Women in Islam: The Western Experience

By Anne Sofie Roald

Women in Islam investigates the ongoing debate across the Muslim world and the West on the position of women in Islam.
Anne-Sofie Roald focuses on how Islamic perceptions of women and gender change in Western Muslim communities. She shows how Islamic attitudes towards social concerns such as gender relations, female circumcision, and female dress emerge as responsive to culture and context, rather than rigid and inflexible.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415248965
• ISBN13: 9780415248969
• Release Date: April 2001
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 360 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Excellent

This book is sooo extremely informative. It explores issues relating to Muslim women from many different Islamic perspectives (non-Muslims seem to be shocked that there is actually more than one Islamic perspective!!!). Roald, a convert to Islam, critically examines specific issues from the eyes of the most important and relevant players in contemporary Islamic discourse, from Eastern and Western Muslim feminists, to the typical mainstream Muslim writers (in the West and in the Arab world), to the Wahhabi/Salafi literalists. She is honest and insightful, and she includes personal experiences and anecdotes gathered from interviewees. She also gives well cited hadeeth evidence and Quranic verse to explain where many of her subjects' views originate. She ties modern Islamic rhetoric on women's issues to the convergence of Western cultural encounters with Islam/Muslims due to colonialism and globalization, together with basic Islamic sources of knowledge (Quran and hadeeth), and with culturalized Islam in the Arab context. This book is a MUST READ for people who want to take a critical and well-informed look at the "Women in Islam" issue.