Ebook: Asian Muslim Women: Globalization and Local Realities

Presents multifaceted aspects of Asian Muslim women’s lives and agencies.

This book resists the homogenization of Muslim women by detailing the diversity in their lives and by challenging the dominant paradigm of Arabized Islam as the sole interpreter of the faith. Though much has been written on the Middle East, there is a huge gap in research on Asia, which has two-thirds of the world’s Muslim population. These essays reveal that the lives of Muslim women are impacted not only by Islam but also by local politics, class, religion, and ethnicity. Through ethnographic research and other methodologies, the contributors describe how economic globalization, construction of sexualities, and diasporic expectations shape women’s lives. The book focuses on women’s negotiations and resistances to global, national, and local patriarchies in an attempt to empower themselves.

“This book’s greatest strength is the diversity of its scope, both geographically and thematically, without reducing Muslim women to particular roles and/or identities.” — Bahar Davary, author of Women and the Qur’an: A Study in Islamic Hermeneutics

Huma Ahmed-Ghosh is Professor of Women’s Studies at San Diego State University and the editor of Contesting Feminisms: Gender and Islam in Asia, also published by SUNY Press.