Modern Traditions? British Muslim Women and Academic Achievement

Participation rates in higher education for British South Asian Muslim women are steadily increasing. The aim of this article, therefore, is to explore motivations and influences for entering higher education and to consider how these may contribute to current discourses surrounding Muslim women in Britain. The possible impact higher education may have on their future relationships and lifestyle choices is also briefly considered. Various notions of 'agency' have been expressed that are characteristic of the ongoing complex assessments made by these women in relation to both perceived familial obligations and their own aspirations. Their articulations suggest that higher education is increasingly viewed as a necessary asset in maintaining and gaining social prestige. This preliminary research indicates that young South Asian Muslim women are continually negotiating and renegotiating their cultural, religious and personal identities and that these processes operate in complex and sometimes contradictory ways.     

The impact of inter‐generational change on the attitudes of working‐class South Asian Muslim parents on the education of their daughters

This paper presents the findings of ethnographic research into inter‐generational attitudinal change of parents towards the education of young British Muslim women. Based on in‐depth interviews with parents of different generations, given social class and ethnicity, there is a universal belief in the importance of education for young Muslim women per se, with economic and cultural factors significant in shaping this sentiment. A range of important differences in attitudes towards Islamic schooling and mainstream education, and questions relating to marriage, however, were found. There are complex issues of identity and religion among Muslims in relation to educational issues, but there has been a move towards Islamisation among both generations; the first generations through a form of cultural traditionalism and the second generations through Islamic conservatism. Although this finding is based on a study of a relatively small and isolated working‐class Muslim community in a declining post‐industrial town in the West Midlands, it is argued that this Islamisation places both particular risks and opportunities in relation to young Muslim women in education in such isolated and disaffected communities which have a wider conceptual, theoretical and policy impact.     

Barriers to higher education: commonalities and contrasts in the experiences of Hindu and Muslim young women in urban Bengaluru

Gender inequalities in educational attainment have attracted considerable attention and this article aims to contribute to our understanding of young women’s access to higher education. The article is based on our in-depth interviews with 26 Hindu and Muslim young women attending colleges in urban Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore), south India, and explores the barriers they confronted in fulfilling their aspirations. We highlight the similarities amongst the young women, as well as the distinctive experiences of the Hindu and Muslim interviewees. Financial constraints, lack of safety for women in public space, and gender bias, gossip and social control within the family and the local community affected Hindu and Muslim interviewees in substantially similar ways. For the Muslim interviewees, however, gender disadvantage was compounded by their minority status. This both underlines the importance of incorporating communal politics into our analysis and undermines popular discourses that stereotype Muslims in India as averse to girls’ and young women’s education.     

The Impact of Religio-cultural Norms and Values on the Education of Young South Asian Women

This paper is a discussion of how the educational attitudes, perspectives and experiences of young South Asian women in schools and colleges in the city of Birmingham, UK, are affected by domestic religio-cultural norms and values. Taking into consideration social class and the different types of schools they attend, young South Asian women were interviewed and surveyed to ascertain the effects of religion and culture upon education. The empirical findings show that all young South Asian women had supportive parents who actively encouraged them in education, irrespective of religion. For young Muslim women a strong bond between religion and individual was found, but for Hindus and Sikhs it was more tentative. For young working-class South Asian women, Hindus and Sikhs also regarded religion as less significant in their lives, but for Muslims it was again seen as crucial--but certain practices were argued to be more cultural than religious, and thereby problematic. For some young South Asian Muslim women, it leads to further marginalisation in education, given that they also originate from lower social class positions.     

Agency in action: young Muslim women and negotiating higher education in Australia

This article draws on an analysis of the narratives of Australian young Muslim women to explore their higher education experiences and aspirations. The article aims to explore the notion of agency employed by Muslim female university students in relation to the ways they discover their own capabilities along their deployment of available financial, cultural and social resources under cultural and structural constrains. The women’s accounts suggest that pursuit of higher education is highly perceived as a key to girls’ success and economic independence in the present precarious neoliberal environment yet concerns over Islamophobia and gender and racial discrimination which may curtail employment opportunities are present. The research findings also suggest that educational outcomes entail complex forms of negotiation, bargaining and resistance, stressing the ways in which class, gender, ethnicity and religion interrelate.     

