The last 15–20 years have seen the emergence of a new trajectory of ‘Muslim feminism’ in India which has grounded Muslim women’s rights discourse both in the direct interpretation of Islamic scriptures and also in principles derived from the Indian Constitution. Examining two prominent Muslim women’s organizations—the All India Muslim Women’s Personal Law Board and the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan—this article examines how this form of Muslim feminism has become a central repository of Islamic modernist thought in India in light of its perceived failure in some other sections of Muslim public life. Based on writings and educational materials produced by these organizations, this article discusses their methods of harnessing the teachings of the Quran, their application of ‘Islamic feminist’ methodology to interpret Islamic family laws, their identification of equivalence between Islamic and constitutional values, and their attempts to engage the state in their efforts to promote the modernization of Muslim Personal Law.

Critical and feminist ageing scholarship has drawn attention to how dominant discourses of ageing negatively impact older women's identities and social lives. While research intersecting migration and ageing has broadly focused on older immigrants' settlement experiences, very little is known about the discursive influences over older immigrant women's sense of agency and social relations. To address this knowledge gap, this study explores the subjectivity-formations of older South Asian Muslim women engaged in transnational migration. Narrative and discourse analysis principles were used to conduct and analyse life story-based interviews with 15 South Asian Muslim older women who recently migrated to Toronto, Canada. Findings indicate that participant subjectivity-formations are shaped by: (a) discourses of ageing; (b) socio-cultural–religious discourses; and (c) discourses of transnational migration. In response, participants engaged in dynamic strategies including conforming, negotiating, creating alternative narratives and/or resisting these discourses to organise their lives. These findings reinforce the continued need to trace the governmentality of structural conditions over ageing migrant women's lives and their responsive strategies to manage these impacts.

Maulana Ashraf `Ali Thanawi, a reformist Islamic scholar, was very much part of his times in his urgent concern with women’s potential role in individual and societal “improvement,” the goal of the enormously successful encyclopedic work that included the chapter considered here. Thanawi’s teachings included generic elite male “best practices” on health and ethics, undergirded by Greco-Arabic humoral medicine in its Indian form. His text caught a historical moment when medical treatments were more craft than industrial, and when the professionalization of discrete Muslim and Hindu “systems” of Unani Tibb and Ayurveda, with Ayurveda increasingly incorporated into majoritarian Hindu nationalism, was only incipient. Health maintenance in Thanawi’s hands was a matter of empowering women to both spiritual and practical competence and responsibility, freeing them from resort to (as he saw it) quacks, ignorant midwives, and untrained women, along with dubious healers and holy men, Muslim or Hindu or any other. In its description of challenges, strategies, and resources related to health, his text offers a window into women’s everyday world. But it also raises comparative questions about the history of medicine, the history of emotions, ethnicity in a colonial context, and the potentially empowering implications of Islamic socio-religious reform for women.

This article examines five wars that occurred on the Malay-Thai Peninsula in the period 1785–1838 and the deep impact they had upon women's lives during and after the conflicts. Constituting the majority of surviving refugees, women rebuilt their lives in the wake of war through business and trade in Malaya, as Islamic teachers in Mecca and Southeast Asia, and as servants and slaves in Bangkok. In each of these settings, women encountered new forms of agency and newfound challenges, shifting cultural values that regulated decisions and actions, and evolving perceptions of the qualifications for leadership. Focused upon the political demise of the Patani Sultanate, a state with a long history of female rule, this study is of particular relevance to scholarly debates concerning women in contemporary warfare because of its transnational focus with keen attention to women in a variety of Islamic spaces and contexts, its aim of dispelling the pervasive notion of Muslim women as lacking agency, and as a point of comparison for the present armed conflict still raging in Southern Thailand that has claimed more than five thousand and continues to impact women and gender dynamics in the region.

This article focuses on the representations and perceptions of Muslim Palestinian women as encapsulated by early Israeli legislation. The analysis is based on a close reading of the negotiations and discussions leading up to the criminalization of bigamy by the Israeli state and, in particular, those principal discussions surrounding the legislation of the Women's Equal Rights Law of 1951. Primary materials from the Israeli State Archives are used to reconstruct the debates in the Knesset, assess the legislation's intended effects on the Muslim Palestinian family, and trace the opposition to it fielded by the Palestinian religious leadership. The legislative process is dissected to expose the implicit and explicit patriarchal and nationalized underpinnings of the image of the “ideal family” fashioned by Israeli legislators. Despite their national divide, I argue, both the Israeli Knesset and the Muslim community leadership articulated women's roles in similarly distinctive national-patriarchal hues.

