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This paper is based on a three‐year research project entitled Minority Women Negotiating Citizenship. Conceived of in the aftermath of Gujarat 2002, the project studied 75 life‐history narratives of Muslim women survivors of communal violence in Gujarat, Hyderabad and Mumbai, in order to map their everyday experiences of negotiating survival, marginalisation and exclusion. While analysing our material we found that our preliminary organising or analytic categories – victim, agent, Muslim, woman, class, location – could not contain the negotiations and fluid ‘subjects’ of the narratives. The most useful analytic concepts and tools were those being used by the women themselves in their narratives, such as bahar nikalna and sambhalna. …

Women activists, politicians and policymakers including international development experts are seeking to harness the power of the divine. The rationale is simple: if people are driven by faith, then let us use faith to drive them towards social and political change. This article problematizes the instrumentalization of religion, arguing that there are many risks in pursuing this route as a way of addressing gendered injustices. It also calls for a different approach to disentangling women's engagement with religion as politics, as morality and as personal piety, using women's hair as a case in point. …

This article introduces an issue of writing on the ways in which religion enters cultural and social life. The papers in this issue concentrate on the way that Islam impacts on the everyday aspects of the lives of people in Muslim societies or communities where Islam plays a part. This issue emerged from a panel presentation on ‘Women Negotiating Islam’, about how women cope with the ways that religion enters their lives, and brings out the cultural aspects behind women’s negotiations of the positions made available to them and their struggle to carve their own spaces. The issue aims to show how women, culture and religion form a difficult and complex terrain in which our political and social lives are lived. …

This article examines how girls’ education since 1995 has emerged as a prominent symbol within the ‘rights’ discourse coming out of the Beijing Platform for Action. By highlighting the neo-liberal and neo-colonial processes during this time, particular shifts are traced which show how girls’ education has been a symbolic part of the geo-political canvas in Pakistan and Afghanistan alongside the ‘war on terror’ and universalisation of education. The article refers to alternative voices which have attempted to disrupt the global narrative of the post-Beijing ‘rights’ agenda and points to the problems of this in the context of occupations, militarisation, and markets being used simultaneously as strategies for global governance and order. …

One in four world citizens across the globe identify themselves as Muslim, and they represent a striking diversity of values and interpretations of Islam’s tenets towards female sexual behaviour and abortion. This is characterized both in the social stigma associated with abortion, and the varying legal status abortion holds in Islamic countries, ranging from legalization to decriminalization in certain cases to full criminalization. In many places, the changing face of society and attitudes towards family size have not kept current with policies and access to contraception, resulting in an increase in the number of abortions and high levels of maternal mortality rates where abortion remains a criminal offense. This article illustrates how a range of strategies including documenting and sharing women’s experiences, advances in abortion techniques, and learning from model countries can be used by a variety of actors and organisations to advocate, on religious, human rights and political grounds, to gain greater access to safer abortion and sexual health services. …

Islam and feminism have had a troubled relationship. Over the last two decades, scholars and activists have questioned the western credentials of feminism and claimed justice as a purpose and possibility that can be captured via religious routes. Religion provides women with an ethical framework and a moral foundation that recognizes their rights as individuals and as a collective, albeit redefining equality in the process. The mosque movement in Egypt has empowered women to find dignity, companionship and comfort through piety and conformity to a religious ideal and challenge the less-than-perfect world around them. …

In the past two decades, women en route to places of work and education have become a very visible part of the urban landscape. In the past five to seven years, women’s active engagement with religion via taleem groups has also left its mark on the public space through, among other things, the proliferation of the hijab - the covering of the head. In light of the new spaces that have opened up for women, this paper, presented to 'Pathways: What are we Learning?', Analysis Conference, Cairo, 20-24 January 2009 explores what it means for these women - the factory worker, the student and the taleem participant to be Muslim. It investigates what it means for these women to have faith, and how they negotiate the performance of rituals. …

