Social Science Research Council

"Recreating Communities of the Faithful?: Negotiating Gender, Religion and Feminism in Egypt and Malaysia"

Questions of gender in Islam, particularly of how women have been excluded from the understanding and codification of religion, have generated some of the most highly contested and controversial discourses in Muslim societies. Across the Muslim world, from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia, Islam’s faithful, especially women, are calling for innovative ways to balance their religion and culture with the demands of globalization. This transnational dissertation project investigates how Muslim women scholar-activists in two organizations in Malaysia and in Egypt are negotiating conventional religious and cultural discourses in order to construct alternative understandings of religion and culture. In addition, assuming that notions of static identity and religious and cultural authenticity are unstable in the process of globalization, this project traces the relationship between the politicization of religion and culture and the remaking of “Muslim” identity. To understand women’s agency, resistance and gender power relations, I explore three interrelated questions: 1) How are women transforming the discourses of gender in Islam through their engagement with religion and culture? 2) Are women’s advocacy strategies a viable tool to re-imagine the transnational Muslim Umma as a transformative space that is inclusive of women’s concerns, experiences and realities? 3) What is the relationship between the politicization of religion and culture and the remaking of identity?

Through methodology that integrates feminist and anthropological approaches to ethnographic research, this project investigates the intricate ways postcolonial states have compelled women to seek creative and contradictory strategies to structure their struggles. This project will further our understanding of gender politics and religious activism both within and among Muslim communities, which is increasingly important given the contemporary resurgence of religion as a political and cultural motivation, and will also advance theoretical understanding across disciplines of specific strategies of resistance that characterize sub-religious and sub-cultural communities.