Moving out of Salafism: Muslim Women and the Development of a Pious Feminist Consciousness

Abstract

In this article, I demonstrate how piety and feminism can come together to motivate women’s departures from gender-traditional religious communities. I draw on, and combine, theories of religious defection with those on the development of feminist consciousness to show how some Muslim women, who joined the Salafi community in London between 1980s and 2010, later moved out of the community in different directions and to varying degrees, after developing a pious feminist consciousness. This pious feminist consciousness, I argue, involves the identification of gender inequality in gender-traditional religious communities as well as the development of an oppositional consciousness in which religion is critically applied to contest women’s subaltern position in these communities. This work not only furthers our understanding of the gendered dimensions of religious defection, but also highlights the processes through which women may come to participate in religious feminism, and the different forms of agency they exhibit in the process.

Discussions about women’s religiosity have tended to focus on women’s participation in gender-traditional religious movements, with debates emerging about women’s agency within these patriarchal environments (Avishai 2008; Burke 2012; Davidman 1991; Gallagher 2007; Mahmood 2005; Rinaldo 2014). In the last decade, however, scholars have realized that women can and do frequently leave religious communities, ushering in a new trend in the literature which tries to make sense of why, how, and with what effect women sometimes depart from these communities. These recently published works point to the gendered nature of religious defection, suggesting that women’s experiences differ from those of men (Davidman 2015; Faulkner 2018; Gillette 2016; Gull, Smith, and Cragun 2023; Keller et al. 2023; Vliek 2019, 2023). In most of these accounts, women come to find the gender dynamics of these communities problematic, developing a consciousness of gender inequality. This newly developed consciousness, which at least partially motivates women’s departures from these religious communities, is frequently traced to their encounters with, and in many cases adoption of, secularism. Yet little is known about the role that religious ideas and sensibilities can, and sometimes do, play in contributing to the development of this consciousness.

In this article, I demonstrate how piety and feminism can come together to motivate women’s exit from gender-traditional religious communities. I draw on, and combine, theories of religious defection with those on the development of feminist consciousness to show how some Muslim women, who joined the Salafi community in London between 1980 and 2010, later moved out of the community after developing a pious feminist consciousness. This pious feminist consciousness, I argue, involves the identification of inequality within gender-traditional religious communities as well as the development of an oppositional consciousness in which religion is critically applied to contest women’s subaltern position in these communities. This article thus contributes to our understanding of women’s departures from gender-traditional religious communities by isolating and theorizing the development of a feminist consciousness as an integral component of many women’s exit pathways. It also contributes to our understanding of religious feminisms by highlighting the processes through which women may move toward more egalitarian approaches to religion, and the different forms of agency they exhibit in the process.

The United Kingdom, being a secular Muslim-minority country, makes for a particularly interesting case through which we can study Muslim women’s departures from gender-traditional religious communities because women’s decisions to join, stay in, or leave these communities have been taken against a secular, highly politicized background. For example, the niqab, or full-face veil, which is worn by only a minority of British Muslim women but is recommended (and in some cases considered obligatory) in Salafi communities, is the subject of much contestation. Women who wear the niqab have been accused of clashing with “British values” and likened to “letterboxes” and “bank robbers” by Boris Johnson, the United Kingdom’s former prime minister (Johnson 2018). Muslim women’s continued piety, despite this highly politicized and secular background, provides important insight into the different ways that religion, secularism, and feminism can intersect.

Women in and out of Religious Communities

I begin by critically engaging with works on religious conversion and defection, before introducing the concept of pious feminist consciousness and situating it against the literature on religious feminism and pious women’s agency. I then provide some background information about Salafism in the United Kingdom and describe the article’s methodology. In the remainder of the article, I outline the different stages involved in the development of a pious feminist consciousness, detailing the experiences that have led my participants to move toward more egalitarian approaches to Islam.

Moving Beyond “Conversion”

Scholars have long been motivated by the question of why some women are attracted to conservative religious traditions that impose strict rules on gender relations (Riesebrodt and Chong 1999). Works have thus sought to demonstrate the voluntary nature of women’s conversion in diverse settings such as the Middle East and Europe, challenging perceptions of women as passive victims and showing how women have agency in these settings even if they are not working to resist religious norms in favor of liberal norms (Anwar 2021; Avishai 2008; Inge 2016; Mahmood 2005).

The rich literature on gender and conversion has also revealed the diversity of motivations behind women’s participation in gender-traditional religious movements in Western settings (Köse 1996; Özyürek 2014; Taylor 2017). Scholars have challenged the depiction of conversion as a sudden process, conceptualizing it instead as an “ongoing” process that may at times be contested (Korte 2023). Van Nieuwkerk (2023), for example, has applied a long-term lens to conversion, demonstrating how it can include moments of weak belief, religious doubt, and ambivalence. Other works have, likewise, moved beyond the focus on initial conversion by exploring challenges, such as gender conflict and marginalization, that women experience in these communities (Gaddini 2022; Ingersoll 2003). One key question that remains implicit within the literature, as Jouili (2011, 48) argues, is: “Will these women, due to Western influence, eventually grow out of this position in order to endorse values more in keeping with the egalitarian ideas of modern, liberal thought?” This question also permeates the growing body of literature on women’s religious defection.

Gendering Religious Defection

Religious defection is a complex, multidimensional process that involves disaffection (emotional withdrawal from the group), disillusionment (cognitive dissonance that results in doubts and disbelief), and disaffiliation (the severance of organizational ties with the community or movement) (Wright and Ebaugh 1993). In this article, I focus on religious disillusionment and disaffiliation, because I have found that concerns about gender inequality within religious communities tend to interact mostly with these two dimensions. While Wright and Ebaugh (1993) imply that it is possible for individuals to experience detachment at these different levels simultaneously, I go further to suggest that there is a dialectical link between these processes. In the case of disillusionment and disaffiliation, for example, episodes of cognitive dissonance frequently (though not necessarily) lead to disaffiliation, and decisions to disaffiliate often (though, again, not necessarily) give individuals the distance needed to think critically about and become further disillusioned by the religious community or movement.

