Famous Women in Islam

Islamic history has one of the most remarkable legacies
of famous women in human history. This CD set is primarily biographical and
focuses on a select number of prominent women in Islamic history from the Age of
the Prophet until modern times in a wide variety of areas from scholarship,
mysticism, and poetry to social patronage, war, and politics. It shows that the
status of women in Islamic societies has never been uniform or monolithic but
has shifted from place to place, from age to age, and from class to social
class. The greatest disparity, however, has been between the norms of the
Prophetic period and those of subsequent ages. Prophetic society lacked the
rigid divisions of social space that became characteristic of many traditional
Islamic societies, and, as a rule, Prophetic society was more open and less
patriarchal, giving women greater freedom and allowing them a conspicuous role
within the matrix of social and civic life. A second major shift in women's
status occurred during the colonial, post-colonial, and modern periods, when the
position of Muslim women often deteriorated markedly. Although the class focuses
on the legacies of particular women, it will look at their lives as an index of
a number of concrete theological and legal issues pertaining to gender and
sexuality in Islamic Law and Muslim culture. This set is not intended for women
alone or just for Muslims.

Includes Class Notes!

Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah

Chairman of the Board & Scholar-in-Residence

Dr. Abd-Allah (Wymann-Landgraf)
is an American Muslim, born to a Protestant family of the Midwest. In 1970, he
embraced Islam in New York while studying English literature at Cornell
University as a Woodrow Wilson honorary fellow. He received his doctorate, with
honors, from the U. of Chicago for a dissertation pertaining to the origins of
Islamic Law. He taught at the U. of Windsor (Ontario). Temple, and Michigan from
1977 until 1982. He then left the US to teach Arabic in Granada, Spain. In 1984,
he was appointed to the Department of Islamic Studies at King Abdul-Aziz
University in Saudi Arabia and taught Islamic studies and comparative religions
until 2000. During his years abroad, Dr. Abd-Allah studied numerous classical
Islamic disciplines under several traditional  teachers. He is fluent in
English, Arabic and is acquainted with several modern and ancient tongues. Dr.
Abd-Allah returned to Chicago in August of 2000 to work with the Nawawi
Foundation as its Chairman and Scholar-in-Residence. Accordingly, he teaches
throughout Chicagoland and conducts research in Islamic studies and cognate
fields. Dr. Abd-Allah resides with his family in the suburbs of Chicago.