Understanding Muslim conceptions of women's rights in Malaysia, Egypt and Great Britain

Abstract

The thesis examines the processes by which certain sets of ideas about Muslim women's rights become dominant in particular localities, and questions the specificity accorded to Muslim women in both global human rights talk and transnational Islamic narratives. In order to do so, the thesis is therefore presented in two parts; the first provides the general arguments and theoretical positions in the debate, while the second contextualises and particularises these in the form of three case studies. The first section considers the interaction between social forces, ideas and agency at global and national levels in Muslim women's rights debates. The research consequently examines the relationship between power and ideology in the construction of understandings of Muslim women's rights. As a result it does not uncritically accept the claims made by those seeking to define Muslim women's empowerment or their rights. Additionally, the thesis considers the agency of Muslim women in particular contexts in order to assess the impact of Islamic discourses on the realisation of women's rights in Muslim communities. In order to do this without essentialising, or stereotyping, Muslim women, or Islam, the second part of the thesis examines three countries as case studies: Malaysia, Egypt and Great Britain. In each of the case studies the national context is elaborated and five key rights are examined. This enables comparison while maintaining the particularities of women's rights talk in each of the cases. The main conclusion of the thesis is that Islam alone cannot explain the strategies, negotiations and women's rights claims made in Muslim communities. Rather, these are embedded in a dynamic array of social, economic and ideological relations. Attempts at understanding the conceptualisation of women's rights in Muslim communities must therefore be a holistic analysis which resists essentialising and imposing predetermined interests on actors.

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