Globalization and women's rights: Islamic traditions of modernity in a transnational women's education project

In the post 9/11 era, international interest in modernizing Muslim societies reinvigorated the focus on Muslim women as the indicator of progress. In this narrative of progress, the Western and Muslim states as well as the international development agencies highlight women's education as central to gender empowerment and modernization in Muslim societies. In order to examine the processes that produce "modern Muslim womanhood," my ethnographic dissertation study focuses on a transnational women's education project, founded and managed by Muslim women of Pakistani American origin, to support education for girls from low-income communities in Pakistan.;My analytic chapters follow the processes through which this particular transnational development organization defines quality education, gender empowerment, and community participation. First, I investigate how the women teachers, recruited and trained by this organization, employ the notion of wisdom to construct their identities as modern educated women. These identity construction processes that embody particular conceptualization of human rights and family honor reflect an overlap of local and global discourses on Muslim womanhood and modernity. Second, I show how the constitution and leadership of the organization shape the meaning and implementation of quality education and gender empowerment at the intersection of class, gender, and religion. Quality education is defined as a process to equip women teachers and students with economic and cultural tools to claim the middle-class status, whereas gender empowerment is seen as a collective progress of women, families, and communities. Next, I focus on the day-to-day workings of the organization to shows how it employs what I call collaborative strategies to support gender empowerment in different communal contexts. These strategies aim to achieve the radical vision of transforming patriarchal structures, but uses negotiations in contrast to the confrontational strategies often associated with the international development agencies and NGOs working on gender-focused projects in Muslim countries. I conclude by arguing for the need to bring in local and global contexts as overlapping and co-constructed sites to examine the production of modern Muslim womanhood.