ABSTRACT
During the past twenty years, Arab Muslim women have become an increasingly popular topic of study in the United States. Courses on women and Islam are becoming part of the regular offerings of departments of religious studies, history, politics, and women’s studies. A new contingent of scholars and students is examining the connections among gender, women, and religion in Muslim contexts. Some scholars who had studied the Arab world from a gender-blind perspective began to recognize how their work undergirded a masculinist approach to a society already stigmatized as reactionary and patriarchal. Others trained at the height of second-wave feminism turned away from their teachers’ focus on the public space that was occupied by men to examine that other public space, the part occupied by women. Although most of the early research was done by U.S. and European women, by the mid-1980s a new generation of scholars of Arab Muslim women appeared. They were Arab-American women who, as a result of the impact of political events in the Middle East and North Africa on U.S. policy and public opinion, recognized how scholarship on Arab Muslim women was influencing the U.S. imaginary of the Arab world.
