-identified
Muslim women writing on the topic of Islam and women, such as Irshad
Manji’s Trouble with Islam (2005) and Allah, Liberty, and Love (2011).
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Muslim turned humanist-secular is a Somali-
Dutch-American, whose works Infidel (2008) and The Caged Virgin: An
Emancipation Proclamation For Women and Islam (2008) are examples of
fervent new Orientalism. While Manji and Ali differ in their personal ori-
entations towards religion and their claim of devotion to or rejection of
Islam, they share in their unyielding support of the West as the only place
where feminism, freedom, and reason can flourish. Neither are scholars of
religion or of Islam. Hirsi Ali’s knowledge of Islam does not go far beyond
 islamic studies 221

her personal experiences with it. In the case of Manji, she can be credited
with nothing more than self-education in matters of Islam. Despite this
fact, Manji has launched organizations such as Project Ijtihad “to pro-
mote critical thinking and dissent within Islam” and calls for reform as
if it were a novel idea. Her label for herself as a “Muslim refusenik” and
her approach towards Israel have gained her the title of “Muslim Zionist.”
This type of fervent new Orientalist approach is far from the ideas of pro-
gressive and reform minded scholars of Islamic Studies. Islamic Studies
cannot continue at any time without the study of its foundational texts,
the Qurʾān and the ḥadīth. Post-colonial Islamic Studies have focused
on the foundational texts in order to pose the questions that are raised
within the disciplines of Religious Studies as well as the social sciences
and humanities.

Progressive Muslims and Systematic Theory of Interpretation

Transforming the Islamic spheres and constructing authority have been

the challenges of Islamist feminists, progressive Muslims, and secular
Muslim women and men engaged in the struggle for justice and equal-
ity. Women have made prominent progress within piety movements.
They have gained and lost battles over their specific rights within major-
ity Muslim populated countries and their respective constitutions. The
struggle for women within Islamic Studies has been one against imperial,
colonial, and neocolonial feminism, as well as against Islamist patriarchal
normativity. Where the ideas of female preachers and teachers with reli-
gious authority are still strongly challenged, women are engaged both in
the realm of scholarship and in the realm of practice in the cause of self-
reform and self-making.
Margot Badran’s general definition of Islamic feminism as a “feminist
discourse and practice articulated in an Islamic paradigm” opens up the
classical methodologies of Islamic research to women and allows them to
engage with the textual tradition. The classical methodologies of ijtihād
(independent interpretation in the realm of fiqh, jurisprudence) and
tafsīr (Qurʾānic commentary) are applicable in both modern and post-
modern studies of Islam. It would not be correct to assume that feminist
re-reading of the sacred texts of Islam found its beginning in the United
States by American Muslims/scholars. Post-revolutionary Iranian women
in the Islamic republic challenged the male-centered interpretations
of the Qurʾān and of the Islamic legal codes as early as the first majlis
222 bahar davary

(­parliament) in 1980. In Malaysia, SIS or Sisters in Islam was formed in

1990 to seek legal redress for women within Sharīʿa courts by appealing
to Islamic discourse. In the realm of theory, the Iranian thinker Abdulka-
rim Soroush presented a paradigm of discourse in his famous Gabz va
baste teorike Shariʾat (Theoretical ontraction and expansion of Sharīʿa).
Soroush’s ­paradigm distinguished between what is essential (zati) and
what is accidental or fortuitous (arazi). The essential doctrines such as
that of tawḥīd (unity of God) are unchangeable, but the fortuitous ele-
ments within the realm of religion can and must change with time.
According to this doctrine the entire corpus of Islamic law is considered
contingent and non-essential, a contested text open for contraction and/
or expansion. While Soroush himself did not engage in arguments about
women and women’s rights, his methodology has been applied by those
interested in gender justice in Iran and elsewhere around the world; these
individuals have found in this methodology a new paradigm in the Islamic
discourse of post-modernity. It has developed into a discourse that rejects
the ideological assumption of an essential nature for women as gendered
other. Many progressive Muslims within U.S. academia find this theoreti-
cal base appealing as a systematic theory of interpretation of the whole
Islamic legal corpus.

Women, Sexuality and Queering Religious Texts

Some traditional interpretations of the Qurʻān and sunna have developed a

binary view of sexuality in which men’s and women’s sexuality are viewed
differently. From this perspective women have been perceived as fitna,
that is, causes of social and moral chaos and/or embodiment of seduction
whose presence is a distraction to men and their productivity and religious
morality. It is therefore necessary that external precautionary safeguards
be established in order to limit women’s power of kayd (cunning and
intrigue). Preventive measures such as the veil, seclusion and gender seg-
regation safeguard not only men’s honor, but also the moral order. Within
contemporary Muslim scholarship the neo-traditional Salafi school aims
to return to the interpretation of the Islamic canon as presented by the
first three generations of ṣahāba (companions of the Prophet) maintain-
ing the above arguments. From the Salafi perspective there is no need to
engage and utilize modern epistemologies in creating a normative Muslim
woman. This approach, however, disregards the importance of the holistic
 islamic studies 223

context of the Qurʾān by focusing on textual and philological elements as

studied in segments, without regard for other parts.
In contrast to the atomistic methodology, the progressive Muslims
focus on the broader elements of Qurʾānic ethical religious values such as
justice (ʿadl), equality (qisṭ), mercy (raḥma), and dignity (karāma). Based
on these principles, they argue for the simple yet radical idea that every
human being, male or female, has the same intrinsic worth. From this
perspective, gender justice becomes a measuring stick of the broader con-
cerns for social justice. Its absence not only oppresses women but also
dehumanizes men who participate in creating and sustaining the unjust
system. In a systematic approach to the body of tradition, Kecia Ali claims
that within the texts written and compiled by the fuqahāʾ (jurists), “sex is,
by and large, a male right and female duty.” Even if woman’s sexual satis-
faction is discussed within those texts, measures to enforce it are not the
same as they are with the male dissatisfaction with the wife. In the latter
case, the statements by the Prophet have been understood to associate
a husband’s displeasure with a wife who refuses to have sex with God’s
displeasure with her. Such is not the case when a man refuses to satisfy his
wife. In Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith, and
Jurisprudence, Ali takes the first step towards defining the problem within
Muslim sexual ethics. The Muslim discourse on sexuality as defined by
classical Muslim scholarship, according to Ali, lacks a just ethics of sexual
intimacy in its constraints of lawful sexuality. Ali not only problematizes
the legal discourse of the ninth- and tenth-century jurists but points to
the challenges of the Qurʾānic text as well. Limiting ourselves to selec-
tive egalitarian verses of the Qurʾān in isolation from its broader scrip-
tural context, she states, is both dishonest and futile. The methodology
Ali suggests is jurisprudence itself, as the practice of the jurists entailed
utilizing ijtihād (human interpretive reasoning) as well as maintaining a
constructive dialogue between textual sources and social customs of the
time. While the focal point of Muslim family law and ethics is generally
focused on marriage and divorce laws, there are few references within fiqh
texts that reflect on same sex relations.
A rudimentary reading of Medieval Muslim literature reveals that same-
sex relations were treated differently within Muslim communities, com-
pared to today. Legal experts have argued that in some cases, for example
in Iran prior to the 1979 revolution, consensual sexual relations between
adults did not figure in the country’s criminal code. In this particular case,
Shirin Ebadi states that the Islamic Republic enacted a version of Islamic
224 bahar davary

law, which is “extraordinarily harsh even by the standards of the Islamic

world.” Obviously, Islamic sources, concepts, and modes of reasoning
have been utilized to create the current dominant logic of sexuality within
some Muslim legal codes of law. At the same time there is scholarly and
literary interest in the growing discourse of Muslim sexualities as well as
attention to the life of queer Muslims. The works of Shannahan (2009),
Habib (2007) and Kugle (2003, 2010) focus on re-readings of the Qurʾānic
story of the Prophet Lūt in light of the grand moral values of the Qurʾān.
The re-reading reflects on the narrative not as a marker of heteronorma-
tivity but as a rejection of the behavior of the people of Sodom who not
only rejected God, but committed rape, robbery, and violated the dignity
of their guests. Kugle presents a new Lūt paradigm in which the ethical
component of the story is not to be reduced to a juridical one, and corrup-
tion is not reduced to sexual transgression. Rather, the ethical massage of
the narrative lies in denouncing greed and disallowing inhospitality and
sexual violence.
For Ali (2006) and Shannahan (2010) the key problem remains the lack
of attention to mutual consent in matters of intimacy as reflected in the
Prophet Lūt offering his daughters in marriage to the transgressors. In that
respect, the wishes of the daughters were not considered, and even their
consent did not seem to be required. Generally speaking, female sexuality,
and female same-sex desire appears very minimally within textual tradi-
tion, with no mention of it in the Qurʾān. Shannahan considers women
of the scriptural story of Sodom as “collateral damage in the war against
homosexuality”; at the same time she sees them as “collateral damage in
the war against heteronormativity” in Kugle’s re-reading of the story. As
Shannahan points out, discourses on sexuality and the embodied power
relations they represent are not only about sex.
The dominant discourses, theories, and methodologies on women, gen-
der, and sexuality are highly varied within the global academic contexts.
The focus of this entry was mainly the methodologies within the Ameri-
can context and their influences, with few references to prominent voices
elsewhere. Considering the multitude of languages in which Islam and
Islamic Studies are taught around the globe, giving a comprehensive sur-
vey of approaches and methods in all those localities and languages is an
enormous task that would entail a far greater research project than this
space allows. In all locations, Muslim feminist theology has been bound
by multiple constraints of Orientalism, colonialism, and patriarchal Isla-
mism, yet the task of questioning, reading, and re-reading the texts and
contexts within which Muslim women flourish continues. So does the
re-envisioning of the future.
 islamic studies 225

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 Literary Studies

Michelle Hartman

Introduction: Literary Studies, in Crisis?

Literary Studies struggles to define itself as an academic discipline. This

is partly because, as Mary Layoun states so succinctly in the first volume
of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, “A great diversity of
epistemologies (ways of knowing), theories (generalized optics or ways
of seeing), and methods (ways of disciplinary practice) inhabits the disci-
pline of literary studies” (Layoun 2003, 387). Like many other academic
disciplines, Literary Studies in the English-language academy, particu-
larly when based in North America and the United Kingdom, has been
closely tied to trends of thought and ideologies based in enlightenment
Europe. Also like other academic disciplines, Literary Studies has sought
to shape and reshape itself over time. Layoun goes on to point out some of
the benefits of Literary Studies, as a discipline in the English-language
academy, despite the particular difficulties it faces when it attempts to
work with literatures that differ from or pose a challenge to literatures
rooted in European humanism and enlightenment ideals:
Nevertheless it attempts to take up questions of gender (“women”), of rela-
tive cultural difference (“Islamic cultures”) and of unequal relations of cul-
tural and social power—though it has not always done so—literary studies
can afford a useful reminder of the ways in which the study of literature
teaches us to read, to query and to learn differently, and to be attentive to
the silences, lapses, and ambiguities of (literary) language, text, and context
(Layoun 2003, 387).
Rooted in particular histories and traditions, yet containing multiple fields
and subfields, approaches and paradigms, not to mention ideologies and
epistemologies, the discipline of Literary Studies is particularly open to
self-reflection and reinvention.
One of the issues central to the definition of Literary Studies as a disci-
pline is the definition of literature itself. What is studied in Literary Studies?
How different times, places, and ideologies define “literature” is notoriously
diverse. The methods and approaches employed to study these are as var-
ied if not more so. Moreover, unlike History, Philosophy, Anthropology,
there are few academic departments of “Literary Studies,” though the study
228 michelle hartman

of literature is considered central to scholarship in the humanities. Perhaps

more so than many other scholarly disciplines, Literary Studies is focused
explicitly as well as implicitly on issues related to artistic expressions of the
representation and deep analysis of the Self. This means it therefore also
takes up the question of the relationship between Self and Other. Because
literature is constructed as something that is created for pleasure as well
as study, it bears these representational burdens intensely. Languages, cul-
tures, societies, and literary traditions that fall into the category of Other—
the so-called Islamic cultures are a good example of this—have not fared
well in Literary Studies. Marginalized, exoticized, romanticized and often
despised, literary traditions that engage with Islamic culture/s and societ-
ies are a salient example of some of the problems in the discipline through-
out its history and persisting until today.

Where Are Women and Islamic Cultures in Literary Studies?

Where do women and Islamic culture/s fit into this picture? In many ways,
women who are connected to Islamic culture/s are relatively marginal to
and excluded from mainstream Literary Studies. Up until the latter part
of the twentieth century, they have not been a part of the scholarly appa-
ratus of English-language academia; nor are works that are written by
women from Islamic cultures a central part of the studies being produced
there. They are neither widely represented nor widely studied. The dis-
cipline of Literary Studies in English-language academia has not, on the
one hand, produced a large amount of knowledge on women in Islamic
cultures. Outside of a relatively small number of specialists, few scholars
in mainstream Literary Studies have read and investigated works written
in languages that could be broadly defined as “Islamic.” Authors whose
works have been translated over time tend to be read as broadly “repre-
sentative” and often become distorted beyond recognition in translation.
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is one famous example of this.
On the other hand, women and Islamic cultures are not entirely absent
from mainstream literary studies either. In the twenty-first century, but
dating back much further, women from many diverse locations around
the globe have been a feature of study, not as actors but as objects, sub-
jected to an Orientalist gaze, meant to be an Other against which a puta-
tively Euro-American Self can be defined or compared. Mohja Kahf ’s
illuminating study, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman (1999),
for example, provides a brilliant argument demonstrating how the very
image of the Muslim Woman has changed so dramatically from Medieval
 literary studies 229

times, through the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romantic periods in

Europe. Despite these changes, the figure of the Muslim Woman has been
consistently depicted as an Other. This allows her to be read and appropri-
ated through lenses that in most cases do not challenge stereotyped rep-
resentations and received notions, whether these are of the out of control
harridan or the oppressed woman shrinking behind her veil in purdah.
Studies not only of the representation of Muslim women and/or women
and Islamic cultures have been produced, but also studies of writings by
women from Muslim-majority countries and/or of Muslim backgrounds
are increasing. Lisa Suhair Majaj, Paula Sundeman and Therese Saliba, for
example, edited Intersections: Gender, Language and Community in Arab
Women’s Novels (2002), a collection of essays that all engage recent liter-
ary scholarship in their examination of recent Arab women’s writing.
The production of knowledge about women and Islamic cultures in
Literary Studies is therefore tied up in issues of representation, particu-
larly static and fixed images of the Muslim Woman. Whether this is done
by seeing literary texts as ethnographic information about women from
different and “exotic” parts of the world, as representative of these “cul-
tures,” or by choosing a handful of female poets and authors to represent
vast areas of language, regions, cultures, and traditions, women have been
depicted in limited ways in Literary Studies. This can be seen in the inclu-
sion of women writers from Islamic cultures in literary anthologies, for
example. The creations of canons of women’s literature presented oppor-
tunities for the increased representation of women and Islamic cultures
in literature. Though often misrecognized (by nation, language and other
factors), women writers from Muslim majority parts of the world have
found more spaces in such locations, thereby opening up possibilities for
a different sort of production of knowledge around their texts and liter-
ary traditions more generally. This is just one example of a location in
which texts are positioned in various ways with more than one possibility
of interpretation. The rest of this entry traces multiple locations of Liter-
ary Studies as a discipline within English-language academia broadly and
within university settings in North America more specifically.

Brief History of Literary Studies as a Discipline in the Academy

Pre-modern
From its earliest origins, the historical understanding of literature has
shared two main qualities: 1. that access to literature is a mark of cul-
ture and good breeding; and 2. that this gives textual access to religious
230 michelle hartman

scriptures and books (Layoun 2003). As religious texts and scriptures con-
stitute the base of academic Literary Studies before the modern period,
there are deep connections with Religious Studies. As Layoun points
out, “What we now call the discipline of ‘literary studies’ was more prop-
erly textual scriptural studies—the study of the sacred word” (Layoun
2003, 383). The exegesis and hermeneutics of religious texts are two of
the important approaches to this study. The value of Literary Studies
in the academy is grounded in these main modes of understanding texts.
The study of literary texts as a way to preserve history and culture, and
to distinguish between high and low cultures, follows on from this. Fur-
ther developments through the European Renaissance and beyond then
follow, with the elevation of “ordinary people” to “high culture” through
poetry and literary prowess. This connection is all the more important to
recognize in relation to Islam and “Islamic cultures” that have often been
over-identified with religion.

Modern
From the second half of the twentieth century onward, literary theory
deeply changes the ways in which literature is studied and talked about.
This period witnesses the increasing acknowledgment that methods of
reading are connected to bigger ideas and ideologies. Whereas not all lit-
erary theory and its manifestations offer explicit interrogations of power,
the move to theory makes more visible the ways in which studies of lit-
erature are thought about and framed. The ideological underpinnings of
Literary Studies at times have worked to buttress oppressive systems, even
as much as they have questioned and challenged power at other times.
The most obvious examples of this are the links between Literary Studies,
nationalism, and colonialism.
There are many new critical lenses and theoretical approaches that
arise and become dominant throughout the twentieth century. They do
not always compete, nor is there a strictly chronological development.
Some of these include: New Criticism, Structuralism and Formalism; Post-
structuralism and Deconstruction; Critical Theory and New Historicism;
Marxist Literary Studies; Modernism and Postmodernism; and Psycho-
analytic, Feminist and Queer Studies. This is a far from a exhaustive list
and is meant to give a sense of some of the main schools of thought and
theoretical trends that dominated Literary Studies in the late twentieth,
into the twenty-first, century. Where Literary Studies are located within
the academy can give a better sense of some of the factors that shape
 literary studies 231

its engagements with women and Islamic cultures. The entry next traces
some of these locations and then moves on to an examination of the most
productive ways in which knowledge around women and Islamic cultures
has been generated in Literary Studies.

Locations of Literary Studies in the Academy

The historical trajectory of the study of literature in the academy as it

develops into a discipline called Literary Studies can be linked to the
location/s in which it is housed in university contexts. The organization
of the study of literature has been concentrated in different locations in
the academy over time. A diverse and diffuse series of fields and sub-
fields, Literary Studies does not have one specific place in a university
environment; there are few departments of “Literary Studies.” The brief
discussion here privileges English-speaking North America, recogniz-
ing university practices in the United Kingdom, and is somewhat able,
though this is not uniformly true, to be generalized to other educational
institutions around the world operating in English. It is notable that the
trend over time, from the middle of the twentieth century onward, is to
­concentrate literary study in departments that are defined by national
and pan-national linguistic categories. The divisions, roughly speaking,
within this broad framework are between the study of the Self (English
Literature, including locations outside England), the Other (Comparative
Literature, almost exclusively European) and the other Others, which may
be grouped together (Romance Languages and Literatures, Slavic Litera-
tures) or are divided up into further subcategories.

Literature and Nationalism

Mainstream English-language university environments largely concentrate
the study of literature in English departments. These departments vary a
great deal in ideological orientation and make up and sometimes add on
other naming devices like Cultural Studies or Critical Theory or Compara-
tive Literature. Nonetheless this means that the study of literature/s—
especially “modern” literature—is still organized in national, pan-national,
or even nationalist terms. Linguistic categories for the study of literature
are often defended on the basis that language is the most coherent crite-
rion by which to exclude and include literary texts from “traditions.” But
it is also acknowledged that a stronger ideology is at work in maintaining
these histories. Though the concept of the study of a nation’s ­literature
232 michelle hartman

being crucial to development of burgeoning nation states may seem to

have fallen out of favor in the United States, the United Kingdom or
Canada, for example, the organization of literary studies in this way belies
its origins.
Therefore, in addition to the English department, universities also
largely group the study of literatures not written originally in English in
a variety of other nationally-defined departments: French departments,
Spanish departments, and so on. These departments are most often “prag-
matically” organized by language, though they usually offer courses in
English translation, and most often group parts of Europe together with
literature produced beyond the borders of the nation-state, including for-
mer colonies. Though budget cuts have meant that departments devoted
to the study of languages and literatures are being eliminated and often
are merged together, rarely do universities have entire departments where
Literary Studies as a discipline is centered, across languages.
Within such linguistically and nationally defined departments of litera-
ture, works by women writers have been consistently marginalized, even
with the attention brought to this issue throughout the very end of the
twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Most courses in literature use
works by women as representatives of specific trends or of their gender
and often have little more than token inclusion in programs of study—
offering several courses in women’s literature for example—or several
texts on a syllabus for so-called “mainstream” literary courses. This doubly
marginalizes languages and literatures associated with Islamic cultures, in
particular women writing from these locations. Because of the linguistic-
national emphasis in departmental organization, literary texts by women
writing in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Turkish, Bhasa Indonesia or a host of other
languages will be studied in different locations, as no departments repre-
senting these languages individually exist in the English-language acad-
emy. People who write literary texts in languages represented by national
literature departments but of a Muslim background, or originally hailing
from places that are considered part of Islamic world, for example, are
included in particularly bounded ways. Usually this is a famous figure cast
as an exception to her/his culture/s and religion, or part of a group of
writers labeled diasporic, postcolonial or cosmopolitan, as in the case of
South Asian writers using English, who often have a marginal, niche loca-
tion within English departments; well-known examples include Salman
Rushdie and Arundhati Roy. Some of the best-known women writers used
to represent the “Islamic cultures” fit uneasily into these categorizations,
including Monica Ali, Nawaal El Saadawi, and Taslima Nasrin.
 literary studies 233

Comparative Literature
One location in the academy that has worked consistently to break down
these nationally-defined ways of studying literature are departments of
Comparative Literature. Central European émigré professors are credited
for the origins of Comparative Literature as a field. It was conceived of in
order to work across languages and cultures, reach beyond English and
Anglo-America into Europe, and focus differently on literary texts. Com-
mitted to the notion that scholars should be deeply familiar with more
than one language, comparatists by definition work between more than
one national literary tradition. Many of the innovations in the study of
literature have come from within the cross-fertilization of ideas engen-
dered by Comparative Literature departments. Different critical schools
are engaged in such locations and they are freer to work through issues
and problems or investigate literary principles such as “genre” or “canon,”
because they can range through various traditions and languages together,
than are more nationally or linguistically limited studies. The field of Com-
parative Literature sets itself up as being better able to work in a series of
worlds than studies defined by only one language.
Some of the problems with the larger project of Comparative Literature
are brought into sharp focus when examining it from an angle informed
by Islamic culture/s. The way in which Comparative Literature as a field
was developed, and the way in which departments operate in practice, are
deeply intertwined with Europe and a Euro-centered worldview. Though
comparatists work with literatures from all parts of the world, based on a
belief that a mix of expertise and knowledge leads to sound literary study,
most people committed to the concept and practice are only deeply read
in and knowledgeable about European languages and literatures. This
means that comparisons and connections between languages and litera-
tures of the global South—particularly those that are not mediated by
a colonial language—are unusual and not encouraged. Frequently, these
languages and literatures (most literatures of the Sub-Continent other
than English, for example) are either completely absent or represented by
one or at most two people in an academic unit. This limits the possibilities
for working between languages, literatures and traditions of the South.
It also means that Comparative Literature departments are ill-suited to
reformulate and rethink ideas growing out of such interactions.
The self-critique of Comparative Literature by its advocates has been
extensive. Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism (Bern-
heimer 1995), for example, is an edited book that contains the 1995 report
234 michelle hartman

on the field, two previous reports, and reactions by some of the field’s
leading thinkers. Many of the contributions underline some of the cri-
tiques of Comparative Literature’s Euro-centrism (Apter, Pratt), including
a powerful essay by Rey Chow that argues against simply adding more
languages—Arabic, Chinese and Hindi—to “balance” the European focus
of French, German and Spanish. Overlapping in many cases, feminist cri-
tiques of the field are collected in another volume, Borderwork: Feminist
Engagements with Comparative Literature (Higonnet 1994). In this vol-
ume, Fedwa Malti-Douglas points out a number of the problems with
how Islamic cultures are represented within literary studies, including the
ridiculous and insulting way in which writing by Arab Muslim women
gets labeled as “emerging” or as “new voices,” despite the centuries-long
histories of women’s writing across Islamic cultures. Malti-Douglas has
further argued that women from Islamic cultures have more to offer the
study of literature generally than insight into their “oppression” and has
called for deeper analysis of ties to rather than breaks from classical lit-
erary traditions. More recently, Gayatri Spivak published a series of lec-
tures that she gave as Death of a Discipline. Here, she provides a trenchant
rethinking of Comparative Literature as a framework, which is discussed
in more detail below.

Regional Studies
Though Comparative Literature departments and national literature
departments, especially English departments, are the central hubs of
Literary Studies within the academy and universities, the study of texts
by women writing from Islamic cultures is rarely done here. This logical
paradox makes sense in the history of most, or at least many, institutions
in United Kingdom and English-speaking North America (and beyond)
because they were established and designed to work within national and
nationalist frameworks. Like all Literary Studies, these fields and depart-
ments are built upon and build up canons. This is particularly true of elite
educational institutions and universities that are centers of power, pro-
ducing graduates who later populate government and industry. National
and pan-national groupings are covered from above, where a French lit-
erature department houses literature/s from metropolitan France and all
of France’s colonies and former colonies. Spanish departments include
areas of colonial conquest. In the case of Spanish, particularly in North
America, this can also lead to a “regional studies” approach that would set
up a Department of Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
 literary studies 235

The regional studies model, therefore, carves up the world into regions
originally often designated along Cold War lines, although this varies.
Soviet Studies have become Eastern European or Slavic Studies and have
been greatly reduced. Asian Studies is at times general, at times divided
into East and South (rarely West) Asian Studies. African Studies is at
times connected to its diaspora as Africana Studies but often maintains a
regional distinction. Some knowledge produced about women and Islamic
cultures falls under the purview of these kinds of departments and fields
of study.
The departments that are designated to house most of the studies of
parts of the world commonly defined as connected to Islamic cultures are
most frequently departments labeled Middle or Near East, North Africa,
Oriental or Islamic Studies. South Asian Studies, of course, covers a great
deal of the Islamic world/s though it is not always linked to these depart-
ments and there are relatively fewer centers of study in North America
than in the United Kingdom. The division of the world into these kinds
of categories has at times gone hand in hand with ideological state proj-
ects and does not necessarily undermine national categories and depart-
ments. Rey Chow points out in her critique of Comparative Literature that
these departments are most often Cold War products that still perform
the same operations criticized by Edward Said’s Orientalism (Bernheimer
1995, 108).
It is crucial here to recognize that these departments almost always
marginalize Literary Studies, even if this is where such studies are
housed. The emphasis on History and Political Science is considerably
more central. This is truer of “modern” than “classical” ­studies and is
often posed as a question of “modern” and “classical” languages. Lan-
guages are taught as “literary” to enable students to read the classical tra-
ditions of poetry and religion, but modern languages are taught mainly
to deal with current events. Moreover, many literary texts fit uneasily
into the regional classification, particularly when tied to language. South
Asian writers of English for example, can be cast as diasporic or post-
colonial and therefore displaced to English departments. The strong
philological impulse and training of scholars in ancient and modern
languages mean that there is often a focus on “literature,” but in such
a way as to serve as an example of something else—a historical point
or an archeological find. This can in turn serve to make modern litera-
tures and peoples seem hopelessly archaic and tied to ancient traditions
because of the structure of the field. Magda al-Nowaihi’s excellent cri-
tique of this situation from within a Middle East Studies department in
236 michelle hartman

the United States lays out these problems forthrightly, challenging us to

think about where modern literatures written in Islamic cultures can “fit”
in a system in which departments are organized in this way. She offers
readings of texts by a number of Arab writers demonstrating a range of
ways in which they engage crucial questions in Literary Studies today.

Ethnic Studies: A Focus on Identity and Experience

North American departments of Ethnic Studies and other smaller loca-
tions where scholarship and teaching on various world “diasporas” happen
were largely prompted by student activism and agitation in US society for
better representation of cultures, communities, literatures and histories.
These vary and can include many groups or be devoted to one. Examples
include Black Studies, African American Studies, Chicano/a Studies, and
so on. They have defined themselves differently over time and continu-
ally reinvent and challenge themselves as well. The kinds of frameworks
and methods used in these locations are often multidisciplinary and draw
on multiple ways of knowing, constructing, and producing knowledge
that challenge the status quo. Representation and knowledge production
around women of Islamic culture/s can often find a place here because
they work against the grain of dominant canons . . . . . A works such as Glo-
ria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) is produced in this tradition.
Its focus on language, theory and practice, with a woman-centered mes-
sage, inspired scholars who work with women from many places on other
borderlands. The inclusion of Arab-American women in the volume This
Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Change (Anzaldúa and Keating
2002), follows up on the classic This Bridge Called my Back (Moraga and
Anzaldúa 1981), showing the ways in which women whose backgrounds
are originally Arab and/or Muslim can have their writing and experiences
validated in radical women of color spaces, though their process of inclu-
sion was not without contest or struggle (Elia 2011).

Producing Knowledge about Women and Islamic Cultures in Literature

The tracing of multiple locations of Literary Studies in the academy is

meant to give a sense of how these studies are centered around particu-
lar schools of thought, but are also overlapping. Literary Studies are not
pure; drawing from multiple approaches and paradigms to create mixed
reading methods is common and encouraged. Literary scholars regularly
 literary studies 237

draw on a wide range of sources without a problem. They often work to

develop theories and methods in ways that deviate from the norms of
the field/s, even while at times they reinforce and shore up mainstream
ideologies and approaches. The ways in which knowledge is produced
around women and Islamic cultures, therefore, is diffuse and not located
squarely in one approach, paradigm, method, theory or source. The next
section outlines some of the powerful trends in Literary Studies that have
had an impact on the production of knowledge about women and Islamic
cultures. There are insights from many theoretical schools evident in the
trends discussed below, since many critics and scholars draw upon them.
The focus here is strands of thoughts that have offered possibilities for
productive readings of women and Islamic cultures.

Marxist Criticism and the Third World

Marxist literary criticism, defined broadly, has, and continues, to produce
some of the most challenging studies of literature, particularly in relation
to the central question of the relationship between the politics and poet-
ics of literary creation. It is impossible to group Marxist literary schol-
ars all together, as many who study literature with a Marxist ideological
bent or system in mind would define and root themselves in other critical
schools as well. Many Marxist critics have devoted attention to the study
of literature from the formerly colonized world and many of the locations
that would fall under the broad label of Islamic cultures. The famous
debate by Fredric Jameson (1986) and Aijaz Ahmad (1987) about Third
World literature as a national allegory demonstrates this concern with the
connections between politics and poetics. Jameson’s categorizing of all
literature produced in parts of the world that were colonized by Euro-
pean powers as national allegory is attacked by Ahmad as simplistic and
reductive of the vast production of literature/s in this part of the world.
This kind of debate, which is still being written about and used as a frame-
work for studies of literatures of certain parts of the world, reveals that
the production of knowledge around women and Islamic culture/s can be
contested even when performed by critics who are theoretically “birds of
a feather,” as Ahmad himself puts it (1987). In this same period, Chandra
Talpade Mohanty (2003) pointed out the problems with the representa-
tion of Third World women, particularly by white Western feminists. She
shows the ways in which they are subsumed under static categories and
subjected to even more reductive labels and burdens of representation
than men are.
238 michelle hartman

Feminist and Womanist Approaches to Women’s Literature

As Mohanty (2003) suggests, drawing a line between Marxist critics and
feminist/womanist critics is a false distinction. Many male and female
scholars who are Marxists also are avowedly feminists and vice versa.
Feminist criticism and other kinds of approaches to literature that use
gender as a relevant category of analysis and center experiences of mar-
ginalized people in their studies, whether these be women, queer people
and/or others, are increasingly common in the twenty-first century. Com-
mon does not mean universally accepted, however. Some kinds of analysis
get more purchase in the academy than others. Such categories include:
Marxist feminists; French feminists; Black feminists/womanist scholars;
and Queer theorists (who emerged out of Feminist Studies but now have
developed sophisticated tools outside of their beginnings). While differ-
ent strands of feminist thought developed and offered possibilities that
have undoubtedly pushed Literary Studies in challenging and productive
directions, some of these have harmed women of color and Third World
feminists. Mohanty (2003) outlines some of the ways in which this has
and has not changed from the 1980s when she first wrote her well-known
critique of Western feminism, to its recent revision in the journal Signs,
“Under Western Eyes Revisited.” Mohanty charges white, Western femi-
nists with homogenizing women of color and Third World women into
static and unified categories. The imperial ideologies that allow Western
women to posit their superiority over Third World women are often left
uncriticized in the name of “liberating” or “saving” women from their
putatively oppressive cultures. The culturalist approach to women of the
world outside of white, Euro-North America has pervaded feminist stud-
ies. These important criticisms of white, Western feminists are particu-
larly relevant to Islamic cultures broadly defined, throughout the world.
Many of these locations are precisely those where foreign powers seek
to use the “oppression” of Other women to justify neo-imperial projects,
much as earlier this was used to justify colonialism.

Literary Methods and Theories: Relations, Responses and Resistance

Despite these challenges, constellations of theories, methods and prac-

tices of Literary Studies that focus on women and/or gendered analyses,
together with materialist approaches, offer possibilities for a production
of knowledge about women and Islamic cultures that can move beyond
seeing women “as a source,” offering a transparent “peek behind the veil,”
 literary studies 239

or using them as representatives of “culture.” Moreover, the vast produc-

tion of literary works by women from Islamic cultures, Muslim-majority
countries and/or Muslim backgrounds can demonstrate how creative lit-
erary work of all kinds itself resists these studies. There are also other
schools and approaches that have opened up productive spaces for this
kind of analysis, connecting to other approaches, revising and expanding
on them.

Postcolonial Studies and the Subaltern Studies Collective

Postcolonial Studies refers to a loosely affiliated group of theories, meth-
ods and approaches that developed out of mainstream Literary Studies.
It gained currency throughout the 1990s in particular, and has found
a not always uncontested home in the academy. Not limited to stud-
ies of creative literature, Postcolonial Studies is based on a theoretical
approach that underlines and critiques power dynamics between colo-
nizer and ­colonized. As a field of study, it places a critique of colonialism
at its center and opens up new spaces for such analysis, with a focus on
voices, texts and parts of the world typically underrepresented in English-
language scholarship. Franz Fanon’s writings on colonialism serve as an
inspiration to many later postcolonial theorists, particularly The Wretched
of the Earth (1963) and Black Skin, White Masks (1952).
Two of the first scholars to be credited with developing the field of
Postcolonial Studies are Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Bringing the analyses of European theorists such Michel Foucault and
Antonio Gramsci into English, together with a biting indictment of colo-
nial power in academic and literary writings, Said’s Orientalism (1978) and
its companion volume Culture and Imperialism (1993) have had a sub-
stantial impact on the field of Literary Studies. Spivak also draws on con-
cepts from Foucault and Gramsci, as well as Jacques Derrida and Gilles
Deleuze, in her groundbreaking essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1998).
In this article and others, Spivak has worked with the concept of the sub-
altern, originally articulated by Gramsci, and developed it in her criticism
throughout her career as a literary critic, theorist, and translator. Her work
has had a major impact on how women in subaltern positions can and
cannot be understood in the academy.
Spivak was also a part of the Subaltern Studies Collective, a group that
came together to center the study of the histories of those people excluded
from imperial power and discourses. Focused mainly, but not exclusively,
on South Asia, the group produced a good deal of scholarship in the vein
240 michelle hartman

of postcolonial studies and challenged many elements of the status quo

in its production. The Subaltern Studies Collective and its work, within
the broader field of Postcolonial Studies, have been extremely important
to Literary Studies. They have offered more spaces for the discussion of
women and Islamic cultures and increasingly sophisticated tools of liter-
ary analysis. As the Bernheimer report on Comparative Literature shows,
many academics in the 1990s were arguing for the greater expansion and
inclusion of Postcolonial Studies as a method of opening up studies in and
of the West to the “rest.” Postcolonial Studies and the Subaltern Studies
Collective have also both been critiqued for their “postmodern” leanings
and marginalization of real, material issues in favor of more theoretical
concerns. Moreover, the success of Postcolonial Studies in penetrating the
mainstream of Literary Studies has led to some of the most relevant and
persistent critiques of it.
The ways in which Postcolonial Studies often turns away from an analy-
sis of material conditions, from the politics and economics of colonial and
post/neocolonial societies, is crucial. Critics point out that the deflection
from these issues in favor of privileging issues such as exile, diaspora,
indeterminacy of identity, and hybridity belies the shaping of the field
by people who themselves operate with a certain amount of privilege,
distanced from subaltern realities, and moving in rarefied spaces. More-
over, the heavily South Asian focus of the Subaltern Studies Collective
is reflected within the larger field of Postcolonial Literary Studies. This
means not just that studies pay more attention to the Sub-Continent, but
also that theories and ideas develop out of this specific location and its
experiences in ways that cannot always be exported.
Another related, prominent critique of the field questions the notion
that “postcolonial” status, ideology or experience is a relevant way to orga-
nize Literary Studies. Aijaz Ahmad’s 1984 rebuttal of Jameson’s argument
about Third World literature as national allegory, mentioned earlier, hinges
on the notion that the Third World cannot be reduced or limited to cases
that are easily homogenized. For example, many of the preoccupations of
the field of Postcolonial Studies do not resonate with the issues taken up
within Arabic-language literary texts (Al-Nowaihi 2005). To take this one
step further, many locations or literary traditions, from Islamic cultures
and others, that might be discussed under the category of “Postcolonial
Studies” cannot claim to be “post” colonial in any meaningful way. Pales-
tinians, for example, are still actively resisting the ongoing colonization
of their land, and Iraq and Afghanistan face American-led occupations
and their aftermaths. People in numerous other locations throughout the
 literary studies 241

Islamic world/s (and beyond) struggle with neo-liberal agendas that serve
larger imperial projects.
This debate has been raging since the theories and approaches of Post-
colonial Studies gained prominence. Much has been written about what
the “post” in postcolonial means in different situations. One defense of the
concept is that the “post” refers to post-contact with colonizers, encom-
passing everything from that moment on. It has been conceived of tem-
porally, geographically, in terms of land, in terms of statehood, and so on.
Because of these multiple interpretations and ideas about possible mean-
ings of the concept “postcolonial,” another charge leveled against it is that
it can be so watered down as to mean nothing. The active debates and
discussions in the field, and its explicit attention to power relations and
focus on areas of the world in which Islamic cultures have thrived, means
that Postcolonial Studies will continue to be a useful site for literary inves-
tigations of women and Islamic cultures, particularly literary texts written
by women from Islamic cultures.

