Panel Organizers:

Dr. Shailaja Fennell - Development Studies, University of Cambridge
Dr. Anna Lindberg - Penn State University, Division of Arts and Humanities, Altoona, USA
Prof. Night Queen Pankaj - Professor, Dept. of History, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India

Abstract

The interaction between Gender and Islam has emerged as a much discussed and disputed arena both within South Asia as well as among diasporic South Asian groups in recent decades. Islam as a religion and the corpus of Islamic Law influence the construction of gender identities, roles and rights with far reaching implications for Muslim as well as secular states in South Asia and the West. As gendered identities are socially constructed within a given religious, cultural and legal context, specific engagement between Gender and Islam are fashioned by the particularities of local norms and customs.

As a consequence there are variations in the characteristics of gendered identity across Islamic legal traditions within the Muslim world, as well as different understandings of the gendered subject within the academic discourses that emerge from Orientalist, religious revivalist and feminist (secular and Muslim) positions on gender and identity. While the primary locus of Islamic law is the text, epistemological, hermeneutic and philosophical traditions of analysis uncover the more complex and far-reaching consequences of Islamic law and texts on the position of women. The production and control of religious knowledge has direct implications for the position of Muslim women engaged in production and reproduction within local, national and global circuits. The panel intends to examine the current call for rethinking the interrelations of gender with Islam both through new analytical frameworks as well as an examination of the proposed reform of Islamic Law and new interpretations of these laws.

The panel welcomes papers on a number of themes such as:

• The impact of modernization, globalization and Islamization
• Gender and Reform in Muslim Personal Law
• The interrelations between Space and Discours
• Send your abstract to the panel organizers
• The interaction between gender and religious identities in colonial, and post colonial eras

This particular interdisciplinary forum calls for diverse positions and varied analytical frames to understand the relationship between gender, Muslim identity and law within the Muslim communities in South Asia as well as diasporic communities in the West. Scholarly exchanges from the field of religious studies, gender studies, law, history, literature, development studies, sociology and anthropology are encouraged to facilitate richness in papers and multiplicity of approaches.

Anjum Alvi, Free University of Berlin, Institute of ethnology, Berlin, Germany
Another Look at the Headscarf Debate: the Veil in Pakistan and the Diaspora
 
In recent years, debates about the covering of the hair by Muslim women in official positions or public institutions have sprung up in several Western countries, and the overall outcome is one of antagonism, confining the meaning of the veil to either a confined and limited existence of the concerned women or a  religious preoccupation in similarly confining terms. The paper tries to establish a broader and multifaceted understanding, and to this end compares different social contexts in which different forms of veiling are used by looking at the Muslim Punjab in Pakistan in rural and urban settings, and it tries to establish a preliminary scale approaching aspects of the modern world view which is less historical than ideological. It shows that the veil has to be seen first and foremost not as a symbol but as a  a value whose meaning relates to different social contexts, expressing the way a woman acts towards her social other. The veil is t!
 hus not so much a concept of suppression as one of identity, connected to issues like honour, shame, religion, and, of course, gender, and turns out to be a multivalent principle. This notion is taken to the situation in the Western diaspora where the multivalence of the veil increasingly engages in a critical encounter with central principles of modernity.
 
Tanya Sheikh, International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM), Leiden, The Netherlands
Love Marriages Revisited', the Shaista Almani Case
 
In June 2003 Shaista Almani, a 22 year old schoolteacher eloped with her lover Balaksher Maher. Consequently, her face was plastered on every newspaper cover in the country for over a year. What happened? Had somebody pressed the repeat button? Was this case a carbon copy of the now infamous 1996 Saima Waheed case which had initiated a nation,wide debate in Pakistan on a woman's right to marry without the consent of her wali (legal guardian), even though the Hanafi school of law which is the dominant school of law in Pakistan grants women that right, and even though the Federal Shariat Court had upheld this right already in 1981? The judges of the Lahore High Court had held Saima's marriage to be valid, even though her father's consent had not been obtained. Leave to appeal the decision was granted and in December 2003 the Supreme Court again upheld a woman's right to contract a marriage without the consent of her wali.
           
