Books like Politics, gender, and the Islamic past by D. A. Spellberg

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s "Nomad" is a stark memoir that follows her life after leaving her Somali homeland, detailing her exile, the scrutiny from Islamist circles, and her personal battle with identity and freedom.

"Islamic feminism" would seem a contradiction in terms to most Americans. We are taught to think of Islam as a culture wherein social code and religious law alike force women to accept male authority and surrender to the veil. How could feminism emerge under such a code, let alone flourish? Now, traveling throughout Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as Islamic communities in the United States, acclaimed Arab Studies scholar and bestselling author Elizabeth Fernea sets out to answer that question. Fernea's dialogue with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances prompts a range of diverse and unpredictable responses, but in every country she visits, women demonstrate they are anything but passive. In Iraq, we see an 85 percent literacy rate among women; in Egypt, we see women owning their own farms; and in Jerusalem, we see women at the very forefront of peacemaking efforts. Poor or rich, educated or illiterate, these women define their own needs, solve their own problems, and determine the boundaries of their own very real, very viable feminisms.

Rafia Zakaria’s memoir follows her family's migration to Karachi, interweaving the city’s social and religious upheavals with the personal tragedy of her aunt, who endures a painful second marriage amid Pakistan’s Islamization era.