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.
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