Feminism, Muslim Women, and Empire

FAIN: FT-249349-16

Elora Shehabuddin
Rice University (Houston, TX 77005-1827)

A book-length study about the development of various forms of Muslim feminism from the early modern period to the twenty-first century.

Visions of Progress traces the long history of the construction of Muslim and Euro-American feminist agendas against the backdrop of empire. It brings together recent scholarly research that has sought to complicate familiar tropes about women, gender, and Islam and presents it in an accessible manner for a larger readership, but also intervenes in this very scholarship by charting the specific ways in which Muslim feminisms, particularly in South Asia, and Anglo-American feminisms have developed in tandem rather than in isolation, in the process even helping to construct one another. By historicizing the shared past of the many feminisms in the West and in the Muslim world, by highlighting the relationships between them, this book seeks to confront notions of superiority (in terms of the treatment of women) that persist in the wider Western public as well as the charges of imperialism used by many nationalists and Islamists alike to oppose feminist movements in many Muslim contexts.

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