Islamic Society in Practice

Islamic Society in Practice is written in a new tradition of Westernscholarship on Islam that seeks to represent an alternative view to that ofOrientalism. The author sets out to analyze Islam as lived and practiced ineveryday life, and brings out the human dimension of a region and a religioustradition that largely have been stereotyped in the West. Withoutadvocating conversion or the blurring of differences, she argues thatapproaching Islamic and Arab cultures on their own terms and recognizingtheir strengths and weaknesses will produce the crosscultural understandingnecessary for world peace in the twenty-first century.The book, the result of more than two decades of research and over fiveyears of residence in Khartoum, Cairo, and Tunis, covers a wide range ofsubjects. Among these are the five pillars of Islam, Islamic values andsocial practice, family and gender relations, the ongoing debate on thereform of family law, Islamic identities in a changing world, and the sociopoliticaldimensions of contemporary Islamic movements.The author's study of Islam and her residence among and closeinteraction with Muslims accorded her considerable access to Islamicculture and enabled her to debunk tenured stereotypes. She gives a veryintimate picture of the ethos of Muslim societies and pays special attentionto the structure of the extended Muslim family and the status ofwomen in Islamic societies. In a bid to explode the myth of theoppressed Muslim woman, she goes beyond facile observations to lookat the deeper social and ethical logic that informs apparent genderbaseddiscrepancies in Islamic laws and practices. She also documentsfacts about the strides that Muslim women have been making that nevermake it to the headlines: For instance, many major universities in theMiddle East, such as Cairo University, have about 50 percent femalestudents, and until recently, there was a greater proportion of femalemedical doctors and engineers in Arab Muslim societies than in theWest ...