To reflect the “ongoing” nature of processes of religious exit, some scholars working on defection from Islam in Western settings have referred to religious defection as “moving out” (Van Nieuwkerk 2018; Vliek 2019). Works on other religious communities have also suggested that those defecting may continue to identify with certain elements of their respective communities. Beckford (1985, 171), for example, points to ex-Moonies’ “lingering support for various aspects of the UC [Unification Church]” in Britain. As these scholars have done, I too conceptualize departure as an ongoing process of religious transformation, recognizing that departures from religious communities are seldom “complete” but in many cases involve individuals’ continued identification with some elements of their religious tradition or community.

Barring a few exceptions (Hayes 1996; Sandomirsky and Wilson 1990), early studies on religious switching and apostasy have rarely considered gender in their analysis. More recently, however, the literature has begun to acknowledge that experiences of religious defection may differ by gender (Keller et al. 2023), with a particular focus on women’s experiences (Davidman 2015; Faulkner 2018; Gillette 2016; Gull, Smith, and Cragun 2023; Vliek 2019, 2023). Gender inequality is frequently identified in this emerging literature as a motivating factor for women’s departures. In Cottee’s (2015) work on women leaving Islam in Canada and the United Kingdom, for example, one female interlocutor references sexism in her exit narrative. Davidman (2015, 59) also finds that an awareness of gender inequality motivates exit from Orthodox Judaism in the United States, briefly alluding to one woman’s “emerging feminist consciousness” and her “feminist critique” of the Haredi world. Vliek (2023) similarly demonstrates how gender inequality has been an instigator of doubt for some leaving Islam in the Netherlands and Britain, while Alyedreessy (2018) notes that three of her participants referred to women’s rights and feminism when narrating their deconversion from Islam in Britain. This article contributes to this literature by isolating the development of a feminist consciousness as an integral component of processes of religious exit, and showing how religious ideas and sensibilities can contribute to the development of this consciousness.

A Pious Feminist Consciousness

Building on insights from the literature as well as my participants’ own experiences moving out of Salafism, I adapt Klatch’s (2001) model of the development of feminist consciousness as it outlines the conditions that encourage the identification of gender inequality within different social movements. Like Klatch, who adopts Klein’s (1987) definition of group consciousness, I define feminist consciousness as “the belief that personal problems result from unfair treatment because of one’s group membership rather than from a lack of personal effort or ability” (Klein 1987, 23). For members of religious communities, then, feminist consciousness refers to the realization that problems encountered within gender-traditional religious communities are not the result of a woman’s personal failure but can and should be traced to the inequitable treatment of women within this community. Unlike Klatch, however, when I use the term feminist consciousness, I am not limiting my analysis to those who self-identify as “feminist,” as the term is highly contested among my participants and within Muslim communities globally for its association with secularism and Western imperialism (Badran 2005; Weir 2013).

Feminist consciousness in this context also has more to do with the “recognition of the inequities of gender roles by an individual or by a small group” (Kiernan 2016, 1) than with the concerted political or social action that is often associated with feminism. In this article, I am, therefore, mainly concerned with the first two stages of Klatch’s model of the development of feminist consciousness (the recognition of the mistreatment of women and the development of oppositional consciousness), but not the last stage, which refers to the development of collective identity. As the accounts in the literature and my own participants’ experiences demonstrate, the development of a feminist consciousness within gender-traditional religious movements is most often an individual or small-group occurrence, and thus rarely involves collective action on a large scale.

The first stage of the development of feminist consciousness is the identification of inequality within gender-traditional religious communities, with women coming to see the problems they experience in these communities as not owing to their own individual failings, but to their identities as women. As Klatch (2001) shows in her work on activists in Students for a Democratic Society and Young Americans for Freedom in the United States during the 1960s, after repeatedly experiencing inequality, women may come to see a contradiction between the rhetoric and reality of a particular movement. Within gender-traditional religious communities, these repeated experiences of inequality may instigate processes of religious disillusionment, prompting women to develop intellectual doubts about this religious movement. The second stage of the development of a feminist consciousness involves developing an oppositional consciousness capable of challenging gender-traditional religious beliefs. This oppositional consciousness entails the ability to articulate inequality experienced and the development of alternative beliefs about gender relations. This second stage is integral to processes of religious defection as once a woman is able to think about gender relations in a different way, she is more likely to disaffiliate from the community (Davidman 2015; Vliek 2023).

This model of the development of feminist consciousness helps us make sense of the experiences of women as they first begin to recognize and then eventually come to contest gender inequality. However, these are not rigid stages, and the development of a feminist consciousness is often a nonlinear process where women may move back and forth between different stages. Women may recognize further instances of inequality, for example, even after developing an oppositional consciousness and working to challenge inequality.

Within the literature, feminist consciousness is frequently traced to encounters with secularism and moves away from religion. Davidman (2015, 168), for example, recounts how one of her participants in the United States, Sarah, developed a feminist consciousness after reading Ms., a feminist magazine, going on to question and abandon “Orthodox praxis.” Davidman (2015, 174) reports how Sarah eventually leaves Judaism and religion altogether, “work[ing] hard to resocialize herself by acting in ways that approximated secular culture’s prescriptions for feminine behavior.” In Alyedreessy’s (2018, 270) work, for example, women in Britain juxtapose Islam with “Western values, ethics, principles, and beliefs,” lamenting how Islam is being used to take away the rights that feminists fought for in “modern-day Western society.” Departing from these works, however, Aune’s (2015, 139) work on feminists’ religio-spiritual lives in the United Kingdom demonstrates how feminism “is associated with disaffiliation from church but only slightly with rejection of Christian practices or beliefs.” Similarly, Gaddini (2022) finds that after experiencing marginalization in churches in the United States, some women leave the Church but continue to believe in the tenets of Christianity. These works suggest that women may continue to attach themselves to religious beliefs and practices even after developing reservations about the way women are treated in these communities.

