Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger

Conclusion

While most studies on Muslim women make it their main goal to investigate how Islam views women or to examine the oppression of Muslim women resulting from Islam, this book has explored the lives of women as agents in several ways. The overarching concern has been with how the statuses and roles of Muslim women in Niger have changed as a result of local and global processes. We have discussed here how the processes of French colonialism, the development agenda of the 1960s to late 1970s, the Structural Adjustment Programs of the 1980s, and the democratization and pluralism of the 1990s have made, in the presence of globalization and the rise of political Islam, an impact on traditional gender statuses and roles in a predominantly patriarchal society. This book also analyzes how the Muslim women of Niger have responded to the above forces. Sections of the book have also been concerned with how Muslim women have inscribed feminine public meanings to Islam by participating in the production and enactment of legitimizing symbolic images of piety. 187 Conclusion Their strategies have included Islamic literacy, Islamic dress discourse, involvement in religious rituals, and formation of Muslim women’s networks that use Islam as an organizing principle. All this has taken place in a climate where extremist militant Islamist groups are engaged in violent aggression on Muslim women who do not fit their “prototypical model” of the “real Muslim woman.” Of equal concern has been the militarization of society resulting from the confrontation between the state’s armed forces and the combatants of a disenfranchised citizenry and the confrontation between religious militant orthodoxies and their secularist counterparts, which has transformed Muslim women’s consciousness of their statuses and roles during the conflicts and in their aftermath. Finally, the book has also demonstrated the mechanisms by which Muslim women project themselves and act as agents in various cultural, political, and economic fields such as in religion, performing arts, and government, contrary to the mainstream beliefs that persist in seeing Muslim women only as recipients of ideology and passive respondents to the consequences of ideology on their lives. This exercise of Muslim women’s agency has often taken place in an overlapping space between tradition and modernity, reinforced by the reemergence of the politics of pluralism since the early 1990s. Malama A’ishatu Hamani Zarmakoy Dancandu followed the trajectory of education for years within the domain associated with “tradition.” However, in her late seventies, within the context of democratization and the rise of political Islam, she rose to public visibility as a female Qur’anic commentator. By drawing on her Qur’anic educational background, Malama A’ishatu inscribed a Qur’anic woman’s face in Islamic exegesis through the national electronic media, a domain that had hitherto been the preserve of the Muslim male clergy. In the meantime, education itself was transformed under colonial and postcolonial conditions. Though disproportionately represented, women had the opportunity to partake of this “modernist” education as a result of which some came to be highly placed in modern institutions of government , administration, economy, and politics. Yet when the chips were down and the country was confronted by crises in various sectors, particularly in education, some of the same successful secularist Muslim women came to rely and draw on the legacy of traditional and Islamic education in the quest for a new direction in their lives and of their children. Furthermore , they joined hands with some elite and nonelite women who have been using Islam to chart out an alternative modernity for the Muslim women’s agenda. Similar observations can be made in the areas of the performing arts. Habsu Garba essentially broke out of the “traditional confines” of culture 188 Conclusion and its caste foundations by choosing to become a public performer with an “activist”—even if not radical—orientation. Yet she has continued to justify her choices as a calling, rationalized on the basis of her Afro-Islamic heritage that shaped her life, even as she continues to function as a clerk within a postcolonial administration inherited from the French colonial legacy. It is perhaps within the same understanding of agency between tradition and modernity that Habsu Garba preferred to select a particular version of a Hausa Cinderella tale to retell in the national media. The story itself appraises women’s intelligence and agencies for transforming their conditions and those around them. These women’s...