Cover -- Contents -- Preface -- Organization of the Volume -- 1. Introduction: Deciphering Middle Eastern Women's History -- 2. Islam and Patriarchy: A Comparative Perspective -- I: The First Islamic Centuries -- 3. Political Action and Public Example: 'A'isha and the Battle of the Camel -- 4. Early Islam and the Position of Women: The Problem of Interpretation -- 5. Gendering the Ungendered Body: Hermaphrodites in Medieval Islamic Law -- II: The Mamluk Period -- 6. Manners and Customs of Fourteenth-Century Cairene Women: Female Anarchy versus Male Shar'i Order in Muslim Prescriptive Treatises -- 7. Class Solidarity versus Gender Gain: Women as Custodians of Property in Later Medieval Egypt -- 8. Women and Islamic Education in the Mamluk Period -- III: Modern Turkey and Iran -- 9. Ottoman Women, Households, and Textile Manufacturing, 1800-1914 -- 10. The Impact of Legal and Educational Reforms on Turkish Women -- 11. The Dynamics of Women's Spheres of Action in Rural Iran -- 12. Political Roles of Aliabad Women: The Public-Private Dichotomy Transcended -- IV: The Modern Arab World -- 13. Ties That Bound: Women and Family in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Nablus -- 14. The House of Zainab: Female Authority and Saintly Succession in Colonial Algeria -- 15. The Making and Breaking of Marital Bonds in Modern Egypt -- 16. Artists and Entrepreneurs: Female Singers in Cairo during the 1920s -- 17. Biography and Women's History: On Interpreting Doria Shafik -- List of Contributors -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.