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Women’s Human Rights and Islam: A Study of Three Attempts at Accommodation by Jonas Svensson Women in Islam: The Western Experience by Anne Sofie Roald Medicines of the Soul: Female Bodies and Sacred Geographies in a Transnational Islam by FedwaMalti‐DouglasWomen’s Human Rights and Islam: A Study of Three Attempts at Accom‐modation by Jonas Svensson; Women in Islam: The Western Experience by Anne Sofie Roald; Medicines of theSoul: Female Bodies and Sacred Geographies in a Transnational Islam by Fedwa Malti‐DouglasReview by: A. Holly ShisslerSigns, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Autumn 2005), pp. 241-247Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/432745 .

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S I G N S Autumn 2005 ❙ 241

while Farmer’s work both expands our understanding of medieval povertyand reinforces the broad caution within gender history against essential-izing gender stereotypes. Both are welcome additions to the study ofpremodern European women and gender. ❙

Women’s Human Rights and Islam: A Study of Three Attempts atAccommodation. By Jonas Svensson. Lund, Sweden: Studies in the Historyof Religion, Lund University, 2002.

Women in Islam: The Western Experience. By Anne Sofie Roald. London:Routlege, 2001.

Medicines of the Soul: Female Bodies and Sacred Geographies in aTransnational Islam. By Fedwa Malti-Douglas. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2001.

A. Holly Shissler, University of Chicago

T oday the “woman question” is a battleground both inside and outsidethe Muslim world. That is, the woman question raises the sharpestcriticism of Islam and Muslim societies from the outside and is at the

same time one of the most hotly debated areas within Islamic and Islamistcircles. This situation is reflected in the three books under review here,each of which looks at how Muslim voices engage with a secular, globalized“Western” world as seen through the lens of women’s rights and women’sproper role in society.

Women’s Human Rights and Islam: A Study of Three Attempts at Ac-commodation is fascinating and is the most successful of the three works.Jonas Svensson assesses how three very different public intellectuals at-tempt to reinterpret Islam in ways that make it compatible with women’shuman rights as expressed in various international instruments, most no-tably the 1979 United Nations Women’s Convention. Svensson’s subjectshave in common that they are Muslims who hail from predominatelyMuslim societies, have received extensive Western-style academic training,have published widely on the topics in question, and actively participatein international academic and human rights forums. In their work all threeemphasize approaching religious questions on the basis of the earliest,most fundamental sources of Islam, mainly the Qur’an, at the expense ofthe established schools of Islamic law, the madhahib. They all champion



242 ❙ Book Reviews

a broader ethical understanding of the Qur’an, and they insist on theessential message of equality in Islam. There are also important differences,however. Fatima Mernissi, the renowned Moroccan feminist and aca-demic, accepts as a given that secularism is the social ideal to strive for.Her reinterpretations of Islamic scripture and history are overtly aimedat facilitating a gradual move in Muslim societies toward that goal, whereasthe other two authors are committed to the idea of working for fullyIslamic societies that subscribe to and enforce Islamic law, albeit Islamiclaw interpreted according to each author’s lights. Riffat Hassan, a U.S.-based Pakistani woman and self-described feminist theologian, approachesthe interpretation of the Qur’an by insisting on its internal coherence.This leads her to defend women’s equality in Islam through the idea ofcomplementarity between the sexes, positing an essential and biologicallydetermined difference in social function between men and women. Thusshe accounts for the different rights accorded to men and women in Islamwhile still maintaining that there is a principle of equality. By contrast,Sudanese exile and specialist in comparative law Abdullahi Ahmed an-Naim follows the teaching of his spiritual mentor Mahmud MuhammadTaha in asserting that the Qur’an has two messages: one, a timeless ethicalmessage of equality embodied in the Meccan revelations, the other, atemporally located message embodied in the Medinan revelation and con-taining regulations that helped the first Muslim community flourish inspecific circumstances. Therefore an-Naim rejects all of the specific reg-ulations and legal restrictions directed at woman on matters such as lead-ership, divorce, marriage, and so forth, as pertaining to the Medinanperiod, and he argues that in modern times the “larger” Meccan messageof total equality should prevail.

