Customer Reviews

Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender

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I am a history professor at a small private college. I assign this book when I teach my survey history of the Middle East. With respect to the reviewer from _Publishers Weekly_, I have found that by the third or fourth week of class my students can read most of the articles in it without too much difficulty. I don't find there to be more jargon in the text than is necessary to discuss early Islamic institutions in English. There are no real English equivalents for waqf, ulama, and isnad, for example, and although these terms appear in the articles, they are also terms I teach my students early on in the course.

I use this book in class because it accomplishes two things that no other publication currently does. In addition to providing materials to use for the entire span of Islamic middle eastern history, it provides insight into women's history and social history. The fact that it is a series of articles is also helpful, because it gives my students an easy way to examine a variety of quite different research methods. I particularly like the three different articles on the Mamluk era. These allow me to have students consider the variety of possible scholarly research perspectives on a relatively narrow subject.