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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
185579
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| Summary/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.
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| 2 |
ID:
123190
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Using three vignettes of the same physical space this article contributes to understanding of how the right to the city is contested in provincial England in the early twenty-first century. Oral history and ethnographic material gathered in Peterborough between 2010 and 2012 are drawn on to shed new light on the politics of diversity and urban space. This highlights the multiple place attachments and trans-spatial practices of all residents, including the white ethnic majority, as well as contrasting forms of active intervention in space with their different temporalities and affective intensities. The article carries its own diversity politics, seeking to reduce the harm done by racism through challenging the normalisation of the idea of a local, indigenous population, left out by multiculturalism. It simultaneously raises critical questions about capitalist regeneration strategies in terms of their impact both on class inequality and on the environment.
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| 3 |
ID:
160377
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article draws from the author’s study of marital breakdown in South Asian Muslim families in Britain, in which she found women engaging with an Islamic advice literature about marriage, much of which develops themes which were established in the reformist literature from colonial India, but redirects these themes to stem a recent tide of divorce. In the long haul of difficult marriages, she found women to be educating themselves about and working themselves into the mould of this literature, but also using these teachings in ways that diverge from the stated intentions of the authors, taking this literature as a benchmark of what a wife should expect from a husband and considering their infraction just cause for ending their marriages, or finding legitimacy for remarriage, rather than reversing the contemporary swell in divorce. Engaging debates over the work of Saba Mahmood and her critics, the everyday here appears to be resistive, in contrast with the patient submission of the religious virtuoso. It becomes clear, however, that women inscribe their moves towards divorce and remarriage within, rather than in opposition to, Islamic norms and values.
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| 4 |
ID:
185576
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| Summary/Abstract |
Images of the ‘Muslim Woman’ – passive, cloistered, and oppressed – have a long and inglorious history and have often been deployed in wider political debates in South Asia and beyond. The ground realities, however, tell a different story: there is no such person as the ‘Muslim Woman’ and this Special Issue presents papers that highlight the diversity of Muslim women’s lives within South Asia and among Muslim women of South Asian heritage in the diaspora. Muslim women often live in economic and political contexts that are hostile to their wellbeing and their experiences are also shot through with their own intersecting identities – region and residence, class, educational and employment opportunities, marital status, stage in the life course, and so forth. Our contributors focus on different arenas to highlight the diverse complexities faced by Muslim women grappling with the exigencies of daily life: engagements with the legal system in relation to marriage and inheritance; performing ‘claims work’ in order to obtain their entitlements from the state; involvement in income-generating work; and the impact of male outmigration on ‘left-behind’ wives.
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