Stories about gendered social relations permeate the Qur'an, and nearly three hundred verses involve specific women or girls. The Qur'an features these figures in accounts of human origins, in stories of the founding and destruction of nations, in narratives of conquest, in episodes of romantic attraction, and in incidents of family devotion and strife. Overall, stories involving women and girls weave together theology and ethics to reinforce central Qur'anic ideas regarding submission to God and moral accountability. Celene Ibrahim explores the complex cast of female figures in the Qur'an, probing themes related to biological sex, female sexuality, female speech, and women in sacred history. Ibrahim considers major and minor figures referenced in the Qur'an, including those who appear in narratives of sacred history, in parables, in descriptions of the eternal abode, and in verses that allude to events contemporaneous with the advent of the Qur'an in Arabia. Ibrahim finds that the Qur'an regularly celebrates the aptitudes of women in the realms of spirituality and piety, in political maneuvering, and in safeguarding their own wellbeing; yet, women figures also occasionally falter and use their agency toward nefarious ends. Women and Gender in the Qur'an outlines how women and girls - old, young, barren, fertile, chaste, profligate, reproachable, and saintly -enter Qur'anic sacred history and advance the Qur'an's overarching didactic aims.

This is the first book to examine how pre-Islamic/Late Antique goddesses shaped the Qur’an, including its basic theology and cosmology. Exploring the traces found in the text of cultic veneration to goddesses of Arabia and the Ancient Near East, this book analyses what these traces tell us about female power in late antique Arabia, and how this power changed on the advent of Islam. While recent studies on the Qur’anic God have typically considered the question of divinity separately from gender, this book bridges the gap between these two questions, and is therefore an essential constructive mission. This mission adduces literary and documentary evidence—including recent scholarly revolutions in Syriac literature and Arabian epigraphy—and builds upon the critical insights of preceding studies in conversation with post-biblical and Near Eastern traditions.

Today, the issue of Muslim women is held hostage between two perceptions: a conservative Islamic approach and a liberal Western approach. At the heart of this debate Muslim women are seeking to reclaim their right to speak in order to re-appropriate their own destinies, calling for the equality and liberation that is at the heart of the Qur'an. However, with few female commentators on the meaning of the Qur'an and an overreliance on the readings of the Qur'an compiled centuries ago this message is often lost. In this book Asma Lamrabet demands a rereading of the Qur'an by women that focuses on its spiritual and humanistic messages in order to alter the lived reality on the ground. By acknowledging the oppression of women, to different degrees, in social systems organized in the name of religion and also rejecting a perspective that seeks to promote Western values as the only means of liberating them, the author is able to define a new way. One in which their refusal to remain silent is an act of devotion and their demand for reform will lead to liberation. Asma Lamarbet is a pathologist in Avicenna Hospital, Rabat, Morocco. She is also an award-winning author of many articles and books tackling Islam and women's issues. Myriam Francois-Cerrah is a writer and broadcaster whose articles have been published in the Guardian, Salon, and elsewhere.

Islamic ideas about women and their role in society spark considerable debate both in the Western world and in the Islamic world itself. Despite the popular attention surrounding Middle Eastern attitudes toward women, there has been little systematic study of the statements regarding women in the Qur'an. Stowasser fills the void with this study on the women of Islamic sacred history. By telling their stories in Qur'an and interpretation, she introduces Islamic doctrine and its past and present socio-economic and political applications. Stowasser establishes the link between the female figure as cultural symbol, and Islamic self-perceptions from the beginning to the present time.

Reinterprets divine injunctions from the Quran and traditional practices in Islam in light of the fundamental Islamic values of justice and equality on women's status. This work presents sociopolitical values and medieval social ethos as the origins of repressive practices, discussing controversial issues such as polygamy, and family planning.

A classic, pioneering account of the lives of women in Islamic history, republished for a new generation This pioneering study of the social and political lives of Muslim women has shaped a whole generation of scholarship. In it, Leila Ahmed explores the historical roots of contemporary debates, ambitiously surveying Islamic discourse on women from Arabia during the period in which Islam was founded to Iraq during the classical age to Egypt during the modern era. The book is now reissued as a Veritas paperback, with a new foreword by Kecia Ali situating the text in its scholarly context and explaining its enduring influence. “Ahmed’s book is a serious and independent-minded analysis of its subject, the best-informed, most sympathetic and reliable one that exists today.”—Edward W. Said “Destined to become a classic. . . . It gives [Muslim women] back our rightful place, at the center of our histories.”—Rana Kabbani, The Guardian