Project description
Exploring Muslim women’s access to justice in Europe
The EU-funded BILQIS project will combine socio-legal, gender, feminist and Islamic studies to investigate the Muslim women’s rights in Europe. BILQIS will explore questions of gender in relation to Islamic family laws (IFLs). To this end, researchers will conduct a comparative study of how Muslim women in Europe have navigated agency and authority over time from the 19th century to the present day across European peripheries of the Balkans and Nordic-Atlantic contexts. Furthermore, they will interrogate how the gendered development of IFLs in each of these peripheral contexts can be better understood in terms of agency and authority by studying legal texts and authorities.
Objective
BILQIS emerges from a critical concern around Muslim women’s access to justice in Europe. BILQIS will be driven by methodological advances in Islamic feminism that the PI has been to the fore in delivering and will be primarily distinguished by its systematic and rigorous inquiries into questions of gender in relation to Islamic family laws (IFL) and IFL-related socio-religious and socio-legal power structures. The project will engage in a comparative study how Muslim women in Europe have navigated agency and authority over time from the long 19th century to the present day across diverse European peripheries, specifically the Ottoman Balkans, the post-Ottoman Balkans, and the territorial spaces that are currently governed by Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Greece, Ireland, Norway, and Sweden. BILQIS will interrogate how the gendered development of IFL in each of these peripheral contexts can be better understood in terms agency and authority through studies of legal texts and authorities (e.g. qadis, sijills, muftis, fatwas, istintâk, national court judgements) and will produce new critical, contextual, conceptual, and constructive knowledge in this regard. As a result BILQIS will break significant epistemic, conceptual and methodological impasses around shari’a, conflict of laws, and cultural pluralism in Europe. Finally, BILQIS will aim to use the sum of this new knowledge to construct a new methodological framework to transform the study of gender gaps and power imbalances related to agency and authority. This new methodology will direct the future of critical work on gender gaps across multiple disciplines (e.g. Islamic studies, Socio-legal Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, European Studies, Near and Middle Eastern Studies, Cultural Studies, Political Philosophy, Government and Policy Studies).
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
H91 Galway
Ireland