Pedagogies of Muslim feminisms: reflections on faith, space and citizenship

In this article, I offer a qualitative study of three spaces created by and for young Muslim women in Toronto, Canada: an after-school drop-in programme for Muslim girls, a Somali women’s group and a Muslim women’s collective. I focus on data gathered from interviews of seven Muslim women in their 20s who created the spaces, which offered refuge from the racism and Islamophobia in Canadian schools and society and from the patriarchal forms of social control in their families and communities. Drawing on feminist and ethnographic approaches to citizenship studies and a critical faith-centred epistemology, I consider how these spaces function as loci for teaching and learning self and community, building communities of resistance and articulating new notions of the political and of citizenship.