In 1928, a young Lebanese woman, Nazira Zeineddine al-Halabi, wrote a book called Unveiling and Veiling, an indictment of patriarchal oppression in which she boldly stated that the veil was un-Islamic, directly challenging the teachings of wiser male scholars. Considered by many an attack on Islam, it rocked the Muslim world and was banned by many clerics, although it quickly went into a second edition and was translated into several languages. In...