Art, Culture & Society

Just a Gaze: Female Clientele of Diet Clinics in Cairo (An Ethnomedical Study), by Iman Farid Basyouny. (Cairo Papers in Social Science) 150 pages. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1998. $10.00 (Paperback) ISBN 977-424-479-6

Just a Gaze explores the now familiar Western women’s health issues of body image and dieting in an unexpected setting: namely, Cairo, where growing numbers of elite and even non-elite women are now availing themselves of rapidly proliferating weight loss clinics. Situating her study in Western and Arab feminist literatures on the body and the contemporary ‘tyranny of slenderness,’ the author aims, in part, to explore “fat as a feminist issue in contemporary Egyptian culture” (p. 20), a line of inquiry which, to date, has been little explored in either feminist or medical anthropological writings on the Middle East. Furthermore, in the title and throughout the text, the author aptly applies, in at least four ways, Foucauldian notions of the ‘gaze.’ First, Egyptian women weight-loss clients ‘gaze’ upon their own bodies in critical self-surveillance and self-objectification, feeling ‘shame’ when they are unable to achieve the look of the slender, (blonde) European models who are now valorized in the Egyptian media. Second, Egyptian women comparatively and competitively ‘gaze’ upon other women’s bodies―that is, what has been termed ‘body scanning’ in women’s health circles―to assess other women’s degree of self-discipline around food and, ultimately, desirability to male ‘Others.’ Third, Egyptian men routinely ‘gaze’ upon Egyptian women’s bodies in an erotic and objectified fashion, particularly in the context of a now highly commodified marriage market. And, finally, mostly male Egyptian diet doctors ‘gaze’ upon women’s bodies in the clinical setting, often using their patriarchal authority to chastise their patients for their flabby bodies and lack of self-control. For Western-women readers, these findings are surprisingly and depressingly familiar, and echo the now burgeoning literature on the troubled relationship of women to their bodies in the West.

Yet, this monograph is also troubling in its lack of cultural specificity. One would assume upon reading it that Egyptian women of all social backgrounds are blind followers of Western beauty norms and fashions, and are, to use the author’s own terms, “obsessed” with their weight and bodies. What is missing in this overidentification with Western culture is a careful historical analysis of changing local Egyptian bodily ideals—including the long-standing valorization of a curvaceous, full-figured woman’s body and the ongoing association of this body type with beauty, especially among the urban and rural lower classes in Egypt. This study, conducted over three months with only twenty women in six Mohandiseen area clinics, clearly represents an elite perspective (including the author’s own as a highly educated, unveiled, Egyptian “fellow dieter”); it also lacks the careful cultural and historical contextualization that one would expect in an ethnography. Indeed, the ethnographic detail here is—no pun intended—‘painfully thin,’ occupying only 23 of the 150 total pages of text. The rest of the monograph, which was written as a master’s thesis in anthropology at the American University in Cairo, consists of a fairly tedious and turgid literature review on issues of embodiment, patriarchy, reflexivity, and dialogical methods, which may be useful only to those who have never encountered these literatures.

Marcia C. Inhorn
Emory University



Individual and Society in the Mediterranean Muslim World: Issues and Sources, edited by Randi Deguilhem. 160 pages, indices. Aix-en-Provence, France: European Science Foundation, 1998. 79FF.

The papers included in this volume were presented in 1993 at the first meeting of an ambitious long-term project―Individual and Society in the Mediterranean Muslim World―funded by the European Science Foundation to discuss possible issues for future meetings and to look at important sources for studying the individual from within a Muslim Mediterranean environment. In the introduction Robert Ilbert, one of the project’s initiators, informs us that the purpose of the project is to “clearly delineate that it was time to depart from abstraction to study the real” (p. xi). The “real,” Deguilhem explains, involves details of daily lives, social relations, and strategies followed by individuals vis-á-vis social laws and rules:

The individual experience of women, men and children: their personal and personalized itineraries; their dreams, their hopes, their deceptions and their consciousness of self...individuals—represent unique beings—nonetheless, implicitly, reflect the influence of the communities to which they belong (p. xi).

The articles included in the two parts of the book treat the reader to various ways by which Mediterranean history can be studied. Jan Hjñrpe starts off the first part “The Making of the Individual” by discussing how group loyalty, essential for group identity particularly in border defense and militancy, has been maintained in Muslim societies through such means as social pressure, violence, punishments for disloyalty, and rewards for good conduct. He sees group loyalty and Muslim ritual practices as essential to establishing group and individual identity among Muslims. This is a persuasive argument, but it is unclear whether an ‘individual’ should be studied from within social and cultural parameters, or if the project is following a comparative exercise to find how close the ‘other’ is to the Western self. Mercedes Garc¡a-Renal’s study of conversion to Islam in the Mediterranean world suggests that individual and group conversion, elite versus massive religious conversion, millennarianism, and forced conversions are important avenues for studying Muslims. Nevertheless, the significance of conversion for studying the individual Muslim is unclear.

