Women and Islam is both an important book and a wonderful and exciting text. It should be required reading for all courses in Middle East Studies that seek to impart a serious understanding of the real lives of Muslim women. The study of Muslim women has become a battleground where the academy seems more concerned with debating whether Islam is good or bad than with probing how this religious system actually works. By bringing together texts written by Europeans, as well as by Muslim men and women in pre-modern Muslim Iberia, Ibtissam Bouachrine shows that women’s lives do not comprise a unified story captured either by those who see only unremitting suffering and abuse or by those who find signs everywhere of their resistance. Through her creation of this literary dialogue—and only someone possessed of a rich set of linguistic skills and literary sensitivity can discharge this kind of scholarly task—Bouachrine is able to uncover the diversity of points of view about women and perhaps, more importantly, convey their meaning.

Donna Divine, Smith College

This is literary criticism, intellectual history, and feminist theory at their best. In uncompromising fashion, Ibtissam Bouachrine's Women and Islam challenges received myths or partial pictures of both past and present Islam. Bouachrine courageously engages previous scholarship that had presented al-Andalus as a model of tolerance, early Islam as an ally of women's challenges to Arabian patriarchy, or the current Arab revolutions as potentially liberating for women, and submits these claims to a nuanced, impeccable feminist critique. This is a first-rate scholarly work with which specialists in feminist theory, Cultural Studies, both medieval and modern Arab literature, as well as history of religions, will grapple for years to come.

Idelber Avelar, Tulane University

Women and Islam is a refreshing, well-written, and heartfelt critique of a series of modern myths, apologies, and celebratory discourses that have been constructed about the role and status of women in Islamic societies—medieval and modern. Beginning with a close reading of a wide range of pre-modern sources, Ibtissam Bouachrine skillfully demonstrates how modern myths and falsehoods about the Andalusian ‘Golden Age’ as well as the patronizingly protectionist Saidian discourse about Muslim culture have been used to silence criticism and stave off reform. Women and Islam: Myths, Apologies, and the Limits of Feminist Critique is a welcome and outstanding contribution to the field.

James E. Lindsay, Colorado State University