Arab FeminismBooks

Leila Ahmed traces how gender norms in Muslim societies were formed through changing social orders, legal interpretation, colonial power, and modern nationalist debate rather than by a single timeless religious command.

Mona Eltahawy’s polemic links state, family, and religious control over women’s bodies across the Middle East and North Africa while forcing debate about anger, generalization, and the politics of speaking for a region.

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.

A groundbreaking novel by Egyptian feminist pioneer Saadawi that exposes the violence and oppression faced by women in Arab society through the story of a woman sentenced to death.