A Genealogy of Islamic Feminism offers a new insight on the changing relationship between Islam and feminism from the colonial era in the 1900s to the early 1990s in Indonesia. The book juxtaposes both colonial and postcolonial sites to show the changes and the patterns of the encounters between Islam and feminism within the global and local nexus. Global forces include Dutch colonialism, developmentalism, transnational feminism, and the United Nations’ institutional bodies and their conferences. Local factors are comprised of women’s movements, adat (customs), nationalism, the politics underlying the imposition of Pancasila ideology and maternal virtues, and variations of Islamic revivalism. Using a genealogical approach, the book examines the multifaceted encounters between Islam and feminism and attempts to rediscover egalitarianism in the Islamic tradition—a concept which has been subjugated by hierarchical gender systems. The book also systematizes Muslim women’s encounters with Islam and feminism into five phases: emancipation, association, development, integration, and proliferation eras. Each era discusses the confluence of global and local factors which shape the changing relationship between Islam and feminism and the way in which the discursive narrative of equality is debated and contextualized, progressing from biological determinism (kodrat) to the ethico-spiritual argument. Islamic feminism contributes to the rediscovery of Islam as the source of progress, the centering of women’s agency through spiritual equality, and the reworking of the private and public spheres. This book will appeal to anyone with interest in international women’s movements, interdisciplinary studies, cultural studies, women’s studies, post-colonial studies, Islamic studies, and Asian studies.

This book traces the genealogy of ‘women’s fiction’ in South Asia and looks at the interesting and fascinating world of fiction by Muslim women. It explores how Muslim women have contributed to the growth and development of genre fiction in South Asia and brings into focus diverse genres, including speculative, horror, campus fiction, romance, graphic, dystopian amongst others, from the early 20th century to the present. The book debunks myths about stereotypical representations of South Asian Muslim women and critically explores how they have located their sensibilities, body, religious/secular identities, emotions, and history, and have created a space of their own. It discusses works by authors such as Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Hijab Imtiaz Ali, Mrs. Abdul Qadir, Muhammadi Begum, Abbasi Begum, Khadija Mastur, Qurratulain Hyder, Wajida Tabbasum, Attia Hosain, Mumtaz Shah Nawaz, Selina Hossain, Shaheen Akhtar, Bilquis Sheikh, Gulshan Esther, Maha Khan Phillips, Zahida Zaidi, Bina Shah, Andaleeb Wajid, and Ayesha Tariq. A volume full of remarkable discoveries for the field of genre fiction, both in South Asia and for the wider world, this book, in the Studies in Global Genre Fiction series, will be useful for scholars and researchers of English literary studies, South Asian literature, cultural studies, history, Islamic feminism, religious studies, gender and sexuality, sociology, translation studies, and comparative literatures.

Khadija was the first believer, to whom the Prophet Muhammad often turned for advice. At a time when strongmen quickly seized power from any female Muslim ruler, Arwa of Yemen reigned alone for five decades. In nineteenth-century Russia, Mukhlisa Bubi championed the rights of women and girls, and became the first Muslim woman judge in modern history. After the Gestapo took down a Resistance network in Paris, British spy Noor Inayat Khan found herself the only undercover radio operator left in that city. In this unique history, Hossein Kamaly celebrates the lives and achievements of twenty-one extraordinary women in the story of Islam, from the formative days of the religion to the present.

"A must read."—CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2022 "Holds up a mirror to the unifying, braided futures underlying so-called 'Western' and 'Muslim' feminism that are both undermined by the power of capital, the world trade order, and cynical geopolitics."—2023 Association for Asian Studies Coomaraswamy Book Prize A crystal-clear account of the entangled history of Western and Muslim feminisms. Western feminists, pundits, and policymakers tend to portray the Muslim world as the last and most difficult frontier of global feminism. Challenging this view, Elora Shehabuddin presents a unique and engaging history of feminism as a story of colonial and postcolonial interactions between Western and Muslim societies. Muslim women, like other women around the world, have been engaged in their own struggles for generations: as individuals and in groups that include but also extend beyond their religious identity and religious practices. The modern and globally enmeshed Muslim world they navigate has often been at the weaker end of disparities of wealth and power, of processes of colonization and policies of war, economic sanctions, and Western feminist outreach. Importantly, Muslims have long constructed their own ideas about women’s and men’s lives in the West, with implications for how they articulate their feminist dreams for their own societies. Stretching from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment era to the War on Terror present, Sisters in the Mirror shows how changes in women’s lives and feminist strategies have consistently reflected wider changes in national and global politics and economics. Muslim women, like non-Muslim women in various colonized societies and non-white and poor women in the West, have found themselves having to negotiate their demands for rights within other forms of struggle—for national independence or against occupation, racism, and economic inequality. Through stories of both well-known and relatively unknown figures, Shehabuddin recounts instances of conflict alongside those of empathy, collaboration, and solidarity across this extended period. Sisters in the Mirror is organized around stories of encounters between women and men from South Asia, Britain, and the United States that led them, as if they were looking in a mirror, to pause and reconsider norms in their own society, including cherished ideas about women’s roles and rights. These intertwined stories confirm that nowhere, in either Western or Muslim societies, has material change in girls’ and women’s lives come easily or without protracted struggle.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In Forging the Ideal Educated Girl, Shenila Khoja-Moolji traces the figure of the ‘educated girl’ to examine the evolving politics of educational reform and development campaigns in colonial India and Pakistan. She challenges the prevailing common sense associated with calls for women’s and girls’ education and argues that such advocacy is not simply about access to education but, more crucially, concerned with producing ideal Muslim woman-/girl-subjects with specific relationships to the patriarchal family, paid work, Islam, and the nation-state. Thus, discourses on girls’/ women’s education are sites for the construction of not only gender but also class relations, religion, and the nation.

