Prof. McCloud: "Souaiaia has also developed an approach of investigation that has a known integrity"

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CONTESTING JUSTICE: WOMEN, ISLAM, LAW, AND SOCIETY. By Ahmed E. Souaiaia. State University of New York Press 2008. Pp. 195. $20.95. ISBN: 0-791-47398-8.

Some studies on Muslim women have assumed that the liberation of Muslim women from the oppressions of the Qur’an and Muslim men could only emerge by forcing Muslim governments to change their laws.
Other studies strongly advocate for women’s participation in governmental institutions and civic life where their voices on interpretations of texts including the Qur’an will cause changes in the distribution of justice and fairness regarding women. Still others assert that most, if not all, of women’s disenfranchisement is a result of male domination which must be attacked. Other researchers on Muslim women, especially in the West, have discovered that the more identifiable (i.e. western) the actions of Muslim women, the greater their potential for liberation. The variations on these arguments are too numerous to name here. What is evident is that there is a contradiction between a central text, the Qur’an, that calls for social justice and traditional cultural practices that largely obscure that justice and fairness in Muslim societies, communities and families irrespective of geographical location. Equally obvious is the fact that comparing the lives of Muslim women with lives of other women is not a path for a solution.

Rationales for the circumstances of Muslim women have alternatively been placed at the feet of male interpretation of the Qur’an, patriarchy, colonialism, the threats of Western modernity and illiteracy.
Analyses that base any of their positions on this list of blameworthy opponents however, have not produced a viable path. Yet, inside an unsettling green and yellow set of covers, Professor Ahmed Souaiaia presents one of the most compelling set of arguments to date. In Contesting Justice: Women, Islam, Law, and Society, he seeks to reexamine the arguments listed above and provide more challenging analyses. Focusing on justice and fairness, Souaiaia proposes that researchers cease to limit their attention to singular solutions such as legal reform or radical cultural reform; rather, he argues that they turn their intellectual resources to the creation and protection of civil society with a rebuilding of educational institutions that support and nurture critical thinking by men and women.


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