Beyond the Veil (Preview available)
Description: A study of sexual inequality in Muslim society. It argues that the Islamic view of women as active sexual beings resulted in a stricter regulation and control of women's sexuality, which Muslim theorists classically regarded as a threat to civilized society.
This book describes the Hadramaut rebellion in detail, plus it says that marriage customs in Pre Islamic Saudi were matrilineal, even the Prophet's father Abdullah had a matrilineal alliance with his mother Amina, who stayed on with her own people even after marriage, after her husband's death & her son went to live with his father's kin only after her death.
It says that while polygamy might've been existent in Pre Islamic Saudi, the virilocal polygamy Muhammad practiced was rare, & men would have different wives whom they'd visit in their homes, while women would similarly often be visited by different husbands.
The Jewel of Medina Description: Jones's controversial novel about A'isha bint Abi Bakr, the "child-bride" and one of the favored wives of Muhammad, comes to light amidst a swirl of debate about free speech. As for the book itself, it's not bad for a first novel. It opens with a 14-year-old A'isha returning to Muhammad in the company of her first love. Fearing she'd been unfaithful, Mohammad sends her back to her parents while he debates her innocence. The novel then backtracks to A'isha's youth, where her strength of character and sharp wit quickly become apparent. When she's betrothed to Muhammad at age six, she's ordered confined to her house (to preserve her virginity) until her marriage three years later. She is forced to leave her beloved Mecca for Medina when it becomes unsafe for Muhammad and his followers, and as Muhammad-here depicted as caring, progressive and politically savvy-marries more women and early followers of Islam face political challenges and devastating battles, A'isha grows from a self-centered child to a worldly woman whose advice and counsel are a source of comfort and strength to Muhammad. The subject matter here is more spectacular than the writing, which tends toward the maudlin and purple. It's a page turner, but not outstanding.
Women's Rebellion & Islamic Memory - By Fatima Mernissi Description: Chronicling ten years of research, this book presents a sustained analysis of the position of women in the world of contemporary Islam. One of the most important feminist thinkers, Fatima Mernissi here makes a major contribution to the theorisation of gender roles and sexual identity in the Islamic world.
The book first explores some of the concrete issues fundamental to the status of muslim women, such as the production of statistics which mask women's contribution to the economies of Arab states. Mernissi also looks at a variety of demographics including education and literacy - she shows their importance not only for empowering women but also for improving their health. She analyses the role of the state in prescribing women's roles, activities and spheres and explores the insidious consequences of state supported inequality - not only for women but for the creative and spiritual life of a culture.
She goes on to look at the position of women in Islamic thought and history and the construction of femininity in the muslim unconscious. She presents a sustained analysis of some of the Koranic formulations of gender, and demonstrates how very partisan the collective Islamic memory - of both history and theology - can be. Throughout, Mernissi argues that the emancipation of women is vital for the development of the Arab world.
Sakeena aka Sukayna bint Husayn bin Ali!
"Some women tried to resist the changes imposed on them after the death of the Prophet. They claimed the right to go out barza (unveiled), a word that they added to the Lisan al-?Arab dictionary: "A barza woman is one who does not hide her face and does not lower her head." And the dictionary adds that a barza woman is one who "is seen by people and who receives visitors at home" ? men, obviously. A barza woman is also a woman who has "sound judgement." A barz man or woman is someone "known for their ?aql [reasoning]." Who are they, these Muslim women who have resisted the hijab? The most famous was Sukayna, one of the great-granddaughters of the Prophet through his daughter Fatima, the wife of ?Ali, the famous ?Ali, the ill-fated fourth orthodox caliph who abandoned power to Mu?awiya and was assassinated by the first Muslim political terrorist. His sons? fates were as tragic as his own, and Sukayna was present at the killing of her father at Karbala. That tragedy partly explains her revolt against political, oppressive, despotic Islam and against everything that hinders the individual?s freedom ? including the hijab.
Sukayna was born in year 49 of the Hejira (about AD 671). She was celebrated for her beauty, for what the Arabs call beauty ? an explosive mixture of physical attractiveness, critical intelligence, and caustic wit. The most powerful men debated with her; caliphs and princes proposed marriage to her, which she disdained for political reasons. Nevertheless, she ended marrying five, some say six, husbands. She quarreled with some of them, made passionate declarations of love to others, brought one to court for infidelity, and never pledged ta?a (obedience, the key principle of Muslim marriage) to any of them. In her marriage contracts she stipulated that she would not obey her husband, but would do as she pleased, and that she did not acknowledge that her husband had the right to practice polygyny. All this was the result of her interest in political affairs and poetry. She continued to receive visits from poets and, despite her several marriages, to attend the meetings of the Qurashi tribal council, the equivalent of today?s democratic municipal councils. Her personality has fascinated the historians, who have devoted pages and pages, sometimes whole biographies, to her... All her life Sukayna harboured feelings of contempt, which she never hesitated to express, for the Umayyad dynasty and its bloody methods. She attacked the dynasty in the mosques and insulted its governors and representatives every time she had the opportunity, even arranging occasions for this purpose.
