The Struggle of Sinden: Female Artists, Family Economy, and Religious Identity in Art

The Relationship between Religion and the Public Square: Freedom of Religion in the Public Space

Less than Equal: Secularism, Religious Pluralism and Privilege

Muslim women are an integral part of North American society. However, these women face challenges as they expand on their identities independent from the ones delineated by Western and Muslim communities. Muslim women across North America face multiple tiers of discrimination rooted in patriarchy, Orientalism, and challenges associated with migration. On the one hand, they are confronted with neo-Orientalist portrayals of Muslim women that reduce their identities to submissive subjects and their religion to violence and extremism. On the other hand, these women encounter different intersections of oppression, including sexism and racism, both within and outside of their religious communities. Muslim women have responded to these challenges by actively participating in North American civic and religious discourses. It is crucial to acknowledge that Muslim women’s civic participation is not merely a reaction to the challenges posed by Orientalism, sexism, or racism, but it is also driven by their religious beliefs and values. Muslim women actively participate in civic affairs as a means of fulfilling their faith commitments, and they are active agents of change, motivated by their faith commitments to create a more just and equitable society. The current article examines women-led Islamic organizations in North America that provide services and support Muslim women in the region in different capacities. These women face unique challenges that are not adequately addressed by Muslim and non-Muslim civil rights advocacy groups and women’s rights organizations in North America. By establishing such organizations, women-led Islamic organizations are attempting to fill this gap and offer interventions in support of Muslim women that disrupt the popular discourse of representation and interpretation of Islam in North America. The services offered by these female-led organizations range from battling sexism in their communities to supporting domestic and sexual abuse survivors to offering Islamic education to Muslim women regarding their rights with the aim of advancing gender justice. The rise in Muslim women’s activism is redefining and paving the way for the emergence of new identities that bring aspects of these women’s Western and Muslim identities into conversation. While women have contributed to their communities in a myriad of ways without necessarily adopting a reformist agenda, there is a visible increase in activism and involvement in civil society organization that can be interpreted as an emerging impetus for reform in traditionally male-dominated spaces of leadership. Considering that Islamic scholarship and leadership has traditionally been governed by men, women’s activism unsettles normative assumptions about gender hierarchy and marginalization of women in Islamic organizations and communities. By actively engaging in the formation and restructuring of these organizations, Muslim women advance gender justice, both intentionally and inadvertently, in the Islamic tradition and their communities. In a departure from the approach adopted by secular organizations that support women, Islamic women’s organizations regard religion as a means to empower women and an alternative frame of reference for understanding and addressing their unique needs. By addressing women’s issues within an Islamic framework and tackling the central causes of women’s disempowerment and grievances, women’s organizations informed by Islamic principles empower Muslim women to actively participate in constructing their identities and meaningfully contributing to society. Muslim women’s activism and their exercise of authority as leaders of organizations and interpreters of religious knowledge have left a mark on the civic, religious, and political landscape of North America. A steady surge in women’s involvement in Islamic organizations is taking place organically, and women’s contributions to Islamic knowledge carry important implications for societal development and gender relations.

