ABSTRACT
The gender question – or more strictly the positioning of women with regard to men within the Islamic community – is a central tenet of both popular and academic thinking about Islam. For some, images of the ‘veil’, shariat divorce laws, polygyny and the confinement of women are symbols of a harsh and restrictive regime. For others, these images invoke an exotic, mysterious way of life, full of touristic pleasures. For others still, Islamic gender codes signify an ideal, or model, upon which the morals and ethics of future generations might be based. The highly charged discursive context of gender and Islam creates particular challenges to the researcher; if researching ethnicity or gender alone forces the researcher to address her/his own subjective positioning, researching the interrelationship between gender, ethnic and religious identification places an extraordinary burden on the researcher’s capacity for reflexivity. 1 This, to some extent, explains the failure of Russian sociological literature to explore fully the intersection of gender and Islam in Russia, and the current authors make no claim to have met these challenges fully either. However, the discussions that developed among the team of researchers – itself comprising men and women from different ethnic and religious backgrounds – about impressions from the field at the end of each day of interviewing helped the team recognize, if not suspend, their own preconceptions.
