Marchand, Trevor H.J.

English

TREVOR H. J. MARCHAND

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MAI GHOUSSOUB and EMMA SINCLAIR-WEBB (ed.):
                    Imagined masculinities: male identities and culture in the modern Middle East

SOAS Research Online

183reviewsNasif. Shaykh "Ali Yusuf actually married a daughter of Shaykh al-Sadat,who was one of the ashraf. As for Malak Hifni Nasif, bahithat al-badiyah, shewas married to "Abd al-Sattar al-Basil. Sonbol also states that a secret policeforce was instituted in 1940, yet it was established in the early 1920s to fightpolitical crime. There is also the burning of the Cairo Opera House which,according to Sonbol, took place in the 1990s, whereas it burned down in1971. Montreux is referred to as Montreaux. Also according to Sonbol,Isma"il Sidqi was fired as Prime Minister of Egypt after the Badari incident,but the Badari case was debated in the Egyptian Parliament in January 1933,and Sidqi only resigned in September 1933, as a result of King Fuad andIbrashi's machinations. In referring to the Ziwar cabinet of 1925, she writes1952. The bread riots took place in Egypt in 1977, not in 1981.malak badrawimai ghoussoub and emma sinclair-webb (ed.):Imagined masculinities: male identities and culture in the modernMiddle East.294 pp. London: Saqi Books, 2000. £25.00, £14.95 paperback.There has been a significant increase during the 1990s in publications onWestern ‘masculinity’. Some have been written in response, and sometimesas a challenge, to a perceived imbalance in gender and identity studies thatfavours women. These (primarily male) authors assert that feminist literatureand women's studies have either excluded men, or have neglected to addressthe complexities and possible diversity of male identities. The juxtaposition ofmore fully explored and developed female identities against some essentialized,monolithic, and normally patriarchal ‘male’ in much feminist literature hasbeen viewed as tactically disempowering towards men, and some have soughtto rectify the situation by reclaiming a male focus in their writing. Positionsentrenched in exclusionary policies, however, have only served to widen thegender divide and have failed productively to engage with the social andcultural politics of gendering.More inclusive approaches to gender studies have also responded to theunder-representation of ‘masculinity’ in earlier feminist works and women'sstudies, but have more successfully avoided the pitfalls of the ‘all-male’ worksby bridging the divide between the sexes. Contemporary gender studies addressnotions of masculinity and femininity within a unified discursive field, therebyrecognizing not only their necessary relation to one another, but also thepossibility of multiple and overlapping gender identities. Writers, such as thecontributing authors to Cornwall and Lindisfarne's Dislocating masculinity(1994), consider the construction of hegemonic and variant masculinitieswithin particular ethnographic contexts, and thereby collectively challenge thenotion of a natural, universal and heterosexual masculinity. The compilationof writings in Ghoussoub and Sinclair-Webb's edited volume under reviewhere, Imagined masculinities, follows suit, and makes a significant contributionnot only to the study of masculinities, but also to gender research in theMiddle East more generally.Despite commonly held assumptions about patriarchal dominance inMiddle Eastern cultures and societies, studies of the production andreproduction of masculine identities have been scant, and much of the genderfocus in this region has been on women in relation to issues of social status,184 reviewsIslam, politics and law. Ghoussoub and Sinclair-Webb's volume initiates amuch-needed correction to this deficiency. Imagined masculinities presents thework of fifteen academics, journalists and writers of various culturalbackgrounds, all of whom share the premise that masculinity, like femininity,is socially constructed with complex webs of power relations. In addition tonewly-authored contributions, a few of the chapters are excerpts reprintedfrom existing publications, such as Bouhdiba's ‘Sexuality in Islam’, andothers are translations from works in Arabic which present an English-readingaudience with a valuable insight into gender studies pursued by non-Westernscholars and writers. One of the great merits of the book is that the editorshave not equated the Middle East exclusively with Islam, and have includedseveral fascinating contributions on Jewish-Israeli notions of masculinity (butunfortunately none specifically addressing the Christian communities of theregion), and regional coverage extends widely from Morocco to Turkey andinto the Arabian Peninsula without ever positing generalized notions of‘Middle Eastern’ practices.The book has been divided into three parts. The first, entitled ‘Makingmen: institutions and social practices’, comprises essays that analyse themaking of masculinity in ritualistic and institutionalized contexts. The editorsclaim to have achieved a chronology from childhood to adulthood here, butwith only five chapters in the section, two of which deal with circumcisionand three that analyse masculinity within military and combative contexts,there are certainly a great many lacunae in relation to the ageing process. Infact, elderly males, or even those who have passed beyond the ritual ‘weddingnight’, tend to be relegated outside of studies of masculinity, falsely suggestingthat either masculine identity remains static with maturity, or that older menassume classic patriarchal roles. The contributions in this section arenevertheless among the strongest in the book, and