Islamic Society in Practice Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1994, 201 pp.

Abstract

Islamic Society in Practice is written in a new tradition of Western
scholarship on Islam that seeks to represent an alternative view to that of
Orientalism. The author sets out to analyze Islam as lived and practiced in
everyday life, and brings out the human dimension of a region and a religious
tradition that largely have been stereotyped in the West. Without
advocating conversion or the blurring of differences, she argues that
approaching Islamic and Arab cultures on their own terms and recognizing
their strengths and weaknesses will produce the crosscultural understanding
necessary for world peace in the twenty-first century.
The book, the result of more than two decades of research and over five
years of residence in Khartoum, Cairo, and Tunis, covers a wide range of
subjects. Among these are the five pillars of Islam, Islamic values and
social practice, family and gender relations, the ongoing debate on the
reform of family law, Islamic identities in a changing world, and the sociopolitical
dimensions of contemporary Islamic movements.
The author's study of Islam and her residence among and close
interaction with Muslims accorded her considerable access to Islamic
culture and enabled her to debunk tenured stereotypes. She gives a very
intimate picture of the ethos of Muslim societies and pays special attention
to the structure of the extended Muslim family and the status of
women in Islamic societies. In a bid to explode the myth of the
oppressed Muslim woman, she goes beyond facile observations to look
at the deeper social and ethical logic that informs apparent genderbased
discrepancies in Islamic laws and practices. She also documents
facts about the strides that Muslim women have been making that never
make it to the headlines: For instance, many major universities in the
Middle East, such as Cairo University, have about 50 percent female
students, and until recently, there was a greater proportion of female
medical doctors and engineers in Arab Muslim societies than in the
West ...