Usha Sanyal

• Wingate University

Indian Muslim women’s identity is being contested more than ever before under the BJP’s Hindutva regime. Newly imposed meanings of nation and nationalism have produced new imaginaries of the category of “Muslim women”—from being a mere victim of Islam and Muslim men, she has become a nurturer of jihadi mentality, antinational, and a symbol of non-i...

This paper examines madrasa education in UP, with a particular focus on girls, during the 2017–23 period of BJP rule, led by Yogi Adityanath as chief minister. The paper is directed along three distinct lines of inquiry. First, I look back at British Indian colonial policy regarding institutions of higher learning, both Indian and Western, to under...

The Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA), a Muslim women-led organization, has recently supported the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) in India. This step by the BMMA has added a new dimension to the debate on reforms in personal laws, especially the Muslim Personal Law (MPL). More specifically, it signifies a shift in the BMMA’s position. Since its ince...

This book raises important South Asian Muslim historiographical questions through the frame of a small number of case studies of mosque disputes in colonial North India. The book ‘presents a history of the South Asian mosque and Muslim worship as subjects of the [British Indian colonial] law through stories of successive judicial authorizations of...

In India, madrasas for Muslim girls have been increasing in number since the early 1990s, the result in part of rising levels of female literacy but also of the shortage and majoritarian ethos of government schools, leaving Muslim communities to rely on their own local leaders and resources to educate their young. Thus far, there have been few ethn...

In Chapter 9 I focus on the students of Al-Huda classes, both onsite and online. Most of the students who spoke to me were young adults—some married with children, some college students, and some professionals. Whether living in North America, Europe, or South Asia, they were drawn to Al-Huda for a variety of reasons, and all of them reported deriv...

Chapter 6 begins a new section, one which emphasizes daw‘a rather than adab. Against the backdrop of Pakistani politics in the 1990s when Al-Huda International was founded by Farhat Hashmi and Idrees Zubair, it shows how online classes are organized and run at its North American site in Mississauga, Canada. It takes the reader into the online class...

Since the late twentieth century, new institutions of Islamic learning for South Asian women and girls have emerged rapidly, particularly in urban areas and in the diaspora. This book reflects upon the increased access of Muslim girls and women to religious education and the purposes to which they seek to put their learning. Scholars of Faith is ba...

Chapter 7 explores the intellectual foundations of Farhat Hashmi and Idrees Zubair. Zubair was raised in a family with Ahl-i Hadith affiliations, while Hashmi’s father had ties with the Jama‘at-i Islami. However, Hashmi gradually became an Ahl-i Hadith follower as well. What distinguishes the Ahl-i Hadith from other South Asian Sunni maslaks? I tra...

In Chapter 8 I discuss how concretely social change occurs at the level of the everyday among a geographically dispersed set of Muslim women studying the Qur’an. I closely analyse Al-Huda’s messages for women in terms of family and community relationships through examination of Farhat Hashmi’s use of language over an extended period (the mid-1990s...

This chapter introduces the first of my two case studies. It discusses the location and history of Shahjahanpur (and Farrukhabad district) in west UP and the personal history of Sayyid Sahib, the founder of the madrasa. Employing Winkelmann’s concept of ‘core families’, it lays out the web of connections, both familial and Sufi-based, between the l...

In Chapter 3 I enter the classroom with the teachers and students. This chapter presents an ‘ethnography’ of two different classes, one a Qur’an class and the other a class of Qur’anic exegesis for advanced students. We also hear discussions about the importance of taharat or ritual purity. We see how students and teachers interact, and how adab gu...

Chapter 5 examines the lives of six madrasa students who graduated from Jami‘a Nur. This chapter was written collaboratively with Sumbul Farah, an anthropologist, who interviewed the students extensively. The overall conclusion of the chapter (a modified version of which appeared as an article in Modern Asian Studies ) is that the madrasa succeeds...

Chapter 4 looks at students’ emotional attachment to the madrasa, comparing them with the students of a secular Barelwi school that initially operated in a different part of the same premises. Student engagement in the madrasa is demonstrated through key ritual moments: morning ( fajr ) prayer and morning assembly ( du‘a ), and the student-led week...

This chapter lays out the historical background of Muslim women’s education in British India and post-Independence India, including statistical data on UP education history and the Sachar Commission Report. The chapter then explores girls’ madrasa education, in north India specifically, with a focus on a Rampur madrasa (of Jama‘at-i Islami affiliat...

The book concludes by asking ‘Why Now?’ How do we make sense of the contemporary surge in Muslim women’s religious education across South Asia and elsewhere in the world? To start, we must recognize that the growth of Muslim women’s education is part of a wider phenomenon that crosses religious boundaries. This is not an exclusively Muslim phenomen...

How do women express individual agency when engaging in seemingly prescribed or approved practices such as religious fasting? How are sectarian identities played out in the performance of food piety? What do food practices tell us about how women negotiate changes in family relationships? This collection offers a variety of distinct perspectives on...

How do women express individual agency when engaging in seemingly prescribed or approved practices such as religious fasting? How are sectarian identities played out in the performance of food piety? What do food practices tell us about how women negotiate changes in family relationships? This collection offers a variety of distinct perspectives on...

This article presents an ethnography of a contemporary residential madrasa for teenage Muslim girls in a North Indian town undertaken by a team of two researchers. We focused on different aspects of the overall study, with Sanyal conducting participant observation within the madrasa and Farah interviewing a select number of graduates and former stu...

This article is part of Darakhshan Khan’s larger body of work on women in the Tablīghī Jamā‘at, who, as she argues persuasively, have not been given the scholarly attention they deserve (barring a few notable exceptions, among them Metcalf 2000). Khan observes that the reasons for this range from the fact that the public image of the Tablīghī Jamā‘...

Al-Huda International was founded in Islamabad in 1994 by Farhat Hashmi and has since spread across several continents. Its rapid spread has been considerably aided by the online classes in English and Urdu from its headquarters in Canada. Its goal is to teach the Qur’an in Arabic to as many women as possible so they can access the sacred text dire...

This is a very different book from Sikand's first book by Penguin (Sacred Spaces: Exploring Traditions of Shared Faith in India). In that book, he described a variety of what he calls ‘liminal’ religious traditions in different parts of India, traditions that cross boundaries between ‘Hindus’, ‘Muslims’ and ‘Christians’, among others. The quotation...