Paradigms, Approaches, Issues, Challenges

This chapter reviews paradigms and approaches in the academic study of Muslim societies, using Edward Said’s seminal work, Orientalism (1978), as the leading milestone in the field. An assessment of Said’s influence on postcolonial and Middle Eastern studies precedes a critical summary of the development of the fields of feminist postcolonial theory and Middle Eastern and Muslim women’s studies. The review also outlines the theoretical framework for the analytical sections of the book, with an emphasis on the argument that scholarly representations of women in Muslim societies are interwoven with epistemological power relationships. Particularly coming to the fore in delineating these relationships are discussions of veiling, the relationship between Islam and feminism, the categorization of Muslim women, Islam and modernity, nationalism and state ideologies, and Islamic fundamentalism. Subjectivity, subalternness, otherness and agency in Muslim women’s discursive representations, and binarism, Eurocentrism and essentialism in the way discourses are produced are the major issues that this book invites readers to contemplate. The last section explains how the study adopts Michel Foucault’s theorization of the relationship between discourse, knowledge and power as its methodology in tracing the change in the discourse pertaining to the research data, which is composed of published books and articles based on ethnographic studies of women and Islam in Turkey. The methodology of this study also presents a periodization of the scholarship based on notable assertions of truth, widely circulated statements and approaches regarded as valid in defined time frames by relating them to the extended social context and scholarly discourse in the period in which they were generated.