In this paper I show how Shaista's case was not only a power struggle between women's groups fighting for women's rights and the feudal lords who wanted to maintain the status quo, but also how Shaista's story was embedded in a struggle for state resources. Furthermore, I show how Shaista's case was also about a struggle for power and authority between the official legal system and the unofficial, i.e. jirga system in Pakistan. I will show that though there are similarities between the Saima Waheed case and the Shaista Almani case, there are also subtle differences. The SC decision, though not able to morally legitimize a woman's right to marry without the consent of her wali, did shift the parameters of the debate.
 

Aisha Anees Malik, University of Cambridge, Churchill, UK

Voices of British-Pakistani Muslim Women: Perceptions of Muslim Family Laws of Marriage and Divorce

This particular paper draws attention to the phenomenon of global migration and the associated problem of the politics of group rights that has generated tensions between feminism, multiculturalism, cultural relativism or even universalism and their approaches towards gender justice. It aims to investigate the conflict that may arise due to the acceptance of minority group rights like the demand of Muslim community

leaders in Britain that Shari'a should be given a place in personal law and the universally accepted human rights of gender equality. It intends to bring to forefront the views of women on the issue and as they understand the Muslim Laws as opposed or similar to the views of the community leaders or the experts.

 
This particular paper is also a result of a study being conducted in these two cities (Luton and Peterborough) to analyze the perceptions of women about marriage and divorce in Shari'a. It has been seen that in the case of Muslim women of Pakistani origin a shift in their identity from ‘south,Asian' to ‘Muslim' in the post Rushdie and 9/11 scenario has resulted in increased pressures on them to conform to the ‘perceived conceptions' of Muslim laws. The process is indicative of the politics of group identity amongst Pakistani Muslims in England. It has been seen that they are being subjected to a more fundamentalist, or less enlightened, interpretation of Muslim Personal law in England than that to their sisters in the subcontinent (Pakistan, Bangladesh and India). This has generated a debate on gender justice where feminist, multiculturalist and universalist perspectives see potential for conflict. However, these positions are located outside the subject group - with the understanding of cultural difference as a matter of "us" and the "others". The voices of women who themselves are the "other's other according to Robina Mohammad (1999) have not been heard. This paper aims to provide a subjective expression of the voices of Muslim women themselves as to their own perceptions of Shari'a laws of marriage and divorce and how they affect them as opposed to or similar to the views of their own community leaders or the more established view of the experts (academics and jurists).
 
Neelam Raina, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
Reconstruction in Kashmir and the Role of Islam
 
The objective of this work, which is based on primary research done through fieldwork in Kashmir, was to assess the impact of the conflict on the women in Kashmir who work in the area of crafts. Personal interviews and meetings with Kashmiri crafts people, bureaucrats, widows, orphans and militants have contributed to this research. The conflict has changed the sex ratio; male deaths mean that increasing number of women are now involved in crafts. Being home based crafts are considered safe in this conflict torn region. Yet the shrinking markets push an increasing number of people below the poverty line and into the depths of conflict, where hiring people to shoot and kill is also an optional means of income generation. The symbiotic relationship between development and peace means income generation that combats base level poverty, could bring peace at some level. The role that Islam plays in the state and the relevance of the Sharia law (for women, widows and charity) and its applicability to development acivities being planned for the reconstruction of the state are the main arguements for this research.
 
Yagoob Foroutan, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
The Australian National University 
 
The place of women in Islam has been observed both ‘fascinating' and ‘complex'. Despite existing a substantial consensus between scholars in relation to the inferior settings of Muslim women with the world standard, the approaches explaining the settings are completely different and sometimes contradictory. 
 
