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From the cleric-led Iranian revolution to the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, many people have been surprised by what they see as the modern reemergence of an antimodern phenomenon. This book helps account for the increasingly visible public role of traditionally educated Muslim religious scholars (the `ulama) across contemporary Muslim societies. Muhammad Qasim Zaman describes the transformations the centuries-old culture and tradition of the `ulama have undergone in the modern era--transformations that underlie the new religious and political activism of these scholars. In doing so, it provides a new foundation for the comparative study of Islam, politics, and religious change in the contemporary world. While focusing primarily on Pakistan, Zaman takes a broad approach that considers the Taliban and the `ulama of Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India, and the southern Philippines. He shows how their religious and political discourses have evolved in often unexpected but mutually reinforcing ways to redefine and enlarge the roles the `ulama play in society. Their discourses are informed by a longstanding religious tradition, of which they see themselves as the custodians. But these discourses are equally shaped by--and contribute in significant ways to--contemporary debates in the Muslim public sphere. This book offers the first sustained comparative perspective on the `ulama and their increasingly crucial religious and political activism. It shows how issues of religious authority are debated in contemporary Islam, how Islamic law and tradition are continuously negotiated in a rapidly changing world, and how the `ulama both react to and shape larger Islamic social trends. Introducing previously unexamined facets of religious and political thought in modern Islam, it clarifies the complex processes of religious change unfolding in the contemporary Muslim world and goes a long way toward explaining their vast social and political ramifications.

After a brief introduction that sketches the scope and historical development of Islamic law, chapter one addresses women in the Qur'an; chapters two and three focus on, respectively, the marriage contract and divorce in legal texts from the formative period; chapter four covers selected topics from the two previous chapters as they are addressed in the classical period; and chapter five treats elements of women's lives unexplored in the rest of the volume. The first chapter's discussion of Qur'anic \"verses particularly relevant to the legal position of women\" (p. 4) provides a straightforward and detailed account of the numerous Qur'anic provisions that serve as points of departure for jurists' regulations of the marriage portion, guardianship, prohibited degrees of kinship, divorce, and menstruation.

[...]the following questions arise: * Why and how did verse 4:34, rather than other relevant Qur'anic verses, become the foundation for the legal construction of marriage? * Why did the jurists not choose to base their legal rulings on the two other terms that occur so frequently? * How, and through what juristic processes, was men's authority over women legitimated and translated into laws? * What does male guardianship, as translated in the concepts qiwamah and wilayah, entail in practice? * How can we rethink and reconstruct them in ways that can accommodate gender equality? * Do those modern-day jurists and Muslims who resist and denounce the notion of equality in marriage and society as alien to Islam have any more valid textual justification to offer? * How can we argue for an egalitarian construction of Muslim family laws from within Muslim legal tradition? * These questions are central to the ongoing struggle for equality and justice in Muslim families. The first is that of the recent encounter between two ideologies and modes of knowledge production, one rooted in pre-modern notions of justice, gender and rights, which allow discrimination among individuals on the basis of faith, status and gender, as found in pre-modern interpretations of the Shari'a; the other shaped by the ideals of human rights, equality and personal freedom, as found and advocated in international human rights documents such as CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women).