CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Karaca, Asli |
|---|---|
| Title | Women's Islamic Movements and Politico-Religious Empowerment: Accommodation, Dissent, and Transgression in Turkey and Egypt (1995-2016) |
| Summary | Increasing religious traditionalism and authoritarianism worldwide, and in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in particular, pose a severe threat to the politico-religious empowerment of women. The threats have made examining women’s Islamic movements (WIMs), one of the most important agents of political-religious empowerment of Muslim women, all the more necessary. What have been the capacities of women’s Islamic movements for increasing and embodying politico-religious power in the Muslim-majority countries in the MENA for the last twenty years? How do institutional configurations of religion and other contextual differences across MENA influence politico-religious empowerment of women and movement patterns of WIMs? Movement elements and contextual constraints influencing the empowerment capacities of WIMs have been overlooked, as scholars have mostly focused on the Islamic ideologies and discourses of WIMs. As opposed to the emphasis on ideology and agency in the literature on women’s Islamic movements, I analyze empowerment capacities of women’s Islamic movements with a contextual social movement approach. I study the rights advocacy of WIMs as opposed to the women’s piety movements. Conducting a case-oriented comparative study in major cities in Turkey and in the capital of Egypt – two countries with different religion-state configurations, secularization patterns, and governing parties – enables us to see the effects of political institutions and context on the movement dynamics of WIMs and politico-religious empowerment of women. The dissertation combines multiple data collection tools including personal interviews, ethnography, participant observation, and collection of published, broadcast and online sources. Data analysis is based on historical tracing and discourse analysis. The findings are based on fieldwork in Istanbul, Ankara, and Bursa between May 2013 and January 2016 over a period of fifteen months, and in Cairo over six months in 2014. Two primary fields of literature have guided the theoretical framework: Social movement literature and literature on power contestations between religion and gender. I deploy the critical perspectives in both kinds of literature, especially those on the specificities of authoritarian contexts in the MENA. The findings of the thesis, however, signal a need for a new conceptual lens in understanding women’s empowerment and movements in authoritarian and patriarchal religious contexts. I argue that the concept of visibility of dissent, incorporated from recent anthropological studies, captures dissenting and transgressive acts of women in broader public space in authoritarian and patriarchal contexts more fittingly than ‘participation’ or ‘collective action’ concepts in social movement literature, and than the ‘power of presence’ (Bayat 2007) or ‘everyday politics’ emphases in the literature on authoritarian settings. Secondly, I adapt Linda Woodhead’s (2007) typology on religion’s relation to gender to create a typology of politico-religious acts of WIMs, namely accommodating, dissenting and transgressing. Finally, by juxtaposing these acts with their stances on broader political oppression in their contexts, I demonstrate that WIMs can attain several politico-religious empowerment capacities, namely consolidating, reformative and transformative ones. The dissertation provides a contextual- and movement-sensitive analysis of empowerment capacities of the women’s Islamic movements, based on the recent empirical data from two important countries in the MENA. |
| Supervisor | Sgier, Lea; Al-Bagdadi, Nadia |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/karaca_asli.pdf |
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