Arab FeminismBooks

Leila Ahmed traces how gender, law, and religious authority changed across Islamic history, then shows how colonial rule turned the veil and the ‘woman question’ into political symbols.

Mona Eltahawy connects control over women’s bodies at home, in public, and through the state, then asks what a sexual revolution can mean without flattening the Middle East into one story.

Lila Abu-Lughod dismantles the rescue narrative that turns Muslim women into a uniform victim class and uses their suffering to authorize war, humanitarian intervention, and moral superiority.

Saba Mahmood’s ethnography of Cairo’s women’s mosque movement challenges feminist theories that recognize agency only as resistance to norms and asks how ethical subjects are formed through embodied religious practice.

miriam cooke reads Muslim women’s literary and public interventions as the making of Islamic feminism, a contested space in which religious belonging and demands for gender justice are claimed together.

Nawal El Saadawi’s novel follows Firdaus, an Egyptian woman on death row, as she recounts a life shaped by poverty, sexual violence and economic dependence. This reading examines the narrative frame and avoids treating one character’s experience as representative of all Arab women.