Women’s Religious and Social Activism in Egypt and North Africa

Abstract

Abstract The chapter surveys some of the common themes that marked women’s social and religious activism and shaped its trajectory specifically in Egypt, and, more broadly, in North Africa. It highlights the nature of their early efforts, the shift in their activism, the overlap between secular and Islamic discourses in their intellectual grounding, and their international orientation and recent NGO-ization. It is particularly interested in analyzing how the literature approached and theorized these social and religious forms of participation and how the latter refashioned scholars’ thinking of agency and activism. Women’s engagement either in social welfare activities or Islamic inspired volunteerism, it argues, often blurred the dichotomy between the social, the political, and the religious, since it took place against complex backgrounds and grounded itself in overlapping discourses.