The corpus of miriam cooke’s writing defines new frontiers in scholarship on women’s writings on war and violence, Islamic feminism, and the dissident politics of art and literature. cooke engages with double critique that writes against Orientalism and Islamophobia as well as indigenous forms of repression and injustice. Her emphasis is on the intersections of power and poetics, highlighting the aesthetics of political critique. Her work identifies the persistent agency of women writers and artist-activists in times of hopelessness and turbulence. Her scholarship, deeply grounded in several countries in the Arab world, generates questions about gender, politics, and everyday experiences in Turkey, where I have been conducting research since the 1990s. Women have been at the forefront of contestations over the terms of inclusion and exclusion in Turkey. They challenge prevailing hegemonies, provoked partly by the targeting of women’s bodies, dress, and subject positions by differently situated ideological groups, secular or Islamist, attempting to reconfigure the public sphere according to their vision.Women Claim Islam, which focuses on the rise of Islamic feminism in the Arab world, helps us understand how secular and religious women in contemporary Turkey respond to prevalent power structures and political ideologies. cooke (2001, viii) argues that dominant narratives of history, war, emigration, and exile have excluded women’s stories, leading Arab women writers to demand “to be heard and seen.” These writers have formulated complex identifications based on their multiple positionalities, criticizing global and national feminisms and Islamic power and knowledge systems that marginalize them (155).Much of the research I conduct in Turkey focuses especially on women who self-identify as devout Muslims. For much of the 1990s through 2010, the headscarf symbolized shifting ideological fault lines in Turkey (Secor 2005). During this period the state banned the wearing of this article of clothing in many government and public spaces. In other spaces, secularists maligned and marginalized women who wore it. From 1996 to 2013 I heard many accounts of how women’s practice of wearing the headscarf had initiated encounters and experiences that made them aware of the dominance of secular ideology not only on the streets but also in scholarship, in feminist activism, and with respect to their own bodies and family lives. All devised tactics to navigate the everyday geographies of secularism and several became actively involved in resisting this hegemony by producing alternative realities.In Women Claim Islam cooke (2001, ix) usefully defines feminism as “above all an epistemology”: “it is an attitude, a frame of mind that highlights the role of gender in understanding the organization of society.” Whether or not a woman self-identifies as a feminist, cooke argues that feminism “seeks justice wherever it can find it. Feminism involves political and intellectual awareness of gender discrimination, a rejection of behaviors furthering such discrimination, and the advocacy of activist projects to end discrimination and to open opportunities for women to participate in public life” (x). This emphasis on feminism as awareness, rejection, and activism is productive for thinking about how headscarf-wearing women have responded to opposing parties politicizing and instrumentalizing women’s dress and bodies in struggles for power and dominance. Pious women have strategically claimed identities as Muslim women while refusing to be depicted as the singular Muslimwoman—a term that cooke (2007) coined to criticize the erasure of differences among Muslim women and the emergence of an ascribed singular category where gender and religion become one. Turkish women, most of whom wore the headscarf, participated in demonstrations at the gates of universities and in city squares to criticize the headscarf ban from the mid-1980s. Realizing that most women’s rights organizations were aligned with secular state-sponsored feminism and did not consider the headscarf ban a violation of women’s rights, devout Muslim women either established new Islamic feminist organizations (Diner and Toktaş 2010, 42) or started working in human rights organizations. Several sued the Turkish state at the European Court of Human Rights, to no avail (Gökarıksel and Mitchell 2005).Focusing on the symbolism of the headscarf reduces this article of clothing to a representation of something else and erases the experiences of women and even the woman herself. Instead, the stories of women in my research illustrate how veiling is an embodied spatial practice that makes the body and shapes the experiences of women across the spaces they traverse (Gökarıksel 2007, 2009, 2012). In all cases, women’s stories reveal the intimate, embodied, and everyday workings of political power and the potential of women’s actions to expose and reconfigure that power. Indeed, women’s embodied practices, such as wearing the headscarf and identifying as devout Muslims, became crucial to their awareness of gender injustices. Their experiences helped many see and feel these injustices as products of secular nationalist political ideologies. This kind of awareness remains a critical element of their ability to challenge the reign of the Islamically oriented populist nationalism of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) regime as well.Women’s encounters with the state and broader cultural hegemony in public spaces produced a certain kind of feminist consciousness. For example, after deciding to wear a headscarf in college, Neriman found herself no longer able to pursue her university degree, disowned by her family, and rapidly losing her hair. Becoming pious and adopting a new style of dress and bodily conduct underscored for her an intimately felt sense of gendered injustice and initiated a critical approach to the making of bodies, everyday spaces, and the state (Gökarıksel 2009). Similarly, many Turkish women who wear the headscarf recount stories of feeling out of place in shopping malls (Gökarıksel 2007). Fellow citizens verbally and even physically assaulted such women at parks and on the streets because of their dress (Gökarıksel and Secor 2016).Pious Turkish women insistently claim their rights and seek belonging in the city and nation. Today headscarf-wearing women are increasingly and more comfortably visible in the media and on the street in Turkey. However, new lines of exclusion and unfreedom have emerged. For example, during a focus-group discussion with self-identifying devout women in 2013 in Istanbul, when one woman praised the AKP government for taking steps to address discriminatory acts against headscarf-wearing women, another questioned her claim of new freedoms, citing the crackdown on the Gezi protesters as an example (Gökarıksel and Secor 2016). This conversation underlines that while Islamic feminists have certainly developed deep criticisms of state secularism and associated feminist movements, they still can do more to criticize the masculinist, Islamic populist politics of the AKP regime as well as to stand up for the freedom of all women and other oppressed groups.A sea change occurred in Turkey at the beginning of the twenty-first century. A neoliberal, procapitalist, and increasingly authoritarian Islamically oriented government led by Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP and a newly enfranchised Sunni Muslim middle class challenged secular hegemony over politics, economics, and public life. To an important degree, these Islamic political and economic elites have become the new hegemons. Their values, lifestyles, and ideologies have replaced the spaces, institutions, and cultural norms previously defined by secular elites. These drastic changes are especially visible in the cosmopolitan city of Istanbul, where the new elites constantly and sometimes violently contest the city’s pluralism. The 2013 Gezi mass protests were a significant flash point in the struggle over who has a right to the city and whose norms and values will govern it.Since the rise of Islamic government, pious and secular Turkish women have also had to develop tactics to live with and challenge the hegemony of Muslim nationalism (White 2013). Since the AKP lifted the ban against the veil, wearing the headscarf has ironically become almost an obligation in many places. Studies today find that women feel that they must cover their heads and