Full Description
Does Islam as a religion oppress women? Is Islam against democracy? In this classic study, internationally renowned sociologist Fatema Mernissi argues that women's oppression is not due to Islam because this religion celebrates women's power. Women's oppression, she maintains, is due to political manipulation of religion by power-seeking, archaic Muslim male elites. Mernissi explains that early Muslim scholars portrayed women as aggressive hunters who forced men, reduced to weak hunted victims, to control women by imposing institutions such as veiling, which confined women to the private space. In her new introduction, she argues that women's aggressive invasion of the 500-plus Arab satellite channels in the twenty-first century, including as commanding show anchors, film and video stars, supports her theory that Islam as a religion celebrates female power.
Contents
New Introduction: Why Does the Veil Scare Europe? 7 Introduction: Roots of the Modern Situation 19 Part One The Traditional Muslim View of Women and Their Place in the Social Order 35 1. The Muslim Concept of Active Female Sexuality 37 2. Regulation of Female Sexuality in the Muslim Social Order 57 3. Sex and Marriage Before Islam 77 Part Two Anomic Effects of Modernization on Male-Female Dynamics 99 4. The Modern Situation: Moroccan Data 101 5. Sexual Anomie As Revealed by the Data 110 6. Husband and Wife 122 7. The Mother-in-Law 135 8. The Meaning of Spatial Boundaries 151 9. The Economic Basis of Sexual Anomie in Morocco 162 Conclusion: Women's Liberation in Muslim Countries 181 Notes 195 Index 215