Drawing on insights from Aune and Gaddini as well as the experiences of my participants, I argue that after experiencing repeated problems in religious communities, women may come to find particular religious interpretations or approaches problematic but not religion altogether. A pious feminist consciousness, which I define as the use of religious traditions in a critical way to contest women’s secondary status, can emerge and inform moves away from gender-traditional religious communities. This concept builds on works about feminist piety (Dokumacı 2020; Jacobsen 2011; Jouili 2015; Mahmood 2005). Indeed, the word “pious” is key here because it stresses that women who draw on religious ideas to contest gender inequality are engaging with religion in an instrumental way, and that piety remains a goal for them (Rinaldo 2014). Pious feminist consciousness thus acknowledges and makes sense of the experiences of defecting women whose pious sensibilities remain intact even as they are moving out of religious communities. While the concept of pious feminist consciousness puts a particular emphasis on these women’s pious subjectivities, as we will see later in this article, it does not preclude the influence of other factors, such as the surrounding secular environment, allowing us a nuanced understanding of how religion, feminism, and secularism can intersect.

In developing this concept of pious feminist consciousness, I aim to bring sociological discussions on women’s religious defection together with the literature on religious feminisms. By unpacking the different stages involved in the development of a pious feminist consciousness, this work also helps to explain why and how women may move toward more egalitarian approaches to religion or participate in religious feminist movements. Religious feminisms intersect with but also depart from feminist movements with secular origins (van den Brandt 2014) by drawing on religious frames to challenge gender inequalities within religious communities and society at large (Aune 2015). More specifically, the concept of Islamic feminism captures efforts by Muslim women to reform social practices and legal provisions that structure Muslim societies in women’s favor (Badran 2005; Mir-Hosseini 2006; Moghissi 2011; Weir 2013). Within a European context, Van Es (2016) has also suggested that Muslim women, who don’t necessarily identify as feminists, partake in “diffused Islamic feminism” when they challenge misogynistic practices by distinguishing between patriarchal practices in Muslim communities and a “real” Islam that empowers women. In this way, women who develop a pious feminist consciousness and work to contest gender inequality through a critical engagement with religion can be seen as belonging to this larger community of feminists.

This work also contributes to our understanding of women’s agency in religious communities. The fact that women come to resist and challenge gender norms they find problematic suggests, as Meyers (2002, 5) has argued, that women are able to exercise agency despite this “hostile environment.” Yet simply equating women’s agency here with “resistance against social norms” (Mahmood 2005, 157) limits our understanding of the complex ways that women exhibit agency as they move away from gender-traditional religious communities and partake in forms of religious feminism. Women who develop a pious feminist consciousness are not working toward complete autonomy as they are still concerned with the cultivation of pious sensibilities or with what Avishai (2008, 413) refers to as “the goal of becoming an authentic religious subject.” A pious feminist consciousness can thus involve a renewed commitment to piety and the practice of agency by maintaining religious norms that may not align with secular feminist expectations. This suggests that as women move out of religious communities, they may simultaneously practice “compliance” and “resistance” through their inhabitation (Mahmood 2005) of some religious norms and resistant opposition (Katzenstein 1998) to others.

Salafism and Gender in the United Kingdom

Salafism is a transnational Sunni movement in which adherents claim to be closely emulating the pious predecessors or al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ (generally regarded to be the first three generations of Muslims) in as many spheres of life as possible (Wagemakers 2016). In this loosely organized movement, participants are empowered through discourses about belonging to the “saved sect” of Muslims (see Wagemakers 2016) and work together toward a common goal of reforming themselves and wider society. Though there is diversity within the community, Salafis are generally known theologically for emphasizing the importance of worshipping God alone (tawḥīd) and for considering many traditional Islamic practices to be shirk (believing in more than one God, or holding up anything or anyone as equal to God). Salafis are also known for insisting that the Qur’an, Sunna, and the consensus of the Prophet’s companions as the only valid sources of authority, and in some cases, for discouraging “blind following” of the madhaheb or schools of Islamic jurisprudence (Hamid 2016).

This approach to Islam generally involves a conservative approach to gender in which adherents believe that they are adopting the gender order that existed at the time of the Prophet Mohamed and the pious predecessors. The Salafi gender order is a gender-traditional one based on the understanding that there are ontological differences that make men more suited for leadership and work outside of the home, and women more suited for nurturing and educating. Salafism can thus be considered a gender-traditional religious movement that “promote[s] strict gender relationships based on male headship and women’s submission” (Burke 2012, 122). Though Salafism shares several gender norms with more “mainstream” approaches to Islam that also prioritize men’s leadership and women’s nurturing role (Haddad and Esposito 1998), Salafism adopts a more conservative and strict approach to questions around women’s submission, modesty, and gender mixing. Salafi discourses emphasize the need for a wife’s complete devotion, submission, and obedience to her husband (Inge 2016). An ideal Muslim woman is also one who wears the jilbāb (a loose outer garment that conceals everything but the hands and face) or the niqab and conforms to Salafism’s strict gender segregation including within educational and employment contexts.

