Product Description: Presents multifaceted aspects of Asian Muslim women’s lives and agencies. This book resists the homogenization of Muslim women by detailing the diversity in their lives and by challenging the dominant paradigm of Arabized Islam as the sole interpreter of the faith...read more

Muslim women of all ages, economic status, educational backgrounds, sexual orientations, and from different parts of historically Muslim countries suffer the kinds of atrocities that violate common understandings of human rights and are normally denounced as criminal or pathological, yet these actions are sustained because they uphold some religious doctrine or some custom blessed by local traditions. Ironically, while instances of abuse meted out to women and even female children are routine, scholarship about Muslim women in the post 9/11 era has rarely focused attention on them, preferring to speak of women’s agency and resistance. Too few scholars are willing to tell the complicated, and at times harrowing, stories of Muslim women's lives. Women and Islam: Myths, Apologies, and the Limits of Feminist Critique radically rethinks the celebratory discourse constructed around Muslim women’s resistance. It shows instead the limits of such resistance and the restricted agency given women within Islamic societies. The book does not center on a single historical period. Rather, it is organized as a response to five questions that have been central to upholding the 'resistance discourse': What is the impact of the myth of al-Andalus on a feminist critique? What is the feminist utility of Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism? Is Islam compatible with a feminist agenda? To what extent can Islamic institutions, such as the veil, be liberating for women? Will the current Arab uprisings yield significant change for Muslim women? Through examination of these core questions, Bouachrine calls for a shift in the paradigm of discourse about feminism in the Muslim world.Cover images provided by Tachfine Bouachrine.

Britain is an island, and this is an account by a literary historian - the first to be attempted - of its literature since the end of the Second World War in 1945. It sees the literature of this island as a surprisingly self-sufficient art, subject to foreign influences but rarely dependent on them; and in its theatre and fiction, a story of international success. It considers the New Novel of the 1950s with Kingsley Amis, Iris Murdoch and others, the literature of Christian revival with Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, the new theatre of Osborne, Pinter and Stoppard, the poetry of Philip Larkin; and its emphasis throughout is on the argumentative issues that they raise and struggle to answer. This is the story of a nation reflected in its literature since it emerged in victory at the end of Hitler's war.

There are numerous conflicts ensuing in the Middle East, but not all are being fought with rockets and rifles. While the internet has proven invaluable to those who wish to uphold a patriarchal society and spread the message of Islamic fundamentalism, Muslim women have used the Web to build a transnational community intent on growing women's rights in the Middle East. There is a large disparity between a Muslim woman's role according to the Qur'an and her role as some corners of Muslim society have interpreted it. In ""Velvet Jihad"" Faegheh Shirazi reveals the creative strategies Muslim women have adopted to quietly fight against those who would limit their growing rights. Shirazi examines issues that are important to all women, from routine matters such as daily hygiene and clothing to controversial subjects like abortion, birth control, and virginity. As a woman with linguistic expertise and extensive life experience in both Western and Middle Eastern cultures, she is uniquely positioned as an objective observer and reporter of changes and challenges facing Muslim women globally.

Product Description: The Middle East has become a flash point for extremism and intrareligious violence, as well as a cultural debacle of women's rights. From the current derelict state of women's rights in the Arab world to the current sectarian divide in Iraq and the ongoing hatred between Shia and Sunni Muslims, this book demonstrates the genesis of the collapse of the original Islam of Mohammad and the core of the split of these two sects of Islam while also looking deep within one of the most powerful struggles for women's rights-the struggle led by Fatima, the daughter of Mohammad, that took place in the early days of the religion Shattered explores what took place during and after these events...read more

Product Description: Feminism and Islam meet here in this uncommon perspective.

A Wall Street Journal reporter and unwed Muslim mother recounts her pilgrimage to Mecca on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, discussing how her journey and unmarried status reflect the history and emerging role of Muslim women as well as profound changes within the practice of Islam. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

A Wall Street Journal reporter and unwed Muslim mother recounts her pilgrimage to Mecca on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, discussing how her journey and unmarried status reflect the history and emerging role of Muslim women as well as profound changes within the practice of Islam. 35,000 first printing.

In an age when Western feminism is continuously undergoing redefinition, the struggles of women in Muslim countries are often overlooked. This volume illustrates how women in Islamic societies have become more actively involved not only in learning their rights under the sharia (Islamic law) but in rereading this law to improve their status and gain increased equality and freedom. Surveying Iran, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt and Arab societies in general, the essays in feminism and Islam focus on such subjects as crimes of honor and the construction of gender in Arab societies; law and the desire for social control; women ad entrepreneurship; family legislation; and the political strategies of feminists in the Islam world.