The position of women in Islam remains deeply contentious. While conservative elements both within Islam and among its Western critics continue to claim that Islamic law and values are fundamentally incompatible with modern notions of gender equality, since the 1980s there has been a growing body of scholarship which seeks to make the case for feminism and gender justice within a distinctly Islamic paradigm. In Islamic Feminism, Mulki Al-Sharmani examines the goals, approaches and methodologies which key scholars have adopted in their efforts at crafting an Islamic feminist discourse. Encompassing scholars from both the Islamic world and the Muslim diaspora, ranging from the pioneering scholar activist Amina Wadud to Egypt's Omaima Abou Bakr, the book also looks at how these scholars have translated their work into meaningful political action through groups such as the global Musawah movement and the Egyptian Women and Memory Forum. Crucially, Al-Sharmani also shows that Islamic feminism is a phenomenon which extends far beyond academia. Drawing on the author's own extensive research and interviews with women in Egypt, the UK, Malaysia, Finland and elsewhere, the book explores how ordinary Muslim women in both the West and the Islamic world are increasingly asserting their autonomy and challenging patriarchal interpretations of their religion, as well as exploring the linkages between Islamic feminist scholarship and the realities of these women's lived experiences. In the process, Islamic Feminism not only uncovers new directions for Islamic feminist scholarship, but upends many of our preconceptions about Islam and the role of women within it.

Eliezer-Zusman of Brody: The Early Modern Synagogue Painter and His World discusses Jewish cultural and artistic migration from Eastern Europe to German lands in the first half of the eighteenth century. Focusing on Eliezer-Zusman of Brody, who painted synagogues in the Franconia area, hitherto neglected biographical aspects and work methods of religious artisans in Eastern and Central Europe during the early modern period are revealed. What begins as a study of synagogue paintings in Franconia presents an unexpectedly intensive glimpse into the lives and sacred products of painters at the periphery of Jewish Ashkenazi existence.

Movement, smell, vision, and other perceptual experiences are ways of thinking and orienting ourselves in the world. And yet the appeal to experience as resource for theology, though a significant shift in contemporary scholarship, has seldom received nuanced investigation. How do embodied differences like gender, race, disability, and sexuality highlight theological analysis and connect to perceptual experience and theological imagination? In Meaning in Our Bodies, Heike Peckruhn offers historical and cultural comparisons, showing how sensory experience may order normalcy, social status, or communal belonging. Ultimately, she argues that scholars who appeal to the importance of bodily experiences need to acquire a robust and nuanced understanding of how sensory perceptions and interactions are cultural and theological acts of making meaning.