Jamaat-e-Islami Women in Pakistan: Vanguard of a New Modernity?

This book critically examines the feminization of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a major movement for Islamic renewal and reform in South Asia. Through an ethnographic and textual study of Jamaat women elected to local, provincial, and national bodies in Pakistan from 2002 to 2008, Jamal draws attention to the cultural-political forces that enabled these women to become influential within the party and in Pakistan's major urban centers of Karachi and Lahore.

Jamal situates Jamaat women within Islamic modernism without reifying them as either pious agents reacting to state-imposed modernization or gendered citizens who use Islam for class-based instrumental ends. Jamaat women are represented as subjects who move in many directions by acting against and through the discourses of Islamic tradition, cultural modernity, and modernization.

Author: Amina Jamal
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 11/27/2013
Pages: 328
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.22lbs
Size: 9.19h x 6.40w x 0.97d
ISBN: 9780815633273

Review Citation(s):
Choice 05/01/2014

About the Author
Amina Jamal is associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario.