Author: Therese Saliba
Carolyn Allen/Judith A Howard
Editor(s): Therese Saliba / Carolyn Allen
Publisher: Orient Longman
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 354
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8125027424
Description
In a time of increasing hostility towards Islam, this collection extends the boundaries of global feminism to include Islamic women. Challenging Orientalist assumptions of Muslim women as victims of Islam and Islamic fundamentalism, these groundbreaking essays focus on the complex relations of power that shape women's negotiations for identity, power, and agency as participant in religious cultural and nationalist movements. This book brings together Signs essays on women in the Middle East, South Asia, and the Diaspora, from Bangladesh, Canada, Egypt, Iran, Israel/Palestine, Pakistan, and Yemen to explore how women negotiate indigenous identities and attempt to gain political, economic and legal rights.
This collection shows that Islam is a heterogeneous set of historically and contextually variable practices and beliefs shaped by region, nation, ethnicity, sect, and class, as well as by responses to local and transnational cultural and economic processes. In examining women's participation in religious and nationalist project, these critics debate controversial issues: does Islamic feminism provide an alternative, possibly revolutionary paradigm, to Eurocentric liberal humanism and the individualism of western feminism? Is Islam any more oppressive to women than the workings of the modern secular state? How are the lives and texts of Arab and Muslim women discursively constructed for local or western Consumption? These essays expose the shortcomings of the secularist assumptions of many recent feminist analyses, which continue to treat religion in general and fundamentalism in particular as a problematic tool of oppression used against women, rather than as a viable form of feminist agency that produces contradictory effects for women participants.
Contents
INTRODUCTION
Gender, Politics, and Islam
THERESE SALIBA
Islamic Feminism and its Discontents: Towards a Resolution of the Debate
VALENTINE M MOGHADAM
The Politics of Feminism in Islam
ANOUAR MAJID
The Power Paradox in Muslim Women’s Majales: North-West Pakistani Mourning Rituals as Sites of Contestation over Religious Politics, Ethnicity, and Gender
MARY ELAINE HEGLAND
Icons and Militants: Mothering in the Danger Zone
JULIE PETEET
Elusive Bodies: The Politics of Aesthetics among Yemeni Elite Women
GABRIELE VON BRUCK
Contesting the Illicit: Gender and the Politics of Fatwas in Bangladesh
ELORA SHEHABUDDHIN
Women in the Era of Modernity and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Case of Taslima Nasrin of Bangladesh
S M SHAMSUL ALAM
Framing Nawal El Saadawi: Arab Feminism in a Transnational World
AMAL AMIRCH
Muslim Women: Negotiations in the Third Space
SHAHNAZ KHAN
About the Contributors
Index