publicly present themselves as observant Muslims to ensure access to jobs and for family social mobility and economic success (Toprak et al. 2009). Women who wore tank tops or short skirts reported being harassed on the street even during demonstrations to counter the military coup attempt on July 15, 2016 (Tahaoğlu 2016, cited in Korkman 2017, 182, and Başdaş 2017, 187).Islamic feminism developed a crucial voice against oppressive secular republican ideology and secular state feminism. Today Islamic feminists are uniquely positioned to oppose the new forms of Islamic masculinist hegemony of government that professes to represent the victimized devout Muslim majority. The AKP consolidated its power over a decade in government, moving it in a more religiously and socially conservative direction, especially after 2007. In late May 2013 a mass movement emerged to resist a government plan to demolish a central Istanbul park and its centuries-old trees, but it quickly spiraled into a widespread protest against the AKP government, its neoliberal policies and practices, its intensified imposition of an Islamic lifestyle, and its increasingly authoritarian tendencies. Similar protest sites developed in other cities throughout the country.In Istanbul many groups came together at Taksim Gezi Park, and some joined an encampment that lasted more than two weeks. Among them were anticapitalist and revolutionary Muslims, including women who joined the protests to reject Erdoğan’s efforts to present himself as representative of all pious Muslims. Photographs of such women circulated widely. In one, a headscarf-wearing woman carried a banner that ridiculed the Erdoğan government’s legislation restricting the sale of alcohol: “It’s impossible to stand you when sober” (Ayık kafayla çekilmiyorsun AKP). The poster held by the woman standing next to her (also wearing a headscarf) read: “Standing together against fascism” (Faşizme karşı omuz omuza) (festigan.blogspot.com/2013/06/direnis-degil-uyanis.html).The presence at the demonstrations of headscarf-wearing women whose Islamic orientation was visibly marked was significant because Erdoğan consistently tried to present the protests as a return to the “tyranny” of the secular establishment. To illustrate this narrative, he and progovernment media circulated apocryphal stories of headscarf-wearing women being abused in Istanbul during the Gezi protests. The presence of visibly pious Muslim protesters at Gezi complicated such representations. On June 7, 2013, about fifty headscarf-wearing women marched to protest the harassment of headscarf-wearing women on the street and expanded their concerns to include forms of violence that target all women. This march ended at Taksim Gezi Park, where the marchers noted a lack of harassment. They asserted ownership of urban spaces with banners that read, “Taksim is ours, Çarşı is ours, the street is ours.” They enacted “a politics that refused the alignment of the headscarf with unconditional support for the AKP government, and call[ed] for a broad feminist alliance to fight violence against all women” (Gökarıksel 2016, 236–37).Following Gezi and the corruption scandal that threatened Erdoğan’s close circle in the winter of 2014, the AKP government continued to amass power and suppress critics. The unsuccessful coup attempt of July 15, 2016, fueled a widespread government crackdown on its opposition facilitated by the declaration of a state of emergency. The government arrested and detained thousands of people and canceled the passports of many more. Most of these people were associated in some way with Fethullah Gülen’s Hizmet Movement, which the government accuses of orchestrating the coup. However, among the detained are also critics of the AKP, pro-Kurdish activists, academics who signed a peace petition, and members of parliament from the People’s Democratic Party (HDP). For years Erdoğan voiced ambitions to change the parliamentary system into a presidential system that gives the leader more executive power. After the coup the parliament proposed a referendum on this issue for April 16, 2017. The results are widely contested, although Erdoğan declared victory.Women’s voices, Turkish and Kurdish, were crucial leading up to the referendum. They challenged what they aptly called “one-man rule” and urged everyone to vote no. Among these were devout Muslim women who wore a headscarf and even the çarşaf. Their voices questioned ethnic and religious divisions that extend the ruling party’s power. They challenged the narrative that the AKP is ruling on behalf of all devout Muslims. They expressed a clear message that being religious does not mean supporting Erdoğan unconditionally and pointed to ongoing and expanding injustices. These women voiced their opposition despite strong measures to silence any dissent.cooke’s work on Islamic feminism opens up productive avenues for understanding women’s awareness, positioning, and activism. The work draws attention to the ways in which women who may not necessarily identify as feminist are indeed feminists—and may be uniquely positioned to expose and subvert masculinist narratives and ideologies. They do so even, or perhaps especially, in repressive environments where their bodies, dress, and everyday practices become targets of political ideologies and when cultural and political hegemony is manifest through their bodies. In Turkey such women have challenged secular ideology and encouraged moving away from authorized state feminism toward more plural feminisms. Today their voices are crucial for questioning the encroaching authoritarianism of an Islamically justified ideology.cooke (2007, 140) notes how central Muslim women have become to political discourses and cultural production about the Middle East and Islam:In the twenty-first century, Muslim fundamentalists, neo-Orientalists, Western feminists and Muslim and non-Muslim states are all arguing about what is right and wrong for the newly visible Muslim women. More and more Muslim women are joining the fray. Recognizing their centrality to their society’s self-conception, they are looking for ways to affirm themselves. Many are embracing and performing a singular religious and gender identity even if their lives are as varied as the innumerable cultures they inhabit.The increased visibility of Muslim women, cooke argues, generates a primary identity in which gender and religion become inseparable and gain ascendance over other identity categories. Such reductive labels serve conservative right-wing politics at home and abroad: “The Muslimwoman erases for non-Muslims the diversity among Muslim women and, indeed, among all Muslims. This erasure of diversity is mirrored within Muslim societies . . . where the Muslimwoman becomes the emblem of the purity of her community” (cooke 2007, 142).These dynamics continue to structure how others see and represent Muslim women as well as how they see and represent themselves. Identifying a diverse “Islamic culture industry” that includes fashion, literature, and products for Muslim women (Gökarıksel and McLarney 2010), cooke, Ellen McLarney, and I collaborated on the “Marketing Muslim Women” project, which examined the production, circulation, and consumption of images, commodities, and narratives concerning Muslim women in the early twenty-first century. The related JMEWS-sponsored conference led to the publication of a special issue of the journal that I guest-edited with McLarney. The essays focus on the negotiation and redefinition of what it means to be a Muslim woman “through or in reaction to the images, narratives, and knowledges about Muslim womanhood constructed in the marketplace.” We argue, “As Muslim women stake out their own positions, they actively engage with given Islamic practice and knowledge as well as with modalities of capitalism” (2). The political implications of this engagement continue to be crucial.cooke (2007, 153) encourages us to examine how women form and negotiate their gender and religious identities in complex times. Such a project remains important as the image of the Muslimwoman continues to circulate, even wrapped in the US flag in an iconic response to Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim and misogynistic rhetoric and policies. cooke’s research provides us with the critical tools we need to perform double critique that questions given categories, develops grounded understandings of agency, and recognizes the aesthetics of politics.