The articles as a whole are notable for the methodologies presented and sources used or introduced. Chibli Mallat’s argument that fiqh, qanun, and shari`a are essential sources for studying the history of the individual is right on the mark. Manuela Marin and David Waines impress me with their methodology for connecting food and socialization, and Avner Giladi convincingly stresses the need to study the formation of the individual in premodern Muslim societies. Manuela Mar¡n’s “Biography and Autobiography” takes to task G. E. von Grunebaum’s “appraisal of Muslim cultural values as responsible for discouraging portrayals of individuality,” and Robin Ostle quotes Derrida―“Autobiography is indeed everywhere one cares to find it” (p. 90)―to show what could be achieved through the application of deconstruction techniques. Interestingly, Ostle includes rihla, adab, and akhbar literature as important autobiographical sources. Remke Kruk adds popular epics, hagiographies, and folktales, and Eugene Rogan’s argument that Islamic court records yield attitudes and situational conflicts is significant for students of these records. If this first volume is a signal of what we should expect from the rest of the project, Deguilhelm and Ilbert deserve our appreciation.

Amira Sonbol
Georgetown University

Imagined Masculinities: Male Identity and Culture in the Modern Middle East, edited by Mai Ghoussoub and Emma Sinclair-Webb. 294 pages, index. London: Saqi Books, 2000. £15.95 (Paper) ISBN 0-86356-042-3

Imagined Masculinities offers a broad range of approaches to its subject, including anthropological analysis, interviews, literary criticism, fiction, and personal memoir. This generic variety is reflected in the book’s three-part structure, which groups its thirteen articles under the categories “Making Men: Institutions and Social Practices,” “Male Fictions: Narratives, Images and Icons,” and “Memoir and Male Identity.” The book also reveals the cultural specificity of masculine identities in various nations such as Turkey, Israel/Palestine, Iraq, and Egypt. In the introduction, Ghoussoub and Sinclair-Webb provide a brief, useful overview of ‘men’s studies’ as an outgrowth of and complement to contemporary Western feminism. They point out that while traditional scholarship on the Middle East has focused primarily on men, more recent scholarship on gender in the Middle East has focused on women, thus leaving masculinity as a monolithic, ahistorical essence. Ghoussoub and Sinclair-Webb, like many feminist and men’s studies scholars, argue that masculinity, like femininity, is a socially constructed category intersected by other forms of identity, such as sexuality, class, race, and nationality.

As someone who has studied feminist and gender theory and (more recently) men’s studies over the past ten years, I noticed relatively few citations to recent works in these fields in the essays collected in this book. While R. W. Connell’s Masculinities, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men, David Gilmore’s Manhood in the Making, and Peter Murphy’s Fictions of Masculinity are mentioned briefly, most of the cited works focusing on gender or masculinity are more specific to certain Middle Eastern cultures and rituals than masculinity in general. Nevertheless, this relative absence of recent Western work on men’s studies in Imagined Masculinities is not necessarily a flaw, but may indicate the cultural limitations to much of the discourse on men’s studies, which often focuses only on Western men who live in predominantly Christian cultures where Jews and Muslims are minority groups. For instance, neither Connell’s Masculinities nor Harry Brod’s The Making of Masculinities discuss how ideologies of masculinity are at work in circumcision rituals in Israel, a subject analyzed in Yoram Bilu’s essay “Circumcision, the First Haircut and the Torah.” Although men’s studies refutes the traditional notion that men are not bound by their gender in the same way that women are, much men’s studies scholarship tends to universalize the masculinity of Western, white men. The analyses of Middle Eastern masculinities in Imagined Masculinities belie these implied claims to Western, white universality. It is hoped that the work of Ghoussoub, Sinclair-Webb, and the authors whose works they include will continue to develop more theoretical work on masculinity in the modern Middle East.

Imagined Masculinities offers something new to two audiences. For scholars of the Middle East, it provides a fresh approach to some familiar subjects. For those (such as myself) interested in gender theory and men’s studies but who are unfamiliar with the contemporary Middle East, it reveals masculinities different than those explained by Western men’s studies, such as those of Saddam Hussein, Egyptian ‘tough guy’ film star Farid Shauqi, members of the Turkish military and the Palestinian Intifada, as well as male homosexuality in Arabic literature. Both audiences should find the book to be fascinating, eclectic, and well worth reading.

