Muslim Women's Religiousity

My ethnographic fieldwork conducted with female converts to Islam in France and in Quebec (Canada) shows that, for these women, being Muslim does not necessarily mean wearing clothes with ‘oriental’ designs. Rather, they are starting their own clothing companies so as to produce distinct Muslim-Western fashions that they promote through the Internet. By interpreting Islam in a context where Muslims are a minority religious group, converts construct alternative religious and social representations of Muslim identity that accord with their feminist interpretation of the Qu’ran while simultaneously incorporating the Western background within which they were socialized. In this regard, the strategies that they develop for wearing the veil and for integrating into their environment (family, workplace, etc.) make it clear that fashion, religion and politics are interacting in multiple, creative ways. In this paper, I look at how new Muslim feminist subjectivities are produced and realized through habits of dress, resulting in new representations of the body. I explore this issue by considering dress and hairstyle strategies developed by Muslim converts, in order to examine new perspectives on the place of gender in religion as it relates to particular social contexts.

Many Jewish and Muslim women in New Jersey too often suffer grave consequences of litigating with husbands who want to punish them for seeking divorce or for demanding their financial marital rights. Such malevolent husbands often use their unilateral right to dissolve the marriage in a religious context as a tool to abuse their wives or extract a more favorable financial settlement from them. The resulting injustice must cease. Jewish and Muslim women must be given a remedy in our civil courts to dissolve the chains of religious matrimony and to permit them to move on and remarry without fear of forfeiting their financial rights. To that end, we strongly recommend that the New Jersey Legislature adopt a measure that would mandate the removal of barriers to remarriage upon the entry of a final judgment of civil divorce. We hold out as an example New York's model. In every action for divorce or annulment filed there, each party must file a sworn statement that he or she will remove all barriers to the other's remarriage. If either party fails to do so, the other spouse can petition the court to seek enforcement. The New York statute is gender-and religion-neutral and has withstood several constitutional attacks.

Women's spiritual care networks are keeping the Islamic intellectual heritage fresh and intelligible for new generations of U.S.-based Muslims who are navigating faith, practices, and values as religious minorities. Here, I highlight leading voices and promising directions in the professionalization of Muslim women's spiritual caregiving. I detail how campus chaplaincy and seminary teaching positions have become vibrant settings for context-relevant guidance and spiritual mentorship among women.

Despite the widespread idea in Islamic culture that Muslim women should under no circumstances marry a non-Muslim, many Muslim women get married to non-Muslims. The potential influence of a non-Muslim husband on a woman’s religiosity is one of the main arguments used by scholars who are against Muslim women’s interfaith marriages. This research aims to highlight the untold stories of interreligiously married Muslim women and to examine how being part of an interreligious marriage affects their religiosity and religious experience.
Based on qualitative interviews with intermarried Muslim women who are currently in interfaith union, this study shows that for many interreligiously married Muslim women, marriage to a man from a different religion influences their religious observance in two ways – first, by having no effect (either negative or positive), and second, by having a positive impact on the practice of their religion and the expansion of their religious knowledge. It reveals that the main reason for the positive change was Muslim women’s feelings of being an ambassador of Islam and Muslims in their inter-religious family.

Muslim societies, and especially Muslim women, have often received fetishized attention in (neo-)Orientalist literature. However, opening up spaces for the voices of Muslim women especially those wearing the hijab is long overdue. Therefore,
the representation of diasporic Muslim women and their multiple identities in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Shelina Janmohamed’s Love in a Headscarf is of paramount importance. These two texts show how, face to face with possibilities and pitfalls of diaspora, Muslim women negotiate and prioritize Islamic identity in the metropolis. While immigrant Muslim men are racked with somewhat unacknowledged exilic anxieties, the challenge and possibility of Muslim women largely concern gender and religion. For a group of Muslim women, the West facilitates a critical interrogation of their feeling of identity vacillation and creates a useful framework for thinking about their religious observances, which eventually helps them conceptualize and articulate their sense of belonging. For many others, it provides
a third space in which they can confidently engage in a reinterpretation of the Islamic texts and thus reclaim an identity which liberates them from culturally enacted practices of their countries of origin.