Within the United Kingdom, Salafism began to gain traction in the 1980s, following proselytization by Saudi Arabia and other Salafi non-state actors during this period. Salafism mainly drew young, second-generation British Muslims who were drawn to Salafism as an “authentic” Islam that only drew on “Quran and Sunna.” Though no data on the number of Salafis exist, most accounts suggest that the number of committed Salafi activists remains a small minority of the British Muslim community (Hamid 2016; Inge 2016). Women are anecdotally said to have disproportionately joined the Salafi community in comparison to men, which generally coincides with literature suggesting that women tend to be more religious than men (Penny, Francis, and Robbins 2015; Trzebiatowska and Bruce 2012). Adherents to Salafism come from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds that reflect the diverse makeup of the British Muslim community. In some areas, however, such as Brixton in London, Salafism has tended to appeal to Black British Muslims and converts from African Caribbean, Somali, or mixed backgrounds—backgrounds that tend to be of a lower socioeconomic standing within the British Muslim community and the British population more generally.

During my fieldwork, I found that many of those who originally joined the Salafi community in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s have since moved out. Similarly, works on Salafism in other parts of the world have suggested that male Salafi leaders in other parts of the world may be rethinking Salafism in response to its “internal contradictions” (Thurston 2018). Yet within these works, there is a complete neglect of discussions on women’s critical engagement with Salafism.

Methods

In this article, I focus on the experiences of 20 women who came to Salafism between 1980 and 2010 and have since moved out of the community in different directions and to different degrees. This study is part of a larger ethnographic study on the emergence, evolution, and impact of the Salafi movement in the United Kingdom between 1980 and 2020. I carried out 20 months of participant observation in Salafi and non-Salafi Muslim spaces in London between 2017 and 2019. I also conducted more than 150 interviews, primarily with British Muslims who joined Salafi circles between 1980s and 2010s in London. My interviewees were associated mainly with historical Salafi organizations such as Jamiat Ihyaa Minhaaj al-Sunnah, which was one of the earliest and largest Salafi organizations founded by second-generation British Muslims, as well as more contemporary Salafi networks associated with organizations such as Salafi Publications, Brixton Mosque, and Muslim Research and Development Forum (MRDF). These Salafi networks diverge in many ways, but most networks promote a very similar ideal Muslim woman.

I conducted all the interviews myself between 2017 and 2019, sometimes in women’s homes, mosques, or cafes. Interviews were carried out in English, though women frequently interspersed some Arabic words and phrases from the Quran. I transcribed all the interviews myself and used NVivo to manually code them thematically. I also anonymized my participants’ identities and assigned them pseudonyms for this article. I initially began my fieldwork by contacting a few women who had enjoyed leadership positions within female Salafi networks and were involved in leading talks and study circles for women during the late 1980s and 1990s. These women often pointed me to other members of the community who used to regularly attend Salafi classes and events. The women in this sample are diverse in terms of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, with women from South Asian, Black, African, African Caribbean, and mixed backgrounds. Their ages also vary, with several women in their late 40s and early 50s who had come to Salafism during the 1980s and 1990s, as well as younger women who came to Salafism during the 2000s. Most of my participants were married at the time of our interviews, though three of my participants were divorced and one had never been married.

After carrying out several interviews, I began to realize that many, though certainly not all, of the women that had joined the community in earlier years are no longer affiliated with Salafism. Perhaps because of my own identity as a veiled, married, non-Salafi Muslim woman and mother in higher education, my participants who had moved out of Salafism felt they could relate to me, most often bringing up, unprompted, marital conflicts, childrearing difficulties, and decisions to go back to university. These stories, along with my own research interests in the compatibility of piety and feminism, led me to delve deeper into and pay more attention to my participants’ experiences of defection. Though I heard during fieldwork that some Salafis had had “secularizing exits” (Streib et al. 2009, 26), I never actually came across someone who had left Islam completely. The accounts in this article are, therefore, not representative of all experiences, but they provide important insight into the experiences of women who continue to identify with religion even as they move out of particular religious communities.

Becoming a Salafi Woman

When my participants first came across Salafism, most often as young adults in colleges and universities, they were drawn to Salafism as a logical, evidence-based, “pure” Islam that brought together a community of diverse English-speaking Muslims from different ethnic backgrounds. They were also generally persuaded by Salafi gender discourses. One of my participants, Jamila, a woman in her 40s from a South Asian background who had joined the Salafi community back in the 1990s, recalled to me in hindsight: “I think I did believe in the role of the woman, and I think I sort of believed that when I got married and became a wife, that I would somehow morph into this person. . . . I didn’t question that I wouldn’t be able to do it.” Jamila also alluded to how in hindsight she realized that a part of her had been attracted “to the idea that a woman should be submissive to her husband, that the husband was the head of the home, that somehow, this magical, mythical figure would take charge, and make everything right,” suggesting that in some cases there is something initially desirable about patriarchy for women who adhere to gender-traditional religious beliefs (Taylor 2017).

Some of my participants also felt empowered by Salafi discourses that suggested that women should be concerned only about a prospective spouse’s ‘aqīda (creed) and not race or economic background, using these discourses to justify their refusal of non-Salafi spouses arranged for them by their parents, as is often the case in some South Asian communities. A few of my participants, however, had some concerns about Salafi gender discourses from the start and thought they could diverge from Salafism’s gendered scripts while remaining within the community. For example, though Hamida, who comes from a South Asian background, believed in Salafi ‘aqīda (creed) after joining the community in the late 1980s, she chose not to seek a Salafi spouse. She explains: “I actively chose not to marry a Salafi. The ideal Muslimah, from a Salafi point of view, was somebody who never went out, didn’t really have a life, [had] a husband and children, and studied Qur’an. It just seemed to me quite a closed off life.” Unlike Hamida, however, most of my participants initially tried to become the ideal Muslim women touted in Salafi discourses. These women eventually struggled with Salafism’s strict approach to gender segregation, which interfered with their needs and desires to study or work, with Salafi marriage norms that pressured them into submission, and with the unequal division of labor they experienced after having children.

