The ‘Non‐dit’ in the Zenana: representations of Muslim women in Islamic canonical texts, the neo‐colonial imagination and a feminist response from Bangladesh

Representations of women, Islam, and colonial discourses appear in the Ratu yang Bersujud (2013). The novel is a counter discourse towards the representation of women and Islam in global discourse. The main problem of this research is the representation of Islam and women towards the Western world within the perspective of the author's subject. The purpose is to show the representation of Islam and women according to the author's subject view. This research uses a post-colonial perspective, especially the way colonized subjects present re-representation or overwriting. The objects are the Ratu yang Bersujud (2013) and the views of colonized subjects on the representation of Islamic identity (women and Islam). This research data consists of text narrative structure, thematic ideas of the text, social context of the author or colonized society, and discourse of modern colonialism. The result of the research is that the author's subject carries out a deconstruction that leads to the defense or resistance to the image or representation of Islam and women in the global discourse. However, it is trapped in ambiguity, which is trapped in colonial discourse and does not voice women in Islam but Islamic identity in the perspective of the patriarchal subject. It is proven as a representation of women as objects of misfortune.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the representation of Muslim women in social media. The essentialist and stereotypical projection of Muslim women by Western media often influences Western feminist understanding of Muslim women. Similarly, in the Indian context, the representation of Muslim women in visual media is much sensualized and is restricted to certain specific issues like personal laws, triple talaq, and low education level with an overtone of religion. However, this portrayal of Muslim women in media is not static; it is changing with time. Due to globalization and technological advancement, Muslim women are also becoming tech-savvy. This notion of representation changed when Muslim women’s activists started representing themselves on social media platforms as agentive selves. This paper investigates the self-representation of Muslim women’s online activism on social media. Based on the study of online presence on various social media platforms, this paper uses thematic analysis, content analysis and critical discourse analysis to investigate the formation of discourse about Muslim women in social media. To collect data, leading Newspaper Websites, magazines, news channels, YouTube, and X were chosen purposefully to demonstrate the various ways by which self-expressions of Muslim women, solidarity, activism, and womanhood are re-constituted across time and different locations

This study focuses on the representation of Muslim women in France within France24's YouTube content, particularly concerning Laïcité policy and human rights issues. It analyzes perspectives from politicians, historians, and members of the Muslim community to understand the impact of Laïcité on Muslim women's rights. Muslim women in France face tensions between secular values and their religious identities, often resulting in feelings of isolation and marginalization. The research employs the Netnography method with a content analysis approach to explore this topic on France24's YouTube channel. Findings indicate that France24 plays a central role in presenting diverse perspectives and complex situations. The coverage highlights the effects of Laïcité on Muslim women's individual rights, emphasizing potential limitations on their religious identities. The public's understanding of Laïcité and its influence on Muslim women is analyzed based on the presented content. This provides a comprehensive depiction of how views on Laïcité policy are reflected in media platforms and how it affects the perception and individual human rights, particularly for Muslim women in France.

Do Muslim women need freedom? has remained a contentious question in gender equality discourses since 9/11. In this ongoing debate, the usage of personal narratives of Muslim women plays a critical role in popularising the perception that Muslim women are denied their right to freedom in Islamic societies. Approaching these narratives with the idea of freedom configured in secular liberal tradition impedes the critical responsiveness to the variants of freedom that govern the lives of Muslim women. As a corrective to this long-held critical bias, this research contends that any attempt to settle this controversy needs to be attentive to the questions that must precede the readings of such narratives: What is freedom? Is it an essentialist idea? What practices harm Muslim women? What type of freedom do Muslim women need? This paper responds to these questions by situating them in its reading of I Am Malala to destabilize the mainstream readings of the text, which view the oppression of Muslim women as rooted in religion. Informed by the transnational feminist understanding of freedom as postulated by Serene J. Kahder in Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic(2019), an anti-essentialist reading of this narrative rejects the representation of traditional forms of selfhood of Muslim women as marginalized compared to the dominant construction of individualized selfhood of Malala. Khader’s idea of freedom negates the liberal feminist’s approach to the value of independence individualism as a necessary precondition for freedom supports this paper to argue against the representation of Muslim women as oppressed in I am Malala.

