Badran, M. (2009). Feminism in Islam: Secular and religious convergences. Oneworld.

What does it mean for a woman to speak? This is one of the central underlying questions in Margot Badran’s Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences. She situates what women’s speaking means in the context of modernity and Islam in the wake of colonialism, public education, nationalism, secularism, and later Islamist revival and Islamic feminists’ ijtihād. Badran juxtaposes patriarchal traditions and the emergence of self-authorizing female voices in their negotiation of changing social realities. A theme that runs throughout the whole collection of essays is women speaking for themselves about their own lives, which constitutes “a form of shedding of the patriarchal surrogate voice” (Badran, 2009, p. 97).