Robert Nowatzki
Ball State University


Alevi Identity: Cultural, Religious and Social Perspectives, edited by Tord Olsson, Elisabeth Özdalga and Catharina Raudvere. (Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul Transactions Vol. 8). 209 pages. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 1998. (Cloth) ISBN 0-7007-1087-6

Alevi Identity consists of papers delivered at the conference “Religion, Cultural Identity, and Social Organization among the Alevi in Ottoman and Modern Turkey” arranged by the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul in November 1996. It is a pleasant surprise that the volume is more comparative in scope and content than its title suggests, as only nine of its essays are fully on the Alevis and the Bektashis, while the rest are devoted to the Druze of Lebanon and Israel, the Nusairis of Syria, the Ahl-i Haqq of Iran, the Sabbateans, and urban studies in Turkey.

As is usual in such collections, the essays are of uneven quality. Irèné Mélikoff’s initial short piece on the Bektashis is too cursory and general, where the ‘doyen’ of Alevi studies repeats her claim that “Bektashism as well as Alevism are both...examples of religious syncretisms” (p. 1) without explaining what syncretism really means and why it applies only to Alevis and not, for instance, to the Sunnis in Turkey, while Erik Cornell, in his equally brief glance at Bektashism in Bosnia, cannot account for its absence there without asking why Bektashism should have spread to Bosnia in the first place. The contributions on Alevis in Turkey by Faruk Bilici, Rusyahen Çakır, Helga Rittersberger-Tiliç, Reha Çamuroglu, and Fuat Bozkurt are generally informative but analytically somewhat thin. Reading their essays, we learn that Alevi identity in contemporary Turkey is bound up with rapid urbanization, state policy towards Alevis, and the rise of Sunni political movements, all certainly valid points but hardly unexpected. On the other hand, David Shankland and Karin Vorhoff, in their essays on ethnography and on Alevi publications respectively, both break new ground by pointing to the “beginnings of a codification of an oral tradition” (p. 15) among the urbanizing Alevi and by probing the manifold consequences and implications of this phenomenon. Ilber Ortayli’s transitional study of the Sabbateans (Ortayli prefers ‘Sabetaists’) provides a useful parallel to the Alevis, though the comparison between these two minority communities is not made explicit. Jean During’s “Critical Survey of Ahl-i Haqq Studies in Europe and Iran” is simply excellent: from now on, it should be consulted as the introductory essay by anyone who becomes interested in this group. In the next two essays, Jacob Skovgaard-Petersen and Aharon Layish provide valuable information on authority structure among the Druze in Lebanon and Israel respectively. It is illuminating to see how while Skovgaard-Petersen emphasizes the importance of allowing the Druze to speak for themselves on their identity (and, according to the author, in Lebanon they have been moving to stress the Islamic dimension of their tradition), Layish categorically declares them to be completely un-Islamic. Of the two contributions on the Alawites/Nusairis of Syria by Marianne Aringberg-Laanatza and Olsson, the former, though innovatively comparative in design, is derivative and rather superficial, while the latter, by contrast, contains fresh information gleaned from underutilized manuscript texts. Next, Raudvere addresses Alevi-related issues at “the intersection of urban and religious studies” (p. 185). There are many analytically rich insights in this essay, but they are partially concealed by the author’s rather opaque style. Finally, Olsson brings the volume to an end with an excellent epilogue where he masterfully weaves together the disparate threads that run through the different essays and thus greatly enhances the overall impact of the collection. This is a volume that those interested in the Alid communities of the Middle East (and not just Turkey) will consult with considerable profit.

Ahmet T. Karamustafa
Washington University in St. Louis


Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, by Edward W. Said. 617 pages, index. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. $35.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-674-00302-0

Said’s twentieth book is a collection of essays on literature and culture published between 1967 and the present. Arranged chronologically, the essays narrate the development of Said’s lifelong obsessions. Reflections on exile recur throughout the essays and organize the book. He uses exile to describe the condition of millions in the late twentieth century, including many of Said’s subjects, and Said himself as a self-declared man “between worlds” (p. 544). The essays cover a wide range of topics: analyses of novelists Joseph Conrad, Naguib Mahfouz, and V. S. Naipaul, who depict the state of exile; critical theorists Georg Lukacs, Michel Foucault, and Theodor Adorno, who grapple with understanding the relationship between art and history; colonialism and orientalism in popular films such as Tarzan and The Ten Commandments; and more personal pleasures such as pianist Glenn Gould and belly dancer Tahia Carioca. While Said’s commitment to Palestinian nationhood is evident in many essays, especially recent ones, the book focuses on the politics of culture rather than the culture of politics.

