Women in the Middle East and North Africa (review)

Women in the Middle East and North Africa. By GUILTY NASHAT and JUDITH E. TUCKER. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999. Pp. lxi + 160. $11 .95 (paper).

Women in the Middle East and North Africa, by Guilty Nashat and Judith E. Tucker, is part of Cheryl Odim-Johnson and Margaret Strobel's project entitled "Restoring Women to History." This book and the larger project seek to re-integrate women into the narratives of world history, while identifying the gaps in current scholarship about women's roles in diverse societies.

Nashat and Tucker acknowledge that "the Middle East and North Africa" is an imperfect unit of analysis more reflective of Western geopolitical interests than indigenous realities. They nevertheless engage in a comparative analysis of women's cultural, political, and socio-economic roles from the Arabian Peninsula in the south to the mountains of present-day northern Iran, westward to northern Africa, dividing history into two periods: 8000 B.C.E.-1800 C.E., and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In Part I, Nashat traces how women's roles evolved from ancient times through the advent of Islam in the seventh century into the birth of modernity; in Part II, Tucker examines women's lives during the modern era. What emerges is a cogent volume that invites readers to recognize the historical causes and consequences of women's participation in various regional societies, dispelling myths of women as passive victims of authoritarianism, colonialism, economic exploitation, and/ or religious fundamentalism.

Nashat's discussion of women during the pre-Islamic era in Part I is the book's most original contribution to women's and Middle Eastern studies. What little historical scholarship on Middle Eastern women there is typically begins with the advent of Islam, reinforcing the stereotype that these women were and remain believers above all else. Nashat explains, ". . . the course of women's experience, especially in the pre-Islamic period, is still largely uncharted. The dearth of primary data and secondary studies makes . . . an in-depth study truly daunting, but this ignorance is also the result of a lack of appreciation for the crucial contribution of women to the emergence of civilization in this region" (p. 8 ).

Interestingly, Nashat applies rational-choice theory to regional history, demonstrating how individual women's decisions in the aggregate may have produced unintended consequences. That is, as individual women chose to concentrate on raising children and keeping house, in order to maximize their families' well being, their choices in the aggregate decreased the political and socio-economic power of women over the long run. The rational-choice model also illuminates how men intensified the exploitation of women, despite caring for their individual female relatives. Arguably, Nashat's thesis requires empirical verification, but rational choice is ". . . consistent with commonsense observations of conditions . . . in various societies to this day as well as in the past" (p. 10 ).

Tucker's analysis of regional women during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is more detailed and less speculative--if not as innovative--due to the availability of primary sources and secondary studies. Yet she also offers the reader a sound analysis of the uneven changes in women's roles resulting from the ". . . encroaching world economy as well as various forms of European imperialism, including colonialism" (p. 73 ). Like Nashat, Tucker challenges determinist and reductionist arguments that women's roles in the Middle East and North Africa merely reflect literal applications of Islamic texts and/or the region's integration into the world economy.

Certain areas--the Maghreb, Eastern Mediterranean coast, Egypt, and Iran--felt the consequences of economic transformations for women (and men) as early as the eighteenth century, whereas the societies of the Arabian Peninsula have only experienced rapid changes more recently. Semi-industrialization and participation in the world economy exacerbated the exploitation of women, who have confronted the dual challenge of patriarchy within the local community and imperialism. Yet these developments have also created the...