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"In education, journalism, legislative politics, social justice, health, law, and other arenas, Muslim women across Kenya are emerging as leaders in local, national, and international contexts, advancing reforms through their activism. Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya draws on extensive interviews with six such women, revealing how their religious and moral beliefs shape reform movements that bridge ethnic divides and foster alliances in service of creating a just, multicultural, multiethnic, and multireligious democratic citizenship."--Publisher website

The post-Cold War conditions created new socio-political spaces in Kenya for new articulations of Muslim women's public activism and leadership. This essay focuses on two such Muslim women in terms of their leadership responses to issues of Muslim women's rights in Kenya as framed within a secular paradigm, on the one hand, and within an Islamic one, on the other. In spite of their differences, the essay concludes the efforts of the two leaders complement each other in fundamental ways, especially with regards to their contributions to the national debates on theShari'aand the reform of the Kadhi's Court.

Intro -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Tables -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- When Kuble (Seclusion) Literacy Invades the Electronic Space -- Women and the Political Economy of Education -- Politics, Popular Culture, and Women Performing Artists -- Cinderella Goes to the Sahel -- Islamisms, the Media, and Women's Public Discursive Practices -- Through the Eyes of Agaisha -- Conclusion -- Appendix A -- Appendix B -- Notes -- References -- Index.

This article uses Rudolph T. Ware III's original and compelling book, The Walking Qur'an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa, as a window through which to reflect on the contribution of West African clerisy of the classical Quran tradition to Islamic thought and the social transformative aims of their teachings and epistemologies. It focuses on the ways in which the West African clerisy of the historical period covered by Ware framed philosophical resistance strategies, based on their embodied knowledge of the Quran, to combat hegemonic forces of enslavement. In this way, they were able to reconstitute a sense of emancipatory noble citizenship. In the process, the essay shows how Ware's study challenges both the perceived notion, reiterated in many studies of the classical Quran school, that this classic institution, once catering equally to both men and women, is a purveyor of a passive, Thomistic education, and the Hegelian dismissal of Africa South of the Sahara as a place of no philosophy and, according to Hugh Trevor-Roper, of no history. The discussion also draws attention to the philosophical distinctiveness of the classical Quran school tradition and modernist puritanical Wahhabi Salafism sweeping through West Muslim African societies.

Writing Through the Visual and Virtual:Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean explores the various cultures of writing in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean, and their relation to literature, orality, language, the visual arts, film, and popular culture. It is an invaluable resource to Francophone and cultural studies alike.