Table of Contents

Introduction From Difa al-Nisa to Mas’alat al-Nisa: Readers and Writers Debate Women and Their Rights, 1858-1900. Love, Marriage and Social Reform and the Early Arabic Novel Repaving the Path of Muru’a: Manly Virtue and the Emergence of a Modern Masculinity in Greater Syria. Like a Planet without a Star: The Glocalization of Domestic Discourse. The Missing Link: The Nahda Novelists from Social Commentary to Political Critique. Beyond the Marriage Plot: Marriage, Sexuality and the Rise of Outlaw Emotions in the Turn of the Century Novels. Conclusions

Promotional Information

The lasting impact of the Nahda is given an innovative and thoroughly unique interpretation, providing an indispensable perspective to studying the nuanced roles of the construction and development of gender ideologies in the nineteenth century Middle East .

About the Author

Fruma Zachs is Professor of Middle East History at the University of Haifa, Israel. She is the author of The Making of a Syrian Identity: Intellectuals and Merchants in Nineteenth-Century Beirut and co-editor of Ottoman Reform and Muslim Regeneration (I.B.Tauris). Sharon Halevi is a senior lecturer of history and director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the University of Haifa, Israel. She is a founding member of the Israel Association of Feminist and Gender Studies, and holds a PhD from the University of Iowa.

Reviews

[T]he material this book draws on is in and of itself rich and open to several avenues of interpretation and analysis. The authors are to be commended for weaving together lesser known authors and works with other seminal ones. The book also gives due attention to the earlier years of the nahda? , tracing debates about marriage and women’s place in society back to the 1850s and earlier, and tracing the emergence of a discourse on masculinity in the region back to the 1870s.
*International Journal of Middle East Studies*