Books like Feminists, Islam, and Nation — picked by fans

When global diplomats formed the League of Nations in 1919, feminists were forced to lobby for women’s rights from outside the halls of power. As a small measure of progress, after World War II six states would appoint women to the 1945 conference charged with drafting a charter to govern the League’s successor: the United Nations. Half of the female delegates were appointed by Latin American nations, and together, the three feministas would lobby tirelessly to ensure that the UN Charter bound the body to promote human rights “without distinction as to race, language, religion, or sex.” Marino’s fabulous book explains why, in the 1920s and 1930s, Latin American feminists came to play such an outsized role in the global quest for sexual equality and human rights.

One of the shocking discoveries I made while researching my book was that China was the only Allied power to appoint a female delegate to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Readers of Edwards’s book will be less surprised. While British suffragists of the early twentieth century were busy planting bombs in postboxes, Chinese women were taking up arms to overthrow the Qing dynasty and smashing the windows of the newly opened parliamentary chambers to demand their nation codify citizens’ political rights “regardless of sex.” This book tells their story and puts the lie to the myth that women’s rights only became a priority in China decades later, when Mao Zedong proclaimed that women “hold up half the sky.”

All authors regretfully leave some things out of their books. If I had written a seventh chapter to mine, it would have focused on Indian feminists like Sarojini Naidu and Herabai and Mithan Tata who conducted a full-throttled campaign for the British Parliament to endorse women’s political rights in the 1919 Government of India Act. Fortunately, Mukherjee’s book tells this story in compelling detail. Based on research into previously ignored sources, this book follows Indian feminists’ battles as they pressed for women’s suffrage, initially within the constraints of the British empire and later, as anticolonial battles intensified, side-by-side with Gandhi and other nationalists fighting for Indian self-determination.

The Sri Lankan feminist Kumari Jayawardena produced this groundbreaking history in 1986 and it has never been out of print. It told me so many things I didn’t know, for example how Chairman Mao’s early radicalism was centred on women’s issues: a social system which so subjected women must be brought down; Marxism was a later add-on (but don’t tell the Chinese Communist Party, they don’t like to acknowledge this fact).

Saba Mahmood’s book is an intellectually stimulating and insightfully written study of a grassroots women’s mosque movement in Cairo, Egypt.

Speaking to a North American audience, Mahmood challenged secular-liberal theorizations of human agency and views that depicted Muslim women in patriarchal societies as without agency. Her nuanced and multi-dimensional study evidenced a considerably more complex picture of moral choice, agency, and Islamist politics that centered on the women’s own understandings and interpretation of a complex religious and political landscape.

It is Mahmood’s balanced and reflexive approach that makes this book a deeply educational study for students and scholars alike.

The individual conflicts described in this book stem from the reality of relationships that are supposed to be in a certain way, but somehow get twisted into something different, rather forbidden, or at least with blurred boundaries. I love the interweaving of spirituality, cultural diversity, and the parallel timelines, past and present. The characters are complex and represent different value systems. Swinging between their own personal struggles, trying to find suitable answers to the big questions of life, they get caught in a web of events that lead to surprising consequences. 

I first came across this book as an undergraduate student many years ago. I was drawn to the book because it covered a topic that was not very common at the time, namely the Egyptian working class. Beinin and Lockman’s study of how the working class navigated the three major intellectual currents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—nationalism, religion, and Communism—opened my eyes to social history as no other book had done. Workers on the Nile analyses how Egypt brutally is drawn into the global capitalist system in the nineteenth century and how this process produced a native working class (alongside a large community of European ex-pat workers). Gradually the working class comes of age by organising its labour, and eventually, this gives rise to more radical politics in the shape of Communism, Islamic activism, and nationalist tendencies.

Cassette tapes of Muslim sermons played by taxi drivers in Cairo set the stage for this profound investigation of the intersection of sound, spiritualism, and technology. The tapes, Hirschkind argues, are not mechanisms for social control as much as jumping-off points for Muslims to find their way towards ethical self-improvement. 

This book was recommended to me by the first sound practitioner who facilitated a memorable sound healing session with me. Trusting my intuition, I decided to give it a chance. I found myself deeply engrossed in Inayat Khan’s soothing and logical approach to sound, so much so that it inspired me to embark on a similar journey of my own. Shortly after reading this book, I left my corporate life behind to write my first book and open my sound healing practice. 

This book is a true gem. Khan’s masterful presentation of abstract concepts like imagination, desire, mysticism, mortality, and immortality, and their connection to sound, has a profound, Rumi-like effect on the soul. I find myself returning to its wisdom every few months, continually reaping the rich bounty it offers. 

This choice might be idiosyncratic, but it is one that deeply matters to how I think about the wider question of religious hatred.

In short, if we want to understand any form of prejudice, or the reasons why one group of people hates another group of people, why one group of people is disadvantaged in society compared to others, then we need to understand the question of how different types of prejudice relate to each other.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western societies often spoke of a “Jewish question” (or problem). In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this has become a “Muslim question” (or problem). Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference except the group the enmity is directed against, but it’s often both.