This is a reflexive account of an American woman and her family's unpredictable journey through the private and public worlds of a traditional Muslim city in the process of change. As a Western stranger in Marrakech, Fernea was met with suspicion and hostility. The story of the slow growth of trust and acceptance between the author and her Moroccan neighbors involves the reader in everyday activities, weddings, funerals, and women's rituals. Both the author and her friends are changed by the encounters that she describes. A Street in Marrakech is a crosscultural adventure, ethnographically sound, and written in an accessible style.
 Titles of related interest from Waveland Press: Azoy, Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan, Third Edition (ISBN 9781577667209); Jordan, The Making of a Modern Kingdom: Globalization and Change in Saudi Arabia (ISBN 9781577667025); and Omidian, When Bamboo Bloom (ISBN 9781577667001).

A Street in Marrakech

Politics & Social Sciences

Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock

Anthropology

DOUBLEDAY

A delightful, well-written, and vastly informative ethnographic study, this is an account of Fernea's two-year stay in a tiny rural village in Iraq, where she assumed the dress and sheltered life of a harem woman. This volume gives a unique insight into a part of the Midddle Eastern life seldom seen by the West. "A most enjoyable book abouut [Muslim women]--simple, dignified, human, colorful, sad and humble as the life they lead." --Muhsin Mahdi, Jewett Professor of Arabic Literature, Harvard Unversity.

Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village

Reference

Anchor

A Street in Marrakech: A Personal Encounter with the Lives of Moroccan Women

Travel

Africa

Anchor Books

To most American readers, the very idea of "Islamic feminism" would seem a contradiction in terms. We are taught to think of Islam as a culture wherein social code and religious law alike force Muslim women to accept male authority, to throw themselves on their husband's funeral biers, to surrender to the veil...how could feminism survive under Islam, let alone flourish? Acclaimed Arab Studies scholar and bestselling author Elizabeth Fernea sets out to answer that question, traveling throughout Russia, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as Islamic communities in the United States, to interview Muslim women. The questions Fernea poses to scores of women friends, colleagues, and acquaintances prompt a range of diverse and unpredictable responses, but in every country she visits, Fernea finds that Muslim women are hardly passive. Poor or rich, educated or illiterate, these women define their own needs, solve their own problems, and determine the boundaries of their own very real, very viable feminisms. Since her first visits to the Arab World in the 1950s, Elizabeth Fernea has been an intelligent and unique voice in the documentation of cultures that are all too often misunderstood. In Search of Islamic Feminism offers a ground-breaking new interpretation of the status and vision of Muslim women that will open up a new world to its American readers, even as it challenges our own sense of what feminism means.

In Search of Islamic Feminism: One Woman's Global Journey

Women's Studies

In the ten years since Anchor first published Elizabeth and Robert Fernea's award-winning The Arab World: Personal Encounters, vast political and economic shifts have taken place: the end of the Iran/Iraq War and the Lebanese civil war; the outbreak of the Gulf War; the historic 1993 peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians, to name just a few. Which is why the Ferneas, leading scholars in Middle Eastern studies, felt a need to return to the same towns and cities they had written about previously-to see how these changes had affected the region and the people who live in it. The authors reveal the human face of the Arab World as they revisit and talk with newsmakers and colleagues, old friends and new. Their forty years of experience in the region help illuminate the human consequences of changes all too often discussed in abstractions and generalizations: the military conflicts, new urbanization, labor migration, religious revival, as well as radical changes in the roles of men, women, and the family. With new chapters on Baghdad, Beirut, Amman, Jerusalem, Marrakech, and Cairo, this new edition of The Arab World will strengthen its reputation as a book "which should be required reading for anyone with a serious interest in the Middle East" (The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs).

The Arab World: Personal Encounters

History

Fernea, Robert A.

Middle East

"Islamic feminism" would seem a contradiction in terms to most Westerners. We are taught to think of Islam as a culture wherein social code and religious law alike force women to accept male authority and surrender to the veil. How could feminism emerge under such a code, let alone flourish? Now, traveling throughout Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as Islamic communities in the United States, acclaimed Arab Studies scholar and bestselling author Elizabeth Fernea sets out to answer that question. Fernea's dialogue with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances prompts a range of diverse and unpredictable responses, but in every country she visits, women demonstrate they are anything but passive. In Iraq, we see an 85 percent literacy rate among women; in Egypt, we see women owning their own farms; and in Israel, we see women at the very forefront of peacemaking efforts. Poor or rich, educated or illiterate, these women define their own needs, solve their own problems, and determine the boundaries of their own very real, very viable feminism. In Search of Islamic Feminism offers a groundbreaking new interpretation of the status and vision of Muslim women that will open up a new world to its readers, even as it challenges our own sense of what feminism means.

Social Sciences

This is an extraordinary narrative by any Western standard: a Western woman telling what she learned of women whose lives were as veiled as their faces.

Guests of the Sheik

Hale

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Street in Marrakech

Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village

A Street in Marrakech: A Personal Encounter with the Lives of Moroccan Women

In Search of Islamic Feminism: One Woman's Global Journey

The Arab World: Personal Encounters

In Search of Islamic Feminism: One Woman's Global Journey

Guests of the Sheik