Book Review: Daughters of Islam

By the way, there is a personal post from today under this, so do not miss that!

So this was a book I read for my Intro to Islam class. Though these grading scales don't mean much, here is my quick evaluation of the book.

Overall - C
Ability to Hold Interest – B
Theology – B
Reliability – B
Useful – C-

This book is an interesting one to review. I did not find this book greatly valuable. I will explain why. The entire purpose of the book is to explain the lives of Muslim women and, as the book is subtitled, for "Building Bridges with Muslim Women." However, the book lacks focus. The writer states in the introduction that their aim of the book is: "To educate about important parts of Muslim women's lives. To elucidate some missions strategies. To offer examples. And to encourage." Here lies my issues with this book; by having so many aims for the book, it seems to not really satisfy any of them. The book is a little scatter-brained in purpose for me.

Way too much of this book seems to be explaining things about Muslim women that are true of all people. For example, chapter two is called "Every Woman Is an Exception," and it explains all the different types of Muslim women. There are poor Muslim women, successful Muslim women, devout Muslim women, and apathetic Muslim women. Do we need to elaborate on this? By being part of humanity, much of this is logic, and I feel the time could be spent better. I would say a good half of this book is comprised of stories of Muslim women coming to faith in the Lord. This is really interesting and encouraging, but I don't feel like it is completely the most important thing. I will explain later.

Chapter 4 has the same issues I explained about the fact that it explains things that should be obvious. With titles like "Muslim Women are Created in the Image of God," "Muslim-Background Women are Redeemed by Christ," and "Muslim-Background Women Can be Empowered by the Holy Spirit," as well as others, I feel like these things would be utterly obvious to any Christian, unless that Christian is completely discriminatory against Muslims and doesn't think they are people.

Some sections were very useful, however. Chapter 6, entitled "Family: Sex, Singles, Husbands, Children" was incredibly interesting and informative on Muslim views of family and sexuality, as well as the impacts these views have on them and their spiritual lives. For example, because of their views of purity in prayer and fasting, Muslim women can never get as close to God because they cannot fast during childbearing, menstruation, etc. In a works based system, they cannot spend as much time in prayer and fasting as a man is capable. There are a lot of interesting facts like that in this chapter than can paint a picture that is not obvious or just pure logic.

Chapter 10 was also enlightening about our impact on Muslim cultures, how we should try and build up and invest in their economies and help poor Muslims turn around their society. It talks about setting up banks that microloan out money and help Muslims start business with having a reasonable interest rate (not possible for them anywhere else). This was creative and I believed a great solution to helping the poor. Understanding economics, just giving handouts or doing things for people will never help them. Poverty can be cured in these situations with a combination of compassion and evoking hard work in people. This really resonated with my recently increasing interest in social-justice.

In the end, my evaluation of this book is interesting. There is nothing major that I disagree about in the book. However, is it the best use of your reading time? Not really. If you read chapter 6 and 10 (as I stated above) you would be fine. If you want some encouragement, you can read any or all of the chapters filled with stories on conversion. However, unless you read a few books a month, you would be better off spending your time reading the Qur'an itself, of Islamic theology books, or at least demographical studies on different groups of Muslims. The book was just so general in that when it gave the story different Muslim women to paint for the reader a picture of how Muslim women are, I feel like it fell short. Combine those stories with statistics and better analysis! Regardless, if you are looking to work with Muslims or want to start witnessing to some Muslims at you work or in your family, this book could be somewhat useful, but there are much more useful books.

Final Conlusion: Read only if you are going to read several books on Muslim people and culture, and only if you read a lot of books. There are more useful resources on this topic. Or, just read chapters 6 and 10.