An exploration of powerful Muslim women covering issues of gender, culture and politics in Islam.

Winner of the W.J.M. Mackenzie Book Prize 2017 This book provides an account of Muslim women’s political and civic engagement in Britain and France. It examines their interaction with civil society and state institutions to provide an understanding of their development as political actors. The authors argue that Muslim women’s participation is expressed at the intersections of the groups and society to which they belong. In Britain and France, their political attitudes and behaviour are influenced by their national/ethnic origins, religion and specific features of British and French societies. Thus three main spheres of action are identified: the ethnic group, religious group and majority society. Unequal, gendered power relations characterise the interconnection(s) between these spheres of action. Muslim women are positioned within these complex relations and find obstacles and/or facilitators governing their capacity to act politically. The authors suggest that Muslim women’s interest in politics, knowledge of it and participation in both institutional and informal politics is higher than expected. This book will appeal to students and scholars of politics, sociology, gender studies and social anthropology, and will also be of use to policy makers and practitioners in the field of gender and ethno-religious/ethno-cultural policy.

This book investigates agency in the historical resistance movement in Kashmir by initiating a fresh conversation about Muslim Kashmiri women. It exhibits Muslim women not merely as accidental victims but conscientious agents who choose to operate within the struggles of self-determination. The experience of victimization stimulates women to take control of their lives and press for change. Despite experiencing isolating political conditions, Kashmiri women do not internalize their supposed inferiority. The author shows that women’s struggles against patriarchy are at the heart of a very complex historical resistance to the Indian rule.

This book analyzes perceptions of self, power, agency, and gender of Muslim women in a rural community of Bangladesh. Rural women’s limited power and agency has been subsumed within the male dominated Islamic discourses on gender. However, many Muslim women have their own alternative discourses surrounding power and agency. Sarwar Alam intertwines an exploration of these power dynamics with reading of the Qur’an and Hadith, and analyzes how Muslim women’s perception of power and gender are linked to their relationship with religion.

Do Muslim Women Need Saving? is an indictment of a mindset that has justified all manner of foreign interference, including military invasion, in the name of rescuing women from Islam. It offers a detailed, moving portrait of the actual experiences of ordinary Muslim women, and of the contingencies with which they live.

The public debate on Shariʿa councils in Britain has been heavily influenced by the assumption that the councils exist as religious authorities and that those who use them exercise their right to religious freedom. In Shariʿa Councils and Muslim Women in Britain Tanya Walker draws on extensive fieldwork from over 100 cases to argue for a radically different understanding of the setting and dynamics of the Shariʿa councils. The analysis highlights the pragmatic manoeuvrings of Muslim women, in pursuit of defined objectives, within limited space – holding in tension both the constraints of particular frameworks of power, and the realities of women’s agency. Despite this needed nuance in a polarised debate however, important questions about the rights of Muslim women remain.

In the Eyes of many Westerners, Muslim women are hidden behind a veil of negative stereotypes that portray them as either oppressed, subservient wives and daughters or, more recently, as potential terrorists. Yet many Muslim women defy these stereotypes by taking active roles in their families and communities and working to create a more just society. This book introduces eighteen Muslim women activsts from the United States and Canada who have worked in fields from social services, to marital counseling, to political advocacy, in order to further social justice within the Muslim community and in the greater North American society. --