Feminist movements assume a social, cultural, and political position, characterized by their heterogeneity, representing the diversity present in humanity. Within this plurality, Islamic feminisms are movements that aim to find in the Muslim community a space that can be shared between men and women in an ideal of equality, both in the public and private spheres. On the other hand, within the concerns of feminisms, the media took on one of the central issues. At the confluence between feminisms and the representation of women in the media, this study aimed to investigate the representation of Muslim women in the Portuguese press. To this end, informative pieces were collected from the Portuguese newspapers Observador and Público, methodologically using Critical Thematic Analysis, as stated by Brandi Lawless and Yea-Wen Chen (2019). The results showed that five critical themes stood out in the analysis: clothing, sport, fashion, migration, and gender issues. The critical theme that stood out most from the data analyzed was that relating to Muslim clothing, with this issue still being seen in the Western world as a form of oppression of women. Finally, it should be noted thatnews content focused mainly on the international context, meaning the media continues to perpetuate ignorance regarding the reality of Muslim women residing in Portugal.

This study mainly investigates the representation of Muslim women in online news. This article analyzes the data using Corpus Linguistics combined with Critical Discourse analysis (CL-CDA) supported by the topic modeling method. The data used are the news articles with approximately 50 thousand-word tokens. The selected news is news published in 2013-2021. The news was chosen because it can represent the social view of Muslim women since the news has the power to influence people’s perspectives. The results show that the direction of media representation towards Muslim women is gradually leading to a better direction. Factors that bring a negative image to Muslim women are generally due to the “black fashion,” which is associated with “terrorism.” However, modernization makes today’s Muslim women more critical. They have the freedom to express their opinion, take important positions, and support feminism and gender equality movements. The use of the niqab is generally prohibited in European countries because it is considered an extremist. But, The COVID-19 pandemic has also changed the image of the niqab to be more accepted in society. Niqab users are now seen as “face covering experts,” which attracts a lot of people.

Social scientists critically examine the role of higher education in women’s empowerment. In the Indian context, gender, religion, caste, class and region are crucial in determining access to education. The gender gap has been a significant obstacle in India’s pursuit of educational goals. The status of Muslim women’s education has been a contested policy from state and community vantage. Prominent scholarly writings argue that Muslim women were even more isolated from the social and cultural changes than their men were and even more invisible in the public arena of society. Their condition is more pathetic in educational and cultural realms. The primary objective of this paper is to empirically outline the negotiation and strategies employed by Muslim women students in negotiating with their families, religion, communities and careers. The study followed qualitative methodology to understand Muslim women’s educational choices, the rationale behind their educational decisions, and their agency in negotiating with their families and the career prospects of young Muslim women. The current paper argues that there is a remarkable growth in the history of women’s education in India, especially after the 90s, which could not change the social structure and social status of women in society in general and Muslim women in particular. Still, the gender differences remained stable in the educational practices, in the families, and even in the equity-minded educational committees. According to various government reports and studies, despite the improvement in the educational enrolment rate of Muslims, the representations of the Muslim community in general and Muslim women, in particular, are minimal in higher education. More than looking at the representation of Muslim women in education institutions, the current paper will analyse the challenges and experiences of Muslim women to reach the secondary and higher secondary levels of education.

The representation of women in digital spaces has become a critical area of inquiry, as social media now serves not only as a medium for religious dissemination but also as a contested arena for discourse that shapes the social construction of Muslim communities. While previous studies have examined Qur’anic interpretations of women within academic and mainstream media contexts, limited attention has been paid to how these interpretations are constructed and publicly received on digital platforms—particularly Instagram, with its distinctive visual and interactive features. This study aims to analyze how the Instagram account @QuranReview represents Qur’anic interpretations related to women and to identify the patterns of public reception toward such content. Employing a qualitative descriptive approach and guided by reception theory, data were collected over a three-month period through the content analysis of 21 women-focused posts and 228 user comments, supplemented by non-participant observation. Thematic analysis using systematic coding procedures revealed a key finding: there has been a shift in interpretive authority from traditional scholars to digital figures who function as religious influencers in online spaces. This shift is accompanied by three dominant patterns of reception: progressive-affirmative, conservative-resistant, and critical-reflective. These findings underscore the urgency of re-evaluating the legitimacy of religious interpretation in the digital age and call for further studies that explore platform diversity and algorithmic influences in shaping public religious discourse.

This essay attempts to argue about the representation of Muslim women in veil in Western media. This topic is chosen because of general discourse about Muslim women, who wear veil as a threat to secular tradition and value of freedom. Besides, media has power to create affirmation about the general discourse. This paper analyses some researches about Muslim women in media. Based on previous research, it can be assumed that media has power to create women representation as otherness and placed them as threat towards secular tradition and value of freedom.

