Socio-Religious Entrepreneurship As the Antidote to Fundamentalism: Islam, Gender, and Microcredit in Bangladesh

The scholarship on women microcredit entrepreneurs is vast. It, however, does not include how they successfully functioned as socio-religious entrepreneurs against the Islamicist fundamentalists who stated that microcredit participation was against Islam. My longitudinal ethnography (2001-24) of 73 men and women in Bangladesh, draws on the “lived religion” approach, which explores how individuals construct their own meanings of religion as distinct from institutional definitions. Findings reveal that women microcredit loanees act as socio-religious entrepreneurs in three ways. 1.) By creating buddhi, their own feminist grassroots Muslim spirituality, loanees have created new definitions of purdah, which enable both sharecropper women's and men’s empowerment. Their definition of purdah as having moner purdah, or a pure heart, versus barite purdah, or physical confinement, has enabled women to leave the homestead to go to the Grameen Bank to take out microloans as believing Muslim women. Their microcredit profits reaffirm sharecropper masculinity by challenging intersectionalities: the hegemony of landowning men and their control of religious social structures. Money in women’s hands has disrupted the class inequalities that existed between rich and poor masculinities. 2.) Buddhi evolved through discussions in women's meetings. It is a Muslim gender ideology that provides the social structure imperative to shift socio-religious capital from village Islamicist patriarchy to women loanees. They utilize buddhi as socio-religious capital to define women's entrepreneurial endeavors as sacred and to decry the oppression of women as sinful. 3.) As socio-religious entrepreneurs, women took social risks. Buddhi, however, gave them unity and moral purpose to prevail; and their heterodox beliefs created vigorous village-level debates about gender and Islam. This study illustrates how low-income Muslim femininities function as vectors of socio-religious evolution to continue the Islamic discursive tradition―thereby succeeding against Islamicist patriarchy in Bangladesh.