Muslim Woman/Muslim women: lived experiences beyond religion and gender in South Asia and its diasporas

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.