Midnight Tales: A Woman's Journey Through the Middle East (review)

The title of Midnight Tales alludes to The Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade's tales of her journey through the spatial and the temporal toward the eternity of art. As Muhsin al-Musawi wrote in Scheherazade in England (1981), and later in Mujtama' Alf Layla (2000), Scheherazade's tales achieve durability as art not only through her triumph over authoritarianism, but also through her perseverance in moving forward in unlimited time and space. Midnight Tales also focuses on nighttime as pivotal to the narrative, which strives to capture meaning through a synthetic accumulation of events, details, and experiences in a number of Arab cultures and countries. The tales gather momentum as the narrative in its variations aims to involve the reader in the experiences of the female narrator. Like Scheherazade, the narrator of Midnight Tales leaves the reader entangled in a web of experiences and visions.

Midnight Tales is a collection of personal essays spanning six Middle Eastern countries. The journey starts with Iraq, the narrator's homeland, then moves to Lebanon, Syria, Kuwait, Egypt, and the Emirates. Organized by country, the book comprises a prologue and six essays, each of which contains a number of tales related to the country it concerns. The more time al-Rawi spent in a country, the longer the essay. Hence those on Iraq, Egypt, and the Emirates are the longest and those on Syria and Kuwait are the shortest.

The unique organization of the book follows the chronological order of the author's life experiences and those of the people she meets along her journey, first as a child in the company of her parents and later as a sociologist collecting stories of Bedouins. The tales of her personal experiences and the stories of others are told effortlessly, so that we feel they are unforced and so real.

Al-Rawi describes each country in great detail and provides historical information as a background to her tales. She strives to show the reader that the differences between Arab nations are apparent through the women of each culture: "As in so many Arab countries, it is the women who highlight most clearly the different characters and contrasts" (106). Embedded in these tales is a critique of the treatment of Arab women in the modern world. This pertains not only to customs loosely based on religion but also to women's political and social rights in the various countries through which the author traveled. The story of the woman who was tested for virginity before marriage to her cousin stands as a striking criticism of customary practice. The author evokes true tradition and religious custom regarding women and their rights as the basis for her critique of modern ways.

Al-Rawi's journey across the Middle East can be read as an allegory, like a Sufi path that takes the individual from selfhood toward selflessness, as she learns about societies and cultures that make her forget her early selfish orientation, obsessions, and concerns. On another level, the work is a Bildungsroman, a book of self-education: "Travelling is the most beautiful way to learn" (44). The self is trained and educated through a life pursuit that has many stations; the individual moves forward on a horizontal trajectory, from one place to another and from one culture to another; at the same time the individual follows a spiral trajectory deep into the self to examine early notions, attitudes, and platitudes in the light of new discoveries and findings.

Although Midnight Tales provides an entertaining and valuable reading of cultures across the Middle East, the multiple itineraries and the historical data with which it abounds may confuse or even annoy the general reader, who might find it opaque and hard to navigate. The work is marred by some mistransliterations (e.g. "al-Achtal" for "al-Akhtal," 118) and typographical errors (e.g. "militrary," 116) that should have been caught by the editor. But this does not detract from the value of al-Rawi's...