We will be coordinating with the Islamic Studies Workshop for a presentation by Tomal Hossain (Phd Student, Ethnomusicology) with respondent Samantha L. Pellegrino (PhD Student, Islamic Studies, Divinity)

When? Wednesday 7 April @ 5:30-7:00 CT

Where?

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https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/94949588944?pwd=SjlFVmhlOHJ3N2NFYk12dnU0aXhXZz09
Meeting ID: 949 4958 8944
Passcode: 647570
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Here’s a snapshot of what to expect: 

In recent years, Bangladeshi Muslim women have begun to participate as preachers and audience members in mohliā/nāri wāz māhfil(“women’s sermon events”). These traditionally androcentric programs entail a combination of technical expansion, storytelling, call and response, quranic and/or poetry recitation, chanting, and/or a capella singing in service of wide-ranging normative Islamic guidance. Some female preachers advocate for gender justice while many more eschew both Western liberal and Islamic feminist ideas altogether. Regardless of content, one might construe the materialities and affective attachments of women’s public vocalization at sermon events squarely in terms of resistance towards patriarchal Islamic gender norms around what I call women’s “vocal modesty” in Islam. Nevertheless, sponsors and organizers of women’s sermon events are primarily men who both recognize the Islamic women’s sphere as sacrosanct and wish for Muslim women to publicly uphold normative Islamic gender roles. In this paper, I build upon Saba Mahmood’s (2001) work to view resistance as but one of several possible realities of Bangladeshi Muslim women’s agency in the contexts of contemporary sermon event participation. Specifically, I argue that female sermon event participants demonstrate a simultaneity of agential capacities including resistance and submission by centering considerations of sex-segregated space, visibility of bodies, and materiality of voice as opposed to the content of sermons alone. Such attention to Bangladeshi Muslim women’s participation in sermon events today thus helps unsettle the typical boundaries drawn around and between secular and Islamic feminisms (Moghadam 2002; Badran 2005).

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