After encountering Salafi discourses about the impermissibility of attending coeducational universities that were especially popular during the 1990s, but do not seem as prevalent in Salafi circles today (Dawood 2023), my participants reported feeling torn between their educational ambitions, parental pressures to attend university, and desires to avoid sinning. Yosra, who came from a South Asian background and had attended a private school before joining university and coming across Salafism, recounted how her first year of university was “a difficult time” owing to pressure from one of the leading male figures of the Salafi movement to quit university and get married. Yosra explained how she eventually quit university after finding that she no longer enjoyed it because of the pressure she was under. Rabiya, whose family migrated to the United Kingdom from Afghanistan, also spoke to me bitterly about how Salafism influenced her decision during the 2000s not to attend university. She recalled that “everyone was like you can’t go to university, there’s men there. You can’t free mix, and I accepted that, and I didn’t go.”

Women who chose to attend university, despite Salafi discourses warning against it, also experienced their own struggles. Jamila, for example, experienced confusion and disappointment while at university. She explained,

At university I did start to question why I was studying. I did begin to feel like: “but what’s the point, where is this taking me?” I felt very dissatisfied. I think part of that was because there definitely was an idea of what is an ideal Muslimah [Muslim woman].

For Jamila, Salafi gender roles that prioritized a woman’s role as a wife and mother, compounded with what she refers to as “bad career advice” regarding the different career paths available to her after university, led her to wonder what the point of university education was. This was also the case with a few of my other participants who struggled to find a way forward after university.

Conforming to Salafi teachings that recommend marriage at a young age, many of my participants got married in their early 20s and faced many difficulties after marriage. After feeling quite independent and empowered as young Salafi women who played leading roles within the female Salafi community, several of my participants reported difficulties becoming the submissive obedient wife expected in Salafi communities. Many of my participants mentioned marital problems, and several eventually got divorced. Participants reported clashing with their husbands over their desires to work, for example, as well as over the division of household duties. One of my participants spoke of the challenges she experienced obeying her husband, who expected her to focus on raising her children even though he knew she had wanted to do a postgraduate certificate in education before their marriage. Another participant recalled how she struggled to understand why she was the one who was expected to do all domestic duties, such as cooking. When my participants became mothers—in some cases having several kids, as encouraged by Salafi discourses that recommend having children to increase the size of the Umma or the larger transnational community of Muslims—they experienced increased household duties and the unequal distribution of childrearing responsibilities.

Salafi discourses that require women to stay at home and not go out unless “necessary” also caused my participants trouble over the years, as young adults, married women, and mothers. Umm Sarah, a white convert who was pressured by other Salafi women to try to stay at home (although her own husband was not a Salafi and did not encourage her to do so), explained to me that she quickly felt like she was “going to go crazy.” Two of my participants also experienced mistreatment or coercive control (Sharp 2014) by male Salafi figures in their lives who believed that it was their duty to enforce Salafi gender norms. Salma, who comes from a South Asian background, recounted how the early days of her marriage were particularly difficult. Salma recalled:

My husband, in the first five or six months of married life, he sort of became a dictator, I wasn’t allowed out of the house without him being next to me because Salafism says you have to protect your wife, you are her protector, you are her maintainer, he’d just say “no, you can’t go out alone, what if something happens to you and I’m not there.”

It became slightly better, she explained, after she had children because this meant that she needed to leave the house to take them to doctors’ appointments, for example. Nonetheless, Salma, who was used to “doing [her] own thing” before getting married, really struggled to conform to her husband’s wishes and the Salafi community’s expectations of her to stay at home. Hamida also shared how her brother tried to prevent her from going to university because of his concerns about free-mixing. “When he came back from university, he’d lock the front door and hide the key so that I couldn’t go to university,” she recalled. Hamida found these double standards, and the harshness with which they were applied, off-putting despite her “totally” agreeing with the doctrinal aspects of Salafism.

Although at first drawn to Salafism as a logical, evidence-based, “pure” Islam, most of my participants eventually encountered problems in Salafi communities. They found it difficult to accept Salafism’s strict approach to gender segregation, Salafi marriage norms that emphasize women’s submission, and the unequal division of domestic labor that they experienced as wives and mothers. Feelings of confusion and dissatisfaction were thus part and parcel of my participants’ experiences becoming Salafi women.

Identifying Inequality

At first, most of my participants saw their troubles as owing to their own shortcomings, inabilities, and failures. Salma initially felt that her troubled marriage was a personal failure, one that could be traced to her own lack of strength, so she increased her supplications and prayers, coming to feel more spiritual but still not any closer to resolving the issues in her marriage. Umm Sarah also originally felt that her struggle to stay home was an indication of shortcomings in her faith, only later coming to see discourses asking women to stay home as problematic. My participants began to wonder if their feelings of confusion, disappointment, and dissatisfaction could and should be traced to their identities as women within the Salafi community—and particularly their roles as wives. Salma explained:

I realized that my role as a wife, I’ve questioned it a lot, in the past couple of years. . . . I don’t think Allah wants you to be at home, looking after your children, serving your husband, being the dutiful wife. I think back, and I think you know what? I had a lot of dreams and aspirations when I was young, about what I wanted to do, and where I wanted to go, and that’s all disappeared over night once I got married.

My participants also began to observe the experiences they shared with friends or other women in the Salafi community. Nusayba, for example, a convert from a mixed background who joined the community in the early 1990s, began to realize that many women had “failed marriages,” and Rabiya discovered that Salafi men, especially the young ones, have a very “I’m the ruler, I’m the leader” attitude toward women that has led to the “breakdown of lots of marriages.”

For most of my participants, these experiences eventually resulted in a rethinking of Salafism’s treatment of women. For example, Umm Ibrahim, one of my participants from a South Asian background who joined the Salafi community during the late 1980s, shared how she had conversations with female friends during which they collectively reflected on their experiences within the Salafi community. She recalled:

I was saying [to my friends] I think it was the men that limited our ability to think and be more. It wasn’t us. Because the brothers were there, whatever they said, we would take. Whatever they told us our role was, we took it on.

