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Based on first-hand ethnographic insights into Shi'i religious groups in the Middle East and Europe , this book examines women's resistance to state as well as communal and gender power structures. It offers a new transnational approach to understanding gender agency within contemporary Islamic movements expressed through language, ritual practices, dramatic performances , posters and banners. By looking at the aesthetic performance of the political on the female body through Shi'i ritual practices - an aspect that has previously been ignored in studies on women's acts of resistance -, Yafa Shanneik shows how women play a central role in redefining sectarian and gender power relations both in the Middle East and in the European diaspora.
List of contents
Preface; Introduction; 1. Trajectories of Shiʿis in the Gulf and their presence in Europe; 2. The rites of mourning within Shiʿi Islam; 3. Performing the sacred: emotions, the body, and visuality; 4. Aestheticisation of politics: the case of taṭbīr; 5. Fatima's apparition: power relations within female ritual spaces; 6. The power of the word: the politicisation of language; 7. Conclusion.
About the author
Yafa Shanneik is Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Department of Theology and Religion, University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on agency and authority of women in Shi'i and Sunni Muslim communities in the Middle East and their transnational links to Europe. She was awarded three British Academy grants to examine understandings of gender relations and women's resistance to patriarchal gender norms among Syrian and Iraqi refugees in both the Middle East and Europe.
Summary
Examining different forms of resistance among Shi'i women in the Middle East and Europe, this book studies the performance of sectarian and gender power relations as expressed in Shi'i ritual practices. It provides a new transnational approach to researching gender agency in contemporary Islamic movements in both the Middle East and Europe.
