Wives and Work

Wives and Work
Author: Marion Holmes Katz
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2022-10-25
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0231556705

It is widely held today that classical Islamic law frees wives from any obligation to do housework. Wives’ purported exemption from domestic labor became a talking point among Muslims responding to Orientalist stereotypes of the “oppressed Muslim woman” by the late nineteenth century, and it has been a prominent motif in writings by Muslim feminists in the United States since the 1980s. In Wives and Work, Marion Holmes Katz offers a new account of debates on wives’ domestic labor that recasts the historical relationship between Islamic law and ethics. She reconstructs a complex discussion among Sunni legal scholars of the ninth to fourteenth centuries CE and examines its wide-ranging implications. As early as the ninth century, the prevalent doctrine that wives had no legal duty to do housework stood in conflict with what most scholars understood to be morally and religiously right. Scholars’ efforts to resolve this tension ranged widely, from drawing a clear distinction between legal claims and ethical ideals to seeking a synthesis of the two. Katz positions legal discussion within a larger landscape of Islamic normative discourse, emphasizing how legal models diverge from, but can sometimes be informed by, philosophical ethics. Through the lens of wives’ domestic labor, this book sheds new light on notions of family, labor, and gendered personhood as well as the interplay between legal and ethical doctrines in Islamic thought.

Everyday Conversions

Everyday Conversions
Author: Attiya Ahmad
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2017-03-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 082237322X

Why are domestic workers converting to Islam in the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf region? In Everyday Conversions Attiya Ahmad presents us with an original analysis of this phenomenon. Using extensive fieldwork conducted among South Asian migrant women in Kuwait, Ahmad argues domestic workers’ Muslim belonging emerges from their work in Kuwaiti households as they develop Islamic piety in relation—but not opposition—to their existing religious practices, family ties, and ethnic and national belonging. Their conversion is less a clean break from their preexisting lives than it is a refashioning in response to their everyday experiences. In examining the connections between migration, labor, gender, and Islam, Ahmad complicates conventional understandings of the dynamics of religious conversion and the feminization of transnational labor migration while proposing the concept of everyday conversion as a way to think more broadly about emergent forms of subjectivity, affinity, and belonging.

Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates

Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates
Author: Antoinette Vlieger
Publisher: Quid Pro Books
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2012-03-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1610271297

Page 1 opens with a jarring turn: "Filipina domestic worker, employed in Riyadh: 'Really they are good to me. If I say I need rest, they give me rest.' [And if they were not so good to you, if you would have some problem with your employer, where would you go?] 'Madam, I cannot go anywhere, I am not allowed to go outside. I cannot go to the embassy. I will just cry in my room and pray.'" This book explores the duality and conflicts faced by the desperate employee far from home, having signed a contract written in Arabic, her passport held by her employer, and with limited power as a woman to be a witness in court against a man. DOMESTIC WORKERS IN SAUDI ARABIA AND THE EMIRATES is a new socio-legal study of pressing questions of human rights, contractual freedom, transnational markets, and social policy: Which factors influence the emergence and character of conflicts in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates between domestic workers and their employers, the social and legal norms both parties refer to, and the related imbalance of power? In what way and to what extent do domestic workers and their employers refer to Islamic, customary, contractual, and formal legal norms? Do conflicts concern disagreement over norms or disputes regarding behavior contrary to the norms upon which both parties agree? Which factors influence the norms that both parties refer to in conflicts? Which party is able to enforce its own norms or to act contrary to norms on which both parties agree and which factors influences the balance of power? Using a grounded-theory methodology involving extensive field research and revealing interviews of workers, employers, employment agencies, human rights organizations, and governmental officials, Vlieger exposes the multifacets and dilemmas of the people and institutions involved. Finally, she proposes pragmatic solutions to prevent the most excessive vulnerabilities and imbalances. This is an upsetting and candid introduction to another world, supported with scholarly research but accessible to the general reader, as well as academics and human rights activists. Part of the Human Rights and Culture Series from Quid Pro Books.

Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition

Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition
Author: Ayesha S. Chaudhry
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2013-12-20
Genre: Law
ISBN: 019166989X

Modern scholars of most major religious traditions, who seek gender egalitarian interpretations of their scriptural texts, confront a common dilemma: how can they produce interpretations that are at once egalitarian and authoritative, within traditions that are deeply patriarchal? This book examines the challenges and resources that the Islamic tradition offers to Muslim scholars who seek to address this dilemma. This is achieved through extensive study of the intellectual history of a Qur'anic verse that has become especially contentious in the modern period: Chapter 4, Verse 34 (Q. 4:34) which can be read to permit the physical disciplining of disobedient wives at the hands of their husbands. Though this verse has been used by historical and contemporary Muslim scholars in multiple ways to justify the right of husbands to physically discipline their wives, progressive and reformist Muslim scholars and activists offer alternative and non-violent readings of the verse. The diverse and divergent interpretations of Q. 4:34 showcases the pivotal role of the reader in shaping the meaning and implications of scriptural texts. This book investigates the sophisticated and creative interpretive approaches to Q. 4:34, tracing the intellectual history of Muslim scholarship on this verse from the ninth century to the present day. Ayesha S. Chaudhry examines the spirited and diverse, and at times contradictory, readings of this verse to reveal how Muslims relate to their inherited tradition and the Qur'anic text.

