Huma Ahmed-Ghosh 
Asian Muslim Women 
Globalization and Local Realities

This book resists the homogenization of Muslim women by detailing the diversity in their lives and by challenging the dominant paradigm of Arabized Islam as the sole interpreter of the faith. Though much has been written on the Middle East, there is a huge gap in research on Asia, which has two-thirds of the world’s Muslim population. These essays reveal that the lives of Muslim women are impacted not only by Islam but also by local politics, class, religion, and ethnicity. Through ethnographic research and other methodologies, the contributors describe how economic globalization, construction of sexualities, and diasporic expectations shape women’s lives. The book focuses on women’s negotiations and resistances to global, national, and local patriarchies in an attempt to empower themselves.

Table of Content

Acknowledgments



Introduction


Huma Ahmed-Ghosh




Part I. Globalization and Transnationalism: The Muslim Woman and Public Space



1. “Just 6P on a T-shirt, or 12P on a pair of jeans”: Bangladeshi Garment Workers Fight for a Livable Wage


Shelley Feldman



2. Dilemmas of Women’s Movements in Turkey: Labor, Charity, and Neoliberal Patriarchy


Damla Isik



3. Complicated Belonging: Gendered Empoerment and Anxieties about “Returning” among Internally Displaced Muslim Women in Puttalam, Sri Lanka


Sandya Hewamanne



4. Women in Post-Conflict Sweat, Pakistan: Notes on Agency, Resistance, and Survival


Lubna Nazir Chaudhry




Part II. Muslim Women: Lived Realities, Resistance, and the State



5. Maintenance for Divorced Muslim Women after the Muslim Women (Protection of Right on Divorce) Act 1986: A View from the Lower Courts


Sylvia Vatuk



6. Gender, Sharia, and the Politics of Punishment: A Contemporary Malaysian Case


Maila Stivens



7. At the Forefront of a Post-Patriarchal Islamic Education: Female Teachers in Indonesia


Ann Kull



8. Education, Gender, and Islam in China: The Place of Religious Education in Challenging and Sustaining “undisputed traditions” among Chinese Muslim Women


Maria Jaschok and Hsu Ming Vicky Chan




Part III. Women’s Voices and Agency: Challenging and Reclaiming Islam



9. Cosmetics, Fashion, and Moral Panics: The Politics and Ethics of Beauty in a Girls’ Dormitory in Kabul


Julie Billaud



10. Negotiating Polygamy: Islam, Gender, and Feminism in Indonesia


Sonja van Wichelen



11. South Asian Muslim American Girls: Resistance and Compliance in Public and Private Spaces


Marcia Hermansen and Mahruq F. Khan



Contributors

Index

About the author

Huma Ahmed-Ghosh is Professor of Women’s Studies at San Diego State University and the editor of
Contesting Feminisms: Gender and Islam in Asia, also published by SUNY Press.