South Asian Muslim Women Research Articles

Collective vulnerability between the researcher and the researched: a reflection on researcher positionality and ‘safety’ in the study of Islamophobia in economic Muslim migrants

ABSTRACT This paper reflects on collective vulnerability shared between the researcher and the researched, specifically in relation to studying the impact of Islamophobia in South Asian Muslim women in Britain. I reflect on my PhD study, and explore the tensions within the research space vis-à-vis researcher positionality. Puwar’s ‘Space Invaders’ is employed to explore the possibilities of disrupting power within research. This paper, therefore, reflects on the role of ‘collective vulnerability’ as a key to creating and maintaining a ‘safe’/ ‘counterspace’ to dislodge the trappings of employing a vertical gaze on data.

Exploring the experience of natural green space among South Asian Muslim people in the UK

ABSTRACT Visiting Natural Green Spaces (NGS) is an important lifestyle factor that contributes to quality of life. Whilst NGS can be used to combat health issues, many of which are experienced by South Asian Muslim communities in the UK, it is concerning that such communities face the largest disparities in access to NGS compared to other ethnic minority groups. This paper responds to the paucity in research of South Asian people’s experiences of NGS. Data were generated through individual semi-structured interviews with 20 South Asian Muslim men and women. Using Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus and capital, data underwent thematic analysis. This paper reports on the key findings of the study: defining the field of NGS; enhancing wellbeing in NGS; and challenges of accessing NGS. The study concludes that we understand NGS as fields in which capital is shaped by race, religion and gender, and provides suggestions for how policy and practice can consider NGS in health enhancing interventions.

Sultana’s Sisters: Genre, Gender, and Genealogy in South Asian Muslim Women’s Fiction, Edited by Haris Qadeer and P.K. Yasser Arafath

Sultana’s Sisters: Genre, Gender, and Genealogy in South Asian Muslim Women’s Fiction, Edited by Haris Qadeer and P.K. Yasser Arafath

When does a book launch become a meeting?

This is an account of a discussion between Sita Balani, Amardeep Singh Dhillon, Gail Lewis and Adam Elliott-Cooper on Sita Balani's book, Deadly and Slick: Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race, offered as a means of sharing its insights and exchanges among a wider community of activists and organisers. The origin of the book was Sita's observation of two dynamics at play at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s. The first was the fracturing of British Asian identity in the early years of the 'War on Terror', as Muslim became a racialised category in and of itself. The second was the rapid rise in 'gay rights': until 2003, Section 28 had criminalised the teaching of homosexuality as a 'pretended family relationship'; in 2004, civil partnerships had been introduced. Sita recognised that the moving around of these categories of sexuality and race was not merely coincidental. To help understand this she has introduced the concept of 'sexual modernity', which also has two parts: the promise of self-realisation through the pursuit of romantic love, the nuclear family and sexual adventure, and then - what 'stalks' this possibility - all of the sexual conduct and sexual practice that is disavowed and excluded from this. The book charts the state's racial taxonomies alongside its mobilisation of categories of sexuality and gender, in both the historical colonial context and the contemporary imperial centre. Panellists discussed some of the contradictions of these developments. These included the inclusion of police officers in the Gay Pride parade; moral panics about - and violence against - asylum seekers and drag queens; the 'problem' of the Black boy being attributed to not-enough-patriarchy, while for South Asian Muslim women it is a question of too-much-patriarchy; in an historical context, sexual violence being the norm in Jamaica but a source of paranoia in the colony of India. Through showing us the field of battle and its character, Sita gives us a tool with which to help build aligned constituencies of opposition and vision

Rememory, resistance and the geographical: adult and community education as spaces of possibility

This paper attends to the educational narratives of South Asian Muslim women who grew up in an inner city area. Using walking interviews, each individual took me around the neighbourhood where they grew up, identifying places of educational encounter on the way. There was a pertinent sense of a past that was in many ways, still present. Their memories transcended a place abandoned by the state and its residents by adopting a hauntological perspective and decolonial feminist inquiry. The work of rememory illuminates narratives that uncover some unsettling truths about how the intersection of race, gender and migratory settlement have provided more than voice and agency. Despite deficit stereotyping, a notable and rooted choice prevails from participants. There is a will to remain in what is externally framed as a place of social and economic deprivation. There follows a critique of how adult and community education has anchored and provided a foundation for agency, creativity and a commitment to future forming an informed community.

