Mosques and Meeting Rooms: Professional Lives of Muslim Women

Abstract

This IQAS special issue relates to the relationship between religious knowledge and women’s professionalisation. It links empirical observations of applied religious knowledge with the conceptualisation of professionalisation, examined through case studies from Southeast, South and Central Asia. The lens it looks through is intentionally gender-sensitive, exploring how Muslim women in Asia actively and creatively participate in the production and dissemination of religious knowledge and the formation of new knowledge societies through participation in social activism and the global economy on multiple scales. The authors are members and partners of a research initiative that seeks to explore women’s pathways to professionalisation in Muslim Asia. In the course of three years, substantial findings have come to light that lead the authors of this issue to suggest a more flexible understanding of the concept of “profession” and the notion of “religious knowledge”.

Keywords

• Asia
• Muslim women
• religious knowledge
• professionalisation
• concepts of profession
• knowledge production