Reading the Qur'an in Bangladesh: The Politics of ‘Belief’ Among Islamist Women

Abstract

While much has been written about resurgent Islamic movements in recent decades, the proliferation of religious reading circles has received little attention. Few studies delineate the specifics of audience engagement with authoritative Islamic texts on the ground. This paper is a small attempt at such an inquiry in the context of Bangladesh. It investigates a particular Islamist Qur'anic study session conducted in Dhaka in 2003. Such reading sessions are routinely conducted within Bangladesh Islamic Chatri Sangstha (BICSa), the leading Islamic organization of women students in Bangladesh. I suggest that BICSa reading sessions embody spaces of both deliberation and discipline. In analysing a group discussion of a set of Qur'anic verses widely assigned for study within BICSa, particularly in relation to the central Islamist notion of 'belief', this paper argues that reading circles play a primary role in the production of a uniquely disciplined and devout, yet modern Islamist subjectivity in Bangladesh. A study circle familiarizes a lay Bangladeshi with specific kinds of religious literature and teaches them to understand and shape contemporary realities via scriptural injunctions. However, this inculcation process is not linear: The mastery of the Qur'anic literature enables both devotion to and contestation of BICSa precepts.

Polygamy: Uncovering the effect of patriarchal ideology on gender-biased interpretation

“…Studies related to the relationship between gender and Quran have been conducted by many researchers, which can be classified into four categories: Firstly, the extenuation of misinterpretation in understanding the Quran (Abdelgelil et al 2019;Aziz, Abdullah & Prasojo 2020;Fathy et al 2018;Izadi 2020); secondly, the role of women in the process of writing and collecting Quran in the early days of Islam (Geissinger 2017;Khan 2014); thirdly, regional studies related to women using the living-Quran approach (Chaudhary 2011;Huq 2008;Kusmana 2019;Masoud, Jamal & Nugent 2016) and fourthly, interdisciplinary studies related to the psychological role of Quran on women (Irmawati et al 2020;Madavifar, Polygamy, which was practiced without limitations in the past, had been restricted to four wives after the arrival of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula. However, some scholars have different views on this issue, supposedly influenced by the literal and cultural background of patriarchal tradition on treating women as the object of polygamy.…”

Politics of Constructing Islam in the Everyday Lives of Young Bangladeshis: Asserting Majoritarian Islam, and the “Good / Bad Muslim” Narrative

“…8In considering our methodology, we took inspiration and benefitted from the studies of Samia Huq and Sabina Faiz Rashid (2008) and Maimuna Huq (2008) who studied how religious identity forms among Muslim elite women and Islamist women of Islami-Chatro Shibir by participating in their reading circles. These studies were helpful in shaping our own methods.…”