The task to reshape governments in the countries confronted with the Arab Spring prompts the question whether there are necessary conditions to realize a stable society that simultaneously seeks to eliminate the elements that have led to the uprisings. Acknowledging some constitutional rights seems indispensable in such a process. I argue that such a state of affairs is indeed the case, at least now that the ‘old’ justifications to differentiate between people do not suffice anymore. That is not to say that the countries involved will have identical laws in each respect, but merely that a common basis has to be realized, manifested in political and legal equality, so this given does not derogate from the fact that each country’s specific legislation needs to be shaped in the light of its own history. Such a basis has no ‘moral’ character, but is simply a necessary condition to prevent sedition.

Summary of the article by Dr. Mona Abul Fadl, 2002
Setting the Record Straight: Aisha and the Tradition Reclaiming a Lost Legacy
Using Umm al mu’mineen, Aisha bint Abu Bakr’s legacy, this paper draws attention to an important and under-researched area in hadith scholarship identified with a revisionary body of literature that takes for its scope the verification and validation of a prophetic tradition. By interpellating a reported narration in terms of source, context, intent and purpose, some of the earliest companions of the Prophet assumed a role that went beyond the transmission of a legacy to its critical authentication. Aisha’s Istidrakat belong to this category and occupy within it pride of place.
The paper proceeds by selecting a number of concrete narrations/situations where the scope, style, method and purport of Aisha’s interventions in counter checking the content of a disputed tradition are scrutinized. What emerges is a pattern of consistencies with inform her approach and that when taken together, may be seen to provide a basis for a critical methodology for adjudicating contested traditions. In addition to concern for verifying the authenticity of a tradition, the focus of suc methodology is on understanding the meaning of a tradition through instituting a matrix for testing its validity/viability.
In her studied and didactic responses that often involved sharp, witty, and reasoned rebuttals, Aisha may be seen to have thus deliberately engaged the grounds for a consistent and coherent rationale for dealing with contested issues in the community. Through teaching by example, she was also imparting an ethic for disagreement and disputation that drew on the source and model that inspired and infused her own practice.
Asked to describe for a latter generation the character of the Prophet whom she outlived by nearly fifty years and whose mantle she reverently and authoritatively carried, Aisha had referred her interlocutor to the source, succinctly and answering, “His character was the (lived) Qur’an.” It was this categorical link between the Qur’an and the Sunna that was at the core of a methodology for dealing with an entire corpus of hadith that she sought to embed in a rational and purposeful matrix of reasoning which affirmed an integral internal hierarchy between the founding sources of Islam.
By going beyond the conventional hagiographies of ummahat al mu’mineen and identifying with the authentic and critical cast of mind exemplified in Aisha’s Istidrakat, this paper points the classic disciplines to new and creative possibilities for reclaiming a tradition and building on it.

“Carnivalesque” is perhaps the best, if not the only way to describe what was going on at the Bab al-Saghir Cemetery that hot summer afternoon in 2008.  In front of the graves of the Prophet’s wives, Shi‘i pilgrims could buy Viagra, sex-enhancement creams, and massage oils.  Sexual mores were normally strictly guarded in Syria and medicines were usually available only at pharmacies.  Yet, there in one of the most historically and religiously significant cemeteries in Damascus, makeshift vendors sold an array of sex-related items.  In order to analyze this phenomenon, this article draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “carnivalesque.”  First, it provides a short background of Twelver Shi‘ism in Syria and explains how Shi‘i religious tourism encouraged the development of black markets.  Then, it examines how Shi‘i pilgrimage, which occurred all year around, but peaked during Muharram, fostered an attitude that liberated Shi‘is from prevalent social norms and emphasized “grotesque” imagery and practices, including blood, death, and sex.  In short, it follows Michael Taussig’s call for anthropologists to attend to the transgressive aspects of religious ritual.

During the onslaught of the Islamic caliphate on Kobanî, Syria, media outlets across the globe broadcast pictures of brave and often unveiled Kurdish women fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), a quintessentially male force of destruction. The images of women fighting Islamist male aggressors aroused outrage, admiration, and pity among observers. But had all Kurdish fighters been male or had women fought for ISIS, viewers might have reacted differently. To examine some of the most widely disseminated gendered pictures and videos of the Syrian uprising in the media, this article draws on Mohja Kahf’s three categories, which typify how Muslim women, Arab women, or both are perceived by the Anglophone reading and viewing public: the first is victims; the second, escapees; and the third, pawns of patriarchy and male power. While this typology helps in examining gendered images of the Syrian uprising, it also obscures the socioeconomic realities on the ground.

