عنوان

New claimants to religious authority:

Number

TLpq818747288

.Language of Text, Soundtrack etc

انگلیسی

Title Proper

New claimants to religious authority:

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Faiza Mushtaq

Title Proper by Another Author

A movement for women's Islamic education, moral reform and innovative traditionalism

Subsequent Statement of Responsibility

W. N. Espeland

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

Northwestern University

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2010

Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item

311-n/a

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Body granting the degree

Northwestern University

Text preceding or following the note

2010

Text of Note

This dissertation examines an Islamic movement called Al-Huda which has become popular amongst urban educated Pakistani women over the last decade and a half. Al-Huda runs a network of schools in which women study the Quran and other religious texts as interpreted by the leader of the group, Farhat Hashmi, and learn moral lessons that can be applied to their daily lives. Al-Huda participants share a conviction that they can reform Pakistani society by spreading their version of Islamic belief and practice. In order to understand the appeal of this movement to social classes not previously known for their interest in religion, I carried out twenty months of fieldwork in Karachi, Islamabad and Lahore. I attended Al-Huda classes and events, conducted interviews, and analyzed lectures and textual material produced by the organization. This study finds that Al-Huda's structured classroom activities are pivotal in providing women with emotional and cognitive cues that transform them into committed followers of the movement. Participants in these recurrent collective experiences come to recognize Hashmi as having the qualities of an authoritative religious teacher and learn to obey her. In these settings we can observe how charismatic authority is supported by a complex set of social structures and relationships. The activism of Al-Huda women and their sectarian Ahl-i Hadis orientation towards Islam build upon a long reformist tradition and history of Islamic learning in South Asia. Equally important are recent historical developments such as Pakistani women's increased but still contested access to higher education and professional careers. Al-Huda's innovation lies in making religious ideas relevant to the lives of these women by combining elements from traditional Islamic learning with modern organizational forms and practices. This analysis contributes to our theoretical understanding of social movements and institutional change. Al-Huda reinforces many norms of gender behavior but also provides women with religious literacy, positions of leadership, and networks of solidarity not available to them earlier. In doing so it challenges and reorders cultural rules governing who can access Islamic knowledge and claim expertise in it. This gradual process of institutional transformation is a significant consequence of the movement.

Gender

Institutional change

Islamic education

Pakistan

Religious authority

Social sciences

Faiza Mushtaq

W. N. Espeland

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y