MUSLIM WOMEN NETWORKS: ISLAMIC KNOWLEDGE [RE]PRODUCTION AND THE PREMISES OF EMPOWERMENT THROUGH TRANSMISSION AND DISSEMINATION

Abstract

This thesis is about some teeming social actors that operate and co-exist in a society that has contradictory features: conflictual, sectarian, hierarchical, pluralistic, and quasi-cosmopolitan. These actors lie within networks that manage their actions and provide a backbone for their activities. One of these networks is the Islamic institutions, especially that the contemporary moment witnesses a proliferation of publicly engaged religiosities. Most religious centers and institutions advanced women sections where women actively participate in shaping themselves and their perspective societies under the umbrella of da‘wah. Women activism within/out institutional frameworks is not a new phenomenon but a marginalized one.

This research will shed light on the Islamic knowledge produced by some Lebanese Muslim women activists and the premises of their empowerment through transmission and dissemination. Underlying Muslim women activism is indeed an empowerment process that lies within the "ethical turn" and the "everyday turn" in the Islamic studies and the anthropology of Islam. Hence, this paper will investigate the knowledge produced and the potential of this activism in engendering novel empowered subjectivities (scholars and activists).

Accordingly, the thesis will be based on a triangulation of 1-content analysis of the curricula used by the activists in the lectures and circles; 2- In-depth interviews with the heads of women sections and independent activists; 3- participant observation mostly in North Lebanon and Beirut to spot the intimacy of Islamic da‘wah, the mechanisms of the educational system and the production of meaning within these spaces. As a result, it will consider the sociability of Islam in the public sphere through Muslim women activists as a form of presence in the crowded Lebanese society.