Ces dernières années, un certain nombre de femmes musulmanes ont été condamnées pour terrorisme, notamment Roshonara Choudhry, accusée d’avoir poignardé le député Stephen Timms en 2010, et Shasta Khon, pour fabrication de bombe. Ces cas démontrent que les femmes musulmanes sont, à l’instar de leurs homologues masculins, la cible des tentatives de radicalisation et de recrutement entreprises par de violents groupes politiques islamistes au Royaume-Uni. Bien qu’il soit essentiel d’en savoir plus sur l’acquisition d’idées extrémistes et le passage à la violence, il est très difcile d’avoir accès aux personnes concernées. L’accès aux femmes mêlées à des groupes islamistes est possible mais présente un certain nombre de problèmes. Cet article s’appuie sur les premières conclusions tirées des entretiens que
j’ai menés avec des femmes musulmanes qui étaient afliées aux groupes politiques islamistes Muslims Against Crusades (interdit en 2011) et Women4Shariah. Il étudie la façon dont celles-ci se sont afliées à ces groupes et l’impact que cela a eu sur leur vie.

Mainstream conceptions of autonomy have been surreptitiously gender-specific and masculinist. Feminist philosophers have reclaimed autonomy as a feminist value, while retaining its core ideal as self-government, by reconceptualizing it as “relational autonomy.” This article examines whether feminist theories of relational autonomy can adequately illuminate the agency of Islamist women who defend their nonliberal religious values and practices and assiduously attempt to enact them in their daily lives. I focus on two notable feminist theories of relational autonomy advanced by Marina Oshana and Andrea Westlund and apply them to the case of Women’s Mosque Movement participants in Egypt. I argue that feminist conceptions of relational autonomy, centered around the ideal of self-government, cannot elucidate the agency of Women’s Mosque Movement participants whose normative ideal involves perfecting their moral capacity.

This article investigates the attribution of authority by Swiss Muslim women. It is shown that the interviewed women have a critical attitude towards (male) shaiks and imams and appreciate the experience of elder woman. Concerning religious texts, the women more likely read hadith-compilations then the Qur'an and appreciate basic books with titles as "50 questions and answers about Islam". The women insist that every individual Muslim (woman) have to search herself for answers. However, the empirical data shows that in a quest of an answer to a question about religion, (male or female) leaders are needed.

Maria Dakake argues in her article, ‘Guest of the Inmost Heart’ that Sufi women imagined God in domestic terms as the ideal faithful lover, provider, and protector. Based on my research of pious and Sufi women from the 7th to 10th century, I support Dakake’s important observation; but I also suggest it needs to be opened up to more complicated notions of “domesticity” that take into account the connections made between patriarchal social norms and the divine personality as well as the historico-theological context of the women’s sayings on divine love which touch on the problem of anthropomorphism and the push and pull of popular and elite theologies.

This article contains selections from my book in progress on early Pious and Sufi women.

Interfaith marriages among Muslim immigrants in the UK are under-researched, despite the increase of these marriages; and Muslim women’s exogamy is even less researched. Such a practice is controversial since it is regarded by Muslims as being both religiously and socially unacceptable. Inter-religiously married Muslim women in Britain come from different ethnic backgrounds, but the focus here is on Turkish Muslim women. Examining the stories of twenty Turkish women in the UK who are currently in interfaith unions, this article discusses the Islamic view on women’s interfaith marriages. This research assesses the impact of individual women’s decisions, the challenges they face theologically and socially, and the strategy they adopt to deal with their unique situations and their individual experiences. It reveals that Muslim women rely on two main strategies to deal with religious differences within the context of family life: pre-marriage discussion and conflict avoidance.

This paper explores some forms of female identity in post-revolutionary Egypt. It analysis two documents issued on Muslim women’s rights after the 2011 uprising. The first one is Al-Azhar Position Paper on Women’s Rights (Waṯīqat al–Azhar lil-mar’ah), issued in 2013. The second one is Alexandria Declaration on Women’s Rights in Islam (I‘lān al–Iskandariyyah ḥawla “ḥuqūq al–mar’ah fī’l–islām”), issued in 2014. Egyptian Islamic feminists have been involved in the drafting of Alexandria Declaration, which initially was the draft of Al-Azhar Position Paper. The article has three aims: 1) to provide a comparative reading of these documents, 2), to highlight the contribution of Egyptian Islamic feminists in the contemporary renewal of Islamic discourse and production of organic gender equality-based religious knowledge, 3), to reveal how al-Azhar and the civil society actors represent Muslim women’s identity. Moreover, it addresses that the collaboration between the religious establishment and Islamic feminists is fundamental for the consolidation of a female identity that not only respects Islamic tradition but also is aware of the challenges of the new era.

