Following a long historical legacy, Muslim women’s lives continue to be represented and circulate widely as a vehicle of intercultural understanding within a context of the "war on terror." Following Edward Said’s thesis that these cultural forms reflect and participate in the power plays of empire, this volume examines the popular and widespread production and reception of Muslim women’s lives and narratives in literature, poetry, cinema, television and popular culture within the politics of a post-9/11 world. This edited collection provides a timely exploration into the pedagogical and ethical possibilities opened up by transnational, feminist, and anti-colonial readings that can work against sensationalized and stereotypical representations of Muslim women. It addresses the gap in contemporary theoretical discourse amongst educators teaching literary and cultural texts by and about Muslim Women, and brings scholars from the fields of education, literary and cultural studies, and Muslim women’s studies to examine the politics and ethics of transnational anti-colonial reading practices and pedagogy. The book features interviews with Muslim women artists and cultural producers who provide engaging reflections on the transformative role of the arts as a form of critical public pedagogy.

This essential collection examines South and Southeast Asian Muslim women’s writing and the ways they navigate cultural, political, and controversial boundaries. Providing a global, contemporary collection of essays, this volume uses varied methods of analysis and methodology, including: • Contemporary forms of expression, such as memoir, oral accounts, romance novels, poetry, and social media; • Inclusion of both recognized and lesser-known Muslim authors; • Division by theme to shed light on geographical and transnational concerns; and • Regional focus on Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Muslim Women’s Writing from across South and Southeast Asia will deliver crucial scholarship for all readers interested in the varied perspectives and comparisons of Southern Asian writing, enabling both students and scholars alike to become better acquainted with the burgeoning field of Muslim women's writing. This timely and challenging volume aims to give voice to the creative women who are frequently overlooked and unheard.

This book examines Muslim women's creative strategies of deploying religious concepts such as ummah, or community, to solve problems of domestic and communal violence, polygamous abuse, sterility, and heteronormativity. By closely reading and examining examples of ummah-building strategies in interfaith dialogues, exchanges, and encounters between Muslim and non-Muslim women in a selection of African and Southeast Asian fictions and essays, this book highlights women's assertive activisms to redefine transnationalism, understood as relationships across national boundaries, as transgeography. Ummah-building strategies shift the space of, or respatialize, transnational relationships, focusing on connections between communities, groups, and affiliations within the same nation. Such a respatialization also enables a more equitable and inclusive remediation of the citizenship of gendered and religious citizens to the nation-state and the transnational sphere of relationships.

Multiculturalism and multicultural education are at a paradoxical moment. There is work that continues as if the multicultural hegemony was still intact and on the other hand work articulated as if multiculturalism was decidedly passe. The essays in this collection will be of considerable interest to academics, policy makers and students of both multiculturalism and multicultural education principally because they touch on both perspectives but concentrate for the most part on the thorny problematic of the workings of multicultural education in its present precarious moment. Given the renewed, urgent attacks in various western countries, the cottage industry of “death of multiculturalism” texts and the rise of the interculturalism, transnationalism, diaspora alternatives, is multiculturalism dying? Are the ends of multiculturalism- the management or celebration of diversity; representation and recognition for all in society; creation of just and equitable communities at the global, national and local school classroom levels- better theorized and realized through the ascendant alternatives? Representing the precarious moment in Canada, Ireland, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, the essays in this collection address these questions and both depict and trouble hegemonic multicultural education and contrast it with its supposed successor regimes.

A Genealogy of Islamic Feminism offers a new insight on the changing relationship between Islam and feminism from the colonial era in the 1900s to the early 1990s in Indonesia. The book juxtaposes both colonial and postcolonial sites to show the changes and the patterns of the encounters between Islam and feminism within the global and local nexus. Global forces include Dutch colonialism, developmentalism, transnational feminism, and the United Nations’ institutional bodies and their conferences. Local factors are comprised of women’s movements, adat (customs), nationalism, the politics underlying the imposition of Pancasila ideology and maternal virtues, and variations of Islamic revivalism. Using a genealogical approach, the book examines the multifaceted encounters between Islam and feminism and attempts to rediscover egalitarianism in the Islamic tradition—a concept which has been subjugated by hierarchical gender systems. The book also systematizes Muslim women’s encounters with Islam and feminism into five phases: emancipation, association, development, integration, and proliferation eras. Each era discusses the confluence of global and local factors which shape the changing relationship between Islam and feminism and the way in which the discursive narrative of equality is debated and contextualized, progressing from biological determinism (kodrat) to the ethico-spiritual argument. Islamic feminism contributes to the rediscovery of Islam as the source of progress, the centering of women’s agency through spiritual equality, and the reworking of the private and public spheres. This book will appeal to anyone with interest in international women’s movements, interdisciplinary studies, cultural studies, women’s studies, post-colonial studies, Islamic studies, and Asian studies.