Graduate student Azzarina Basarudin, supervised by Dr. Sondra Hale, will undertake a comparative analysis of how Muslim women scholar-activists in Malaysia and Egypt work within Islamic discourses to improve the lives of women. Through field research in both countries, she will construct a transnational ethnography of two Non-governmental Organizations, Sisters in Islam (Malaysia) and the Women and Memory Forum (Egypt). She will examine whether the women's advocacy strategies challenge or accommodate conventional Islamic religious and cultural discourses as they seek to transform the conditions of women's lives locally and transnationally. The project explores three interrelated questions: How are women transforming Islamic discourses of gender locally and transnationally through their engagement with religion? How are women's relationships to self, community, and the state reconfigured when religion is politicized? Can these advocacy strategies provide a viable transformative space for feminist struggles to re-imagine the faith-based Muslim community (Ummah)?
The researcher will use a combination of qualitative research methodologies, including participant-observation, semi-structured interviews, structured focus groups, textual analysis, and archival research. The intellectual merit of this project emanates from its investigation of an over-generalized and poorly understood population (Islamic women); its contribution to advancing theoretical understanding across disciplines of a specific strategy that characterizes a sub-religious community and; its research methodolgy that integrates feminist and anthropological approaches to ethnographic research. The research also will contribute significantly to the education of a female social scientist.
