Gender and Religious Study in a Transnational Age: Pakistani Women and the Al-Huda Academy for Women

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

Graduate student Khanum Shaikh, supervised by Dr. Sondra Hale, will undertake twelve months of research on how religious education for women affects urban Muslim women's lives in Pakistan. She will study the Al-Huda Academy for Women, a Pakistan-based transnational organization that promotes religious study for women in Pakistan and the United States; and two informal home-based study groups. Her primary research objectives are (1) to determine how religious education specifically tailored for women affects their ideas about their own potentials and their roles within families and communities; and (2) and how pedagogical strategies in the formal, transnational academy, which is widely networked to Muslim women outside Pakistan, differ from those employed in the less formal, home setting. Research methods will include participant observation, multiple in-depth interviews, and content analysis of Pakistani and American text, audio, and visual educational materials. She will supplement this with interviews with American Al-Huda students conducted through computer mediated interviewing systems. The research is important for several reasons. Most studies of Muslim women's religiosity have focused on the Arab and/or Middle Eastern world. This project will add a missing Asian dimension. Most of the world's Muslims live in Asia, so this in itself will be an important contribution of this project. The project also will contribute to developing social science theory that integrates different scales of analysis, from local to transnational, by carefully delineating for this case how local experiences interconnect with transnational communities. Finally, the research will contribute significantly to the education of a social scientist.