World Literature and Moves towards Diversity

World Literature is another concept and term that has seen a revival at
the turn of the twenty-first century. Critics most often trace World Lit-
erature as an academic model and framework for Literary Studies to
Goethe’s articulation of Weltliteratur and/or proclamation about the end
of national literatures by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto.
A vague and amorphous concept, World Literature builds upon ideas sim-
ilar to those enunciated by Comparative Literature—that literary works
should be studied in relation to each other, across borders of language,
location, and author’s identity. It seeks to underline deep, situated knowl-
edge of literary texts while making connections across borders. In the cur-
rent context, moreover, this bringing together of multiple theoretical and
methodological insights into studies of literatures from locations around
the globe, written in many languages, offers resistance to the Eurocen-
trism that has so plagued Comparative Literature and other mainstream
literary approaches and fields.
A number of very different kinds of project have taken on the task of
arguing for a new theory of World Literature. Many of today’s studies
somehow engage with Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters
(2004), in which she makes a broad case for the revival of reading the
world as a plane of literary production. Another well-known and con-
troversial project is Franco Moretti’s grand program of “distant reading,”
242 michelle hartman

drawing on world systems theory, whereby groups of scholars study move-

ments and trends throughout vast swathes of the world.
Many of the most interesting current theorists involved in this push
to think about World Literature are also those who have challenged the
foundations of Comparative Literature and have been working to create
productive methods for studying literature, particularly those who are tra-
ditionally seen to be “Other.” One of these is David Damrosch’s What is
World Literature? (2003), an erudite volume that ranges across many of
what would be considered separate and different fields in order to pro-
pose new methods of reading. Emily Apter has also taken up the con-
cept in challenging and productive ways in The Translation Zone: A New
Comparative Literature (2006), which draws on concepts developed out of
theoretical translation studies among other locations, to build arguments
about the circulation and reading of literary texts today. Gayatri ­Spivak’s
recent work has also pushed Literary Studies towards methods that
take world, global or, as she puts it, “planetary” approaches. She argues
this compellingly in her indictment of Comparative Literature in Death
of a Discipline (2003) and this development in her thought is also evident
in the collection of essays, An Aesthetic Education in an Era of Globaliza-
tion (2012).
Spivak and others have pointed out that while the debates around
World Literature are lively and the concept and framework is compelling,
there remain problems with it. Some of these are particularly relevant to
the production of knowledge around women and Islamic cultures. Episte-
mologically, these studies demand a move away from Eurocentered theo-
ries that have served to marginalize, denigrate and dismiss the writings by
women from Islamic cultures for so long. One question that arises is: how
effectively does such a vague concept or framework as World Literature
decenter this Eurocentrism? How much does it challenge certain under-
lying premises of Comparative Literature and how much does it repro-
duce them? An example of this is that World Literature—as expounded
with great theoretical sophistication by scholars—is a method and an
approach, not a canon of works or a new “great books list” that is more
open than it was in the past. In common parlance, however, this latter
concept is exactly how the term is still used today—even in university
classrooms. World Literature, despite well-developed and carefully argued
theoretical approaches, remains a catchall term for literatures of “the rest
of the world,” the parts of the world that are not “us.”
In “Orientalism and the Institutionalization of World Literatures”
(2010), Aamir Mufti builds on this line of argument and takes it further.
 literary studies 243

Critiquing Casannova’s argument in some detail, he demonstrates how

the theoretical underpinnings of the revival of World Literature are deeply
Euro-centered and how they ignore many of Said’s important and now
classic insights offered in Orientalism. Mufti borrows from Spivak the idea
that today’s literature circulates in a mode of “cosmopolitan exchange,”
whereby literary texts are available throughout different parts of the
world, through the exclusive medium of English. He points out the ways
in which this is a situation itself formed by colonialism, and he uses the
South Asian case to detail some of the means by which even the languages
that today we know as “Urdu” and “Hindi” (and therefore the “Urdu litera-
ture” and “Hindi literature”) were not separate or defined as such in any
meaningful way until during colonial times.
Mufti’s critique is particularly relevant here in relation to the produc-
tion of knowledge about women and Islamic cultures, not only because
South Asia is a region deeply implicated in this these cultures, but also
because of the theoretical issues and problems he raises with the frame-
work. Mufti argues that if such a concept can be at all useful it must rec-
ognize and investigate how the notion of “diversity” itself—so central to
any enterprise of world literary study—is “a colonial and Orientalist prob-
lematic, though one that emerges precisely on the plane of equivalence
that is literature” (Mufti 2010, 493). He warns against the standardization
and homogenization both within and across languages and cultures that
come, as he puts it, “masked as diversity.” The impetus for diversity is
one that has troubled Literary Studies since its inclusion of parts of the
world outside Euro-North America, as the critique mentioned earlier by
Rey Chow demonstrates. To date, it has not found a sufficient response.

A Focus on Writing by Women from Islamic Cultures: Fields and Subfields

Literary study that specifically focuses on works written by women from

Islamic cultures is another location within scholarship where knowledge
is produced. There are many possibilities, fields, and subfields that can be
understood as falling into this broad category. These kinds of studies draw
upon and locate themselves somehow in relation to one or more of the
approaches, paradigms and trends discussed earlier: Postcolonial Literary
Studies, Feminist/Womanist studies, World Literature, and so on. Even
if they do not explicitly position themselves in relation to this scholar-
ship, much work done in these areas of literary scholarship on women and
Islamic cultures often draw on their insights. The fields of Literary Studies
244 michelle hartman

based on an “Islamic language,” Arabic literature, Persian literature, Turk-

ish literature, Urdu literature, and others, often have a direct or indirect
focus on women—whether this means the representations of women
in texts or women as authors and creators of literary works. In English
language academia, these fields range widely temporally, generically, and
thematically, and may or may not have a separate branch for the study
of writing by women. Certainly, there are new subfields of academic lit-
erary study being created. There is, for example, an area of scholarship
and writing in English on women’s literature of the Lebanese Civil War.
There are many studies of South Asian women’s fiction written in English,
some of which fit nearly under the Postcolonial Studies umbrella, others
less so. Within studies of literature by women originally from Iran, there
is a growing amount of work on women of the diaspora, writing in Farsi,
English and other languages.
Such literary studies may be based in a variety of locations theoreti-
cally, methodologically and /or epistemologically, reflecting the disparate
nature of Literary Studies as a discipline. It is relevant that studies that
focus on the works of women from Islamic cultures, broadly defined, have
been developed not only in diverse ways but can produce a different kind
of situated knowledge with studies that are able to draw upon multiple
kinds of resources. Recently, for example, Egyptian scholar and literary
critic, Hoda Elsadda, published Gender, Nation and the Arabic Novel (2012).
This book fits squarely within traditions of literary history in the field of
Arabic literary studies but at the same time interrogates the problematic
premises upon which these studies are built. She questions the role of
literary elites in canonizing certain works of Arabic literature and reveals
many of the gendered dynamics around the marginalization of writings
by women. She shows women as agents and producers of social change
through literature, using examples ranging from Latifa Zayyat, active from
the 1940s on, to young women writing today in the aftermath of the 2011
revolution.
Other kinds of studies that decenter conventional notions about litera-
ture and literary studies focus their attention in less expected locations,
for example, the way in which book clubs in North America produce and
consume images of women from Muslim-majority countries. Studies of
Azar Nafisi’s now notorious Reading Lolita in Tehran, demonstrate this
through their varying critical lenses and politics. While some see book
clubs as offering a space for women to relate to other women across cul-
tural divides (Twomey 2007), other studies have taken a critical approach
to “empathy” and analyzed in detail how a neoliberal, imperial agenda
 literary studies 245

structures this emotion precisely through its marketability to women’s

book clubs (Kulbaga 2008). Other studies provide a deep contextualiza-
tion of Nafisi’s book and its critics, using the parallels between the book
club in the book and those that proliferated in the United States when it
was published (DePaul 2008); still others take a more critical stance inter-
rogating the underpinnings of book clubs as reading practices in North
American locations when the US and Canadian governments are engaged
in escalating conflicts, wars and occupations of Iran and neighboring
countries in the region (Burwell 2007).
Through this specific example we can see that what is properly consid-
ered “Literary Studies” itself is decentered. This is all the more true because
Reading Lolita in Tehran would not normally be categorized as “literature,”
but rather non-fictional memoir. These studies centered on US women’s
book clubs’ readings of Nafisi’s text home in on the way in which people
read, as well as what knowledge is produced and consumed in informal
learning environments. The object of study is different in these articles.
They investigate the US women who are in book clubs and make their
reading practices the object of analysis. This is a challenge to scholarship
that produces knowledge about women in Islamic cultures by reading a
book such as Nafisi’s and making the Iranian Muslim women their object
of study. The project of decentering the Muslim Woman as an object of
study is notable here.
Another group of recent literary studies focused on women and Islamic
cultures uses the insights of translation theory to understand the problem-
atics of knowledge production around the Muslim Woman. These stud-
ies focus on the ways in which texts originally written in Arabic undergo
deforming changes in translation into English. They analyze this in terms
of language in relation to the packaging and marketing of these works in
reception environments in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Most of these analyses are based firmly within Arabic literary studies and
are written by scholars who are also translators, working with Arabic liter-
ature (Amireh, Booth, Hartman, Kahf). They have studied texts as diverse
as Nawaal El Saadawi’s novels, the pre-Islamic poet al-Khansāʾ, the con-
temporary work of Lebanese Hanan al-Shaykh and the memoirs of Egyp-
tian feminist Huda Shaʿrawi among others. Increasingly, scholars based
in other locations have looked at Arabic–English translation as a site of
conflict within which there is potential to push Literary Studies forward.
Emily Apter’s The Translation Zone (2006), for example, moves in and
out of the Arab world (and other locations), seeking to explore connec-
tions between translation and the formulation of a new world literature.
246 michelle hartman

Vron Ware’s study of the reception of The Girls of Riyadh in Britain (2011)
underlines the complexities of British cultural politics and nicely com-
plements studies by the original translator of the work, Marilyn Booth.
A prominent literary translator from Arabic to English and a scholar of Arab
women’s literature, Booth wrote two articles (2008, 2010) that emerged
from her experience of translating this novel and her deep engagement
with issues of the politics of translation, language, and representation.

Transnational Studies, Indigenous Studies, “Internally Developed Theory”

The connections between scholars who are using Translation Studies as a
way to push Literary Studies forward, especially in relation to the way in
which women, particularly those from Islamic cultures, are included and
excluded from the field continue to grow. This kind of work between liter-
ary fields constructed as different because of national, linguistic, regional,
religious or other kinds of affiliation is where there are many possibili-
ties for new ways of conceptualizing the study of literatures within and
between societies and peoples. Just as so-called Ethnic Studies grew out
of an approach to scholarship grounded in lived experience and activism,
transnational and indigenous approaches to literature draw upon some of
these same insights to bring different epistemological concerns to schol-
arship, advocating for different sorts of connection to be made between
people and texts. An example of this kind of work, which uses a frame-
work built around concepts of indigeneity and draws together narratives
produced by Palestinian and Anishinaabe writers, is Steven Salaita’s The
Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan (2006). The
kinds of possibility for transnational solidarities between peoples in var-
ied locations open up spaces for the literary study of works by and about
women and Islamic cultures in new ways. Making these connections pro-
pels the scholarship being produced in the discipline of Literary Studies
to rethink representations of “women from Islamic cultures” in relation
to others and for scholars and critics to operate from multiple positions.
This means the decentering of some of the assumptions of Literary Stud-
ies based in the English-language academy, particularly the central place
of the major colonial languages—English and then French and Spanish—
and the literary production associated with them. South-South compara-
tive work, comparative work within nations, indigenous and anti-colonial
paradigms, unexpected parallels and centering of ideas and issues that are
driven from within literary works themselves are all helping to advance
these moves for renovation in the fields that are subsumed under the
larger disciplinary umbrella called Literary Studies.
 literary studies 247

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 Oral History in the Twenty-First Century

Hoda Elsadda

Introduction

There is no question that the first decade of the twenty-first century has
witnessed significant developments in the recognition of oral history as
an integral part of historical inquiry. This is a far cry from the 1970s and
1980s when oral historians struggled to gain credit for their work as they
spearheaded the democratization of historical research by foregrounding
the voices of the voiceless, and contributing to the creation of the oral
archives of marginalized and subaltern groups. Oral history projects occu-
pied center stage in liberation projects in general, and the feminist move-
ment in particular. Pioneering oral historians, such as Alessandro Portelli
and Luisa Passerini, revised and reinstated concepts used to undermine
oral history by giving them value and primacy. Emphasizing the subjec-
tivity of the interviewer in oral history, they initiated a radical break with
a positivistic paradigm that privileged the detachment and objectivity of
the researcher/historian. Portelli argued that the alleged unreliability of
oral sources was actually a strength, as “memory is not a passive deposi-
tory of facts, but an active creation of meanings” (Portelli 1990, 53). Oral
historians subverted the pseudo-binary between the subjective and the
objective and made a case for the value of subjectivity and the dynamic
relation between individual memory and collective memory. They also
demonstrated how oral history presented diverse points of view result-
ing in a more balanced view of history. Their interventions in intellec-
tual debates about the relation between the social and the individual,
the workings of memory and the construction of subjectivity, the relation
between personal memory and collective memory, gradually gained cre-
dence and legitimated their field of inquiry. In 1999, Sherna Berger Gluck
noted a “major turnaround in the acceptance of oral history in the histori-
cal profession” (Gluck 1999, 6).
Evidence of this shift in the standing of oral history in the historical
profession is manifested in the publishing field in the launch in 2003
of the Palgrave Studies in Oral History, and another series in 2009, the
Oxford Oral History Series. Editors of the Palgrave series target a wide
250 hoda elsadda

readership and draw attention to the general direction of the series, which
“explore a wide variety of topics and themes in all areas of history, plac-
ing first-person accounts in broad historical context and engaging issues
of historical memory and narrative construction.” Controversies about
the legitimacy of oral history accounts as reliable historical sources have
taken a back seat amongst academics and popular historians.
The other key factor that marks the rise in the fortunes of oral history
is the emergence of the new discipline of memory studies. The journal
Memory Studies was launched in 2008 to examine “the social, cultural,
cognitive, political and technological shifts affecting how, what and why
individuals, groups and societies remember and forget” (Memory Studies
website). The new field of study is deeply indebted to the work of Portelli
and Passerini, whose analysis of the workings of memory brought to the
fore issues of “subjectivity and inter-subjectivity,” and expanded the dis-
cipline of oral history to include insights from anthropology, psychology
and literary criticism (Bonomo 2013, 11).
Notwithstanding, the most important development to have impacted
the field of oral history has been the ongoing technological revolution in
digital media, social networking and open source software. Technology
made available new tools for the collection, preservation and presentation
of oral history records. Oral history collections once hidden from public
view or open to limited circulation and viewing are increasingly accessi-
ble on websites that are user-friendly and interactive. Oral historians who
struggled in the 1970s and 1980s with the challenges of the preservation
and access to oral history archives that required advanced expertise and
sophisticated equipment are now operating in a technological environ-
ment that is much more manageable and amenable to non-specialists.
New technologies have made it possible for ordinary individuals and
traditionally marginalized groups to record, edit and publish their own
stories via the new internet platforms that have been made available,
enabling these voices to reach new publics and forge new partnerships.
Blogs, social networking sites, YouTube, Google, Yahoo, and Flickr are all
venues that encourage individuals to share their stories, be they in text
form, audio or video. In fact, oral historians are taking notice of the rise
of video as a medium of expression and communication of oral stories. In
“Oral History in the Video Age” Peter Kaufman regards this development
as an opportunity for oral historians who will be required to consider
“new forms of engagement with the academy, with partners beyond the
academy, and with the vast and teeming crowd that is the modern digital
public” (Kaufman 2013, 1).
 oral history in the twenty-first century 251

New technologies have also brought about a paradigmatic shift in

debates on orality and literacy, on our relation to the world and on our
subjectivity. A new literacy is rapidly growing as new generations master
advanced technologies in communication and self-expression: the new
digital literacy. The written word has not lost its primacy in intellectual
circles, but the oral and the audio-visual are fast gaining ground as the
medium for public debates and public engagement, as media for inter-
personal communication and expression, and not least, in academia and
centers of knowledge production. “The literate reader . . . has become a flu-
ent auditor and a capable producer as well, a bard and priest of his own.
Everyone now is not only his own historian . . . but his own oral historian”
(Kaufman 2013, 2).
The recognition of oral history as an integral part of scholarship in his-
tory outlined above is reflected in the noted increase in oral history proj-
ects in the Middle East. The first disciplinary entry on “Oral History” in
the Encyclopedia of Women and Muslim Cultures (Elsadda 2003), noted
the scarcity of oral history archives of women in Muslim cultures in gen-
eral, and in the Arab world in particular. This entry will shed light on
some of the interesting recent developments in the field of oral history of
women in Muslim cultures. It will conclude by highlighting the political
and material challenges that face some of the newly founded oral history
projects in the twenty-first century.

Oral Histories of the Middle East

The past decade witnessed a marked increase in oral history projects

and archives in the Middle East, particularly in the Arab world. Major
upheavals in the region and intensified political struggles involving local,
regional and international players, produced a multitude of competing
narratives about what really happened, who made it happen, and who
was responsible for the debacle. The second intifada in 2000, the war on
Iraq in 2003, the invasion of Lebanon in 2006, and most recently, the Arab
revolutions in 2011, resulted in radical historical transformations whose
meanings continue to be contested and negotiated between the warring
factions. Oral history accounts have become crucial sources for historians
and analysts in their attempts to decipher the meaning and ramifications
of rapidly changing events. Oral history accounts are used by all sides to
support a particular narrative. However, it remains an indispensable tool
of resistance in the struggle over representation, particularly in a world
252 hoda elsadda

order where the instruments of power and resources, both material and
discursive, are controlled by 1 percent of the population of the world.
For Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, oral history is a key tool
in resisting the “memoricide” perpetrated by Zionist nationalists, argues
Nur Masalha in his book The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Nar-
rating the Subaltern and Reclaiming Memory (2012). Masalha foregrounds
the “destruction and elimination of cultural patterns of a group, including
language, local traditions, shrines, monuments, place names, landscape,
historical records, archives, libraries, churches—in brief the soul of a
nation” (Masalha 2012, 11); this is the fate of Palestinians since the Nakba
and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. His book counters
the annihilation of Palestinian memory with references to oral histories
of Palestinians and the creation of a Palestinian resistance narrative that
counters the memoricide and reclaims the remembrance of the Nakba.
Masalha also argues that oral history is potentially an advocacy tool and
a key component of the decolonization of Palestine.
Oral history as an advocacy tool for the decolonization of Palestine and
resistance to the erasure of memory has been the underlying principle and
goal of oral history accounts by Palestinians since the Nakba. In the last
decade, the list of publications and projects has increased significantly as
oral history gains credence and circulation in academic and public circles,
as a new generation of Palestinian historians acquire international sta-
tus, and as the Palestinian resistance to occupation gathers around the
battle over memory. It is worthwhile to note the large number of publica-
tions in the past decade that challenge the Zionist narrative using oral
histories: scholarly books, books for wider circulation, as well as memoirs
and autobiographies. A selected list is impressive: Fatma Kassem Pales-
tinian Women: Narrative Histories and Gendered Memory (2011); Rhoda
Ann Kanaaneh and Isis Nusair eds., Displaced at Home: Ethnicity and
Gender Among Palestinians in Israel (2010); Rosemarie M. Esber, Under
the Cover of War: The Zionist Expulsion of the Palestinians (2008); Nur
Masalha ed., Catastrophe Remembered: Palestine, Israel, and the Internal
Refugees, Essays in Memory of Edward W. Said (1939–2003) (2005); Dina
Matar, What it Means to Be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood
(2011); Ahmad H. Sa⁠ʾdi and Lila Abu-Lughod eds., Nakba: Palestine, 1948,
and the Claims of Memory (2007); Fayhāʾ ʿAbd al-Hādī, Adwār al-marʾa
al-Falasṭiniyya fī al-thalāthīnīyāt (Roles of Palestinian women in the thir-
ties (2005) and Adwār al-marʾa al-Falasṭiniyya fī al-arbaʿīnīyāt (Roles of
Palestinian women in the forties (2005); Jean Said Makdisi, Teta, Mother
and Me: An Arab Woman’s Memoir (2005).
 oral history in the twenty-first century 253

Oral history has been a key resource for reclaiming the voices of Pal-
estinian women in the making of the history of Palestine. Fatma Kas-
sem records the stories of 20 urban Palestinian women over the age of
65 who remembered the 1948 Nakba and who continued to live in the
newly established State of Israel. Her project is a conscious attempt to
give voice to women who are silent in patriarchal mainstream history;
she argues that women’s stories are not “complementary to men’s sto-
ries, but . . . [are] worthwhile and deserving of visibility in their own right”
(Kassem 2011, 39). Kassem highlights the constraints women face in patri-
archal communities that live under threat of persecution. Many women
had family members sit in during the interviews and intervene in the story
or censor a particular topic. One woman was forbidden by her daughter
to partake in the interview because she was afraid of losing her job in
an Israeli college. As Kassem demonstrates, the silence of women is not
necessarily a sign of a lack of agency but a feature of cultural and political
life in Palestine.
Fayhāʾ ʿAbd al-Hādī, on the other hand, reclaims women’s stories and
foregrounds the role of Palestinian women in the resistance movement.
She challenges the nationalist narrative that relegates women to their
domestic traditional roles as helpers and carers and demonstrates that
women were at the frontline of battles and have been key participants in
the resistance movement since the Nakba. She proposes a feminist reread-
ing of Palestinian history with the aim of revising nationalist history using
a gender lens.
Jean Said Makdisi’s, Teta, Mother and Me, is about three generations
of Palestinian women: Makdisi’s grandmother, her mother and herself. It
covers the encounter between East and West in the nineteenth century,
the advent of missionaries to the Arab world, and the plight of Palestinians
exiled from their land after the Nakba. This historical/personal narrative
draws on various official historical records but is primarily based on oral
history interviews, personal memoirs, biographies, and family letters; it
succeeds in constructing a counter-narrative about women and the impact
of modernity on their lives. Narratives of missionary ventures in the Arab
world are disproportionately represented through the eyes of missionaries
and missionary organizations themselves, with little input from the point
of view of local inhabitants. In addition, nationalist histories have uncon-
sciously assimilated the colonial discourse about the backwardness of the
traditional Arab women in juxtaposition to the modern Arab woman who
is educated in Western-style schools and ways of life (Elsadda 2011). The
stories collected by Makdisi in her memoir “complement, even correct,
254 hoda elsadda

dominant national and international narratives about the nature and

impact of the encounter” (Elsadda 2011). Makdisi’s stories subvert the
modernist narrative that pits traditional women against modern women
by exposing the limitations that modernity imposed on women’s lives.
More and more Middle East scholars are using oral history to rewrite
mainstream histories by recognizing the constructedness of all historical
accounts and by paying attention to the workings of memory and the
inevitable diversity of narratives and experiences. A notable example is
Nadje al-Ali’s book, Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present
(2007). According to al-Ali, the book consists of “experiences, life stories
and oral histories of Iraqi women, interwoven with more conventional
published histories, as well as my own anecdotes, experiences and obser-
vations” (al-Ali 2007, 2). It is a modern history of Iraq told through the
eyes of women and their experiences, integrating their voices and revis-
ing official narratives. The book subverts the generalizations and ste-
reotyping common in official histories and focuses on “social histories
which . . . [place] greater emphasis on personal narratives and the voices
of ordinary citizens” (268).

Digital Oral History Projects

Digital technology has enabled many oral history projects across the region.
In 2003, PalestineRemembered.com launched al-Nakba Oral History Proj-
ect to preserve the stories of Palestinians who have been displaced and
driven outside their land. The aim of the project as stated on the website
is “to preserve the memories and experiences of the Palestinian people
around the world, especially the 726,000 Palestinian refugees who were
ethnically cleansed from their homes, farms, and businesses as a result of
the 1948 war” (http://www.Palestineremembered.com).
The interviews are divided according to districts and towns in Pales-
tine and are accessible on the website as video and audio recordings.
The majority of the interviewees are men. The website invites Palestin-
ians to share their oral histories and memories of the Nakba and provides
them with instructions on how to go about making their own oral history
recordings. The project is not particularly gender-sensitive and very few
women are interviewed. The lack of a gender lens raises questions about
nationalist narratives’ ambivalence to gender issues and highlights the
need for a concerted effort to integrate gender in historical narratives.
 oral history in the twenty-first century 255

Digital oral history archives of the Middle East respond to major his-
torical upheavals and transformations that affected specific communi-
ties or countries. The Libya Initiative launched a “Collective Oral History
and Memory Project” in Spring 2013 to reconstruct the history of Libya
under the rule of Qaddafi with the aim of “initiating a process of healing
and reconciliation which can open up a space for a future of peace and
justice for all Libyans.” The project mission statement acknowledges “the
power of a narrative” for mobilization and commits to a policy that will
tolerate not discriminate “on ethnic, religious, and gender grounds.” The
project is still in its inception phase and work remains to be done. How-
ever, oral history stories are foregrounded as powerful tools for healing
and reconciliation of communities for victims of trauma in conflict zones.
This is a new direction in oral history research, namely, trauma studies,
so the project will potentially lead to interesting insights, especially as it
lists Professor Alessandro Portelli, prominent oral historian and theorist,
among its partners.
The Iranian Oral History Project is another digital oral archive launched
in 2002 and is housed at the University of Harvard. It consists of the per-
sonal accounts of 134 individuals who played major roles in or were wit-
nesses to important political events in Iran from the 1920s to the 1980s.
Middle Eastern migrant communities also initiated oral history projects
to preserve memories and write their stories in the history of their adopted
countries. Moroccan Memories in Britain was launched in 2004 by the
Moroccan Foundation to document the experiences of three generations
of Moroccan migrants to Britain. The website also includes educational
packs to be incorporated in school curricula in the United Kingdom. The
aim is to encourage the integration of Moroccan/British citizens in Britain
through a recognition of the multicultural nature of British society.
Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution is an oral history proj-
ect that documents the stories of Egyptian women after the 25 January
2011 revolution. The focus on women as well as the description of the
project on the website as a “web-series documenting the participation
of Women in the Egyptian Revolution. An audio-visual Herstory project,
to remind history” identifies the direction as clearly feminist in aim. The
project consists of video recordings of women who reflect on the impact
of the political transformation that took place in Egypt on their lives and
their relation to the world. In August 2011, the project team launched a
fund raising campaign to support the continuation of the project. Eleven
videos have been made available via the internet, but more money
256 hoda elsadda

was needed to edit another 14 interviews and collect more. The crowd-
funding campaign on Indiegogo succeeded in collecting almost half of the
targeted funds.
The project is directed by Leil-Zahra Mortada, who describes himself
on twitter as “a feminist queer Arab anarchist, among other not-so-nice
things. Horribly addicted to cinema, politics, vegetarian food, open rela-
tionships and making noise.” The videos show individual women telling
their stories to the camera and are interspersed with relevant real life
scenes of clashes and protests.
Although the interviewer’s questions are muted in the video, they
clearly encourage the interviewees to reflect on their status as women
and to express their views on gender roles and women’s rights. Nada
Zatouna, a 23-year-old Nubian woman who was detained and beaten
during the protests, establishes a link between the discrimination against
her as a Nubian, and the discrimination against women in society in gen-
eral. In the same vein, she rejects the argument that women’s rights and
Nubian rights are not priority issues in times of national crises and notes
the oppressive nature of this line of thought. Her story reveals the gen-
dered and racialized nature of the violence she was subjected to and, at
the same time, her resilience and refusal to be silent. Mariam Kirollos, a
22-year-old Coptic woman, acknowledges that “we” live in a patriarchal
society and that women face restrictions and gender related constraints.
Nevertheless she insists that women have power and can control their
destinies. All interviewees come across as competent women who have
agency and clarity of direction.
The oral project team is conscious of questions of representation. The
interviews feature a diverse group of women from different classes, dif-
ferent age groups, and different religions and ethnicities. There is Rasha
Azab, the 29-year-old hardcore activist who was arrested during the rule
of Mubarak and spent time in prison; Umm Ahmed Gaber who had noth-
ing to do with politics and activism but who became involved in protests
after her son was arrested; Madeeha Anwar, a 20-year-old student who
wears a niqab and who insists on her rights as a citizen, and considers her
niqab to be her own personal choice that does not limit her freedom in
any way. One video features a mother and her daughter who joined the
protests together on 28 January. The stories challenge stereotypical repre-
sentations of women and contest ideological categorizations and assump-
tions based on modes of dress, on generations, on class or on religion.
The stories told by this group of women not only narrate their own
personal experiences, but they also narrate the revolution. They consti
 oral history in the twenty-first century 257

tute valuable interventions in topical political debates about what hap-

pened, what made it happen, who is to blame for the confusion and other
relevant questions. The stories shed light on specific events the women
witnessed and participated in as well as their views on the wider political
transformations.

Digital Oral History Archives

A discussion of oral history projects necessarily takes into consideration

the changing scene in a global world and must factor in the ramifications
of new digital technologies that have resulted in the emergence of new
publics, new platforms and new partners. These same technologies, while
they open up new spaces and opportunities, also pose new challenges and
constraints to notions of preservation, continuity and archiving. The ease
of establishing digital oral history archives by individuals or small groups
has enabled the documentation of what Gyanendra Pandey has called the
fragments of history, namely those stories, personal accounts, oral testi-
monies, songs, and so forth that express the voice of minorities or mar-
ginalized groups in any society and are invariably excluded from official
mainstream histories (Pandey 1992, 28). Oral history stories as fragments
complement and correct official narratives and, potentially, construct
counter-narratives of dominant histories. There is no question that now,
more than ever, marginalized groups, societies and individuals have more
opportunities to reach wider audiences, to forge partnerships across the
globe and to construct counter-narratives and counter-publics. Women’s
stories and experiences, as an example, are more widely represented and
their voices are heard more loudly.
Having said that, archives, of oral histories or otherwise, have been
described as “tools of the powerful” who seek to normalize, standardize
and impose order. Many archivists, librarians and curators of libraries and
museums will remind us that “archives are the manufacturers of memory
and not just merely guardians of it” and that “power is everyday practice
in archives” (Harvey Brown and Davis-Brown 1998, 21–22). Archives are
necessarily entangled in the construction of hegemonic narratives as well
as counter-hegemonic narratives that potentially shape the future of a
given group or country or nation. Archives mean order, and order requires
framing and framing consolidates a point of view. The question becomes:
whose point of view gets represented in an archive? Whose stories are
recorded and preserved? And who decides what is worth preserving?
258 hoda elsadda

Consider the following. The US/Iraq war resulted in the creation of an

oral archive entitled “The Oral Histories Project on Stability Operations.”
Launched in October 2005, it consists of “interviews with individuals
involved in stability operations, to draw lessons learned and address chal-
lenges of post-conflict intervention.” The interviewees are individuals who
served in the US military and in the Coalition of Provisional Authority in
Iraq. The project is conducted by the United States Institute of Peace, a
global conflict management center based in Washington, D.C. The chal-
lenge is: will the oral history of the US/Iraq war be told from the point
of view of American combatants? This is a case where there is a pressing
need for an oral history archive to be established and run by Iraqi men
and women in order to tell the story of the war from their point of view.
If history is always written by the victorious and the powerful, oral his-
tory can potentially, but not necessarily, preserve the fragments that may
constitute a counter-narrative.
This point refers us back to the geopolitics of the production and dis-
semination of knowledge (Elsadda 2003), and the extent to which Muslims,
citizens of the global South, control their voices, and more importantly,
the representation of their voices and images. Elsadda argued that on bal-
ance, the new digital age has enabled more subaltern groups to own their
voices and represent themselves. However, stereotypes do not go away but
have to be contended with and fought persistently. Also, unequal power
relations and limited access to resources have created what is known as
the digital divide between countries in the North and the South. These
imbalances have implications for representation and control over voice.
In addition, women are not necessarily fairly represented in the new
generation of digital oral history archives. A gender lens is not always inte-
grated in projects, resulting in the marginalization of women and their
voices. There is still a need for oral history archives that are gender sen-
sitive and that pay attention to issues of exclusion and discrimination.
The Women and Memory Forum archive of voices, started in 1999, con-
tinues to document women’s experiences and has embarked on a new
project of digital oral history to document the experiences of women in
the light of the recent political and social transformations. The project
foregrounds notions of gender and agency and hence includes both men
and women. However, women are prioritized and constitute the majority
of interviewees to compensate for the absence of a gender lens in many
similar projects. The oral history project, “Words of Women from the
Egyptian Revolution” discussed earlier, foregrounds gender as a category
 oral history in the twenty-first century 259

of analysis and highlights the multiple roles of women in the revolution.

Still, more oral history projects that factor in gender as a category of analy-
sis are needed.
At the same time, the ease of establishing digital oral history archives
comes with some disadvantages. First, many small research projects con-
ducted by students at universities or at NGOs create a digital presence
that very often, but not necessarily, disappears, remains incomplete, or
ceases to be updated. In fact, digital archives, floating in virtual space,
have an ephemeral dimension that needs to be noted and considered.
This ephemerality stands in opposition to the notion of archives as places
for the preservation and safeguarding of collective memories for future
generations. While all archives, both material and virtual, are subject to
extinction by accident or design, digital archives seem to be more sus-
ceptible to loss and erasure. A casual browse of cyberspace reveals the
beginnings and ends of many oral history archives that have either ceased
to be updated or were removed from the web, and can only be detected
through news items reporting on them. How to safeguard digital archives
is a challenge to historians and technicians.

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Sa⁠ʾdi, Ahmad H. and Lila Abu-Lughod (eds.). Nakba. Palestine, 1948, and the claims of
memory, New York 2007.
Women and Memory Forum. <http://www.wmf.org.eg/en/node/36>.
Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution. <http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/
words-of-women-from-the-egyptian-revolution?c=home>.
 Philosophy

Nerina Rustomji

Introduction

In the last ten years, the discipline of philosophy has seen vibrant schol-
arship about gender, authority, and Qurʾānic interpretation. New lines of
inquiry are transforming the academic discourse of Islam and challeng-
ing the traditions and practices of Islamic communities. However, not
all scholars would categorize themselves as philosophers, and their work
does not fit neatly into the present, conventional categories of the dis-
cipline of philosophy. Contemporary scholarship on women and gender
in Muslim cultures investigates questions about gender equality, and in
that effort the scholarship continues to “blur disciplinary distinctions,” as
noted by Tamara Sonn in her initial entry in the present encyclopedia
(Sonn 2003).
This review entry introduces the methods and major lines of inquiry
within philosophy and points to future areas of growth. In many ways,
the past decade has seen the emergence of a new form of scholarship that
has yet to crystallize into a set genre, but invokes a similar constellation
of issues. Those issues are driven by the need for women to engage with
Qurʾānic interpretation and Islamic authority.
The discipline of philosophy regarding women and gender, then, is
developing in the intersection between scholarship and activism. As schol-
ars develop research agendas that address questions of gender, authority,
religion, and family, new forms of engagement are created. These hybrid-
ized forms of scholarship and activism are particularly evident in the sub-
fields of hermeneutics, ethics, and jurisprudence.

