Price of Honor : Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World
A journalistic account of the status of women in a number of Islamic countries, highlighting changes that have occurred as Islamization advances, along with an interesting chapter on Wahhabist recruitment in the U.S. The opening chapters, giving an overview of Islam as a religion and the history of the Islamic world, are a disaster, apparently cobbled together from clip files and never checked for basic coherence or context, so that the story contradicts itself from one page to the next. Skip directly ahead to the country chapters, which contain many first-person and uncensored accounts by ordinary Muslim women which are more precious than gold in their rarity, interviews with various notables like Queen Noor, and female Islamist propagandists like Laili Zikria Helms, the late, unlamented Taliban regime's female publicist in America. This book makes things seem much worse for women in Islamic countries than some other accounts I've read, the chapter on Pakistan being particularly hair-raising.