Gender, Governance and Islam is a tribute to Deniz Kandiyoti's groundbreaking book, Women, Islam and the State, which was published in 1991. In the preface to the book, Nadje Al-Ali and Kathryn Spellman Poots discuss the impact of the book on a generation of scholars in women's studies and Islam in the way it challenged essentialist understandings of women in the Middle East and the reification of culture and religion, as well as in its emphasis on the then newly coined theory of intersectionality. They also reflect on their decision to coedit the current book with Deniz Kandioyti to trace the shifts in academic scholarship over the past three decades. On the one hand, neoliberal transformations and geopolitical developments that followed 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the Arab uprisings in 2011 have reconfigured the parameters of gender, which emerged both as an object of policy and a domain of activism. On the other hand, gender as a field of academic scholarship was transformed after feminist engagement with post-structuralist theories critiqued conventional approaches to the state, patriarchy, and the sexual difference. While the coeditors acknowledge that gender studies are no longer focused on women only, but include Queer theory and masculinity studies, they limit their focus on women's rights since women's and sexual rights remain under threat in the countries under study. In this book, the politics of gender became intricately intertwined with, and mediated by, “systems of governance and processes of political contestation that may deploy Islam in very different ways in response to shifting dynamics at subnational, national, and transnational levels” (p. 13). The struggle for women's rights and the definitions of gender identities take place against the backdrop of political turmoil, global standards, and various state and non-state actors, in an effort to delineate Islamic authenticity.

One of the themes in the book is the relationship between increasing women's activism and the different centers of power that endeavored to re-establish systems of governance with the aim of affirming patriarchal norms and legitimacy. As the demands for gender equality evolved over the decades in places like Egypt, Turkey, and Iraq, women's activism represented continuities and discontinuities in a long history of the struggle for gender equality and of challenges that women confronted. Heba El Kholy and Nadia Tahir argue that the role women played in the Arab uprising in Egypt involved complex and paradoxical processes that reconfigured gender roles. The brutal reaction to the protests by women and men who sought genuine transformation engendered new forms of gender identities, namely “insubordinate femininities and insurgent masculinities,” that both defied authoritarianism and patriarchy (p. 31). Likewise, Deniz Kandiyoti employs the term “gender activism” to critique approaches to gender in Turkey through the lens of the ruling party's evolving political goals, and to shed light on the different forms of collective action around gender that cut across class and ethnic divides. She looks at the Gezi protests in 2013 as instances of subversion by the youth who aimed to challenge the “patriarchal pretensions of power” which aimed to undermine “any gender egalitarian or, indeed, any emancipatory project” (p. 94). Iraq presented another case when the new ruling elites who assumed power after the US invasion in 2003 sought to do away with the gains women achieved in the past, represented by efforts to abolish the Personal Status Code of 1959. Nadje Al-Ali asserts that systematic marginalization of women has galvanized civil society organizations, and social and political movements. Women—who crossed the ethnic, religious, and political divides—came to realize that their fight for greater gender equality was part and parcel of the struggle against an emerging dictatorship, militarization, and corruption (p. 159).

As issues of gender emerge as spaces of political contestations, states in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan resorted to different systems of power, including governance and violence, and enacted different legislations to produce new subjects and spaces and to control citizens. Nazanin Shahrokni critiques approaches to Iranian state power as resorting only to a form of top-down coercive practices, and examines the “productive side of its power.” She looks at women-only parks as instances of Islamic governance as well as response to globally recognized health problems. Women could now engage in healthy practices, through exercising, within “the parameters of Islamic regulation (that is, the segregation of space)” (p. 43). As the Iranian state moved away from prohibitive and disciplinary measures and endorsed a productive form of power in order to give women some rights, Saudi Arabia felt the imperative to make minor changes to its rhetoric and practices concerning women within the context of development projects and neoliberal policies. Though the Saudi state could tolerate the cosmopolitan women's writings on the plight of women and demands for representation in minor municipal elections or more job opportunities, Madawi al-Rasheed shows that women who pushed for genuine rights and organized against the detention of their relatives were met with harsh treatment at the hand of security forces; such demands did not fit with the narrative of “tame modernity” that the state wanted to project. Likewise, Afiya Shehrbano Zia asserts that, while state laws and politics protect women's rights to education and mobility even within male dominated communities in Pakistan, women's sexual rights present a challenge to the gender order and heteronormativity. A struggle to exert power over women's bodies plays out through moral shaming and killing, whereby heads of households act as extensions of the state (p. 177).

The book also focuses on the question of colonial and imperial violence and discourses, which women in Palestine, Afghanistan, and the diaspora had to grapple with while fighting for gender rights. Torunn Wimpelmann argues that the struggle over women's rights in Afghanistan challenges the idea of state and imperial governance as “a coherent project” given the conflicting agendas of different local and international players. International organizations and Western countries allied with certain segments of the Afghani state apparatus and civil society in order to bring about a radical gender order. However, they had to compromise their radical agendas in order to co-opt more conservative elements in the society, thus foreclosing the possibility of a coherent gender project. Similarly, Islah Jad asserts that a donor-driven gender agenda in Palestine has shaped the parameters of struggle for women's rights under conditions of occupation. The rift between Islamist women in Gaza and feminist activist in the West Bank was aggravated by donor-driven discourses, which aimed to focus solely on gender-based violence and ignores the conditions of occupation under which Palestinian women lived. In this instance, “the burden of violence is taken off Israel and resituated as an Arab/Muslim violence, represented in the violent pathologies of Palestinian manhood” (p. 138). This approach to violence led to the delinking of women's activism from the Palestinian national context, and negated the possibilities of creating a shared view of gender justice in the West Bank and Gaza. In a similar vein, Kathryn Spellman Poots shows how 9/11 and the rise of anti-Muslim sentiments and pro-imperialist viewpoints cast their shadow on women who lived in Western countries. While Western pundits cast veiled women as victims who needed saving, Western governments aimed to co-opt women in their efforts to tackle radicalism by asking women to report on their families. This political atmosphere foreclosed the possibility of the formation of networks of solidarity among women and groups with different agendas. It also reflected that gender became an essential element in the construction of a Muslim Diaspora and delineated the boundaries of diasporic citizenship in post 9/11 national security politics (p. 202).

Gender, Governance and Islam delineates how the struggle for gender equality is riveted by paradoxes as the gender order emerges as a site of contestation among local, national, and international groups amid political and economic shifts in the world, and is implicated in different systems of power and governance. The book covers different academic approaches—including political science, sociology, anthropology, development studies, and Middle Eastern studies—to questions of gender. What makes the book unique is the breadth of the historical narrative in each chapter. The contributors to the book offer a genealogy of the evolvement of women's activism in most countries since the early 20th century until the present. The book shows, as Deniz Kandiyoti reflects in her concluding remarks, that the politics of gender remains at the core of the struggle for democracy and human rights.