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In 1928, a young Lebanese woman, Nazira Zeineddine al-Halabi, wrote a book called \"Unveiling and Veiling\", an indictment of patriarchal oppression in which she boldly stated that the veil was un-Islamic, directly challenging the teachings of \"wiser\" male scholars. Considered by many an attack on Islam, it rocked the Muslim world and was banned by many clerics, although it quickly went into a second edition and was translated into several languages. In this latest addition to Makers of the Muslim World series, Miriam Cooke offers an intimate portrait of the life and work of this pioneering champion of Islamic feminism. Miriam Cooke is Professor of Modern Arabic literature and Culture at Duke University.

\"The Mazhar al-ajaib is the devotional work written to expound upon the teachings of Agha-yi Buzurg, a female religious master active in the early 16th century in Bukhara. The work was produced in 16th century Central Asia, when the region underwent major socio-economic and religio-political changes in the aftermath of the downfall of the Timurid dynasty and the establishment of the Shibanid dynasty in Mavarannahr and the Safavid dynasty in Iran. In its portrayal of Agha-yi Buzurg, the Mazhar al-ajaib represents a tradition that maintained an egalitarian conception of gender in the spiritual equality of women and men, attesting to the presence of multiple voices in Muslim discourse and challenging conventional ways of thinking about gender history in early modern Central Asia\"--.

Traces the evolution of Muslim women's position in the Indian society, from the 1930s to the present.

In the eyes of many Westerners, Muslim women are hidden behind a veil of negative stereotypes that portray them as either oppressed, subservient wives and daughters or, more recently, as potential terrorists. Yet many Muslim women defy these stereotypes by taking active roles in their families and communities and working to create a more just society. This book introduces eighteen Muslim women activists from the United States and Canada who have worked in fields from social services, to marital counseling, to political advocacy in order to further social justice within the Muslim community and in the greater North American society. Each of the activists has written an autobiographical narrative in which she discusses such issues as her personal motivation for doing activism work, her views on the relationship between Islam and women's activism, and the challenges she has faced and overcome, such as patriarchal cultural barriers within the Muslim community or racism and discrimination within the larger society. The women activists are a heterogeneous group, including North American converts to Islam, Muslim immigrants to the United States and Canada, and the daughters of immigrants. Young women at the beginning of their activist lives as well as older women who have achieved regional or national prominence are included. Katherine Bullock's introduction highlights the contributions to society that Muslim women have made since the time of the Prophet Muhammad and sounds a call for contemporary Muslim women to become equal partners in creating and maintaining a just society within and beyond the Muslim community.

In The Mother of Mohammed, Four Corners journalist Sally Neighbour tells the extraordinary story of how a dope-smoking beach bunny from Mudgee, Robyn Hutchinson, became Rabiah-a member of the jihadist elite. Known among her peers as 'the mother of Mohammed', and as 'the Elizabeth Taylor of the jihad' in CIA circles, Rabiah lived for twenty years on the frontlines of the global holy war. With a reputation for tough investigative journalism, Sally Neighbour persuaded Rabiah to tell her story. She investigates how Rabiah became a trusted insider to the Jemaah Islamiyah, Taliban and al Qaeda leaderships, and married a leading figure in Osama bin Laden's inner sanctum. In The Mother of Mohammed Sally Neighbour discovers a world of converts and true believers. This unique and confronting account from inside the jihad helps us to understand the magnetism of the Islamist cause.

Eugénie Luce was a French schoolteacher who fled her husband and abandoned her family, migrating to Algeria in the early 1830s. By the mid-1840s she had become a major figure in debates around educational policies, insisting that women were a critical dimension of the French effort to effect a fusion of the races. To aid this fusion, she founded the first French school for Muslim girls in Algiers in 1845, which thrived until authorities cut off her funding in 1861. At this point, she switched from teaching spelling, grammar, and sewing, to embroidery-an endeavor that attracted the attention of prominent British feminists and gave her school a celebrated reputation for generations. The portrait of this remarkable woman reveals the role of women and girls in the imperial projects of the time and sheds light on why they have disappeared from the historical record since then.

\"[I]t is extremely salubrious to see the ways Islam works in the lives of ordinary people who are not politicized in their religious lives... No other book on South Asia has material like this.\" -Ann Grodzins Gold In Amma's Healing Room is a compelling study of the life and thought of a female Muslim spiritual healer in Hyderabad, South India. Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger describes Amma's practice as a form of vernacular Islam arising in a particular locality, one in which the boundaries between Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity are fluid. In the \"healing room,\" Amma meets a diverse clientele that includes men and women, Muslim, Hindu, and Christian, of varied social backgrounds, who bring a wide range of physical, social, and psychological afflictions. Flueckiger collaborated closely with Amma and relates to her at different moments as daughter, disciple, and researcher. The result is a work of insight and compassion that challenges widely held views of religion and gender in India and reveals the creativity of a tradition often portrayed by Muslims and non-Muslims alike as singular and monolithic.

The compilation by Muhammadi Begum (1877-1908) of Ashrafunnisa's life titled Hayat-e Ashraf (1904, The Life of Ashrafunnisa) is one of the earliest biographies of an ordinary Indian Muslim woman. This biographical account includes Muhammadi's version of Ashrafunnisa's life, the articles and letters written by Ashrafunnisa herself, and other women. The article in which Ashrafunnisa (1840-1903) recorded the difficulties she encountered in learning to read and write in a patriarchal society was originally published in two instalments on March 23 and 30, 1899 in Tahzib-e Nisvan and was subsequently included in Hayat-e Ashraf. The publication of this autobiographical narrative in the women's magazine edited by Muhammadi marks the inception of a feminist consciousness on Urdu literary scene in early twentieth-century North India. Since Muhammadi was the first Muslim woman to edit an Urdu journal, her consequent decision to compile the life of a working woman points to what was common in their life. Muhammadi's entry into the male dominated field of Urdu literature and Ashrafunnisa's appointment to the post of a teacher in a semi-government girls' school announced the triumphant arrival of ashraf Muslim women in the public sphere. This biography was compiled after Ashrafunnisa's death in 1903 as a tribute to the extraordinary life of an ordinary Muslim woman and reads like a female bildungsroman in Urdu. This paper investigates the dilemma faced by Ashrafunnisa after her widowhood and her negotiations with the contending demands of respectability and financial constraints. The intertwining of Ashrafunnisa's life with the growth of the educational institution she served in this biography challenged the nineteenth-century reformist discourse on domesticity that confined women to the household. My analysis of Hayat-e Ashraf seeks to demonstrate that Indian women in the nineteenth-century contested the reformist discourse on womanhood and were actively engaged in recasting themselves. Keywords: Indian Muslim women, women's biography in Urdu, Indian Muslim reformers, Tahzib-e Nisvan, colonial educational institutions, job opportunities for women, early twentieth-century India.

In this text, Andrew Garrod and Rober Kilkenny present fourteen personal essays by college students of the Muslim faith who are themselves immigrants or are the children of immigrants to the United States. In their essays, the students grapple with matters of ethnicity, religious prejudice and misunderstanding, and what is termed Islamophobia.

The itinerant Judaeo-Muslim battlefield preacher Abū Rayḥāna, who is still a source of inspiration in our time, fathered Rayḥāna, who became one of Prophet Muḥammad’s concubines. The preacher was active both on the battlefield and in al-Aqṣā mosque. It is unknown whether he was a preacher before Islam, but the materials he used in his preaching probably belonged to his Jewish background. This prosopographical study of father and daughter is of value in its own right as well as for the study of the Prophet Muḥammad’s life and time.