Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women: review

Abstract

Women of Islam?: Struggling with Women's Struggle in the Middle EastNine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women Geraldine Brooks New York, London, Toronto, Sydney and Auckland: Anchor Books, 1995; 255 pp.Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question Marnia Larezg New York & London: Routledge, 1994; 270 pp.Feminists, and Nation Margot Badran Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995; 352 pp.Reviewed by Haideh Moghissi Sociology, Atkinson College York University North York, TorontoScholarly and popular writings on in the Middle East continue to be troubled and troubling. Sex - segregation, veiling, polygamy - Islam's engendering signifiers, and an essentialized - parochial, primitive, unyielding - is given to us as the key which opens all doors. Islamic laws are made to insinuate an irresistible hold over the rights, lives and selves of Middle Eastern women. In the process, the contingencies of an Islamic political tradition made effective within territorial borders - and of an Islamic culture understood historically within specific settings, as well as differences between Sunni and Shi'a interpretations of the Quran and within each of them (for example Ismaailis' position on women's rights) - are totally disregarded.The factors responsible for the subjugation of in Islamic cultures are spatially and temporally diverse, including the impacts of colonial rule and of semi - colonial status, social and economic underdevelopment, archaic political systems and the absence of democratic structures and relations. Set in this context, misogynist Islamic traditions encompass one set of factors which determine how experience gender in the Middle East. But conventional studies, shortcircuiting the analysis, treat in isolation, either disregarding economic, political and sociocultural influences, or trivializing them. Indeed, by drawing only on the Quran and orthodox texts, the new scholarship (as the old) risks lapsing into an embrace, however unsought and uncomfortable, of the very fundamentalist views which authors seek to nuance or to oppose, seeing the inequality of the sexes and the coerced, historically - generated inferiority of Middle Eastern as unchangeable in nature, divine in origin.How the failure to take these problems seriously may lead to confusion, and, indeed, to misrepresentation is evident in Geraldine Brooks' Nine Parts of Desire, an ambitious journalistic project which tells stories about in several Middle Eastern Brooks sees all these countries merely as countries. Setting the stage for an entertaining discussion of through a mock historical review of Islamic traditions and a scriptural reading of the Quran, Brooks is overjoyed to be allowed entry into the mysterious Islamic world (symbolized, for example, by her entry to Khomeini's house and her interview of his widow), and thrilled by the wonder her reports may excite on her return to the West. The words of the and men Brooks meets are presented without qualification as the wisdom of authorities. Thus, presuppositions, stereotypes, distortions and disingenuous paradoxes abound. At a press conference for foreign reporters after Khomeini's funeral, Brooks takes President Rafsanjani's question to her as to why was she was wearing a heavy veil (when a simple scarf would do) as a sign of the Islamists' surprising moderation (pp. 17 - 18). Again, she finds, delightedly, that the happiest couple she got to know was the most strictly observant of Muslim traditions (p. 61). Brooks also quotes the statements of Khomeini's daughter at lunch in the Iranian Embassy in London, and the opinions of devout assigned to accompany her on her trips to Qum and elsewhere in Iran, as if they express views representative of all women of Islam (pp. 25 - 30).Brooks, of course, observes the gap between Islam's formal recognition of female sexual needs and the reality of sexual repression, female circumcision, the stoning of on charges of adultery, men's unilateral rights to divorce and other oppressive practices. …