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Challenging Identities: Muslim women in Australia by Shahram Akbarzadeh (ed.) Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2010 ISBN 978-0-522-85715-3, 208 pp.
In this book, Akbarzadeh aims to dispel misconceptions of Muslim women by exploring the myriad of experiences both within the Australian Muslim community and Australian society as a whole. The book covers an array of topics capturing Muslim women's experiences, such as: attending the mosque, as converts, exposure to racism and their resistance to it, the dilemmas they face in divorce, the implications of multicultural policies on Muslim women and sports and recreation.
The book is a collection of articles written by Muslim women, whom readers will find accessible as the writing is clear, succinct and coherent. The clarity of the writing befits the objective of the book: to inform people both from an academic and non-academic background, and improve their understanding of Muslim women by complicating Muslim women's experiences and representation.
'Challenging Identities' aims at being a counter-narrative to the existing political discourse on Muslim women and utilises the current interest in them. The political climate of the 'War on Terror' has rejuvenated interest in the Muslim world. Nowhere is this interest more palpable than in the fetishistic focus on the Muslim woman. With its socio-historical preconceptions of Islam and the Muslim woman, the Western gaze, once again, has made her the centre stage in its narrative: the 'othering' of Islam and Muslims in the Muslim world, and particularly in the West. Never before have we seen such vigorous reporting on Muslim women, often in relation to the hijab -the visible presence of Islam's Otherness and its very antithesis to Western values. Coupled with media attention, the Muslim woman is once again prioritised by Western academic scholarship and cultural discourses, in tandem with Western powers use of such discourses as a political pretext. Driven by orientalist imagery, misconceptions and...