What does it mean to be a middle-class Muslim kid in India today? Talking to over a hundred children and their parents across twelve cities, Nazia Erum uncovers stories of religious segregation in classrooms and rampant bullying of Muslim children in many of the countryÕs top schools.

Muslim Mothering is an interdisciplinary volume, concentrating on the experiences of Muslim mothers, largely in the contemporary period. The volume is notable for the global range of its contributors and topics, indicative of the number of Muslim majority national contexts and large and diverse Muslim diaspora of today's world. While motherhood is highly valued in the sacred texts of Islam, the lived reality of Muslim mothers demonstrates that their lives do not often conform with traditional religious paradigms. For instance, prominent among the themes uniting these essays from diverse global contexts are the challenges facing Muslim mothers to protect and nurture their children in the context of war and militarization. With ongoing turbulence in the Middle East and subcontinent, many Muslims mothers face the difficulties of rearing children amongst frequent bombings and episodes of violence. Muslim mothers living in the diaspora face other challenges, such as the difficulty of fostering positive Muslim identity as a minority and in a context of Islamophobia. Other contributions discuss the way that Muslim mothers negotiate cultural institutions and practices, such as divorce, adoption/guardianship, post-partum confinement, and societal/religious expectations of procreation. This collection demonstrates the diverse and complex ways that Muslim mothers define and redefine the resources of Islam to negotiate better situations for themselves and their children, revealing how religious identity is a dynamic and vital force in their everyday lives.

Muslim Mothering is an interdisciplinary volume, concentrating on the experiences of Muslim mothers, largely in the contemporary period. The volume is notable for the global range of its contributors and topics, indicative of the number of Muslim majority national contexts and large and diverse Muslim diaspora of today’s world. While motherhood is highly valued in the sacred texts of Islam, the lived reality of Muslim mothers demonstrates that their lives do not often conform with traditional religious paradigms. For instance, prominent among the themes uniting these essays from diverse global contexts are the challenges facing Muslim mothers to protect and nurture their children in the context of war and militarization. With ongoing turbulence in the Middle East and subcontinent, many Muslims mothers face the difficulties of rearing children amongst frequent bombings and episodes of violence. Muslim mothers living in the diaspora face other challenges, such as the difficulty of fostering positive Muslim identity as a minority and in a context of Islamophobia. Other contributions discuss the way that Muslim mothers negotiate cultural institutions and practices, such as divorce, adoption/guardianship, post-partum confinement, and societal/religious expectations of procreation. This collection demonstrates the diverse and complex ways that Muslim mothers define and redefine the resources of Islam to negotiate better situations for themselves and their children, revealing how religious identity is a dynamic and vital force in their everyday lives.

Explores how medieval Muslim theologians constructed a female gender identity based on an ideal of maternity and how women contested it. Conceiving Identities explores how medieval Muslim theologians appropriate a woman’s reproductive power to construct a female gender identity in which maternity is a central component. Through a close analysis of seventh- through fourteenth-century exegetical works, medical treatises, legal pronouncements, historiographies, zoologies, and other literary materials, this study considers how medieval Muslim scholars map the female reproductive body according to broader, cosmological schemes to generate a woman’s role as “mother.” By close consideration of folk medicine and magic, this book also reveals how medieval women contest the traditional maternal identities imagined for them and thereby reinvent themselves as mothers and Muslims. This innovative examination of the discourse and practices surrounding maternity forges new ground as it takes up the historical and epistemic construction of medieval Muslim women’s identities.

Dear Reader, I know exactly how you are feeling. People will tell you, to have sabr and trust in Allah's plan. People will expect you to behave in a certain way. I have written this child loss book for you and me. We are parents who have lost a piece of our heart. No one else can understand what we are going through. There are many self-help books for parents and child loss stories, however, very few are written from an Islamic perspective. I am here to tell you that there is hope, there is a way to find peace and solace, and that way is through the healing words of Allah and the comforting words of our beloved Prophet Muhammad (saw). Inshallah, both the Quran and Sunnah are a balm that will soothe your heart. Together they have helped me carry on when I thought my sorrow would consume me. Inshallah, my sincere dua is that this book provides you with comfort and the strength to carry on. Love and duas Farhat Amin Losing a baby or child, whether through miscarriage or illness, leaves so many parents lost in grief and full of unanswered questions. Farhat Amin personally experienced a miscarriage and faced the loss of her teenage son. She has written this self-help book, which thoughtfully describes her experiences and how she found a way to live and learn from her bereavement. Some of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to charity.

This book unpacks and interrogates dominant constructions of mothering, making use of interdisciplinary, ideological and theoretical perspectives to investigate how new rhetorics of mothering can expand the realm of maternal care-givers beyond the biological definitions of motherhood. This diverse collection is at the cutting-edge of rhetoric, feminism, and motherhood studies, and the chapters challenge the confines of biological parenting as heteronormative within the neo-liberal nuclear family. The contributors examine, how despite the diversity of parental relationships, many are excluded by the understanding of mothers biologically tied to their children. The volume seeks to expose the underpinnings of biological primacy and argues that 21st-century families and familial circumstances are ill-served by biological ideology. Topics include Re-Imagining Queer Black Motherhood, Chicana Feminist approaches to reproductive justice, the commercialization and medicalization of infertility, and ableism and motherhood. This is a unique and fascinating book suitable for students and scholars in gender studies, sexuality studies, communication studies, sociology, and cultural studies.

""Islam and Women" is a very broad topic and as complex as the lives of women that it encompasses in a broad swath of the world. In its wide-ranging coverage of issues subsumed under this umbrella topic, this volume is purposefully multi-disciplinary. The chapters are authoritative contributions from well-known scholars who are at the cutting-edge of scholarship on inter alia Qur'anic hermeneutics and hadith studies, women's legal and social rights, women's scholarly, cultural, economic, and political activities in the pre-modern and modern Islamic societies, the rise of Islamic feminism and women's activism and movements in a number of contemporary Muslim-majority countries and regions, including Egypt and North Africa, Turkey, Iran, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region, South and Southeast Asia, and in Muslim-minority contexts in western Europe, the United States, and China. The politicized portrayal of Muslim women, especially of those who wear the headscarf (hijab), in the global Western-dominated media and the weaponization of their bodies in certain kinds of political and feminist discourses also receive attention. These chapters delineate a broad spectrum of views on these key issues that are prevalent inside and outside of academia and provide sophisticated and careful analysis of textual sources and of broad sociological and political trends. Many of these essays emphasize above all the diversity present in Muslim women's lives, both in the pre-modern and modern periods, and pay close attention to the historical and political contexts that shaped their lives and framed the thinking and actions of key female figures throughout Islamic history. Such an approach results in fine-grained macro- and micro-studies of Muslim women's lives that problematize reified assumptions of gender and agency in the context of Muslim-majority societies"--