One of the first things people still ask me about living in Turkey is, do you have to wear a headscarf? Whether a woman covers or not and the manner in which she wears her scarf reflects much more than differing levels of religious conviction. Göle explores the extremely nuanced and conflicting relationships around the subject, combining sociological research with historical analysis and in-depth interviews. She examines the ways young women form their identities in relation to the issue of covering, how they adapt fundamental religious tenets in response to the pressures of modernity, what covering contributes to debates about politics, nationalism, and other issues. Anyone wanting to know more about the practice of veiling beyond the standard modern/backward, secular/religious divides should read The Forbidden Modern. By the way, if you’re still wondering, the answer is no.

This novel shows us how the sisters in our lives aren’t always connected by blood. That sometimes, our chosen sisters are the ones who carry us through life’s difficult moments.

Malek, Kees, and Jenna have been lifelong friends, but when a single argument threatens to pull them apart, can they find their way back to one another? Alternating between each woman’s story, the novel explores deeper themes of love, family, and faith while also shedding light on both the strengths and fragility of female relationships.

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.

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 women to negotiate their patriarchal-designated office and imbue their office with their own set of ideals.

In the post-9/11 period, we were inundated with images of veiled Muslim women in Afghanistan and elsewhere. However, there is a long and rich history of Muslim women’s feminism that many people don’t know about. This book is an accessible entry point to this history. It also illustrates the interaction between Western feminists and Muslim feminists and shows the limits and possibilities of transnational feminism.

We all know that the oppressive structures of patriarchy are all-pervasive. But can we see "oppression" in black and white? Certainly not! 

Unless we put things in context and see through their nuances, the vicious Islamophobic tendency (subtly or not) comes into play, caricaturing Islam as the sole source of gender-based oppression. No doubt, the condemnation of Islam flows from prejudice and half-baked Orientalist assumptions surrounding the religion.

Leila Ahmed, a pioneering figure of Islamic feminism, hits hard at the stereotypes surrounding Islam and challenges them. I learned from her that Islam is anything but monolithic, especially from the perspective of gender. She devotes chapters on Egypt to link the percepts of Islam with colonial modernisation.

For academics like me, this book adds a dynamic perspective and opens the big picture. However, for even those bearing the burden of prejudice, I am sure this book will be educative.

In 1865, the 22-year-old Salama bint Said (later known as Emily Reute), daughter of the great Sultan Said of Zanzibar, become involved in a failed coup against her older brother. Fleeing for her life with her German lover, Rudolph Ruete, she would find herself widowed with two children and marooned in Germany without financial support at age 26. Written as a heartwarming series of letters addressed to her children, the first known autobiography and travelogue published by an Arab woman poses serious challenge to the rationales underlying both women’s subordination and economic dependence on men as well as European imperialism in Africa and the Arab world.

Fatima Mernissi was a Moroccan feminist. This book is her memoir of growing up in a harem (an enclosed all-female space) in Morocco in the 1940s and 50s.

It dispels many of the stereotypes and prejudices that many Westerners hold about how Islamic society treats women. The harem Mernissi grew up in was a warm and loving space. One of the elderly women living in it had been a slave, but was now cared for by the family. It was also a space where women could talk about their condition and consider ways of rebelling against it.

I assigned this book to a class on women’s human rights in the 1990s. It was very popular among the students, including the one man, whose background on his father’s side was Palestinian.

During the sixties, Atiya collected life stories of five Egyptian women from the lower and middle classes, ranging in age from twenty to mid-sixty. The stories show how to them, life starts with marriage. If they mention their childhoods, it is as preparation for marriage. Parents invariably arranged the women’s marriages or gave permission to potential husbands attracted to their daughters from a distance. Once the excitement of their weddings is over, however, most face an endless stream of difficulties. They recount experiences as co-wives, being forced into acrimonious divorces, family conflicts, and problems with children. They discuss witchcraft, female circumcision, poverty, and health issues. The book is unusual in that it conveys in their own words, the thinking of people not usually heard from in Middle Eastern writing.

This is a book about the collision of worlds and ideologies, told through the life of a single woman. This is a biography of Margaret Marcus, a small-town Jewish girl in midcentury America who converted to Islam, emigrated to Pakistan, and became a student of the Islamist political theorist Abul Ala Mawdudi. Under the name Maryam Jameelah, Margaret wrote many books condemning the corruption of Western capitalist society. And then came September 11… 

I found this book absolutely gripping and no less absorbing—and unsettling—in its moral power. Deborah Baker is a truly extraordinary biographer, and I admire her artistry, research, and instinct for an important life history in equal measure. Even though I have traveled extensively across Pakistan myself and written about many of the themes Baker explores, I still learned a great deal from this deeply serious but no less spellbinding biography.