This article examines how identities are constructed and performed by a sample of Muslim women in the Canadian workplace. This research will provide new insights on how Muslim women disclose or ‘perform’ their identities in different contexts. This study will build upon previous research on identity construction of ethnic minorities in the workplace and intersectionality and the workplace experiences of Muslim women by conducting interviews with 23 professional Muslim women in Canada. The findings have important implications for understanding Muslim women’s identity work in broader contexts of discrimination, as well as accommodation and inclusion in organizations.

Within sparse studies available on ethnic privilege at work, the emphasis is dominantly on ethnic privileges available to white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, heterosexual men and to a lesser extent white women. This paper presents and develops an Islamic and postcolonial perspective on ethnic privilege, which is unique not only due to contextual and cultural differences but also due to its postcolonial nature and composition. By postcolonial, the paper refers to cultural legacies of Arab colonialism and ideology in South Asia and elsewhere. Drawing on a qualitative study of Muslim female employees in Pakistan, the paper shows that religio-ethnic privilege represents postcolonial influences of a foreign (Arab-Salafi, ultra-orthodox Islamist) culture on a (non-Arab Muslim) society, and as such does not represent ethnic norms of a local mainstream society. The paper investigates the case of religio-ethnic privilege and female employment in Pakistan and examines how a foreign-influenced stereotype of female modesty is used to benchmark and preferentially treat ‘good Muslim women.’ The analysis shows that an Islamic and postcolonial lens may be needed to understand the nature and implications of religio-ethnic privilege at work in Muslim majority countries and societies.

Through the journey of one symbolic legal institution—mahr (a form of dowry)—the article follows the ways in which Islamic marriage has travelled to Canada, the United States, France, and Germany, offering a panoply of conflicting images, contradictions, and distributive endowments in transit from Islamic family law to Western adjudication. The author emphasizes the importance of ensuring that distributive consequences, rather than recognition, occupy a central place in the assessment of the legal options available to Muslim women in Western courts. This article represents an important methodological contribution to the debates over the role of identity politics and the (im)possibility of legal transplants in comparative law. The author's argument is that mahr cannot travel to Western liberal courts without carrying with it a very complex interaction among several parties whose interests are often opposed as to its recognition. A legal realist and distributive analysis of Islamic marriage is crucial, she argues, because mahr is often used by the parties as a tool of relative bargaining power in negotiating contractual obligations related to the family. Moreover, Islamic law travels with a multiplicity of voices, and it is this complex hybridity that will be mediated through Western law upon adjudication.

This article examines the issue of gender equality within Islam in order to develop an ethical framework for businesses operating in Muslim majority countries. We pay attention to the role of women and seemingly inconsistent expectations of Islamic and Western societies with regard to appropriate gender roles. In particular, we contrast a mainstream Western liberal individualist view of freedom and equality—the capability approach, used here as an illustration of mainstream Western liberalism—with an egalitarian Islamic view on gender equality. While the article identifies an opportunity for this particular approach to reform patriarchal interpretations and practices of Islam toward gender egalitarian interpretations and practices, it also contests the notions of adaptation and well-being inherent within the capability approach. We suggest that a dialectical approach to understanding the relationships among religion, culture, and business provides a better guide to responsible business action in Muslim Majority countries than does the capability approach.

Widely recognized by nationalists, Islamists and conservatives as the heroine of the Turkish Right in the twentieth century, Sâmiha Ayverdi influenced the renaissance of right-wing politics in Turkey as an important leader of the Rifaȋ order, a prolific author, an unyielding anti-communist, and finally as an institution-builder for right-wing causes. This article focuses on the apparent paradoxes in Ayverdi's long career, such as her modernist interpretation of Islam, her relationship with her sufi master, preference for memoirs, and her unabashed elitism. Such characteristics defy clichés associated with the stereotypical conservative/nationalist/Islamist intellectual in Cold War Turkey. Our in-depth study of Ayverdi's works thus reveals the complexity of right-wing identities, and the fact that our protagonist is an outspoken woman intellectual also adds an important twist to the story.