Machine summary:
Female Personalities in the Qur’an and Sunna: Examining the Major Sources of Imami Shi‘i Islam Rawand Osman London and New York: Routledge, 2015.
Additionally, the author gives her work a modern twist by considering ideas from contemporary writers on women in Islam who do not engage with the Shi‘i tradition, such as Amina Wadud, Fatima Mernissi, and Asma Barlas.
Like Stowasser, Osman begins with Eve, continues with women in ancient sacred history, and then proceeds to the wives of the Prophet – with the main difference, of course, that Stowasser’s book explores the Sunni scriptural sources.
While Osman answers this question, sadly, it becomes a moot point since, as she observes in a later section, after the Prophet’s time their al legiance was no longer even considered.
One valuable aspect in this section is the author’s acknowledgment that Shi‘i religious culture contains multiple portrayals and understandings of these women, ranging from a traditional one that uses them to promote restrictions on women to a dynamic one that uses them to promote women’s public partic ipation.
” While Osman observes that Shi‘i ha dith collections also contain narrations favorable to women as a group, such as “the most goodness is in women,” she questions how such conflicting ideas could arise from the same sources.
One valuable contribution is her comparison of these nar rations about women against the portrayal of actual women in the Qur’an and Sunnah (as discussed in the previous sections).