In 1928, a young Lebanese woman, Nazira Zeineddine al-Halabi, wrote a book called "Unveiling and Veiling", an indictment of patriarchal oppression in which she boldly stated that the veil was un-Islamic, directly challenging the teachings of wiser" male scholars. Considered by many an attack on Islam, it rocked the Muslim world and was banned by many clerics, although it quickly went into a second edition and was translated into several languages. In this latest addition to Makers of the Muslim World series, Miriam Cooke offers an intimate portrait of the life and work of this pioneering champion of Islamic feminism.
Negotiating Palestinian Womanhood: Encounters between Palestinian Women and American Missionaries, 1880s–1940s is the first analytical study to examine the American Quaker educational enterprise in Palestine since its establishment in the late nineteenth century during the Ottoman rule and into the British Mandate period. This book uses the Friends Girls School as a site of interaction between Arab and American cultures to uncover how Quaker education was received, translated, internalized, and responded to by Palestinian students in order to change their position within their society’s structural power relations. It examines the influence of Quaker education on Palestinian women’s views of gender and nationalism. Quaker education, in addition to ongoing social and political transformations, produced mixed results in which many Palestinian women showed emancipatory desires to change their roles and responsibilities in either radical, moderate, or conservative ways. As many of their writings in the 1920s and 1930s illustrate, Quaker ideals of internationalism, peace, and nonviolent means in conflict resolution influenced the students’ advocacy for cultural nationalism, Arab unity across tribal and religious lines, and responsible citizenship.
How realistic is the prospect of peace in the Muslim world? This question is the predominant focus for global analysis today, but its debate frequently ignores the cultural and social complexity of the Muslim world, reducing it into a system of states and select actors. This book addresses such a failing by exploring how the everyday interactions of women, in accordance with Islamic personal ethics, can offer the world a new interpretation of peace. In particular, it focuses on the women in Islamic societies, from Aceh to Bosnia, Morocco to Bangladesh, initiating a dialogue on the role of these women in peacemaking. This concentration upon the complex issues of the everyday both enables a detailed exploration of how people conceptualise peace and opens up new frameworks for conflict resolution. The discussions that emerge lead to a critical questioning of assumptions about peace as a state policy and cessation of violence. Drawing upon original research from different parts of the Middle East, North Africa and Asia, including Iran, India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Egypt and Sudan, the contributors offer a refreshing new look at Muslim women as peacemakers, challenging any assumptions of Islam as an inherently violent religion. Such a timely work provides new and important analyses on the role of Muslim women in forging new pathways of peace in the contemporary world.
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The challenges presented by feminism to traditional understandings of representation, normative values, power relations and the political are not simply the product of late-20th century thinking. Feminist Moments, in examining some of the pivotal texts in the history of feminist thought, demonstrates that these challenges emerge from a long and varied history of feminist writing. The volume brings together texts from literary and analytical works written by women and men, and from inside and outside the Western tradition, including Mary Wortley Montagu, Anna Wheeler and William Thompson, Nazira Zeineddine, Betty Friedan, Andrea Dworkin and Luisa Valenzuela. The volume is unique in offering close readings of key passages from the selected texts, making it ideal for classroom use; its original essays, all authored by specialists, will also be of interest to more advanced scholars. In juxtaposing and analysing a wide range of texts which despite their significance are rarely discussed together, Feminist Moments provides a fascinating historical narrative of feminist thought which will be highly valuable to students and scholars of the history of political thought, political philosophy and gender and literary studies.
This book offers an insightful look at the development of feminist theory through a literary lens. Stressing the significance of feminism's origins in the European Enlightenment, it traces the literary careers of feminism's major thinkers in order to elucidate the connection of feminist theoretical production to literary work.
‘Abd al-Jabbar ibn Hamdis (1055–1133) survives as the best-known figure from four centuries of Arab-Islamic civilisation on the island of Sicily. There he grew up in a society enriched by a century of cultural development but whose unity was threatened by competing warlords. After the Normans invaded, he followed many other Muslims in emigrating, first to North Africa and then to Seville, where he began his career as a court poet. Although he achieved fame and success in his time, Ibn Hamdis was forced to bear witness to sectarian strife among the Muslims of both Sicily and Spain, and the gradual success of the Christian reconquest, including the decline of his beloved homeland. Through his verse, William Granara examines his life and times.
Illustrating the collective power and relevance of feminist theory today, Mary Caputi and Patricia Moynagh have carefully selected a diverse international range of leading scholars and activists to critically assess key social and political challenges in the twenty-first century. This Research Handbook demonstrates a variety of feminist analyses that offer compelling insights into an array of topics, including police brutality, the carceral state, racial and sexualised violence, trans rights, climate change, and the denial of reproductive rights.
In this book Zeina G. Halabi examines the figure of the intellectual as prophet, national icon, and exile in contemporary Arabic literature and film. Staging a comparative dialogue with writers and critics such as Elias Khoury, Edward Said, Jurji Zaidan, and Mahmoud Darwish, Halabi focuses on new articulations of loss, displacement, and memory in works by Rabee Jaber, Elia Suleiman, Rawi Hage, Rashid al-Daif, and Seba al-Herz. She argues that the ambivalence and disillusionment with the role of the intellectual in contemporary representations operate as a productive reclaiming of the 'political' in an allegedly apolitical context. The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual offers the critical tools to understand the evolving relations between the intellectual and power, and the author and the text in the hitherto uncharted contemporary era.
Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792) aroused great controversy in his lifetime. More than two centuries after his death he still elicits strong views. For some he is the model of a pious religious activist who fought to establish a regime of Islamic godliness in the least promising of environments. For others, especially Muslims associated with mystic orders or who belong to the Shi‘i branch of Islam, he is a hate figure. Few would contest that he shaped the Muslim world. For over two hundred and fifty years the Wahhabi religious movement has rested on the twin pillars of a clear, compelling credo and an indissoluble alliance with temporal power in Arabia. Absolutist, uncompromising theology and political and religious ambition combined to make it the dominant force there, turning its champions, the Al Sa‘ud clan, from petty rulers of a middle-sized settlement with a talent for balancing interests, into the guardians of Islam’s Holy Places, disposing of the earth’s greatest identified oil reserves. This thought-provoking and incisive biography, which charts the relationship between religious doctrine, political power and events on the ground, is ideal for readers interested in uncovering the life and convictions of the man who founded the Wahhabi movement and a dynastic alliance between his clerical descendants and Saudi princes that has lasted to the present day.
