Sherine Hafez's An Islam of Her Own: Reconsidering Religion and Secularism PDF

As the realm grapples with problems with non secular fanaticism, extremist politics, and rampant violence that search justification in both “religious” or “secular” discourses, ladies who declare Islam as a car for person and social swap are usually both considered as pious topics who join an ideology that denies them many glossy freedoms, or as feminist topics who search empowerment in simple terms via rejecting faith and adopting secularist discourses. Such assumptions emerge from a typical pattern within the literature to categorize the ‘secular’ and the ‘religious’ as polarizing different types, which in flip mitigates the identities, studies and activities of girls in Islamic societies. but if truth be told Muslim ladies whose activism is grounded in Islam draw both on rules linked to secularism.

In An Islam of Her Own, Sherine Hafez makes a speciality of women's Islamic activism in Egypt to problem those binary representations of spiritual as opposed to secular subjectivities. Drawing on six non-consecutive years of ethnographic fieldwork inside a women's Islamic flow in Cairo, Hafez analyzes the ways that ladies who perform Islamic activism narrate their selfhood, articulate their wants, and embrace discourses during which the bounds are blurred among the non secular and the secular.