Just a Cup of Tea? Jewish-Muslim Interfaith Activism and the Gendered Politics of Representation

Abstract

During the past 15 years, there has been a rapid increase in interfaith initiatives in the United Kingdom. Even though the “interfaith industry,” as some have cynically called it, has rapidly increased, the involvement of women in these groups has been relatively low. Based on ethnographic data, including 20 interviews and 3 years of fieldwork with female interfaith activists in the United Kingdom (2017–2020), this ethnography focuses on the emergence of Jewish and Muslim female interfaith initiatives, analyzing the creative ways religious women negotiate their challenges and struggles as women of faith, together. I examine the ways Jewish and Muslim women form nuanced representations of female piety that disrupt “strictly observant” gendered representations, thus diversifying the binary categories of what being Jewish, or Muslim, entails. Further, whereas former studies have focused on interfaith settings as crucial for the construction of religious identities, I show that interfaith activism also serves as a site for religious minorities to learn how to become British citizens. In a highly politicized Britain, where allegations of racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia prevail, I argue that Jewish-Muslim encounters are sites for the construction and performances of British civic citizenship well beyond the prescriptions of the state. Drawing on these findings, I situate interfaith activism at the anthropological intersection of gender, religion, and citizenship, and as a site that reproduces and disrupts minority-state relationality.