This article attempts to explain the similarities and differences between the religious beliefs and practices of young Jordanian and Palestinian women of Muslim and Christian background. It analyses the emerging patterns in the light of Bourdieu's ideas of ‘distinction’ and ‘habitus’, as well as Scott's notion of ‘hidden transcripts’ as aids to explain how differences between the religious communities are maintained despite the obvious similarities, and argues that the similarities found in the religious beliefs and practices of Muslim and Christian women (and men) are the result of a shared socio-cultural space as well as specific historical and political circumstances, their habitus. The past and current political circumstances require a public discourse of ‘unity’ and ‘harmony’. The differences that are regularly emphasized in day-to-day discourse are a specific feature of the minority situation in which Christians in the region find themselves. This is explained with reference to ‘hidden transcripts’ by a dominated group about those in a dominant position.

This volume includes eight studies of faith and giving for youth and emerging adults. Combined,we find organizational, cultural, institutional, educational, informal, familial, and developmentalinfluences on the shape and contours of youth and emerging adult faith and giving. These studiesprovide some challenges to popular interpretations of Millennials, and to the ways researchers typicallystudy religiosity and charitable giving. Accounting for the greater demographic and cultural diversityof Millennials may require changes to interpretations of young people by religious and spiritualleaders, parents, and scholars.