Philosophy: Conventions and Opportunities

Philosophy may have been the queen of the sciences in medieval Europe,
but its place in Islamic intellectual history has been limited. Initially, the
introduction of philosophy (known as falsafa) was framed as a new method
distinct from theology, kalām (theology), and falsafa was perceived as
being a new approach, which elicited different reactions. Kalām and fiqh
262 nerina rustomji

( jurisprudence) were the primary methods by which Muslim theologians

traditionally developed their interpretations of Islamic faith and practice,
with akhlāq (ethics) as a categorical possibility, as well. This categoriza-
tion does not mean that ʿulamāʾ (religious learned) did not focus on philo-
sophical inquiries. In fact, the nature of knowing, the forms of Muslim
faith, and the ways that Muslim societies could be configured were central
questions from the beginning of Islamic theological sciences.
While the first entry on philosophy (Sonn 2003) discussed the limits
as well as the discourse about women in Islamic texts, this entry looks
specifically at how to characterize new scholarship about gender within
the last decade. In order to survey the current trends in the academic and
activist fields, the conventional categories of the discipline of philosophy
have to be expanded in order to provide discursive space for the new
lines of inquiry. Islamic philosophy, largely construed, never fit within
European categories. New forms of Islamic philosophy take earlier Islamic
forms and imbue them with modern sensibilities and standards.
In particular, recent scholarship seeks to make room for gender inquiries
within the classical Islamic tradition. In doing so, scholarship challenges
both the tradition as well as the methodology underpinning intellectual
tradition and social practice. The efforts of scholars are energetic, and the
new field of social philosophy is developing quickly.

Hermeneutics: Gender and Contemporary Qurʾānic Interpretation

Since Muslims believe that the Qurʾān is the literal word of God, all Islamic
texts have to provide an interpretative framework of how to understand
Qurʾānic verses. Because of the importance of the Qurʾān as a source text,
it can be maintained that all Islamic philosophy is a kind of hermeneutic
because it must adhere, challenge, or develop a way to interpret divine
words into earthly understandings. In many respects, all Islamic philoso-
phy has to contend with how to interpret the words of the Qurʾān.
How to interpret the Qurʾān is particularly important when it comes to
issues of gender. Because the realities of women are largely absent from
the historical record, the question of how the theological texts shaped
and reflected women’s realities has become a topic for Islamic scholars.
Furthermore, how Islamic faith and practice is configured for women in
the twenty-first century is a central focus of scholars who are using phi-
losophy to reimagine the possibilities of Muslim experience.
 philosophy 263

While hermeneutics provides a larger framework for thinking about

recent philosophical advances, there are some recent works that develop
the subfield in more pointed ways. This scholarship looks at the Qurʾān
directly and holistically in order to develop a new interpretation that
does not draw upon normative tradition. In creating a new context for
the Qurʾān in which verses are understood outside the framework of the
encompassing, normative tradition of commentary, these works focus on
what methodologies allow for more inclusive readings of the Qur’an.
This kind of open hermeneutic is the focus of works by authors such
as Asma Barlas in her “Believing Women” in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal
Interpretations of the Qur’an (2002), which draws upon earlier feminist
scholarship that sought a greater gender inclusiveness (Hidayatullah
2009, 167). Barlas argues that gender inclusiveness comes as a result of
reinterpreting the Qurʾān in terms of principles of tawḥīd, the unity of
God. Barlas argues that if the holistic approach is the guiding interpretive
force, then it is possible to see the underlying principle of equality that
informs the Qurʾānic verses. This principle is dependent on the “ontologi-
cal quality of the sexes,” which acknowledges that women and men derive
from the same entity, and that the principle of equality is therefore pri-
mordial in nature (Marcotte 2010, 141).
The possibilities of Qurʾānic interpretation are further emphasized by
Bahar Davary in Women and the Qur’an: A Study in Islamic Hermeneutics
(2009), which focuses on the premise of Qurʾānic hermeneutics. Davary’s
guiding principle is that texts have dynamic identities that must be rein-
terpreted and be seen as mutable (Davary 2009, 139). As such, she sug-
gests that there is not just one way to interpret the Qurʾān, but there must
be multiple ways to do so. If tradition is to have a real force, then the
possibility of its flexibility is indispensable (Davary 2009, 139–40). Guided
by the principle of interpretation, Davary analyzes four commentaries of
al-Ṭabarī, Fakhr al-Dīn Rāzī, ʿAbduh, and Ṭabāṭabāʾi and notes that the
commentators share the spiritual perspective that women are equal to
men, but their religious responsibilities and paths to salvation are defined
differently within the commentaries (Davary 2009, 141). Davary’s focus is
on the development, continuity, and change in the portrayal of woman
throughout Islamic history and the ways in which the commentaries
affect the self-perception of Muslim women.
The philosophical works that explicitly involve hermeneutics also
develop new methodologies about epistemology. In her book Gender
and Self in Islam, Etin Anwar focuses on both the notion of self as being
264 nerina rustomji

dependent on societal constructions and on how it relates to men and

women. By using the considerations of the nafs, “soul, spirit, mind, life,
animate being, living creature, person, individual, self, personal identity
or nature,” Anwar creates a philosophical enquiry that seeks to examine
the constitutive parts of self-formation (Anwar 2006, 3). She asks what it
means to conceptualize gender as a philosophical construct and how such
a philosophical method would work (Anwar 2006, 10). In her conceptual-
ization, philosophy refers to two different kinds of inquiry. First, it entails
an engagement with philosophical works that creates a history of ideas.
Second, it constitutes a methodology that disentangles the patriarchical
factors in women’s lives.
Like other works that are politically aligned with the project of gender
equality, Anwar’s book is driven by the premise that if Islam developed
in the way that it was meant to, then we would not see gender inequali-
ties. In her work, she does not merely point to the narratives that create
justifications of inequity. Instead, she argues that the inequities create a
“gender thinking” that molds societal systems and structures men’s and
women’s attitudes and practices (Anwar 2006, 14).
After arguing that the problem of inequity is systematic rather than
power-based, Anwar locates the particular mechanisms. By analyzing
the Adam story, she suggests that the origin of creation is a male father
and that creation privileges “authoritative legitimacies and perspectives”
(Anwar 2006, 14). For her, the Qurʾān never meant to establish male
authority through the Adam story. Instead, it was meant to signal a lesson
to human creation with Adam as the example (Anwar 2006, 48). She also
argues that medical explanations for reproduction justify women’s “subor-
dinate status in society” by diminishing women’s role to the contribution
of an egg and so justifies women’s “subordinate status in society” (Anwar
2006, 15). These understandings of creation, procreation, and causation
are materialized onto women’s bodies and create the fixity of the femi-
nine material self (Anwar 2006, 15).
In making the connection between self and society and linking past
interpretation and future possibilities, Anwar creates a new form of meth-
odology that allows her to argue that Islamic philosophical discourses cre-
ate an inequity for women, and that they structure a gender differentiated
world where women are the minor, demoted players. This reduction of
women’s value is connected with both the jāhiliyya as the age of igno-
rance and the failure of women’s rights: “In fact, to be embarrassed at hav-
ing a female child is an act of jahiliyyah (ignorance). Similarly, to deprive
one’s daughter of the rights to education, personal morality, property, and
 philosophy 265

various opportunities—when they are available—simply because she is

biologically female is tantamount to burying her alive” (Anwar 2006, 131).
Instead of pointing to discourses that create societal frames that restrict
women, Sa⁠ʾdiyya Shaikh turns to Islamic discourses to locate gender pos-
sibilities. In Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn ʿArabī, Gender, and Sexuality
(2012), Shaikh turns to the philosopher Ibn ʿArabi to consider the pos-
sibilities of women’s agency and leadership in religious matters. Partly,
Shaikh has political reasons for insisting on a different narrative of gender
in Islamic history. She begins her book with the story about the jurist
( faqīha) Umm Zaynab Fāṭima bint ʿAbbās al-Baghdādiyya who ascended
the pulpit in fourteenth-century Cairo to deliver the Friday sermon. Ini-
tially, the scholar Ibn Taymiyya resisted the effort, but then realized that
piety was the guiding standard of who should be allowed to preach, not
external attributes such as gender. Shaikh takes the story as an example
of the possibility of women’s leadership, which has elicited controversy in
the twenty-first century, especially in light of Amina Wadud’s leading of
the Friday prayer in New York City in 2005.
Shaikh intervenes in the contemporary debate about Wadud’s leader-
ship by turning to the writing of the mystic philosopher Muḥyi al-Dīn ibn
al-ʿArabī, who argued for a spiritual equality between men and women
based on the possibility of spiritual potential. As a result, he suggests
that women may lead prayer of mixed congregations (Shaikh 2012, 3).
In recovering the philosophy of Ibn ʿArabī and applying it to contempo-
rary debates, Shaikh creates an analogy between mysticism and feminism
that depends on the epistemological concern of how experience produces
knowledge. In this way, she sees feminist philosophers who aim to decon-
struct “some of the assumptions about objectivity and universality in
dominant patriarchal epistemological enterprises” and mystics who value
“epistemological priority over purely rational deliberations” as aligned in
their methods and aims (Shaikh 2012, 97).
However, Shaikh does not locate Ibn ʿArabī’s neutrality solely within
the paradigm of equality. Instead, she seeks to recover the ways that Ibn
ʿArabī reinforced and challenged categories of gender. By focusing on
the distinction between jamāl (beauty) and jalāl (majesty), Ibn ʿArabī
accounts for the wholeness and perfection of human creation. Both men
and women exhibit these characteristics. Even if there are patterns that
may look conventional, it does not mean that women cannot aspire to posi-
tions of leadership or that men are destined to hold authority over women
(Shaikh 2012, 208). Shaikh’s contribution, then, is to focus on how Ibn
ʿArabī understands the “emancipatory potential” that both acknowledges
266 nerina rustomji

and extends gender norms (Shaikh 2012, 218). Ibn ʿArabī does reflect upon
patriarchal structures within the context of his time’s gender constructs.
For example, he speaks of men as holding authority over family matters.
Yet by reinterpreting categories, he recognizes the tradition while also
transforming it (Shaikh 2012, 218). Hence, he creates the possibility for
women’s jurisdiction and leadership in communal matters.

Ethics and Jurisprudence: Women and Islamic Authority

If interpretation is the cornerstone of engaging with and redefining Islamic

tradition, then what constitutes legitimate authority becomes the central
question of the subfields of ethics and jurisprudence. In challenging past
conceptions of authority, the works fuse scholarship and activism in an
effort to encourage women to be active interpreters capable of making
and remaking their social worlds.
In Woman’s Identity and the Qur’an (2004), Nimat Hafez Barazangi
argues that Muslim women have to recognize that accepting the model
presented to them forces them to be passive actors in their religious iden-
tity. As an antidote, Barazangi suggests that it is incumbent upon women
to become active interpreters of the Qurʾān. In doing so, they will neither
be feminists pushing a women’s agenda, nor fit within agendas that try
to shift authority structures in Islam. Instead, Barazangi argues that they
will also meet their obligation to engage with Islam as an interpretative
framework.
The problem, for Barazangi, is that Muslim woman have accepted a
world in which the interpretation of the text and the tradition are driven
by male concerns. In speaking of a tradition that accords women sta-
tus only in the capacity of mothers, Barazangi argues that women do
not develop the self-identity to become autonomous Muslim women as
enjoined by the Qurʾān (Barazangi 2004, xiii). The new readings have to
be made through an engagement with ta⁠ʾammul (reflective understand-
ing) and taʿamul (action-oriented reflection) (Barazangi 2004, 3).
For Barazangi, truth claims about women’s agency are less important
than the question of authority. She asks who has the authority to inter-
pret the Qurʾān and questions the framework for the interpretations. Her
answer is to develop a self-learning of Islamic curriculum with the aim
of fulfilling the Qurʾānic concept of “human trusteeship as being equally
mandated for the male and female” (Barazangi 2004, 193). The curriculum
itself is shaped by seven determinant principles: pluralism in the private
 philosophy 267

and public domain; secularism in normative and scientific discourses;

practical, procedural, and ideal knowledge of Islam; text comprehen-
sion; textual reproduction; learner’s needs and interests; and learner’s
inter­activity. The pedagogy of reading the Qurʾān, then, is not driven by
a particular political aim. Instead, it is a process that aims to transform
women into true Muslims who are active in their faith. The process of
transforming women into authorities in their own domains is what con-
stitutes Islamic education.
While Barazangi represents the articulation of authority for the indi-
vidual women within society, Amina Wadud focuses on the possibility
of women exercising leadership in the Islamic community as a whole. In
Qur’an and Women: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective
(1992), Wadud takes a hermeneutical approach to recover the unity of the
Qurʾānic text. In 2005, Wadud led a public, mixed congregation Friday
prayer in New York. While most Muslim religious scholars condemned the
prayer, the event marked the developing movement of scholar-activists,
a term that Gisela Webb (2000) uses to identify scholars who use their
research to engage with faith-based traditions.
Wadud wrote Inside the Gender Jihad (2006) to explain her role in the
event and also the larger principles of gender and Islam. The reflective
work gives a name to the movement within academia that “brought spiri-
tuality, scholarship and activism together” (Marcotte 2010, 131). In her
book American Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism: More
than a Prayer (2012), Julianne Hammer traces the context for prayer and
situates it in a global discussion about women and Islam.
While there are movements for gender reform in law in many Mus-
lim-majority countries, the study of gender in jurisprudence is fairly new.
Kecia Ali has led the way in analyzing Islamic law and jurisprudence in
an effort to engage with question of gender. Her work Sexual Ethics and
Islam (2006) articulated an agenda that differed from the previous works
which looked at the Qurʾān as the principal text for Islamic practice, but
discounted subsequent texts as too androcentric. Ali argues, in contrast,
that discounting centuries of tradition does not fully engage with the
developed tradition. Through careful and balanced analysis, she has inter-
preted texts in order to better understand the possibilities of Islamic law.
While her techniques are hermeneutic in nature, they are also informed
by principles of equality, as well as the sense that if law has shaped Islamic
tradition, then law should also be a central focus of study for gender.
268 nerina rustomji

New Directions

The discipline of philosophy will continue to engage old and new meth-
odologies in order to create new categories of gender scholarship. As a
result, the scholarship about women and Islam will have both a herme-
neutic and a political impact. While the focus of scholars has been on
engagement with interpretation of the Qurʾān, the disciple has begun
to show an engagement with legal texts and the larger Islamic textual
tradition as well.

Bibliography

Ahmed, Leila. Women and gender in Islam. Historical roots of a modern debate, New Haven,
Conn. 1992.
Ali, Kecia. Sexual ethics and Islam. Feminist reflections on Qur’an, hadith, and jurisprudence,
Oxford 2006.
——. “The best of you will not strike.” Al-Shafiʿi on Qur’an, Sunnah, and wife-beating, in
Comparative Islamic Studies 2:2 (2006), 143–55.
Anwar, Etin. Gender and self in Islam, London 2006.
Badran, Margot. Feminism in Islam. Secular and religious convergences, Oxford 2009.
Barazangi, Nimat Hafez. Woman’s identity and the Qur’an. A new reading, Gainesville,
Fla. 2004.
——. M. Raquibuz Zaman and Oman Afzal (eds.). Islamic identity and the struggle for
justice, Gainesville, Fla. 1996.
Barlas, Asma. “Believing women” in Islam. Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an,
Austin, Tex. 2002.
Davary, Bahar. Women and the Qur’an. A study in Islamic hermeneutics, Lewiston,
N.Y. 2009.
Hammer, Juliane. Identity, authority, and activism. American Muslim women’s approaches
to the Qur’an, in Muslim World 98:4 (October 2008), 442–63.
——. American Muslim women, religious authority, and activism, Austin Tex. 2012.
Hidayatullah, Aysha. Women trustees of Allah. Methods, limits, and possibilities of “feminist
theology” in Islam, Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara 2009.
——. Inspiration and struggle. Muslim feminist theology and the work of Elizabeth
Schuessler-Fiorenza, in Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 25:1 (2009), 162–70.
Marcotte, Roxanne. Muslim women’s scholarship and the new gender jihad, in Women and
Islam, ed. Zayn R. Kassam, Santa Barbara, Calif. 2010, 131–62.
Murata, Sachiko. The Tao of Islam. A sourcebook on gender relationships in Islamic thought,
Albany, N.Y. 1992.
Shaikh, Sa⁠ʾdiyya. Sufi narratives of intimacy: Ibn ʿArabī, gender, and sexuality, Chapel Hill,
N.C. 2012.
Sonn, Tamara. Philosophy, in Encyclopedia of women and Islamic cultures, gen. ed. Suad
Joseph, vol. 1, Methodologies, paradigms and sources, 399–403.
Wadud-Muhsin, Amina. Qur’an and woman, Kuala Lumpur 1992.
Wadud, Amina. Inside the gender jihad. Women’s reform in Islam, Oxford 2006.
Webb, Gisela. Windows of faith. Muslim women scholar-activists in North America, Syracuse,
N.Y. 2000.
 Political Science

Amaney A. Jamal and Vickie Langohr

Introduction

The literature on political science and women in the Muslim world

(defined as countries in which Muslims are a majority or a plurality of the
population) has centered on three main debates. The first examines the
lack of democracies in the Muslim world compared to other regions
(the “democracy deficit”) and asks whether gender discrimination has con-
tributed to this deficit. The second set of debates asks why women in the
Muslim world lag behind their counterparts in the rest of the developing
world in areas such as representation in parliament and, particularly, in
their participation in the workforce. The third focus of the literature looks
to the ways women work within contexts often presumed to be patriar-
chal, such as Islamist political parties, to advance their own interests. This
last strand contextualizes the sources of the barriers and opportunities
that hinder or empower women. By and large, the political science litera-
ture on women in the Muslim world is a small field. This is perhaps driven
more by the disciplinary boundaries of political science, where the study
of women has not received adequate scholarly attention.
Because of this dearth of information and since several political science
approaches such as political culture, identity, and political behavior strive
to understand the micro-foundations of individual political behavior, the
analysis in this entry extends beyond the formal field of political science
and examines influential works on women and Islam from the fields of
sociology and anthropology as well. The works from these other fields
have also been influential in addressing questions of individual political
agency and mobilization in the field of political science.

Democracy and Women’s Rights

Scholarship in the first decade of the twenty-first century has argued that
systematic discrimination against women is a key reason for the lack of
democracy in the Muslim world. Steven Fish (2002) contends that women
in countries in which Muslims are a plurality or a majority of the population
270 amaney a. jamal and vickie langohr

suffer systematic discrimination and that this discrimination significantly

hinders democratization. Fish assesses statistically quantifiable measures
of women’s well-being such as the gap between male and female literacy
rates, the gap in the numbers of men and women in parliament and in
high-ranking executive branch positions, and the percentage of women
and men in the population, known as the “sex ratio” (because when men
significantly outnumber women in a country, this is often due to girls hav-
ing less access to food and healthcare, or strong societal preferences for
sons which lead to abortions of female fetuses or girl infanticide.) Fish
compares these indicators in the 47 Muslim majority or plurality coun-
tries to countries across the globe. While holding economic development
constant, Fish finds that Muslim countries perform worse on each of these
indicators than non-Muslim countries. He then notes that performance
on his gender indicators is correlated with Freedom House scores measur-
ing countries’ levels of democracy.
Daniela Donno and Bruce Russett (2004) strongly challenge Fish’s find-
ings, arguing that there is no connection between democracy and per-
formance on gender indicators and that only Arab women, not Muslim
women more generally, lag behind women in other regions. Donno and
Russett used Fish’s indicators and added several additional measures of
female empowerment, as well as using more precise measurements for
indicators adopted by Fish. More importantly, they measured factors
other than gender which could account for authoritarian rule in a par-
ticular country, such as the number of other democracies in the region
(in accordance with well-substantiated findings that when some countries
in a region democratize the chance of others doing so increases) and the
number of fatal military disputes that a country participated in between
1991 and 2000 (to measure the extent to which war and militarization
affect democratic and gender outcomes). In this fuller analysis, Donno and
Russett found that all but one of these gender outcomes (women in gov-
ernment) were unrelated to democracy, concluding that “women’s rights
exhibit virtually no independent influence on democracy” (2004, 593).
They also found, counter to Fish, that Muslim countries do not perform
particularly badly on gender outcomes, but Arab ones do, contending that
“when Islam is in the equations without a separate variable for Arab, it
often impacts negatively on women’s rights, but when a control for Arab
states is in the equation it is that, not Islamic culture per se, that regularly
makes the difference” (599). In this analysis, then, Muslim countries are
particularly likely to be authoritarian and Arab countries are particularly
 political science 271

likely to oppress women, but levels of women’s rights explain the pre-
dominance of authoritarian government in the Arab or Muslim world.
In his 2011 book Are Muslims Distinctive? A Look at the Evidence, Steven
Fish argued that when he revisited his earlier hypothesis that gender
inequality in Muslim countries was causally related to authoritarianism
using different measurements and control factors, he no longer found
a “stable relationship” between the two. Even after controlling for fac-
tors other than Islam which could affect democracy, such as length of
national independence and population size, Fish continued to argue that
there was a strong relationship between authoritarian rule and proportion
of Muslims in the population (as opposed to the simple binary variable,
in which countries were either Muslim—if a plurality of the population
was Muslim—or not, employed in the 2002 article). He also found once
again that “females tend to fare relatively poorly in places where Muslims
predominate,” but that data that better measured the relevant variables
suggested no clear link between gender inequality and authoritarian rule
in the Muslim world (2011, 201).
Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris (2003a, 2003b) also contend that
there is a causal link between women’s status in the Muslim world and
authoritarian governance. In contrast to Fish, who measures women’s sta-
tus with statistical measurements of socio-demographic indicators such
as literacy gap and sex ratio, Inglehart and Norris cite opinion surveys to
argue that attitudes towards women’s rights are significantly more patriar-
chal in the Muslim world than elsewhere. In Rising Tide: Gender Equality
and Cultural Change Around the World, they use answers to World Values
Survey (WVS) questions asked in countries throughout the world to argue
that Muslim societies have the world’s least supportive attitudes towards
gender equality and that, more generally, “where there are more egalitar-
ian attitudes, these are systematically related to the actual condition of
men’s and women’s lives” (2003a, 10). In an article in Foreign Policy (Ingle-
hart and Norris 2003b), they explicitly connect the inegalitarian gender
attitudes found in Muslim countries to the Muslim democracy deficit,
arguing that “among all the countries included in the WVS, support for
gender equality—a key indicator of tolerance and personal freedom—is
closely linked with a society’s level of democracy” (2003b, 67). While sur-
veys show that Muslims strongly support democracy as a political system,
Inglehart and Norris contend that “democracy may not be sustainable in
(Muslim) societies” due to their low levels of support for gender equality
(65). In a 2007 working paper, “Democratic Deficit and Gender Attitudes.
272 amaney a. jamal and vickie langohr

Do attitudes toward women affect women’s rights and level of democ-

racy?”, Amaney Jamal and Vickie Langohr (2007) argue that inegalitari-
anism, as expressed in the more qualitative measure of gender attitudes
revealed in WVS surveys, is not causally related to the democratic deficit
in the Arab world. They find that although there is a link between ine-
galitarianism and objective indicators measuring women’s empowerment,
these measures are not linked to levels of democracy.

Modernization and Attitudes towards Gender

There is much agreement in the literature underscoring the primary fac-

tors that structure attitudes towards gender equality in the Muslim world.
These can be organized under two main rubrics: cultural modernization
and economic development. In a nutshell, societies that have undergone
some level of socioeconomic modernization, particularly industrializa-
tion and urbanization, tend to have cultural attitudes that bode well for
women’s equality. Similarly, accounts of the impact economic develop-
ment has on women’s equality maintain that as women enter the labor
force, a host of other factors, such as expanded rights and the ability to
distance women from patriarchal dominance, ensue in ways that also sup-
port women’s equality.
In Rising Tide, Inglehart and Norris concern themselves with the con-
nection between economic development, culture, and gender attitudes.
In what they call a “revised version of modernization theory,” they argue
that as societies develop economically their attitudes towards the role of
women change in predictable ways. Industrialization leads large numbers
of women to become educated, work outside the home, have smaller
families, and obtain the right to vote; in post-industrial societies women
additionally gain more power in the workplace and in politics. These
economic changes spark attitudinal shifts, as the importance of the tra-
ditional family declines, secularism spreads, and daily economic security
allows citizens to turn from survival to self-expression values such as
support for gender equality. In pre-industrial societies, by contrast, the
constant struggle for economic survival and corresponding insecurity
“develop(s) cultures mistrustful of rapid change, emphasizing the values
of traditional authority and strong leadership . . . backed up by social sanc-
tions and norms derived from religious authorities. In these societies, the
traditional two-parent family, with its division of sex roles between male
breadwinner and female caregivers, is crucial for . . . survival” (2003a, 16).
 political science 273

Inglehart and Norris analyze 74 countries in which the WVS was con-
ducted at least once between 1980 and 2000. Eleven of these were Muslim
countries, including Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania, Azerbaijan, Nigeria,
and Bangladesh. Inglehart and Norris divide these countries on the basis
of their Human Development Index (HDI) score into 21 postindustrial,
32 industrial, and 21 agrarian countries. They compare these countries’
attitudes on gender equality as measured by five WVS questions to levels
of development indicated by logged per capita GDP and find that these
countries cluster together predictably by group: with the exception of
Japan, all of the postindustrial countries have high scores on the Gender
Equality scale, the industrials have somewhat lower scores, and the agrar-
ians have the lowest. Most Muslim countries fit into the agrarian cluster,
with a few in the industrial cluster as well.
However, for Inglehart and Norris, economic change is not the only
driver of attitudinal change: cultural and particularly religious traditions
account for wide variations on support for gender equality even within
groups of countries at the same level of economic and social development.
They argue that of all the countries surveyed, “Muslims living in poorer,
agrarian nations . . . are by far the most traditional group in their attitudes
towards gender equality” (2003a, 68). Because this is true even once HDI
scores, levels of democracy, and the social background of respondents
(age, education, and so forth) are controlled for, the evidence indicates
that traditional religious values and religious laws have played an impor-
tant role in reinforcing inegalitarian social norms (68). In their Foreign
Policy article, Inglehart and Norris take this argument further to contend
that the Muslim democracy deficit may well be caused by low support for
gender equality in the Muslim world, since “among all countries in the
WVS [World Values Survey], support for gender equality is closely linked
with a society’s level of democracy” (2003b, 67). As a result, “Islamic reli-
gious heritage is one of the most powerful barriers to the rising tide of
gender equality” (2003a, 49).
Inglehart and Norris express additional concerns pertaining to the sta-
tus of women in the Muslim world. The poor attitudinal record of Mus-
lims on gender quality exemplifies a more troubling pattern. Societies
that have a more favorable opinion towards women also exemplify other
important characteristics. They maintain that, “These issues are part of
broader syndrome of tolerance, trust, political activism, and emphasis on
individual autonomy that constitutes ‘self-expression values.’ ” Inglehart
and Norris link these “self-expression values” to democratic institutions.
274 amaney a. jamal and vickie langohr

Mark Tessler and Eleanor Gao (2009) find that, ultimately, there are
basic personality traits that unite people in their negative attitudes towards
women. Parochial people, they maintain, are not tolerant of diverse politi-
cal views, do not support gender equality, are not interested in politics, do
not participate in civic and associational life, and are not trusting of fel-
low citizens. Conversely, citizens with a democratic orientation are more
tolerant of diverse political views, support gender equality, are interested
in political views, support gender equality, show interest in politics, par-
ticipate in civic and associational life, and are trusting of fellow citizens.
A new wave of research has found significant variation in attitudinal
orientations towards women. Helen Rizzo, Abdel-Hamid Abdel-Latif
and Katherine Meyer (2010) find that non-Arab Muslim societies tend
to exhibit higher levels of support for women’s rights than Arab Muslim
societies. This is a finding echoed by Michele Angrist (2012). Rizzo et al.
(2010) argue that one possible problem is that in the Arab world the
link between anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism may explain nega-
tive attitudes towards gender equality, since gender equality norms are
advanced by the West and in particular the United States. Hence, ideas
about gender empowerment are linked to a hegemonic Western discourse,
which is highly resisted in many sectors of Arab societies.
In addition to cultural arguments, there are several other explanations
linked to the role of religion in hindering the advancement of women in
the Muslim world. Religion as a category can be broken down into three
main components: religion as denomination, individual-level religiosity,
and the degree of secularism in a given state. The implication of these
formulations is that religion in all its manifestations is bad for women.
Thus, as modernization ensues, people should become less religious, soci-
eties should become more secular, and the denominational influences
should dissipate. A plethora of studies substantiate these claims, includ-
ing Inglehart and Norris’ Rising Tide. Another strand of the modernization
literature looks to the role of education and urbanization. As societies
become more educated and more urban, their worldviews should become
more cosmopolitan and universal. As such, their attitudes towards gender
should improve, especially since higher levels of education and urbaniza-
tion are seen as ways of shedding traditional norms and opinions in favor
of more egalitarian concepts.
Economic modernization is deemed extremely useful for improving
attitudinal predispositions towards women. This argument is best cham-
pioned by Valentine Moghadam (2003). Economic development first
allows women to enter the labor market, where they prove that they are
 political science 275

capable of performing many of the same tasks as men, therefore signify-

ing that they are equal to men in the workforce, and improve general
attitudes about women’s competence and rights. Michael Ross (2008)
also argues that labor market participation is important for advancing
the status of women, but notes that increasing oil wealth often decreases
women’s employment. In some countries, employed women tend to work
almost exclusively in the production of tradable goods (such as cloth-
ing for export) but not in what Ross calls “nontraded” sectors, such as
construction or sales, either because the physical labor requirements of
these jobs exceed women’s capacity or because social norms discourage
women from interacting with unrelated men. In these gender-segregated
economies, oil booms decrease the number of women in the workforce by
raising their reservation wage (the wage at which they will seek to enter
the workforce), as the male-only nontradable sector of oil production
provides higher wages to men in their families and government transfers
increase family wealth. Because women do not join the labor force, they
are more likely to have more children, less education, and less influence
within families. Not working outside the home also renders women less
likely to exchange information, to form networks to overcome collective
action problems, and gain influence in the political sphere. It is important
to note that for Ross, increases in oil production will not decrease wom-
en’s labor participation in countries which do not have gender-segregated
economies, which is why, he argues, oil has not decreased women’s rights
and influence in some Latin American countries such as Venezuela and
Mexico, as well as in Muslim-majority Malaysia (110).
Aili Tripp, Alice Kang, Mounira Charrad, Pippa Norris and Teri Caraway
all question Ross’s arguments in a 2009 issue of Gender and Politics. For
example, Pippa Norris (2009) suggests that one way to “disentangle the
complex effects of Muslim religious faith and oil” would be to expand
the logic of the argument—that employment in the oil sector is over-
whelmingly male, and that this hurts women’s chances of winning elected
office—to similarly male-dominated forms of natural resource extraction
found in many regions of the world, such as the mining of gold and dia-
monds. Such an extension may not replicate Ross’s findings. As one exam-
ple, Norris notes that South Africa’s economy was heavily dependent on
mineral extraction but women there have very high levels of participation
in political activism and in parliament.
In other political economy formulations that explain the status of
women in Muslim societies, Lisa Blaydes and Drew Linzer (2008) argue
that in societies where economic opportunities are few, women embrace
276 amaney a. jamal and vickie langohr

“fundamentalist” practices, such as wearing the veil, to signal their mar-

riage eligibility. The argument here is premised on the assumption (which
is not substantiated in the article) that Arab men in general prefer marrying
women who wear the veil. As such, women will opt to marry rather than
risk competing in a labor force that offers few economic opportunities.
Many scholars discuss other macro-level factors that have influenced
the status of Arab women in particular. Angrist (2012) argues that there
are multiple explanations. Structural adjustment programs and austerity
measures are seen as having a negative effect on women’s rights. Once
states pulled back their social welfare programs, women across the Mid-
dle East disproportionately suffered because they were predominantly
employed in the public sector (Doumato and Posusney 2003). Second,
Arab states have been involved in more interstate wars than other states
elsewhere. Warfare has had negative consequences on women, both in
terms of economic opportunities and security vulnerabilities (Pratt and
al-Ali 2009). Third, anti-Westernism has resulted in opposition to Western
norms being imported into the Arab world. Increasing levels of Western
intervention have made it more difficult for women to embrace women’s
equality, as it is often seen as complicity with Western values and dictates.
Furthermore, Arab societies have resisted the imposition of Western gen-
der norms more vigorously than non-Arab Muslim states. Other scholars
have found that high levels of anti-Westernism have served as a source of
empowerment for Islamist movements, which often dictate the discourse
on gender equality in ways unfavorable towards women ( Jamal and Lan-
gohr 2007, Langohr and Jamal 2012).
Sociologist Mounira Charrad (2001) wrote an influential analysis of the
role of different paths of state formation in shaping different women’s per-
sonal status regimes in Maghrib states. The process through which tribes
and clans were integrated into the nation state is crucial for understanding
the variance in outcomes. Examining Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia from
the pre-colonial period to the 1970s, Charrad finds that in states that had
incorporated the tribes, customary laws also influenced the nature of per-
sonal status laws. This was more evident in Algeria and Morocco than in
Tunisia. Jamal and Langohr (2012) further argue that, in fact, women tend
to have more equitable personal status laws in countries where regimes
have been willing to stand by a commitment towards women.
Laurie Brand (1998) wrote a very comprehensive book on women’s
rights in the Arab world in the era of political liberalization. Her book
examines the reasons why an expansion of women’s rights did not accom-
modate the expansion of political liberalization in many Arab states. Brand
argues that the process of political liberalization itself is rather tumultuous
 political science 277

and uncertain. These levels of uncertainty do not bode well for women.
Exacerbating this tension is that external aid for women’s rights had been
negatively tarnished as a “Western”-imposed agenda. In the process of
asserting nationalist credentials, especially among groups that are other-
wise liberal, women’s rights tended to be sacrificed. By contrast, linguistics
scholar Ousseina Alidou (2008) notes that with the rise of democratiza-
tion in Niger in the early 1990s came a significant increase of women
doing activist work, including the creation of makaranta or madarasas to
provide literacy for adult women—only 15 percent of whom were literate
in 2005—through memorization of the Qurʾān. In the democratization
period, the IMF and World Bank moved to privatize education in Niger, one
of the poorest countries in the world, further limiting educational oppor-
tunities for poor boys and girls who were already largely excluded from
a Francophone-dominant education system. Women activists responded
to this with the creation of female-only Qurʾānic study sessions to pro-
vide literacy training for adult women. These sessions also provided space,
and social sanction, for women to learn income-generating skills such as
incense-making and hairdressing and encouraged “friendship gatherings”
in which women provided economic support to friends.

