A comprehensive collection of links on the topic of
If you know of other web pages not listed here, please tell us about them so that we can add them here.
"Women in Islam", their position, their rights, polygamy, etc... are constantly hot topics on the newsgroups and personal discussions as well as academic research.
End of 1996 I did some major web search on this topic and would like to share the resources collected with all of the readership here.
Then: Just about everywhere we find:
The ultimate propaganda pamphlet. This was immediately recognized as extremely valuable by many Muslims and it is located on over a dozen pages. Multiplication of locations is, however, not turning false claims into true statements. This book is responded to in several articles.
Now, we do observe the great creativity in titles... "Women in Islam" being the absolute most favorite one. :-) ... I started to wonder why I never have seen any article named "Men in Islam". Either this indicates that indeed it is only the women whose problems and place have to be solved, established and explained, because only they have to struggle with such problems. OR (?) do I detect a discrimination against men who do not receive any attention in Islam?
The above two books seem to be the only books that deal with the many hadiths and rulings of Muslim scholars and take a deeper look at the traditional Islamic view on women. I would be interested to see a careful discussion of this material by Muslims, since this is done by non-Muslim authors. Call it biased against Islam, but what is the answer?
Berkey, Jonathan P., "Circumcision circumscribed: female excision
and cultural accomodation in the Medieval Near East,"
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 28 (1996), 19-38.
Observation:
Most of the Islamic pages start off to explain that the image of women in Islam is bad, and this is wrong, and then try to explain why women really have equal status etc. They do clearly have the agenda to remedy a situation that the authors do not like [understandably so]. This doesn't mean from the outset that it is all wrong and biased. But it is good to keep the agenda in mind when reading this. They ARE written to change an image. Not from a "neutral observer's" viewpoint. There are few Islamic web sites [I haven't really found any, but I might not have found all] who seem to display articles on the topic which are NOT done mainly for producing a better image but who try to give an overview of the REALITY [instead of a theoretical explanation of what it should be (according to whom?)] nor do Islamic web sites deal with the traditional view of women as in the Muslim scholarly works. That seems to be done only in non-Muslim publication(s).
I hope this list is helpful to some at least. It was highly interesting for me to surf around and see what is there.
Related topics:
Women Issues
Answering Islam Home Page