Being Visible as an Islamic Movement: Women's Politico-Religious Space and Empowerment in the MENA

In an age of increasing authoritarianism and religious traditionalism worldwide and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) – with brief revolutionary and free moments – the politico-religious empowerment of women is at stake. Women’s Islamic movements (WIMs) are one of the main agents of politico-religious empowerment of Muslim women. What are the capacities of women’s Islamic movements in expanding women's politico-religious space and increasing politico-religious power in Muslim-majority countries with different institutional configurations of religion for the last 15 years in the MENA region? Often regarded as secondary, parochial, and less-emancipatory due to its Islamic ideology and discourse, emancipatory capacities of the WIMs within religion and structural conditions and social movement factors that influence these capacities have been overlooked. As opposed to the emphasis on ideology and agency in the literature on women’s Islamic movements, I search for emancipatory capacities of women’s Islamic movements with a social movement approach. Conducting a comparative study on Egypt and Turkey – two countries with different religion-state configurations and secularization patterns – enables us to see the effects of political institutions on social movement dynamics of WIMs. Building on the existing literature on social movements in authoritarian contexts and recent sociological studies on visibility, I argue that the concept of ‘visibility’ captures the dissenting activism of women better than the ‘participation’ and ‘power of presence’ (Bayat 2007) concepts in the social movement literature. Secondly, utilizing Linda Woodhead’s (2007) typology on religion’s relation to gender, I show that WIMs create multiple politico-religious spaces with different emancipatory/empowerment potentials. I argue that being visible with dissent creates a movement and space that have a transformative capacity of the ‘gender order’ in religion.