Women in the Middle East, Past and Present.

McAleese, Mary K. Meyer

Women in the Middle East, Past and Present, by Nikki R. Keddie. Princeton University Press, 2007. 193 pages. $24.95, hardcover.

Few topics are as shrouded in misunderstanding and misinformation among Americans and their policy makers as the lives of women in the Middle East. In her book, Women in the Middle East, Past and Present, Nikki R. Keddie presents a fascinating collection that repackages several key articles from one facet of her life's work on Middle East history: the question of women. The result is an engaging compendium of her scholarship that offers a retrospective look at the development of the broader social-science research in this growing subfield of Middle East studies. This volume gives the non-specialist a comprehensive introduction to this neglected subfield of Middle East studies and offers the specialist a handy tool in the form of an authoritative historiography on the topic. Anyone interested in understanding the Middle East, whether citizen, scholar or policy maker, who has neglected (or avoided) the question of women in the region would do well to read this book. It offers an accessible overview of the field and deeper insights into the crucial economic, socio-cultural, and political locations of women in this diverse region.

The articles in this volume focus on Muslim/Islamist women in the geographic region from Afghanistan westward through Morocco. Jewish and Christian women in this expansive area are not discussed except for occasional comparisons. Centered within these boundaries, the volume is divided into two parts. Book One offers an updated overview of the history of women in the Middle East and North Africa from pre-Islamic times to the present day. It serves as a "state of the field" snapshot of what we currently know about this broad and rich history by one of its original historians. Divided into six "Parts" (chapters) addressing six historical periods, the first four chapters handle the region as a whole up through the "long" nineteenth century. The last two chapters of Book One cover the two halves of the twentieth century (1914-45 and 1945 to the present), each providing an introductory regional overview for the period under question followed by a country-by-country summary of women's legal status, political activitism and socioeconomic realities. Some countries receive more coverage than others in these summaries, due mainly to the limits of available scholarship.

Book Two includes five of Keddie's previously published articles that inform many of the themes and findings in Book One. Spanning the 1970s to the present decade, these articles bring the reader deeper into the key scholarly questions, methodological challenges and political debates relating to the study of Muslim/Islamist women and the realities of their lives. The oldest piece here, "Problems in the Study of Middle Eastern Women" from 1979, holds up well despite its ageresearchers continue to face largely the same methodological and documentary problems, raising issues of interest to both scholars and policy makers. The most recent piece, "Women in the Limelight: Recent Books on Middle Eastern Women's History since 1800," presents an excellent bibliographic essay on the field and should be a starting point for interested students, scholars and policy makers. The three other essays in Book Two give deeper background to the material presented in Book One, providing a layering rather than redundancy of important points. The final pages of the volume include an interesting interview with Keddie that traces her own professional development alongside the developments in her field as well as a short autobiographical essay that reviews the highs and lows of her professional life. By the end of the book, the reader has found a new teacher to admire, one who respectfully uncovers the lives of Middle Eastern women and inspires us to learn more.

Throughout the volume, Keddie teaches a number of important lessons about Islam, Muslim women and doing good social history. In Book One's historical overview, Keddie explains how ancient tribal and agnatic (male) lineage patterns favoring male family members across the Middle East and Mediterranean regions formed the material basis for patriarchal practices and beliefs that pre-date the dawn of Islam. These pre-Islamic patriarchal practices and beliefs underlie women's unequal status in all three monotheistic religions, not just Islam. They also played a key role the Shia-Sunni split after Muhammad's death, as he had no direct male heir. It was later interpretations of Muhammad's teachings (hadiths) and the codification of legal "Traditions" in the Quranic schools by the ninth century--all of which were tied up in the political struggles of the times--that reversed any modest gains made by women in Muhammad's lifetime. But, Keddie carefully reminds us, Muslim women's lives through these early and later centuries were not very different from those of Christian or Jewish women in the region. Keddie's attention to the material bases of women's lives allows her to show the complexity in the treatment and status of women across Arab and non-Arab areas, rural and urban areas, Shia- and Sunni-dominated areas, and especially across economic classes in the centuries after Muhammad. She has a keen comparativist's eye. Despite her region-wide view and the many generalizations that can be made, Keddie's use of historical, anthropological and other social-science and literary sources highlights the great diversity within Middle Eastern societies in the position, roles and power of women through the centuries.

Keddie walks a fine line between the relativist-universalist dialectic (Book Two, Part 2) that defines Western (and Orientalist) debates about Muslim women, their legal rights and their socioeconomic status. She explains that one must be careful about making judgments based solely on "ideal sources" (legal texts and political pronouncements) and instead look deeper at women's material living conditions. She does not absolve Islam for the prolonged unequal status and hardships of women in the Middle East, whose lives she clearly wants to see improve. But Keddie does situate Muslim women's lives in their broader socioeconomic contexts and demonstrates that many additional factors, all linked to Western influence colonialism, underdevelopment, support of autocratic modernizers and oil politics, to name a few-have also been at work in prolonging and exacerbating women's economic, social and political inequality in the region.

Perhaps there is no better symbol of this than the question of the veiling of women, a question Keddie revisits throughout the volume. Keddie reminds us that the veiling and seclusion of women is also rooted in pre-Islamic times, but shows that these practices in ancient times were specific markers of upper-class urban women and a sign of leisure and privileged status. Slaves, lower-class urban, rural and tribal/nomadic women who worked out of necessity were less likely to wear veils or to face seclusion, both in ancient and more recent times. More important, intrusions by Western powers, especially from 1789 onward, played a key role in making the veil an important cultural marker, political symbol, and the center of political debates about women in the Middle East. Among other things, Western colonialism and economic and political influence drew pronouncements by conservative religious and political leaders insisting on women's veiling and seclusion from the Western colonial gaze in public spaces. Many lower-class urban and some rural women embraced veiling and seclusion as signs of higher social status, personal honor and cultural identity. Meanwhile, upper-class women whose families profited from ties with Westerners sought to abandon the veil for more Western-style fashions and freedoms.

Later, the impact of Western influences led some nationalists and modernizing autocrats (e.g., Ataturk, the shah) to abolish the veil as a sign of breaking the power of local religious conservatives and consolidating secular authority. In more recent decades, the uneven effects of modernization, Western political influence in oppressive autocratic regimes, and the widening gap between elites and masses have given rise to new oppositional Islamist movements in which Islamist women embrace veiling and the hijab not as a step backwards into "tradition" but rather to signal a reinvented and innovative symbol of cultural identity, national pride and religious piety. Perhaps more than any other lesson in her book, Keddie shows how the politics of Western influence in the region through colonialism and post-colonial dependence on petroleum as well as the reactive, oppositional politics of nationalists and Islamists have been played out on the bodies of women in the Middle East, from the questions of veiling and seclusion, to personal status laws, to economic and political rights and freedoms.

Keddie's lasting gift to the reader is a deeper appreciation for the variety, activism, richness and hardships of women's lives in the Middle East set within the broader social and political history of the region. If more people with an interest in U.S. policy in the region read this volume, they could gain a far better understanding of the region as a whole and of the complex politics of Islamist movements. Moreover, they might begin to find more effective ways of supporting the actual aspirations, needs and struggles of Muslim women in the Middle East.

Mary K. Meyer McAleese, Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Floridd