Elizabeth Warnock FerneaRecensioni

4.5 stars

The outdated cover doesn't do this book justice. It was one of the more interesting memoirs I've read as of late.

Fernea details her time living with a rural tribe in Iraq in the late 1950s. Her husband is studying for a doctorate as an anthropologist, and she helps him by relating the stories of the tribe's women and their customs.

I enjoyed learning of the cultural differences between this tribe and my own society. It was also nice to see some similarities. I do wonder how much has changed in Iraqi culture in the 60 years since the events in the book took place.

Worth a read!

First of all this book was written in 1958. I was fooled by the cover which made it look more contemporary. But this is my fault since I never checked the publication date until the author mentioned that Faisel was the head of Iraq, and Faisel preceded Sadam Hussein. This not an ethnographic study; it is a memoir of a woman's life in a Shiite tribal settlement in Southern Iraq. This is not to diminish it. The book is quite moving particularly in the parts in which the author must navigate the female culture in this conservative outpost where the veil is always worn and a woman would never even be seen by a man unless covered or found in the company of an unmarried man. In the end there is a poignant moment in which the author makes a mistake and with a local friend goes for a ride in the vehicle driven by a man and returning realizes that the woman could be killed for this. There is no choice but to lie. There was a very moving moment also when she is first introduced and understands very little Arabic but enough to know she is being disparaged, only to be rescued by the Sheik's favorite wife. Of course, I had presumed that this book would deal with the conflict between cultures through the prism of the recent disastrous war and occupation, but it doesn't. Still the book cuts to the core of how common humanity given time, patience and a lot of compassion can create bonds between people with very very different backgrounds. It is not an ethnographic study because the kind of distant analysis of the cultural differences is rarely touched upon. What we get instead is a memoir of the interactions. Lastly the book does a terrific job giving us the play by play of the core Shiite holy ceremonies surrounding the martyrdom of Hussein, the 7th Iman, and the seismic emotion these rituals hold of the Shiite people. You get a bird's eye view of how swept up people are by the story.

I read this as a freshman in college and it has never been more relevant. It is an ethnography of the women of an Iraqi village named El Nahra. At the time it was written, the author was not an anthropologist but the wife of one of the men in the village. In fact, she was a newlywed!

I wish I knew where my copy of this book was. I'd like to read it again.

An American scholar who has long studied Muslim women returned to the Islamic world in the 1990s to interview women about their activities as and for women and their understanding of “Islamic Feminism.”

Elizabeth Fernea first came to the Middle East in the 1950s as the young bride of an anthropologist doing research in a small village in southern Iraq. As a result of living there for two years, she wrote a very insightful account of her experiences with the village women, women who were strictly segregated from the men. After returning she and her husband both taught at the University of Texas and continued to spend time in various Arab countries. She continued to write and create films about Muslim women. In the 1990s she decided to explore the issue of feminism for Muslims. Returning to Muslim regions, she interviewed a variety of women and a few men about the conditions for women in their countries. Often these were women with whom she was already friends. She visited Uzbekistan, Morocco, Kuwait, Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Palestine. She founded the women of the Iraq village in which she had lived still valued her friendship and that gender segregation had weakened over the years. Returning to the United States, she also interviewed American Muslim women.

What is most clear in the book is that conditions for women in Muslim communities vary enormously. For those of us who tend to lump Muslims and/or feminists together, we need to absorb this critical fact. In some places women have rights and benefits that we are still struggling for in the United States. For example, while most of us assume that feminism is linked to democracy, Iraqi women in the 1990s were grateful to Sadam Hessian for the benefits he established for them by acting as a dictator.

Here and there Fernea found women who strongly identified themselves as feminists. More generally, however, she found women deeply engaged in efforts to improve women’s lives in ways we might consider feminist in the United States. But these women often refused to identify as feminists. Women find themselves fighting against the misogyny of both traditional and colonial leaders. Globally, an easy way for opponents to attack women is to label them as feminists and therefore as American or foreign. Feminism is said to be a luxury for outsiders.

Yet Muslim women are working with Christian and Jewish women to resolve these specific problems rather than attacking particular men. They struggle with poverty, lack of education or economic independence, oppressive family and marriage laws, and other issues that affect them as wives and mothers. Fernea’s book is full of descriptions of the variety of ways that Muslim women working to improve their own lives and those of other women within their families and religion.

More basically, women in other parts of the world remain grounded in family and religion, in ways that many western feminists do not. They view western feminists as too secular and too individualistic. They often lump all western feminists together and fail to understand the variety within western feminism. Muslim women, like other post-colonel ones, do make an important point. For better or worse, the “Western Civilization” differs from other cultures in its emphasis on progress through secular, individualistic efforts for both men and women. Muslim women want better lives, but they do not define them as most of us do. They particularly resent western assumptions of what they need.

Fernea does not provide us with a neat picture of Islamic feminism. In fact she remains ambivalent over whether such a thing exists. Instead she ends her book with useful comments about feminism in general and how her project showed her the need to reconsider how we define it. In her travels, she observed the limitations of mainstream western feminism and our need to listen respectfully to others. The novels I have been reading have convinced me of the same point.

I gladly recommend Searching for Islamic Feminism to readers interested in the lives and projects of Muslim women. Its information was collected twenty years ago and may be somewhat dated, but much of what Fernea observed continues to be valuable.

