You are a consultant to the US State Department and you have been asked to write a memo on human rights in Islam (specifically the rights of women and religious minorities) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In this five-page memo, your main responsibility is to introduce US officials, concerned by the rise of ISIS and its infringements of human rights, to other interpretations of Islam, in particular to those of Muslim scholars who have been fighting for the respect of human rights in general and women's rights in particular.

According to these scholars,

· How has Islam affected or changed the status of women and minorities?

· How can this apply to the present? Are their views monolithic?

· What accounts for these differences?

· How are women influenced by and influencing Islamic interpretations of their rights today?

· What kind of ijtihad do they perform and why?

· Can Muslim societies be pluralistic and give women and minorities their full voices despite ISIS's claim for the truth?

ijtihad means refers to independent mental reasoning aimed at finding a legal solution. (If this word not clear to you let me know or you can look to Islam in the Modern World book (IMW), pp. 14-52 to understand it)

Your thesis (that is the conclusion of your analysis) should be placed at the end of your introductory paragraph in BOLD. It should be no more than one sentence long.

Use the questions in the assignment to come up with a thesis statement. You do not have to answer all questions. Hopefully, some questions will speak more to you and will help you generate a good thesis statement (which is the answer to a question you posed.)

When you introduce an author in the paper, please give full name first and add a qualifier (The Pakistani scholar/philosopher/activist argued/stated...)

Your prose should be formal (no contractions) and all your sentences should be complete.

For the bibliography and references/footnotes, please give me the author's name, the title of the text, and the page numbers in Islam in Transition book (IT).

You may use MLA or Chicago style for your bibliography.