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Some strands of liberal feminist thought have understood agency primarily through resistance to established authority and the assertion of individual choice. Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject challenges the assumption that agency must necessarily take the form of resistance. Drawing on the mosque-centred movements of Egyptian Muslim women, her central argument is that embodied piety, cultivated through religious discipline, self-submission, and the deliberate observance of divine commands, is itself a form of active agency.^[1] Adopting Michel Foucault’s notion of the technologies of the self, she reads the hijāb as a complex practice of ethical training, in which outward ritual and dress cultivate inner spiritual purity.^[2] Agency here is understood not only as liberation from power but as a process of ethical self-formation carried out within relations of power.^[3]

Against this theoretical background, two different readings of female agency and dress emerge. Certain liberal feminist interpretations regard communal boundaries as constraints on individual freedom and religious dress codes as forms of regulation. Mahmood, by contrast, examines how religious self-discipline can itself become an expression of agency, with dress serving as a practice through which spiritual devotion and ethical self-formation take shape.  Communal boundaries, in turn, can be read as more than a denial of individual freedom: they are social structures that protect a spiritual and ethical way of life. In the traditional Islamic scholarly tradition of Kerala, women’s social presence has largely been defined within this second framework. By organising life within Sharīʿa rulings, maḥallu discipline, and familial and social obligations, the tradition has approached agency on its own terms.^[4] Dress therefore cannot be reduced to a mere marker of control; it also operates as a social sign that reflects the community’s ethical identity and cultural continuity.

It is therefore historically incomplete to view the social and educational empowerment of Muslim women in Kerala, and especially in Malabar, solely as a product of modernity and Western feminist ideas. The historical record, however, points to several distinct carriers of change, and they need to be kept apart. Reformist currents from the late nineteenth century onwards, beginning with figures such as Sana’ullah Makti Thangal, pressed for modern and vernacular education, translation of religious texts, and attention to women’s rights.^[5] Such currents formed part of wider Malayali movements of social reform that cut across religious communities.^[6] The contribution of the traditional ulamā lay chiefly in a different register: the building of an institutional infrastructure for mass religious education. The Samastha Kerala Jamʿiyyat al-ʿUlamāʾ, formed in 1926, established the Samastha Kerala Islam Matha Vidyabhyasa Board in 1951 to coordinate madrasa syllabi and public examinations across Kerala.^[7] By 2009, one report notes, girls were ranking first at all four levels the Board examines, and traditional Sunni organisations that had earlier given little priority to women’s education had begun to open institutions combining religious and modern education for girls.^[8]

This evidence should temper any simple narrative of traditional scholarship as a driver of women’s advancement. Studies of contemporary Malabar show that ulama-authored books and sermons across factions often tie the educated woman to the roles of wife and mother, and that some widely read texts view educated women with suspicion.^[9] The claim advanced here is therefore a limited one. Traditional institutions supplied the infrastructure of religious literacy within which girls, like boys, were schooled; the push for women’s modern and higher education has come from several quarters, reformist and traditional, and has been contested within each. How far the maḥallu–madrasa network itself enabled women to take up wider educational opportunities remains an empirical question that further archival and oral-historical work could test.

Gulf migration from the 1970s brought remittances and educational investment, and contributed to changes in the socioeconomic position of the community and in family arrangements.^[10] Yet these changes should not be read as a purely economic transformation. Kurien’s comparative ethnography of three Kerala communities, including Mappila Muslims, argues that community-specific configurations of religion, gender, and status shaped how migration unfolded and were in turn transformed by it, producing reinterpretations of religious identity and of gendered behaviour.^[11] Osella and Osella likewise treat the Gulf as one strand, alongside older Arab links and wider currents of Islamic reform, in the making of Kerala’s Islamic reformism.^[12] These studies do not show that ulama-led institutions caused advances in women’s education. They do suggest that the effects of migration were mediated by existing religious and social structures, which is the more modest point made here. Empowerment in Malabar is thus not the outcome of a simple conflict between modernity and tradition, but of the interplay of reformist currents, religious educational institutions, global migration, and economic change.

Within traditional scholarly bodies, as among reformist groups, differing positions have existed on the extent of women’s presence in the public sphere, dress norms, the nature of education, and the limits of employment and social participation. Rather than reading these differences through a binary of support for or opposition to empowerment, they should be understood as distinct approaches grounded in how agency is defined within Islamic ethics. Malabar’s history is not simply one of tradition rejected: reformists argued from Islamic sources, traditional institutions adapted and expanded, and public debate between the two has continually redefined what counts as reform.^[13]

Seen in this light, it is inadequate to read the positions of Kerala’s traditional ulamā on women solely in the language of control. Their directives on dress, public presence, and interaction with men are attempts to regulate communal life from within a particular juristic and ethical system. A recent example is the circular issued on 27 August 2026 by the faction of the Samastha Kerala Jamʿiyyat al-ʿUlamāʾ led by Kanthapuram A. P. Aboobacker Musliyar, addressed to maḥallu committees, mosques, and madrasas. It asked that Milad-un-Nabi celebrations stay within religious limits and described the presence of young women among unrelated men on public roads and stages as impermissible.^[14] Critics across the political spectrum condemned it as anti-women, and Kanthapuram’s defence of it at a conference in Kochi, where he said women should remain at home, drew wider criticism, after which he stated that Samastha does not confine women.^[15] From the internal perspective of the scholarly body, the circular forms part of a religious authority entitled to define a faith community’s juristic distinctiveness and ethical boundaries.

