M. Haque | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

In this book, we present the role of a modern Muslim woman, in the last quarter of 19th and first half of 20th centuries, and discuss the changes in their social, educational and political development in Muslim communities. Of course, their current stage of development occurred due to gradual change and development and the previous movements for their emancipation. These did not happen by chance but rather by a historical process, which have been achieved through various stages. It is important to be familiar with such chains of development, and how the general Muslim community and in particular Muslim women responded to these changes during the periods leading to the creation of many Muslim nations. In recent times there have been a number of studies on the status of Muslim women all over the world. Unfortunately, many of these studies incorrectly pointed out that their misfortune is determined by their religion, blaming Muslim personal law, marriage, divorce, deprivation of human rights, education, employment, freedom and self-determination. These lead to the continuous belief among many Non-Muslims and even among many Western educated Muslims that Islam is the obstacle for women's development and well-being, which is based on misconceptions about the position of women in Islam. In the present book, we take a different approach and show that the Muslim women's disadvantaged position can largely be explained by their local habits, poverty, inequality, unemployment, gender and social disability and injustice. In this respect, we extensively study the status of Muslim women in Bengal (presently Bangladesh and West Bengal, a state in India) during 1880-1937 to show that contemporaryMuslim women's social, educational and political development was similar to women of other religions.