Scholars of Faith: South Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious KnowledgeSouth Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious Knowledge
Abstract
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 based on ethnographic fieldwork in two institutions of religious learning: the Jami‘a Nur madrasa in Shahjahanpur, North India, and Al-Huda International, an NGO that offers online courses on Islam, especially the Qur’an. In this monograph, Sanyal argues that Islamic religious education in the early twenty-first century—particularly for women—is thoroughly ‘modern’ and that this modernity, reflected in both old and new interpretations of religious texts, allows young South Asian women to evaluate their place in traditional structures of patriarchal authority in the public and private spheres in novel ways.
... Barbara Metcalf, scholar of Islamic reform movements in colonial India, argues that nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Islamic reformers established an imaginary of the ideal Muslim woman as a pious and modest protector of a Muslim ethnonational identity (Metcalf 1990). This construction of the ideal woman's identity, which evolved in response to colonial interventions, continues into the present (Metcalf 1990; for more discussion, see Minault 1986;Devji 1991;Chakrabarty 1993;Chatterjee 1993;Sanyal 2020;Alam 2021). 25 In fact, this image was refashioned to establish Muslim women as the carriers of postindependence/post-Partition cultural, spatial, and political insecurities (Parveen 2021). ...
... The dominant narratives of politics and the debates on the secularization versus the Hinduization of Muslims in order to achieve "national integration" gave rise to cultural, political, and physical insecurities in Muslim communities while at the same time establishing Muslim identity and space as contested categories. The issues of precarity and the invisibilization of Muslim women's struggles in political and academic debates thus need to be placed in the context of anti-Muslim rhetoric, dispossession, and discrimination, which became prominent during and after the National Emergency in the late 1970s (Parveen 2021 intersection of religious practices, religious identity, class, and caste, and the ways in which they navigate and negotiate a space for themselves within and without "Muslim localities" and Muslim/minority institutions (Kirmani 2013;Menon 2022;Sanyal 2020). Kirmani (2013) discusses Muslim women's lives in India in the context of their socioreligious identity and experiences of marginalization, and highlights the insecurity they face every day in a predominantly Muslim locality in South Delhi. ...
... She explains the socioeconomic and political forces that shape the worlds of a number of Muslim women and how they negotiate landscapes of inequality, especially in a neoliberal economy and right-wing Hindutva politics. Usha Sanyal (2020) explores this question in the context of girls' madrasas, which have been yet another constitutive element of contestation of identity and agency, and at the same time the site of distinct experiences. Looking at the rapid growth of educational institutions of Islamic learning for women and girls, especially in India and South Asia, Sanyal argues that Muslim women and girls belonging to some marginalized Muslim communities view these paradoxically "modern" religious institutions as a safe space in which to study and develop greater self-awareness and self-confidence. ...
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-inclusivity. This objectification reflects the ways in which Muslim women have survived disparities, and responded to patriarchal and institutional structures of power and control—the exclusionary mechanisms they face within and without community boundaries—to “make place” for themselves as individuals, as women, and as Muslims. In this context, we deconstruct the idea of “the Muslim woman” in India, arguing against their essentialization and “Othering” in popular culture, the media, and even by those who employ the established notions of “secularity.” Specifically, we highlight the intersections of socio-economic factors that explain the hardships and discrimination Muslim women face, and the many ways in which they have expressed agency in their daily lives in both private and public spaces. The ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the authors in different parts of India, including Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, and Delhi, as well as on online platforms, explores the notions of khidmat (care), adab (etiquette), namaz (prayer), riwaj (ritual), and talaq (divorce) as expressions of individual and collective struggle, assertions of identity, and politics.
... In this madrasa-and probably in many other girls' madrasas around the country-discipline is coupled with nurture. Punishment, when meted out, is not corporal but takes the form of shaming (Sanyal and Farah 2019;Sanyal 2020). 43 It is clear in a number of ways that I explore below that the madrasa space is a mirror of Muslim domestic space, though not identical to it. ...
... Ritual duties are interwoven with mundane schooltime obligations. Over time this strict routine engenders a new habitus and lasting personal transformation that the student carries over into her adult life (Sanyal and Farah 2019;Sanyal 2020). Additionally, Barelwi identity is created in subtle ways through the texts used and interpretive moves that teach the students how to live as "good" (Barelwi Sunni) Muslims who will guide the spiritual development of their families after marriage. ...
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 understand the colonial roots of the current mistrust of madrasa education by secular Indians and the Hindutva-leaning public. Second, I ask how the UP government has handled educational policy toward Muslims, particularly that regarding madrasas. I focus on a statewide government survey of madrasas in 2022–23, the results and implications of which are ongoing as we speak. And third, I ask how and why many Muslims continue to support madrasa education, including girls’ madrasas, a relatively new addition to the overall educational landscape in UP and elsewhere in India. This section of the paper is based on fieldwork observations at two girls’ madrasas in UP. I conclude that despite some problems—curricular, financial, and other—girls’ madrasas play a valuable role in educating Muslim girls. Graduates enjoy greater respect in their families and communities because of their religious knowledge, and they acquire life skills which benefit their families and communities.