Svensson analyzes quite incisively the authors’ use of various rhetoricaland argumentative strategies to achieve accommodation and to garnerauthority, and he makes a clear exposition of the implications of thoseapproaches for women’s human rights. About Hassan’s framing of genderequality in Islam, he notes, for example, “There is no notion of a rightfor women to freely express their sexuality. . . . The institution of mar-riage, and intercourse within the framework of marriage is given a telosin relation to a view of society that is organic” (107).

The book contains a useful discussion of how international humanrights documents are formulated and then locally contested, drawing at-tention to how the intellectuals under study straddle two worlds and speakto two audiences. What Svensson terms the “positive emotive charge”(19) carried by the term human rights, together with the ever-increasingglobalization that makes such ideas widely available around the world,




render it difficult for governments and even religious groups to completelyreject these discourses. At the same time, claims of self-determination andcultural relativism make it hard for the international human rights com-munity to ignore local voices. Thus these globe-trotting intellectuals,whose origins give their voices “authenticity” and whose training allowsthem access to the political capital of human rights discourse, wield in-fluence in both camps and cannot be ignored even by their critics. WhatSvensson explicitly does not do in this work is make any evaluation of the“Islamicness” of his authors or their arguments, because, as he says, “thatwould amount to participating in the debate” (11).

By contrast, Anne Sofie Roald’s Women in Islam: The Western Ex-perience is a mixture of sociological study and cultural intervention.Roald attempts to examine “change and changing processes in the in-terpretation of social issues in the Islamic sources” (79). This she seeksto understand through interviewing and distributing questionnaires toMuslims living in Western Europe in order to see “how attitudes towomen and gender relations change in the cultural encounter between‘Islam’ and the ‘West’” (79).

The voices heard in this book, of educated, devout Muslims living inthe West and striving to make accommodations between their best un-derstanding of the faith and the realities of their daily lives, are fascinating.Roald’s discussion of their understanding of questions such as the natureand adaptability to historical circumstances of the Sharia, or the propermeaning of Qur’anic passages referring to men’s stewardship over women,allows those voices to come through clearly while also giving a good senseof the larger international and historical discourse to which these indi-viduals are responding. Often Roald also offers her own interpretation onsuch issues, as she does with the Sharia (103–4).

However, in explaining the choice of target group for her study, inoutlining her criteria for selecting her respondents and interviewees, andin identifying intellectual trends she deems important, Roald makes manyproblematic assertions and allows her own commitments to structure herwork. The parameters she establishes amount to a religious or theologicaljudgment about who a real Muslim is, and they reveal a certain arabo-centric prejudice. For instance, she identifies four movements or trendsamong Islamists as the most important and therefore the focus of herstudy: the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Liberation Party, the salafimovement (the movement to return to the sources—the Qur’an and theSunna—and to interpret them directly without deferring to tradition),and what she terms the “post-ikhwan trend” (37–57). The post-ikhwantrend and the Muslim Brotherhood are further singled out because she




claims they have “more potential for change” (97). But she offers noevidence for these claims. What is true is that the four movements shechooses are based in the Arab world and advocate a return to the “pure”and “original” sources of Islam—the Qur’an and the Sunna of theProphet—at the expense of the madhahib or of other trends that giveimportance to leaders, such as the sheykhs of Sufi orders or the ayatollahsof Shi‘i Islam. In terms of her respondents and interviewees, the study islimited to Arab-speaking Sunni Islamist intellectuals living in the West.In justifying her focus on Arab speakers to the exclusion of the non-ArabMuslim majority, Roald makes the argument that due to having the Arabiclanguage as their mother tongue, Arabs feel greater confidence and havegreater facility in consulting the original sources. She claims that the move-ment to return to the original sources is most prominent in the Arabworld and that this shows that Arabs continue to exercise an importantleadership role in the Islamic world. She further asserts that she has ob-served that non-Arab Muslims rely more on religious leaders and tradi-tional legal schools than do Arabs. She attributes this to their not knowingArabic and deduces that these communities will be less likely to produceinnovative and influential approaches to social issues (31–32, 59). But isthis true? Her attitude ignores the centuries of rich contributions madeby non-Arabs to Islamic thought and civilization, on the one hand, and,on the other, it overlooks the fact that, by her own account, there areboth ulama (religious scholars) from the traditional legal schools and Sufisheykhs taking a reformist or hermeneutic approach to Islamic law andtheology. Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, one of the originators of the pro-gressive-minded return-to-the-sources trend Roald praises, was neither anArab nor a Sunni.

