Unscripting Piety: Muslim Women, Pakistani Nationalism, and Islamic Feminism
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation analyzes Muslim womens processes of pious subject formation and the intersection of these processes with discourses of Pakistani nationalism and Islamic feminism. Drawing primarily on interviews and participatory observations with Pakistani women in Karachi, Islamabad, and Mississauga associated with two Sunni Muslim groups, Al-Huda International and the Jamaat-e-Islami, I examine how women comprehend and inhabit their piety in and through the spiritual, social, and political milieu of their everyday lives. I argue that taking up piety while understanding the spiritual as epistemological reveals contradictory and relational dimensions of Muslim womens subjectivities, including complicities with structures of power and relationships with the secular. By taking up religiosity as a way of knowing, this dissertation intervenes in the normative secularity of knowledge production about Muslim women that renders the epistemic dimension of their pious subjectivities unintelligible. \n \nTo explicate what analytical openings are enabled by taking up the spiritual as epistemological, I look at how the women I conducted research with conceptualize their piety and how their Islamic discourse coalesces, contradicts and co-exists with dominant discourses of Islam, religio-nationalism, and universal rights-based feminism. I begin with an exploration of the spaces created for Muslim women through Al-Huda and the Jamaat and what these spaces meant to the women I met. I juxtapose my respondents Islamic praxis with a discourse analysis of Pakistani religio-nationalism and rights-based Islamic feminism that also stake a claim on defining the relationship between women and Islam. These discursive structures of nationalism and feminism anchor analyses of Muslim womens piety in secular epistemologies that render practices such as veiling or the qawwam (authoritative status) of men, for example, in secular terms. Focusing on how the women I interviewed conceptualize qawwam, I elucidate the paradoxical processes by which they implement an ostensible gendered hierarchy, often in face of resistant men, in their everyday lives. I then turn to how their piety is complicit with structures of power by examining how the focus on scripture in their literalist Islamic praxis secures a rational subject of piety.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it