The subject of Islamist women remains hotly debated in academic circles. Some hard-line secular feminists consider women's engagement with Islamism a form of patriarchal co-optation, given the conservative outlook of Islamists in general, gender bias, and exclusionary policies. More recent nuanced research, however, highlights the complexity of this engagement and draws attention to its possibilities and limitations, citing cases of women exercising modern and pious agency.
Amina Jamal follows in the footsteps of recent feminist scholars who situate women's involvement in Islamist politics within theories of alternative and new modernities. Like many other feminists, Jamal wants to explain why some Pakistani women opt for practices that her generation considers constraining of freedom and autonomy. Her book focuses on contemporary urban Pakistani women who are active in Jamaat-e-Islami, one of the oldest and most prolific Islamist movements. From colonial India in the 1940s to contemporary Pakistan and beyond, the Jamaat appeals not only to men but also women. This book is an attempt to explain why middle-class women are attracted to its doctrine and practices in the urban environment of Pakistan.
Caught between the restrictive folkloric culture of the lower classes and the secular practices of the elite, Pakistani middle-class women seem to find an alternative modernity in Islamic revivalism. According to Jamal, their activism within the Islamist movement is a catalyst of modernization rather than a form of an internalized subjugation (as claimed by radical secular feminists). Jamaat women are successful at reconceptualizing their identity and challenging narratives of secular development. Through education, mobility, and employment, they shift the dominant discourse of secular modernity and develop alternative ways of being both religious and modern. Jamaat women construct themselves as both modern and Muslim as they draw on a variety of Islamist discourses; above all, they assert their autonomy as citizens and as religious subjects (68). The analysis in this book explores the intersection of class, ethnicity, sect, religion, and region as relevant variables, thus going beyond a simple reductionism that misrepresents Islamist women.
Jamal is particularly sensitive to this misrepresentation. As a Canadian scholar of Pakistani origin, her fieldwork among Jamaat women brought her own identity into focus, and the politics of research became obvious to herself and her interlocutors. Her reflections on the context of fieldwork in the book's introduction are a welcome contribution to big methodological questions. A detailed review of recent feminist studies of Islamist women in Chapter 1 does not claim to resolve old debates, but nevertheless adds important contributions and offers a nuanced assessment of the relationship between Islam, secularism, and feminism.
In Chapter 2, Jamal explores how well-known Jamaat women representatives and activists conceptualize politics as religion, thus justifying their public roles as Islamist activists. Contemporary women politicians insist that their public political engagements do not interfere with domestic roles and responsibilities. As the history of Islamist women in the anticolonial struggle is often overlooked, Chapter 3 focuses on the role of personalities such as Hameeda Begum, described as a female image of Maududi, the founder of Jamaat, and Maryam Jameelah, a spokesperson for his vision. These women engage with Jamaat discourse and practices to construct a new moral society that draws on the teachings of the founder of the movement. In Chapter 4, the concept of new modernity is introduced to capture the meaning of women's participation in three domains: the nation-state, the socio-economic conditions for safeguarding the Islamic family, and the appropriation of modern feminist activism in the form of engagement with modern organizations and institutions. In these modern spheres, the gendering of political Islam becomes a product of modernity, thus blurring the boundaries between the traditional and the modern, and the religious and the political. The class dimension of development is challenged by Jamaat women who seek to Islamize the projects of modernization (Chapter 5). Jamal argues that like middle-class women elsewhere, Jamaat women negotiate dominant narratives about modernization and development in order to articulate their own needs and desires. The project of constructing the moral community is expressed in the involvement of Jamaat women in ihtisab, forbidding evil and enjoining virtue (Chapter 6). The duty of ihtisab ensures the implementation of the law in situations that require legal redress. But this is not a reciprocal process based on virtue cultivation; rather, it is a hegemonic impulse to impose morality. Jamal challenges dominant narratives about Islamist women as she highlights how they use social class to undermine liberal and secular groups.
Jamal offers a realistic analysis of Islamist women as she recognizes and documents the possibilities Islamism offers and draws attention to the obvious limits of gendered Islamism. Certain discriminatory tendencies within the general Islamist project are bound to be rejected by some women. She succeeds, however, in moving feminist theory away from the binary opposites of secular-versus-religious or modernity-versus-tradition. This shift is a welcome theoretical contribution that should be taken seriously by scholars trying to resolve wider debates about women in Muslim society, and Islam and modernity. More importantly, Jamaal does not uncritically endorse “Muslim feminist” perspectives that depict local culture as oppressive while highlighting the liberating potential of a generic Islam, divorced from culture and local history. This negative depiction of culture is not specific to Pakistan but is widely shared across the Muslim world, from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia. Islamist men and women, the majority of whom are now urban and educated, find in it a way not only to defend Islam against accusations of misogyny, but to locate solutions in its own teachings and texts. They absolve Islam from any wrongdoing against a deluge of accusations, often endorsed by Western commentators as well as local secular feminists. In Jamaal's book, South Asian Islam, culture, and colonial history are incorporated in the analysis of modern trends and movements, thus moving away from simplistic claims about an “oppressive Islam” that keeps women behind strict segregation and patriarchy. Her focus is not on static relations between religion and politics in Pakistan but on a dynamic relationship that continues to be unpredictable and unsettled. Jamaat women have the potential of either continuing to endorse exclusionary Islamist policies or shifting the practices of Islamism toward a more open and inclusive Islamist modernity. Their struggle depends on how hegemonic Eurocentric universalism and deracinated Islamism unfold in local contexts where political parties, the military, and Islamists struggle to dominate public debate and politics, not to mention the global context in which the causes of Muslim women are entangled with global domination and international interventions.
The study of Jamaat women in Pakistan is relevant to wider debates that go beyond women in Muslim societies. Jamal could have drawn on comparative perspectives linking her specific case study to other examples of women in religio-political movements, such as those that have sprung among contemporary Christians, Jews, and Hindus. This comparative approach has the potential of resolving debates about why many modern women are drawn to contemporary religious and political movements that many secular feminists consider oppressive. The study remains grounded in the history and culture of a Muslim society, but has the potential of being incorporated into the general study of women, gender, religion, and politics. It seems that urban Jamaat women are not a unique case but can provide insights into the opportunities, constraints, and limitations that women in general have encountered in both old and new nation-states. As all these contexts seem to have experienced disenchantment with hard-line secularism and even moved toward post-secularism, in which the religious narrative is constantly being invoked in the public sphere as an alternative modernity, Jamal's book can enrich the debate and contribute to the on-going controversy about women, religion, and politics in both the West and the Muslim world.
The book remains a valuable contribution that is bound to challenge the way we think about Islamists and women. Jamal's rich ethnography, personal engagement with her interviewees, thorough reading and analysis of feminist scholarship, and deep knowledge of the wider South Asian history and culture make this book a nuanced study of a complex and controversial topic. Sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists will benefit from its insights while feminist scholars may reconsider already-established paradigms and theories.
