Tales Arab Women Tell And the Behavioral Patterns They Portray (review)

Tales Arab Women Tell, by Hasan El-Shamy, is another in a series of works presenting and analyzing the folk narrative of the Arab world. As with his anthology in The Folktales of the World Series, Folktales of Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) and his Folk Traditions of the Arab World: A Guide to Motif Classification (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), Tales Arab Women Tell is important not only for the study of Arab and Islamic folk narrative, but for the study of folk narrative generally as well.

The contribution of Tales Arab Women Tell can be seen in several ways. Perhaps foremost is that it is one of the largest and best-annotated collections of Arab folk narrative in English-indeed, its only rival as an anthology of Arab folktales fitting the demands of modern folklore scholarship is El-Shamy's own Folktales of Egypt. Though there are other anthologies of Arab folktales available, they are deficient in several ways: for instance, through the lack of a scholarly apparatus, conflation of multiple texts into single texts, rewriting of texts, or the inclusion of texts that are not authentic Arab folk narrative. The texts in Tales Arab Women Tell, however, are fully annotated with motif and tale-type indices, along with detailed cultural and comparative notes and commentaries on the texts. El-Shamy's system of annotation in the section "Tale Types, Motifs, and Occurrences" does take a little time to master, but it allows him to pack an extraordinary amount of information about the tale types, motifs, and distribution of the tales in the Arab world into a remarkably small space. This information is of special value for both the student of Arab folklore and the comparativist and is something often lacking in collections of folktales.

Another contribution of Tales Arab Women Tell is that it is an anthology of tales told by women. There are a few tales collected from men in the book, but in these cases the tales were learned from women. This stands in contrast to many studies and anthologies of women's folklore, where the emphasis is not on which stories women tell, but on the analysis of stories from a feminist perspective. One cannot deny the importance of feminist analyses, but it is equally important to know what stories are typically told by women in a tradition if we are to fully understand women's folklore. El-Shamy's attention to the demographics of Arab storytelling is thus an important modification to how folk narrative is usually studied, and something that other collections could easily emulate. Indeed, given the importance of women as storytellers in many traditions, demographically oriented studies of storytelling would be especially revealing as to the relationships between gender, gender roles, and the types of tales commonly found.

El-Shamy's "Brother and Sister" hypothesis provides the topical emphasis and arrangement of Tales Arab Women Tell. The two main premises of this theory are, first, "that contrary to prevailing academic views, the brother-sister relationship is of paramount importance in Arab cultures;" and, second, "that this relationship plays a decisive role in the generation, development, and continuation of a specific pattern of family structure and a host of other related social and cultural institutions" (p. 3). Because of his interest in highlighting the sociopsychological study of the narratives and their relationship to the social patterns of Arab culture, El-Shamy first arranges the stories into broad categories such as "Parents and Paternal Figures" or "Siblings," and then in narrower categories such as "Mother and Son" or "Brother and Sister." Editors and anthologists, of course, select their texts to support their arguments, whether their arguments are made explicitly, as in this book, or implicitly, as in most anthologies and, thus, are sometimes likely to bias their results in favor of their thesis. The brother and sister relationship...