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  • Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World by Katherine Zoepf
  • Rachel Pope (bio)
Katherine Zoepf: Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World. New York: Penguin, 2016. 272 pages. ISBN 1-59-420388-1. $17.00 (paperback).

After 11 September 2001, author Katherine Zoepf became curious about the perpetrators of the attacks on the East Coast of the United States. She was interested in learning more about the culture and ideology of Muslim people. Rather than blindly believing all information the media was reporting, she decided to learn Arabic and traveled to various Arab nations herself. Her resulting book Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World is the byproduct of the years she spent in the Middle East. During this time, Zoepf socialized with and documented the experiences of various Muslim women she encountered. Zoepf makes sure that the reader is aligned with an actual person, and that he or she hears each story from that person’s perspective as well as that of her family. This allows the reader to feel connected to the woman, root for her, or feel outraged when she experiences injustice. From honor killings to the importance of a woman’s virginity, education, and work opportunities to the current women’s right movement, Excellent Daughters tells the stories of Muslim women who are slowly but surely changing their communities. As one woman named Mohamed put it, “My sons are going to be different. . . . They have to be different. They have to treat women with respect.”

One of the most moving stories in Excellent Daughters concerns a deceased young woman named Zahra. The reader discovers that her brother has murdered her because one of her father’s friends kidnapped and raped her. The practice of killing one’s family members in retaliation for sexual crimes is called jareemat al sharaf (honor killings). Families are concerned about how these women are perceived, and a daughter or sister who has been sexually assaulted is considered shameful and an embarrassment for the family, as she is no longer a virgin for her future husband. All the males in the family take responsibility for the women, and so Zahra was murdered for the sake of the honor of the family. Her situation became an international headline, causing people around the world to question why honor killings are still allowed. Some Arabs believe that Islamic law through the Quran protects the honorable act. However, there are Islamic scholars who state honor killings are pre-Islamic traditions, and the Syrian codes that allow men to conduct honor killings are actually Napoleonic laws. In an ironic twist of events, the brother who killed Zahra in hindsight ultimately felt remorse for his actions. “We’re tribal people,” he says. “At first, I started thinking about revenge, about our honor. . . . But then I started to think about Zahra lying there, dying, and I don’t think I can believe in that set of values anymore.” [End Page 127]

Zoepf also discusses both the promiscuity and virginity of Lebanese women. In the modern world of globalization and social change, women are becoming more and more concerned about their outward appearance. They live in a complex environment where they have plastic surgeries as a rite of passage, yet still feel pressure to maintain their virginity and purity for their future husbands. Both oral and anal sex are common practices that young women engage in so that their boyfriends do not leave them for other, younger girls, and so they are still “virgins” who can marry in the future. For those who do have premarital vaginal intercourse, either from rape or sexual activity, hymenoplasty is viewed as necessary for the women to have any sort of future. According to one gynecologist who performs these restoration surgeries, “ ‘Why should a girl lose her whole future? She would be rejected completely [without the surgery].’ ”

As in the United States, girls in the Arab world value their education. Zoepf notes that girls with the highest scores on baccalaureate exams—taken before attending higher education—usually enter medicine. In declining...

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