Critical Lives: Muhammad Ibn 'Abdullah

This book is about Muhammad the prophet of Islam. This book starts off with the history of Arabia before Islam came into the picture. The Reason why I'm reading this book as well is because its going to help me learn more about the Background or history of Arabia and how everything had started. Also, it will help me explain somethings about the religion and be able to connect it with the stories that I am going to read soon. It talks about how women had just a few rights back back then. "Tribal customs had a nightmarish side as well. Muhammad labeled the time before the coming of Islam Jahiliyya, the days of Ignorance, and rightly so. Arab Human rights were quite backwards, even for the time. Women had precious few rights. A women became the property of a man upon marriage, and no woman could refuse a match made by her father. Spousal abuse was rampant, with no recourse to any quarter for help. Upon the death of her husband, a woman could be inherited by her son and made her son's wife. Female infanticide in which newborn baby girls were buried alive in the sand was quite common in a society that considered surplus females a burden. Women had no divorce or well-defined inheritance rights and certainly no politcal voice. A man could divorce without reason and leave a woman penniless, and there was no limit to the number of wives a man could have, nor rules for how each should be treated." (Emerick 8-9) This all changed once Islam came into the picture, except for some of the people who kept that tradition going. People tend to think that this behavior towards women is part of the religion Islam. It is not part of the religion its just mere traditions that should not be allowed at all. This really goes against what the religion is truely about.

Tales from the Thousand and One nights

The novel Tales from the thousand and One Nights is a large collection of different stories that consists of fables,fairy tales, legends, adventure tales, parables, morality tales, etc. The novel has been translated from Arabic to English. The book that I am reading is Dawoods edition which is a much shorter version of the much longer versions. The tales consist of Indian, Persian and Arabian roots. They say it goes back to the Sassanid Kings predating the rise of Islam. The stories in a thousand and one nights are inspirations for other works through the centuries. Some of the things inside the tales is going to help me relate to the novels that I am going to read about the treatment of Muslim women in different regions.