The marginalisation of Muslims in India has recently been the subject of heated public debate. In these discussions, however, Muslim women are often either overlooked or treated as a homogenous group with a common set of interests. Focusing on the narratives of women living in a predominantly Muslim colony in South Delhi, this book attempts to demonstrate the complexity of their lives and the multiple levels of insecurity they face. Unlike other studies on Indian Muslims that focus on Islam as a defining factor, this book highlights the ways in which religious identity intersects with other identities including class/status, regional affiliation and gender. The author also sheds light on the impact of such events as the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 and the subsequent riots, the Gujarat communal carnage in 2002, and the anti-Sikh violence in New Delhi in 1984, along with the rise of Hindutva, and growing Islamophobia experienced worldwide in the post-9/11 period — on the articulation of identities at the local level and increasing religion-based spatial segregation in Indian cities. The study highlights how these incidents combine in different ways to increase the sense of marginalisation experienced by Muslims at the level of the locality. Understanding the need to look beyond preconceived religious categories, this book will serve as essential reading for those interested in sociology, anthropology, gender, religious and urban studies, as well as policymakers and organisations concerned with issues related to religious minorities in India.

Until now the bulk of the literature about the veil has been written by outsiders who do not themselves veil. This literature often assumes a condescending tone about veiled women, assuming that they are making uninformed decisions choices about veiling makes them subservient to a patriarchal culture and religion. “Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil” offers an alternative viewpoint, based on the thoughts and experiences of Muslim women themselves. This is the first time a clear and concise book-length argument has been made for the compatibility between veiling and modernity. Katherine Bullock uncovers positive aspects of the veil that are frequently not perceived by outsiders. “Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil” looks at the colonial roots of the negative Western stereotype of the veil. It presents interviews with Muslim women to discover their thoughts and experiences with the veil in Canada. The book also offers a positive theory of veiling. The author argues that in consumer capitalist cultures, women can find wearing the veil a liberation from the stifling beauty game that promotes unsafe and unhealthy ideal body images for women. This book also includes an extensive bibliography on topics related to Muslim women and the veil.

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.

Marnia Lazreg examines four arguments given by women who take up veiling, exposes their assumptions, & describes the implications for the future.

Using the methodology of modern scholars in the fields of Arabic lexicography, linguistics, and psychoanalysis, Tunisian feminist scholar Olfa Youssef investigates the rulings about inheritance, marriage, and homosexuality in the Qur’anic text itself and compares them with the interpretations provided by male Muslim theologians and legal scholars from medieval times to the present. In this book, she makes five central arguments: (1) There is a discrepancy between the layered signification in the Qur’anic text itself and the sutured explanations by religious scholars which have been enacted into law in many Muslim countries today; (2) the plurality of meanings is the quintessential essence of the Qur’an as evidenced in the absence of any sura over which there was unanimous agreement among Muslim scholars; (3) when male privilege was at stake, male legal scholars, to protect their own interests, ignored the divine text and based their rulings on human consensus; (4) Muslim medieval views on gender and homosexuality were more tolerant than contemporary ones; and finally (5), preferring indetermination and perplexity over the finality and certainties found in the judgements of male theologians, Youssef argues that only God knows the Qur’an’s true meaning. Her job as a Muslim female scholar is only to raise questions over those human interpretations that many Muslim societies mistake for divine will.

The marginalisation of Muslims in India has recently been the subject of heated public debate. In these discussions, however, Muslim women are often either overlooked or treated as a homogenous group with a common set of interests. Focusing on the narratives of women living in a predominantly Muslim colony in South Delhi, this book attempts to demonstrate the complexity of their lives and the multiple levels of insecurity they face. Unlike other studies on Indian Muslims that focus on Islam as a defining factor, this book highlights the ways in which religious identity intersects with other identities including class/status, regional affiliation and gender. The author also sheds light on the impact of such events as the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 and the subsequent riots, the Gujarat communal carnage in 2002, and the anti-Sikh violence in New Delhi in 1984, along with the rise of Hindutva, and growing Islamophobia experienced worldwide in the post-9/11 period — on the articulation of identities at the local level and increasing religion-based spatial segregation in Indian cities. The study highlights how these incidents combine in different ways to increase the sense of marginalisation experienced by Muslims at the level of the locality. Understanding the need to look beyond preconceived religious categories, this book will serve as essential reading for those interested in sociology, anthropology, gender, religious and urban studies, as well as policymakers and organisations concerned with issues related to religious minorities in India.

Why “the Muslim question” is really about the West and its own anxieties—not Islam In this fearless, original book, Anne Norton demolishes the notion that there is a “clash of civilizations” between the West and Islam. What is really in question, she argues, is the West’s commitment to its own ideals: to democracy and the Enlightenment trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In the most fundamental sense, the Muslim question is about the values not of Islamic, but of Western, civilization.