ABSTRACT
The racialised and pathologised accounts of Muslim women summarised above act to silence and obscure alternative forms of agency and difference, confining Muslim women’s experiences and identities within artificial binaries such as ‘modern’ (Western, educated, secular) and ‘traditional’ (‘Muslim, uneducated, backward, religious) (Ahmad, 2001; 2003). The choices and opportunities that exist within or outside these boundaries become necessarily constrained and negatively problematised. However, there is an alternative narrative that has been subsumed within the rhetoric of preventing extremism and ‘high achieving jihadi brides’, and that is the story of young British Muslim women and academic achievement and the impact their educational experiences have for their religious and cultural identities. These alternative accounts – which I argue are far more representative – challenge assumptions played out in government and media discourses that currently focus on universities as sites of extremism and on educated Muslim women as threats to national security. First, they challenge tired notions of excessively restrictive and controlling
Muslim families by highlighting the increasing participation of young British Muslim women in higher education and professional employment (Ahmad, 2001, 2006; Dale et al., 2002a, 2002b; Ahmad et al., 2003; EOC, 2006; Tyrer and Ahmad, 2006; Shah et al., 2010), with recent analyses suggesting that Muslim women are outperforming Muslim men (Khattab and Modood, 2015). These are in direct contradiction to previous studies where an earlier lack of participation in higher education and the labour market was attributed to cultural constraints, that is, that Islam and notions of ‘purdah’ and patriarchy were restricting women’s movements. Second, these studies show how the high educational aspirations among
young British Muslim women were shared by their parents, regardless of social class. These women were not using university as an opportunity to rebel or lead a ‘double life’ (Ahmad, 2012). My earlier research on British Muslim women in higher education highlighted the positive role played by fathers in encouraging their daughters’ higher education participation (Ahmad, 2001, 2007) and this was confirmed in several other studies (Tyrer and Ahmad, 2006; EOC, 2006; Hussain and Bagguley, 2007; Ijaz and Abbas, 2010), and studies linking young British Pakistanis’ higher educational aspirations to theories of social capital (Dwyer et al., 2011). The encouragement and support offered by fathers to their daughters represents another challenge to stereotyped notions of distant and oppressive Muslim fathers. Third, as I demonstrate here, these alternative accounts highlight how parti-
cipation in higher education, rather than act as an overwhelming secularising influence, or as a route towards extremism, facilitated Muslim women’s conceptualisations of themselves as British Muslim women. Although the following quote is from a Muslim woman in a Q-News and Open Democracy debate held after the 7/7 bombings in 2005, it encapsulates many of the views I have come
across through various discussions with degree-educated British Muslim women:
I am a Muslim youth working on the ground who found her faith at university. Just on reflection, I found my British identity by finding my faith. … So what is about going to university that facilitates this? I look at it and I see that there was infrastructure for debate with Muslims and nonMuslims. The cultural, theological, generational gap, I can relate to it, because we evolve through this when we are at university through education, dialogue and debate.