The language of trauma has been used by many to explain what happens to individuals and to the collectivities to which they belong. Some of these traumatic experiences stem from interpersonal violence, such as sexual and physical abuse or domestic violence. Others may stem from witnessing interpersonal violence and victimisation, such as witnessing or being a victim of a serious accident, war, a terror attack, or experiencing the loss of a loved one. Regardless of its cause, trauma, whether individualistic or collective, arises from the experience of pain and suffering post ‘an extraordinary event’ so disruptive that it triggers an emotional response and public attention. This chapter will situate the experiences of trauma felt by the surviving Muslim women victims of the Christchurch terror attack that occurred on March 15, 2019, within the scope of collective trauma theory. We do this by examining two types of collective trauma unique to the Christchurch experience: collective trauma through personal experience and collective trauma through empathy. Although our focus is on the Muslim women victims and survivors of the attack, we also show how ‘meaning-making’ processes such as the media and the New Zealand government helped define the type of pain and suffering felt by the victims. We discuss how this was translated into a broader form of collective suffering whereby the Muslim community, the community of New Zealand, and those abroad felt victimised by the event on a traumatic level.

Despite media and political interest, Salafi women in Britain have not been the subject of in-depth empirical study, until now. This paper argues that their involvement in the group
can be conceptualized as a ‘conversion’, and illuminates this process through evidence from ethnographic research in London. Interviews reveal that conversion to Salafism was often delayed and interrupted by experiments with other approaches to Islam, as the women navigated an Islam ‘market’, trying to identify an ‘authentic’ brand. Initially, many resisted Salafism because they were put off by the group’s poor public image and encounters with ill-mannered adherents.Gradually, however, the women became convinced that Salafism alone represented ‘pure’ Islam, free from opinion, personality,emotion, tradition and culture. The Salafis supported their rulings with the Qur’an and Sunna; were reassuringly rigid in their religious practice; provided a ‘serious’ religious learning environment; were associated with the ‘authentic’ aura of Saudi Arabia; and supplied guidance on even the most minute and mundane of everyday matters. In contrast to other studies of conversion in new religious movements, this research finds that social networks and affective ties played only a limited role. The data support an intellectual, rather than passive or affective, conversion model – contrary to the prevailing discourse on veiled or ‘radical’ Muslim women – and the conceptualization of a new form of conversion, delayed conversion, which may arise in liberal, pluralist religious milieus.

From the early 1970s until 2011, the Syrian shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab flourished as a minor centre of Shiʿi learning. It predominantly served Iraqi Shiʿi refugees, but also temporary visitors from Iran and the Gulf countries. The seminaries viewed it as their responsibility to draw in transient Shiʿa and turn them into students and loyal followers of important marājiʿ al-taqlīd or Shiʿi legal scholars who mainly reside in major centres of Shiʿi learning, such as Najaf, Karbala and Qom. While the seminaries in Sayyida Zaynab aimed at strengthening institutional affiliation among lay Shiʿa, they concurrently aided the questioning of authoritative religious edicts and opinions emanating from Iranian and Iraqi centres of learning and produced local religious authorities. This article examines two spheres in which central authority was challenged in the shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab. First, it was contested in seminaries where students and teachers debated legal rulings, and second, in contested public Muharram practices such as self-flagellation processions and the showing and selling of recorded laṭmiyyāt, which are chants performed during ritual mourning gatherings.

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, Islamic theological seminaries for women produce thousands of young female theologians. In addition to the (traditional and socio-cultural) role assigned to them within the family, their functions in society are also of relevance. The development of Islamic theological thought – in Iran mainly in the framework of Shi " ite religious philosophy and jurisprudence – has considerable bearing on the legal and social situation of women in the Islamic Republic, and beyond that, on contemporary Islamic thought. To female graduates of Islamic seminaries, the labour market offers work mainly in the educative, cultural or social field. However, qualified female theologians can reach high positions in many areas, including the judiciary and the political arena. This paper reflects preliminary research on ideas and possible concepts concerning female leadership in the Iranian system of higher religious education through theological seminaries and departments of religion at universities. First results show a certain preference for " indirect leadership " roles for women, both at the community and policy level.

