Lila Abu-Lughod
Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor, Columbia University, and author of Do Muslim Women Need Saving?
Book Recommendations:
Recommended by Lila Abu-Lughod
“With grace and erudition, Kamaly vividly captures key moments in the long and varied history of the Muslim world, bringing to life some of the extraordinary women…who made that history and transformed our world.” (from Amazon)
Hossein Kamaly(you?)
Hossein Kamaly(you?)
Beginning in seventh-century Mecca and Medina, A History of Islam in 21 Women takes us around the globe, through eleventh-century Yemen and Khorasan, and into sixteenth-century Spain, Istanbul and India. From there to nineteenth-century Persia and the African savannah, to twentieth-century Russia, Turkey, Egypt and Iraq, before reaching present day London. From the first believer, Khadija, and the other women who witnessed the formative years of Islam, to award-winning mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani in the twenty-first century, Hossein Kamaly celebrates the lives and groundbreaking achievements of these extraordinary women in the history of Islam.
Recommended by Lila Abu-Lughod
“A lucid and devastating analysis of the psychic and political fantasies that fix Muslim veiling/unveiling as obsessive affective images in Western media in a world driven by ideologies of national and global security, anxieties about immigration and multiculturalism, and liberal promises of freedom, women’s rights, and human rights.” (from Amazon)
Sahar Ghumkhor(you?)
Sahar Ghumkhor(you?)
Veiled women in the West appear menacing. Their visible invisibility is a cause of obsession. What is beneath the veil more than a woman? This book investigates the preoccupation with the veiled body through the imaging and imagining of Muslim women. It examines the relationship between the body and knowledge through the politics of freedom as grounded in a ‘natural’ body, in the index of flesh. The impulse to unveil is more than a desire to free the Muslim woman. What lies at the heart of the fantasy of saving the Muslim woman is the West’s desire to save itself. The preoccupation with the veiled woman is a defense that preserves neither the object of orientalism nor the difference embodied in women’s bodies, but inversely, insists on the corporeal boundaries of the West’s mode of knowing and truth-making. The book contends that the imagination of unveiling restores the West’s sense of its own power and enables it to intrude where it is ‘other’ – thus making it the centre and the agent by promising universal freedom, all the while stifling the question of what freedom is.