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Gendering Chinese Religion marks the emergence of a subfield on women, gender, and religion in China studies. Ranging from the medieval period to the present day, this volume departs from the conventional and often male-centered categorization of Chinese religions into Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and popular religion. It makes two compelling arguments. First, Chinese women have deployed specific religious ideas and rituals to empower themselves in various social contexts. Second, gendered perceptions and representations of Chinese religions have been indispensable to the historical and contemporary construction of social and political power. The contributors use innovative ways of discovering and applying a rich variety of sources, many previously ignored by scholars. While each of the chapters in this interdisciplinary work represents a distinct perspective, together they form a coherent dialogue about the historical importance, intellectual possibilities, and methodological protocols of this new subfield.
Emphasizes time between 1950s and 1970s in rural southern and central Shanxi province.
This volume is the first to bring together analysis of contemporary female religious leadership in ideologically-diverse Muslim communities in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, with chapters discussing the emergence, consolidation, and impact of female Islamic authority.
This authoritative “go-to” publication aims to educate women on how to express their rights within Islam. Perfect for enabling activists to integrate an egalitarian Islamic belief system into their movements. The most effective means of improving Muslim women's lives is connecting them to their deeply held beliefs that affirm human dignity and gender equality at the core of the Islamic faith. But Muslim women lack this information that enlightens and vouches for their sacred rights, and they have no accessible tools that encourage faith-based activism consistent with the Islamic faith. To protect them from being misrepresented by or outside their communities, there is a need to provide pre-packaged, easy-to-understand literacy tools to women so they can lead lives of choice, dignity, and opportunity. 30 Rights of Muslim Women aims to fill this gap.
The Place of the Mosque: Genealogies of Space, Knowledge, and Power extends Foucault’s analysis, Of Other Spaces, and the “ideological conflicts which underlie the controversies of our day [and] take place between pious descendants of time and tenacious inhabitants of space.” This book uses Foucault’s framework to illuminate how mosques have been threatened in the past, from the Cordóba Mosque in the eighth century, to the development of Moorish aesthetics in the United States in the nineteenth century, to the clashes surrounding the building of mosques in the West in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Akel Kahera uses Foucault’s genealogy to elaborate on and study the subj...
In this ethnographic examination of women’s mosques in the Maldives, anthropologist Jacqueline H. Fewkes probes how the existence of these separate buildings—where women lead prayers for other women—intersect with larger questions about gender, space, and global Muslim communities. Bringing together ethnographic insight with historical accounts, this volume develops an understanding of the particular religious and cultural trends in the Maldives that have given rise to these unique socio-religious institutions. As Fewkes considers women’s spaces in the Maldives as a practice apart from contemporary global Islamic customs, she interrogates the intersections between local, national, and transnational communities in the development of Islamic spaces, linking together the role of nations in the formation of Muslim social spaces with transnational conceptualizations of Islamic gendered spaces. Using the Maldivian women’s mosque as a starting point, this book addresses the roles of both the nation and the global Muslim ummah in locating gendered spaces within discourses about gender and Islam.
Presents a patchwork narrative of Muslims from different ethnic and class backgrounds, religious orientations, and political affiliations, bringing together an unusually personal collection of essays and documents from an incredibly diverse group of Americans who call themselves Muslims.
Analyzes how American Muslim women assert themselves as religious actors in the US and beyond, using the Qur’an as a tool for social justice and community building The Women’s Mosque of America (WMA), a multiracial, women-only mosque in Los Angeles, is the first of its kind in the United States. Since 2015, the WMA has provided a space for Muslim women to build inclusive communities committed to gender and social justice, challenging the dominant mosque culture that has historically marginalized them through inadequate prayer spaces, exclusion from leadership, and limited access to religious learning. Tazeen M. Ali explores this congregation, focusing on how members contest established p...
Creates a new space for hybrid feminist analysis of Asian Muslim womens lives. Contesting Feminisms explores how Asian Muslim women make decisions on appropriating Islam and Islamic lifestyles through their own participation in the faith. The contributors highlight the fact that secularism has provided the space for some women to reclaim their religious identity and their own feminisms. Through compelling case studies and theoretical discussions, this volume challenges mainstream Western and national feminisms that presume homogeneity of Muslim womens lives to provide a deeper understanding of the multiple realities of feminism in Muslim communities. Contesting Feminisms attempts to of...
This book seeks to challenge the way in which China and Chinese-ness is generally understood, privileged on a central tradition, a core culture, that tends to marginalise or peripheralise anything or anyone who does not fit that essential core. The Hui Muslim Chinese discussed in this volume demonstrate that one can be an integral part of Chinese society and yet challenge many of ourassumptions about that society itself. For that reason they and other so-called minority ethnics have generally been ignored by Western scholarship.