Faith and Freedom: Women's Human Rights in the Muslim World.

• Author: Levitt, Matthew A.

The title of this book, Faith and Freedom, grabs the reader by the collar and demands to know where the line is to be drawn between these two basic rights. As if thus being shaken throughout this collection of essays, the reader is left with two dizzying sensations: (1) a troubling conflict exists between respect for religious faith and its observance on the one hand and human freedoms as articulated in the United Nations Charter and international law on the other; and (2) this book fails to adequately address this issue, let alone seek to offer answers.

The book is divided into two parts, one theoretical and the other illustrative. Part One, entitled Women, Islam, and Patriarchy, "addresses the patriarchal structures and processes that present women's human rights as contradictory to Islam." Part Two, Women and Violence -- Selected Cases, offers "concrete examples to demonstrate the kind, nature and intensity of the problems women face in contemporary Muslim societies." While the entirety of Part One provides a shadowy outline of the clashing ideological premises from which the conflict between women's rights and religious doctrine stem (divine will versus universal human rights), no one essay addresses this question in any satisfying way. This results from underlying deficiencies in the aggregate product of the collection in both the approach of the authors to the problem of violations of women's human rights in the Muslim world and the framework in which they analyze the issue. These deficiencies, and the price they exact on this volume, serve as the focus of this analysis. Part Two offers five cases of gross violations of human rights in the Muslim world which successfully personalize the plight of women in Muslim society and end the collection on a more factual, less theoretical note. One of these however, The Politics of Dishonor: Rape and Power in Pakistan by Shahla Haeri, an assistant professor of Anthropology specializing in Iran and Pakistan at Boston University, stands out for taking eight of eleven pages to list politically inspired rapes, at which point the author announces that with this "background" completed she is ready to "try to look at the politics of honor rape." The rest of Part Two, however, stands out for counterbalancing the theory of Part One with case studies that contextualize the plight of women in the Muslim world and leave the reader with a sense of urgency that a theory alone, especially at the book's end, would have failed to convey.

One of the major successes of the book is to highlight the barriers facing women in the Muslim world, both in terms of their rights and their ability to mobilize and affect change. Farida Shaheed, a sociologist working in a women's resource center in Pakistan, notes that while some support the myth that the Muslim world...