SPECIAL 30% Discount to SOCREL SUBSCRIBERS
An Islam of Her Own
Reconsidering Religion and Secularism in Women’s Islamic Movements
By Sherine Hafez
| "This unique study of the personal narratives of women active in Islamic charity organizations in Cairo allows us to glimpse the surprisingly complicated and contemporary meanings for them of ‘Islam as a way of living.’” |
| -Lila Abu-Lughod, author of Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories |
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“A lucid account of the personal, community, and national forces that shape Egyptian Muslim women who engage in social activism as part of their commitment to religious ideals. This book seeks to go beyond the usual dichotomies that pit the secular and modern against the religious and traditional.” |
| -Marnia Lazreg, author of Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women |
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“Emphasizing narratives that explore modern selfhood and identity politics among Islamic activist women, Hafez examines the many contexts that transcend an opposition between religion and secularism. This timely, excellent book formulates new methodological and theoretical approaches relevant to anthropology, religious studies, gender studies, and Middle East studies.” |
| -Susan Slyomovics, co-editor of Women and Power in the Middle East |
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“Exquisitely captures the multi-faceted desires that draw Egyptian women into Islamic beliefs and practices. Compelling insights, challenging to key standing theories. Powerfully and convincingly argued.” |
| -Suad Joseph, editor of Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures |
As the world grapples with issues of religious fanaticism, extremist politics, and rampant violence that seek justification in either “religious” or “secular” discourses, women who claim Islam as a vehicle for individual and social change are often either regarded as pious subjects who subscribe to an ideology that denies them many modern freedoms, or as feminist subjects who seek empowerment only through rejecting religion and adopting secularist discourses. Such assumptions emerge from a common trend in the literature to categorize the “secular” and the “religious” as polarizing categories, which in turn mitigates the identities, experiences and actions of women in Islamic societies. Yet in actuality Muslim women whose activism is grounded in Islam draw equally on principles associated with secularism.
In An Islam of Her Own, Sherine Hafez focuses on women’s Islamic activism in Egypt to challenge these binary representations of religious versus secular subjectivities. Drawing on five non-consecutive years of ethnographic fieldwork within a women's Islamic movement in Cairo, Hafez analyzes the ways in which women who participate in Islamic activism narrate their selfhood, articulate their desires, and embody discourses in which the boundaries are blurred between the religious and the secular.
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
June 2011
240 pages
ISBN 978-0-8147-7304-8 £13.99 PB
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