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4 books match the query 'Kuwait'

cover of Citizenship, Faith, and Feminism: Jewish and Muslim Women Reclaim Their Rights

Citizenship, Faith, and Feminism

Jewish and Muslim Women Reclaim Their Rights

Jan Feldman

Brandeis University Press, 2011

Religious women in liberal democracies are “dual citizens” because of their contrasting status as members of both a civic community (in which their gender has no impact on their constitutional guarantee of equal rights) and a traditional religious community (which distributes roles and power based on gender). This book shows how these “dual citizens”—Orthodox Jewish women in Israel, Muslim women in Kuwait, and women of both those faiths in the U.S.—have increasingly deployed their civic citizenship rights in attempts to reform and not destroy their religions. For them, neither “exit” nor acquiescence to traditional religious gender norms is an option. Instead, they use the narrative of civic citizenship combined with a more authentic, if alternative reading of their faith tradition to improve their status.
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cover of Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work, and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait

Everyday Conversions

Islam, Domestic Work, and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait

Attiya Ahmad

Duke University Press, 2017

Why are domestic workers converting to Islam in the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf region? In Everyday Conversions Attiya Ahmad presents us with an original analysis of this phenomenon. Using extensive fieldwork conducted among South Asian migrant women in Kuwait, Ahmad argues domestic workers’ Muslim belonging emerges from their work in Kuwaiti households as they develop Islamic piety in relation—but not opposition—to their existing religious practices, family ties, and ethnic and national belonging. Their conversion is less a clean break from their preexisting lives than it is a refashioning in response to their everyday experiences. In examining the connections between migration, labor, gender, and Islam, Ahmad complicates conventional understandings of the dynamics of religious conversion and the feminization of transnational labor migration while proposing the concept of everyday conversion as a way to think more broadly about emergent forms of subjectivity, affinity, and belonging.
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cover of Poet and Businessman: Abd al-Aziz al-Babtain and the Formation of Modern Kuwait

Poet and Businessman

Abd al-Aziz al-Babtain and the Formation of Modern Kuwait

Leif Stenberg

Gingko, 2022

A history of contemporary Kuwait as seen through the life of an individual Kuwaiti.
 
This book reviews and analyzes the modern history of Kuwait through the life of Abd al-Aziz Sa‘ud al-Babtain, a wealthy businessman, philanthropist, and poet. He is the head of a large, influential international cultural foundation based in Kuwait City. Abd al-Aziz’s life story tightly interweaves with modern discussions on the history of the state of Kuwait. There are very few books taking a collective grip on the history of the state of Kuwait. Likewise, there are very few studies about the generation of Gulf individuals who experienced, benefitted from, and even suffered from the discovery of oil, and who has been a crucial part of socioeconomic and cultural developments in countries like Kuwait in recent history. By constructing a cohesive overview of the modern history of Kuwait enriched by the life of an individual that has lived through the better part of that particular history, this book fills a lacuna in contemporary scholarship on the Middle East, and especially the Arabian or the Persian Gulf.
 
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cover of The Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait: Religion, Identity and Otherness in the Analysis of War and Conflict

The Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait

Religion, Identity and Otherness in the Analysis of War and Conflict

Hamdi A. Hassan

Pluto Press, 2005

Focusing on the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Hamdi Hassan offers a balanced examination of the motivation of the Iraqi polity and the conditions which accelerated and facilitated the decision to invade. Critical of the traditional approach of most Middle East studies, The Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait offers a counterpoint to Western interpretations of this key event in the contemporary history of the Middle East.

Hassan examines how Saddam Hussein assessed and responded to American and Israeli intentions after the invasion, the reaction of other Arab states, and the unprecedented grassroots support for the Iraqi leadership. In this context, the author examines the social structure of Iraqi society – families, clans and regional alliances – and the importance of Ba’athism. Hassan also examines the political structure of the country, relating the identity of Arabism – the religion and language which is associated closely with the Pan Arabist ideals – to Iraqi foreign policy.

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