Cet article présente quatre textes liḥyānites (ancienne civilisation arabe pré-islamique) où les auteurs donnent leur généalogie par leur mères, prêtresses. L'article s'interroge sur la fonction des femmes et la généalogie matrilinéaire chez les anciens arabes.

The purpose of this article is to comparatively analyze the processes of social, political and economical exclusion of Muslim women in Iran and Turkey. These processes are related to a system of beliefs and values of religious character. We suggest that the specific political models that exist in Turkey and Iran play a fundamental role in institutionalizing these processes in structurally different ways.

Resumo A proposta do presente trabalho é desenvolver uma análise comparativa do processo de exclusão social, política e econômica da mulher muçulmana. Esse processo está, por sua vez, diretamente relacionado ao sistema de crenças e valores de caráter religioso. Sugerimos assim como pressuposto, que os modelos políticos específicos que operam na Turquia e no Irã, o institucionalizaram de forma estruturalmente distinta. Palavras-chave: Islã, mulher, legislação, Turquia, Irã, revolução.

[...] Two key arguments drive the book’s narrative: firstly, the pious practices of kamil momina (in Urdu, an ideal, complete, or perfect Muslim woman: see page 3) are ambiguous; and secondly, the girls’ aspirations change through an ongoing process of negotiation. Accordingly, the perceived “stereotypical conceptualization of madrasa education as a religio-cultural constraint on women” is problematized (268). She rails against policy makers’ attempts to instrumentalise madrasas, whose cultivation of culture or religion serve other ends from the top-down and state-led madrasa modernisation approach. Instead, the author advocates a bottom-up approach by eliciting the multiple micro-processes at play in girls’ madrasa education, including parental interests, dini (religious) and duniyavi (worldly) educational provision, and the peer networks developing within the madrasa. Borker argues that madrasa [...]

https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/view/2912


How to Cite
Lahmar, F. (2021). Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood (by Hem Borker). American Journal of Islam and Society, 38(1-2). https://doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v38i1-2.2912

This paper describes the challenges some German Muslim women converts face while learning Qurʾan recitation particularly in their attempts to articulate the Qurʾanic letters (makhārij al-ḥurūf). It focusses on the connection between makhārij al-ḥurūf with piety cultivation (khushūʿ) and rituals (ibādāt) while adding to both Gade's and Brusius's work on recitation. The paper also raises positionality questions with regards to the author being both a researcher and teacher of recitation writing about her students.

L’autore intende dimostrare come sia possibile arguire alcuni aspetti della
figura di Caterina Colombini (1340?-1387) e della sua rappresentazione agiografica attraverso l’analisi di una rosa di testi: l’agiografia di Caterina, le lettere del Beato Giovanni e la "Vita" del Colombini scritta dal Belcari. Il discorso è articolato in quattro parti: nella prima si prova a guardare da vicino la rappresentazione agiografica della cugina di Giovanni; nella seconda si dà una disamina della lingua e dello stile del testo; nella terza si indaga il valore simbolico della finestra ove Giovanni e Caterina si intrattengono a parlare di notte; nell’ultima, infine, ci si sofferma sulle esortazioni del beato Giovanni alla Colombini e alle sue figlie spirituali – le gesuate.

For his compilation of the Life or Legend of Saint Margaret
of Cortona (1247–1297), the Franciscan friar Giunta Bevegnati (thirteenth century) was guided by texts found in a collection of laude
belonging to the Confraternity of Santa Maria delle laude in Cortona
and the iconography associated with it. The hymns the confraternity sang are to be found in the Laudario di Cortona. This article
shows that not only is there a strong link between the hagiography
of St Margaret and the confraternity’s laude, but also that the hagiographical text is closely linked with the iconography supported by
the confraternity with whom the saint was in contact. In the first part
we will compare the text composed by Giunta Bevegnati with the
laude sung by the Compagnia di S. Maria delle laude to show how
the laude influenced the saint’s Legenda; in the second part, we will
compare the texts of the Legenda with the contemporary iconography of St Margaret.

