Introduction
In one of my ethnographic visits, in a modest office in Kano, northern Nigeria, I see Aisha scanning over a project budget on her tablet. Her hijab is carefully styled, and her voice is calm and strong as she tells her staff how to use their resources for a new maternal health program. Later that day, she meets with community elders to present a strategy to encourage more young girls to attend school, backing her arguments with Quranic verses that stress the importance of learning. This image of Aisha, a professional, a leader, a strategic thinker, is a world away from the pervasive Western media portrait of the Muslim woman in this region, which is usually a silent, shadowed figure perpetually victimized by her culture, her faith, and patriarchal groundings in the area, awaiting liberation by an external savior. These are the types of women I have encountered repeatedly in my research on Muslim women leading faith-based non-governmental organizations in Nigeria.
The women I work with are not passive beneficiaries of aid; they are its architects, they are powerful agents of change who navigate complex landscapes of local patriarchy and global development politics with remarkable skill. So why do the reductive stereotypes of the “oppressed Muslim woman” remain so stubbornly persistent? This paper draws on their work to argue that Muslim women leaders in Northern Nigeria exercise a distinct form of agency, which is established through piety and ethical practice, that challenges colonial, secular, and liberal feminist assumptions about empowerment. Their story is a powerful corrective to the pervasive Western media portrait of the Muslim woman in this region as a silent, shadowed figure, perpetually victimized and awaiting liberation by an external savior (Abu-Lughod, 2002).
To understand how their work dismantles this stereotype, we must first see them clearly. We must decolonize this narrative so that we can begin to see these women and the strategies they employ in their INGOs as a form of agency that operates within and through religious frameworks to drive tangible progress in their community. This isn’t just an academic correction, it is a necessary step towards a more ethical and practical global feminism.
Aisha is not an exception. In my research, I have observed women such as Sherifah, a lawyer and the director of Al-Tanzil Young Islamic Forum in Kwara State, and Hafsah, a community mobilizer who uses the prophetic traditions (hadith) to persuade hesitant fathers to allow their daughters to receive an education. Their work is a living example of how religion can be a source of feminist action rather than a constraint. They do not see their faith and development as separate spheres; in fact, they consider them principal instruments for establishing legitimacy and mobilizing their communities. For example, when advocating for women’s economic participation, they frequently cite Islamic principles of independence and the story of the Prophet Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, a successful and wealthy merchant. They frame entire organizational missions through Islamic concepts of
To understand women like Aisha, we need to start by unlearning the frameworks that obscure their visibility. To accomplish this, we must examine postcolonial and feminist scholarship that challenges Eurocentric assumptions. In her essay, Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving, Lila Abu-Lughod forces a critical examination of the imperial and colonial ideologies that underpin the Western feminist desire to “rescue” Muslim women. She argues that this savior complex is profoundly intertwined in the politics of the War on Terror, where the situation of Muslim women is used to justify military intervention and neo-colonial domination (Lila Abu-Lughod, 2002, p.784). She notes that this discourse reduces diverse, complex lives to a single story of victimhood, ignoring the ways these women have been able to resist and survive for a long time.
When we assume that these women need saving, we allow ourselves not to see the important work that they are already doing. This dynamic is not new, it has its origins in the colonial period, as post-colonial feminist scholar Chandra Mohanty established in Under the Western Eyes, feminist discourses have often constructed the third-world women as a singular monolithic subject, ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, and victimized (Mohanty, 1984, p. 333). With this, she urged feminist scholars to oppose Universalist narratives that portray “Third World women” as passive victims of culture or religion. Instead, Mohanty advocates for historically specific analyses that consider class, race, and colonial power. This critique remains essential for any reevaluation of religion in post-colonial feminist studies. In her subsequent work (2003, p. 19), she expanded this critique by demonstrating that feminist theory itself is situated within global power structures that favor Western epistemologies. Oyeronke Oyewunmi further explains how colonial administrations imposed Western gender hierarchies on societies such as those of the Yoruba in south-west Nigeria, where social roles were not primarily determined by anatomy (Oyewunmi 1997, p. 12). The contemporary saving narrative is a direct link to this colonial practice of reordering the social world under the guise of civilization.
