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

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.