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2011 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
“I Really Couldn’t Think of Being Married, Having a Family with Nothing behind Me”: Empowerment, Education, and British Pakistani Women
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Western media have portrayed Islam as a sexist religion and Muslim women as victims of a patriarchal culture (Kundnani 2007). Sensationalist headlines have focused upon “forced” marriages and “honor killings” in the UK and abroad, powerfully influencing non-Muslim views on Islam (Saeed 2007). Despite all the attention on Muslim women’s supposed subordination, Western media rarely invite Muslim women to speak, and on the rare occasions that they do, Muslim women are almost never asked to talk about the issues that are important to them (Afshar 2008). This represents a disjuncture between British Pakistani women’s experiences and dominant Euro-American conceptions of empowerment and agency (Wray 2004).