The Use of Existing Avenues

Although Muslim women, and Arab women in particular, enjoy less

advantageous positions in cross-national perspectives, they have hardly
been absent from key debates addressing social, economic and political
realities. One increasingly fruitful field of research has been studies of the
roles of women in Islamist political parties. While these male-dominated
political parties espouse very conservative views of women’s roles, female
party members have gained crucial organizational skills through their
work in the parties, and in some cases have used their own knowledge of
Islamic texts to discourage religiously-sanctioned practices such as polyg-
amy, which they understand to be harmful to women.
In Yemen, Stacey Philbrick Yadav (2010) notes, the decline of the Yemeni
Socialist Party and the rise of the Islamist Islah party as the most powerful
opposition force in the country significantly increased gender segregation
in the public sphere by the late 1990s. The Women’s Sector of the Islah
party, however, provided an unparalleled opportunity for women to gain
crucial skills, from raising funds to giving speeches to instructing other
women in the Qurʾān.
278 amaney a. jamal and vickie langohr

Religious studies scholar Pieternella van Doorn-Harder’s study of wom-

en’s activities within the two biggest Islamic organizations in Indonesia,
Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiya, finds similar opportunities for
women’s advancement, with one female leader telling a graduating high
school class that through her own activism in Nasyiatul ʿAisyiyah, Muham-
madiyah’s group for girls and young women, she “learned how to write
proposals . . . sometimes phone a minister and . . . travel all over Indone-
sia,” and even traveled abroad (van Doorn-Harder 2006, 140). In contrast
to many Muslim countries, Indonesia has a long tradition of girls having
access to pesantren, which van Doorn-Harder defines as “Islamic boarding
schools” (van Doorn-Harder 2006, 2), producing a relatively large num-
ber of women deeply trained in Islamic texts. Nasyiatul ʿAisyiyah mem-
bers have used this knowledge to offer more feminist readings of current
Indonesian and Islamic norms. For example, Siti Ruhaini, one of three
women added to the formerly male-only guidance bureau (Majlis Tarjih)
of Muhammadiya in 1995, argues that “cooking, cleaning, and washing
clothes are the man’s responsibility. Islam acknowledges that women’s
tasks of giving birth and breastfeeding are heavy . . . giving birth and tak-
ing care of the baby are in principle tiring enough” (van Doorn-Harder
2006, 156).
Other scholars have looked at the ways in which participation in
Islamic movements has helped women improve their overall status. His-
torian Margot Badran (2006) finds that women in Egypt have benefited
from participation in Islamic movements, while political scientist Yeşim
Arat (2005) sees the same phenomenon among women in Turkey’s Refah
party.
Janine Clark and Jillian Schwedler examine the conditions under which
women can rise to positions of authority in two Islamist parties, Islah in
Yemen and the Islamic Action Front in Jordan. Writing in 2003, they
explain how over the decade of the 1990s these two parties moved from
strongly opposing women’s political participation to “not only hav[ing]
women in their highest decision-making bodies but hav[ing] more
[women] than any other party in either country” (Clark and Schwedler
2003, 293). Female party members exploited particular opportunities,
such as disputes within the parties between moderates and hardliners. The
rise of women to leadership positions, however, did not lead either party
to consistently support increased public activism for female members, as
was demonstrated when reformists in the IAF bowed to more hardline
members and asked IAF women to leave public meetings in the summer
of 1999 to discuss problems between the King and Hamas. Even while
women face gendered barriers, they continue to push an inclusive agenda
 political science 279

that works to their advantage. Historian Eleanor Doumato (2000) shows

how some women (in Iran and Saudi Arabia, respectively) actively created
a type of counter-orthodoxy and thus challenged the male-dominated
orthodoxy by adopting marginal types of worship such as exclusively
female performances, healing sessions, and saint worship. Sociologist
Alessandra González (2012) finds that Kuwaiti women demanding politi-
cal rights did so within the realm of traditional boundaries. They refused
to see gender empowerment as undermining key traditional values, such
as women’s importance in domestic affairs. In fact, these women wanted
to maintain some of the comforts and values linked to patriarchal tradi-
tion. Although Kuwaiti women were influenced by the principles of equal-
ity, they wanted equality to coincide with a traditional value system.
A recent phenomenon in the literature on women and politics in the
Middle East is the increasing number of women who incorporate Islam
in their daily lives. Anthropological works, such as Saba Mahmood’s
2005 study of an Egyptian women’s mosque movement and Lara Deeb’s
2006 study of Lebanese Shiʿi communities have examined public piety.
By adopting Islam, these women have turned what is usually considered
an obstacle to women’s empowerment—their frequent exclusion from
public spaces—into an opportunity to become active. Women tend to
meet in homes and mosques where they dialogue, engage and question
as in Yeşim Arat’s study (2005) of women in Turkey’s Refah Islamist party,
mentioned earlier. Women in those parties developed their own under-
standings and interpretations of Islam that contrasted with secular voices.
The women wanted headscarves but not polygamy, and they wanted an
Islamic state because they associated it with a moral state.
Through a rich ethnography of poor Bangladeshi women, Elora She-
habuddin (2008a) finds that they carefully negotiate their support for
political parties in the context of a failing state. She carefully shows
that women’s support for Islamism should not simply be confined to a
polarized secular-religious debate. Rather, there exist serious material
grievances that structure the choices these women make. Shehabuddin
(2008b) also extends this argument in her article “Jamaat-i-Islami in Ban-
gladesh. Women, democracy and the transformation of Islamist politics.”
Here, she argues that, over time, the Jamaat party, now engaged in the
formal electoral process, has incorporated women in meaningful roles so
as to privilege their individuality, as both mothers and voters in ways that
can be empowering. This account of women’s participation in Islamist
groups problematizes accounts that declare that women always partici-
pate in these movements from a position of subordination.
280 amaney a. jamal and vickie langohr

The one unifying feature of the works described here is the direct
challenge to a Western hegemonic discourse of liberal feminism. These
works advance the argument that there are different modalities for “femi-
nist engagement.” Because women are using Islamic-authored channels,
which at times serve as marginalized spheres of participation, women are
nevertheless gaining a voice of empowerment and influence that they
otherwise would not have obtained. These studies suggest that we cannot
simply deem women’s behaviors as instances of political subordination or
marginalization, when in fact the sources of women’s agency and empow-
erment are a complex and dynamic process.

Conclusion

There remain multiple venues of research that are of vital importance.

Little is known about women’s role in the formal political process. Do
women comprise an electoral constituency? How might patriarchy
influence the choice-set before them? Do formal political channels offer
adequate opportunities for female representation? Farida Jalazai’s Shat-
tered, Cracked, or Firmly Intact?: Women and the Executive Glass Ceiling
Worldwide (2013) is an excellent study of women and leadership in com-
parative perspective, which has received little attention.
In the field of political science, however, the study of gender remains
on the fringes of the discipline. This is primarily because there is not a
unified theory about the ways to operationalize gender, gender relations,
gender identities, and gender politics in influential models of political sci-
ence, especially those in cross-national or large N studies. The discipline
is increasingly moving toward mixed method approaches, which means
that there will remain several challenges to the study of gender and poli-
tics. Primarily, this will require the compilation, production, and coding
of data made available in an accessible way. The turn to mixed methods
however, will continue to underscore context-specific knowledge of the
cases at hand. The study of Muslim women must also be committed to
an understanding of the political contextual influences that continue to
shape the constraints, opportunities and challenges they face. The qual-
itative-quantitative divide should not be constructed as an “either-or”
paradigm, but rather one that speaks to a vigorous debate. Mixed method
approaches will allow for a more nuanced understanding of the dynam-
ics that shape women’s political lives, while paying attention to patterns
that are generalizable across the Muslim world. Indeed, the route forward
should build on the exemplary and influential works in this essay.
 political science 281

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 Population and Health Sciences

Hania Sholkamy

Introduction

Population and health sciences have shifted focus from reproduction, fer-
tility, and the medicalization and systemization of populations to a politi-
cal economy paradigm. The last decade has witnessed a radicalization of
social sciences in general and the disciplines of population have followed
suite. The overtly medicalized tenor that marked population and health
till 1994 has given way since then to a concern with gender, youth, pov-
erty and governance. These last ten years have culminated in a number
of revolutions in the Arab Muslim world and have also witnessed a series
of crises in the world at large. The problems of population growth have
become closely associated with the crisis of impoverishment and inequal-
ity. The relations of reproduction are now addressed as gender inequali-
ties. The issues that relate to services, access to information and rights to
health are subsumed by radical political overhauls and loud calls for social
justice. In brief, the arena of population and health studies now studies
politics, ideologies, gender and social rights, as well as poverty and depri-
vation. In the Muslim world there has also been a significant shift in the
preponderance of religion as a frame of reference and of the resurgence of
its jurisprudence as a source for policy directions. The old contradictions
between renditions of religion and those of modernities are once again
on the surface but are perhaps on their way to a complex and nuanced
resolution.
The Muslim world and the worlds of Muslims seem to have become more
radicalized, more dangerous, more urgent, and fractured by unrelenting
competitions around identity, resources, rights and bodily integrity. Half
a billion Muslim women inhabit some 45 Muslim-majority countries, and
another 30 or more countries have significant Muslim minorities, includ-
ing, increasingly, countries in the developed West (Offenhaur 2005). The
tensions that define the demographic and daily life of hundreds of mil-
lions of women are precipitated by a changing real world and by the shift
in the world of research and ideas. On the one hand, scholarship has come
to encompass the economic and social determinants of population health
284 hania sholkamy

and well-being or of deprivation and inequality. On the other hand, the

growing importance of religion and religious identity have brought added
attention to the individual, to sexuality and to agency.
These two almost contradictory trends are delineated by political con-
testations and economic deprivations and inequalities. The work of Livia
Wick (2008) exemplifies these changes well. Wick worked on birthing
practices, looking at the medicalization of birth in Palestine and at the
impact of politics of protest and liberation on Palestinian health services.
In telling the stories of Palestinian women’s birthing experiences as deter-
mined by the checkpoints that fragment the landscape of their homeland,
Wick has illustrated the unnecessary suffering and risks taken by Palestin-
ian women giving birth while at the mercy of checkpoint schedules or the
checkpoints themselves. The increased risk to the health of both mother
and newborn are mitigated by the brave and innovative efforts of local
midwives. Besides registering the birth stories themselves, Wick histori-
cizes the intersection between the professional politics of medicine and
national politics during the second Palestinian uprising, which erupted in
2000, and brings to bear the significance of the Palestinian political move-
ments of steadfastness (ṣumūd) and of the popular health movement on
the practices of health professionals (Wick 2008). Her work and that of
others has yielded a popular campaign called “VisualizingPalestine” that
has produced posters to express the horrendous neonatal mortality asso-
ciated with restricted mobility precipitated by checkpoints. (Between
2000 and 2005, 67 Palestinian mothers were forced to give birth at Israeli
military checkpoints; 36 babies died.)
Population and health studies have been defined by two sets of rela-
tionships of production. The first are from the world of donor aid and
oversees funding. Much of population research has been motivated by an
anti-natalist agenda that identifies population growth as a development
burden. The scholarship produced in this context tends to be problem
and policy oriented and to be dominated by statistics and prescriptions.
The second emanate from critical knowledge production networks and
movements. This body of work references overtly political projects such
as those of feminism, national liberation, bodily rights and integrity, and
anti-globalization movements. These divergent worlds of scholarship often
intersect and usually inform one another. This entry will trace some of
the important trends in population and health studies that have emerged
in the past decade in both the world of policy that is relevant and criti-
cal scholarship. The approach adopted focuses on examples of initiatives,
literatures and ideas that have shaped the field and does not attempt a
 population and health sciences 285

comprehensive summation or rendition of this large area of scholarship

and action. The entry highlights areas of intersection between health and
population and considers the influence of gender ideologies on both.
The scope of this entry falls short of EWIC’s mandate because the focus
here is primarily on the Arab world; therefore many aspects of health
and population studies in Africa, Asia and Europe are overlooked. There
are three reasons for this oversight. The first concerns the articulation of
health and population with policy. There are such differences between
the situation and experiences of women in these contexts and their expli-
cation that a broad sweep analysis is impossible. Muslim women in non-
Arab Asia and Africa experience life through diverse cultural lenses that
determine their status, rights, health, work and reproductive norms and
practices. Second, the character of the state and of state institutions varies
enormously between these countries and locations. The rights availed to
women by legal and moral regimes are significantly different for Muslim
women in India than they are for Nigerians in the north. Muslim women
in Europe have access to services that enable them to make reproductive
decisions that are remarkably different from services available to Muslims
in Ghana. Third, the revolutions and transformations taking place in Arab
countries have to some extent overwhelmed this entry; the dramatic and
unfinished revolutions and the ongoing wars and displacements have war-
ranted reflection on the relationships between social, gender and political
transformations and their implications for our understanding of health
and population.

Reproductive and Public Health

In a summary of the state of reproductive health and population research

after the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development,
Huda Zurayk (1999) noted a number of future directions. These included
an engagement with health services to ensure quality of care and inves-
tigations into the economic and political contexts in which health and
population policy is drafted. These recommendations also highlighted the
intersections between reproductive and public health in general.
Population and reproductive health have always featured as a core
component of public health programs and research. The past decade
confirmed the importance of macro-level conditions to health and well-
being. The collection edited by Michael Marmot and Richard G. Wilkinson
(2009) presented hard evidence of the importance of social and political
286 hania sholkamy

factors to individual health. The Whitehall study that tracked thousands

of British public sector employees over time proved that people’s social
and economic circumstances strongly affect their health throughout life.
Junior office workers were found to suffer double the disease burden of
senior office workers, despite the advantage of youth (Brunner 1997).
This landmark study filtered into policy discourses in the past decade
whereby the social determinants of health became a key approach to
addressing health burdens. Health is affected by conditions and structures
that limit or enhance well-being, security and opportunity (Marmot and
Wilkinson 2009).
These macro-level determinants affect the distribution of health and
well-being and the risks and vulnerabilities that cause morbidity and mor-
tality. Thus, poverty, inequality, environmental pollutions, deprivations,
racism, and biases all impact health and the distribution of disease. They
also impact the care that people receive at the hands of health systems
(Farmer 1999). While public health programs alone cannot ameliorate
the social forces that are associated with poor health outcomes, develop-
ing a better understanding of the social determinants of health is criti-
cal to reducing burdens of disease. Working with this approach, WHO
launched a major effort to document the social determinants of health
and to encourage governments to reorganize their health systems so as
to address these causal factors. The important influence of Iran in shap-
ing this agenda should be noted as it is one of the countries that has long
adopted a social approach to health care (WHO 2008).
More than any other field of health, reproductive health is immersed,
not only in material and social conditions, but also in personal and social
relations. Beliefs, family relations, material conditions, as well as politi-
cal choices all condition reproductive health and how it is experienced
or pursued. For example, maternal mortality is a construct of a number
of social determinants—the practice of letting women eat last and least;
early marriage and early pregnancy; lack of decision-making power within
the household; low demand for prenatal care and for attention—that can
lead to increased exposure to maternal death. Community factors also
impinge on health, so access to water, sanitation, employment, public ser-
vices and resources are important determinants of health outcomes.
The connections with poverty and war are clear when looking at
women’s health outcomes in Arab and Muslim countries. Of mater-
nal deaths in the Arab region, 77 percent occur in Somalia, Sudan, and
Yemen; these are three countries that have been recently ravaged by war
 population and health sciences 287

and poverty, and where contraception use is low (Roudi-Fahimi et al.

2012). The impact of violence on the quality of life of peoples in occupied
and war-torn countries has been amply documented, particularly in Iraq,
Palestine and in Lebanon (Giacaman et al. 2012, Rawaf and Rawaf 2012,
Nuwayhed et al. 2012). Gender disparities as determinants of poor health
outcomes have also been discussed (DeJong 2006), since gender is recog-
nized as a primary category in health research and analysis.
There are many other ongoing conflicts in the Arab region, including
the bloody and protracted war in Syria and the recently ended conflict in
Sudan that split the country into two. The impact of violence and insecu-
rity has shaped the field of population studies in these societies not only
in terms of their impact on mortality and morbidity, but also in the effect
of the dramatic cost of war on stability and livelihoods. These and other
conflicts in the region have produced vast numbers of forced migrants
and refugees making the Arab region one of the largest refugee producing
areas in the world. There are reportedly one million Syrian refugees now
scattered on the borders in Lebanon and in Turkey. Iraqi refugees have
been pouring into Jordan, Syria and Egypt over the past decade (Fargues
2013, 2012).
Structural adjustment and the impoverishment of health systems is
another political/economic determinant of health. The impact of global-
ization and liberalization on population in general has been a feature
of recent scholarship. The policies that have been associated with rising
social and economic inequalities are blamed on the structural adjustment
programs dictated by international economic agents such as the Inter-
national Monetary Fund and the World Bank, who have promoted what
some label as market fundamentalism. These programs are dictates of the
so called Washington Consensus, which is a recipe for policy changes that
enable countries to rationalize public spending, liberalize their markets
so as to enable the private sector, attract foreign investment and thereby
realize high levels of economic growth which could/should decrease pov-
erty, provide employment and enhance well-being.
However, these SAPs (structural adjustment programs) have had a
devastating impact on livelihoods and on public health and other public
services to the poor, leading to a “new intensity of immiseration” (Pfeiffer
and Chapman 2010). The World Bank has promoted user fees for services,
for example, as a way to improve quality, reduce waste, and create the
correct incentive structure for service providers that would ensure a bet-
ter quality of care; but this has resulted instead in the privatization of
288 hania sholkamy

basic services (Turshen 1999). These policies have been shown to fail the
poor and the vulnerable and to create inequalities and social disruptions
(Castro and Singer 2004).
The impact of macro-level policy direction on the production of health
inequalities has been noted for countries such as Egypt (Shukrallah 2012)
and Senegal (Foley 2001; see also Desclaux 2004). These policies have
also led to the commodification of social relations, while unemployment
and falling incomes have affected the reproductive behavior and choices
of women in, for instance, Mongolia (Janes and Oyuntsegtseg 2004), and
Egypt (Hatem 1992, Pfeiffer and Chapman 2010). This is a growing field of
interest as it affects vulnerable people everywhere, and women in particular
as reproductive health services that serve women and primary health care
services that benefit children are being undermined or priced out of their
reach. The recent and ongoing financial crises will further limit the ability
of states to finance and develop health and reproductive care services.
The edited collection Public Health in the Arab World has made a signifi-
cant contribution to health studies in Arab countries (Jabbour et al. 2012).
The chapters cover the gamut of public health scholarship from the char-
acteristics of different population groups to the gaps in scholarship and
the specificities of contextual actors in Arab countries. The chapter on
gaps in knowledge is a particularly important one as it points the way
toward future scholarship that investigates the linkages between social
and health actions and measurements to promote a health equity lens to
examine policy and research interventions (Rashad and Khidr 2012).
Despite the proliferation of disease burdens amongst women as a result
of reproductive health burdens, deprivations, the high cost of immobility,
and the lack of access to resources, there is little in terms of new scholar-
ship that further investigates the excess disease burdens of women and
the relevance of nation and society to this relationship. Recent work on
gender and violence has, however, paid specific attention to the ideologi-
cal and moral connections of Islam and the justifications for violence in
wars of occupation (Abu Lughod 2002), as well as to suicide bombing and
acts of struggle (Das 2008, Asad 2007).

The Changing Profiles, Positions, and Problems of Women

The situation of women in Arab and Muslim countries and societies has
been central to population research, particularly over the last decade.
There are three strands of research that focus on women. The first concerns
 population and health sciences 289

the changing demography of families and societies, which is forcing a re-

imagination of gender roles and responsibilities. The second concerns
debates over Islamic laws and whether their interpretations are compat-
ible with demands for more personal freedoms and socioeconomic rights
for women. The third concerns narratives of sexuality, of the body and of
health rights and bodily integrity. This third area of work also involves the
development of rights groups and movements.
There are convergences between the situation of women in Muslim-
majority and Muslim-minority countries. Gender as a religious and moral
construct has crossed borders and adapted to a variety of socioeconomic,
linguistic, and political contexts. This section will, however, focus on
Arab-majority and Muslim-majority countries since many of the debates
concerning women are contingent on national legal and political frame-
works; therefore the patriarchal character of the state and of the political
and economic institutions of society shape the debate on the situation of
women.
The new demographic reality of the Arab family has been a focus of
interest for scholars. The dynamic changes in family formations, size, and
function have created new contexts in which gender roles are enacted.
Several studies have shown evidence of lower fertility levels, higher edu-
cational attainment, longer years spent single, and lower rates of nuptial-
ity amongst Muslim and Arab women.
Studies based on numerous data sources include the book-length 2004
UNIFEM report, Progress of Arab Women, the Arab Human Development
Report 2005: Empowerment of Arab Women, Philippe Fargues’s 2005 arti-
cle on women in Arab countries and challenges to the patriarchal system
(Fargues 2005), and a 2012 edited volume on Population Dynamics in Mus-
lim Countries: Assembling the Jigsaw (Groth and Alfonso 2012). Together,
they draw a picture of change and tensions. Although there are a few
people who insist that “demographics are destiny” or base analysis solely
on the basis of demographic determinism, still there some hard facts that
demonstrate the inevitability of a reformulation of gender roles.
The most striking finding that emerges from such studies pertains to
reproduction, namely fertility, female reproductive health (and related
contraceptive prevalence), and the age and type of family formation. Cur-
rent research reveals that a “demographic transition” is underway in many
Muslim areas. The theory, which has governed population policies since
the 1970s, holds that societies in general eventually abandon the strategy
of high fertility when mortality drops because of health improvements
290 hania sholkamy

and the pressures of urbanization and modernization. For demographic

researchers, the evidence of Muslim countries bears out this theory, in
that most have seen a sharp fertility decline as well as improvements in
child survival and overall life expectancy (Offenhaur 2005, 45, Eberstadt
and Shah 2012, 11–14).
Philippe Fargues pointed to a falling fertility rate that may, on aver-
age, be high by global standards, but is much lower than it was in the
recent past. He cites the example of Iran, which saw a drop from a pre-
transitional 6.4 children per woman in 1986 to a below-replacement level
of 2.06 in 1998. All Muslim-majority countries have witnessed such sharp
drops, leading researchers to focus on the implications of transition to
social and family life. A particular effort has been made to link this tran-
sition not only to falling fertility but also to delayed marriage as a driver
of lower fertility.
The New Arab Demography project alluded to earlier has yielded a
number of studies on nuptiality transition. The first aspect of nuptiality
that has undergone significant changes is the proportion of women who
never marry. In the 1960s and 1970s, between 15 percent and 26 percent
of women aged 15–49 were never married. These proportions increased
considerably in the 1990s, ranging from 24 percent to 61 percent, except
for Oman, which has a proportion of 18 percent. The figure has reached at
least 40 percent in half of Arab countries. Thus, for many Arab countries,
two out of every five women in the age group 15–49 have never married
(Rashad and Osman 2003, 8). More than a third of the Arab countries
have experienced an increase in the median age at marriage for the cohort
25–29 from 4.7 to 7.7 years during a span of 20 years. Estimates of the
time spent in not-married state during 35 years between ages 15 and 50
show that in nearly half of the Arab countries, a female spends around a
third of her prime 35 years of life in the unmarried state (Rashad, Osman
and Roudi-Fahimi 2005, 10–11).
The timing of marriage has important implications for social life in gen-
eral and family life in particular. Women who marry young are fertile for
longer than those who marry later. They may not be able to begin or sus-
tain careers or work opportunities. They are more likely to be destined for
a lifetime of dependency. The ideological valorization of women’s work
at home as daughters, mothers and wives is the mainstay of patriarchal
ideologies and policies (whether of individuals or of the state). It is this
“work” that enables women to claim rights, dignity, recognition, and influ-
ence. But homemaking and care-giving roles are least prized by the cul-
tures that theoretically venerate stay at home women. This is evident in
 population and health sciences 291

legal codes that do not compensate women for these gender roles and
which provide social security covers only through markets and families
rather than as a natural right of citizenship, even for stay at home mothers
and wives (UNIFEM 2004). Decades of cultural scrutiny have shown that
women have not claimed the benefits of the patriarchal bargain.
The shift in age of marriage and in the patterns and timing of family
formation are therefore a key element in political and social transitions in
Muslim countries. An Egypt labor market panel study notes that women
exit labor markets almost automatically upon marriage (and rather than
in relation to motherhood as has been noted in other parts of the world
(Assad and Hamidi 2009). Not only is this the practice, but it is also the
expectation. Another survey of laborers also found that the vast majority
of young women workers expect to leave work once married (World Bank
2009). Despite the entry of millions into the labor market as a strategy to
provide basic needs and enable young women to save up for marriage, paid
work outside the home is not pursued or promoted for women. Women’s
rights as workers have also been neglected (ITUC 2012). A large cohort
of women has joined labor markets although, unfortunately and often, as
in the case of Egypt and Turkey, in informal or home-based employment
(Assaad and Hamidi 2009, Buğra and Özkan 2012, Sholkamy 2012a).
In sum, significant change in the familial roles of women is in progress
because of delayed marriage, even in areas that have tended to be the
most resistant to such change (Rashad and Osman 2003, 55, Hasso 2011).
Feminists have problematized the meaning and implications of paid work
and questioned its viability as an unconditional route to women’s libera-
tion. The issue now surely should be how to make work empowering and
not whether the right to work is a right worth having or not (Kabeer et
al. 2013, Sholkamy 2012a).
Education is another area that exemplifies important changes in the
status of women. The Arab Human Development Report 2005 cites educa-
tion as the only arena in which discrimination against women is overturned
as there are increasingly higher levels of enrollment in, and attainment of,
education amongst women than there are amongst men (AHDR 2005;
see also UNFPA 2010); for example, in Iran, 54 percent of recent entrants
to universities were women, and in Kuwait, in 2003, female registrations
in higher education exceeded men’s by 30 percent (Hosseini-Chavoshi
and Abbasi-Shavazi 2012). These changes have been the focus of scholars
working at the intersection of population and gender research.
There are also significant changes taking place at the level of prevalence
of contraception and the concomitant changes in reproductive behavior.
292 hania sholkamy

Four in ten married women of reproductive age in Arab countries use

modern contraception (Roudi-Fahimi et al. 2012). As well as addressing
the general trend of declining fertility that contributes to “demographic
transition,” researchers have taken up the related issues of desired levels
of fertility and of family planning by means of contraception and abor-
tion. In an effort to understand the demographic transition, research on
these well-documented issues deploys both quantitative and qualitative
approaches. Straightforward quantitative research reveals widespread
growth in the rates of the adoption of modern contraceptive methods,
but with respect to Islamic countries, rates of contraception are highly
variable and often counterintuitive. For example, religiously conserva-
tive Iran shows a respectable contraceptive prevalence rate of 55 percent,
while conservative Yemen shows only 10 percent. The main factors deter-
mining contraceptive prevalence are the availability of services and their
quality; poverty and culture also play a very important role (Roudi-Fahimi
et al. 2012).
Exceptional cases of high fertility that have received scholarly atten-
tion include diaspora populations, most notably the Palestinians. Other
counter-examples of persisting or renewed high fertility include Isla-
mist sub-populations in Egypt. Such cases, however, in the view of
many demographers, are indeed exceptions, in which a high birth rate is
best explained as a strategy whose meaning is highly situation-specific.
Amongst Palestinian families, according to Rita Giacaman and her col-
leagues, high fertility is an act of political engagement and an assertion of
national identity (Giacaman et al. 2012), while in Islamist Egyptian sub-
groups, it is a marker of political dissent and dissonance (Offenhaur 2005,
114). These researchers are not convinced of the explanatory primacy of
Islam, Islamic traditions, or even Islamic family laws, because Islam itself
has proven to be adaptable on issues of family planning under wider
socioeconomic and other pressures.
The problem of “unmet need,” or the situation whereby women do not
want to get pregnant but are not using contraception, remains one of
much importance (Bradley et al. 2011, Roudi-Fahimi et al. 2012). Failures
in reproductive health services, in the quality of care received by women,
and in the ability of the state and civil society as well as service provid-
ers to communicate the ideals of smaller families to the population at
large are cited as the reasons for continued contraceptive failures (Roudi-
Fahimi et al. 2012). Abortion as a right and as an indicator of unmet need
has also been a recent focus of research and of action (Dabash and Roudi-
Fahimi 2008).
 population and health sciences 293

Whatever their causal dynamics, changes such as the postponement of

marriage, the growing proportion of never-marrieds, declining childbear-
ing, increasing contraceptive usage, and mass schooling for females spell
erosion of the traditional kinship-based and patriarchal extended family.
Fargues suggests that such changes undercut key pillars of the kinship-
based family structure (Fargues 2013; see also Offenhaur 2005).
These shifting demographic sands have created a demand for a moral
and political investigation of women’s rights in Islam and of the religious
constructions of gender. Recent scholarship from the Arab Families Work-
ing group, for example, is providing ample evidence of changes in the
family which is the building block of the Muslim umma. The tensions
between moral desires and modernities’ mandates have been a feature
of all literatures on Islamic social transformations and on stagnations in
Muslim societies (Rogan 2009, Soroush 2000).
Although an established tradition since the 1970s, Islamic feminism has
gained a larger following from observers and a deeper scrutiny by schol-
ars in the past decade. In 2011, the revolutions of Tunis, Egypt and Libya
changed existing political orders and, with them, overthrew the structures
of state-led feminisms that had obfuscated the relationships between reli-
gion and gender (Sholkamy 2012b). The replacement of secular, albeit
conservative, elites with new cadres of religiously inclined and informed
voices and agents is one expression of a decade-long tussle between the
religious and the secular in which women were a prime territory for the
display of an often adversarial relationship. The prevalence of formal
and physical displays of modesty and piety has long been a feature of
qualitative work on Muslim communities and countries (for example,
Mahmood 2005). But beyond these “veils” lie varied constructions of gen-
der rights. Recently, observers and activists have questioned the validity
of assumptions concerning the moral determinisms of idioms of piety
(Sholkamy 2010).

Changing Age Structures of the Population and Their Consequences

The third and perhaps most dynamic and urgent field of recent scholar-
ship concerns the implications of changing age structures of populations.
The youthfulness of populations or so-called demographic gift has been a
focus of surveys and analysis. The political protests, revolutions and ten-
sions seen all over the world, and which have resulted in regime change
in several Arab countries, were led by youth and mounted in the name of
294 hania sholkamy

social justice and the right to work. Those who stress that demographic
factors are at the heart of the Arab spring focus mostly on the so-called
youth bulge theory (Urdal 2006, Cincotta 2012, Puschmann and Mattjis
2012). According to this theory, the risk of revolutions and armed conflicts
increases if there is an excess of young people, especially young men, in
the age group 15–24. The demographic gift in this case was a poisoned
chalice for autocrats. The situation for several Arab countries shows a
younger, better-educated population with fewer opportunities for mobil-
ity and employment.
For example, the ratio of those entering the labor force to those leaving
it is 3:1 in Egypt, 5:1 in Jordan, 8:1 Saudi Arabia. Millions of young Arabs
between the ages of 15 to 29 years have acquired an education, but have
not found jobs or a means to support themselves, start families, or gain
voice and citizenship rights. The Survey of Young People in Egypt (Popu-
lation Council 2011) predicted the problems of economies and society out
of synchronization with demographic upheavals. The characteristics of
youth have also been analyzed in other studies. Recent scholarship in the
field of health has noted the lack of health services and access to care and
the heavy burdens placed on youth by unhealthy lifestyles (see Jabbour
et al. 2012).
The politics of revolt have been addressed by some recent scholarship,
but mostly in the context of political science research and transition the-
ory. Youth anger and frustration have been noted by Diane Singerman in
Egypt and explained by the lingering state of liminality caused by the pres-
sures of culture and economy whereby the attainment of adulthood and
full respect via marriage (the cultural gate) or employment (the economic
avenue) are both denied to young men and women (Singerman 2007, 29).
As Miriam Marks observes, “Even as these youth voice their disapproval of
authoritarian regimes and corrupt governments, marriage is not an issue
far from their minds. Rather, it is perhaps the most important institution
in the life of a young person, and its relevance to political activity and
even extremism should not go understated” (Marks 2011, 23). Population
sciences have confronted the consequences of an un-addressed youth
bulge for the future of social security and protection. While Arab societ-
ies are now young they are only growing older. By 2025 the percentage of
those aged over 60 in Egypt will be over 12 percent; in Bahrain, Qatar, and
the United Arab Emitates it will be 25 percent; and in other Arab states it
is projected to be around 10 percent of the population.
The family has also been studied in connection with the accelera-
tion in aging and the various needs for social protection and security.
 population and health sciences 295

Because families are such vital social institutions, valuable cultural assets
and an integral part of the Arab self perception, this changing institution
has been the subject of extensive study, not only in terms of demographic
changes and theory, but also as an economic institution that provides wel-
fare and protection for both the young and unemployed, for women who
remain single or whose marriage is delayed and for the elderly (Yount and
Sibai 2009, Olmsted 2005, Rashad, Osman and Roudi-Fahimi 2005). Few
people in the Arab region, for example, will be able to rely on retirement
payment (Kárpáti 2011, Puschmann and Mattjis 2012). This situation can
increase poverty burdens as well as pose a challenge for health systems.
Also of concern is that what may be seen as a lessening of both personal
and geographic ties between generations means that a revival of extended
families is less likely to occur.
Analysts in the field of population are of the opinion that demographic
factors played a decisive role in the outbreak of the Arab Spring (Cincotta
2012). Others have pointed to the inadequacy of any models based on
the youth bulge theory to explain the timing of revolutions, while retain-
ing the notion that demographics provide the most relevant explanations
of political transformation and disruptions. The inability of youth to find
work and a marriage partner are key to understanding the politics of Arab
countries in particular and Muslim countries in the global South in gen-
eral (Puschmann and Mattjis 2012).

Reports, Networks, Benchmarks and Goals

This entry coincides with the flagging of policy initiatives in the fields of
population and reproductive health. A new international conference of
population will be convened in 2014. In 2015 the end of the Millennium
Development Goal initiative will be celebrated and the achievements of
the initiatives in terms of poverty, health, population and gender equity
assessed.
The Millennium Declaration commits itself to gender equality as part
of its broader vision of human rights and social justice. The goals set by
this agenda include several that relate to population issues. However,
since population has been linked to the development agenda, it is fair
to argue that all the goals are relevant to population. The commitment
to gender equality that is key to the achievements of all these goals is
expressed in terms of two rationales: one intrinsic, seeing gender equality
as a fundamental human right, the other instrumental, recognizing the
296 hania sholkamy

powerful contribution that women make to the eradication of poverty in

all its dimensions—and indeed to development itself (Sholkamy 2010,
Kabeer et al. 2012).
The goal of gender equality and women’s empowerment, even in the
narrow sense that it is defined in MDG 3, will not be achieved without
progress on equalizing access and control in relation to paid work, educa-
tion at all levels, health, water, sanitation, housing, and political partici-
pation. Equally, progress on the other MDGs, particularly those related to
hunger, health, education and poverty reduction, are likely to be acceler-
ated as a result of progress on gender equality. All development interven-
tions need to be formulated with a view to transforming these structures,
whether through radical interventions such as land reform or incremental
interventions such as building separate toilets for girls and boys in schools
(Kabeer et al. 2012).
A number of reports have been issued, which cover different regions
in which Muslim women live and report on the situation of women
and of population. The ICPD (International Conference in Population
and Development)/15 reports have gauged the progress on the popula-
tion agenda. The BPFA (Beijing Platform for Action) reports focus on
the advancements in the situation of women. In the Arab world, two
important reports that focus on women have been produced. The first,
by UNIFEM (now UN Women), called The Progress of Arab Women, was
published in 2004. The second is the Arab Human Development Report:
The Empowerment of Arab Women, published in 2005. All of these docu-
ments combine statistics and narrative to describe the situation, charac-
teristics and options/choices facing women in particular and populations
in general. The surveys on youth have also been an important reference
for scholars and have proven to be precursors of a critical field of investi-
gation in which Muslim countries seem to be following their own trajec-
tory of population transition as the impact of delayed marriage on youth
is seen as the key to understanding all elements of transition including the
demographic, the social and the political (Puschmann and Mattjis 2012).
The next two years will witness a new cycle of pledges, global initia-
tives, and covenants. The legacy of the ICPD has been honored in terms
of the mainstreaming of reproductive health and gender equality as essen-
tial approaches to population policy and services. The focus on quality
of and access to care has proven to be more problematic as health ser-
vices continue to be of uneven quality or unaffordable to millions of
women. The ascendance of political Islam in many Arab countries and the
 population and health sciences 297

preponderance of ultra-orthodox renditions of Islam amongst groups

such as Salafists have also posed a challenge to the values that have hith-
erto held sway in population policy circles. One newspaper article in
February 2012 noted that 6 percent of the newly elected parliamentarians
had more than ten children (al-Masry al-Youm 2012).
In the Arabic-speaking world, there are now more venues for the dis-
cussion of issues relating to population and to public health. Reproductive
Health Matters continues to be published in Arabic. Recently, the Lancet
has begun to appear also in Arabic. Breaking the hegemony of European
languages on scholarship may well yield a more dynamic and broader-
based engagement with population sciences and also garner a different
audience to these disciplines.
In addition, there are digital platforms for discussing and sharing informa-
tion and experiences on the issues of development and population. These
blogs and sites may not yet be fully recognized as sources of scholarship,
but it is a matter of time before this becomes the case. Jadaliyya (<http://
www.jadaliyya.com>), which mixes academic, activist, and journalistic con-
tent, has become one of the few places where issues of sexuality in the Arab
world are freely expressed. Muftah (<http://www.muftah.org>) is another
site that hosts “free and open debate from Morocco to Pakistan” and invites
contributions on issues that matter to people. While these are not explic-
itly population-related fora, they are becoming instrumental in facilitat-
ing the voices of actors and activists engaged in the work of development
and social change. A third noteworthy source of opinion and scholarship is
Contestations (<http://www.contestations.net/>), an electronic newsletter
devoted to presenting the opposing opinions of scholars on contentious
questions related to women’s empowerments and gender rights.
A number of activist networks are approaching the gender aspects of
population. Musawah (<http://www.musawah.org/>) works in African,
Asian, European and Middle Eastern contexts and is focusing on the
gender pact and constructions of gender within marriage as defined by a
progressive Islamic frame of reference. These scholars have made signifi-
cant contributions towards equality in the Muslim family through work
on guardianship, maintenance, the nature of the marriage contract, and
the constructions of gender as designed and sanctioned by scripture and
Qurʾānic texts (Mir-Hosseini 2009).
Pathways of Women’s Empowerment (<http://www.pathwaysofempower
ment.org/>) is a consortium of researchers working on identifying the
development and policy interventions that empower women. Researchers
298 hania sholkamy

from this network have addressed women’s empowerment in Islamic con-

texts in Egypt (Sharmani 2010), Pakistan (Khan 2010), and Bangladesh
(Azim and Sultan 2010, Nazneen and Tasneem 2010).
There is evidence from this work that gender equality is strengthened
through key resources that enable women’s agency and bargaining power.
These include women’s share of employment, particularly formal employ-
ment; post-primary education and life-learning opportunities; access to a
broad range of financial resources, including microfinance; access to land
and housing on a secure joint or individual basis; access to organizational
resources across a range of spheres of life (natural resources management,
women’s organizations, microfinance groups, trade unions, co-opera-
tives); sexual and reproductive health and rights, including access to safe
abortion, contraception and treatment for HIV and sexually transmitted
infections; access to safe water and sanitation; and access to opportunities
for voice and representation, and to participation in governance (Kabeer
2012, UN Women 2004).
Another important network is that of the Arab Families Working Group,
which has nurtured new generations of scholars working on the dynamics
of Arab families in a variety of contexts. The Reproductive Health Work-
ing Group has also continued its association and scholarship and investi-
gated new areas in this field, including the constructions of masculinity in
Turkey, prostitution and the leisure industry, as well as playing an instru-
mental role in the contributions to public health in the Arab world.
The field of population has also been defined by the activism of civil
society, in particular health, human, and women’s rights groups. The social
power of movements has been an important signifier of the politics of
this decade (Bayat 2007, Batliwala 2012). Women’s movements have been
key to peace-building, as in the case of the Sudanese Women Empow-
erment for Peace (SuWEP), and in promoting reproductive health and
women’s political rights, as in the case of Iran (Hoodfar 2012). Interna-
tional networks for reproductive rights, such as Women’s Global Network
for Reproductive Rights (WGNRR) and Realizing Sexual and Reproduc-
tive Justice (RESURJ), undertake research, produce evidence, and lobby
for sexual and human rights.
Such networks and organizations have also emerged at the national
and local levels. In Egypt, for example, due to the proliferation of sex-
ual harassment as both a planned and opportunistic mode of violence
against women, a number of organizations not only combat harassment
and document its incidence, but also operate as research centers, pro-
ducing activist scholarship on women’s rights and conditions, such as the
 population and health sciences 299

New Women Research Centre, Women and Memory Forum, and Nazra
for Feminist Studies.