In contrast to traditional visions of violence, war, and oppression, accounts of religious toleration and accommodation, although perhaps grudging and on the local level, are beginning to be brought to the fore of European histories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These studies usually examine areas with significant religious minorities, and reveal that common people were cognizant of different religious beliefs and practices, and actively engaged in religious debate within the community.1 Despite the cooperation and relations between faiths, lines drawn between religious communities still existed, if blurred or often crossed. And in this milieu of competing religious identities and communities, there were still those who deliberately chose the path of conversion; consciously giving up one spiritual identity for another.Inquisition trials of reconverts to Catholicism in the seventeenth century, found in Italy, demonstrate that the majority of converts conceived of themselves as exchanging religious identities.2 In the seventeenth century, from the Catholic Church's perspective, being a Protestant constituted a crime that was solely within the Inquisition's jurisdiction to prosecute. Therefore, any Protestant wishing to become a Catholic would have to be tried, sentenced, and given a penance by the Inquisition. Only after making a full abjuration of their criminal errors and performing the assigned penance could converts become Catholics in good standing. The documents that form the basis of this paper, then, are the inquisitorial records generated by this official conversion process.The surviving records I examine in this paper, found in Florence and Rome, described conversion experiences that occurred over the course of the seventeenth century; the records found in Florence begin as early as 1638 and end as late as the 1690s, while those from Rome begin in the 1680s and continue until 1709.3 The records are incomplete, therefore making it difficult to calculate definitively the total number of converts the Holy Office dealt with every year, or over the course of the seventy years discussed here. The records that do survive, however, indicate very small numbers of converts.Furthermore, the converts themselves were atypical in seventeenth-century European society, since they were non-Italians who migrated to Italy and then converted to Catholicism. As a part of the trial procedure, inquisitors were required to record each defendant's name, place of origin, previous heretical beliefs and errors, and motive for conversion; only then could the defendant made a complete abjuration and be assigned a penance. Inquisitors often included additional important information, such as the defendant's age, family background, and travel experiences, especially as these factors pertained to the defendant's motive for conversion. This information reveals that, not surprisingly considering the precondition of mobility, most of these converts were male, and relatively young; under ten percent of the trials examined here involved women, and the vast majority of defendants were under the age of thirty-five.The records of these trials, therefore, describe the circumstances in which an individual, usually young, male, and definitely mobile, born and raised in a Protestant religious tradition, chose to convert to Catholicism. This paper, then, will discuss a confluence of several religious interstices; I intend to discuss the specific concepts defendants formulated to explain the attraction of Catholicism in several broad categories, most of which express the ritualistic, and therefore social, aspects of post-Tridentine Catholicism as it was practised. The motivations behind conversion also highlight the performative nature of religious identity in early modern Europe. These converts conceived of religion, and religious identity, as a series of actions they performed in a ritualistic setting.4 The doctrinal discussions and the converts' own contributions to the conversion narrative will be discussed concurrently, along with their ritualistic concerns, in order to display the intellectual interplay between inquisitors and converts, for both of whom ritual possessed powerful connotations and stimuli. …

