Prof. Shirin Edwin of New York University Shanghai is a literary scholar known for analysing Francophone and Anglophone West African fiction about African Muslim women. Edwin argues against the demonisation of Islamic beliefs and practices in Africa, in particular the widespread tendency to see Islam as a foreign oppressor of African Muslim women. The problem, Edwin writes, is that scholars misrepresent Islam in Africa as foreign and monolithic, when it is local and complex, and misrepresent African Muslim women as weak and oppressed, when they use Islam to live meaningful lives of their own choosing. Scholars should see that Islam does not marginalise women in Africa, she insists, and would if they attended to how African Muslim women's private practice of Islam nourishes them, rather than attending only to radical activism. If scholars view feminism as only marching in the streets, joining activist women's groups, running for office, and struggling for legal reform, then they miss how Muslim women's private lives, and their personal daily rituals such as prayer, can also be expressions of feminism. Edwin claims that Islam is a willed praxis of emotion, not merely an unwilled praxis of legalism. With a focus on women's private praxis not public activism, Edwin is an important part of a larger research current, launched by scholars like Saba Mahmood, which asserts that western theories of agency are too limited to account for the freedom of Islamic women who see submission and surrender as life goals.
In Privately Empowered, Edwin analyses the Anglophone novels of three under-studied northern Nigerian authors: Ms Zaynab Alkali (The Stillborn [which analysis takes up Edwin's Chapter 2], The Virtuous Woman [Chapter 3], The Descendants [Chapter 4]), Mr Abubakar Gimba (Golden Apples [Chapter 5]) and Ms Hauwa Ali (Destiny [Chapter 5]). All five novels detail the private lives of African Muslim women and the meaning they find in Islamic ritual. ‘Privately Empowered argues that the rampant oversight of the ordinary lives of Africa Muslim women stems from the inordinate preoccupation with political, public, and organized approaches to the religion’ (3).
One of the outstanding strengths of the book is that Edwin does not rely on foreign feminist theories, but takes advantage of the innovations in both Islamic feminist and African feminist theory, too little used to date. Edwin thoughtfully reviews such theories in Chapter 1 – including African womanism, negro-feminism, Stiwanism and motherism – proposing ‘African-Islamic feminism’ as a theory, focus and reading practice. She then actually uses these theories for her readings in the rest of the book. That is, instead of bowing to criticisms of these theories as too quietist, Edwin shows how this very quality makes them useful for thinking about women who are not engaged in radical activism.
A peculiarity of the book that Edwin addresses is that her focus is on northern Anglophone literature, rather than the Hausa-language literature that is most read in the region. She defends this choice by saying that these Anglophone novels reflect the themes and concerns of popular Hausa novels and thus ‘amplify in English’ (4) what would normally be lost to a global audience.
Edwin is a typical part of African literary studies in instrumentalising African texts as native informants about Africa. However, she uses them, unlike most, to underscore the complexity and richness of African cultures. This is an important book with an innovative method working against an all too common trend to dismiss Islamic African women as powerless.
