The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast

Abstract

whose early love for religion led her to study in the seminaries of Qom, Iran. Vasmaghi’s is a radical stance: she rejects the theoretical premise that equates religion with law-making and suggests that family law should all together be removed from the realm of fiqh. Neither her condition of near blindness in an eye, nor the Iranian government’s efforts to incarcerate and silence her have succeeded in curbing her firm belief that Islam is inherently just, and that it must be translated in ways that are ‘not in contradiction with evolving human rationality, knowledge and lived experiences’. (222) The book concludes with the authors reflections on the importance of ‘recovering and reclaiming the ethical and egalitarian ethos in Islam’s sacred texts, ad exposing the relationship between the production of religious knowledge and the practices of power’. (240) Overall, this book is an exceptionally strong contribution to the scholarship on feminism and Islam, as well as scholarship on intellectual movements for Islamic reform and justice. It undertakes an ambitious project of narrating hermeneutic and activist methodologies for breaking up patriarchal monopoly of the ulema and the state in diverse national contexts. Methodologically Mir-Hosseini’s approach reveals the elements of relationality in the exchange of ideas–a back and forthness–that mirrors the process through which all knowledge is produced and shifts over time. In this sense the method exquisitely mirrors the central claim of the book that knowledge is a process, constructed, mediated, exchanged, and transformed, and that claims to immutability and efforts to codify across time and space are precisely what make them irrelevant to human lives. This book is highly recommended for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in Religious Studies, Middle East Studies, Gender Studies, Sociology Research Methods and Anthropology. Indeed, Journeys toward gender equality in Islam is an engaging, incisive, and delightful book. It is welcome contribution to the vibrant scholarship on Islamic feminism that was at its height in the 1990s, and that remains as necessary today as it was decades ago.