particularly enlightening isthe contrast between both Bouhdiba's and Khal's accounts of Muslimcircumcisions with that of Bilu's highly informative (though at times overlytheoretical) analysis of circumcisions, haircuts and the Torah among Israel'sultra-orthodox Jews. Sinclar-Webb's study of military service and manhood issituated within the intricate relationship between gender, ethnicity and powerin contemporary Turkey, and the government's ongoing oppression of theKurds. I felt, however, that this relation could have been better highlightedin order to demonstrate more clearly how questions of gender identity cannotbe disentangled from ones regarding language, ethnicity and race. Peteet'sessay on male gender in the Intifada is an abbreviated version of an articleoriginally published in 1994 that nicely complements her earlier and moreextensive work on women in the Palestinian resistance movement. Kaplan'sstudy of gender and sexuality in the all-Israeli millitary ‘melting pot’ pointsout how some men, while fully upholding the hegemonic masculine idealespoused by the army and nation, may also develop a homosexual identity.Part 2 of the book on ‘Male fictions’ takes a more literary slant on theissue of masculinity, with contributions considering medieval and modernArabic literature, the Egyptian cinema, and propagandist journalism. The firsttwo chapters are particularly insightful and complement each other nicely intheir historic focus. In her analysis of ‘wiles of women’ stories, such as thoseintegrated within such frame stories as The Thousand and One Nights,Najmabadi provocatively suggests that, in contrast to the way that theOedipus story works to produce ‘heterosocial heteronormativity’, thesecirculate in the Middle East to produce and reproduce a ‘repudiation of theworld of women, while distancing from male homoeroticism to construct a185reviewshomosocial adult manhood’. In the following chapter, Lagrange engages in asomewhat extensive historical survey of ‘homosexuality’ in Arabic literature,and posits several possible reasons for the subject's general neglect incontemporary writing in comparison with literature of the Classical Age. Thebook's third part, ‘Memoir and male identity’, completes the volume withthree chapters by Jewish and Arabic writers. All three present highlyentertaining autobiographical insights into the lives of Middle Eastern menand explore important episodes in the construction of gender identities.Imagined masculinities provides a necessary study in the Middle Eastcontext, and will be extremely valuable for students in gender, anthropology,and Near and Middle Eastern studies. We can only hope for more follow upon this important issue.trevor h. j. marchandruth roded (ed.):Women in Islam and the Middle East: a reader.xiv, 271 pp. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1999. £39.50.Ruth Roded has been associated with the Department of the History of Islamand the Middle East at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for over twenty-five years. During this time she has worked to transmit an understanding ofthe complex role of women in the history and culture of this part of theworld. From the first course she taught on women in Islam and MiddleEastern history, it became clear to the author that the only way to do justiceto this controversial subject was by enabling her students to read primarysources (in translation, if necessary) and form their own opinion. This was aperilous path, fraught with dangers in not only the selection of materials, intheir translation (mainly into English), but also in the omission of material.Ruth Roded is careful to highlight the particular difficulties of interpretingearly Islamic, particularly quranic, references to women. Hence her effort tolet the material speak for itself is introduced by text which attempts to‘locate’ the material. Here she raises questions which the twenty-first centuryreader might wish to ask. She is also careful to note the biases which emerge—particularly in European travel literature—isolating Islam as denigrating towomen, when the facts presented seem to suggest that what is being perceivedis a social and cultural attitude common to Arab Christians, Muslims andJews alike. She cites, for an example, the work of Henry Harris Jessup, aProtestant missionary in Syria for seventeen years in the mid-nineteenthcentury. In his book Women of the Arabs he refers to a number of scholarlyworks and Arabic written and oral sources, yet his attitude to the subject isextraordinarily biased. ‘The scourging and beating of wives is one of theworst features of Moslem domestic life’, he says. Yet, as Ruth Roded shows,Jessup, by his own evidence, admits that Christians in nineteenth-centurySyria beat their wives as often as did Muslims. In fact she goes on to statethat the nineteenth-century man's ‘right and even obligation to punish womenand children in his care by beating if necessary was widely recognized in theWest as well as the East until very recently’ (p. 6). With this culturalrelativistic approach to the material outlined in her 20-page introduction, theselected readings which comprise the bulk of the book offer a promise ofbeing more than a reaffirmation of orientalist scholarship.The readings are divided into five parts: Part 1, The foundation of Islam;

Review of "Imagined Masculinities: male identity and culture in the modern Middle East" edited by M. Ghoussoub and E, Sinclair-Webb

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Review of "Imagined Masculinities: male identity and culture in the modern Middle East" edited by M. Ghoussoub and E, Sinclair-Webb

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