Reina Lewis and Nancy Micklewright, eds., New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006. 259 pages.

This book presents a dialogue between western and Middle Eastern women that is often presumed never to have happened. It supplies us with a collection of extracts from Ottoman,  Egyptian, British, and American writers, each accompanied with a biography and literary introduction of its writer. The book covers 100 years, beginning with 1837, and focuses on writings by women from Istanbul and Cairo, key locations for the flowering of Middle Eastern feminism. As mentioned in the “Introduction,” the articulation of women’s views was particularly advanced in these two cities.

The burgeoning cannon of memoirs and fiction written by or about Iranian women has saturated the literary scene of post-9/11America. We have seen literary works translated or mostly written by exiles that entice the curious western reader with Orientalist tales ofMuslim women as veiled, unveiling, powerless victims, or brave escapees of an inherently oppressive patriarchy. The titles and contents of many of these works show that appealing to a specific political climate and power structure is a key factor behind their production, dissemination, and consumption. Therefore, despite this literary boom, it is not certain whether these books add anything to our knowledge of Muslims or if, in fact, they actually obfuscate it.

John R. Bowen, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 290 pages.

Western anthropologists are typically concerned with interpreting the non-western world’s unfamiliar cultures for western audiences. The French law banning the hijab from public schools presents itself as just as baffling as any non-western custom. Thus, it is fully understandable that it would take an American anthropologist to interpret this event, especially for those in Anglo-Saxon cultures, where in spite of Islamophobia and discrimination against the hijab, concepts of religious tolerance and multiculturalism have generally translated into legal protections for women  and girls who wish to wear it in public spaces. So with a catchy title designed to appeal to this widespread bafflement, the author seeks to explain the intellectual underpinnings and political processes that led to this banning of “ostentatious” religious symbols in public schools on March 15, 2004.

Minoo Derayeh, Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellon Press, 2006. 242 pages.

This ambitious undertaking, comprising 6 chapters, 16 tables, 4 appendixes, and a glossary, is the culmination of a doctoral program at McGill University’s Institute of Islamic Studies. A specialist in Islam, world religions, and gender studies, Minoo Derayeh is now an assistant professor at York University in Toronto. Gender Equality in Iranian History seeks to uncover the social, political, and economic status of women across the vast expanse of Iranian history. In her “Foreword,” Ratna Gosh (McGill University) applauds the author’s contribution for showing that the “concept of Islamic feminism is founded on the idea of complementary rather than equal rights” and, equally importantly, for laying bare “the root of cultural patriarchy” (p. ii). The very idea of complementarity, as the book’s chapters reveal, has not always been unproblematically present in Iran’s encounter with Islam.