Saba Mahmood, in her work on the politics of piety, offers an essential tool for redefining agency, moving beyond the liberal feminist assumption that agency is always about resisting norms (Mahmood, 2005). In her ethnography of the women’s piety movement in Egypt, she shows how agency can be found in the deliberate and skilled cultivation of religious virtues. She asks us to consider agency not as the capacity to realize what one wants against the weight of custom, tradition, transcendental wills, or other obstacles, but as a capacity for action that is historically specific, relations of subordination enabled and created (Mahmood, 2005). For Mahmood, the women in her study exercised agency through practices such as prayer and modesty to cultivate pious dispositions, thereby forming ethical selves that found power in submitting to Allah’s divine will. This framework is indispensable for analyzing the women leaders in northern Nigeria. Their leadership is not necessarily about rejecting their faith community’s norms. Most of the time, it is about embodying pious disciplines, such as the profound knowledge of the Quran, impeccable ethical conduct, and a demonstrated commitment to Islamic principles, to build a foundation of unassailable credibility and authority from which they can lead. This is what Mahmoud calls agentive piety, a form of power built not by breaking rules but by mastering and redirecting them from within the tradition.
Sarah Farris’s concept of femonationalism describes the contemporary phenomenon in which Western governments and NGOs instrumentalize feminist rhetorics to justify nationalist, anti-immigrant, and specifically anti-Islam policies (Farris, 2017, p. 4). In this context, Muslim women are celebrated only when they are portrayed as embodiments of a moderate Islam that supports Western liberal values, or when their empowerment is perceived as a means to counter extremism. This creates a precarious tightrope for leaders of the INGOs that I study. They must strategically present their work to secure international funding, all while avoiding being cast as pawns in a project that stigmatizes their wider religious communities. Their agency is then exercised in the delicate balance of accepting resources without internalizing the problematic premises that sometimes underlie them.
The Muslim women leaders in northern Nigeria whom I studied carefully navigate these intersecting influences. Their work is a living example of how religion can be resourced for feminist action rather than a constraint. The women that I have interviewed and observed do not see their faith and their development work as separate spheres. In fact, their extensive religious knowledge serves as their principal instrument for establishing legitimacy and mobilizing the community. For example, when they discuss how women should be able to work, they cite Islamic principles of financial independence and the story of the Prophet Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, a famous and wealthy merchant. They frame and organize entire organizational missions through the Islamic concept of adl (justice) and rahama (compassion), arguing that improving maternal health, educating girls, and providing microloans to women are not Western imports but fundamental religious duties.
For example, FOMWAN (Federation of Muslim Women Association of Nigeria) was established in October 1985 with the primary aim and vision to empower Muslim women to become role models and contribute positively to the country’s economic and socioeconomic growth. Their aims were achieved through proper education and understanding of Islamic teachings and traditions. (Fomwan, 2007). This was not merely a performance for external audiences, it was the ethos of their work as laid down in their constitution. For instance, one director of an INGO in Kaduna, affiliated with Fomwan, explained her approach to skeptical male community leaders. She said to me, “When we teach a woman about nutrition, we are fulfilling the command to enjoin what is right. When we give her a loan for a start-up business, we are practicing zakat in its truest form, which is to strengthen the community.” By grounding their authority in piety and religious scholarship, they disarm potential critics of their work. They are not importing Western feminism, they are enacting a form of Islamic social justice that aligns perfectly with Mahmood’s theory on agency and piety, a form of power cultivated through rigorous ethical practice within the Islamic tradition. Scholar Sadiayyah Shaikh, in her work on Islamic feminism, affirms this approach, arguing that a rich ethical tradition within Islam provides a resource for critiquing patriarchal interpretations and that Muslim women’s hermeneutics is about reclaiming the ethical spirit of the Quran (Shaikh, 2009, p. 23). The women I study in their respective INGOs are practical theologians, asserting their beliefs through texts and action. Similarly, Isabel Apawo Phiri (2009, p. 75) discusses African women’s theologies as an important part of global feminist thought, arising from local struggles against both patriarchy and neo-colonial development goals. These works insist that African feminist theologies are productive and provide critical resources for both academic scholarship and activism.
Their affiliations with international donors are always places where they have to negotiate and develop strategic plans. Organizations like FOMWAN (Federation of Muslim Women Association of Nigeria) exemplify this practice. While they have partnered with global bodies such as the United Nations and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to advance social and economic development by channeling resources into girls’ education, healthcare, and skills development. They engage in a survey translational act. In their project proposals, the language of gender equality is often reframed as enhancing God-given roles in community development or as upholding Islamic rights to health and education. This strategic framing helps them get important, international funding and affiliations while preserving their religious integrity and avoiding accusations of promoting foreign values in their own country. (Fahm, 2017; Kurfi, 2018. Fomwan, 2017).
