Paper short abstract:

In three West African contexts we explore the ways strong gender hierarchies were instantiated within Muslim youth’s national and religious imaginaries. In particular, we examine the agentive contestations of female Muslim youth against their gender subordination.

Paper long abstract:

We use recent empirical research with Muslim youth in three different West African countries (Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal) to explore how gender is performed and recruited in the constructions of religious and national identities. The Muslim youth claims to 'authentic' national and religious belonging pivoted on emphasised articulations of gender differences and hierarchies. To this extent their discourses of identity constantly invoked binary gender distinctions in which females were always subordinate to males. This gender symbolism was integral to both national and religious imaginaries.

Significantly, in this paper we illustrate how female Muslim youth were agentic in contesting their subordinate positioning. In doing so, they invoked both Islamic codes and juridical notions of gender equality enshrined in the national policies of the three countries. Whether drawing on religious or national codes however, the gender binary remained untroubled. For example, female youth drew on Islamic codes to point to men's obligations to them within Islam, but this left intact an assumed differentiation between male and female within Islamic practice. Furthermore, juridical codes, based in a liberal gender binary, were often readily dismissed as 'inauthentic' impositions of western/colonial origins and as in conflict with proper religious/Islamic practices, in ways that rendered female youth's contestations doubly problematic. Overall, our research shows the inadequacy of liberal understandings of gender equality for disrupting the powerful gender symbolism embedded in youth's national and religious imaginaries as well as the material conditions that emanate from these.