Includes bibliographical references (pages 467-500) and index.

History then, history now : the role of medieval Islamic religio-political sources in shaping the modern debate on gender / Denise A. Spellberg -- The Qur'an and history / Barbara Freyer Stowasser -- Muslim women : public authority, scriptures, and "Islamic law" / Haifaa Khalafallah -- Gendered sources in ethnohistorical research : the study of emigration from a Lebanese village / Patricia Mihaly Nabti -- Individualism and political modernity : devout Catholic women in Aleppo and Lebanon between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries / Bernard Heyberger -- Women, patronage, and charity in Ottoman Istanbul / Fariba Zarinebaf -- Consciousness of self / Randi Deguilhem -- Sources for the study of slave women and concubines in Ottoman Egypt / Nelly Hanna -- Thoughts on women and slavery in the Ottoman era and historical sources / Madeline Zilfi -- Observations on the use of sharia court records as a source of social history / Ramadan al-Khowli -- Mahkama records as a source for women's history / Fatima Zohra Guechi -- And God knows best : the fatwa as a source for the history of gender in the Arab world / Judith E. Tucker -- Gender violence in Ottoman law / Elyse Semerdjian -- Mixed and other courts / Amira El-Azhary Sonbol -- Islamic personal law in American courts / Richard Freeland -- Learning gendered modernity / Lisa Pollard -- The use of textbooks as a source of history for women / Mona Russell -- Sources on the education of Ottoman women in the prime ministerial Ottoman archive for the period of reforms in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries / Selçuk Aks̲in Somel -- The history of the discourses on gender and Islamism in contemporary Egypt (1980-1990) / Mervat F. Hatem -- Female patronage of Mamluk architecture in Cairo / Howayda al-Harithy -- Islamic art as a source for the study of women in premodern societies / Sheila S. Blair -- Discerning the hand-of-Fatima : an iconological investigation of the role of gender in religious art / Diane Apostolos-Cappadona -- Oral traditions as a source for the study of Muslim women / Valerie J. Hoffman -- Political science without clothes : the politics of dress, or, contesting the spatiality of the state in Egypt / Mamoun Fandy.

"Most research has accepted stereotypical images of Muslim women, treating their outward manifestations, such as veiling, as passive and oppressive. Muslim women have been depicted as different, and by exoticizing (orientalizing) them - or Islamic society in general - "they" have been dealt with outside of general women's history and regarded as having little to contribute to the writing of world history or to the life of their sisters worldwide. By approaching widely used sources with different questions and methodologies, and by using new or little-used material (with much primary research), this book redresses these deficiencies. Scholars revisit and reevaluate scripture and scriptural interpretation; church records involving non-Muslim women of the Arab world; archival court records dating from the present back to the Ottoman period; and the oral and material culture and its written record, including oral history, textbooks, sufi practices, and the politics of dress. By deconstructing the past, these scholars offer fresh perspectives on women's roles and aspirations in Middle East societies."--Jacket.

1 2