Hind Elhinnawy, "Secular Muslim Feminism: An Alternative Voice in the War of Ideas" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025)

In the latest episode of Unlocking Academia, your host, Tarin Ahmed, is joined by guest Dr Hind Elhinnawy, a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Nottingham Trent University and co-director of the Critical Criminology and Social Justice Research Group. Discussing her book, Secular Muslim Feminism: An Alternative Voice in the War of Ideas (Bloomsbury 2024), they unpack the intellectual and personal motivations behind this work, tracing how over two decades of feminist activism and scholarship across the Middle East and Europe have informed Elhinnawy’s thinking.  Secular Muslim Feminism explores how simplistic narratives of oppression and empowerment obscure the lived complexities of Muslim women’s experiences, and how the selective celebration of religious agency can sometimes reinforce the very patriarchal structures feminism seeks to dismantle. The episode also examines how the language of women’s rights has been appropriated by far-right and Islamophobic actors, and what it means to actively resist that co-option. At its core, Secular Muslim Feminism insists on a feminist politics that refuses easy alignment: one that will not be absorbed into Western liberal paternalism, nor constrained by conservative religious authority. This episode invites listeners behind the scenes of that argument, opening up the tensions, risks, and possibilities of staking out a feminist position that sits deliberately at the margins, yet speaks urgently to some of the most pressing debates of our time.