Muslim Women

Abstract

Shahnaz Khan's study of Muslim female identity in Canada is a worthy contribution to the literature on Muslim experiences in the West. She explores how women negotiate their identities in-between the polarized discourses ofOrientalism and Islam by occupying a hybridized third space. This third space is not only the site of resistance to the dominant Islamic and Orientalist prescriptives of Muslim female identity, but a starting point for Muslim women to engage in individual and collective projects to remap and reconfigure their identities in a process of cultural, political, and economic empowerment. Khan argues that progressive politics by and for Muslim women are possible only from this hybridized location. Her study elucidates this third space's dynamics by examining the dialectic between the personal narratives of culturally diverse Canadian Muslim women and the political space they inhabit. In her introduction, Khan locates herself as a Muslim feminist intellectual who does not practice but is influenced by Islam, as well as Orientalist, multiculturalist, and feminist discourses. In order to move away from essentialist notions of "Muslim," Khan clarifies that she uses the term to reveal the fluidity and diversity of expressions associated with being Muslim, including its use in both a religious and non-religious context. In chapter 1, Khan draws on the work of various social theorists to rup­ ture the notion of a homogenous, static, and authentic culture. She does this by emphasizing cultural fluidity, permeability, and shifting boundaries. Resisting and challenging the former serves as the premise of what is termed the third space, whereby hybridized identities are constructed from a wide and even contending range of influences, such as eastern and western cultural forces and religion. For Muslim women, Khan outlines how the third space disavows colonial authority and forbids the reign of dominant narratives of either Islam (which legitimates patriarchal authority through sacred texts) or Orientalism (which represents Muslims as the pejorative "Other"). This third space allows Muslim women to negotiate, resist, and reinvent the forces informing their realities. In the next few chapters, the personal narratives of 14 Muslim women elucidate how Muslim women negotiate their own identities as they confront racism and lslamophobia in the broader community, and sexism and ...