Discusses the modern Egyptian Muslim woman's question of whether to wear modest dress and the veil or Western dress. Also discusses the proper role of women in modern Islamic society, with specific attention to the recent practice of women entering mosques to hold study meetings. Looks at the struggle for women's rights in Egypt within the framework of their own Islamic traditions.

This book is very informative and descriptive as her work always is. Of special interest is a section on her return to her hometown of Portland and the new insights she gained.

Updated from an earlier work by the same authors, the region has been beset by changes throughout the 90's. Elements discussed and predicted in this book have also brought even more disruption and change in the years since 9/11

Talley, Steve, Director, Fernea, Elizabeth, Producer, Public Broadcasting System, 1991. VHS, 58 min. Grade 9 and above.
An in-depth and personal look at grassroots peace movements that focuses on four groups: The Vigil of Women in Black, the dialogues at Beit Shahur, the Yesh Gvul refusniks, and the Friends School at Ramallah. Filmed in conjunction with book of the same title that is also available from the MESC (see catalog for description).

Fernea doesn't seem to know what exactly she means by 'Islam,' or what exactly she means by 'feminism,' but she has some very interesting experiences going she knows not whither in search of she knows not what. In particular, a large part of the book is concerned with Central Asia -- Uzbekistan, especially -- and the conditions of women there, in a world of nomadic Turkic peoples swept over by the Mongol wave, the Muslim one, and finally the Soviet. We hear little enough about this region, but it's a deeply interesting one; seeing more about it is well worth the trouble.

As for the condition of women in the Islamic world? You probably already know: bad among the Arabs, varying in Lebanon (where either the good guys or Hezbollah will win sooner or later -- and I do not use the term "good guys" lightly), terrible among the Pashtuns, the opposite of what the authorities want in Persia, Euro-y in Albania and Kurdistan... and it would be outright good in Bosnia and the Turkic states were it not for how the Saudis can generally claim to be the better Muslims. But, as in Shakespeare's plays, the interest is much more in the details than in the big picture.

This book looks at what rural Iraqi village life was like in 1956-1958, through the eyes of an American woman. As a newlywed, she accompanied her husband to Iraq and lived there with him for two years as he conducted his ethnographic research. For a detailed review, see my web site at http://www.shira.net/books/breviews/fernea-guestsofsheik.htm

I've recommended this book to tons of people. Warnock's book was a text for a modern Middle East class I took a few years ago. It is a classic and fascinating. After reading this book I wanted to read everying by Warnock that I could find.

Bought at Powell's in June. Started 7/5/08 finished 7/13/08. I read most of this while in SD for Grandma Schuldt's funeral. I liked this book for the honest light it cast on the lives of women in Iraq 50 years ago. I wonder if anything has changed since this was written? It takes place in a small, secluded village outside of Baghdad. The most interesting thing was the realization by the author that her relationship w/her husband, the typical American marriage, appears to Iraqi women as one of loneliness.

Positively outstanding! I felt like I was right there with "Bee Ja". I actually cried at the end and hated that the story was over. ;)

Account of author's year long life as veiled observer in small village in southern Iraq in 1956(?) just before the revolution which violently overthrew the royal family and eventually led to reign of Saddam Hussein. Roughly same period and area of "Ring of Bright Water" (Maxwell) and "People of the Reeds",(Thesiger). While not directly connected to the "present unpleasantness", it portrays womens' lives of the period; not much has changed.

'The Guest of the Sheik' is the story of the author's two year stay in a conservative Iraqi village in the 1950s.

Ms. Fernea's account is, due to the conservatism of the village, almost entirely the story of the women of the village - women that Ms. Fernea brings to life. A story of a journey of acceptance and a great look into a life very foreign to many. Well worth reading.

Interestingly, this book frequently reads less like feminist theory and more like an evocatively descriptive travel narrative, which will certainly be enjoyed by fans of that genre. Indeed, this book is at its best when describing the people and places; and when the Muslim women in the chapters speak for themselves.

Unfortunately, though, I sometimes found the pacing a bit clunky, and the author's own viewpoints and/or insertion of herself into the proceedings, to be irritating. Some of her attitudes seemed surprising, as she is supposed to be a longtime professor of Middle East studies.

The glimpse into the lives and viewpoints of women abroad, though, was very interesting, and I found the chapter on Iraq to be fascinating. The book was written in the 1990s, but I read it in 2006, after the second Gulf War, so it was like looking back in time to an Iraq that, to judge by media reports, no longer exists.

I saw someone I worked with reading this book for a class. It looked so interesting that I went and picked up a copy. I read it from cover to cover. A fascinating glimpse of a very foreign world.

A wonderful description of life in an Iraqi village.

In 1956 Elizabeth Warnock Fernea accompanied her husband, who was doing postgraduate work in anthropology, to the village of El Nahra, Iraq. For nearly two years, they lived as guests of Sheik Hamid Abdul Emir El Hussein. Elizabeth donned the abayah and attempted to integrate with the women of the village. Her Arabic was not very good and her hosts were naturally reluctant to welcome an American Christian. They assumed she was lazy, retarded and that she didn’t know how to cook. As her knowledge of the language and customs improved she came to be accepted as a member of the village and developed a mutual love and respect for the women of El Nahra.

Read for Honors Anthropology course