Developed in response to the events of September 11, 2001, these 14 articles from prominent Muslim thinkers offer a provocative reassessment of Islam's relationship with the modern world. Confronting issues such as racism, justice, sexuality and gender, this book reveals the real challenges faced by Muslims of both sexes in contemporary Western society. A probing, frank, and intellectually refreshing testament to the capacity of Islam for renewal, change, and growth, these articles from fifteen Muslim scholars and activists address the challenging and complex issues that confront Muslims today. Avoiding fundamentalist and apologetic approaches, the book concentrates on the key areas of debate in progressive Islamic thought: "Contemporary Islam," "Gender Justice," and "Pluralism." With further contributions on subjects as diverse and controversial as the alienation of Muslim youth; Islamic law, marriage, and feminism; and the role of democracy in Islam, this volume will prove thought-provoking for all those interested in the challenges of justice and pluralism facing the Muslim world as it confronts the twenty-first century.

The book, Economic Empowerment of Women in the Islamic World, discusses the economic, social, and political rights and status of women in Islam, which is theoretically given by the Islamic Jurisprudence (Shariah law). The chapters in this volume will address historical practices in comparison to the status of women in the contemporary Muslim world. Men and women in Islam, regardless of their age, social class, and education, are equal as citizens and individuals, but not identical in their rights and responsibilities. It can be observed from Islamic history that in the early age of Islam, women were given full confidence, trust, and high responsibilities in leadership, educational guidance, and decision-making.This volume will try to clarify the confusion in the status of the women in Islam that is presented by the media, as it is assumed that theoretical Islamic empowerment of women bears little relation to the real conditions of women in modern Muslim societies. It has been widely claimed in the media that Muslim women suffer more than men in Muslim societies and communities in terms of insecurity, domestic abuse, and low access to education and medical care. It is also stated in the press and media that absence of good governance also results in gender inequality and violation of the rights of Muslim women.This volume also aims to provide the solutions for the empowerment of women in the Islamic world. We assumed that without good governance, the status of women is not likely to improve. Muslim women have the potential to play a fundamental role in curbing corruption, social ills, violence, and crime in the Muslim world. This volume will make the case that in order to achieve stability and prosperity, the government must ensure a platform for women to participate in decision-making and hence benefit from the rights they are accorded in Islam.By covering a range of perspectives on the economic lives of Muslim women around the world, it hopes to shed light on the problems faced and to offer possible solutions to the empowerment of women in the Islamic world.

This history of Middle Eastern women is the first to survey gender relations in the Middle East from the earliest Islamic period to the present. Outstanding scholars analyze a rich array of sources ranging from histories, biographical dictionaries, law books, prescriptive treatises, and archival records, to the Traditions (hadith) of the Prophet and imaginative works like the Thousand and One Nights, to modern writings by Middle Eastern women and by Western writers. They show that gender boundaries in the Middle East have been neither fixed nor immutable: changes in family patterns, religious rituals, socio-economic necessity, myth and ideology—and not least, women’s attitudes—have expanded or circumscribed women’s roles and behavior through the ages.

While many in the West regard feminism and Islam as a contradiction in terms, many Muslims in the East have perceived Western feminist forces in their midst as an assault upon their culture. In this career-spanning collection of influential essays, Margot Badran presents the feminisms that Muslim women have created, and examines Islamic and secular feminist ideologies side by side. Borne out of over two decades of work, this important volume combines essays from a variety of sources, ranging from those which originated as conference papers to those published in the popular press. Also including original material written specifically for this book, "Feminism and Islam" provides a unique and wide-ranging contribution to the field of Islam and gender studies.