An ethics of coherence: self, knowledge, and religious authority among women Islamic scholars in Leicester, UK

This thesis is about Sunni Muslim female religious scholars (‘alimat sing. ‘alima) of Gujarati-Indian origin in the British Midlands city of Leicester. It investigates their efforts to live a good Muslim life and to guide others in doing so. These women studied a multi-year Islamic syllabus at local Deobandi seminaries for women where they begin their journeys of becoming pious Muslims. I examine the shifts and continuities in their engagements with knowledge and the ‘ulama, and how these figure in their projects of the self as well as in the construction of their own religious authority. I argue that these women’s work on the self and their modes and discourses of guidance need to be understood as emerging relationally and contextually in dialogue with their own ethical aspirations, moral conflicts, concerns, doubts, and everyday struggles as well as those of the lay Muslim women they seek to guide. I employ a Foucauldian framework of the care of the self to examine how ethical reflection and knowledge-seeking are employed as technologies to facilitate both self and other in cultivating a coherent and consistent Muslim subjectivity. The ‘alimat strive to show that Islam is a comprehensive and timeless source of guidance for all Muslims. But these efforts entail an interweaving of Islamic and secular-liberal registers and values precisely to render both the Islamic tradition and Muslim subjectivity coherent. I contrast the concerns and strivings of these third-generation Muslim women with those of older generations to trace historical shifts and continuities and to show how these are linked to debates internal to the British Muslim social milieu I worked in as well as wider mediatic and political discourses on Islam in Britain. I aim to show how Muslim women are critically intervening in these debates, even as the modalities in which they do so change, diverge, and multiply across generations. By examining everyday struggles toward cultivating a coherent Muslim subjectivity, I emphasise the shifting, non-linear, and ongoing reflective nature of subjectivation processes even as these aim for coherence and perfection. In the face of frequent crises and disappointments in their ethical journeys, hope emerges as both affect and practice through which Muslim women propel themselves into the future and their ethical becoming. This thesis contributes to recent debates in anthropology of Islam and anthropology of ethics which have tended to paint a stark divide between analyses that emphasise coherent subjectivities and traditions and those that prioritise incoherence and fragmentation. In contrast, this ethnography highlights how religious discourses and everyday experiences mutually constitute each other. Drawing on their own struggles, conflicts and concerns, young female Islamic scholars are reading the Islamic tradition in novel ways. In doing so, they are reconfiguring Islamic orthodoxy in Britain by cultivating and promoting shifts in Muslim sensibilities and subjectivities through which a Islamically good life can be lived in secular-liberal pluralist British society.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Ahmed, Shumaila

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Laidlaw, James

• Anthropology of ethics
• Anthropology of Islam
• British Islamic scholars
• British Muslim women
• british Muslims

Licence

• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.85046

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/337640