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There have been marked differences between many urban youths and the older generation in practising Islam in Bangladesh. In the contemporary expression of Islam, many urban youths in Bangladesh adopt an approach where they are inclined to explain various Islamic discourses in a modernistic way through adopting an Islamic code of life. Simultaneously negating the traditional idea of the incompatibility of Islam with modernity is also an essential phenomenon in this discourse. 'Self-conscious sense of collective identity' and the concept of belonging to a global Islamic community is motivating many of these contemporary urban youths in Bangladesh to search for the 'pure' form of Islamic practices. These new manifestations eventually affect their urban social sphere while they either reject many traditional Islamic norms or adopt 'more authentic' Islamic norms. Thus, this qualitative paper argues that the expression of Islam among many urban youths has to be seen as an adaptive strategy in an ongoing struggle to make sense of Islamic life in a more complex, modern and Westernised world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Family planning programs in Bangladesh have been successfully operating for over half a century, achieving phenomenal reductions in fertility rates. Acknowledging restrictions on women’s freedoms, much of the initial program design was concentrated on giving household supplies for women priority. However, one unfortunate impact of these outreach services is that, by bypassing the opportunity to challenge patriarchal attitudes directly, they inadvertently reinforce the power relationships of the status quo. Hence, we problematise the decision-making structures within Bangladesh’s family planning programs. We argue that the fundamental flaw with Bangladesh’s family planning program is the lack of conscious effort to understand women’s health choices and decision-making as a complex contextual process of relational, structural, and institutional forces. Additionally, avoiding men in these programs often creates new dependencies for women, as this approach does not directly seek to build relational bridges based on equality between genders. As a result, many women still depend on permission from their husbands and family for reproductive health services and face constrained family planning choices and access to care. We recommend that family planning programs adopt a broader vision to create new and more sustainable possibilities in an ever-evolving social relations landscape where gender is constantly negotiated. Such strategies are even more pressing in the post-Covid world, as national systems are exposed to uncertainty and ambiguity.

Intertextuality is one of the terms that have sparked controversy in the modern critical arena almost since its appearance in the sixties of this century, and between conscious intertextuality and unconscious intertextuality came the research issue, which is based on an attempt to interrogate texts, especially poetic oppositions, through a comparative critical reading that works to reveal manifestations of creativity. And superiority between earlier and later poets by tracking and monitoring stylistic differences. The research aimed to clarify the stylistic differences between previous texts and later texts, represented by the poems Nahj al-Burda and al-Burda, and to clarify the stylistic relationship between the texts through the pattern of poetic oppositions. The comparative stylistic approach was followed to show the stylistic differences between the two poets. The study consists of two sections preceded by an introduction that includes an introduction to the poets and the selected poetic models. The first section dealt with defining research terms such as poetic oppositions, intertextuality, style, and stylistics. As for the second section, it was devoted to the application of stylistic intertextuality between the two poems, Nahj al-Burda, by Ahmed Shawqi, and Burda al-Busiri. The research concluded with a list of sources and references, and a conclusion with the most important findings and recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the author's personal encounter with a photograph of an unidentified concubine in a museum, sparking reflections on the woman's gaze and the complexities of her portrayal. Topics include the historical context of women in purdah, the modernization efforts of Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II, and the author's attempt to interpret and liberate the woman through the photograph.

The 1943 Bengal famine had severely changed the social landscape in rural Bengal. Thousands of peasants who mortgaged or sold their lands to the economic elite to migrate to Calcutta for food had to start over landless and precarious. Married women who were forcibly repudiated by their husbands ("talaq") during the famine had to abide by the religious law of purdah (of keeping women at home) and accepting death by hunger. Abu Ishaque's 1955 novel, Surja Dighal Bari (The Ominous House) evocatively captures these harrowing moments of hunger and poverty in the majority rural population through the life-events of Jaigun and her family. The novel shows how a resilient single mother's will to work and provide for her children is crushed by the male elite through religious injunctions and social alienation. In this essay, I will comment on the intersection of land, hunger, purdah, and patriarchy, reading them together as an instance of "postcolonial disaster," which conspires to produce an endless condition of precarity for the socio-economically vulnerable in post-independence rural East Pakistan, and consequently a raw esthetic of realism in the postcolony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how do feministand queer activist imaginaries respond to, initiate, mitigate, enable and complicate the ongoing process of radical transformation in the world .Topics include analyses of how the famous feminist expression in the era of climatic, pandemic, economic and political crises, particularly in the European context; and reflects on women's courageous resistance identifies as ‘gender apartheid' in Afghanistan with transformative politics in writing, and art.

