Islam, Gender, and Social Change By Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John L. Esposito (eds.), (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, 259 pp.)

Abstract

The anthology, Islam, Gender and Social Change, starts with an introduction
by Professor John Esposito, one of the coeditors, and it continues with an overarching
chapter "Islam and Gender: Dilemmas in the Changing Arab World" by the other coeditor, Professor Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad. The introduction
gives a short survey of gender issues in Islamic history and it points out that
reforms in women’s issues have more often than not been a State rather than a
grassroots concern. The strength of the introduction is that in contrast to many
of the other articles in this volume, it takes into account not only the feminist
point of view on gender but deals with the various views that exist in Muslim
society.
Haddad’s chapter introduces the first part of the anthology titled “Islam,
Gender, and Social Change: A Reconstituted Tradition,” which gives the reader
a short survey of the modem challenges facing Arab society. She sees the
main factors of change in the Arab world as the economic fluctuations of the
1970s and 1980s: labor migration, women’s entrance into the labor market,
State ideology and politics, the Islamic movement’s role in society, United
Nations’ recommendations, and input from Western feminist movements. So
far, so good; however, in her following comments, Haddad has a tendency to
victimize Arab Muslim women, particularly the religious-oriented- viewpoint
which, as a researcher on the Muslim world, I cannot always agree with.
This victimization is partly a result of how Muslim women are often described
from an outsider’s perspective, either from a Western or a secular Muslim point
of view. Victimization of Muslim women is not only a feature in Haddad’s article
but also in many of the other articles in this book. Interestingly, even the
few Muslim contributors do not have a particular Islamic outlook; rather, they
are part of a Western research paradigm. The fact that Islamic-oriented Muslim
women are generally defined within a frame of Western research traditions
reinforces, on the one hand, attitudes of “we” and “them” and, on the other, the
notion that these women are victims rather than women responsible for their
own lives ...