Conclusion

Linking demographic change with its social implications is not new. How-
ever, doing so in a framework that is dynamic and illustrates how popu-
lation transitions can be burdens or opportunities is a more interesting
alternative that places populations in political economy contexts. Thus
one can see how the link between population changes and socio/political
ones is neither causal nor simple. Rather, it is a dynamic change that has
multiple connections that can be causal, complementary, or competitive.
The first decade of the second millennium was marked by a number
of revolutions in the Arab Muslim world. Egypt, Tunis, Libya and Yemen
toppled their autocratic rulers. There is ongoing or recently ended con-
flict in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan. And many
other Muslim-majority countries have witnessed rebellions, protests or
civil unrest, as is the case in Bahrain, Iran, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The
Muslim world is unsettled and the populations within these societies are
almost all somehow touched by turmoil and change.
Analysts have linked the demographics of these societies with their
political trajectories and transitions. A young cohort has come of age in
many if not all Arab Muslim countries where youth and children now
form the majority of the population. These anticipated changes in the
demographics of countries that enjoyed/endured high fertility rates have
been noted in the vast literature on population and reproductive health
of Arab and Muslim countries. The problems of population growth have
become closely associated with the crisis of impoverishment and inequal-
ity. The relations of reproduction are now addressed as gender inequali-
ties. The issues that relate to services, access to information, and rights
to health are subsumed by radical political overhauls and loud calls for
social justice. In brief, the arena of population and health studies now
studies politics, ideologies, gender, and social rights as well as poverty and
deprivation.
The Muslim world and the worlds of Muslims seem to have become
more radicalized, more dangerous, more urgent, and fractured by unrelent-
ing competitions around identity, resources, rights, and bodily integrity.
The field of population and health sciences has embraced the social, eco-
nomic and political contexts in which issues of reproduction, movement,
300 hania sholkamy

and health are transacted. The past decade bears testimony to the eclectic
and critical outputs of scholars and practitioners in this field. It is, how-
ever, unfortunate that other social sciences and fields of development
have not reciprocated by considering the demographic and human health
dimensions of their own subjects of study.

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 Religious Studies

Zayn Kassam

Introduction

The field of religious studies is intrinsically multicultural and interdisci-

plinary. It views religion from a global perspective, combining humani-
ties and the social sciences. Academic programs of religious study are not
directed to those who have a religious background or think of pursuing a
religious vocation but are for those with interest in intellectual inquiry in
a particular tradition or comparative thematic study within multiple tra-
ditions. Religious studies perceives religion both appreciatively and criti-
cally by presenting methodological questions (particularly in the subfields
of philosophy of religion, sociology and anthropology of religion, history,
and hermeneutics). It examines thematic, often cross-cultural phenom-
ena (such as ritual, prayer and contemplation, as well as comparative eth-
ics). It presents issues within a particular religious tradition or addresses a
particular theme in a comparative religious framework.
The undeniable fact that women’s lives have been and continue to be
affected by religion requires that religious commitments and experiences
be taken seriously. Studies on women and gender issues in religion by
women in the field of religious studies have predominantly focused on
feminist scholarship by examining the sources of cultural and religious
beliefs about authority, leadership, and values, as well as offering new
resources in reading religious texts. Because most religious texts and tra-
ditions include narratives of exclusion and misogyny, the work of women
in religious studies tends to focus on historical revision and reconstruc-
tion, as well as building interdisciplinary alliances.
This entry picks up on current debates in religious studies from the
previous entry on religious studies in this encyclopedia (Yount 2003). It
examines selected works of authors such as Azizah Al-Hibri, Riffat Hassan,
Amina Wadud, Nimat Hafez Barazangi, and Asma Barlas. The focus of the
entry is on contributions of feminist interest and insights to the study of
religion.
306 zayn kassam

Religious Studies and Hermeneutics

As with their Semitic monotheistic Jewish and Christian sisters, Muslim

women must also consider the patriarchal context of centuries of inter-
pretation of their primary sacred text, the Qurʾān. Identifying this con-
text, which has driven interpretations of the Qurʾān that women find to
be essentialist and unjust, several scholars in the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries have sought to re-examine the Qurʾān for its gender justice
potential. They have found that the Qurʾān does offer more guidelines for
gender justice than medieval Muslim male interpreters could previously
imagine because of their normative patriarchal context.
A discussion of American Muslim gender scholar/activists re-examin-
ing the Qurʾān should begin with the writings of Azizah al-Hibri and Riffat
Hassan. Azizah al-Hibri published in 1981 her landmark essay, “Islamic
Herstory: Or How Did We Get Into This Mess?” (al-Hibri 1981) and went
on to found Karamah: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights. Riffat
Hassan’s reflections on gender issues entered the American scene in 1987
with her essay, “Equal Before Allah? Woman–Man Equality in the Islamic
Tradition” (Hassan 1987). Hassan later founded the International Network
for the Rights of Female Victims of Violence in Pakistan. Both continue
to publish on issues pertaining to gender in Muslim societies, and both
argue that the Qurʾān is a scriptural text that offers women dignity and
rights that Muslim societies have not always allowed, despite the fact that
women are ontologically equal to men in the Qurʾānic perspective. For
consideration here are three scholars whose entry into the field is more
recent but nonetheless extends the analysis begun by al-Hibri and Hassan:
Amina Wadud, Asma Barlas, and Nimat Hafez Barazangi. Their efforts are
important for all Muslims to consider, regardless of sectarian affiliations,
when rethinking prior interpretations of the Qurʾān from the perspective
of gender justice.
Of necessity, each of these scholars has had to address what may be
termed “problematic” verses in the Qurʾān, which have been seized upon
by those wishing to affirm male supremacy over women as an Islamic
teaching. Each makes the case that the Qurʾān has to be read holistically,
and not selectively, and that verses should be read as part of the social and
historical context in which they were revealed. Thus, they argue, gender-
related verses must be read within the cultural context of attitudes held
toward women in seventh-century Arabia. In doing so, they separate the
Qurʾānic principles that are eternally valid as a source of guidance for
 religious studies 307

Muslims, regardless of time and place, from those whose relevance is lim-
ited to the specific historical period in which the Qurʾān was revealed.

Amina Wadud
Born into a Methodist family in 1952 in Bethseda, Maryland, Amina
Wadud converted to Islam in 1972. She earned her doctorate in Islamic
Studies and Arabic from the University of Michigan in 1988, and taught at
the International Islamic University in Malaysia till 1992. It was there that
she became involved with Sisters in Islam, an organization devoted ini-
tially to addressing gender issues in Malaysia, and which has since taken
on a transnational agenda. At this time, she also published her seminal
work, Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Per-
spective, leading Asma Barlas to note, “Wadud is the first [Muslim gender
scholar] to acknowledge that people always read from specific sites and
that they always bring specific forms of subjectivity into their readings”
(Barlas 2004, 97).
Wadud (1992) suggests that any Qurʾānic hermeneutic must distinguish
between the “spirit” of the Qurʾān, by which she means the principles of
the Qur’an, and the socially regulatory verses that spoke to the seventh-
century Arabian contexts in which they were revealed. It is on the spirit,
she suggests, that we must reflect today in order to retain the Qurʾān’s
primacy in guiding Muslims. The goal of her work is to read the Qurʾān
from “within the female experience and without the stereotypes which
have been the framework for many of the male interpretations” (Wadud
1992, 3). Reading the Qurʾān in light of its principles concerning ethics,
morals, and social justice opens up the possibility of “adapting the text to
a multitude of culturally diverse situations in a constantly changing world
of social communities” (Wadud 1992, 100).
To do this, Wadud proposes a hermeneutical model that concerns itself
with three aspects of the sacred text: the context, the grammatical compo-
sition, and the whole text. For context, she argues against imbuing certain
words with universal significance when they should be more precisely
translated in terms specific to the cultural context of seventh-century Ara-
bia. She also argues that, according to the rules of Arabic grammar, the
masculine plural should be read as gender-inclusive even when the text
of the Qurʾān does not specifically address both men and women. With
respect to the Weltanshauung, or worldview, of the whole text, Wadud
argues that “all discussion that the Qur’an contains about matters from the
Unseen involve the ineffable: the use of language to discuss what cannot
308 zayn kassam

be uttered in language. Such language cannot be interpreted empirically

and literally” (Wadud 1992, 11). Further, she argues, a correlation needs
to be established between divine guidance and every theme discussed in
the Qurʾān, rather than looking at verses individually without considering
the rest of the text.
Turning now to some illustrative applications of her hermeneutical
principles, Wadud first considers the common assumption that there are
essential distinctions between men and women, which are “reflected in
creation, capacity and function in society, accessibility to guidance . . . and
in the rewards due to them in the Hereafter” (Wadud 1992, 7). Given that
the woman in Muslim societies “is often restricted to functions relating
to her biology” (Wadud 1992, 7), she finds that while the Qurʾān acknowl-
edges “the anatomical distinction between male and female” (Wadud
1992, 8), it “does not propose or support a singular role or single definition
of a set of roles, for each gender across every culture” (Wadud 1992, 8). To
do so, she argues, would be to “reduce the Qur’an from a universal text to
a culturally [and historically] specific text—a claim that many have erro-
neously made.” Rather, the Qurʾān’s injunctions against certain behaviors
were leveled specifically at [seventh-century] Arab cultural perceptions
and misconceptions about women, such as infanticide, sexual abuse of
slave women, denial of inheritance to women, and divorcing women with-
out allowing them the freedom to remarry. Indeed, she argues, citing Wan
Mohd Nor Wan Daud, that the Qurʾān is “not confined to, or exhausted
by, (one) society and its history” (Wadud 1992, 9) but rather, that “each
new Islamic society must understand the principles intended by the par-
ticulars. Those principles are eternal and can be applied in various social
contexts” (Wadud 1992, 9).
Like Riffat Hassan, Wadud considers readings of the Qur’anic verses
on the creation of human beings that privilege the primacy of males and
relegate women to secondary and derivative status to be misinterpreta-
tions of the texts, as this distinction is not specified in the Qurʾān. Using
linguistic analysis, Wadud asserts that the Qurʾānic verses on the creation
of the human species reveal that “Man and woman are two categories of
the human species given the same or equal consideration and endowed
with the same or equal potential” (Wadud 1992, 15). Further, “the Qur’an
does not support a specific and stereotyped role for its characters, male
or female” (Wadud 1992, 29). Piety, not gender, determines how human
beings are assessed: verse 49:13 testifies that God considers the one with
the most taqwa the most noble among males and females. Taqwa, piety,
 religious studies 309

which Wadud renders “consciousness of Allah,” underscores the actions

and the attitude that lead God to judge one’s nobility. Therefore, there is
no gender distinction in the emulation of piety and God-consciousness.
Both men and women have “the same rights and obligations on the
ethico-religious level, and have equally significant responsibilities on the
social-functional level” (Wadud 1992, 102). Wadud argues that the equal-
ity on the first level has often been overlooked in the second level, leading
to the absence of equality in legal and social structures. The goal of social
justice necessitates challenging patriarchy and striving for an egalitarian
system that “allows and encourages the maximum participation of each
member of society” in which “women would have full access to economic,
intellectual, and political participation, and men would value and partici-
pate fully in home and child care for a more balanced and fair society”
(Wadud 1992, 103). This would mean that the principle of consultation,
or shūra, would be extended to women in cases of marital conflict, which
would impede the creation of oppressive marriages (Wadud 1992, 103).
Only under these conditions can women exercise their rightful religiously
authorized place in society in a manner that would translate into social
well-being and participation in political activity. It is towards these ideals
that Wadud’s work strives.

Asma Barlas
Pakistani-born Asma Barlas, who worked briefly in the foreign service in
Pakistan before seeking asylum in the United States, published her work,
“Believing Women” in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the
Qur’an, almost exactly ten years after Wadud’s book. With advanced
degrees in international studies, she is the founding director of the Cen-
ter for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity at Ithaca College and
teaches in the department of politics. In recovering the Qurʾān’s egalitar-
ian and anti-patriarchal epistemology, Barlas identifies three hermeneuti-
cal moves:

1. To draw upon the principle of textual polysemy: texts can be read
in multiple modes, in order to critique interpretive reductionism/
essentialism.
2. To argue against interpretive relativism without forsaking textual poly-
semy on the grounds that not all readings can be accepted as contextu-
ally legitimate or theologically sound, especially those that read ẓulm,
or injustice, into God’s words.
310 zayn kassam

3. To locate the hermeneutic keys for reading the Qurʾān in the nature of
Divine Ontology, according to which God cannot be considered guilty
of ẓulm or injustice, nor is God in the Qurʾān conceptualized as Father/
male, nor does God support theories of father-right or the human male
as God’s representative on Earth (Barlas 2002, 203–04).

Barlas’s objective is “to show that the family in Islam is not patriarchal
inasmuch as the Qurʾān’s treatment of women and men in their capacity
as parents and spouses is not based in assumptions of male rule/privi-
lege or sexual inequality” (Barlas 2002, 167). Her hermeneutical approach
entails showing that the Qurʾān “repudiates the concept of father-right/
rule and, to that extent, claims about husband privilege as well” (Barlas
2002, 167). Instead, Barlas argues that “the Qurʾān not only does not link
the rights of fathers and husbands in this way, but it also does not appoint
either one a ruler or guardian over his wife (and children), or even as the
head of the household. Nor does it designate the wife and children as the
man’s property or require them to be submissive to him” (Barlas 2002,
167–68).
Barlas also asserts that the Qurʾān’s teachings on the family, marriage,
and sexual relationships must be viewed against the milieu in which they
were revealed. Although historical investigation suggests that women had
some freedoms depending on their class, they could not inherit property
but were themselves considered property; concubinage was unrestricted;
slavery and polygyny abounded; sexual abuse of women taken captive
in war and as slaves was endemic; and female life was devalued as evi-
denced by the killing of baby girls. Against this context, the radicalism of
the Qurʾān’s teachings is far more apparent as it considers women as legal
persons rather than chattel, and guarantees women a share in inheritance
alongside granting them several other rights.
Barlas locates marriage and family at the intersection of social and
moral-religious spheres. Marriage is social because of its contractual
nature, and moral-religious because the laws governing it come from
rights and limits placed by God. In addition, family and marriage are
also located at the intersection of private and public. In the Western
context, feminists have argued that the public sphere has traditionally,
and patriarchally, been represented as the domain of freedom, politics,
and culture, and has been associated with men, while the private sphere
has been associated with women and seen as the domain of necessity,
restriction, nature, and family. It is also the domain in which males reign
 religious studies 311

supreme. However, Barlas argues that the Qurʾān “does not define either
human beings or social reality in terms of female-male, public-private,
nature-culture, politics-family binaries” (Barlas 2002, 171). Rather, the
Qurʾān is concerned with whether men and women observe the limits of
God, and the only distinction made is between believers and unbelievers.
Even the Qurʾān’s distinction between individual and community does
not distinguish between private relations and public institutions because
God belongs in both spheres, and both must equally observe the limits
set down by God in the Qurʾān (Barlas 2002, 171–2). Since anything the
Qurʾān says about women refers to both public and private spheres, this
dichotomy is fruitless in reading the Qurʾān. Nor indeed is the Western
feminist utilization of social/sexual division of labor helpful, according to
Barlas, for the concept confuses sex with class, and the Qurʾān “does not
advocate a specific social or sexual division of labor” (Barlas 2002, 172).
Barlas holds firmly to the position that although the Qurʾān acknowl-
edges gender differences, it does not privilege males, but rather directs
most of its provisions to protecting women’s interests (Barlas 2002, 198).
She states: “The Qurʾān recognizes that men have the power and authority
in patriarchies. However, this does not mean that it either condones patri-
archy, or that it is itself a patriarchal text . . . nothing in the Qurʾān suggests
that males are the intermediaries between God and women” (Barlas 2002,
198). As a consequence, she holds that the Qurʾān cannot be held “respon-
sible for how a particular social or sexual division of labor has evolved
over time” (Barlas 2002, 199). Rather, the responsibility lies in the failure
by Muslims to read the Qurʾān in a manner that upholds its timelessness
and to acknowledge its gender egalitarian teachings, the result of a lack of
recognition of the ontological equality between men and women or of the
distinction between religious and social/legal equality. In sum, she finds
that the Qurʾān “comes closest to articulating sexual relationships in the
kind of ‘non-oppositional and non-hierarchical’ mode that many scholars
believe can be liberating for both men and women” (Barlas 2002, 202).

Nimat Hafez Barazangi

Nimat Hafez Barazangi was born in Syria and is a research fellow for
feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Cornell University. In her work,
Woman’s Identity and the Qur’an: A New Reading, she argues that Muslims
have oppressed women “by stripping them—perhaps unintentionally—
of their self-identity with Islam” (Barazangi 2004, 34). By assuming that
312 zayn kassam

a woman’s religio-moral rationality (dīn) is the responsibility of her male

household, Muslim communities not only denied women the Qurʾānic
meaning of dīn but also violated the very first principle of Islam, the One-
ness of the Deity, as the source of value and knowledge. In addition, and
because of these assumptions, Muslims built the early structure of Islamic
life without including the woman’s voice either pedagogically or in policy-
making, affecting both the construction of “Islamic” knowledge and that
of social fabrics and norms. Eventually, this inability led to women’s par-
ticipating in their own oppression (Barazangi 2004, 34–35).
Barazangi notes that “most male scholars and religious leaders per-
ceive and propagate the female’s role as complementary to that of her
male guardian” (Barazangi 2004, 14). So doing “actually contradicts the
basic Qur’anic principle of human autonomous trusteeship in the natural
order of justice and in mutual domestic consultation” (Barazangi 2004,
14). Thus, her central question is, “Who has the authority to reread and
interpret the Qur’anic text, and how is it to be done?” (Barazangi 2004, 5).
She challenges the widespread notion that “only select elite males are
authorized (males who bestow upon themselves the exclusive author-
ity) to interpret the text” (Barazangi 2004, 5). Arguing that Islamic higher
learning is a responsibility for a Muslim woman, Barazangi makes the case
that “a woman has a basic right to participate in the interpretation of the
Islamic primary sources, the Qur’an and the prophetic tradition, in order
to gain and claim her identity with Islam” (Barazangi 2004, 2). Indeed,
such an engagement with the Islamic primary sources may “bring about
and sustain fair changes both in the understanding of Muslim women and
in their realities” (Barazangi 2004, 7).
Noting women’s absence among the major commentators on the
Qurʾān and the crafters of jurisprudence, Barazangi asserts that any male
or female Islam-identified person understands him- or herself as “a trustee
of God on earth (khalifah)” (Barazangi 2004, 21):
I also argue that the absence of women from earlier Qur’anic readings is at
the root of the misreading of the meaning of Islamic identity and trusteeship,
interpreting the principle of khilafah stated in the Qur’an—“God said to the
angels: I will create a trustee on earth, and God taught Adam the names of
all things” (2:30–31)—as if it were limited solely to the male’s political and
theological leadership, and as if “Adam” were limited to the male human. By
this misinterpretation, Muslims also confused human leadership with God’s
Lordship. Thus, reading and interpretation of a woman who is self-identified
Muslim is the only course of action for a change from these conventional
readings (Barazangi 2004, 25).
 religious studies 313

If Barazangi’s first hermeneutical move is to suggest that Muslim women’s

active self-identification with the Qurʾān is their right and responsibility
based on the notion of khilāfa (trusteeship) shared by all humans, then
her second move is to justify women’s participation in interpreting the
Qurʾān based on the ontological equality of men and women. For this,
she relies on verse 53:45, “God created the pairs (al-zawjayn)—males and
females,” and 4:1, “O humankind (ya⁠ʾāyuhā al-nās), be conscientious of
(or in equilibrium with) your Guardian God (Rabbakum) who created you
of a single [personal] entity (nafs wahida). Created, of the same entity,
its [grammatical feminine gender] mate (zawjahā)” (Barazangi 2004, 25).
Such ontological equality makes women’s interpretation of the Qurʾān
long overdue and a necessary condition for trusteeship.
In a third hermeneutical move, Barazangi attempts to free Muslims
from blindly following prior interpretations of the sacred text. Asserting
that “the Qur’anic text is God’s Word and hence these eternal words can-
not be constrained by time, space, or any interpretation that is given to
them” (Barazangi 2004, 27), she implies that Muslims may bear earlier
interpretations in mind, but a fresh approach is a necessary and mor-
ally responsible action in order for Muslims to identify with and benefit
from the Qurʾān “as the primary living text of Islam” (Barazangi 2004, 5).
Further, she argues that while the occasion and the context of revelation
must be taken into account, interpretations must consider the whole
of the Qurʾān within its lexical and linguistic rules. Limitations may be
imposed on interpretations of the Qurʾān by any of the following: 1. lim-
iting valid interpretations to those of the first century and a half after
the revelation; 2. viewing the Qurʾān through the lens of the Ḥadīth
(reports concerning what the Prophet purportedly said or did during his
lifetime); 3. imposing juristically determined limits on Qurʾānic verses
due to imposed chronological orders of revelation; 4. subjecting women’s
intelligence and interpretation to male authority and omitting or prevent-
ing women’s interpretations; or 5. viewing the occasion and context of
revelation as determinant of meaning. According to Barazangi, all such
limitations on interpretation must be lifted in order to privilege reading
the Qurʾān through its own internal guidance and wholeness as a text
(Barazangi 2004, 27–29).
The historical excision of women from interpreting the Qurʾān has
resulted in exclusion, prevention, and deprivation (Barazangi 2004, 33).
The structural change proposed by Barazangi, which calls women actively
to participate in the interpretation of the Qurʾān, rests on “making explicit
314 zayn kassam

the Qur’anic view of a Muslim’s religio-morality that is conditional on the

ability of each individual to cognize it autonomously” (Barazangi 2004,
48). In this regard, the criterion of the moral, cognizant human being,
the mutaqqī, one who embodies taqwa (morality, piety), is of much more
importance than the stated gender of the person. Adam, to whom God
taught the names, was assumed by the early Muslims to be male (rather
than cognizant humanity). Rather, through understanding Adam to be the
representative of primordial humanity, the autonomous religio-morality
of the female is restored from under the guardianship of the male mem-
bers of her household, and with it, the notion that God judges according
to moral conduct (taqwa) rather than gender (Barazangi 2004, 49).
The key to breaking the stranglehold of Muslim women’s erasure from
textual interpretation is to “generate new meanings” (Barazangi 2004, 120)
of religious texts, particularly the Qurʾān. In remaining conscious of socially
constructed identities such as gender, ethnicity, race, and class, while
reading, interpreting, and applying the Qurʾān’s guidelines as an auton-
omous subject, a woman can gain her self-identity based on the Qurʾān
(Barazangi 2004, 125) and exercise taqwa according to her understanding
of the Qurʾān’s guidance. Ultimately, the changed worldview allows one
“to replace human domination of nature with a creative understanding of
natural law and of the divine guidance; [and] . . . replace human domina-
tion over other humans by dedicating ourselves to the practicing of taqwa,
specifically in how we discuss, examine, and engage the different world-
views—be they Islamic or non-Islamic” (Barazangi 2004, 136).

Religious Studies and the Law

European pressure on the Ottoman state for legal reform led to the codi-
fication of Sharīʿa laws on marriage and divorce in 1867–1877, known as
the Majalla al-aḥkām al-ʿadliyya. In 1916 and 1917, the Ottoman Law of
Family Rights was created, in which “European [largely French and Bel-
gian] notions of marriage and family were ‘patched together’ with inher-
ited shari‘a law provisions derived from more than one school” (Stowasser
and Abul-Magd 2004, 169). These codes became the basis for modern-
izing the legal codes in most of the Arab states, with Egypt leading the
way, despite the resistance mounted by traditional judges, who foresaw
not only the problems inherent in the methodology of “patching” but also
the erosion of their authority, finalized with the abolition of the Sharīʿa
courts in Egypt in 1956 (Stowasser and Abul-Magd 2004, 169). A further
 religious studies 315

point to be noted with regard to family law is that the very notion of fam-
ily, predicated upon European models of the same, first appeared in Arab
discourse in the second half of the nineteenth century, introduced by
reformist or indigenous feminist intellectuals such as al-Ṭahṭāwī (d. 1873),
Muḥammad ʿAbduh (d. 1905), Qāṣim Amīn (d. 1908), and Malak Ḥifnī
Nāṣif (d. 1918). They adopted French or British “definitions of family and
the family’s role in the modern nation state. The European model empha-
sized ‘family stability’ and limited divorce rights, largely on the basis of
Christian doctrine, in order to solidify citizen relations for the ultimate
purpose of state control and planning in the political and economic
realms” (Stowasser and Abul-Magd 2004, 168). Such an emphasis on fam-
ily stability and divorce rights stands in contrast to the evidence found in
pre-modern Arab court records, which suggest that marriage was simply
a contract among other contracts, and was not rigidly defined; nor was
it specifically noted as an institution based on permanence, and “various
divorce practices, including khulʿ (wife-instigated divorce), were liberally
used” (Stowasser and Abul-Magd 2004, 168). Ironically, despite the resis-
tance of the traditionally trained jurists to patchwork and to Western legal
codes, over time the marginalized jurists came together to offer fatwas
or legal rulings “as expressions of an alternative and more authentically
Islamic position compared to that of the modern civil codes” (Stowasser
and Abul-Magd 2004, 175). However, as Stowasser and Abul-Magd note,
these fatwas are themselves new creatures, subject to patchwork without
defending or remaining within the principles of the particular madhhab
(school of law) to which the mufti or dispenser of the fatwa belongs. Fur-
ther, these fatwas tend to advocate “the most restrictive stance among the
four schools, perhaps on the basis of equating greater authenticity with
greater strictness” (Stowasser and Abul-Magd 2004, 175); and, in a sur-
prising move, “have adopted the ‘modern’ concept of family by calling it
al-usra al-muslima (the Muslim family), which must be protected against
Western colonialist or neocolonialist attack; consequently, their fatwas
paradigmatically resemble the modern national personal status codes in
emphasizing that the Islamic marriage is built on permanence” (Stowasser
and Abul-Magd 2004, 176). In adopting the Western model of viewing the
family as the cornerstone of society, any call for mitigation of family per-
sonal laws is perceived as an attack on the very ʿulamāʾ (those who are
“learned” in Islamic religious sciences) who paradoxically rejected “mod-
ern legal codes as Western inspired and therefore inauthentic” (Stowasser
and Abul-Magd 2004, 177). Further, viewing the family as the cornerstone
316 zayn kassam

of society reinforces the patriarchal dimension of the father as representa-

tive of the state or a higher authority.
To reiterate, over the course of the nineteenth century, the scope of
traditional Islamic law was gradually reduced by the expansion of secu-
lar legal and educational institutions to the point where “the Sharia was
reduced to personal status law” (Crecelius 1974, 79 cited in Abu-Odeh
2004, 193) in Egypt, and emulated by other Arab societies. Moderniza-
tion in the area of personal status law and family codes as expressions of
“state patriarchy” in which the post-colonial state offered education and
employment access to women, but upheld the “prevailing cultural norms
that defined gender roles” (Abu-Odeh 2004, 196), that is, left Sharīʿa codes
largely intact in the area of personal and family law, has been subjected
to analysis by scholars such as Deniz Kandiyoti, Amira Sonbol, Valentine
M. Moghadam, Vrinda Narain, and others. As noted by Abu-Odeh, Egyp-
tian feminists have focused their activism on redressing gender inequities
in laws pertaining to the “marriage of minors, no-fault divorce for men,
polygamy, the doctrine of obedience, improving the financial well-being
of divorced women, increasing the age of custody, and so on” (Abu-Odeh
2004, 198–199). However, cultural politics places feminists in a bind in
which they are caught between the class interests of state patriarchy,
and conservative religious élites who accuse feminists of being both un-
Islamic and ideologically driven by Western attempts to undermine Islam
and Muslim culture. Consequently, Egyptian feminists, as elsewhere in
Muslim-majority societies, find themselves increasingly called to argue for
reform on matters pertaining to personal status codes and family law on
the basis of reinterpreting Islamic foundational and authoritative texts.
Muslim women themselves are well aware of that fact, as noted by Iso-
bel Coleman in her study of women in Muslim societies (Saudi Arabia,
Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan), in which she notes that progressive
Muslim men and women, whom she terms “quiet revolutionaries,” “are
using Islamic feminism to change the terms of religious debate, to fight for
women’s rights within Islam instead of against it” (Coleman 2010).
As a case in point, the late Louise Halper engages a discussion of
Islamic law in the context of Iranian women’s activism to determine
whether democratic change is possible within Islamic law. Interrogating
the widely held view that Muslim women “benefit from a regime of secu-
lar law and suffer under religious law,” Halper points out that the situation
of women under Islamic law in Iran is quite comparable to that of Turk-
ish women under secular Turkish law and not at all like that of women
under Taliban-inflected Islamic law in Afghanistan. Rather, she argues,
 religious studies 317

a more compelling determinant of women’s status may, in fact, be “the

salience of women to the political process and their active involvement
in it,” a hypothesis that is tested in conjunction with laws on marriage
and divorce in Iran. Noting the strides that have been made in Iranian
women’s literacy rates, school and university enrollments, and fertility
decreases and employment increases in the two decades between 1980
and 2000, since the inception of the Islamic regime, Halper asks how such
data are compatible with the reinstitution of Islamic law and how such
improvements in women’s status have been effectuated and what role
they themselves have played.
Since the law of marriage and divorce exercises a huge impact on the
lives of women, Halper focuses on two legislative innovations occurring
in 1993 and 1996 to the Divorce Reform Law of 1989, between Ayatol-
lah Khomeini’s death in 1989 and Mohammad Khatami’s inception as
president of the Republic of Iran in 1997. A rich historical summary of
the law of marriage and divorce pre- and post-Revolution illustrates the
strategies women began to utilize once Khomeini reinstituted Islamic
family law. Often they used the mahr, a predetermined sum to be paid
to the wife in the eventuality of the husband’s death or divorce, to negoti-
ate a more favorable situation than they were entitled to under the law.
The indigence into which newly divorced women were placed in cases
where the mahr was practically worthless also motivated attempts by the
women’s press and women’s organizations to draw attention to the issue.
In response to such realities, Khomeini added in 1982 a provision in the
marriage contract that a wife should receive half her husband’s wealth
upon divorce. Halper traces the new interpretive moves made by clerics
attempting to reconcile feminism with Islam, whose work was published
in such women’s magazines as Zanān, and by women members of the
Majles, the Iranian parliament, who sought to find religiously legal ways
to address inequities experienced by women under the Iranian Islamic
marital regime.
An examination of the political education and participation of women
before, during, and after the Iranian Revolution reveals that Islamist
women, although they subscribed to the notion that “women’s primary
roles were in the family,” they also “supported women who wanted or
needed to work outside the home” and “became advocates for interpre-
tations of the shariʾa more open to the concerns of modernist women”
(Halper 2010). The participation of women in the war effort during the
Iran–Iraq War, as well as in the labor force during and after the war, led
to the call for overt government support for the promotion of women’s
318 zayn kassam

social participation and to the subsequent formation of institutions estab-

lishing a direct connection between the government and women’s issues.
The successes achieved by women after the Iranian Revolution demon-
strate that democratic change is indeed possible under Islamic law. As the
Iranian parliament took up the issue of the lack of support for divorced
women, women members and their male allies were able to come up with
a religiously acceptable solution that relied on the concept of muʿāmalāt,
or the social contract, which can be understood as the duties people owe
to one another. Embedded within this notion is the idea of ujra al-mithāl,
that people should be fairly compensated for their labor, provided the
labor is not coerced but is voluntarily provided. As Halper notes,
although the marriage contract commits the wife to compensate her hus-
band with her obedience and sexual and reproductive services in return
for his maintenance of her, it does not require her to keep house or nurse
children. Yet most women do so. Thus, they are entitled to be compensated
for this work, should they demand it, as they might do upon divorce. Such
a provision was added to the 1991 divorce law at the end of 1992, as another
judicially cognizable claim a divorced woman would have upon her hus-
band. This time, the Majles [Iranian Parliament] not only required that the
formal contract include the provision that the wife was due her wages in
case of divorce but also made it possible for a woman married under the
old form of contract to get wages for housework, implied into the old con-
tract judicially, if a court found she had not agreed to contribute her work
without pay (Halper 2010, 9).