In Palestine, a reassertion of the ‘secularist’ identity of the ‘Palestinian national project’ is taking place against a deeply divided political society characterised by a Palestinian authority in conflict with Hamas. This article argues that the instrumentalisation of religion by the state has backfired leaving secular feminist activists in an unenviable position – without a constituency or a socially legitimate framework through which to address gender and social justice issues. At the same time, a reassertion of the ‘secularist’ identity is taking place against a deeply divided political society characterized by a Palestinian authority in conflict with Hamas. This conflict accompanying the ‘secularization process’ resulted in crushing the very structure of the notion of citizenship and the figure of the secular citizen subject itself. …

In December 1995, when Hamas announced the establishment of the Islamic National Salvation Party, a political organization separate from its military wing, it opened the way for involvement of the Islamic movement in the political processes brought about in the West Bank and Gaza with the signing of the Oslo Accords and the arrival of the Palestinian National Authority. In speaking of the rights of different groups, including women, in its founding statement, and in setting up in Gaza a Women's Action Department, the new party opened its doors to the ‘new Islamic woman’ and to a significant evolution in Islamist gender ideology in Gaza, if not in the West Bank – where, due to Hamas' policy there of targeting only males, there exists no parallel to the Salvation Party or organisational support for women like that represented by the Women's Action Department in Gaza. Hamas' gender ideology, like that of the secularist parties, remains contradictory, and doors to women's equality only partly open; nevertheless, Islamist women have managed to build impressive, well‐organised women's constituencies among highly educated and professional women coming from poor and refugee backgrounds; and the Salvation Party shows an increasing tendency to foster gender equality and more egalitarian social ideals, while holding fast to the agenda of national liberation. These advances have been achieved both through alternative interpretations of Islamic legal and religious texts, and through positive engagement with the discourses of other groups, whether secular feminists or nationalists. …

Postcolonial feminist representations of Muslim women as subjects and agents have successfully cleared a space for unsettling oppressive colonial representations of Muslim women as unchanging victims of patriarchal religion and Muslim men. This space has also brought into view new problems and issues that divide Muslim women into feminist and fundamentalists, secular and religious, diasporic and native. This paper focuses on one of the most contentious issues of Muslim women's representation: secular feminists' attempts to represent women in Islamic religious movements. In this process I examine some of the normative and ethical dimensions of feminist research as they emerged in my research with women in the Jamaat‐e‐Islami, a movement for religious reform and renewal in Pakistan. …

This report focuses on a project which looks at resurgent Islam and its influence on the formation of female identities and sexualities. The researchers explore the ways in which women in their daily lives engage with religious tenets and observance, focusing on new forms of religious organization and the appeal it has for women of various classes. …

Mulki Al-Sharmani critically examines the institutional narrative of marriage constructed and sustained by substantive family laws, juxtaposed against the lived experience of marriage for many women in Egypt. Based on the doctrines of classical schools of Islamic jurisprudence, Egypt’s family laws uphold a contractual model of marriage in which a husband acquires the right to a wife’s physical and sexual availability in the conjugal home in return for the obligation to provide for her and their children. …

Bangladesh has recently been seeing a rise in religiosity which has been treated as problematic, anti-secular and anti-progressive within the public sphere. Various writers describe this trend as having a disempowering effect on women and negating their self-expression. However, underlying these views is the assumption that the assertion of women's agency is not enough if it does not confront existing structures of relations. This article asks whether it is possible that in seeking changes in certain aspects of one's life, existing gender relations are not necessarily transformed, but indirectly challenged and reconfigured? The conclusion suggests that rather than a polarisation of the secular and religious ways of living most people are in fact in between, negotiating between the two camps, and borrowing ideas and ways from both. …

Final synthesis report from the Middle East Hub of Pathways of Women’s Empowerment (Pathways) - an international research and communications programme that has focused for the five years from 2006-2011 on understanding and influencing efforts to bring about positive change in women’s lives. After an introduction to the Middle East research projects within the four research themes, the report analyses selected research. Highlights from the ME Hub are given along with a detailed list of research outputs. …

This presentation to the Pathways South Asia Hub Final Conference held in Dhaka from 26-28 July 2011 outlines Pathways South Asia research which explores Bengali women's ability to become cultural markers and their place in shaping an emerging nationalist discourse. By using a focus on music, the research looks at the binary between the secular and the religious and questions how the Bangladeshi nation can be understood through this through history. …