NurulQuran er en salafi-orientert skole og et trossamfunn grunnlagt, organisert og ledet av kvinner. Med tilhold på Lindeberg i Alna bydel i Oslo siden 2014, har NurulQuran nå også vokst til et transnasjonalt nettverk innad i den pakistanske diasporaen. Leder og grunnlegger er Iffat Maqbool, som etter eget ønske omtales som ustazah. Selv om det finnes fellestrekk mellom hennes islamtolkning og profeministiske tolkninger, spesielt i forståelsen av kvinner og menn som likestilte under Gud, avviser Maqbool feministiske likestillingsidealer som et «ikke-tema». Kvinnene ved NurulQuran omfavner islamsk ortodoksi og ortopraksi, og anser det som frigjørende for seg selv som kvinner og muslimer. Målet er å bevisstgjøre kvinner om deres status og stilling i islam, og på denne måten styrke umma og kunnskapen om «sann islam».
From December 2019 to March 2020, India was engulfed in protests against the new Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The Act provides a path to citizenship for persecuted minorities from neighboring countries but excludes Muslims. Amid countrywide protests emerged a unique political experience spearheaded by Muslim women: Shaheen Bagh. This article focuses on a protest site in the southern Indian city of Chennai to examine the everyday practices of domestic and ritual life that Muslim women brought to such spaces. It argues that such moments, though seemingly apolitical, also express political and moral will. By contextualizing these protests within a longer history of dissent in the state of Tamil Nadu, this article shows how Chennai Shaheen Bagh lies at the intersection of region and nation, union and federal government. When protesters declare that they will not show their papers, it is not just a form of political dissent; they are also alluding to affective ties to place, kinship, and traditions that temporally and spatially exceed the prescriptive nature of the state’s demands to prove one’s citizenship via documents. Although the protests were about a citizenship law, Muslim women were in fact pointing to various modes of belonging that cannot be captured by the bureaucratic apparatus of the state.
This article draws on my ethnography of girls’ madrasas in India. It is woven around the ethnographic portrait of Zainab, a rather reluctant madrasa student studying in a residential girls’ madrasa in Delhi who aspires to be a doctor. The article employs ethnographic portraiture to ‘focus in’ on Zainab’s educational journey and life in the madrasa, while also drawing attention to the larger canvas of intersecting forms of marginalisation, gender negotiations, and claim-making by Muslim women. It highlights how Muslim marginalisation intersects with gender disadvantage shaping everyday decisions about education, mobility and career choices. It argues that women’s negotiations and agency are nested in a larger context of marginalisation; while also co-constituting it. It examines Zainab’s life trajectory and aspirations to illustrate how education is a contradictory resource. At one level there is a synchrony between parents and madrasas on ideals of Islamic womanhood, but at another level, the piety project implemented by the madrasa does not represent the everyday experiences of madrasa students. The article argues that young women like Zainab, in attempting to balance madrasa prescriptions and their own aspirations, refashion gender norms through its inhabitation.
The article employs the ethnographic portrait of the founder and co-owner of a chain of girls’ madrasas in a Muslim-dominated mofussil town in Uttar Pradesh to illuminate the current moment at which girls’ madrasas stand in a rapidly changing India. These madrasas use a range of imaginaries from the global ummah to the pious educated Indian Muslim woman to recast madrasa education, offering a mix of formalised religious education and modern schooling in safe ‘purdah’ institutions. The article illustrates how girls’ madrasas are both a source and result of the changing imagery of the kamil momina ¹ or ideal Islamic woman in India. It teases out the connections between these various strands to illustrate larger social implications and argues that contemporary girls’ madrasas do not conform to the binaries of social reproduction and empowerment that have been conventionally applied to studies on madrasas.
We are witnessing an exciting renaissance in scholarship on modern South Asian Muslim religious scholars (‘ulama’). This article examines how this new scholarship repositions earlier academic conversations in distinctive ways to make several signal moves: (a) centering the political (particularly the theme of sovereignty); (b) complexifying the study of religious authority by attention to textuality, embodiment, and internal criticism; and finally (c) taking the transnational turn and tracing ‘ulama’ communities in the South Asian diaspora. The article also considers the public scholarship of three academics who have begun asking the question: What are the ethics and politics of translating ‘ulama’ life‐worlds beyond the etic‐emic and secular‐religious frameworks?
Over the last two decades we have seen a proliferation in the number of self-proclaimed Islamic scholars preaching piety to Muslim women. An emerging few of these scholars gaining prominence happen to be women, feminizing what is predominantly a patriarchal domain of dawah (missionary work) and proselytization. Traditionally speaking, Muslim missionaries have never been restricted to a particular moral province, perhaps due to the fact that Islam was never intended as a hierarchical religion with a mosque–state divide. This makes mapping Muslim moral spaces in a hyper-globalized world—one in which shared identities and ideologies transcend territorial boundaries—all the more challenging. Using the firebrand female Muslim tele preacher, Dr. Farhat Hashmi, and her global proselytizing mission (Al-Huda International) as a springboard for discussion, this paper seeks to map out the ways in which modern Muslim women in the post-9/11 British Pakistani diaspora navigate these moral provinces. By juxtaposing the staunchly orthodox impositions of niqab-clad Dr. Hashmi, with the revolt from within Muslim spaces, from practicing, ‘middle-path’ Muslims, this paper critically engages with Saba Mahmood’s concept of the ‘politics of piety’ and its various critiques. In so doing, we reimagine Muslim spaces, as well as the moralization versus multivocality debate surrounding them, and the importance of positioning agency and complex lived realities of women occupying these spaces at the center of our analysis on Muslim moral provinces.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.