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Muslim Women on the Move: From Local Notoriety to Global Networks
Abstract
Recent North American Muslim Women's movements articulate an urgent need to be part of the American and the universal, global discussion on Muslim human and political rights. Furthermore, they represent a timely and an engaged response to what some Muslim religious scholars have dubbed as the "crisis of epistemology," and the "crisis of religious leadership." This research will examine grassroots North American Muslim women's organizations and movements such as: KARAMAH (Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights), The Peaceful Families Project, and Muslim Women Freedom Tour. It will further advance the notion that the printed, visual and virtual output of US and Canadian Muslim women activists; such as: the Muslim woman's magazine Azizah, Zarqa Nawaz's documentary Me & the Mosque as well as the virtual online blog of Mohja Kahf "Sex and the Ummah" do indeed create a unique reclaimed feminine space for Muslim women whose activist liberating message cross ethnic and national boundaries in its efficacy and empowerment of Muslim women. Additionally, their call to reopen the doors of fiqh (Islamic Jurisprudence), long deemed closed since the consolidation of the four major schools of jurisprudence in the ninth century, fosters a temporal and a geographical bond between these North American Women activists and their fellow Muslim women Middle Eastern predecessors both during the seventh century at the dawn of Islam, and in the early nineteenth century Arab women's liberation movements. These movements seek legitimacy by working with an Islamic jurisprudence framework so as to initiate change from within Muslim women's own spiritual and cultural contexts. The geographical spaces conquered due to the enactment of these religious and legal journeys claim more than personal and private spaces for these Arab Muslim women, rather they open up political and cultural spaces for their communities as well. Virtual and real networks are created in the process of reclaiming the religious feminine voice, as Asma Barlas puts it, from the patriarchal tradition of Muslim hermeneutics and jurisprudence.
Discipline
Religious Studies/Theology
Geographic Area
North America
Sub Area
Islamic Studies