The article reports that Women's courageous resistance to gender apartheid in Shaharzad Akbar's leading voices of human and women's rights in Afghanistan. Topics include feminist antimilitarism that works towards breaking the cycles of violence to her reflections on the potentials of art in human rights activism; and reflections on gender politics and women's rights in Afghanistan, Europe in poetry, literature, and politics.

Since they returned to power in August 2021, the Taliban are again imposing a regime of gender apartheid in Afghanistan in violation of international law, just as they did in the 1990s. Given that it is pervasively discriminatory, gender apartheid poses specific human rights problems requiring particular, heightened responses. A system of governance based on subordination of women institutionalizes sex discrimination across state political, legal, and cultural infrastructures. It necessitates different counter-strategies. This Article suggests conceptual architecture for analyzing and responding to this aspect of the current Afghan crisis. Specifically, the robust international legal framework that helped end racial apartheid should be urgently adapted to address gender apartheid and concert the responses of other states to it. There are three principal arguments in favor of this approach. 1) It is essential for fulfilling states' international legal commitments on sex discrimination across every document in the International Bill of Human Rights, as well as the specific target they affirmed in the Sustainable Development Goals to achieve gender equality by 2030. 2) Any other stance leads to an unacceptable imbalance in the manner in which international law addresses discrimination on the bases of sex and race. 3) This may be the only way to effectively tackle systematic Taliban abuses, as the organization is deeply committed to its violations of women's rights and already sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council. Such an approach marshals the resources of the international community to constrain the Taliban, and is the best hope for ensuring the credibility, legitimacy and effectiveness of the international legal response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the crisis of subjectivity Bilquis Jehan Khan's autobiography A Song of Hyderabad (2010) both represents and creates, embedded in the act of representation/writing as well as unfolding through recollection/experience. To do so, I closely analyze two critical events in Bilquis' life -- menstruation and the consummation of her marriage -- which are striking in terms of the frankness with which she describes these events and the vividness with which she informs us about her confusion and bewilderment on both occasions. Drawing from Margot Badran's conception of autobiography as the "final unveiling," I argue that Bilquis' representation of these events in her life constitutes radical acts of "bepardahgi," in defiance of the norms of the society in which she was raised, which considered intimate subjective experiences taboo, to be shrouded in silence and euphemisms. In this regard, following Sidonie Smith and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, I show that these acts of narration involve performance on the part of the autobiographer and her multiple collaborators, and it in these choices and circumstances (when, where, and how to reveal what about the self and to whom) that the central tension of Bilquis' narration of her subjectivity lies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article aims to unravel the complexities of defining modern Muslim womanhood caught at the crossroads of neo-colonialism, westernization, and globalization. Hamid's fictional portrayal of young Muslim Pakistani women proves to be a crucial site where both positive and negative effects of globalization on contemporary Pakistani women can be understood. Various female characters such as Mumtaz from Moth Smoke (2000), The pretty Girl from How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) and Nadia from Exist West (2017) come across as bold, assertive, and independent women who aspire to change their lives. However, this change is spurred by the alluring pull of globalization economically, politically, and socially. Thus, overwhelmed by the urge to seek glamourous lives, these women transgress sacred religious and cultural boundaries. The resultant specie is a sad amalgam of lonely, depressed, alienated, and secular women. Insights from the theory of globalization and neo-colonialism have been drawn to contextualize the fictional representation of Modern Muslim women as presented by Hamid. The methodology includes a close reading of the selected fiction with a critical analysis of the selected textual lines. Particular emphasis shall be laid on how the scared institution of marriage, sexuality, modesty and purdah are transgressed, reconstructed and violated in the guise of modernization and westernization. This article significantly demonstrates that the inextricable link between neo-colonialism, globalisation and westernisation is proving to be erroneous for traditional Pakistani cultural values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abul A'la Maududi explicitly built on Islamic ideas of equality to critique nationalism and modern racism. How then could he reject the idea of social equality between men and women? This is particularly puzzling given his noticeable employment of a Marxist critique of the marketisation of society and liberal conceptions of freedom in his controversial 1939 book Pardah. Parsing out the structure of his argument