Social pressure for religious conformity and anti-gay sentiment among Muslim and Christian youth

Abstract

Research on civic education, for the most part, investigates the alleged outcomes of deliberate civic education programs. Remarkably, few types of research have investigated how the outcomes of group process (e.g. based on religion) in schools, and more specifically, the pressure to conform to in-group norms, relate to civic educational goals (e.g. promoting tolerance for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender people). Against that background, this paper has two objectives. First, we assess social variation in perceived social pressure for religious conformity among Christian and Muslim Youth enrolled in secondary education in Flanders (N?=?2765). Second, we investigate the relationship between perceived social pressure for religious conformity and anti-gay sentiment. Our analyses are guided by social identity theory and rely on multilevel analysis. We find that for both Christian and Muslim youth, anti-gay sentiment is higher among young people who experience higher social pressure through the perceived expectations from talking with significant others about religion.     

Political Partisanship, Voting Abstention and Higher Education: Changing Preferences in a British Youth Cohort in the 1990s

This paper focuses on the relationship between education and political partisanship, using the British Household Panel Study (1991–1999). It is known that partisanship has been falling in Britain since the mid–1950s. However, voting abstention rose only gradually until the June 2001 election where the turnout (at 59 per cent) was the lowest since 1918. Partisanship also fell sharply during the 1990s. Although social class and education are associated with turnout in the USA, no relationship has been reported in the UK, and voting seems to have been perceived as a citizen duty. However, in the light of recent changes in voting patterns and educational participation, this paper investigates the role of education, contextualising education effects in social class and gender effects. The preferences of young people are observed in their late teens, before entering the labour market or higher education, and are compared with those of the same young people in their early 20s, after completing higher education courses or gaining labour market experience. The BHPS yielded a sample of about 500 young people with the required data over the time period. It was hypothesised that dissatisfaction with government performance would take different forms for the more and the less educated, with the more educated shifting preferences to minority parties while the less educated shift preferences to voting abstention. The hypothesis was confirmed for young men. Endorsement of abstention was very high for adolescent women who also seemed to be more influenced by their family's social class. However, by early adulthood a lower proportion of young women endorsed abstention than young men. Strong effects of education were still found with more highly educated young women (as with more highly educated young men) being more likely to have party preferences.     

Growing up female and Muslim in the UK: an empirical enquiry into the distinctive religious and social values of young Muslims

Abstract

What does it mean to be a Muslim young woman in Britain today and with which religious and social values do these young women identify? This paper tests the thesis that Muslim identity predicts distinctive values of public and social significance among female adolescents (13- to 15- years of age) who participated in a survey conducted across the four nations of the United Kingdom. From the 11,809 participants in the survey, the present analyses compares the responses of 177 female students who self-identified as Muslim with the responses of 1183 female students who self-identified as religiously unaffiliated. Comparisons are drawn across two domains defined as religiosity and as social values. The data demonstrated that for these female adolescents self-identification as Muslim encased a distinctive profile in terms both of religiosity and social values.     

The politics of gender segregation and women's access to higher education in the Islamic Republic of Iran: the interplay of repression and resistance

One of the significant achievements of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been the increasing access of women to all levels of education. This paper focuses on women's access to higher education and its unexpected and paradoxical outcomes. Today women in Iran represent over 60% of university students at the undergraduate level. Against the dominant social imaginary of Muslim women, this paper explores how the contradictions and complexities of politics within the Islamic Republic impact women's lives and how women themselves have been able to bring gender justice to the core of Iranian politics.     

