Ellen McLarney is Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature and Culture in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. McLarney’s work focuses on Islamist movements, Islamic theological texts, gender in Islam, and North Africa. McLarney recently published Soft Force: Women in Egypt’s Islamic Awakening with Princeton University Press. This fall she’s teaching two courses— Andalusia: Muslim, Jewish, Christian Spain and Islamic Awakening: Revival and Reform.
Soft Force: Women in Egypt’s Islamic Awakening chronicles the exponential rise in writings on women and gender that accompanied—and catalyzed—the Islamic revival in Egypt in the decades leading up to the 2011 revolution. The book is about the soft revolution of Islamic popular culture, mass media, and public scholarship, a “passive revolution” criticizing military dictatorship in Egypt. Women’s Islamic cultural production, their lectures, pamphlets, theses, books, magazines, newspapers, television shows, films, and digital production, has been a critical instrument of this soft revolution. These revivalist writers describe themselves as waging jihad in the family, in the home, in childbearing and childrearing, in their selves and souls, in their bodies, and in the body politic. Reorienting Islamic politics in women’s spheres of influence, these writers put gender justice in the family on par with ritual worship in Islam, make this justice the heart and soul of Islamic law, and understand the family as a sacred domain for cultivating Islamic piety. Their jihad is performed within the “social units of the Islamic umma,” in Islamic organizations and groups, in communities, in the family, and in the home.
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