Negotiating Empowerment: A Critical Ethnography of Hijabi Women in Sarajevo

Abstract

This ethnographic study explores the daily enactments and negotiations of self and religious practice performed by hijabi women living in Sarajevo, a city marked by gender inequality in social and economic rights on one hand, and civil and political rights on the other. Against this backdrop of severely challenged positions in both public and private spheres, ten women share stories that reveal how embracing and reinterpreting faith can be an act of personal fulfilment and moral regeneration. It is also a public actualization of agency that problematizes the hegemonic narrative of Islamophobia which renders hijabi women oppressed and disempowered. |Keywords: Islam, gender, piety, identity politics, empowerment