Introduct ion-Engaging Is lam FEMINISMS, RELIGIOSITIES AND SELF-DETERMINATIONS ELORA HALIM CHOWDHURY, LEILA FARSAKH AND RAJINI SRIKANTH

This Special Issue has its genesis in a Ford Foundation-funded Institute held at the University of Massachusetts Boston from 12–16 September 2007. The Institute, titled ‘Engaging Islam: Feminisms, Religiosities and Self-Determinations’, brought together 29 scholars and activists from around the world to discuss challenging and provocative issues relating to the intersectionalities of Islam, feminism, secularism and democracy. The participants (10 invited keynote speakers and 19 competitively selected panel presenters) came from and focused their work on a variety of locations, including Bangladesh, Bosnia, Egypt, France, India, Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Syria, Turkey and the United States. The discussions drew on the vibrant exchange of perspectives underway within academic and activist networks of transnational feminism. This exchange seeks to disrupt unproductive binaries between secularism and religiosity and to disprove the absolute links often drawn between secularism and democracy, on the one hand, and religiosity and authoritarianism, on the other. It also challenges the negative representations of Muslim women that play a role in imperialist and globalizing projects and that are sometimes found within feminism itself. Seminal works such as Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979) have indelibly established the long Euro-American history of racializing Arab and Muslim societies. Feminist scholarship has then highlighted the gendered production of colonialist and neo-colonialist discourses and their uses in consolidating current imperialist projects (Ahmed 2005; Lazreg 1994; Abu-Lughod 2001, 2002). In colonial discourses, Muslim women have long been considered as the measure of their societies’ civilization and regard for freedom by the West, and the site of cultural preservation by male authorities in their own societies (Deeb 2006; Moghissi 1999). Their dynamic and