The conditions Sakina put in her marriage act with one of her husbands, Zayd, made of her a celebrity and a nashiz, a rebellious wife. She stipulated that he would have no right to another wife, that he could never prevent her from acting according to her own will, that he would let her elect to live near her woman friend, Ummu Manshuz, and that he would never try to go against her desires (Agani XIV, pp. 168, 169. Mada?ini, Kitab al-muraddafat, p. 66). When the husband once decided to go against Sakina?s will and went one weekend to his concubines, she took him to court, and in front of the Medina judge she shouted at him, ?Look as much as you can at me today, because you will never see me again!? (Agani XVI, p. 155).?
- Women's Rebellin & Islamic Memory, by Fatima Mernissi
The Veil And The Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation Of Women's Rights In Islam - by Fatima Mernissi Description: From Publishers Weekly
Muhammad was a chief of state who publicly acknowledged the importance of affection and sexuality. He was a polygynous husband whose wives were not just background figures but often shared decision-making with him. According to Moroccan sociologist Mernissi ( Beyond the Veil ), the founder of Islam asserted the equality of women, rejected slavery and envisioned an egalitarian society. Mernissi further claims that successive Muslim priests manipulated and distorted sacred texts, from the seventh century onward, in an effort to maintain male privileges. Her close textual analyses of the Hadith , or stories of words and deeds attributed to the Prophet, support her far-reaching reinterpretation of the historic roots of Islam and its modern tendency to reduce woman to a "submissive, marginal creature."
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Mernissi, an internationally known Moroccan sociologist, endeavors to show that discrimination against women, so common in the Muslim world today, is not a fundamental tenet of Islam as many contemporary male Muslims would like us to believe. Her basic premise is that Islam is inherently egalitarian and, using extensive documentation from the Koran, the Hadith, and other Islamic historical commentary, Mernissi successfully proves her hypothesis. While doing so, she teaches the reader a great deal about Mohammed (the man as well as the prophet), his wives, his companions, and early Islamic society. Like Mernissi's other books ( Beyond the Veil , Indiana Univ. Pr., 1987; Doing Daily Battle , Rutgers Univ. Pr., 1989; Women in Emergent Morocco , Flame Internat., 1982), this fascinating, well-written, and well-documented work is an excellent addition to scholarship on Muslim women. Recommended for academic libraries and others with women's studies or Middle East collections.
- Ruth K. Baacke, Bellingham P.L., Wash .
You can imagine my surprise when I was accused of lying at a conference in Penang, Malaysia in 1984, where I presented Sukayna as a type of traditional Muslim woman for us to think about. My accuser, a Pakistani, editor of an Islamic journal in London, interrupted me, shouting to the audience: "Sukayna died at the age of six!" Trying to snatch the microphone away from me in a vindictive rage, he kept repeating: "She died at Karbala with her father! She died at Karbala!" Then smugly assuming the role of qadi, he demanded that I name the sources where I found my version of Sukayna's history. I furnished him a list on the spot - in Arabic obviously. He looked at it with disdain and told me it was very scanty. In fact, it contained the names of Ibn Qutayba, Ibn 'Abd Rabbih, Ibn 'Asakir, al-Zamakshari, Ibn Sa'd, Ibn al-Ma'ad, al-Isbahani, al-Dhahabi, Al-Safadi, Al-Washaa, al-Bukhari - in short, the great names of Muslim historiography. I learned later that this important editor, whose journal claims to contribute a better understanding of the Muslim world, neither speaks nor reads Arabic.
Sukayna died in Medina at the age of 68 (117 AH). Other sources have her dying at the age of 77 at Kufa. (...)
In any case, that verbal aggression that I was subjected to and that attempt to obliterate the memory of Sukayna by a modern Muslim man who only accepts his wife as veiled, crushed, and silent remains for me an incident that symbolizes the whole matter of the relationship of the Muslim man to time - of amnesia as memory, of the past as warping the possibilities of the present. (...)
What a strange memory, where even dead men and women do not escape attempts at assassination, if by chance they threated to raise the hijab that covers the mediocrity and servility that is presented to us as tradition. How did the tradition succeed in transforming the Muslim woman into that submissive, marginal creature who buries herself and only goes out into the world timidly and huddled in her veils? Why does the Muslim man need such a mutilated companion? (...)
From the footnotes:
For biographical information on Sakayna, see the following, which, however, is far from being an exhaustive list: Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqat, vol. 8, p. 475; Isbahani, Aghani, vol. 3, pp. 36Iff; vol. 16, pp.138ff; vol. 17, pp.43ff; and vol. 19, pp.155ff; Ibn 'Asakir, Tarikh Madinat Dimashq (Damascus: n.p., 1982), pp. 155ff. (The authr died in the eleventh century.); Ibn Hasan al-Malaki, Hada'iq; Ibn Habib al-Baghdadi, Kitab al-Muhabbar (Beirut: Al-Maktaba al-Tijariya, n.d.), pp. 439ff. (The author died in the year 245 AH, 9th Century CE.)
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Topic: The Feminists of Islam