BOOK REVIEW

BOOK REVIEW Name of the Book: Woman in Islamic Shariah Author: Maulana Wahiduddin Khan Pages: 160 ISBN: 9788187570318 Reviewed by: Mr Tauseef Ahmad Parray Regarding women and Islam, the author, Maulana Wahiduddin Khan has three significant books to his credit: Women between Islam and Western Society, Woman in Islamic Shariah and Women: The Builders of Humankind as well as many booklets such as Polygamy and Islam, Concerning Divorce and Hijab in Islam. Women in Islamic Shariah consists of eleven chapters that discuss the status of women in Islam in the light of the teachings of the Quran and Sunnah, womanhood in Islam, the qualities of Muslim women, the rights and duties of the husband and wife in the first five chapters., The remaining chapters offer a detailed discussion of concepts and issues relating to divorce, polygamy, dowry, hijab, etc., in light of Islamic teachings and history. The book concludes with a chapter on “success in marriage”. In his ‘Foreword’, the author quotes the statement of Edward William Lane (Selections from Kuran, London, 1982, p. xc) that ‘the fatal blot in Islam is the degradation of women”. For Khan, this ‘ill-considered observation gained such currency’ in the succeeding centuries that instead of having ‘elapsed since then’, it has so ‘deepened’ as ‘if it were an established fact’ (p. 11). Against this backdrop, he asserts that ‘to interpret the Islamic concept of womanhood as a ‘degradation’ of women is to distort the actual issue. Islam has never asserted that women are inferior to men: it has only made the point that ‘women are differently constituted’ (Ibid.). This is precisely the main theme and thesis of this book.