Of duty and diaspora: (Re)negotiating the intergenerational contract in South Asian Muslim families

In recent years, there has been exponential growth in the South Asian Muslim population in the United States. This demographic trend, along with a rapidly aging North American population, implies that very soon, a significant proportion of U.S. adults 65 years and older will identify as South Asian Muslim. Moreover, more than one-half of Muslims (57%) live in a multi-person/multi-generation household where all members identify as Muslim. Despite this evidence, limited research exists on the dynamics of multigenerational living in aging South Asian Muslim households, particularly around intergenerational support exchanges and the nature and strength of affectual bonds between generations. Additionally, research suggests that espoused within internalized cultural norms around filial obligation and duty, kinwork in South Asian families remains highly gendered. Less is known, however, about the gendered nature of kinwork in immigrant South Asian Muslim families. Based on 30 in-depth narrative interviews with three generations of South Asian Muslim women living in the U.S., this paper addresses these gaps, specifically focusing on intersections of faith, culture, gender, age, immigrant status, and age at migration. The findings from this study point to a renegotiation of the intergenerational contract, wherein care and support for a parent or grandparent were understood and enacted within the framework of an overarching Muslim identity, while simultaneously, for their older relatives, it was reinterpreted within shifting local and global realities such as the increasing participation of the middle generation, the daughters and daughters-in-law, in the paid workforce. In addition to providing insights into ethnic and religious-oriented experiences of aging and care, these findings may help inform policymakers and stakeholders (e.g., community service providers and faith leaders such as imams of mosques, researchers, and family members) in culturally congruent ways to support the health and well-being of aging South Asian Muslim families.

Self-Rooted Belonging and “Pleasing Dislocations”

Abstract This paper examines the interplay of religion, nationalism, and Muslim womanhood in the work of Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander. Specifically, I examine how Sikander’s work grapples with the problem of home and belonging for South Asian Muslim women in the face of religious, cultural, and nationalist discourses. These discourses characterize women as perpetual outsiders to the nation and as potential threats to the religion, while also objectifying women as symbols of purity whose bodies and sexuality must be strictly policed. For Muslim women in diaspora, the rhetoric and policies of the War on Terror compound this sense of unbelonging by characterizing Muslim women as potential threats to homeland security and as “the enemy within” due to their actual or perceived religious identity.

“Me? At this age?”: A narrative analysis of older South Asian Muslim immigrant women’s subjectivity-formations in migration arrangements

Abstract Critical and feminist ageing scholarship has drawn attention to how dominant discourses of ageing negatively impact older women's identities and social lives. While research intersecting migration and ageing has broadly focused on older immigrants' settlement experiences, very little is known about the discursive influences over older immigrant women's sense of agency and social relations. To address this knowledge gap, this study explores the subjectivity-formations of older South Asian Muslim women engaged in transnational migration. Narrative and discourse analysis principles were used to conduct and analyse life story-based interviews with 15 South Asian Muslim older women who recently migrated to Toronto, Canada. Findings indicate that participant subjectivity-formations are shaped by: (a) discourses of ageing; (b) socio-cultural–religious discourses; and (c) discourses of transnational migration. In response, participants engaged in dynamic strategies including conforming, negotiating, creating alternative narratives and/or resisting these discourses to organise their lives. These findings reinforce the continued need to trace the governmentality of structural conditions over ageing migrant women's lives and their responsive strategies to manage these impacts.

Usha Sanyal. Scholars of Faith: South Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious Knowledge

Usha Sanyal. Scholars of Faith: South Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious Knowledge

Connecting the racial to the spatial; migration, identity and educational settings as a third space

ABSTRACT The VET sector can be located as one that sits within the intersections of the racial and spatial in addition to the classed; the traditional focus of research concerns. There is a direct correlation between towns and cities with high levels of deprivation and the recruitment of racialised and other marginalised groups into general further education colleges. This paper considers the intertwined nature of the racial and spatial and its implications for South Asian Muslim women students in VET spaces in terms of identity construction and possible futures. This paper critiques how geographical location and educational settings highlight the complex factors encountered by diasporic communities; patterns of historical migration; the educational space as a third space); the role of teachers as mentors. These factors contributed to students developing fluid and dynamic identities rooted in a critical self-awareness whilst resisting Western-centric notions of success. Whilst this created a self-realised agency in the narratives of South Asian Muslim women, it also created a cultural hauntology in the absence of a third space. This has various implications for future VET research in terms of how students from ethnically diverse groups, create or engage with a third space.