This approach differs fundamentally from the cultural hyper-vigilance toward the wider public that is visible among social media celebrities and popular brands. The scholarly bodies address a specific religious community that accepts their religious authority and juristic principles. They are under no pressure to keep redefining their norms in order to win the approval of an external liberal public sensibility. Their primary responsibility, as they understand it, is to protect and regulate the religious life of their followers within the Sharīʿa framework. Behind this lies an institutional conviction in an epistemic authority, historically formed, to interpret religious law and guide its social application. In practice the ulamā have not merely proclaimed prohibitions; through sermons, printed manuals, classes, and maḥallu institutions they have offered guidance on religious education, family life, marriage, and women’s religious learning.^[16] The directives on dress and public presence should be read as a continuation of this wider role. When minority communities face pressures of cultural assimilation, the protection of religious symbols and norms of life becomes a matter of cultural continuity, which is why women’s dress and conduct become visible markers of boundaries in identity politics.

A crucial critical question nevertheless arises: why is the burden of safeguarding the community’s cultural and religious boundaries concentrated so heavily on women’s bodies and clothing? In Kerala’s changing social context, the Muslim woman’s body has become a site where two distinct processes of power meet. On one side stand the aesthetic, consumerist, and individualist norms of a dominant secular popular culture; on the other, the religious identity and ethical boundaries of a minority community. The dispute over dress cannot be confined to a simple opposition between freedom and control. It is a complex field in which individual agency, religious autonomy, communal responsibility, and cultural identity intersect. While some liberal interpretations emphasise freedom from constraint, the traditional Islamic framework discussed here also understands agency through conscious obedience to divine law and self-restraint.  The positions of scholarly bodies should therefore not be measured solely by the standard of liberal individual freedom; they must first be understood within their own juristic and epistemological framework.

In an era of cultural encroachment and rapid social transformation, the protection of religious symbols cannot be dismissed as mere traditionalist rigidity. It can also be read as a social strategy through which a minority community sustains its cultural continuity and religious autonomy. Yet it must also be examined whether this protective effort places an unequal burden on women. Younger pious women in Malabar themselves object that sermons and manuals dwell on wives’ duties while saying little about husbands’ duties.^[17] When communal morality is directed at women alone, men’s conduct, responsibility, and public ethics deserve discussion with equal seriousness.

The residues of colonial paternalism must also be recognised, which casts minorities as unenlightened people in perpetual need of liberation.^[18] To adopt the Western liberal way of life as the sole measure of emancipation, and to read difference as backwardness, is not to acknowledge pluralism. The decision of a Muslim woman who pursues higher education, employment, and social leadership while retaining religious dress and ethical commitments should be recognised as an independent form of agency.

A religious community’s right to define certain norms of social conduct on the basis of its own faith should be considered within the bounds of democratic pluralism, but such positions need not be accepted beyond criticism. Equally, women's empowerment should not be understood only as emancipation from traditional religious structures. Muslim women must also have opportunities to participate in education, employment and public life while maintaining their religious beliefs and ethical commitments. The Malabar experience suggests that religious commitment and social progress are not necessarily contradictory, although their relationship has been uneven and contested.

The positions of traditional scholarly bodies, including the Samastha guidelines, therefore need to be assessed at two levels: the community's right to maintain its religious and ethical boundaries, and the opportunities those structures provide for women's education, agency and social participation. Recognising the first does not remove the need to examine the second. This places a particular responsibility on contemporary ʿulamāʾ to open wider opportunities within the tradition for women's higher education, research, employment, social service and intellectual leadership.

The aim of Muslim women’s empowerment lies not in measuring distance from tradition but in creating social conditions in which women can establish a greater presence in knowledge and social life while safeguarding their own faith and cultural identity. By strengthening both religious autonomy and women's agency, rather than treating them as opposing aspirations, the Muslim community can engage more confidently with modern secular pluralism.

About the Author:

Muhammed Nihal K is a first-year postgraduate student in the Department of Societal Development at Darul Huda Islamic University, Chemmad, Kerala, India. He is from Karippur, Malappuram.

Reference:

[1]Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 1–39.

