Hungering for more.

Gendering the Spirit: Women, Religion and the Post-Colonial Response Durre S. Ahmed (ed.) (Zed Books, 2002, 244pp) ISBN 1842770276, $19.95

THIS GEM OF A BOOK IS essential reading for anyone engaged with issues of women and religion. While the topic has become increasingly "fashionable," especially in the post-September 11 context and with an over-emphasis on Islam, this collection of papers is decidedly not run-of-the-mill. Its emphasis is not the decrying of oppressive dress codes and fundamentalisms, and there's little feminist reinterpretation of verses. Instead, it offers a refreshingly cross-cultural reclaiming of the herstory of women's spirituality--for centuries often located at the challenging heretical fringes of the mainstream. It is a rich resource for understanding the scope of human engagement with the divine--and some of the temporal, gender battles that result.

Existing literature on women's relationship with religion has tended to be dominated by Northern-based anthropologists. Among this book's major contributions will be to have swelled the body of studies by women believers from within the traditions themselves and to have covered a wide range of faiths: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity. Moreover, while much of the existing literature focuses on women's daily experience of the politicisation of religion or alternatively on theoretical theological debates, this book unusually focuses on aspects of women's real-life spirituality. (The International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) in Sri Lanka conducted a research project on Women, Religion and Social Change in the late 1980s which examined precisely these issues, yet its final report has never been made widely available.)

Based on papers presented at a series of seminars, the book contains five case studies of women spiritual leaders in the four traditions. These "reclaiming" chapters--grouped as The Hidden Woman and The Feminine--are sandwiched in between seven papers covering theoretical examinations of the representation of women and the relationship between violence and the feminine in the different traditions. Many of these are highly useful summaries.

THE MAIN PERSPECTIVES THAT form the framework for the collection--outlined in the editor's lucid introductory chapter--have much in common with frontline feminist theory being generated by women located outside the global North or in minority communities: neither universalism nor cultural relativism, neither structuralism nor post-structuralism offer satisfactory frameworks for understanding women and religion. The aim is clear: an examination of "women's heretical (re)engagement with religion holds the possibility of reclaiming a spiritual, even socio-political space, which can be inhabited with dignity by both men and women." (p10). In sum, religion for women is not confined to theological hair-splitting bur is actively lived in the world of day to-day life. (p12)

LIKE ALL GEMS, THIS BOOK IS NOT without its flaws. The danger of reproducing seminar papers is that they are inevitably written for a sympathetic audience of like-minded participants. At least one paper (Grace P. Odal, "Mother Victoria Vera Piedad as a Mutya Figure--A Study of an Archetypal Image of the Self") simply didn't work for me as an "outsider," reading more like an oral contribution at a self-help group than a considered paper on women's spirituality. Seminar papers are equally notoriously uneven and thus the book contains some delightfully accessible pieces along with some that are impenetrably dense in places and others that verge on New Age-ish naivete.

Of greater concern are the essentialisms that creep into the text. One is the overall sense that the feminine is good and the masculine bad, instead of discussing femininities and masculinities--plural. This point is important in that many women spiritual leaders have had a male following (as evidenced by the papers) and equally that many women are very orthodox in their spirituality (not discussed). Another is the counterposing of East and West in academia and religion. Both are the natural outcome of the authors' experiential locations.

This book left one hungering for more: it covers only Asia and one wonders what would be the similarities and diversities of women's spirituality among, for example, Jewish communities, Afro-American Christian communities, animist communities in Siberia and elsewhere, and European women in New Age groups. There is still much to be written.

CASSANDRA BALCHIN works with Women Living Under Muslim Laws in London, UK. www.wluml.org