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"A must read."-CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2022 "Holds up a mirror to the unifying, braided futures underlying so-called 'Western' and 'Muslim' feminism that are both undermined by the power of capital, the world trade order, and cynical geopolitics."-2023 Association for Asian Studies Coomaraswamy Book PrizeA crystal-clear account of the entangled history of Western and Muslim feminisms. Western feminists, pundits, and policymakers tend to portray the Muslim world as the last and most difficult frontier of global feminism. Challenging this view, Elora Shehabuddin presents a unique and engaging history of feminism as a story of colonial and postcolonial interactions between Western and Muslim societies. Muslim women, like other women around the world, have been engaged in their own struggles for generations: as individuals and in groups that include but also extend beyond their religious identity and religious practices. The modern and globally enmeshed Muslim world they navigate has often been at the weaker end of disparities of wealth and power, of processes of colonization and policies of war, economic sanctions, and Western feminist outreach. Importantly, Muslims have long constructed their own ideas about women s and men s lives in the West, with implications for how they articulate their feminist dreams for their own societies. Stretching from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment era to the War on Terror present, Sisters in the Mirror shows how changes in women s lives and feminist strategies have consistently reflected wider changes in national and global politics and economics. Muslim women, like non-Muslim women in various colonized societies and non-white and poor women in the West, have found themselves having to negotiate their demands for rights within other forms of struggle-for national independence or against occupation, racism, and economic inequality. Through stories of both well-known and relatively unknown figures, Shehabuddin recounts instances of conflict alongside those of empathy, collaboration, and solidarity across this extended period. Sisters in the Mirror is organized around stories of encounters between women and men from South Asia, Britain, and the United States that led them, as if they were looking in a mirror, to pause and reconsider norms in their own society, including cherished ideas about women s roles and rights. These intertwined stories confirm that nowhere, in either Western or Muslim societies, has material change in girls and women s lives come easily or without protracted struggle

Through extensive field research, Elora Shehabuddin explores the profound implications of women's political and social mobilization for reshaping Islam. Specifically, she examines the lives of Muslim women in Bangladesh who have become increasingly mobilized by the activities of predominantly secular NGOs, yet who desire to retain, reclaim, and reshape-rather than reject-their faith. In their employment and in their interactions with the legal system, the state, NGOs, and political and religious groups, women are changing state practices, views of women in the public sphere, and the nature of

AbstractThis article argues that leaders of the Jamaat-i-Islami in Bangladesh regularly invoke women's privileged status as mothers to counter the claims of the largely secularist non-governmental organizations operating in the country today that Islam has been harmful to women and that the only route to progress is to discard the shackles of religion and tradition. The current Jamaat rhetoric marks a significant change from the original Jamaat position—elaborated by the party's founder Abul Ala Maududi—that women's divinely ordained place is in the home. Now, several decades later, Jamaat leaders in Bangladesh still enjoin women to fulfil domestic obligations; however, they also go to great lengths to highlight Islam's recognition of women as 'individuals' with 'individual' responsibilities to God and Islam as well as Islam's support for women's right to study, work and vote. I contend that the Jamaat in Bangladesh has been prompted to undertake these recent modifications by specific developments in local social and political contexts, specifically the twin pressures on the Jamaat of operating in a functioning, if often imperfect, democratic polity; and of competing with more secular organizations for the hearts, minds and votes of impoverished women.

In recent electoral campaigns in Bangladesh, the Jama'at-i Islami or "party of Islam" has claimed that a vote in its favor is a vote in favor of God and Islam; yet, the party repeatedly has failed to find significant support among what is generally considered a pious Muslim population. The Jama'at has attributed its electoral losses to secularist conspiracies, arguing that without such negative propaganda the "god-fearing people" of the country naturally would vote for its candidates. Through a study of the strategies and ideology the Jama'at has employed in its bid to attract women voters, I assess the extent to which the Jama'at is responsible for its inability to achieve broader support. I conclude that despite its public rhetoric, such as its plans to alleviate poverty and safeguard women's interests, the Jama'at has failed to convince most impoverished, unlettered, village women that it represents their interests.