Based on an empirical investigation, this paper examines the place of Islamic identity on women's status. Here, women's status is identified by their socio,demographic characteristics and employment pattern. The paper focuses on Australia's multicultural and multiethnic setting where its Muslim population like other religious minority groups came from the four corners of the world. The research is based on the special tabulation of the 2001 full census provided by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. However, the paper has a special focus on approximately 60,000 Muslim and non,Muslim women from South Asia who are largely Indian and Sri Lankan followed by women from Burma, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. 
 
The paper examines the status of South Asian women by Islamic identity and compares it with that of both native,born women and other migrant groups. Using SPSS software and Logistic Regression Analysis enable us to assess the competing influence of Islamic identity on women's status when other relevant factors such as human capital endowments, family formation characteristics, migration status, and age composition are controlled. This empirical investigation is also able to compare the strength of Islamic identity on women's status with that of the other relevant factors. More importantly, focusing on Australia's multicultural and multiethnic setting where Muslim women are substantially heterogeneous and diverse due to their different backgrounds and experiences reflected in ethnic origins provides an opportunity to examine more accurately and to distinguish the role of Islamic identity on women's status from the competing determinants.

Anna Lindberg, Penn State University, Division of Arts and Humanities, Altoona, USA

Globalization and Migration: Family Systems and Gender Relations among South India Muslims

The first section of this paper will analyze early 20^th century historical discourses about family systems among Muslims in South India. The second part focuses on recent changes in cultural practices concerning gender relations and labor migration in the same group. The two sections are related because migration during the past decades has contributed to changed family and inheritance systems in a direction that was sought by many Muslims eighty years ago. The desired changes were considered more in accord with Islamic law than the traditional family systems then prevailing.

The empirical material draws upon a case study in Kerala, a state known for its high social indicators, level of development, and radical trade unions. Kerala has a population that is approximately 56% Hindu, 19% Christian, and 25% Muslim. Each religious community is ruled by different civil regulations, family systems, and customary laws.

The Mappilas, a Muslim community in the Malabar district of northern Kerala, is of particular interest because of its matrilineal family traditions. In the early twentieth century, various Muslim groups against the matrilineal inheritance and family system employed a religious discourse in seeking to modernize family laws. By contrast, Hindu reformers excluded religion in arguing for the modernization of their personal laws.

Since about 1970, large numbers of Mappilas have migrated from South India to countries in the Arabian Gulf in search of work, most returning to India only occasionally. In the wake of this exodus, a process of cultural change that we may call Islamization has taken place in the community left behind in Kerala. The most conspicuous of these changes is the wearing of the burqa-something unheard of in South India twenty years ago. This migration has been a strong impetus for the complete abolition of the matrilineal family system that has long been considered un-Islamic. However, with regard to marriage payments, the customs of the Mappilas have gone in the other direction, shifting from the traditional Islamic mahr (the mandatory gift from a Muslim bridegroom to his bride) to the Hindu and Christian practice of dowry, in spite of the fact that Muslim religious doctrine strongly condemns dowry.

Shailaja Fennell, Development Studies, University of Cambridge

Learning to live by the rules: interrogating the role of education in the identity politics of Muslim youth

The identity politics of Muslim youth is a subject that has gained importance in recent years on account on international concerns regarding terrorism and suicide bombers. There is, however, a much older tradition in the social sciences that examines the manner in which youth identity is constructed through the process of knowledge acquisition both within the classroom and in the community (Freire 1998). This academic literature indicates that the education processes provided a valuable opportunity to understand the manner in which young men and women construct their identity in response to the social, religious and cultural norms that operate in the local environment.

This paper engages with the process of knowledge acquisition among Muslim youth in mainstream education through the study of role models provided in the curriculum and in their locality. The intention of the paper is to examine the pedagogical impact of these role models on the lives of youth and how these models are used to negotiate the social norms that these young people encounter in their daily lives. The impact will be assessed through the commentaries provided by these young people drawing on recent methodologies used to garner youth voices.  The voices of Muslim youth will provide insights into the manner in which learning occurs with regards to interactions between those norms that are regarded as ‘Muslim' by these youth and the favoured attributes of their identified role models.