Sunday, September 19, 2004
Wave of religion books brings women's stories to the forefront
With the success of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, publishers have incentive to launch religion books that bring women's stories from the margins to the center.
This writing, says Jana Riess, religion book review editor for Publishers' Weekly, "has the potential to be life-changing."
Feminist spirituality has been a distinct publishing category for about 15 years, she says, but she has seen a surge in new titles since the spring 2003 publication of The Da Vinci Code.
And after sales of The Red Tent took off in 2001, says Riess, many publishers sought to draw comparisons between the surprise best seller and their new feminist spirituality books.
"Many women read that novel and said to themselves, 'I thought I knew what really happened in that story (of Dinah in The Red Tent), but wow! Here's something that takes the same facts and interprets them in a totally different way. Maybe everything in the Bible that I have assumed should be questioned,'" says Riess, who lives in Winchester.
The new books are written with a female-centered lens: Ochs' Sarah Laughed: Modern Lessons From the Wisdom and Stories of Biblical Women; Faith and Feminism: A Holy Alliance by Helen LaKelly Hunt; and The Women Who Danced by the Sea: Finding Ourselves in the Stories of Our Biblical Foremothers by Marsha Mirkin.
And in The Scimitar and the Veil: Extraordinary Women of Islam, author Jennifer Heath recounts the stories of more than 50 Muslim women from antiquity to the 19th century. Heath, who spent her teenage years in Afghanistan with her family in the 1960s, says she felt an urgent need to work against the one-dimensional portrayals of Muslim women in the media and popular discussion.
"We should know all this already by now," she says. "Muslim women are not shrouded ghosts. They really have a past and a future, not to say a present."
Her collection includes historical figures well-known to most Muslims and many who have received little scholarly attention: scholars, saints, warriors and artists. Their accomplishments, argues Heath, not only can expand our notions of what it means to be Muslim -- but also can offer new responses to pressing spiritual and political problems.
The ninth-century mystic Rabi'a al-Adawiyya of Basra (in what is now Iraq) is one example. "Rabi'a al-Adawiyya basically reinvented, or rediscovered, the idea of God as beloved," Heath says. "God is the lover. Now there's a concept, right?
"That everything belongs to God is an idea whose time has come. If you think of God as ... the creator of all this world, and we're destroying it, then we're destroying the beloved -- and that's a terrible thing."
The notion of giving voice to the voiceless runs like a current through the four books. For the authors, women across time and place have several things in common: They are women, their experience is different from men's, and their stories -- when not pushed to the margins or silenced altogether -- can show us something about the complexity of human experience.
The new books on women and religion are one facet of a remarkably diverse range of religion books, Riess says.
"Americans seem to be very interested in spirituality across the board, and naturally there are different segments to that audience," she says. "But the fact that the audiences are large enough to sustain markets on both ends of the spectrum is pretty significant."
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