Introduction

The poles of religious and secular are illuminating rather than fully descriptive, especially of women who identify as Muslim but whose relation to belief and practice are various. Muslim Textualities assumes flexible maneuvering between culture, practice, and belief. The exploration of chick-it and its televisual offshoots reveals the subterranean but integral relations of women who belong to minority groups abjected by their ethnoreligious identities and women who belong to dominant groups abjected by age, disability, or other factors that render them ineligible for luminous bodily display. The relations of Muslim theologians to a Western monolithic or so-called hegemonic “feminism” has also been a complicated one. Because Muslim-identified women serve a shorthand for the opposite of individual “freedom,” they must address structural impasses created by neoliberal feminism, its disregard of race, class, disability, ageing, and violence. The chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.