Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil: Challenging Historical & Modern Stereotypes

by Katherine Bullock

'Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil' looks at the colonial roots of the negative Western stereotype of the veil. It presents interviews with Muslim women to discover their thoughts and experiences... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565644328
• ISBN13: 9781565644328
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: International Institute of Islamic Thought
• Length: 275 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Has good points but aged considerably

most of the interviews took place in the '90s while there are points that can be applied to the modern day (the exploitation of women's bodies, orientalism within feminists movements) There's an insensitivity to other important topics that I feel is a sign of those times.

You think you're modern?

Read this book. To observe, you must look. To look, you must have an object at which to stare. But what if an object refuses to be seen? Worse, what if an object can see you AND refuses to be seen? Fascinating, fascinating book. If you think of yourself as a feminist, as modern, as progressive, as tolerant, etc. READ THIS BOOK. And learn how to think again.

interesting and thorough

This book is very much needed in America today. There are so many misconceptions about Muslim women who wear hijab, and this book does a wonderful job of explaining the complex reasons why women choose to wear it. Of course there is opression going on in some areas of the world, but that doesn't mean that every Muslim women who covers is forced to! Bullock explains in great detail the politics, cultural relativism and individuality that is expressed in the veil without the bias of ethnocentrism. However, if you are not ready to accept that you cannot generalize about all Muslim women, this book is not for you.

A Fresh, Intelligent Approach to a Complex Topic

Rethinking Muslim WomenRethinking Muslim Women and the Veil by Katherine Bullock is a valuable addition to the voices of Muslim women writing about the issue most immediate and peculiar to their life: Veil. Broadly, we can divide the recent literature in English about Islam and women into two categories: first, that produced by Muslim activists and scholars in the West who defend or present the Islamic position, and read primarily by the activist or traditional Muslims; second, that produced by the Western academicians, intellectuals and feminists or Muslims who are thoroughly Westernized. The two types of literature remain almost mutually exclusive and isolated. The first kind of literature only marginally or very generally addresses the challenges, threats and questions posed by the second kind of literature to the Islamic position about women. Some of it is apologetic, compromising and adaptationist, but largely it is straightforward and simple, and at times, even simplistic.While innumerable books about Islam and women have mushroomed in the contemporary Western as well as Islamic world, lately, a new tradition of Western Muslim women writers has emerged that attempts to combine the two traditions. Some of these works could be regarded as academic and scholarly from the Western viewpoint, and Dr. Bullock's present work is one such work. According to her self-description, she writes "as a practicing Muslim woman," who embraces a certain kind of "feminism" (p. xvii). Her aim is to defend Hijab in the Western intellectual world and "to break the equation: `modernity equals unveil'"(p.xxi). The book first presents and analyzes different views about Hijab among the Muslim women from different backgrounds, all of whom are in one way or other concerned about women's rights and want to transcend the traditional house-bound image of women. On one hand, in order to present the real inside story of Hijab, she interviews several Muslim women in the West, most of whom practice Islam and wear Hijab. On the other, she presents an in-depth critique of the infamous books of Moroccan secular feminist Fatima Mernissi whose pernicious condemnation of Hijab as well as the Islamic tradition is hailed and quoted widely in the West as an authority. In the end, the author synthesized these viewpoints and concludes with an alternative theory of Hijab that challenges the unfair stereotypes in the West as well as what she calls the "oppressive tradition" in the Muslim world.In an insightful classification of the Western views about the Muslim women, she divides them into three types: the pop culture view of oppressed Muslim women perpetrated by the Western politicians and demagogues for the consumption of popular ignorant culture and that serves to justify interventionist and imperialist policies every now and then. The second is the dominant trend of "liberal feminism" prevalent in the liberal academia and among the feminists. The third trend within the academia is a