Here, in Umm Ibrahim’s statement we can see a clear shift in her thinking; she no longer linked her troubles to her own personal failings but saw these troubles as owing to the unequal treatment of women. Salma also began to trace her personal problems, especially within her marriage, to Salafi gender discourses originally disseminated by men. She explained, “it’s the men, it started off from them, then I think the sisters that were giving the talks followed that narrative as well, without questioning, without thinking about it.”

Women thus began linking their problems to Salafi male leaders and discourses, going on to develop doubts about Salafism itself. The organizational fragmentation of the Salafi movement (Hamid 2016) has made it easier for women to make this link. Organizational fragmentation and fractionalization, as Klatch (2001) has also identified in her work, can lead to a lack of cohesion which often leads to a decreasing sense of community within movements. Economic pressures, especially for those in Brixton, Lambeth’s most deprived town center, have also interacted with and exacerbated the problems my participants faced. This was the case with women who found it difficult to stay at home and not work despite the economic pressures they faced. Rabiya, for example, mocked how men in the Salafi community have prevented women from working saying, “no I’m the breadwinner, even though I’m on the lowest salary and we’re living on a budget, you can’t do anything.”

Though my participants initially traced their feelings of confusion, disappointment, and dissatisfaction to their own personal failures and shortcomings, after repeated experiences of inequality in Salafi communities, they began to wonder if their problems could and should be traced to their identities as women and particularly as wives. This prompted a rethinking of Salafi gender norms and discussions about the unequal treatment of women in Salafi communities. The organizational fragmentation of the Salafi movement during the 1990s and 2000s and the economic pressures have in many cases additionally intensified women’s doubts about Salafi gender norms.

An Oppositional Consciousness

After identifying inequality within the Salafi community, my participants developed an oppositional consciousness which has involved the rejection of many Salafi gender discourses and the development of an alternative, critical approach to gender norms based on the Islamic tradition. As my participants began to describe the problems that women were experiencing in the Salafi community, they drew on religious frames to diagnose and solve this social problem. Umm Ibrahim, for example, drew on the concept of “blind following.” While Salafism encourages its adherents to avoid “blind following” and to follow only “authentic” Islamic sources and evidence (Hamid 2016), many of my participants began to see that they had in fact ended up “blind following” Salafi men, taking the discourses they touted for granted instead of thinking critically about and ensuring the validity of their claims. Umm Ibrahim recalled that “although we were trying to free ourselves from blind following, it’s almost like we went from one type of blind following to another, but in a different form.” Yosra also lamented blind following, explaining how she unfortunately didn’t realize at the time that she was “actually blind following this ideology [Salafism].” The fact that my participants drew on the concept of blind following is interesting not only because it demonstrates how an oppositional consciousness can employ religious frames, but also because it demonstrates how, in processes of religious defection, women can continue to find certain religious principles or concepts associated with their religious tradition valid, going on to use them in a critical way.

Like other Muslim women engaging in Islamic feminism, my participants contested interpretations or translations of Islamic texts used to justify gender norms (Rinaldo 2014; Van Es 2016). Fatima, who comes from a South Asian background, suggested that Salafism doesn’t offer a balanced perspective on rights and responsibilities of women and men in Islam, and that Salafi books aimed at women, such as The Righteous Wife, incorrectly focus on “how a subservient a wife should be to her husband” because Salafi men have chosen to translate some Islamic texts but not others. She continued “none of us knew Arabic, none of us can translate books, we were relying on the translations that were given to us, and the interpretations.” Samar, who comes from a Black African background, also now believes that men in Salafi communities have used their “prior understandings” to interpret the Islamic sources, which has resulted in misinterpretations and misunderstandings that have been used against women in the Salafi community. A few of my participants also suggested that there is nothing wrong with the Islamic texts themselves, but that they have been misused by men with “controlling” personalities to justify behavior they would have engaged in even if they weren’t “practicing [Islam].”

To contest Salafi gender norms, many women drew on examples of the Prophet’s companions, who are usually used to enforce Salafi gender norms. Salma, for example, has recently realized that Salafi discourses that referred to Al-Salaf al-ṣāleḥ (the pious ancestors) presented only one side of the story. Thinking back on Salafi classes, Salma explained:

Khadija (radiyya Allahu ‘anha [God be pleased with her]), she was a businesswoman, but that wasn’t the emphasis. The emphasis was the wife that she was, how much she supported the Rasoul [messenger] ṣalla Allāhu ʿalayhi wa sallam [Blessings of God and Peace Be Upon Him]. . . . And even with Asiyah (radiyya Allahu ‘anha), again it was more about her generosity, not necessarily on her scholarship, not necessarily on her amazing mind or anything, and the fact that she was a feisty person, she wasn’t a submissive wife that said, “yes sir and no sir.”

Salma explained that she began to do her own research about what Islam says about gender roles, and listened “to other speakers who aren’t following the Salafi persuasion,” who helped her realize that “a woman’s role isn’t just to be at home, feeding clothing, cleaning, wiping, all of that. That’s just not what it means to be a Muslim wife, or even a good Muslim woman.” Maliha, who originally joined the Salafi community in the 1990s, also similarly spoke about how “the examples we have from [Islamic] history are amazing,” contrasting Muslim men during the time of the Prophet and his companions with Muslim men in the community today who are “happy to put the responsibility onto their wives.” Hamida, drawing on examples from later Islamic history, likewise, questioned how women could be excluded from educational settings when “the first university in the world was founded by a Muslim woman.”

