Women's Islam

After the 1979 revolution in Iran, the western media revealed pictures of full-veiled Iranian women demonstrating in the streets of Tehran to demand the death of the Shah and the downfall of his regime. Many asked what it was that made these women reject the nobility of the socio-economic modernity of the Shah's regime and instead embrace Islamic belief widely presumed to be "oppressive" and misogynistic--a religion in which women have no place and no identity. Zahra Kamalkhani's new book goes behind the veil to disprove this misconception and to look in detail at the complex lives of the majority contemporary Muslim women. She deals with Islamic beliefs and the religious tradition of women in the context of modern political turmoil and addresses the false assumption that a clear distinction can be made between the "official" Islam practiced by men and the "popular" Islam practiced by women. In this important study in Islamic anthropology, the author treats women as actors in the interconnected domains of family, religious, political and social contexts, all under the umbrella of Islam., in order to generate new models for understanding the Muslim women of today.