This article presents a sociological inquiry into an understudied phenomenon: exogamous partnerships of Muslim-born women in a migratory context, focusing on Italy. It examines the challenges and opportunities women from migratory backgrounds encounter in such unions, particularly around pressure to convert their partners to Islam and the negotiation of their children’s religious upbringing. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 21 Muslim-born women of diverse national backgrounds, the study shows how women’s experiences challenge the dominant understanding of womanhood and family relationships held by Muslim jurists. The Italian case offers an empirical lens through which to reconsider dominant interpretations of Islamic family law and highlights a sensitive issue with significant social, legal, and human rights implications, with relevance for policymakers across diverse migratory contexts involving Muslim-born women and interfaith marriage.
This article examines how non-specialist Muslims in Chicago decide whether financial practices are “halal enough” when religious authority is dispersed and conventional finance structures everyday life. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I show that Islamic finance in the United States operates as a lived field of evaluation organized around practical actionability, the credibility of religious-financial authority, and social accountability. I develop the concept of pragmatic consensus to explain how socially connected actors can converge on participation in a contested practice while continuing to rely on non-equivalent grounds of justification. Public-equity investing illustrates this pattern: participation becomes socially available even as investors disagree over screening standards, scholarly certification, permissible debt, purification, and the meaning of shariah compliance. These disagreements remain active within participation without converging into a shared account of legitimacy. Critics further question the independence of Islamic-finance certification and the field’s orientation toward individualized access to capitalist markets, invoking broader commitments to social justice, mutual aid, and collective uplift. The article shows how religiously contested practices can remain socially available without doctrinal closure and how such availability coexists with continuing struggles over who may define legitimate economic conduct and what Islamic accountability requires under secular-capitalist conditions.
Existing scholarship on Islamic piety often treats actions (amal) and intentions (niyyah) as aligned and mutually reinforcing. This paper offers an alternative view: in Singapore’s hyper-capitalist and technocratic context, these domains can become separated. Drawing on ethnographic research with middle-class professional Muslim women, I argue that the state’s survivalist ethos, which often links productivity to citizenship and moral worth, creates conditions in which the demands of scripturalist piety and professional productivity frequently come into tension. In response, my interlocutors increasingly privilege niyyah (intention) over amal (visible practice) as a means of negotiating competing ethical demands. Yet this inward turn generates its own paradox: in critiquing visible religiosity as commodified or performative (exemplified by “hijabster” culture), my interlocutors claim a more authentic form of piety through the very act of distinguishing themselves from others. The reorientation toward niyyah thus both resists and reproduces the logic of competitive distinction it seeks to escape, recasting interiority itself as a site of moral evaluation and judgment.
This article draws on the life stories of divorcing or divorced women living in Istanbul. By attending to my interlocutors’ transformations over time, in relation to others and divine power, it examines the complex workings of destiny and the idea of imtihan (test from God) in the construction and moral revaluation of women’s life narratives, as well as in their responses to episodes of marital crisis. The concept of imtihan is embedded in a religious imagination that understands both fortune and misfortune as coming from God and demands a response accordingly. It works as a multitemporal narrative practice - retrospective, relational, and anticipatory at the same time- and reveal a nuanced understanding of destiny that foregrounds human responsibility and multiple modalities of agency. By reinterpreting past and present struggles and calling for responses grounded in Islamic ethical values such as forbearance, gratitude, and trust in God, the imagination of imtihan rebuilds one’s relationship with God and others. It also anchors believers in the present and encourages them to dwell in the world while simultaneously orienting them toward the future, not only because imtihan promises future reward, but more importantly because it anticipates the future as an open horizon of possibilities shaped by divine presence.
