Middle East Studies

For many Egyptians in the early twentieth century, the biggest national problem was not British domination or the Great Depression but a marriage crisis heralded in the press as a devastating rise in the number of middle-class men refraining from marriage. Voicing anxieties over a presumed increase in bachelorhood, Egyptians also used the failings of Egyptian marriage to criticize British rule, unemployment, the disintegration of female seclusion, the influx of women into schools, middle-class materialism, and Islamic laws they deemed incompatible with modernity. For Better, For Worse explores how marriage became the lens through which Egyptians critiqued larger socioeconomic and political concerns. Delving into the vastly different portrayals and practices of marriage in both the press and the Islamic court records, this innovative look at how Egyptians understood marital and civil rights and duties during the early twentieth century offers fresh insights into ongoing debates about nationalism, colonialism, gender, and the family.

The Horn of East Africa is one of the driest regions on the continent, where competition for water and land can be extremely violent. As a result, conflict and hunger have followed each other for centuries, leading to forced migrations and thousands of refugees from Ethiopia, Eritrea, and other countries in the region. As gateways to the west, Egypt and Sudan have absorbed thousands of refugees from these countries, in communities ranging from makeshift refugee camps to crowded urban neighborhoods. In this groundbreaking study, historian Fabienne Le Houérou examines the complex interactions between these refugees and their hosts, as well as the struggles that shape their daily lives. From Sudanese families in Cairo tenements to Ethiopian farmers fleeing war and famine, Le Houérou draws on years of field research to offer fresh insights into some of world’s most vulnerable populations.

The Egyptian society is aging. Families have to find solutions for care-dependent older persons, while at the same time, social changes threaten the traditional system of family care. The society has to adapt to this previously unknown situation and to develop new strategies for meeting the needs of its older members. Based on eight years of research, this book investigates the cultural shifts necessitated by these developments. It introduces the reader to the nursing homes and homecare services that are currently available in Egypt’s bigger cities. It describes how younger persons face the challenges of the new profession of care-giving and how recipients adapt in different ways to the situation of receiving care by non-family members. Besides examining culturally rooted attitudes, care needs and their related factors are analyzed in order to identify requirements for the future development of professional care in Egypt.

Gender-based violence (GBV) affects women throughout their lives and occurs in different forms including physical, psychological, sexual and economic abuse. GBV has a diverse impact on women and may result in homicides, suicides, and many adverse health problems. It occurs as a result of gender roles and cultural norms, which influence the expression of violence within intimate relationships. In Palestinian society such violence is about exertion of control and a sanctioned way of life, a way of life that is legitimized by religion and culture. The level of violence experienced is heightened by the on-going violent conflict in Palestine, which adds to the level of violence against women due to increased feelings of despair, loss of control and emasculation among Palestinian men. Regardless of their age, religion or social economic status, Palestinian women are rarely heard. They have loud voices and they are outspoken; yet the culture requires that they are not to be seen or heard outside the confines of the home. This book, a collection of voices of Palestinian women victimized both by the ongoing violent conflict and at the hands of their husbands, is intended to redress this balance.

Little is known about Egypt’s Gypsies, called Dom by scholars, but variously referred to by Egyptians as Ghagar, Nawar, Halebi, or Hanagra, depending on their location. Moreover, most Egyptians are oblivious to the fact that there are today large numbers of Gypsies dispersed from the outskirts of villages in Upper Egypt to impoverished neighborhoods in Cairo and Alexandria. In Gypsies in Contemporary Egypt sociologist Alexandra Parrs draws on two years of fieldwork to explore how Dom identities are constructed, negotiated, and contested in the specifically Egyptian national context. With an eye to the pitfalls and evolution of scholarly work on the vastly more studied European Roma, she traces the scattered representations of Egyptian Dom, from accounts of them by nineteenth-century European Orientalists to their portrayal in Egyptian cinema as belly-dancers in the 1950s and beggars and thieves more recently. She explores the boundaries—religious, cultural, racial, linguistic—between Dom and non-Dom Egyptians and examines the ways in which the Dom position themselves within the limitations of media discourses about them and in turn differentiate themselves from the dominant population. This interplay of attitudes, argues Parrs, sheds light on the values and markers of belonging of the majority population and the paradigms of nation-state formation at the governmental level. Based on extensive interviews with government workers and ordinary individuals in routine contact with the Dom, as well with Dom engaged in a variety of trades in Cairo and Alexandria, Gypsies in Contemporary Egypt is about the search for the fragments of identity of the Egyptian Dom.

