Related resources
Search for item elsewhere
University researcher(s)
Academic department(s)
The Emergence and the Development of the Women’s Piety Movement (WPM) in Nablus City, A Practice Theory Approach
[Thesis]. Manchester, UK: The University of Manchester; 2015.
Access to files
-
FULL-TEXT.PDF (pdf)
Abstract
AbstractThis thesis is about the emergence and the development of the current women’s piety movement (WPM), in the West Bank city of Nablus, as well as about its current momentum. The WPM is a socially diverse, non-organisation-based, women’s movement, in which, as indication of their adherence to Islamic morality, pious women embark on in-group diverse Islamic practices, including, among other activities, the memorisation, recitation, and the interpretation of the Quran, and the learning of the hadith (Prophet Mohammad’s sayings). It consists of various boundary-open piety groups and networks. The beginnings of the WPM date back to the mid-1950s and 1960s. Its presence in the city over the last two decades has been compelling. Yet, to date, the WPM has attracted little or no scholarly attention; hence the need for an enquiry into the movement. When considered, the WPM, with its various piety groups and networks, is conceptualised as an outcome of Islamist politics. In addition, the few previous studies, which by way of their attention to Islamist politics, attended to this type of Islamic women’s activism, had relied on problematic sources of data, such as security state reports and archives. Therefore, my contribution in this thesis is both methodological and conceptual. On methodological grounds, using ethnographic and oral history methods, I recover a spectrum and a social space of Palestinian women’s activism, which, despite its compelling presence, has been ignored and inadequately conceptualised as the outcome of Islamist politics. The recovery of the history of such types of Islamic women’s activism during the 1950s-1960s, and 1970s-1980s, is important and telling in both Palestinian women’s activism and theoretical terms. It is telling in Palestinian women’s activism terms, because situating the WPM on the landscape of twentieth century Palestinian women’s activism, as such, one can observe that the WPM was preceded, paralleled, and intersected with three generations and types of Palestinian women’s activism: the voluntary/charity type of activism of the middle and upper-class women of the British Mandate (1922-1948), the political activism of the lower and middle-class generation of the 1960s through to the 1980s, and the Islamist type of activism of yet another younger generation of Palestinian women, those of the generation of the late 1980s and 1990s. Such observation compels us to ask the additional question: why, in contrast to the two preceding generations, did the founding cohort of the WPM take an interest in Islamic morality, and in a non-political form of activism, as indicated in their making of and participation in the WPM? It further compels us to ask who were in social class terms those women founders of the WPM as compared to the three generations of women activists just described? Further, it is telling in theoretical terms, because, as we will see in chapter three, while the emergence of the WPM was facilitated by some male Islamist informal networks, confirms the story of the origin of most Islamist movements in interpersonal relations and informal network, the WPM’s development over the years into a broad women’s movement troubles the explanation of this movement’s emergence as the outcome of Islamist mobilising strategies, or Islamist identity politics. It also troubles the conceptualisation of the WPM itself as an Islamist ideological domain. The recovery therefore of the historic foundational moment of the WPM and its later development into a movement that attracts women with some force, compels the analysis to advance other conceptual means to capture the meaning of this formation – we call it the WPM. I therefore argue that the WPM is a social field and is a type of new social movement (NSM). In contrast to traditional social movements, which contested the economic order of the society and how its economic wealth is distributed, NSMs’ contest the moral order of society and how its moral codes are lived in everyday life. As such, I conclude as an NSM, the WPM, in Nablus City, advances, and moves on women’s interests, and well-being, in the city, albeit in Islamic terms, and in intentional and unintentional ways. Thus, also in line with Badran’s (2009) Islamic feminist approach, I conclude that the WPM in Nablus City is an important gender empowerment means.