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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 book explores the role that religion, culture and society play in the social and political positioning of women. The collection of essays in the book aims to capture the variety of policies, discourses, debates and interventions that have influenced the lives of women in South Asia and to identify those that have led to greater empowerment of women. The contributors assess the current situation and provide a rallying call for progressive politics that is committed to universal values. The essays also review as well as show us the new directions that are opening up new pathways for women to traverse. …

Charmaine Pereira’s and Bibi Bakare Yusuf’s chapter is a study of a sex scandal in which nude photos of a Nigerian actress, Anita Hogan, appeared in print media in 2006. The publication of the photos transgressed normative and legal prescriptions about what constitutes legitimate exposure of the female body in the public arena. …

This report in Bangla comes from research that focused on exploring the identity formation of Bengali Muslim women by investigating the cultural and political history of Bangladesh spanning the 20th Century. …

This chapter situates the analysis of the Palestinian women’s movement in a colonial context and conceptualises the relation between the national liberation struggle against the Israeli occupation and social emancipation. It traces the historical development of the women’s movement including the contemporary professionalisation and institutionalisation of women's activism in the nineties, and its impact in expanding the gap between women’s leadership and grassroots. …

What is new and different in the formation of the 21st century Bangladeshi woman in comparison to her formation in the 20th century? What forces are at play in the construction of the figure of this new millennial woman? The Pathways of Women’s Empowerment research consortium has identified three themes to map out the progress and changes in women’s lives. The notion of ‘progress’ must be problematized, and a cultural trajectory must be used to see where the conflicts between tradition and modernity are still at play, what these concepts mean in the lives of women, and what are the main cultural factors that pertain to the lives of women today. In this chapter, Azim refers to three broad fields: religion, especially Islam; the role of new media; and the development discourse and analyses their role in the fashioning of the new Bangladeshi woman. …

The author presents the findings of her research to look at two dominant factors – religion and popular culture – that have affected women’s lives in Bangladesh in their search to give it meaning and form. This research stemmed from an exploratory paper five years ago, and sought to answer the questions: How are we to understand these ‘new’ women? What are the policy and programmatic interventions that are now required? How are they being articulated by women themselves? In short, what’s new in new women’s lives? In this paper presented to Pathways South Asia Hub Final Conference, 26-28 July 2011, first Azim provides a background on nation- and identity-building in post-colonial South Asia and then examines the position of women a hundred years on to see if there has been a ‘resolution’ of the nation- and identity- building issues, or what shape and form they have acquired since. The research found that religion, however it figured into women’s lives, was always empowering and was not seen as anti-modern or conservative. With regard to popular culture, they found that women viewers of TV were aware of social messages on TV and were critical of TV programming’s lack of diversity. …

Women have always been central to the process of national identity formation in South Asia, and in the contests and contradictions with which such monolithic identity making is, of necessity, faced. It is hoped that the new scholarship will open up new ways of negotiating contested terrains, and will shed new light on the historical and cultural positioning of women in this process. In this article, Azim reviews two books that look at Islam and the politics of being Muslim in Bangladesh. The books concentrate on the construction of Islam or a Muslim polity as well as on the position of women within emerging structures. …

This presentation to the Pathways South Asia Hub Final Conference held in Dhaka from 26-28 July 2011 outlines research which, in the light of a seemingly contentious relationship between state, religion and modernity in Bangladesh attempts to understand the historical antecedents of tensions in the modern Bengali Muslim woman and how she negotiates religion. The historical research begins from the early twentieth century to trace the formation of the idea of a Bengali nation to its source. Its focus is through literature and journals which expressed the thoughts and desires of Bengalis, and became the site where language, nationhood and the place of woman in the nation were debated. …

The special journal issue sprung out of a special panel at the IACS 2009 Tokyo Conference. The panel, entitled ‘Women Negotiating Islam’ had looked at how women in different locations cope with the ways that religion, either as politics or as culture, enters their lives. …

The project explored the identity formation of Bengali Muslim women by investigating the cultural and political history of Bangladesh spanning the 20th Century. Researchers investigated how women placed themselves in the anti-colonial nationalist movements of the early twentieth century; the import of language, culture and national identity for Bengali Muslims during the middle decades; and the contestations between nation, culture, progress, modernity and women's sexuality in a globalised world towards the end of the millennium. …

The collection of essays in the book aims to capture the variety of policies, discourses, debates and interventions that have influenced the lives of women in South Asia and to identify those that have led to greater empowerment of women. …

The research investigated the definition of empowerment in Palestinian women's organisations and contextualised it in Palestinian practices of mobilisation and resistance. …