Outside belonging: a discursive analysis of British South Asian (BSA) Muslim women’s experiences of being ‘Othered’ in local spaces

ABSTRACT Drawing on empirical research with British South Asian (BSA) Muslim women in Oldham and focussing on the embodied intersectional nature of discrimination they face, this paper explores British Muslim women’s experiences of belonging in local spaces. Through a discursive analysis of place, belonging and identity, this paper argues that BSA Muslim women appear as a visible threat to the nation, occupying a contradictory position of both within the local and national but not part of it. Focused on the context of Oldham, a former mill town in the North of England, findings suggest wider hegemonic discourses of Muslim woman as “Other” are inflected by local dynamics and shape discordant everyday experiences. It is argued that Oldham presents a microcosm with which to view the nations complex relationship with its Muslim minority groups and resonates with the current political landscape of rising right-wing populism and Islamophobia.

Book review: Usha Sanyal, Scholars of Faith: South Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious Knowledge

Usha Sanyal, Scholars of Faith: South Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious Knowledge (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020), xiv + 410 pp.

Creating diversification through hybrid identities and educational encounters: the power of a third space

PurposeThis paper explores the contextual factors that support the necessity of a diversified curriculum. The author draws on the findings of the author's doctoral research to consider the complexities underpinning the educational narratives of South Asian Muslim women. The paper critically examines South Asian Muslim women's position as migrant daughters and how South Asian Muslim women navigated colonial systems and the practices and behaviours inherent in these. Situated in a racialised inner-city area with a framing by policymakers as one that creates spatial anxiety, participants shared empowered and agentic narratives. These demonstrated a resistance to the othering and stigma that often ensues through stereotyping.Design/methodology/approachThe project adopted a feminist participatory approach and made use of hauntology as both a theoretical and methodological framework. In keeping with this, four participants who had grown up in the area and still lived there were spoken in the form of research conversations, a walking tour and photographs of significant sites.FindingsThe paper provides empirical insights into how these four participants encountered education. By frequenting both formal and informal educational settings, these spaces became a crucial third space which alleviated unsettlement though allowing a more embodied occupation with learning. Teachers played a critical role in cultivating appropriate and supportive environments and were described and inferred to be moral agents and figures who assisted participants' navigation of a space, often embodying a more mentor-like disposition. Teachers proved to embody a practical wisdom, acting as anchors for offering spaces in and outside of the classroom that invited occupation and construction. Such spaces at school enabled the encountering of difference through recognising first the similarities with peers. Whether these commonalities were cultural or otherwise, those commonalities provided a firm foundation from which to imagine and push the parameters of the space and identity, and so school was likely another crucial space for hybridity.Research limitations/implicationsThe research approach is specific to the context(s), narratives and migratory moment of the participants, and although participants' accounts have been re-storied to honour participants' voices, the accounts may lack generalisability. The paper raises two key implications: first, by recognising educational settings as a third space for students to create a hybrid identity, and second, through familial, community and navigational capitals which have the potential to shift the pedagogical approaches underpinning the conditions created for students.Originality/valuePointing out that hybrid identities without the frequenting of space are hauntological is crucial, and hybrid identities cannot reconcile cultural differences because hybrid identities are out of place, and without location, hybrid identities remain troubled and alienated. This is a situation that the author describes as cultural hauntology – a condition which draws on both hybridity and hauntology to illuminate unsettlement long after colonisation. The native culture is never fully banished or forgotten. The native culture exists behind the closed doors of homes, within communities and perhaps even within the demarcation lines of a given geographical area. Cultural hauntology comes about as a deep-seated internal colonisation that appears as traces, marks and murmurs that cannot be deleted. Perhaps what alleviated the extent of what might have been more extreme in cultural hauntology's dissonance, were the teachers, mentors and role models that participants repeatedly referenced as agents that bridged and enabled the participants.

Intersectionality as personal: the science identity of two young immigrant Muslim women

ABSTRACT This paper studies intersectional multiplicity by encompassing the ways individuals shape relationships between social structures and their science identity. We discuss the science lives of two sixteen-year-old British South-Asian Muslim women studying in a single-sex independent school in London, both of whom aspire to science careers. Adapting McCall’s ‘intracategorical complexity’ in favouring a case study approach, we present the multiplicity of our participants’ relationships with exclusion and inequality, discrimination and privilege within their lived social settings, and how these relationships shape their identities and ambitions to become scientists. Our findings reveal that despite their similarities in their societally ascribed intersectional makeup, Ayesha and Hanya differ in viewing their intersections as challenges and/or opportunities. They both portray agentic control towards ‘going against the grain’ as future women scientists by negotiating their intersections as they develop their science identity.

