Given my comments in the previous chapter, a question that we could well ask ourselves is: What might the beginnings of a non-apologetical treatment of Muslim women look like? To begin this rethinking, the present chapter offers an account that tries to nuance the neat and reified distinctions made by the likes of John Esposito, in which we encounter unhelpful signifiers such as “religion” and “culture” that he (and others) conveniently separate from one another in the service of a liberal theological framework. Working on the assumption that the diversity exhibited in the historical record is the best antidote to essentialism, this chapter examines diachron-ically how the category “Muslim women” has been manufactured and contested.

Modern Attempts to Recreate Women's Lives During the Time of Muhammad

The attempt to write about anything during the lifetime of Muhammad returns us to an issue encountered previously: We know virtually nothing about the earliest centuries of Islam because all of the materials that claim to provide knowledge of this period come from much later sources. This has not stopped many writers from attempting to portray the lives of women during the time of Muhammad. This is usually done, as witnessed in the analysis of Esposito in the previous chapter, for apologetic purposes, to show that the earliest period was characterized by a type of gender equality preached by Muhammad, which was later eroded when male elites began to corrupt his message by increasingly circumscribing the role and place of women in Muslim society (e.g., Mernissi 1991; Ahmed 1992).