Contesting Feminisms explores how Asian Muslim women make decisions on appropriating Islam and Islamic lifestyles through their own participation in the faith. The contributors highlight the fact that secularism has provided the space for some women to reclaim their religious identity and their own feminisms. Through compelling case studies and theoretical discussions, this volume challenges mainstream Western and national feminisms that presume homogeneity of Muslim women's lives to provide a deeper understanding of the multiple realities of feminism in Muslim communities.

Isabelo’s Archive reenacts El Folk-Lore Filipino (1889), Isabelo de los Reyes’s eccentric but groundbreaking attempt to build an “archive” of popular knowledge in the Philippines. Inspired by Isabelo’s ghostly project, this collection mixes essays, vignettes, extracts, and notes on Philippine history and culture... Blending the literary and the academic, wondrously diverse in its range, it has many gems to offer the reader.

This book focuses on the written heritage of Muslims in the Philippines, the historical constitution of chancelleries within the Islamic sultanates, and the production of official letters to conduct local and international diplomacy. The standard narrative on Muslims in the Philippines is one that centres political and armed struggles within the region. However, two important aspects remain unattended: the cultural and intellectual production of the sultanates, and the Moro involvement in Southeast Asian Islamic civilization. This book connects the development and personality of the Philippine sultanates into the regional context of local communities that adopted an international faith. Political alliances and religious missions altered different ethnolinguistic groups and furnished them with the Word, the Qur’anic message, and the Arabic script. Indeed, customary orality and Adab shaped a way of being and acting modelled after what was called the Bichara. Particularly, the book studies the Moro Letter as cultural craft with political meaning, and Jawi heritage in the Philippines. A general catalogue of Jawi manuscripts from the National Archives of the Philippines is provided as appendix.