Intersectional Religious Agency: Mauritian Muslim Women and the Negotiation of Porous Interfaces

Abstract

This paper explores the lives of 12 Mauritian Muslim women of three generations, and the ways in which they negotiate agency in what is at once a multicultural, pluralistic island nation and also a space in which religious boundaries are socially and institutionally maintained. Using the concept of intersectional religious agency, we argue that the experiences of the Muslim women from our sample are best understood in terms of their daily, creative and untidy negotiations of the porous interfaces of class, caste, profession, patriarchal structures, religion, cultural repertoires and secular arrangements. In a country shaped by the complex navigation between and within groups’ social stratification, these women are at once witness to the enormous changes that have taken place in Mauritius since independence, and participants in local and global discourses pertaining to both religion and the place(s) of women. We expose how women take ownership of compromise as a tool to negotiate both secular and religious boundaries. This negotiation is made more complex when it is undertaken by a group who are a ‘majority minority’ within the island state. This, we believe, adds important insight into the study of small but diverse community structures, and in particular the constantly shifting tones of women’s voices within such space.