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WOMEN
Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences, by Margot Badran. Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2009. ix + 338 pages. Index to p. 349. $29.95.
Velvet Resistance: Muslim Women's Quiet Resistance to Islamic Fundamentalism, by Faegheh Shirazi. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. xiv + 226 pages. Notes to p. 249. Bibl. to p. 264. Index to p. 277. $65.
Burçak Keskin-Kozat
These two books explore the issue of contemporary women's activism in Muslim societies with a special focus on the Middle East and Africa. The activists are (self-) identified as either "feminists" or "gender activists." Despite their ideological divergences, they challenge and aim to eradicate the patriarchal forms of oppression, suppression and discrimination that women experience because of their sex. Both Badran and Shirazi discuss in numerous cases how such Muslim women's activism, whether it is secular or not, emerges in close conversation with Islamic modernism or Islamist fundamentalism that characterizes contemporaneous cultural, political and theological landscape of their society.
Badran's book is a collection of 13 previously published articles and one new piece. The first part of the book focuses on secular and Islamic women's movements in the specific case of Egypt from the late 19th century to the 1990s. The second half of the book focuses more specifically on the definition, strategies, and sources of Islamic feminism by drawing comparisons between the Egyptian case and other Middle Eastern and African societies - specifically, Nigeria, Yemen, and Turkey. Badran's analysis is grounded in rich archival data gathered and interpreted through various decades. Each chapter reflects the meticulous work and documentation of a historian who masterfully captures the historical continuities and discontinuities from late 19th to the 21st century. In this respect, the book presents a rich narrative of transformation as well as simultaneous articulation of secular, nationalist, and Islamic women's movements in...