Research Paper on:
Women and Gender in Islam by Leila Ahmed

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
to the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalist movements that were characteristic of the early 1990s and also to the way that the ways in which the West has viewed the  position of Arab women in Islamic society. In so doing, Ahmed argues convincingly against the concept that women in Arab societies were inherently more oppressed then women in Western  cultures. In so doing, she not only discloses the restrictive structures that have traditionally inhibited the lives of Arab women, but also illuminates the hypocrisy of Western critics who have,  to loosely quote a Christian maxim, endeavored to take the speck out of the eye of their neighbor while ignoring the log in their own. Ahmeds study is  divided into three parts. The first section of the book deals with the pre-Islamic Middle East. In these chapters, Ahmed discusses how the subjugation of women first began with the  rise of the first cities in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys and was formalized between 3500 and 3000 BC. As patriarchal family structure gained dominance, women became excluded from participation  from the majority or professional classes, and womens sexuality became culturally regarded as the property of men, which led to the use of the veil to designate between "respectable" and  "disreputable" women. However, Ahmed emphasizes the fact that "Mesopotamian, Persian, Hellenic, Christian, and eventually Islamic cultures each contributed practices that both controlled and diminished women, and each also  apparently borrowed the controlling an reductive practices of its neighbor" (Ahmed 18). In other words, the cultural practices of the Middle Easter were undoubtedly repressive toward women, but, arguably, no  more so then in other regions of the world during the same period. To substantiate this point, Ahmed turns to classical Greece, and specifically addresses the theories of Aristotle,