Essay on Analysis of Writing Women's Worlds by Lia Adu-Lughod

“Women and Gender in Islam” by Leila Ahmed was published in 1992, at a time when research on Arab women was a young, newly emerging field of study. Leila Ahmed is an Egyptian American writer and feminist. Her text “Women and Gender in Islam” targets proclaimed feminists, both western and non-western, as the intended audience. The text is involved with the discourse of gender, the discourses of women, the discourses of feminist, and colonial and post-colonial discourses.

Throughout American Literature, women have been depicted in many different ways. The portrayal of women in American Literature is often influenced by an author's personal experience or a frequent societal stereotype of women and their position. Often times, male authors interpret society’s views of women in a completely different nature than a female author would. While F. Scott Fitzgerald may represent his main female character as a victim in the 1920’s, Zora Neale Hurston portrays hers as a strong, free-spirited, and independent woman only a decade later in the 1930’s.

“Life is full of unhappiness and most of it caused by women (Harik and Marston 11)”. For women in the Middle East life is faced with great and unequal odds, as their human rights are limited, due to Islamic beliefs and that of patriarchy. From their daily actions at home to their physical appearance, Middle Eastern women are portrayed as quiet, faceless women veiled from head to toe. While this image is just another stereotype, women in the middle do face many obstacles and challenges of creating their own identity as they are frequently denied a voice in their rights. Living in a society dominated by men life is not, but regardless women in the Middle East, predominantly Muslims, continue to fight for

Women often undergo oppression and subjugation by the male dominated society. Women were merely slaves to the men as they would clean, sweep, work, while they have to maintain their obedience and sanity. Women were targets of oppression outside their work where men abused their wives as they were an entity for their sexual desires when they felt the need to. This exact relationship of “owner - possession” can be seen through the relationships between Rasheed and Mariam, also with Janie and her husbands. Both novels, A Thousand Splendid Suns and Their Eyes were Watching God, show that women have a lower social status, power, and legal rights when women had become property to eyes of men.

Through out Middle East the lives of women appear to have no influencing role in society. Elizabeth Fernea provides an survey of the traditions of an Iraqi village in her book Guests of the Sheik. Within this book, Fernea explores the element of gender and its impact on the roles of women in Iraq, directly in the village of El Nahra. She also encounters the expectations based on the gender-specific social constructs of polygamous families. Another woman author, Leila Abouzeid, explores similar elements in the work Return to Childhood, which is based in islamic Morocco. Fernea, who the women of the harem call Beeja, presents experiential information about the life of both women and men and her role within her husband 's life as it reflects

The physical body has been seen as many things both positive and negative. It can be thought of as the temple which houses the soul or can be seen as entrapping, like a cage of flesh. More often it seems that the body, especially women’s bodies, are looked at in more complicated ways than the bodies of men. As I grew up, it began to feel more and more like my body, and the bodies of other women, did not actually belong to us like we believed. Through my Women’s Studies class I have gained more knowledge on the body as a political object. In this essay I will examine six different articles with the similar theme of women’s bodies, the expression of those bodies and how by using feminism as a political standpoint they gain power and ownership of their bodies.

The women of Saudi Arabia have been oppressed by the men of the country for generations due to the ignorance of the people, their Islamic faith, and the government. They have no rights and they must receive permission from their husbands or fathers to work, travel, and receive medical attention. The memoir Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia by Jean Sasson, is an excellent example of the oppression of women in Saudi Arabia and the literary devices of characterization and setting help to bring the oppression to life.

The Romance of resistance is an article which is written by Lila Abu-Lughod in regard with the different forms of resistance among the Bedouin women and the traditional structure of power among the Bedouin Community in the Egypt's Western Desert. She arrived in late 1970 to begin a fieldwork, and she discovered different forms of resistance among the Bedouin women. In this Article she emphasis on how the Bedouin women resisted the decision of their fathers, uncles, and older brother, how the resisted the sexually segregation, and sexually irreverent discourse. Furthermore, it also talk about how local communities are being incorporated into modern states and integrated into a wider economy.

Society’s view of women has changed as a result of what they have accomplish to become relevant inside a man oriented culture. Women are accused of being untrustworthy, due to their approach of going around the rules. Although this may be true, their limited possibilities push them to use their cleverness to look for alternatives that will help them reach their goals. The stories of The Arabian Nights demonstrate that when women are in control of a situation they must be trusted, as long as they act upon good will.

The fictional accounts of women’s experiences in Fadia Faqir’s, Pillars of Salt, illustrate issues articulated by women’s rights activists in the Middle East. Traditional roles of women and men and a mythology of femininity and masculinity are juxtaposed with the disparate realities of the characters. The damaging forces of colonial rule, war, and Westernization are also exposed.

Annette Bair and Marilyn Friedman have opposing views on whether women have distinct moral perspectives. Like Friedman, I believe that women have no different moral perspectives than men. Some people, like Bair, think that women base their moral perspectives on merely trust and love and men base theirs on justice. Friedman points out that care and justice coincide . People use justice to decide what is appropriate in caring relationships and care is brought into account when determining what is just. Since these two moral perspectives correspond, gender does not distinguish different moral perspectives.

In today’s society women are given ample opportunity just as much as men. In some countries, such as middle-eastern nations that is not the case. Muslim women are often perceived to be submissive to Muslim men and unequal. Mohammed never taught for women to be treated as lower class citizens. Nonetheless, the blame is pointed towards the religion of Islam. The Islamic religion began as all monotheist religions representing a belief in one God and moral standards. In the following essay I will discuss and elaborate what Mohammed taught, how women lived in early Islamic society, and what it has become.

The book, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society, by author and anthropologist, Lila Abu-Lughod, who is best known for her work on women's issues in the middle east, presents two years of fieldwork in Egypt among the Awlad' Ali Bedouin community who have gone from living a nomadic lifestyle , a farming system where animals are transported from one area to another in search for fresh grazing land, to living in villages where smuggling, raising animals, and doing odd jobs are ways of supporting themselves. In the book, Abu-Lughod brings together the concepts of structure, hierarchy, ideology, and discourse to illustrate the Bedouin culture, and how the

In the United States, our concept of gender, and the differences between men and women, have deep traditional roots. Men are supposed to be strong individuals, who support and defend their families. Women are seen as nurturing, and motherly, more gentle and tame. We believe so strongly that the two genders are entirely separate, with such completely different traits, that it almost seems that men and women are just born with different qualities.

The identity of African women juxtaposed to the Western women’s identity is a hard concept for one to grasp. The word feminism is merely looked at from one perspective, the western perspective. The reality of feminism is that everywhere in the world has a different idea of what feminism is defined as and what it should look like. However there is one central theme that applies to feminists around the world, which is a feminist is someone who goes against traditional roles of a woman in their society to better their gender as a whole.