Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures: Volumes and Supplements

The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (EWIC) is an interdisciplinary, transhistorical project that compiles essays by scholars on Muslim and non-Muslim women and Islamic cultures. Print EWIC was published in six volumes between 2003 and 2007, bringing together the work of 907 scholars in 1,246 articles for a total of almost 2 million words. In 2010, the EWIC project moved to EWIC Online. EWIC is now a digital, fully searchable database of articles on every facet of life of women in societies with a significant Muslim population. EWIC Online uploads two supplements per year, each publishing 25-30 articles consisting of 100,000 words. This annual increase of 50-60 articles, or 200,000 words adds over 1,000 international authors to the already extensive index of scholars and scholarship on women and Islamic cultures.

Volume I of the encyclopedia focuses on the study of gender and Islamic cultures, examining methodologies commonly employed by various academic disciplines. Volume I contains the Introduction to the entire encyclopedia, as well as a bibliography of works published on women and Islamic cultures.

Introduction
The General Editor's Introduction outlines the history of the EWIC project, the rationale behind important editorial decisions, and the organization of the encyclopedia. The General Editor explores the contradictions between the ways in which encyclopedia projects tend to stabilize concepts and the editors' efforts to destabilize, complicate, represent the "fuzziness" of reality, marking this as a foundational idea for the structure of the encyclopedia. The Introduction also touches on the importance of decentralizing the Middle East within Islamic studies, of presenting a heterogenous view of women's experiences in Islamic cultures, and of the importance of EWIC in today's global reality. The Introduction then explains the rationale for organizing the encyclopedia by theme, region, and period rather than alphabetically.

Volume I Entries

Volume I contains several different types of entries: Thematic Entries, Historical Thematic Entries, and Disciplinary Thematic Entries. Thematic entries cover various methodologies used in the academic discplines that study women and Islamic cultures, the sources available for research, the constraints and limitations presented by methodologies and sources, and the implications of the above for scholarship on women and Islamic cultures. This section aims to set the agenda for future research rather than answer all the questions. Section One is particularly directed at scholars and graduate students for teaching purposes.

Historical Thematic Entries focus on problems in methodologies and sources for each period as relevant for doing research on women and Islamic cultures. They are not reviews of events, the state of Islam, or the conditions of women in the period covered, but rather evaluations of the methodological and epistemological problems in the study of women in the period covered.

Disciplinary Thematic Entries explore the problems of methods and sources specific to their disciplines. Authors were asked to evaluate the epistemological assumptions of their disciplines and how these have affected the field of study, the study of women and Islamic cultures within their disciplines.

Volume II of EWIC explores the intersections of family, law, and politics specifically as they relate to women (both Muslim and non-Muslim) in Islamic cultures. This volume takes as a given that in many regions of the world, especially in the Middle East, family is defined as the basic unit of society (rather than the individualized citizen) and state actors mediate their relationships to state citizens through family structures, family relations, family idioms, and family moralities. Thus, the family is always a subject of law and politics, and states are always invested in what is defined as family and in the regulation of the ativities of families as collectivities and of the persons ensconced in families. Topics covered in this volume include citizenship, friendship, hospitality, kinship, political and social movements, and secularism.

Volume III of EWIC focuses on the body as a biological entity and simultaneously the product of cultures, specific contexts, and the genealogies of knowledges which constitute local understandings of the body, its capacities, purposes, possibilities, regulations, and limitations. In this Volume, the articles trace the ways in which the body figures in discourses about law, family, health, sexuality, and Islam. In addition, Volume III includes the "Scholars and Scholarship Project," which is a study of all doctoral dissertations on women and Islamic cultures completed between 1960 and 2002. The "Scholars and Scholarship Project" can also be found here.

Volume IV addresses the material conditions facing women in Muslim majority societies and Muslim women in Muslim minority societies. Specificially, these entries examine the every day lives of women around the globe, providing data-rich and empirically specific coverage of crucial topics from region to region and country to country. Especially important were questions of agency; authors examined women's activisim in non-governmental or community-based organizations, credit associations, and the possibilities created by education. The articles also highlight the changes caused by urbanization, forced and voluntary migration, internal and international displacement, and refugee status, much of which disproportionately--or differently--affects women. Entries include articles on urban identities, homelessness, housing projects, cottage industries, sex workers, migration, and slavery.

Volume V covers modes of expression, broadly defined. Expression here ranges from music, theater, and the arts, to language use, to religious practices. Rather than focus on Islam and the Qur'an, the EWIC Editors instead decided to identify critical topics within a broad range of issues, including the emergence of Islam, early expansion, discourses of patriarchy, and religious practices. Topics include fiction, film, storytellers, journalists, conversion, pilgrimage, proverbs, and prophets.

Volume VI completes the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures. This volume provides the reader with supplemental articles that were not submitted in time for previous volumes, as well as an index of all six volumes.

Since the publication of Volume VI, the encyclopedia has moved online and is now available as a fully searchable database of articles. These supplements fill in gaps in the original encyclopedia where scholarship was not available, and offer new articles on ground-breaking topics.

Supplements provide articles on (among other new topics) Cinema, Blogs, Television, Memoirs, and Autobiographies, Non-Governmental Organizations, National and Transnational Security Regimes, and Political-Social Movements. Supplements are available through Brill Online. Supplement I became available in April 2010. Supplement II became available in October 2010. Supplement III became available in April 2011. Supplement IV became available in October 2011. Supplement V became available August 2012. Supplement VI became available November 2012.