Ayesha Khurshid

Islamic Traditions of Modernity Gender, Class, and Islam in a Transnational Women’s Education Project

Women’s education has been central to discourses that have sought to modernize developing and Muslim societies. Based on ethnographic data collected from women teachers from rural and low-income communities of Pakistan, the article shows how being a parhi likhi (educated) woman implies acquiring a privileged subject position making claims to middle-class and Islamic morality, and engaging in specific struggles within, rather than against, the institutions of family, community, and Islam. This focus on the lived experiences of educated Muslim women complicates the prevalent narrative of modernity that presents women’s education and gender empowerment as an expression of individual women’s choice and free will against the oppressive frameworks of family, community, and Islam.

Malala Yousafzai as an Empowered Victim: Media Narratives of Girls’ Education, Islam, and Modernity

Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani youth activist who has become a global icon for her advocacy of girls’ education, youth agency, and gender empowerment. Yousafzai started The Malala Fund, and her activism has become an inspiration for local and global organizations working on youth related issues. Through conducting a discourse analysis of newspapers published in the USA, we argue that this media discourse presents her not only as an agent but also as a victim. Our analysis reveals how this media discourse modifies Malala Yousafzai’s own narrative. It constructs her as a symbol of the oppression of the Muslim girls as well as the empowerment of youth to be acquired through Western education and modernity. This chapter highlights the need to critically engage with the global discourses of girls’ education, youth, agency, and gender empowerment that may be embedded in the problematic dichotomies of modern West versus unmodern Islam.

Comparative Studies and the Reasons of Reason

Cross–cultural and international comparative research embodies a conundrum the very analytics of comparativeness in the social and education science research, with variations in their themes, draw from particular European and North American Enlightenments’ notions of reason and rationality that provide their epistemological “foundations”1

Multicultural Education in a Global Context: Addressing the Varied Perspectives and Themes

We live in a global village shaped by technology that allows us to watch events unfurl in real time even if they are occurring thousands of miles away. Economic market forces are reshaping our world in many ways, changing how and where we live. Since the end of World War II, there have been huge changes in maps of our physical world, as arbitrary political boundaries shift and change and nation states both arise and disappear. Demographic maps continue to change and evolve, as population numbers increase and decrease due to birthrates, war and political and economic emigration, and population characteristics such as age, race, religion, socioeconomic status and ethnicity shift likewise. As educators committed to multicultural education, we recognise the multiplicity of identities and cultures that exist in our global village and we acknowledge that they are often sources of confl ict or foci for controversy. We believe that everyone should enjoy fundamental freedoms for without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion; but we acknowledge that basic human rights still do not exist in some parts of the world. We also know that the very words we use to describe our goals and the tools we use to achieve them remain contested terrain: multiculturalism and multicultural education mean different things in different countries, and the impetuses for acknowledging and advocating them often spring from very different sources. In some countries, multicultural education is promoted as a means to help students obtain skills for employment in the global society and to educate citizens to accept and affi rm human/cultural diversity. In other countries, the idea of multicultural education (and multiculturalism) is seen as a way to address equality issues; and still in other countries it receives a mixed acceptance or it is rejected for various reasons, including a perception

Writing against culture: unveiling education and modernity for Hindu Indian and Muslim Pakistani women through an ‘ethnography of the particular’

Abstract In this article, we analyze our experiences engaging in a collaborative ethnographic project. This project brings together two ethnographic studies undertaken independently from the other in Gujarat, India and Punjab, Pakistan. We integrate the narratives of young, rural Hindu women in India with those of young, rural Muslim women in Pakistan to depict globalization as a simultaneously interconnected and disjointed project. Our effort is to disrupt the linear telling of the production of global and universal modernity through education, which is often seen through rejecting local culture. We take a critical, feminist, postcolonial approach to challenge traditional hierarchies of knowledge and incorporate the scholarship and perspectives of non-Western scholars, problematizing the traditional self–other distinction. This article outlines the methodological process and journey that we undertook to create a dialog between our independent ethnographic work focusing on India and Pakistan.

Contested womanhood: women’s education and (re)production of gendered norms in rural Pakistani Muslim communities

ABSTRACT In a world marred by the fears of religious extremism, Muslim women have become subjects of various global projects that aim to modernize ‘traditional’ Muslim societies through women’s education and empowerment. Embedded in these discourses is an assumption that all educated Muslim women will empower themselves through challenging the ‘oppressive’ structures of their families and communities. This paper challenges these homogeneous narratives of education and empowerment through highlighting the complexities of educated women’s daily lives in rural Pakistan. We situate the lived experiences of rural educated Pakistani women in global mainstream as well as in local historical narratives regarding the role and purpose of education for women. Our analysis reveals how the educated women participants’ lives were shaped by a complex gendered hierarchy that facilitated educated women to take on new roles while simultaneously requiring them to maintain harmonious relationships with family and community members.

Love marriage or arranged marriage? Choice, rights, and empowerment for educated Muslim women from rural and low-income Pakistani communities

ABSTRACT Using ethnographic data collected with Muslim women teachers from rural and low-income communities in Pakistan, this article shows how empowerment for these educated women meant access to different forms of power within families and communities. The focus on the issue of choice in marriage reveals how the participants conceptualised empowerment as practice of rights that entailed right choices; choices that produced positive long-term benefits in terms of making new opportunities and roles available to them within their contexts. Through focusing on the lived experiences of educated and professional Muslim women in a specific cultural context, this analysis presents a critical analysis of the gendered concepts and practices of choice, rights, and empowerment. It disrupts the global narrative that mobilises the image of Muslim women as victims of their culture and presents education as a tool that empowers Muslim women against their patriarchal families and institutions.

Claiming modernity through clothing: gender and education in Pakistani Muslim and Indian Hindu communities

ABSTRACT Through focusing on forms of clothing, this article reveals how educated women from marginalized communities in Pakistan and India made differential claims to being modern. Our analysis of two ethnographic studies shows how the participants mobilized their subjectivities as modern and educated women through a distinction between ‘local modern’ and ‘local traditional’. In this article, our goal is not to define modernity, but instead to illuminate what it meant to be modern in both contexts. We integrate the narratives of young, rural Muslim women in Pakistan with those of young, rural Hindu women in India to disrupt the linear telling of the production of universal and homogenous modernity through education.

Malala: the story of a Muslim girl and a Muslim nation

ABSTRACT In this article, we analyze the coverage of Malala in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to explore how these influential media sources characterize Islam and Pakistan to tell Malala’s story. Our discourse analysis reveals how these newspapers construct Malala’s status as a global icon as an embodiment of her subject position as a girl. This media discourse mobilizes Malala’s agency in relation to her potential as an individual whereas her vulnerability as a young girl is presented in reference to her Muslim heritage and culture. Malala’s image as a global icon, thus, is produced through approaching her as an agent in a culture where girls are vulnerable victims of patriarchy. Through focusing on this media discourse, this article argues that Malala’s image as a global icon of girls’ education has become a site to reinsert, rather than challenge, the dominant images about Islam and Muslim societies.

Globalized Local & Localized Global in a Women’s Education Project in Pakistan

This is an excerpt from Malala Yusufzai’s speech delivered at the United Nations on her 16th birthday on July 12, 2013. Malala has become a global symbol for the struggle to support women’s access to education. Her story of bravery and determination against all odds has a universal appeal inspiring policymakers and private citizens alike all over the world. Malala’s activism for women’s empowerment and education is viewed as “global,” and as something that is translated into action primarily through the projects of international development agencies in countries like Pakistan.