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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.