Female Muslims in Singapore : negotiating Islamic modesty in a secular state.

• Main Author: Siti Nurfadhilah Binte Hashim.
• Other Authors: Caroline Pluss
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Religions::Islam
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/51732
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Singaporean Muslimahs (Muslim Females) express diversity in the level of adherence to Islamic form of Modesty. This paper claims that embodied knowledge and values generated through Secular State Education contribute to this phenomenon. Muslimahs need to constantly engage in negotiations to fuse the concept of Islamic Modesty into the Ideologies of Singapore (Neoliberalism and Meritocracy). While doing so, they face the possibility of religious compromise or are barricaded from access to certain opportunities like employments. Through verbal accounts of lived experiences and practices of Muslimahs in Singapore, the research deconstructs their negotiations of Modesty and found: (1) the mechanisms of formation and reproduction of embodied structures, utilizing Bourdieu’s idea of disposition and Capital and Cooley’s “Looking Glass Self”, (2) the effect of structures on their modesty (3) the expression of diversity. I hope that this research will provide a critical viewpoint for the comparative study of women’s agency.