试论近代西北回族教育的几种类型

西北是回族重要的聚居区,近代以来回族社会面临重要的社会转型,回族教育也以一种多元化的不同类型呈现出来,回族传统的经堂教育、新式教育和陕甘宁边区的回族教育是其主要的几种类型,同时还有＂化彼殊俗＂的汉化教育、私塾性质的回族教育和分别由政府、回族上层人士、寺院创办的民族教育、新式回族女子教育、回族幼儿教育等类型。     

Strategies of resistance to anti-Islamic representations among Australian Muslim women: an intersectional approach

ABSTRACT

Contemporary anti-Islamic discourses in Australia construct Islam as an uncivilised belief system and its Muslim followers as homogenous unassimilable Others. Within these discourses, the diversity among Muslim women has been overshadowed, and they are constructed as a monolithic ‘veiled’ woman. Drawing on 20 conversational interviews with veiled and unveiled Australian Muslim women from various cultural backgrounds, this paper explores the diverse ways in which Muslim women resist and challenge anti-Islamic discourses on Islam, Muslims and Muslim women. Guided by intersectional theories on identity and resistance, our analysis show that the women drew on discursive and performative strategies to contest anti-Islamic representations that homogenise and vilify Muslims and construct Muslim women as veiled and oppressed. The findings also show that the ways in which women contested hegemonic anti-Islamic representations were diverse and informed by intersecting power and social locations, including race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Implications for research on resistance and identity negotiations of minority groups are discussed.     

Are Muslim women in need of Islamic feminism? In consideration of a re-imagined Islamic educational discourse

In its remonstrations against male patriarchy, common understandings of Islamic feminism have, on the one hand, claimed attachment to other forms of feminism. On the other hand, because of its location within the structures of Qur’anic exegesis and prophetic traditions, it has claimed a detachment from what has been understood as the largely secular base of other forms of feminism. Inasmuch, however, as there continues to be disagreement about feminism in its conceptions of the identity of women, gender recognition and inclusion, Islamic feminism has remained unproblematised. In this article, I wish to address two questions. Firstly, to what extent is Islamic feminism based on a bifurcationist or divergent understanding of Islamic education? And secondly, to what extent should Islamic feminism be reconsidered as a discourse of Islamic education? In addressing these questions, I argue that there are two possible solutions to the prevalence of social inequality experienced by Muslim women. One is a reformation of Islamic education. And secondly, that Muslim women need to engage and deliberate with the discourse of the Qur’an, so that they can begin to bring into contestation the privilege of male interpretation.     

A Feminised Profession: women in the teaching profession

The education profession in Germany is presented as a feminised profession. This is defined and qualified, showing what sort of schools women are employed in and why there is a difference between women's opportunities in certain school types. An analysis is presented as to why women were allowed to enter the education profession when they did, linking women's employment opportunities and national shortages. The prejudice still existing against women's professional status within the employment sector is questioned. The paper shows how the education profession in Germany has been feminised and how the feminisation of a profession affects its pay and social prestige.     

Capabilities and the global challenges of girls’ school enrolment and women’s literacy

The education Millennium Development Goals have been highly influential on the priorities for education and concentrated policy efforts on numbers of girls enrolled in public sector schools offering basic education. This focus has been justified by human capital calculations of the social rates of return to basic schooling. This concern with quantities has met criticism from more qualitative researchers concerned with understanding not only why girls are not enrolled in school, but also why they may be irregular attenders and poor performers in public examinations even if they are enrolled. Alongside the efforts to achieve the education Millennium Development Goals have been initiatives to improve adult women’s literacies, often combined with an empowerment objective. This paper uses Sen’s capability approach to argue that improving deliberative processes is relevant for the well-being of girls and women of all ages.     

Higher education and feminism in the Arab Gulf

This article explores how higher education is being conceptualized as part of a neo-liberal ‘feminist’ social change project in the post-imperial context of the Arab Gulf. Challenging the tendency to essentialised treatments of gender and women in Muslim countries, it makes visible the diverse experiences and views of a particular group of Gulf purposively sampled women – students, graduates and academics – as it explores how they are situating themselves against available feminist narratives, how they are seeing themselves as citizens and political actors, and how higher education’s spaces and constraints are mediating these processes. A conflicted picture emerges, of mass higher education helping provide women with radical ideas and ambitions, and helping to make public demands and assert self-representation, while their freedoms to act are limited by underlying hegemonic structures that are still predominantly male and against which women variously rationalize their strategic conformity.     

