Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism

THE ENTANGLED HISTORY OF WESTERN AND MUSLIM FEMINISMS The Muslim world is often portrayed as the last and most difficult frontier of global feminism. Challenging this view, Elora Shehabuddin presents a unique and engaging history of feminism as a story of colonial and postcolonial interactions between Western and Muslim societies. Muslim women have been engaged in their own struggles for generations, negotiating their demands for rights within other forms of struggle—for national independence or against occupation, racism, and economic inequality. This book is organized around stories of encounters between women and men from South Asia, Britain, and the United States that led them, as if they were looking in a mirror, to pause and reconsider norms in their own society, including cherished ideas about women’s roles and rights. Through stories of both well-known and relatively unknown figures, Shehabuddin recounts instances of conflict alongside those of empathy, collaboration, and solidarity. Stretching from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment era to the War on Terror present, Sisters in the Mirror shows how changes in women’s lives and feminist strategies have consistently reflected wider changes in national and global politics and economics.