Framing Secular Women’s Rights in Contemporary Britain and Beyond: Challenges and Implications (MA Thesis)

Abstract

This thesis argues that a group of women from Muslim majority communities campaigning against Sharia law in Britain is challenging group rights multicultural discourse, and that this challenge is quite serious. The thesis' premise is based on decentering. Instead of looking at their campaign through the lens of multicultural theory, the campaigners are given the proverbial first and last word against their intellectual adversaries. This is done for the purpose of added value -there is limited literature in the field privileging this position. The theory used consists of frame analysis with added insights from critical theory and critical discourse analysis, as power and the concept of hegemony are central to the case. It is concluded that the way the women frame their campaign and their politics does indeed challenge group rights multicultural discourse.Keywords: Islam, Muslims, women's rights, multiculturalism, framing, critical discourse analysis, hegemony, Sharia, discourse, Britain, universalism, Islamism Framing Secular Women's Rights in Contemporary Britain and Beyond: Challenges and Implications SummaryThis paper argues that the current secular women's rights campaign against sharia councils and religious group rights in Britain both challenges and is challenged by the multicultural discourse it engages with. The theory and methodology is primarily based on frame analysis, but also incorporates insights from critical theory and critical discourse analysis, which, while making many of the same observations as frame analysis, allows for a greater focus on exertions of power on the lexical level.While multiculturalism both as academic theory and policy has been under increasing strain in Britain in recent years, secular minority women's rights activists in Britain have been targeting defenses of cultural and religious rights, which they view as more condescending than helpful, since at least 1979.More than merely attacking particular policies with which they disagree, the activists also argue that they have been betrayed by both the political and the academic left, which insists on seeing them as part of the Muslim community instead of as women from a marginalized ethnic group. They frame their fight in transnational and universal terms, rejecting that there is something particular about Muslim communities or people from them that should make them more or less compatible with secular human rights values. By extension, they argue that there is nothing wrong with demanding that Muslims in Britain adhere to secular human rights values, and that religious accommodation risks empowering patriarchal authority figures in minority communities. Instead, they believe that ethnic categories and gender should be the focus of rights policies. However, their rejection of the political accommodation of Islam resembles that of the far-right, and so they must walk a tightrope, simultaneously rejecting what they see as Islamic patriarchy and far-right racism.In the academic realm, the multicultural discourse they ...