Digital Subaltern Counterpublics and Muslim Women’s Resistance in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire and Samira Ahmed’s Internment

This article examines the gendered racialization of Muslim women in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017) and Samira Ahmed’s Internment (2019) and argues that their young South Asian Muslim women protagonists navigate physical and digital spaces to claim their rights as citizens. The article first explores the ways in which the public sphere operates transnationally and has shaped perceptions of Muslims in the United Kingdom and United States since 9/11, and analyzes the role of transnational subaltern counterpublics to resist Islamophobia and state repression. The article then examines the ways in which the young Muslim women in Shamsie’s and Ahmed’s works fight the xenophobic state, its surveillance regime, and the curtailment of the ability of Muslims to move freely. In both novels, resistance emerges as a transnational subaltern counterpublic in traditional and digital media. The novels underscore the young women’s agency in overcoming constraints on their mobility and freedom of speech to claim their rights as citizens and engage in an oppositional public sphere that counters their exclusion.

Book review: Usha Sanyal. 2020. Scholars of Faith: South Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious Knowledge

Usha Sanyal. 2020. Scholars of Faith: South Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious Knowledge. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. xiv + 395 pp. Figures, tables, glossary, bibliography, index. ₹1495 (hardback)

Seaming Sisterhood/Seaming Seams: South Asian Muslim Women in London-- Community among Precarity

Seaming Sisterhood/Seaming Seams: South Asian Muslim Women in London-- Community among Precarity

Scholars of Faith: South Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious Knowledge. By Usha Sanyal

<i>Scholars of Faith: South Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious Knowledge</i>. By <scp>Usha Sanyal</scp>

Courting agency: gender and divorce in an English sharia council

ABSTRACT Sharia councils have been in existence in England since the 1980s, providing advice and guidance in matters of Islamic family law. The vast majority of their users are women applying for Islamic divorces. The ulamā (scholars) at the councils encourage reconciliation and only grant divorces where this is deemed impossible. This paper, based on observations at a large sharia council in East London, supplements earlier institutional analyses by focusing not on what the ulamā are doing, but on what women are doing at the council. The paper identifies a spectrum of compliance with the council and its procedures, ranging between those who say they just want what the sharia wants, to foot-dragging, actively contesting the ulamā and exiting the council. Further, these forms of engagement may change over time. Overall, the paper contributes by illustrating the complexity of British South Asian Muslim women’s identities and affiliations and engaging with questions of gendered agency. It is clear that even when women petitioners contest, confront or exit the council, they may inscribe their moves within, rather than in opposition to, Islamic norms and values. The paper draws out the wider political implications of this non-opposition between Islamic subject positions and agency.

Intergenerational Exchanges In Aging South Asian Muslim Families: An Intersectional Lifecourse Perspective

International migration flows are increasing at a rapid pace and are often accompanied by emergent global realities, (re)negotiation of identities and familial bonds, anticipated challenges, and unforeseen exigencies. Concomitantly, advances in public health have resulted in longer lives with an increasing proportion of the global population now 65 years and older. While these demographic shifts have received considerable research attention, little is known about aging South Asian Muslim families in the US and the ways in which they adjust and adapt to shifting social realities. To address this gap, this qualitative study explores the intersections of faith, culture, gender, age, and immigrant status, and how these seminal life course events shape intergenerational care and support exchanges in South Asian Muslim families. Building on findings from 30 in-depth narrative interviews with three generations of immigrant South Asian Muslim women, and using an intersectional lifecourse perspective, this study explores the (re)negotiation of familial bonds and the enactment of religious beliefs and practices such as those around filial expectations in a transnational Islamic context. It shows how, for the grandmothers, daughters, and granddaughters in the study, their Islamic faith was a part of both the public sphere and a collective ideology, as well as a deeply personal and intimate attachment that provided structure and continuity in their everyday lives. Finally, the implications of these findings in the broader context of Islamophobia and salient structural barriers to accessing available health and social support services for aging South Asian Muslim families are discussed.