The Cambridge Companion to Women and Islam (edited by Masooda Bano)

Abstract

The Cambridge Companion to Women and Islam comes at an important moment in the scholarship on Muslim women. Over the past two decades, the field has transformed from one dominated by Orientalist misrepresentations into a robust, interdisciplinary conversation grounded in textual scholarship, ethnography, sociology, and gender theory. It also challenges the assumption that the Islamic tradition is inherently as a course of women’s oppression or a marker of their backwardness. The book comprises fifteen chapters across three sections. The first introduces the foundations of classical Islamic gender teaching and outlines a vision of women’s well-being and equality distinct from Western feminist models. The second section offers cases of women navigating piety, some by following classical norms, others by reinterpreting them, demonstrating that pious agency is an active, adaptive process embedded in the Islamic legal tradition. The final section broadens the focus to women’s roles in shaping states and societies, highlighting forms of agency that resonate more closely with textual and ethnographic scholarship on Muslim women has evolved in the past two decades and where further work is needed, revealing the complex interplay between faith, agency, and social context.