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130 JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY SPRING The Middle East Leila Ahmud T The first section of the material on "Women in the Middle East" by Guity Nashat, is subtitled "8,000 B.C.-A.D. 1800." Part I focuses on women in the ancient Middle East, and specifically in Mesopotamia, which Nashat describes as the major source of the cultural attitudes toward women prevalent in the Middle East today. Curiously (or not so curiously), ancient Mesopotamia was also the focus of Gerda Lerner's book. The Creation of Patriarchy (New York, 1986), which set out to "isolate and identify" the forms out of which Western civilization constructed gender, forms which derived, Lerner argues, largely from Mesopotamian (and later Hebrew) sources. Like Lerner, Nashat relies on secondary sources. She ably pieces together a history (a complicated task since most of her sources do not focus on women), inevitably full of lacunae because of the paucity of the sources, tracing the evolution of human societies and women's changing roles in them from the first emergence of human groups in the Middle East through to early Mesopotamian communities, the Sumerian city-states, and the Babylonian and Assyrian kingdoms. The attitudes she identifies were undoubtedly influential in shaping gender relations in later Middle Eastern societies—though others were, too. Mediterranean attitudes in particular deserve at least brief mention. Moreover, while most authors who have written on Middle Eastern women readily acknowledge that the roots of the area's attitudes predate Islam, few in fact take the trouble to explore those roots, and thus Nashat's essay is a useful departure from common practice. Nashat's treatment of this material differs from Lerner's in that her objective is essentially to piece together rather than to attempt theoretical analysis. She makes no reference to Lerner's work—a loss, I believe, on two counts. First, though Lerner's book has been criticized on a number of points, her theory of the emergence of women's subordination is nevertheless important and needs to be addressed in a teaching packet devoted to considering the origins of a patriarchal tradition in which Middle Eastern societies and, evidently, Western societies have their roots. And second, the mere fact that two authors, setting out to consider the origins of current gender structures—one in Western societies, and the other in Islamic societies —explore identical roots is in itself a fact whose implications deserve to be pondered—particularly by American students who are accustomed to thinking of the Western and Islamic worlds as innately and unbridgeably different. Moreover, attention to Lerner's work might have enabled Nashat to avoid some too-easy generalizations, such as her dismissal, without ©1989 Journal of Women's History, Vol. i, No.i (Spring)_________________ 1989 Review is! indicating her reasons, of the notion that the veil originally signaled male sexual property rights over women, a point to which Lerner gives considerable and thought-provoking attention. Broad, unspecific generalizations and unexamined assumptions indeed figure rather too frequently, for example, the suggestion that monotheisms bore a special relation to women's subordination—even though the evidence is plentiful that nonmonotheistic religions whose lettered heritage took shape over the same period were no less insistent on women's subordination. Her citing a ninthcentury monotheist text in support of this, without indicating from which monotheism it emanated, is irritatingly unspecific. In her treatment of the Islamic era, Nashat's focus continues to be almost exclusively the Iraqi-Iranian region. Egypt, Syria, North Africa (let alone Spain) do not figure, though this is perhaps not surprising given that she covers twelve centuries in twenty-eight pages. Sometimes, however, her failure to mention these areas is glaring. Writing, for example, of a period when Damascus was the capital of the empire and referring to the reigning caliph's adoption of his subjects' "non-Arabian" ways in secluding his women, she does not identify Damascus, or even Syria, as the locus, or mention that the customs in question were Mediterrean/Byzantine/Christian . There are also some striking inaccuracies, for example, the statement that Rabi'a was the first person to initiate mystical worship in Islam: Rabi'a (d. 801) was...

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