Introduction

In the last three decades, scholarly attention to gender issues in the Middle East and North Africa has been focused almost exclusively, sometimes obsessively, on a quest to understand Islamic femininity: what it is and how it is made and regulated – with Muslim women's oppression, the question of the hijab, and the practice of female genital mutilation attracting most of the scrutiny. Some of the most significant literature in this well-established field includes Fatna Sabbah’s Woman in the Muslim Unconscious (1984), a critique of the contradictory messages which the Islamic legal and erotic discourses imprint on the female body; Fatima Mernissi’s The Veil and the Male Elite (1987), an indictment of the ways in which numerous Hadiths (or sayings by the Prophet) have been manipulated by a male elite to maintain male privileges; Fedwa Malti-Douglas’s Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word (1991), a mapping out of the relationship of woman’s voice in Arabo-Islamic discourse to sexuality and the body; Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam (1992), a study of the development of Islamic discourses on women and gender from the ancient world to the present; and Marnia Lazreg’s The Eloquence of Silence (1994), an analysis of the gender relations in Algeria from the pre-colonial times to the present.