Seeking Knowledge: Muslim Women, Islamic Education, and a Guénonian Critique of Secular Anthropology

Abstract

In the decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan witnessed a remarkable religious revival. Among its significant developments has been the growing number of young Muslim women seeking Islamic knowledge through formal and informal means. This thesis offers a metaphysical critique of secular anthropological approaches to Islamic revival, focusing on women’s pursuit of religious education in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. While much of the existing literature, shaped by liberal and feminist paradigms, interprets Muslim women’s piety as a form of ethical self-fashioning or agency within social structures, such readings, I argue, remain limited by immanentist assumptions. Drawing on the metaphysical insights of René Guénon, this thesis critiques the modern epistemological foundations underlying secular anthropology. It proposes that Islamic self-cultivation must be understood not merely as ethical practice, but as a reorientation toward transcendent Truth and spiritual order. Through a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and theoretical analysis, I investigate how women seek religious knowledge in a landscape shaped by Soviet-era secularism, postcolonial nation-building, and global Islamic currents. I ask: What motivates their turn to Islamic learning? What is the significance of religious knowledge and education for these young women? Does it transcend the functionalist or corporeal utility and acquire metaphysical value as a path towards the Divine? What is the role of contemporary secularized institutions of Islamic education in religious self-cultivation of young women? Does it align with the spiritual function of religious knowledge? To answer these questions, I adopt a relatively novel theoretical approach. It explores the roles of Islamic educational institutions, the motivations behind women’s engagement in Islamic education, and the inadequacy of prevailing conceptual tools to account for these phenomena. As a response to the calls for a post-secular anthropology and more integration between anthropology and theology, the study introduces a Guénonian framework that situates piety within the metaphysical order of tradition, rather than within the confines of modern subjectivity. Through this lens, I aim to produce an anthropology of Islamic education that takes seriously both the historical specificities and the metaphysical depth of women’s learning practices in post-Soviet Central Asia.