New Studies of Women, Gender and Islam: Contextualizing and Historicizing Muslim Women's Lives

Abstract

Not much more than a decade ago, the academic study of Muslim women consisted largely of superficial attempts to read their contemporary realities directly from a random selection of sacred texts and patronizing assessments of the degrees of their immiseration. The progress made in the last decade with crucial contributions by Muslim women themselves and exemplified by Women in Muslim Societies: Diversity within Unity, edited by Herbert L. Bodman and Nayereh Tohidi, and Women, Work and Economic Reform in the Middle East and North Africa, written by Valentine M. Moghadam derives from the insight that the lives of the half a billion Muslim women in the are shaped by the ever-changing intersections between the specific histories and the contemporary global processes affecting their diverse communities. Therefore, such corrective scholarship, as Tohidi calls it, examines Muslim women's lives in the context of their societies: political histories and circumstances (such as colonial domination, nationalist struggles for independence, and minority status), mode of production and nature of socioeconomic development, specific state interventions and policies, local customs and interpretations of Islamic beliefs, and women's own agency and activism. Muslim women's lives are thus inflected by whether they are first world or third world, urban or rural; by their class, ethnic and educational backgrounds, and so forth. The two volumes reviewed here