Customer Reviews

Honour And Shame

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Al-Khayyat's book was suspiciously released by Saqi Press in 1990 - perhaps following Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait - despite being based on research conducted in 1982. In it, she violates nearly every warning enunciated by both third world feminists and critics of Orientalism. Like Hubertine Auclert almost a century earlier, she uses the condition of Arab women as a foil with which to combat perceived problems and inequalities in Europe, noting for example that "the definition of [an] `educated' [woman] in this sense only means qualifications, diplomas, and so on, not real knowledge." In addition, she cites Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind and a 1960 text entitled The Temperament and Character of the Arabs as authoritative explanations for what she observed in Baghdad in 1982. She also makes statements such as "since the appearance of Islam in the seventh century and up to the First World War, the Arab world could be considered as one" and, in a philological turn, proposes that the Arabic language is by its very nature misogynist.