"Muslim Women" in Europe: Citizenship and the Construction of "Counter" Public Spheres

Key information

Date
Time
5:00 pm to 6:30 pm
Venue
Russell Square: College Buildings
Room
4418

About this event

Dr Ruba Salih

This talk will explore how Muslim women in Europe - and the political cultures they embody - challenge a nationally and culturally bounded conception of citizenship and of the public sphere. Transnational identities and affiliations have challenged citizenship in various ways, not least by questioning loyalty to one nation, culture, and to one religion, as main or exclusive prerequisite for accessing rights. The cultural, political and social implications of these transformations of citizenship translate into utter tensions when the subjects of claims are Muslims, who are represented in public and popular discourses as responsible for most cultural and social conflicts in contemporary Europe.

Gender lies at the heart of the frictions occurring as a result of contemporary transnational challenges. Muslim women’s bodies are becoming a sort of public space itself where different agendas and rhetoric of modernity, secularism and performances of loyalty are inscribed. Yet, women are also taking an active part in the process of making manifest the postnational constellation which characterizes contemporary Europe in various ways, by challenging the secular notion of the public sphere through specific body techniques on the one hand, but also by making visible their multiple identities and affiliations and mobilising around a reconceptualisation of citizenship and the “public sphere” on the other hand. This appears to be in continuity rather that in clash with historical critiques to the abstract and gender blind notion of the public sphere.

Young Muslim religious women in Europe, and their complex selves, simultaneously pious and liberal, local and global, witness to the existence of very lively and gendered “counter publics” whose crucial role in processes of refreshing democratic pluralism should be acknowledged rather than repressed.

Bio

Dr. Ruba Salih( PhD University of Sussex 2000) is a social anthropologist and teaches at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the university of Exeter. Her research interests and writing cover the broad areas of Transnational migration and Gender across the Mediterranean, Multiculturalism and Citizenship; Gender, Islam and the Public Sphere; gender, Islam and modernity in the Middle East and Europe Islam in Europe. Among her publications: (2003) Gender in Transnationalism. Home, Longing and Belonging Among Moroccan Migrant Women . London and New York: Routledge. (2008) Muslim Women Revealed. Women, Islam, Modernity . [ Musulmane Rivelate. Donne, Islam, Modernita]. Roma: Carocci ( in Italian). She is currently co-editing a special issue of Social Anthropology which will focus on gender, performativity, Islam and the public sphere in Europe.

Contact email: N.S.Al-Ali@soas.ac.uk