Product Description: The New Yorker-Australian writer Geraldine Brooks is now known internationally for her bestselling novels, but as a foreign correspondent Geraldine spent six years covering the Middle East. And when her poised and sophisticated assistant at the Cairo bureau of the Wall Street Journal suddenly “adopted the uniform of a Muslim fundamentalist,” Geraldine Brooks set out to discover the truth about women and Islam...read more

Product Description: This work argues that a link between modern views of women and Qur'anic discourse can be established only through a discussion of modern hermeneutics and a consideration of the historical development of language. The work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, a contemporary German philosopher, provides the framework for this discussion...read more

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

Product Description: What does Islam really say about women? This work is a collection of major references to women in the Quran and Hadiths. Topics covered include hygiene, divorce, marriage, sex and chastity, inheritance, and status and rights.

Product Description: An original study of the Qur'anic foundations of women’s identity and agency, this book is a bold call to Muslim women and men to reread and reinterpret the Qur'an and to discover within its revelations an inherent affirmation of gender equality...read more

Product Description: Does Islam call for the oppression of women? Non-Muslims point to the subjugation of women that occurs in many Muslim countries, especially those that claim to be "Islamic," while many Muslims read the Qur'an in ways that seem to justify sexual oppression, inequality, and patriarchy...read more

Product Description: An American Muslim woman's lively answer to Islamic women's issues. Lisa Spray uses the Quran, Islam's scripture and her own experience. She demonstrates that culture is the source of traditional women's issues and other negative Western stereotypes of Islam...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Assembles references to women in the two holy writings on which Islamic legislation and social practice are based. The hadiths are from the eight-century AD Sahih of al-Buchari, who traces each through named informants to actual witnesses of events in the Prophet's life...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Argues against the restrictions placed on women in Islamic countries and traces this repression to its roots in the Koran and the life of its Prophet, Muhammad (view table of contents)

Islamic ideas about women and their role in society spark considerable debate--both in the Western world, and in the Islamic world itself. Despite the popular attention surrounding Middle Eastern attitudes toward women, there has been little systematic study of the statements regarding women in the Qur'an. Barbara Stowasser fills this void with this study on the women of Islamic sacred history. Women and the Qur'an, Traditions, and Interpretation presents the Qur'anic revelations on female figures associated with God's prophets from Adam to Muhammad. Revealed narratives and legislation are then pursued through their medieval, modern, and contemporary interpretations. The theological exegetic sources here chosen, all Sunni, include the major classical works as well as, for the modern period, examples of modernist, traditionalist, and fundamentalist exegesis. For Hadith materials beyond the theological tafsir, Stowasser analyzes both popular narratives of the "tales of the prophets" genre and also representative samples of the classical historical and legal Hadith. A close reading of modern sources, including by lay writers, shows the waning influence of these traditional materials in present-day Islamic thought. By telling the stories of the women of sacred history in Qur'an and interpretation, this book presents an introduction to past and present Islamic paradigms of doctrine and their socio-economic and political applications. Stowasser establishes the link between the female figures as cultural symbol, and Islamic self-perceptions from the beginning to the present time.

Product Description: This is an analysis of the concept of woman drawn directly from the Qur'an. An explicit attempt to return to the original source--the Qur'an--when the tendency has been to confuse the works of Islamic scholars with the Qur'an, it demonstrates that in order to maintain its relevance, the Qur'an must be continually reinterpreted; that the importance of the Qur'anic text is its transcendence of time and its expression of eternal values...read more