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NWSA Journal 18.3 (2006) 202-205


Reviewed by
Rafia Zakaria
Encyclopedia of Women in Islamic CulturesVols. I and II edited by Suad Joseph. Boston: Brill Publishing, 2005, 1,526 pp., $296.00 hardcover.

Imagine the voices of millions of Muslim women represented such that each voice is distinct without being dissonant and discrete without being solitary. Such is the accomplishment of the editors of the Encyclopedia of Women in Islamic Cultures (EWIC). The voices of women through war and peace, in their efforts to claim justice and garner social change, are all encapsulated and made to cohere without acceding to the temptation of conforming them to a particular thesis regarding the status of women in Islamic cultures. From the initial pages, the editors are clear in their delineation of the project: the encyclopedia is a compilation of information about "women in Islamic cultures" rather than about "women in Islam." This distinction is important and yet necessarily ambiguous. The relationship between Islamic culture and Islam as a faith is a hotbed of controversy rife with many incongruities and particularly lethal in the prevalence of current debates regarding the necessity of reform within the faith. In giving precedence to women as the essential and primary subject of their inquiry, the editors make the original and commendable move of grounding their inquiry into Islamic culture by documenting the lives of women living in them.

The arrangement of the Encyclopedia is such that a variety of essays deal with similar topics from different perspectives1 with the laudable result that no single perspective dominates the treatment of a subject. In the case of law, the dominant proclivities to paint the advent of Islam as either a complete revolution in terms of the legal rights available to women, or a forced imposition of patriarchy on previously existing matrilineal pre-Islamic culture are both avoided. Amira Sombol's chapter on the "Rise of Islam" points out how the changes in women's lives precipitated by the rise of Islam in the sixth century cannot be painted in such broad strokes and emphasis must be placed instead on "the history of the world into which Islam expanded" as an essential denominator of the Islamic culture that consequently developed (Vol. I, 3). The essay highlights how the laws governing marriage and family in early Islam varied as did all other customs by tribe and only later evolved into a common codified core.

One of these core concerns that developed in early Islam and resonates through the history of the development of Islamic family law, as presented in various essays in the EWIC, is the moral prerogative for the "control of sexuality through prescribed dress, actions and limited mixing between [End Page 202] the sexes" (Vol. 1, 5). Ingrid Mattson's chapter on Islamic family law as it evolved in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shows how this core moral prescription retained its centrality in Islamic law and was translated into the exclusion of women from the public sphere with the concomitant result that "the more scholarship became institutionalized and closely associated with the state, the less opportunity women may have had to participate in legal discourse" (Vol. II, 450). Mattson's chapter outlines how the conceptualization of gender relations within Islamic law is embedded in a culture with a highly collectivist sense of identity and belonging and where family solidarity is the fulcrum of all relations. According to Mattson, Islamic gender relations are based on a principle of "complimentarity" that justifies the "coercive authority given to husbands over their wives" (Vol. II, 451). This coercive control, which allows disciplining wives by beating them with a switch the size of the thumb, is part of a larger power dynamic that also places all legal responsibility of financial support and management for all female relatives including wives, mothers, and sisters on the males in the family. In highlighting the crucial difference between "equality" and "complimentarity," Mattson sheds light on the role of women within the Islamic legal system as essentially protected (and...

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