Contains 13 essays which discuss formal women's organizations, informal associations related to rural and semiurban organization of work, women's religious associations, and individual strategies outside the framework of associations.

DOES IT MATTER?: Jimi 0. Adesina

Since around 2000, a growing number of women in Dakar, Senegal have come to act openly as spiritual leaders for both men and women. As urban youth turn to the Fayḍa Tijāniyya Sufi Islamic movement in search of direction and community, these women provide guidance in practicing Islam and cultivating mystical knowledge of God. While women Islamic leaders may appear radical in a context where women have rarely exercised Islamic authority, they have provoked surprisingly little controversy. Wrapping Authority tells these women’s stories and explores how they have developed ways of leading that feel natural to themselves and those around them. Addressing the dominant perceptions of Islam as a conservative practise, with stringent regulations for women in particular, Joseph Hill reveals how women integrate values typically associated with pious Muslim women into their leadership. These female leaders present spiritual guidance as a form of nurturing motherhood; they turn acts of devotional cooking into a basis of religious authority and prestige; they connect shyness, concealing clothing, and other forms of feminine “self-wrapping” to exemplary piety, hidden knowledge, and charismatic mystique. Yet like Sufi mystical discourse, their self-presentations are profoundly ambiguous, insisting simultaneously on gender distinctions and on the transcendence of gender through mystical unity with God.

This trilingual volume focuses on acts of transgressive acting/writing in selected texts of European literatures whose authors differ in gender, nationality and time frame. Thus, the contributions collected here consider a double questioning: of difference and transgression of norms. Both concepts are set in relation to each other in order to be able to embed any transition in cultural-social-historical contexts. The analyses and interpretations of selected texts from German, French, Polish, Russian and ancient literature, presented in chronological order, show exemplary acts of transgression in different cultures and under changing time circumstances and document aesthetic attempts to revise the existing order and create a new one.

(Peeters 1995)

Focuses on women and the civilizations and societies in which Islam has played a historic role. Surveys all facets of life (society, economy, politics, religion, the arts, popular culture, sports, health, science, medicine, environment, and so forth) of women in these societies.