SHIFTING ALLEGIANCES

What happens when Muslim women gather together at the mosque to read the Quran, learn, and pray? How does family loyalty interact with mosque attendance for women? This book explores the growing Muslim womens piety movement through looking at one womens program in a Syrian suburban mosque. Community models shape individual behavior. The place and power of blessing help define the boundaries between orthodox and popular Islam. Modesty and shame, feasts and fasting, purity and prayer, interact to shape daily life possibilities for women involved in the mosque program. At the same time, the growing accessibility of religious teaching for women allows them to take up new places of authority in the Muslim ummah. Women read the Quran not just for blessing, but for what it has to say to issues of daily female and family life. And the words of communal dhikr devotion offer a window into the worshippers consciousness of God and of Muhammad, Prophet of Islam. This detailed examination of a womens mosque program places it within the wider contemporary movement of piety and dawa (mission) in Islam, offering an insight into the forces that are shaping communities and countries today. It is almost unbearably poignant to read Moyra Dales description of a vibrant Muslim womens group in Damascus at a time when Syrias tensions pervade the media, and the people she describes have scattered. The vivid and loving description of the women is an important record of imperiled humanity, and the analysis in terms of changing allegiances offers a tool for understanding some of the communal and family dynamics of todays world.  --Ida Glaser, Director of The Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies, Oxford, Co-author of Thinking Biblically about Islam