New stories by Leila Abouzeid, the noted Moroccan writer, constitute an event for both East and West, for, as in her critically acclaimed novel, Year of the Elephant, the author cuts across cultural and national boundaries to offer fiction that has meaning for both Western and Middle Eastern readers. The stories in this volume deal with issues both traditional and modern-relations between parents and children, between husbands and wives, and between citizens of newly independent Morocco and its new nationalist representative government.

Independence from French colonial...

Growing up is a universal experience, but the particularities of homeland, culture, ethnicity, religion, family, and so on make every childhood unique. To give Western readers insight into what growing up in the Middle East was like in the twentieth century, this book gathers thirty-six original memoirs written by Middle Eastern men and women about their own childhoods.

Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, a well-known writer of books and documentary films about women and the family in the Middle East, has collected stories of childhoods spent in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait,...

The female voice plays a more central role in Sufi ritual, especially in the singing of devotional poetry, than in almost any other area of Muslim culture. Female singers perform sufiana-kalam, or mystical poetry, at Sufi shrines and in concerts, folk festivals, and domestic life, while male singers assume the female voice when singing the myths of heroines in qawwali and sufiana-kalam. Yet, despite the centrality of the female voice in Sufi practice throughout South Asia and the Middle East, it has received little scholarly attention and is largely unknown in...

Today nearly half of all people in the Middle East are under the age of fifteen. Yet little is known about the new generation of boys and girls who are growing up in a world vastly different from that of their parents, a generation who will be the leaders of tomorrow. This groundbreaking anthology is an attempt to look at the current situation of children by presenting materials by both Middle Eastern and Western scholars. Many of the works have been translated from Arabic, Persian, and French.

The forty-one pieces are organized into sections on the history of childhood, growing up,...

The determination of ordinary people to end regional and global conflicts is powerful despite the forces opposing them. The Struggle for Peace explores how average citizens on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict worked for peace in the late twentieth century. Essays by noted scholars are juxtaposed with profiles of individual Israelis and Palestinians involved in peace activism. What emerges is a unique perspective on the prospects for peace in this troubled area.

Coordinated with a documentary film of the same name, the book is designed as a tool for the...