Humanizing the Sacred
Description
In recent years, global attention has focused on how women in communities of Muslims are revitalizing Islam by linking interpretation of religious ideas to the protection of rights and freedoms. Humanizing the Sacred demonstrates how Sunni women activists in Malaysia are fracturing institutionalized Islamic authority by generating new understandings of rights and redefining the moral obligations of their community. Based on ethnographic research of Sisters in Islam (SIS), a nongovernmental organization of professional women promoting justice and equality, Basarudin examines SIS members' involvement in the production and transmission of Islamic knowledge to reformulate legal codes and reconceptualize gender discourses. By weaving together women's lived realities, feminist interpretations of Islamic texts, and Malaysian cultural politics, this book illuminates how a localized struggle of claiming rights takes shape within a transnational landscape. It provides a vital understanding of how women "live" Islam through the integration of piety and reason and the implications of women's political activism for the transformation of Islamic tradition itself.
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Person
Azza Basarudin is a research scholar at the Center for the Study of Women at the University of California Los Angeles.
Content
Acknowledgments
Note on Malay Names, Honorific Titles, and Terminology
List of Abbreviations
Introduction | Faith, Self, and Community
1. Islam, the State, and Gender | The Malaysian Experiment
2. The Politics of the Sacred | Returning to the Fundamentals of Islam
3. In the Path of the Faithful | Activism for Social and Legal Reforms
4. Who Speaks for Islam? | Religious Authority and Contested Justice
5. Negotiating Lives, Crafting Selves | Narratives of Belonging
6. The Local in the Transnational | Gender Justice and Feminist Solidarities
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
