Women and gender in Islam : historical roots of a modern debate

Are Islamic societies inherently oppressive to women? Is the trend among Islamic women to appear once again in veils and other traditional clothing a symbol of regression or an effort to return to a “pure†? Islam that was just and fair to both sexes? In this book Leila Ahmed adds a new perspective to the current debate about women and Islam by exploring its historical roots, tracing the developments in Islamic discourses on women and gender from the ancient world to the present. In order to distinguish what was distinctive about the earliest Islamic doctrine on women, Ahmed first describes the gender systems in place in the Middle East before the rise of Islam. She then focuses on those Arab societies that played a key role in elaborating the dominant Islamic discourses about women and gender: Arabia during the period in which Islam was founded; Iraq during the classical age, when the prescriptive core of legal and religious discourse on women was formulated; and Egypt during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when exposure to Western societies led to dramatic social change and to the emergence of new discourses on women. Throughout, Ahmed not only considers the Islamic texts in which central ideologies about women and gender developed or were debated but also places this discourse in its social and historical context. Her book is thus a fascinating survey of Islamic debates and ideologies about women and the historical circumstances of their position in society, the first such discussion using the analytic tools of contemporary gender studies. CONTENTS 5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 7 INTRODUCTION 9 PART I: The Pre-Islamic Middle East 19 Chapter 1. Mesopotamia 19 Chapter 2. The Mediterranean Middle East 33 PART 2: Founding Discourses 49 Chapter 3. Women and the Rise of Islam 49 Chapter 4. The Transitional Age 72 Chapter 5 Elaboration of the Founding Discourses 87 Chapter 6. Medieval Islam 110 PARTS 3: New Discourses 135 Chapter 7. Social and Intellectual Change 135 Chapter 8. The Discourse of the Veil 152 Chapter 9. The First Feminists 177 Chapter 10. Divergent Voices 197 Chapter 11. The Struggle for the Future 216 CONCLUSION 243 NOTES 257 INDEX 288 Explores the historical roots of the debate about women in Islamic societies by tracing the developments in Islamic discourses on women and gender up to the present. The book describes the gender systems in place in the Middle East both before and after the rise of Islam I BEGAN THIS BOOK WITH THE INTENTION OF BRINGing together such information and insights as were currently available on the conditions and lives of women in Middle Eastern Arab history.