Religious Studies and Globalization

How does economic globalization affect women, and how does global-
ization in its multiple facets—economic, political, and cultural—connect
to religion? Valentine M. Moghadam, a sociologist who is also Chief of
the Gender Equality and Development Section at UNESCO, observes that
economic globalization has generated jobs for women in production are-
nas, enabling “women in many developing countries to earn and control
income and to break away from the hold of patriarchal structures, includ-
ing traditional household and familial relations” (Moghadam 2005, 37).
However, these benefits are far outweighed by the disadvantages that
accrue to women. Apart from the low wages, poor working conditions, and
the lack of security and benefits that accompany many of the production-
sector jobs opened up for women, especially in export processing zones,
unemployment figures for women are still higher than those of men, and
 religious studies 319

women’s participation in informal sectors is increasing, as is trafficking

in women and the feminization of poverty. In addition, countries that
face structural adjustment programs (SAPs) are forced to cut government
expenditure on social and health and educational programs as these are
privatized, leaving such programs to the mercy of the market and out of
reach of the poor. Such SAPs have been shown to have an adverse effect
on women as both men and women lose jobs in a declining economy,
leaving women “to bear most of the responsibility of coping with increased
prices and shrinking incomes, as women were the ones largely responsible
for household budgeting and maintenance . . . the policies [of SAPs] con-
tained an implicit and unspoken assumption of the elasticity of women’s
labor time, or the idea that women would always fill the gap created by
public expenditure cuts in health and social services” (Moghadam 2005,
39). Arguably, SAPs have increased unequal gender relations between
men and women, as they tend to favor men and income-earning adults.
The effects of economic globalization are further compounded by cul-
tural globalization, which, homogenizing even as it hybridizes, elicits
nativist resistance to what is often perceived as the powerful onslaught of
Westernization that threatens to destroy indigenous culture and identity.
As Bayes and Tohidi observe:
Thanks in part to globalization, women’s movements for equal rights and
feminists from different parts of the world have brought their forces together
through international and global forums like the UN conferences and grow-
ing transnational NGO networking. At the same time, the various conserva-
tive religious forces have formed united blocks against the implementation
of equal rights. . . . Women, whether feminist or not, face neopatriarchal con-
servative forces that operate through religious states or new religiopolitical
movements known as communalism, fundamentalism, and Islamism (Bayes
and Tohidi 2001, 7–8).
Fundamentalism is on the rise in every religious tradition, despite the
global perception that it is solely an Islamic issue. However, religious fun-
damentalism is not alone in mounting simultaneously a resistance to glo-
balization while re-inscribing patriarchal control over women. In his book
Jihad vs. McWorld, Benjamin Barber uses the term jihad as shorthand to
describe religious fundamentalism, disintegrative tribalism, ethnic nation-
alisms, and similar kinds of identity politics carried out by local peoples
“to sustain solidarity and tradition against the nation-state’s legalistic and
pluralistic abstractions as well as against the new commercial imperialism
of McWorld” (Barber 2001, 232). Unfortunately, rather than formulating
320 zayn kassam

alternative economic policies that would address the inequities brought

about by free-market capitalism and transnational corporations’ assault
on labor, or seeking to uphold and facilitate genuine democratic prin-
ciples and practices,
nativist resistance movements such as Islamic fundamentalism, more accu-
rately described as Islamist movements, tend to focus their energies on
providing social safety net services and on undermining their local govern-
ments by campaigning on a platform that asserts that “Islam is the solution,”
that is, governance according to Islamic law, popularly known as shariʾah
(more accurately, fiqh). Such governance seems to be heavily weighted in
favor of concern with identity, morality, and the family. This preoccupation
places a heavy burden on women, who are seen as the bearers of tradition,
religiosity, and morality, and as the reproducers of the faithful. Such views
have profound effects on women’s legal status and social positions, espe-
cially when fundamentalist views are successfully inscribed in constitutions,
family laws, penal codes, and other public policies (Moghadam 2005, 47).
However, a positive result of the privations brought about by neoliberal
economic policies and structural adjustment programs on women has
been the formation of feminist or women’s organizations that have
increasingly become transnational in their concerns, collaboration, and
resulting strategies aimed at achieving social, including gender and envi-
ronmental, justice. Aptly termed “globalization from below,” Moghadam
points to social movement organizations created by labor, feminists, and
environmentalists as the key agents of anti-capitalist protest, resistance
and opposition to the “globalization from above” brought about by neolib-
eral market policies and the programs of the Bretton Woods institutions
(Moghadam 2005, 30–32). Such organizations have also sought to critique
the “patriarchal nationalistic” or the “patriarchal religious” ideologies and
practices of their politicians (Moghadam 2005, 102).
The foregoing brief remarks on globalization and its impact on women
are offered by way of contextualizing the effects of globalization on
women, including Muslim women and their responses to it, whether
such responses are expressed in religious terms or not. It is clear that glo-
balization has brought with it many benefits “from above” with respect
to opening up employment and trade opportunities on a massive scale,
and has facilitated in some cases a generation of wealth that has trick-
led down to ordinary citizens, thereby enabling greater freedom of choice
with respect to raising the standard of living. However, by and large, such
small gains have come at a tremendous cost to those who do not consti-
tute the elite, especially in developing countries (often termed countries
 religious studies 321

at the periphery). For such countries, their increasing indebtedness and

inability to compete in a global economy, especially once their trade bar-
riers are dismantled, leads to increased borrowing from global institutions
such as the International Monetary Fund and the imposition of structural
adjustment programs that have resulted in cutbacks in public social ser-
vices such as education and health care, as well as rising unemployment,
thereby increasing the burden on women as managers of their households.
Globalization and its concomitant industrial and business practices have
also contributed greatly to environmental degradation and its deleterious
effects on women. At the same time, globalization has facilitated, “from
below” nativist resistance movements, often couched and presented in
religious terms; these turn to identity politics and greater control over
women’s morality, comportment, and role in society, ostensibly to address
broader social inequities, but concomitantly exercise a restrictive effect
on the attainment of gender justice. Countering both such impulses is the
role of global institutions such as the United Nations and its many pro-
grams for ameliorating inequity in its multifarious forms, including gender
injustice “from above,” and the growth of non-governmental organizations
and feminist and transnational feminist organizations “from below” that
seek to challenge and address the economic, political, and cultural aspects
of globalization in their local and transnational forms. Such approaches
call religious studies theorists to consider factors additional to religion in
examining Muslim women’s issues.
For the field of religious studies, the study of Muslim women and gen-
der offers scope for theorizing about the confluence of religion, globaliza-
tion, geopolitical realities and constructions, and feminism. It also locates
religion as both the source of challenges for women and simultaneously
as liberatory when coupled with new hermeneutical tools and strategic
activism.

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 Sexualities and Queer Studies

Samar Habib

Introduction

Muslim gender and sexual minorities have in the last decade displayed
unprecedented visibility and political activism, through both self-
representations and grassroots organizing in diasporic and local contexts.
Consequently, a paradigmatic shift in the way queer genders and sexuali-
ties in Muslim contexts are studied is taking place in the academy.
In the last decade, we began to glimpse what is perhaps a uniquely
new field of enquiry, that is, scholarship that emerges from the juncture
of Islamic and queer/sexuality studies. The traditionally institutionalized
field of Islamic Studies has not had an easy relationship with this emer-
gent fusion and this new field is yet to be institutionalized in a process
similar to the institutionalization of women’s, gender and sexuality stud-
ies. Similarly, Queer Studies, in its current institutional configuration is
also not unproblematically fusible with queer Islamic studies, or with
queer Muslim scholarship, largely because sometimes, all that “queer”
denotes in the latter is “gender and sexual minority persons,” who for rea-
sons of cultural specificity may not be suitably labeled “gay” or “lesbian.”
Often, in queer Islamic thought, there is not an outright rejection of the
gender binary or even of normativity, nor is there an outright rejection of
sexual identification or an essentialist view of sexuality and orientation,
all of which tend to characterize queer discourse in Western contexts.
This is necessitated by the fact that scholars who engage with Islam and
gender and sexual diversity from a theological perspective cannot wholly
circumvent the gender binary so evident in both scripture and living cul-
tures of Islam. Additionally, the argument regarding the innateness of
homosexuality and transgenderism is central to the theological rebuttals
of prohibition (Bin Jahangir 2010, Kugle 2010), which traditionally relies
on constructing homosexuality not as an orientation/identity but a cho-
sen behavior (Abdul-Latif and Bin Jahangir 2012, Bin Jahangir 2010, Kelly
2010b, Zollner 2010). Nonetheless, Queer Islamic Studies has certainly
earned its “queer” stripes, in that it builds on a collage of socio-cultural
studies that highlight a gender and sexual continuum which is anything
326 samar habib

but privileging of gender and (hetero)sexual normativity, and one which

spans 1,400 years of Muslim cultures across vast geographic and temporal
expanses.
Until recently, most scholars writing on the subject of Muslim sexuali-
ties were from Western and secular backgrounds. A perusal of Frédéric
Lagrange’s list of secondary references on this topic in this encyclope-
dia is a case in point (Lagrange 2003). Of course that is not to say that
this scholarship holds any more or less value or analytical accuracy than
writings carried out by (believing) Muslim gender and/or sexual minor-
ity scholars themselves. However, Islamic feminism of the late twentieth
and early twenty-first century impacted the fields of gender and sexuality
studies relevant to Islamic cultures, fostering queer Muslim scholarship.
This is discussed in greater detail later. Another factor that has contrib-
uted to the rise of a queer Islamic studies framework can be seen in the
rising visibility of queer Muslim counter cultures, both in diaspora and in
homelands. There is an awakening across borders of a Muslim queer iden-
tity, and this has led to the activation of the “inclusive mosque” and the
queer Muslim activist, vis-à-vis scholar. These two notable developments
have led to a shift in research emphasis, methodologies, approaches and
outcomes and will also be discussed in greater detail later.
The last decade’s most remarkable outcome of the intersection of sexu-
ality, queer and Islamic studies can be found in the emergent scholarly
works engaging with Islamic theologies and the permissibility of gender
and sexual diversity therein. While discussions of the permissibility of
same-sex relations from a theological perspective in Abbasid and Andalu-
sian texts were in circulation (Habib 2007), a revival and queering of such
approaches was first revisited by Camilla Adang (2003) in her case-study
on Ibn Hazm, and by Scott Kugle in his chapters in Omid Safi’s collections
Progressive Muslims (2003) and Voices of Islam (2007). Additional con-
tributions in this area include several chapters in the two-volume edited
collection Islam and Homosexuality (Habib 2010, Zollner 2010, Zanghell-
ini 2010, Bin Jahangir 2010, Kelly 2010b, Musić 2010), and Scott Kugle’s
book-length theological treatise Homosexuality in Islam (2010). Mohsin
Hendricks also contributed a seminal article on queer acceptance in Islam
(2010), while Vanja Hamzić produced an article on Human Rights Law
and “Islamic legal and social ethos” (2011). Mohamad Zahed published the
book Le Coran et la Chair in 2012.
What is noteworthy is how authors from various disciplines, deploy-
ing a variety of methodologies and relying on differing textual evidences,
often converged on the same result: this being that same-sex attractions
 sexualities and queer studies 327

and gender diversity can find a legitimate place in Islamic theological

considerations. These conclusions, undertaken by secular scholars, as
well as scholars of faith, commonly reject the unauthenticated (or sev-
ered) ḥadīths that are seen to prohibit homosexual relations. They also
de-program the belief that the story of Lūt in the Qurʾān is a story about
“homosexuals” or worse yet, a story about all homosexuals (Habib 2008).
From this common ground, scholars who have written on this subject
diverge in interests. Scholars of faith, who engage theology from a non-
secular perspective proceed to highlight Qurʾānic verses describing and
upholding diversity, and verses which refer to union between people in
gender neutral terms (such as the word zawj, which means “pair”). Others
emphasize the values of love and ethical conduct praised in the Qurʾān,
or refer to the historical coexistence of the Prophet with gender non-nor-
mative “men”—mukhannathūn.
It should be noted, however, that two of the three madhāhib (schools of
thought) which may be open to such suggestions are extinct in contem-
porary institutional Islam; these being, the Muʿtazila school of thought
of the early Abbasid period and the Ẓahirī perspective (deployed by the
Andalusian Ibn Ḥazm). Meanwhile, the Ḥanafī perspective, deployed by
Scott Kugle, is popular in regions of Turkey and Southeast Asia as well as
some parts of the Arabic-speaking world, but is not particularly influen-
tial elsewhere. Needless to say that Sufi Islam, which is often considered
heretical and un-Islamic among mainstream Muslims, also has a propen-
sity toward toleration of sensory pleasure and diverse manifestations of
love, provided that these act as avenues toward communion with the
divine, which is the ultimate Beloved.
Meanwhile, secular scholars who engage scripture from analytical per-
spectives rooted in historical contextualization and lexicography, further
rely on historical studies of gender and sexually diverse communities across
Muslim cultures and civilizations to demonstrate that there has been no
homogeneously prohibitive dealing with gender and sexual variance.
These studies often cite cultural scholarship on gender and sexuality in
Muslim contexts, such as those undertaken by Murray and Roscoe (1997),
El-Rouayheb (2005), Wright and Rowson (1997), to name but a few.
What has eased the development of this set of reformative ideas has
been the emergence of what is now termed Islamic Feminist scholarship
of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Although Islamic
Feminist scholars can disagree considerably about the extent to which
scriptures can be exonerated of patriarchy, the essence of the methodolo-
gies deployed in re-reading Islamic scripture paved the way for queering
328 samar habib

them in terms that are consistent with the internal logics of the faith.
Essentially, in the works of Amina Wadud, Miriam Cooke, Leila Ahmad,
Fatma Mernissi/Fatna Sabbah, Hiadeh Moghissi and Asma Barlas, the
patriarchal and hegemonic tradition of interpretation is reconstructed
in post-structural approaches to language, text and hermeneutics and
in interrogating the historical constructions of prohibitory law and what
makes a real Muslim. Amina Wadud (1999), for example, emphasizes
that meaning is created at the juncture of text and reader and thus frees
the Qurʾān from its millennium-old exegesis/tafsīr, placing it in dynamic
relationship with a lived and living reading and interpreting experience.
Wadud departs from the literalist methodology of traditional exegesis
and considers themes and the “spirit” of the text as a whole. Meanwhile,
Leila Ahmed (1993) interrogates the authority of ḥadīth and Qurʾānic
exegesis long-used to justify restricting women to certain (domestic)
functions in society, while also revisiting what she uncovers as the revo-
lutionary character and actions of the Prophet, by situating these in their
historical milieu.
Consequently, the tension between “queer” and “feminist” methodolo-
gies that can be glimpsed elsewhere in the academy seem to be largely
absent here. This is perhaps because both queer and Islamic feminist
approaches in the context of Islamic studies share a need to destabilize
gender and sexual normativity without necessarily rejecting the gender
binary altogether, at least so far. So much has remained unexplored with
respect to the migration of conceptual tools from Islamic Feminist to Queer
and Sexuality Studies. We do not yet know what a post-feminist, queer
Islamic subjectivity looks like, or whether it is even possible, although Sufi
philosophies of the dissolution of self and other reasonably carry such a
fruitful possibility.

Why is There a Need for Queer Islamic Studies?

There is a need to reconceptualize the field of studying gender and sex-

ual non-normativity in Muslim cultures given the proliferation of queer
Muslim counter cultures and theologically-based enquiries in the last
decade. There is also a need to broaden the scope of what is now known
as Islamic Studies, necessitated by the emergence of a non-secular queer
Muslim scholarship, though there is no immediately foreseeable way
toward achieving this. On the one hand, traditional Islamic Studies suf-
fers terribly from the burden of sometimes disguised, sometimes outright,
 sexualities and queer studies 329

homophobia. On the other, the cultural cringe in the West against Islam,
and the endemic Islamophobic sweep should not be underestimated in
the role they play in maintaining a dividing wall between what is called
Islamic Studies and the liberal traditions of Women’s, Gender, Sexuality,
and/or Queer Studies (Habib 2013). However, this dividing wall is an imagi-
nary line which has been repeatedly resisted, thwarted and subverted only
because there is a growing momentum, on an international scale and in
multiple local contexts, of subversive Muslim counter cultures and schol-
arships (for example, Farajajé 2012).

Queer Counter Cultures

These counter cultures can be observed through a number of outputs.

Writings on Islam and gender and sexual minorities have increased con-
siderably in the last decade, espousing not simply scholarly works, but
activist paraphernalia, novels, television series and feature and documen-
tary films. Nonetheless, there remains a disparity between the explosion
of queer Muslim counter cultural outputs and scholarly documentation
and analysis of these.
Gender and sexual non-normativity in Islamic cultures and theological
apologetics is noted in classical works in ninth-century Abbasid Baghdad
and eleventh-century Andalusia. But what is indeed a modern phenom-
enon, which is yet to be the subject of substantial scholarly treatment, is
the emergence of designated worship spaces for queer Muslims. Several
queer-inclusive mosques have been established throughout the world,
the first of which appeared in Toronto, Canada, under the directorship
of the Muslim LGBT organization, Salaam, founded by El-Farouk Khaki.
This was followed by the Inner Circle, another queer-inclusive mosque
and organization in South Africa, founded and headed by the openly
gay Imam Muhsin Hendricks. In the United States, al-Fatiha, founded by
Faisal Alam, organizes annual retreats for LGBT Muslims, while a queer-
inclusive mosque was inaugurated in Washington, D.C. in 2011 and is
headed by the openly gay Imam Daayiee Abdullah. In France, Homosex-
uels Musulmans oversees the publication of relevant literature on Islam
and gender and sexual diversity, whilst also organizing an annual confer-
ence through a sister organization, CALEM, which gathers queer-friendly
Muslim scholars and public figures annually. The founder of Homosexuels
Musulmans, Ludovic Lotfi Mohamad Zahed, opened a queer-inclusive
mosque in France in 2012. In England, the Muslim LGBT organizations,
330 samar habib

Iman and Yousef Foundation, provide a context of community formation

and activism, while Sydney’s famous Mardi Gras (Pride Parade) in Aus-
tralia, witnessed its first of a kind “Muslims Against Homophobia” float
(and group-formation) in 2011. To date, there has not been an intensive,
book-length study of these various interlocked movements emerging in
Muslims diasporic contexts.

Queering Muslim Marriage

The founder of Homosexuels Musulmans, Ludovic Lotfi Mohamad Zahed,

has been the subject of vitriol and adulation alike, following his publicized
same-sex nikāḥ (marriage) in 2012. It would be erroneous to presume
that same-sex nikāḥ is a modern concept or phenomenon. Sufi zawāyā in
Morocco and Tunisia have facilitated such marriages for at least two cen-
turies. Police prosecution and persecution occurred for the first time in
Morocco in 2008, when 46 pilgrims to the annual Darih Sidi Ali Bin Ham-
doush festival, suspected of seeking same-sex marriage ceremonies, were
ambushed and arrested (Bergeaud-Blackler and Eck 2011). Meanwhile, it
has been suggested that same-sex nikāḥ also took place at the turn of
the twentieth century at the Egyptian oasis of Siwa, although scholarship
on the historicity of same-sex nikāḥ in Islam is, unfortunately, virtually
non-existent. There is fertile ground for studies yet to be conducted on
the existence of these sites of subversion of heteronormativity in Mus-
lim societies, which require tools and methods of analysis that combine
Islamic and sociological Queer studies. Naturally, such studies will invari-
ably be locked into the sometimes irresolvable tension between essential-
ist and constructivist considerations of sexuality. On the one hand “queer”
Muslims can be seen as part and parcel of a trend in globalization that
has fixed in identity what have otherwise been fluid sexual acts in ear-
lier centuries. On the other hand, it is perfectly viable to see contempo-
rary queer Muslims as part of a historical continuum where it is not their
prior existence which can be doubted, but rather the reliability of reports
written about the subjects, rather than by them. Considerable theoreti-
cal tension surrounding the issue of whether same-sex nikāḥ or religious
gender and sexual minority persons can be transgressive, or whether they
simply reenact normativity in ways which cannot be really queer, is likely
to emerge.
 sexualities and queer studies 331

Measuring Counter Cultural Outputs

More scholarship that takes up this question is needed to investigate

and analyze the literary and filmic outputs of the emergent queer Mus-
lim counter cultures. In 2007, the first feature-length documentary on
Islam and homosexuality was released to international audiences. Parvez
Sharma’s A Jihad for Love has now been seen by over 8 million people
worldwide and in as many as 23 countries. While A Jihad For Love may
have been seen by a large international audience, other, lesser known,
documentaries relevant to Muslim gender and sexual minority persons
include Gay Muslims, a UK Channel 4 2006 production; Transsexual in
Iran, a BBC2 production released in 2008, and Out in Iran produced by
CBC in 2007 (Beirne and Habib 2012).
The Lebanese film Caramel (2008), by Nadine Labaki, depicts a lesbian
character and is a film moved by strong feminist themes. Religion does
not feature centrally in this film, though its impact on social formations
are clear to those familiar with Lebanese society. Rola Selbak’s film from
the United States, Three Veils (2011), depicts a devout Muslim-American
migrant struggling with her lesbian sexuality. The film’s depiction of this
character could very well have been a reflection on a number of Mus-
lim lesbian narratives found in recent ethnographic studies (discussed
later). The Egyptian television series A Woman’s Cry (2007) sympatheti-
cally portrays, and is centered on, a male-to-female transgender heroine.
This series was shown around the world on satellite television and it was
entirely sympathetic to the character who undergoes a gender transition
in a society still ill-equipped to deal with gender variance. Meanwhile the
Lebanese drag queen, Bassem Feghali, reached international fame with
a series of televised female impersonations, beginning on LBC Lebanese
television, culminating in a television special for Ramadan and a series of
theatrical appearances in Beirut’s Monroe Hotel. None of these texts has
received critical or scholarly attention despite the groundbreaking rep-
resentations that they undertake. These motion pictures (and Feghali’s
theatrical presence) emerge after a significant hiatus in Arab cinema and
show business in the treatment of the subject of same-sex relations and
transgenderism (Habib 2007, Meniccuci 1998), providing further evidence
of a paradigmatic shift that installs a queer Muslim subjectivity at the
center of culture and scholarship.
In the literary world, recent novels and autobiographical writings have
also emerged. Hanan al-Shaykh’s novel Misk al-Ghazāl (1988) attracted
332 samar habib

considerable attention in the Western academy for its depiction of a tran-

sient lesbian relationship in an unnamed Gulf country. However, many of
this novel’s successors from the region have yet to garner similar atten-
tion and it has now become a rather outdated depiction of same-sex rela-
tions between women in Arabic literature. By contrast, Thānī al-Suwaydī’s
poetic novella, Al-dīzil (Diesel), was published in 1994 and is a first per-
son narrative voice of a gender and sexually non-normative protagonist;
it received virtually no critical attention (Habib 2007). Equally, Nawāl
Saʿdāwī’s Jannāt wa-Iblīs (Jannāt and the Devil, 2000), which also depicts
a lesbian protagonist, has yet to receive due critical attention. ʿImārat
Yaʿqūbiyān (2002) by ʿAlāʾ Aswānī (made into an eponymous film, The
Yacoubian Building in 2006) provides a representation of the demise of a
homosexual man in Egypt as one of many character threads. Al-Ᾱkharūn
(2006), by Saudi writer Ṣabā al-Ḥirz, provides a lengthy engagement
with a lesbian protagonist. Rāʾiḥa al-qirfa (2007), by Samar Yizbak, from
Syria, depicts a same-sex relationship between a domestic worker and her
employer. Banāt al-Riyāḍ (2005), by Rajāʾ al-Sānīʿ,’ depicts queer Saudi
characters in passing but provides interesting insights into cultural and
social homophobia of both the protagonist and the society in which she
lives. Notably, each of the last four novels mentioned have appeared
in English translation, producing a discursive impact well beyond the
Arab world.
Abdella Taia’s Une Mélancolie Arabe first appeared in French in 2008
and again in English translation in 2012. A novelized autobiography, Taia
sets a stage for trauma and traumatization of a gender and sexual minor-
ity protagonist traversing the geographies of Morocco, France and Egypt.
Amīrāt Mansiyāt /Forgotten Princesses (2011) by Jamal Mutayyim and
Samar Habib’s Rughum and Najda (2012) are ficto-historical narratives
set in the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties respectively and clearly depict
gender and sexual minority characters and themes. While mostly explic-
itly, sometimes implicitly, Islam plays a role in framing all of these narra-
tives, often as a religion and a set of scriptures, but sometimes simply as
a culture and community. Hanadi al-Samman’s 2008 article, “Out of the
Closet: Representation of Homosexuals and Lesbians in Modern Arabic
Literature,” fills a necessary gap in scholarship on contemporary Arabic
novels dealing with gender and sexual transgression in Muslim contexts,
but clearly so much more is needed.
Beyond the Gulf region, a new genre of autobiographical Arab queer
writing has emerged, and this has largely been the work of grassroots NGOs,
 sexualities and queer studies 333

which did not exist in the last century. The latest of these is the autobi-
ography of Hazim Saghia: Memoirs of Randa the Trans (2010). Three other
autobiographical and literary book collections written by anonymous
lesbian and/or transgender contributors of the Middle East and North
Africa include Ḥaqqī ʿan ʿAysh, ʿan Akhtar, an Akūn (2007) and Waqfa
Banāt (2010), both published anonymously in Haifa by the Palestinian
Gay Women’s organization, Aṣwāt. Meanwhile, the Lebanese organiza-
tion, Meem, released Barīd Mustʿajil (2010). The strength of these autobio-
graphical reflections on gender and sexuality is that they collect writings
by Arab gender and sexual minorities from throughout the Arabic-speak-
ing, Muslim-majority world. Other relevant literature in the vein of self-
narrating Muslim and queer subjects include contributions in the edited
collection Islam and Homosexuality by Badruddin Khan, Rusmir Musić and
Omer Shah. Books published in a similar vein also include authors such as
Badruddin Khan (1997), Rahal Eks (2008; 2012) and Afdhere Jama’s collec-
tion of narratives, Illegal Citizens (2008). When, occasionally, Islam is not
central in some of these autobiographical texts, it sometimes continues to
feature in self-reflections and contemplations of queer “Muslims,” be they
believers or renunciates. When Islam does not prefigure as a religion, it
manifests as a cultural identity and especially as a racial marker of other-
ness, when the subjects find themselves in (often Islamophobic) Western
contexts. Activist organizations are also responsible for the proliferation
of countless websites and blogs dedicated to queer issues in Islam and
these, together with local grassroots organizations that are sprouting in
clandestine ways in Muslim-majority countries, also require extensive
scholarly documentation and analysis.
Further to the queer historical and literary studies of Islamic cultures of
the past, the surge in contemporary counter cultural outputs, the establish-
ment of visible queer Muslim communities, and the emergence of a queer
Islamic exegesis in scholarship, there has been a rise in sociological and
ethnographic enquiry into queer Muslim identities. The most quantitative
of these may be Rudolf Pell Gaudio’s Allah Made Us (2009), which pro-
vides an extensive ethnographic account of the lives of “sexual outlaws” in
Northern Nigeria. The article by Tariq Bereket and Barry D. Adam (2008)
asked 20 same-sex attracted Turkish men: “What joys and difficulties have
you experienced regarding your sexual orientation in relation to Islam?”
Meanwhile, the collection Islam and Homosexuality (Habib 2010) includes
four chapters investigating questions of identity formation among trans-
gender and/or same-sex attracted Muslims in diasporic contexts (Kelly,
334 samar habib

Khan, Al-Sayyad and Abraham). The same collection also includes three
chapters looking at identity formation among same-sex attracted and/
or transgender Muslims in Muslim-majority contexts (Luongo, Kramer,
Maulod and Jamil). While all these studies cannot be justly or properly
reviewed in this forum, what is noteworthy is the common recurrence
of faith in Islam and/or retention of Muslim cultural heritage/identity
among a disproportionate number of interviewees, a finding which can be
at first surprising. Nevertheless, instances where “participation in the gay
scene” results in a loss of religious convictions are also present in these
studies (Bereket and Adam 2008, Kelly 2010a). Equally, the rejection of
the gay scene, or the gay scene’s rejection of religious individuals, tends
to result in the problematization of gay or queer identification for non-
heterosexual and/or gender nonconforming study participants (Abraham
2010). Overall, however, these studies reveal a broad spectrum of con-
figurations of identities which are irreducible to binaries or generaliza-
tion. Just as we come to expect multitudes in terms of gender and sexual
expressions, so do we find multitudinous formulations of identity around
Islam and queerness. For example, we also find study participants who
live no contradiction between a deeply held faith and queer selves (Abu-
Hatoum 2007, Musić 2010, Maulod and Jamil 2010, Lindström 2009).
Four social science dissertations on this subject are also worth noting.
The first of these was completed by Nadine Naber in 2002 and has since
been revised and published as a monograph in 2012. This work discusses
numerous facets of “Arab San Francisco,” including a significant inves-
tigation of the many slippages between “straight Arab” and “American-
ized queer” that queer Arab community members of the San Francisco
Bay Area unveil. Tellingly, these exhaustive and exhausting negotiations
between familial obligation and personal self-assertion are also reflected
throughout the more recent sociological/anthropological literature on this
subject, in both diasporic and homeland contexts. Nayrouz Abu Hatoum’s
Masters thesis, completed in 2007, also looks at the liminality, what she
calls “the borderzone,” which queer Muslim self-narratives of this century
seem to be communicating. Abu Hatoum’s subjects were predominantly
members of a close-knit queer Muslim community in Toronto, facilitated
by the group Salaam. Meanwhile, Christina Lindström’s “Narratives of
Lesbian Existence in Egypt” (2009) concludes that same-sex attracted
women in Egypt identify with a category of sexual orientation and simul-
taneously retain religious identification (four of her five participants were
Muslim, one was of the Christian faith). Ghaida Moussa’s Masters thesis,
completed in 2011, looks at the intersection of race and sexuality among
 sexualities and queer studies 335

“queer Palestinian womyn.” In Moussa’s work, as well as the work of

scholars engaging in diasporic and colonial contexts, Islam often (but not
always) functions less as a religion than it does as a “racial” marker of oth-
erness, as the study participants emphasize and interrogate Islamophobia
in Western discourse and its impact on them.

Conclusion

Despite first impressions, gender and sexual minority counter cultures in

Muslim majority contexts are by no means a result of postmodernity. The
studies listed in Frederic Lagrange’s secondary references all provided a
range of treatments of gender and sexual diversity in pre-modern or early
modern Islamic contexts. Specifically in relation to women and transgen-
der persons, the scholarship of Afsaneh Najmabadi (2005), Saher Amer
(2008), Fedwa Malti-Douglas (2001) and Habib (2009) have uncovered
an extensive range of early or pre-modern texts written by scholars of
Muslim civilizations across a range of historical localities and contexts.
Therefore, the study of queer counter cultures is not new to the academy,
nor are “queer Muslims” new to the world (contestations over the nomen-
clature notwithstanding).
However, the contemporary explosion and increased visibility of and
interconnectivity between queer Muslim counter cultures globally neces-
sitate a methodological shift in the academy to engender a new field of
enquiry that is born of the union between Islamic and Queer/Gender/
Women’s/Sexuality studies. Islamic Feminist discourse, emerging in
recent decades, has lent a credible theoretical framework of deconstruct-
ing patriarchy and traditional exegesis, which has facilitated the emer-
gence of non-secular theological engagement with the permissibility and
prohibition of gender and sexual diversity in Islam.
Queer Islamic Studies no doubt generates moral panics, whether
from the homo/transphobia of traditional scholastic institutions of the
study of Islam, or from the Islamophobia of managerial systems institut-
ing otherwise liberal queer/gender/women’s/sexuality research centers.
Additionally, the term “queer” as it functions in Islamic Studies is not
entirely commensurable with notions of the post-feminist, post-gender-
queer we come to know in queer theoretical analysis of Western societ-
ies and subjects. Nevertheless, Queer Islamic Studies distinguishes itself
from previous approaches to the study of gender and sexuality in Muslim
contexts in that it is theologically engaged and coexistent with, perhaps
even emergent from, living queer Muslim realities. These realities are
336 samar habib

now becoming evident throughout the scholarly field, which is attending

to their examination in a variety of ways, whether through exegetical and
theological enquiry, sociological and anthropological narratives of queer
Muslim subjects, cultural studies of filmic and literary texts, or the ongo-
ing probing of early or pre-modern Islamic world. Nonetheless, there is
much work left to be done with respect to bringing scholarship up to date
on counter cultural outputs, in what are truly invigorated and lively times
for Islam, Muslims and the question of queer.

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 Sociology

Rachel Rinaldo

Introduction

The study of women and gender in Islamic contexts is relatively new in

sociology, and it reflects very significant changes in the discipline, includ-
ing increasing interest in globalization and transnational processes, as well
as greater attention to culture, religion, and meaning. In fact, the study of
Muslims and Muslim societies has been a small but growing subfield of
sociology since the 1970s (Keskin 2012). Sociologists of women and gender
in Islamic contexts are conducting qualitative and quantitative research
in a wide variety of settings, and opening up the discipline of sociology
to greater consideration of how gender and sexuality are connected to
religion, the state, and economic life.
Sociology’s founders, particularly Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, did
not shy away from the study of non-Western traditions. Indeed, Weber
was one of the first social scientists to discuss Islam. But as sociology
became institutionalized in North American and European universities
during the twentieth century, and American sociology attained global
dominance, Western societies became the focus of the discipline. Soci-
ology also shared a methodological nationalist orientation with other
social sciences—meaning that the nation-state has been the analytical
framework, and theories and concepts have treated it not just as an object
of analysis but as a natural entity. As Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick
Schiller (2002) maintain, this made it difficult for sociologists to grasp
processes that are transnational or subnational in character. During the
1960s and 1970s, a few sociologists initiated research in non-Western set-
tings, but the dominance of secularization and modernization theory as
well as structuralist approaches meant that little attention was paid to
culture or religion. Finally, the ascendancy of quantitative methods meant
that studies of non-Western societies tended to be large-scale but limited
to issues encompassed by standard surveys, such as health or economic
development.
Since the 1980s, there has been strong, renewed interest in qualitative
and historical methodologies, as well as a trend toward mixed-qualitative/
quantitative methods, and increasing concern with topics such as gender,
340 rachel rinaldo

race and ethnicity, the self, culture, and religion. Indeed, sex and gender is
now one of the largest sections of the American Sociological Association.
Additionally, global economic and political changes have helped to draw
the field’s attention to transnational issues, and also resulted in challenges
to secularization theory. Sociologists have also become comfortable with
interdisciplinarity, and have often been quick to incorporate theoretical
and empirical innovations from neighboring fields such as Gender Stud-
ies, Anthropology, and Political Science. (In fact, it can be difficult to
define who is a sociologist, since sociologists often work in non-sociology
departments, and sociology departments sometimes hire Ph.D.s from
other fields. For the purposes of this entry, sociologists are those with
a Ph.D. in sociology.) From such developments have emerged a grow-
ing number of prominent sociologists who write about Islam, Muslims,
or predominantly Muslim societies, including Mark Juergensmeyer, Asef
Bayat, Mansour Moaddel, Bryan S. Turner, Fatma Müge Göçek, Charles
Kurzman, Marnia Lazreg, Sami Zubaida, Valentine Moghadam, Nilufer
Göle, Christian Joppke, Yasemin Soysal, and Cihan Tuğal. These scholars
have studied topics ranging from citizenship and rights to transnational-
ism, democratization, religion and the state, social movements, religious
nationalism, and much more.
The sociological study of women in Islamic cultures and contexts is
only a small part of this literature, but the work of scholars in this sub-
field has been significant both in and outside the discipline. It has shifted
from an early emphasis on structural oppression and inequality to one
that explores the intricacies of social change and women’s lives in a vari-
ety of settings.

