This book is an analysis of perceptions of self , power , agency, and gender as narrated by Muslim women of Chandhara, a village located in the Netrakona district of northeastern Bangladesh . The ethnographic data reveal that the female informants of the village, where the study was conducted, do not perceive themselves as powerless or without agency ; instead, they assert that the power and agency of women are different from those of men. Believing that almost every aspect of human life is gendered, some of the informants argue that the perception of women possessing less power or agency often arises from comparing the power and agency of men and women by the same standards and criteria, without considering this gendered aspect of everyday life. For instance, when a woman enters the domain of a man, not only does she often perceive herself to be a less powerful person, but also others perceive her that way. Yet, when a man enters a woman’s domain, though he also feels powerless, his powerlessness often goes unnoticed. Because of this disparity, these informants argue that the power and agency of men and women should, therefore, be judged by two different sets of criteria.
Interestingly, such observations are contrary to what is popularly believed about either Islam or Muslim women, especially in the West. For instance, in both Western print and online media not only is Islam too often equated with violence, but Muslim women are commonly portrayed as subjugated and oppressed . The terrorist attacks in some Western countries and the brutalities of the so-called Islamic State in recent years have made Islam synonymous with terrorism. In other words, Islam is something to be suspicious of, something to be feared, something incompatible with the cherished values of the West, such as individualism , freedom, and democracy . Alongside this negative portrayal of Islam in the media and consequent perceptions of the general masses, even members of scholarly communities occasionally project and conceptualize Islam in this way. 1 In fact, they were doing so long before the events of either September 11 in the United States or the hijab debate in France. Bernard Lewis ’s Roots of Muslim Rage (1990) and Samuel P. Huntington ’s Clash of Civilization? (1993) are only two of the plethora of available examples of this kind. In some cases, Islam is conceptualized as an ahistorical, acontextual, and monolithic tradition. 2 Similarly, “Muslim women” are generally perceived, conceptualized, and projected as veiled, oppressed, and subjugated in the popular discourses of the West, even in academia. 3 Cover pages of most scholarly books on Muslim women portrayed with veils would testify to this conceptualization. 4
For Westerners, the veil is the principal symbol of Islam’s oppression of women. 5 It is perceived as an obligatory dress code of Muslim women, although only Saudi Arabia has a law requiring women to cover their faces in public. The general public perception of the oppression of women in Muslim societies is so strong that the US war on terror and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were morally justified on the grounds that they were aimed at “saving Muslim women.” 6 The colonizers also fashioned similar discourses centuries ago to justify their presence in South Asia and elsewhere. 7 They justified their politico-cultural hegemony by producing new knowledge and new subjectivity , 8 and by projecting their imagined status of women in the colonized countries. 9 Concomitantly, the concept of colonization was projected into the orientalist discourses, among others, as a civilizational mission of superior 10 white men in their attempts to save brown women from the tyranny of brown men, to paraphrase Gayatri C. Spivak . 11 For Hindu women, signs of brown men’s tyranny over them was sati (the emulation of a Hindu widow in the funeral pyre of her dead husband), while for Muslim women they were purdah or parda (seclusion), among others. Disregarding customary practices, oral traditions, local variations, and flexibilities, both Hinduism and Islam were perceived and projected in most of these discourses as scriptural, doctrinal, and monolithic traditions. 12 In addition, colonized people, in general, and women, particularly, of Muslim communities, were perceived as traditional individuals who lacked any ideas of selfhood , individualism , or freedom .
Projections of Islam and women in Islamic traditions in most Western media and academic scholarship in recent years, with few exceptions, are identical with the orientalist conceptualizations of Islam and women. However, there exist similar tendencies among some Muslim scholars who essentialize the faith of Islam and tend to substitute Arab cultural traditions for Islamic ones. Thus, they dehistoricize and decontextualize Islam and attempt to project it as a tradition immune to any changes, influences, or social and cultural variations, which is a conceptualization no less distorted than those of Lewis and Huntington. Without considering cultural borrowings and influences, they also tend to portray the Arabo-Persian dress code of women as normative Islamic attire and view the seclusion of women from the public sphere as a mark of Islamic civilization.
This book illuminates the lived experiences of Muslims of a rural community in Bangladesh. It describes how adherents of the Islamic faith, especially women, perceive selfhood, individuality, power, and gender. Grounded in the narratives and practices of the informants, this book challenges the orientalist formulation of Islam as a homogenous tradition and argues that Islam is neither a uniform or monolithic tradition, nor is the identity of its adherents uniform, even in small rural communities such as Chandhara. My data reveal that identity is often related to the group an individual belongs to and is subject to shifts and changes in the socioeconomic and cultural ethos of the country. In this book, I historicize the shifting aspect of religious beliefs and practices of the community I studied, and I analyze how Muslim women (as well as men) of a rural community in Bangladesh use religion and religious discourses not only in describing their self and identity but also in their perceptions of power, agency, and gender roles. However, before turning to this data, I have summarized some important publications on Islam and women in Bangladesh in the following pages.
Studies of Islam and Women in Bangladesh
It is interesting to note that there are very few studies available that address the nature of Islam and its impacts on the social and cultural heritage of Bangladesh in recent decades. Some of the most comprehensive studies that attempt to historicize the specific nature of Islam in Bangladesh are done by Anisuzzaman (1983 [1964]), Muin ud-Din Ahmad Khan (1965), Muhammad Enamul Haq (1975), Rafiuddin Ahmed (1981), Asim Roy (1983), Abdul Karim (1985), U.A.B. Razia Akter Banu (1992), Richard M. Eaton (1993), and Hans Harder (2011). Anisuzzaman analyzes the political changes, reform as well as religious movements, Hindu–Muslim relationships , and the linear progress of the literary production of Bengali Muslims between the years 1757 and 1918. Khan focuses on one of the prominent movements, the Fara‘ idi , that attempted to purge un-Islamic practices, especially Hindu influences upon Muslims of Bengal, as well as political resistance against the zamindari (land tenure and taxation) system. Haq illustrates how Sufi or mystical traditions in Bengal were being contaminated by Hindu and Buddhist traditions. Ahmed analyzes the influences of Sufis and punthi (a medieval and premodern poetic genre) literature in shaping the form of Islam in Bengal. Roy emphasizes the syncretic characteristic of Bengali Islam and how punthi literature shaped present-day Islamic practices in Bangladesh. Karim engages the historical role Islam played in the social, political, and cultural changes in Bangladesh. However, Banu attempts to quantify the degree of religiosity among the Muslims of Bangladesh, in addition to her attempt to contextualize Islam in the social and cultural traditions of the country. She also analyzes how Islamic religious beliefs have impacted social change as well as the agricultural production and political culture of Bangladesh. Eaton conducted one of the most comprehensive studies of Islamic religious tradition in Bangladesh. Arguing against the polemical literature on conversion, he shows how shifting the river courses influenced the daily lives of ordin...