The use of 'culture and religion to deny women's rights' by political Islamists and other patriarchs in Muslim contexts is an example of the power dynamics that disempower women. Women's empowerment in Muslim contexts is in crisis because political Islamists claim that religion itself sanctions women's disempowerment. However, the 'use of culture and religion to deny women's rights' is not limited only to political Islamists or to Muslim contexts. Such claims are also made by patriarchal elements in non-Muslim contexts, especially with the rise of conservative extremism across a range of religions. Yet these disempowering power dynamics that are occurring on the ground are generally ignored by policies, programmes and development interventions. In Muslim contexts, the Islamist political agenda seeks to impose a uniform construction of a 'Muslim woman' as the cornerstone of an equally constructed, supposedly immutable 'Muslim world'. Denying the diverse historical and contemporary realities of over a billion Muslims worldwide, intolerant Islamists are trying to impose all-encompassing gender system that strengthens patriarchal oppressions, undermines more gender-equitable Muslim practices, and reduces women to being symbolic boundary-markers without rights. Such a political agenda inhibits equitable development and democratisation.

Women who resist are condemned, ostracised, threatened, abused, and de-humanised. Overturning this political construction is therefore pivotal to women's empowerment in Muslim contexts. Contrary to spurious claims that women's empowerment is alien and illegitimate, women in diverse Muslim contexts have long negotiated for their rights through indigenous strategies. Most, however, have struggled alone, their strategies largely undocumented, their endeavours muted by violence justified as 'tradition' or 'religion'.

The WEMC programme documents and amplifies women's indigenous strategies for individual and collective empowerment. The programme is implemented in four nodal countries - Indonesia, Pakistan, China and Iran - as well as among cross-border communities. The cross-border research covers a range of supra-local processes, including migrations and diasporic networks, the convergences and divergences of women's empowerment strategies across generations and cultures, and women's resistance to spreading exclusionary systems. WEMC's aim is to build a body of new knowledge that will strengthen existing, bottom-up transformations that are culturally appropriate and socially sustainable. Cumulatively, such transformations promote democratisation from the inside out, with women's voices from within calling for accountability and equal rights. While WEMC research focuses on women's empowerment in Muslim countries and communities, its findings are relevant to other contexts where culture and religion are also being used to marginalise and disempower women.