This multi-disciplinary work provides deep and wide-ranging coverage of issues relating to Islam and women. The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Women offers authoritative contributions from well-known scholars who provide sophisticated and cutting-edge analysis of topics such as Qur'anic hermeneutics regarding women's status and roles, analysis of hadiths (statements attributed to the Prophet Muhammad) that address women's issues, Islamic legal rulings as they pertain to women's legal and social rights, the scholarly and literary activities of Muslim women through time, and their activism in a number of contemporary Muslim-majority societies. The essays in this volume delineate a broad spectrum of views on these key issues and above all, emphasize the diversity present in Muslim women's lives, both in the pre-modern and modern periods. Close attention is paid to the historical and political contexts that have shaped their lives, framed by the thoughts and actions of key figures throughout Islamic history. Such an approach results in fine-grained studies of the lived realities of Muslim women across time and space that problematize reified assumptions about gender and agency in the context of Muslim-majority societies, assumptions that remain all too common.
Introduction Asma Afsaruddin Foundational Texts and Their Interpretations Chapter 1: The Qur'an and Woman Hibba Abugideri Chapter 2: Classical Exegeses of Qur'anic Verses concerning Women Hadia Mubarak Chapter 3: Women in the Hadith Literature Feryal Salem Chapter 4: Modern Rereadings of the Qur'an through a Gendered Lens Asma Afsaruddin Chapter 5: Modern Rereadings of Hadith through a Gendered Lens Khaled Abou El Fadl Women and Islamic Law Chapter 6: Women's Rights and Duties in Classical Legal Literature Mariam Sheibani Chapter 7: Status of Women in Modern Family and Personal Law Sohaira Siddiqui Chapter 8: Modern Rereadings of Classical Legal Texts on Women Natana DeLong Bas Deciphering Women's Lives: Women in History and Texts Chapter 9: Early Muslim Women as Moral Paragons in the Classical Literature Yasmin Amin Chapter 10: Women in Shi'i Islam as Moral Exemplars Maria Dakake Chapter 11: Women as Transmitters of Knowledge Asma Sayeed Chapter 12: Muslim Women and Devotional Life Zahra Ayubi and Iman Abdoulkarim Chapter 13: Women as Littérateurs in the Premodern Period Samer Ali Chapter 14: Women as Economic Actors in the Pre-Modern Islamic World Amira Sonbol Women's Lived Realities and their Religious and Social Activism in the Modern Period Chapter 15: Women in the Mosque : Contesting Public Space and Religious Authority Marion Katz Chapter 16: Negotiating Motherhood, Religion, and Modern Lived Realities Margaret Pappano Chapter 17: Women as Modern Heads-of-State Tamara Sonn Chapter 18: Women's Religious and Social Activism in Syrian, Lebanon, and Palestine Elizabeth Brownson Chapter 19: Women's Religious and Social Activism in Egypt and North Africa Nermin Allam Chapter 20: Women's Religious and Social Activism in Iran Seema Golestaneh Chapter 21: Women's Religious and Social Activism in Turkey Chiara Maritato Chapter 22: Women's Religious and Social Activism in South Asia Elora Shehabuddin Chapter 23: Women's Religious and Social Activism in Southeast Asia Nelly van Doorn-Harder Chapter 24: Muslim Women's Religious and Social Activism in China Maria Jaschok and Man Ke Chapter 25: Muslim Women's Religious and Social Activism in South Africa Nina Hoel Chapter 26: Muslim Women's Religious and Social Activism in North America Juliane Hammer Chapter 27: Muslim Women's Religious and Social Activism in western Europe Jeanette Jouili Chapter 28: Women's Religious and Social Activism in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Alainna Liloia Modern Narratives of the Gendered Self: Women Writing about Women Chapter 29: Modern Representations of the Wives of the Prophet Ruqayya Khan Chapter 30: An Overview of Modern and Contemporary Muslim Feminist Literature Miriam Cooke Islam, Women, and the Global Public Arena Chapter 31: Women's Sartorial Agency: The History and Politics of Veiling Anna Piela Chapter 32: Muslim Women as a Cultural Trope: Global Discourses and the Politics of Victimhood Katherine Bullock Index
Asma Afsaruddin is Class of 1950 Herman B. Wells Endowed Professor and Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author and editor of eight books, including The First Muslims: History and Memory (2008); her award-winning Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought (OUP, 2013); Contemporary Issues in Islam (2015); and Jihad: What Everyone Needs to Know (OUP, 2022). She was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2005 and was inducted into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars in 2019.