Similarly, when Roald stipulates that her women respondents must wearsome form of head covering and that respondents in general must obeythe Islamic commandments, she is making a religious judgment aboutwho can rightly be considered, if not a Muslim, then an Islamist (21,61–62). But is it true that all women who view Islam as a comprehensiveapproach to life wear some form of head covering? Indeed, one mightfurther ask why, if she wants to study change in interpretation, Roaldlimits herself to “Islamists”? In all religions, many people who considerthemselves believers and pious nevertheless have a secular way of life andoutlook. Roald claims that those who fall within her stipulations are thoselikely to have the greatest impact on the reformist debate currently takingplace within the Muslim world, but again, is this true? Or is it true thatsuch people are likely to have the greatest impact on others like themselves?Implicit in all of this is the notion that secular Muslims are not really




Muslims, and therefore their opinions cannot or should not have an impacton the interpretation of Islam. The book focuses on Arabic-speaking Is-lamists in the West and in the Arab world in a way that creates the illusionof a two-dimensional debate between a secular West and an Islamist Arabworld, and it tends to flatten the range of views toward religion commonin the West, as well as the truly cosmopolitan nature of Muslim and Islamistsocial discourse.

Very different in tone and style from the above works is Fedwa Malti-Douglas’s study of three autobiographies by Muslim women relating theirspiritual transformation from a secular life as nominal Muslims to a reli-gious awakening and life as practicing Muslims. Malti-Douglas employsthe tools of literary criticism effectively in showing how these stories,though ostensibly women’s stories, are permeated with male authority.The women’s texts are framed by validating introductions, conclusions,or both by male authority figures. The title page of Belgian-born SultanaKouhmane’s book actually lists her husband as coauthor, even though thebook is her memoir and purports in places to consist of extracts from herdiary. Leila Lahlou’s account of her struggle with breast cancer and mi-raculous cure following her journey to Mecca is sandwiched betweenintroductions by a medical doctor and by the king of Morocco and anappendix containing medical documents. Karıman Hamza’s descriptionof her evolution from Egyptian bourgeoise to Islamically garbed mediapersonality incorporates extensive passages from the works of her spiritualguide and also carries a male-authored introduction and conclusion.1

Malti-Douglas notes (in interesting counterpoise to Roald’s work) thestories’ Sufi or mystical overtones—all three protagonists are deeply af-fected by “true” dreams that either set them on their spiritual quests orsignal the fulfillment of those quests. Hamza’s story, in fact, follows thebasic structure of a Sufi journey toward enlightenment, with each phasein the progressive covering of her body standing for a stage on her mysticaljourney. Similarly, Kouhmane’s trip to the Atlas with her husband and hergradual acceptance of sex segregation as a natural social order where menoccupy the public sphere and women the private, follows in some waysthe pattern of a Sufi journey in which the external, material, and false are

1 The works discussed by Malti-Douglas are Karıman Hamza, Rihlatı min al-Sufur ilaal-Hijab (Cairo: Dar al-I‘tisam, 1981); Layla al-Hulw, Fala Tansa Allah (Casablanca:Matba‘at al-Najah al-Jadıda, 1984), and the French language ed., Leıla Lahlou, N’oublie pasDieu (Casablanca: Imprimerie Najah El Jadida, 1987); and Cheikh Mohammed Saghir andKouhmane Sultana, L’Islam, la femme, et l’integrisme: Journal d’une jeune femmme euro-peenne (Brussels: Edition Al-Imen, 1991). (The authors’ names are transliterated from theArabic differently in these publications than in Medicines of the Soul.)




renounced in favor of inner truths. Missing from all these women’s ac-counts, however, is any mention of female mystics or prominent contem-porary Islamist women who might have served as inspiration. Eachwoman’s voyage to enlightenment is entirely inspired and guided by men.

