Negotiating Islam: Conservatism, Splintered Authority and Empowerment in Urban Bangladesh

Abstract

Bangladesh has recently been seeing a rise in religiosity which has been treated as problematic, anti-secular and anti-progressive within the public sphere. Various writers describe this trend as having a disempowering effect on women and negating their self-expression. However, underlying these views is the assumption that the assertion of women's agency is not enough if it does not confront existing structures of relations. This article asks whether it is possible that in seeking changes in certain aspects of one's life, existing gender relations are not necessarily transformed, but indirectly challenged and reconfigured? The conclusion suggests that rather than a polarisation of the secular and religious ways of living most people are in fact in between, negotiating between the two camps, and borrowing ideas and ways from both.

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“…research that identifies Islam as a barrier to modernity and women's empowerment (Kabeer, 1989;Rozario, 1992) or research on political Islam, identity politics and their impact on women's rights and NGO work (Hashemi,2000;Shehabuddin, 2008a). The findings presented here contribute to the scholarship on Bangladesh by extending the analysis of women's religious subjectivities (Huq, 2008;Huq 2010) Western imperialism or as a failure of modernising projects of oppressive regimes . Bangladeshi scholars have used this understanding of women's religious subjectivity to explore women's agency, the multiplicity of women's subjective positions and selfactualisation through construction of the virtuous-self based on the good/moral/authentic/Muslim womanhood (Huq, 2008;White, 2010;Naher, 2010;Hussain, 2010;Huq, 2010).…”

“…Studies also analysed discourses around the fatwa on Taslima Nasrin, a writer, for promoting minority and women's rights and critiquing Islam (Hashemi, 1995). These studies explored how the 'politics of representation surrounding gender, modernity and Islam' (White 2010, p. 338 Recent feminist studies have questioned these easy binaries and explored how 'women are caught between...contradictory movements at the local/global levels' (White 2010, p. 338), and how women negotiate or exercise agency by subverting, resisting or using religious framings (Shehabuddin, 2008b;Huq, 2008;Huq, 2010). The emphasis on the latter two studies is to show that women's agency within religious structures and participation in religious groups do not necessarily translate into extremist activities.…”

Introduction: contentious women's empowerment in South Asia

“…In Kashmir, as Louireiro shows, this discourse is still live, and women sought to renegotiate the meaning of purdah as an internal condition and a system of self-governance. This discursive reframing of purdah has been documented as a feature of several South Asian settings where women's mobility and public employment have grown (World Bank 2007;Feldman 2010;Huq 2010;Khan 2011). Perhaps it is not surprising that more than four decades, as much as two generations since the United Nations Decade for Women , traditional norms that restrict women's movements and interactions in the world should be disappearing.…”

Women’s empowerment: What works and why?

“…What would it take, we asked, to change the storyline and to challenge the limits placed upon women that so constrain their capacity to enjoy bodily and sexual autonomy? Here our focus was as much on the less visible pathways of empowerment-women watching TV and attending taleem (religious instruction) classes in Bangladesh (Priyadarshini and Rahim 2010;Huq 2010)-as well as on impact of the mainstream media in shaping and reinforcing societal normativities, as in Pereira and Bakare-Yusuf's (2014) study of the case of Nigerian actress Anita Hogan whose private sexual moments became public fodder. Taking the body as a starting point took us to an exploration of the power of a 'pleasure-based' approach as a pathway of empowerment that begins with reclaiming the positive, pleasurable dimensions of women's sexualities rather than focusing only on hazards and harms (Jolly et al 2013).…”