Religion and Gender

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's 1924 Bengali novella centers a women-run school and welfare institution, asking how education, work, and mutual aid can build public life without pretending that reform is a frictionless utopia.

Leila Ahmed traces how gender, law, and religious authority changed across Islamic history, then shows how colonial rule turned the veil and the ‘woman question’ into political symbols.

Daniel M. Lavery uses faith, pop culture, and humor to unsettle the demand that trans lives follow a clear, uplifting narrative arc.

Lila Abu-Lughod dismantles the rescue narrative that turns Muslim women into a uniform victim class and uses their suffering to authorize war, humanitarian intervention, and moral superiority.

Saba Mahmood’s ethnography of Cairo’s women’s mosque movement challenges feminist theories that recognize agency only as resistance to norms and asks how ethical subjects are formed through embodied religious practice.

miriam cooke reads Muslim women’s literary and public interventions as the making of Islamic feminism, a contested space in which religious belonging and demands for gender justice are claimed together.

Engineer and writer Yassmin Abdel-Magied uses the assumptions attached to a headscarf to ask why visible religious dress is treated as a complete explanation of a Muslim woman's life.

Using regional survey data, Dalia Mogahed challenges media stereotypes about the Arab uprisings and examines how demands for dignity, accountable government, religion, and women’s rights coexist.