Islamic Law and the Challenges of Modernity

Since Europeans first colonized Arab lands in the 19th century, they have been pressing to have the area's indigenous laws and legal systems accord with Western models. Although most Arab states now have national codes of law that reflect Western influence, fierce internal struggles continue over how to interpret Islamic law, particularly in the areas of gender and family. From different geographical and ideological points across the contemporary Arab world, Haddad and Stowasser demonstrate the range of views on just what Islam's legal heritage in the region should be. For either law or religion classes, Islamic Law and the Challenges of Modernity provides the broad historical overview and particular cases needed to understand this contentious issue.

Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad is professor of history of Islam and Christian-Muslim relations at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at the Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Serice at Georgetown University. She has taught Middle East history and Islamic studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Hartford Seminary; and Colgate University. She is a past president of the Middle East Studies Association. Haddad's research interest has focused on twentieth-century Islamic thought and Muslims in the West. Her numerous publications include Contemporary Islam and the Challenge of History; Muslim Communities in North America; The Islamic Revival; The Muslims of America; Women, Religion, and Social Change; Muslims on the Americanization Path?; Muslims in the West: From Sojourners to Citizens; and Muslim Minorities in the West: "Visible" and "Invisible."

Barbara Freyer Stowasser (Ph.D., Islamic Studies and Semitic Languages, Universitat Munster) is professor of Arabic in the Department of Arabic at Georgetown University. Since 1993, she has served as director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. She served as the 34th president of the Middle East Studies Association (1998-99). Her publications include a book length study on Women in the Qur'an: Traditions and Interpretation (Oxford University Press, 1994), an edited volume entitled The Islamic Impulse (CCAS, 1987), articles published in American, German, Arabic and Turkish journals and periodicals, and book chapters in collected volumes. CCAS recently published Dr. Stowasser's A Time to Reap: Thoughts on Calendars and Millennialism, an exploration of how Islam, Christianity, and Judaism have historically treated periods of apocalyptic imminence.