Elora Shehabuddin

A crystal-clear account of the entangled history of Western and Muslim feminisms. Western feminists, pundits, and policymakers tend to portray the Muslim world as the last and most difficult frontier of global feminism. Challenging this view, Elora Shehabuddin presents a unique and engaging history of feminism as a story of colonial and postcolonial interactions between Western and Muslim societies. Muslim women, like other women around the world, have been engaged in their own struggles for generations: as individuals and in groups that include but also extend beyond their religious identity and religious practices. The modern and globally enmeshed Muslim world they navigate has often been at the weaker end of disparities of wealth and power, of processes of colonization and policies of war, economic sanctions, and Western feminist outreach. Importantly, Muslims have long constructed their own ideas about women’s and men’s lives in the West, with implications for how they articulate their feminist dreams for their own societies. Stretching from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment era to the War on Terror present, Sisters in the Mirror shows how changes in women’s lives and feminist strategies have consistently reflected wider changes in national and global politics and economics. Muslim women, like non-Muslim women in various colonized societies and non-white and poor women in the West, have found themselves having to negotiate their demands for rights within other forms of struggle—for national independence or against occupation, racism, and economic inequality. Through stories of both well-known and relatively unknown figures, Shehabuddin recounts instances of conflict alongside those of empathy, collaboration, and solidarity across this extended period. Sisters in the Mirror is organized around stories of encounters between women and men from South Asia, Britain, and the United States that led them, as if they were looking in a mirror, to pause and reconsider norms in their own society, including cherished ideas about women’s roles and rights. These intertwined stories confirm that nowhere, in either Western or Muslim societies, has material change in girls’ and women’s lives come easily or without protracted struggle.

A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism

Sisters in the Mirror

Through extensive field research, Elora Shehabuddin explores the profound implications of women's political and social mobilization for reshaping Islam. Specifically, she examines the lives of Muslim women in Bangladesh who have become increasingly mobilized by the activities of predominantly secular NGOs, yet who desire to retain, reclaim, and reshape-rather than reject-their faith. In their employment and in their interactions with the legal system, the state, NGOs, and political and religious groups, women are changing state practices, views of women in the public sphere, and the nature of lived Islam itself. In contrast to most work on Islam and Muslims, which has focused on the Middle East and has privileged the study of religious and legal texts, this book redirects our attention to South Asia, home to one of the largest Muslim populations in the world, and emphasizes the actual experiences of Muslims. Women and gender, as well as Bangladesh's formally democratic context, are central to this inquiry and analysis.

Democracy, Development, and Muslim Women in Bangladesh

Reshaping the Holy

Ebru Kongar

Jennifer C. Olmsted

Bringing together feminist analyses of economic processes and outcomes with feminist critiques of Orientalism, this book examines the diverse economic realities facing women in a range of Muslim communities. This approach pays special attention to the role of Islam in economic analyses of gender equality and women’s well-being in Muslim communities, while at the same time challenging biased and inaccurate accounts that essentialize Islam. Nuanced case studies conducted in Bangladesh, Iran, Israel, Nigeria, and Turkey illustrate the historical and institutional diversity of Muslim communities and draw vivid pictures of the everyday economic lives of Muslim women in these communities. These studies are complemented by quantitative analyses that extend beyond inserting Islam as a dummy variable. The contributions represent a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, economics, gender studies, political science, psychology, and sociology. By placing critiques of Orientalist scholarship in direct dialogue with scholarship on economic development in Muslim contexts, this diverse collection illustrates how different methods and frameworks can work together to provide a better understanding of gender equality and women’s well-being in Muslim contexts. In doing so, the authors aim to facilitate conversations among feminist scholars across disciplines in order to provide a more nuanced picture of the situation facing women in Muslim communities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Feminist Economics.

Critical Feminist and Postcolonial Analyses

Gender and Economics in Muslim Communities

"Taking a transnational approach, this book challenges the belief that the Muslim world is unrelentingly antifeminist. The author challenges assumptions about inevitable civilizational antagonism between the "West" and the "Muslim world," a notion that has become increasingly popular in recent decades, and of a lag in the emergence of feminism in the latter. While it shouldn't be controversial to insist that male bias and privilege are present in Western as well as in Muslim-majority societies, it is more difficult to show how and why efforts to improve women's lives in even these geographically distant parts of the world have long been interconnected and interdependent. Sisters in the Mirror is a feminist story about how changing global and local power disparities-between Europeans and Bengalis, between Brahmos, Hindus, and Muslims within Bengal, between feminists of the global North and South, and between Western and Muslim feminists-have shaped ideas about change in women's lives and also the strategies by which to enact change. With the lasting shift in the balance of economic, political, and military power between Muslim and Euro-American nations toward the latter since the eighteenth century, Muslim advocates for women's rights have had to define their agendas for reform in the shadow of Western imperial and economic power. The stories in this book show that no society has a monopoly on ideas about justice and fairness (in the matter of women's or any other group's rights) or, for that matter, on male bias, violence, and injustice; no community is isolated or pure; and people everywhere are enriched by open-minded encounters with people who eat, dress, and pray differently, or don't pray at all"--

Elora Shehabuddin

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