Book description
Explores how medieval Muslim theologians constructed a female gender identity based on an ideal of maternity and how women contested it.
Why read it?
1 author picked Conceiving Identities as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Motherhood features in diverse literary traditions, from antiquity to the present, as perhaps the most prominent aspect of female power.
Already in the womb and shortly after, during the formative stage of the child's upbringing, the mother occupied a unique, almost exclusive, position vis-à-vis its offspring, imbuing it with character and ideals. It is for this reason that maternal power and roles have been treated so extensively in diverse literary traditions and genres, constituting an object of religiously-charged imageries.
In Conceiving Identity, Keuny masters a rich Islamic literary corpus in order to show how literary images constituted a means for…
From Uriel's list on women in medieval Near Eastern history.
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