Background: It has been shown that religious beliefs and affiliations might be a protective factor for trying or using drugs. Objectives: This study focuses on whether the choice to try a specific drug is also influenced by religion. The data were collected in the Cohort Study on Substance Use Risk Factors (C-SURF), a longitudinal study designed to assess substance use patterns and their related consequences in young Swiss men. MethodsL: Between August 2010 and November 2011, 5990 males between 17.9 and 31.4 years old filed a questionnaire about their socio-professional and family background, their drugs use, and their religious affiliation and beliefs. Results: Beliefs distribution shows a majority of non believers (58.3%) compared to believers with or without religious practices. Alcohol was reported to be chosen by almost the whole sample (90.4%), followed by cannabis (47.7%) tobacco (39.6%) and for the other substances the prevalence ranged from 9.4% for hallucinogens to 1.1% for heroin use. Alcohol as the drug of choice increased the risk to belong to the Christian community whereas it decreased the risk to belong to the Islamic and other religious community compared to no religious affiliation. Cigarette smoking increased the risk to belong to the Islamic community. Cannabis and other drugs use decreased the risk to belong to the Christian and Muslim community. Conclusion: Drugs of choice, independently from religious affiliation and strength of belief, are mainly driven by the local social norms, but being religious and practicing has the highest protective factor for choosing any drugs.

This Paper examines Muslim women's struggles with social expectations and religious identities in two novels: "The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf" by MohjaKahf and "Does My Head Look Big In This?". In the context of Muslim women's feminine identities amidst conflict due to religious visibility like Hijab in socially anticipated and demanding western settings, modern Anglophone literature is examined. Post-colonial feminist theory is used to analyse the text qualitatively through critical reading revealing literary aspects and representations that underscore Muslim women's struggles in Western countries. The research uses McKee's interpretive textual analysis, emphasising context and various interpretations as the autonomy, resilience, cultural integration, prejudice followed by identity were key words and themes in data collecting.The research revealed that Muslim women's complicated identity struggled between religious visibility and Western social expectations as in Randa Abdel-Fattah's work, the protagonist endured sleeplessness owing to the dread of wearing the headscarf in a potentially hostile situation. This internal conflict demonstrated how societal marginalisation affects Muslim women's mental health, as they must balance their religious identification with the dread of social discrimination. Additionally the conflict between cultural values and social inclusion is another important discovery as Uncle Joe's admonition to hide one's culture for social progress highlighted the conflict between cultural authenticity and social acceptability under which Muslim women and their families feel forced to sacrifice Islamic values for social and economic prospects in the diaspora. Similarly the protagonist's distress when her community is wrongly identified with Islamic radicalism showed how stereotyping affects relationships as this example demonstrated how daily micro-aggressions. On the other hand, Khadra's hijab experience in "The Girl with the Tangerine Scarf" emphasised its symbolic and emotional meaning as her resolve to wear the broken hijab showed her tenacity in keeping her cultural and religious identity despite social pressures. Along with that the ideological conflict between Islamic and Western values is concluded by Khadra's condemnation of Western individualism as her prioritisation of community over self-interest showed the basic difference in values.The research highlighted that Muslim women in Western nations struggle to preserve their religious and cultural identities despite competing social expectations. Identity negotiation is complicated by psychological stress, assimilation pressure, stereotyping and ideological disagreements while the Cultural competency, empathy and inclusive policies that recognise and accept multiple identities are needed to facilitate Muslim women's free expression. Keywords: Identity Negotiation, Religious Visibility, Cultural Integration, Psychological Strain and Stereotyping.

