A review by sofia_reading
Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate by Leila Ahmed

5.0

Leilah Ahmad provides a fascinating, well cited and thought provoking history of women in the Middle East prior to the advent of Islam. She provides a history of how the prevailing attitudes and beliefs regarding women were absorbed into Islamic thought as the empire expanded. Ahmad goes on to discuss the effect of colonialisation of Arab countries and the resistance from the indigenous populations arising in the form of certain dogmatisms. From here on she focuses on the Arab world, and more precisely on Egypt. While thoroughly interesting, it could have been even better had she been able to include the non Arab world and its history too. Nonetheless it is still an excellent book and still so relevant all these years after its first publication.

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Read this first in 2014, then again in 2015 for my MA, and then again this year (2018) for a Islam and Feminism Critical Reading Group, and have upped my rating to 5 stars because this is a book that keeps giving each time I read it!