In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Gulf Women ed. by Amira El-Azhary Sonbol
  • Bridget Guarasci
Gulf Women Amira El-Azhary Sonbol, ed. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012. 454 pages. ISBN 978-0-8156-3309-9.

Amira Sonbol’s Gulf Women is an ambitious project: The volume is a call to revise Gulf history by accounting for women. In this regard, the collection focuses not on gender as social construction, but on identifying the role of women in Gulf society. Sonbol assembles a collaboration of scholars in and out of the Gulf who mine the archaeological record dating back to the third millennium BCE, comb the archival fray of colonial travel writers, and dissect contemporary Islamic jurisprudence. The volume will have broad scholarly appeal for its multidisciplinary approach, and it will be of particular interest to historians and anthropologists for the questions it poses about the production of subaltern histories.

The first five chapters address the cultural production of the Gulf in pre-modern, pre-Islamic societies and the present day. Hatoon Ajwad al-Fassi’s chapter analyzes common myths and artifacts to identify women’s participation in social life beginning in the third millennium. Unlike other scholars writing about this time period, she argues that while evidence indicates matrilineal social organization, the kinship structure was embedded within a largely patriarchal framework. In Chapter 2, Allen Fromherz investigates Qatari tribal poetry, arguing that [End Page 158] Islam rebuked representations of women as symbols of tribal honor. Barbara Freyer Stowasser demonstrates in her chapter that Muslim women’s right to active participation in public space established by the Qur’an had historical antecedents in the Jahiliyya period. Amira El-Zein’s chapter evaluates how social regulations on male/female communication of Hijaz elites in literary salons were important to delimiting social class in the Umayyad period. A chapter by Moneera al-Ghadeer argues that Bedouin women’s poetry constructs the self as a metaphysical critique of conflict and hegemony. Collectively, these articles articulate a method for apprehending groups marginalized in historical records by assembling numerous, diverse source materials and reading across their gaps. The method succeeds in locating women, but, due to source limitations, raises more questions than can be addressed.

Middle chapters delve into the nineteenth century, a period densely recorded in writing. Here the volume more confidently evaluates women’s roles in economy, religion, and education. Hoda El Saadi’s chapter argues the participation of working-class women—who worked as teachers, midwives, beauticians, among other occupations—in preoil, pre-modern Arabian Gulf economies made them public figures and economic players. Hibba Abugideiri’s chapter questions the public/ private divide by making visible the social contributions of Bedouin women midwives whose labor might not have been waged or public, but was professionalized and socially valued. Omaima Abou-Bakr’s chapter shows that women were a continuous presence in the Islamic tradition by examining their role as religious educators. Ramadan al-Khouli’s chapter demonstrates that girls’ education was socially prized before the 1976 fatwa supporting girls’ education, indicating Qatar’s social readiness for and acceptance of women’s role in the public sphere. Fatma al-Sayegh’s chapter examines how cultivating relationships with women was an important gateway for Christian evangelization of the Gulf. Though these chapters expand understandings of women’s participation in economy and society, with few exceptions, they tend to code women’s participation in public life and in waged economies as signs of their relative social “empowerment.” In so doing, they unwittingly uphold the evaluative standard that measures women’s agency by their participation in and economic impact on the public sphere.

The final four chapters of Gulf Women evaluate the family as a [End Page 159] social organizing force and legal category. By analyzing the role of Arab women in late and post-Ottoman families, Soraya Altorki asserts that evidence about women’s role in the family suggests that marriages were based on a spirit of reciprocity. Despite unanswered questions about women’s autonomy, she finds that evidence does not support the scholarly convention that women had no political power in this era. Sonbol’s chapter demonstrates that the structure of the family has changed over time; while...

pdf

Share