Medicines of the Soul: Female Bodies and Sacred Geographies in a Transnational Islam

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University of California Press, 2001 - Religion - 224 pages
"Fedwa Malti-Douglas . . . crosses linguistic, cultural, national, and religious frontiers; she gives consistency to an Islamic revival differentiated from Islamic fundamentalism, challenging methods, programs, problematisations of social, and political sciences applied to the study of the contemporary Islamic textual corpus. It is a needed contribution to the interpretation of the born-again phenomenon as expressed by female figures emerging from Islamic context where so far women are subjects talked about more than the subjects talking."—Mohammed Arkoun, editor of Arabica

"The author's voice is nuanced by her wide knowledge of Islam, of feminism, and of life. One comes to know these women well, and to care about them. I was often deeply moved, and I was also often moved to laughter by the zany Marx Brothers—like collisions between the registers of East and West, or medicine and religion, or just between the wits of these gutsy, self-aware women and the flat-footed male establishment."—Wendy Doniger, author of The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade

"A remarkable book. Combining textual analysis and biography Fedwa Malti-Douglas opens new vistas in understanding Islamist women and gender relations in contemporary Islam."—John L. Esposito, University Professor, Georgetown University
 

Contents

Gender Culture and Religious Revival I
1
Female Body Male Gaze
15
Gender and Spiritual Vision
48
Corporal Geographies of Salvation
93
Sacred Springs Damaged Bodies
119
The Integrated Body
148
Geographies of the Sacred
168
Notes
187
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About the author (2001)

Fedwa Malti-Douglas is the Martha C. Kraft Professor of Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington. Among her previous publications are Woman's Body, Woman's Word: Gender and Discourse in Arabo-Islamic Writing (1991), Men, Women, and God(s): Nawal El Saadawi and Arab Feminist Poetics (California, 1995), and a novel, Hisland: Adventures in Ac-Ac-Ademe (1998). Her most recent book is The Starr Report Disrobed (2000).

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