in Pardah in some detail and emphasising the hitherto understudied engagement with Marxist ideas in his thought, this article shows that Maududi rejected a specific vision of social equality, where equality amounts to exchangeability. His use of Marxist ideas to non-Marxist ends was in large part a result of his assessment of Marx as a capable historian but a flawed philosopher, and more fundamentally a very different conception of society to the Marxist one. Maududi relied on his by then well-developed concept of divine sovereignty to carry much of the conceptual burden regarding his critique of, as well as alternatives to, social equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, amid anti-Islamist sentiment in Egypt, the athlete Manal Rostom founded a Facebook group to support hijabis. Intended as a space of internal discussion and solidarity, it grew into one of Facebook's largest groups worldwide. Analyzing posts on this forum and its offshoot Instagram page, this article examines digital repertoires of Muslim women's selfstyling as both pious and liberal. While the women-only Facebook group reproduced existing religious norms in contemporary language, the Instagram platform generated self-modulated performances of fashion and fitness, blurring lines between liberal and Islamic feminism. The article analyzes the use of digital platforms to construct both a hijabi support group and an influencer platform, arguing that this two-pronged project signified hijab as an ethical and performance practice. As a symbol of self-discipline that moved between the worlds of style and sport, hijab in this digital forum supplemented representations of religious consumerism with competitive performances of strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reframes the relationship between women and early cinema in Bombay in the 1920s by foregrounding women's collective work toward sanitizing the cinematic medium and using cinema as an instrument to further public well-being and women's rights. It argues for a historiography of cinema in 1920s Bombay where female cultural and political instigators used cinema to shape progressive social and educational policies. Through events such as the Bombay Baby Week and the All India Women's Conference, influential women produced and employed useful cinema to create the earliest film exhibition spaces for women in late colonial Bombay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the west, 19th century witnessed various social reform movements like movement against slavery, fight for public schools, humane prisons, greater political representation and the movement for women's civil, political and economic rights. Indian society during 19th century was experiencing political transition and by becoming Britain's colony India began to experience the impact of western ideas on its society as well. One such impact was that of feminism which demanded greater social, economic and political rights for women all over the world. Indian society was dominantly patriarchal in nature and so, these western ideals of women freedom and social equality were not very much welcomed among the masses of India. During the late 19th century and the early 20th century there were a few brave women who broke the customs, taboos and social stereotypes and set an example of courage and bravery. These women at that time came out of seclusion and became active on the social podium. In this article the courage and bravery of some of those Muslim women is presented and how they became an example and symbol of female social liberation during early 20th century in Indian Subcontinent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In selected villages in Saharanpur district of Uttar Pradesh, purdah or ghunghat (veiling) observed by all married women of both the Muslim and non-Muslim communities plays a significant role in restraining and prohibiting their participation in social and economic roles. The tradition is perceived to enhance the status of the women as well as of the family among both communities. While women within the home could be relaxed, they had to observe strict veiling when outdoors. Muslim women wear burqa (usually it is black in colour used to cover from head to toe), while non-Muslim women wear dupatta (usually a 2.5 m long cloth) or end of the sari (usually a 6 m long cloth) to cover the face properly while going outside the home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India as everyone knows is the largest democracy in the world and we Indians are proud of it. Equality, fraternity and liberty are the basic principles of democracy. Though our governments, both Central and States, are elected by the people, can we call the country a democratic in the strict sense of the word? No. There is gender discrimination as well as class segregation at a very high rate. Though we call India a secular state, it is unlike the Western secularism and the country has evolved more a religio-centric one. Religions are the main culprits of gender discrimination. And they are fed and supported by politics of our country. This paper aims at portraying the plight of Indian women marginalized and tortured by the religious, political patriarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the theoretical framework of inequality regimes, this article offers a reconceptualization of purdah as it is practised, lived and experienced by women doctors of Pakistan. Based on an ethnographic study of Pakistani women doctors, this research indicates that practising purdah in the workplace is perceived as doing femininity within the hegemonic masculine