Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate

Rating:
Summary: Worth Reading
Review: This one has been circulating for a while now, and I grabbed a copy recently. I have been studying the role of gender in traditional societies and have always been shocked at way in which modern scholarship approaches these issues from a relative moral position completely inaccessible to the social order they are studying. This title offers some good studies in the first two chapters of women in societies before Islam in and around the Middle East, but once she gets into Islam I feel she loses sight of the context. First off she takes everything she reads in the hadith literature at face value. While the hadith literature contributes greatly to the oppression of women in Islam, we must understand that this hadith literature was developed over several centuries (see Islam, Fazlur Rahman) and cannot be taken as strictly objective in the modern sense of the word. In her acceptance of the hadith literature, with its glaring contradictory reports, she passes over subjects of debate with simplicity and charm. I was unmoved by this sort of approach and was expecting a bit more, but it was still an enjoyable read.