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Reviews Leila Ahmed. Women and Gender in Islam Reviews Leila Ahmed. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Pp. viii + 296. ISBN 0- 300-04942-0. Reviewed by Valene J. Hoffman-Ladd. This book responds to a genuine need in the fields of Middle Eastern, women's, and Islamic studies for a comprehensive treatment of the sensitive and often controversial subject of women and gender m Islam. Until recently, there have been no book-length works m the English language dealing with Muslim women from a lustorical perspective. Those works that have come to fill that gap have either been collections of essays gUikk1 Keddie and Beth Baron, eds., Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries In Sex and Gender [New Haven: Yale Umversity Press, 1991]) or works dealing with a very limited topic (Judith E. Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt [Cambndge: Cambndge Umversity Press, 1985 ]). Other works dealing with gender issues have usually been heavily weighted with theoretical or apologetic biases that yielded either mcomplete or distorted perspectives on women in Island It is therefore a great pleasure to note that this book is histoncally precise, meticulously wntten, comprehensive m its objectives, nch m details, and unusually well-balanced. The book draws from a broad range of sources-scriptural, legalistic, mystical, historical, anthropological, and literary-m its analysis of the status of women in Islam from the time of Muhammad to the present. Ahmed begms with an inventory of female status and subjugation in pre- Islamic societies of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, a project that is virtually necessitated by the nature of the polemics that surround the issue of I Of these, the best and most ongmal is FatimaMemissi's Beyond the Veil:Male-Female DynamicsIn MuslimSociety (Cambndge, MA: SchenkmanPublishing Co., 1975; revised ed. London:Al Saqi Books, 1985). Memissi'sexcellent, mcisive analysis has becomesomething of a classic m the field of Middle East women's studies, but taken alone it presents an unbalancedperspective on womenm Islamand sometimesdistorts the basicmeaning of Queanic verses. 178 women's status in Islam. While Westerners have often condemned Islam as an entire religious system on the basis of its treatment of women, Muslims often claim that Islam vastly improved the position of women over their situation in pre-Islamic Arabia, and that the customs of veiling and seclusion were not origmally Islamic, but were bofrowed by Muslims from surrounding cultures. In this section, Ahmed relies on the work of other scholars who have studied the earlier cultures. She states that the subordination of women originated with urbanization, basmg this assumption on scholarly literature attesting to the prominence of female figunnes m prehistoric wall drawings and the fact that goddesses were worshipped in many pre-urban societies. The assumption that the worship of goddesses indicates high social status for women is flawed, as is evident from a consideration of India or ancient Greece. Indeed, Ahmed herself notes that although the ancient Arabs worshipped goddesses, whom they called the "daughters of Allah," they considered it shameful to have daughters for themselves, and the practice of female infanticide was common. So, she concludes, "the existence of goddesses m the late Jahilia period did not mean a concomitant valuation of females above or equal to males" however, reflecting on the implications of this fact for the validity of her earlier assessments of the position of women in prehistonc and ancient societies. This is, however, an isolated flaw m what is, for the most part, a tight analysis. Women m the pre-Islamic societies in the region outside Arabia were by and large debased, reduced to their reproductive functions, and considered the property of men to dispose of as they liked. Only in the Chnstian exaltation of celibacy does Ahmed find a way for women to claim spiritual and moral authonty, striking "at the roots of the definition of women as essentially and exclusively biological beings" (22). Nonetheless, she notes that their sexuality often played a central role m their martyrdoms. Ahmed's analysis of pre-Islamic Arabian and early Muslim society employs the too-often neglected work of Nabia Abbott which, published m several articles in the early 1940s, remams the most vivid, detailed, and accurate analysis to date on this subject. She adds to this her own insights gleaned from examination of the primary sources m Arabic. Perhaps as an expiation for the past sms of Western scholars who wrongly vilified Islam, some recent authors have gone to the other extreme of accepting the claims of Muslim apologists that Islam vastly improved the status of women m Arabia, often without any historical justification.2 Ahmed's depiction of the 2 For example,John Esposito,Women In MuslimFamily Law (Syracuse,NY. Syracuse UniversityPress, 1982), 14-15, says that m pre-IslamicArabia mamage was a contract that closely resembleda sale throughwhich a womanbecame the propertyof her husband. In fact, as Ahmed pomts out, there were many types of mamage arrangementsm pre-lslamicArabia, .
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