Women in Islam includes at least a billion women (Pew Trust 2011) spread across the globe. Muslim women live in every country, in incredibly diverse geographical, racial, economic, political, legal, historical, and cultural environments. Their language, food, clothing, and everyday habits vary enormously, depending upon the climate and history of their land, ranging from illiteracy and extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa to highly educated professionals in a Sufi order in the West (Wilcox 2002). Most women in Islam, about 83 %, are not Arabic. The largest number live in Asia, in Indonesia (Pew Trust 2011).
The western media tends to provide images of women in Islam which erroneously attribute the behavior of and toward women in Muslim countries to their religion rather than to their culture and society. Some authors profitably follow the same path (Gabriel 2006; Sultan 2011). Abu-Lughod (2013) has carefully dissected the economic and political motivations underlying the Western...
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Wilcox, L.E. (2016). Women in Islam. In: Leeming, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27771-9_9325-1
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