The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Women

This multi-disciplinary work provides deep and wide-ranging coverage of issues relating to Islam and women. The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Women offers authoritative contributions from well-known scholars who provide sophisticated and cutting-edge analysis of topics such as Qur'anic hermeneutics regarding women's status and roles, analysis of hadiths (statements attributed to the Prophet Muhammad) that address women's issues, Islamic legal rulings as they pertain to women's legal and social rights, the scholarly and literary activities of Muslim women through time, and their activism in a number of contemporary Muslim-majority societies.

The essays in this volume delineate a broad spectrum of views on these key issues and above all, emphasize the diversity present in Muslim women's lives, both in the pre-modern and modern periods. Close attention is paid to the historical and political contexts that have shaped their lives, framed by the thoughts and actions of key figures throughout Islamic history. Such an approach results in fine-grained studies of the lived realities of Muslim women across time and space that problematize reified assumptions about gender and agency in the context of Muslim-majority societies, assumptions that remain all too common.

Asma Afsaruddin is Class of 1950 Herman B. Wells Endowed Professor and Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author and editor of eight books, including The First Muslims: History and Memory (2008); her award-winning Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought (OUP, 2013); Contemporary Issues in Islam (2015); and Jihad: What Everyone Needs to Know (OUP, 2022). She was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2005 and was inducted into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars in 2019.

Introduction
Asma Afsaruddin

Foundational Texts and Their Interpretations
Chapter 1: The Qur'an and Woman
Hibba Abugideri
Chapter 2: Classical Exegeses of Qur'anic Verses concerning Women
Hadia Mubarak
Chapter 3: Women in the Hadith Literature
Feryal Salem
Chapter 4: Modern Rereadings of the Qur'an through a Gendered Lens
Asma Afsaruddin
Chapter 5: Modern Rereadings of Hadith through a Gendered Lens
Khaled Abou El Fadl

Women and Islamic Law
Chapter 6: Women's Rights and Duties in Classical Legal Literature
Mariam Sheibani
Chapter 7: Status of Women in Modern Family and Personal Law
Sohaira Siddiqui
Chapter 8: Modern Rereadings of Classical Legal Texts on Women
Natana DeLong Bas

Deciphering Women's Lives: Women in History and Texts
Chapter 9: Early Muslim Women as Moral Paragons in the Classical Literature
Yasmin Amin
Chapter 10: Women in Shi'i Islam as Moral Exemplars
Maria Dakake
Chapter 11: Women as Transmitters of Knowledge
Asma Sayeed
Chapter 12: Muslim Women and Devotional Life
Zahra Ayubi and Iman Abdoulkarim
Chapter 13: Women as Littérateurs in the Premodern Period
Samer Ali
Chapter 14: Women as Economic Actors in the Pre-Modern Islamic World
Amira Sonbol

Women's Lived Realities and their Religious and Social Activism in the Modern Period
Chapter 15: Women in the Mosque : Contesting Public Space and Religious Authority
Marion Katz
Chapter 16: Negotiating Motherhood, Religion, and Modern Lived Realities
Margaret Pappano
Chapter 17: Women as Modern Heads-of-State
Tamara Sonn
Chapter 18: Women's Religious and Social Activism in Syrian, Lebanon, and Palestine
Elizabeth Brownson
Chapter 19: Women's Religious and Social Activism in Egypt and North Africa
Nermin Allam
Chapter 20: Women's Religious and Social Activism in Iran
Seema Golestaneh
Chapter 21: Women's Religious and Social Activism in Turkey
Chiara Maritato
Chapter 22: Women's Religious and Social Activism in South Asia
Elora Shehabuddin
Chapter 23: Women's Religious and Social Activism in Southeast Asia
Nelly van Doorn-Harder
Chapter 24: Muslim Women's Religious and Social Activism in China
Maria Jaschok and Man Ke
Chapter 25: Muslim Women's Religious and Social Activism in South Africa
Nina Hoel
Chapter 26: Muslim Women's Religious and Social Activism in North America
Juliane Hammer
Chapter 27: Muslim Women's Religious and Social Activism in western Europe
Jeanette Jouili
Chapter 28: Women's Religious and Social Activism in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf
Alainna Liloia

Modern Narratives of the Gendered Self: Women Writing about Women
Chapter 29: Modern Representations of the Wives of the Prophet
Ruqayya Khan
Chapter 30: An Overview of Modern and Contemporary Muslim Feminist Literature
Miriam Cooke

Islam, Women, and the Global Public Arena
Chapter 31: Women's Sartorial Agency: The History and Politics of Veiling
Anna Piela
Chapter 32: Muslim Women as a Cultural Trope: Global Discourses and the Politics of Victimhood
Katherine Bullock

Index