Women and Gender in Islam Quotes

“Even though Egypt had material prosperity, the British held exclusive political control: British officials held all key administrative positions and filled the top ranks of the civil service. However skilled an Egyptian, there were barriers beyond which he could not advance.”
― Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam

“Anthropology, it has often been said, served as a handmaid to colonialism. Perhaps it must also be said, that feminism, or the ideas of feminism, served as its other handmaid.”
― Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam

“The restrictions [Lord Cromer] placed on government schools and his raising of school fees held back girls’ education as well as boys’. He also discouraged the training of women doctors. Under the British, the School for Hakimas, which had given women as many years of medical training as the men received in the School of Medicine, was restricted to midwifery.”
― Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam

“Cromer, the British consul general, believed that providing subsidized education was not the province of government, and he also believed that education could foster dangerous nationalist sentiments.”
― Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam

“o [Muhammad Abdu] was probably the first to make the argument, still made by Muslim feminists today, that it was Islam and not, as Europeans claimed, the West that first recognized the full and equal humanity of women. Abdu argued that the Quranic verse on the equal rewards of labor showed that “men and women are equal before God in the matter of reward, when they are equal in their works… There is therefore no difference between them in regard to humanity, and no superiority of one over the other in works.”
― Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam

“o Like his teacher [Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani], Abdu was an ardent and committed religious thinker. He argued for the acquisition of “modern” sciences and for “modernisation”, for the promotion of widespread education, for reforms in the intellectual and social fields, and for the elevation of women’s status and changes in marriage practices, and he emphasized the importance of the need to throw off ignorance and misrepresentation of Islam that had accrued over the centuries.”
― Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam