In 1957, Henny Harald Hansen, the first Danish female anthropologist, was invited to take part in an archaeological expedition to the site of the projected Dokan Dam on the Little Zab river in Northern Iraq. Although her responsibilities were originally ethnological, she became the guest first of the local sheik and later of her interpreter’s family and as a result, the doors of many Kurdish homes were opened to her that normally would have remained closed to foreigners. She travelled widely among the mountain villages of Iraqi Kurdistan and was able to see from very close range the everyday life of women. First published in 1958 and translated in 1960, this book contains the intimate and fascinating account of Henny Harald Hansen’s travels and her encounters with the women of Kurdistan. It will be of keen interest to those studying women in Islamic societies and anthropology.

Mary, a young Australian girl, suddenly finds herself in a Muslim girls' boarding school in Alexandria, Egypt. Everything is strange, including the other girls. A month of Ramadan fasting, a desert sandstorm, lesbian advances, accusations and love affairs... in Daughters of Allah Mary suddenly finds herself in a world vastly different from anything she has ever experienced before. How will she cope? How will she fit in? Daughters of Allah is based on Ellen Mary Wilton's true life experiences with the Islamic culture as a young girl. An inspiring and thought-provoking story, Daughters of Allah raises many interesting points about the way the world perceives Muslim women and Islamic cultural traditions. Written from the point of view of a young girl, the author also offers insight from an adult perspective, gained through years of study and fascination with the Middle East.

In this comprehensive open access book, written for readers from any or no religious background, Leena El-Ali does something remarkable. Never before has anyone taken on every last claim relating to Islam and women and countered it not just with Qur’anic evidence to the contrary, but with easy-to-use tools available to all. How can a woman’s testimony be worth half of a man’s? How can men divorce their wives unilaterally by uttering three words? And what’s with the obsession with virgins in Paradise? Find the chapter on any of the seventeen topics in this book, and you will quickly learn a) where the myth came from and b) how to bust it. The methodology pursued is simple. First, the Qur’an is given priority over all other literary or “scriptural” sources. Second, the meaning of its verses in the original Arabic is highlighted, in contrast to English translations and/or widespread misunderstanding or misinterpretation.

Just before dawn one winter's morning, a hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel. Through the falling debris, two figures, Gibreel Farishta, the biggest star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an expatriate returning from his first visit to Bombay in fifteen years, plummet from the sky, washing up on the snow-covered sands of an English beach, and proceed through a series of metamorphoses, dreams, and revelations.

From the front page of The New York Times to YouTube, Dr. Wafa Sultan has become a force radical Islam has to reckon with. For the first time, she tells her story and what she learned, first-hand, about radical Islam in A God Who Hates, a passionate memoir by an outspoken Arabic woman that is also a cautionary tale for the West. She grew up in Syria in a culture ruled by a god who hates women. "How can such a culture be anything but barbarous?", Sultan asks. "It can't", she concludes "because any culture that hates its women can't love anything else." She believes that the god who hates is waging a battle between modernity and barbarism, not a battle between religions. She also knows that it's a battle radical Islam will lose. Condemned by some and praised by others for speaking out, Sultan wants everyone to understand the danger posed by A God Who Hates.