Muslim womanhood, education, and empowerment: ethnographic reflections from Pakistan and India

ABSTRACT

In contemporary times, the status of Muslim women has become a lens to approach and engage with Muslim societies. Embedded in these narratives is an image of Muslim women as oppressed victims of their patriarchal families and societies. In this article, we focus on the lived experiences of educated Muslim women from Pakistan and India to examine what empowerment means for them. We are particularly interested in examining how these participants, being some of the first and only educated women in their rural and low-income communities, employ their distinct educated status to construct what it means to be empowered Muslim women in their contexts. This focus on the lived experiences is a departure from frameworks that offer universalistic and homogeneous understandings of Islam, education, and empowerment. Instead, it provides insights into the complex, and at times even contradictory, meanings and performances of gendered identities shaped by historical and social conditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• women’s education
• comparative education
• empowerment
• modernity
• Pakistan
• India

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Payal Shah is an Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Qualitative Inquiry in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of South Carolina. She conducts critical ethnographic research on gender, education, and development in India and has published across the fields of international and comparative education, qualitative inquiry, and women’s and gender studies.

Ayesha Khurshid is an Associate Professor of International and Comparative Education in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Florida State University. She focuses on the issues of gender, education, and modernity in Muslim majority societies and communities. Her ethnographic research examines the construction, performance, and politics of Muslim womanhood in different global/local contexts.

Notes

1. See Silova and Jeremy (2015) and Bartlett and Vavrus (2014) for overviews of globalization and education frameworks in comparative education.

2. A pseudonym.

3. The KGBV program defines ‘most marginalized girls’ as girls who are lower caste, rural, and who have either never attended school before or dropped out more than two years ago.

4. A pseudonym.