Through untold stories of women in the social project of the Nation of Islam, this book reveals an activism of NOI women that sought to engage self-agency, despite classist, patriarchal, and sexist underpinnings.

"Focusing on women, who sometimes move outside of their ethnic Muslim spaced and interact with other Muslim ethnic groups in search of gender justice, this ethnographic study of African American and South Asian immigrant Muslims in Chicago and Atlanta explores how Islamic ideas of racial harmony amd equality create hopeful possibilities in an American society that remains challenged by race and class inequalities."--Page 4 of cover.

With vocal public figures such as Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, and Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam often appears to be a male-centric religious movement, and over 60 years of scholarship have perpetuated that notion. Yet, women have been pivotal in the NOI's development, playing a major role in creating the public image that made it appealing and captivating. Women of the Nation draws on oral histories and interviews with approximately 100 women across several cities to provide an overview of women's historical contributions and their varied experiences of the NOI, including both its continuing community under Farrakhan and its offshoot into Sunni Islam under Imam W.D. Mohammed. The authors examine how women have interpreted and navigated the NOI's gender ideologies and practices, illuminating the experiences of African-American, Latina, and Native American women within the NOI and their changing roles within this patriarchal movement. The book argues that the Nation of Islam experience for women has been characterized by an expression of Islam sensitive to American cultural messages about race and gender, but also by gender and race ideals in the Islamic tradition. It offers the first exhaustive study of womenOCOs experiences in both the NOI and the W.D. Mohammed community."

Negotiating Development in Muslim Societies explores the negotiation processes of global development concepts such as poverty alleviation, human rights, and gender equality. It focuses on three countries which that are undergoing different Islamisation processes: Senegal, Sudan, and Malaysia. While much has been written about the hegemonic production and discursive struggle of development concepts globally, this book analyzes the negotiation of these development concepts locally and translocally. Lachenmann and Dannecker present empirically grounded research to show that, although women are instrumentalized in different ways for the formation of an Islamic identity of a nation or group, they are at the same time important actors and agents in the processes of negotiating the meaning of development, restructuring of the public sphere, and transforming the societal gender order.

Marriage is central to Indonesia’s social fabric and critical in defining socially legitimate relationships. This book offers a rich anthropological account of Muslim Indonesian women’s experiences of courtship, love, marital discord and separation, polygamy, divorce and remarriage. By applying a new approach to theorising marital experiences as playing out across a dynamic marital continuum, it expands static and dichotomous understandings of marriage and divorce. It offers new insights on how local modalities of Islam shape gender relations and are actively negotiated by women in pursing their marital desires. The book draws upon ethnographic case studies from the eastern Indonesian island of Lombok where early marriage, divorce and remarriage, are common place for Muslim women. In this context up to 70 per cent of marriages are legitimated through Islamic ceremonies and remain unregistered with the state. While these unregistered marriages are legally valid within the communities in which they occur, such unions exclude women from accessing the marital rights theoretically enshrined in Indonesian marriage law. A key contribution of this book lies in its exploration of legal plurality in relation to Indonesian marriage, which involves investigating the salience of Islamic law, local customary law and state law, for women’s varied marital trajectories.

The author investigates the configurations of power implicated in the production of the discourses on the 'muslim woman' in the West and North Africa. She argues that as a single category, the 'muslim woman' is an 'invention', whether in the Western discourses of Orientalism (Isabelle Eberhardt) and psychoanalytic feminism (De Beauvoir, Irigaray, Cixous and Lacan), or in the discourses of islamic feminism (Djebar and Mernissi) and Maghrebian nationalism (Habib Bourguiba and Tahar al Haddad).