Thesis advisor: Natana DeLong-Bas / This thesis seeks to investigate female conversion to Islam in the United States, and the role of gender and identity in this process. Utilizing various conversion studies, from four different fields, I will provide the background on conversion in general and will attempt to rationalize the decision for conversion to Islam in an environment, which may not be conducive to these beliefs. By looking at individual conversion narratives, the motivations for conversion, as well as the purposes for the conversion process will be revealed. Ultimately, this research attempts to understand the factors which may drive an individual to convert to Islam, when other religious options are easily accessible. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Middle Eastern Studies.

The veil is a historically constructed site, a fixed sign used in Euro-America to conveniently and clearly dress the borders between east and west. Recent disciplines like visual and cultural studies, Third World feminism, and postcolonialism have challenged this assumption positing instead the veil's polysemy and its different sometimes multiple meanings according to the individual, and the historical and geographical context. Representations of the veil in contemporary art have appeared quite frequently in Euro-America in the last couple of decades, and in the thesis I set out to demonstrate that many of these visual texts also propose significant reinscriptions of the sign capable of displacing dominant discourse. However, because of the veil's metonymy in Euro-American mainstream culture and 'collective gaze,' the thesis first charts the topography of the trope in history, discourse and visual culture as its entrenchment obviously complicates any use of the sign by artists of Muslim origin exhibiting within the western art apparatus. It then traces three alternative narratives of the veil evident in contemporary practice underscoring their critical importance with regards to gender, politics, representation and the conception of self. I must however concede that the major impetus behind the analyses of the contextualized veil, the postcolonial veil and the subject-ive veil is a belief in the radical power of visual texts to facilitate transnational literacy and translation. The study therefore focuses on the relationship between the location -territorial or ideological- of the gaze and the image. It demonstrates that this relationship or space is protean, plural and full of promise both individually and collectively.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2005. / Advisor: Alec G. Hargreaves, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Modern Languages and Linguistics. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Jan. 24, 2006). Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 256 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

Thesis (M.A.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Anthropology, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis concerns female Islamic dress, the hijab, in contemporary urban Finland. The hijab is not merely a symbol or an inevitable embodiment of either female oppression or agency, but rather is a form of dress that is simultaneously social, mental, material, and spatial. The approach developed here captures the multiple dimensions of the hijab as it is lived and experienced. The thesis draws upon ideas from a range of social theorists, including Bourdieu, Lefebvre, Goffman, and Gramsci. These ideas are deployed to understand the conscious and semi-conscious dress strategies and practices that veiling Muslim women use to manage various everyday issues and challenges. I investigate questions concerning how social, material and spatial relations both impact upon, and are negotiated by, the wearing of the hijab. The research was conducted in Helsinki using ethnographic methods, such as semi-structured interviews and participant observation. The main groups of informants were Finnish converts to Islam, Somalis, and Shi'a Muslims from Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the sample covered women of various ages, educational backgrounds, and professional positions. The empirical chapters are organised according to four major themes: Politics, Materiality, Performance, and Visibility in Public Space. According to the findings, Muslim women in Finland negotiate their dress strategies with reference to Finnish ‘mainstream' society, religious doctrine and the demands of their particular ethnic communities. Dress strategies and practices are found to be bound up in complex but identifiable ways with factors such as fashion markets and dress availability, diverse modes of embodiment and habituation, and the socio-spatial relations which produce and are produced by the Finnish built environment. In sum, by focussing on the lived experience of wearing the hijab, many of the more simplistic politicised understandings of Muslim women and their characteristic forms of dress can be challenged and superseded.

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Understanding how disability is perceived from a cultural perspective, helps create knowledge about the issues related to disability in a particular culture. It helps to understand how much cultural beliefs impact the social status of a person with a disability in a society. In addition to culture, religion also plays a significant role in most South Asian people’s lives. This thesis explores the lives of South Asian Muslim immigrant women in Winnipeg with various disabilities in order to obtain a specific cultural as well as religious perspective on disability in the form of personal stories. A descriptive thematic analysis was performed on the data collected directly from participants. The thematic analysis attempts to understand the meaning of disability from the participants’ and community’s perspective. / October 2016

Magister Artium - MA / Muslim women’s lack of access to mosque space has left them with few opportunities to direct or influence the interpretation of the theological texts. The mosque is an almost strictly gendered space that is seen as a key platform from which Muslims are exhorted to fulfill existing obligations and where new practices emerge as part of the creation of tradition in the Muslim community. I would further like to argue that it is the acts and interventions of the women who have claimed Islam and its belief system in its entirety as their own and then shaped this to fit their lives that will enable Muslims to rethink existing attitudes to women in Muslim communities.