Stepdaughters of Al-Andalus? Muslim Women in Southern Spain between Discrimination and Empowerment.

In the last fifteen years, Spain has experienced a remarkable increase in its immigrant population among which Maghrebien Muslims make up a significant percentage. Parallel to that a strong tendency to conversion to the Islamic religion has been observable in Andalusian cities like Granada and Cordoba since the end of the Franco regime. In the face of these two phenomena, anti-Islamic and anti-?Moorish? attitudes, which reflect different dimensions of discrimination, prevail in large sectors of the Spanish general public. These attitudes in fact are deeply-rooted and nothing else than historically transmitted stigmatisations of ?the other?. Especially afflicted by this newly emerging ?islamophobia? are Muslim women, whose social role, in the opinion of the majority society, is reduced to motherhood and obedience to their husbands, but who are becoming more and more an important protagonist in the process of forming a Muslim community. The ethnographic study presented in this paper addresses the largely unknown daily life-world of these Muslim female migrants living inside the secularising, but still mainly Catholic southern Spanish society. The paper analyses both the more general, often overlapping and mutually reinforcing sources and forms of citizenship-based, ethno-national and religiously motivated discrimination, and more specifically gender-related forms of exclusion. Such discrimination and exclusion comes both from the non-Muslim majority society and from within Muslim minority communities. Finally, these experiences of discriminatory practices are contrasted with official public definitions of and attitudes towards discrimination as well as with the awareness of ethno-religious discrimination and gender-based exclusion shown by non-governmental organisations and public institutions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]