Do you want to be happy? We are all looking for an escape from worry, stress and depression, and for ways to find happiness. This book presents the route to happiness in a nutshell, drawing on Islamic teachings and the voices of experts both western and eastern. So sit back, relax and read it from cover to cover, or dip into it a page or two at a time in between other activities in a busy life as a wife, mother, student or worker.
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
Women have more education, more money, and more choices than ever before. Yet, research shows we are less happy than women 40 years ago. Today, we can “have it all.” So why is happiness declining? In Happy Women Live Better, bestselling author Valorie Burton unlocks the secret to your personal happiness. She reveals 13 happiness triggers–choices that can boost your joy right now, even in the midst of deadlines, children, marriage, dating, and squeezing in a workout or girls' night out. Through these happiness triggers, you will learn to bounce back from stress and adversity faster. enjoy deeper satisfaction in your marriage and friendships. maximize career opportunities and increase your income. fight off depression, colds and other illnesses live longer! Valorie talks about the cultural shifts and modern challenges that threaten women’s happiness, such as increased stress from increased demands, earning more money than men, constant comparisons brought on by social media and reality television, and many more. Learn to navigate these issues and join thousands of women in a modern movement that empowers you to take control of your happiness.
Childfree and Happy examines how millennia of reproductive beliefs (or doxa) have positioned women who choose not to have children as deviant or outside the norm. Considering affect and emotion alongside the lived experiences of women who have chosen not to have children, Courtney Adams Wooten offers a new theoretical lens to feminist rhetorical scholars’ examinations of reproductive rhetorics and how they circulate through women’s lives by paying attention not just to spoken or written beliefs but also to affectual circulations of reproductive doxa. Through interviews with thirty-four childfree women and analysis of childfree rhetorics circulating in historical and contemporary texts and events, this book demonstrates how childfree women individually and collectively try to speak back to common beliefs about their reproductive experiences, even as they struggle to make their identities legible in a sociocultural context that centers motherhood. Childfree and Happy theorizes how affect and rhetoric work together to circulate reproductive doxa by using Sara Ahmed’s theories of gendered happiness scripts to analyze what reproductive doxa is embedded in those scripts and how they influence rhetoric by, about, and around childfree women. Delving into how childfree women position their decision not to have children and the different types of interactions they have with others about this choice, including family members, friends, colleagues, and medical professionals, Childfree and Happy also explores how communities that make space for alternative happiness scripts form between childfree women and those who support them. It will be of interest to scholars in the fields of the rhetoric of motherhood/mothering, as well as feminist rhetorical studies.
This book examines the transformation of the figure of the stranger in the literature of the modern age in terms of liminality. As a ‘spectral monster’ that has a paradoxical and liminal relationship to both the sacred and the secular, the figure of the modern stranger has played a role in both adapting and shaping a culturally determined understanding of the self and the other. With the advent of modernity, the stranger, the monster, and the spectre became interconnected. Haunting the edges of reason while also being absorbed into ‘normal’ society, all three, together with the cyborg, manifest the vulnerability of an age that is fearful of the return of the repressed. Yet these figures can also become re-appropriated as positive symbols, able to navigate between the dangerous and chaotic elements that threaten society while serving as precarious and ironic symbols of hope or sustainability. The book shows the explanatory potential of focusing on the resacralizing – in a paradoxical and liminal manner – of traditionally sacred concepts such as ‘messianic’ time and the ‘utopian,’ and the conflicts that emerged as a result of secularized modernity’s denial of its own hybridization. This approach to modern literature shows how the modern stranger, a figure that is both paradoxically immersed and removed from society, deals with the dangers of failing to be re-assimilated into mainstream society and is caught in a fixed or permanent state of liminality, a state that can ultimately lead to boredom, alienation, nihilism, and failure. These ‘monstrous’ aspects of liminality can also be rewarding in that traversing difficult and paradoxical avenues they confront both traditional and contemporary viewpoints, enabling new and fresh perspectives suspended between imagination and reality, past and future, nature and artificial. In many ways, the modern stranger as a figure of literature and the cultural imagination has become more complicated and challenging in the (post)modern contemporary age, both clashing with and encompassing people who go beyond simply the psychological or even spiritual inability to blend in and out of society. However, while the stranger may be altering once again the defining or essentializing the figure could result in the creation of other sets of binaries, and thereby dissolve the purpose and productiveness of both strangeness and liminality. The intention of “Monstrous Liminality” is to trace the liminal sphere located between the secular and sacred that has characterized modernity itself. This space has consequently altered the makeup of the stranger from something external, into a figure far more liminal, which is forced to traverse this uncanny space in an attempt to find new meanings for an age that is struggling to maintain any.
This book was written to remind some and to make others aware that we belong to God, and it is Gods right to orchestrate our lives. Men and women were created by God. Since God is the creator, He is the only one that knows what He created us to do and to be. Man should not dictate over others by telling them what they should do; unless, their words are coming directly from God. No one should allow man to manipulate them into following wrong teachings and doings. That is what the serpent did to Adam and Eve. All of Gods creation is important to Him, and all was created with a specific purpose designed by God. Although, this book focuses on women, it is written to everyone. The goal of this book is to help everyone see that God has something for them to do, and chances are they will not be fulfilled or happy until they are doing what God created them to do. Women especially are being pushed back, criticized, ignored, silenced, and abused in todays churches. The majority of Christian women are being emotionally abused by their husbands over church people and church matters. Christian women and their children are suffering due to mans ignorance. This book is written to encourage women that they are somebody; that they matter to God; and that they have callings given to them directly from God. This books goal is to show women that just by being a woman there are certain things that only they can do and certain ministries that only they can fulfill. The ministry of motherhood is exclusive to a woman. Not only is motherhood exclusive, but what God tells a woman to do specifically is exclusive to her also. No one else should do what God created a particular person to do. The impact is not the same.
Oxford private investigator Zo� Boehm struggles with the aftereffects of her violent past as she hunts for a killer--or has she become the hunted? Zo� Boehm has harbored a distinct aversion to death ever since she shot the man intent on killing her. So when Caroline Daniels takes a deadly fall in front of a train and her lover fails to turn up at the funeral, Zo� wants nothing to do with the case. But Caroline's boss is persistent, and as Zo� attempts to unlock the secrets of a woman she's never met while in search of a man who could be anywhere, she starts to wonder if he's found her first. And if he has, will that make her the next victim, or prove to be her salvation from a paralyzing fear?
