Lila Abu-Lughod Knihy

Frequent reports of honor killings, disfigurement, and sensational abuse have given rise to a consensus in the West, a message propagated by human rights groups and the media: Muslim women need to be rescued. The author challenges this conclusion. An anthropologist who has been writing about Arab women for thirty years, she delves into the predicaments of Muslim women today, questioning whether generalizations about Islamic culture can explain the hardships these women face and asking what motivates particular individuals and institutions to promote their rights. In recent years the author has struggled to reconcile the popular image of women victimized by Islam with the complex women she has known through her research in various communities in the Muslim world. Here, she renders that divide vivid by presenting detailed vignettes of the lives of ordinary Muslim women, and showing that the problem of gender inequality cannot be laid at the feet of religion alone. Poverty and authoritarianism, conditions not unique to the Islamic world, and produced out of global interconnections that implicate the West, are often more decisive. The standard Western vocabulary of oppression, choice, and freedom is too blunt to describe these women's lives. This work is an indictment of a mindset that has justified all manner of foreign interference, including military invasion, in the name of rescuing women from Islam, as well as a portrait of women's actual experiences, and of the contingencies with which they live

In this portrait of world trade before the age of European hegemony, the author examines global commercial connections amongst a large number of cities between the years 1250 and 1350.

Groundbreaking essays by Palestinian women scholars on the lives of Palestinians within the state of Israel. Most media coverage and research on the experience of Palestinians focuses on those living in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, while the sizable number of Palestinians living within Israel rarely garners significant academic or media attention. Offering a rich and multidimensional portrait of the lived realities of Palestinians within the state of Israel, Displaced at Home gathers a group of Palestinian women scholars who present unflinching critiques of the complexities and challenges inherent in the lives of this understudied but important minority within Israel. The essays here engage topics ranging from internal refugees and historical memory to women's sexuality and the resistant possibilities of hip-hop culture among young Palestinians. Unique in the collection is sustained attention to gender concerns, which have tended to be subordinated to questions of nationalism, statehood, and citizenship. The first collection of its kind in English, Displaced at Home presents on-the-ground examples of the changing political, social, and economic conditions of Palestinians in Israel, and examines how global, national, and local concerns intersect and shape their daily lives