A Space of Her Own: Previously Married Muslim Women’s Religious Reclamations

Despite the role of religion in creating and sustaining gender hierarchies, women tend to be more religious than men. In the body of scholarship addressing this puzzling finding, researchers point to explanations ranging from false consciousness to a focus on women’s agency in constrained negotiations. Individuals find meaning within social institutions that are structured to disempower them by creatively repositioning themselves within those institutions. However, there are limitations to this repositioning, as not all individuals are able to find a space of their own. In this article, I focus on previously married women’s experiences to highlight the ways gender policing can shape individual engagement with religious reflexivity, or the critical reflection of religious beliefs and practices. Drawing on a sample of previously married Pakistani Canadian Muslim women, who are gendered bodies surveilled by Muslim communities, I demonstrate how gender accountability and censure can shape meanings and experiences embedded within religious institutions and ideologies. As adult women, they must be heterosexually married, and failure to comply with this ordinance results in ostracism. When previously married women face multiple forms of scrutiny for failing to conform to communal expectations, they feel pushed out of an impossible space: because of their deviant identities as divorcees, they are unable to exist within a structure that requires their gender compliance. However, some women are able to leverage religion through reflexive engagement and reclaim their religious identities. The experience of familial and communal gender surveillance shapes previously married women’s relationship with and reflexivity of Islam, as they strategically navigate and reclaim religion.