Older males having sex with younger females are known to increase unsafe sex practices,exacerbated by power and economic imbalances between partners. The purpose of this paper was toexamine transactional sexual relationships (i.e. long-term relationships constructed as “girlfriends not„prostitutes‟” based on the exchange of gifts and other obligations) among female studentsofhigher institutions in Kaduna state Nigeria. It particularly explored the implications for HIV education ininstitutions of higher learning in Nigeria. HIV/AIDS has been labelled as a disease of the poor and theuneducated, and it might be expected that as university students, they would engage in safer sexual practices even if the sexual practice is on transactional bases: ifthey do not, then it highlights the problem around gender and economic imbalances and their repercussionsevenmore clearly as the implications could impact negatively on reproductive health decision making by women generally whether married or unmarried. Design/methodology/approach – Using snowballing, 50 female students from each of the three institutions of higher learning (150) in the stateengaged in transactional sex were selected and interviewed using in-depth interview procedures, while those who declined to engage in a face to face interview filled out questionnaires, the quantitative data was used to support the qualitative data that was analysed thematically. Findings – These young women werenotperused as simple victims; these relationships are perceived as the result ofcomplex and conscious choices. They will not want to marry their partners and were clear that thesewere short-term relationships primarily for material gain, which they nevertheless kept secret fromfamily and most friends for fear of stigma, particularly in blighting their future marriage prospects.They protected themselves from emotional involvement, although they often saw their partnersas loving, taking the provision of gifts as a sign of affection and sometimes a replacement forparental love. Their motivation was primarily economic, to fulfil “wants” not survival “needs” – therelationships enabled them to purchase the trappings of affluent society such as clothes, hairstyles,fast food and gadgets. They were also motivated by the enhanced experiences these relationshipsallowed, such as feeling protected, respected, “high class”, part of a daring elite of women and beingable to travel and continue their education. The unequal nature of the relationships (often described as“father-daughter”) in a society, in which parents, older people and men are given unquestioningrespect, reduced their abilities to negotiate safe sex practices. In so far as they practiced safer sex itwas to avoid pregnancy rather than disease, believing they would be able to tell from physical signs iftheir partner was infected.
Practical implications – This study shows that the “privileged” status‟ that higher education offersis no match for the socioeconomic and cultural factors which make female youths, whatever theireducational background, compromise on safer sexual practices, rendering them vulnerable to STIs andparticularly, HIV infection.

The central aim of the chapter is to explore the process of re-islamization in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina with a special focus on the reconceptualization of the role of the women and gender equality in a reconstructed and highly nationalised cultural milieu. 
The main focus is on the unpacking of secularist and competing Islamist discourses in present day Bosnia-Herzegovina.  The chapter offers an analysis of ethnographic accounts of Muslim women’s engagement with Islam and its role in gender identity
construction in Sarajevo.  The author investigates the openness of Islam to various interpretations and argues that current use of Islam among practicing Muslim women in Bosnia-Herzegovina is complex, since it is often combined with the socialist Yugoslav legacy and a relatively high degree of Western influenced modernization.

¿Es posible usar la pedagogía popular feminista con mujeres creyentes? Y si esto es posible ¿Para qué? Sí,  es posible. Brief sobre una iniciativa de pedagogía popular feminista con mujeres musulmanas en el barrio de Bonteheuwel de Ciudad del Cabo, Sudáfrica con una colectiva de mujeres llamada The Bonteheuwel Walking Ladies (BWL)

In Everyday Conversions, Attiya Ahmad uses storytelling and the concept of key "moments" in the lives of female domestic workers to illuminate the trajectory of their everyday personal transformations in Kuwait. She sets this frame against the larger history of labor migration to the Persian Gulf during the 20th century, the intersection of class and gender, and the politics of belonging in a diasporic context to two households, those of their employers and of their natal families in South Asia. Throughout, she writes with deep sympathy for her subjects and reflexivity about her own interventions as a researcher into their lives. Grounding her ethnography in the theoretical literature on power and agency, gender and affect, and modernity and tradition, she examines the perspectives of both employers and domestic workers on a variety of issues, perhaps the most interesting of which is a recent phenomenon: the workers' increasing conversion to Islam.

Since 9/11, many Muslim women in the USA are in a similar predicament as what African American and Chicana women found themselves in decades ago during the Black Power and Chicano Power Movements. African American and Chicana women stood along side African American and Chicano men to fight against oppression and injustices against them by the power structure and the people in positions of power. In both movements, women’s issues were relegated to the sidelines; they were only visible in the periphery of decision-making. Both African American women and Chicanas decided that they had to stand up for themselves and call it like they saw it—they were being oppressed and marginalized in mainstream society because of their race and ethnicity and also within their racial group because of gender.