As Malti-Douglas emphasizes, the degree to which women’s bodiesconstitute the terrain on which piety and religious practice, especially socialreligious practice, are defined is striking in these accounts. A greater in-terpretative effort at thinking about why this should be the case wouldhave enriched this work, however. These women, through their awak-enings and the subsequent publication of their conversion stories, haveentered into a heated public debate in Islam and Islamic revivalism aboutthe proper role of women in society. Malti-Douglas’s exposition clearlydemonstrates this, and she casts her authors as examples of a new kind ofIslamist intellectual engage, but her failure to situate any of these womenprecisely in terms of the Islamic and Islamist movements active in thecontemporary world or to address the question of who the audience forthese works is and how the works have been received and answered inother quarters leaves the reader unable to evaluate them as cultural in-terventions or to see their transnational character in any meaningful an-alytical sense.

A common feature among many of the thinkers treated in these books,one that is present also in some of the authors of the books themselves(Hassan, Kouhmane, Roald, among others) is the tendency to essentializewomen based on “natural” biological function, to view the family ratherthan the individual as the basic unit of society, and to emphasize thatthere is equality within the harmonious acceptance of natural or divinelyordained gender roles. This is a set of attitudes familiar from other con-texts, such as organic nationalism, and the corporativist movements thatarose between the World Wars, in particular. It is an outlook that employsthe language of love, not rights, and asserts that in fulfilling his or herproper function, each member of society finds happiness and contributesto social harmony—ends that cannot be achieved through a model ofrights and adversarial or competitive interaction. Like corporativism, thisform of Islamism should be understood as a radical modernizing move-ment that rejects tradition, on the one hand, and seeks to offer an alter-native to classical liberal models based on formal equality and individualself-interest, on the other. The woman question is one piece of terrainwhere this alternative vision of modernity is articulated particularly, andit may serve as one explanation for why the topic is so fraught. It is tobe hoped that authors writing on questions relating to women and Islamwill dedicate more time to considering not only the articulation of the




woman question in various contexts but the reasons for its centrality andhotly contested nature. ❙

Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties. By Sheila Rowbotham.London: Verso, 2001.

Shaky Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks. By Alice Echols. New York:Columbia University Press, 2002.

Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin–Madison

T he time of reflection has arrived. The 1960s as a period of personalas well as social transformation has now entered into the category of“the past,” which many believe makes it merit individual and collective

stocktaking. These two feminist historians now offer an intriguing com-bination of professional scrutiny of their own individual history and anattempt to make some sense of the changes of the period in some largerway. Each book is quite different, yet only in part because of the authors’social locations. Sheila Rowbotham is older, experiences the sixties in Parisand London, and is deeply involved in socialist politics long before sheever begins to think of feminism; Alice Echols experiences already activewomen’s studies communities on the fringes of American politics in Min-nesota and New Mexico and studies the 1950s and 1960s in order tomake sense of what she lives through in the 1970s. Rowbotham is engagedin an explicitly autobiographical project in which she deploys historicaltools to try to make sense of the context of her own life, hoping to convertits raw experience into a more self-conscious and critically evaluated lifefrom which she and others can learn. Echols aims instead to write historicalassessments of the period, some of its personae, and its politics, whilereflecting on the life context in which she wrote the various essays thatare collected here and bringing her own life story to bear on the events.

The authors can, therefore, hardly avoid questions of to what extentthe personal is political and vice versa. Rowbotham’s memoir is deeplypersonal, discussing in depth such events as her schooling, her parents’deaths, and her various affairs and trying to evaluate just what they meantto her. Like a good session of psychoanalysis, her stories about her pastare frank and thoughtful. Writing them must have been tremendouslyuseful to her as she worked through what meaning she wished to give to



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