Abstract
This paper constructs a culturally appropriate model for Muslim women’s empowerment in management and leadership positions that addresses sustainability goals of quality education, gender equality, economic growth and reducing inequalities, as well as national and cultural differences from Western women’s empowerment models. The approach to model building begins with two sources of evidence for women’s empowerment—first, the empowerment of women recognised in the Qur’an and Sunnah, and in the historical-biographical record, particularly in the early Islamic period that draws to some extent on hermeneutics. This is followed by identifying four approaches that can be used in constructing a comprehensive model of Muslim women’s empowerment: Bourdieu’s social, cultural and intellectual capital theory; multiple modernities theory that recognises societal diversity; cultural security arguments for the preservation of cultures; and postcolonial critiques that argue for diversity through decolonising. The main argument of this paper is that sustainability goals cannot be achieved without a model appropriate to the valuational, cultural and societal context in which women are educated and work. The final section of this paper proposes a multidimensional and multilevel model that can be used as a guidance for empowering Muslim women in management and leadership positions. The model construction is based partly on Côté and Levine’s psychosocial cultural model that identifies multiple levels and dimensions of identity, role and social institution construction. This article contributes to the current literature by proposing a theoretical foundation and a multidimensional model that can inform and shape the empowerment of Muslim women in management and leadership positions in different societies.
Highlights
The literature on Muslim women has expanded rapidly in recent decades, reflecting to some extent the changing conditions in many countries that have allowed for more education, opportunities in the workplace, and assuming increasingly senior-level management and leadership positions (Zahidi 2018)
Many of the historical studies, such as El Cheikh’s (2015) work on women’s identity in the Abbasid Caliphate, investigate actual roles that women played in all societal sectors and classes in politics, economics, religion and culture in response to and contrasting with the stereotypical views of women as subjugated and dispossessed of capabilities, roles, influence, and power while retaining the complex gender politics of society
(1993) overview of Muslim women’s history described their integral roles in social and economic life in early pastoral societies through to their variable roles in later periods ranging from the highly engaged and even leading roles to those of suppression due primarily to political and cultural practices. It is the contention of Walther, like many other recent writers, that the misrepresentation of Muslim women has been constructed in the West to support feelings of superiority and political aims, and that many political and cultural causes of oppression are mistakenly attributed to Islam
Summary
The literature on Muslim women has expanded rapidly in recent decades, reflecting to some extent the changing conditions in many countries that have allowed for more education, opportunities in the workplace, and assuming increasingly senior-level management and leadership positions (Zahidi 2018). This article is a theory- and model-building treatment of Muslim women’s empowerment to counter many negative stereotypes and Islamophobic assumptions that affect views on Muslim women and Islam, a purpose shared by a large body of recent literature in depoliticising Islamic studies to reconstruct the actual principles and values in Islam as they relate to women and their empowerment, quite often highly divergent from the cultural and political conditions in many societies that deviate from Islam This purpose is line with Lynham’s (2002) discussion of theory-construction in applied disciplines, focussed on creating an understanding and explanation of a topic, making more explicit something that often remains implicit. The final section describes a suitable multilevel and multidimensional model from which Islamic management practices derive that include women as empowered actors
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