Teaching Shabanu: the challenges of using world literature in the US social studies classroom

This paper discusses inclusion of global literature in social studies curricula, especially in teaching about women of the world. It analyses the attraction of, and difficulties with, a popular work of young adult fiction, Shabanu, often taught in US middle‐school social studies and humanities classrooms. It uses the framework of post‐colonial, feminist theorizing and critical, post‐structuralist considerations in history and literature to analyse the novel. It draws on several sources: my experiences in incorporating the book into a teacher‐education course in social studies education; interviews with teachers and teacher educators; testimonials about the book available on the Internet, including the reactions of Muslim groups in the USA; and interviews with Pakistani‐American students about their reactions to the book.     

Pedagogies of Muslim feminisms: reflections on faith,space and citizenship

In this article, I offer a qualitative study of three spaces created by and for young Muslim women in Toronto, Canada: an after-school drop-in programme for Muslim girls, a Somali women’s group and a Muslim women’s collective. I focus on data gathered from interviews of seven Muslim women in their 20s who created the spaces, which offered refuge from the racism and Islamophobia in Canadian schools and society and from the patriarchal forms of social control in their families and communities. Drawing on feminist and ethnographic approaches to citizenship studies and a critical faith-centred epistemology, I consider how these spaces function as loci for teaching and learning self and community, building communities of resistance and articulating new notions of the political and of citizenship.     

‘The sky is the limit’: higher education,gender and empowerment in the Bedouin community in the Negev in Israel

This article addresses the meaning that female Bedouin from the Negev in Israel give to higher education. I shall focus the discussion on the processes in which personal and social contexts merge into one another. Although there has been an increase in the number of investigations of the ways in which Bedouin women in the Negev in Israel participate in the public sphere, a survey of the literature reveals that no investigations have been conducted on the meaning educated women attribute to higher education during the course of their lives. Through an analysis of ten in‐depth interviews carried out between 1998 and 2001, this article examines issues such as gender, empowerment and social mobility amongst young Bedouin women in Israel.     

Being ‘religious and cultural rebels’ or being ‘cultural hybrids’? The role of identity capital in Muslim female university students’ self-construction

ABSTRACT

Research on university-educated Muslim women in different cultural contexts has displayed an intricate and paradoxical connection between experiences of higher education and identity mediation. A traditional model conceptualizes Muslim female university students as ‘rebels’ against their heritage religion and culture. Recent developments in the context of poststructural feminism highlight the configuration of a hybrid self-image embracing the target and heritage cultures in an additive and empowering manner. To enhance our understanding of the potential impact of higher education on identity negotiation, this study employs the notion of identity capital in an analysis of two South Asian Muslim female university students in Hong Kong over a two-year period. Participants’ life histories reveal that personal capacity to invest in identity capital (a contextually-dependent hybrid self) relies on an individual’s unique possession of various forms of capital. This study thus cautions against generalizations about Muslim women’s university experiences, and suggests that Muslim minorities as multicultural students and that their multilingual/multicultural skills, as forms of ‘intercultural capital,’ should be valued by all societal institutions.     

Gender and higher education in different national spaces: Female Palestinian students attending Israeli and Jordanian universities

This study examines the higher education experience among Palestinian Arab females in two national spaces and seeks to determine whether studying at an Arab institution of higher learning in a nearby Arab country can alleviate the emotional and economic difficulties that affect Palestinian women at Israeli universities. What can institutions of higher learning in Israel learn or derive from the proposed model to relieve the alienation and exclusion that their female Palestinian students experience? The study will compare two geographically distinct groups of women students. The first is a group of Palestinian women who attend university in Jordan, while the second consists of Palestinian women of Bedouin origin from southern Israel who study in the Jewish Israeli cultural space. The study seeks to shed light on the experience of Muslim students in Western and Muslim universities.