I picked up Guests of the Sheik over December vacation, after family had headed home. With the start of school looming. I was starved for a book to read, and found this one lying around on the kitchen counter. As one of the books for a course in Cultural Anthropology taken by our younger son, he had shared the book with his older brother, and there it was on the table, calling to me. At first, based purely on the title, I thought it was a work of fiction, and picked it up to read the blurb on the back cover.
A delightful, extremely well-written, and vastly informative ethnographic study, Guests of the Sheik is an account of the author's two-year stay in the tiny rural village of El Nahra in southern Iraq. To help her anthropologist husband gather data, Mrs Fernea agreed to dress only in the all-enveloping black veils of the women of the harem. Although she shared a small mud-brick cottage with her husband, her daily life was spent only with the women of the town, for in this polygamous society there existed no social communication between the sexes. The hardships were many but the rewards greater, especially for the readers of this extraordinary narrative: this volume gives a unique insight into a part of Middle Eastern life seldom seen by the West–a life of the women who have no outwardly apparent role in society, but whose thoughts and ideas are now emerging with force and helping to shape modern Middle Eastern society.
I opened the cover to peruse the book, and was hooked by the first sentence: I spent the first two years of my married life in a tribal settlement on the edge of a village in southern Iraq. While the story sounded interesting, I was immediately curious about the woman who wrote this book in the 1950s. Elizabeth Fernea became enmeshed in, and enamored by the Middle East, and wound up spending her life demystifying it for others through teaching, writing and film making.
As for Guests of the Sheik, I found it to be a page turner, filled with fascinating descriptions of the people and community in El Nahara. I kept thinking back to the 1950s; while Elizabeth was living in El Nahra, I was two years old, growing up on Long Island just 20 some miles east of New York City, and my childhood and teenage years would form an experience so completely different from that of the people of this small rural village in southern Iraq.
Reading her book, I was intrigued as a woman, a parent and a wife. I tried to put myself in Elizabeth's place and wonder how I would have reacted. I tried to get a sense of her husband, Bob, and decided she was a far more flexible and forgiving spouse than I might have been. And I tried to see life through the eyes of the women Elizabeth profiles. By the end, I was left thinking about how difficult it can be to have a clear understanding of people who are not like us, and how important it is to spend time with people to garner a better understanding of the complexities of geography, sociology, ethnicity, economics, and all those factors that make one part of the world (indeed, sometimes one part of a country) so different from another part.
For more about Elizabeth Fernea:
- Al-Ahram Weekly On-line (Cairo): Elizabeth Warnock Fernea: Part of it all (April 2001)
- Elizabeth's article for the American Foreign Service Association: The Muslim women's movement is discovering its roots in Islam, not in imitating Western feminists (2000)
- obituary in the LA Times: Elizabeth Warnock Fernea dies at 81; scholar of Middle Eastern women's studies (December 2008)
- ICARUS Films: brief bio of her filmmaking