Religion, Power, and Place: Three Muslim Women’s Stories in Old Delhi

Affected by the intersection of their religious, class, and gender identities, Muslim women experience both economic and political marginalization in India, and gendered inequalities in the public and private spheres. In this context, they are often depicted as helpless victims, not as agents who draw on available resources to effect change. Moreover, obscuring the very real political and economic forces that create precarity in the lives of Muslim women, Islam is often constructed as the primary force inhibiting women’s agency and power. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Old Delhi’s diverse Muslims to problematize such representations, I show how religion creates space for women to reimagine and re-inscribe their lives. I focus on three Muslim women who represent different class, educational, and sectarian backgrounds to examine how they variously draw on religion to make place for themselves and their communities. Each case reveals the centrality of religion as a source of power in women’s lives, inspiring their actions, bolstering their hopes for a different future, and creating an arena where they try to effect change. Their stories force us to reconfigure notions of agency, and challenge stereotypes about Islam and Muslim women that prevail in India and elsewhere.