Review of Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya: Leadership, Representation and Social Change by Ousseina D. Alidou, and: Bargaining for Women’s Rights: Activism in an Aspiring Muslim Democracy by Alice J. Kang."

Authors

Lisa Mueller, Macalester College, Saint Paul , MinnesotaFollow

Date of this Version

2016

Citation

Citation: Lisa Mueller, "Review of Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya: Leadership, Represen-tation and Social Change by Ousseina D. Alidou, and: Bargaining for Women’s Rights: Activism in an Aspiring Muslim Democracy by Alice J. Kang." African Studies Review, Volume 59, Number 2, September 2016, pp. 290-292 (Review). doi:10.1017/asr.2016.61

Comments

Published by Cambridge University Press.

Abstract

Alidou offers an important lesson for scholars who study Muslim women in contemporary Africa: gender and religion are transnational identities, but “being a Muslim in a predominantly Muslim area has different implications for Muslim women and men than being a Muslim in a predominantly non- Muslim area” (103). This is an implicit invitation to read Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya alongside literature on regions of Africa where Muslim women are in the religious majority.

Enter Bargaining for Women’s Rights: Activism in an Aspiring Muslim Democracy by Alice J. Kang, who studies women in the context of Niger, a country whose population is more than 90 percent Muslim. She thus helps to complete the story that Alidou begins in Kenya, where only about 11 percent of people are Muslim. Reading these books together is not an obvious choice, given the authors’ distant academic backgrounds (Kang is a political scientist; Alidou a theoretical linguist). Nevertheless, the pair of texts facilitates a fuller understanding of Islam and women in Africa than either text could do alone.