Author: Etin Anwar, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Published in: Religions, Vol. 15, Issue 6 (June 2024), pp. 706-726

Publication Date: June 6, 2024

Publisher: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), Basel, Switzerland

Abstract:

The Women’s March on 21 January 2017, opened a new social and political landscape for Muslim women to engage in Islamic liberatory activism. I locate Muslim women’s participation in the marches following the 2017 ‘Muslim travel ban policy’ as a site for discovering the link between the politics of resistance and the utility of Islam as a source for liberation. I argue that Muslim women living in minority and post-secular contexts resort to faith as a source of agentival liberation to address the political rhetoric of anti-Islamic sentiments and policies.

The outcome of this research demonstrates:

1. How Muslim women activists challenge the Western narratives of being oppressed and explore the ways they want to represent themselves;
2. How Islam serves as a catalyst for theological resistance and how this enhances the role of Muslim women as moral and spiritual agents in transforming their political and social conditions;
3. How the Islamic liberation in the US context historically intersects with Black churches’ resistance toward White racism; and
4. How Muslim women’s agency as spiritual beings is linked to the promotion of justice in the Western liberatory movements.

Overall, the article shows how Muslim women resort to their spiritual journey and use such narratives to confront unjust political rhetoric and policies.

Keywords: Islamic liberation theology; agency; Women’s March; Justice activism; Islamic feminist resistance

Read the full article HERE.

Source: MDPI

Printed Edition of the Special Issue Published in Religions

Publisher: MDPI – Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (October 2018)

(This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue Glocal Religions that was published in Religions)

The globalization of the world’s religions leads to a variety of fusions whereby local elements blend with global religions, leading to hybrid local-global or glocal religious forms. Glocal forms of religion provide a hitherto insufficiently explored research agenda with the potential of further growth in the future.

This volume introduces the basic tenets of this research agenda and offers examples from around the globe. In the volume’s individual chapters, authors explore a diverse tapestry of such forms that cover cases from the Caribbean, Japan, Finland, Eastern Europe, US, Korea, Southeast Asia and Central America. Glocal forms of religious expression exist across diverse religious traditions.

In this volume, religious traditions specifically explored include Buddhism, Hinduism, folk or traditional religions, Eastern Orthodox Christianity & Protestantism. The study of glocal religions involves a trans-disciplinary group of scholars and researchers. In this volume, contributions come from the fields of sociology, archaeology, anthropology, history and religious studies. This collection is an indispensable reader for scholars and students who wish to explore the dynamics of glocal religion in their part of the world.

 Read the book here.

Source: mdpi.com