Search results for ""Author Elizabeth Warnock Fernea""

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 rule has brought many changes to Morocco—some more beneficial than others. Women have entered the work force in great numbers, a development which has brought them new freedoms, but which has also caused problems within the traditional family. Abouzeid shows us how these changes have affected ordinary men and women, how small everyday events loom large in individual lives. To her crisp style, reminiscent of some Western realist novelists, she adds elements of Arabic fiction—the oral story-telling technique, for example. Abouzeid writes first in Arabic, which she has stated is a political choice. This makes her a literary pioneer in North Africa, where, until recently, most authors wrote in French. Elizabeth Warnock Fernea has written an introduction for this book, setting the stories in historical context.

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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, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and Turkey. The accounts span the entire twentieth century, a full range of ethnicities and religions, and the social spectrum from aristocracy to peasantry. They are grouped by eras, for which Fernea provides a concise historical sketch, and include a brief biography of each contributor. The introduction by anthropologist Robert A. Fernea sets the memoirs in the larger context of Middle Eastern life and culture. As a collection, the memoirs offer an unprecedented opportunity to look at the same period in history in the same region of the world from a variety of very different remembered experiences. At times dramatic, humorous, or tragic, and always deeply felt, the memoirs document the diversity and richness of people's lives in the modern Middle East.

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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 the West.This book presents the first in-depth study of the female voice in Sufi practice in the subcontinent of Pakistan and India. Shemeem Burney Abbas investigates the rituals at the Sufi shrines and looks at women's participation in them, as well as male performers' use of the female voice. The strengths of the book are her use of interviews with both prominent and grassroots female and male musicians and her transliteration of audio- and videotaped performances. Through them, she draws vital connections between oral culture and the written Sufi poetry that the musicians sing for their audiences. This research clarifies why the female voice is so important in Sufi practice and underscores the many contributions of women to Sufism and its rituals.

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A young Palestinian named Usama returns from working in the Gulf to support the resistance movement. His mission is to blow up buses transporting Palestinian workers into Israel. Shocked to discover that many of his fellow citizens have adjusted to life under military rule, Usama sets out to accomplish his mission ...with disastrous consequences. Wild Thorns is the first Arab novel to offer a glimpse of social and personal relations under Israeli occupation. Featuring unsentimental portrayals of everyday life, its uncompromising honesty and rich emotional core plead elegantly for the cause of survival in the face of oppression.

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