Blaming Islam

Blaming Islam
Author: John R. Bowen
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 138
Release: 2012-03-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0262301105

Why fears about Muslim integration into Western society—propagated opportunistically by some on the right—misread history and misunderstand multiculturalism. In the United States and in Europe, politicians, activists, and even some scholars argue that Islam is incompatible with Western values and that we put ourselves at risk if we believe that Muslim immigrants can integrate into our society. Norway's Anders Behring Breivik took this argument to its extreme and murderous conclusion in July 2011. Meanwhile in the United States, state legislatures' efforts to ban the practice of Islamic law, or sharia, are gathering steam—despite a notable lack of evidence that sharia poses any real threat. In Blaming Islam, John Bowen uncovers the myths about Islam and Muslim integration into Western society, with a focus on the histories, policy, and rhetoric associated with Muslim immigration in Europe, the British experiment with sharia law for Muslim domestic disputes, and the claims of European and American writers that Islam threatens the West. Most important, he shows how exaggerated fears about Muslims misread history, misunderstand multiculturalism's aims, and reveal the opportunism of right wing parties who draw populist support by blaming Islam.

Corporate Islam

Corporate Islam
Author: Patricia Sloane-White
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2017-03-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1316878716

Compelling and original, this book offers a unique insight into the modern Islamic corporation, revealing how power, relationships, individual identities, gender roles, and practices - and often massive financial resources - are mobilized on behalf of Islam. Focusing on Muslims in Malaysia, Patricia Sloane-White argues that sharia principles in the region's Islamic economy produce a version of Islam that is increasingly conservative, financially and fiscally powerful, and committed to social control over Muslim and non-Muslim public and private lives. Packed with fascinating details, the book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in Islamic politics and culture in modern life.

"I Already Bought You"

Author: Rothna Begum
Publisher:
Total Pages: 79
Release: 2014
Genre: Forced labor
ISBN: 9781623131586

At least 146,000 female migrant workers - perhaps many more - are employed in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Female domestic workers from the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Ethiopia, and elsewhere face severe abuse and exploitation by employers and labor recruitment agencies. "I Already Bought You" : Abuse and Exploitation of Female Migrant Domestic Workers in the United Arab Emirates documents how the UAE's visa sponsorship system (known as kafala) ties migrant workers to employers and how the exclusion of domestic workers from labor law protections leaves migrant domestic workers at risk of abuse. The report exposes barriers preventing abused domestic workers from obtaining remedy, including lack of shelters, penalties for "absconding" workers, and justice system failings. Based on interviews with 99 female domestic workers, recruitment agets, employers, and others in the UAE, the report documents abuses that domestic workers face - passport confiscation, non-payment of wages, lack of rest periods and time off, confinement to households, excessive work and working hours, food deprivation, and psychological, physical, and sexual abuse. In some cases the abuses amounted to forced labor or trafficking. The UAE has an increasingly influential role in the international labor arena. In 2014, it joined the governing body of the International Labor Organization. At home, however, it maintains the exploitative kafala system, has failed to adopt a bill pending since 2012 on domestic workers' rights, and has yet to ratify key international treaties on migrants' and domestic workers' rights. Human Rights Watch calls for the reform of the kafala system and the introduction of labor law protections and other measures to fully protect domestic workers' rights. -- back cover.

Migration and Islamic Ethics

Migration and Islamic Ethics
Author: Ray Jureidini
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Asylum, Right of
ISBN: 9789004406407

Migration and Islamic Ethics, Issues of Residence, Naturalization and Citizenship contains various cases of migration movements in the Muslim world from ethical and legal perspectives to argue that Muslim migration experiences can offer a new paradigm of how the religious and the moral can play a significant role in addressing forced migration and displacement

China and Islam

China and Islam
Author: Matthew S. Erie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2016-09
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1107053374

This book is the first ethnographic study of Muslim minorities' practice of Islamic law in contemporary China.

The Politics of Islamic Law

The Politics of Islamic Law
Author: Iza R. Hussin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2016-03-31
Genre: Law
ISBN: 022632348X

In The Politics of Islamic Law, Iza Hussin compares India, Malaya, and Egypt during the British colonial period in order to trace the making and transformation of the contemporary category of ‘Islamic law.’ She demonstrates that not only is Islamic law not the shari’ah, its present institutional forms, substantive content, symbolic vocabulary, and relationship to state and society—in short, its politics—are built upon foundations laid during the colonial encounter. Drawing on extensive archival work in English, Arabic, and Malay—from court records to colonial and local papers to private letters and visual material—Hussin offers a view of politics in the colonial period as an iterative series of negotiations between local and colonial powers in multiple locations. She shows how this resulted in a paradox, centralizing Islamic law at the same time that it limited its reach to family and ritual matters, and produced a transformation in the Muslim state, providing the frame within which Islam is articulated today, setting the agenda for ongoing legislation and policy, and defining the limits of change. Combining a genealogy of law with a political analysis of its institutional dynamics, this book offers an up-close look at the ways in which global transformations are realized at the local level.