The Woman Question in Islamic Studies
The Woman Question in Islamic Studies

Author: Kecia Ali

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2024-09-17

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0691263744

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The interconnected ways that sexism functions in academic Islamic studies and how to shift professional norms toward parity Despite remarkable shifts in the demographics of Islamic studies in recent decades, the field continues to be dominated by men, who often relegate other scholars and their work—particularly research on gender—to its periphery, while treating subfields in which men predominate as more rigorous and central. In The Woman Question in Islamic Studies, Kecia Ali explores the interconnected ways that sexism functions in academic Islamic studies. Examining publications, citations, curricula, and media representations, Ali finds that, despite the growth and depth of scholarship on Islam and gender, men continue to overlook women’s scholarship, even in work that purports to discuss gender issues. Moreover, media and social media dynamics make talking about Islam and Muslims for broader audiences especially fraught for scholars who are not men, particularly when the topic is gender or sexuality. Combining broad surveys with more focused analyses of a smaller set of texts, Ali shows that textbooks and syllabi continue to exclude women as historical actors and scholars and to marginalize gender and sexuality as subject matter. Finally, she provides a “Beginner’s Guide to Eradicating Sexism in Islamic Studies," offering practical strategies to help scholars avoid common pitfalls in their own work and contribute to broader professional transformations.

Qur'an and Woman
Qur'an and Woman

Author: Amina Wadud

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1999-06-10

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 0198029438

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Fourteen centuries of Islamic thought have produced a legacy of interpretive readings of the Qu'ran written almost entirely by men. Now, with Qu'ran and Woman, Amina Wadud provides a first interpretive reading by a woman, a reading which validates the female voice in the Qu'ran and brings it out of the shadows. Muslim progressives have long argued that it is not the religion but patriarchal interpretation and implementation of the Qu'ran that have kept women oppressed. For many, the way to reform is the reexamination and reinterpretation of religious texts. Qu'ran and Woman contributes a gender inclusive reading to one of the most fundamental disciplines in Islamic thought, Qu'ranic exegesis. Wadud breaks down specific texts and key words which have been used to limit women's public and private role, even to justify violence toward Muslim women, revealing that their original meaning and context defy such interpretations. What her analysis clarifies is the lack of gender bias, precedence, or prejudice in the essential language of the Qur'an. Despite much Qu'ranic evidence about the significance of women, gender reform in Muslim society has been stubbornly resisted. Wadud's reading of the Qu'ran confirms women's equality and constitutes legitimate grounds for contesting the unequal treatment that women have experienced historically and continue to experience legally in Muslim communities. The Qu'ran does not prescribe one timeless and unchanging social structure for men and women, Wadud argues lucidly, affirming that the Qu'ran holds greater possibilities for guiding human society to a more fulfilling and productive mutual collaboration between men and women than as yet attained by Muslims or non-Muslims.

Women and Gender in Islam
Women and Gender in Islam

Author: Jin Xu

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0300257317

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A classic, pioneering account of the lives of women in Islamic history, republished for a new generation This pioneering study of the social and political lives of Muslim women has shaped a whole generation of scholarship. In it, Leila Ahmed explores the historical roots of contemporary debates, ambitiously surveying Islamic discourse on women from Arabia during the period in which Islam was founded to Iraq during the classical age to Egypt during the modern era. The book is now reissued as a Veritas paperback, with a new foreword by Kecia Ali situating the text in its scholarly context and explaining its enduring influence. “Ahmed’s book is a serious and independent-minded analysis of its subject, the best-informed, most sympathetic and reliable one that exists today.”—Edward W. Said “Destined to become a classic. . . . It gives [Muslim women] back our rightful place, at the center of our histories.”—Rana Kabbani, The Guardian

Female Islamic Education Movements
Female Islamic Education Movements

Author: Masooda Bano

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-08-31

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1107188830

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book challenges the assumptions of creative agency and the role of Islamic education movements for women across the wider Muslim world.

Women in the Mosque
Women in the Mosque

Author: Marion Holmes Katz

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-09-23

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 0231537875

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Juxtaposing Muslim scholars' debates over women's attendance in mosques with historical descriptions of women's activities within Middle Eastern and North African mosques, Marion Holmes Katz shows how over the centuries legal scholars' arguments have often reacted to rather than dictated Muslim women's behavior. Tracing Sunni legal positions on women in mosques from the second century of the Islamic calendar to the modern period, Katz connects shifts in scholarly terminology and argumentation to changing constructions of gender. Over time, assumptions about women's changing behavior through the lifecycle gave way to a global preoccupation with sexual temptation, which then became the central rationale for limits on women's mosque access. At the same time, travel narratives, biographical dictionaries, and religious polemics suggest that women's usage of mosque space often diverged in both timing and content from the ritual models constructed by scholars. Katz demonstrates both the concrete social and political implications of Islamic legal discourse and the autonomy of women's mosque-based activities. She also examines women's mosque access as a trope in Western travelers' narratives and the evolving significance of women's mosque attendance among different Islamic currents in the twentieth century.

