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In this article, I draw on critical investigations of gendered, racialised and sexualised discourses on Islam and Muslim minorities in Western Europe to explore two recent instances of Muslim female intellectuals and artists responding to what has been dubbed “the Muslim question”. I shall show that Muslim women’s counter-voices are multilayered, conveyed through various means, and context-dependent, as well as dependent on intersectional marginalised positionalities. My goal is to theoretically rethink the feminist methodology of ‘talking back’ on the basis of the complex ways in which Muslim women establish modes of critique.

In this article, I engage with feminist discussions about secularity, gender, and emancipation. The feminist study of the secular was spurred by interventions of Saba Mahmood [2005. The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press], and can be seen as a critical engagement with at least one basic assumption that underlies much of progressive thinkingthat secularism is beneficial for women and LGBTQ subjects. I begin by exploring how the Belgian feminist activist platform Baas Over Eigen Hoofd! (Boss Over One's Own Head!) builds a locally suited theory and practice of emancipation. I analyse how BOEH! raises questions about gender and secularity. Second, I zoom-out by mapping feminist studies of the secular in Western European contexts, distinguishing various analytical approaches and visions on social-political secular emancipatory alternatives. To conclude, I relate local feminist activism to feminist academic discussions, and argue that there is a continued need for thinking about shared emancipatory futures.Emancipation is not an 'all or nothing' affair. (Nancy Fraser in: Fraser and Liakova 2008, 4) The story [of secularism] has had enormous staying power. Our view of history is shaped by that story. (Scott 2018, 14) Posing questions about emancipation often means criticising political, social, cultural, and religious structures of dominance and revealing the relationships between freedom and its restrictions. Critical theories, such as feminist, postcolonial, and queer theories, and social movements, such as women's, antiracist, and LGBTQ movements, analyse the restriction of freedom in various ways and as such propose differing ideas about progressive change. In Western contexts influenced by a European Enlightenment tradition, 'emancipation' is a layered and emphatic concept, referring to equality, self-determination, liberation, and individual responsibility (Birkle et al. 2012). Posing questions about emancipation within this political-cultural framework leads to asking about the obstacles to equality and self-determination: Liberation from what? Self-determination regarding what? What does it mean to be responsible for building one's 'own life'? (Bauhardt 2004).

In response to the phenomenon of women converting to Islam, a body of research has emerged, engaging with the question, ‘Why are Western women, raised in liberal contexts, converting to Islam?’ This line of enquiry is not limited to academic literature. In recent years, converts to Islam have faced intense scrutiny in mainstream media across Europe. This article contributes an analysis of documentaries to the study of representations of female converts to Islam, focusing particularly on the British documentary Make Me a Muslim (2014) and the Swiss documentary Les Converties d’Allah (2017). We suggest that comparing these two documentaries illuminates certain common narrative threads in media representations of female converts to Islam across different European contexts. In this article, we firstly situate this research within existing literature on gender and conversion to Islam and outline our approach to the study of documentaries on women’s conversion to Islam. Secondly, we analyse the two documentaries, focusing on their shared concerns, namely gender equality and women’s oppression, and the familial environment of the female convert. We argue that paying attention to how female converts are represented illuminates some of the ways in which European framings of the ‘in-betweenness’ of female converts to Islam create notions of female converts as ‘vulnerable-fanatics’ prone to ‘radicalisation’, and threatened by ‘oppressive’ Islam. We demonstrate how female converts participating in documentaries at times complicate and talk back to apprehensions regarding equality, oppression and radicalisation. Finally, we focus in a similar way on understandings of female converts as ‘troublemakers’ within their family environments. Throughout the analysis, we show how the figure of the female convert as vulnerable-fanatic and as family troublemaker is gendered and interlaced with concerns about essentialised cultural difference and radicalisation.

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In this article, we aim to contribute to feminist academic debates about multiculturalism and secularism/religion by drawing upon an analysis of an ethnic minority women’s organisation in Belgium that has been active since 1999: ella. The analysis focuses upon the way in which ella constructs notions of empowerment and emancipation by discussing structural inequalities, cultural-ethnic values and religious authority and identity. First, we look at how ella formulates its ideas about the emancipation trajectories of minoritised women and the potential role of religious belonging. Second, we look at ella’s discussion of religious interpretation and gender/sexual diversity. Here, we explore assumptions about the relationship between religious authority and minoritised women’s and LGBTQs’ desires and pursuit for knowledge. We conclude by considering ella as an affirmative-critical actor of multiculturalism, and an implicit agent of religious reform.

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This article is a thematic exploration of the organizations that Muslim women have established in the Netherlands and Belgium since the 1970s, and the forms of activism they have engaged in. The article provides insight into the complex dynamic between the lived experience of Muslim women in Dutch and Flemish societies, the shifting forms of their collective identities, and their efforts to bring about social change. We discuss the early organizational activities of migrant women from predominantly Muslim countries during the first few decades after their arrival. We explain the emergence of Islamic organizations and the growing participation of women in these organizations. We also explore the attempts made by Muslim women for feminist mobilization across ethnic and religious boundaries. Finally, we examine Muslim women’s engagement in (mixed-gender) anti-racist and LGBTQ movements. Our results indicate a rising visibility of Muslim women’s activism in the public sphere, and an increase in transversal mobilizations across ethnic and religious boundaries. The article concludes with the latest developments in Muslim women’s activism, and provides suggestions for future research.