Women in Islam: The Western Experience

Understanding Islam from the point of view of those whom call themselves Muslim here in the West would be a good reason to delve into this book if you're not quite ready to delve into Qur'an for yourself. Reading Qur'an is the absolute best source of jurisprudence if you want to make up your own mind about this vast subject matter.

This book is sooo extremely informative. It explores issues relating to Muslim women from many different Islamic perspectives (non-Muslims seem to be shocked that there is actually more than one Islamic perspective!!!). Roald, a convert to Islam, critically examines specific issues from the eyes of the most important and relevant players in contemporary Islamic discourse, from Eastern and Western Muslim feminists, to the typical mainstream Muslim writers (in the West and in the Arab world), to the Wahhabi/Salafi literalists. She is honest and insightful, and she includes personal experiences and anecdotes gathered from interviewees. She also gives well cited hadeeth evidence and Quranic verse to explain where many of her subjects' views originate. She ties modern Islamic rhetoric on women's issues to the convergence of Western cultural encounters with Islam/Muslims due to colonialism and globalization, together with basic Islamic sources of knowledge (Quran and hadeeth), and with culturalized Islam in the Arab context. This book is a MUST READ for people who want to take a critical and well-informed look at the "Women in Islam" issue.

Although the premise of this book is quite interesting, the semantics of the book are complex. There is more discussion of theology than of the practical implications of Islam on Muslim women living in the West, thus detracting from the overall thesis of the book. That said, there are interesting tidbits that can be gleaned from the overall content, but most readers will find it to be rather monotonous.

The author spent most of the book examening hadiths and explaining the authentication of them. Although this presents how Muslims deal with their literature, I would have liked to have seen some of the contemporary literature of the 8th-9th centuries (this is when early Islamic literature was exploding). To understand why this literature suddenly became so massive, I would recommend books by Patricia Crone, Ibn Warraq and Joseph Schaht. Possibly the best book to start would be "The Quest for the Historical Muhammad" by Ibn Warraq and start with chapters 1&2. The material in these books also introduces the reader to the world of hadith and how they are mainly polemic in nature (hostile to a specific group or groups of people).If anyone thinks that to study the Qur'an as a human document is wrong, then you should consider that most of the Qur'an is from the Talmud, Midrash and other Jewish tales that were floating around at the time. Also, many of the people that Arabs interacted with in the 7th-8th centuries never mentioned a sacred book that these people had.One last thing. To clear up an issue, Ishmaelites lived only in northern Arabia, not southern; and there were no Jews in Medina in the 7th century.