Soft Force
Soft Force

Author: Ellen Anne McLarney

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-05-26

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 0691158495

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The unheralded contribution of women to Egypt's Islamist movement—and how they talk about women's rights in Islamic terms In the decades leading up to the Arab Spring in 2011, when Hosni Mubarak's authoritarian regime was swept from power in Egypt, Muslim women took a leading role in developing a robust Islamist presence in the country’s public sphere. Soft Force examines the writings and activism of these women—including scholars, preachers, journalists, critics, actors, and public intellectuals—who envisioned an Islamic awakening in which women’s rights and the family, equality, and emancipation were at the center. Challenging Western conceptions of Muslim women as being oppressed by Islam, Ellen McLarney shows how women used "soft force"—a women’s jihad characterized by nonviolent protest—to oppose secular dictatorship and articulate a public sphere that was both Islamic and democratic. McLarney draws on memoirs, political essays, sermons, newspaper articles, and other writings to explore how these women imagined the home and the family as sites of the free practice of religion in a climate where Islamists were under siege by the secular state. While they seem to reinforce women’s traditional roles in a male-dominated society, these Islamist writers also reoriented Islamist politics in domains coded as feminine, putting women at the very forefront in imagining an Islamic polity. Bold and insightful, Soft Force transforms our understanding of women’s rights, women’s liberation, and women’s equality in Egypt’s Islamic revival.

Woman's Body, Woman's Word
Woman's Body, Woman's Word

Author: Fedwa Malti-Douglas

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2019-01-15

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 0691194653

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Woman's voice and body are closely entwined in the Arabo-Islamic tradition, argues Fedwa Malti-Douglas in this pioneering book. Spanning the ninth through twentieth centuries and covering a wide range of texts—from courtly anectdote to mystical and philosophical treatises, from works of geography to autobiography—this study reveals how woman's access to literary speech has remained mediated through her body. Malti-Douglas first analyzes classical texts (both well-known works like The Thousand and One Nights and others still ignored in the West) in which the female voice, often associated with wit or trickery of a sexual nature, is subordinated to the male scriptor. Showing how early Arabo-Islamic discourse continues to influence contemporary Arabic writing, she maintains that today feminist writers of novels, short stories, and autobiography must work through this tradition, even if they subvert or reject it in the end. Whereas woman in the classical period speaks through the body, woman in the modern period often turns corporeality into a literary weapon to achieve power over discourse. Fedwa Malti-Douglas is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas, Austin. Her books include Structures of Avarice: The Bukhala' in Medieval Arabic Literature (Leiden) and Blindness and Autobiography: Al-Ayyam of Taha Husayn (Princeton). Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Wives and Work
Wives and Work

Author: Marion Holmes Katz

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2022-10-25

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 0231556705

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

It is widely held today that classical Islamic law frees wives from any obligation to do housework. Wives’ purported exemption from domestic labor became a talking point among Muslims responding to Orientalist stereotypes of the “oppressed Muslim woman” by the late nineteenth century, and it has been a prominent motif in writings by Muslim feminists in the United States since the 1980s. In Wives and Work, Marion Holmes Katz offers a new account of debates on wives’ domestic labor that recasts the historical relationship between Islamic law and ethics. She reconstructs a complex discussion among Sunni legal scholars of the ninth to fourteenth centuries CE and examines its wide-ranging implications. As early as the ninth century, the prevalent doctrine that wives had no legal duty to do housework stood in conflict with what most scholars understood to be morally and religiously right. Scholars’ efforts to resolve this tension ranged widely, from drawing a clear distinction between legal claims and ethical ideals to seeking a synthesis of the two. Katz positions legal discussion within a larger landscape of Islamic normative discourse, emphasizing how legal models diverge from, but can sometimes be informed by, philosophical ethics. Through the lens of wives’ domestic labor, this book sheds new light on notions of family, labor, and gendered personhood as well as the interplay between legal and ethical doctrines in Islamic thought.

The Lives of Muhammad
The Lives of Muhammad

Author: Kecia Ali

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2014-10-07

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0674050606

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Kecia Ali delves into the many ways the Prophet’s life story has been told from the earliest days of Islam to the present, by both Muslims and non-Muslims. Emphasizing the major transformations since the nineteenth century, she shows that far from being mutually opposed, these various perspectives have become increasingly interdependent.

Feminist Edges of the Qur'an
Feminist Edges of the Qur'an

Author: Aysha A. Hidayatullah

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0199359571

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Aysha A. Hidayatullah offers the first comprehensive examination of contemporary feminist Qur'anic interpretation, exploring its dynamic challenges to Islamic tradition and contemporary Muslim views of the Qur'an.