While sacred spaces cannot be narrowed down to particular forms or meanings, they do in their meanings and functions express fundamental values and principles, and in doing so, they perform the work of religion itself. This collection of essays looks at the meanings, functions, and negations of sacred space in Egypt and the Middle East. It is divided into three parts: meanings and functions of contemporary sacred spaces, historical perspectives on sacred space, and sacred space in literature and philosophy. Cairo Papers in Social Science 31/1

Recent events have focused attention on the perceived differences and tensions between the Muslim world and the modern west. As a major strand of western public discourse has it, Islam appears resistant to internal development and remains inherently pre-modern. However, Muslim societies have experienced most of the same structural changes that have impacted upon all societies, developments accompanied by a wide range of social movements and by complex and varied religious and ideological debates. Key issues are selected here to give readers an understanding of the complexity of the issues from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including social change and the transformation of political and religious institutions, gender politics, changing legal regimes, devotional practices and forms of religious association, shifts in religious authority, and modern developments in Muslim religious thought. Contributors: Martin van Bruinessen, Deniz Kandiyoti, Muhammad Khalid Masud, Ebrahim Moosa, Armando Salvatore, Abdulkader Tayob, Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Sami Zubaida. “No other book captures current debates with such effectiveness.” —Dale F. Eickelman, Dartmouth College

There is no escaping the Jerusalem of the religious imagination. Not once but three times holy, its overwhelming spiritual significance looms large over the city’s complex urban landscape and the diurnal rhythms and struggles that make up its earthbound existence. Nonetheless, writes Paola Caridi, in this intimate and hard-hitting portrayal of the city, it is possible to close one’s eyes and, “like the blind listening to sounds,” discern the conflict and plurality of belonging that mark out the city’s secular character. Jerusalem without God leads the reader through the streets, malls, suburbs, traffic jams, and squares of Jerusalem’s present moment, into the daily lives of the men and women who inhabit it. Caridi brings contemporary Jerusalem alive by describing it as a place of sights and senses, sounds and smells, but she also shows us a city riven by the harsh asymmetry of power and control embodied in its lines, limits, walls, and borders. She explores a cruel city, where Israeli and Palestinian civilians sometimes spend hours in the same supermarkets, only to return to the confines of their respective districts, invisible to each other; a city memorable for its ancient stones and shimmering sunsets but dotted with Israeli checkpoints, “postmodern drawbridges,” that control the movement of people, ideas, and potential attackers. Describing Jerusalem through the lenses of urban planners and politicians, anthropologists and archaeologists, advertisers and scholars, Jerusalem without God reveals a city that is as diverse as it is complex, and ultimately, argues its author, one whose destiny cannot be tied to any single religious faith, tradition, or political ideology.

Richard A. Debs follows the modern development of law in Egypt, a predominantly Islamic society in which the west has defined the terms of progress in the modern era. Debs focuses specifically on Egypt and its modern legal institutions, which draw upon society’s own vigorous legal traditions as it forms its modern law. Yet Debs also touches on issues that are common to all such societies that have adopted, either by choice or by necessity, western legal systems. Egypt’s unique synthesis of western and traditional elements is the outcome of an effort to respond to national goals and requirements. Egypt’s traditional law is the Sharia, the fundamental law of all Islamic societies, and through his analysis of Egypt’s law of property, the author shows how Islamic jurisprudence can be sophisticated, coherent, rational, and effective, developed over centuries to serve the needs of societies that have flourished under the rule of law.

Five contemporary Egyptian women, ranging in age from early twenties to mid-sixties, members of Cairo’s impoverished middle to lower classes, told their life stories to Nayra Atiya over a period of many months. Their stories are fresh and vivid, recording the various roles of being co-wife in a polygamous marriage, the complications of divorce, the rituals of female circumcision and marriage, the loss of children, life-long hate and its source, the position of witchcraft and superstition in their daily lives, primitive health practices, and managing a family’s meager resources, including gold or silver khul-khaal anklets worn by married women. These self-portraits are fascinating reading and a mine of information for anyone interested in understanding contemporary Egyptian life. A foreword by anthropologist Andrea Rugh and many photographs by Asma el-Bakry are included.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Egyptian women gained the unique right to divorce their husbands unilaterally through a procedure called khul‘. This has been a controversial application; notwithstanding attempts to present the law as being grounded in Islamic law, opponents claim that khul‘ is a privileged women’s law, and a western conspiracy aimed at destroying Egyptian family life and, by extension, Egyptian society. In Khul‘ Divorce in Egypt, Nadia Sonneveld explores the nature of the public debates—including the portrayal of khul‘ in films and cartoons—while an examination of the application of khul‘ in the courts and everyday life relates and compares this debate to the actual implementation of the procedure. She makes it clear that the points of controversy bear little resemblance to the lives of the lower-middle-class women who apply for khul‘; they merely reflect profound changes in the institutions of marriage and family.

How do women use courts within the context of paternity lawsuits? This study analyzes the challenges that the formal legal approach to empowering women faces once it is translated into everyday socio-legal experiences and court repertoires. It also seeks to trace the pathologies inherent in personal status law reform and normal legal practices in Egypt, attesting to the limitations of law as an agent of social change in the private domain of the family. It mainly sheds light on the difficulties of separating formal legal rules from informal social practices. It also explores the problem of paternity claims in Egypt. Adding to growing literature on the use of legal mobilization to advance gender equity, this study offers insights on the often-neglected role of social norms in court experiences, often leading to unexpected consequences that sometimes defy the intended goals behind policies and legislation.