This oppositional consciousness has thus involved the rejection of Salafi gender discourses on women’s education, employment, and responsibilities at home. Samar no longer believes in Salafi discourses that discourage women from going out unless “necessary.” She explains, “I just feel like the society that we live in, that’s not really possible for a lot of us, and I don’t think it’s healthy.” Similarly, Yosra, who quit university over worries about free-mixing, now believes that “the ideal Muslim woman can still go to university and be a wife and a mother.” Aaminah, who comes from a Black African background and joined the Salafi community in the 2000s, now currently works in a research lab and is also no longer overly concerned with free-mixing. She explained how complying with free-mixing discourses would stop her from “going out into the world,” which is not necessary because she understands what “Allah has prohibited” and will not be engaging in sinful behavior while working with men in the lab. Jamila now thinks that “you can’t give someone 20 years of vocationalizing education and then just expect them to cook and clean and be locked in a home.”

Rabiya’s idea of the ideal Muslim woman has also changed substantially. When describing her wishes for her daughter, she explained:

[I hope] that she has good manners, is respectful. I imagine for her to wear hijab, I imagine for her to pray, I hope In Shā’ Allah [God willing]. I still want her to be academic, and have aspirations, and to be a woman that chooses what she would like, she’s not just going to let a man decide. . . . I want her to have a free sort of mind, to be able to make right decisions. I want for her to be a doctor, I want for her to be a lawyer, I don’t care if it’s a men’s environment. Let her be the best women Islamically that she can be in that environment. Allahu al musta‘an [God is our Refuge].

Rabiya herself has begun attending university after all these years because she now believes that it is possible for Muslim women to “still preserve their hijab, and their identity, and still get far.” Samar has also decided to explore alternative career opportunities instead of teaching, because she no longer sees it necessary to avoid gender mixing at work.

Some of my participants engaged in acts of resistance that were directed at their husbands. For example, as Maliha began rejecting the Salafi conception of the ideal wife, she began treating her husband differently. She explained, “Now, I’m actively not being it [the ideal Salafi wife]. So, for example, before I had an expectation of myself, that when my husband comes in, the food is cooked, now I’ve changed it, because I’ve thought actually, it’s not my role.”

Though Maliha still cooks for her family, she no longer goes out of her way to make sure there is always food ready for her husband when he comes home. After changing her behavior she discovered that having food ready for her husband was actually more important to her than to him, and that if there’s no food ready he “will just make himself eggs, no fuss.” Salma, whose children are now older, similarly spoke of how she’s made it clear to her husband that she no longer wants to be a “submissive wife.” She explained:

I think he knows now that I’m not going to be that person, so he can either accept it, or fight me on it. I’ve done it, and I don’t want to do it anymore. Not to say that I’ve had a really horrible path, or I’ve been downtrodden, oppressed, not that. It’s just that I did all the looking after, and the tendering, now I can do my own thing.

Departing from approaches to gender relations prevalent within Salafi circles and other gender-traditional religious communities that focus on complementarity between women and men (Burke 2012), my participants’ oppositional consciousness has involved the adoption of a more egalitarian approach to gender relations, albeit one that is much more focused on the rights that women are frequently denied, rather than their responsibilities. My participants now believe they have the same rights as men in terms of education and employment, and that household duties and responsibilities should be shared. Maliha, who currently has a job, frustratingly exclaimed that

for us, we can have a full-time job, but then we’re still expected to come home, cook and clean and make sure everything is done for the kids. Why is that the men can have a full-time job, and he comes home, and he’s expected to have a meal down.

She explained,

I want to bring up my boys up, to be embarrassed to ask their wife to do something for them. Your wife should ask you to do whatever she wants, but you as a husband, should be able to do everything to take care of yourself.

Hamida also spoke about how Muslim women have “a lot to offer” and should not be denied the same opportunities as men, lamenting how many men in the community have not shared caring responsibilities with women.

In recounting their new understanding of gender relations, several of my participants made references to British society. As we saw earlier, Samar, for example, spoke about how staying at home is not healthy “in the society we live in today,” while Aaminah suggested that complying with free-mixing discourses would stop her from “going out into the world.” These references to wider society suggest that my participants’ attitudes have indeed been influenced by the surrounding secular context. Yet for several of my participants, taking into consideration the society they live in does not contradict the pursuit of piety, but is critical to their new-found understandings of Islam. Umm Ibrahim, for example, now believes that one cannot simply speak of “Qur’an and Sunna” but must also consider the ‘urf, or customs, of a place—referring to how fiqh (Muslim jurisprudence) can be adapted to the customary preferences of people in different contexts as long as it does not violate any basic principles of Islam. She spoke about how the U.K. context, which makes completely avoiding men at universities and workplaces impossible, differs substantially from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries where Salafi scholars are based. Umm Ibrahim’s use of the term ‘urf here is further evidence of the use of religious frames to contest Salafi gender norms.

As part of this process of rediscovering what the ideal Muslim woman is, a couple of my participants have decided to remove their niqab and/or jilbab, no longer deeming them obligatory. They have decided to dress modestly and wear the hijab instead. I found it interesting, however, that not all women who developed a pious feminist consciousness spoke negatively about the niqab. Yosra, who wore the niqab for 10–15 years, took it off only after the London bombing attacks of 7/7. She explains:

When the attacks happened here [7/7] . . . that’s when I decided to take off my niqab, because at that point I could see fear in the eyes of the people in this country. . . . To be honest, I loved my niqab, I loved wearing [it], like I said, it made me feel a stronger Muslim. I’m not going to say better, but definitely stronger in my faith, closer to God.

In fact, Yosra still wears the niqab in certain circumstances—for example, when she is delivering marriage seminars. She explains, “I would feel very uncomfortable standing in front of men, talking about some of the issues that we have to talk about in a marriage seminar.” Farhana, who comes from a South Asian background, also still selectively wears the niqab, choosing to wear it when she is giving talks that will eventually be uploaded to YouTube, for example. The continued adoption of the niqab here may indicate continued attachment to conservative gender norms, but is also evidence of how the niqab is an empowering tool for these women.

