Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : deciphering Middle Eastern women's history / Nikki R. Keddie -- Islam and patriarchy : a comparative perspective / Deniz Kandiyoti -- Political action and public example : 'A'isha and the battle of the camel / Denise A. Spellberg -- Early Islam and the position of women : the problem of interpretation / Leila Ahmed -- Gendering the ungendered body : hermaphrodites in medieval Islamic law / Paula Sanders -- Manners and customs of fourteenth-century Cairene women : female anarchy versus male Sharí order in Muslim prescriptive treatises / Huda Lutfi -- Class solidarity versus gender gain : women as custodians of property in later medieval Egypt / Carl F. Petry -- Women and Islamic education in the Mamluk period / Jonathan P. Berkey.

Ottoman women, households, and textile manufacturing, 1800-1914 / Donald Quataert -- The impact of legal and educational reforms on Turkish women / Nermin Abadan-Unat -- The dynamics of women's spheres of action in rural Iran / Erika Friedl -- Political roles of Aliabad women : the public-private dichotomy transcended / Mary Elaine Hegland -- Ties that bound : women and family in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Nablus / Judith E. Tucker -- The house of Zainab : female authority and saintly succession in colonial Algeria / Julia Clancy-Smith -- The making and breaking of marital bonds in modern Egypt / Beth Baron -- Artists and entrepreneurs : female singers in Cairo during the 1920s / Virginia Danielson -- Biography and women's history : on interpreting Doria Shafik / Cynthia Nelson.

This history of Middle Eastern women is the first to survey gender relations in the Middle East from the earliest Islamic period to the present. Outstanding scholars analyze a rich array of sources ranging from histories, biographical dictionaries, law books, prescriptive treatises, and archival records, to the Traditions (hadith) of the Prophet and imaginative works like the Thousand and One Nights, to modern writings by Middle Eastern women and by Western writers. They.

show that gender boundaries in the Middle East have been neither fixed nor immutable: changes in family patterns, religious rituals, socio-economic necessity, myth and ideology - and not least, women's attitudes - have expanded or circumscribed women's roles and behavior through the ages.

Description based on print version record.