Women, Islam and Social Change

“The Muslim Woman Issue as a Product of the Western Publishing Industry: A Literary 

Comparison of Jan Goodwin’s Price of Honor and Isobel Coleman’s Paradise Beneath Her 

Feet” (2012)

Abstract: Muslim stereotypes are presented in various forms by mass media in the West. 

Stereotypical representations of Muslims manifest frequently in creative outlets - including 

television, art, and literature (among others). These representations, which have been historically 

and predominantly negative, often have adverse repercussions for Muslims, as well as adverse 

repercussions on cross-cultural understanding efforts between the so-called “East” and “West.” 

The exploitation and negative stereotypes particularly of Muslim women have been crucial to 

negative depictions of the religion and its cultures. As a result, in the eyes of the Western viewer, 

Muslim women  have become doubly inferior – by virtue of being both women and Muslim. 

Once upon a time, the plight of Muslim women served as the justification to colonize the Middle 

East and introduce “civilization” to its natives, specifically through the process of Muslim

deculturization in favor of superior Western practices. What began as an eastward-looking

Orientalist gaze focused on the cliché of the exoticized Orient and its women have given way in 

the past few decades to a second image of Muslim women. This image was of an ignorant and

repressed woman whose culture, based on religion, forced her into servitude behind the veil. Her

nearest male kin (father, brother, husband) claimed responsibility for her and had complete

power over her - preventing her from schooling, forcing her to marry, and killing her were she to 

dishonor the family. She was neither seen nor heard, forced to live out her life behind the closed

doors of the kitchen (or harem). Today, the study of women in the Muslim world is an enterprise. 

The U.S. book industry and its audiences love a good read about oppressed Muslim women. My 

interest here is not to defend any particular doctrine. Rather, in this research I am attempting to 

identify how these books (using specifically Jan Goodwin’s Price of Honor: Muslim Women Lift 

the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World as an example of this phenomenon) reproduce 

longstanding stereotypes commonly associated by Westerners with Islam: backwardness, 

oppression, and cultural decay. As a contrast, I will then turn my attentions to researching an 

emerging effort to write about Muslim women in a nuanced way, giving agency to the women by 

highlighting local initiatives in the Muslim world that are headed up by Muslim women, for 

which I will review Isobel Coleman’s Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women Are 

Transforming the Middle East.