workplace culture of Pakistan. In Pakistani organizations, individual and institutionalized practices of purdah create a gendered substructure which marginalizes women doctors by dictating the norms of conduct, international ethics, organization of physical space and work allocation. Patriarchal interpretations of religious doctrines of modesty provide legitimacy to the existence of these inequality regimes. Based on this, the article argues for a system‐level theorization of purdah that accounts for both individual and institutional norms of veil. Such conceptualization contributes to our understanding of how religion intersects with gender, class and race to create complex systemic inequities in organizational structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini published in 2007 is a modern epic of woman subjugation within the complex socio-political history of Afghanistan and it is not just-as many readers take it to be- a one dimensional love story or a mother-daughter tale or an imaginative fiction of two struggling Afghan women. In the backdrop of post-Taliban post 9/11 Afghanistan, this novel portrays myriad forms of social, political, cultural or familial injustices that had inexorably been meted out to the Afghan women even before the advent of Taliban regime in the country. Apart from caste and class one of the most prominent issues that the text grippingly engages with is gender apartheid. This paper endeavours to deal with almost all such nuances which contribute to the critical intrigue of the text and attempts to revisit the horrid socio-political past of war-ravaged Afghanistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's participation in the Tablīghī Jamā'at, an Islamic reform movement launched in the 1920s that emphasizes personal piety, remains underexamined, impeded by the organization's strict pardāh requirements but also by the popular perception that it is a body of male preachers. While there is no indication that its founder wanted women to play an active role in his movement, women were a part of the Jamāt a few decades later. This paper points to important twentieth-century shifts in the socio-economic configuration in north India that paved the way for women's inclusion in the Jamāt. The mode of piety that evolved in this period was better suited to handle the stresses of the emerging salaried class, and it upheld the pious wife as an ideal companion for the pious man, underplaying the role of teachers and spiritual masters. This paper argues that the possibility of social and geographic mobility that changed the structure of the household and the texture of local communities also formulated a mode of piety that enabled women to perform da'wāt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aimed to explore that how illiteracy contributes in the way honour killing in tribal societies. A sample size of 377 respondents was randomly selected comprising of 'Maliks' of the study area. To get inferences and draw conclusion, the data was crossed tabulated and Chi-Square test statistics were used at bi-variate and multi-variate levels. Moreover, at multi-variate level background variable i.e. marital status of the respondents was controlled. Research findings highlighted significant association of honour killing with illiteracy, education brought positive changes in honour norms, less observance of the normative order by literate women, and fear of sending female to the educational institutions. Moreover, honour killing was non-significantly associated with teachings of honour norms, and higher rate of killing among illiterate than literate. All stakeholders need to be educated over the magnitude and direction of human losses through ultra judicial killing, education regarding social equity, harmony and integration with particular emphasis on gender equity need to be imparted, educated chunk of population are required to perform their positive role, and study materials about human rights in general and women rights in particular need to be incorporated in the syllabi were forwarded some recommendations in light of the study findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pastoralist women are perceived as doubly disadvantaged, due to gender inequality and their low status as pastoralists. Thus, development organizations are adopting gender-specific approaches to improve the specific position of female pastoralists. This paper examines this issue with respect to the Raika (Rabari), the largest nomadic pastoral community of Western India, using an ecofeminist theoretical framework. Because Raika women observe purdah, there is an outward impression that men play the dominant role in sheep production, but in reality nomadic shepherding is a family operation and dependent in equal parts on the contribution of women and men. A series of interviews and group discussions revealed that women often prefer being on migration to staying in the villages because of lower workloads, nevertheless, they are concerned about security issues and the dangers of nomadism. Raika women increasingly express their resistance to traditional customs by refusing to consummate marriages with husbands to whom they have been betrothed in childhood. Very often the reason for the refusal is that they do not want a husband following the traditional pastoralist livelihood, preferring an urban way of life. The gradual decline of Rajasthan's sheep population over the last fifteen years may be due in part to women's refusal to engage in shepherding. It is suggested that this issue needs to be addressed by instating pro-pastoralist policies that benefit