Throughout the collection, Said explores the creative possibilities of a ‘provisional’ rather than fixed sense of home and belonging, but he cautions readers not to glamorize the state of exile: “set aside Joyce and Nabokov and think instead of the uncountable masses for whom UN agencies have been created” (p. 175). His elegant yet material definition of exile exemplifies the careful, politically engaged criticism on display here. What emerges is an idiosyncratic and original criticism that draws equally on biography, personal response, and cultural theory. Said strives to write against critical orthodoxies, whether the New Critical Anglophilia of the Partisan Review, New York intellectuals, or the sometimes ahistorical formalism of deconstruction.

Said’s most important work, Orientalism, was deeply influenced by Foucault, whose work has been critiqued for leaving little room for resistance or individual agency in his understanding of power structures. In these essays, Said argues that writers and critics are products of the ideologies of their time, but he maintains a belief in their ability to stand outside institutions and ideologies. He is convinced that humans possess “the mobility, the uncoopted and unadministered force, of what political life hasn’t totally absorbed” (p. xxxiv). Therefore, he declares that intellectuals can and must resist collaboration with “the centralizing powers of our society” (p. 504). It is not always clear from these essays how to make a space for oneself outside of political life; it sometimes seems that the simple desire to be outside will achieve the result. Ultimately, and perhaps surprisingly, Said asserts a hopeful note in the later essays. In a 1995 review of Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes, he writes: “I would still want to ask whether there aren’t greater resources of hope in history than the appalling record of our century seems to allow.…The twentieth century after all is a great age of resistance, and that has not completely been silenced” (p. 483). Essay collections like this one have some built-in limitations; few readers will be interested in all the subjects covered, and there is some repetition between the essays. Yet this is an exemplary work. It serves as a model of a disciplined, rigorous commitment to intellectual work and its most serious political implications.

Lauren Onkey
Ball State University


Women and War in Lebanon, edited by Lamia Rustum Shehadeh. 363 pages, tables, endnotes, index, bibliography. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1999. $55.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-8130-1707-6

According to the editor, who notes that the Lebanese seemed bent on forgetting their civil war, “(t)he purpose of this book is...to record part of this experience before it is completely forgotten and analyze its effects on the lives of women” (p. xvi). Women and War in Lebanon is organized into five sections: The Public Sphere, Creative Women, Women at War, Foreign Women, and Psychological Sequelae, plus an Introduction and a Conclusion.

The first substantive chapter in the “Introduction” is devoted to a brief summary of the causes of the war, a chronology, and an account of women’s organized protests against the war. The section on “Women Before the War” is fullest in its treatment of women in political life; the other parts of the chapter are brief and stop short of the early 1970s. The sole chapter in “The Public Sphere” contains a sustained analysis of women’s education, work, and other public contributions, during the war, and at present.

Part III, “Creative Women,” is composed of four chapters. “Mapping Peace” emphasizes the ways in which women writers insisted upon an alternative discourse on the war, one that challenged the masculine ‘just war’ narrative. “Lebanon Mythologized or Lebanon Deconstructed” contrasts the focus of some writers on a Lebanon that never was with the insistence of others that Lebanese must face reality. Part IV, “Women at War,” addresses women’s participation in the militias as well as their auxiliary roles in supporting men fighters. One chilling chapter is a first-person account of a young woman’s participation in the Phalangist forces and her deepening devotion to religion. Part V, “Foreign Women,” contains one chapter documenting the devotion of foreign women to Lebanon even during the worst of the war. Part VI, “Psychological Sequelae,” contains three chapters on the effects of the war on women’s psyches. Not surprisingly, women often found support in anti-depressants and tranquilizers. The editor’s “Conclusion” leaves us with some hope that the changes in gender roles required by the war have had some lasting effect.

This book is a useful and important contribution to the literature for several reasons. First, it is frequently thought that Middle Eastern women have nothing to do with war. This book shows us that women not only fought but also supported the men who fought. Second, women were involved in the war in other ways. Of course they were victims, but they had something to say about the war, too, including creating alternative narratives of it and actively protesting it. Third, and most important of all, they survived and enabled their families to survive. Lebanon still exists, in large part thanks to its brave and persistent women. This book is a tribute to them.

There are a few small flaws in Women and War in Lebanon. One is that the chapter on “Women Before the War” seems truncated. Second, the publisher should have employed a copy-editor alert enough to find several minor writing errors. On the whole, though, these flaws do not detract from the overall merits of the book.

Nancy W. Jabbra
Loyola Marymount University