This in-depth ethnography looks at the everyday lives of Muslim students in a girls’ madrasa in India. Highlighting the ambiguities between the students’ espousal of madrasa norms and everyday practice, Borker illustrates how young Muslim girls tactically invoke the virtues of safety, modesty, and piety learnt in the madrasa to reconfigure normative social expectations around marriage, education, and employment. Amongst the few ethnographies on girls’ madrasas in India, this volume focuses on unfolding of young women’s lives as they journey from their home to madrasa and beyond, and thereby problematizes the idealized and coherent notions of piety presented by anthropological literature on female participation in Islamic piety projects. The author uses ethnographic portraits to introduce us to an array of students, many of whom find their aspirational horizon expanded as a result of the madrasa experience. Such stories challenge the dominant media’s representations of madrasas as outmoded religious institutions. Further, the author illustrates how the processes of learning–unlearning and alternate visions of the future emerge as an unanticipated consequence of young women’s engagement with madrasa education.

Annotation. In the aftermath of 9/11 Islamic seminaries or madrasas received much media attention in India, mostly owing to the alleged link between madrasa education and forms of violence. Yet, while ample information on madrasas for boys is available, similar institutions of Islamic learning for girls have for the greater part escaped public attention so far. This study investigates how madrasas for girls emerged in India, how they differ from madrasas for boys, and how female students come to interpret Islam through the teachings they receive in these schools. Observations suggest that, next to the official curriculum, the 'informal' curriculum plays an equally important role. It serves the madrasa's broader aim of bringing about a complete reform of the students' morality and to determine their actions accordingly. This title can be previewed in Google Books - http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN9789053569078. This title is available in the OAPEN Library - http://www.oapen.org.

This history of Middle Eastern women is the first to survey gender relations in the Middle East from the earliest Islamic period to the present. Outstanding scholars analyze a rich array of sources ranging from histories, biographical dictionaries, law books, prescriptive treatises, and archival records, to the Traditions (hadith) of the Prophet and imaginative works like the Thousand and One Nights, to modern writings by Middle Eastern women and by Western writers. They show that gender boundaries in the Middle East have been neither fixed nor immutable: changes in family patterns, religious rituals, socio-economic necessity, myth and ideology—and not least, women’s attitudes—have expanded or circumscribed women’s roles and behavior through the ages.

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.

Drawing upon Muslim Europe's own voices, institutions, and experiences, this compelling work reframes the debates on European secularism, the historic role of Shari'a law in diverse European states, Muslims and Nazis, Muslims and Communists, and the contributions of Muslims to Europe today.

Award-winning historian Theodore Friend recently set out alone across Asia and the Middle East on a quest to understand firsthand the life situations of women in Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey. Woman, Man, and God in Modern Islam recounts Friend s remarkable journey and relates hundreds of encounters and conversations with people he met along the way. Commingling a deep respect for Islam and his faith in the potential of women to change their worlds, Friend presents an open, exploratory outsider s perspective on women in five very different Islamic cultures timely fare for all who wish to broaden their world horizons.

Based on empirical research in India, this book presents a post-colonial feminist analysis of subjectivities available to Muslim girls and the ways in which they are inhabited and negotiated. Examining government education policies together with the narratives of teachers and parents, the author explores the manner in which gender, class, ethnicity and religion intersect both to confer certain subjectivities and to challenge or reinforce the conferred subjectivities. A study of the imposition of subjectivities that label Muslim girls as economically subordinate and culturally different, Contemporary Muslim Girlhoods in India analyses Muslim girls’ reconstructions of self through a combination of reflexivity, resilience and agency, and conformity. Drawing on the thought of Pierre Bourdieu and Nancy Fraser, this volume offers an original contribution to the study of gendered minorities, institutions and relationships in post-colonial contexts, and an alternative to identitarian politics or cultural explanations of Muslim women’s educational deprivation in India. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and gender studies with interests in education, class, religion and identity.