Shehnaz Haqqani’s new book Feminism, Tradition and Change in Contemporary Islam: Negotiating Islamic Law and Gender (Oneworld 2024), masterfully blends textual analysis of pre-modern and modern Islamic consensus with qualitative interviews with Muslims in the contemporary United States, to track how notions of what constitutes Islamic and Islamic tradition shift over time. We learn from her interlocutors that certain Islamic legal rulings can be negotiated, as in the case of child marriage, sexual slavery or even female inheritance, while other legal consensus, such as around women’s interfaith marriage or women leading mixed-gender prayers are not negotiable. Haqqani incisively swifts through these various standards of negotiations and arrives at how legal rulings pertaining to Muslim women’s experiences are met with resistance. It seems then that matters of urgency and relevance, which are inevitably political, dedicate when Islamic law and/or tradition can be negotiated. Haqqani’s book illuminates how Islamic tradition has always been flexible, but male dominated scholarly consensus still dedicates this flexibility (or rather inflexibility from an Islamic feminist perspective). This book will be of interest to those who think on gender, Islam, Islamic feminism, Islamic law, and much more.
Dr. Shehnaz Haqqani is an assistant professor at Mercer University and specialises in Islam, with a focus on gender and sexuality. She is a host of the podcast New Books Network.
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