Navigating between the Religious and the Secular: Responding to the Muslim `Woman Question' in Diasporic Britain

This study is a story of the multiple sides of subject formation, the ways in which immigrant practice, cultural and religious, and the norms of British civil society operate in relation, each responding to the other. In this work I challenge generalized third-person notions of Muslim women as sites of oppression, and place British Muslim women at the center of their own stories. I investigate how South Asian Muslim women in Britain navigate between competing religio-cultural and secular discourse. In order to address gender discrimination in Muslim communities and at the same time, resist external ethnic, and religious stereotyping, I examine the following questions: How is Islamic identity asserted away from the "homeland," and moreover, what are the larger consequences of these assertions to women? What are the mechanisms whereby Muslim women construct, challenge, contest, collaborate in, and negotiate religio-cultural readings of Islam? My work is at the crossroads of Islamic feminist theory, and immigration/diaspora studies. I draw on data collected through ethnographic work (in-depth interviews and media analyses) conducted in Birmingham, Britain. By analyzing the construction of women-only spaces, development of Muslim-centric media and the adoption of Islamic fashion, I demonstrate how British Muslim women respond to the Muslim "woman question" in a diasporic space and further postulate ways to integrate Muslim sensibilities into the secular public