pastoralist families at large rather than gender-specific measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the Muslim women's question was articulated by men in the 'reform' movement (as in other communities), the participation of women was also by their (male) design; many times, women's reform activities were seen as evidence of their own (male) progress. This paper examines the role of women initiated in the reform movement and the 'role model' they were expected to play, especially if educated and wedded to one active in 'reform.' The paper takes up the study of Wahid Jahan in reform, wife of Sheikh Abdullah, a pioneer in Muslim women's education at Aligarh in the early twentieth century. Initiated in reform by her husband, and expected to follow his guidelines in all-important matters like being a 'good wife', her life would still be worthwhile to explore if the wife's commitment and initiatives moved beyond the expectations or dictates of her husband. The paper thus, through biographical writings on Wahid Jahan, seeks to examine the larger question of reform normative and wife's agency; whether it was possible for a wife as subordinate partner in reform and agent at home, to extend spaces for women both in the family and the school, or to separate herself from her roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the rhetorical implications of transnational exchange between feminist activists in the late twentieth century. It uses Gloria Steinem’sMs. Magazine (est. 1972) and the Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF) as a lens through which to understand the emergence of the gender-apartheid analogy in the 1990s. During the 1970s and 1980s,Ms. demonstrated knowledge of and commitment to the anti-apartheid movement. However, when the FMF andMs. began using apartheid as an analogy for gender-based oppression in the Middle East after the fall of the apartheid regime, the limitations of transnational understanding became fundamentally apparent. This article traces the historical and rhetorical foundations for the use of race-based analogies in women’s rights activism. It then examines the journalistic and foreign policy perspectives espoused toward the South African apartheid regime and women’s rights abuses under fundamentalist Islamic regimes. At the turn of the twenty-first century, this article argues, the transnational feminist imaginary was shaped by a process of inspiration and appropriation which delimited solidarity and understanding across transnational networks of feminist activists. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Humans have been called 'cooperative breeders' because mothers rely heavily on alloparental assistance, and the grandmother life stage has been interpreted as an adaptation for alloparenting. Many studies indicate that women invest preferentially in their daughters' children, but little research has been conducted where patrilocal residence is normative. Bangladesh is such a place, but women nevertheless receive substantial alloparental investment from the matrilateral family, and child outcomes improve when maternal grandmothers are alloparents. To garner this support, women must maintain contact with their natal families. Here, the visiting behavior of 151 interviewed mothers was analyzed. Despite the challenges of patrilocality and purdah, almost all respondents visited their own mothers, and mothers-in-law were visited far less. This contrast persists in analyses controlling for proximity, respondent age, postmarital residence, family income, and marital status. These results affirm the importance women place on matrilateral ties, even under a countervailing ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The novella Sultana 's Dream (1905) by Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain is the pioneering text of India 's sciencefiction. In the novella, the drivingforce behind the success of the utopian feminist country of Ladyland is women 's education. In the unconventional, inverted world of Sultana 's Dream, the men are "kept in the zenana " ("Sultana 's Dream " 5) and are left busy with household chores. The women, on the other hand, use their superior intellectual ability to govern the country dexterously and gingerly. Rokeya 's unflinching attempt towards female education is described in some of the words. Sultana 's Dream retains its status being the most successfulpieces of Indian writing in English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its exploitative nature, colonialism facilitated continuous cultural exchanges between Muslim Bengal, home of the writer Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, and the European metropolis. Although Rokeya never visited Europe, she was exposed to European literature, overcame sociocultural constraints, and thus became engaged in a complex critique and assessment of European culture in relation to her own environment. This article explores the ways in which, as a writer, educationalist, activist and wife of a civil servant, Rokeya had opportunities to interact directly with European women and indirectly with European men. Importantly, she made available to her readers an interpretative summary of Marie Corelli’s novelThe Murder of Delicia(1896), informed them about the Victorian “woman question” and identified comparable gender norms in Europe and India. This article discusses how Rokeya broke through the iron gate of purdah practices prevalent at the time, availed herself of opportunities to explore European culture, and commented on the condition of women. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]