Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender

This collection of essays constitutes a scholarly volume on the history of Middle Eastern women. Unlike other works which take a sociological or religious standpoint, its focus is emphatically historical - covering the period from earliest Islam to the present day. Sources for the Middle East are scanter than those for the West and are heavily male-oriented, containing little overt material on women. Yet this volume demonstrates that much can be gleaned from the dominant material on men, and the essays make use of a wide range of sources, including histories, geographies, biographical dictionaries, law books, narrative texts, and poetry. Use is also made of imaginative works like the Thousand and One Nights, and of the Traditions (hadith) of the Prophet. Inferences are drawn too from music, art, architecture, and material culture. The volume examines modern writings by Middle Eastern women, and material in Western writings and archives of the modern period. Later essays show how these historical investigations may be aided by the methods of sociology and anthropology, giving strong evidence of how complex and multifaceted is the position of Middle Eastem women, past and present, how diverse are the scholarly views of them, and how one might shift the boundaries that constrain them.