Women and Islam Myths, Apologies, and the Limits of Feminist Critique [Paperback]

Women and Islam is both an important book and a wonderful and exciting text. It should be required reading for all courses in Middle East Studies that seek to impart a serious understanding of the real lives of Muslim women. The study of Muslim women has become a battleground where the academy seems more concerned with debating whether Islam is good or bad than with probing how this religious system actually works. By bringing together texts written by Europeans, as well as by Muslim men and women in pre-modern Muslim Iberia, Ibtissam Bouachrine shows that womens lives do not comprise a unified story captured either by those who see only unremitting suffering and abuse or by those who find signs everywhere of their resistance. Through her creation of this literary dialogueand only someone possessed of a rich set of linguistic skills and literary sensitivity can discharge this kind of scholarly taskBouachrine is able to uncover the diversity of points of view about women and perhaps, more importantly, convey their meaning.This is literary criticism, intellectual history, and feminist theory at their best. In uncompromising fashion, Ibtissam Bouachrine's Women and Islam challenges received myths or partial pictures of both past and present Islam. Bouachrine courageously engages previous scholarship that had presented al-Andalus as a model of tolerance, early Islam as an ally of women's challenges to Arabian patriarchy, or the current Arab revolutions as potentially liberating for women, and submits these claims to a nuanced, impeccable feminist critique. This is a first-rate scholarly work with which specialists in feminist theory, Cultural Studies, both medieval and modern Arab literature, as well as history of religions, will grapple for years to come.Women and Islam is a refreshing, well-written, and heartfelt critique of a series of modern myths, apologies, and celebratory discourses that have been constructed about the role and status of women in Islamic socielÚ