However, this achievement is fragile and is based on a constant financial problem. For example, FOMWAN has stated that, because of how they frame their work, they do not receive sufficient resources and sometimes lack independence from external donors (Fomwan, 2015). This reality forces leaders into a deliberate balancing act. They are acutely aware that their funding might be contingent on their usefulness to a donor’s “countering violent extremism” (CVE) agenda or their status as acceptable Muslim women. They walk a fine line, leveraging femonationalist interest to secure survival without allowing their entire mission to be reduced to it. As one woman puts it, “We accept the funds for our girls’ education program, but we refuse to frame our work as saving girls from Boko Haram, we are building a better society for everyone based on faith. Their agency lies in this conscious and critical navigation of the global aid industry on which they depend. This exemplifies Lamia Karim’s observation that NGOs must always negotiate their identity in relation to Western donors and local communities (Karim, 2011, p. 110).
Perhaps their most impactful work is the quiet, persistent challenge to patriarchal norms from within a religious framework. I have documented women leaders conducting workshops with both men and women, reinterpreting verses often used to restrict women’s mobility. An instance I frequently remember was growing up, when my mother and her friend, Dr. H.N. Adams, would put young girls together in a group after our madrassa and teach us the tafsir of Surah al-Nisa and other Quran verses on the rights of women. In these groups we explored classical and contemporary Quranic exegesis to redefine “providers” and “guardians” in ways that emphasize mutual responsibility, kindness, and the husband’s duty to facilitate, not restrict his wife’s spiritual and intellectual growth. We were taught this from a very young age, so that when we grow up, we understand our rights and we know what the religion expects of us. Looking back, it was a very powerful and sustainable form of change for me. It is slower and more complex than a top-down mandate, but its roots run deep because it is seen as culturally and religiously authentic rather than an external imposition. Amina Wadud, in her work, The Quran and Women, provides the theological backbone for such efforts. She advocates for her hermeneutics of tawhid (oneness of God), which reads the Quran holistically to prioritize this overarching theme of justice and equality over isolated topical readings or specific verses (Wadud, 1999, p88). The women in northern Nigeria are, in effect, practicing a grassroots version of this hermeneutics. They are not rejecting the text rather engaging in what Oyeronke Oyewumi calls a “cultural project” of reclaiming their history and redefining their roles within their own worldview (Oyewumi, 2003, p. 13).
Conclusion
The story of Muslim women in northern Nigeria NGO’s is a powerful corrective to monolithic narratives. It requires us, as scholars, educators, and global citizens, to adopt a more nuanced approach and to practice decolonization. The consequences for public scholarship are significant. First, we need to actively promote pedagogy and knowledge, as Mahmood argues that “Ritual acts of prayer are seen as objects of pedagogy” (Mahmood, 2012, p. 123). We need to stop using textbooks and media that solely portray Muslim women as victims or problems that we need to rescue or solve. We must educate about figures like Aisha, the strategic leader, and the intellectual traditions of Islamic feminism that empower her. This means putting the work of scholars like Wadud and other African feminists who have long been discussing these issues at the center of the discussion. As Amina Mama contends that ethical study of Africa requires the rejection of imperialist and patriarchal epistemologies that, for so long, distorted and disfigured African realities (Mama, 2007, p. 6). Our teachings must be an act of epistemic justice.
Secondly, for development practice and policy, successful and ethical international aid must stop circumventing or distrusting local religious institutions. It must work with and learn from leaders like these women, whose community-based methods are more sustainable and culturally appropriate than the projects they offer. Donors need to think carefully about how they frame their aid and stop using women’s right to push their own security objectives. Instead, they should trust local community members to figure out their own development path. Thirdly, to promote a true global feminism, we must expand our definition of agency and liberation to include the agency, piety, and strategic navigation practiced by women like Aisha. A feminism that cannot make space for religious objectivity or that assists piety solely as false consciousness remains parochial, not global. It represents the colonial gesture of imposing a single standard of liberation as the only one. As Mohanty asserts in her later work, decolonial feminist praxis entails promoting solidarity across borders by being mindful of the historical, geographical, and cultural particularities of specific movements (Mohanty, 2003, p. 249).
Decolonizing the narrative of Muslim women in northern Nigeria transcends mere academic inquiry, it is an ethical obligation that enables us to recognize, learn from, and authentically support these powerful agents of change who have been working in plain sight all along. By listening to their stories and analyzing them through an informed theoretical lens, we contribute to public scholarship that dismantles stereotypes and builds a more just and inclusive vision of global feminism.
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