University of Toronto, Canada
Muslim Women's activism in North AmericaAbstract
The study of Muslims (of either gender)
and political participation in North America
is in its infancy. This is likely due to the absence of Muslims in the
formal political arena. Indeed, it is only in the last five years or so
that Muslims have begun running for elected office, and there are only a
handful in the North American continent that have been successful in this
endeavour.
The absence of Muslims from formal
politics is not due to their lack of interest in political engagement with
society. Although due to their nature as new immigrants to North American
society, Muslims concentrated on inwardly focused projects such as mosque
building, schools, and halal businesses, in the last decade attention has been
turned outward with a significant involvement in the arena of informal
politics: notably social services, and media and political advocacy work.
Feminist scholars have determined that
while women’s involvement in formal politics is significantly lower than their
percentage of the general population, this by no means indicates that women are
not involved politically in their societies. Women tend to concentrate
their political involvement in the informal sector.
This observation remains true for Muslim
women. Thus while contemporary popular culture and liberal feminist
scholarship tends to view Muslim women as submissive and passive, it turns out
that Muslim women in North America are
neither. Muslim women have been as politically engaged as men from the
very beginning. Moreover, like Muslim men, they have recently begun to
make their mark by entering formal politics.
By their involvement in politics, Muslim
women have encountered and overcome many hurdles, internal and external.
The internal hurdles come from community pressures that can see their activism
as compromising their proper roles as a Muslim woman. The external
hurdles are from racism and Islamophobia they encounter in North American
society.
This paper aims to demonstrate Muslim
women’s extensive involvement in informal sector politics by providing a
synopsis of Muslim Women’s activism in North America.
, Autobiography, biography, newspapers and interviews with women activists will
provide the primary sources for this account. The paper proceeds in three
parts. Part One will lay the framework for investigating Muslim women and
activism in North America. Part Two will
canvass the panoply of arenas and experiences with informal activism, and Part
Three will look at the nascent involvement in formal politics.
Bio
Katherine Bullock
completed her PhD in Political Science at the University of Toronto,
in 1999. She has taught a
course on the “Politics of Islam” at theUniversity of Toronto for the last several years.
She is the Editor of the American
Journal of Islamic Social Sciences. Her books include Muslim
Women Activists in North America: Speaking for Ourselves(University of Texas
Press, 2005) and Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil: Challenging
Historical and Modern Stereotypes (IIIT
Press, 2003). She has also
published articles on Muslim women and the media, and Islam and political
theory.
She is a community
activist and lectures frequently, both to Muslim and non-Muslim groups. She has worked for the Islamic
Society of North America as
a media spokesperson and is a founding member of the Federation
of Muslim Women, and Beacon, a group dedicated to supporting
new Muslims. Originally from Australia,
she now lives in Mississauga, Canada, with her husband and
children. She embraced
Islam in 1994.
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