ABSTRACT
Despite the seemingly inexhaustible appetite among Muslim and non-Muslim audiences for information about “Islam and women,” “Muslim women’s status,” and “the woman question in Islam,” it is very difficult to generalize about the hundreds of millions of Muslim women living at the turn of the twenty-first century. Muslim women’s life circumstances tend to closely parallel those of non-Muslims with similar backgrounds; a poor Indian Muslim villager has more in common with her rural Hindu counterpart than with a career woman in Mumbai who happens to be her co-religionist. Put simply, economic, geographic, and social factors do more to shape the circumstances of Muslim women’s lives than religion.