My participants have thus developed an oppositional consciousness which has involved the rejection of many Salafi gender discourses on women’s education and employment, for example, and in some cases has entailed acts of resistance directed at the men in their lives, particularly husbands. The women have also developed a more egalitarian approach to gender relations, one that draws on religious frames. They now frequently reference examples of the Prophet’s companions to support their new understanding of Islam and gender relations, and contest Salafi interpretations or translations of Islamic texts used to justify inequitable gender norms.

Moving out of Salafism

As my participants developed a pious feminist consciousness, they began disaffiliating from Salafism. Though it took different forms and occurred at different paces, disaffiliation has generally been a gradual occurrence. Some women started decreasing the number of visits they made to Salafi mosques, for example, before discontinuing their visits altogether. For example, although Samar has largely stopped going to Salafi events and conferences to seek knowledge, she still occasionally visits her local Salafi mosque to socialize with friends who continue to regularly visit this mosque.

Two of the women have now joined communities linked to Sufism, an approach to Islam known for being inward looking and mystical (Malik and Hinnells 2006; Ridgeon 2015). Jamila, for example, was drawn to this spiritual approach to Islam after many years of strict adherence to correct ritual practice in Salafi communities. Once she started exploring Sufism, she was happily surprised to find that there were women scholars within the community. She explained that although in Salafi circles women frequently gave talks, she had never come across any women who were accorded scholarly status. “That did actually blow my mind,” she recalled. The presence of women scholars in Sufi circles encouraged Jamila to explore Sufism further. Yet Jamila also conceded that even Sufi communities do not go far enough in improving women’s place in society, arguing that “there needs to be dialogue of what is a woman’s place . . . and is it different for men and women really?” Jamila’s pious feminist consciousness thus continues to shape her exit trajectory, encouraging her to think critically about gender roles within this new community.

Unlike Jamila, however, most of my participants have not adopted another coherent, all-encompassing approach to Islam, nor have they joined another religious movement after disaffiliating from Salafism. Most women have simply moved out of Salafism. This moving out has sometimes meant no longer identifying as a “Salafi” and dropping the Salafi label, a label that has been the source of great contestation in Salafi communities (Dawood 2020). Some women have not, however, shed the Salafi label altogether, arguing that they still believe in the essence of Salafism—following the pious predecessors—but that they no longer identify with the modern-day Salafi movement. Moving out of Salafism for these women has meant the adoption of a more critical approach to Islam by which they (usually independently) try to discover what Islam “really” says about gender roles and other aspects of life. These women thus no longer listen (at least exclusively) to Salafi-sanctioned preachers and have become open to other non-Salafi interpretations of Islamic texts.

Importantly, these processes of disillusionment and disaffiliation have rarely led my participants to stop identifying with Salafism altogether. Women have continued to both consciously and unconsciously adopt other elements of Salafism. Jamila, for example, explained to me how she has still retained Salafi “skepticism.” She explains: “The idea of baraka [spiritual blessing], do something for baraka, if somebody said it to my husband, perhaps he’d just accept it, whereas with me . . . I won’t necessarily delve into all the practices that people do.” Moving out of Salafism is thus an incomplete process still underway for most women in my study.

Conclusion

In this article, I examine the experiences of 20 British Muslim women who, after joining the Salafi community between 1980 and 2010, have moved out of Salafism in different directions and to varying degrees. I show how, as they worked to become the “ideal Muslim woman” propagated in Salafi discourses, these women faced repeated problems in their educational, employment, and marital lives. After initially seeing these problems as owing to their own personal failures and shortcomings, they began identifying these problems as stemming from the unequal treatment of women, and in some cases the mistreatment of women, in Salafi communities during the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. My participants went on to develop an oppositional consciousness that draws on the larger Islamic tradition to contest women’s secondary status in Salafi communities and offers a more egalitarian approach to gender relations. A pious feminist consciousness, which I define as the use of religious traditions in a critical way to contest women’s secondary status, has thus contributed to these women’s disillusionment with and disaffiliation from Salafi communities.

Building on the emerging literature on women’s departures from gender-traditional religious communities, this article confirms concerns about gender inequality as a motivating factor for moves out of gender-traditional religious communities. Pious feminist consciousness is presented as a concept that can help to identify and explain instances where women may move out of religious communities that they no longer find empowering but continue to maintain pious sensibilities. This article, therefore, provides important insights into how piety and feminism can interact against the backdrop of secularism in Europe. It also provides one possible answer to an important question that permeates the literature on gender-traditional religious movements (Jouili 2011): Whether and how women may shed gender-traditional values? It suggests that some women may indeed move out of these communities and take steps toward the adoption of more egalitarian values that are informed by alternative readings of Islam. Yet it also importantly demonstrates how piety may remain a key concern for these women despite the secularizing influence of wider society. It offers a nuanced account of how women’s experiences may motivate their moves toward the discovery of an Islam that they deem to be both “authentic” and more in line with their lived realities.

This work also contributes to our understanding of the different forms of agency that women exhibit as they come to draw on religion to diagnose and contest gender inequality within their lives, community, and wider society. We see here how the development of a pious feminist consciousness has involved very clear acts of resistance. My participants have in some cases reversed earlier decisions not to go to university and resisted carrying out certain household chores. Yet they have also continued to cultivate their pious sensibilities, inhabiting religious norms that don’t quite align with “modern, liberal thought.” Some participants’ decisions, for example, to start wearing the hijab (instead of the niqab) after defecting from Salafism signify a “conscious act of self-cultivation in which the body is an instrument utilised towards piety” (Bautista 2008, 79). The accounts in this article provide further evidence of how women involved in religious feminisms, instead of simply resisting or complying with religion, can concurrently, as Dokumacı (2020, 244) has found, “make references to both feminist resistance and critique as well as religious compliance and affirmation.” Further research on women’s religious defection should thus not only be on the lookout for women’s acts of resistance, but also consider other, perhaps more subtle, modalities of agency that better account for the complexities involved in moves in and out of religious communities.