Maya Shatzmiller – författare

This book is a study of the historical record of Muslim women’s property rights and equity. Based on Islamic court documents of fifteenth-century Granada—documents that show a high degree of women’s involvement—the book examines women’s legal entitlements to acquire property as well as the social and economic significance of these rights to Granada’s female population and, by extension, to women in other Islamic societies.The microhistory of women’s property rights is placed in a comparative historical, social, and economic context and is examined using a theoretical framework that suggests how this book’s conclusions might coexist with the Islamic feminist discourse on the law as a patriarchal system, serving to highlight both the uniqueness and the limitations of the Islamic case. The specifics presented in the case studies reveal the broader structures, constructs, rules, conditions, factors, and paradigms that shaped women’s property rights under Islamic law. They show that women’s property rights were more than just part of a legal system; they were the product of a legal philosophy and a pervasive paradigm that made property ownership a normal construct of the Muslim woman’s legal persona and a norm of her existence.

Islam and Bosnia re-examines the conflict of the 1990s from the perspectives of international relations, conflict resolution, and history as well as psychology, anthropology, and cultural studies. Rejecting the primordialist, or "ancient hatreds," interpretation as the root of the conflict, the authors detail how a complex cultural transformation led to the erosion of what had been the common inclusionist base of a multi-ethnic state and brought about a new exclusionist nationalism. By pulling together the individual elements of culture, society, and foreign policy and analysing their interaction, Islam and Bosnia demonstrates how the secular romantic nationalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, centred on history, language, and landscape, was overthrown in favour of one that highlighted religion, race, and territory. Islam and Bosnia shows how the Bosnian conflict bears on the wider contexts of cultural paradigms, deadly conflicts, and the formulation of foreign policy. It argues for a new perspective in foreign policy-making, one that would embrace and incorporate better and deeper knowledge and understanding of culture, history, and ideology. Contributors include Tone Bringa (University of Bergen), Amila Buturovic (York University), John V.A. Fine (University of Michigan), Peter W. Galbraith (former U.S. ambassador to Croatia), Graham N. Green (former Canadian ambassador to Croatia), Nader Hashemi (Ph.D. candidate, University of Toronto), John M. Reid, (information commissionaire for Canada), András Riedlmayer (Harvard University), Michael A. Sells (Haverford College), Donald W. Smith (former Canadian ambassador to Croatia), and Vamik D. Volkan (University of Virginia).

The essays focus on identity formation in five minority groups - Copts in Egypt, Baha''is and Christians in Pakistan, Berbers in Algeria and Morocco, and Kurds in Turkey and Iraq. While every minority community is distinctive, the experiences of these groups show that a state''s authoritarian rule, uncompromising attitude towards expressions of particularism, and failure to offer tools for inclusion are all responsible for the politicization and radicalization of minority identities. The place of Islam in this process is complex: while its initial pluralistic role was transformed through the creation of the modern nation-state, the radicalization of society in turn radicalized and politicized minority identities. Minority groups, though at times possessing a measure of political autonomy, remain intensely vulnerable.