[2]Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 16–49. Mahmood develops her reading of the veil as a practice of ethical formation in chapter 4 of Politics of Piety.

[3]Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 14–15, 22.

[4]Shabeera Kolakkadan, “Islamic Piety, Corporeality and Agency: Young Mappila Women’s Dissensus over the Notion of Ideal Muslimah in Malabar,” Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics 8, no. 2 (2024): art. 29, https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/14941. Kolakkadan applies Mahmood’s framework to Malabar, examining how ulama-authored literature and sermons shape ideals of the pious woman and how younger women contest them.

[5]Kolakkadan, “Islamic Piety,” introduction, which cites L. R. S. Lakshmi, The Malabar Muslims: A Different Perspective (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press India, 2012), 87, on the educational, linguistic, and gender-related concerns of reformists beginning with Sana’ullah Makti Thangal.

[6]Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella, “Islamism and Social Reform in Kerala, South India,” Modern Asian Studies 42, no. 2/3 (2008): 317–346, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X07003198, which situates Kerala’s Islamic reformism within wider Malayali movements of social reform in which education was a shared concern.

[7]“System of Islamic Education in Kerala,” TwoCircles.net, 6 January 2010, on the founding of the Samastha Kerala Islam Matha Vidyabhyasa Board in 1951 and its examinations.

[8]“System of Islamic Education in Kerala,” TwoCircles.net, 6 January 2010, which also reports that girls ranked first at all four levels examined in 2009 and that traditional Sunni organisations, which had earlier given little priority to women’s education, had begun to set up institutions offering religious and modern education to girls.

[9]Kolakkadan, “Islamic Piety,” section on the ulema’s narrative. Kolakkadan argues that organisations running madrasas and women’s colleges often expect educated women to cultivate Islamic morals in their families rather than to claim wider rights, and she cites a widely reprinted family-life manual that portrays educated women unfavourably.

[10]Kolakkadan, “Islamic Piety,” introduction, on the socioeconomic changes linked to Gulf migration in the 1970s and 1980s.

[11]Prema A. Kurien, Kaleidoscopic Ethnicity: International Migration and the Reconstruction of Community Identities in India (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), an ethnographic study of Ezhava Hindu, Mappila Muslim, and Syrian Christian communities in Kerala.

[12]Osella and Osella, “Islamism and Social Reform,” which acknowledges longstanding Arab links and contemporary Gulf links as one strand among several shaping Kerala reformism.

[13]Osella and Osella, “Islamism and Social Reform,” which argues that public debate between reformist and traditionalist Muslims in Kerala continually shifts practice and redefines what counts as reform.

[14]“Samastha Says Young Women among Unrelated Men at Public Events ‘Not Permissible,’” The News Minute, August 2026, https://www.thenewsminute.com/kerala/samastha-says-young-women-among-unrelated-men-at-public-events-not-permissible (the circular is dated 27 August 2026); The Hindu, August 2026, “Kanthapuram Samastha circular on women at public events in Keralam draws criticism,” https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/kanthapuram-samastha-circular-on-women-at-public-events-in-keralam-draws-criticism/article71400500.ece; “Kanthapuram’s ‘young women should not be displayed on stages’ comment draws flak,” The New Indian Express, 29 August 2026, https://www.newindianexpress.com/states/kerala/2026/Aug/29/kanthapurams-young-women-should-not-be-displayed-on-stages-comment-draws-flak.

[15]“Keralam: Islamic Scholar Says Women’s Public Appearances Will Cause ‘Great Destruction,’” PTI, via ETV Bharat, August 2026, https://www.etvbharat.com/en/state/keralam-islamic-scholar-says-women-public-appearances-will-cause-great-destruction-enn26083005441; “After Backlash, Grand Mufti Kanthapuram Says Samastha Does Not Confine Women,” The News Minute, https://www.thenewsminute.com/kerala/after-backlash-grand-mufti-kanthapuram-says-samastha-does-not-confine-women.

[16]Kolakkadan, “Islamic Piety,” section on the ulema’s narrative, which documents how Friday sermons, recorded talks, women’s classes, and printed manuals address family life, and how mahallu committees and madrasas organise such events (see also n. 10 therein on the mahallu as a unit of mosque-based community organisation).

[17]Kolakkadan, “Islamic Piety,” sections on young women’s modes of contestation, which report that younger pious women object to a discourse that stresses wives’ duties far more than husbands’ duties.

[18]Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 783–790, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2002.104.3.783; Pallavi Gupta, Banu Gökarıksel, and Sara Smith, “The Politics of Saving Muslim Women in India: Gendered Geolegality, Security, and Territorialization,” Political Geography 83 (2020): 102257, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102257.

AI-use declaration: The ideas, arguments, and organisation of this article originate with the author, who wrote it first in Malayalam. Generative AI tools were used for translation into English, for language editing, and for assistance in locating and checking references during revision. The author is responsible for all content and citations.