Postcolonial feminist representations of Muslim women as subjects and agents have successfully cleared a space for unsettling oppressive colonial representations of Muslim women as unchanging victims of patriarchal religion and Muslim men. This space has also brought into view new problems and issues that divide Muslim women into feminist and fundamentalists, secular and religious, diasporic and native. This paper focuses on one of the most contentious issues of Muslim women's representation: secular feminists' attempts to represent women in Islamic religious movements. In this process I examine some of the normative and ethical dimensions of feminist research as they emerged in my research with women in the Jamaat‐e‐Islami, a movement for religious reform and renewal in Pakistan. I reflect critically on issues in feminist research across ideological differences, incongruent locations and divergent cultural and spiritual investments.

This ethnographic article focuses on interactions between poor Muslim women, various intermediaries/brokers, and the Indian state. The article illustrates the complexities of claim-making and the forms of subjugation/marginalisation Muslim women experience when attempting to access resources, documents or paperwork. Contrary, however, to many representations of Muslim women’s engagements with the state, we also draw out agentive aspects as women hustle and negotiate to make claims and assert citizenship rights. Outcomes are variegated but also incorporate some women in brokerage roles, challenging assumptions regarding state/people mediation in India which foregrounds male brokers. The empirical detail is situated in a theoretical context incorporating gendered distinctions between shifting imaginaries of ‘nation’ and lived experiences of the ‘everyday state’. In a context where ‘nation’ has been evoked and articulated as a feminine form – through evocations of mata (mother) – we show how shifts towards a masculine imaginary, symbolised within Hindu-nationalist discourses, impacts Muslim women’s subjective experiences. We also illustrate that, whilst gendered imaginaries of ‘the nation’ are shifting, the ‘everyday state’ has long been experienced as a masculinised formation. Here we show how embodied involvements with the everyday state were constituted through gendered bureaucratic histories, spatial configurations, urban cosmologies and broader ideologies.

On the Politics of Viruses and Visibility

The introductory chapter of the book explores the tradition of writings by Muslim women in South Asia and studies their contribution to the development of fiction in the region. It examines the evolution of genre fiction and also explores the possibilities of formation of new genres such as partition fiction and graphic novels. The chapter also seeks to examine the complex socio-political dynamics in South Asia that include the pain of colonial violence in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the post-partition uncertainties in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh that created significant diversity in the voices of Muslim women writers over a period of time. The first part of the chapter, titled ‘Muslim women in South Asia,’ investigates the images and representations of Muslim women in South Asia, and the second part, titled ‘Genre and genealogy in Muslim South Asia,’ engages itself with the socio-historical circumstances that led to the origin and development of ‘women’s novel’ and trace the genealogy of fiction written by Muslim women in South Asia.

The political participation of Muslim women in Malabar has evolved from historical marginalization to a gradually increasing presence in public life, shaped largely by educational advancement, social reform movements, and community activism. Historically, patriarchal norms, conservative interpretations of religion, and the minority status of Muslims in India restricted women’s access to education, social mobility, and political engagement. The social renaissance in Kerala, spearheaded by religious reformers, educational initiatives, and community organizations, provided Muslim women with opportunities to acquire education, thereby laying the foundation for their involvement in political processes. Despite these advancements, representation of Muslim women in electoral politics—particularly in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies—remains limited, though local governance participation has shown measurable improvement. This study examines the historical trajectory and contemporary patterns of Muslim women’s political participation in the Valluvanad region, highlighting the influence of education, community organizations, and political mobilization. Findings reveal that increased access to education, combined with sustained social reform, has enabled Muslim women to gradually claim their space in decision-making, contributing to social, economic, and political transformation within their communities. The study underscores the ongoing structural, cultural, and institutional challenges that continue to constrain full political inclusion, while emphasizing education as the key driver of empowerment.

Women in Islam have an important position and clear rights since the beginning of this religion, but in practice these values are often distorted by patriarchal culture. In the digital era, Muslim women are not only consumers but also content creators in Islamic media, although their representation is still often limited to narrow and normative images. Digital media offers a new space for women to express themselves and play an active role in da'wah, but also faces pressure from social norms and algorithms that prioritize popular content. Therefore, it is important to view Islamic digital media critically as a space influenced by various interests, so that the roles and representations of Muslim women can be more diverse and authentic. The method in this study is: qualitative. The results of this study are that Muslim women in Islamic digital media are now increasingly diverse in the way they appear and play their roles. They are not only objects in content, but also actively shape and spread Islamic values in a more modern and authentic way. Although still facing challenges such as stereotypes and social pressure, women have succeeded in balancing traditional roles with new opportunities in the digital world, including in the fields of da'wah, education, and economy. Digital media is also an important space for women to voice their rights and fight discrimination, so they can build inclusive communities and fight for better social change.