A highly controversial intervention into the debate on postmodernism and feminism, this book looks at what happens when these modes of analysis are jointly employed to illuminate the sexual politics of Islam. As a religion, Islam has been demonized for its gender practices like no other. This book analyzes that Orientalism, with particular reference to representations of Muslim women and describes the real sexual politics of Islam. The author goes on to describe the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the West's response to it. She argues that regardless of the sophisticated argument of postmodernists and their suspicion of power, as an intellectual and political movement postmodernism has put itself in the service of power and the status quo. Moghissi brilliantly demonstrates how this trend has given rise to a neo-conservative feminism. A major feminist critique of Islamic fundamentalism, this book asks some hard questions of those who, in denouncing the racism of Western feminism, have taken up an uncritical embrace of the Islamic identity of Muslim women. It is urgent reading for all those concerned about human rights, as well as for students and academics of women's studies, political science, social theory and religious studies.

During the past two decades, the surge of religious fundamentalism in the United States and in the Muslim world has resulted in many studies of the status of women and other family issues. This volume is a cross-cultural study of women's social status in Iran, Egypt, and in the U.S. during different stages of religious fundamentalism. In each of these countries, women have been active participants in fundamentalist movements, and this study shows that such participation enables women to reexamine their relationship to power in the family and in society and increase their group solidarity and feminist consciousness. The author combined quantitative, historical, and interview techniques in her analysis, gathering data by administering a questionnaire to middle-class women in the three countries. In Iran, she interviewed selected women leaders about future gender roles in the Islamic Republic. Students in women's studies, Middle Eastern culture, religion, history, sociology, and psychology, and political science will be interested in this publication.

Between February 1979 to June 1981, after the Shah had been overthrown, and fundamentalist and non-fundamentalists were struggling for power in Iran, says Kazemzadeh (political science, Utah Valley State College), provides a unique situation in which to study the relationship between Islamic fundamentalism and gender inequality. He writes primarily for undergraduates studying the Middle East, women's studies, and third-world politics. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book deconstructs the religio-political writings and political practices of the nine Islamic ideologues of the twentieth century who masterminded the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism: Hasan al-Banna, Abu al-'A'la al-Mawdudi, Sayyid Qutb, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Ayatollah Mortaza Mutahhari, Zaynab al-Ghazali, Hasan al-Turabi, Rashid al-Ghannoushi, and Sheikh Hussein Fadlallah. It demonstrates that although these ideologues have individual peculiarities, their consistent emphasis on the subordinate status of women in society and in their relation to men constitutes a vehicle for attaining political power. Examining the spectrum of 20th-century Islamic fundamentalist discourse on the subordinate role of women, Shehadeh builds a bridge between political ideology and gender theory. She determines how the diversity of political, social, and economic domains within the discourse of the nine ideologues--male or female, Sunni or Shi'ite, radical or moderate--applies to gender relations, and whether their discourse is distinctive or remains within the classical or traditional mold of Islam. She demonstrates that the importance given to gender issues by fundamentalist ideologues and the constraints imposed on women in society are not so much due to patriarchy as to the manipulation of such issues for purely political purposes--to assure overwhelming male support and to divert attention from the real problems of society.

This three-volume interdisciplinary collection is of use not only in Middle East studies but also in various other disciplines, including women's studies, political science, religion, cultural studies, sociology of gender and anthropology.The collection offers the most influential writings in the field by both renowned scholars as well as those by the new generation of scholars of Islam and gender and includes a wide variety of cases from Middle Eastern and Islamic societies. By including case-based articles, the collection highlights the clear links between concepts and theories and actual practices.Titles also available in this series include, Shamanism (March 2004, 3 volumes, 395) and the forthcoming titles Childhood (2005, 4 volumes, c.495), Gender (2005, 4 volumes, c.495) and Knowledge (2005, 4 volumes, c.495).

In a time of increasing hostility towards Islam, this collection extends the boundaries of global feminism to include Islamic women. Challenging Orientalist assumptions of Muslim women as victims of Islam and Islamic fundamentalism, these groundbreaking essays focus on the complex relations of power that shape women's negotiations for identity, power, and agency as participants in religious, cultural and nationalist movements. This book brings together Signs essays on women in the Middle East, South Asia, and the Diaspora, from Bangladesh, Canada, Egypt, Iran, Israel/Palestine, Pakistan, and Yemen to explore how women negotiate indigenous identities and attempt to gain political, economic, and legal rights. This collection shows that Islam is a heterogeneous set of historically and contexually variable practices and beliefs shaped by region, nation, ethnicity, sect, and class, as well as by responses to local and transnational cultural and economic processes. In examining women's participation in religious and nationalist projects, these critics debate controversial issues: Does Islamic feminism provide an alternative, possibly revolutionary paradigm, to Eurocentric liberal humanism and the individualism of western feminism? Is Islam any more oppressive to women than the workings of the modern secular state? How are the lives and texts of Arab and Muslim women discursively constructed for local or western consumption? These essays expose the shortcomings of the secularist assumptions of many recent feminist analyses, which continue to treat religion in general and fundamentalism in particular as a problematic tool of oppression used against women, rather than as a viable form of feminist agency that produces contradictory effects for women participants.