While there’s NO book I can recommend yet as anywhere near accurate re origins & cultural position of Raks Sharki, since its geographical areas of origin are currently populated by Muslim majority cultures, understanding the vast differences between their ways of thinking & behaving & ours (recognizing that most of what we assumed previously re the East, especially vis-a-vis women, is based on fantasy & misinformation) is necessary to avoid inadvertent & often serious social faux pas while “there” or dealing with Mideasterners here, & adopting/absorbing unnecessary aspects of those cultures in the mistaken notion it’d add to the quality of one’s dance: forewarned is forearmed. Not to mention (but you know I will) that these books are really good “reads”, in & of themselves.
Quoting parts of the foreword: this anthology is a “valiant effort to unveil an important dimension of Middle Eastern history & society....hidden from view....conditions, aspirations, struggles & achievments of Middle Eastern Muslim women.” With this book, one must read & absorb the foreword & introduction before touching the body of the book: necessary foreplay to maximize understanding & enjoyment.
“Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak” has four sections: Tradition; Transition; Beginnings of Change: Colonialism & Nationalism; & Future Directions? (with question mark!). Each has several parts & can be read in sequence (preferable) or by selected parts. Personally, I read the whole book & then reread the parts that interested me the most.
Tradition: A beautiful poem by al-Khansa, an early convert to Islam; the Koran on the subject of women; & very short biographies of: A’ishah, favorite wife of the Prophet Mohamed, but a good introduction to her, nonetheless; Rabi’a the mystic (most revered Sufi saint); Walladah bint al-Mustakfi: daughter of the deposed Cordovan Caliph (Andalusia), famous for her intelligence, poetry, beauty & lifestyle (held salons for male & female writers & poets of her time & the great love of poet Ibn Zaydun); Rabiah Balkhi, pioneer of mystic poetry in Persian (Dari) & one of the most outstanding Afghan poets.
Transition: Tunisian lullabies (not at all what one would expect!) & an excerpt from Naguib Mahfouz’ first book, “Palace Walk”, of his Nobel-winning trilogy - a very revealing glimpse of a middle-class married woman’s life in Egypt in the first half of this century, entitled “The Mistake”.
Beginnings of Change: The largest section, comprising Women’s songs from Morocco’s Berber mountains (check “The Second Wife”); an excerpt about the start of her illustrious career, from Umm Kulthum’s biography; excerpts from the autobiography of Halide Edib Adivar, one of the most prominent intellectuals of her time & a leading force in Kemal Attaturk’s struggle - the first Turkish women to become a public figure & national hero; a biographical sketch of Hoda el Sh’ arawi, founder of the Egyptian women’s movement; a rural Moroccan woman, Zahrah Muhammad’s stream-of-consciousness recollection of incidents in her life - far more revealing than one realizes at first; in Umm Ahmad’s chapter, changes in Egyptian village women’s roles as they age (before the neo-”fundamentalist” movement) are detailed; examples of Iraqi Nazik al-Mala’ikah’s free verse poetry & her essay analyzing what she feels is “free verse”; two interviews with Jamila Buhrayd, legendary heroine of Algeria’s War; & a biographical sketch of Jawazi al-Malakim, wife of a “settled” Jordanian Bedouin sheikh.
Future Directions?: “A Space Ship of Tenderness to the Moon”, the short story that led to Lebanese novelist Layla Ba’labakki’s trial on charges of obscenity & harming the public morality, is printed, as well as an account of her trial; a chapter on Iranian poetess & free spirit, Furugh Farrukhzad, who would’ve been executed by the Iranian ayatollahs, had she not died, at 32, in a car accident in 1967, for she was the first Persian woman to write love poems with men as the object; a selection from “Les Algeriennes” (“The Algerian Women”) by journalist Fadela M’rabet, on the hard, unhappy lives of Algerian women & girls; A life history of Zaynab, a working-class urban Lebanese woman (before the Civil War); “The Arab Woman & the Challenge of Society” by Egyptian feminist, Aminah al-Said; & the book ends with “The Sexual Revolution & the Total Revolution” by modern Lebanese novelist, Ghadah al-Samman.
I think no other book to date gives such a comprehensive education in the reality of women’s lives (before the current “fundamentalist” movement changed them all for the worse) in the Islamic countries represented therein. I’ll get to what’s going on now, when I review “Price of Honor: Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Secrecy on the Islamic World” by Jan Goodwin...