Negotiating Religion and Secularism: Muslim Women's Activism(s) in India

  • Schrago, Sophie S. (PI)

Project: Research project

Project Details

Description

The research project “Negotiating Religion and Secularism: Muslim Women’s Activism(s) in India" is set against the backdrop of the debate initiated by feminist scholars on the need to rethink secularism and its political implications for feminism and minorities’ rights. My project is concerned with opening avenues for the conceptualisation of a feminist reading of secularism that both retains a commitment to women’s human rights - economic, social and cultural as much as civil and political - and actively respects women’s cultural differences. Today, it is indeed vital to interrogate the principle and practices of secularism and to question earlier feminist certitudes about the alliance between feminism and secularism. Drawing on 19 non-consecutive months of ethnographic fieldwork within a particular Muslim women's movement based in several Indian cities, this research project examines how Indian Muslim women are apprehending the challenge of simultaneously addressing the claims of both equality and identity in a multicultural society. In a world where democratic secular societies have been operationalizing the principle of secularism in a way that does not accommodate religion in public spaces, where the rights of women and religious people have been often pitted against each other, where feminism as a political project has been enacted in a way that downplays cultural differences and religion as a positive resource for the struggle of gender equality, it is indeed urgent to rethink the interplay of secularism, religion and gender justice. Through an exploration of the ground-breaking actions and discursive production on secularism, gender justice and Islam by Indian Muslim women activists, this project therefore aims to investigate an enlightening feminist reading of the principle of secularism, where the role of religion and ‘Islamic knowledge’ in particular’ are reflected in a way to reclaim space for inclusive democracy and justice.

StatusFinished
Effective start/end date2/1/161/31/17

ASJC Scopus Subject Areas

  • Religious studies
  • Sociology and Political Science
  • Social Sciences (miscellaneous)

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