Religion and GenderBooks

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.

Daniel M. Lavery’s memoir-in-essays mixes transition, theology, pop culture, family estrangement, humor, and literary play.

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.