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[quote=Anonymous]Nice little quote from the first book:

"Ahmed believes that women’s contribution to early Islamic literature is proof that “at least the first generation of Muslims – the generation closest to Jahilia days and Jahilia attitudes toward women – and their immediate descendents had no difficulty in accepting women as authorities” (p. 47).  This diminished as Islam spread. In Mecca “even before Islam it was apparently the custom for women to inherit” (p.53). Women were keepers of Kaaba’s keys – two famous examples given are those of Sulafa, and Hubba the daughter of Hulail. Women were kahinas (female soothsayers) and priestesses, prophets, participants in warfare, nurses on battlefield, and individuals who initiated and terminated marriages at will. They were “fiercely outspoken, defiant critics of men; authors of satirical verse aimed at formidable male opponents”; they were rebels and independent and hence “protested the limits Islam imposed on that freedom” (p.62). The author also mentions the names of two women– Salma and Sajah – who collected women and rebelled against Islam after the Prophet’s death “because of the limitations Islam had brought to them.” Hind bint Utbah was another famous rebel against whom Umar Ibn Khattab said the following couplet:

The vile woman was insolent, and she was habitually base, since she combined insolence with disbelief.

May God curse Hind, distinguished among Hinds, she with the large clitoris, and may he curse her husband with her.

The prophet’s own “great-granddaughter Sukaina, who, when asked why she was so merry and her sister Fatima so solemn, replied that it was because she had been named after her pre-Islamic great-grandmother, whereas her sister had been names after her Islamic grandmother” (p.60).

The author points out that the most important question Arabian women asked the Prophet about the Quran was “why it addressed only men when women, too, accepted God and his prophet. The question occasioned the revelation of the Quranic verses explicitly addressing women as well as men (33:35) – a response that unequivocally shows Muhammad’s (and God’s) readiness to hear women. Thereafter the Quran explicitly addressed women a number of times” (p.72).

HERE IS THE IMPORTANT PART:

So why are we consistently told that pre-Islamic pagan women suffered greatly before the rise of Islam? Ahmed has this to say:

[b]“Islamic civilization developed a construct of history that labeled the pre-Islamic period the Age of Ignorance and projected Islam as the sole source of all that was civilized – and used that construct so effectively in its rewriting of history that the peoples of the Middle East lost all knowledge of the past civilizations of the religion. Obviously that construct was ideologically serviceable, successful concealing, among other things, the fact that in some cultures of the Middle East women had been considerably better off before the rise of Islam than afterwards.” (Underlining mine) (p.37).[/b]

Like I said in the beginning, these books have been an eye opener and shattered myths I entertained about pre-Islamic women. I knew that stories about pre-Islamic women were not entirely true, but the works of Al-Fassi and Ahmed (both are Muslim women, Al-Fassi is Saudi Arabian) are very detailed and show pre-Islamic women in a new light. These books are very well-referenced and are seriously scholarly. I honestly don’t know where my ideas about Islamic feminism stand now that I am being told that “women had been considerably better off before the rise of Islam than afterwards.” I will have to reformulate my premise to claim a future direction for Islamic feminism in the light of these evidences.[/quote]

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