Muslim Women and Gender Equality: An International Women's Day Event 2025

On Friday 7 March, GENDER.ED and IASH co-hosted the event "Muslim Women and Gender Equality: An International Women's Day Event" that featured a panel discussion with Dr Qazi Sarah Rasheed, GENDER.ED Postdoctoral fellow and Dr Hamide Elif Üzümcü, IASH-Alwaleed Postdoctoral Fellow, chaired by Professor Patricia Jeffery. GENDER.ED's Undergraduate Intern, Mouna Chatt, reflects on the event. 

Last Friday, 7 March, GENDER.ED and IASH co-hosted a well-attended event, “Muslim Women and gender equality”, as part of the International Women’s Day 2025 celebrations. Chaired by Professor Patricia Jeffery, this was a panel discussion with Dr Qazi Sarah Rasheed, GENDER.ED Postdoctoral fellow and Dr Hamide Elif Üzümcü, IASH-Alwaleed Postdoctoral Fellow.

Dr Qazi Sarah Rasheed started off the conversation with a presentation on how the colonial notion that Muslim women need ‘saving’ from Muslim men has been adopted by the Hindu Right in India, to serve their political agenda. Hindu right-wing politicians and much of the mainstream media have portrayed Muslim Personal Law as exceptionally biased against women, particularly in enabling capricious male-initiated divorce and avoidance of financial maintenance of wives post-separation. Recently, this has culminated in moves to criminalise the triple talaq form of male-initiated divorce.  Drawing on Lila Abu-Lughod’s seminal piece ‘Do Muslim Women Need Saving?’, Sarah encouraged us to reflect on ‘Who decides what Muslim women need saving from?’. Sarah led us through some of the findings of her PhD research – an ethnographic study conducted in Lucknow, India. She found that those who sought legal remedies reported discrimination by legal figures in courts and community mediation centres, who harbour assumptions about Muslim women and discourage them from exiting the marriage, due to paternalism. She also problematised the assumption that women will seek protection from the law. Rather, Muslim women navigate marital disputes in complex and nuanced ways, sometimes choosing to remain in a difficult marriage and experiencing marriage as a protective institution. Sarah reminded us of the need to position ourselves critically vis-à-vis the notions of rights and liberties, asserting that it is unfair to view Muslim women’s lives through those frames, when they do not experience their own lives through them (as indeed, non-Muslim women may not either). She warned that by pitying Muslim women and reducing them to objects in need of ‘saving,’ we obscure the reality that we, ourselves, are not free.

Following Sarah’s presentation, Dr Hamide Elif Üzümcü presented some findings from her doctoral research conducted in Eskişehir in Turkiye. Introducing us to three of her interlocutors, she discussed how Muslim girls negotiate privacy at home and in the family. Elif also gave us a linguistic tour through the word mahremiyet – the Turkish translation of privacy. Mahremiyet is derived from the Arabic root ‘h-r-m’, and it means forbidden, taboo or one who has permission to enter forbidden areas, a confidant. A mahram is close kin that one cannot marry under Islamic jurisprudence. I appreciated this linguistic tour, as it made me reflect on the politics of translation, and recognize the history, culture, and meaning that goes missing when we provide simple one-word translations instead of presenting words in their respective contexts. I found myself giggling at the story of 11-year-old Asya, whose parents did not let her post on social media, but who adopted an impressive range of creative strategies to continue posting content anyways, one of which included sharing the log in details for her social media accounts with her friends and having them post for her, instead. Intricate and complex networks of innocent secrecy are what I miss the most about girlhood! As well as highlighting girls’ resistive agency, Elif showed how this was constrained by the interplay of male protection and surveillance of honour embodied in femininities, making boys enjoy more privacy than girls. 

There was an engaged Q&A exploring how Sarah and Elif’s research subjects themselves perceived privacy, equality and justice, and unpacking the problems of coloniality and essentialism posed by the demonisation of Muslim families as especially authoritarian, alongside the feminist impulse to address gender inequality. The audience observed that there is no singular feminist stance on gender and religion. To conclude, Professor Patricia Jeffery commented on how the two presentations both reinforced her own long-standing arguments about the need to de-homogenise Muslim women and recognise the differences among them, alongside the contribution of non-religious dimensions of their lives; and how gender justice demands economic justice.