ABSTRACT

Muslim Women and Sport is a collection of accounts of ways in which people construct and live their lives in different situations. The term ‘sport’ is used in its widest sense to cover all aspects of physical activity, including physical education and school sport, leisure/community-based participation and competitive sport at elite level. The contributors to this book come from fourteen countries: Bahrain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Denmark, Egypt, Germany, Iran, Iraq, Morocco, Oman, South Africa, Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. It is the first international publication in the field of physical education and sport studies with an intersecting theme of women, sport and religion, set in a variety of cultural contexts. ‘Women, Islam and sport’ constitutes a contested area where issues of power intersect: for example, in gender relations and politics; where tensions arise between religious and secular values; and where answers need to be found between universal human rights, which can deny the significance of cultural distinctiveness, and cultural relativity, which can unacceptably justify inhumane activities on the grounds of long-held cultural traditions. In promoting understanding, the authors incorporate both Islamic studies and socio-cultural approaches to the analysis and interpretation of data. By focusing on the experiences of Muslim women, the reader can gain insight into the differences of situations, histories and nuances of power relations that influence their lives. The term ‘Muslim women’ is used to include all women who have committed themselves to the Islamic faith. Although the use of ‘Islamic women’ is becoming popular in everyday usage, it is a term normally reserved for those who are related to, empathetic with or belonging to political Islamic organisations. Therefore, the term ‘Muslim women’ is used in this book to be as inclusive of Islamic faith followers as possible. The predominantly qualitative insights into women’s

lives are not intended to be representative but to offer rich descriptions of the lives of people who are normally silent and of histories not previously written. In a world of multiple realities, this book offers a unique collection of narratives, including those from experienced leaders and practitioners in the field of sport and those from emerging and established researchers. Waljee (2008: 99), in her research on transitions in the lives of Muslim women in Tajikistan, critiques academia dominated by Western researchers who do not treat as equal the accounts of women already redefining their roles in complex political, economic and cultural contexts:

Western (even feminist) conceptualisations of gender relations will always remain at best incomplete and at worst misguided. To gain a better understanding of what is played out in such relations it is crucial to pay more attention to political, economic and cultural context so as to understand how communities have historically dealt with imposed ideologies that are diametrically opposed to their values.