Female Islamic Education Movements
The Re-democratisation of Islamic Knowledge

This book challenges the assumptions of creative agency and the role of Islamic education movements for women across the wider Muslim world.

Masooda Bano (Author)

9781316638613, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 30 May 2019

263 pages
23 x 15.3 x 1.8 cm, 0.4 kg

Since the 1970s, movements aimed at giving Muslim women access to the serious study of Islamic texts have emerged across the world. In this book, Masooda Bano argues that the creative spirit that marked the rise and consolidation of Islam, whereby Islam inspired serious intellectual engagement to create optimal societal institutions, can be found within these education movements. Drawing on rich ethnographic material from Pakistan, northern Nigeria and Syria, Bano questions the restricted notion of agency associated with these movements, exploring the educational networks which have attracted educated, professional and culturally progressive Muslim women to textual study, thus helping to reverse the most damaging legacy of colonial rule in Muslim societies: the isolation of modern and Islamic knowledge. With its comparative approach, this will appeal to those studying and researching the role of women across Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, as well as the wider Muslim world.

1. Understanding knowledge creation: a re-reading of female Islamic education movements
Part I. The Power of Dispersed Knowledge: 2. Incentivising creative outcomes: historical patterns
3. Knowledge production and student profiles
Part II. Incentivising the Mixing of Knowledge: 4. Institutional shifts: facilitating emergence
5. Institutional shifts: facilitating expansion
6. Institutional shifts: the rise of Western feminism
Part III. Conclusion: 7. Incentivising creative outcomes: looking forward.

Subject Areas: Islamic studies [JFSR2], Gender studies: women [JFSJ1], Feminism & feminist theory [JFFK]