When Benazir Bhutto became Prime Minister of Pakistan in 1988, there were some who claimed that it was a blasphemous assault on Islamic tradition since no Muslim state, they alleged, had ever been governed by a woman. In this extraordinary book, Fatima Mernissi shows that those self proclaimed defenders of Islamic tradition were not only misguided but wrong. She looks back through fifteen centuries of Islam and uncovers a hidden history of women who have held the ...