Modern people have cut themselves off from the sacred and imaginative realties and live in secular and measurable time. They live in a world described by Max Weber in terms of disenchantment. In Muslim society, many Muslims are not detached from reality; rather, they live in an enchanted world, a world of spirits and forces. This creates tensions between secular liberal and traditional views of life. In this sense, the young people strives to take a certain place and role in that society; they try to know themselves in society, to determine their personalities’ limits, to find out ‘who they are, what they believe, what they value and connect, what their aim should be, in short, what their place in society is’. In this research, the identity, religious life and behavior of Muslim young people, religious resilience, and accordingly religious changes and transformations have been examined along with religious potential. To be resilient, a person must be able to change, and to adapt to new circumstances. Thus, the paper explores that the Turkish youth may have new religious perceptions and different identity structures depending on the color of the time. The effect of different cultures and social changes and the new social manifestations that develop depending on this situation can be effective on the way to the transformation of religious identities. İn the first step, this paper is exploring the questions: ‘how does religion affect young people's recognition and evaluation of themselves and life? The next step is to research how Muslim youth can help people experiencing resilience to be strengthened, and how they can be strengthened as they exercise a religiosity and their identity. The paper could help to find out how religious faith can have in enabling people to overcome difficulty by giving them faith to hold on to life and find meaning and purpose, as well as by providing a supportive network of people. The data were obtained from semi-structured interviews which were conducted with 30 students of Şırnak University in Turkey. İt includes participants’ accounts of their process of making meaning of the world, their evolving understanding, perceptions, experiences and identity situations. Nevertheless, literature survey method has chosen to support and enhance the quality of the research. The qualitative research method was adopted as an interpretative paradigm. The data shows that; the relationship between the individual and religious belief and identity motivation is related to inhomogeneous results and factors. Young people create their own identity, which is mixed, and bricolage. Each individual has different conceptions and different motivations regarding religious identity. In this sense, religiosity and identity is fed by different social and psychological dynamics; in general, it seems to be related to time, space and socialization processes.

Muslim women had discovered the value of social mobilization; they empowered themselves and implemented literacy and livelihood training for marginalized and impoverished groups. Muslim women’s access to institutions of governance and their participation in the decision-making processes of their communities is still limited, despite the growing number of Muslim women holding public offices. Muslim women must be provided more opportunities to develop their potential through capability-building and training programmes. Women’s organizations can be mobilized towards this end. The Regional Commission for Bangsa Moro Women (RCBW) collaborated with the Philippine Council for Islam and Democracy to hold a conference on the Role of Muslim Women in Peace and Development. Muslim men and women are equally recognized as fathers and mothers of all nations. Muslim men and women are therefore also equally recognized as members of society. Keywords:democracy; development agenda; Islam; Muslim women; peace agreement; Philippine; RCBW

Muslim women’s experiences with the veil in France elicits diverse feedback yet little research has been conducted on the veil experience of Southeast Asian Malaysian Muslim women who have resided in France for more than a year. In response to this gap, the study identifies the controversial meanings of veiling experiences and explores the complexities of veiling practices among Malaysian Muslim women in France. Six Malaysian Muslim women residing in France were interviewed. Interpretive phenomenological analysis approach (IPA) revealed that Malaysian Muslim women in France shared accounts of receiving respect, finding acceptance within their work environments, and encountering a general atmosphere of tolerance towards their religious and cultural identities. They also believed that the opinion of the locals in France towards the act of veiling are different depending on their geographical location. Some interviewees are certain that the locals in rural areas are more paranoid of women in veils than the locals in urban areas. The findings support the importance of exploring the discourse of veiling experiences among Malaysian women in France and the need to highlight the intersection of cultural practices, religious identity, and the challenges faced by Muslim women who choose to wear the veil while residing in a non-predominant Muslim country like France.

