Empowering Women Paradigms and Strategies

Empowering
Women
Paradigms and Strategies

General Editor : Prof. P Koya

Muslim women in India have always been an object of curiosity and gaze for culture, political and social reasons. The discussions and debates focusing on their backwardness most often attack Islam as a religion that forcefully separates men and women and throws into winds modern concepts of gender equality and justice. Feminist writings which heavily draw upon the western ideas of equality ignored the views of other women and denied them their right to be heard and counted.

Media and academics cherry pick what they want to buttress existing prejudices and divisions. When a naive Muslim religious scholar expresses a fool hardy opinion about strictly private family quarrel it is given wide currency while the existential threads to womenhood in the country are left on the lurch or reduced to an insignificant footnote. The veiled and oppressed women is no less a construct than a totemic misrepresentation of all that is wrong with Indian Islam.

It is against this context that The Institute of Objective Studies hosted the international conference on empowering women on 6-8 January 2012 at Calicut as a part of its Silver Jubilee celebrations. It was an effort to forefront the issues and problems of women in Indian Islam. Public intellectuals, scholars, activists and academic coverged to analyse, questions and desconstruct the traditional and modern position as regards gender justice Islam. .

This book is the collection of papers in the conference. It also incorporates some other papers written exclusively for the Institute on issues related to Muslim women by academics of great repute. This book gives an enriched understanding about the multiple views on the topic and engenders highly logical and creative responses to the attacka on Islam and Muslim society. It establishes counter narrative to the received discourses about l women shaped by the secular, majoritarian and hegemonistic forces at work in our society.