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Gender And Authority In Almoravid Andalusia: Subjects/Objects Of Regulation In Ibn Abdun's Risala Fi Al Qada'wa Al Hisba, Sean Connor Riordan

Archived Theses and Dissertations

Recent strands of western historical writing understand gender in medieval Islamic societies through any of number of local cultural, religious and political discourses. This type of writing shifts the focus of historical research away from questions regarding whether Islam debases or improves the status of women--questions that tend to immobilize the subject in a polemic of competing essentialisms-and instead finds gender as having been produced in historically dynamic local processes. My thesis attempts to contribute to th.is literature by exploring how gender functioned as a regulatory issue in the context of the Almoravid political-religious movement in al­Andalus through a close …