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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.
"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 Mirro...
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.
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 ...
The articles in this volume build up ethnographic analysis complementary to the historiography of South Asian Islam, which has explored the emergence of reformism in the context of specific political and religious circumstances of nineteenth-century British India. Taking up diverse popular and scholarly debates as well as everyday religious practices, this volume also breaks away from the dominant trend of mainstream ethnographic work, which celebrates Sufi-inspired forms of Islam as tolerant, plural, authentic and so on, pitted against a 'reformist' Islam. Urging a more nuanced examination of all forms of reformism and their reception in practice, the contributions here powerfully demonstrate the historical and geographical specificities of reform projects. In doing so, they challenge prevailing perspectives in which substantially different traditions of reform are lumped together into one reified category (often carelessly shorthanded as 'wah'habism') and branded as extremist – if not altogether demonised as terrorist.
Focusing on seven crucial debates in the field of gender and development, this compilation shows why development policy must respond to cultural differences and illustrates the rewards of doing so.
In Intimacies of Violence, Nadine Shaanta Murshid demonstrates how transnational middle-class Bangladeshi women personally embody structural violence to shed light on the ways in which violence is produced, perpetuated, and resisted. Transnational Bangladeshi women are individuals who occupy space in both the United States and Bangladesh, living bilocating yet bordered lives. Murshid forwards four broad arguments. First, a transnational feminist approach documents the "shock of arrival" to provide an examination of how social locations and associated status impact the intimate economies in which women experience inequities related to love, sex, and desire. Second, drawing on theories from so...
This new edition of the Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia provides a comprehensive overview of the study of gender in South Asia. The Handbook covers the central contributions that have defi ned this area and captures innovative and emerging paradigms that are shaping the future of the field. It offers a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives spanning both the humanities and social sciences, focusing on India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. This revised edition has been thoroughly updated and includes new chapters, thus adding new areas of scholarship. The Handbook is organized thematically into five major parts: • Historical formations and theoretical ...
Is Bangladesh becoming a Taliban state? The question has become urgent in light of the growing strength of militant groups supposedly aligned with Al Quaida, the landslide victory of the center-right coalition in the general election of October 2001, and the deliberate and planned violence against religious minorities that followed. God Willing explores the explosive issue of Talibanization by analyzing the politics of Islamism in the world's third most populous Muslim country. Ali Riaz helps the reader to understand the emergence of Islamism as a legitimate democratic political in a largely secular state, as opposed to the media's sensational portrayal of Bangladesh as a country overrun by Islamist forces with a supranational agenda. The author compares Bangladesh with Indonesia and Pakistan, thus adding a valuable global context for evaluating the politics of Muslim countries.
This book critically examines the constitutional position and contribution of the Bangladesh Parliament during the fifty years of its existence. Examining the institution through a “Westminster” lens, the book unearths how and why it behaves in an (un)Westminster, rather say the "Eastminster”, way. This book is the first of its kind attempting a separation of powers and checks and balances inspired analysis of the Parliament vis-à-vis Bangladesh's government, judiciary, and the people. It explains how its internal democracy deficit arising from the country's undemocratic political partises deny the Bangladesh Parliament, its rightful place within the country's constitutional design.