Ethics Document Offers Guidance on Religious/Spiritual Issues in Care

Reviewed by: Muslim Women and Sport Christina Kwauk (bio) Muslim Women and Sport edited by Tansin Benn, Gertrud Pfister, and Haifaa Jawad. London: Routledge, 2010, 296 pp., $168.00 hardcover. Sport, usually described as a male preserve, has become a yardstick of gender equality and an arena in which women’s rights are championed and challenged. Often though, (Western) advocates, fans, and feminist scholars assume sport to be an endeavor pursued by women with shared gold-medal dreams and common gender-based sociocultural obstacles to overcome; differences in religious identity and cultural values are ignored in favor of the view that sportswomen share a universal sport agenda. The increased visibility of elite Muslim sportswomen wearing the hijab in international sport competitions reminds us, however, of the nonuniversality of women’s experiences and values. The topic of religion, women, and sport, therefore, opens up a unique area for expanding discussions on gender equality, women’s empowerment, and social change by challenging scholars and popular audiences to question deeply held assumptions about women’s identities, bodies, and public roles in society. Expanding this discussion, Muslim Women and Sport, edited by Tansin Benn, Gertrud Pfister, and Haifaa Jawad, is a timely collection of sixteen essays that highlights the diverse experiences and realities of Muslim women participating in sport. The volume is a product of an international meeting on the sporting opportunities of Muslim women held in Oman in 2008, and it represents the diverse perspectives, experiences, and research of its twenty-three contributing Muslim and non-Muslim authors. Muslim Women and Sport makes three important contributions to scholarship in this area: first, it gives voice to Muslim women athletes, coaches, teachers, and leaders who have been silenced, marginalized, or gone unseen in physical education and sport studies—a field dominated by non-Muslim Western researchers; second, the volume challenges negative stereotypes and assumptions about Islam, Muslim women, and sport by offering alternative, “woman-friendly” (32) interpretations of Islam, and by making a compelling case for the compatibility of Islam and women’s sport; and third, Muslim Women and Sport expands the analytical potential of gender analysis by recognizing the significance of religious identity and embodied faith as factors shaping the choices, values, and experiences of Muslim women participating in sport. Specifically, Pfister’s chapter aptly employs Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to frame a theoretical discussion on the sociological and political significance of different “body projects” and body practices for women who have been socialized in Muslim cultural practices, and the chapters on the Muslim diaspora make insightful contributions to understanding how central women’s bodies, and the control of these bodies, are in mediating the complex relationship among Islam, women, and sport. [End Page 186] The book is organized into four parts, with part 1 (chapters 1–3) providing a comprehensive overview of the underlying concepts and debates framing the entire volume. It also introduces the “Accept and Respect Declaration” (the first product of the Oman meeting), which states that “Islam is an enabling religion that endorses women’s participation in physical activity.” The declaration also recommends that “people working in the sport and education systems accept and respect the diverse ways in which Muslim women and girls practise their religion and participate in sport and physical activity,” including their “choices of activity, dress and gender grouping” (5). These points inform the foundational assumptions held by the authors in the remainder of the book—namely, that the religious values of Muslim girls and women must be respected, and that inclusive sporting environments can be created without religious transgression. The remaining three sections provide an encyclopedic representation of the history and contemporary status of Muslim women in sport in thirteen Muslim and non-Muslim societies. Muslim-majority nations in the Middle East serve as the sociocultural and political context for most of the volume, including Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Oman, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. Branching out to other Muslim-majority countries in southeastern Europe and North Africa, two chapters provide snapshots of Muslim sportswomen in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Morocco, respectively. Finally, three chapters cover the Muslim diaspora in Denmark, Germany, and South Africa. It should be noted that...

This paper examines South African Muslim women's opinions of the acceptability of microbicidal products to prevent HIV infection if these were to become available in the future. In the context of the HIV pandemic, prophylactic methods such as male circumcision, vaccines and microbicidal preparations are increasingly thought of as ways to reduce the incidence of infection. We examine the extent to which participants' religious beliefs and the implications of religious norms and ideals might influence decision-making concerning hypothetical acceptability to use a microbicide. We conducted qualitative interviews with 29 Muslim women residing in South Africa, a country with one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in the world. Four themes emerged from the data, namely, (1) participants' questioning of the need for microbicides; (2) reasons they gave in favour of microbicide use; (3) the juxtaposition of microbicide use and religious ethics; and (4) the role of religious authorities in decision-making regarding microbicide use. The juxtaposition of microbicide use and religious ethics was further informed by three sub-themes, namely, the life-promoting nature of both Islam and microbicide use, the possibility that microbicide use could encourage sexual risk-taking among male partners, and that the use of these products contradicted womens' notions of ethical agency and ideals about marriage. These themes and sub-themes are analysed in the context of gender relations among South African Muslims. The study findings are significant in light of recent data showing the effectiveness of a microbicidal preparation in reducing the risk of HIV infection in South Africa. We also show that the acceptability of microbicidal products is to a certain extent linked to a variety of religious persuasions and ideals. When microbicides become available in the future, proponents of their use will need to consider religious reasoning of potential users, including that of Muslim women.