Influential Early Works

Some of the earliest studies of women and gender in Muslim contexts

were by sociologists, and the debates they sparked have continued to res-
onate in the field. Fatima Mernissi’s Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynam-
ics in Modern Muslim Society (1987) is considered a landmark in the field,
and has been republished several times. Mernissi combines interview data
and analysis of letters to a counseling service, along with an examination
of Islamic religious texts. In one of the book’s most cited chapters, “The
Muslim Concept of Active Female Sexuality,” Mernissi argues that women
are constrained in Islamic cultures not because they are considered weak
and passive (as in Christian traditions) but because their sexuality is
 sociology 341

seen as strong and dangerous to men. Elsewhere in the book, Mernissi

argues that rapid modernization has destabilized old patterns of relations
between the sexes in Morocco, leading to increased competition for edu-
cation and employment. In her view, fundamentalism is men’s response to
such threatening changes. Mernissi was one of the first scholars to tackle
the gendered aspects of fundamentalism, and her argument has been
extremely influential. Yet the book has also come in for significant criti-
cism. Some scholars argue that her depiction of Islam is an essentialized
one that does not account for significant differences in interpretation and
practice, even within Morocco. Others maintain that she reduces funda-
mentalism to a reaction to modernization, without seriously investigating
fundamentalist religious beliefs. Mernissi’s more recent writings, which
are more historical and essayistic, have taken a different tack, seeking to
recuperate the lost history of women’s important roles in Islam (1992).
Valentine Moghadam’s Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change
in the Middle East (1993) helped launch a very different explanation of
women’s inferior status in the Middle East. Moghadam attributes women’s
lower status not to any intrinsic properties of Islamic belief or practice,
but rather to economic and political conditions. To understand women’s
status, Moghamam proposes instead a complex framework emphasiz-
ing the interplay of the sex/gender system, social class, economic devel-
opment, and state policies within the capitalist world system. And she
also draws attention to the expanding roles of women in the Middle
East, including their participation in social movements, NGOs, and civil
society organizations working for emancipatory social change. Mogha-
dam continues to argue against what she sees as culturally deterministic
approaches to studying Middle Eastern women, and more recently she
has published significant research on women’s work in the Middle East
(1998), feminist activism in the region (2011), and globalization and social
movements (2012).
Nilufer Göle’s The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (1997) is
an essential and prescient study of women’s involvement in the Islamic
revival in Turkey, and was one of the first sociological studies to explore
Muslim women’s religious beliefs in a particular social context. Based on
interviews with young veiled women, Göle proposes that these women
are rejecting the Western model of secular modernity that has been urged
on Turks since the country became a republic, and that they are instead
gravitating toward an Islamic version of modernity. For Göle, gender is an
essential aspect of these competing modernities, as the Western model is
342 rachel rinaldo

predicated on the equality and visibility of women in public life, while the
Islamic model is predicated on gender segregation in public spaces. Nev-
ertheless, she emphasizes that young Turkish women choose to submit to
Islamic doctrines of modesty for women, and she shows how they inter-
pret Islam as encouraging them to take an active (though covered) role in
public life, pursuing higher education and careers. Göle’s work has been
influential particularly because of her discussion of Islamic modernity,
which anticipated the idea of multiple modernities. Unlike much other
scholarship of the time, Göle’s book shows how the practice of Islam in
Turkey is a result of a specific historical and social context. Moreover,
while many Turks in the 1990s argued that women who veiled were sim-
ply victims of patriarchal oppression, Göle was one of the first to suggest
that such women were exercising agency in their choice to veil. Göle’s
work has helped to jumpstart discussions about Islam and modernity, as
well as debates about Muslim women’s agency, an important and con-
tinuing theme in the literature. In her more recent work, Göle has contin-
ued to critique Eurocentric versions of modernity and she has also written
insightfully about the difficulties of Muslim integration in Europe (2011).

Recent Areas of Study

These early efforts have helped to spark the research of a new genera-
tion of sociologists interested in women in Muslim contexts. Among the
primary, though often overlapping, areas of study in this recent literature
are Muslim immigration to the West; social movements and civil society
(including Islamist and feminist movements); the state and/or national-
ism; and economic life and development (including work).

Muslim Immigration and Integration

Migration and the integration/incorporation of immigrants are among
the most prominent subjects for sociological research more generally.
The late twentieth century saw a surge in migration from less affluent to
more affluent countries, producing important shifts in national ethnic and
religious landscapes. Sociologists of women in Muslim contexts have con-
tributed to the already voluminous literature on migration by studying
Muslim women migrants, as well as debates over gender practices within
Muslim migrant communities.
Muslim migrants in the United States became more visible in the after-
math of 9/11, in some cases encountering increased scrutiny. In the American
 sociology 343

context, Jen’nan G. Read (2000, 2004) has explored Arab-American wom-

en’s decisions to veil, highlighting the complex negotiations involved in
this decision, exploring the variations among women’s viewpoints, and
showing how the decision to veil or not often depends on how women
interpret their ethnic/religious identities. In her study of Arab-American
teenagers, Kristine Ajrouch (2004) maintains that ethnic boundaries are
drawn by controlling girls’ behaviors; interpretations of religious teach-
ings are used to justify these restrictions. Nevertheless, she points out that
such boundaries are also contested. More recently, Read has challenged
the view that religious identity is paramount for Muslim Americans, argu-
ing that they are far from uniformly religious, and that they are similar to
other Americans in their views on social and political issues (Read 2007,
2008). Other scholars have followed in Read’s steps, examining how veil-
ing is used by American Muslim women to create autonomous selves
(Williams and Vashi 2007) and how negative stereotypes after 9/11 made
veiled Muslim women feel particularly insecure and unsafe in public
spaces (Cainkar 2009). Mustafa Gurbuz and Gulsum Gurbuz-Kucuksari
(2009) argue that because they are torn between dominant secular norms
in the society and the values of Islamic faith, most American Muslim col-
lege girls see their headscarf practice as “liberating” and “empowering.”
Other scholars have investigated religion, gender, and family practices
among Muslim migrants. Nazli Kibria (2011) has examined the growing
salience of Islamic identity for Bangladeshi migrants in the United States
and the United Kingdom. Noting that transnational marriage is much
more accepted among British Bangladeshis, she argues that second- and
third-generation Bangladeshi immigrants demonstrate significant cre-
ativity and selection in the process of finding a marital partner (2012).
Moreover, Kibria shows that in the British national context, the issue of
transnational marriage has been far more politicized by concerns about
forced marriage and the state regulations that have arisen in response to
it. Also in the United Kingdom, Andrew Yip has studied religion and sexu-
ality, including lesbian, gay, and bisexual Muslims. He has shown how
lesbian and gay Muslims are able to interpret religious texts in revisionist
ways that affirm their sexuality. He also argues that lesbian and bisexual
Muslim women in the United Kingdom find themselves in a particularly
complicated position, as Islamophobia and racism cement their sense
of belonging to the Muslim community, but their sexuality puts them at
odds with this same community (2008).
The latter half of the twentieth century also saw increased migra-
tion from majority Muslim countries to continental Europe, and many
344 rachel rinaldo

sociologists have studied the sharp controversies that have arisen over
veiling and Muslim dress for women. Caitlin Killian (2003, 2006) shows
that North African Muslim women in France are divided in their attitudes
toward the veil, with some embracing it as a symbol of identity, and oth-
ers rejecting it as an obstacle to integration. Killian argues that Muslim
migrant women creatively manage their identities, engaging in selective
acculturation and picking and choosing among cultural beliefs. Similarly,
comparing veiling in France and the United States, Ajrouch (2007) pro-
poses that national context and the history of ethnic stratification in each
country shape both debates about veiling and actual practices. Taking
a very different perspective on veiling, Fareen Parvez (2011) argues that
Muslim women who wear the burqa in France are engaged in anti-poli-
tics, meaning that they attempt to reconfigure the private sphere against
an intrusive state, to retreat into a moral community, and emphasize
achieving spiritual serenity rather than political activism.

Social Movements/Civil Society/Collective Action/Democratization

The study of the varieties of collective action has always been a mainstay
of sociology, and scholars of women in Muslim contexts have contributed
greatly to this field. Certainly, one of the most notable elements of the
revival of Islam and the rise of Islamic movements in the early twenty-first
century has been women’s strong participation in such forms of activ-
ism. Much recent sociological scholarship has investigated the nature and
consequences of women’s involvement in Islamic movements, as well
civil society or grassroots activism in predominantly Muslim contexts
(Charrad 2011, Moghadam 2012). These studies have helped to overturn
the misconceptions that women in Muslim countries are not politically
active, and that their collective action is controlled by more powerful
forces. Issues of women’s agency are central in this literature, with some
scholars proposing that Western definitions of agency may be too limited
to capture the complexities of women’s activism in Muslim contexts, and
suggesting that such activists commonly use multiple frames for rights
and empowerment claims (Charrad 2011). Perhaps most importantly, soci-
ologists explore the vitality of both secular and religious feminist move-
ments in Muslim contexts, and also demonstrate how women activists
have had a real impact in many places.
The Middle East and North Africa have been the focus of much of this
work. A notable early study is Frances Hasso’s work on Palestinian femi-
nism, which investigates the long-term impact of feminist activism for
 sociology 345

individual women (2001). Women’s involvement in recent democratiza-

tion movements in the region has also begun to attract more attention
(Moghadam 2011, Salime 2012), as has the relationship between gender
equality and democracy (Rizzo, Abdel-Latif, and Meyer 2007). A number
of scholars have chronicled the dynamic women’s movement in Morocco,
and its success in demanding reforms to family law (Sadiqi and Ennaji
2006). Zakia Salime’s important study Between Feminism and Islam:
Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco (2011) shows how the Moroc-
can Islamist and feminist movements have interacted and shaped each
other, helping to build a broader movement for women’s rights. Salime
also examines how the global context matters for such movements, argu-
ing that popular discourse about fundamentalism, terrorism, and the
oppression of women compelled some Moroccan Islamist women activ-
ists to start discussing women’s rights and empowerment, while feminists
have begun to explore how Islam can support women’s empowerment. A
more recent article by Fatima Sadiqi and Moha Ennaji (2012) also argues
that women’s legal rights in Morocco are closely associated with issues of
democratization. Egyptian women’s activism has a long history, but has
not been studied by many sociologists. However, Helen Rizzo has exam-
ined Egyptian anti-sexual harassment movements (2011) as well as wom-
en’s activism for political rights and democratization in Kuwait (2005; see
also Shultziner and Tetrault 2012). Also focusing on Kuwait, Alessandra
Gonzalez (2013) looks at how a culturally conservative environment has
spawned a small Islamic feminist movement.
Following in Göle’s deep footsteps, sociologists continue to examine
women’s involvement in both secular and Islamic activism in Turkey
(Gürbüz and Bernstein 2012, Turam 2008). Certainly, one of the deepest
disagreements among scholars of Turkey is the issue of Islamist women’s
agency. In her intriguing (2002) Living Islam: Women, Religion, and the
Policitization of Culture in Turkey, Ayşe Saktanber argues that Turkish Isla-
mism is a type of “life politics” that is producing a new pious middle class.
She shows how the success of the Islamist movement has blurred the
boundaries between “the public” and “the private,” while making women
central to its reformist project. Yet because of such developments, she
maintains, pious Muslim women have gained agency as they construct
new roles for themselves and participate in the ongoing transformation
of the Islamist movement. Berna Turam observes that women are cen-
tral to the legitimization of both secularism and Islamism in Turkey. She
maintains that while Turkey’s founders “nationalized” secular ways of life,
346 rachel rinaldo

contemporary Islamists are nationalizing their faith-based ways of life,

and discourses about women’s place and role in society have played a
major part in both of these national projects that were engineered exclu-
sively by men (2006). Nevertheless, Turam maintains that the increasing
interaction between secular and Islamist men has left Islamist women
outside the politics of engagement, and thereby outside of power struc-
tures. Thus, women’s increasing visibility as Islamic actors coexists with
continued gender inequality and segregation.
A few sociologists have ventured further afield from the Middle East,
to South and Southeast Asia. While India is not a Muslim majority soci-
ety, its Muslim minority of approximately 150 million (13.4 percent of the
country’s population) makes it one of the world’s largest Muslim societ-
ies. Raka Ray’s Fields of Protest: Women’s Movements in India (1999) has
inspired many sociological studies of women’s movements in the develop-
ing world. Ray’s innovative analysis of women’s activism in Calcutta and
Mumbai shows how women’s mobilization differs in these cities because
of important differences in local political fields. However, Ray does not
examine religion, either as identity or as part of political fields. More
recent studies of South and Southeast Asia examine women’s activism in
a context of religious mobilization. For example, Afshan Jafar (2007, 2011)
examines women’s rights NGOs in Pakistan, arguing that Islamic funda-
mentalism poses a unique challenge, and examining the strategies they
use to contest it. Similarly, Filomena Critelli and Jennifer Willett (2013)
examine Pakistani women’s rights organizations’ strategies for change
and how the historical, political, and social environments of their fields
for protest shape these strategies. Rachel Rinaldo’s research on women’s
activism in Indonesia examines how Muslim women activists draw on
different interpretations of religious texts to support very different aims,
ranging from gender equality to a more Islamic state and society. This
work also shows how both Muslim and secular Indonesian women’s orga-
nizations act as cultural brokers mediating transnational flows of Islam
and feminism (2008, 2011, 2013).

States, Nations, Nationalism, and Citizenship

The study of states, nations, and nationalisms is also a rich part of the
sociological tradition. Indeed, for some sociologists, the state is one of the
most significant forces in the shaping of gender relations and women’s
status. An early collection of articles from a variety of scholars, including
 sociology 347

but not limited to sociologists, Reconstructing Gender in the Middle East:

Tradition, Identity, and Power (Göçek and Balaghi 1994) helped move
Middle Eastern studies forward in the 1990s, problematizing the sup-
posed relationship between tradition and gender, and proposing atten-
tion to gender’s intersections with power, identity, and politics in various
national contexts.
Since that time, Mounira Charrad’s States and Women’s Rights: The
Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco (2001) has set the
standard for consideration of how women and gender matter in nation-
building in Muslim contexts. According to Charrad, the existence of pro-
gressive or regressive family laws in North Africa, which have a significant
effect on women’s status, is largely an outcome of nation-building efforts.
In Tunisia, where the national state succeeded in exerting power over
older kin-based centers of power, family laws were more progressive.
In Morocco and Algeria, where the state either incorporated kin-based
power structures or fought ongoing struggles with them, the state tended
to adopt family laws based on conservative interpretations of Islam that
disadvantaged women.
Family law is also a subject of study for Hasso, whose Consuming Desires:
Family Crisis and the State in the Middle East (2011) compares struggles
over family law in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Hasso proposes
that states build their legitimacy and gain regulatory power as they codify
Islamic law on families. She concludes that while this expansion of state
power over family sometimes protects women from abuses such as child
marriage, it ultimately makes women further dependent on hierarchical
and authoritarian states.
Despite the rich scholarly literature on contemporary Iran, not many
sociologists of women and gender in Muslim societies have turned their
attention to this country. One of the exceptions is Haideh Moghissi,
a feminist critic of fundamentalism who has studied the dynamic Ira-
nian women’s movement (2008). She is perhaps best known for arguing
that feminism and Islamic fundamentalism are essentially incompatible
(1999). She has recently revisited this idea, suggesting that the uncritical
promotion of Islamic feminism may work to the detriment of the feminist
movement more generally (2011). Turning attention to the practices of
gender segregation in Iran, Nazanin Shahrokni and Parastoo Dokouhaki
(2012) propose that increasing attempts by the Iranian state to exclude
women from higher education are related to an escalating concern with a
perceived crisis of masculinity.
348 rachel rinaldo

Singapore is not usually included as a place of interest to sociologists of

women and gender in Muslim societies. Yet Muslims (many of Malay eth-
nic background) make up about 15 percent of the country’s nearly 5.5 mil-
lion people. Youyenn Teo’s study of state and family policies (2011) shows
how the Singapore government’s family policies have shaped collective
practices, habits, norms, and beliefs that bind Singaporeans to each other
and to the state. Teo argues that the inequalities embedded within fam-
ily policies, which naturalize gender, ethnic, and religious differences as
“cultural” and in need of protection, help to stave off dissent and produce
a sense of citizenship based on individual family units rather than collec-
tive identities.
Debates and practices of veiling are also of great interest for the many
sociologists who study the state, and who explore how this issue relates
to democratization, freedom of expression, secularization, and neoliber-
alism. Saktanber (2008) analyzes veiling in Turkey as part of the emer-
gence of new state–society relations, as well as a sign of differences in
understandings of rights and equality. Christian Joppke (2007) examines
headscarf laws in France and Germany, arguing that liberal state neutral-
ity is a field of struggle in which both proponents and opponents of the
headscarf seek to vindicate their interpretations of neutrality, and that
the recent laws against headscarves represent a backlash against rights-
oriented versions of neutrality. Joppke continues this theme in his more
recent book Veil: Mirror of Identity (2009) in which he compares differ-
ent European responses to the headscarf and explores how it is linked to
tensions around multiculturalism.
Another North Africa specialist, and one of the few sociologists to
consider the nation of Algeria, is Marnia Lazreg. Her Eloquence of Silence
(1994) examines the history of gender roles in that nation to consider the
question of why Algerian women’s active participation in the revolution
did not lead to higher status. Lazreg suggests that gender roles are often
suspended in revolutionary contexts, and thus women’s lives don’t neces-
sarily change in any permanent way afterwards. Lazreg’s book may help
understand the outcomes of the current democratic upheavals in the Mid-
dle East. Lazreg has also become known in recent years for her critique of
veiling. In Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women (2009), she
argues that the global veiling trend has been driven by an organized cam-
paign, and that the veil itself has become a tool for engaging women in a
conception of religiosity that serves the political aims of certain groups in
the Muslim world.
 sociology 349

Development and Economic Life

Muslim women’s involvement in economic development, formal and
informal work, and socioeconomic issues is another broad area of inter-
est for sociologists. Sociologists have tended to take a critical approach to
economic development, demonstrating its differential consequences for
men and women, and showing that economic development is not inher-
ently beneficial to women. Moghadam was one of the first sociologists to
pursue work on this subject in the Middle Eastern context, and her studies
of the impact of economic reforms on women’s work in the region have
been a touchstone for many scholars (Moghadam 1998, 2005).
The low rates of female labor force participation in the Middle East
have been the subject of ongoing discussions among social scientists. This
has especially been the case since the publication of the influential arti-
cle “Oil, Islam, and Patriarchy” by political scientist Michael Ross (2008),
which argues that the Middle East’s oil-based economy discourages invest-
ment in sectors that are more favorable to women’s employment. However,
Charrad (2009) responds that such arguments overlook real variations in
women’s employment and political representation even among oil pro-
ducers, and she also suggests that Ross’s argument ignores the extent to
which some states are intertwined with patriarchal networks and, in some
cases, work to discourage women from working outside the home.
Recent sociological literature on women and economic life often takes
an interview-based or ethnographic approach. Drawing on nearly two
decades of qualitative fieldwork in Syria, Gallagher’s Making Do in Damas-
cus: Navigating a Generation of Change in Family and Work (2012) shows
how women creatively manage family relationships and work within the
constraints of a conservative culture. Gallagher proposes that instead of
thinking of Syrian women as oppressed or as autonomous agents, we
instead consider how collective identity, connections within families, eco-
nomic resources, and regional politics shape their family lives.
Many majority Muslim countries in the Middle East and Asia have a
long tradition of domestic service provided by poor rural migrant women.
Gul Ozyegin has studied this issue in Turkey (2001), arguing that cultural
and religious constraints on the mobility of rural women make their labor
expensive and somewhat difficult to obtain, which actually gives them
a degree of power in negotiating relationships with middle-class urban
employers (usually women). Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum’s Cultures of
Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in India (2009) explores the
350 rachel rinaldo

changing practices and meanings of domestic service in Calcutta, showing

how the middle and upper classes consolidate themselves through their
practices of servant and home management.
Recent sociological studies have also focused new attention on the
rise of the middle class in India. Reena Patel (2010) examines women in
India’s call center industry, showing how new opportunities for employ-
ment do allow some women to expand their mobility, but also produce
new social anxieties and attempts at regulating women’s bodies. Simi-
larly, in her study of information technology professionals in India (2012),
Smitha Radhakrishnan shows how female IT workers reconfigure notions
of respectable feminity and the “good” Indian family, while also accruing
both material and symbolic privileges. Radhakrishnan also argues that this
emerging middle class has constructed a transnational, homogenized ver-
sion of Hinduism that is inextricable from its sense of being Indian, thus
contributing to the escalation of right-wing Hindu movements. Such work
demonstrates the importance of religion in the construction of class and
national identity. While it makes sense that sociologists focus on India’s
Hindu majority, more research on the Muslim minority might also deepen
these insights.
A very significant qualitative study of economic development in a Mus-
lim majority society is Ann Tickamyer and Siti Kusujiarti’s Power, Change,
and Gender Relations in Rural Java: A Tale of Two Villages (2011). This
unusual and careful longitudinal study compares the lives of women in
two villages in the midst of Central Java’s rapid economic modernization.
They conclude that while Javanese women have important economic roles
in their communities and contribute significant income to their families, a
culturally prescribed gender ideology, reinforced by the state and religious
institutions, continues to limit their power and status.
Bangladesh has also begun to attract the attention of sociologists. Fauzia
Ahmed, working on rural Bangladesh, has studied microcredit and poverty
alleviation programs and their impact on men and women, and is one of
the only sociologists to write about the subject of masculinity in a Muslim
setting (2008). Based on ethnographic fieldwork, she identifies different
ways of being masculine in rural Bangladesh, and proposes that develop-
ment agencies need to take these into account in microcredit programs.

Debating Women’s Agency

As noted earlier, the question of agency has a long history in the sociologi-
cal literature. Sociologists tend to view agency as being shaped by, embed-
ded in, or constrained by social structures, but they disagree greatly as to
 sociology 351

how much ability individuals have to determine the course of their lives.
Certainly, the nature and consequences of women’s agency have been an
essential topic of debate for scholars of women in Muslim contexts, and
sociologists who study Muslims are familiar with the important critiques
of Western conceptions of agency that have been introduced by postco-
lonial feminists such as Chandra Mohanty (1987) as well as more recently
by scholars such as Lila Abu-Lughod (2002) and Saba Mahmood (2005).
However, sociologists have not yet contributed very much to these discus-
sions, though some are beginning to explore agency in specific settings.
For example, in her study of low-income women in Syria, Sally Gallagher
(2007, 2012) argues that by embracing cultural schemas that position
women as dependent, and by defining their labor as not real work and
their wages as insubstantial, women are able to circumvent norms regard-
ing husbands as sole provider, maintain greater control over their wages,
and thereby increase their household income. Thus, she argues, while
the overall gender ideology does not change, women have found ways to
access work and income opportunities, as well as interactions outside the
household. Agency here operates within constraints, but it does seem to
bring change.
Other sociologists examine the role of religion in women’s agency,
overturning long held conceptions about Islam as a source of disempow-
erment. Ayşe Saktanber (2002) shows how pious Muslim women in Tur-
key turn their religion into a resource by gaining control of private spaces
and focusing on self-knowledge and self-actualization. Rachel Rinaldo’s
research on Indonesia (2008, 2013) shows how Muslim women activists
use religious texts as a resource for arguments for women’s rights and
equality, and proposes that new forms of women’s agency are emerging
out of the intersections of Islamic politics and gender politics. Study-
ing the incorporation of Muslim immigrants in Canada, Anna Korteweg
(2008) examines how debates over tolerance often revolve around the
belief that Muslim women lack agency, especially with respect to matters
of family. She suggests that while Canadians tend to see agency as a mat-
ter of individual autonomy, Muslim women understand their own agency
as being embedded in a particular religious and cultural context. Ironi-
cally, this is similar to how many sociologists also conceptualize agency,
but it goes against popular Western understandings that foreground indi-
vidual free choice.
In a comprehensive review article on gender in the Middle East,
Mounira Charrad (2011) observes that women’s activism in the region
increasingly brings together multiple ideologies of rights, and that women
352 rachel rinaldo

are using religion in a variety of ways, both in daily life and activism. She
argues that a key task for sociological work on the Middle East is to further
address the relationship between structure and agency, particularly with
respect to understanding how social structural conditions facilitate col-
lective mobilization. Indeed, noting the ways that Muslim women seem
to be using Islam as a means of empowerment or demanding rights, one
of the intriguing questions she poses is, where do we witness the rise of
Islamic feminism and how do we explain it? Nevertheless, a cautionary
note is also sounded by Marnia Lazreg (2013), who is concerned that
social scientists are relying on simplistic interpretations of Foucault to
explain Muslim women’s veiling. For Lazreg, this means that social scien-
tists are increasingly viewing any purposive action as agentive or political,
and ignoring the ways in which acquiescing to veiling is complicity rather
than resistance.

Other Areas of Interest

Many sociological studies do not fall neatly into the categories discussed
so far. Among these are more quantitative studies of popular attitudes,
health, and gender issues in Muslim contexts. For example, demogra-
pher Kathryn Yount has explored attitudes toward domestic violence and
female genital cutting in Egypt, as well as more general health issues affect-
ing women in the region, including post-partum depression (2004, 2009,
2012). A fascinating study exploring the relationship between Islamic reli-
giosity and gender egalitarianism among youth in Saudi Arabia and Egypt
finds that for young men in both contexts, orthodoxy and mosque atten-
dance are negatively associated with gender egalitarianism. In contrast,
for young Egyptian women, self-identified religiosity positively affects
gender egalitarianism, while for Saudi Arabian women, Islamic religiosity
has no effect (Kucinskas 2010).
Not many researchers have explored the emerging terrain of sexual-
ity among heterosexual Muslim women. In her study of virginity among
young, educated Turkish women, Ozyegin (2009) finds that women who
embrace new identities as non-virgins cultivate “virginal facades” to
accommodate the old norm of virginity as well as the new rules of an
emerging premarital sex culture. She suggests that the new culture makes
it acceptable for young women to lose their virginity as long as it is within
the context of love and emotional investment.
The study of religious subjectivity, personhood, and meaning has been
prominent in disciplines such as anthropology, with scholars investigating
issues such as what it means to be a religious person, the nature of
 sociology 353

religious agency and action, and religious notions of the self. Such ques-
tions are certainly also of great interest to sociologists of religion, but they
have not been widely applied to the study of women in Muslim contexts.
However, in an unusual and intriguing study of Sunni Muslim women in
Senegal, Erin Augis (2012) examines how such women strive to build a
religiosity centered on piety and social critique. The women Augis stud-
ies wear hijab in a manner influenced by the Salafi movement, and they
have also appropriated prayer and other practices that are inspired by
Saudi conventions. Augis argues that their adoption of these practices
is at once a critique of Senegal’s corrupt secular government as well as
an attempt to become closer to God. Similarly, Fareen Parvez (2013) has
recently turned her attention to prayer practices among Indian reform-
ist Muslim women, examining the importance they place on practicing
prayer correctly as part of their goal of a more direct relationship with
God. These deeply nuanced and contextualized studies of Muslim female
subjectivity present a significant contribution to the sociology of religious
practice and belief.

Contributions of the Sociological Literature

The examination of inequality, stratification, and power differences has

always been central to sociology. One of the great strengths of the socio-
logical literature is its use of this critical lens to study women and gender
in Muslim contexts, paying close attention to mechanisms of economic,
cultural, and political inequality, as well as struggles for transformation
and change. Sociologists such as Charrad, Hasso, Lazreg, Moghadam, and
Tickamyer elegantly show how social structures and political systems
systematically disadvantage women and/or promote particular sex and
gender arrangements. Indeed, showing these connections between larger
social structures and Muslim women’s everyday lives is certainly one of
the central contributions of sociologists. Sociologists have also been care-
ful not to privilege religion as a simple cause of gender inequality. For
example, Moghadam, Tickamyer and Kusujiarti, and Gallagher present
Islam as one of many intersecting structural factors that influence sex and
gender, while those who focus more on religious meanings and subjec-
tivities, such as Göle and Salime, emphasize how Muslim practices and
social movements are shaped by the broader political and social context.
Sociologists who study gender and Muslim immigrants in the West, such
as Read, Killian, Yip, Kibria, and Parvez have drawn attention to the par-
ticular difficulties these groups have encountered with integration and
354 rachel rinaldo

tolerance, while not losing sight of women’s agentive capacities. Finally,

sociologists such as Göle, Salime, and Moghadam have been at the fore-
front of examining Muslim women’s increasing participation in social
movements and civil society, challenging widely held assumptions about
passive or victimized women in Muslim societies.
One of the greatest assets of the sociological tradition is the vast range
of methodologies employed by scholars—from ethnography to inter-
views to historical studies, surveys and quantitative approaches, to dis-
course and media analysis. This diversity allows sociologists of gender and
women in Muslim contexts to address a broad array of topics, and it also
allows for quite different approaches to a particular issue, as is evident
with studies of Muslim immigrants, veiling, or Muslim women’s activism.
Sociologists have been schooled to think carefully about methods, and
many sociology journals require an expansive section on methodology in
all the articles they publish. This disciplinary norm leads to many produc-
tive discussions about the benefits and constraints of various approaches.
It also means that sociologists are usually explicit about their method-
ological procedures, as well as forthcoming about their own relationships
as researchers to informants. These issues are especially important when
studying populations who are often subject to misleading and inaccurate
depictions, such as Muslim women. Indeed, sociologists who are reflec-
tive about methodology have the potential to lead the way toward fruitful
discussions of the problems and possibilities of knowledge production in
the social science of Muslim societies.
Finally, sociologists who study gender are very comfortable with inter-
disciplinarity, and the literature cited in this entry does much to incor-
porate theoretical and empirical insights from neighboring fields such as
anthropology and political science. Thus, for example, sociologists working
on South Asia or the Middle East bridge the world of regionally focused
scholarship with more general debates in sociological or feminist theory,
which helps their work become legible to a broader audience. Indeed,
many of the works discussed here are very much part of the growing and
extremely interdisciplinary field of studies of Islam and gender.

An Agenda for the Sociology of Women and Gender in Muslim Contexts

The most fundamental obstacle for the sociology of women and gender
in Muslim contexts is that it is a small subfield within both the sociology
of gender and the sociology of Muslim societies. Sociology emphasizes
 sociology 355

journal articles as much as or more than books, but this literature is not
well represented in the discipline’s most prestigious journals. As a result,
although sociologists of women and gender in Muslim contexts have had
some success in becoming part of interdisciplinary conversations, in most
cases their work has not had great visibility or impact in the general field
of sociology. Indeed, it is all too easy, especially for those whose work
focuses on non-Western societies, to be pigeonholed as regional scholars
whose work does not make a more general contribution to the discipline.
For example, their work is often regarded as too specialized to be included
in core survey classes such as the Sociology of Gender or Social Move-
ments. Moreover, because sociologists of women and gender in Muslim
societies study a wide variety of issues and geographical contexts, there
is no readily apparent common theoretical agenda for this literature, and
little ongoing dialogue between scholars, resulting in a scattered and frag-
mented subfield.
Within sociology, there is certainly rising interest in Muslim populations
in the West, as well as in the phenomenon of Islamophobia, which is why
these themes are some of the most prominent in the subfield, though not
many of these studies focus specifically on gender or sexuality. Research
on Muslims outside the West is relatively rare in sociology, and most of
the existing sociological literature on Muslims is based on studies of the
Middle East and North Africa. With a few notable exceptions, sociologi-
cal studies of Muslim societies outside the MENA region are even rarer,
reflecting the discipline’s more general lack of attention to sub-Saharan
Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. There are also countless signifi-
cant topics which have received far too little attention from sociologists
of women and gender in Muslim societies, including sexuality, religious
minorities, masculinity, secularism and secularization, the self, class dif-
ference, neoliberalism, and poverty.
These problems are largely a result of shifts within social science, but
also stem from some of the foundational assumptions and practices of the
discipline of sociology. The decline of area studies centers and the lack of
funding for qualitative research mean that it is increasingly difficult for
Western social scientists to pursue fieldwork outside their home coun-
tries. Sociology also emphasizes broad patterns and generalizations, often
at the cost of deeper engagement with local histories and meanings. This
is much less the case for sociologists who study Muslim societies, but at
times this tendency is visible in their work as well. Most sociologists do
attempt to contextualize their research in its political and/or economic
356 rachel rinaldo

milieu, but less often do they grapple more profoundly with local history
and culture. This is particularly so when it comes to the case of religion.
The study of religion, once central to sociology, became marginalized in
the discipline in the 1970s and 1980s, and it has only recently begun to
recover. Many sociologists of women and gender in Muslim societies, even
those who use qualitative approaches, continue to treat Islam largely as
a variable and/or to generalize about Islamic beliefs and practices, rather
than investigating more fully what Islam means to people, the differences
in how it may be practiced, and how it influences (or does not influence)
social life and politics in a particular society.
Another potential source of difficulty for studies of women in Muslim
contexts is that sociologists doing fieldwork outside the West or on uncon-
ventional topics are often strongly encouraged to frame their research as
case studies of a more general phenomenon. While the case study strat-
egy can be very successful in connecting such work to broader themes in
the discipline, it can also make it difficult to discuss phenomena that fall
outside existing theories or debates. This is probably the primary reason
that many sociologists of women and gender in Muslim contexts have not
published their work in the discipline’s major journals.
Nevertheless, sociology is certainly becoming far more receptive to
research from outside the traditional terrain of North America and West-
ern Europe, as well as to underappreciated topics such as religion and sex-
uality. Since 9/11, the discipline’s interest in religion seems to have been
rekindled, and this has resulted in a growing number of scholars studying
Islam, as well as religion, modernity, and secularization more broadly. The
increasing emphasis on transnational processes and globalization, par-
ticularly within the sociology of gender, also provides a very significant
opportunity for research on women and gender in Muslim contexts. Cer-
tainly, many of the scholars discussed in this entry have been at the fore-
front of examining how global discourses are both resisted and adapted
in Muslim contexts, as well as how transnational and national political
and economic arrangements matter for gender and sexuality in Muslim
societies. Sociologists of women and gender in Muslim contexts are ven-
turing into countries long ignored by the discipline, employing traditional
and novel research methods, and helping to open the discipline to more
consideration of how gender and sexuality are connected to religion, the
state, and economic life. The ongoing controversies over Muslim women’s
agency and religious subjectivity would be enhanced by more contribu-
tions from sociologists, and the outcome of such discussions might also be
 sociology 357

beneficial for sociological theory more generally. The greatest challenges

for the sociological literature on women and gender in Muslim contexts
will be to encourage more scholars to engage in research in a broad array
of settings, to consider how local settings are connected to transnational
or transregional contexts, to increase visibility within the discipline by
publishing monographs and articles in high-profile journals, and not least,
to connect studies of women and gender in Muslim contexts to current
theoretical debates and discussions in the discipline, while also bringing
attention to endogenous concepts and realities.

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——. Consuming desires. Family crisis and the state in the Middle East, Palo Alto, Calif. 2011.
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——. Women’s NGOs in Pakistan, New York 2011.
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——. Veil. Mirror of identity, Malden, Mass. 2009.
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——. Islamic cultural nationalism and gender politics in Iran, in Third World Quarterly 29:3
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 sociology 359

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 APPENDIX 1

WOMEN AND ISLAMIC CULTURES:

DISCIPLINARY PARADIGMS AND APPROACHES: 2003–2013
DISCIPLINES AND AUTHORS

Chapters Author Discipline training of author

Anthropology Basarudin, Azza Women and Gender Studies
Art and Architecture Watenpaugh, Heghnar Art History
Cultural Studies Jarmakani, Amira Women and Gender Studies
Demography Amin, Sajeda Sociology and Demography
Film Studies Kamran, Rastegar Comparative Lit. M.E. &
Asian Lang. & Cultures
Geography Mohammad, Robina Geography
History: Europe Rabo, Annika Social Anthropology
History: Science Ragab, Ahmed Science and Religion
History: Southeast Asia Hearman, Vannessa History
Islamic Studies Davary, Bahar Religious Studies
Literary Studies Hartman, Michelle Literature
Oral Histories Elsadda, Hoda English and Comparative
Literature
Philosophy Rustomji, Nerina History
Political Science Jamal, Amaney; Langohr Political Science
Vickie
Population and Health Sholkamy, Hania Anthropology
Studies
Religious Studies Kassam, Zayn Religious Studies
Sociology Rinaldo, Rachel Sociology
Queer Studies Habib, Samar Gender Studies
Total number of articles: 18 Total number of authors: 19
 APPENDIX 2

ARTICLES PUBLISHED 2010–2013

EWIC ONLINE SUPPLEMENTS I–VII

Article title Author Discipline of Supplement Countries

author covered

Arts: Women Journalists and Simons, Suzanne Western 7 United States

Women’s Press European Studies
Arts: Fiction and Fiction Khan, Hafiza Literature 6 Bangladesh
Writers Nilofar
Arts: Fiction and Fiction Shamsie, Muneeza Literature 4 Pakistan
Writers
Arts: Performers and Knight, Lisa I Anthropology 3 India &
performing groups Bangladesh
Arts: Poets and Poetry Saliba, Therese; English 3 United States
Crawford, Hazel
Arts: Theater Musa, Helen M Theater 4 Malaysia
Arts: Visual Arts and Artists Dirgantoro, Wulan Art 4 Indonesia
Arts: Visual Arts and Artists Al-Adeeb, Dena Philosophy 7 North America
Breast Feeding Ansori, Siaan Political Science 5 Malaysia
Census Projects Stephan, Rita Sociology 7 United States
Cinema: Films Made by Imran, Rahat Women’s Studies 2 Pakistan
Women Screen Writers,
Directors, Producers: Women
Documentary Filmmakers
Cinema: Films Made by Paramaditha, Intan Cinema Studies 1 Indonesia
Women Screenwriters,
Directors, and Producers
Cinema: Films Made by Khoo, Gaik Cheng Cinema Studies 1 Malaysia
Women Screenwriters,
Directors, and Producers
Cinema: Films Made by Khannous, Touria Literature 1 Morocco
Women Screenwriters,
Directors, and Producers
Cinema: Films Made by Elhaik, Tarek Anthropology 1 Arab world &
Women Screenwriters, diaspora
Directors, and Producers
 articles published 2010–2013 363

Table (cont.)

