Democracy, Gender, and Indian Muslim Modernity in Trinidad

Abstract

In chapter 11, Gabrielle Jamela Hosein ethnographically examines the 2004 election of the President General and Executive of the Anjuman Sunnat al Jamaat Association (ASJA) in Trinidad and Tobago. She focuses on deliberations over what determines the spiritually “correct” practice of racial, class, and religious distinctions as well as participation in bureaucratic, democratic, and constitutional sources of power. Gendered negotiations over such ideals of spirituality in the election illustrate how investments in patriarchal status, religious authenticity, and middle-class respectability produce specific configurations and meanings of democracy among these Indo-Muslims. On this basis, Hosein shows how governance gains significance in the contemporary management of gender and community boundaries, national belonging, and Indo-Muslim modernities. She therefore explains why women’s contestations over authority and governance in the ASJA seek to maintain gendered notions of purity and authenticity even while insisting that authority, and even patriarchal authority, must not be power by any means.

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