Dr Katherine Bullock

University of Toronto, Canada

Muslim Women's activism in North America

Abstract

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.