Article title Author Discipline of Supplement Countries

author covered

Cinema: Representations in Joseph, Sabrina Social Sciences 4 Egypt

Commercial Films
Cinema: Representations in Jhala, Angma History 3 India
Commercial Films
Cinema: Representations in Murty, Madhavi Cultural Theory 3 India
Commercial Films
Cinema: Representations in Das, Srijana Mitra Anthropology 1 India
Commercial Films
Cinema: Representations in Hamdar, Abir Literature 2 Lebanon
Commercial Films
Construction of Individual Valassopoulos, Literature 1 Arab world &
Women as Iconic Anastasia diaspora
Representatives
Construction of Individual Hooker, Virginia; Asian Studies 1 Indonesia
Women as Iconic Hooker, M.B.
Representatives: Raden Adjeng
Kartini
Construction of Individual Mukherjee, Wendy Literature 1 Indonesia
Women as Iconic
Representatives
Construction of Individual Campbell, Christine History 1 Malaysia
Women as Iconic
Representatives
Construction of Individual Hooker, Virginia Asian Studies 1 Southeast Asia
Women as Iconic
Representatives: Overview
Diaspora Studies Hussain, Jamila Law 2 Australia
Diaspora Studies Sharmani, Mulki Al Cultural 6 Egypt
Anthropology
Diaspora Studies Pastor de Maria Sociocultural 6 Mexico
Campos, Camila Anthropology
Domestic Violence Ameen, Nusrat Law 5 Bangladesh
Domestic Violence Parker, Lynette Asian Studies 7 Indonesia
Domestic Violence: Muslim Abugideiri, Salma Psychology 2 United States
Communities
Domestic Violence Critelli, Filomena Social Work 7 Pakistan
Domestic Violence Sharipova, Muborak Sociology 6 Tajikistan
 364 appendix 2

Table (cont.)

Article title Author Discipline of Supplement Countries

author covered

Economics: Advertising and Nassif, Maggie; Post-colonial 4 Egypt

Marketing Nassif, Mira Studies
Economics: Crafts Leigh, Barbara Southeast Asian 4 Indonesia &
Studies Malaysia
Economics: Industrial Labor Elias, Juanita Political 4 Malaysia
Economy
Economics: Sex Workers: McNutt, Debra Feminist & 3 United States
United States of America Cultural Studies
Military
Education: National Curricula Parker, Lyn Asian Studies 5 Indonesia
Education: Women’s Religious Riaz, Sanaa Anthropology 3 Pakistan
Education: Women’s Religious Jackson, Elisabeth Religious Studies 7 Indonesia
Funerary Rites for Women Anwar, Ghazala Religious Studies 2 Indus Valley
Victims of “Honor Killings”
Human Rights Setiawan, Ken Human Rights 5 Indonesia
Human Rights Whiting, Amanda Law 7 Malaysia
Islam: Saints and Sacred Callan, Alyson Medicine 7 Bangladesh
Geographies
Islam: Saints and Sacred Quinn, George Literature 5 Indonesia
Geographies
Laboring Practices Zaman, Habiba Gender, Sexuality 6 Canada
and Women’s
Studies
Laboring Practices Sholkamy, Hania Anthropology 6 Egypt
Laboring Practices Khuri, Taghrid Gender, Sexuality 5 Jordan
and Women’s
Studies
Laboring Practices Ford, Michele Cultural Studies 1 Southeast Asia
Law: Modern Family Law, Hooker, M. B. Southeast Asian 3 Southeast Asia
1800–Present Studies
Migration: Regional Hashimova, Umida Independent 3 Uzbekistan
Scholar
Music: Hip Hop, Spoken Chan-Malik, Sylvia American & 3 United States
Word and Rap Women &
Gender studies
 articles published 2010–2013 365

Table (cont.)

Article title Author Discipline of Supplement Countries

author covered

Music: Hip-Hop, Spoken Word Dotson-Renta, Lara Comparative 5 Arab States

and Rap Immigration
Studies
Music: Hip-Hop, Spoken Word Eqeiq, Amal Comparative 5 Israel/Palestine
and Rap Literature
Music Krishnan, Sonia Music 3 India
Gaind
Music Kartomi, Margaret Music 2 Indonesia
Music Ansori, Siaan Political Science 3 Malaysia
National and Transnational Antonius, Rachad Sociology 2 Canada
Security Regimes
National and Transnational White, Sally Social Sciences 5 Indonesia
Security Regimes
National and Transnational Smith, Ron J. Geography 4 Israel/Palestine
Security Regimes
National and Transnational Hamaz, Sofia Migration 1 United
Security Regimes Studies Kingdom
National and Transnational Cainkar, Louise Sociology 2 United States
Security Regimes
New Modes of Aouragh, Miriyam Anthropology 4 Palestine
Communication: Internet Cafés
New Modes of Somani, Alia English 4 South Asia
Communication: Online Dating
New Modes of Platt, Maria Anthropology 2 Indonesia
Communication: Social
Networking, Text Messaging,
Skype
New Modes of Abdel-Fadil, Mona Gender Studies 3 Egypt
Communication: Social
Networking, Text Messaging,
Skype
New Modes of Mellor, Noha Media and 6 Gulf States
Communication: Web Cultural Studies
Representations and Blogs
New Modes of Barendregt, Bart Anthropology 4 Indonesia
Communication: Web
Representations and Blogs
 366 appendix 2

Table (cont.)

Article title Author Discipline of Supplement Countries

author covered

New Modes of Amir-Ebrahimi, Sociology 1 Iran

Communication: Web Masserat
Representations and Blogs
New Modes of Ansori, Siaan Political Science 3 Malaysia
Communication: Web
Representations and Blogs
New Modes of Skalli, Loubna H. Mass 1 North Africa
Communication: Web Communications
Representations and Blogs
New Modes of Piela, Anna Women’s Studies 1 Overview
Communication: Web
Representations and Blogs
New Modes of Subramanian, Communications 1 United States
Communication: Web Mathangi
Representations and Blogs:
United States
Political and Social Sharoni, Simona Women & 5 Israel/Palestine
Movements: Feminist Gender Studies
Political-Social Movements: del Mar Logroño History 1 Argentina
Religious Associations Narbona, Maria
Political-Social Movements: Elia, Nada Global Studies 2 United States
Academic
Political-Social Movements: Nicola Pratt International 6 Middle East
Community-Based Politics
Political-Social Movements: Corcoran-Nantes, Social Sciences 7 Central Asia
Community-Based Yvonne
Political-Social Movements: Jaschok, Maria; Women & 4 China
Community-Based Jingjun, Shui Gender Studies
Political-Social Movements: Davies, Sharyn Social Sciences 2 Southeast Asia
Homosexuality and Queer Graham
Movements
Political-Social Movements: Khan, Mahruq F. Women, Gender 3 United States
Homosexuality and Queer & Sexuality
Movements Studies
Production of Knowledge on Obeid, Michelle Social 1 Lebanon
Women: Non-Governmental Anthropology
Organizations
Production of Knowledge on Hessini, Leila Women’s Studies 1 Maghrib
Women: Non-Governmental
Organizations
 articles published 2010–2013 367

Table (cont.)

Article title Author Discipline of Supplement Countries

author covered

Production of Knowledge Zaatari, Zeina Anthropology 2

Production of Knowledge: Siddiqi, Dina M. Anthropology 1 Bangladesh
Non-Governmental
Organizations
Production of Knowledge: Basarudin, Azza Women’s Studies 2 Malaysia
Non-Governmental
Organizations
Production of Knowledge: Basarudin, Azza Women’s Studies 2 Egypt
Non-Governmental
Organizations
Production of Knowledge: McMillan, Joanne Anthropology 2 Indonesia
Non-Governmental
Organizations
Production of Knowledge: Al-Ali, Nadje Women & 1 Iraq
Non-Governmental Gender Studies
Organizations
Production of Knowledge: Ware, Vron Sociology 1 United States/
States, Discourses, Policies United
Kingdom
Public Office Chowdhury, Farah Law 6 Bangladesh
Qur’an: Modern Interpretations Nurmila, Nina Gender and Law 4 Indonesia
Religious Practices: Ablution Kaya, Laura Pearl Anthropology 1 Central Arab
and Purification: Prayer, States & Egypt
Fasting, and Piety
Religious Practices: Zakat Fauzia Amelia Religious & 7 Indonesia
(Almsgiving) and Other Cultural Studies
Charitable Practices
Representations: Children’s Soliman, Mounira Literature 3 Egypt
Literature Gamal
Representations: Children’s Kurian, Anna Literature 3 India
Literatures
Representations: Children’s Khan, Rukhsana Literature 2 North America
Literatures
Representations: Lebanon Hamadeh, Najla Philosophy 4 Lebanon
Representations: Memoirs, Mehta, Brinda French & 1 Algeria
Autobiographies, and Francophone
Biographies Studies
 368 appendix 2

Table (cont.)

Article title Author Discipline of Supplement Countries

author covered

Representations: Memoirs, Telmissany, May Modern 1 Arab world

Autobiographies, and Languages &
Biographies Literature
Representations: Memoirs, Makdisi, Jean Said Literature 1 Palestine
Autobiographies, and
Biographies: Writing in
Another Language
Representations: Memoirs, Dahab, F. Elizabeth Comparative 6 Canadian-
Autobiographies, Biographies World Literature Francophone
Representations: Memoirs, Crawford, Hazel English 2 United States
Autobiographies, Biographies
Representations: Memoirs, M’Baye, Babacar; American 3 West Africa
Autobiographies, Biographies Oztan, Meltem Cultural Studies
Representations: Memoirs, Bennett, Sharareh Literature, 1 Iran
Autobiographies, Biographies: Frouzesh; Philosophy
Writing in Another Language Rahimieh, Nasrin
Representations: Memoirs, Mirapuri, Dawn Literature 2 Iraq
Autobiographies, Biographies: Iseult
Writing in Another Language
Representations: Memoirs, Abou-Bakr, English & 3 Overview
Autobiographies, Biographies: Omaima Comparative
Writing in Another Language Literature
Representations: Fiction, Civantos, Christina Modern 7 Argentina
Modern Languages &
Literature
Representations: Romance Jarmakani, Amira Women & 2 United States
Fiction Gender Studies
Representations: The Veiled Nayebzadah, Arts 4 North America
Muslim Woman Rahela
Representations: Theater Ahmed, Syed Jamil Theater 1 Bangladesh
Representations: Theater Musa, Helen M. Theater 5 Malaysia
Representations: Visual Arts: Zine, Jasmin; Bala, Sociology & 1 Canada
Television Asma Public Policy
Representations: Visual Arts: Ida, Rachmah Media and 4 Indonesia
Television Cultural Studies
Representations: Visual Arts: Chakraborty, Kabita Cultural studies 6 India
Television
Representations: Visual Arts: Alsultany, Evelyn Cultural studies 5 United States
Television
 articles published 2010–2013 369

Table (cont.)

Article title Author Discipline of Supplement Countries

author covered

Reproduction: Health Bennett, Linda Rae; Medical 5 Indonesia

Barnard, Emma Anthropology
Sexual Harassment Ahmed, Hana Development 6 Bangladesh
Shams Studies
Sexualities: Practices Karim, Shuchi Women’s Studies 6 Bangladesh
Sufi Orders and Movements Millie, Julian Anthropology 3 Indonesia
Theater: Plays by Women Bhatia, Nandi English 3 India
Playwrights, Directors, and
Producers in Islamic Cultures
Theater: Plays by Women Nicholson, Elin Middle Eastern 6 Palestine
Playwrights, Directors, and Studies
Producers in Islamic Cultures
Theater: Plays by Women Amin, Dina Literature, 7 Egypt
Playwrights, Directors, and Culture and
Producers in Islamic Cultures Theater
Theater: Representations Garlough, Christine Women & 7 India &
Gender Studies Pakistan
World Literatures & World Hartman, Michelle Literature 7
Markets: The Translation
Industry
Women, Gender, Islam and Hafez, Sherine Anthropology 7
Feminism
Youth Culture and Youth Maira, Sunaina Education 3 United States
Movements & Human
Psychology

Total Number of Articles: 127

Total Number of words: 687,533
 APPENDIX 3

COUNTRY AND REGION ARTICLE COUNT

EWIC ONLINE: SUPPLEMENTS I–VII

ART= Number of articles

Algeria: ART; 1 Israel/Palestine: ART; 3

Arab World: ART; 5 Jordan: ART; 1
Arab States: ART; 1 Lebanon: ART; 3
Argentina: ART; 2 Maghrib: ART; 1
Australia: ART; 1 Malaysia: ART; 10
Bangladesh: ART; 8 Mexico: ART; 1
Canada: ART; 5 Morocco: ART; 1
Canada, United States of America, North Africa: ART; 1
United Kingdom, Australia: ART; 1 North America: ART; 3
Central Arab States and Egypt: ART; 1 Pakistan: ART; 5
Central Asia: ART; 1 Palestine: ART; 2
China: ART; 1 South Asia: ART; 1
Egypt: ART; 8 Southeast Asia: ART; 4
Gulf States: ART; 1 Tajikistan: ART; 1
India: ART; 8 United Kingdom: ART; 1
India and Pakistan: ART: 1 United States: ART; 12
Indonesia: ART; 19 United States and United Kingdom:
Indonesia and Malaysia: ART; 1 ART; 1
Indus Valley: ART; 1 Uzbekistan: ART; 1
Iran: ART; 1 West Africa: ART; 1
Iraq: ART; 2
 APPENDIX 4

SUMMARY STATISTICS
EWIC ONLINE: SUPPLEMENTS I–VII

Number of authors in EWIC Online Supplements I–VII: (authors who wrote more
than one article are not double-counted) = 132. Number of articles: 127. Total
word count 687,533.

1. Number of authors and articles

Authors per Supplement Articles per Supplement

Supplement I 30 29
Supplement II 19 19
Supplement III 23 21
Supplement VI 17 16
Supplement V 14 13
Supplement VI 14 14
Supplement VII 15 15

2. Number of Authors with 1, 2, and 3 articles

• Number of authors with one article: 119
• Number of authors with two articles: 6
• Number of authors with three articles: 1

3. Number of Articles written by authors with 1, 2, and 3 articles

• Total Number of articles with 1 author: 119
• Total Number of articles with 2 authors: 8 (includes coauthoring)

4. The total word count by authors with single and double articles
• Total word counts for Authors who wrote 1 Article: 617,854
• Total word counts for Authors who wrote 2 Articles: 57,788
• Total word counts for Authors who wrote 3 Articles: 11,891
 APPENDIX 5

NEW ENTRY TOPICS

EWIC ONLINE: SUPPLEMENTS I–VII

1. Census Projects: United States

2. Cinema: Films Made by Women Screen Writers, Directors, Producers: Women
Documentary Filmmakers: Pakistan
3. Cinema: Representations in Commercial Films: Egypt
4. Construction of Individual Women as Iconic Representatives
5. Diaspora studies
6. Domestic violence
7. Laboring Practices
8. Music: Hip Hop, Spoken Word and Rap
9. Music
10. National and Transnational Security Regimes
11. New Modes of Communication: Internet Cafés
12. New Modes of Communication: Online Dating
13. New Modes of Communication: Social Networking, Text Messaging, Skype
14. New Modes of Communication: Web Representations and Blogs
15. Political-Social Movements Religious Associations
16. Political-Social Movements: Academic
17. Political-Social Movements: Community-Based
18. Political-Social Movements: Homosexuality and Queer Movements: South-
east Asia
19. Production of Knowledge on Women: Non-Governmental Organizations
20. Production of Knowledge: International Development Agencies
21. Production of Knowledge: Non-Governmental Organizations: Bangladesh
22. Production of Knowledge: States, Discourses, Policies
23. Representation: Fiction, Modern
24. Representations: Children’s Literature
25. Representations: Memoirs, Autobiographies, and Biographies
26. Representations: Memoirs, Autobiographies, Biographies: Writing in Another
Language: Overview
27. Representations: Visual Arts: Television
28. Theater: Plays by Women Playwrights, Directors, and Producers in Islamic
Cultures
29. Women, Gender, Islam and Feminism
30. World Literatures and World Markets: The Translation Industry
 APPENDIX 6

EWIC PUBLIC OUTREACH PROJECT

WEB RESOURCES

http://sjoseph.ucdavis.edu/ewic/ewic-outreach-resources

The EWIC Public Outreach Project acknowledges the generous support of the
Henry Luce Foundation

Topical Notes

Islamophobia http://sjoseph.ucdavis.edu/ewic/ewic-outreach-resources/islamophobia
Muslim Americans http://sjoseph.ucdavis.edu/ewic/ewic-outreach-resources/muslim-
americans
Contraceptive Use: Muslim-Majority Countries http://sjoseph.ucdavis.edu/ewic/
ewic-outreach-resources/contraceptive-use-muslim-majority
Women in Government: Muslim-Majority Countries http://sjoseph.ucdavis
.edu/ewic/ewic-outreach-resources/women-in-government-muslim-majority-
countries
Veiling Styles http://sjoseph.ucdavis.edu/ewic/ewic-outreach-resources/veiling-
styles-2
Women and Education: Malaysia and Indonesia http://sjoseph.ucdavis.edu/ewic/
ewic-outreach-resources/women-and-education-indonesia-and-malaysia
Women and Education: Middle East http://sjoseph.ucdavis.edu/ewic/ewic-
outreach-resources/women-and-education-middle-east
Women and Education: Sub-Saharan Africa http://sjoseph.ucdavis.edu/ewic/
ewic-outreach-resources/women-and-education-sub-saharan-africa

Concept Notes

Information Sheet: Demographics of European Muslims http://sjoseph.ucdavis.edu/

ewic/ewic-outreach-resources/concept-sheet-muslim-demographics-europe
Additional material on Suad Joseph’s http://ucdavis.academia.edu/SuadJoseph

Bibliographies

The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures: A Bibliography of Books and

Articles in European Languages since 1993 http://www.academia.edu/3652603/
Encyclopedia_of_Women_and_Islamic_Cultures_A_Bibliography_of_Books_
and_Articles_in_European_Languages
374 appendix 6

Suggested Reading List: Children and Teen http://sjoseph.ucdavis.edu/ewic/ewic-

outreach-resources/suggested-reading-list-children-and-teen
Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures Scholars Database Template http://
sjoseph.ucdavis.edu/ewic/ewic-scholars-database

Translations

The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures Arabic Translation of Volume

I: Methodologies, Paradigms, and Sources http://www.academia.edu/3266093/
EWIC_Arabic_Translation_of_Volume_I_Methodologies_Paradigms_and_Sources

Previews

The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures Online Supplement I Preview

http://www.academia.edu/3019570/Encyclopedia_of_Women_and_Islamic_
Cultures_EWIC_Supplement_I
Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures Previews I–III http://sjoseph
.ucdavis.edu/ewic/ewic-preview
Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures Print Preview http://sjoseph
.ucdavis.edu/ewic/ewic-preview

EWIC Scholars Database

An invitation to join the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures Scholars

Database http://www.academia.edu/2610970/Join_the_Encyclopedia_of_Woman_
and_Islamic_Cultures_Scholars_Database_
 APPENDIX 7

EWIC PUBLIC OUTREACH PROJECT

SCHOLARLY ARTICLES PUBLISHED

http://sjoseph.ucdavis.edu/ewic/ewic-outreach-resources

The EWIC Public Outreach Project acknowledges the generous support of the
Henry Luce Foundation

Adoption and Fostering: Overview by Ingrid Mattson

Aging: United States by Sonia Salari
Arts: Fiction and Fiction Writers: North America by Samia Serageldin
Arts: Popular Culture: North Africa by Saeed A. Khan
Arts: Theater United States by Nathalie Handal
Arts: Women Journalists and Women’s Press: Central Arab States by Magda Abu-
Fadil
Childhood: Coming of Age Rituals: North America by Taslim Madhani
Citizenship: Southeast Asia by Vivienne Wee & Asma Beatrix
Economics: Labor Profiles: Arab States by Jennifer C. Olmsted
Education: Women’s Religious: United States by Debra Mubashshir Majeed
Education: Women’s Religious: Southeast Asia, East Asia, Australia and the Pacific
by Muhammad Eeqbal Farouque Hassim
Family Modern Discourses: United States by Earle Waugh
Family Relations: United States by Barbara C. Aswad
Freedom of Expression: United States by Mohamed Nimer
Genital Cutting: Africa and the Middle East by Noor Kassamali
Kinship, Descent Systems: East Asia by Mina Elfira
Language: Use by Women: North America: Yemeni American Girls by Loukia K.
Sarroub
Law: Articulation of Islamic and non-Islamic Societies: Southeast Asia by Mark
Cammack
Marriage Practices: United States by Lori Peek
Memory, Women, and Community: Western Europe by Karin van Nieuwkerk
Military: Women’s Participation: United States by Shareda Hosein
Motherhood: Arab States by Farha Ghannam
Networks: North Africa by Paula Holmes-Eber
North America: Early 20th Century to Present by Nadine Naber
Political Social Movements: Feminist: Indonesia by Yuniyanti Chuzaifah
Political Social Movements: Feminist: Iran by Nima Naghibi
Political Social Movements: Feminist: United States by Maliha Chishti
Political Parties and Participation by Katherine Bullock
Religious Associations: United States by Mohamed Nimer
376 appendix 7

Religious Practices: Conversion: Mexico: Chiapas by Sandra Cañas Cuevas

Religious Practices: Preaching and Women Preachers: South Asia by Maimuna
Huq
Religious Practices: Preaching and Women Preachers: Sudan by Souad T. Ali
Religious Practices: Religious Commemorations: Argentina by Sofia Martos
Religious Practices: Waqf: Overview by Zeinab A. Abul-Magd
Religious Practices: Zakāt (Almsgiving) and Other Charitable Practices: Overview
by Ellison Banks Findly
Representations: Afterlife Stories: Overview by Jane I. Smith
Representations: Fiction, Modern: Argentina by Christina Civantos
Reproduction: Conception, Reproductive Choices, and Islam: Overview by Anke
Niehof
Sectarianism and Confessionalism: United States by Rula Jurdi Abisaab
Secularism: Arab States (excepting North Africa and the Gulf ) by Annika Rabo
Stereotypes: United States: Arab Muslim Women as Portrayed in Film by Jack
Shaheen
Youth Culture and Movements: United States by Kristine Ajrouch
 Index
Afghanistan 14, 70–72, 77, 110, 205, 240,
299, 316
agency 9, 21, 23–24, 29–30, 32–33, 42,
118, 134, 138, 187, 206, 253, 256, 260,
265–266, 269, 279, 284, 298, 342,
344–345, 350–353, 356
age structure 10, 66, 75–76, 293
American studies 5, 10, 16, 52, 54–56, 60,
209, 236
Ibn ʿArabīʾ 265–266
area studies 5, 8, 54–55, 94, 96, 100, 185,
355
attitudes 27, 84, 138, 139, 183, 187, 191,
197, 264, 271, 274, 306, 344, 352
Nimat Barazangi 214, 266–267, 305–306,
311–314
Asma Barlas 314, 263, 305–307, 309, 328
belonging 22, 28, 103, 107, 109–114, 145,
149, 343
birth rates 10, 69–71, 83–84
Birmingham, U.K. 52, 111, 115, 216
body 21, 26, 40, 43–45, 54–55, 57, 94–95,
114–118, 137–138, 206, 208, 221, 284, 289
communities of Muslims 23, 31, 87
comparative literature 13, 16, 231,
233–235, 240–242
converts 138–139
creators—art and architecture 39, 42
cultural studies 4–5, 9–10, 51–60, 62, 96,
231, 336
culture 1–13, 15, 19–22, 27, 31, 34, 37–40,
44, 47, 51–62, 66–67, 87–89, 91–92,
96–97, 103, 112, 114, 166, 169, 171, 173,
180, 203, 206, 210, 214–215, 218, 220,
227–246, 251, 269–270, 272, 290,
292, 294, 308–311, 316, 319, 325–329,
331–333, 335, 339–340, 349, 352, 356
death rates 10, 66–67, 69, 74
democracy 21–22, 147, 186, 269–273, 345
democratization 12–13, 189, 199, 249,
270, 277, 340, 345, 349
demography 3–4, 10, 66–67, 78, 289–290
diaspora 8, 34, 42, 55, 61, 99, 100, 115,
140, 235, 236, 240, 244, 292, 326
digital media 250
economy 3, 14–15, 27, 92, 120, 133, 134,
148, 275, 283, 294, 299, 319, 321, 349
Egypt—oral history 255
employment 133, 170, 275, 286–287, 294,
297–298, 316–317, 320, 343, 349–350
ethics and jurisprudence 13, 261, 266
ethnic studies 5, 28, 52, 54–56, 60, 236,
246
ethnography 23–25, 27–28, 30, 38, 60,
103, 147, 191, 354
ethnoscape 110–111
family 10–11, 14, 25–28, 30, 39, 44,
69–70, 73, 80, 83, 114, 127, 129, 131–134,
138, 140, 149, 164, 166, 170, 183, 188,
190–191, 194–195, 219, 223, 253, 261,
266, 272, 275, 286, 289–294, 297, 307,
310–311, 314–317, 320, 323, 343, 345,
347–351
family reunification 131, 145–156
Forough Farrokhzad 98
fatwas 11, 140–141, 315
female migrants 133
female subjects of cinematic works 97, 99
femininity 25, 57–58, 61, 137
feminism 9, 10 12, 14, 32–33, 55, 59,
152, 189–190, 195, 198, 204–206, 218,
220–221, 238, 265, 279, 284, 293,
316–317, 321, 326, 344–347, 352
feminist literary studies 238
fertility 14, 65–66, 69–70, 72–73, 75, 77,
283, 289–290, 292, 299, 317
film 53–54, 58, 87–101, 147, 197, 331–332
film studies 4–5, 9–12, 44, 52, 56, 58,
87–88, 91, 93–96, 100–101
fiqh ( jurisprudence) 140–141, 190,
209–210, 212, 221, 223, 261, 320
gender 9, 13–15, 21–23, 25–29, 31, 33, 52,
55–56, 58, 60–61, 65, 74, 87–88, 90–93,
95, 99–101, 103, 109, 113, 115, 118, 129,
132–133, 135, 137–140, 142, 142–146,
151–152, 156, 158, 160–162, 164–166, 169,
173, 177, 183, 186–188, 190–192, 194,
197–198, 203, 207, 212–213, 216–217,
222, 224, 227, 232, 238, 252–256,
258–259, 261–272, 274–277, 279–280,
283, 285, 287–289, 291–293, 295,
378 index
297, 299, 305–309, 311, 313–314, 316,
319–321, 325–335, 339–343, 346–348,
350–357
gender—art and architecture 9, 37–41,
43–46
gender in/equality 22, 114, 129, 137–138,
140–141, 149, 159, 261, 264, 271–274, 276,
283, 295–296, 298–299, 316, 345–346,
353
gender justice 29–31, 222–223, 306, 321
gender, social role of—art and
architecture  45
gender studies 4–5, 23
gender, visual representation of—art and
architecture 45
geopolitics 258
globalization 14–15, 115, 139, 284, 287,
321, 330, 339, 341, 356
harems—art and architecture 42
headscarf 26, 103, 107, 115–118, 136–137,
343, 348
hermeneutics 13–15, 29–30, 230, 261,
263, 305, 328
heteronormativity 192, 224, 330
homosexuality 219, 224, 325–336
identity 22, 26, 28, 31–32, 45, 87, 90, 93,
101, 103, 105, 107, 110–111, 113, 114, 118,
129, 133–134, 143, 148, 153, 156, 158, 163,
165–166, 168–171
immigration 15, 22, 28–29, 342
Indonesia 2, 12, 22, 30, 43, 69–71, 75, 82,
108, 117, 177, 181, 184, 186, 193, 197, 199,
203, 232, 277–278, 346, 351
Iran—oral history 255
Iraq—oral history 251, 254, 258
Islamic fashion 135–136
Islamic feminism 221, 293, 316, 326, 347,
352
Islamic studies 4, 6, 9, 11–12, 14,
203–205, 207–210, 213, 215, 217–218,
220–221, 224, 235, 307, 325–326,
328–329, 335
Islam in southeast and east Europe 128,
133, 147–148
Islamism 120, 194, 218, 224, 279, 319, 345
Islamist women 25, 317, 345–346
Islamophobia 9, 14–15, 19, 21, 26, 31, 104,
159, 162, 171, 335, 343, 355
ijtihād (reasoning) 213, 221, 223
knowledge production 3, 11–12, 14,
22, 52–53, 57, 60, 104–105, 151–157,
159–160, 163, 166–168, 170, 173, 236,
245, 251, 284, 354
labor 3, 8, 13, 38, 65, 74, 76, 78, 82–83,
106, 108, 120–122, 127, 129–133, 146, 155,
157–158, 162, 191, 217, 272, 274–276, 291,
294, 311, 317–320, 349, 351
laïcité 27, 136
law of marriage and divorce 317
leadership/marginalization 156, 159
liberation 57, 59, 90, 134, 155, 161, 172,
198, 205–206, 249, 284, 291
Libya—oral history 255
literature 3, 8, 10–13, 15–16, 21, 37,
44, 52, 73, 92, 180, 183–184, 191, 197,
208–209, 214–217, 219–220, 223,
227–246, 269, 272, 274, 279, 299, 329,
332–334, 340, 342, 344, 347, 349–350,
353–355, 357
literary criticism 13, 237, 250
literary reception 245–246
literary theory 230
living Islam 345
Malaysia 12, 22, 30, 67, 71, 97, 118, 159,
177, 183, 193–199, 203, 222, 275, 307
manipulation of space—art and
architecture 41
marriage 8, 10, 24, 26, 66–68, 77–84,
109, 120–121, 141, 143–145, 167, 183, 185,
187–188, 189, 195, 217, 219 223–224, 276,
286, 290–291, 293–297, 310, 314–318,
330, 343, 347
masculinity 25–27, 31, 33–34, 58, 61, 120,
158, 298, 347, 350, 355
media studies 56
memory studies 250
migrant communities—oral history 
255
migration 8, 10–11, 27, 34, 65–68, 74–75,
77, 83, 115, 120, 127, 129, 131–133, 145,
182, 328, 342–343
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 
295
modernity 22, 24, 37, 118, 147, 157, 183,
185, 189, 191, 193, 203, 222, 253–254,
341–342, 356
modernization 13, 66, 172, 272, 274, 290,
316, 339, 341, 350
mosque 22, 30, 32, 41–42, 46, 110–111,
113, 141, 215–216, 279, 326, 329, 352
Muslim majority countries 19, 66–72,
74–78, 208, 210, 229, 239, 244, 267,
283, 289–290, 299, 333
 index 379
Muslim women 5, 9, 11, 13–14, 18, 21–22,
26–27, 30, 53, 89–90, 103, 107, 110, 122,
127, 129, 130–131, 133–138, 140–145,
147–149, 153–154, 158, 162, 164–173,
189–190, 194, 196, 198, 204–206, 208,
211–212, 215–216, 218–221, 224, 229,
234, 245, 263, 266, 270, 277, 280, 283,
285, 296, 306, 312–314, 316, 320–321,
341–346, 349, 351–354, 356
national cinema 91, 94–96, 97, 100–101
normative Muslims 222
nuptiality 289–290
oil 27, 59, 275, 349
oppression 28, 90–93, 107, 115, 118, 149,
164, 196, 206, 218–219, 234, 238, 312,
340, 342, 345
orientalism 5, 9–10, 12, 28, 53, 55–56,
60–61, 134, 203–206, 211, 220, 224, 235,
239, 242–243
Palestine—oral history 252–254
participation 13, 22–24, 33, 83, 97,
159, 162, 169, 186, 189, 194, 204, 255,
269, 275, 278–280, 296, 298, 309, 313,
317–319, 334, 341, 344, 348–349, 354
patrons—art and architecture 40
politics 3, 7, 9, 10, 14–16, 21–25, 27,
32, 39, 41, 44, 60, 72, 88, 104, 106, 118,
133, 135, 188, 196–197, 203, 208, 237,
240, 244, 246, 256, 272, 274, 279–280,
283–284, 294–295, 298–299, 309–311,
316, 319, 321, 344–347, 349, 351, 356
political science 4–5, 7–8, 13, 23, 109,
235, 269, 280, 294, 340, 354
popular culture 52, 54, 57, 59
population 2–5, 11, 14, 22, 27, 29, 65–67,
69–70, 73–77, 82, 113, 128, 133, 147,
158, 170, 172, 177, 181, 184–185, 194,
199, 252, 269–271, 283–285, 287–288,
289, 291–292, 294–299, 346
postcolonial cinema 91, 93
postcolonial studies 52–53, 239–241,
244
progressive Muslims 217, 221–223, 326
public health 8, 65, 285–288, 297–298
Qurʾān—active interpretation 30, 135,
263, 266–267, 307–308, 312
queer studies 4–5, 10, 14, 60, 62, 192,
230, 325, 329–330
queer-inclusive mosques 15, 329
queer Islamic studies 14, 325–326, 335
Reading, U.K. 105
religiosity 22, 33, 117, 138, 217–218, 274,
320, 348, 352–353
religious organizations 18, 130, 142, 188,
190
representation 9, 13–14, 16, 43–45,
53–54, 56, 58, 99–101, 104–106, 205,
207, 228–229, 236–237, 246, 251, 256,
258, 269, 280, 298, 331–332, 349
rights 13, 22–23, 26, 29–31, 34, 43, 54,
59, 65, 114, 119–120, 140–142, 146–147,
152, 165, 173, 186, 191, 211–213, 219,
221–222, 256, 264, 270–272, 274–277,
279, 283–285, 289–291, 293–295,
297–299, 306, 309–310, 315–316, 319,
340, 344–346, 348, 351–352
secularism 14, 22, 24, 26, 32–33, 35, 115,
136, 215, 267, 272, 274, 345, 355
sexuality 9, 12, 15, 21–22, 25, 28, 31,
33–34, 39–40, 44, 52, 55–58, 60–61,
69, 100–101, 103, 119, 134–136, 138, 177,
191–192, 194, 197–198, 203–204, 219,
222–224, 284, 289, 297, 311, 325–331,
333–335, 339–340, 343, 352, 355–356
science and Islam 151–173
Science and Technology Studies 4, 6, 154
scriptural interpretation 21–22, 29, 31
Shariʿa courts/councils 142–144, 222, 314
Sisters in Islam 30, 222, 307
social movements 15, 340–342, 344,
353–355
social networking 34, 250
social structure 31, 158, 309, 350, 353
sociology 4, 8, 15, 109, 134, 151, 154, 197,
209, 269, 305, 339–340, 344, 353–356
Southeast Asia 4–5, 8–9, 12, 15, 22, 95,
108, 115, 177–186, 191–192, 197–199, 327,
346, 355
space 25–26, 37–39, 41–44, 46, 56, 93,
103, 120–122, 132, 148, 152–153, 155, 161,
165, 171, 178, 208, 213, 224, 244, 255,
259, 262, 277, 313
subjectivity 26, 32–33, 152, 159, 161, 196,
215, 249–251, 307, 328, 331, 352–353,
356
tafsīr (exegesis) 209, 213–214, 221, 328
theology 140, 203, 209, 213–214, 224,
261, 327
“third” cinema 10, 92
transgender 192, 331, 333–335
transnational migration 11
trauma studies 255
380 index
urban 6, 22, 30, 33, 39–41, 44, 46, 81,
108–109, 111–117, 120, 166, 253, 274, 349
users—art and architecture 9, 37, 42, 46
veil 9, 14–15, 30, 92, 103, 107, 116–118,
134, 136–137, 194, 205–206, 222, 229,
238, 276, 342–344, 348
veiling 9, 11, 19, 21, 117–118, 343–344, 348,
352, 354
Amina Wadud 214–215, 218, 265, 267,
305–307, 328
War on Terror 9, 11, 14, 59, 104, 107, 110,
205
women and science 19, 151–173
women filmmakers 98, 100
women—Islamization 212
women—Orientalism 12, 205
women—Qur’an 12, 259, 263
women—Shariʻa law  197, 314
women’s, gender, and sexuality studies 
52, 55–56, 60, 311
women’s identity 264, 311
women’s literature 229, 232, 244, 246
women’s studies 4–5, 60, 204–205
world cinema 10, 91–93, 97
world literature 13, 92, 237, 240–243,
245
youth 8, 15, 24, 33–34, 75–76, 109–110,
112–114, 189, 283, 286, 293–296, 299, 352
youth bulge 75–76, 294–295